William Bailey, the "Gwyneth Paltrow of Radiation," sold fraudulent tonics like Radathor with a 400% markup, while the Radium Girls faced fatal poisoning from dial-painting duties. Despite Grace Fryer and Catherine Wolfe's legal crusade leading to a 1927 settlement, corporate denial persisted until golfer Eben M. Byers' public testimony in 1931 forced an FDA cease-and-desist against Bailey. Ultimately, the Radium Girls' sacrifice established OSHA and stricter safety regulations, exposing how industries prioritized profits over human life through disinformation and evidence destruction. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:10
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
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I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
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Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Oh, yeah.
It is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is always opened with a mixture of consummate skill and, of course, inimitable charisma by myself, Robert Evans.
Also with me on the call today, Sophie Lichterman, my producer, and our lovely guest, Sophia Alexandra.
Sophia, can you do a good, can you do a good?
Behind The Bastards Intro00:16:07
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That was good.
That was good.
Thank you so much.
I actually, in my free time, I moonlight as the Kool-Aid man.
Oh, yeah.
I had heard that.
I had heard that.
I will not be doing that because I would like to be excluded from this narrative.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Sophie's just saying that because she drives the Oscar Meyer Wiener bus and doesn't want anyone to know.
She's mad because she's actually Cap and Crunch.
You think if I was driving that, that Jamie Loftus wouldn't know?
Let's be honest.
That's why you got to keep it a secret.
Jamie can't be trusted with that knowledge.
Who knows what she'd do?
She'd probably write a book and then go on a comedy tour about it.
That's right.
To disclose how fucking that automobile is.
It is pretty funny.
Anytime you see that thing going into a tunnel, it's a good time.
Just good clean fun.
Just good, clean fun.
So we're back and we're talking about our boy, Bill Bailey.
So after 1921, Marie Curie has done her big, her big show.
Bailey has had a couple of cons get busted by the government, but he is he is off to the races now making radioactive gizmos to to make sure people have all of the radium they need in their diets for optimum health.
He started selling.
Yeah, what a hero.
He starts selling a radioactive paperweight called the BioRay, which ensured any working man could keep a healthy dose of uranium poisoning at his desk while he worked.
Hell yeah, efficiency.
That's what you need.
He sold a radioactive water solution, the Thorinator, which is made with putting thorium in your water.
And then there was the Adeno Ray, his next foray into the dick medicine game.
The Adeno Ray was a radioactive belt clip that was meant to beam straight radiation into your penis.
So really just a great set of products there, right?
He invented the early cell phone, you know?
It sounds like he was a plant by like feminists to be like, the only way we can get free, if we're being honest, is we got to murder some of these men.
Yeah.
Just like a little bit at a time in unseen ways.
Like, oh, you know how they get to go outside the house and work?
I propose you put one in a paperweight.
Enjoy your work, bitch.
You know what else they love?
Belts.
Let's throw some in there, you know?
It's so fucking like, I keep thinking about, yeah, there's like some of these weirdo right-wing guys will like flip out every now.
Sperm counts are lower than ever in the West.
And, you know, like, man, we made it through the era where people were just putting, shooting straight thorium into their penises.
Like, it's fine.
We'll make it through microplastics as a species.
I'm not worried, you know, not that there's not health consequences, but people aren't going to stop breeding just because we've poisoned ourselves.
We do that a lot.
No, fucking intensifies the more we actually feel like life is being slowly poisoned.
Yeah.
Everything's fine, folks.
So Bailey's products were not cheap.
And you might view him as the same kind of dude as like, again, like the supplement salesmen who sponsor like Infowars and shit with their alpha brain supplements.
And this shit is not cheap.
His dick cancerizer costs like $1,000.
So the primary...
Wait, an old-timey money?
Yeah, an old-timey money.
So like, this is like buying a nice car, right?
Is buying one of these dick cancer machines.
Holy fuck.
Sorry.
I need to like actually process how much money he wants for that dick shit.
Yeah.
I mean, it comes down in price.
Eventually he's selling them for just like $150 as they, but at first, you know, it's a good idea.
I would wait for Black Friday, guys.
If anybody's looking to buy the deal to rate to irradiate, I'm going to go deal.
Yeah.
Once people start dying, you'll be able to irradiate your dick a lot cheaper, folks, you know?
So by this point, his first company, Associated Radium Chemists, had been busted by the Department of Agriculture for false advertising.
So this man has now been busted by different government agencies three times.
I think three different agencies.
I think it's the FDA, the FTC, and now the DOA have all like gone after him for various scams.
Nothing stopped.
The egot of criminals right there.
Yeah.
He has done the fucking patent medication con man version of an egot.
Yeah, that's great.
So he starts, you know, he forms another company.
He starts making new pills.
He makes linarium, which sounds like it was basically radioactive icy hot and thorone, which is just a dick pill made out of thorium, right?
It's just a thorium dick pill.
What's wrong with me that when he said I spit it out with some radium or whatever?
I was like, that sounds kind of good.
Sounds kind of dope.
I bet it felt good, right?
I bet it felt good.
That's all I'll say.
He had founded two new companies by this point.
The Thorone Company, named after his dick pills, was mostly thorium-based supplements, which he promised were good for all glandular metabolism and faulty chemistry conditions.
He also sold the radio endocrinator, a gold-plated radium harness that you could use in several ways.
One around the neck, it would rejuvenate your thyroid and around the midsection, it would irradiate your adrenals or ovaries.
The radio endocrinator, he claimed, gave off gamma rays that would ionize the endocrine glands.
And I'm going to quote from the book Quackery again here.
The idea was that ionizing, i.e. irradiating, the endocrine system would increase hormone production.
Or as it was better understood by its less enlightened audience, the device worked by lighting up dark recesses of the body.
The radio endocrinator could even be worn under the scrotum in a special drock strap rigged up to energize uninspired penises.
So that's good.
We're at like three different ways you could expose your dick and balls to radiation now.
Like this guy cannot irradiate enough testicles.
Like he just loves it.
He loves it.
And you know what they say?
Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life.
You know, you'll never do what you love.
You'll never irradiate what you love and yeah, you'll never work a day.
It is, again, unclear how much he believed in the therapies he was selling.
This is a guy who takes radiation tonics himself.
He clearly believes that this is helpful to some extent, as do a lot of people.
But also a lot of his shit is like clearly bogus.
There's definitely a degree because he's done cons before.
There's certainly a degree to which he knows he's conning people, right?
So, you know, his stuff goes well, though.
He starts doing better and better, making getting better at like conning people.
He really, one of the things that's going to set him apart from a lot of the pack is he goes directly to the medical community with a lot of his inventions.
