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15 extremely disquieting events of 20th century that I wish I hadn’t heard of!

Sharat Misra
7 min readSep 19, 2023

The Past can be glorious and able to bring clarity. But upheavals even when dead and buried are counterintuitive and sometimes shocking. Few continue to threaten our peace of mind till today!

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When radium was first discovered in 20’s, people knew little of its toxicity. Its impressive glow-in-the-dark properties made this stunning heaviest alkaline earth metal a popular additive in products like paints, toothpaste, hair cream, and even food items, until years later the entire factory crew of the United States Radium Corp. fell to radiation-related sickness with decaying teeth, crumbling bones and spines that crushed under their own weight. Tragically most of them were to succumb to this lethal discovery not very long after.

Woefully, these weren’t Carl Sagan moments; not until 1995 when his Big Think 1995 stunner “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” swayed the media with a passionate version of a better world that was all set to debunk a dystopian future. Contrarily, the world had just begun to morph into kinda eerie sink hole that many would today find disturbingly similar to ours. Who would have then thought that an unpleasant legacy of utterly devastating events from 20th century was cursed to follow down to us!

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Sharat Misra
Sharat Misra

Written by Sharat Misra

Free-spirited, minimalist and an ex-banker, I’m a committed keyboard fanatic and luv to write about food, relationship, health and everything sassy in life.

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