The Deadly History Of Household Appliances | Hidden Killers Full Series| All Out History

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] Sanctuary from the outside world especially in the cities where dirt and disease hung in the air and danger stalked the streets [Music] and 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 for under the guise of family-friendly products Mass consumption was bringing Killers into the very heart of the Victorian home with the aid of modern science I'll seek out the deadly assassins that hid on every floor leaning too close to the fire and 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 that could completely remove the skin from the hand and the arm welcome back to the perilous world of the real Victorian home 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 three million people was a strategic challenge but thankfully by the late 19th century the Staples of bread and milk had become cheaply available a cater for the new demands the victorians pioneered new food processing techniques foreign this left the consumer at the mercy of the unscrupulous Merchants responsible for each part of the food chain one thing 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 that would add weight and increase 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 release 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] the biggest adulterant at the time was Alan and that's been used since the 18th century uh 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 to listen to that this one's still quite dense but again looks nice and smells really like rubber or something very odd that 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 preferring 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 what 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 Housewives 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 foreign [Music] 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 is expensive tea is adulterated with everything from iron filings to dust to used 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 alteration 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 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 blithely 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 foreign 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 but over time as it showers 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 but 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 destroyers bacterly it promises everything fact borax Promise Too Much as well as purifying milk it was brilliant at cleaning your bath and your Lube foreign 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 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 fever it's a 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 coffin symptoms that we associate with TB but what's called non-pulmonary TB is spreads out into the extremities includes damage to internal organs damage to the bones and particularly a 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 Beaton 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 a loud 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 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 one of which for example was a series of postmortems 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] foreign [Music] 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 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 300 000 accidents occur every year in the UK but in Victorian times it was even worse cancer of breaking a leg and dying later of septicemia why were there so many deaths and injuries from stairs 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 straightforward geometrical problem is if you've got 11 foot and only a very short space to get into the staircase has to be steep in middle class homes the stairs that were most likely to be cheaply constructed to be the steepest and the narrowest with those that led to the servant quarters [Music] 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 at 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 seven Visionary Builder Peter Nicholson stated how to build a safer staircase transforming the art of stair building into a science he 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 [Music] did I mention similar to a main Victorian staircase 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 on 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 you walk down as you would normally predictably this is not comfortable at all in fact I'm really having to slow down 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 a 17.5 centimeters room you've had I had to turn it sideways you decided any sideways well otherwise otherwise what will happen an important part of the food would come out of the eggs and then you would have an increased likelihood of encountering sleep yes yes and I've fallen downstairs before so I was very conscious of not wanting to do it absolutely from the data input the scientists reveal that on the servant staircase we are six times more likely to fall than on the ground 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 of the stairs 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 a 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 difficulty for people and this is why it's more likely to for someone to have an accident or to slip on that irregular step so so if you'd give me two that 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 the extra way to carrying trays and food there's no way a 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 [Music] 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 the 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 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 well mostly it's given to us and what happened in this private lockable 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 oh wow we're just going to look at some of the baths in the collection 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 um they're very careful to point out that you don't want to actually start tearing 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 Keepers 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 [Music] this new room with its cutting-edge Innovations would bring even more Killers into the home foreign 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 problems the 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 what 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 mixing getting back into the into their into the houses [Music] and it was one of Britain's most famous inventors that helped put a stop to this 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 me saying 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 police pollution of the time in 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 the 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 sodden 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 um 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 wash 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 it was a fearing Force where you were 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 [Music] 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 look hidden from sight and needed to be eradicated [Music] thank you until the late Victorian period many believe 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 flies could spread germs flies were everywhere living off the horse manure and trampled into the home once scientists identified fliers 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 you've lost 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 English tooth 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 everything else 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 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 [Music] and the victorians 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 the problem 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] in 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] 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 you'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 through many poisons around things like arsenic but probably the worst and the one that caused the most awful death was strickening [Music] strychnine 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 convulse 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 demand 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 [Music] thank you 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 for 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 Parkinson Birmingham and it got there [Music] 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 ball 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 would 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 I know I know he was a great inventor too he had something like 90 patents to his name 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 a guy called Hyatt and Hyatt gave it the name Celluloid and from then on with no idea so you'll be forgotten Parks but we all know Saturday 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 color and cuff and there's a sociological reason for it of course remember the Clarks sitting at those High desk right away in Ledges all day long and they wouldn't be allowed to have scrap paper for calculations so they'd make calculations on them 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 with 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 these affordable Celluloid products found their way into items all over the house a terrible Discovery was made It's a Wonderful material it's not a perfect material because it's inflammable it burns chemically it's very similar to guncon and guncon we know isn't it it's explosive material so cellulose nitrate Parkinson's solo it burns very fiercely ignoring its flammability Celluloid was such a useful material that canny 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 it's 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 love 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 ball 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 ship from building research establishment Martin the flame please wow a surprisingly Fierce flame definitely not something to try at home Martin estimates that Celluloid is five times more flammable than plywood foreign '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 cellulite 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 Billy boar had a letter from a Colorado Saloon keeper that didn't mind when the balls crashed together sometimes they've got a mini explosion because of the explosive material what he did object was the fact that every man in the room turned around and pulled out a gun but 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 so long and when you consider that's a highly flammable material and the reports of people passing two coaster gas lamps or leaning too close to the firearm they're burst into flames foreign 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 although in 1922 there wasn't act enforcing 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 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 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 with the Edwardian home be any safer [Music] next 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 [Music] the dawn of a new century and the reign of a new King Edward VII ushered in an age of dramatic scientific changes stunning new inventions and groundbreaking discoveries and it was in their homes that Ed wardens experienced the full impact of this Leap Forward into modernity it offered a Brave New World but these mod cons were all untried and untested and soon turned the Edwardian home into a hazardous place to be absolutely she covered her face in Poison [Music] Vogue was advertising arsenic soap for that offending pimple products that were brilliant maybe not so brilliant and downright dangerous because they find they're easy to inhale when you breathe in they can get deep into the lungs and they stick there I'm going to search out these hidden killers and reveal how science both created them and then solved the problems they caused welcome to the perilous world of the real Edwardian home [Music] foreign this is a typical House of the Edwardian period [Music] I not only looked more modern than the houses of the victorians it even sounded different foreign Victoria died in 1901 her son Edward VII became king and the era that bore his name began as the new century got underway and it seemed as though a world of opportunity was opening up H.T World summed up the spirit of the age perfectly when he wrote that Queen Victoria like a great paperweight sat on men's minds and when she was removed their ideas blew all over the place haphazardly in other words her death created the perfect conditions for new ideas to flourish and this of course had an impact on the home in the first five years of Edward VII's Reign Over 140 000 British patents were granted [Music] like the victorians before them the new Edwardian middle classes had the spare cash to purchase products that would make their home lives more comfortable the most exciting new invention on the market was electricity it would not only transform every room of the Edwardian house but it would make possible a whole host of new domestic inventions and gadgets if there's one thing we take for granted it's that this works but imagine how incredible it must have been when it was introduced this clean invisible magical energy that transformed the Edwardian evening in today [Music] so what problems could there possibly be electricity in our modern homes is subject to all kinds of regulations but the unsuspecting Edwardian had no idea what damage it could do when it was first invented it was considered to be quite magical it was clean of course and it was they thought I guess they thought it was safe and it meant they could do things that they couldn't do before they could put on a light at the tone of a switch it to completely transform the amenities within the ordinary domestic house it was in the late 19th century that the components needed for electrification began to be developed the vital invention was made by both Joseph Swann in Britain and Thomas Edison in America the incandescent light bulb street lights came first and then in the Edwardian period individual companies began to produce electricity to offer to domestic households gaslighting and heating had become popular in Victorian times but it was a dirty source as well as being potentially explosive it left a residue of grime electric light seemed to offer the perfect alternative it might seem an obvious thing that electricity should replace gas but at the time um electricity companies and gas companies were very much in competition people had just got used to gaslighting and now they're faced with a new technology something else which they've been told to take on and adopt in their lives this is um instructions about how you'd use your urdus and electric light and it says do not attempt to light with match simply turn key on wall by the door um sounds quite Bonkers to us today that you have to explain it in that way