The Most Lethal Household Inventions In History | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

i'm alice lockson and i present documentaries over on history hit tv if you're passionate about all things history sign up to history hit tv it's like netflix but just for history we've got hours of ad-free documentaries about all aspects of the past you can get a huge discount from history hit tv make sure you check out the details below and use the code absolute history all one word when you sign up now on with the show nowadays we think of the tudor home as an icon of britishness timber framed maybe thatched a cottage sounds wonderful but these quaint pretty relics of the past belie the revolution in technology that changed them and us [Music] 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 from the new technology that warmed our rooms 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 new life-threatening changes made their way into the heart of the tudor home with 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 this house dates from the end of the tudor age around 1590 at the 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 yeoman who inhabited them [Music] 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 [Music] the middling sort 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 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 additional 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 colour 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 sharply 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 rather 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 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 there's 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 so there's work hours in sugar as well as expense sugar becomes 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 with no sense that sugar could be bad for you they would even show off and play with sugar disguising 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 what's this well why earth did i lay out some bacon on the table you were 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 cochineal and leaving the rest white to look like fat but it's in fact all sugar what are these 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 wow 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 from nowhere sugar became the must-have item at 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 gonna be buzzing so why don't you try one of the sugar nuts it feels really naughty as sugar became more popular and its 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 forts dr yelena mcvarlet studies the remains of almost 20 000 bodies spanning the city's history it's a unique resource that reveals changes in disease patterns over time i've come to see what evidence 16th century teeth can provide for the impact of sugar on our health yelana 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 we see a marked change from medieval period the early medical coming through up until 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 they're they're a 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've 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 that mid 16th century so this is later on and this is then sort of the 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 so imagine how painful it would have been to go through that it must have been absolutely horrendous yes because i've had toothache and 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 used to clean their teeth didn't really help in fact they unwittingly made things worse the tudors 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 sweets which would take away bad breath but did nothing for the decay tragically the tudors 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 um 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 is 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 [Music] bad teeth can you really die from bad teeth yes yes absolutely tooth disease can be a killer teeth 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 teeth are pretty deadly actually the acids bacteria produce eat into the teeth allowing infection to take root bacteria can then get into the bloodstream and attack other parts of the body but without antibiotics there was very little the tudor dentists 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 develop 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 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 there was a fire in the center a little hole in the roof where it took a smoke away these early makeshift vents 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 he 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 it 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 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 burnt 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 [Music] 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 fire and light it the wood had burned the the sparks that grew 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 unknowingly 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 ten 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 gasses away from the fire up the chimney and out of the house but if the drawer's not strong enough smoke lingers in the chimney for far too long with deadly consequences the smoke used to sit about halfway up the chimney and it would just tumble now anybody knows anything about fires knows that 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 fire at the base of the chimney ignites and all of the smoke that's exiting the chimney begins to flame very quickly the smoke itself catches fire the smoke catches fire yes and i've got an experiment to show you how combustible smoke can be okay here we go whoa [Music] so without an effective draw thick soot deposits build up inside the chimney smoke hangs around in the flue until the heat builds up to ignition point it's easy to see this effect in emma's experimental chimney so you can see the gases coming at the top start to get the ticking there you are you've got flames at the top already gosh imagine the effect of these flames on a thatched roof [Music] 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 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 but the biggest cause of death was not fire itself [Music] dr stephen gunn is conducting important new research into some 9 000 coroner's 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 actually in the coroner's 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 inside a chimney wood at about a thousand degrees c and coal at about 1200 degrees c and that was way more than the brick could handle so the bricks just couldn't handle the heat whatsoever and they would explode the the mortar that was holding the bricks together would expand then it would contract fall out the bricks should be split and the chimney would come crashing down so for example we 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 tudors 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 [Music] there are ordinances for example issued in oxford in 1582 that actually make it the responsibility of 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 paying a 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-room houses in many ways the house remains 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 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 cosy modern homes the tuners 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 [Music] and analysis of the coroner's reports reveals for the first time the number of deaths due to drowning in the tudor the period 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 wart leaves to put under bread she was baking in the house the fence broke she fell into the moat and drowned elizabeth cormunger washing linen clothes on the bank of a river her feet slipped she fell into the water and drowned lena delane relieving himself on the verge of a ditch when he crouched his feet slipped and he 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 tudor garb 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 glass the first reflex when our body hits cold water is to gasp 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 it was any sort of current it would be very easy to go under and then the difficulty was getting out is that immediately my clothes are getting very heavy this is all wall and it's getting completely waterlogged wall is 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 it's like lifting up a huge bag 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 try 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 way down by wet wall 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 installed water pumps and as communities worked together to create safe sources of water so the risk of death by drowning declined the 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 for 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 rushes these were 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 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 cesspit out for you disease was obviously rife there was dysentery collar a tie fight three of the biggest ones in the two day 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 as basic and natural as childbirth was very dangerous around 20 out of every 1 000 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 had 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 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 5 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 reports 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 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 in 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 style physic garden what sort of plants do they think we're used for 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 a 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 roux now rue is one of a battery of different plants that can be used to induce abortion penny royal is another one lungwort with its spotted leaves there that one is good for infections of the lung easing the chest and uh 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 [Music] 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 their friends and neighbors and of course when that happens the medicine spreads out into 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 power is lies within the chemicals in the plants and that's what work 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 gerard'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 best sellers were reprinted over and over again to meet popular demand historians estimate that maybe 400 000 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 gerard's recommendation against planting deadly nightshade if you will follow my council deal not with the same in any case and banish it from your gardens three boys did eat of the pleasant and beautiful fruit here of two wherefore died in less than eight hours after they had eaten them these medical books made their way into the tudor home where they would have played a pivotal role in everyday life 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 but the medical tomes weren't necessarily the wonderful cure-alls they first appeared to be some of the recipes found in their pages seem very odd today this is andrew board's brothery of health medical treaties it was something of a best seller in the 16th century and it includes all sorts of remedies including this one here for the 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 entrails stones and kidneys stiffens 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 kill a chicken and while it's still