How Dangerous Was The Average Victorian Home? | Hidden Killers

foreign [Music] home was a place of sanctuary from the outside world especially in the cities where dirt and disease hung in the air and danger stalked the streets [Music] thanks to advances in science a whole host of products and services were promising to make life at home cheaper easier and more convenient but they were also making life much more dangerous but under the guise of family-friendly products Mass consumption was bringing Killers into the very heart of the Victorian home thank you with the aid of modern science I'll seek out the deadly assassins that hid on every floor leaning too close to the firearm they burst into flames I'll be revealing what the victorians couldn't see inside their homes five grams is sufficient to potentially kill a small child and showing the terrible injuries that were inflicted in the name of progress Matt could completely remove the skin from the hand and the arm welcome back to the perilous world of the real Victorian home foreign between 1800 and 1900 the urban population in Britain increased tenfold London became the biggest industrial city in the western world City dwellers in houses like this were creating an unprecedented demand for mod cons as well as life's necessities they were becoming Mass consumers at the end of a production line [Music] supplying the household with Basic Foods in the newly expanded cities of up to 3 million people was a strategic challenge but thankfully by the late 19th century the Staples of bread and milk had become cheaply available for the new demands the victorians pioneered new food processing techniques this left the consumer at the mercy of the unscrupulous Merchants responsible for each part of the food chain one thing that the victorians left above all was profit and the way to make profit of course is to use the cheapest ingredients and charge a high price for them so adulteration became very popular throughout the Victorian period some Merchants would substitute real ingredients with cheap Alternatives the profit margins food adulteration had always gone on but the new manufacturing process meant it was now big business the Food Shops themselves change as well so you used to have a system whereby for example with bread the Miller was the same as the baker was the same as the retailer now the Miller Mills the flower passes it to the baker the baker bakes and the retailer sells so you've got divorcing all the way along the chain that depersonalizes the food chain people don't have the personal relationship with their customers therefore they think they can get away with it anything that is made manufactured or passes through the hands of somebody who can adulterate it by the mid-victorian period the chances are it will be adulterated these additions were astounding chalk iron sulfate and even plaster of Paris but for many buying processed foods released them from the drudgery of baking was time saving and above all was affordable bread was particularly susceptible to tampering as many things could be disguised in it [Music] biggest adulterant at the time was Alum and that's been used since the 18th century it's a Whitener what it does is it enables you to take seconds or middlings or the lower grades of flour make them look whiter Alum is an aluminum-based compound often found today in detergent but when hidden in bread it not only makes it whiter but retains water so the bread feels more substantial in theory the amounts used were quite small and in theory they were not particularly dangerous to health but when you've got both the Miller adding Alum and then you've got the baker adding Alum as well then you start to build up the dose to levels where it really will affect your bowel system food historian Annie gray has prepared three loaves for me to illustrate the choice I would have had as a Victorian housewife whilst one loaf is pure two of them have plaster of Paris Alum and other undesirables added to them and which is which well you're the Victorian housewife so I would say you're in the Bakers and you're presented with these slaves which one would you pick well they all look very attractive which is slightly worrying um it's really quite dense though isn't it it's quite heavy so listen to that this one's still quite dense but it again looks nice and smells really like rubber or something very odd smells fine this is lighter smells more like bread that I'm familiar with so my guess is that that this one is fine yes it is although it's interesting the way perception plays a role part of the reason that you're preparing that one I suspect is because we are predisposed now to like Granary Breads and things that look healthy whereas with your Victorian hat on you should be looking for the bread that is whitest and therefore will impress your dinner guests ah so I would probably be looking not to go for something wholemeal that looks healthy today but something like this yes in the Victorian period people really want white bread it's the the current obsession with wholemeal Granary beautiful artisanal loaves nothing you want white bread so Alum is a Whitener that's put in and which is which in terms of these two which is the one what's got what this one is the Alan based one and this one is the one with plaster of Paris and bean flower from a Baker's point of view this one's brilliant because a third of the the dry solids in this are not pure flour so you're making a reasonable saving on even the sort of low-grade flour that you're using but this housewife's Choice had dire consequences for the consumer if you were a worker eating two pounds of bread a day and not much else when you consider that a third of what you're eating just won't benefit you at all you can see why chronic malnutrition is such an issue and