we know how we operate our electricity we know we go to the light switch but then that wasn't so obvious at the turn of the century electricity was far more expensive than gas but it was heavily marketed by the supply companies who could see the possibilities and the profits we get key figures like Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill choose to have it in their homes and this is sort of widely reported in the Press so it becomes more attractive and almost glamorous for some of the middle classes to take it on the newspapers were full of the wonders of electricity for example the Dundee Courier in December 1906 praised its romantic story and said that its rapid Advance is more wonderful than any tale of wild Arabian fiction it seemed Chic modern and desirable if you're a sophisticated Urban up-to-date family you needed electricity in your house you needed electric lamps and those who didn't have it were simply seen as behind the times so if you really wanted to show off to your business associates that you were the right type of person you brought in the electric light gradually Edward Edward but it was a completely new little understood force and electricity cables were just that naked bare cables one touch and you could be electrocuted early cases the elect the the cables weren't actually insulated at all they used to just run through wooden Runners and then they'd just do bear running around the properties when they did catch on to insulation they used the wrong material originally they were made just lined in paper and Lead a fantastic fire accelerant brilliant they even tried wrapping it in cloth they wrapped up in Wood they wrapped it up in it basically anything they thought might stop the electricity getting through and somebody inadvertently touching them and earthing the ability to make a 40 circuit safe by redirecting it to the Earth simply didn't exist there's no ways there is nothing at all so if you had a small child that could just you know run around and and touch one of these things that absolutely Lethal lethal or not the Fearless edwardians kept inventing and found the new power source could be used for all sorts of domestic appliances its full potential could be seen in the electric house the centerpiece of the 1908 Manchester electrical exhibition Tomorrow's World of its day and on display were all the must-have items for the ideal Edwardian home one excited visitor wrote a postcard about their visit I went to the electrical exhibition last week and spent a very enjoyable afternoon kettles boiling and frying pans on the go all on a clean table without a speck of dust what sort of items are available a whole range of things that we see now when we find a common place in our homes today but also a whole other range of things which maybe we're not so familiar with all sorts of weird and wonderful appliances appeared some of which had not been seen before all since as suppliers tried to generate a demand for electricity beyond the electric light what's this that's actually an early electric curling tongue and you just put your curling tongue in there to heat up and this must have been quite a breakthrough to have an electric iron for the first time up until now irons had been heated on coal stoves in many ways I guess that is quite a breakthrough and one of the appliances that people probably were most fond of in the early days a look at the magazines and papers of the time reveals a fundamental lack of understanding about how to use electricity safely even by some manufacturers in the evening telegraph of December 1908 it recommended the use of an electric tablecloth a device which it says up-to-date hostesses will not be long in taking advantage of one of the most unusual items is probably this one here this is a tablecloth it's an Illuminating tablecloth and the idea is that you turn it the other way around so you'd have this side showing and wired up inside here are just bare wire connectors you'd lay it down you'd cover it with your cloth basically plug your lamp on the base into the tablecloth directly into the tablecloth you're pronging through and making that connection I can see that's quite fun but presumably it's also really dangerous I mean yes yes extremely dangerous whoever in their right mind thought up of putting the tablecloth which stores water and food and all the rest of it and run electricity through it was Beyond me but it was it was new it was it was that's what you just need to do and it was sold and marketed as being the new technology lamps that are on the table [Music] thankfully despite the marketing this electrical Wonder did not catch on they have the goods but they didn't have the infrastructure we have today and here lay the problem they would use the light socket so run all sorts of pieces of equipment possibly even electric heaters now on the from the wires going to the lot that's right yes they would put an adapter into the light socket they would then run a bowl plus another piece of equipment off that and in extreme cases they would add a number of adapters and have a number of different sorts of pieces of equipment coming off the lights light circuit all right and then you get this whole sort of cascade of adapters coming out from the ceiling fitting what we call a Christmas tree leading to lots of different pieces of equipment so for example people would be doing ironing off the lighting circuit they would maybe have an electric heater running off the lighting circuit and of course every extra piece of equipment was adding an additional energy load to the system which is why we would get overheating of the system and potential fires because whenever they plugged plates in or toasters or refrigerators they used to overheat then the current would be running through the cable would start melting the cable and then this cable would catch fire [Music] straight how quickly overloading can cause a fire Martin applies a battery to wire wall the battery is too high of voltage for the wire mirroring what might have happened in the Edwardian home when extra appliances were added to the electric light socket this overloading of one circuit is what caused fires in Edwardian homes [Music] it wasn't safely regulated in the way ours is now there were no consumer units miniature circuit breakers or any of that safety equipment that we now rely on modern fuse boxes protect homes from this [Music] becomes overloaded it cuts out but back then the electricity would keep flowing there'd be a fire in the house and now we knew all I could you'll be in bed when it happens and there'd be no getting out all the institution of electrical engineers issued its first wiring regulations in 1882 they were often ignored part of the problem was that initially electricity was sold by individual local companies who each supplied a particular voltage of electricity to their local area so an iron used at home in Manchester wouldn't be compatible with one in Liverpool it was down to the individual generating company what voltage and what amperage that they put the electricity into the properties so even though you understood one system it didn't mean that if you went further down the road or bought the electricity from somebody else it would be exactly the same [Music] on its own and left alone electricity isn't overly dangerous is when you bring in the human factor that's when electricity becomes dangerous because of the many and varied ways people had aged unwittingly themselves he accidentally touched the Mane and receiving the full force of the current was killed on the spot [Music] swung himself upon an electric light bracket which broke and the electric current passed through his body being electrocuted the effects of that depend on several things the current the duration of the electric shock that you have and also the voltage if you have a very low current electric shock for a sufficient duration it can affect the beating of the heart if you disturb that electrical flow around the heart each of the individual heart muscles can contract individually and so there's no concerted effort and so no blood would be pumped around the body so damaging the heart with an electric shock is particularly dangerous and that can happen even at quite a low current if you have a very high current you typically get a burn where the electricity enters and possibly leaves the body and that may cause instant death as it causes the heart to stop [Music] though slow to address the dangers of electricity edwardians credited it with all kinds of health-giving properties which led to some strange practices Space Age element to it it's 12 years it's an early Sunray lamp which is meant to encourage sort of good health the theory was that this would make you healthier and there are adverts from a bit later on where they show babies positioned in front of these [Music] the therapeutic use of electricity also extended into the medical profession where it was applied to a range of physical and mental illnesses have you got any other surprising items yes there are some surprising items this is a fairly early um massage machine electric massage machine it's a bit like a ray gun I think that one it does look a bit like a ray gun or a sort of a microphone you think Elvis and this is for massage um ostensibly from massage it was often used for more intimate sort of purposes as well but it was sold I say yeah right some of the things edwardians got up to in their own homes revealed how little they understood this deadly force to my amazement I even found an extraordinary headline in the Daily Mail a man accidentally electrocuted himself during his daily beautifying routine he was using an electrical Gadget which was plugged in at the mains and was designed to enhance and inflate his pecs a man's fatal vanity he attached the needle wire to the electric light work the needle over his breast and drop dead eventually the edwardians were given the option of a wall socket instead of the light but this brought up another issue at the time both the plug and the socket contained metal which created a small spark when they came into contact foreign plugged in or plugged out when the equipment is live so as two pieces of metal come into contact or come out of contact when they're alive then a spark will occur as most Edwardian homes were still using a lot of gas we went to leaking this small spark could be enough to cause a big explosion explosion just waiting to happen from the tiniest amount of gas and windows and doors I knew would be on the street waiting but then every Undertaker I would imagine over time improvements were applied that lessened the dangers it wasn't until 98 99 that Edison came up with the idea of a rubber socket which went onto a plug which had a few was in which obviously saved any shocks when you were touching it it saved any any problems with insulating and it saved this problem of overheating but with its varying currents assortment of sockets and plugs no Earth or fuse box Edwardian electricity was a dangerous business especially as it was often installed and maintained by DIY enthusiasts anyone could really wire up their home so potentially you've got people not knowing what they're doing getting into big trouble even one of Edison's friends killed himself and executed himself and that's somebody who knew who knew what he was doing by 1915 there were 600 separate electricity suppliers across the country [Music] the demands of war led the government to take steps to set up electricity commissions to make the generation and supply of electricity more efficient and then the the government actually made a declaration that we would all use the same current voltage it would all come through the same way and it was the start of the the grid [Music] all its early dangers electricity became the utility of choice for the modern Edwardian by 1913 most of the 1 million new middle-class homes that have been built in Britain had electricity wired in and people were learning to use it with care foreign [Music] was not just a foot in technological terms Edwardian Society was also changing dramatically this was an age of great social reforms and above all it was an age of female advance although women were still employed in service other options existed now in factories and shops which inevitably had an impact on the home increasingly the Edwardian housewife particularly the middle and lower class housewife she really felt she shouldn't have to spend her entire day doing housework and so there was a real growth of labor-saving devices of ways in which the Edwardian women could save her time could not be doing the drudgery of the old days [Music] where technological and social change met was in finding an alternative to an unpleasant chore that had traditionally Fallen to women the building and cleaning up of open coal fires foreign who could find a way to dispense with this onerous task was on to a winner by the turn of the century in cities particularly Gas and Electric fires were rivaling coal some of them used a new Wonder material [Music] insulating and provided clean energy the new material was hailed as a miracle its name asbestos [Music] asbestos was seen as a wonderful material because it didn't burn it was a very versatile material you could weave it which was which was superb and you could use it as a as an insulator it's good for soundproofing it's good for thermal efficiency it was good for fire resistance it was really the Wonder stuff it was strong and it was very very cheap asbestos is naturally occurring and had been used for thousands of years but never on an industrial scale by 1909 it was embedded in all sorts of manufacturing processes in the elected building period they were doing 190 000 metric tons of asbestos over they were mining it phenomenal amount coming out of South Africa Russia Canada America all being imported into Britain and then after the asbestos factories every day he was like Christmas Day because when they walked through the factory it was snowing and it was asbestos test s were happily working with what we now know to be a carcinogenic killer this person to alert the authorities to the possibility there could be a problem was a factory inspector the earliest account was a health hazard of working with asbestos came from Lucy Dean one of the first female inspectors of factories in the UK writing in 1898 she included asbestos work as one of the four Dusty occupations under observation that year quote on account of their easily demonstrative danger to the health of workers Dean's report notes that where the particles are allowed to rise and remain suspended in the air the effects have been found to be injurious as might have been expected [Music] if you look through the the records there are instances around about the late 1800s of actually it was a 19 year old asbestos worker who They carried out a postmortem on and they actually found fibrous substances in his lungs asbestos fibers are very very fine about a hundredth of the width of a human hair so you can't really see them with the naked eye but because they're so fine they're easy to inhale when you breathe in they can get deep into the lungs and they stick there initially they cause scarring something