Carter Roy
👤 SpeakerVoice Profile Active
This person's voice can be automatically recognized across podcast episodes using AI voice matching.
Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
When the girls question whether it's safe to ingest, they're told it's totally harmless.
Actually, it might even make them healthier.
The girls accepted the answer, so they continued on.
Lip massage.
Paint.
250 dials a day.
6 to 14 brush licks per dial.
That's over a thousand times every single day that these women are putting radioactive paint in their mouths.
Meanwhile, in a different part of the same building, the male chemists and scientists handle radium very differently.
They use tongs and wear protective equipment.
They know better than to let this stuff touch their skin, let alone put it in their mouths.
Same company, same radium, two completely different sets of rules.
But the dial painters don't know any of this.
Like most of America, they see radium as a beauty product.
Soon the dial painters become the envy of every young woman in town, because by the end of each shift, the women literally glow.
The radium dust settles on their hair, their skin, and their clothes.
They paint their fingernails and teeth with the stuff.
They wear their best dresses to work so the fabric will sparkle at the dance hall.
They come to be known as the Ghost Girls, because when they walk home at night, they shimmer in the dark.