Speaker 1: We all need a break from the constant cycle to
Speaker 1: learn something new, to gain new perspectives. The Great Courses
Speaker 1: Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to expand our
Speaker 1: knowledge on a variety of subjects or pick up a
Speaker 1: new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while
Speaker 1: researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball, the rise
Speaker 1: of Baseball is America's pastime, History of the Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the dots on
Speaker 1: several stories from history. Right now, they're giving our listeners
Speaker 1: a special limited time offer a free month of unlimited
Speaker 1: access to their entire library. Sign up now through our
Speaker 1: special U r L go to the Great Courses Plus
Speaker 1: dot com slash Aussie. That's the Great Courses Plus dot
Speaker 1: com slash o z Y the Great Courses Plus dot
Speaker 1: Com slash Assy. Nobody knows for sure how many buckets
Speaker 1: of urine Hinnig Brandt kept in his basement. By some accounts,
Speaker 1: the seventeenth century German chemist had more than fifty. He
Speaker 1: used to collect the urine from his neighbors. Why well, Brandt,
Speaker 1: like a lot of great minds of his day, was
Speaker 1: in pursuit of the elusive Philosopher's Stone, the legendary substance
Speaker 1: capable of turning base metals into gold and ambitious scientists
Speaker 1: into very rich men. Maybe it was the color. It
Speaker 1: certainly wasn't the smell, but Hinnick Brandt was convinced that
Speaker 1: by distilling human urine he could somehow create gold. He
Speaker 1: was wrong, of course, but in a vial of boiled
Speaker 1: urine he discovered something else in sixteen sixty nine. It
Speaker 1: wasn't the Philosopher's Stone, but it was an element that
Speaker 1: would prove just as valuable and destructive phosphorus. Welcome to Flashback,
Speaker 1: a podcast from Azzie. I'm Sean Braswell. Today, our tale
Speaker 1: of Unintended Consequences centers on what would become known as
Speaker 1: the devil's element, phosphorus. The compound that Henni brand unleashed
Speaker 1: would change history in some unexpected ways. It would kill
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of innocent civilians and also helped feed
Speaker 1: an entire planet. And phosphorus was also the spark that
Speaker 1: lit perhaps the greatest underdog story in the history of
Speaker 1: human labor relations. Phosphorus is the most important element on
Speaker 1: the planet. This is kenn Ashley the director of the
Speaker 1: River's Institute at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and
Speaker 1: a global expert on phosphorus. It's really what sustains all
Speaker 1: life on the planet. It's both inside is in our
Speaker 1: DNA and we needed to having food to lived, and
Speaker 1: so it really is the essence of life on Earth.
Speaker 1: But like so many good things, phosphorus has a dark side,
Speaker 1: and for a while it was that dark side that
Speaker 1: dominated the balance of its force on the planet. Let's
Speaker 1: go back to hitting Brandt are urine boiling seventeenth century
Speaker 1: German chemists for a moment. In his laboratory in Hamburg, Germany,
Speaker 1: Brandt tried to make magic and his own fortune. What
Speaker 1: Henting brand did, and you certainly wouldn't want to have
Speaker 1: a neighbor doing this, is that he would take gallons
Speaker 1: and gallons of urine that he collected from around his
Speaker 1: local neighborhood, and he boiled it, and he drove off
Speaker 1: all the moisture, and then he'd keep heating it and
Speaker 1: heating it. After months of experimenting with stagnant urine, Brandt
Speaker 1: was eventually rewarded with a newly created substance that glowed
Speaker 1: with an eerie green light. And because phosphorus blows in
Speaker 1: the dark, you can imagine from an alchemist in the
Speaker 1: in the Middle Ages there, if you found something that
Speaker 1: glowed in the dark, you thought you were pretty close
Speaker 1: to the magic, magic sort of compound. Then that could
Speaker 1: transmutate let into gold. But of course that's not what
Speaker 1: Brandt had found. White phosphorus was what ning Brand had found,
Speaker 1: and uh, and it's not naturally found in nature because
Speaker 1: it's spontaneously combust brand streams of gold and wealth did