called asbestosis with fibrosis and scarring of the lungs which starts to replace the normal lung tissue with fibrous scars which means that the lungs aren't doing their job properly but although Dean raised the alarm her findings were ignored for many years people might have noticed it caused difficulty with breathing but nothing was done they didn't really know what it was and they used to just put it down to bronchial problems or you know breathing problems of some description but they were starting to think that there may be something in these new substances that weren't good when they actually mixed with humans [Music] what the edwardians didn't appreciate at the time temperature of asbestos what a lung looks like when it's been destroyed by asbestos fibers the real danger of asbestos is in causing a particular cancer called mesothelioma this affects the pleura and it's an abnormal growth that can encase the lungs and spread throughout the body it's almost completely untreatable and it certainly was in the early part of the 20th century unfortunately because of its amazing qualities by now asbestos was being used in all sorts of products throughout the home it was actually quite good for lining water tanks so unfortunately we then put asbestos inside water tanks and then we were taking water out of the tanks through lead piping with asbestos and it's the case of how many problems do you want to put in one place and then reap the benefits years down the line they started making floor tiles ceiling tiles it was laying in their boilers they made gutters out of it you could make a system for your toilet your toilet seat even the amount of applications that asbestos actually had in gutters in in in in fascia board in tiles in artex it's in just about everything it was the most hidden of hidden Killers sometimes waiting years to do its worst and to the least suspecting members of the household there are quite a few stories of the wives of asbestos workers developing mesothelioma and that's thought to be because they're washing their husbands clothes and are being exposed to the asbestos fibers in that way and so it's not just people who work with asbestos who can develop these problems [Music] the dangers of asbestos in the home were different to the problems in the factory when asbestos remained undisturbed in the fabric of the building its fibers would not be released into the air it's really disrupting asbestos it causes the problem so that you breathe in the fibers so you hear today about buildings that have been condemned because they have a lot of asbestos in the walls that probably wouldn't cause any problem to somebody walking through the building but if you were to knock it down those fibers could get into the atmosphere and be breathed in the other problem with asbestos is it has a long latent period it can take 20 30 even 40 years for mesothelioma to develop after exposure so it wasn't something that happened immediately it took a long time and it took a long time for the danger to be acknowledged in the factories too they did a series of post-mortems on 30 people in a factory where only two people have actually survived this Factory and they looked for common trends that was the problem and it was all about this fibrous buildup in inside their lungs and that's when asbestosis actually got its its name it was really where it really came from [Music] [Applause] partly because of cover-ups partly because of a desire not to know the dangers of asbestos didn't become public until the 1920s the first aspitosis diagnosis by the British medical journal was not until 1924 and legislation took much longer to follow Mrs Lilly Harriet died from fibrosis of the lung caused by inhaling of asbestos dust I think sometimes it was ignorance at the times it was for a profit there was so much money to make out of it the death rate in factories led to a decline in the use of asbestos and it is banned today but it remains hidden in many buildings a lot of people don't actually know about the widespread applications of asbestos are no doubt still still in properties today even now over a hundred years later there are annually more deaths in the UK due to mesothelioma than deaths caused by Road accidents and it could be argued we won't know the final death toll for another hundred years to this day asbestos remains a true hidden killer foreign but it wasn't all doom and gloom this was an age of Firsts Innovations of the Edwardian era include such Fantastical breakthroughs as the first powered sustained successful flight by a machine heavier than air the first mass production of motor cars the first vacuum cleaners and electric washing machines being manufactured in the UK in other words the edwardians were laying the foundations of our modern world of these were the big inventions that transformed life outside the home but there were also the smaller items that made day-to-day domestic life easier and more comfortable things we take for granted today all of the items and activities that the modern middle class Edwardian needed could be bought from these Pages a hundred years previously most of them would probably not have existed let alone have been available for Mass consumption foreign [Music] that we find the greatest technological marvels of the Edwardian age making domestic life easier and sometimes shorter if you are really up to date and had money to burn what could be more desirable than a brand new refrigerator foreign food preservation was a major issue in Edwardian times initially they made purpose-built cold cabinets to store food they were carved out of Timber lined with sawdust it could be rabbit for and then your item was put inside and packed with ice ice was shipped in from the Arctic and distributed to people's homes but no matter how well insulated the ice would not last long they want some other way of doing it and technology gave them the answer I suppose so what came after ice how did we get to the first fridges that used chemicals find out I've come to South Bank University in London to meet Refrigeration expert Professor Graham madement so is this enormous thing an early fridge probably about 1870 that sort of thing this unlikely looking fridge has been rebuilt from early designs it was never actually manufactured but it is perfect to illustrate the first attempts at Refrigeration when a version did come on for the market it wasn't cheap the earliest commercial fridges early 20th century would have been about 700 pounds that sort of price and compare compared to a Model T Ford which was maybe 500 pounds so more expensive than a car fridges were the placing of the Edwardian rich and did not become affordable to the masses until much later and how did it work Refrigeration uses the principle of evaporation of the liquid to gas to produce a cooling effect if I can show you the little experiment in this cam we've got some butane which is a common refrigerant that we use today if we spray it you can see it actually produces cooling as it hits the surface and evaporates well yes [Music] the evaporating gas draws Heat this is how a fridge works the Edwardian Engineers understood they needed to create a cycle where a gas could evaporate draw the Heat and return to liquid continuously refrigerant would have been in this pipes here and would have made this small container within here cold just this absolutely I know it's huge isn't it the whole machine is massive just for a small amount yes you could put a pint of milk in there and that's about it that's it what's all this then well that's that's basically making the refrigerant back to a liquid again we've got a compressor that pumps it but this is a hand driven one so you'd have had a servant drive in this terrible job that was awful you didn't you have to be doing this all day 24 hours a day in order to keep that pint of melt cold absolutely it took time for the technology to develop to cope with the chemicals they knew could work this prototype was developed before electricity and well before rubber sealants you can see here you know the sort of components that we would use the refrigerant wouldn't have stayed within the system so it leaked out the trouble was that the early fridges weren't actually sealed fridges so they used these gases and there would be a certain amount of of seepage and leakage from these fridges and this is what made the early fridges so hazardous the dangers of the early fridges were actually in the chemicals that they used as the refrigeration the pneumonia which was pretty flammable and pretty toxic if you breathe in ammonia gas it's immediately very toxic so the eyes would start to water your throat would become sore it can cause chest pain difficulty in breathing and if you have enough of it it can cause circulatory collapse and even death you know it's so fair dark side which is extremely toxic and then you had methyl chloride only certain gases will turn from liquid to gas in the way required unfortunately these properties also made them exceptionally dangerous gases like methyl chloride also had other uses they actually used gases that in the first World War I used unfortunately used the gas people in the trenches he took ill after repairing a burst pipe in a refrigerator medical evidence showed that death was directly due to inhaling ammonia fumes if you have any length of a period being exposed to these gases then you can get frostbite on the inside of your lungs your blood can pool on your heart you were talking absolutely lethal materials to be used in in the fridge so not only were they poisonous but they could be a fire hazard these chemicals were volatile and could explode under certain conditions of course hundreds of deaths the ammonia typical tiniest of leaks and there's just an explosion making it happen it would wipe everyone in the room out a pretty lethal stuff ether will also ignite with a temperature of about 160 degrees C which is quite a low temperature and actually there's lots of things in our house that operate with a temperature of 160 degrees C so switching on a light switch potentially could do that so when the awardians were introducing all sorts of electric items into their homes they were putting things that could actually set The Ether on fire without a naked flame that's right so that's why it's not a good refrigerant for a domestic fridge the proud owners of the first fridges which by then were electric were paying a small fortune for a product riddled with dangerous design Force just as well fridges didn't go into mass production until the 1950s by which time the technology could control the chemicals so what do we use now we use hfc's hydrofluorocarbons we also use some of the old refrigerants as well still we use ammonia and carbon dioxide but we can use them in a better way because we've got better materials to contain them they're actually sealed fridges now that the systems are actually a closed loop so you have a compressor you have the gases inside there we're starting to use smaller amounts of the gases the more efficient and as long as you actually sort of dispose of them properly then they can be okay so although they were using dangerous substances they'd hit on something that really worked absolutely yeah that's completely wrong [Music] I'm going upstairs to the bedroom in search of the next killer one that particularly affected half the population [Music] one of the consequences of the liberating social change of the period was that makeup which the victorians had denounced as the mark of a loose woman became increasingly acceptable the new Edwardian woman needed a little Rouge and a dash of lipstick to look up to date desire to look beautiful remains a constant Through the Ages but what is considered attractive in each era differs the art of beauty we always want to do the same things and what distinguishes the Victorian period from the Edwardian period is that in the Victorian period you were supposed to be perfectly beautiful with no assistance whatsoever in the Edwardian period you could use a little bit of help by now make gold over the counter in the new department stores and the products were advertised to Edwardian women by actresses famed for their beauty actresses were seen as more acceptable by the edwardians and one particularly famous actress Lily loudtree was actually noted very much for her beauty and she really capitalized on this by lending her name to various beauty products including face creams in this period Lily Langtry here advertising pear soap and she was apparently paid 132 pounds which was exactly what she weighed Lily langtry's Beauty was known to have caught the eye of the king so it became a style to be copied but Beauty came at a cost makeup was not subject to any safety testing many new products made bogus claims but were dangerous and in extreme cases a killer the death of a young girl who had managed to acquire perforation of the stomach through eating raw rice with a view to improving her complexion the Edwardian woman was told to make herself beautiful to catch a husband and to keep her husband by doing so she covered her face in poison foreign the dangers began before any makeup had been applied with face cream an Edwardian lady had to have a pure Lily white skin to distinguish herself from the sun-tanned working classes and some of the most dangerous products are things like this this is um Harriet Hubbard air moth and Freckle lotion what is that moths were sort of liver spots it was a 19th century term for liver spots and discolorations on the skin and a lot of them are except well pretty much camphor bleach ammonia anything you could choose to sort of blanch your skin because you had to have a pure Lily white skin this latest sort of 1909 Vogue was advertising arsenic Wafers which you would take to get rid of you know any poor skin issues and arsenic soap for that offending pimple on top of these layers of poison they put a dusting of toxic powder poisonous chemicals have very bright and distinctive colors and so there were lead compounds for example that were very white and so women like to use it on their skin as part of a face powder and that would be absorbed through the skin and could cause chronic lead poisoning [Music] different things we use for Rouge Koh Chenille which is made out of crushed insects that's fine but the million came from Mercury Mercury is a heavy metal and it's very bad for the body it can affect several different organs particularly the brain the lungs and the kidneys it can cause problems with sensation unable to feel things may be unable to see and can cause you to go mad eventually even the eyes weren't safe there was a product for darkening your eyelashes and your eyebrows which actually made your cornea fall off and several people went blind one of the things that women like to use in the early 20th century was Belladonna this is obtained from a plant and when drops are put in the eyes it makes the pupils dilate which is meant to signify desire and arousal and so made women look more attractive one of the problems with this of course is that it's a drug and when it's absorbed it can hasn't have an effect on the rest of the body at best it would probably have called blurred vision and a dry mouth