And part of this is that he's a Harvard man.
He's, he knows how to talk to people who went to like these fancy colleges, right?
He knows the right things to say.
He knows how to put on that proper attitude.
And in 1924, William Bailey stands up before an annual meeting of the American Chemical Society and gives a career-defining speech about the medicinal potential of toxic radium exposure.
He announces, we have cornered aberration, disease, old age, and in fact, life and death themselves in the endocrines.
Basically, like we've backed illness into a corner and it's in the endocrine system.
I'm just watching him stand in front of like illnesses and the mission accomplish banner just drops.
He's like, we did it.
Yeah.
Now, when you envision this moment, the speech he gives to the American Chemical Society, you got to think about it the same way we used to think about like Apple's annual product announcement events, right?
Will Bailey is the Steve Jobs of radium, right?
He's getting up there being, this is insanely great.
You know, you've never been able to irradiate your dick as much as you can now.
And a lot of people, many of them doctors, are as excited for this moment as people were in 2008 to see the iPhone.
So they listened with rapt attention as he walked them through his newly evolved understanding of how radium therapy was supposed to work.
By this point, Bailey had convinced himself, or at least decided to market his products under the understanding that aging was caused by the gradual failure of one's endocrine glands.
This process could be reversed by ionizing them with radiation, which would reverse damage and rejuvenate the worn-out glands.
Full of pride, he told this audience of scientists, I am satisfied from definite clinical experience with the radio endocrinator that a method of ionization is now available whereby we can definitely, practically, without exception, retard the progress of sinesence and give a new lease of relatively normal functioning power to those whose sun of life is slowly sinking into the purple shadows of that longest night.
The wrinkled face, the drawn skin, the dull eye, the listless gait, the faulty memory, the aching body, the destructive effects of sterility all spell imperfect endocrine performance.
So that's cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the voice is really the party.
Only part I care about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do.
I do always enjoy when I get a chance to take that bad boy out for a spin.
So that is some grade A scientific mumbo jumble, right?
Just unparalleled nonsense, but it's sold to his audience.
Part of this is.
I haven't heard you mention toxins.
I'd like to know how many toxins are actually going to be leaving my body.
Yeah.
So what's the toxin situation?
You know, Star Trek, the radium is like a teleporter.
It beams the toxins right out of your body, you know?
The more radium you're exposed to.
Yeah.
You could sell this shit today, right?
We're not far from it.
Another Republican administration and they'll make it legal to sell this shit again, right?
It'll go everywhere.
Joe Rogan will be laughing at it, which honestly could solve a lot of problems for us.
Like if we just all turned to blind eye to radium medicine for like five or six years, we might be in the clear.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We just solved a lot of stuff just to something people are ready.
Yeah.
Put like 50-50 Ivermectin uranium mix and just let people shoot it up their assholes.
You know, it'll be fine.
So this shit, this nonsense Bailey's putting out, it sells to his audience.
And part of why, again, these are all real scientists, part of why they believe in what he's saying is they think that William Bailey is a scientist like them, right?
By this point, he was not just pretending to have graduated from Harvard, but he started, he'd started claiming that he'd went on to do graduate work at a prestigious college in London and become a PhD, right?
He's claiming to be a doctor now.
Now, again, in reality, his Harvard admission exam, he got kind of mid-grades on, and all of his worst grades were in like scientific fields, engineering and physics.
He's not, he's, not only is he not a doctor, but this is specifically the shit he's bad at, right?
It's like me selling accounting software.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm like, hold on, your taxes.
Yeah.
I'm like, if you want to know what to do with your money, maybe talk to me, who when someone says stocks, I just picture a folder and you open it and it's empty.
Yeah.
I'm imagining me like a Jordan Belford at the end of like when he's doing those big seminars at the end of Wolf of Wall Street.
I'm just up in front of a crowd.
Folks, you're hearing a lot of things about what you can do with your money, put it into a 401k, a high-yield investment fund.
No, I want to walk you through the real way to get rich.
Bury it in a big hole.
That's right.
The big hole method for just $20,000.
I will walk you through everything you need to do to dig a big hole in your yard and bury all your money in it.
You know, this is what Warren Buffett does.
This is what Bill Gates is doing.
That's why Bill Gates bought all that farmland.
He needs more holes.
You know what else?
For a very small monthly fee, I will let you keep your money in my big hole.
That's right.
That's right.
You put all your money in my hole, and I promise it'll still be there when you need it.
That's right.
And it won't smell weird or anything.
That's right.
Yes.
So his lies are not seriously.
Again, there are doctors and scientists, as we'll talk about, who are angry at Bailey and all of that, who do push back about this.
But in the mainstream, this is pretty accepted.
And in fact, the paper of record, the New York Times, reaches out to Bailey the day after this speech, and they wind up just exerting his speech to write an article about the wonders of like irradiating yourself for health.
They just, without questioning it, like reprint chunks of his speech as an article in the New York Times.
So he's doing great by 1925.
Bailey moves his headquarters to East Orange, New Joise, and he launches yet another company, the Bailey Radium Laboratories.
It was through this company that he would produce his masterpiece, Radathor.
This was a pre-bottled radiation-infused beverage.
Basically, it's vitamin water if you put a couple Hiroshima's worth of rads inside it.
So he had the ear of a decent chunk of the scientific community and a lot of credulous journalists.
And as a result, Bailey decides he's going to do something new to advertise Radathor rather than like these standard patent med ads.
I mean, I think he's doing these too, but he starts advertising specifically in like medical journals and publications, right?
And this part is actually pretty brilliant.
He's kind of on the cutting edge here.
He's aware at this point the FTC and the FDA are looking at him and guys like him, right?
Putting out specific health claims in like a scientific journal would get him in trouble.
He can't do that, but he wants scientific legitimacy.
And so he realizes if I just publish research or at least articles that look like research talking in general about radium therapy and how radium affects the human body, but without making claims about my products, if I'm just publishing research on radium and it's attached to the name of my company, that acts as an advertisement.
But I'm not in danger with the FTC, right?
They can't come after me for that.
Yeah, he's smart.
This is an innovation, right?
Profession.
Yeah.
So instead of saying the thorinator will cure your depression, he just bought his way into publishing scientific monographs and magazines and particularly publications read by physicians.
And I'm going to quote from the Journal of the American Medical Association here.
One example of these monographs, a 32-page pamphlet published in 1926 under the title Modern Treatment of the Endocrine Glands with Radium Water, Radathor, the New Weapon of Medical Science, was mailed to every physician in America.
The pamphlet outlines Bailey's theories and urges skeptical physicians to place one or two of your most obstinate cases on radium water so that you may observe its action right in your own practice.