Speaker 1: not pan out with white phosphorus. I think Brand seems
Speaker 1: to have had a tough life. He you know, he
Speaker 1: discovered it, and then he people found out that he
Speaker 1: had it, and they wanted to figure out how to
Speaker 1: make it too. Of course, he wanted to keep it
Speaker 1: secret because then that would mean he would get more
Speaker 1: attention and he'd be able to earn an income. And
Speaker 1: as is so often the case, the fame and the
Speaker 1: money when not to the first inventor but to the
Speaker 1: first salesman. A fellow German alchemist named Daniel Kraft stole
Speaker 1: Brand's thunder and became phosphorus is first showman. Craft ended
Speaker 1: up doing better with it because then he claimed that
Speaker 1: he had discovered and he was going around to various
Speaker 1: courts with nobility and showing it at night and sort
Speaker 1: of bringing in in the dark room and pulling the
Speaker 1: cover off and showing the glow in the dark. Still
Speaker 1: no one knew quite what to do with phosphorus. It
Speaker 1: did not turn anything into gold. You could only entertain
Speaker 1: the European aristocracy so long with glow in the dark urine. Eventually,
Speaker 1: phosphorus was extracted from animal bones and later from mining
Speaker 1: phosphate rocks, but it really wasn't until the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: that phosphorus truly came into its own. That was an
Speaker 1: eighty seven when an English chemist named John Walker invented
Speaker 1: what was called the lucifer, or what we refer to
Speaker 1: today as the match. The tiny splints of wood with
Speaker 1: white phosphorus tips soon became a transformative invention. Matches were
Speaker 1: absolutely essential before electricity. You didn't have hot water, you
Speaker 1: didn't have lighting, you didn't have hot food unless you
Speaker 1: had matches. This is Louise Raw, historian and author of
Speaker 1: Striking a Light. The Bryanton may match women and their
Speaker 1: place in history. Most Victorian homes were lit by candles
Speaker 1: or gas lights and heated by coal. Fires and matches
Speaker 1: were a huge step forward from previous methods of starting
Speaker 1: a fire, and we see them from the eighteen fists
Speaker 1: onwards being sold absolutely everywhere. Everywhere that people would gather,
Speaker 1: everywhere that smoke us would gather, there'd being perhaps a child,
Speaker 1: usually a little boy or a girl with a tray
Speaker 1: or a basket of matches, eagerly selling them to people.
Speaker 1: But the ones really making the money off the groundbreaking
Speaker 1: product were the match manufacturers. And the leading matchmaker in
Speaker 1: the UK was a company started by two quaker grocers,
Speaker 1: William Bryant and Francis May. Brian and May made in
Speaker 1: sort a variety of goods, and they quickly realized that
Speaker 1: producing matches was something that could be done very cheaply.
Speaker 1: So in eighteen sixty one they came to bow in
Speaker 1: East London, very very poor East London was then, and
Speaker 1: set up what they called the fair Field Works, this
Speaker 1: match production site, and very quickly starts to make lots
Speaker 1: of money. The two men quickly went from being Quaker
Speaker 1: grocers to Victorian industrial royalty. They became incredibly rich, multimillionaires
Speaker 1: really the equivalent so of even possibly billionaires, enormous country
Speaker 1: states entertaining the great and goods. Bryant and May's newfound
Speaker 1: wealth did not trickle down to their workforce. But in
Speaker 1: the heart of London's impoverished East End, a chemical reaction
Speaker 1: of sorts was brewing. The potent mixture of stark inequality
Speaker 1: and the hazardous effects of white phosphorus was about to
Speaker 1: result in the salvation of millions of future workers. The
Speaker 1: catalyst for this remarkable reaction hundreds of brave, mostly teenage girls,
Speaker 1: willing to take a stand like none that the industrial
Speaker 1: world had ever seen. That's next. Do you have an
Speaker 1: interesting tale about unintended consequences from history or your own life,
Speaker 1: Please share it with us by emailing flashback at ausi
Speaker 1: dot com. That's flashback at oz y dot com. History
Speaker 1: can feel like a moving target. Sometimes it can be
Speaker 1: hard to pin down what happened decades ago, much less centuries.