when your adulterants are things like plaster of Paris and Alum you can also see why chronic gastritis is a problem in late Victorian England if you're in a workhouse and you're a three-year-old you're going to start off with constipation you're then going to have irregular bowel movements and then that will lead to diarrhea and if you are a three-year-old in a workhouse and you've got chronic diarrhea that will lead to death [Music] thank you [Music] another reason for adulteration was a desire to make food more attractive and appealing color was a key component and so there were things like colorants you might have something like lead chromate which is a very Vivid yellow color in fact it's the yellow that's used in the paint of American school buses it's that really bright yellow and that was put in things like mustard to give it authentic mustard color without having to actually include too much of the real ingredient which was expensive tea is adulterated with everything from iron filings to dust to use tea leaves and then black lead to make it look black green tea has Prussian Blue in it I mean they're pretty lethal Sir Arthur Hill hassle a london-based physician identified adulteration in 2500 products and published his results in the Lancet this led to the first wave of legislation in 1868. the food adulteration laws were not very strong when they were initially put in and they were not particularly effective either people simply continued because it was very difficult to police it was very difficult to prove and even after it is known about even after um akam and Hassel start to publicize the food adulteration people just simply don't know what adulterated food looks like versus non-adulterated food so you might know that your bread is probably adulterated but either you don't have a choice or you just assume blindly that it happens to other people bread adulteration might ultimately kill you because of malnutrition but there was a greater more immediate danger that was part of every child's diet for the victorians milk was a cheap and important source of calcium a healthy food it was thought however in 1882 20 000 milk samples were tested and revealed that one-fifth had been adulterated a clue as to what was going on came from the domestic goddess of her day Mrs Beaton the victorians sought advice on all manner of things and when it came to food Mrs Beaton was their Guru according to the 1888 edition of her book of household management milk she said could be purified by preparations of which the principal constituent is boracic acid and she adds it is said that most of the milk that comes to London is treated in this way she concludes fortunately for the consumer it is a quite harmless addition but was it as harmless as Mrs Beaton believed microbiologist Matthew Avison has devised an experiment that tests Mrs beaton's advice boracic acid was a component of a product called borax an Alkali which was used during the Victorian period to prolong the life of milk this milk doesn't taste very nice so you would throw it away the Victorian should say that's a waste so let's do something to it that removes the sour taste and what they would have done is added alkalis when fresh milk has a neutral pH measurement of around seven and over time as it sours or spoils and becomes contaminated with bacteria it becomes more acidic and its pH measurement drops so the victorians worked out probably by trial and error that if you add Alkali to this it would neutralize the acid then I've calculated that that will neutralize the acid in this milk so just give it a little bit of a Shake and then we'll show hopefully that it gives a pH closer to neutral so you can see this has gone back to 6.6 which is approximately neutral it's neutralized the acid it's now made this milk palatable again this new Wonder Alkali sold in the shops as borax was so popular it became a staple of the Victorian ladder alarmingly borax wasn't only used to treat milk it was also marketed as a wonderfully versatile product as I found when I read the journals of the time [Music] I'm just looking at these ads in the sketch from 1893 and there's this absolutely extraordinary one page ad Californian household treasure it says it's absolutely pure and absolutely safe it possesses qualities that are exceptional and unknown to any other substance and it purifies water destroys bacterly it promises everything in fact borax promised too much as well as purifying milk it was brilliant at cleaning your bath and your loom so what happened when borax ended up in the body Borax or sodium borate if inhaled or ingested can cause severe irritation so if it's swallowed it can cause abdominal pain nausea vomiting diarrhea if you have a large amount of it it will start to affect other organs like the brain and the kidneys and if you have enough it can prove fatal but just how much borax is harmful I've added a small amount of borax to neutralize the acid in this milk but of course if you had a pint of milk you need more borax so I calculated that you need this much borax to neutralize a pint of milk that's gone sour this is five grams and according to some people five grams is sufficient to potentially kill a small child so the addition of borax was not as harmless as Mrs Beaton suggested enough of it could kill but by reducing the acid in the spoiled milk and disguising the sour taste borax was concealing another deadly threat the real problem is it doesn't get rid of the bacteria the underlying cause of the acid and those bacteria could still kill people bacteria like brucella which causes undulating fevers and nasty fever that can go on for weeks at a time that's not particularly lethal but what would be lethal would be TB the bovine TB bacterium is present in cow's milk and this was what was able to flourish