The Secret Killers Of The 50s Household | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

[Music] the shadow of World War 2 loomed long it was a desperate need to rebuild bomb damaged towns and cities because above all people wanted a safe place to live and to bring up their families in the 1950s the government was under pressure to build new homes and started an ambitious building program the time to look forward had come at last and the British wanted everything around them to reflect that sense of optimism into the nation's living rooms and kitchens came bright new materials man-made fabrics and labor-saving devices for the post-war generation of homeowners domesticity had never been more comfortable but there were problems some of the new products and innovations they welcomed into the home were killers with the aid of modern science I'm going to search out these hidden assassins and reveal them it is unbelievable just by burning that flame we're going to produce a deadly gas yes we are the post-war home was the most dangerous place you could be [Music] welcome to the hidden killers of the post-war home [Music] it's a two-story three-bedroom four thousand three hundred pound house built in the modern manner doors slide or fold there's underfloor electrical heating and many other bright ideas as well [Music] but isn't this wonderful let's say familiar it reminds me of the houses of my grandparents it's so exuberant and optimistic at the time it must have thought like living in the height of modernity little did they know how dangerous it really was this was the age of boom an affluent revival especially for the middle classes who made up some 15 to 20 million of the population they were richer than they'd ever been before and they were spending more than they ever had before Macmillan was right in 1957 when he said they'd never had it so good [Music] what could be safer than a modern home I'm going upstairs to find our first hidden killer to the child's bedroom children now had rooms of their own and all sorts of newfangled toys that were designed to be educational and to prepare them for their future careers so the girls had electric irons and ovens and the boys had model aircraft and train sets and chemistry sets although the odd girl did creep in look yeah I've had that chemistry set as a loser came as a Christmas present and it was it was it was only literally an hour before I'd blown it seventeen-year-old Ian Findlay was experimenting with his chemistry set in the living room of his home there was an explosion neighbors heard the bang and ran out to find that the living room window had been blown out Ian's managed to make his way to number 72 where mrs. Casey Bell treated an injured arm put him to bed and summoned an ambulance [Music] chemistry sets throughout the years have reflected many changes in science and society and never more so than after the Second World War young would-be chemists inspired by the apocalyptic images in the comics of the day and their soldier fathers could not resist experimenting with terrifying consequences to 14-year old pupils were seriously injured on Saturday when an explosion occurred while they were trying to make liquid oxygen well this is the chemistry set I took my vintage chemistry set to Joy ledger at the Bristol Science Center to find out just how dangerous this box really was so what's most alarming about it I suppose copper sulphate would definitely have a husband yet today the test tubes are so flimsy I really are we wouldn't use any lights in the lab at school these days these heated with a Bunsen burner wouldn't last very long they'd melt very quickly Bunsen burner yes just tiny and this would go well into there presumably gas supply the gas supply which is unbelievable that they could actually have and there must be some sort of taps that turn the gas on and off so you've got the full force of the gas coming and that would be the whole cooker just going through that little frame oh my goodness we decide to read the instruction booklet always a good idea only there's absolutely no diagrams at all and actually I think it says up here that you will see there are no diagrams so then you can be more liberal with your experiment you can change the apparatus as you as you feel I'm just staggered at the lack of instructions the idea of quantities concentrations there's no indication of how much solution to add to each one no a mention of how to dispose of the chemicals at the end it's just frightening and there's absolutely no mention of parental supervision still at least they are clear about what to do if your chemistry kit loving chum has a problem yeah she says here if the clothing of the person is on fire pull the person down to the floor or strike them sharply behind the knees so they fall cover them with any materials you might have to hand with rugs cloths or carpet etc and then it says you will have used your scientific knowledge in the noblest way you will have applied science to the service of man with capital letters and probably saved life it says underneath science is never evil except in wrongly used by man many of the chemicals in chemistry sets were caustic so they would burn the skin and irritate it of course would be particularly dangerous if it got into the eyes part of the point of the chemistry sets was that they exploded they wanted to make these explosions and the bright colors to impress friends and make it look like a magic trick explosions could burn set the hair on fire set the clothes on fire damage the eyes even blind a child and of course children wanted to share these with their friends and they think nothing of putting some of the chemicals in their pockets when they went out and of course that could burn holes in the material and then in the