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SPEAKER_05: Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Dave C is here in spirit. Jerry's here in spirit. And let's go. Let's start talking about a color, a really interesting color.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, this is the first of a two-part series on color.
An accidental series, really.
That's right. In this one, we're going to be talking about Scheele's Green, S-C-H-E-E-L-E, or Schloss Green. Schloss is pretty obviously spelled, I think.
SPEAKER_05: Do you know, is that just another name for Scheele or something, or was that Carl Wilhelm Scheele's hotel name? Like, how did it come to be Schloss as well?
SPEAKER_04: Oh, I don't know. I thought you knew.
SPEAKER_05:
I don't know. I have no idea, actually. Well, I spilled the beans, Chuck. It is named after Carl Wilhelm Scheele.
Who was the guy who discovered it, so it's appropriate that it would be named after him.
SPEAKER_04: 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, it is a big problem, and it killed people. And that's not funny. I laughed because of the way I said it.
SPEAKER_05:
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.
SPEAKER_04: Well, tragedy is, or comedy is tragedy plus time, right?
SPEAKER_05: Oh, man, that's great. 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 Scheele's Green blisteringly toxic.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:
And the thing that was toxic about it was arsenic, as we'll see.
But Karl Wilhelm Scheele, 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.
That's right. But she said it was almost accidental. I don't know what he was doing, but he heated some sodium carbonate. He added some Arsenius oxide, gave it a good stir, and then he added some copper sulfate.
SPEAKER_05: And when that happened, he found that he had a really, really brilliant green.
SPEAKER_04: 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. Arsenic had been around for a long time, so people knew it was poisonous because it was a great murder poison. Right. And it's been around 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, that was, you know, it was a pretty good way to kill somebody.
SPEAKER_05: 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. That's like a hangover. The long things can do that. Sure. What are you drinking? Arsenic. 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 kerplatz.
SPEAKER_04:
That's right. And that's 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.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_04:
And it can give you cancer. It's, you know, it's a known carcinogen now. I don't think it was at the time. I think they just thought this is a heck of a good poison.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's the thing. Even though I'm not sure if it's clear that Schiele spilled the beans himself, but somebody did because it was common knowledge that Schiele'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. In their experience, arsenic was kind of hit or miss. Some people it seemed to poison very acutely. Other people seemed to be fine as far as acute poisoning goes. And there wasn't an awareness yet of long-term exposure poisoning.
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. And what's ironic is it turns out it seems to have been Schiele's 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_01: I'm Lauren Bragg-Pacheco, host of Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, a production of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia.
SPEAKER_06: Every other week, we get to know the everyday people living with a mysterious illness and hear their firsthand stories of struggle and perseverance on their quest for answers.
SPEAKER_00: During the day, I'd feel like I'm just getting sick. I'd sort of have that fluish feeling, and then the next morning I'd be fine.
SPEAKER_02: Then he started getting nodules on his body. He had been to so many different doctors, and I just felt like they were just throwing a dart at what this could be and trying different medications.
SPEAKER_03: You couldn't imagine that anyone could be alive and have a mutation in that gene.
Listen to Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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SPEAKER_04: It was in all kinds of clothing.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, they went nuts for it because it was like this natural green that they had never seen before.
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_04: No one had ever been able to replicate like this really gardeny, vegetal green. And so they went nuts for it. It was in soap. It was like in stuff they ate. It was in beauty products. It was on stamps that, you know, postage stamps that you licked, like Costanza. What else? It was on wallpapers. It was in toys, like children's toys. On behalf of all the pedants out there, I want to point out that she wasn't a Costanza yet. She died licking the envelopes that were going out as a wedding invitation, so she wasn't a Costanza yet.
SPEAKER_04: Never made it to Costanza. Do you think someone would have emailed that? Totally.
SPEAKER_05: 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, 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_05: They said that it was not too yellow, 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 had 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 Scheels green? Yeah. Exactly. So reports all of a sudden after, you know, this becomes the color of the season, start to roll in a little bit.
SPEAKER_04: Children were, quote, wasting away in their green rooms.
SPEAKER_05:
People, these women that wore these dresses were falling ill.
SPEAKER_04: Apparently, 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 was actually a public push that centered on the death of a 19-year-old artificial flower maker named Matilda Schur.
SPEAKER_05: And she – Was Schur a rural juror? Yeah. I said that in 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 schiels green pigment.
SPEAKER_04: And so she inhaled it.
SPEAKER_05: It was all over her fingers and her nails, so she ate it. And by the time she died and was autopsied, it was in her stomach, it was in her liver, it was in her lungs. Before she died, her eyes had turned green, and she reported to her doctor that everything she looked at had a green tint to it.
That's how arsenic-laden this poor girl was.
Yeah. 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 there was an actual, you know, real human death to point to. And Parliament got involved, and, you know, this is sort of one of the first big regulatory acts for something like this.
SPEAKER_05: This kind of thing wasn't that common back then.
SPEAKER_04: Mm-hmm. So I think in less than 10 years, Parliament said, all right, this is a – we're going to do something.
It's called Regulating and Limiting Arsenic in Food. And everyone went, what? And all of the wigs stood up and said, nanny state, nanny state. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_04: 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 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?
SPEAKER_04:
Yeah. And then the Indian 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 moldy as an island, the arsenic dust in that shield's green would become vaporized and Napoleon would breathe it in.
SPEAKER_05: 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 said he probably died of stomach cancer. But it's entirely possible he died from inhaling shield's green from his wallpaper in his bathroom. Well, that could have very well led to the stomach cancer. For sure. And there is a documented case of somebody becoming ill from their shield's green wallpaper, right?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. There was an ambassador in the 1950s to Italy named Claire Booth Luce who had arsenic poisoning.
SPEAKER_05: And just like Napoleon thought someone was poisoning him, the CIA got involved and thought, well, the Soviets are poisoning this woman who is an ambassador for us.
SPEAKER_04: 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 Open Culture, Paris Review, Artist Network, Jezebel, and my dear wife Yumi for suggesting this one in the first place.
Oh, was that her idea? Mm-hmm. She comes up with some good ones. Because of her schloss green headdress? Yeah. She's into schloss green antiques.
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_04: I love it.
SPEAKER_05:
Well, Chuck said he loves it, everybody. You know what that means. Short Stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
SPEAKER_07: .