undetected in the milk with devastating effects bovine TB it's not the same TB that would cause the coughing symptoms that we associate with TB but what's called non-pulmonary TB it spreads out into the extremities includes damage to internal organs damage to the bones and particularly problematic in children what other effects could drinking milk contaminated with the bovine TB bacterium have bovine TB could also cause damage to the bones and the spine for example it could cause an abscess in the bones of the spinal column which would soften the bone which would then collapse to form a wedge shape and if several of these vertebra collapsed at once it could cause massive deformity of the spine this woman was actually particularly lucky because her TB damaged only the bones of the spine and not the spinal cord itself if the abscess had tracked and burst backwards into the spinal column it would have compressed the spinal cord and caused paralysis at best or death at worst effectively purifying this according to the standards of Mrs beaten is like removing The Biohazard tape and now it's basically potluck as to whether we have something that's contaminated and could kill us or something that's not contaminated and is safe to drink adding borax to milk allowed bovine TB bacteria to grow undetected exposing a generation to a lethal infectious disease it's estimated that virtually all children were exposed to bovine TB at some time during their upbringing and it's known that many of those children uh succumbed to that infection so you're saying that hundreds of thousands of people mostly perhaps children died as a result of that there are many studies uh one of which for example was a series of post-mortems done in London in the 1890s and they did postmortems on 1300 children who had died 30 percent of those children died as a result of TB non-pulmonary TV almost certainly that came from milk now if you extrapolate that up it's considered likely that half a million children died of TB from milk during the Victorian era [Music] thank you [Music] foreign despite these horrendous deaths the purification of milk with Alkali was not banned by legislation in the Victorian period and the problem of adulterated food continued until gradually consumer pressure LED manufacturers to advertise their Wares as pure and unadulterated [Music] the next hidden killer lies not in the room but between the levels of the Victorian house the dangers weren't just a result of products introduced into the home they were built into the very fabric of the new Victorian houses one of the most common death traps was right under their feet [Music] stairs have always been dangerous even with today's building regulations at least three hundred thousand accidents occur every year in the UK but in Victorian times it was even worse the new West counts of P up being done staircases and breaking their necks or breaking a leg and dying later septicemia the finger points to the urban population Boom the number of victorians per square mile increased from 390 in 1871 to 558 by 1901. houses were thrown up and packed into smaller plots with little concern about regulation or standardization the problem was is the way that the house styles changed houses become very much more narrow so what you've got is very high ceilings 10 11 feet with a very narrow Frontage it straightforward geometrical problems as if you've got 11 foot and only a very short space to get into it the staircase has to be steep class homes the stairs that were most likely to be cheaply constructed to be the steepest and the narrowest were those that led to the servant quarters Upstairs Downstairs came from the the difference in staircases from the decorated staircase which was the main one in the house which was there as a show of wealth it was a it was a statement to say look this is how much money I've got you came to the front door and this is wonderful double nose stairs highly decorated with spindles and velout days and balustrades and goosenecks you had people spending thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds on these staircases and then the downstairs staircase was for the servants it was built in the cheapest softwood that you could possibly buy you'd be lucky if there was handrails and spindles Rises of 9 10 12 inches safety really wasn't wasn't high on the agenda tragic really 1847 Visionary Builder Peter Nicholson had calculated how to build a safer staircase transforming the art of stair building into a science they came up with a mathematical formula for working out the rise and go the staircase he worked out that if you went up a certain height you could travel a certain distance with great ease and he developed a formula around that in order that people may pass freely the length of the step ought never to be less than four feet though in town houses for want of room the going of the stair is frequently reduced to two feet and a half Nicholson's formula considered how someone could take a normal stride yet still allow them to rise six to eight inches with every step and to look at those factors right then the stairs is always going to be a dangerous place [Music] there's a science to Stair building but in the rush to throw up houses it was a science that was often overlooked in the late Victorian period I've come to Manchester Metropolitan University to see what modern science can tell us about the dangers of the Victorian stairs I've been wired up to a motion capture device which will track every step I take to find out how my body adapts to the stairs Professor Costas manganaris okay so I'm just going to clip you into the harness and Professor Neil Reeves are experts in biomedical research and are going to demonstrate two staircases we'd like you to go to the top of the staircase stand facing this way