The pamphlet also included many photographs that purport to show the process of radium refinement and purification at the Bailey Laboratories.
These were later found to be fakes.
Bailey simply bought his radium and mesothorium from the nearby American Radium Laboratory of New Jersey, bottling it into skilled water, distilled water at his plant and marking up the price more than 400%.
But at least it's real radiation, you know?
Yeah, I mean, at least he has integrity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's what I respect is a man who sells honest poison to you, right?
Thank you.
Good man.
So Bailey shipped his pamphlets to every registered physician in the country and filled them with testimonials from happy patients and doctors.
He helped blaze a trail that would later be followed by Purdue Pharmaceutical decades later in the marketing of OxyContent by offering a rebate to physicians as a professional fee.
So if you prescribe radathor to a patient, whatever they spend on it, you get 17% of that as a kickback directly to you, right?
That's smart.
Now, to their credit, the AMA does eventually come after him.
It takes him a while, but the AMA is like, this is unbelievably unethical, like incredibly evil.
But it works really well.
And again, some of these doctors are prescribing it, are prescribing the equivalent of like hundreds or thousands of doses per patient.
So there is good money in this shit, especially because a lot of these patients are rich, right?
Kickbacks And Radiation00:03:33
Like you are milking the rich by poisoning them with radiation, which like not necessarily always bad, right?
You know?
We've seen worse.
It's complicated.
Yeah.
Look at that.
Yeah.
In the maybe pile.
In the maybe pile.
Yeah.
So from what we can tell, Bailey definitely overhyped his products beyond what he actually believed they could do.
But he also seems to have been all the radiation and then you get cocky.
Yeah, yeah.
And then you start to get a little arrogant, right?
Now, he seems to have been genuinely convinced that to some extent radiation was good medicine.
Again, he becomes a daily user of radathor.
I have found no evidence that he was lying about this.
He does seem to have taken his own poison.
We'll talk more about that at the end.
Again, I respect him.
Is this actually a fan episode?
Yeah, yeah, this is now we're fans of this guy, right?
That's all I'm hearing because we love him.
And he does seem to, he seems to be obsessed.
And again, he is to some extent consciously still conning people because he has, he has made con products.
Like he has made outright cons.
So he's, he's both.
We all contain multitudes, right?
And he, he does seem to have an actual obsession with trying to figure out why radium is good for you, right?
He is trying.
And again, he doesn't have any competence as a scientist, but he, he does try to do his own research here.
And I'm going to quote from Smithsonian Magazine again.
By 1925, Bailey had formulated his central pharmacological thesis concerning radium's stimulatory powers.
As described in a lecture that he gave in 1925, this thesis was essentially a variant of the Radiation As Catalyst school of thought.
More than 90% of all diseases claimed Bailey were the result of endocrinologic dysfunction that prevented the transmission of essential physiological factors.
Without the correct metabolic signals, the body lapsed into a state of biochemical energy deprivation.
Eventually, this state exhausted the pericnymal organs, resulting in anemia, lassitude, cancer, depression, idiocy, and many other problems.
Bailey believed that the energy lost through ineffective metabolism could be replenished using the power of radium's alpha particles, thus allowing the body to return to its proper state of oxidative metabolic balance through radioactive gland control.
Yeah, that all scans.
That seems real.
Sure.
Yeah, actually, me and my girls, yeah, our band, radioactive with gland control.
So that's actually a pretty good band name.
Yeah, we're fucking actually opening for what's the name of that?
Of the name of that device that that dude was peddling to make your dick.
What was it called?
Yeah.
Oh, Thorone.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're actually opening for own.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
And speaking of irradiating your dick again, you can buy some dick pills that probably aren't radioactive if you listen to these ads.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
Outsider With A Secret00:03:09
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
And yeah, we're talking Bill Bailey.
So Radathor takes the fuck off.
Dangers Of Radium00:15:02
This is a huge success.
He finally has his big hit, right?
It's fucking, it's, it's fucking wild.
He sells more than 400,000 half ounce bottles of Radathor in just five years.
And again, these are all 400% markup.
So he is making bank off this shit.
Now, by this point, the boom years of Radathor, evidence had begun to mount that there were horrific long-term health consequences to being exposed to radiation.
And this is going to bring us to a bit of a digression, but this is a story worth telling.
The infamous tale of the Radium Girls.
It is, this is a fuck, I think a lot of people are broadly aware of this, which is why I didn't like make it the whole focus, but this is a wild ass story.
It is laid out in gripping detail by author Kate Moore in her book, The Radium Girls.
I was like, why do I know that?
I think people have heard this.
And this is a, the Radium Girl story is a standard story of like an evil corporation abusing its workers for profit, you know, when they should have known better and ultimately killing them.
It's very shady.
I wanted to focus more on the patent medication stuff because that's more fun, but we are going to talk about the radium girls now.
This is where shit gets pretty bleak.
As I've noted before, sufficient doses of radium and like toothpaste will make your teeth glow, right?
This was a thing people advertised for at the time.
This meant that radium, because it can glow, has the potential practical uses.
You can make stuff like watches and dials that need to glow in the dark glow, right?
For like planes, for military equipment, right?
For industrial equipment.
And like, it's obviously it's useful if you have like a watch that can glow in the dark, right?
You don't have to like.
Like a road divider or whatever.
Yeah, a road divider, a compass, right?
You know, all of the different things you need if you're like firing artillery in the night or some shit.
So obviously there's a military application.
A lot of this takes off, like radium dial painting takes off as an industry when we get into World War I because there's a sudden demand for the equipment that they need to be able to have like dials lit up on.
And this is a demanding job, right?
You cannot, if you are, if you are working on stuff that's going to be military, it's going to be used to like drop bombs and fire shells at people.
It has to be precise, right?
You have to be accurately putting everything on.
So that is, you know, a job that has to be done by skilled workers.
And there's no other way to apply this stuff than by hand, right?
It has to be done by hand.
And women with tiny hands were generally seen to be the best at this job, right?
So dial painting.
Oh my gosh.
Robert, just fucking text me next time.
You would have been a great radium girl.
Girl, you had those radium girl hands.
You got those radium girl hands.
You don't want to have those because it does not end well for them.
But this is considered an incredible job for a while, right?
It has a reputation for being the elite job of poor working girls because it pays three times normal factory wages.
Kate Moore notes that dial painters were in the top 5% of female workers nationally when it came to compensation.
So like this is seen for ambitious poor young women.
This is how you get a leg up.
This is how you can escape poverty, right?
Which is, again, why this is a lot less fun than selling radioactive poison to rich people.
Because these jobs are so good, the first women who get them guard them jealously, often recruiting close friends and they keep it in the family, right?