Speaker 1: Often the stories we do pin down and tell for
Speaker 1: generations are not the whole story, And to get that
Speaker 1: story you have to go beyond the scholars who work
Speaker 1: in the ivory towers. Luise raw Again, I called myself
Speaker 1: an accidental historian. I kind of fell into historian ng
Speaker 1: By accident, I got very involved in the trade union movement,
Speaker 1: and then it was through that that I got a
Speaker 1: chance to learn what we call labor history, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, the history of working people, so it's not
Speaker 1: your kings and queens necessarily, it's ordinary working people. As
Speaker 1: part of her job, Raw was given the chance to
Speaker 1: take a history course. One day she was given an assignment.
Speaker 1: It my mom thinking, oh my god, an essay. You know,
Speaker 1: I hadn't done anything like that since I was at school,
Speaker 1: and I sweated blood over that first esset. Raw decided
Speaker 1: to write about the only women covered in the course,
Speaker 1: the so called match girls. The best Match Girls strike
Speaker 1: was considered to be a colorful footnote in British labor history,
Speaker 1: a curiosity that occurred right before the strike of male
Speaker 1: doc workers in London that most scholars think was the
Speaker 1: true landmark event. In the course, you could in those
Speaker 1: days learn the history of working people and just think
Speaker 1: that women weren't involved at all, which I've subsequently found
Speaker 1: out isn't true, but it was very much told as
Speaker 1: a story of working men. Rock wouldn't find a whole
Speaker 1: lot of material on the match women to write her essay.
Speaker 1: So she went digging and the company Branon May, the
Speaker 1: match making company, had ceased to exist in the UK
Speaker 1: in night, and they've given all their records to this
Speaker 1: little local library. So literally, down in the basement of
Speaker 1: this library were the Brighton May records. Were they kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, just brought to me and dumped in front
Speaker 1: of me all these huge boxes. Raw set to work
Speaker 1: and really quickly discovered, to my surprise, that the story
Speaker 1: I'd been told really wasn't the way things happened, and
Speaker 1: it was actually a much more interesting and far more
Speaker 1: important story one traditional historians had not done justice. Raw
Speaker 1: wrote her essay and later a critically acclaimed book. Here
Speaker 1: I was, this trade unionist and not particularly well educated,
Speaker 1: did not expect to be inadvertently kind of challenging the
Speaker 1: great historians who had written about this, But there you go.
Speaker 1: That's that's how it turned out. The story Louise Raw
Speaker 1: uncovered in the basement of the local library was an
Speaker 1: epic Dickinsian tale of perseverance and courage in the face
Speaker 1: of a corporate giant's appalling treatment of some of its
Speaker 1: most vulnerable workers. Mostly they were women and girls, and
Speaker 1: they were really famous in the area. The match girls,
Speaker 1: they were treated badly and they were very much looked
Speaker 1: down on as well. They were as I discovered, something
Speaker 1: like a really cool girl gang. They really looked after
Speaker 1: each other. They knew that the one thing they had
Speaker 1: was strength in numbers, so they really supported one another.
Speaker 1: Which it's just as well because the employers didn't. You
Speaker 1: could tell how poorly the women were paid just by
Speaker 1: looking at them. They were extremely small and pale and
Speaker 1: frail looking, and even for East End working class women
Speaker 1: who were not you know, through no fault of their own,
Speaker 1: were not the healthiest of people. Some of the workers
Speaker 1: were girls as young as nine. They were working twelve
Speaker 1: hour days from six in the morning to six at night,
Speaker 1: standing up the whole time. Most most of the work
Speaker 1: was done standing up, so it's really exhausting. Um. What
Speaker 1: made matters worse is that Brian's may find them as well,
Speaker 1: which was actually illegal under the Factory Acts at the time.