and just walk down at your own comfortable speed as you would normally first day following Nicholson's principles the going or width of each step has been set to 11 inches and the height the rise to 12 and a half inches well apart from all the get up it felt pretty easy coming down those stairs I'd feel pretty happy running up and down those no problems at all now they set the stairs as they might have been in the servants quarters this definitely breaks Nicholson's formula with the going narrower and a steeper rise so you can walk down as you would normally [Music] change the way I take each step and hold the handrail imagine if I had to carry a tray or the linen and couldn't see where my foot fell because of a long skirt [Music] if we measure your foot this is about 26 centimeters which is much larger than the 17.5 centimeters room you've had I have to turn it sideways you decide to turn it sideways well otherwise otherwise what will happen an important part of the food would come out of the eggs and then you will have an increased likelihood of encountering sleep yes so I was very conscious the scientists reveal that on the servant staircase we are six times more likely to fall than on the grand one it may seem obvious that a steeper staircase would be more dangerous but there was another hidden danger many Victorian homes were built with non-uniform steps this video of a New York Subway stairs illustrates what happens when one stare out of 16 is a fraction of an inch higher than the others [Music] Professor Jake Paul's a specialist in stair safety studied the stairs and worked out that this tiny change has a dramatic impact on the misstep and fall incidents that is not equated to any other stair defect in other words you're more likely to fall if the stair is not uniform than for any other reason what is it about that video what does it tell us well I think what it tells us is that people get used to very regular stare pattern very quickly so after a few steps and if all of a sudden you introduce a step which is very different it poses difficulties with people and this is why it's more likely to for someone to have an accident or to slip on that a regular step so so if you'd give me two that there were the were the bigger ones and then a smaller one I'm almost certainly would have fallen down exactly thank you for not doing that by disregarding Nicholson's formula the victorian's new staircases installed in many of these narrower houses had unwittingly combined high-rises narrow goings and uneven steps to create a grave Hazard for the servants with the extra way to carrying trees and food there's no way no way that they could get up and down those stairs in one piece total death traps absolute death traps stairs remain one of the most common sources of accident and death in the home to understand our next set of dangers we need to appreciate one of the major preoccupations of our Victorian forebears it was at this time that cleanliness was becoming powerfully linked to ideas of morality and respectability and this is reflected in the literature of the period Charles kingsley's novel The Water Babies epitomizes it because it suggests you could take a dirty boy off the street and transform him into a model gentleman through the cleansing power of water it sums it up in the last lines they say meanwhile do you learn your lessons and thank God that you have plenty of cold water to wash in and washing it too like a true Englishman foreign the victorians were totally and utterly obsessed with being clean for them cleanliness was truly Next to Godliness they were setting themselves against the 18th century which was a time of dirt such a time in the upper classes the perfume was used to disguise dirt the victorians believed that a clean heart a clean body meant a clean soul yeah it was this desire for cleanliness that would lead the victorians to embrace a whole new range of potentially deadly Innovations and products one of the rooms the victorians can claim to have invented is the bathroom and what sure a sign of progress than a private room in which to carry out one's ablutions the bathroom really appears primarily because running water comes into the home for the first time so if you can actually bring water into the home it comes becomes more practical to have a room dedicated to its use until the mid-victorian period hot tubs for bathing had stood next to the fire in the front room or kitchen where water had to be warmed and poured into them this means that servants no longer have to be sort of traipsing up and down for back stairs carrying large amounts of water and I think this is when the bathroom as we know it is a sort of separate private lockable space away from the rest of the house really starts to take shape what the victorians hated most of all was the idea of bodily fluids the kind of smells they made the kind of traces they left they wanted to expunge them entirely from the body so that no one can smell the traces of these fluids that link you to the working classes [Music] space could be incredibly dangerous I've come to blaze Castle in Bristol to meet curator Catherine littlejohns I want to get some idea of the inventions available to the victorians who sought to meet these new high standards of cleanliness we're just going to look at some of the baths in the collection um I'm going to show you one of my favorite things it's actually a gas powered bath so if we have a look at the underneath here you can see where the gas went in at the front here and then just around by you there's a little door which is where you would like to get okay so here you'd put in your lighted match or whatever yeah gosh so that's actually ridiculously dangerous isn't it doesn't it mean that you can boil yourself in your bath you very probably could do the