This is an excellent history of the "radium girls" who painted dials and watches with radium paint in the 1910s and 1920s, at the dawn of the atomic age. It’s a story that resonates today, featuring a group of uninformed young female workers being subjected to horrific radiation poisoning by several companies, which then did everything possible to deny and suppress knowledge of the nature of the poisoning (to the women and the public), and to prevent having to pay for the damage caused to the lives of their workers. Highly recommended.
There is now a cinematic version of this story on Netflix, in the 2018 movie Radium Girls (not released until 2020 due to the pandemic).
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