warm to dip your privy parts in it to soothe and calm but there was a basic problem with all the cures they were all based on a fundamental misunderstanding the trouble with all the recipes and cures in the home manuals is that they're pre-scientific the tutors 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 humans 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 for the tudors they believed 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 viii allowed surgeons to use the bodies of those hanged at the gallows for their medical research detailed studies of human anatomy became widely available for the first time marking 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 promiscuous 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 bastardy bonds to see how many legitimate children are being born as a result of unmarried sex [Music] 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 root in 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 clothes 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 10 of them had the pox william close produced a medical treatise 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 talks about venomous pustules scabs upon the forehead brows face and beard as about the secret parts its 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 wrath 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 tudors 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 warns a woman that to a whoremonger is wedge is in a most desperate case she scare stairs perform her duty in bed with one of conditions so base for 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 mental sufferer was certain to become a social outcast it carried a terrible stigma if you had uh 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 here in the museum of london's bio bio-archaeology 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 anything 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 veneral 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 absolutely 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 you 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 clothes 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 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 tudor doctors applied mercury to the body were ingenious i took one of the more complex recipes to a specialist laboratory to analyze its makeup [Music] baxter's cream was a blend of lard beeswax various herbs and elemental mercury we mixed it together and uh surprisingly it actually formed a nice uh even uh suspension we expected to see globules of elemental mercury but in fact it ended up being a nice silver cream which is shown here wow the in the final concentration contains 35 of elemental mercury 35 yes so huge concentrations why didn't they just put mercury straight onto the skin you couldn't apply elemental mercury to the skin because it would just 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 it 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 about 50 milligrams per meter cubed and the work room air limits that we can tolerate today is point zero two so that's over two and a half thousand times more concentrated wow that's extraordinary so 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 you could 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 tudors showed great invention they were actually making the bedroom itself a deadly chemical trap filling it with poisonous vapours they would use 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 quick silver 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 virulent 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] [Music] without a doubt the tudor century witnessed a revolution in the way people lived 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 and had 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 it was the victorians who cherished the idea of home as a domestic haven they coined the phrase safe as houses [Music] and in this age of invention homes were bursting at the seams with new gadgets products and conveniences in the bedroom were the latest beauty products and manufactured clothes while in the nursery the toys were brand new and factory produced and for the first time the stove warmed the entire house the original home sweet home but there was a problem many of the exciting products and appealing innovations they welcomed into their homes were not just health hazards they were killers and with the aid of science i'll seek out these domestic assassins oh their houses were disgusting i'll be revealing what the victorians couldn't see inside their homes these things undoubtedly would have killed many children and showing the terrible injuries that were inflicted in the name of progress what you need to do is move your bust up okay [Music] and i'll feel the strain of chasing the victorian ideal but i feel a bit better welcome to the perilous world of the real victorian home [Music] in the second half of the 19th century cities exploded to house the booming middle classes in just over 50 years their number grew from two and a half million to over nine and these new urban middle classes took immense pride in their homes they had money and they wanted to spend it on making their houses cosy havens of domesticity and comfort not for these people the grim perils of victorian factory life or the gritty reality of the overcrowded streets the sort of family who lived here enjoyed a level of comfort and luxury previously unknown to ordinary people the cost of necessities fell dramatically and new mass production techniques made goods available and affordable this meant a level of conspicuous consumption never witnessed before they filled their rooms with things that made the house a home [Music] they'd been inspired by the great exhibition of 1851 which showcased the latest and the best in gadgets and consumer goods what had been happening now for the best part of a hundred years suddenly crystallized in this extraordinary exhibition it wasn't so much that it was new as it was just suddenly boom in bulk [Music] as the century went on and consumerism began to increase one of the fascinating things is that the phrase standard of living first appeared for the first time in history you measured how good your life was by how many objects you possessed when you think about it that's actually a very strange idea you couldn't just buy anything what was and what wasn't tasteful was discussed at length in the many in various new household guides and magazines john ruskin the leading art critic and social theorist impressed on victorian consumers the importance of making the right choices good taste is essentially a moral quality what we like determines what we are and to teach taste is inevitably to form character yet while the victorians fretted about abstract notions of morality they were oblivious to the real dangers that came from things they had welcomed into their houses every room in the victorian home was filled with hidden killers [Music] and one of the most dangerous places was the drawing room [Music] the victorians were really rejecting the idea of the 18th century classicism the restraint the delicacy the white walls that was all over they wanted clutter they wanted colour they wanted excess they they really furnished to show that for them colour and clatter and objects that was wealth and that was that was important and that was riches [Music] one thing that particularly indicated both good taste and status was wallpaper the richer the pattern and the darker more vivid the color the better why because with the introduction of gas lighting for the first time in history there was enough light in the house for ordinary people to have and enjoy intense color on their walls as a result there was something of a wallpaper craze manuals like castle's household guide which told the victorians how to do everything outlined principles of good taste and told them which patterns of wallpaper to buy they were influencing a massive market wallpaper sales had shot up from around 1 million pieces a year in 1834 to 32 million by 1874. castles even gives what it's called its theory of color it describes its rules for the artistic appreciation in dress in furniture and it recommends green it calls it a color of repose it says the eye experiences a healthy and peculiarly grateful impression from this color as opposed to something like yellowish red which it says is the preference of impetuous robust men and savage nations a particularly brilliant green known as shields green was all the rage shield was the swedish scientist who first mixed the pigment to produce an intensely vivid color that didn't fade its incredible popularity meant that it was used in everything from carpets bremons candles and children's toys but most of all it was used in industrial quantities in wallpaper there was one strange coincidence as wallpaper sales escalated so did reports of unexplained deaths and illnesses in the home but there was nothing mysterious about it the magic ingredient that was giving the wallpaper its rich green hue was arsenic these were samples of what would be considered as tasteful wallpapers to have in a victorian home this on the walls would have been loaded with arsenic actually in the printing of the book it's also used or something called dies so this book that you're showing me now has asked the confused pages there's quite a lot of arsenic in that it's not that i don't believe what you're saying but could you prove it it's very easy to do if i use this instrument which is a portable xrf it tells us which contaminants metallic contaminants are present in the items and basically you can see straight off this is got large amounts of copper in it it's got large amounts of arsenic in it oh yes [Music] the actual salts used in this pigment are copper arsenic in this book so it's safe to touch probably not modern science can prove the victorian wallpaper contained arsenic but this danger wasn't fully understood at the time to confuse matters further the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were very similar to cholera which had been rampant in britain in living memory the immediate effects would be of pain swelling of the esophagus very dry throat and difficulty in swallowing and then what's described is agonizing abdominal pains as the whole digestive tract is affected by the arsenic vomiting diarrhea and sounds terribly unpleasant and then people would die which was said to be quite a relief because it's such an agonizing way to die newspaper headlines continued to report mysterious illnesses and deaths and links were made with arsenic in the second half of the 19th century the newspapers are full of cases like this one six-month-old child dies as a result of chewing on a piece of emerald green wallpaper but even if you hadn't eaten the wallpaper you weren't safe in fact the wallpaper was endangering the health of the nation in another hidden and much more insidious way thanks to a chemical reaction poisonous fumes are thought to have infiltrated the very air they were breathing there's a lot of debate about the production of arsenic gases from the wallpaper the actual surface of the wallpaper particularly flock wallpapers could come off and your house would be covered in arthritical dust but also in victorian houses which weren't centrally heated they're relatively damp you put damp together with wallpaper paste and cellulose which is another wallpaper itself and you've got fungal growth and as many fungi can actually volatilize those arsenical salts into volatile form of arsenic and they are highly toxic these things were billowing out arsenic in the home in which obviously the windows were hardly ever open because of the smog they