and at worse a very irregular heartbeat and even blindness you didn't know what was in these things there's no description of of of content or anything like that because it was there was no legal obligation to do so a lot of new treatments were encouraged at this time all in the name of beauty the crowning Glory of an Edwardian woman was her hair and to be truly fashionable it had to be curly Croft and big a process had often destroyed what it was meant to enhance these elaborate hairstyles took a lot of effort effort that inevitably led to unsafe practices with horrible consequences at the inquest Dr chaldecott stated that the dry shampoo was exceedingly dangerous owing to the impracticability of keeping the fumes away from the customer [Music] there was a big problem in the Edwardian period of female boldness why were women going bored people were using very dangerous hair dyes which was one of the causes but the other big course I mean you'd have been fine with your fabulous curls but everybody curled their hair and so if you're doing that allow me to demonstrate this would give you a sort of a crimp yes for traveling you might have a little one like that so you were curling your hair the whole time and the dangers of burning with this were absolutely extreme tongs like these were heated in the fire and applied straight onto the hair often Burning It Off but worse was to follow Carl nestler came up with the first permanent waving machine in 1906 but not before he'd burned his wife's hair off twice goodness me so definitely there's a reason for baldness If Ever I saw one messler's Wonder machine involved wrapping the hair around rods and covering it with alkaline paste and most dangerously of all asbestos gas was then used to steam the curls tight it would take six hours it was extremely popular once your hair was right you had the challenge of adding a hat and so introduced another Danger look at that whacking gray hat you couldn't put your hat on your head without huge hat pins these were up to 14 inches long and that was another very dangerous thing because you've got all that incredibly sort of sharp pointed end ladies were banned from wearing unprotected hat pins on omnibuses in case they scratched people suffragettes had their hat pins removed when they went into court in case they stabbed people and Edwardian novelists they do lovely little sort of vignettes of ladies preserving their virtue by stabbing an aggressor and a dirty old man with a hat pin [Music] ironically while she was killing herself to look beautiful the Edwardian middle class woman was herself a killer of Wildlife the biggest killer in the Edwardian home was undoubtedly the Edwardian lady herself with her taste for hats decorated with the most exotic feathers and sometimes even hold dead birds thousands of songbirds egrets Birds of Paradise slaunted in the name of millenry a public outcry led to the end of the fashion for dead birds on hats and to the establishment of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to birds in 1904 women however continued to be the Willing victims of the beauty industry bored blind burnt scarred Edwardian makeup was a dangerous business in fact the early 20th century was poised on the verge of the mass production of cosmetics and the explosion of a whole new industry one that would test their products first before releasing them on consumers standing on the shoulders of their ingenious Victorian forefathers Edwardian inventors continued to expand the scientific Horizon and yet Edwardian optimism was not as unambiguously confident and certain as the heady days of the mid-victorian period things were moving fast and the speed and consequences of change rightly concerned many commentators their Great Hopes of the future were matched by serious anxieties about what that future might bring and many of their fears were Justified for their new explosive Freedom introduced into the family home some of the biggest Killers ever foreign [Music] Curie discovered radium in 1898 and won a second Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911. she not only showed that women could be successful scientists she also pioneered a new science in terms of the home though the discovery took Killers to a nuclear level [Music] Raiden was known as the wonder element deemed capable of preventing disease and conferring medicinal benefits it was used by doctors and quacks alike radium first came to the Public's attention as a treatment for cancer but it seemed to give off an energy that could be harnessed in the home in ways Madame Curie could not have imagined when she discovered it [Music] I've come to the University of surrey's Department of nuclear physics to explore radium with Professor Patrick Regan [Music] so funny why were people so excited about radium in the early 20th century here is this magic material that appears to come from nowhere it's a changing of the element Uranium spontaneously apparently changing into another element this new chemically separated material radium and it emanates energy this this is this is the birth of nuclear physics so what is radium and why is it a problem radium is a radioactive compound and so most of its effects are due to the radioactivity it has a very long Half-Life that means that it remains radioactive for years and years and so you don't just swallow a bit and within 10 minutes the radioactivity is gone it continues to do you harm probably for the rest of your life one of the problems is that the body treats radium like calcium and so it absorbs it into the bones and that's where the radium does a lot of its damage it damages the bone marrow which is the place where our body makes all of the blood cells that it needs this is called aplastic anemia when all of the bone marrow is destroyed so that none of your blood products are made and this is one of the awful side effects of radium but this horror had yet to unfold in the early 20th century the burdening scientific discoveries of the period provided the Edwardian thirst as fun radium as isolated by Marie Curie was an incredible Discovery it was a really world-changing Discovery what we might see as most important as in medical use that wasn't what the edwardians were interested in they were delighted by the fact it could create luminous paint the public imagination was fired by the idea of radium its energy and Luminosity thrilled and excited them leading to a radium craze in Europe in 1903 corsets for example of corsets that kept you warm for anti-romatism you could buy radium socks radium underwear you could get chocolate with radium in it this be a hidden killer radium was even available in toothpaste and water it was the energy that radium emitted that made it appeal to the edwardians they truly believed that by ingesting radium the body would absorb this energy so they used it in everything they could they developed they even had radium Spas where you could go and relax in the spa water surrounded by radium reports rather strangely also have condoms that had radium included in them men in particular thought luminous paint on their watch faces was pretty thrilling so it was absolutely everywhere anywhere you looked they used radium it was a magic substance it was seen as a sort of Panacea for everything it would be years before the damaging effects of radium were discovered and it was one particular product that gave us a clue one of the most popular items to buy for the home at this time was the Luminous clock and it was radium that made it glow in the dark the radium on clocks was seen as a safety measure in the home because it meant that if you woke up in the middle of the night and there was a banging downstairs you would know what time it was immediately from your clock so they were sold as a safety precaution as something that would really help you stay safe in the home such was the popularity of the Luminous clock a whole new industry grew up around its manufacture young women were employed to paint the dials the girls who used to do that used to lick the tips of their brushes to give a fine point and in doing so they would transfer some of the radium in the paint onto their lips it was these working practices that led to the discovery of how fatal radium can be nowadays we can measure that extremely accurately so we can measure literally one radiation one radioactive decay at a time unless the paint dealers would have we've got a geiger counter here so it says if you just bring that in using modern day measuring techniques and this sample of luminous green paint similar to that of the clock dials we can show that the paint is producing Alpha radiation but when you place a barrier similar to the glass on a clock face between the paint and the geiger counter the radiation is reduced and the Damage it will do to the skin will be less putting it in basically a 10 uxy alpha particles if alpha particles are external to the body they do basically no biological damage or very little biological damage at all if you ingest radium inside you it's a bone-seeking chemical it will go into the surface of the bone and it will deposit its radioactive energy into that bone tissue this is what happened to the women painting the clock dials they developed something called radium draw which was necrosis of the bone the bone was eaten away in their jaw and it would also then go on to cause all the systemic effects the effects on the rest of the body but this radium jaw was very typical of women who worked with radium if it deposits enough energy in the right way it can change the DNA in some of the cells in that region and that can lead to a cancers [Music] these days we have a much better understanding of radium what it is and how to deal with it the tragic thing is what was known and what was hidden during Edwardian period one of the interesting things about this is that we believe that the people who owned the factories that were using radium and the scientists who were developing it knew of some of the dangers and took great care not to expose themselves to radium but unfortunately they didn't take the same precautions with their workers that was really one of the first pieces of strong scientific empirical evidence that ingestion of radium was deleterious to health they even try to smear the reputation of the women by suggesting that a lot of the problems that they had were due to syphilis and not radium at all [Music] the damaging and often fatal side effects of radiation exposure were only realized in the late 1920s um [Music] much for the progress of the Edwardian era still shapes us today and some of the problems are still with us too over time though the killers were gradually unveiled and as a result these mod cons and Innovations continue to develop but without this first burst of creativity we wouldn't be where we are today or have benefited from the resulting safety measures [Music] with all the new materials and Technologies we're exposed to these days we may well be storing up our own hidden Killers for the future [Music] nowadays we think of the Tudor home as an icon of britishness Timber framed may be thatched a cottage sounds wonderful foreign these quaint pretty relics of the past believe the revolution in technology that changed them and us this is the great age of change it's one of the reasons we all love the Tudor period so much because it's the age of Discovery and there's a sense that anything is possible one place this change was most evident was in the home domestic life was transformed but as with anything new there were risks [Music] and our rooms whoa to the exotic foods that filled the table you're using a luxury to show off but there's hidden death behind it I'm afraid it feels really naughty and the radical treatments introduced to the medicine cabinets life-threatening changes made their way into the heart of the Tudor home the help of modern science and historic records I'll investigate what really went on in The Tudor household I'll find out about the hidden dangers and what killed Tudors in their very own houses [Music] welcome to the treacherous world of the real Tudor home [Music] this house dates from the end of the Tudor age around 1590. time there was an emergence of people with New Wealth who had aspirations for their homes this is the house of someone in the middling sort those are the middle ranks of society in a pre-capitalist age before the talk of classes makes any sense so it's professionals Artisans Yeoman farmers and in this case a successful Merchant [Music] the increasingly wealthy people of the middling sort built new kinds of houses and the unforeseen consequence was that they introduced hidden Killers to the home but how exactly did these beautiful buildings threaten the lives of the merchants and human who inhabited them many previously unknown dangers made their way back here from newly discovered distant lands some arriving directly into their kitchens and dining rooms this was an age of discovery that transformed Tudor life and exploration Conquest colonization and trade all had their impact on the Tudor home in various guises the middling sword benefited from a boom in trade prospering from the new markets and goods becoming available new items and imported luxuries from food to Furniture helped make the home more comfortable than ever before [Music] the Tudor period is definitely the start of a real investment in material things for ordinary for relatively Ordinary People [Music] so there's a huge increase in the number and quality of items that people would have had in their homes from Rich textile hangings and Furnishings to more furniture [Music] traditional bedding and many more items of tableware costly showy items like pewter are definitely the kind of thing you want to invest in and display in the home is a way of indicating that you have wealth you have status it's part of your sort of self-fashioning of your identity and it was in the dining room where the taste for the new and exotic was clearly visible overseas trade brought new Goods potatoes tomatoes and the abundance of things that were previously rare like this did you know until the 1540s that English didn't have a word for this color and of course it led to the mass production of a substance so valuable and delicious that it would become known as white gold oh not tobacco sugar sugar had been a fantastically expensive commodity throughout the Middle Ages but in Tudor times the price dropped sharp through using slave labor production costs were kept low so on the back of the slave trade sugar became an attainable luxury for people of the middling sort the Royal the Bland medieval diet of bread pottage beans lentils oats Dairy and eggs occasional meat and if absolutely necessary vegetables began to be enhanced with sugar [Music] what's the process by which we could produce sugar it comes in to your house looking like this as a Sugar Loaf but it has to be broken up someone's got to sit there with a hammer and then a pestle of mortar and if you want sort of an icing sugar to sprinkle over things as a lovely dish which is just a salad of lemons sprinkled with dusted sugar well then some poor Lads got to sit there and push it through a silk sieve oh so this work hours in sugar as well