instructions the guidance always says they're very careful to point out that you don't want to actually start turning the gas on until you've actually got some water in the bath so you don't boil it dry they don't really make a mention of making sure you don't get into the bath while the gas is on the desire to be clean meant that the Bath's popularity outpaced any concern about the dangers which were significant the papers regularly reported cases of scoring so serious they resulted in death it wasn't until the invention of the thermostat safe for gas and its installation that these risks would be addressed foreign this new room with its cutting-edge Innovations would bring even more Killers into the home I think they were trying to understand the dangers of electricity and water and gas and all these new Services coming into fairly small confined areas without really understanding the dangers of how they actually interact with each other what could be better or more desirable than having a loo that flushed but its introduction was not without problems first danger lay in the plumbing early Plumbing in Victorian houses the the sewer systems didn't efficiently drain away the waste Gases such as methane and hydrogen sulfide emanating from human waste would not be able to escape and would build up in the sewer both of these gases are not only flammable but they're also explosive oh it always used to happen was the the sewage Outlet would get blocked and somebody would have to go and figure out how to clear it to get it to actually run away free at the time there wasn't electric batteries torches and stuff like that so the only way you could actually go and investigate it was unfortunately with a a naked Flame not only could gas collect in the sewer methane could actually leak back into the house itself it's quite a common occurrence there's that Outlets of toilets to spontaneously combust and that was really where we the the the drive towards improvements in drainage actually came from because they they needed to stop mingling getting back into the into their into the houses [Music] and it was one of Britain's most famous inventors that helped put us potential killer with one small but crucial component Thomas Crapper even though he's he's sort of he gets a lot of good press about inventing the toilet he actually invented the siphon valve which is actually a water trap and a valve flap which actually stops methane coming back into the property so it couldn't ignite [Music] it didn't stop the problem down in the main sewers but it stopped to actually affecting the people who lived in the house [Music] not only were Victorian bodies subject to a new regime of washing and scrubbing but what they put on them was too wealthy victorians both men and women could change their clothes up to five times a day by the late Victorian period laundry had become a huge operation because clothing was not simple there was an extensive amount of clothing even for a child and certainly for a woman she wore a lot of underclothing a lot of linen and these had to be changed regularly the Victorian mistress had a constant battle against her greatest enemy which was dirt the Victorian house could not escape the pollution of the time in London for instance the manure of the hundred thousand working horses the pervasive Smog and the Smoky gas lamps in the home all took their toll Victorian wash day was quite a mammoth task I mean you washed the clothes on the Monday you dry them on a Tuesday and you would be ironing them on Wednesday so a large part of your week would be taken up by the wash doing the laundry was an expensive business and a major part of the household budget for those who could afford it a lawn dress could be hired in by the day it was a military style operation every Victorian middle class woman came to her marriage with great chunks full of white clothing linen and her big job throughout her marriage was keeping those just as brilliantly white and what she used in this endeavor were soaps disinfectants and most of all she used the mangle so I've just fed this in from from the back here and you just have to get it so that it's between the rollers bringing out heavy Fabrics soddened in boiling water became easier with the arrival of the mangle it's not too heavy because of the the gear system and of course this is dry so if you're doing it with wet clothing but of course this brought its own perils but why is it so dangerous I mean it seems really quite solid I think um it's probably like a lot of Victorian Contraptions where yes it is very solid but you've got kind of exposed Gear wheels and things and obviously you have to feed the clothing in and what you have to remember is that the lady of the house she would have been doing this with young children around her daughters would have been watching her because they needed to learn how to how to work these things and often probably in quite a confined space Oh is it the dangers of little fingers I mean you know possibly the injuries incurred by washed day mango accidents were horrific and sometimes fatal or a mangle could do an awful lot of damage particularly to a child and of course it was typically children who would put their hand out of curiosity into the mangle obviously the the hand the arm and it typically was the Upper Limb that was caught would be compressed and everything in it would be squashed and a significant proportion would have fractures of the bones as well as damage to the soft tissue fearing Force where you're pulling the skin in opposite directions and that could completely remove the skin from the hand and the arm and tear it all away to reveal the muscles and tendons underneath Mr Barham surgeon found the child pale pulseless and partially paralyzed and with the parental Bones on either side of his