See Radium Girls.
And I apologize in advance for what you’ll see.
Depends on what you mean “before they knew what radio activity was”. They did horrible things with it before they knew about the health effects.
Like putting Radium in pills you swallow:
Or even in suppositories which are even worse:
They put thorium in toothpaste:
They used massive powered X-Ray machines with no protection in shoe store so you could see how your feet fit in shoes:
They put radium in paint then put it on pocket watch faces so they glow, but the workers didn’t know the effects of radium and all died of massive cancer of the mouth, jaw, and throat. I’m not putting picture here for that. Google those at your own risk.
The radium paint one is particularly bad because they told the workers (mostly women) to give their brush a fine tip using their mouth.
And they were fucked up for life due to it
And the company was probably like “well how could we have known?” and probably faced zero consequences in true American fashion.
Don’t forget Marie Curie died from it and her documents are so irridated they have to be quarantined.
https://www.businessinsider.com/marie-curie-radioactive-papers-2015-8
One of the early pros working with radioactivity was Marie Curie. She died of aplastic anemia in 1934. Her research notes are still radioactive. Her lab was said to be radioactive as well, yet it was not decontaminated until 1991.
I do wonder how many of the pills etc were effectively fake, radium was expensive, so a lot may have used homeopathic amounts. A lot of cosmetics today still do that, add infinitesimally small amounts of the latest fashionable ingredient, so they can say it contains it.
Ask Marie Curie.
Or the Radium Girls
But didn’t they actually know that it was poisoning the shit out of the radium girls? iirc that whole not knowing thing was a classic corporate case of totally not knowing (nudge nudge, wink wink)
100% correct. They knew, and when the injuries were a lot more severe than they anticipated, they tried to pass it off as syphilis.
An excellent podcast about the story of the radium girls if you’re interested:
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford: How the Radium Girls Fought Back
Episode webpage: https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/how-the-radium-girls-fought-back
I remember reading how, for thousands of years, Aboriginal Australians would avoid outcrops or locations with high levels of radioactive material. Those areas were known as places of sickness and to be avoided, warnings were passed down in Aboriginal lore and intergenerational stories.
It’s fascinating how people, even without knowing anything about the “why”, just realised that whoever hangs around a lot in those specific areas gets sick, and then they’re able to retain that information for many generations.
One of my favourites from aboriginal oral history I that, apparently, they have a history about how they used to cross to some peninsula over dry land, but that the sea slowly came in and made the area inaccessible. Geologists have found that they’re accurately telling the story of sea level rise that happened around 50 000 years ago, and I seem to remember that they’ve found archaeological evidence that backs the story as it’s been told through generations up to this day.
I am one generation removed from a traditional Lakota life and I think that one thing people forget is how important oral history was to people in the ancient world. You would hear a story when you were young and it was paramount to learn it and repeat it exactly as before. And as time went on, if you deviated or embellished the story, you were shunned because everyone knew the story. Imagine your favorite grandparent telling you something and telling you that you must repeat it exactly to your grandchildren when that time comes. You would not disrespect your favorite relative and spoil your place in passing on the story. So millennia does not matter as much when you think about that. Without outside influence, language changes only slightly and stories that are considered the “truth” about life, are super important and passed on as such.
They treated it as if it was not radio active only to find out the hard way later. Marie Curie is one example and the women with rotting jaws from painting watch faces with radium (licking the brush to get a sharp point) are another.
