Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Scheele's Green

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

Can you imagine a color so alluring that even though you know it’s toxic you’d still use it to your heart’s content? The Victorians certainly could.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And this one we're gonna be talking about Shields Green, SCHELE, or Schloss Green. Schloss is pretty obviously spelled, I think. Do you know, is that just another name for Shield or something, or was that Carl Wilhelm Shields hotel name? Like how did it come to be Schloss as well? Oh, I don't know. I thought you knew. I don't know.

I have no idea, actually. Well, I spilled the beans, Chuck. It is named after Karl Wilhelm Scheele, who was the guy who discovered it. So it's appropriate that it would be named after him. That's right. He was a German Swedish chemist, a pharmaceutical chemist, and here's the deal. He created this amazing, kind of accidentally created, this amazing shade of green that kind of took the world by storm, but the big problem with it is that it killed people.

Yeah, that it is a big problem and it killed people. And that it is a big problem. And it killed people. And that's not funny. Left because of the way I said it. Well, it happened a long time ago. So you can laugh now. But it killed a lot of people in some really horrible ways. I was just kidding about laughing at misfortune. That's appropriately old anyway.

Well, tragedy is, or comedy is tragedy plus time, right? Oh, man, that's great. You should, you should market that. Yeah, I just made it up. So yeah, it was a terribly toxic color. Paris Review wrote a really interesting article on it in it they called Sheel's Green blisteringly toxic. And the thing that was toxic about it was arsenic, as we'll see.

But Carl Wilhelm Sheel, he came up with it, supposedly almost accidentally, according to Victoria Finley, who's a historian who wrote a book called The Brilliant History of Color and Art, God bless Victoria Finley for not using a colon. She said it was almost accidental. I don't know what he was doing, but he did some sodium carbonate. He added some arsenous oxide, gave it a good stir, and then he added some copper sulfate. And when that happened, he found that he had a really, really brilliant green. That's right. It was brilliant, but he knew that it was toxic.

And about a year before it was released to the public, he, as legend goes, wrote to a friend of his and said, Hey, I'm kind of worried about this stuff being toxic. And apparently it didn't matter because people went nuts for the stuff. Archenic had been around for a long time, so people knew it was poisonous because it was a great murder poison for many, many years because it has fairly unspecific symptoms as far as poisoning people goes.

So up until 1830, when the marsh test was invented by James Marsh, which basically roots out arsenic, there was, you know, it was a pretty good way to kill somebody. Yeah, like you said, I mean, you could attribute the symptoms of acute arsenic poisoning to a lot of things. You've got vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea. I mean, a lot of things can do that. Sure.

What are you drinking? Arsic. And then later on, you've got numbness and tingling of the extremities. You could have been like, I've been sitting too long, maybe muscle cramping. And then you die, you go cruplots. That's right. And that's the acute poisoning, the long-term exposure.

And we're talking, you know, over the order of, you know, three to five years kind of thing. It can also be really bad. And usually find that in the skin, like you might have lesions, the color of your skin might change. Apparently you can get very patchy, like hard patches on your feet and your palms, like the bottoms of your feet.

Yeah. And it can give you cancer. It's a known carcinogen now. I don't think it was at the time. I think they just thought this is the heck of a good poison. Yeah, that's the thing. Even though I'm not sure if it's clear that she'll spilled the beans himself, but somebody did because it was common knowledge that she'll's green was toxic with arsenic. And yet, as we'll see, people used it all the time. It took off

like gangbusters. Basically, the moment it was available as a pigment. And it's not because the people of the age were dumb or didn't care about dying. Then their experience, arsenic was kind of hit or miss. Some people it seemed to poison very acutely. Other people seem to be fine as far as acute poisoning goes. And there wasn't an awareness yet of long-term exposure poisoning. Exactly. And what's ironic is it turns out, it seems to have been sheels green that introduced the Victorian public to the idea

that you could suffer really horrible consequences from long-term exposure to arsenic, even though along the way you don't seem like you have acute poisoning. Exactly. Maybe we should take our break here. Maybe. And we've kind of hinted around about how this stuff took off. We'll talk more about that right after this. I must stop your sugar. Today's episode is sponsored by Airbnb. Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty

doable. Maybe your place could be an Airbnb. It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place when you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. Maybe a music festival or big tournament is coming to town and you want to get out of town, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money. Maybe you have a vacation plan for this summer. When you're away, your home could be an Airbnb. Whether you could use a little extra money

to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out more at airbnb.ca slash host. That's airbnb.ca slash host. When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure. That night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. What he got was a subject who also soared chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks. And when I sat down with Isaacs in five weeks ago,

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It was on stamps that, you know, post-it stamps that you licked like Kastanza. What else? It was on wallpapers. It was in toys, like children's toys. On behalf of all the pedents out there, I want to point out that she wasn't a Kastanza yet. She died licking the envelopes that were going out as a wedding invitation. So she wasn't a Kastanza yet. Never made it to Kastanza.