head smashed in the dangers of the mangle might seem obvious to us now but our next hidden killer was impossible to see both then and now foreign things couldn't just look clean the new science of germs and microbes was changing ideas of cleanliness from tackling the visible to the invisible dangerous germs they feared could lurk hidden from sight and needed to be eradicated [Music] until the late Victorian period many believed that diseases were caused and carried by bad air but with improvements in technology and the emergence of high-powered microscopes bacteria began to be identified as the cause of disease but this science was brand new and not easily understood by the General Public there are various theories around the origins of disease at this point they're quite confused about it they've started to be aware of germ Theory but this isn't fully understood yet what they did understand was that there were microbes all around invisible to the eye but everywhere and this made the victorians disproportionately fearful and easily spooked some others didn't want to kiss their children because they thought it was spread germs so this is very real and comes up again and again in Diaries um the fact that people were afraid of each other because of germs which is a horrific thing when you think about it as this climate of fear escalated so people became increasingly alarmed about all manner of little things [Music] one of the most important things apart from germs were flies the great fly scare of the 1890s the great fly scare was caused by public awareness of the speed with which fliers could spread germs flies were everywhere living off the horse manure and trampled into the home once scientists identified Flyers as carriers of disease the public reacted they realized that one of the main communicators of germs were probably flies with their little sticky feet walking over everything once used last started to look at flies like that they became objects of horror the Terrors of insects and moths and caterpillars that need to be sternly exterminated because they just show the natural world coming into your perfect home also skirts not strictly speak any to do with flies except if you noticed when you walked around with a long skirt on that you would be brushing up against the feces and the horse manure and then and everything else and and that was likely to bring fly eggs in or anything so skirt length went up to ankles once skirts went up the shutters came down on flies in the home with a variety of products invented to stop them you have fly screens you have little lace doilies over your milk jugs you have little these doilies everywhere really you cover your curtains with lace the stop flies come in not really so that you can not see out all of these things which partly to do with the fly scare but the fight against germs would require more than beaded doilies the victorians needed to believe that these germs were being eradicated by newly invented products that would kill all known germs dead many claims were made in the name of science before these items could be rigorously tested making the late Victorian home a very scary place to be foreign 's worshiped science they worshiped invention so they would do anything to make things cleaner even if that meant using dangerous chemicals but as the incredible cleaning powers of these new items became more potent so the dangers in the home increased [Music] was that many cleaning products are toxic and they have to be that's how they have their cleaning effects but they were stored and sold in very similar packages so you would go to the shop and get a box that contained something like baking soda which we would use to bake bread or cakes and is perfectly harmless but it may look very similar to the box of caustic soda which of course is very corrosive and would do a huge amount of damage to the body dangerous chemicals such as caustic soda and carbolic acid were now in the cupboard next to the flour and sugar and were easily muddled the opportunity for mistakes and mix up between products was huge [Music] drinking bleach or carbolic acid for example would lead to an agonizing death the first thing that would happen if be a burning sensation in the esophagus because it is directly corrosive to anything that it comes in contact with and so that would go down into the stomach and cause abdominal pain in the early stages if the person survives and they don't go into renal failure they may develop strictures because of scarring of the esophagus meaning that they're unable to swallow any food and of course that could prove fatal this lack of Distinction in bottles and packaging of toxic cleaning materials and dangerous substances didn't just confuse the Victorian at home there were cases where even professionals made Mix-Ups with disastrous consequences [Music] on one occasion Bradford a chemist mistakenly mixed arsenic into his lozenge recipe killing 12 people and rendering a further 78 seriously ill [Music] and so it was this problem with the packaging that really forced legislation to make packages much more distinct so different shaped and sized and colored bottles and boxes so that you couldn't reach for the flower and pick up the Arsenic for example [Music] but it wasn't always an accident lethal poisons of all descriptions were easily and readily available over the counter with this lay a new Temptation because poisoning could go undetected Victorian age was the age of the poisoner the rise of arsenic was to many people a great opportunity previously if he wanted to murder someone he'd have to use your brute strength you'd have to stab them or strangle them when arsenic became widely available there was a lot of comment in the newspaper saying well women could just slip it into their husband's tea so why