They're like, if there's an opening, I'm going to make sure my sister, my aunt, my niece gets the job rather than like somebody off the street.
And so one of the things that's going to be devastating about this is that often factories will have like multiple sisters, all the sisters in a family working side by side on the production line and, you know, one guess as to how their lives end, right?
Other workers at the factory, and this is very important, the radium girls are not wearing any kind of PPE.
They are exposed directly physically through their skin with a mix of radium and paint, right?
It's like mixed into a powder and then turned into a paint, basically.
They have no protective gear.
The workers at the factory that is making the paint, that's mixing these pigments that are processing raw radium, they wear protective gear, right?
They've got like lead aprons.
They're wearing gloves.
Like they understand.
They're men though.
They matter.
They in fact are men.
Yeah, they matter.
Like that's obvious.
Like, what are we going to be wasting CFC equipment on fucking vaginas?
That is a big part.
That is a big part of what's going on.
But that's, it's interesting.
That's not all of it.
As we'll talk about, a lot of these men are insanely reckless with this stuff in ways that kind of confuse me because they do know it's dangerous.
They're covering up the dangers for the women, but they are also taking risks with this shit.
I don't fully get some of it.
You get the feeling.
I think radium and uranium and shit, when people first started fucking with it, I think it kind of, there's a high.
I don't know if it's like an actual physical high that it affects your brain, but like because of all of the buzz around this, because of how new and exciting is, it deranges people a little bit.
I don't know that I don't think there's like a medical or pharmacological.
I think it's a psychological thing, but it does appear to be, we'll talk about this in a bit, but that does appear.
Oh, I love that you mentioned that.
You mentioned in the last, in the first one.
Yeah.
But I was thinking like, since the life expectancy is so not great.
Yeah.
Like how many studies could there have been possibly done?
Oh, there's none at this point.
Right.
Right.
No.
Like for somebody, like you might absolutely be 100% correct.
Like, how would you check that?
Yeah.
I mean, they know that it can kill you just because like pure radium will like burn people.
People have died as a result of that.
But the idea that like tiny amounts, like for one thing, it hasn't been being used long enough that people who are being exposed constantly to smaller doses aren't getting cancer yet.
So you can't really like, it's just not as, it wasn't immediately clear.
Although, as we'll talk about, they did know enough that they should have been taking precautions, right?
But they certainly don't know nearly as much as we know now, right?
And part of why they're not giving these girls PPE is that the paint used by the radium girls is so diluted.
They're like, it can't, this is not enough to be dangerous.
And again, part of how they're thinking about this, they're not thinking about this the way we think about radiation, which is like, yeah, you want to, you want to be exposed to as little radiation as possible, right?
They're thinking about it as well.
In high doses, super concentrated, you know, radium can be very dangerous to people, but in lower doses, it's a medicine.
It treats these different illnesses.
So it's like they're thinking about it the way we think of aspirin, right?
Obviously, if you were to like chow down on a brick of aspirin, you would get very sick.
But if you take a pill when you've got a headache or whatever, you feel better, you know?
That's kind of how they're thinking about this, right?
So they're like, well, in these doses, it's not going to hurt these girls, right?
Now, obviously, this is absurd.
As Kate Moore writes in a column for BuzzFeed, Radium's luminosity was part of its allure, and the dial painters soon became known as the Ghost Girls because by the time they finished their shifts, they themselves would glow in the dark.
They made the most of the perk, wearing their good dresses to the plants so they'd shine in the dance halls at night and even painting radium onto their teeth for a smile that would knock the suitors dead.
Grace and her colleagues obediently followed the technique they'd been taught for the painstaking handiwork of painting the tiny dials, some of which were only three and a half centimeters wide.
The girls were instructed to slip their paintbrushes between their lips to make a fine point, a practice called lip pointing or lip dip paint routine, as playwright Melanie Marnick later described it.
Every time the girls raised the brushes to their mouths, they swallowed a little bit of the glowing green paint.
So that's that's great.
That's good.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, one of the women who instructed Grace in this technique later recalled to an interviewer: the first thing we asked was, Does this stuff hurt you?
Naturally, you don't want to put anything in your mouth that is going to hurt you.
Mr. Savoy, the manager, said it wasn't dangerous, that we didn't need to be afraid.
Now, this was a lie.
Even given the incomplete understanding of radiation at the time, they knew enough to know that there was a danger to the jobs.
These women, again, the men handling radium in labs are wearing lead aprons and tongs and shit.
These women are not even warned that those precautions exist, right?
They're not being told that there is an amount of radium that's dangerous because that's common knowledge to scientists, but to lay people, there's no knowledge that there's any danger to this stuff.
It's like widespread.
And like, so even though I think a lot of these guys legitimately believed they were not being exposed to enough to hurt them, these women were not being told that there are any potential dangers to radium, which like is irresponsible.
It's particularly bad because the founder of the U.S. Radium Corporation, which employed the radium girls, was a scientist named Sabine von Sochaki.
He literally invented the paint that they used, and he was aware of the dangers of radium, even in smaller quantities.
Again, this is not just some businessman who like adopts this because it's good money.
This is a scientist.
He had worked personally with the Curies in the earliest radium research.
He had seen radiation burns and he had been injured by radiation himself.
And I'm going to quote from the Radium Girls here.
From them and from the specialist medical literature he had studied, Von Sauchaki understood that radium carried great dangers.
The Curies by that time were intimately familiar with radium's hazards, having suffered many burns themselves.
Radium could cure tumors, it was true, by destroying unhealthy tissue, but it was indiscriminating in its powers and could devastate healthy tissue too.
Von Saciki himself had suffered its silent and sinister wrath.
Radium had gotten into his left index finger, and when he realized, he hacked the tip of it off.
It now looked as though an animal had gnawed it.
Of course, to the layman, this was all unknown.
The mainstream position, as understood by most people, was that the effects of radium were all positive, and that was what was written about in newspapers and magazines.
So, again, this guy is intense.
Yeah, yeah, like he cut his own finger off when he got a little bit of it in there.
He knows these girls are taking a risk and he just doesn't care, right?
Like, I made the sexism joke earlier, which I'm sure is a part of it, but I mostly think honestly, it's a classism thing, right?
It's like a, it's like, you don't give a fuck.
Like, you know, okay, I'm going to recommend this book that I've talked about before called Fashion Victims by Allison Matthews David.
I sent you guys it because I'm going to do a podcast with her, but she talks about all of the different like ways that clothes were essentially killing people that were making them and wearing them.
But one of the things is like the people that work in the factories matter so little that their lives are totally an okay thing to sacrifice, which is like why workers' rights even had to be a thing, you know?
