It was 1925, but it could have been any number of years before The Great Depression. The U.S. was running on fuel, booze, silent comedies, and loud music, as well as this little thing called radium. From the 1910s through the ’20s, American Radium sold glow-in-the-dark wrist-watches made out of (you guessed it!) radium. Workers, mostly women, were exposed to tremendous amounts of radioactive material and were even asked to lick their brushes before painting each watch. When workers began to lose teeth and hair, a handful of them sued the company, which had claimed the substance was “good for the skin.”