The Radium Girls: The Glowing Tragedy That Shook America

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Transcript

00:00During the early 1900s, young women went to work applying a brilliant new material to watch faces, radium.

00:07It glowed in the dark and symbolized progress, but their employers withheld the deadly truth.

00:13These were the radium girls.

00:15To sharpen their paintbrushes, they were instructed to lick the tips, ingesting the poison daily.

00:21Their faces literally shone until their bodies began to fail.

00:25Their jaws crumbled, their teeth dropped out, and their bones decayed from the inside.

00:30When they tried to expose the truth, the company denied everything and called them hysterical.

00:35Refusing to be silenced, these brave women fought back.

00:39Their defiant lawsuit exposed a massive corporate crime and forced the creation of the first worker safety laws in U.S. history.