Were just like oh yeah, we give a about the people that make our like that would not even be an issue clearly anyway, i'm not saying anything new.
But yeah no no yeah, that's I.
I always valid to like bring up, especially when we, as we're in this new age of unionization, like there's a good reason why, because without unions and worker protections, they would literally just poison us all with radium for yeah, to death.
And they don't care because there's a million more people.
Why would you give a?
Yeah, yeah.
And again, I will say, as we're, as we're critiquing him for this very validly, he is also again, he has this kind of irrational transfiction with radium right, and by all reports, he was also pretty reckless with this.
He was known to play with it, to hold tubes of radium with his bare hands to watch this.
Like he would turn the light off so he could like watch its luminosity in the dark.
He would expose his arm up to the elbow.
In radium Solutions company co-founder, George Willis, was also really reckless.
He would pick up tubes of radium with his like four finger finger and they were supposed to use forceps, but he would just use his hands.
Um, and again, these guys are so reckless with this stuff because they just kind of love it.
And their colleagues are like well, these guys are the scientists.
If they're doing this, it must be safe.
And again, like if you saw this in a movie and you do see it and like you know, superhero movie, when a like a villain or whatever is like drawing a thing, you're always like this is so ridiculous.
But listening the way that these people actually relate to uranium, and that is exactly it, i'm like it's wild right psychological yeah, something component that is connected to it.
Because like yeah, that's not normal no, and yeah, I do.
I don't fully understand what it is, but something is clearly going on here because these people are yeah, they're treating it yeah, like like a fucking villain in a Spider-man movie, treats like the superhero serum or some shit right, like they're willing to foe right here.
Yeah, yes.
And it's interesting because, like a lot, there are scientists, prominent ones, who are warning about this one of them.
Normally, this is the only time we're going to bring up Thomas Edison and him not be the bastard, but Thomas Edison was aware of all this and thought it was crazy.
He he remarked right around this time there may be a condition into which radium has not yet entered.
That would produce dire results.
Everybody handling it should have care, right?
That's again the only time Edison says something perfectly reasonable but like, yeah man, they probably should be wearing some protection.
He's basically like, we don't understand this stuff and you're just you're sticking your arm into a vat of it.
What is wrong with you?
Like this burns people.
We should be careful here now.
You will not be surprised to hear that the effect of all of this radium on the bodies of the young women painting these dials was nothing short of calamitous.
The radium that they had eaten particularly settled inside their bodies and basically honeycombs their bones.
With radiation it is drilling holes inside their bones like swiss cheese.
This kills their marrow and it causes their bodies to literally collapse in on it themselves like a dying star.
One worker uh this, this young woman named Grace.
Her spine is crushed.
She has is like given a bracelet.
Basically her spine just crumbles inside of her.
Another girl has her jaw eaten away to a stump.
Some girls would shrink.
They would like lose multiple inches because their leg bones are just crumbling and compacting from the inside.
And while all of this is going on, their bones were glowing in the dark, right?
So fucked up.
Like it is, some of these women first realized they were sick when they saw their, they would see their own bones glowing back at them in the mirror.
Like, what the fuck?
Yeah, it's insane.
And like, yeah, we've got a picture here.
This is one of the radium girls who has, I mean, honestly, I don't mean to be like blithe about this.
It looks like a 90s prosthetic.
Like if you were going to give someone a fake chin for like a skit where they're, you know, trying to make them look like Jay Leno or something, like that's what, but it's just a tumor.
It's like a tumor that's a good eight inches of like chin, basically.
Like it's even more and it's also thick.
I mean, it is, it's actually, it's more like the mass of a brick that's just stuck under her jaw.
Yeah.
Like the tumors these young women got are ghastly.
Some of the most unsettling body horror shit I have ever encountered in my research.
Like it is gnarly.
Radium Girls Crusade00:07:04
And yeah, obviously by the time you have this kind of radium exposure, there's no cure or treatment.
You can't fix this.
Like this is this is by the time your bones are glowing in the dark, you're dead, you know?
But also like how much research and work would have to even be done for anybody to even try to reverse it.
Yeah, I mean like there's no way to even like they're so far behind the ball on that.
But even then I think today, by this point, I don't think there's shit we could do for these girls.
Oh, no, we can't.
We can't fix it.
I'm just saying like the amount of time you would need to figure out how to solve something like this.
Like they do not have that time.
Yeah.
No, absolutely not.
Like this is a death sentence.
And they, you know, these are not dumb people, these women.
Like they realize as soon as they, they don't know what radiation poisoning is because it's not really well known at that point, but they know by the time your bones are crumbling inside of you, well, I'm going to die, right?
They are not possessed of like irrational like hope here.
You know, they're very aware, like, oh my God, my job has fucking killed me.
I was lied to, right?
Now, while they start coming out, going to the press, trying to like get help, like get, you know, basically the equivalent of workman's comp for getting poisoned at work, the radium industry, these companies making the paints, painting the dials, deny there is any danger to their products.
They basically say these girls are crazy.
Something else is wrong with them.
Radium, we all know radium is a health product, right?
And there's so little of it in this paint that no one could get harmed by it, right?
And in fact, when the story that radium girls are getting sick breaks in the news, the New York Times is like, well, we got to report on this.
See if, you know, see what's up to it.
You know who can tell us if these girls are full of shit or not?
Our buddy William Bailey.
So they call Will Bailey, the guy selling radium water, and he's like, there's no proof that radium is responsible for any of these deaths.
Nobody gets sick from radium.
This is just nonsense.
They're women, you know?
They don't know anything.
It's also awesome that if you want to know about a thing, you don't go to the people that have the thing.
No.
You're like, no, what they're doing.
Well, there's a lot of people to learn from them.
No.
Will Bailey's a scientist.
We, the New York Times, didn't check to verify that he has any kind of degree, but he says he's a scientist.
Who would lie about that?
Not a man selling radium.
I'm being a Harvard man.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, I bet that is a big part of it.
I bet the fucking reporter who reached out as some Harvard educated writer and was like, well, a Harvard man would never poison people for money.
He would never lie on behalf of his industry.
So now I will say, again, a lot of the doctors and stuff we're talking about this are not good people.
There are some, these girls, you know, when they get sick, this is horrifying.
And the physicians who are seeing them and realizing what's happened are horrifying.
And some very brave, crusading physicians basically go to bat against a significant chunk of the medical industry and against the radium industry to like try to get not just get justice for these girls, because to an extent that's impossible, but to try and stop people from being exposed to radium, right?
Because they realize, oh, these girls are getting sick from radium paint.
All of these products on their shelves are full of radium.
Potentially, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people could be getting sick.