skin or even catch fire spontaneously with some chemicals 14-year old Ian Murari meant to stage some experiments with his home chemistry set but he put them in his pocket well he went to the pictures with his mother he was sitting watching the show when his clothes began to smolder a man sitting nearby wrapped his coat around the boy to smother the burning clothing the accident was due to body heat igniting the chemicals in his pocket today health and safety regulations are more stringent than they were in 1950s cinemas so we are wearing goggles to do an experiment to illustrate how lethal this kit could be right now in here we have the commander date which is the chemical we saw in the the purple cup chemical it was in the kit naira Shah our lab technician is going to add glycerol a clear odorless liquid that might have been found in the home medicine cabinet as it was used to treat constipation and sore throats okay what we're gonna do is just make a little pile of the potassium permanganate in the middle and then I'm just gonna pour on a couple of drops of the glycerol on top so it sort of looks like nothing's happening there we go Oh oh my goodness it's not necessarily child's play so it's quite a lot of smoke and some beautiful powerful flames and quite a smell yeah oh my word and what is it and that hesitation that moment if they're looking like nothing's gonna happen is the most dangerous thing of all isn't it well if I was a child I'd have moved on to something else by then Narus only used a small amount of potassium permanganate and a drop of glycerol imagine if we'd been more liberal in the amounts we used [Music] a warning was sounded at an Epsom inquest today that there are grave dangers in letting children play with chemicals which are in themselves harmless but in combination may be fatal John geszti aged 15 died in hospital from injuries received in an explosion which also injured a boy companion unsurprisingly the American Chemistry kits were even more spectacular there was even an American chemistry set that included uranium dust and a mini Geiger counter so that children could do experiments and measure the radiation [Music] the company didn't stop making it because of the dangers of the dust it just didn't sell very well uranium actually wasn't very exciting it didn't explode and have puffs of smoke and nobody wanted to buy it eventually new laws came in which required the kits to be non explosive and non-toxic but it's worth remembering what the chemistry set manufacturers used to say experimented today scientist tomorrow a really interesting thing about chemistry sets if you interview eminent scientists nowadays many of them will actually say that it was having a chemistry set as a child that sparked their interest in the science [Music] I'm in search of our next hidden killer [Music] the 1950s home had benefited from the technological developments of the war those are beliefs of fusing the age that science could transform everything and it did in the 1950s there was a significant development in the understanding of the science of plastics and polymers a Nobel Prize was awarded for advances in macro molecular chemistry suddenly all of these things that weren't possible before became possible cheap pliable easily made for better or worse this was when our love affair with plastics began so you have the hard and transparent plastic in the eye holes of the gas mask and then you have these flexible foam toys and then you had so many other different plastic objects plastics are made of polymers the breakthrough was understanding that polymers are very large molecules what's special about them is that different types of polymers can make hard or soft flexible or rigid forms so they can be manufactured into a range of products from furniture to clothing these objects that would previously have been luxury items now began to be mass-produced objects and available to ordinary people there was I suppose a democratization it just made things possible for the ordinary person and they're looking forward to a brighter future and the future of plastics one of the things that plastics could make were comfortable new polyurethane sofas the perfect setting for the 1950s family to relax with a cigarette these were the days when smoking was part of the background of everyday life a combination which would prove to be particularly problematic verdicts of death by misadventure were recorded on three boys who died in a fire at their home on December 19th the fire is believed to have been caused by a cigarette dropped onto a Ceti a lighted cigarette ignited a set e this accident was caused by a householder who fell asleep while smoking an inexcusable practice we're not just hanging out in these lovely chairs in this yard for no reason what are these about these are an example of post-war 1950s style furniture in the post-war period we began to use polyurethane forms polyurethane forms or semi rigid forms that allow a level of comfort without being permanently compressed without being very hard so and they allow for a number of different shapes and styles so we needed this development in order to have this kind of change in design yes yes we did polyurethane they informed sofas are much more comfortable than the early horsehair type and the hardback chairs that we used to have so there there was a big change at that point in time but that big change came at a cost that cost was realized by one unlucky couple a 26 year old Halifax man and his young wife escaped from a smoke-filled bedroom by climbing through a smashed window and down a rope of knotted sheets to the ground the husband ran barefoot over 200 yards of rough track to his father-in-law's house to call the fire brigade the fire is believed to have been caused by a cigarette