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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Ah yes the industrialist who died and was important enough for radiation to be taken seriously
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.
The high school drama group that I work with did this play last year. Such a powerful story.
There’s a lot of old bright orange ceramic mugs, plates, bowls etc. that if you take a Geiger counter (dosimeter) to it it’ll will go crazy when you get right up to contact. A friend got one at an antique store and we did this like a year ago. Can’t remember the dose per minute or hour but I looked it up at the time and it was higher than getting a dental X-ray. And people drank out of them on the daily back then not to mention holding it in your hand and having it next to your bed potentially for decades. So don’t buy antiques that are a bright orange paint
There was some green and yellow ‘depressionware’ that had uranium, with some slightly radioactive. The kinds of doses involved are in this article;
There’s a lot of old bright orange mugs that if you take a Geiger counter (dosimeter) to it it’ll will go crazy when you get right up to contact.
This one? https://youtu.be/PVpP9gcnIcE
I think you’re talking about Uranium glass
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That doesn’t look like it. But very cool! TIL
It was this I think Fiestaware. After reading about its doses that sounds right. I remember now the meter was 11 mR/hr which on the dosimeter was no longer clicking but pretty solid on.
11 mR/hr? Not great, not terrible.
Thanks for feedback for a sense of severity. If I understand correctly, dosimeter have different time constants and I think this one was pretty cheap/slow, meaning the actual level is higher. The instructions said you have to hold it there for a minute for the reading to be accurate. We didn’t do but 10-15 seconds to get the 11 as I didn’t wanna be around it anymore
It was a quote from the TV miniseries Chernobyl. The reading was the highest the dosimeter could measure, so the actual value could have been (and was) much higher. They also underestimated the impact if that reading had been accurate.
Ohhhhh
Spicy!
I honestly can’t blame them for this because that glass does look pretty sick under a blacklight.
I see why you had to ask. It’s a hard question to search for. Everything seems to start with Curie or Röntgen.
I found an article. https://scienceinfo.net/the-ancient-romans-used-radioactive-substances-to-make-decorations.html about ancient Roman radium glass. But that seems to indicate Ancient Romans knew about it, but not how they knew and if others did.
Like any other material. And later, they blamed the aftereffects on witchcraft or bad humor balance.
I was just listening to the QAA podcast episode about witch hunts in the middle ages, and those women literally all died because some random neighbor’s cow stopped producing good enough milk.
Reading about the legal procedures in the salem witch trials is crazy. Most of the evidence was “spectral”, basically people claiming to have seen the ghostly form of the accused. The main legal debate wasn’t if witches existed, they obviously did, but if the devil could take the form of someone without their permission.
People are stupid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
They got cancer
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.