sat there in this lovely fog of arsenic thinking they were in this perfect virtuous healthy home it doesn't actually matter how the arsenic is absorbed into the body whether you breathe it in whether it comes in through the skin or the other membranes or whether you actually eat it it actually has a very similar effect because its effects are via the bloodstream so the arsenic gets into the bloodstream and travels around the body but one of the problems with the slower arsenic poisoning of a small amount over a longer time is that it could cause very vague symptoms and obviously if you're being poisoned by something uh in a particular room of the house and when you left that room you got a bit better it could come and go and so it was much harder to differentiate it from other illnesses or to around at the time some doctors began to question the use of arsenic in wallpaper as more and more mystery deaths were reported in the home the lancet too took up the cause there appears good reason for believing that a very large amount of sickness and mortality among all classes is attributable to this cause and that it may probably account for many of the mysterious diseases of the present day which so continually baffle all medical skill [Music] in 1856 a couple in birmingham reported to their doctor dr heinz that they were suffering from inflamed eyes headaches and sore throats even their pet parrot was drooping they decided to go on holiday to the seaside and their symptoms disappeared they suspected something in their house and they had recently applied bright green wallpaper to two rooms at home dr heinz wondered if that alone could be responsible for their ailments people went to the seaside and took the waters and took the spa what effectively they were doing is moving out of a toxic environment into a healthy diluted environment where you had fresh air water that came from a known source not relying on what was in a concentrated area within the property they moved away from a toxic environment really astounding is how much arsenic there was in a victorian drawing room when you add up all the materials that contained arsenic pigment certainly we know that it was a huge amount of arsenic in south victorian living room which had 100 square meters surface area could contain up to 2.5 kilograms of arsenic and that's a lot of artists dr heinz along with some other medical practitioners became an outspoken critic of the use of arsenic pigment in germany our cynical wallpapers had been banned but not in the uk the wallpaper manufacturers didn't want people to think there's anything wrong with their products and they say the lancet and the british medical journal fought a long campaign to bring this to the public for so there was quite a lot of disputes going on [Music] some doctors and newspapers called on the british government to ban the poisonous paper but others were quick to belittle the claims of the killer wallpaper some manufacturers even offered to eat it to prove how safe it was one of britain's most celebrated wallpaper designers was william morris a leading light of the arts and crafts movement he was also one of the fiercest critics of the heartless industrialists of this period but what is not well known about this champion of handicraft is that he was a director of the biggest arsenic producing mine in the world devon great consoles william morris is making most of his money from arsenic that's quite a surprise isn't it because of course we associate william morris as being you know this leader of the arts and crafts movement as someone who's um you know going back to base it's going to back to natural things but he's got this mind that potentially is certainly selling arsenic whether he's using into his wallpapers online as we said there was enough arsenic produced from that mine to kill the entire planet and every creature on it some of the people who came out with the processes had vested interests in other locations that they would own arsenic mines they would own areas where it was in their interest to include arsenic into paints dyes whatever did willie morris ever accept that he was doing this or did he continue to deny it well there's a interesting letter there was a customer complaining that the wallpaper was poisoning him and his family and basically william morris said it was witch fever so that was this soul utterance we have it was witch feather in other words he thought he was being accused of something that just wasn't true well he was just saying it was you know these doctors were saying the new article war papers were killing people and damaging people's health and he's just saying you know it's it's mumbo jumbo basically what he was saying contrary to maurice's claims the evidence building up became impossible to deny but it would take intervention from the very top before things started to change [Music] one of the the key tipping points of that recognition was when queen victoria herself had had wallpaper of shield green and she had a diplomat who actually came to stay with her who fell ill overnight and she was i think the records show that she was quite put out to be perfectly honest that she'd been stood up early in the morning and he hadn't turned up but actually the poor chap had actually peeled over overnight he was actually effectively poisoned by the arsenic in the wallpaper she was a little skeptical about it but then when it actually came out in the papers and there were actually quite a lot of publications around that time was actually that she'd done that it was then that step changing maybe we need to think in how we regulate this unbelievably the use of arsenic and wallpaper was never officially but as consumers understood its danger they stopped buying these wallpapers and forced commercial practice to change morris wallpapers and other astute manufacturers started to advertise their product as arsenic free certainly by 1872 even the star guides had switched to safer printing but we'll never know how many died a slow death through the prevalence of arsenic in victorian products i cannot see that having this amount of arsenic dust floating around a victorian home wouldn't lead to chronic health problems it's a class one carcinogen it's a human carcinogen so years of exposure to this would have led the cancers basically the victorian ideal or perhaps fantasy of domesticity was that the lady of the house should be as charles dickens describes it in the mystery of edwin drude the ministering angel of domestic bliss victorian women were encouraged to make their home a reassuring sanctuary for their husbands away from the jealousies cares and dangers of working life the idea of the angel of the house was obviously a literary creation but it tapped in completely to what the victorians essentially wanted it was a movement away from the fact that in the 18th century usually father and mother had pitched in together in the business with the professionalization the growth of factories the home was away from the place of work so the home became this ideal place of perfection and taste this this bubble enclosed bubble of purity as the home became an ideal it needed to be protected and nurtured and therefore buying things for the home creating things for the home came to be seen as the woman's occupation the men went out there conquering the empire the women stayed at home and kept things pure [Music] women were expected not only to create the perfect home the lady of the house had to measure up as well our next danger in this house is in the bedroom [Music] the pursuit of this feminine ideal wasn't entirely safe lurking in many beautifying products were harmful toxins [Music] part of being the ideal victorian woman was looking just right whatever your physique one of these came in handy in fact this was essential corsets kept everything under control and they meant self-reserve and that was vital to the victorian woman because the opposite was just excess and freedom and flesh flying everywhere and once he did that what the world might fall down that's quite tight already [Music] looks after one of the biggest corset collections in the country so tell me about all the different layers we can see here what's going on first of all we've got the hmes underneath so you would never have worn your corset next to your skin the corset predates the bra its function was to support the chest and help take the weight of up to 14 pounds of clothing then over the top of this you would have had a petticoat as well that's sort of five garments before yeah you've even got your outerwear it is yes so this is part of this the symmington factory manufactured corsets that were affordable for everybody they did all of their own artwork and printing for all their box stops for their corsets that's just beautiful it may look beautiful but women were unwittingly paying a terrible price in the 1860s and 70s corsetry became increasingly extreme by the mid-19th century the ideal female form the corseted female form was everywhere in newspapers magazines journals aimed at women and this celebrity the actresses had it the dancers had it but particularly these fashion plates had it this impossible figure i mean they were drawn simply because no woman would look like that what kind of corsets and how restrictive they were depended on your age your class your occupation and how fashionable you were it was recommended that a corset was to be worn at all times and there was no escape not even in the colonies simonton's made this to mark it directly at ladies that were going to tropical regions so they were either going with their man or to get their man it's called the ventilated corset for obvious reasons it has the center section removed there were women wearing this in all parts of the british empire whatever the weather yes and you were regarded as a loose woman um if you didn't wear your corset it demonstrated their character and it demonstrated that they were fine and upright citizens and you know fit for the british empire these robust cages of whale bone and steel were turned into potential killers by one surprisingly small technological advance the metal eyelet what difference does that make it allows people if they want to to tight lace their corset without fabric pulling away the metal eyelet made it easier to get the look because it was possible to lace tightly without the material tearing as it previously would have done there was a fashion for wearing very very very tight bodices i mean it's fascinating you see in photographs the fabric pulls in a way that we would think means it doesn't fit a tight lacing is something that a minority of people did and that is to get your waist as small as you possibly can um they used to do this by like lacing their tights cause it tighter and tighter some women would keep their corsets on day and night to train their bodies [Music] so what are the effects of a corset on the body in the long term well if i could just show you here the position of the normal organs so the liver for example our largest internal organ sits underneath the ribs on the right and so it's a large wedge-shaped organ that sits here under the ribs and so in a corset which brings the ribs in very tightly to give the typical small waisted outline the liver gets squashed upwards and it presses against the ribs and in fact there are specimens of livers taken from women who have died who've worn tight corsets actually have ridges on them where the ribs have made indentations in the surface of the liver because it's been so tight [Music] and another organ that may be affected by a tight course it is the stomach that sits here underneath the rib cage and so if the rib cage is pulled in by the corset the stomach is pushed downwards into the abdominal