end dropping onto a Ceti plastic itself as a singular form it is flammable but it's not overly farmable you after you don't really know the light under to get it going it's the additive that you put with the plastic to turn it into like a polystyrene or into a foam for a mattress or from via SAT so it was usually the additive that was put into it which was the flammable piece [Music] that means that those forms and the materials that cover the chairs can be ignited by a cigarette or a match if you were to drop on and then they can burn very quickly and very freely however it's not just the fact that these materials caught fire easily but how they burned that was the problem the way that the polyurethane burns actually in and of itself dangerous so they the the form forms a liquid and it runs down the material and to form a pool underneath and that pool becomes ignited so you can have a flowing pool of burning liquid it's almost like having a flammable liquid fire like petrol underneath your sofa that's how bad it can be [Music] but that wasn't the only issue these substances can give off very toxic fumes and in fact if you're in a room with foam that was burning the cyanide gas that was given off would kill you long before the flames or the heat would [Music] it wasn't only the new plastic furniture that could cause a problem cheap and easy to wash plastic clothing caused a sensation when it bursts into our wardrobes in the 1950s [Music] not dangerous in its own right but in the post-war home environment it could be lethal Edna Cooper aged 13 received burns when her nitrous caught fire and she was fatally burned she stood in front of the open gas oven to keep warm while brewing tea for her invalid mother there will have been open fires there may have been electric fires probably without good guards on them some little one-bar fires didn't have guards at all for a while so certainly there was a lot of different opportunities to get yourself burned [Music] Norah Rhodes aged 85 died in hospital from burns and shock received from when her nightdress caught fire in front of an electric fire synthetic clothing for example when it starts to burn very dangerously it melts and so it's often the melting drops of plastic onto the skin that can cause really severe and deep burns the January 1955 issue of picture post highlighted the dangers there was a serious problem with youngsters particularly little girls in front of the fire wearing lovely frilly nighties looking ever so sweet trouble was sparked might come out the fire or they might lean a little bit too close and wash the nylon nighty would just go up in flames leaving horrendous burns or maybe even killing the child 300 children and old people died each year from burns due to flammable materials which is something we would just not tolerate today the Royal Society for the Prevention of accidents had a campaign to raise awareness they've noticed the significant difference in the number of incidents between boys and girls they had a suggestion we wanted people to go over to wear pajamas which were much neater and tidier around the body and of course to guard the fire in October 1954 an Act of Parliament decreed gas and electric fires must be manufactured with a secure guard and while furniture today is protected by fire retardant there are no such rules for pajamas now I'm going to the living room to find our next hidden killer one of the luxury items that made its way into the house in the early 1950s was a television the coronation in June 1953 was one of the first events to challenge the supremacy of radio it turned a fledgling service into the beginning of the mass medium it is today by 1956 there was a television in every second house it was designed to fit into the room like a piece of furniture and the family gathered around it it's a cozy scene but one that sometimes had deadly consequences mr. George skipper his wife seven-year-old daughter and mother-in-law escaped unhurt by climbing down a ladder after they were trapped in their burning home the outbreak originated in a television set which had inadvertently been left switched on and had become overheated insufficient insulation in the loudspeaker of a television set caused the death of Victor Smith aged four in Keg Worth he was found dead near the set at his home some television models had not taken into account just how dangerous the combination of electrical wiring would poor insulation and ventilation could be the Home Secretary was forced to address the subject and announced a new British standard specification for TV sets including revised safety precautions in the light of recent experience was nearing completion [Music] public enthusiasm though went from strength to strength in 1959 ten million television licenses were issued the mass medium was here to stay that's the TV sorted our next hidden killer could be anywhere in the house [Music] before the war most people rented their homes but during the 1950's more people were able to buy as wages grew at a faster rate than house prices many were in need of modernization and it was almost impossible to get hold of tradesmen because most were tied up with reconstructing war-torn Britain the only option was to do it yourself and so an epidemic of home improvement gripped the nation this was really the DIY generation Dulux paint went on sale from 1953 black & decker started selling to the general public in 1954 and practical household a magazine went on sale from October 1955 for the happy householder with time and money on their hands and new materials and technologies at their fingertips domestic utopia was within reach the public were increasingly being exposed to all these wonderful things through new magazines and the magic of television it was encouraged as a family