wouldn't they they were absolutely afraid that all the women in Britain would turn poisoner because why would you not murder your husband and go off and be a merry widow why not people bought poisons for things like rat poisoning and fly papers so you could easily just go and buy them for completely legitimate reasons the other reason was this is a time when life insurance became available and so you could take out a life insurance policy on one of your family members and then if they die you could claim the money and there's evidence there were quite a few unscrupulous people who took out large policies before people mysteriously died foreign s around things like arsenic but probably the worst and the one that caused the most awful death was strickening [Music] strickening could be used both as a medicine and in the garden as a pesticide a white odorless powder it was like so many other items in the cupboard it has very immediate and unpleasant effects first of all the muscles of the head and the neck would start to contract and then spasm would spread to all the muscles of the body the person would start to come false and at its worst the muscles of the body would be so contracted that the person would be resting on just their heels and their head with their back bowed in the middle and unable to move death would follow rapidly either because of paralysis of the respiratory muscles which meant that they couldn't breathe or exhaustion following all these awful convulsions Bond had never been higher and manufacturers had never sold so many poisonous products it would take a long time for that to change it wasn't until just after the Victorian age in 1902 that the pharmacy act required that bottles of disinfectant be distinguishable by touch from bottles in which ordinary liquids were contained in order to find the next Hazard we must first understand the Temptations on offer to the middle class Victorian could this be a hidden killer manufacturers began to woo a burgeoning mass Market this was the first age of mass advertising back in the 1850s and 1860s it had been thought on gentlemanly to advertise now for the first time advertising became powerfully visual photography and art were used to sell Goods advertising agencies were founded and celebrities started to endorse products foreign there's an expansion in print culture there are more newspapers there are more magazines but there are also new technologies and ways of producing images and putting them in them for example photographs appear in magazines from the 1890s onwards and this really means that advertising takes on a new visual form at this point and I think it becomes more persuasive and more powerful the power of advertising put new pressure on victorians and would lead to increased risks and these advertisements are particularly aimed at the upper class and the middle class women and what they're trying to say is if you don't buy our products if you don't use our products you will be a failure as a housewife as a woman so they really played on insecurities and what they did was they got everyone to buy all kinds of dangerous substances under the guise of perfecting your home and the perfect Victorian home wouldn't be complete without a dangerous new material which they inadvertently welcomed into their homes in an amazing array of objects the man who invented it was so famous at the time a letter bearing just his name and City would get to him Mr a Parks inventor of parkazin Birmingham and it got there Birmingham dubbed the city of a thousand inventions had become a magnet for scientists and it was here that Parks developed his revolutionary idea he took cotton wool ordinary cotton wool which he combined with acids and various things and he found out he discovered how to convert the material into a moldable material which we today will call plastic so we reckon he's the father of plastics so we've sort of forgotten about this Great British inventor haven't we well he wasn't a very good businessman because the company folded about two years later but his idea was so good it was picked up in the states by guy called Hyatt and Hyatt gave it the name Celluloid and from then on with no idea be forgotten Parks but we all know Sunny though it is an early material it was the Americans who developed it into a business success and started something of a revolution [Music] it wasn't until 1885 that the world's first really successful plastic product hit the streets and it was something quite unusual it was a Celluloid collar and cuff and there's a sociological reason for it of course remember the Clarks sitting at those High desks writing away in Ledges all day long and they wouldn't be allowed to have scrap paper for calculations so they'd make calculations on the car on their cuff and they couldn't afford a clean linen collar and cuff every day like their bosses and they couldn't afford to launder them so by the end of the week they must have been chaotic when numbers going left to right right to left and backwards but then Along Comes Celluloid you can do all the numbers you want on your cuff during the day take it home at night put it under the tap rinse it shake it dry put it on again in the morning looking pristine just like the boss and it was an amazing sociological success all over the world 1885. for us is Celluloid products found their way into items all over the house a terrible Discovery was made a wonderful material it's not a perfect material because it's inflammable it burns chemically it's very similar to guncon and gun cotton we know isn't it it's explosive material so cellulose nitrate Parkinson cellular it burns very fiercely ignoring its flammability Celluloid was such a useful material that Kenny manufacturers saw numerous opportunities to produce those must-have items when the invention