cavity and that would then have an effect on the rest of the abdominal organs which would be pushed down this is a pregnancy corset from 1885. some women even wore corsets when pregnant a particular choice came for women about the course it is when they fell pregnant because many husbands complained they didn't want their their baby's head shaped and molded but there were women who continued to wear corsets through pregnancy which you know there's no no way at all that is possibly good for the baby one of the problems with corsets after pregnancy particularly if women had a lot of babies was that of prolapse of the uterus the pelvic floor muscles haven't been weakened during childbirth and then a very tight corset that increases the pressure in the abdomen forcing all the organs down so that would have been a very unwanted side effect of wearing tight corsets now it's my turn i've got a little bit tighter i don't know whether you can feel that i've got it yeah i can feel it yeah yeah i confess i felt delighted to have a smaller waist a result yeah i can see why they did it now 24 inches look 24 and three quarters the victorian household guides even advised on suitable exercises for a lady i'm just exhausted after doing just that i'm not really that unfit honestly or am i we're going to use sports science equipment with matt ferber to measure the effect of the corset on my body yep i'm happy you happy yeah first i have to give him a baseline of fitness without the corset i exercise for six minutes [Music] now matt monitors my vital signs with the corset on first how it affects me at rest and three two one go and i repeat the same exercise with matt measuring my heart rate and airflow how high you're working feels like a 16 now lovely good two minutes ago halfway through a map's already seeing the changes [Music] um stop okay if you just wanna go and take a seat i feel close to fainting and it takes two minutes for my head to clear and i'm not even tight-laced breathing okay okay last 10 seconds excellent well done you're free yes so what happened is that right let's get this off as well what can science reveal about the effects of a corset so in terms of uh the rate in which you're breathing look at that so even at rest you can see so you've got the red line is when you're wearing the corset and the blue line is not when you're when you're not when you course it so you see even at rest when you're sitting down you're breathing in the corset of around about you know 23 24 breaths per minute whereas when you didn't have the corset on you're down about 14 breaths per minute so it shows that even at rest of course it's really restricting and then when it actually comes to wash when you're doing the exercise and we can see with your figures you know with the corset on your tidal volume so the amount of air getting every breath is a lot lower so you're breathing approximately 200 to 300 mils less every single breath with the corset on gosh yeah so that's why at the end i felt like i was really fighting to to get in there absolutely you know really with these figures you can really see the impact the course of restriction of course is having you you're basically hyperventilating within the course that's kind of what's happening because you're breathing an awful lot faster you know 10 over 10 breaths per minute so next to 25 faster wearing a corset i've proved it's damaging but could it be a killer that chronic under perfusion not getting enough air down into the bottom of the lungs could cause problems it predisposes to infections like pneumonia and that was something that a very tight corset worn for many hours a day could cause problems with if a woman had an underlying problem it could exacerbate it so for example if a young girl had rickets from vitamin d deficiency to have soft bones that were still developing and they could be distorted very much by wearing a tight corset there are stories of the ribs breaking and piercing the lung underneath which could be fatal as the century wore on the corset became the focus of a huge debate women's possibilities for activity became much larger over the 19th century by the end of the 19th century it was there was nothing and virtuous in going around on your bicycle in walking freely and so this really wasn't very practical for them to be wearing corsets i mean this simply didn't work and increasingly women began to say these are pointless they're just getting in the way you know i spending hours in the morning getting myself into the corset when i could be doing something far more useful it really also coincided with the growth of the votes for women the idea that women were equal citizens so if they're equal citizens demanding the vote they shouldn't be treated as some kind of excessive ornament that are there to be looked at and they're to be admired and are ruining their health just so they look right for men the campaign for change was spearheaded by the rational dress society established in 1881. constance wilde wife of oscar edited the rational dress gazette [Music] the rational dress society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure impedes the movement of the body or in any way tends to injure health by the 1890s some manufacturers had started to respond to demands for looser clothing yet one thing will probably never disappear the temptation to conform to an ideal of beauty whatever the cost why did women carry wearing corsets well for exactly the same reason as i was delighted to have a 24 inch waist it was psychologically rewarding even if physically it could take its toll the idea of that s-shaped figure we are completely enthralled to it even now so i don't think that we can really look back on the victorians and say oh my goodness weren't they silly fainting when they sang falling all over the place because they wore corsets i don't think we can say without necessarily that far away on the trail of the next household danger i'm heading to the kitchen courses weren't just worn by middle-class women they were also worn by their servants as they carried out household tasks it almost beggars belief but at least those servants benefited from the proliferation of new gadgets designed to make their lives easier and safer well sort of this was a brave new world where the ingenious victorian inventor felt he had the answers to any domestic problem but many of these inventions were difficult to use and proved to be dangerous and people were untrained in how to use them by the mid 1870s the victorians were bringing services into the home piping in water and trying out new gas appliances and gadgets and of all the new inventions available what could be more desirable in these dark damp houses than something that offered heat and light gas was to open a whole new chapter of victorian household catastrophes what we had in the past was everybody would be congregated around a single lamp and it would be either oil or a candle or something else and then all of a sudden people didn't want to live on top of each other all the time we wanted to find better ways of doing it and it was towards the end of the the victorian area that they started bringing gaslighting lighting that was actually capable of light in a whole room it was a massive step forward it was a the greatest innovation you could have a room that was completely lit yeah that coal gas said something was called wood gas and they had um another material called a water gas um now these were highly pilot poisonous there was no control there was no stop it was just gas the worst killer was because you couldn't actually smell it so you'd have no idea until it was too late basically uh you would just keel over and that would be the be the end of you the second half of the 19th century the papers everything from the worcester evening news to the western gazette are full of stories of people dying horribly these aren't headline cases they're just little snippets that give the facts and figures so for example in the manchester evening news in 1886 there's a story of five boys suffocating in a loft or this one from the sheffield independent 1872 the lady was found confined in a bedroom with her infant and its nurse and it says she must have unconsciously deranged the joint of the gas stove thus permitting an escape of gas all three were found apparently lifeless but why were such cases so widespread it may seem obvious to us now but at the time the dangers of gas were not known to the man in the street and the gas company's adverts didn't help matters some of the major gas companies coming out with misnomers that that was actually good for people that you could actually have a room full of das and walk in there with a naked light and it would be perfectly safe gas companies were popping up all over the place you couldn't walk a block in london without seeing a gas company the rivalry was just huge but of course with rivalry comes cost cutting what you also had at the time was unscrupulous activities going on between gas suppliers where they would actually sabotage their their opponents or their competitors by actually dropping the pressure to save money companies would reduce their own gas supply to customers at night the gas lamp would actually just flicker away and then blow out in the middle of the night and then the gas would just seep into your home and you wouldn't be waking up in the morning it was the heart of the industrial period they wanted everything new manufactured to be the seem to be at the cutting edge of what was going on and that was then how they drove innovation through making something engineering something if it wasn't engineered it wasn't good the speed of change was breathtaking but there was neither the time nor the will to test these products that would be sold to millions of consumers one of the most brilliant contraptions in this age of scientific progress was a system that could provide warmth throughout the whole house a massive improvement on open coal fires and drafty chimneys gas central heating was a huge thing in 1800s they came up with the idea of a sealed system where you could you could heat water exactly the same as a steam train basically in a huge cylinder it was very volatile the pressure inside these boilers was just absolutely phenomenal they were running them all around houses you could have 10 12 15 16 radiators on each system but of course you could be sitting down a veneer of in your lunch and this steam valve doesn't open you could be tucking into your turtle soup and the next thing is a huge explosion and he'll be leaving the building without opening the door [Music] the pressure was just huge so it was only ever going to end up in in one story really it was going to be an accident and people will die [Music] the main problem was that they didn't understand the dangers of what they were doing gas and cast iron hadn't been used in this way in the home before when they were actually doing the casting it was at the very forefront of that technology of understanding that the weaknesses and flaws in that car in that casting could actually cause problems further down the line the inventive victorian engineer having tackled heat and light now turned his attention to cooking stoves [Music] what could be so dangerous about a stove like this [Music] with an open system when you had the coal and the massive flu with the smoke pouring up the chimney ventilation was superb because the air would run through the kitchen straight at the tip and take all the smoke away but when they sort of encompassed it into a sealed container then problems with pressure uh and their problems were getting rid of the smoke because the the actual ventilation and the draft there wasn't one to go through the system to take the smoke away so