to get involved it was like going for a walk in a park you know we will redecorate the the back the bathroom mother alone sure we will cut this door will knock this down you were encouraged as a family to do it as a family event and why not the family that DIYs together stays together this is in the first station of practical householder and if we take a look at some index we'll see the range of things people could be doing at home by themselves so you've got paper hanging making rugs concrete paths and floors shows an enormous range of building your own bungalow I mean it's pretty ambitious aren't they goodness me they certainly were people believe they could instill new life into their homes without professional help for a fraction of the price but they were seemingly oblivious to the perils the doyen of DIY Barry Buckner was after all a reassuring presence his television programs on doing it yourself attracted at their peak over seven million viewers he had the best TV show on in the 1950s most watched he was getting something in the region of 35 I was in letters a week he had six or eight secretaries working for him just going through the envelopes that is phenomenal I don't know whether you've got a problem like this a rather ugly old panel door one that can be sold quite simply you can make it look like this you know is almost like a hero then to get people into your mind get up get going change your house get the light and they get the color on the walls and board up your staircase and paint it or pull that Victorian fireplace out and border cover that Victorian door up with plywood and paint it and to transform your house to that that one that you you might have seen advertised that buy a new one he's looking but he later became known to some as Bahji Buckner they saw his desire to strip out what he called clutter as the willful destruction of original features so he was the driving force behind DIY but also he caused great problems I heard stories that they reckon he destroyed more houses than a Luftwaffe because of his changes his radical changes that he wanted to do in homes but Barry who was a professional he knew what he was doing his disciples however didn't necessarily have the experience or the skills a loss of them feature DIY happening high up on ladders of course yeah these look incredibly precarious this man is holding something very heavy so all a bit of a disaster waiting to happen is now although the magazines don't address health and safety and they must definitely definitely have been aware of the dangers this is a comic strip that appears in a loss of them and you can see he's on a set of ladders painting but that manages to fall through Robert wises age 29 died from injuries received in falling from a ladder while painting the upstairs window of his home the ladder was too close to the wall and he had fallen backwards mrs. Agnes Hyde aged 45 was killed when a ladder which her husband was lowering over balanced and struck her on the head but everyone knows that ladders can be treacherous what they didn't know was that some of these products were toxic asbestos was used around the house and garage with lasting and hideous consequences new extra-strong adhesives could be harmful if inhaled this contact adhesive was pretty nasty stuff I remember using it as a apprentice first time I use it I think I spent most of the day floating about a foot off the floor and the next day spent most of the time drinking water and trying to get my float to calm down and my nostrils to calm down and burnt all inside the main office was my throat it was horrendous stuff manufacturers realizing the public's interest produced a range of power tools for the DIY enthusiast a potentially huge market compared to the professional trade electric drills were on sale for five pounds available to buy a monthly installments and advertised as the family favorite the king of power tools was indeed a must for your home but these boy toys could be dangerous mr. guy aged 27 was found about 15 feet from his houseboat with the electric drill in his hand under the conditions in which it was used in water it became a lethal weapon had he been standing on dry land he would not have had a shock they were selling power tools which professionals were used to use in as you as a DIY expert had no training in whatsoever but were expected to use not only power tools used the safety features we know today if you'll cut in something and perhaps you've gone into your own leg or you cut your fingers or whatever you've done it doesn't automatically cut off as soon as you take your you but actually look for the switch to turn it off the longer you're looking for it the more damage it's doing to you nothing it seemed was out of bounds for the do-it-yourselfers a young girl died of electrocution in her bathroom as she touched the electric warming towel rail while standing in the bath her father told the inquest into her death that he had installed the rail in the bathroom five years before a faulty adapter failed to earth the appliance perhaps installing your own Electric Tower l should not have been on the DIY list of jobs to do in the home it was a bit of a problem because people were not necessarily very familiar with wiring so you would get problems with things badly wide plugs badly screwed in so that there were bits of wire hanging out the bottom and they weren't properly held so they would work free and then they could short or catch fire so there were some problems with electrocution and fire mr. Oliver of West Hartlepool Fire Service said many fires were started through faulty electrical wiring which was often the work of the amateur electrician the public we revised when it came to electrics don't do it yourself use a professional they were a lot