Original subtitles

Did you know that there was once a time

when your fridge could be fatal?

Just imagine you're so afraid of your refrigerator,

you gotta keep it outside.

Do you remember when holiday decorations were made

from toxins?

It has this beautiful effect,

but in reality, it's a death trap.

It's like a Christmas nightmare.

Or when monkeys arrived by mail?

You'd open the box and that monkey would jump out

and bite the first person it sees.

Wild, wild stuff.

These are the things we used to do for fun, for money,

or maybe out of boredom,

that we'll never see again.

Were they dangerous? Certainly.

Deadly? Occasionally.

But boy, wasn't it exciting?

These days, it seems like you can get

anything you want delivered straight to your door,

but back in the day, there were things you could get

through the mail that would never fly today.

In 1888, the first Sears Roebuck catalog comes out

and it is absolutely no exaggeration to say

that this will become the Amazon of its time.

Mail order catalogs

offer a far greater assortment

than you could ever find in any store in America.

The joys of internet shopping today would not be possible

without the mail order catalog.

You could get anything and everything.

If you needed some new soap, maybe a new outfit,

you could even get a house.

But you know what else you could get?

Dynamite.

Sears sells dynamite for as little

as 13 cents a pound, less than $5 today.

They actually say, verbatim,

"Dynamite is, in our opinion, an excellent agent

for removing tree stumps,"

and it's hard to argue that it wouldn't get the job done.

There's no training, there's no regulations,

and so to cover their risk, Sears says

they'll include a safety brochure for the amateur.

You could be blowing up a tree stump

as per the suggestion,

or you could be doing who knows with your dynamite.

Imagine being able to add dynamite to your Amazon cart.

It's amazing to think there was a time when your neighbor

down the street could just start blasting off dynamite.

For most of us, dynamite is just something

we've seen in cartoons.

Eventually, Sears stops offering dynamite,

noting that to conform with the insurance laws,

it has been forced to stop selling explosives.

Sears isn't the only place you can get wild items

through the mail.

The golden age of the comic book

is the 1930s, '40s and '50s.

This is where America is introduced to superheroes

like Captain America, Superman, Batman,

Wonder Woman.

One of the most iconic elements of classic comic books

of the time, are really these over the top ads.

I mean, you can order things like x-ray specs,

Whoopee cushions, and even live pets.

For $18.95, a company in Miami Beach,

Florida will send you a real, live

squirrel monkey in the mail.

A monkey coming through the mail

with no real instructions about its care, its food.

It says actually that they can eat anything you eat,

and also they love lollipops,

which probably don't exist in the jungles

from which they come.

Most customers think they're getting a cute,

furry little creature.

They are completely unprepared for what they're getting

and what the challenges will be.

Squirrel monkeys require an insane level of care.

And two common squirrel monkey traits:

throwing feces and frequent masturbation.

But still, squirrel monkey fever

sweeps over the United States in the '60s and '70s.

As many as 173,000 squirrel monkeys are imported from Peru

and Columbia during this time period.

This would never happen today.

There are so many regulations

about sending live animals through the mail.

When they arrive, they're hungry, they're angry.

You'd open the box and that monkey would jump out

and bite the first person it sees.

And there's just reports about, you know,

someone's aunt getting bitten,

a kid getting bitten, just like, it's nuts.

It's probably no surprise that by the late '70s,

the ads for live monkeys, they disappear from comic books.

I can't imagine there were too many repeat customers.

Combing your hair seems like one

of the least dangerous things you could do,

but there was a time when it could be the most dangerous.

These days, it seems like everything is made from plastic.

In the 19th century, it didn't exist, they used ivory.

The problem with ivory is

that it comes mostly from elephants,

and they have to be hunted

and then their ivory has to be harvested

and shipped to the United States.

All of that makes it very expensive.

Manufacturers have little else to turn to.

Not only is ivory good for everyday items,

it is the only material durable enough

and elegant enough for high-end products like piano keys

and billiard balls.

In the 1860s, billiards is starting

to evolve from a purely upper class leisure pursuit

to more of a kind of middle class amusement.

So this billiards company, Phelan & Collender,

put out this call, anybody that can come up

with a substance that will allow us

to make billiard balls more affordable,

we will pay you $10,000.