inevitably the kitchens become really smoky and of course this could lead to anything to suffocation if you avoided suffocating in the smoky kitchen you still had a potential problem they made sealed units and poured hot water into them and used them sort of like the modern day kettle and of course this was a boil as a boiling pot and of course had no release valves or anything like that and of course these stoves were just exploding it was like a small time bomb it was totally sealed unit they didn't understand um the pressures and what happened when you introduced oxygen and you know these huge huge catastrophic explosions in kitchens towards the end of the victorian era a new power source gradually came into play they were starting to turn away from gas because it was so volatile and go towards electricity basically but electricity was a killer as well it wasn't 100 safe when they were you know first coming up with these ideas of light bulbs and because you mix electricity with gas so you bring your electric lights in you've still got your gas cooker and these gas cookers were left on you know the joints still corroded broke down and let gas escape of course you'd come down in the morning and turn your wonderful new electric light on and that's the first thing that explodes is a gas cooker so the two of them that they weren't to go together is it it was a recipe for disaster again it wasn't until 1923 that any safety regulations were brought in but the benefits of a warm cozy home meant that most were willing to risk the consequences invention was running 100 miles an hour and we just weren't quick enough to keep up with all the fitters or we weren't skilled enough to keep up with it but the amount of deaths that happen through negligence not just through not understanding the the but the material you're using was huge [Music] i'm leaving the dangers of the kitchen and i'm going to the one place in the house where you'd think health and safety would be particularly cherished the nursery to seek out the next hidden killer [Music] the new consumer culture even extended as far as providing entertainment for children surely that wouldn't be a problem would it alarmingly despite all the progress 154 000 infants under the age of 1 died annually between 1880 and 1890 and so a surviving child was an important one and their interests were indulged childhood was expanded more than ever before i mean girls were at home for a very long time virtuous young ladies lord shasta is saying children shouldn't work excessively in factories the idea of childhood became sacrificed in the victorian world this meant a new consumer market to target manufacturers absolutely poured goods for the child into the shops and we will snap them up this is the time when christmas was essentially invented as a child's festival at the time when children received presents and children were spoiled but it was this indulgence that was now endangering children and toys were the problem anything that was colored or pigmented would have had high levels of a toxic metal in it and even if it was white it wasn't see if there was large levels of lead in white painted objects lead is a very poisonous substance and there's no amount of lead that is safe for your body even the tiniest amount of it can be detrimental and obviously children being much smaller and also because they're developing and lead damages the nervous system are much more susceptible to lead poisoning and unfortunately it's typically children who were poisoned by lead partly because it was used for things like lead soldiers and for painting children's toys but also because of the children's habit of licking and putting things in their mouth anything they would chew or lick or would potentially flake off on them and they get handled put on their hands they'll then put their hands in their mouths you know little little flakes are laid unlike a lot of poisons which have an unpleasant taste lead is not unpleasant and so just by licking it wouldn't put a child off so why on earth were the victorians putting lead in paint it's been known to be poisonous since roman times quite simply it was and remains the best preserver of wood they had no idea that its poison could be transferred from a toy into a child's body some of the first abnormalities that might be found would be developmental ones so the child may not develop as normal and may have behavioral problems things that might have been put down to temper tantrums or nowadays something like an attention deficit disorder may actually have been due to lead poisoning [Music] almost impossible to identify if you can't test the levels of lead because it's just the way in which that particular child is developing and who knows what their potential would have been had they not been exposed to lead lead wasn't just brought into the house on objects it was in the very fabric of the home on painted surfaces i suspect that probably lead was ubiquitous in the victorian house for providing white gloss paints that you might find on every wooden painted item would have been used with lead we can have a look at this piece of wood work and see what's present in this as well we can see immediately there's quite a lot of lead there's 3000 ppm of lead in that because it's been stripped it's probably just against traces of old lead paint before the old paint broke was taken off in the late 19th century lead poisoning was rife but it was difficult to detect lead poisoning could cause anemia and it's often described that people had a grey pallor a sort of very unhealthy look but one way which is identified by physician dr henry burton in 1840 with something called burton's lines which was a bluey gray line at the base of the gums just at the top of the teeth that gave a very characteristic mark that was a sign of lead poisoning although by the time you identified that line it was probably too late to undo some of the effects that the lead is likely to have had by then despite the gruesome evidence the government did nothing it was not until the 1920s that white lead was banned in indoor paint products in sweden czechoslovakia austria poland spain finland and norway but not britain amazingly it wasn't until the 1970s more than a hundred years after the problem had been identified that the british government finally passed legislation to control the lead content of household paint even today lead paint in old houses still poses a risk [Music] but there was an even bigger threat i'm on the hunt for our last and possibly our greatest hidden killer and again one invisible to the victorian eye infant mortality rates in victorian britain were terrifyingly high as many as 15 percent of all babies died in their first year of life and often the cause was an unexpected one mummy's little helper [Music] baby science the idea that babies could be studied and developed in the most healthy way was the new order of the day in the 18th century the idea was that god took the children he wanted there was very high infant mortality and it was up to god so you just let it go in the 19th century it was much all about science and women could be seen as responsible and they were judged by how many of their children stayed alive just like the queen you had nine children kept them all alive who live long and happy lives [Music] the relationship between traditional ideas and the new scientific approach became increasingly fraught around how to feed babies to comprehend how this domestic danger had such an impact requires understanding the victorian attitudes to baby rearing breastfeeding had long been rather unpopular in the higher aristocracy the queen didn't breastfeed it was something that aristocratic women simply didn't do they gave the job to wet nurses big fat jolly wetness rather than the victorian woman who was supposed to be much more delicate much more refined and much more restrained this attitude filtered into the new swelling middle classes one figure loomed large over the household guides to bringing up baby mrs beaton and it was her they turned to for advice mrs beaton gives two chapters in her book which was enormously influential to baby and child care and it tells you all the useful tips about breastfeeding like drink lots of beer although it does say stay off the gin um but after that it then moves on to um what to do if for whatever reason you cannot breastfeed your child any new idea needs explaining in detail feeding babies by bottle was a new idea the problem with this advice it takes up much more space in the book so it seems as though it is actually recommending bottle feeding or as it was known in the 19th century rearing by hand but many saw this as mrs beaton promoting bottle feeding her perceived support and the marketing of babies bottles put huge pressure on women to abandon breastfeeding and there are these bottles that have these kind of fantastic empire names the empire bottle they're really suggesting that for a woman to choose the bottle i mean brilliant marketing ploy to choose the bottle made her a much better citizen of empire she was essentially doing the right thing for her children but was she could this be a hidden killer [Music] dr matthew averson is a microbiologist he's going to use his scientific expertise to cast an eye on this victorian innovation so matthew i have brought you this this is a victorian babies bottle what's what's wrong with this i think the obvious thing just looking at it because of this bend on the side of it it's very difficult to actually clean away any residue that might be forming in here and also the stopper being made of rubber and the tubing they're all porous materials so they would accumulate a residue of milk and any bacteria that might be in that would permeate into the the porous material and you'd end up very quickly with bacteria growing in that there's the bottle and then there is either a rubber or a animal skin nipple which says mrs beaton's book you tie on and then you don't have to take off for the two or three weeks it lasts so apart from outside it never gets washed sounds disgusting but what are the dangers of using porous materials with milk matthews designed an experiment he contaminates a piece of porous cork and a piece of non-porous plastic with a bacteria that would have been common in victorian times he gives them each a quick wash and drops them into a liquid that mimics the contents of the victorian bottle the shaking of the incubator introduces oxygen into the samples which makes them grow faster and it also heats them up to body temperature 37 degrees just gives us a quicker result whilst we wait for the result what was going into the victorian baby bottle breast pumps existed so mother's milk and a nutritious formula according to the food manufacturers the things that were recommended i mean what mrs beaton's doctor calls farinaceous foods which are foods their formula that's sold in shops but it's basically flour you know the children didn't thrive for very obvious reasons to us did they have an idea about bacteria in the 1890s say when this feeding bottle was invented so around about that time they've probably scientists are going to have made discoveries about the link between the bacterial colonization of substances and disease so there are many examples of that for example the cholera epidemics in london were stamped out by separation of sewage and water and that had happened by that time but it's just whether that information had permeated down to the domestic level so what has our experiment proved okay so these are the results of the samples i inoculated last night you can clearly see that the one with the cork is much much denser you get a much denser growth than on the plastic this just shows that there were many more bacteria on