of plastic allowed broaches hair combs and mirrors to be as ornate and attractive looking as the much more expensive Ivory they were eagerly swept up the middle classes wanted to look wealthy and modern and these products allow them to look just that this Victorian evening bag for example this looks like a piece of hand carved Ivory and it's not as a piece of pressed Celluloid it wasn't a real Ivory comb it was made of Celluloid and it wasn't a real wooden bath it was painted like wood and that's because the victorians were so delighted by Innovation and by science and they loved the idea of tricking themselves and also they love the idea of a cheap bargain maybe not such a great bargain I want to find out just how flammable Celluloid really is this is a ping pong pool from China this is one of the few products in the world that you can still buy that's made of celluloid assisting me is Martin Shipp from building research establishment Martin the flame please wow surprisingly Fierce flame definitely not something to try at home Martin estimates that Celluloid is five times more flammable than plywood [Music] celluloid's chemical composition meant it could not only go up in Flames easily but it was also unreliable in other ways over time it degrades light and chemicals can cause it to gradually break down and in that breakdown process it releases comfort and it releases alcohols and other things that are flammable and those flammable gases in the atmosphere can then be ignited by a spark or a flame without anybody igniting the Celluloid itself that's what made Celluloid so dangerous and there were other problems too Celluloid items could also spontaneously combust as this cartoon of the time illustrates and Billiard bores traditionally made of ivory were now made from the cheapest Celluloid until it was discovered that they would explode on impact this is an example of one of the very first Billy boards made from Cellular's nitrate and the inventor of this billiard ball had a letter from a Colorado Saloon keeper they didn't mind when the boars crashed together sometimes they've got a mini explosion because of the explosive material what it did object was the fact that every man in the room turned around and pulled out a gun even worse was to come Celluloid was so versatile it replaced materials like Ivory and bone in clothing items like corsets and Lace brooches bracelets and all sorts of accessories were either made of or featured Celluloid without concern for the accumulative effect this is a hair comb used in the 1890s and the fashion style was to have a hair combusters pushed in the back not just one but several of them and when you consider that's a highly flammable material and the reports of people passing too close to gaslamps or leaning too close to the fire and they're burst into flames there were terrible Tales of misadventure like the woman who failed to notice a cigar roll under her Celluloid enhanced dress until it was too late she immediately ran outside to try and get away from the smoke unfortunately that change in conditions from Fairly restricted within a small area within a hall to outside where there's a lot of oxygen and some wind the skirt started to burn with flames and she was immediately engulfed in flames in her pursuit of cut price fashion the Victorian woman had been transformed into a walking fire hazard [Music] although in 1922 there was an act in forcing better safety and premises where raw Celluloid film was stored there was never any legislation to stop the use of Celluloid in fashionable items and in clothing it was only over the course of the 20th century as more improved less flammable Plastics were invented that the use of Celluloid declined but while its introduction had been a dangerous one it developed into a far safer product that is still with us one that a British inventor had been responsible for I think you can look around today and virtually everything which you look at or touch or your control everything you do involves Plastics it controls our lives today which you may think is a good thing or a bad thing but it does we can't we can't avoid that I need to set the wheels in motion for that he laid the foundations for a massive industry which Now controls and effects everybody's lives throughout the world from the food they ate to the clothes they wore and the gadgets and products championed by the new exciting advertising campaigns Victorian homes were brimming with killers they laid dormant until scientific progress consumer concern or a brave new Pioneer raised their voice above the clamor and forced a change for the better but the Victorian ideal of safest houses was never really fulfilled [Music] many of the domestic fatalities of late Victorian Britain can be explained by middle class desires to make their lives easier cheaper and more convenient and to conform to ideals of morality and respectability but we mustn't forget that they were pioneers and progress always comes at a cost as the century reached its close Britain was leading the world and was on the verge of a golden age in which scientific advances would really start to make a difference but would the Edwardian home be any safer [Music] time I'll be discovering how a new century a new monarch and extraordinary new inventions would have an impact on the Edwardian home she covered her face in Poison absolutely lethal [Music]

Channel: Progress - Technology History Documentaries

Views: 4,009

Keywords: Progress, Documentary, Technology, Science, History, Full Documentary, Victorian, victoria era, hidden killers, Suzannah Lipscomb, Absolute History, Victorian invention, invention, English history, british history, weird history, bizarre history

Id: lUDx8bzQhe0

Length: 58min 47sec (3527 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2023