Speaker 1: But they find them for the slightest infraction. Really, if
Speaker 1: the girls were laughing, or if they were talking or
Speaker 1: just generally mucking about a bit, as teenage girls will,
Speaker 1: then the foreman would find them. But the workers situation
Speaker 1: was even worse than that, something that a crusading activist
Speaker 1: and journalists named Annie Besson soon discovered. Annie Besson was
Speaker 1: a socialist of a kind. She was for women's right.
Speaker 1: Since she was becoming quite a socialist. She interviewed the
Speaker 1: women and they told her about their terrible working conditions,
Speaker 1: about the fines that they suffered, and also about the
Speaker 1: biggest curse I suppose of matchmaking, which was fossy jaw.
Speaker 1: Fossy jar was an occupational disease of the jar caused
Speaker 1: by exposure to phosphorus white faster us is incredibly toxic
Speaker 1: and it was being pumped in the air throughout Brian
Speaker 1: and May's match factory. There was no escape. There wasn't
Speaker 1: even a separate dining area for workers, so they would
Speaker 1: bring in a bit of bread for home, and working
Speaker 1: class girls lived on stale bread and tea. That was that.
Speaker 1: That was their daily diet, no vegetables, no fruit, and
Speaker 1: by the time you got to eat at the phosphorus
Speaker 1: particles in the air have settled onto your bread, so
Speaker 1: you've got this awful, deadly seasoning that you can't see,
Speaker 1: but it's there on your food. The first symptoms of
Speaker 1: fazzy jar were too thick and a swollen lower jar,
Speaker 1: then your gums, cheeks and jar would develop putrid abscesses.
Speaker 1: But the worst thing about it, the most horrendous and
Speaker 1: really sad aspect of it, is that your jawbone is
Speaker 1: decaying while you're still alive, and women would spit bits
Speaker 1: of bone the size of peas apparently out of these abscesses.
Speaker 1: It was a terrible situation. The met women endured these
Speaker 1: horrors for years. Enter any bescent. So the match women
Speaker 1: told any Besson all of this, and she recorded it
Speaker 1: in this really hard, hissing, brilliant ascal. It's only short article,
Speaker 1: it's only a few columns, but it's called white Slavery
Speaker 1: in London, which is a really attention grabbing title. The
Speaker 1: article appeared in June. In it, Any Psson did not
Speaker 1: just recount the women's hazardous working conditions. She emphasized the
Speaker 1: gap between them and the quote monstrous dividends being paid
Speaker 1: to Briant and May's shareholders. It did not go over
Speaker 1: well with the company. Brian toon May read this article
Speaker 1: and they are furious. They've worked really hard on their
Speaker 1: pr Brianson May, they're very like a modern company in
Speaker 1: that respect, you know, there are no slouches in getting
Speaker 1: good publicity and presenting their good side to the public.
Speaker 1: So people think Brianton may are quite a nice firm
Speaker 1: that are looking after their work as well, and this
Speaker 1: is really messing things up for them. The first thing
Speaker 1: the company does in response put pressure on the match
Speaker 1: women themselves. They try to get them to sign a
Speaker 1: paper which is a pre prepared statement say that Annie
Speaker 1: Besson has lied, that everything she said is untrue, and
Speaker 1: that you know they love working for finding the old
Speaker 1: foss jewel is no problem at all, and they're all,
Speaker 1: you know, one big happy family and treated marvelously. Remember
Speaker 1: these women had no trade union, they had no employment contracts,
Speaker 1: and they knew that if they did the slightest thing
Speaker 1: wrong they would be fired. But they refused to sign
Speaker 1: the paper. The foreman report that they come back to
Speaker 1: collect the papers and every single one in every single
Speaker 1: workshop on this huge factory site is blank. The women
Speaker 1: just won't sign. The first attempt to intimidate the match
Speaker 1: women hadn't worked. The next thing that they do is
Speaker 1: try to sack one girl, and they make up a
Speaker 1: reason for it because they don't want to admit that
Speaker 1: they're just doing it because I think she's probably one
Speaker 1: of the people who've spoken to Annie Bessent. So they
Speaker 1: visibly enforcibly removed one of the women from the factory.