smarter in those days I can't imagine any electrician turning up looking like that now I think I'd probably wonder if he was an electrician if he did but our passion for DIY has never waned our desire to restore and revitalize marches on thanks to bank holidays and Barry thanks Barry I'm going to the kitchen now to find out how one apparently innocuous item of food caused mayhem in the post-war home the kitchen became so important in this age because it moved from being a private space into a public one it became a place to entertain guests and so attention was paid to what this previously hidden room looked like and of course it was the woman's place in the home in October 1955 in women's owned it described the kitchen as the heart and center of the meaning of home the place where day after day you make with your hands the gifts of love 14 years of food rationing finally came to an end on the 4th of July 1954 when restrictions on meat and bacon were lifted not surprisingly life in the kitchen suddenly became a whole lot more fun and gifts of love abounded it means of course that people are able to get more foodstuffs a wider range of things and they're able freely to go out and buy as much as they want so they can really indulge if you like on buying you know as much butter I hope they want to after having really sort of had to live by their ration books for a very long time people were excited about the new possibilities was food and into this gap came cookery writers writers like Elizabeth David and Marguerite Patton infused food with passion tastes were changing quite literally and demand for meat in particular went through the roof the idea of the British family is to have a roast Sunday joint a beef or possibly lamb but what happens after 1955 or so is that you know gradually chicken is brought into the British diets to a much greater extent livestock like cattle could simply not be reared quickly enough in the numbers needed to satisfy demand chickens however could chickens had accounted for only one percent of British meat consumption in 1950 but now its moment had arrived thanks to a revolution in laden's British agriculture intensive rearing and factory farming were introduced and the resulting cheap chicken meat transformed the British diet so in 1954 five million table chickens were available for consumption in this country and by 1959 it's 75 million feeding an extra 70 million birds was a colossal undertaking and one that could only be achieved by importing grain from other countries problem solved there wasn't it in the process of feeding birds and indeed livestock we also bring in imported of artificial feeds like ground meat and these come carrying already about arterial load so what you see is that these birds and indeed livestock are being fed Salmonella contaminated food so the chickens were infected by what they were eating and the intensive conditions in which they were kept processed and packaged aggravated the matter and then they landed in the post-war kitchen bred dead and ready to be roasted an analysis of outbreaks of food poisoning showed that the largest number occurred in the home many outbreaks were due to insufficient knowledge by housewives why was this the post-war period is the time at which domestic service really disappears from the middle-class home so middle-class women sometimes feel rather hard on by because they're having to fend for themselves and do most of household work in labor for themselves and of course this might create more problems in the kitchen because of course they would have been obliged to take primary responsibility for cooking and feeding the family which they may have found difficult if they'd been brought up in a home where all that work have been done by servants but housewife plays a cardinal role in this story partly because she is a person who handles the chicken in the house the hapless housewife was ever thus tasked with putting food in the mouths of her family not realizing that tonight supper is already a heaving mass of bacteria then inadvertently up the ante even further [Music] well into the 50s you could still buy chicken sometimes they are what's called New York dressed which means that they've gotta wear guts left in intact they quite often come still with their heads attached and the housewife would expect to deal with that nothing she might have might not wash chicken when she gets at home and she might well not wash her own hands when she'd finished handling the bird and as such she was accidentally spreading this hidden killer throughout the home I've come to Matthew Ava sons laboratory to find out what the post-war chicken cooking housewife didn't know about Salmonella because Salmonella is too deadly to use in this experiment Matthew has contaminated some chicken with a similar though thankfully for me less lethal bacteria I'm going to show four different ways of cleaning my hands after handling the chicken so we can demonstrate just how pernicious this bacteria was so what I want you to do is just touch the chicken and then we're going to make an imprint of your fingers on this indicator plate okay the first time I don't clean my hands at all then I'll just lift the lid and you just put your fingers on to the surface [Music] after the second time of handling the chicken I wiped my hands with a paper towel hmm not sure this will do the trick it makes it feel less slimy but actually yes yes so when you're touching the meat you feel slimy but that's not actually the bacteria that's just the meat you don't feel the bacteria after the third time of touching the chicken I wash my hands in lovely clean water [Music] and lastly I touched the chicken then washed thoroughly with soap and water [Music] it actually takes a huge number of bacteria to infect