We have to stop this shit, right?
And the radium girls, though, I will say, you know, these doctors, a lot of these doctors, they testify, they are great.
The primary response to this, this attempt to kind of bring it into this industry is centered around these radium girls who are actively dying and basically organize a very effective crusade to bring their employer to some sort of justice and to put a stop to this shit.
And these, again, this is an incredibly heroic story.
These girls are aware we cannot be saved, right?
We are doing this to stop other people from getting sick and dying.
Grace Fryer, who was one of the Radium girls, said at the time, it is not for myself I care.
I am thinking more of the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example.
Kate Moore writes, quote, it was Grace who led their fight, determined to find a lawyer, even after countless attorneys turned her down, either disbelieving the women's claims, running scared from powerful radium corporations, or being unprepared to fight a legal battle that demanded the overturn of existing legislation.
At the time, radium poisoning was not a compensable disease.
It hadn't even been discovered until the girls got sick.
And the women were also stymied by the statute of limitations, which ruled that victims of occupational poisoning had to bring their legal cases within two years.
Radium poisoning was insidious, so most girls did not start to sicken until at least five years after they started work.
They were trapped in a vicious legal circle that seemingly could not be squared.
But Grace was the daughter of a union delegate, and she was determined to hold a clearly guilty firm to account.
Eventually, in 1927, a smart young lawyer named Raymond Berry accepted their case, and Grace, along with four colleagues, found herself at the center of an internationally famous courtroom drama.
By now, however, time was running out.
The women had been given just four months to live, and the company seemed intent on dragging out the legal proceedings.
As a consequence, Grace and her friends were forced to settle out of court.
But they had raised the profile of radium poisoning, just as Grace had planned.
And, you know, this is, again, you know, they're not able to take the radium girls, this first group of them, Grace, they're not able to take this case as far as they want to because they don't have much time.
But they settle, they get money for their families, and this becomes an international story.
And so thousands, hundreds, you know, at least hundreds of other women, and I also assume an equal number of men at least, working in various industries with radium find out for the first time that this shit is dangerous, right?
And it is like, this is like a horror movie scene, right?
As these, as these stories start to come out and they're being read in offices where people are using radium paint and doing other shit with radium, right?
One diet.
They came in after brushing their teeth with their radium toothpaste.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everyone's just looking at their glass of radium water being like, oh, no.
One young woman who worked for another radium corporation, she's a dial painter as well, but in a different state, she's in Illinois.
Catherine Wolf later recalled, there were meetings at our plant that bordered on riots.
The chill of fear was so depressing that we could scarcely work.
And now I bet you're wondering, why the fuck would you keep working after you learn this?
Well, you got to keep in mind, a lot of this shit is breaking right at the start of the Great Depression, right?
And in the middle of the Great Depression.
And so people are suddenly aware, oh my God, this is killing me.
But also, you know, what'll kill my family is if I can't buy food for my kids that I'm a single mother to suddenly, if we get shit pushed out on the street when there are no other jobs.
So they really, this is like, it's an impossible situation, right?
You don't want to die of cancer, but also starvations right around the corner.
Starvation's right there, too.
Yeah, it's fucked.
It's fucked up.
So yeah, a real bummer.
But you know what's not a bummer?
Sophia?
These goods and services.
These goods and services.
That's not a bummer at all.
Impossible Situation00:04:15
Just a good time.
So have some products, folks.
Righto.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Now, we're back.
So this is, it's also, you know, part of why people don't quit immediately, why there's like a lot of confusion in the industry among these workers is just like, well, we still need money.
And another part of it is that the companies, all these radium companies, they're kind of, I haven't read precisely if the tobacco industry looks at how these companies respond when they formulate their own responses later in the century to a similar sort of like, you know, revelation, but they use a lot of the same tactics that will later be used by big tobacco.
Confusion In Industry00:15:48
And the biggest one is they flood the zone with disinformation.
The Illinois firm that Wolf worked at, Radium Dial, denied any responsibility.
And the way that they do this is they come in and they say, you know, we're concerned, obviously, about our workers.
We don't want anyone to get hurt.
So we did medical tests.
You know, we studied, we did tests on these women who got sick to try and see if they had radium poisoning.
Now, here's the thing.
They had done medical tests on these employees.
And those tests had shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of these women had radiation poisoning.
So what does Radium Dial do?
They just lie.
They just say the test didn't show anything and they burn that fucking research.
To further muddle waters, they paid for a full-page ad where they stated, if we at any time had reason to believe that any conditions of the work endangered the health of our employees, we would have at once suspended operations.
Now, listen, if we had known Harvey Weinstein was some sort of a raper, we would have never allowed him to dominate the film industry like he has.
Oh, God.
So here's the thing.
This actually gets more ghoulish than that.
This is one of the worst things I've ever heard about a company doing because not only are they hiding research that proves that their employees are getting sick from this work, not only are they lying to people where they continue to get exposed to more radium, not only are they putting out propaganda, but when their workers die, obviously families who are losing their kids could pay for an independent autopsy, could have research done, could have these bones studied, and that would prove that these girls,
they steal the bones of these dead girls to hide, to like destroy them so that it can't be available.
They are stealing the bones of their dead employee.
That is...
And you gone ahead and you said steal their bones.
Steal their bones.
I think that might be the worst thing I've heard of a company doing to their workers.
That's like...
All their bones.
It's a high bar, but that's like, I mean, when I say ghoulish, I'm not like, that's not even figure.
That is literal ghoul.
You are stealing the bones of a corpse.
That is actual, just literal ghoulshit.
Ah, their motherfucking bones, my daughter.
Yeah.
That is pretty bad.
So 1938.
It's like when fucking, is it Mormons that like convert people to the people?
Oh, dead people.
Yeah.
Well, they're like, they'll make Anne Frank into a Mormon.
Yeah, come through a Jewish cemetery and be like, you're a Mormon now.
Man, I have applied what I call the Anne Frank rule, which is that if you start to bring up or reference Anne Frank in anything other than, for example, the diary of Anne Frank, stop it.
Stop it.
Don't do that.
Like, let her be.
She wrote her book.
Talk about the book if you want to.
If you are bringing up Anne Frank for any other reason, cease.
It's not necessarily.
It's still like the Martin Luther King rule.
It's like, sorry, are you white?
Did you not bring Luther King into your arguments?
Thank you.
Leave it be.
There's plenty of things that he said.
Just stop.
Just let the man rest.
He does not need to be made a part of this.
So in 1938, not long after Catherine Wolfe, you know, the stories had gone viral in her workplace.
They're having these meetings, you know, freaking out.
Do we have to worry about getting cancer?
Shortly after that point, Catherine wakes up with a tumor on her hip.