as expense sugar becomes um something that's a sort of desirable way of displaying status so you might use sweet treats at the end of a meal the banquet course it's known as [Music] with no sense that Sugar could be bad for you they would even show off and play with sugar it to look like some other delicacy so we've got here a little dish of nuts there's little sugar shells with a little bit of sugar and almond in the middle like a marzipan dusted with cinnamon to give it the Nutty color and you get to eat a pure sweet and watch this well why on Earth did I lay out some bacon on the table am I supposed to be being spoiled and bacon is is a working man's food but not in this case it's been made to look like bacon by dying some of the sugar with cochill and leaving the rest white to look like fat but it's in fact all sugar what those are little Tudor roses in sugar and the middle one I've covered that in Silver Leaf so the one that looks silver is actually pure silver on top and that's that's showing your your Diners real luxury because you've taken a luxury ingredient like sugar put man hours into it and then put a precious metal on top as well [Music] from nowhere sugar became the must-have item and any well-to-do meal [Music] what would it have been like to have all the sugar it must have been really intense yes I don't think we can really imagine it we've grown up with sugar all of our Lives it's in most of our food somewhere even bread so to go somewhere where your diet has been virtually sugar-free and be given a table full of sugar I think it's going to be a huge release of energy of course you could have wine at a banking course so if you just had sugar and alcohol for the first time you're going to be buzzing so why don't you try one of the sugar nuts [Music] and it's consumption more widespread the wealthy ostentatious sugar lover would have little idea of the trouble to lay ahead in the museum of London's storage box Dr Yelena mcvarlet studies the remains of almost 20 000 bodies spanning the city's history it's a unique resource that reveals changes and disease patterns over time I've come to see what evidence 16th century teeth can provide for the impact of sugar on our health Helena tell me about these different skulls what are they telling us well what they're um showing us and telling us is the changes that we might see in the dentition and dental health and we see a mark change from medieval period the early media coming through up into sort of the more recent times if I just turn this back over here you can see you've got a lovely set of teeth here and this is Medieval yeah so this is early medieval and I mean there are fairly young individual they are an adult but you can see here that you haven't got any changes of Decay you've got lovely enamel formation but if we come to this individual you can see here that you've lost the molars if you look at the mandible you can just see there you've just got roots of the teeth where they just really sort of been rotted away and the Decay has completely destroyed all of the enamel so this one's a medieval school and this one dates from probably about sort of the mid 16th century so this is later on and this is then sort of time then you've had sugar being introduced it's more freely available and you can see the consequences in their teeth so in both the upper and the lower jaw you've got these huge gaps imagine how painful it would have been to go through that it must have been actually horrendous yes because I've had toothache and an abscess and it was absolutely horrible it was really really nasty so to have had that amount of teeth affected must have been absolutely ghastly unfortunately the methods people in The Tudor period use fact they unwittingly made things worse the tutors would use toothpicks a lot and they would wipe their teeth with tooth cloths and they would use a variety of powders and pastes and solutions often with rose water actually often with sugar or honey in it as well which is not very helpful with the decay they would sometimes use Alabaster sticks and with particularly tough stains they might use a powder which was ground coral and pumice stone which would also take away the enamel of course they also had kissing Comforts which were perfumed Suites which would take away bad breath but did nothing for the decay tragically the tutors had no idea that they were in the grip of what would become a centuries-long addiction it's the Sweet Taste of sugar that attracts us all but part of the reason for that is that it has an effect on the chemicals of our body sugar helps us absorb an amino acid called tryptophan which is used to make the neurotransmitter serotonin and this is a chemical that affects the brain to make us feel happy and content it's one of the sort of like a pleasure chemical and so sugar is linked to that and so it's thought that that's why people like sugar and that's why it sometimes described as being addictive in 1592 the Tudors began recording deaths and mortality bills they include all manner of apparent causes and all the biggest Killers make an appearance plague fever consumption and surprisingly teeth are there too bad teeth can you really die from bad teeth yes yes absolutely tooth disease can be a killer teeth odd or deadly if you've got that amount of Decay happening and that can then also affect the bone so you can then form an abscess and if that's then draining internally you've got all of that poison actually going inside you that can cause you a lot of problems with your health your teeth are pretty deadly actually interior produce allowing infection bacteria can then get into the bloodstream and attack other parts of the body but without antibiotics there was very little the Tudor dentist could do Beyond pulling teeth they would have had no understanding at all of the fact that sugar was damaging the rest of the body so high sugar levels could be predisposing them to developed diseases like diabetes and then the bacteria from the decaying teeth would be damaging perhaps the heart valves and the kidneys so it could be causing damage to all of the internal organs and they would have no idea until it was too late so sugar really can be a killer Yes because if you if you're affected that badly um then it can have that really awful effect on you on your health and and then cause your you know your demise cause you to die [Music] sugar was a slow burn killer taking centuries for its true impact to be felt now it's considered by some to be responsible for some of the greatest health problems of our time the biggest danger though wasn't what they ate but the very construction of the home itself I'm making my way into the main room of the house on the trail of the next killer in fact it's sitting right here hidden in plain sight it's not the fireplace but the chimney before the chimney was widely adopted early Tudor homes like Medieval houses before them could easily fill up with life-threatening smoke the typical Tudor house was um a long house then it was you know a great hall house it was a fire in the center a little hole in the roof where it took a smoke away these early makeshift fence didn't work well allowing noxious fumes to build up in the home the chimney offered a brilliant solution the change from having an atmosphere indoors where you're constantly breathing smoke and your eyes are Weeping to having one where it's drawing and you've got clean air around you is enormous and certainly anybody who could afford to would have moved over as soon as seems to got to grips with the idea of this new technology being available not only did the chimney make the home more comfortable it had a dramatic impact on its overall layout over the course of the Tudor period with the introduction of to begin with quite experimental chimneys more opportunities become possible for pushing the fire to the side of the room enclosing the fire allows you to subdivide that space making possible new ideas of privacy and comfort to some extent so the chimney ushered in the biggest change to the middling sorts home for many centuries for the first time ordinary homes could have an upstairs level separate rooms to sleep in [Music] a kitchen and a room to dine in and each one had its own chimney it revolutionized domestic life but these Comforts came at a price the chimney brought a host of hidden dangers as the century went on there were regular reports of fires sweeping through whole towns in the year 1538 a great and sudden fire happened in the night season which within the space of three hours consumed more than a dozen houses and nine persons were burnt to death there in the year 1541 a great fire began which burned so sore that the flame firing the whole house and consuming it was seen all the city over 1485 Sir John Holland together with the Parson and his man also burned in that fire and in Shakespeare's birthplace of stratford-upon-avon there were two major fires one in 1594 that burned down half the town and another a year later destroyed the remaining half to find out what caused these fires the Tudors examined the construction of the chimney in the rush to introduce this new technology you get a builder in or you do the work yourself not necessarily to the highest specification there's no building regulations so a lot of these early chimneys are built out of really inappropriate materials Timber and wattle so that's Earth you could stock your fighter and light it the wooded burn the the Sparks would go up the back of the chimney and then all of a sudden the Wicker on the back of the chimney would catch a light and I could smolder for hours and hours you and your family would be fast asleep and that chimney was burning away and and knowingly and then of course that would spread to the roof and then you wouldn't be getting out to the building then as well as using flammable materials in its construction Tudor Builders had yet to work out the basic principles that make a chimney function it took quite a while before they realized that you had to have an aperture in the front of the fireplace that was no more than 10 times the narrowest point in the chimney if you don't do that then it won't draw properly you'll get smoke spilling back into the room the drawer is the suction effect that quite literally draws smoke and gases away from the fire up the chimney and out of the house but if the drawer is not strong enough smoke lingers in the chimney for far too long with deadly consequences smoke used to sit about halfway up the chimney and it would just tumble now anybody knows anything about fires nose or smoke is unburnt fuel forensic fire expert Emma Wilson can demonstrate the impact of unburnt fuel in a Tudor chimney the smoke that is being produced by the uh the fire at the base of the chimney ignites and all of the smoke that's exiting the chimney begins to fling very quickly the smoke itself catches fire the smoke catches fire yes and I've got an experiment to assure you how combustible smoke can be okay here we go whoa [Music] thank you so without an effective draw soot deposits built up inside the chimney smoke hangs around in the glue until the heat builds up to ignition it's easy to see this effect in Emma's experimental chimney so you can see the gas is coming at the top start to get the ticking there you are you've got Flames at the top already a thatched roof foreign so I suppose at first people didn't realize that this happened with chimney now if you'd never had a chimney before how would you know that this could happen how would you know that you had to clean the inside of your chimney so when people first started using chimneys I imagine you built it and you thought that was it whereas actually we now know that cleaning your chimney regularly is something you've just got to do to prevent chimney fires from occurring in Tudor times as today the consequences of fire could be devastating pamphlets like this one from 1586 poetically chart the emotional impact of these frequent fires so the chimney could be lethal my Joys are departed my comfort is gone my people poor creatures are mourning in woe they describe really horrendous heart-rending experiences of the individuals losing obviously their lives their children and their property and there's quite a bit of attention paid in these accounts to the the kinds of goods being lost and burned and a sense of just tremendous ruin and loss [Music] a rude fellow by firing up his chimney procured their casualty there are accounts of a third of towns being taken out by these major fires that are sometimes traced back to just one individual not looking after their chimney properly so the chimney could be lethal Leaf but the biggest cause of death was not fire itself [Music] Dr Stephen Gung is conducting important new Research into some 9 000 coroners inquest records from around the country during this period these documents are a unique source of statistical data about Tudor life and provide a whole new insight into death in The Tudor home we're actually in the coroners reports find that there are more house collapses killing people than house fires because Tudor houses are mostly made out of things that burn quite easily they're mostly Timber framed but they burn quite slowly so people have the chance to get out the problem is they're building chimneys onto houses and of course chimneys are large structures so we have chimneys collapsing during fires or when fires are lit inside them brick was the Wonder material that distinguished the architecture of the Tudor age but it turns out that early bricks had a hidden weakness when it comes to the defining feature of a 16th century house coal and wood they would burn in inside a chimney wood at about a thousand degrees C and coal at about 1200 degrees C that was way more than the brick could handle so the bricks just couldn't handle the heat whatsoever and they would explode that the mortar that was holding the bricks together would expand then it would contract The Fallout the bricks would be split and the chimney would come Crashing Down so for example we've got an accident in Kent in 1518 with a fire that breaks out at a house in Wingham in Kent several men run to put the fire out Thomas Adams one of them is called Arthur over and another one they get to help put the fire out with other people but again in the course of the fire the Brit chimney collapses on top of them so it's actually the collapsing material rather than the fire itself that kills them in the end the tutors gradually came to understand the risks to life and property that chimneys could pose to tackle the problem they drew up what were effectively the very first health and safety laws for chimneys there are ordinances for example issued in Oxford in 1582 that actually make it the responsibility of each each individual householder to construct their chimneys and their roofs in appropriate materials so not thatch for the roof but tile or slate and brick or stone for the chimney that all chimneys occupied with Fire Within the said City shall from henceforth be swept four times every year whereupon pain of forfeiture for every time that any chimney shall happen to be fired three Shillings four Pence to be paid by the owners of the same chimneys so