An inventor named John Wesley Hyatt comes up

with just the thing.

He combines different materials, wood pulp, camper,

cellulose, shellac, and alcohol.

He succeeds in creating this durable, lightweight,

and versatile material.

Essentially created synthetic plastic.

Hyatt patents the material as celluloid.

Celluloid, a cheap, plentiful

and manmade substitute for ivory.

Since it can be mass produced,

you can actually add coloring,

you can give it a different luster.

You can make it look shiny.

It could look more like tortoise shell

by adding different additives to it.

So celluloid not only was a substitute for ivory,

but it could be enhanced.

Celluloid is a miracle material.

It's used for everything from billiard balls

to eyeglass frames, to hair combs.

It just has one problem.

Celluloid is really flammable.

It's possibly one of the most combustible things

on planet Earth.

It will go up fast and it will go up hot.

When celluloid is exposed to heat,

it can quickly release a gas

that can result in an explosion.

In the late 1800s, an ivory comb would run you

around $10, which doesn't sound like a lot,

but that's $350 in today's money.

So when celluloid comes along

and offers combs for less than $1, people are ecstatic.

These combs are everywhere.

Women use decorative combs to hold their hair in place.

Men are combing their beards.

But this is the time before electrification.

There's gas lamps everywhere.

When people cooked, they cooked on a hearth

or they cooked on a stove where there's flames.

And these combs, made of this combustible material,

would just light up

and it would be a catastrophe.

In Pittsburgh, an 82-year-old man is combing his hair

near a gas stove and his comb explodes,

setting his beard and hair on fire.

In one incident, a comb explodes with such force

that it throws a woman back several feet,

leaving her banged up

with horrible burns on her face and neck.

There's many reports of people losing their eyelashes,

their eyebrows, their hair.

Soon, there are these crazy headlines

like, "Comb, Cause of Death,"

"Beware the Celluloid Comb."

This stuff is nasty business.

But what makes this material so combustible?

One of its main ingredients,

nitrocellulose.

Nitrocellulose is chemically related to gun cotton,

which is related to gunpowder.

But gun cotton is way more powerful.

So basically what this means is

that people are combing their hair with an explosive

more dangerous than gunpowder.

Wild, wild stuff.

Despite the dangers, celluloid combs continue

to be produced for decades until more versatile

and less explosive plastics were introduced

in the 1920s and '30s.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I was a kid

and I came home from school, I went right to the fridge.

Little did I know what dangers lurked in there.

In the early 1900s,

the way people kept food fresh is

they had a device known as an ice box,

and a ice deliverer would go down the street

in a horse drawn wagon and deliver them a big block of ice.

But ice has a big problem.

It melts and the ice boxes

aren't particularly well insulated,

so the ice is gone every day or two

and you have to replace it before the food spoils.

This is a pretty crappy system.

It produces its own kind of rot and flies.

It's not a good situation.

But then in 1918,

automobile pioneer William Durant has a breakthrough.

He mass produces a home refrigerator

for the very first time, really making ice boxes obsolete.

Today, everyone has a fridge, we take it for granted.

But back then, it's like a miracle.

Suddenly you don't have to worry about your food going bad.

The electric refrigerator becomes a must-have appliance

for every American.

And in the early 1930s, only about 8%

of the American public has an electric refrigerator

in their home.

By the end of the decade, it's half the country.

It really is the epitome of the American dream.

Any food you want at any time, no icebox required.

What's at the core of this huge innovation?

Let's think a little bit about a refrigerator.

It's an insulated box and it's kept cool

because it's refrigerant.

Some coolant, if you will, is traveling through the inside

and keeping the inside cool.

The refrigerants in these machines is ammonia,

methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide.

In other words, poisons.

Once these refrigerators make it into people's homes,

problems start, in that the compressors

start leaking toxic gas.

Sulfur dioxide can cause loss of vision and skin burns.

Methyl chloride, just a few hours of exposure

can lead to death.

In just a handful of months in 1929 in Chicago,

15 people are killed from refrigerator leaks.

There's even refrigerator leak in 1937

that causes an evacuation in the White House.

The leak is so severe it turns the roses in one room

from red to white,

I mean completely destroys the pigment in them.