And in very short order, it grows to the size of a grapefruit.
Her teeth start to fall out.
The detail that like fucked me up about this is that she wants to pick fragments of her jawbone outside of her mouth, out of her mouth, like because it's just crumbling inside of her.
This is my fucking nightmare, honestly.
Literally, I have nightmares about this.
Oh, God.
It's, yeah, it's, I can't imagine really much worse other than like this happening to your kid, right?
That's the only thing worse than this happening.
Like, and I, I don't think I would be a functional person if I were going through this.
Catherine launches a fucking war on her employer.
Like while she is literally pulling fragments of her own jaw out of her head on a daily basis, her body is rotting on her.
She fucking organizes a legal campaign against them.
She sues.
She's fucking, these, all of these ladies are fucking awesome.
She sues her employer, which is one of, you know, and this is like, not only is this not easy because they have a lot of money, but her neighbors start coming after her when she sues the radium dial company because it's the Great Depression.
There's not a lot of other employers.
So they're like, you're threatening everyone's ability to make a living, right?
They don't care that they're in danger too.
I want my husband to go to the job that's killing him.
Yeah, exactly.
Catherine does not let this stop her.
She testifies before a judge.
The court case goes through.
Again, the company tries to delay it.
She gets too sick to go into court.
And so she has, they have the judge and the lawyers show up to her house.
She gives her like testimony on her deathbed.
And she and her lawyer, Leonard Grossman, win their case.
The horrific story of the Radium Girls builds popular support for a whole raft of new regulations.
A lot of our working workers' regulations come out of the backlash to what happened to these girls.
And in fact, Catherine and this whole, like the, the series of court cases launched by the Radium Girls are a major factor in the establishment of OSHA, right?
This is a big part of how we get OSHA.
And, you know, it is obviously does not save any of these young women, but they are continuing to save lives to this day.
Before OSHA, about 14,000 Americans died on the job every year.
And again, this is like when the country's a third the size that it is now.
Today, about 4,500 workers die on the job every year, right?
Still too many, but like that is like the huge improvement.
These girls saved a lot of lives, you know, while losing their own.
It's a, it's as admirable a story as I've ever heard.
So that is a long digression from the story of William Bailey, although he did tie into this.
You know, he's giving comments to the New York Times.
But you can't really talk about radium poisoning without talking about the radium girls, nor should you.
So one crucial difference here between what the Radium Dial Corporation, these other radium companies that these girls work at is doing and what Bailey is doing is that the death toll of the radium dial companies is very well documented because we have all these women who go to work there and they get sick and we know they died and we know it was because of the radium that they were exposed to at work.
We don't know how many people died or were maimed as a result of all of the radiation they got from Willie Bailey's products.
Like, because number one, it's a lower dose than the radium dial girls are getting, but they're taking it sometimes.
Some of these people are taking it for years.
And then maybe 10 years later, they get a cancer.
And like, well, they were a smoker too.
Now, of course, we know that if you're a smoker, you're going to get more lung cancer faster if you're also exposed to radium, right?
It is not known.
We'll never know how many people died because of this guy's stuff, but like he's tens of thousands of people are taking the radium products that he makes, maybe more.
I think his death toll is significant.
I think I'm guessing this guy's got at least a 9-11 on him, you know?
But I don't think it's provable, right?
It should also be noted that the Radium Dial Corporation and others were at least manufacturing products that did something, right?
They had a function.
Bailey is just selling pure snake oil.
You know, whether or not that makes him better or worse is pointless to discuss, but I do think the difference is interesting.
It's also worth noting that the progress that came about as a result of the Radium Girls Brave Battle was not immediate.
As late as 1930, the FDA had taken no serious action against Bailey or his compatriots.
And this last court case ends in 1928, right?
So there is starting to be backlash building and people agitating to like really restrict where this stuff can be used.
But in 1930, the FDA is still like, we don't have any legal basis to go after this guy.
Several warnings.
The FDA does publish warnings because of all of these grisly photos of dying dial painters, but they don't really do anything.
The FTC is a bit faster on the draw.
In 1928, which is the year that Catherine Wolf sues the Radium Dial Company, they start an investigation into William Bailey's company, right?
Particularly into the claims he's making about Radathor.
But this takes a while to work its way through the system.
So in 1930, two years later, they finally charge him with false advertising.
Now, unclear if that would have been enough to bring him down.
He has enough money at this point to have fought this, but this charge comes across at the same time as another very significant development, which is what's going to actually bring an end to not just Bailey, but this whole industry.
And of course, it's a rich white guy getting sick from radium poisoning, right?
Oh, no.
That's the worst of this.
That leads to real fast changes.
Eben M. Byers is an upper-class athlete.
He's a competitive trapshooter.
And he was the champion of the U.S. amateur golf tournament in 1907.
He didn't say he was that kind of white.
That's golf champion white.
He is also the CEO of a metal foundry.
He is a millionaire who is famous for his parties and womanizing.
Smithsonian magazine writes that his, quote, suave demeanor and social conquest at nearby girls' schools earned him the nickname Foxy Grandpa.
So that's probably something criminal, right?
That's probably, that's probably bad.
Ew, Foxy Grandpa.
Foxy Grandpa.
Yeah, because he's going after women or people who are so young.
Dude.
Right.
I'm not sad this guy winds up dying horribly.
Around town.
Yeah.
Which you can't even think.
It is funny that like you have these deeply sympathetic, really incredible people.
These radium girls get sick and die and it slowly brings change.
But like the worst man in the world gets sick on radium and it's this instant fucking backlash.
Yeah.
Seriously.
It's like the like the lacrosse like rapist guy.
Yeah.
And everyone's like, well, now we got to end radiation.
You do have to think of this guy.
He's like a Gatsby type, right?
Oh, of course.
I pictured Leonardo Caprio on the media.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's got like horse racing stables in multiple countries.
Yeah.
You said Foxy Grandpa.
I immediately thought Leonard GiCaprio.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There you go.
So his downfall, Eben Byers' downfall begins in 1927.
He's attending the annual Harvard-Yale football game.
And on his way back, he's got a private, he owns a private train car.
He's like partying with his friends and he falls drunkenly off of his top bunk and injures his arm.
You know, he thinks it's just like a sprain or something, but the pain doesn't leave him.
You know, he goes to a bunch of doctors.
He takes different treatments for weeks, all these different physical therapies.
And, you know, months go by and it's just not, it's still this chronic pain.
He can't play golf anymore and the constant pain makes it hard.
He can't get erections anymore.
So he's like, anything, I'll do anything to deal with this.
He's like, one, no golf.
Two, no more trap shooting.
Yeah, yeah.