Do you think someone would have emailed that? Totally. I can name, like, at least a handful of people by name who would have. Right. You're probably right. So again, it's taking the world by storm. It's in everything and especially in sort of depressing, smoggy, revolution, Victorian, London, all of a sudden they had this brilliant green all around and they loved the stuff. Yeah, because like you said, the industrial revolution had already happened and its full smoggy effects were being felt and people had moved to the city, but yet they were not

so far removed from the country that they had a real affinity and fondness for country rural life, right? So all of a sudden there's this green here that again, I got to go to the Paris Review because this article they wrote on it was so great. They said that it was not too yellow, it wasn't too teal, it was a middle green, and it had full saturation, it was very vibrant because up till then, the greens that they come up with, I think that were based on copper, they were not vibrant. It was green, but it was kind of a dumpy green. This was suddenly like a green,

and everybody just loved it. And like you said, they used it in every way they possibly could. Yeah, like when they went to Sherwin Williams, they were like, what kind of greens you got? And they were like, they're all dumpy. Yeah, don't you have that schloss green? You mean, shields green? Yeah, exactly. So reports all of a sudden after you know, this becomes the the color of the season start to roll in a little bit

Children were quote wasting away in their green rooms. Yeah people these women that were these Dresses were falling ill apparently there were these they would wear them in these elaborate hats that color green. And there was a doctor, Dr. A. W. Hoffman, who was an analytical chemist that did some testing. And he found that the average headpiece with Schloss Green had enough arsenic to poison 20 people. Yeah. So people are starting to become aware like, okay, this stuff is really bad. Like we knew it was toxic, but it's really, really bad.

And so there is actually a public push that centered on the death of a 19 year old artificial flower maker named Matilda Sherr. And she was a roger. I said that on my head, Chuck, I'm glad you put it out there. She died in November of 1861 and she had, I don't remember how long she'd worked, but she'd worked for many years in a little tiny cramped workshop, dusting artificial flowers with a shield's green pigment.

And so she inhaled it. It was all over her fingers and her nails. So she ate it And by the time she died and it was autopsy it was in her stomach. It was in her liver It was in her lungs before she died her eyes and turned green and she reported to her doctor that everything she looked That had a green tint to it. That's how arsenic laden this poor girl was Yeah, the the direct quote is that she vomited green waters. Yeah, you don't want to see that. You don't want to see that. So like you said, the press got behind this

finally because it wasn't actual, you know, real human depth to point to. And parliament got involved in, you know, this is sort of one of the first, first big regulatory acts for something like this. This's kind of thing wasn't that common back then So I think in less than 10 years parliaments said all right This is a we're gonna do something it's called regulating and limiting arsenic in food And everyone would what and all of the wigs stood up and said Nanny state nanny exactly What? And all of the wigs stood up and said, nanny states, nanny states. Yeah, exactly.

And then the little button on top of this episode is that some people believe that Napoleon died of a stomach cancer that was perhaps brought on by this green poisoning because when he lived in exile and in St. Helena on that island, he loved that color and he had that wallpaper in his room and apparently was breathing this stuff in because of the moisture, right? Yeah, open culture wrote that he, so he loved his baths and the wallpaper was in his

bathroom. And they said that any time it was damp from, you know, a hot bath or apparently St. Helena itself was pretty damp and molded as an island. The arsenic dust in that shield's green would become vaporized and Napoleon would breathe it in. And it's not just some random theory, like it's actually fairly widely considered, at least possible that that's what he died of. We just don't know what he died of. Napoleon thought he was being poisoned by British agents. I think someone else that he probably died of stomach cancer, but it's entirely possibly died from inhaling

shields green from his wallpaper in his bathroom. Well, they could have very well led to the stomach cancer. For sure. And there is a documented case of somebody becoming ill from their sheels green wallpaper, right? Yeah, there was a, there was an ambassador in the 1950s to Italy named Claire Booth-Luce who had arsenic poisoning. And just like Napoleon thought someone was poisoning him, the CIA got involved and thought, well, the Soviets are poisoning this woman who was an ambassador for us. And they went in, did some investigating, and sure enough, her ceiling in her bedroom had arsenic in it. And apparently, the washing machine from the floor above would rattle and shake, and that

would release arsenic dust, and she would just breathe that stuff in all night when she slept and it killed her. Mm-hmm. Pretty nuts, huh? Pretty nuts. Well big thanks to OpenCulture, Paris Review, Artist Network, Jezebel, and my dear wife, you me for suggesting this one in the first place. Oh, is that her idea? She comes up with her, uh, Shloss Green headdress? Yeah, she's into Shloss Green antiques. I love it. Well Chuck said he loves it everybody. And you know what that means. Short stuff.

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