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.
In Illinois, employees began asking for compensation for their medical and dental bills as early as 1927 but were refused by management. The demand for money by sick and dying former employees continued into the mid-1930s before a suit was brought before the Illinois Industrial Commission (IIC). In 1937, five women found attorney Leonard Grossman who would represent them in front of the commission. Grossman took the case without receiving pay as the women were too poor due to inability to work. The case was handled at Catherine Donahue’s home, a woman involved who was too sick to travel. In the spring of 1938 the IIC ruled in favor of the women, but by then, Radium Dial had closed and moved to New York, and the IIC refused to cross state boundaries for the women’s payout. The IIC did retain a $10,000 deposit left by Radium Dial when it disclosed to the IIC that they could not find any insurance to cover the cost of indemnifying the company against employee suits. The attorney representing the interests of Radium Dial appealed hoping to get the verdict overturned. Radium Dial appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and on October 23, 1939, the court decided not to hear the appeal, and the lower ruling was upheld. Some of the women received no payout and by the time the matter was officially settled by the supreme court, Catherine Donahue was dead.[24]
Pretty much
And the company know pretty well the dangers, the men who worked with the material used protection against the radiation.
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
For a brief few years Kent cigarettes has asbestos filters.
From March 1952 until at least May 1956, however, the Micronite filter in Kent cigarettes contained compressed blue asbestos within the crimped crepe paper, which is the most carcinogenic type of asbestos.
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.
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.
Wasn’t even a passing off, syphilis was one of those diseases that was seen as a sign of poor character (leper logic) so it was also an attempt to outright slander their own employees.
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.
Interestingly, most natural radioactive material in nature comes from uranium. Uranium is also a heavy metal, and is quite toxic in its own right.
It’s likely that it’s avoided due to heavy metal poisoning rather than radiation.
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People are stupid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
See Radium Girls.
And I apologize in advance for what you’ll see.
How much radiation we talking? I mean I’d assume the answer is the same amount of attention we currently pay to beer, bananas, fluorescent bulbs or some recycled metals. All of which can emit varying degrees of radioactivity. So zero attention in everyday life.
Everyone in the world is continually exposed to background radiation. That level has gone up considerably since the US began testing atom bombs in the atmosphere. The current AVERAGE level in THE WORLD is about 3 millisieverts per year. In the US it averages about 6 mSv per year (depending on where you live; it might be much higher.)
By comparison, these days: One chest x-ray delivers 20 μSv = .02 mSv. On the other hand, one CT scan delivers from 1 to 20 mSv.