the cork than on the plastic and the bacteria have come from the pores within the cork it illustrates the idea that when you have a porous material it soaks up bacteria even in a few hours you're going to get enough bacteria to cause an infection so i mean what does this mean for our babies bottle yeah i think they didn't really understand that porous materials would retain the bacteria even if they were washed over the surface like this cork had been and so therefore if new media is put on new milk new food it's going to take up the bacteria again and cause this effect [Music] victorian britain was alive with killer diseases that sound tropical now but were common then things like dysentery and typhoid these are all very very serious intestinal diseases passed on through dirty water which was then drunk the cycle completes itself and you end up with serious diarrhoea infections and for a small baby dehydration very very quickly would lead to death within 48 hours not that quickly absolutely the lack of knowledge of transmission of germs in water meant that bottle-fed children were more at risk in addition to that there are lots of bacteria that live in the mouth and in the upper respiratory tract in the back of the throat these bacteria are fine if they're there but if they were to get inhaled into the lungs they could cause pneumonia and of course when you suck in on something like this there's a potential for any bacteria like that to effectively be inhaled in small droplets if they get into the lungs they can cause a lower respiratory tract infection what we call pneumonia and of course infant pneumonia was the biggest cause of death in in babies and those bacteria from the upper respiratory tract getting down there causing that pneumonia could potentially be lethal again very quickly and with no cure so that's not just one bacteria it's not just one danger there's loads of them dozens of them we're all covered in billions trillions of bacteria what we're providing here is a place for those bacteria to get a niche to grow multiply into excessive quantities and then an access route straight into a very vulnerable individual and and that's why these things undoubtedly would have killed many children so the dirtiest most bacteria-ridden deadliest object of all went straight into the mouths of babes doctors came to understand the dangers of bacteria and its growth a step forward was made in 1894 with allen and hambry's double-ended feeder bottle the design had a teat at one end and a valve at the other this enabled the flow of milk to be constant but more importantly it was easy to clean and therefore safer [Music] despite this the old dangerous bottles sold well into the 20th century [Music] it may be true that our hidden killers the poisonous wallpaper killer corsets dangerous paint exploding stoves and infested babies bottles damaged the victorians prized ideal of the safe and secure home yet this was an extraordinary age so full of innovations even if there was a price to pay history as ever is a case of two steps forward and one step back and although progress was not without sacrifice we still have their legacy we still live in their houses we may think that we're over regulated today that health and safety has gone too far but when we think about what things were like just over a hundred years ago we should be grateful that the victorians not only pioneered new products but also protections against them it makes me wonder what we're oblivious to today [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 edwardians 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 litho she covered her face in poison vogue was advertising arsenic soap 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 solved 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] it not only looked more modern than the houses of the victorians it even sounded different queen 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.g wells 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 but if that's your blooming game i intend to do the same for the little of what you 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 uh meant they could do things that they couldn't do before they could put on a light at the turn of a switch it completely transformed the immunities 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 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 um electricity companies and gas companies were very much in competition people had 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 um instructions about how you'd use your iris 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 are 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 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 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 you just run through wooden runners and then they just do bare 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 they wrapped up in wood they wrapped up the neck 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 earth there was nothing at all so if you had a small child that could just you know run around and touch one of these things they're 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 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 are available a 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 tried to generate a demand for electricity beyond the electric light what's this that's actually an 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 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 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 if you're still yes 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 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 had the goods but they didn't have the infrastructure we have today and here lay the problem they would use the light socket to run all sorts of pieces of equipment possibly even electric heaters from the wires going to the left 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 would have a number of adapters and have a number of different sorts of pieces of equipment coming off the light light circuit 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 lights in or toasters or refrigerators they used to overheat and the current would be running through the cable would start melting the cable and then this cable would catch fire 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 units miniature circuit breakers or any of that safety equipment that we now rely on modern fuse boxes protect homes from this [Music] 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 nowhere near 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 ampage 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 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 mane and receiving the full force of the current was killed on the spot [Music] the deceased while larking 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 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 what is that it's got a sort of space age element to it's well used um it's an early sunray lamp it was meant to encourage sort of good health the theory was that this would um 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 [Music] have illnesses 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 reagan 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 as an electrical machine okay 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 dropped 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 the spark is typical of any piece of equipment which is being being 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 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 and you will be on the street waiting for the never the undertaker i would imagine over time improvements were applied that lessened the dangers it was until 1908 99 that edison came up with the idea of a rubber socket which went onto a plug which had a fuse 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 homes so potentially you've got people not knowing what they're doing getting into big trouble even one of edison's um friends killed himself he electrocuted 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 despite all its early dangers electricity became the utility of choice for the modern edwardian by 1913 most of the one 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 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 woman 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 anyone who could find a way to dispense with this onerous task was onto 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 a resilient mineral that was non-flammable 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 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 late roading period they were turning 190 000 metric tons of asbestos over they were mining it coming out of south africa russia canada america all being imported into britain and then off to the asbestos factories every day was like christmas day because when they walked through the factory it was snowing and it was asbestos test edwardians were happily working with what we now know to be a carcinogenic killer the first person to alert the authorities to the possibility there 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 [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 post-mortem on and they actually found fibrous substances in his lungs asbestos fibres 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 wrongful 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 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 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 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 lining their boilers they made gutters out of it you could make your system for your toilet your toilet seat even the amount of applications that asbestos actually had in gutters in in 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 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 that 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 a series of postmortems on 30 people in a factory where only two people had actually survived this factory and they looked for common trends that was the problem and it was all about this fibrous build up 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 aspetosis 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 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 that 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 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 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 [Music] all of the items and activities that the modern middle class edwardian needed could be bought from these pages 100 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 were really up to date and had 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 carved out of timber lined with sawdust it could be rabbit fur 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 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 mademont so is this enormous thing an early fridge yeah it's an early 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 um early 20th century would have been about 700 pounds that sort of price and compare compared to a model t fold which was maybe 500 pounds so 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 and how did it work refrigeration uses the principle of evaporation of a liquid to gas to produce a cooling effect if i can show you a 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 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 thing in the middle here absolutely i know it's huge isn't it the whole machine is massive just for a small amount of cooking yes you can put a pint of milk in there and that's 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 