somebody particularly if you're healthy between about a million and a billion bacteria but you can't see them and so the food that you're eating may look smell and taste completely normal okay Matthew let's see some results then okay so these are some plates that have been incubated overnight and this is the first one so this is with the unwashed hands so this is just after touching the bacteria the darker colors at the bacteria there are so many bacteria on here you can't see individual colonies individual spots through literally thousands and thousands of bacteria on each finger after rinsing your hands under the tap though that's just simply the act of washing the bacteria down the sink we're not killing the bacteria at all you're actually making some significant strides to reducing the numbers there's still quite a few bacteria but you can see individual colonies the biggest difference of all though comes from using soap which doesn't kill the bacteria what soap does is it just improves the ability of us to wash away the bacteria from our skin so there are still some bacteria Matthew estimates that simply wiping your hands reduces the level of contamination by maybe 10 times while washing your hands with soap reduces contamination by probably a hundred thousand times so in short if they brought meat into the house that had been contaminated in this way and did anything with it and then didn't wash their hands really thoroughly yeah it could get everywhere yeah absolutely not only into your mouth but also onto the other food that you prepare in on to the surfaces around you onto utensils and to your children to your children absolutely if somebody eats salmonella infected food it between a day and two days after eating it you start to develop symptoms and those are likely to be things like diarrhea abdominal pain and cramps and possibly vomiting most people who develop salmonella food poisoning would recover within five to seven days it would be unpleasant but they wouldn't need any particular treatment but if you're particularly young say babies and young children or old or if your immune system is suppressed for any other reason perhaps you've got cancer or some other disease then you're much more susceptible to really severe infection and in that case it's possible that the bacterium could get into the bloodstream and then spread around the body and then it could affect other areas such as the brain and cause meningitis which could could be faithful or a set to see Mia a blood poisoning today 60 years later intensive farming conditions have improved and successive public health campaigns have resulted in a better understanding of food hygiene in the home there's no reason why you should be at risk from this particular hidden killer nowadays is that [Music] I'm off to find our next hidden her in the bathroom [Applause] amazingly in 1950 half of all homes had no indoor bathroom so one of the pivotal changes of this decade was the introduction of this luxurious new room for the first time people of all classes were able to have an indoor bathroom and a surge of interest in bathroom furnishings reflected this rapidly expanding market this new attitude was summarized in House & Garden magazine at the time a bathroom is a place to rest to morale as well as your looks bathing became an enjoyable experience and wanted to be taken in pleasant rather than Spartan surroundings it was a far cry from the old tin bath in front of the fire but why was it not all that it seemed in order to understand this we have to go outside the home and look at an unrelated killer air pollution was responsible for an unforgettable event in the early 50s which led to a major change in how our homes were heated we've always had environmental pollution but it particularly became important in December of 1952 when we had the great smog in London it was said that you couldn't see your feet because the smog was so thick and it would have been not like the sort of fog that we all understand it would have been a thick yellowy brown smelly horrible sort of fog it would make it be very difficult for you to breathe and the egg smell is from sulphur dioxide which would combine with water to form sulfuric acid the rise in deaths was greater than in the worst week of the cholera epidemic in 1866 records show that about 4,000 people died from the smog although more recently calculations made that up to 12,000 and about a hundred thousand became ill because of it this nightmarish episode produced more civilian casualties in Britain than any single event of the entire Second World War and was the catalyst for replacing coal fires in the home and here's the rub it'd been a very cold winter and has lots of snow on the ground and so people were burning coal in their homes to try to keep warm but the weather conditions at the time meant that there was an anticyclone and that pushed air back down towards the Earth and so the smoke was trapped legislation was introduced to prevent the murderous coal fumes and a virtual ban on the open coal fire in hundreds of thousands of houses in big industrial areas can be ordered by local councils as homes became less reliant from coal fires gas appliances were introduced and into the bathroom came gas boilers and heaters in the early 1950s they brought into the bathroom to produce hot water for your for your bath there was a self-contained boiler during the little tap on and you can just empty it into your bath and obviously jump in and enjoy it what could be more pleasurable but there's a problem when you bring a gas boiler into a small enclosed space a fireman broke down the door of a gas filled bathroom and found a 20 year old nurse slumped in the bath the pathologist said death was due to carbon monoxide poisoning to burn one cubic