The radium girls
by Kate Moore · first published 2016
8mentions
1recommended by
8HN commenters
2017–2025first – last mentioned
13% recommend88% neutral
As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously ill. As the fatal poison of the radium took hold, they found themselves embroiled in one of America's biggest scandals and a groundbreakin
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
…Species Will Be Nature's Salvation" by Fred Pearce. A very different view of ecosystems. * "In the Land of Invented Languages" by Arika Okrent. Very entertaining. * "Bully Inc." by Peter Burnett * "The Radium Girls" by Kate Moore I have also read a lot of Biblical Pseudepigrapha and some works from the Ethiopian canon.
on “Ask HN: Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2025” ↗For those who want more on this, there's a recent book on this subject: "The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women" by Kate Moore [1]. I don't know much about it (just happened to notice it a couple days ago while looking for something else at Barnes and Noble), but it has…
on “The Radium Girls” ↗Radium Girls is a fairly well-reviewed book about that: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31409135-the-radium-girl...
on “Fukushima’s nuclear signature found in California wine” ↗I'm in the middle of reading The Radium Girls.¹ One fascinating thing to me is that radium, once ingested, tends to deposit itself in the bones (which makes sense if you glance at the positions of Calcium and Radium in the periodic table) and as…
on “Creatures of the dawn: How radioactivity unlocked deep time” ↗My wife actually wrote a (published) poem about the "Radium Girls" who worked in those factories: http://hawaiireview.org/poetry/2016/7/15/meg-eden-radium-gir... Don't know if anyone here will find it interesting, but it felt topical. She actually did a good amount…
on “How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer (2013)” ↗…environmental issues at the MOS plant in PA Didn't know of that. That's the third reference to current environmental issues from decades closed plants I've come across in about as many weeks! I just read The Radium Girls about Undark and the worker's horrific injuries and struggle to get compensation or even acknowledgement. The two companies denied, lied, and cheated their way through. Both sites, and even where factory…
on “How Apple Programmer Sal Soghoian Got Apps Talking to Each Other” ↗If you read books from the early 1900s (Radium Girls, Rocket Boys, Seabiscuit), it's painfully obvious to see how incredibly exploitative industries can become (literally working people to death) without something like a union to check corporate greed against…
on “New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike” ↗I just read The Radium Girls, about the ̶w̶o̶m̶e̶n children who were hired to paint clock faces and military instruments with radium paint. 100s of young girls who died in their 20s and 30s because they were carelessly exposed to…
on “The hunt for Marie Curie's radioactive fingerprints in Paris” ↗