Families started putting them

outside the house just in case a leak occurred.

Just imagine you're so afraid of your refrigerator,

you gotta keep it outside.

Refrigerator companies are getting so much bad press.

They really begin to wonder

if it's gonna like, kill their sales.

A year after the Chicago tragedies,

thanks to a chemical engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr.,

a new coolant is developed, Freon.

Tom Midgley says Freon is the way of the future.

It is a cooling gas that is safer and it's non-flammable.

And to demonstrate it in front of a crowd,

he inhales a huge amount of Freon and he blows out a candle.

Perfect, right? No, not perfect!

Tom, Freon is not safe to inhale.

You don't do that.

Freon becomes the norm for the next seven decades,

and is also instrumental

in the creation of air conditioners.

Eventually, scientists come to understand

that Freon depletes the ozone layer.

In 2015, scientists

and governments alike begin to phase out Freon

in favor of other coolants.

I have a good relationship with my fridge these days,

but perhaps tonight, I will sleep

with one eye open, cast towards my kitchen tonight

just to make sure

that I don't go out in the stupidest way imaginable.

Here lies Brian Quinn, killed by a fridge.

Did you know that there are tons of everyday items

that were invented by the US military?

Like the microwave oven, duct tape, super glue,

and one very famous insecticide.

Or should I say infamous?

The American military has a problem.

It's fighting a war in the Pacific in a tropical zone.

During World War II,

American soldiers are under attack, by insects.

Bugs, and their insect born diseases are almost

as much of an enemy as the enemy.

A Swiss chemist uncovers

this new chemical compound called DDT,

and this stuff is great.

It's a powerful insecticide,

it doesn't irritate human skin,

and it remains effective for up to 30 days.

DDT becomes the allied forces' insecticide of choice.

DDT comes home from the war a hero,

and it's about to become the product

for domestic use in American suburbs and farmland.

By 1945, DDT goes on sale as sprays,

as powders, as mist.

It's for sale in grocery stores, department stores,

hardware stores.

DDT is everywhere and it's a hit.

It's used on livestock, in farms, and in crops.

People are eating foods sprayed with DDT.

Used right,

it is absolutely harmless to humans and animals,

but to insects, it is deadly.

Dry cleaners were adding it to their solutions

to ward off moths.

In the US alone,

over 1.3 billion pounds of DDT are sold

during the 30 years that follow.

At the height of its popularity,

DDT is used all over, on the body as a lice treatment,

sprinkled directly onto the skin and hair,

on clothing and bedding to kill insects

and prevent disease, sprayed on walls, furniture,

mattresses, and floors.

All people have to do is

to press the patented top like this.

It's used in public spaces like schools, hospitals,

and theaters, and most famously on suburban lawns.

America's lawns, gardens,

and farms have never looked better,

but it takes years before anyone realizes

that this comes at a very high price.

DDT, it seemed like such a miracle cure all,

but over time, they realize that, oh my God,

there's health effects involved in using DDT.

DDT can lead to hormonal disruption that can lead

to cancer, diabetes, male infertility,

impair neurological development, and neurological diseases.

By the time all these hazards have been discovered,

people have been eating food, spraying their own clothes,

treating their homes with DDT for decades.

When we were kids, we would hear the DDT truck coming

and it would be spewing out literally a thick, gray cloud

of DDT-infused smoke

and the game was, who could get closer to the pipe?

Looking back, not a good idea running around in a cloud

of DDT, but it was sure fun.

As fate would have it,

by the 1970s, DDT fell out of favor,

not because of what it was doing,

but because of what it wasn't.

Insects developed an immunity to it.

Who doesn't love the scent of freshly laundered clothes?

But did you know that

before most houses had modern washing machines,

doing laundry wasn't just time consuming,

it was surprisingly dangerous?

In the early 1900s, laundry is a tedious chore.

It can take hours or even days.

First, you have to soak your laundry overnight.

Then, you have to rub, scrub, and scour.

And then to dry your clothes, that's an entire production.

What most people have in their homes is

something called the ringer.

Two rollers with a hand crank.

You feed your wet clothes between the rollers

and turn the hand crank to squeeze the water out.