metre of gas you need around 10 cubic meters of fresh air full of oxygen the problem occurs when you haven't got enough oxygen so if you're in a cramped place the windows are sealed try and keep the heat in then the gas will burn to form carbon monoxide and this is very toxic carbon monoxide is produced by the incomplete burning of fossil fuels it is dangerous when the boiler is in sufficiently sealed and the toxic gases are allowed back into the room rather than exhausted to the atmosphere they were in that nice new shiny fitted bathroom you'd got your door shut your windows to keep the drafts out and you're just sitting there absorbing all this carbon monoxide you think if you're getting nice and relaxed because of the hot water and it's not it's the carbon monoxide which is slowly putting you to sleep forensic fire expert Emma Wilson has designed an experiment to show me just how quickly this silent deadly gas can be produced in a sealed environment she will use butane gas in a sealed tank to simulate a bathroom with a gas boiler in it in the corner of the tank is a modern-day carbon monoxide detector alarm that we use now homes today if you will help me on the top we can feel the gas in as if we're cleansing dog our bathroom exactly just by burning that flame in a sealed environment we're going to produce a deadly gas yes we are the as the combustion of the gas becomes less efficient because there's less oxygen we produce more and more carbon monoxide when gas burns normally two oxygen molecules attached to it making carbon dioxide when there is less oxygen available the gas can only attach to one molecule making carbon monoxide a toxic gas in addition the steam from the hot bath interferes with the ability of the flame to burn correctly and in a sealed room once the oxygen is used up is not replaced it took just three minutes for the carbon monoxide detector alarm to be activated the sealed tank is now full of poisonous gas that's the detector sounding to let us know that carbon monoxide in that compartment is now at a dangerous level right so nowadays we have you can put it in the detector and you can know about it yeah and it's you know pretty sure shrieking but apart from the sound that is telling us it's there we haven't got any smell we haven't got any obvious signs of it no none gosh so you could be sitting there in that bath and your lovely bath you shut the doors and windows you're having time to yourself your boilers going and it's producing this gas that could make you sick and kill you yes I haven't decided run away by the fact that he's just completely invisible Henry Payne age 41 was found dead in a bath at his home he probably inhaled the carbon monoxide first then slipped into the water there is no official supervision over installation of gas geezers the Borough Coroner was told when it's inhaled a hemoglobin which is the substance in the blood that carries oxygen from our lungs to all of our tissues where it's needed the affinity for carbon monoxide is over 200 times more than the affinity for oxygen which is what that haemoglobin should be carrying so it means if there's carbon monoxide in the air that you breathe in it will bind to the hemoglobin when that hemoglobin passes around to the tissues it doesn't release any oxygen present and it doesn't release the carbon monoxide and so your tissues start to be starved of oxygen and it's really like suffocating the body from the inside it was colorless tasteless and odorless the absolute definition of a hidden killer at low doses carbon monoxide can cause headaches flu-like symptoms confusion and dizziness but if you have a lot of carbon monoxide it can be rapidly fatal and stopped the heart because your entire body is starved of oxygen the heating apparatus in the bathroom was criticized at a Dundee inquiry into the death of Peter Moran aged 25 who was found dead by his father police surgeon dr. door wood said the method of heating water for a bathroom is a very dangerous one because of the bad vent over the decades gas appliances have improved and it is understood that if they are incorrectly installed or not regularly serviced they can be fatal consequences still today legislation only governs landlords homeowners themselves are responsible for keeping their houses safe from this toxic gas gas safe regulations cover the installation of boilers and bathrooms but even so there are still around 4,000 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning and 40 deaths every year in Britain my school friend was one of them my final hidden killer can be found all over the house but I'm going in search of the kitchen variety into the heart of the woman's domain we have seen how men and their power tools came a cropper now we see how the newly on tap electricity brought considerable danger into the shiny world of appliances the magazines are full of adverts showing women breezily vacuuming their houses in high heels one article is even entitled Cinderella would have stayed at home if her fairy godmother had first conjured up all this kitchen equipment after the Second World War the main technology and that people have in their kitchens is the gas cooker but we start to get the fridge we get the vacuum cleaner coming in also washing machines and also eventually freezers and these technologies really do make quite a difference to women's everyday lives electrical gadgets had previously been expensive luxuries now there was an explosion of new affordable brands all marketed as taking the drudgery out of housework this is an article by James story titled what electric living means to ruin and she says for people like myself who have a full-time job plus a home and family to look after such labor-saving automatic service is a tremendous boon if you think about the