the true story about the watch factories of death

THE WAR       THE ELEMENT       THE CRAZE       THE GIRLS       THE LAWSUIT       THE EFFECT       references

Rewinding the clock...

If you know your history, you can't hear the word 'radium' and not immediately think of the madam of radioactivity herself, Marie Curie.

Marie Sklodowska Curie (1883-1928)

Cause of death: aplastic anemia brought on by radium poisoning

Born 'Maria Salomea Skłodowska' in Warsaw, Poland, she worked as a teacher before meeting her husband, Pierre Curie in a research laboratory in France. They were married in 1895 and just three short years later, they discovered the infamous element and that peculiar phenomenon Marie decided to term radioactivity.

In 1914, as Gavrilo Princip plotted the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Curie oversaw the constructions of laboratories in the newly conceived Radium Institute at the University of Paris.

There's a very good reason why the doctor makes you wear a lead apron when they scan for broken bones.


If an element is radioactive, it possesses an unstable nucleus that degrades slowly over time. As it decays, it emits small amounts of energy, the most dangerous of which are x-rays and gamma rays.


When these byproducts of radioactive decay come into contact with, say, living cells, they ionize or break through the chemical bonds holding them together. If enough of them are broken, the cells will die. Early scientific experiments noted that the rays emitted from toxic elements like radium burned skin and could even penetrate bones.

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Radium, the cure for...everything?

The cell-killing power of radioactivity was quickly put to good use. Experimenters found that radium sulfate (or radium salts) had great affect on the reduction of skin lesions and epidermal diseases like tuberculosis. Then they moved on to bigger things, namely cancer. They used rubber bobbins to apply the radioactive material in patients' throats to cure throat cancer, in catheters to kill prostate cancer, and even tiny needles injected to treat breast cancer.


How genius! What better way to combat the uncontrolled growth and reproduction of cancerous cells than a substance that destroys those very cells over time?


It was a miraculous discovery.


Soon, radium salts were used to treat various other ailments. Arthritis, hypertension... you name it and radium was the answer.

But it didn't stop there...