The thing about that is it went at the speed of a person.

Luckily, in 1911, the process gets a huge upgrade

when the first motorized ringer is produced.

No more tedious hand cranking,

the motorized version feels like a godsend.

It becomes a must-have.

Companies are racing to create this new home appliance.

One company even calls it the Hired Girl.

In their peak year producing these in 1948,

they're pumping out 2,000 of these machines a day.

With the addition of the motor,

the ringer gets much faster,

but you still have to feed your laundry

by hand into automated motorized ringers.

The leap from going from the mechanical ringer

to the electric ringer is like hopping on a Ducati

the second you took the training wheels off your bicycle.

It's a whole new world of danger.

When you iron a shirt, you may put a few pounds

of pressure on the iron,

but to dry that same shirt,

the ringer puts up 800 pounds of pressure.

That's enough to break the bones in your body.

If you get your hair, or your jewelry,

or God forbid, your fingers caught in a mechanical ringer,

stop turning it, roll it backwards.

Problem solved.

If you get your hair, or jewelry,

or worse, your fingers caught in a merciless,

nonstop electrical ringer, you're going down.

This powered machine will not stop for anything.

It has no safeguards.

I don't even wanna imagine what a hand would look like

after it gets put through the ringer.

You have so much damage to the skin, to the muscles,

the tendons, the bone itself,

that there's really nothing you can do.

There's no way to put that back together.

This is where the term "put through the ringer"

originated from.

An industrial version comes along

called the Mangler.

If you wanted to wash the towels and sheets at a hospital

or a hotel, you needed the Mangler.

It even caught the imagination of Stephen King,

who wrote a short story called the Mangler

that was eventually turned into a film.

It was about one of these machines becoming possessed

by a demon and really just wreaking havoc

on everyone around it.

Eventually, automatic washing machines come

around in the 1950s that control the entire process.

But these modern washing machines are too pricey

and frankly, they're not built to last.

Laundromats come into play,

but a lot of people want to do the laundry at home

and ringers stay around until the 1980s.

People hung on to their ringers

long after they probably should have.

Laundry's not the only thing

that can create stress in a home.

Consider the holidays.

If you think they're tough today, you won't believe

what people put themselves through in the past.

Christmas really begins gaining traction in America

in the mid-1800s, becomes an integral part of our lives.

And with celebrating Christmas

comes the rise of Christmas paraphernalia.

Americans go big,

they get Christmas trees as tall as their ceilings

and decorate them from top to bottom.

Decor of all kinds flood the market,

including artificial snow.

The original fake snow was cotton, and cotton is cheap

and plentiful, and so many houses had cotton strewn

all about the place to look like snow.

There's one problem though, cotton is incredibly flammable.

This is the era before electric lights.

People are illuminating their trees with candles.

You have a dry tree that could go up like a match.

Now you put flammable cotton all over it.

It's a Christmas nightmare.

Manufacturers have to replace cotton,

they have to find a safe artificial snow alternative.

They try things made out of salts

and they try things made out of minerals.

And eventually the eureka moment,

someone has found something that is white.

it looks like snow,

and best of all, it's completely fireproof.

The substance: asbestos.

At the time,

asbestos is considered a marvel, renowned

for its flame retardant properties.

What has been your experience

with these asbestos cement sidewalls?

Well, we've been very pleased.

Asbestos is not an unfamiliar product.

It had been around for a long time.

It's used in insulation,

on roof tiles, in cigarette filters.

Asbestos is a wonder product and demand for it takes off.

Between the 1930s and 1960s,

asbestos is found in every Christmas household,

boxes are sold for five to 10 cents a box.

That's cheaper than artificial garland.

You'd sprinkle it on trees,

you'd run it across your mantle.

You made little triangles on your windows to simulate snow.

Asbestos becomes this popular thing to the point

where Hollywood turns to it.

You're seeing it in Christmas movies, "It's a Wonderful Life."

Yeah!

Hello, Bedford Falls!

You're seeing it in "Wizard of Oz,"

one of the most classic movies of all time.

It has this beautiful effect.

These actors are surrounded by it, inhaling it.

The producers, directors, behind the scenes people,

the stage crew, they're all surrounded by asbestos

because it's so great and it looks so good on film,

but they don't know that in reality, it's a death trap.