And three, no more pussy.
Like, I will kill myself.
Yeah, you have to fix me, Doc.
So he's got all this money.
He shops around for doctors until he finds one named Charles Moyer.
Now, Moyer is one of these doctors who is aware of Bailey's kickback program on Radathor and is like, well, if I get this rich guy to take a shitload of Radathor, I'll get, I'm getting a fucking, I'm getting a point or I'm getting a couple of points off of each bottle he buys, right?
So Byers tries this stuff.
He like says, hey, try this Radathor shit.
It'll cure you.
Byers tries it and he likes it, right?
He feels energized.
He starts feeling like his old self again.
He can get hard.
He can play golf.
Again, I don't know, is this the placebo effect?
He just finally did his, or was his arm just actually healing?
And he should have given it more time.
I don't know, but he claims to feel fucking great.
And in fact, he falls, he is, he is like the power user of Radathor, right?
He's drinking on a daily basis.
He's drinking three times the maximum, maximum recommended dose.
And he loves it that as gifts, he starts buying cases of it for his friends and loved ones.
But he's also like taking it off label, right?
So like three times the maximum amount.
Yeah.
And his doctor's like, sure, that's just three times as much money for me.
Fuck it.
He buys cases whenever he gets a new girlfriend.
And I think the term girl is very literal there.
He'll give them cases of Radathor to drink for their own health.
And he starts using it to water his racehorses.
No, don't fucking kill the horses.
Yeah, yeah.
Between 1927 and 1931, he personally consumes between 1,000 and 1,500 bottles of this stuff.
Estimates that have been done recently, you know, after the fact when we started to learn how to measure radiation better, scientists now estimate that he exposed himself to about three times a fatal dose of radiation over the course of four years, the equivalent of several thousand x-rays.
Wow.
So that's cool.
Starting in early 1931, Byers began to experience increasing complications.
His bones seemed to be eating themselves, splintering and dissolving one by one.
His marrow failed and his kidneys stopped working.
A brain abscess destroyed his hearing.
By the end, he was bedridden, unable to move or hear, but still alive and horribly alert.
Now, his social prominence means you cannot sweep this under the rug.
This is a famous rich guy, a radiologist, Joseph Steiner, who looked at the radiographs of Byers' rotting bones, launched a crusade of his own.
He had to take action because the other doctors who worked with Byers, including Byers' personal physician, refused to acknowledge that this was radium intoxication, right?
I think because they're all getting kickbacks.
Like, no, man, you're not sick because of radium.
You just need to drink more milk.
So this guy, Steiner, is like, no, this is fucking radium poisoning.
He's been poisoned by this stupid drink he's taking.
And, you know, he makes this enough of a noise about this that a government commission is formed to investigate.
And they have Byers, again, he becomes another person.
He testifies from his sickbed right before he dies to this commission.
An attorney who was present at that testimony later described, quote, a more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine.
We went to Southampton where Byers had a magnificent home.
There we discovered him in a condition which beggars description.
Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak.
His head was swathed in bandages.
He had undergone two successive jaw operations and his whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth and most of his lower jaw, had been removed.
All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating and holes were actually forming in his skull.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, pretty fucked up.
Pretty bad.
On December 19th, 1931, the commission issued a cease and desist to Bailey's company.
This did not help buyers.
He dies in early 1932, but his death provided the impetus for the FDA to push for expanded power so that they can take action against quack medication.
A lot of the FDA's what teeth it has come out of this period as a result of this.
A backlash boiled over from the medical community against patent drugs like Radathor.
Regulations came quickly, and Bailey's business collapsed.
He escaped any personal consequences for this or his role in any other countless number of deaths, though.
We know of at least one female friend of his who died because he kept giving her Radathor, but the number of people who developed cancer as a result of taking his and his other products is kind of unknown.
Backlash Boils Over00:02:22
Bailey does become persona non grata after this point.
He's, you know, the press starts going after him.
He's like hounded in the streets by journalists and stuff.
There's these constant inquiries from like Newark public health officials.
Eventually, he has to flee town, right?
Worker or reporters find him at his office front at the Adeno Ray Company in East Orange.
And when they ask what kind of business he's conducting, he's like, it's an advertising business.
And they're like, well, the name on the door is the same as this radiation product you were selling.
He's like, oh no, the name on the door doesn't mean a thing.
I'm not selling anything radioactive.
Eventually, he has to like drop out of public life entirely.
Although, weirdly enough, I feel like he's like Army Hammer.
Kind of.
He has more of a second act than Army Hammer.
Oh, no.
He somehow gets a job as the editor of a newspaper in New Jersey and like pivots to being a politics influencer.
He writes books on like global politics and like health.
In World War II, he's an aircraft observer under the first fighter command.
He invents a method of swimming instruction for soldiers.
He like puts together, he possibly, it's hard to tell how much of this.
He definitely does some of this.
Some of it's lies.
Like he claims that he was the manager of an IBM electronics division during the war.
And we don't actually know if that's the case or not.
There's not evidence of it, really.
I feel like charlatans be charlataning.
Yeah.
So it's hard for me to like know if like any of the achievements or whatever is true.
Yeah.
What we do know for a fact is that on May 16th, 1949, in Tinsboro, Massachusetts, he dies aged 74 from bladder cancer.
And this is almost certainly due to all of the radiation tonics that he drank over the course of his life.
So he lasted too long still, but I don't know.
Shane McGowan beat him by a year.
So there's that.
You've never read the book A Drink with Shane McGowan.
You should absolutely.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Not to you, but to like a person listening.
Yeah.
And listen to, I mean, all of his albums are great.
I'm always, if you're looking for an inroad into the pogues, rum sodomy and the lash, never been beat.
Incredible.
And, but also, like, read it, read the book, listen to the music at the same time.
It's fucking tight.
Hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
Shane McGowan Legacy00:03:00
Well, that's a happy note to end on.
Listen, listen to and read Shane McGowan.
Don't irradiate yourself for unclear health benefits.
Yeah.
Sophia.
No, if you were gonna drink some uranium tonight, maybe don't.
Maybe don't.
Maybe no uranium to drink tonight.
Like you do you, girl.
Okay.
You can girl boss your way into some uranium if you want.
Why to tell you?
So got anything to plug?
Yes.
Please follow me to my new Patreon, patreon.com/slash SophiaAlexandra.
And you can read my writing there and you can look at pictures and stuff and watch videos.
It's a good ass time.
So come through.
Yeah, come through, check it out.
And, you know, go to hell.
I love you.
We all love you.
Take care of yourself.
Unless you're Bill Bailey.
Okay, bye.
Unless you're Bill Bailey.
Yeah.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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