but this is a hand driven one so you'd have to have a servant driving this that's a terrible job that's awful you mean you have to be doing this all day 24 hours a day if you wanted to keep that point to 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 have used the refrigerant wouldn't have stayed within the system so they 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 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 had sulfur dioxide which was 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 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 if you have 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 making it happen it would wipe everyone in the room out a pretty lethal step ether will auto ignite with a temperature about 160 degrees c which is quite a low temperature and actually there's lots of things in our house that operate with temperature of 160 degrees c so switching on a light switch potentially could do that so when the audience 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 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 gases inside there we've started 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 i'm going upstairs to the bedroom in search of the next killer [Music] 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 the edwardians and one particularly famous actress lily langtry um 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 lilly 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 awarding 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 suntan 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 as late as 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 colours 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 uh cochineal 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 have an effect on the rest of the body at best it would probably have caught 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 content or anything like that because 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 quaffed and big a process that 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 chaldicott stated that the dry shampoo was exceedingly dangerous owing to the impracticability of keeping the fumes away from the customer there was a big problem in the edwardian period a female baldness 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 so 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 karl 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 did do lovely little sort of vignettes of ladies preserving their virtue by stabbing an aggressor and 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 edwardian lady herself with her taste for hats decorated with the most exotic feathers and sometimes even whole dead birds thousands of songbirds egrets birds of paradise slaunted in the name of millinery 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 and 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 marie 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 [Music] in terms of the home though the discovery took killers to a nuclear level [Music] 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 surrey's department of nuclear physics to explore radium with professor patrick regan [Music] so fatty 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 edwardians 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 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 course it 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 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 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 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 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 and that's the paint dollars would have we've got a geiger counter here so susie 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 attenuates 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 it can change the dna in some of the cells in that region and that can lead to 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 the 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 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 too [Music] over time 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 [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] the shadow of world war ii loomed long it was a desperate need to rebuild bomb damaged towns and cities because above all people wanted a safe place to live and to bring up their families in the 1950s the government was under pressure to build new homes and started an ambitious building program the time to look forward had come at last and the british wanted everything around them to reflect that sense of optimism into the nation's living rooms and kitchens came bright new materials man-made fabrics and labor-saving devices for the post-war generation of homeowners domesticity had never been more comfortable but there were problems some of the new products and innovations they welcomed into the home were killers with the aid of modern science i'm going to search out these hidden assassins and reveal them 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 the hidden killers of the post-war home [Music] [Applause] it's a two-story three-bedroom four thousand three hundred pound house built in the modern manner doors slide or fold there's underfloor electrical heating and many other bright ideas as well [Music] gosh isn't this wonderful it looks so familiar it reminds me of the houses of my grandparents it's 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 an affluent revival especially for the middle classes who made up some 15 to 20 million of the population they were richer than they'd ever been before and they were spending more than they ever had before macmillan was right in 1957 when he said they'd never had it so good [Music] what could be safer than a modern home i'm going upstairs to find our first hidden killer to the child's bedroom children now had rooms of their own and all sorts of newfangled toys that were designed to be educational and to prepare them for their future careers so the girls had electric irons and ovens and the boys had model aircraft and train sets and chemistry sets although the odd girl did creep in look there's me 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 findlay was experimenting with his chemistry set in the living room of his home there was an explosion neighbors heard the bang and ran out to find that the living room window had been blown out [Music] ian managed to make his way to number 72 where mrs k.c 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 silver 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 bunsen burner yes gosh it's 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 and 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 um solution to add to each one no a mention of how to dispose of the chemicals at the end it's just frightening and there's absolutely no mention of parental supervision still at least they are clear about what to do if your chemistry kit loving chum has a problem 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 save life it says underneath science is never evil except in wrongly used by man many of the chemicals in chemistry sets were caustic so they would burn the skin and irritate it 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 friends and make it look like a magic trick explosions could burn set the hair on fire set the clothes on fire damage the eyes even blind a child and of course children wanted to share these with their friends and they'd 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 stay some experiments with his home chemistry set but he put them in his pocket while 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 permanganate which is the chemical we saw in the the purple chemical that was in the kit narush 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 going to pour 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 was 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 neris 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 gesty aged 15 died in hospital from injuries received in an explosion which also injured a boy companion unsurprisingly the american chemistry kits were even more spectacular there was even an american chemistry set that included uranium dust and a mini geiger counter so that children could do experiments and measure the radiation [Music] the company didn't stop making it because of the dangers of the dust it just didn't sell very well uranium actually wasn't very exciting it didn't explode and have puffs of smoke and nobody wanted to buy it eventually new laws came in which required the kits to be non-explosive and non-toxic but it's worth remembering what the chemistry set manufacturers used to say experimented today scientists 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 [Music] 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 [Music] a combination which would prove to be particularly problematic verdicts of death by misadventure were recorded on three boys who died in a fire at their home on december 19th the fire is believed to have been caused by a cigarette dropped onto a set e a lighted cigarette ignited a set e this accident was caused by a householder who fell asleep while smoking an inexcusable practice so emma we're not just hanging out in these lovely chairs in this yard for no reason what are these about these are an example of post-war 1950s style furniture in the 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 foam sofas 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 has a singular form it is flammable but it's not overly flammable you have to you know really hold a light under to get it going it's the additive that you put with the plastic to turn it into um like a polystyrene or into a foam for a mattress or from your seti so it was usually the additive that was put into it which was the flammable piece [Music] that means that those forms and the materials that cover the chairs can be ignited by a cigarette or a match if you were to drop 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 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 sulfur that's how bad it can be [Music] but that wasn't the only issue these substances can give off very toxic fumes and in fact if you're in a room with foam that was burning the cyanide gas that was given off would kill you long before the flames or the heat would [Music] it wasn't only the new plastic furniture that could cause a problem [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 she stood in front of the open gas oven to keep warm while brewing tea for her invalid mother there will have been open fires there may have been electric fires probably without good guards on them some little one bar fires didn't have guards at all for a while so certainly there was a lot of different opportunities to get yourself burned [Music] 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 whoosh 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 unhurt by climbing down a ladder after they were trapped in their burning home the outbreak originated in a television set which had inadvertently been left switched on and had become overheated insufficient insulation in the loudspeaker of a television set caused the death of victor smith aged 4 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 [Music] 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 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 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 um the first edition of practical householder and if we take a look at 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 that's it they're 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 