We've since learned that if a little bit

of it gets lodged in your lungs,

it can lead to inflammation.

And at larger scales, cancer.

Asbestos is an incredibly valuable fire retardant product,

and when it's in a large block

or big chunks on its own, it's really not too harmful.

It's most harmful when it's broken down

into small airborne fibers,

like in the case of maybe fluffy bits of snow.

Asbestos finally becomes a thing of Christmas past

during World War II, not because of health concerns,

but because it's needed in Navy ships

for its fire retardant capabilities.

Between 1900 and 1980, 30 million tons

of asbestos were used,

and at its height, it's found in about 3,000 products.

After the war,

companies replaced asbestos in Christmas decorations,

but that didn't stop it from showing up

in some very unexpected places.

Who remembers talcum powder? Cool, clean,

and with a scent that made everything feel fresher.

We used it on babies, after baths, even in our shoes,

because for generations it seemed

like the gentlest thing in the world.

Imagine learning how very wrong we were.

In the late 19th century, there is this new desire

to be clean, but our households haven't caught up yet.

We don't have showers at home.

We don't have changes of clothes every day.

Talcum powder is this miracle product.

You wanna smell good, you wanna absorb some moisture,

you wanna relieve your chafing,

you wanna help your baby who's irritated

with a rash, Talcum powder.

Talcum powder is so effective

at keeping babies dry and rash free,

it's almost immediately marketed as baby powder.

The writing on the container was flowery and sweet.

It was usually white with a little bit

of a pink ribbon on it.

It had a great smell you equate with babies, with childhood.

It was always on the changing table.

In the '70s when I grew up and had little brothers

and sisters, it was a critical element.

That's what you did right before you closed up that diaper.

Almost every baby born from the 1900s

to the 1990s had talcum powdered dumped in its diaper.

Everybody grew up with it.

Imagine a baby, you change the diaper five times a day,

multiplied by countless babies born in a year.

Probably like enough talcum powder to fill up

the biggest football stadium in the country.

But what exactly is this magic powder?

It's a good question.

So if you were looking at a bottle of talcum powder,

it may not have all the ingredients

because people who are manufacturing

it have gotten this material from a mine.

Talc is a natural mineral made up of magnesium,

silicone, and oxygen, all natural, all safe.

The problem is that when talc is mined,

it sometimes gets cross-contaminated by a material

that is harmful to humans:

asbestos.

Like the fake snow, the dangers of asbestos stay hidden

while talcum powder

floods the homes of Americans everywhere.

Think about the last 40 years and how much time

and money we've spent trying

to eliminate asbestos from our buildings, right?

And in reality, we were dumping this on our kids.

Never in a million years would we think something

as simple, as pure, as good smelling,

and as effective as it was could hurt us.

But in the 2000s, a rise in cancer rates

and a flurry of court cases reveal

just how dangerous baby powder can be.

Talc just seems so innocuous,

and then you learn that they could give rise

to an increase in cancer.

Talc on its own,

if it didn't have the asbestos, it was pretty wonderful.

Baby powder is still around, but it's a lot less toxic,

thanks to baking powder and corn starch.

You know, there's another product

that you probably have in your home, a popular disinfectant?

For much of the 20th century, it was used in a way

that will definitely surprise you.

It's 1918 and America is in the grips

of the Great Spanish Flu pandemic.

Almost 700,000 Americans die.

That's more than the deaths in World War I, World War II,

Korea, and Vietnam combined.

Americans were desperate to end this pandemic.

There was all kinds of policy measures like preventing

people from spitting in the streets.

Poster campaigns, wear your mask,

but there was actually a product that did quite a bit

to end the pandemic.

It's one you probably have in your household today:

Lysol.

Lysol is invented in Germany in 1889,

and it's really designed to help fight the cholera epidemic

that they were fighting there.

Finally, it finds its way to America

and is introduced into that world as a miracle germ killer.

It's successful, and because of that,

Lysol earns a place,

sort of in every American cabinet across the country.

By the year 1920, the flu pandemic is largely over.

Thanks Lysol, great job.

But now the manufacturers had a big, big problem.

