Why Were Staircases So Deadly In Victorian England? | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

but the extra weight to carrying trays and food there's no way no way they could get up and down those stays in one piece total death traps absolute death traps stairs have always been dangerous even with today's building regulations at least 300,000 accidents occur every year in the UK but in Victorian times it was even worse the numerous counts of people fall into staircases and breaking their necks or breaking a leg and dying later septicemia why were the so many deaths and injuries from stairs the finger points to the urban population boom the number of Victorians per square mile increased from 390 in 1871 to 558 by 1901 houses were thrown up and packed into smaller plots with little concern about regulation or standardization the problem was this the way that the house Styles changed houses become very much more narrow so what you've got is very high ceilings 10 and 11 feet with a very narrow frontage it's a straightforward geometrical problems if you've got eleven foot and only a very short space to get into the staircase has to be steep in middle-class homeless the stairs that were most likely to be cheaply constructed to be the steepest and the narrowest with those that led to the servant quarters [Music] Upstairs Downstairs came from the difference in staircases from the decorated staircase which was the main one in the house which was there as a show of wealth preserve it was a statement to say look this is how much money I've got you came to the front door and this is one for double bond o stairs highly decorated with spindles and volute days and palace straights and goose necks you had people spending thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds on the staircases and then the downstairs staircase for the servants it was built at the cheapest soft wood that you could possibly buy you'd be lucky if there was handrails and spindles Rises of nine ten twelve inches sacredly really wasn't wasn't high on the agenda tragic really because by 1847 visionary build a Peter Nicholson had calculated how to build a safer staircase transforming the art of stair building into a science he came up with a mathematical formula for working out the rise and go the staircase he'd worked out that if you went up a certain height you could travel a certain distance with great ease and he developed a formula around that in order that people may pass freely the length of the step ought never to be less than four feet though in townhouses for want of room the going of the stair is frequently reduced to two feet and a half Nicholson's formula considered how someone could take a normal stride yet still allow them to rise six to eight inches with every step let's look at those factors right then the stage is always going to be a dangerous place [Music] there's a science to stair building but in the rush to throw up houses it was a science that was often overlooked in the late Victorian period I've come to Manchester Metropolitan University to see what modern science can tell us about the dangers of the Victorian stairs I've been wired up to a motion capture device which will track every step I take to find out how my body adapts to the stairs professor Costas mangu Norris and professor Neil Reeves I experts in biomedical research and are going to demonstrate two staircases we'd like you to go to the top of the staircase stand facing this way and just walk down at your own comfortable speed as you would normally this first staircase has been set to dimensions similar to a main Victorian staircase following Nicholson's principles the going or width of each step has been set to 11 inches and the height the rise to 12 and a half inches well apart for all the get up it felt pretty easy coming down those stairs I'd feel pretty happy running up and down those no problems at all now they set the stairs as they might have been in the servants quarters this definitely breaks Nicholson's formula with the going narrower and a steeper rise so can you walk down as you would normally predictably this is not comfortable at all in fact I'm really having to slow down change the way I take each step and hold the handrail imagine if I had to carry a tray or the linen and couldn't see where my foot fell because of a long skirt if we measure your foot this is about 26 centimeters which is much larger another seventeen point five centimeters room you've had you decide in turn sideways well otherwise otherwise what happened an important part of the food would come out of the edge and then you have an increased likelihood of encountering asleep yes yes and I fallen down stairs before so I was very conscious not to do it absolutely from the data input the scientists reveal that on the servants staircase we are six times more likely to fall than on the ground one it may seem obvious that a steeper staircase would be more dangerous but there was another hidden danger many Victorian homes were built with non-uniform steps this video of the New York subway stairs illustrates what happens when one stair out of 16 is a fraction of an inch higher than the others [Music] professor Jake pulls a specialist in stair safety studied the stairs and worked out that this tiny change has a dramatic impact on the misstep and fall incidents that is not equated to any other stair defect in other words you're more likely to fall if the stair is not uniform than for any other reason what is it about that video what does it tell us well I think what it tells us is that people get used to a very regular stair pattern very quickly so after a few steps and if all of a sudden you introduce a step which is very different it poses difficulties of people and this is why it's more likely to for someone to have an accident or to slip on that irregular step so if you'd give me two that the were the bigger ones and then a smaller one I'm always actually have fallen down exactly thank you for not doing that by disregarding Nicholson's formula the Victorians knew staircases installed and many of these narrower houses had unwittingly combined high rises narrow goings and uneven steps to create a grave hazard for the servants with the extra weight to carrying trays and food there's no way no way they could get up and down those stays in one piece total death traps absolute death traps stairs remain one of the most common sources of accident and death in the home you

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 3,183,985

Rating: 4.8908567 out of 5

Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, hidden killers of the victorian home, hidden killers of the tudor home, hidden killers of the georgian home, dr suzannah lipscomb, the staircase

Id: L1vqQi5Tl70

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/I-use-Bing-as-a-verb]

I always feel like I'm being talked to like a 2 year old in videos like these. The explanation is short and simple: if the steps are otherwise really consistent then even a small deviation can cause a trip. But fuck they labour the point so much.

[u/BillBludd]

A stair safety specialist...