Radium: Miracle. Medicine. Poison.

Episodes

1. 01 Episode 1: The Brush They Were Told to Lick Free2:17 Young women painted glowing watch dials with brushes sharpened between their lips, turning a precision technique into one of history's most consequential workplace exposures.
2. 02 Episode 2: The Miracle No One Could See Locked1:49 Radium's journey from scientific discovery to supposed cure-all created a market before anyone fully understood its risks.
3. 03 Episode 3: The Paint That Never Went Dark Locked2:11 Sabin von Sochocky's luminous formula turned radioactive decay into a commercial light source and launched a new industry.
4. 04 Episode 4: The War Fought by Glowing Hands Locked1:44 World War I turned luminous paint into military infrastructure and transformed young women into a mass production workforce.
5. 05 Episode 5: The Government Weighed the Miracle Locked2:10 While workers ingested invisible traces, laboratories measured an industry producing radium by the gram.
6. 06 Episode 6: The Ten Milligrams That Enchanted Japan Locked1:32 A tiny imported sample helped turn radium into hot-spring tourism, academic prestige, and a Japanese cure-all culture.
7. 07 Episode 7: The Fountain of Youth Came in a Jar Locked2:06 American entrepreneurs packaged radium's reputation into beauty products, water jars, tablets, animal feed, and decorative devices.
8. 08 Episode 8: The Tablet the Government Tried to Seize Locked1:57 Arium's radioactive tablets forced federal prosecutors to confront the line between miracle marketing and dangerous fraud.
9. 09 Episode 9: The Nobel Scientist Inside the Factory Locked2:18 As radium accumulated inside workers, the renamed U.S. Radium Corporation expanded its scientific authority.
10. 10 Episode 10: The Jaw That Exposed the Factory Locked1:47 A dentist, a chemist, and sick former workers begin connecting a horrifying occupational disease to radium.
11. 11 Episode 11: The Report the Company Could Not Unwrite Locked1:36 Harvard investigators find blood changes and jaw necrosis, giving the workers' suspicions scientific force.
12. 12 Episode 12: The Five Women Who Forced a Settlement Locked1:31 Grace Fryer and four fellow painters secure the era's most famous settlement, but most workers receive nothing.
13. 13 Episode 13: The Poison That Stayed in Their Bones Locked2:12 The painters' internal contamination becomes the evidence base for modern radiation limits and wartime industrial safety.
14. 14 Episode 14: The Case Files That Still Gave Off Radiation Locked2:16 The physical evidence of the radium era survives in radioactive archives and contaminated ground in Orange, New Jersey.
15. 15 Episode 15: The 3,276 Lives Science Reopened Locked1:59 Modern researchers revisit the dial-worker cohort to measure lifetime risks without inventing a death toll the evidence cannot support.
16. 16 Episode 16: The Rules Written in Radium Locked2:24 The women denied broad compensation nevertheless changed how governments, industries, and scientists protect people from internal radiation.