I鈥檝e long been intrigued by the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. The magnificent building was constructed of 60,000 panes of glass, ten times as many as in the windows of the Empire State Building! There were exhibits from around the world that included the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond, a steam-powered printing press, an early prototype of a fax machine and a device that used leeches to predict the weather based on the idea that leeches in a jar of water would rise to the top when a storm was approaching. Then there was a fascinating display of vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear and demonstrations by Samuel Colt of his revolver. The Exhibition was championed by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria鈥檚 husband who was a great promoter of science. The Queen herself toured the exhibits some forty times along with six million other visitors who had the chance to relieve themselves in the first public toilets ever installed. They had to pay a penny for the privilege, not much compared with the entry fee of five shillings that effectively limited attendance to middle-class and aristocratic visitors.
The Exhibition made a huge profit with the funds being subsequently used to build the superb London Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Prince Albert planned for some of the money to be used for scholarships to encourage early-career scientists to carry out research. This program eventually came to fruition in 1891 with one of the first recipients being future Nobel Laureate Ernest Rutherford who was awarded the scholarship that allowed him to travel from New Zealand to study at the University of Cambridge. Rutherford then went on to establish a spectacular career in physics at 平特五不中 before returning to England.
As much as I would like to read more about the history of the Crystal Palace, I would not pick up an original copy of John Tallis's 鈥淗istory and Description of the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the World's Industry in 1851.鈥� Not without gloves anyway. The book, published in 1852, has a beautiful emerald green cloth cover and certainly would have invited thumbing through by Victorians. Some, however, would have paid an unexpected price. Burns and blisters caused by arsenic! But the story gets worse.
In 1775, Swedish pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele had discovered that combining sodium carbonate with arsenious oxide and copper sulfate produces a green pigment, copper arsenite, that came to be known as 鈥淪cheele鈥檚 green.鈥� It was used to colour wallpaper, textiles, book bindings, wax candles, toys and even candies. This turned out to be disastrous. Arsenic-containing dust particles from wallpaper could be inhaled, but even worse was poisoning by arsine gas (AsH3), dubbed the 鈥済reen death.鈥� The gas was produced when mold infected the wallpaper and metabolized the pigment. A tragic event underlined the danger of Scheele鈥檚 green in 1861 when a nineteen-year-old maid died as a result of dusting artificial flowers dyed with Scheele鈥檚 green.
Actually, by this time, Scheele鈥檚 green had mostly been replaced by 鈥淧aris green,鈥� first formulated in 1814 by German paint manufacturers Wilhelm Sattler and Friedrich Russ who combined copper acetate with arsenic trioxide to yield copper acetoarsenite. They were trying to improve upon Scheele鈥檚 green which tended to turn black with age. Paris green wasn鈥檛 any better in that regard, but it was a more brilliant green and became popular with artists like Monet, Gaugin and van Gogh who used it extensively in the background for his 1888 self-portrait. Paris green was no less toxic than Scheele鈥檚 green, no surprise here since it also contained arsenic. Indeed, the chemical was toxic enough to be used to kill rats in the Paris sewers, which is how it acquired its name. It also became the world鈥檚 first chemical insecticide and was used to control termites and the tobacco budworm.
I know that even if I got the chance, I would not handle the Crystal Palace book without gloves, but there are undoubtedly book lovers who are unaware that a poison may be lurking in the beautiful bindings of the Victorian books they seek to acquire. The 鈥淧oison Boom Project鈥� at the University of Delaware aims to educate people about the use of arsenic compounds in Victorian books and has put together a database of volumes that are suspected to be tainted with arsenic.
While learning about 鈥渢oxic books鈥� is captivating, it is a trivial issue when considering possible cases of arsenic poisoning. And we are not talking about deliberate arsenic poisoning either, such as was practiced by the Borgias, perhaps history鈥檚 most famous crime family, fond of eliminating enemies with arsenic during the Italian Renaissance. Neither of Giulia Toffana, the 17th century professional poisoner who was happy to provide arsenic-based 鈥淎qua Toffana鈥� to women who wished to dispense with their abusive husbands. The arsenic poisoning that we are talking about is one that affects people drinking water with naturally occurring arsenic leached from the soil. An estimated 140 million people around the world drink such arsenic tainted water. In Bangladesh alone, roughly 43,000 people a year die from arsenic related diseases.
One wonders how many of the visitors at the Crystal Palace Exhibition were wearing apparel dyed with arsenic, and how many of the displays featured posters that attracted the public with the stunning colour of Paris green.
