The alchemist and his apprentice
In the winter of 1694, the latest edition of a scientific journal published by the Royal Society was on sale at the Prince's Arms bookshop in St Paul's churchyard. This particular edition was selling well because it contained a letter written fourteen years earlier but kept sealed until its author, Robert Boyle, died. It was rumoured to contain the secret of phosphorus manufacture upon which his one-time, impoverished apprentice had built a highly profitable business and made himself rich. The...
Placentia Bay Newfoundland
The most serious accident involving phosphorus was not a fire but an environmental disaster this was the Placentia Bay crisis of 1969. It later came to be referred to as The red-herring affair', an apt name for a variety of reasons. The first act of the tragedy took place in December the previous year on Friday 13 December, traditionally a day of ill omen. The drama played on for around six months, during which time tens of millions of fish died. It had seemed a good idea to build the world's...
Brownston Nebraska April
A train comprising eighty-five loaded freight cars was being pulled by three locomotives and was travelling at 100 k.p.h. 60 m.p.h. . Among the freight was a full tank of molten phosphorus. At 4.45 a m train had just passed through the sleeping town of Brownston when part of a connecting bar worked loose and started to drag along the track, catching a switch and forcing the wheels of one of the cars to leave the track. The following cars then began to pile into the derailed car and these were...
Friction matches
The first friction matches were made by John Walker 1781-1857 and sold from his shop at 59 High Street, Stockton-on-Tees. Walker, a dapper little man with a cheery disposition and a ready wit, had trained as a surgeon but found it not to his liking and instead became a pharmacist at the age of thirty-eight. In 1825 he was asked by a customer, Alton Norton, to make up a fifty-fifty mixture of potassium chlorate and antimony sulphide as a paste, thickened with a little gum. This formulation was...
The demonstrations of Daniel Kraft
Shortly after supper on that Saturday evening in September, as it was growing dark, the arrival of Mr Daniel Kraft at Ranelagh House was announced. Boyle and the other fellows of the Society greeted him warmly. He had brought with him a large box and began carefully to lay out its contents on the table. There were several tubes of different lengths and glass vials containing various liquids, but his most impressive piece was a large hollow sphere, about five inches across 12 cm , which...
Gulf War Syndrome sheep dippers flu and chapattis
The World Health Organization says that OP pesticides are responsible for one million serious accidental poisonings a year and that as many as two million people attempt suicide with them. Many more may be affected accidentally but only experience mild symptoms. Two groups of people have suffered illnesses which they have blamed on OP insecticides Gulf War veterans and sheep farmers. The 700,000 troops sent to fight the Gulf War in 1991 were thought to be at risk, not only from chemical warfare...
The cost of a box of matches
Top grade selectable Hardly detectable Phosphorus, phosphorus. Taste is more subtler and Spreads just like butter - grand Phosphorus, phosphorus. Our special beauty cream We look a proper dream -For we are minus a jaw. Guvnors don't charge a fee, Give it away for free, Phosphorus, phosphorus. This comes from Act I scene 1 of the musical The Matchgirls, by Bill Owen and Tony Russell, and is sung by the employees of Biyant amp May. The line in the lyrics which seems rather incongruous is Tor we...
Strike 1
scope of the existing Factory Acts, which laid down a minimum age of employment and hours of work. As a result the matchmakers took on more young women, the alternative source of cheap labour. Bryant amp May had become a public company in 1884 under the chairmanship of Wilberforce Bryant, William Bryant's son. It employed 3,000 people, of whom the majority worked at home making match boxes, with around 1,300 working in the Bow factory itself. While the original partners were in control of the...
Oh shit 1
G. R. Alexander Jr and D. A. Wallgren, Detergent Phosphate Ban, US Environmental Protection Agency, Region 5, Chicago, 1977. A. M. Beeton, 'Eutrophication of the St. Lawrence Great Lakes', Limnology and Oceanography, vol. 10, 1965, p. 240. S. Brett, J. Guy, G. K. Morse and J. N. Lester, Phosphorus Removal and Recovery Technologies, Environmental and Water Resource Engineering Section, Imperial College, London, 1997. C. T. P. Coultate, Food, the Chemistry of its Components, 3rd edn, Royal...
Dr J Milton Bowers
Whether Dr Bowers disposed of his first wife by poisoning her with phosphorus we shall never know, but he almost certainly disposed of his second wife that way and his third wife was definitely killed with it. As a doctor he had easy access to phosphorus, which was a common medicament, and he could easily have administered it in the guise of a medicine. Bowers was born in Baltimore in 1843 and married Fannie Hammet, who died in 1865. The second Mrs Bowers was an actress, Theresa Shirk, whom...
The toxic tonic
Fabre reports that ointments of phosphorus have been known to inflame the skin and the wounds are deep and serious. He advises that no liniment or ointment should contain a greater proportion of phosphorus than one grain to the ounce. As to the possibility of its absorption by this channel in an active condition, De Lens affirms that he has been told by those who were in the habit of handling phosphorus frequently that they suffered from venereal excitation These warnings are taken from Dr...
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law. In most countries where match-making was a key industry, the lucifer was king. It is difficult now to imagine what life was like when most cooking, heating and lighting involved a naked flame. Generating such a flame using flint and tinder could be quite difficult, especially on a cold, damp morning. The phosphorus match did away with the daily struggle to light a fire or a candle and was extremely cheap - 1,200 matches could be bought in London for the price of a postage stamp one penny -...
Gomorrah
Playwrights and novelists have described the dramatic effects of burning phosphorus to portray the horrors that civilians faced in the Second World War 1939-45 , when attempts were made to destroy whole cities with it. heisenberg You never had the slightest conception of what happens when bombs are dropped on cities. Even conventional bombs. None of you ever experienced it. Not a single one of you. I walked back from the centre of Berlin to the suburbs one night, after one of the big raids. No...