fired but even these laws couldn't prevent The Great Fire of London 84 years later [Music] despite all the new luxuries of Tudor life and the proliferation of grand multi-roomed houses in many ways the house remained firmly lodged in the medieval period much of what we think of as the basics of domestic life simply weren't there for us there's nothing more fundamental than the utility and convenience of running water but for the Tudors there was no such thing as a bathroom or a shower [Music] my next hidden killer killer lies outside the four walls of the house the woman of the house and it almost certainly was the woman needed to bring every drop of water that the family required to the door this bucket became a familiar and tedious burden water is a very heavy substance and so if you've got to acquire it from any distance for your household that's going to be quite a major part of the effort that's put in during the day all sorts of chores that we today do inside our cozy modern homes the tutors were forced to do outside particularly washing and laundry this meant spending an awful lot of time down at the nearest water source in all weathers all year round effectively making them an extension to the home because ponds and streams played such a major role in daily life it's no surprise that they also appear in literature often lethally but long it could not be till that her garments heavy with their drink pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death many of Shakespeare's plays and much writing of the time feature characters drowning an analysis of the coroner's reports reveals for the first time the number of deaths due to drowning in The Tudor period the biggest contrast with today is the amount of drowning so in 2010 in the UK about two percent of accidental deaths were drownings in our period in the 16th century it's more like 40 percent gosh why so many well people are exposed to open water in lots and lots of different contexts the single largest cause is probably fetching water but then there are lots of other things that people have to do for household purposes that involve going to the water you have to take animals to water you often have to travel across water and of course the other thing is people have to wash their clothes we've got an accident here with a young woman she's described as a spinster so an unmarried woman called Ursula red Soul this is 1556 and it says she went to a pond she was washing a little tunic called a petticoat and she was sitting on a bridge called a plank and she fell off the plank into the pond and she drowned Elizabeth Bennett collecting Ward leaves to put under bread she was baking in the house the fence broke she fell into the moat and drowned Elizabeth coremonger washing linen clothes on the bank of a river her feet slipped she fell into the water and drowned Leonard Delaine relieving himself on the verge of a ditch well he crouched his feet slipped and fell backwards into the water so why did so many drown and often in quite shallow water in the interest of science I'm donning authentic tudagar and heading down to a nearby pool on a fresh spring morning the water temperatures around 12 degrees the coroner's report suggests it was all too easy to slip and fall into the water with potentially lethal consequences and immediately it's really really cold so much so it's making me fast reflex when our body hits cold water is to gasp when you have a sudden intake in air and it's completely involuntary and there's nothing you can do about it and if you're under the water when that happens you breathe in water and as soon as that cold water hits the back of your throat and your larynx your voice box it can cause it to go into spasm and that will effectively suffocate you even in relatively mild weather like this the water temperature is a shock my reaction may sound extreme but the cold really makes me gasp to catch my breath water takes heat away from your body 25 times more quickly than in air of the same temperature so you very rapidly lose heat from the body and as soon as that happens your bodily functions just stop working as well as the cold and the shock it's difficult to keep my balance my clothes are dragging getting caught up and it's hard to get a footing because it's very slippery and if you imagine there was any sort of currency it would be very easy it's a good under and then the difficulty was getting out is this immediately my clothes are getting very heavy this is all wall and it's getting completely waterlogged uniquely good at absorbing moisture under the microscope it reveals itself to have a surprisingly complex physical and chemical structure it's made up of two internal layers while the outer layer is water dirt and stain repellent the inner layer is highly absorbent so wall can take in more moisture than any other fiber before becoming saturated oh my goodness her clothes have doubled in weight if I lifted up a huge bag oh I'm not just imagining it wall can absorb up to one and a half times its dry weight which means my clothes are much heavier as I try to get out I didn't feel it when I was submerged but as soon as I tried to stand up it's a hefty added burden it's really not easy struggling to stand up on slippery mud while freezing cold and weighed down by wet wool [Music] so it was a combination of heavy clothing slippery Banks and the shock of the cold water that made drowning so prevalent the Tudors were certainly aware of the problem and as the 16th century wore on they began to take precautions towards the end of the Tudor period people began to put covers on Village Wells they fenced off watercourses they installed water pumps and as communities worked together to create safe sources of water so the risk of death by Drowning declined idea of the home as something encompassed by four walls is a very modern notion so much of their domestic life involved the space outside as well as the rooms inside the tutors instead the house was open and permeable humans and animals tumbled in and out in a colorful cacophonous mess from sunrise to sundown the famous Dutch humanist Erasmus visited Cambridge and he was disgusted by the state of the Russians these were the the straw and the hay that they would they would put on the ground to keep the house warm to keep the house Dry and he said that occasionally they would change the top layer but the bottom layer would sometimes stay there for 20 odd years and it was full of Ale it was full of fish juice it was full of vomit it was full of the leakage of men and of dogs and of other Abominations not fit to mention you'd have somebody who was called a Gong farmer who would clean your cespret out to you disease was obviously right if there was dysentery cholera typhoid three of the biggest ones in The Tudor period which would kill you no problems at all so if you went to work one day with a cut on your arm or your leg and the Gentry was going to the toilet and it covered you it was only a matter of time before one of those diseases came knocking on the door in these circumstances then it's easy to understand how something is basic and natural as childbirth was very dangerous around 20 out of every thousand women died in childbirth in comparison to eight maternal deaths per hundred thousand births in Britain today when women give birth obviously they're very vulnerable to infection the lining of the womb is a raw wound and there may be cuts and tears in the genital tract and all of those give an opportunity for infective organisms like bacteria to get into the bloodstream and that can be a very dangerous thing because people have no idea about how infections were caused the concept of microorganisms like viruses or bacteria causing disease that came hundreds of years later [Music] infection was a huge hidden killer in Tudor times as we can understand from the coroner's inquest reports that medical context explains why we have many of these accidental deaths because lots of these are people who cut themselves or break a limb they might cut themselves on a knife they might break a leg falling out of a tree in their in the the yard next to their house picking fruit or whatever and they wouldn't die from that now but under 16th century circumstances they have infection in a wound or they have a blood clot which causes them problems from a broken leg and so actually the coroner's inquest reports report them dying five days 10 days 15 days after the accident but they still say that the accident was obviously the thing that caused it the coroner's report tell us that between 1558 and 1560 unusual deaths from accidents around the country include death from crushed testicles after playing games at Christmas wrestling falling masonry 56 deaths were due to archery and one to an escaped bear [Music] but whatever the cause of injury or sickness get ill in the 15th or 16th century and you'd be unlikely to call in a professional doctor except an extremist most people of the middling saw would treat themselves at home using herbs and ingredients from recipes passed down through the generations for the Tudor housewife the medicine cabinet was limited to her knowledge and what was grown locally in the garden of a home of the middling sort there would be a special section laid out specifically for growing herbs remedies for daily ailments in effect a Tudor first aid kit then a big Tudor house they would have their own physic Garden and there's a vast early modern what's called a pharmacopoeia which is a body of herbal knowledge and an understanding of which plants can help you which plants can heal you and what conditions they can be used to treat now even the smallest Cottage in the village the person living there will have that same knowledge even if they don't have the physic Garden but they'll know where to go in their local area to go and pick herbs Stuart peachy is custodian of a small Tudor staff physic Garden what sort of plants do they think were useful medicinally well we've got things like tansy here now Tans is useful in springtime about the end of Lent because they thought that the intestinal worms they suffered from was partly result of all the fish that they'd eaten over that Lenten period and tansy is very good because it's a relatively mild poison that kills the worms next to that we've got Rue now Rue is one of a battery of different plants that can be used to induce abortion Penny Royal is another one long word with its spotted leaves there that one is good for infections the lung easing the chest and would have been used as a general Herb in that area so the Tudor Garden is really the ultimate in organic natural medicine absolutely it's free as well as far as they're concerned foreign to some sources 150 plants were considered to have useful medicinal qualities all grown in the garden and prepared in the home people have this vast Storehouse of medical knowledge and remedies and they pass them around and that may be to their families it might be to the friends and neighbors and of course when that happens the medicine spreads out in sort of ever-growing circles it's also worth remembering that virtually our entire Corpus of medical remedies tablets today are based on plants we are still using perhaps the same plants but we're distilling them we're using them in the different ways the the power is lies within the chemicals in the plants and that's what works then and it works now but herbal cures weren't without their dangers get the dose wrong and you'd find yourself in trouble many of these plants are safe in small doses and toxic in high doses for example something like tansy which actually was very widely used as a way of purging worms from your body in the springtime later in the year that becomes toxic as the active ingredients build up in concentration and you can make yourself quite ill with it and mixed up with some effective practical cures were some very odd beliefs there was this idea that something that looks like the thing you're trying to treat might actually help it and so there's a plant that's been called pile wart for example because its roots look a bit like piles and this was used to treat hemorrhoids or piles because the plant looked a bit like what it was treating these superstitious beliefs along with the unpredictability of some herbal cures meant that Tudor medicine always had the potential to go disastrously wrong but a radical German invention seemed poised to change all of this for the better Johannes Gutenberg had invented his movable type printing press 40 years before the Tudor era one of the things that is changing with medicine at this point is that with the introduction of printing which occurs just before the start of the Tudor period it is far easier to disseminate knowledge people have written books on medicine since classical times but what you're now seeing is the printed page making that more widely available initially printing presses were used mainly to produce religious texts but by the mid 16th century printers had found a new market publishing home manuals a mixture of Remedies and recipes and these books are enormous John Gerrard's runs to about almost 1700 Pages profusely Illustrated and designed to enable you to clearly identify the plants and know what their effects are and what the toxicities are to some extent as well as what the benefits are [Music] a thousand medical books were printed altogether in The Tudor period suddenly those who could afford it had access to thousands of recipes in just one book far beyond their previous knowledge and all written by a supposed medical expert at first glance the books appear to contain no shortage of Sound Advice like John Gerrard's recommendation against planting deadly nightshade [Music] follow my counsel deal not with the same in any case and banish it from your Gardens three boys did eat of the pleasant and beautiful fruit hereof two wherefore died in less than eight hours after they had eaten them foreign these medical books made their way into the Tudor home where they would have played a pivotal role in everyday life or or death [Music] they're there to help people in the absence of a doctor that they're sort of called things like every man his own physician and they may be set out by body part so therefore you just simply Leaf your way through and find something that's wrong with you the medical terms weren't necessarily the wonderful curels they first appeared to be some of the recipes found in their Pages seem very odd today this is Andrew Bird's brethrie of Health Medical treaties it was something of a bestseller in the 16th century and it includes all sorts of remedies including this one here for palsy so it says take a fox with all the skin and all the body quartered and with the heart liver and lungs and the fatness of the entrail stones and kidneys steep is it long in running water with calamint balm and caraways and bathe the patient in the water of it and the smell of a fox is good for the palsy to the Tudors cures like this were rooted in perfectly reasonable ideas about the body and disease a living thing something that has been alive has and what's called an animus a Living spirit and so if part of you is withered dying then it makes a perfect logical sense to use something