domestic labor involved for example in the weekly washing day if you've got say a family with a large number of children and you have to wash all of their clothes and drive them by hand you can imagine just how much different something like a washing machine really would have made to women's lives so this book that talks about what your Monday to Friday routine of cleaning should be oh gosh that's quite a heavy workload so here we've got vacuum all carpets I thought I wants a week team with your Heba will clear away any embedded grit yes that's one way to say it after you've cleaned all the floors and polish where necessary so actually if there's a four week schedule isn't it for the housewife who's also going out to work of course yes but these labor saving devices welcomed with open arms by the housewife sometimes resulted in undesirable consequences missus Haller age 25 was found dead at her home six weeks after her marriage a modern electric iron found by her body was produced and exposed terminals under a broken section pointed out to the coroner and scrupulous manufacturers produce goods that were shoddily made badly designed even downright dangerous things like kettles somebody came up with a wonderful idea of making a kettle and plug the lead in when it got to a certain temperature it sparked the electric lead out well I don't think it's need to be a scientist to work without there's not that many kettle points in the kitchen there's obviously one straight right by the side of the sink you're doing your dishes your kettles plugged in it shoots the power supply straight out runs in the sink people often didn't really understand electricity or their appliances which led to some horrendous accident Irene Clayton aged 58 died instantaneously from heart failure caused by an electric shock caused by the full-sized electric blanket in her bed an electrical engineer said that it was dangerous to sleep with an electric blanket switched on the trouble is people don't bother to read the instructions so often they think you know this doesn't work properly oh I'll stick a knife in and have a poke about and people were electrocuted through toasters or toasters caught fire because they probably didn't use them as they've been instructed if they'd ever bothered to read the instructions the Carillo newspaper in Dundee consulted a local electrician as to the safest way of handling appliances he told them electrical appliances used in the home nowadays are safe if respected and treated with care the danger of ignorance of these appliances or wear and tear on them has been emphasized recently by a number of burning accidents another solution came from the electrical Association for women who urged that girls should be educated for heaven's sake teach them how to look after the beautiful electrical apparatus they are now getting so that girls who will be future housewives will at least know the rudiments of how to look after the apparatus education would surely help but some products were overused and poorly maintained they would have dodgy connections they might spark a bit when you use them but you know it could be all right I'll get one next week or when payday comes and but obviously you really did need to keep them maintained and changed and make sure that you only buy them from a proper electrical retailer there could be a high price to pay if you didn't mrs. Montgomery died from an electric shock sustained when using an electric iron mr. Montgomery stated that his wife had told him about the electric iron failing and braking she had tied the handle with string it is a deplorable instance of the dangers of using electric equipment which is not in proper order commented sheriff Hamilton the electrical trade union reported that some of these accidents could have been prevented had there been some control over the manufacture of appliances an enforcement of the regulations in October 1954 in a debate in the House of Lords on safety in the home Lord crook complained of the constant sale of very cheap electrical goods the use of which is not always understood by the purchaser Lord man Croft though felt the government had done what it could and that the final responsibility rests with the individual the person in the home consumers though had had enough they decided that they needed more information in order to look after their own interests which magazine was set up in 1957 to provide an independent review of products for consumers by the time this one was published in 1959 the consumers association which produced it had 150,000 members and this represents a sense the nowadays it wasn't enough to trust manufacturers claims not everything could be taken at face value and consumers needed someone on their side consumer power had its roots in the post-war era and continues today the post-war years were a period of affluence euphoria and optimism that led to unprecedented experimentation and development in science and technology and the home was the crucible of the changes such innovation made great breakthroughs in the lives of the post-war generation but also brought profound and invisible dangers as consumers became more aware and began to stand up themselves manufacturers were increasingly called to account but such was the faith in science to solve the problems of the future that many of the killers remained undetected for decades at least we've identified them today but who knows what we've missed [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 2,062,546

Rating: 4.7484088 out of 5

Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, hidden killers, suzannah lipscomb, post war, bbc documentary, history documentary, absolute history

Id: EauvwU2iWFI

Length: 58min 37sec (3517 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019