The Report the Company Could Not Unwrite

Name: The Report the Company Could Not Unwrite
Genre: Documentary

Harvard investigators find blood changes and jaw necrosis, giving the workers' suspicions scientific force.

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Transcript

The dials glowed, but inside the factory, something was changing.
Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium in 1898, and the market became infatuated.
Radium entered medicine, cocktails, paint, and consumer products before its dangers were fully understood.
In 1913, Sabin von Sochocky mixed radium-226 with zinc sulfide to make continuous light.
During World War I, luminous paint supplied military dials and signs for ships and aircraft.
By 1917, the RLMC complex in Orange, New Jersey, occupied several buildings.
Before the mid-to-late 1920s, dial painters used their lips to give brushes a fine point.
In January 1923, a written suspicion said radium caused the workers' occupational disease.
In 1923, the first public report recorded jaw osteomyelitis in a young luminous-dial painter.
The Harvard Medical School report for U.S. Radium was written in June 1924, published in 1925.
Written in June 1924 and published in 1925, the report linked exposure with blood changes and jaw necrosis.
In June 1928, a settlement was reached by Grace Fryer and four other women.

The Harvard report could name the injury, but Grace Fryer and four other women still had to make U.S. Radium pay before their time ran out.

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