Now that everyone's healthy and they're not getting sick

and they aren't seeing people dying all over the place,

maybe they're not gonna go out

and buy as much Lysol, they'll just have the same canister

up in their shelf for maybe a year

or two years, three years.

At this time, Lysol is owned

by a different company called Lehn & Fink,

and they're looking for a new way to market their product.

Women in the 1920s bought most of the household products.

So these manufacturers started thinking maybe these women

would buy Lysol for their bodies.

Lysol comes up with a fairly novel solution.

They say, you can use Lysol for feminine hygiene.

Wrap your head around this.

These ads for Lysol were effectively saying, like,

here's this household cleaner and just dilute it

and then you can put it

in your most intimate parts of your body.

These days, it seems like a very clearly bad idea,

but it's not like there was a feminine hygiene aisle

at CVS in 1920.

This was a new idea.

You know, hygiene in general was a new industry,

so it became a very successful feminine hygiene product.

That's likely because the advertising

includes testimonials that appear

to be from medical professionals.

In this era, people were really intrigued by science,

and so if you had somebody who said, "This is a good product,

and it'll keep you healthy, and was made in a lab,"

people were very primed to believe in that.

So the ads include these female doctors saying,

"We approve of this treatment,"

but those doctors were completely made up.

The nutty part is, that wasn't illegal at the time.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 does regulate food

and drugs, but it does not regulate household products.

So Lysol doesn't fit into that,

and the worst thing that could happen is they would have

to pay a fine from anywhere from like $500 to $2,000.

Without regulations,

the advertising strategy is very effective.

Since Lysol was widely available, cheap, private,

you did not have to speak to a doctor about it.

Lysol was the top feminine hygiene product

from the '30s all the way to the 1960s.

I think they were also enabled by the fact

that there was a lot of kind of nervousness

and modesty about talking about these things.

So women were not about to go start asking a lot

of questions or even really to talk with their friends about

what they were buying this product and for what purpose.

In 1969, Lysol is acquired by another company

that decided selling it

for feminine hygiene is probably not the best strategy,

and it's still one of the most popular brands

in America today.

By the 1930s, a new household hazard was on the horizon,

a popular line of dishware

that you probably didn't want in your home,

let alone on your dining room table.

By the 1930s,

attitudes towards dishware is starting to change somewhat.

The Laughlin Pottery Company in east Liverpool, Ohio,

they had been making dishes

and China since the 1870s.

They are actually producing 10%

of the country's dinnerware

all from that one factory.

But when the Great Depression hits in the late 1920s,

people don't have expendable income to buy really beautiful,

ornate, bone China and expensive dishes.

This really directs a cultural shift to minimalism.

You're just looking for the most practical

versions of things you can get.

But the Laughlin Brothers don't want

to churn out boring white dishes.

So in 1936, they introduced an affordable, sturdy,

and colorful line of tableware called Fiestaware.

Yellow, red, cobalt blue, and green.

It was really like dinnerware you had never seen before.

Fiestaware is one of these amazing hits.

Within a decade and a half,

120 million pieces are sold in the United States.

Fiestaware really brings this sense of

what, at the time, was a very modern design

into your dinnerware, and it had to seem exciting

and different compared to the dinnerware

with all the ornate patterns that had come before.

I remember we would go down to Florida

and my grandma used to serve stuff on Fiestaware.

It was kind of part of the whole experience.

It's warm, there's palm trees and sunshine,

and this beautiful, brightly glazed Fiestaware.

And how do you achieve such beautiful colors?

The colorant that was used in the glaze

was based on uranium.

Yes, that material is radioactive.

This is the same uranium

that now you need protective gear to handle in any form.

People are eating food off of a radioactive plate.

When they started using uranium

and uranium oxide, it had to seem like a miracle product.

Not only does it protect the dish,

but it really makes it vibrant.

Before World War II, look, uranium

and uranium oxide is going into glassware,

it's going into punch bowls.

Consumers are loving it.

In the 1930s, people have heard of radioactivity,

but most of them don't realize how harmful it is.

People didn't know they were being harmed.

Uranium isn't one of these things that if you touch it,

your hand is going to burn or you can smell it.

The danger is the exposure, the long lasting exposure.

