The radium girls
As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously ill. As the fatal poison of the radium took hold, they found themselves embroiled in one of America's biggest scandals and a groundbreaking battle for workers' rights. The Radium Girls explores the strength of extraordinary women in the face of almost impossible circumstances and the astonishing legacy they left behind.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
8mentions
8people
2017–2025years
13% recommend88% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Have mostly read novels this year, but when I have read non-fiction it was mostly extracts for my personal research, not necessarily cover to cover.
I will try to give a wide range:
* "The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation" by Fred Pearce. A very different view of ecosystems.
* "In the Land of Invented Languages" by Arika Okrent. Very entertaining.
* "Bully Inc." by Peter Burnett
* "The Radium Girls" by Kate Moore
I have also read a lot of Biblical Pseudepigrapha and some works from the Ethiopian canon.
- I just read The Radium Girls, about the ̶w̶o̶m̶e̶n children who were hired to paint clock faces and military instruments with radium paint. 100s of young girls who died in their 20s and 30s because they were carelessly exposed to the radiation. It struck me that they were born around the same time as my own grandmother. We really have come a long way in a fairly short amount of time.
- If you read books from the early 1900s (Radium Girls, Rocket Boys, Seabiscuit), it's painfully obvious to see how incredibly exploitative industries can become (literally working people to death) without something like a union to check corporate greed against worker well-being.
It's a fine balance though. Unions are organizations very similar to companies and can fall victim to the same sins as exploitative companies (or worse, like in the 60s when the Teamsters Union became controlled by the mafia and was used to further organized crime goals)
- I'm in the middle of reading The Radium Girls.¹ One fascinating thing to me is that radium, once ingested, tends to deposit itself in the bones (which makes sense if you glance at the positions of Calcium and Radium in the periodic table) and as a consequence, in the later stages of radium poisoning will make the bones glow in the dark. One of the young women who died of radium poisoning, woke up in the middle of the night, and saw her skull glowing through her skin when she faced a mirror near her bed. Another woman, whose body was exhumed during the lawsuit against the US Radium Corporation, again had a visible glow in the bones when her coffin was opened.
1. An interesting read, although not that well written.
- Radium Girls is a fairly well-reviewed book about that: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31409135-the-radium-girl...
- Surprisingly similar story to my own, despite being the other side of the Atlantic and different hardware. School I went to was also piloting IT in schools, so we had a selection of 8 bit kit and an after hours club that was hugely popular.
My memory of Apple II is the expansion slots helped it stay relevant longer and it attracted a huge range of weird and wonderful add ons as a result. C64 was far more price sensitive which showed in some of the choices. Were it much more expensive it would have lost to one of the dozens of other 8 bits.
> This probably tends to bias my experience with the platform away from what people might consider its major strengths
My Amiga bias is less the amazing hardware, as that's always going to become outdated at some point, even though it was astonishing for its day. I actually feel we're all a bit poorer as a result of DOS+Windows and would be in a much better shape had we started with some of the Amiga and Mac OS choices and innovations accepted as the usual way of doing things.
Case in point in the OP: Mac's Applescript, or the earlier Amiga ARexx, rather than batch files and a big fat nothing in Windows.
I spent years finding every innovation on Windows had someone doing it far better a decade previously. Usually with an order of magnitude less code. Windows seemed comically lacking and gratuitously obnoxious to write code for. So of course that platform won for general computing.
Hindsight is easy of course.
> selling overpriced crap to customers deluded by the Reality Distortion Field
Macs were objectively better at so many things but lacked colour. In truth I always felt the reality distortion was on the Windows side. Much later Apple became a little too much focused on style but that's another story. :)
> and the environmental issues at the MOS plant in PA
Didn't know of that. That's the third reference to current environmental issues from decades closed plants I've come across in about as many weeks! I just read The Radium Girls about Undark and the worker's horrific injuries and struggle to get compensation or even acknowledgement. The two companies denied, lied, and cheated their way through. Both sites, and even where factory trash and rubble from demolished buildings was sent(!), were found highly hazardous decades later and required huge cleanups at EPA expense. IIRC one cleanup is still ongoing. I wish humanity could be encouraged to be more considerate of our planet.