from something that's been alive and restore the spirit to yourself cures incorporating the blood and bacteria-ridden guts of an animal stood a high chance of being fatal if applied to an open wound like this remedy for a sexually transmitted disease Nicholas Culpepper's 1618 herbal has a remedy for the clap which is to to kill a chicken and while it's still warm to dip your privy Parts in it they're soothe and calm problem with all the trouble with all the recipes and cures in the home manuals is that they're pre-scientific the Tudor simply didn't know about the bacterial pathogens that cause infection and disease their theory of the body was of the four humors four key fluids that needed to be kept in Balance to remain healthy disease was simply thought to be a result of an imbalance of the humors nowadays we know there's no scientific basis for that at all but if you've got a theory of disease that's simply wrong how can you cure it unfortunately computers they believe they were following sound medical advice these are scientific men leaders of the medical world are writing these texts and the dangers then they become effectively gospel the knowledge in the books would have been perceived as being at The Cutting Edge of medicine and the recipes endured for so long because really effective treatments for infectious disease were still hundreds of years away [Music] part of the problem was that no one had seen inside the body for centuries human dissection had been banned throughout the Middle Ages but in the 1540s Henry VII allowed surgeons to use the bodies of those hanged at The Gallows for their medical research detailed studies of human anatomy came widely available for the beginnings of scientific inquiry into the body but they didn't come soon enough to help with our next problem I'm going upstairs into the bedroom to find our next hidden killer [Music] people are as promised give us in the past as they are today it's certainly socially frowned upon and all the printed literature and all the religious literature and all the morality says you shouldn't do it but people still do it you've only got to look at the court cases and the illegitimacy records and the varsity bonds to see how many illegitimate children are being born as a result of unmarried sex foreign children weren't the only consequences of such activities in 1497 a disease was recorded in the British Isles for the first time and its routine seemed to be via the most intimate of Acts in the most private place in the home the bedroom hospitals were being deluged with people suffering from a disease they'd never seen before William clothed the doctor in London noted that every other patient at his hospital had the same symptoms in the hospital of Saint Bartholomew London among every 20 diseased persons that were taken in ten of them had the pox thank you William close produced a medical treaties describing the symptoms of the disease so he talks about it producing pains or aches ulcers nodes and foul scabs with Corruption of the bones then it goes on here it talks about venomous pustules scabs upon the forehead brows face and beard as about the secret parts it's cause he says was that it was a pestilent infection of filthy lust a sickness very loathsome odious Troublesome and dangerous a notable testimony of the just wroth of God we now know that in fact these horrific symptoms were caused by a virulent bacterial infection which we call syphilis while they may not have understood its bacterial origin the tutors knew enough to link its progress to sex the symptoms are very manifest and to a society that's obsessed with signs and symptoms it's very clear to them how this has come about the first stage gives the characteristic boils and marks on the sexual organs so it's seen as a result of sin promiscuity many Tudor towns had their body house or brothel and these certainly aided the spread of the disease [Music] errant husbands carried the infection right back into the heart of the home as a poem of the time and that to a hormone hunger is wedge is in a most desperate case she scare stares before her Duty in bed with one of conditions so base sometimes he's bitten with Turnbull Street fleas the pox or some other infectious disease [Music] whatever the source of infection the association with illicit sex meant to sufferer was certain to become a social outcast that carried a terrible stigma if you had the syphilis scars then you were seen as a sinner you were seen as a prostitute you were branded a syphilitic consequently the telltale signs of syphilis were sometimes cleverly disguised it was a real stigma to have damage to your nose because people knew immediately that you must have um late stages of syphilis and so they even made wooden and metal false noses so that people could try and cover up the damage that syphilis had done so here in the museum of London's bio archeology Department there's further evidence of the impact of the disease on the City's population some of the treaties I've looked at from the 16th century talk about things like ulcers in the head and on the corners of the mouth and things like that do you ever come across something like that yeah we do we have an individual here that we can see from their skull that they are actually showing these lesions that we would identify as being associated with the venereal syphilis you can see here that's incredibly destructive and if you imagine this poor soul being alive there's so much of it eaten away it's horrific it must have been utterly horrendous because uh you've got those changes that we can then see obviously now in the dry bone but then you would have had the changes that would then be expressed in the soft tissues in the skin as sores we might see the infection affecting your eye which then can lead to blindness or also then sort of around the nasal area and then you can destroy the soft tissues of that part of your face as well the Bones show how sufferers could have lived with syphilis for decades the bacteria slowly eating away different parts of the body and with so many victims a lot of effort went into finding a remedy the problem was all too often the so-called cures could also finish you off this little volume by clothes is full of all sorts of remedies for dealing with syphilis page after page suggests different cures which indicates somewhat that none of them worked and after 40 or 50 pages of these various cures clones identifies one more he says this is for the curation of the disease called the French pox and it's called Quicksilver that is Mercury Mercury had long been thought of as a useful treatment for skin conditions because it seemed to have a beneficial effect from around the 1300s it had been used to treat skin complaints so whether it was psoriasis or leprosy or any other sort of infection they would put mercury on it and so when they saw that people with syphilis were developing skin lesions they thought they would use the usual treatment for skin lesions which was Mercury Mercury can be administered in all manner of different ways a man's penis can be injected with Mercury there is a sort of what you might think of as a bit of a adulterated Underpants which have been dipped in Mercury you can put those on and that'll do it it may have had an effect locally on the area that was being treated but of course we know that the initial Shanker the first sign of syphilis would actually heal up and go on its own anyway within several weeks and so perhaps after several weeks of mercury treatment if the skin lesion had gone they would assume it was because of the Mercury rather than the natural course of the disease some of the ways tutor doctors applied Mercury to the body were ingenious I took one of the more complex recipes to a specialist laboratory to analyze its makeup Baxter's cream was a blend of lard beeswax various herbs and Elemental Mercury we mix it together and surprisingly it actually formed a nice even suspension we're expected to see globules relevant or Mercury but in fact it ended up being a nice silver cream which is shown here wow in the final concentration it contains 35 of Elemental Mercury 35 yes so uh huge concentrations why didn't they just put mercury straight onto the skin you couldn't apply Elemental Mercury to the skin because fall off so this was a method of putting mercury into a cream and then to actually put this on the skin to treat the lesions from the syphilis so this is actually very clever so they've made a way of making a cream so that actually Mercury can be absorbed into it and then rubbed into the skin yes and it also tells us that they are able to make a cream which could be applied to the skin to give the same concentration of pure Elemental mercury vapor they knew what they were doing yes they did yeah it's incredible that they knew how to do that would have had an impact well Elemental Mercury doesn't actually diffuse through the skin very quickly about one percent of this cream would go through the skin but the main hazards are actually due to the inhalation that's why we can't take the Mercury cream out of a sealed container it's lethal when we measure the concentration of mercury vapor coming from the cream it's off the scale at a body temperature say of around 34 to 37 degrees Centigrade that would have released a gas phase concentration of about 50 milligrams per meter cubed and the work room air limits that we can tolerate today is .02 so that's over two and a half thousand times more concentrated wow that's extraordinary even if you weren't Afflicted being in the room administering the treatment would have been hazardous Mercury typically affects the nervous system and so it can cause pins and needles numbness in the hands and it can affect all of the nerves start to lose your sense of balance and not be able to tell exactly where you are in relation to the world but then once it starts to affect the rest of the nervous system it can get to the brain and it can cause dementia memory loss convulsions and then even death so while Tudor showed great invention they were actually making the bedroom itself a deadly chemical trap filling it with poisonous Vapors they reduce great doses of it so much so actually that that one doctor said that after examining the bone of someone who died of syphilis he could see Quicksilver quivering underneath it and amazingly even today historians can't agree on where syphilis came from there are a couple of theories one that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis back from the new world and that was the first time it had been introduced to Europe and that's why it suddenly appeared but another suggestion is that there was some mutation in the bacterium around that time it suddenly became much more Vigilant and destructive and caused this severe disease that suddenly appeared so nobody really knows there would be no effective cure for Syphilis until centuries later with the Advent of antibiotics [Music] to treat syphilis properly and all infection doctors first needed an accurate understanding of the body and a better theory of disease they needed equipment the first microscopes for example were developed in the last decade of the Tudor period [Music] without a doubt the Tudor Century witnessed a revolution in the way people live their lives the changes that took place created the Tudor house we know today with its picturesque beams and fireplaces new technologies had transformed the fundamental nature of domestic life started to usher in the Modern Age [Music] as with any period of change there were dangers some of which took centuries to expose and some of which are with us still their Roots firmly located in The Tudor age [Music] the shadow of World War II loomed long there 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 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 in 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 domestic 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 which 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 hidden killers of the post-war home [Music] [Applause] it's a two-story three-bedroom 4300 pound house built in the modern Manor doors slide or fold there's underfloor electrical Heating and many other bright ideas as well [Music] foreign looks so familiar it reminds me of the houses of my grandparents so exuberant and optimistic [Music] at the time it must have felt like living in the height of modernity little did they know how dangerous it really was this was the age of boom and 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 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'd had the chemistry set as a it was it came as a Christmas present and it was it was it was only literally an hour before I'd blown it up seventeen-year-old Ian Findley 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 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 [Music] two fourteen-year-old pupils were seriously injured on Saturday when an explosion occurred while they were trying to make liquid oxygen [Music] well this is the chemistry set oh my goodness 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 sulfur would definitely have a hazard warning today the test tubes are so flimsy they really are we wouldn't use anything like this in a lab at school these days these heated with a Bunsen burner wouldn't last very long they'd melt very quickly want some butter yes tiny and this would go where into the presumably gas supply the gas supply which is unbelievable that they could actually have and there must be some sort of tap to turn the gas on and off so you've got the full force of the gas coming in that would feed the whole cooker just going through that little flame oh my goodness we decide to read the instruction booklet always a good idea only there's absolutely no diagrams at all actually I think it says up here um 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 I'm just staggered at the um the lack of instructions um 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 charm has a problem it actually says here that 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 and wrongly used by man many of the chemicals in chemistry sets were caustic so they would burn the skin and irritate it which 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 Trends 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 blinded 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 and then in the skin or even catch fire spontaneously with some chemicals 14 year old Ian mirori 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 round 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 manganate which is the chemical we saw in the the purple chemical that was in the kit ner 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 going to do is just make a little pile of the potassium permanganate in the middle and then I'm just gonna pour in a couple of drops of the glycerol on top so it sort of looks like nothing's happening ah there we go oh wow oh my goodness it's not necessarily Child's Play so it's quite a lot of smoke and some beautiful purple flames and quite a smell yeah yeah a little bit of a smell oh my word and what's it and that hesitation that moment of it looking like nothing's