So if you're using this plate every day,

or your teacup every day,

you're constantly getting exposed to radiation.

This is bad stuff.

One study showed that just drinking out

of a red Fiestaware teacup is the equivalent

of getting 2,500 dental x-rays, the kind that you have

to wear a lead apron for.

Despite the danger,

lawmakers don't restrict the production of Fiestaware

until the 1940s.

During World War II,

production of uranium glazed Fiestaware comes

to a halt, but not for the reasons you might think.

Fiestaware is actually a stymied by the war effort.

The US government seizes the company's uranium stock

and restricts all use of it to nuclear weapons development.

So basically, Robert Oppenheimer

and the Manhattan Project are using the same material

that's on your dinner table.

And like a lot of things when they're first introduced,

uranium oxide ultimately was gonna be one of those things

that was maybe a little too good to be true.

Now, after the war, Fiestaware returns to stores, this time

with depleted uranium.

And then finally in 1973, without any uranium at all.

Turns out a little radiation hasn't stopped collectors

from buying vintage Fiestaware.

Danger never looked so stylish.

If ever America needed a pop of color,

it was during the gray days of the 1800s.

And one specific color came with a little extra pop.

Now you can go to an interior design firm

and see 800 different variations of red,

2,000 different variations of white.

But at this time in history, there is not a lot of options.

Dyes were largely based on natural products.

Ironically, the hardest color to make was green.

Adding color is very, very expensive.

Old cloaks that are worn by royalty were only made possible

by crushing bugs, hundreds

and hundreds of bugs to get the color.

This is the industrial revolution, which means

that there's a lot of industrial pollution.

People don't have a lot of green spaces around them.

So the idea of bringing the natural world indoors

is incredibly appealing.

To the rescue comes something called Sheele's green.

It was invented

by a Swedish chemist named Carl Wilhelm Scheele.

This is bright, vibrant, green pigment

and it becomes incredibly popular.

People want products that reminds them of nature.

Scheele's green shows up in clothing, in wallpaper,

in art, in false flowers.

Green, from having been so expensive

and so hard to make, was now inexpensive.

Everywhere you looked, Scheele's green was present,

but it was very dangerous.

Scheele's green was made from something

called copper arsonite.

Copper arsonite.

It's like arsenic, and that has poison.

Arsenic is naturally occurring,

but repeated exposure to these chemicals even on the skin is

where you get yourself into trouble.

People reacted really differently

depending on their age, on their degree of exposure.

A teenager might feel a little bit ill,

somebody else might pass out.

Somebody else might get violently ill.

If they have a small exposure

'cause it's just our handkerchief,

well, they're gonna have a mild response.

But if it's a dress, well, their skin's gonna be irritated

and maybe it gives rise to oozing sores.

Scheele's green is also dangerous

when it's inhaled.

Scheele's green can also release poisonous arsenic fumes,

and these can wreak all sorts of havoc.

People start getting sick, rashes, vomiting,

nausea, dizzy spells.

Some people even die.

And what do they all have in common?

Exposure to Scheele's green.

Napoleon died in a room

that was painted with Scheele's green.

Many years later, the room was examined

and people think maybe he died from exposure to it,

but when they reexamined him, a modern x-ray analysis found

that there really wasn't enough to kill him.

But it's crazy to think that people were getting killed

because of their wallpaper.

By the time the federal government gets around

to regulating arsenic,

Scheele's green is basically out of fashion.

But decades later, the impact

of Scheele's green is still being felt.

In 1950, the American ambassador to Italy,

Clare Boothe Luce, is on a trip and she falls ill.

Espionage is suspected,

but ultimately ruled out.

She was staying in a hotel room

where the ceiling was painted with Scheele's green.

There was a washing machine installed on the floor

above her, and when it shook, it made little pieces

of the paint fall into her bed, which she inhaled.

As recently as April of 2024, the National Library

of France removed four books that date back to 1855

because there were concerns

that the bright, emerald color in those covers

could be laced with arsenic.

America has a rich legacy of product innovation,

and looking back even with the best intentions,

things haven't always gone right, like monkeys by mail,

exploding combs, and poisonous wallpaper.

But maybe those gambles paved the way for the ideas

that did transform everyday life

and made our hazardous history so inspiring.