doyan of diy barry bucknell was after all a reassuring presence his television programs on doing it yourself attracted at their peak over seven million viewers he had the best tv show on in the 1950s most watched he was getting something in the region of 35 000 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 a rather ugly old panel door it's one that can be solved quite simply you can make it look like this you know he'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 and board it up 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 already very much smoother but he later became known to some as badger buckner they saw his desire to strip out what he called clutter as the willful destruction of original features so he was the driving force behind diy but also he caused great problems i heard stories that uh um they reckon he destroyed more houses than the luftwaffe because of his changes his radical changes that he wanted to do in homes and 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 lot of them feature diy happening high up on ladders of course yeah 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 the magazines don't address health and safety and they must definitely definitely have been aware of the dangers so this is a um 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 this contact atheist was pretty nasty steph 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 in 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 in 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 aged 27 was found about 15 feet from his houseboat with the electric drill in his hand under the conditions in which it was used in water it became a lethal weapon had he been standing on dry land he would not have had a shock [Music] they were selling power tools which professionals were used to using but as you as a diy expert had no training in whatsoever but were expected to use not all power tools use the safety features we know today if you're cutting something and perhaps you've gone into your own leg or you've cut your fingers or whatever you've done it doesn't automatically cut off as soon as you take your feet you've got actually look for the switch to turn it off so the longer you're looking for it the more damage it's doing to you [Music] nothing it seemed 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 tower 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 hartlepool fire service said many fires were started through faulty electrical wiring which was often the work of the amateur electrician the public were advised 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 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 fourteen years of food rationing finally came to an end on the fourth of july 1954 when restrictions on meat and bacon were lifted [Music] 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 marguerite patton infused food with passion tastes were changing quite literally and demand for meat in particular went through the roof the idea of the british family is to have a roast sunday joint a beef or possibly lamb but what happens after 1955 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 then wasn't it in the process of feeding birds and indeed livestock we are also bringing in imported artificial feeds like ground meat and these come carrying already a 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 bred dead and ready to be roasted an analysis of outbreaks of food poisoning showed that the largest number occurred in the home many outbreaks were due to insufficient knowledge by housewives why was this the post-war period is the time at which domestic service really disappears from the middle class home so middle class women sometimes feel rather hard 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 it 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 upped the ante even further [Music] 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 um they quite often come still with their heads attached and the housewife would expect to deal with that at home she might or might not wash the chicken when she gets at home and she might well not wash her own hands when she'd finished handling the bird and as such she was accidentally spreading this hidden killer throughout the home i've come to matthew averson'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 wipe my hands with a paper towel not sure this will do the trick it makes it feel less slimy but actually yes practically yes 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 hand so this is just after touching uh the bacteria the darker colours of the bacteria there are so many bacteria on 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 and to your children to your children absolutely if somebody eats salmonella infected food it between a day and two days after eating it you start to develop symptoms and those are likely to be things like diarrhoea abdominal pain and cramps and possibly vomiting most people who develop salmonella food poisoning would recover within five to seven days um 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 a blood poisoning today 60 years later intensive farming conditions have improved and successive public health campaigns have resulted in a better understanding of food hygiene in the home [Music] 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 killer 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 a bathroom is a place to rest your morale as well as your looks 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 four thousand people died from the smog although more recently calculations made that up to twelve thousand um 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's lots of snow on the ground and so people were burning coal in their homes to try to keep warm but the weather conditions at the time meant that there was an 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 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 a fireman broke down the door of a gas-filled bathroom and found a 20-year-old nurse slumped in the bath the pathologist said death was due to carbon monoxide poisoning to burn one cubic 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 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 you've got your door shut your window set to keep the drafts out and you're just sitting there absorbing all this carbon monoxide you think if you're getting nice and relaxed because of the hot water and it's not it's the carbon monoxide which is slowly putting you to sleep forensic fire expert emma wilson has designed an experiment to show me just how quickly this silent deadly gas can be produced in a sealed environment she will use butane gas in a sealed tank to simulate a bathroom with a gas boiler in it in the corner of the tank is a modern day carbon monoxide detector alarm that we use 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 sounding to let us know that carbon monoxide in that compartment is now at a dangerous level right so nowadays we have you can put in a detector and you can know about it and it's you know pretty 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 boilers going and it's producing this gas that could make you sick and could kill you yes i'm just 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 our 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 there's carbon monoxide in the air that you breathe in it will bind to the hemoglobin when that hemoglobin passes around to the tissues it doesn't release any oxygen present and it doesn't release the carbon monoxide and so your tissues start to be starved of oxygen and it's really like suffocating the body from the inside it was colorless tasteless and odourless 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 [Music] 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 dorwood 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 in 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 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 jane's 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 automatic service is a tremendous spoon if you think about the domestic labor involved for example in the weekly washing day if you've got say a family with a large number of children and you have to wash all of their clothes and drive them by hand you can imagine just how much difference something like a washing machine really would have made to women's lives [Music] 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 we'll clear away any embedded grit yes but that's on wednesdays after you've cleaned all the floors and polished where necessary it's actually a 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 mrs haller age 25 was found dead at her home six weeks after her marriage a modern electric iron found by her body was produced and exposed terminals under a broken section pointed out to the coroner unscrupulous manufacturers produced goods that were shortly made badly designed even downright dangerous things like kettles somebody came up with a wonderful idea of making a kettle they plug the lead in when it got to a certain temperature it spat the electric lead out now i don't think you need to be a scientist to work this out there's not that many kettle points in the kitchen there's obviously one straight right by the side of the sink you're doing your dishes your 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 claydon 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 people were electrocuted through toasters or toasters caught fire because they probably didn't use them as they've been instructed if they'd ever bothered to read the instructions the courier newspaper in dundee consulted a local electrician as to the safest way of handling appliances he told them electrical appliances used in the home nowadays are safe if respected and treated with care the danger of ignorance of these appliances or wear and tear on them has been emphasized recently by a number of burning accidents another solution came from the electrical association for women who urge that girls should be educated for heaven's sake teach them how to look after the beautiful electrical apparatus they are now getting so that girls who will be future housewives will at least know the rudiments of how to look after the apparatus education would surely help but some products were overused and poorly maintained they would have dodgy connections they might spark a bit when you use them but you know it could be all right i'll get one next week or when payday comes but obviously you really did need to keep them maintained and changed and make sure that you only buy them from a proper electrical retailer there could be a high price to pay if you didn't mrs montgomery died from an electric shock sustained when using an electric iron mr montgomery stated that his wife had told him about the electric iron failing and breaking 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 trades 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 [Music] consumer power had its roots in the post-war era and continues today the post-war years were a period of affluence euphoria and optimism that led to unprecedented experimentation and development in science and technology and the home was the crucible of the changes such innovation made great breakthroughs in the lives of the post-war generation but also brought profound and invisible dangers as consumers became more aware and began to stand up 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: Absolute History

Views: 8,371,545

Keywords: history documentaries, absolute history, world history, ridiculous history, quirky history

Id: SegfYM4lIvk

Length: 234min 11sec (14051 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 03 2021