The Terrifying Ways Edwardians Wired Their Houses | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

[Music] the dawn of a new century and the reign of a new King Edward the seventh uttered in an age of dramatic scientific changes stunning new inventions and groundbreaking discoveries and it was in their homes that ad 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 she covered her face in poison vote was advertising arsenic safe for that offending pimple products that were brilliant maybe not so brilliant and downright dangerous 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 I'm going to search out these hidden killers and reveal how science both created them and then solve the problems they caused welcome to the perilous world of the real Edwardian home [Music] this is a typical house of the Edwardian period [Music] not only looked more modern than the houses of the Victorians it even sounded different Queen Victoria died in 1901 her son Edward the seventh 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 HD were summed up the spirit of the age perfectly when he wrote the 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 the seventh reign over a hundred and forty thousand British patents were granted 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 so what problems could there possibly be electricity in our modern homes is subject to all kinds of regulations for 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 side of a switch it completely transformed 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 Swan in Britain and Thomas Edison in America the incandescent light bulb streetlights came first and then in the Edwardian period individual companies began to produce electricity to offer to domestic households gas lighting 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 electricity companies and gas companies were very much in competition people that just got used to gas lighting and now they're faced with a new technology something else which they've been told to sort of take on and adopt in their lives this is an instructions about how you'd use your Edison Electric Light and it says do not attempt to light with match simply turn key on wall by the door sounds quite bonkers to us today that you have to explain it in that way we know how we operates our electricity we know I go to the night switch but then that wasn't so obvious how 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 a 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 are a sophisticated urban up to date family you needed electricity in your house needed electric lamps and those who didn't have it 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 and so gradually Edwardian homes began to be lit by electricity but it was a completely new little understood force and electricity cables were just that naked bear 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 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 led a fantastic fire accelerant brilliant they even tried wrapping it in cloth they wrapped up in wood they wrapped out the neck basically anything they thought might stop the electricity getting through and somebody inadvertently touching it and earthing the ability to make a 40 circuit safe by redirecting it to the earth simply didn't exist there's no way there is nothing at all so if you had a small child they could just you know run around and and touch one of these things that absolutely Lisa lethal or not The Fearless Edwardian skeptic venting 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 the 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 were available the whole range of things that we see now 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 or since as suppliers try to generate a demand for electricity beyond the electric light what's this a Sachin early Electric curling Tong and you just put your curling Tong in there to heat up and this must have been quite a breakthrough to having 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 the idea is that you turn it the other way around so you'd have this slide showing my duck inside here I just bare wire connectors you'd lay it down you'd cover it with your cloth basically plug your lamp on the base even to the table directly into the tablecloth your prong through and making that connection I can see that's quite fun but presume it's also really dangerous I mean if you have this yes yes extremely dangerous whoever in the 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 there are all sorts of pieces of equipment possibly even electric heaters now from the wires going to that's right yes they would put an adapter into the light socket they would then run a bulb plus another piece of equipment off that and in extreme cases they word out a number of adapters and have a number of different sorts of pieces of equipment coming off the lights light circuit and then you get this whole sort of cascade of adapters coming out from the ceiling fitting what we call the Christmas tree leading to lots of different pieces of equipment so for example people would be doing ironing off the lighting circuit and 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 loads of the system which is why we would get overheating of the system and potential fires because whenever they plugged lights in or toasters or refrigerators they used to overheat and the code would be running through the cable would start melting the cable and then this cable would catch fire [Music] to demonstrate how quickly overloading can cause a fire Martin applies a battery to wire wall the battery is too high a 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 safety regulated in the way ours is now there were no consumer unit miniature circuit breakers or any of that safety equipment that we now rely on modern fuse boxes protect homes from this as soon as the system becomes overloaded it cuts out but back then the electricity would keep flowing there'd be a fire in the house and nobody knew or like you'll be in bed when it happens and there'd be no getting out although 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 am pitch though 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 it so we let and left alone electricity isn't overly dangerous it's when you bring in the human factor that's when electricity becomes dangerous there were countless stories in the newspapers of the many and varied ways people had managed unwittingly to electrocute themselves he accidentally touched the main and receiving the full force of the current was killed on the spot the deceased while Larkin 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 her body and that may cause instant death as it causes the heart to stop [Music] those slow to address the dangers of electricity edwardian is credited it with all kinds of health-giving properties which led to some strange practices is that it's got a sort of space-age element to it it's an early sunray lamp there's meant to encourage sort of good health the theory was that this would make you healthier and there are adverts for 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 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 helpless and this is for massage ostensibly from massage it was often used for more instrument sorts of purposes as well but it was sold as a right some of the things that ward Ian's 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 prompting at the mains and was designed to enhance and inflate