![]() ![]() By 1915, a single gram cost what would be around $1.9 million in today's money, and that means many of the products didn't contain real radium - fortunately for consumers. Children played with toys painted with radium, and performers on the New York stage danced and twirled in costumes that glowed. Radium was in such high demand that prices soared. Unfortunately, the Radium Girls Netflix movie is based on a true story. Photos above: Grace Fryer before and after radium poisoning (post mortem) Side view photo of Grace Fryer (post mortem, above) Woman working in the radium factory. People drank radium water and brushed their teeth with radium toothpaste, and radium cosmetics were all the rage. To this day, more than 80 years later, the graves of the Radium Girls. right? Real doctors started experimenting with it as a cure for things like tuberculosis and lupus, while the quacks started marketing their own so-called cures for everything from acne and baldness to impotence and insanity. During the early 20th century, little was known about radioactive elements. The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint at the United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey around 1917. Early experiments using radium to kill cancer cells had been a success, and if it could kill cancer, surely, it could kill whatever else was ailing you. It really started in earnest in 1904, when LD Gardner began marketing a health water he called "Liquid Sunshine." According to the New York Historical Society, belief in radium's healthy benefits was rooted in a massive misstep in logic.
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