going to 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 nearest 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 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 jesty 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 kids to be non-explosive and non-toxic but it's worth remembering what the chemistry set manufacturers used to say experimenter today scientist tomorrow I think the 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 there was a belief suffusing 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 um for advances in macromolecular 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 [Music] 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 set e 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 a post-war 1950s Style Furniture in the portable period we began to use polyurethane forms polyurethane forms are 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 thin form sulfurs are much more comfortable than the early sort of horse hair type and the hard back 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 set e [Music] plastic itself as a singular form it is flammable but it's not overly flammable you have to you know really hold a light and 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 yasetti so it was usually the additive that was put into it which was the flammable piece 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 one and then they can burn very quickly and very freely [Music] 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 is 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 foreign [Music] T 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 foreign [Music] it wasn't only the new plastic furniture that could cause a problem [Music] cheap and easy to wash plastic clothing caused a sensation when it burst 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 age 13 received burns when her nitrous caught fire and she was fatally burned 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 laughs Nora Rhodes aged 85 died in hospital from Burns and shock received from when her night dress 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 [Music] 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 spark might come out the fire or they might lean a little bit too close and wash the nylon 90 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'd 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 tidy 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 [Music] 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 the 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 unheard 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 foreign insulation in the loudspeaker of a television set caused the death of Victor Smith aged four in kegworth 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 wood 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 10 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 1950s more people were able to buy as wages grew at a faster rate than house prices many were in need of modernization [Music] 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 householder 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 [Music] 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 bat the bathroom or the lounge or we'll cut this door we'll 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 M the first edition of practical householder and if we take a look at some of the 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 so there's an enormous range of building your own Bungalow I mean it's pretty ambitious aren't they Goodness Me they certainly were people believed 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 Bucknell was after all a reassuring presence his television programs on doing it yourself attracted at their Peak over 7 million viewers he had the best TV show on in the 1950s most watched he was getting something in the region of 35 000 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 or other ugly old panel door can be sold quite simply you can make it look like this you know it's almost like a hero then to get people into DMI get up get going change your house get the light in there get the color on the walls and board up your staircase and paint it or pull that Victorian fireplace out on board it up but 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 brand new one and it's looking for really they're much smoother but he later became known to some as bodger Bucknell they saw his desire to strip out what he called clutter as the willful destruction of original features to lock an internal door so he was the driving force behind DIY but also he caused Street problems I heard stories that they reckon he destroyed more houses than the luftwaffe because of his changes his radical changes that he wanted to do in homes and then that I think has certainly changed the appearance of the door but but Barry 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 oh gosh yeah so these look incredibly precarious yeah this man is holding something very heavy so it's all a bit of a disaster waiting to happen isn't it although their magazines don't address health and safety I think they must definitely definitely have been aware of the dangers so this is a comic strip that appears in a lot of them and you can see he's on a set of ladders painting but then manages to fall through Robert Wise 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 at least contacted easier for his pretty nasty stuff I remember using it as a Young Apprentice first time I used it I think I spent most of the day floating about a foot off the floor and the next day I spent most of the time drinking water and trying to get my throat to calm down and my nostrils to calm down because it burnt all the inside of my nostrils and 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 [Music] the king of power tools was indeed a must for your home but these boy toys could be dangerous Mr guy age 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 [Music] they were selling power tools which professionals were used to use in but as he was a DIY expert had no training in whatsoever but were expected to use not all power tools use the safety features we know today foreign if you're cutting 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 feet you've got to actually look for the switch to turn it off so the longer you're looking for it the more damage it's due into you [Music] was out of bounds for the do-it-yourselfers [Music] 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 towel rail 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 while plugs badly um 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 Hadler pool fire service said many fires were started through faulty electrical wiring which was often the work of the amateur electrician the public were 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 [Music] 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 Own 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 as 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 with food and into this Gap came cookery writers writers like Elizabeth David and Margaret Patton infused food with passion thank you 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 rose Sunday joint a beef or possibly lamb but what happens after 1955 also is that you know gradually chicken is brought into the British diet 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 modern 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 it wasn't it in the process of feeding birds and indeed livestock we are also bringing imported artificial feeds like ground meat and these come carrying already about bacterial 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 bread 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 done by because they're having to fend for themselves and do most of household work and 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 had been done by servants the housewife plays a cardinal role in this story partly because she is the 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's supper is already a heaving mass of bacteria then inadvertently up the ante even further well into the 50s you can still buy chicken sometimes they are what's called New York dressed which means that they've got all their guts left in intact they quite often come still their heads attached and the housewife would expect to deal with that at home she might or might not wash chicken when she gets it 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 everson's 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 and then I'll just lift the lid and you just put your fingers onto the surface [Music] after the second time of handling the chicken I wiped my hands with a paper towel know sure this will do the trick it makes it feel less slimy but actually yes practically yeah so when you're touching the meat it feels 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 are the bacteria there are so many bacteria in here you can't see individual colonies individual spots there are 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 it could get everywhere yeah absolutely not only into your mouth but also onto the other food that you're preparing onto the surfaces around you onto your utensils onto your children and to your children absolutely if somebody eats salmonella infected food it between a day and two days after eating it you'll 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 be fatal or septicemia 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 there [Music] I'm off to find our next hidden Cur in the bathroom [Applause] [Music] [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 [Music] this new attitude was summarized in House and Garden Magazine at the time is to rest to morale as well as your look bathing became an enjoyable experience and one 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 sulfur 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 twelve thousand 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 there was lots of snow on the ground and so people were burning coal in the homes to try to keep warm but the weather conditions at the time meant that there was an anti-cyclone 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 on 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 it was a self-contained boiler turn the little tap on and you 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 foreign 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 two burn one cubic meter 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 to 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 insufficiently sealed and the toxic gases are allowed back into the room rather than exhausted to the atmosphere you're in that nice new shiny fitted bathroom if you've got your door shut your windows set to keep the drafts out and you're just sitting there absorbing all this carbon monoxide you think 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 in our homes today now if you will help me pop this on the top so that we can seal the gas in as if we're closing the door of 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 attach 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 it 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 sounds aim to let us know that carbon monoxide in that compartment is now at a dangerous level right so nowadays we have you can put in a detector and you can know about it and it's you know British shrieking but apart from the sound that's 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 in your lovely bath and you shut the doors and windows you're having time to yourself your boiler's going and it's producing this gas that could make you sick and could kill you yes I'm just so I'm starting to 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 geysers the borough coroner was told when it's inhaled I are 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 hemoglobin should be carrying [Music] so it means if this 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 when 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 stop 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 age 25 who was found dead by his father police surgeon Dr doorwood said the method of heating water for a bathroom is a very dangerous one because of the bad vent [Music] over the decades Gas Appliances have improved and it is understood that if they are incorrectly installed or not regularly serviced there can be fatal consequences [Applause] 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 a woman 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 sort of wash all of their clothes and drive them by hand you can imagine just how much difference something like a washing machine really would have made to women's lives so this booklet 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 a thorough once a week clean with your Hoover will clear away any embedded grip yeah but that's on Wednesdays after you've cleaned all the floors and polish where necessary it's actually it is 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 foreign ER 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 were shortly made badly designed even downright dangerous somebody came up with a wonderful idea of making a kettle they would plug the lead in when it got to a certain temperature it spat the electric lead out well I don't think it needs to be a scientist to work this out there's not that many Kettle points in the kitchen there's obviously one street right by the side of the sink you're doing your dishes your kettle's plugged in it shoots the power supply straight out lands in the sink people often didn't really understand electricity or their appliances which led to some horrendous accidents Irene claden 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 or I'll stick a knife in and have a poke about and um people were electrocuted through toasters or toasters caught fire um because they probably didn't use them as they'd been instructed if they'd ever bothered to read the instructions newspaper and 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 foreign but you know it could be all right I'll get one next week or when payday comes um 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 higher price to pay if you didn't [Music] 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 and 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 mancroft 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 that 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 foreign 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 for 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: All Out History - Premium History Documentaries

Views: 1,076,748

Keywords: suzannah lipscomb, hidden killers, hidden killers of the victorian home, hidden killers of the tudor home, Victorian, Tudor, Georgian, Disease, Sugar, Tudor documentary, bbc documentary, History, inventions that shook the world, inventions at home, inventions that changed the world, All Out History, AlloutHistory, Allouthistory, allouthistory, AllOutHistory

Id: SW_xiKzsDco

Length: 233min 48sec (14028 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2022