his pecs a man's fatal vanity he attached a needle wire to the electric light work the needle over his breast and drop dead eventually the edwardian 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 the spark is typical of any piece of equipment which is being being plugged in or plugged out when the equipment is live so that's two pieces of metal coming to contact or come out of contact when there a lot of then a spark that occurs as most Edwardian homes were still using a lot of gas which was prone 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 Thunder take care who would imagine overtime improvements were applied that lessened the dangers it was until nineteen eight nineteen nine that Edison came up with the idea of a rubber socket which went on to a plug which other food was in which obviously saved any shocks when you were touching it it saved anything 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 learn what they're doing getting into big trouble even one of Edison's and Friends killed himself he electrocuted himself and that's somebody who knew who knew what he was doing by 1915 there was six hundred separate electricity suppliers across the country the demands of war led the government to take steps to set up electricity Commission's to make the generation and supply of electricity more efficient and then the government actually made a declaration that we would all use the same currencies voltage it would all come through the same way and it was the start of the the grid despite 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 [Music] change was not just a foot in technological terms Edwardian society was also changing dramatically this was an age of great social reform and above all it was an age of female advanced 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 woman could save her time could not be doing the drudgery of the old days [Music] we're technological and social changed 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 anyone 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 Sodom used a new Wonder material a resilient mineral that was non flammable insulating and provided clean energy the new material was hailed as a miracle it's named asbestos 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 we 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 origin period they were telling 190 thousand metric tons of asbestos over they were mining it phenomenon and coming up to South Africa Russia Canada America all been imported into Britain and then after their asbestos factories every day was like Christmas Day because when they walked through the factory it was snowing and it was asbestos test Edwardian were happily working with what we now know to be a carcinogenic killer the first person to alert the authorities to the possibility that could be a problem was a factory inspector the earliest account of the 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 demonstrated 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 if you look through the records there are instances around about the late eighteen hundreds of actually it was a 19 year old asbestos worker whom they carried out a post-mortem 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 but although Dean raised the alarm her findings were ignored for many years people might have noticed it cause difficulty with breathing but nothing was done I didn't really know what it was and they used to just put it down to wrong for your problems or no breathing problems of some description but they were starting to think that the maybe something in these new substances that weren't good when they actually mixed with humans what the edwardian tap reciate at the time was the exact deadly nature of asbestos this is 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 effect is a pleura and it's an abnormal growth it 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's actually quite bit fuller for lying in 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 that means 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 it made gutters out of it you could make your system for your toilet opening your toilet seat even the amount of applications that asbestos actually had in gutters in fascia board in tiles in our techs 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 husband's clothes and are being exposed to the asbestos fibres in that way and so it's not just people who work with asbestos who can develop these problems 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 fibres would not be released into the air it's really disrupting asbestos it causes the problem so that you breathe in the fibers so he here 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 - they did a series of post-mortems on 30 people in a fact we're 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 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 aspect osis 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 other 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 people don't actually know about the widespread applications of asbestos or 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 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 motorcars 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 lots 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 [Music] it's in the kitchen 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 have money to burn what could be more desirable than a brand-new refrigerator food preservation was a major issue in Edwardian times initially they made purpose-built cold cabinets to store food they were carven at a timber lined with sawdust it could be rabid for and then your item was put inside compacted 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 wanted 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 to find out I've come to South Bank University in London to meet refrigeration expert Professor Graham made Mont so is this enormous thing an early fridge yes no the invention of a fridge dates probably about 1870 that sort of thing this unlikely looking fridge has been rebuilt from early designs it was never actually manufactured but is perfect to illustrate the first attempts at refrigeration when a version did come onto the market it wasn't cheap [Music] the earliest commercial fridges early 20th century would have been about 700 pounds that sort of price and compared compared to a Model T Ford which was maybe 500 pounds it's a more expensive than a car so early fridges were the plaything of the Edwardian rich and did not become affordable to the masses until much later it was refrigeration uses the principle of evaporation of a liquid to gas to produce a curling 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 Wow yes at first it's warm but then it gets really cold very fast 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 the refrigerant would have been in this pipes here and would have made this small container within here cold just this little I know it's huge isn't it the whole machine is massive just for a small amount of dude yes you could put a pint of milk in there and that was about it that's it what's all this then well that's basically making the refrigerant back to a liquid again we've got a compressor that pumps it this is a hand driven once you divide a servant driving this that's a terrible job that's all for you didn't mean you have to be doing this all day 24 hours a day if he wanted to keep that point of not 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 will use the refrigerant wouldn't have stayed within the system Center leaked out the trouble was that the early fridges will actually see all twitches so they use 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 add ammonia 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 had sulphur dioxide which is extremely toxic and then you read metal and chlorine 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 on you and unfortunately used to 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 few of any length of 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 using in the 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 caused hundreds of deaths the ammonia typical tiniest of leaks and there's just an explosion we did happen it would wipe everyone in the room act there's pretty lethal staph ether will also ignite with the temperature about 160 degrees C which is quite a low temperature and actually there's lots of things in our house that operate with the temperature of 160 degrees C so switching on a light switch potentially could do that so when the mauryans 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 there that's why it's not a good refrigerant for a domestic fridge the proud owners at the first fridges which buy them 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 we use now we use HFCS 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 gasses inside there we started to use smaller amounts of the gases they're more efficient and as long as you actually stop dispose of them properly then they could be okay so although they were using dangerous substances they'd hit on something that really works 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 the 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 makeup was being sold 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 Fiat audience and one particularly famous actress Lillie Langtry 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 Lillie Langtry here advertising pair soap and she was apparently paid a hundred and thirty-two pounds which was exactly what she weighed lillie langtry x' 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 her husband and to keep her husband by doing so she covered her face in poison 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 Harriet Hubbard a moth and freckle lotion 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 that well pretty much camphor bleach ammonia anything you could choose to sort of glance your skin because you had to have a pure lily-white skin this later sort of 1909 vogue was advertising arsenic wafers which she would take to get rid of you know any poor skin issues and arsenic safe 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 LED compounds for example that were very white and so women like to use it on their skin as part of her face powder and that would be absorbed through the skin and could cause chronic lead poisoning different things we use faroush kosha nil which has 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 maybe 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 weren't 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 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 caught blurred vision and a dry mouth and at worst a very irregular heartbeat and even blindness you didn't know what was in these things there's no description of content or anything like that because it would there was no legal obligation to do so a lot of new treatments are 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 that often destroyed what it was meant to enhance these elaborate hairstyles took a lot of effort effort that's never to be led to unsafe practices with horrible consequences at the inquest dr. Charcot 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 baldness why were women gang 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 travelling 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 Karl Esler came up with the first permanent waving machine in 1906 but not before he'd burned his wife's hair off twice goodness was oh definitely there's a reason for baldness if ever I saw one meh slurs 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 omnibus --is in case they scratched people suffragettes had their hat pins removed when they went into court in case they stabbed people and Edwardian novelists did do lovely little sort of vignettes of ladies preserving their virtue by stabbing an aggressor in a dirty old man with a hat pin 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 award e'en 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 slaughtered in the name of millinery a public outcry led to the end of the fashioned 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 [Music] when Mary 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 radium 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 sorries Department of nuclear physics to explore radium with Professor Patrick Regan why were people so excited about radium in the 20th century here is this magic material that appears to come from nowhere it's the 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 s-- with what seemed at least at first 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 edwardian 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 corsets that kept you warm for anti rheumatism you could buy radium socks radium underwear you could get chocolate with radium in it could this be a hidden killer radium was even available in toothpaste and water it was the energy that radium emitted that made it appealed the audience they truly believed that by ingesting radium the body would absorb this energy so they used it in everything they could they developed even had radium spars where you could go and relax in the spa water surrounded by radium reports rather strange lilz of 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 any way 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 he would know what time it was immediately from your [ __ ] 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 the one radioactive decay at a time mr. paint I was what happened put a Geiger counter 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 attenuate the 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 surfaces 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 drill was very typical of women who worked with radium if it deposits enough energy in the right way you can change the DNA in some of the cells in that region and that can lead to cancers 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 tried 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 [Music] much of the progress of the Edwardian era still shapes us today and some of the problems are still with us to overtime though the killers were gradually unveiled and as a result these mod cons and innovations continued 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 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]

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 1,442,286

Rating: 4.841301 out of 5

Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, edwardian era (event), victorian era, queen victoria, history documentary, fun history, fun fact

Id: SkXyCoUCeK0

Length: 58min 45sec (3525 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/srpabloescobar]

We still use ammonia in certain applications.

[u/smiryal]

Chloroflurocarbon is what caused Australian ozone hole. It was also used for cooling and in hairspray