Speaker 1: And also the match women had this tremendous solidarity, absolutely
Speaker 1: no questions are They stick up for each other. So
Speaker 1: when she goes out the door, so do they. They
Speaker 1: lay down their tools and they go streaming out of
Speaker 1: this factory out on to the fair Field Road, out
Speaker 1: onto the Bow Road and they start parading the neighborhoods.
Speaker 1: That's right. In the summer, workers, mostly young women and girls,
Speaker 1: walked out of Brian and May's match factory in East London.
Speaker 1: It was a bold act of defiance. And what I
Speaker 1: love about the way they get their message across because
Speaker 1: you know, no Facebook, no Twister in those days, so
Speaker 1: how do you do it? But they are very clever
Speaker 1: and they know that although they're supposed to be powerless,
Speaker 1: one thing they do have is numbers. They can make
Speaker 1: a lot of noise and they do. They march the
Speaker 1: streets of Bow singing very disrespectful songs about their employers
Speaker 1: and how terrible their employers are and what they'd like
Speaker 1: to do to their employers, which is not nice. The
Speaker 1: women marched all over London, including straight through Trafalgar Square,
Speaker 1: they saying, quote, We'll hang old Brian on the sour
Speaker 1: apple tree, to the theme of Glory, Glory, hallelujah. Observers
Speaker 1: started putting their heads out of their home and office
Speaker 1: windows to see what the first was about. So people
Speaker 1: throw down money, They throw down pennies and farthings, and
Speaker 1: the match women catch the money that's failing through the
Speaker 1: air in the long aprons that they wear to work,
Speaker 1: and that is their first strike funds. The young women
Speaker 1: start to get organized. They organized themselves brilliantly into a committee,
Speaker 1: had a vote on who was going to represent them
Speaker 1: on the strike. Committee went back in put their demands
Speaker 1: to Brian and May, who basically told them not interested.
Speaker 1: You're all SATs no matter what you do. We're not
Speaker 1: listening to you. Bran and May outrage you know here
Speaker 1: we are. We're a rich Victorian gentlemen and these wretched
Speaker 1: rough set of girls as they called them, these common
Speaker 1: working people are trying to tell us what to do.
Speaker 1: They were absolutely not having it. Things did not look
Speaker 1: good from the match women at the start, When they
Speaker 1: first walk out, local papers are saying, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: how dare they're They're very lucky to be employed by
Speaker 1: these lovely, top hated gentlemen who are so well esteemed
Speaker 1: and friends with government and friends of the great and
Speaker 1: good and famous, and lucky to have jobs. The tide
Speaker 1: really turns quickly, because this is only around two weeks
Speaker 1: this strike, and the paper start to become much more sympathetic.
Speaker 1: The press started to shame Bryant and May and accusing
Speaker 1: their shareholders of profiting off the jars of poor women
Speaker 1: and girls. So the share price tumbles and Branton May
Speaker 1: are forced into a climb down, incredibly reluctant, with very
Speaker 1: very very bad grace. Indeed, But the women, in around
Speaker 1: two weeks go back to work triumphant, and the first
Speaker 1: thing they demand is the right to form a trade union.
Speaker 1: The metal women had not only improved working conditions for themselves,
Speaker 1: they had ignited a chain reaction that would do the
Speaker 1: same for millions of other workers in the years ahead.
Speaker 1: We like to think that histories all great individuals, that
Speaker 1: it's kings and queens. We're quite happy with that individual
Speaker 1: heroes and heroines. But you know, a sort of rabble
Speaker 1: of working class Irish, uneducated girls taking matches into their
Speaker 1: own hands, or you know, a bit scary, sounds a
Speaker 1: bit revolutionary, so we tend to talk that down. Historians
Speaker 1: might not have taken much note of that victory, but
Speaker 1: other workers at the time certainly did. Working people are
Speaker 1: not stupid, and you would have to be stupid not
Speaker 1: to notice a large, large group of workers, four Drew
Speaker 1: women were on strike achieving what had never been achieved.
Speaker 1: People are gone on strike, but no one had had
Speaker 1: a victory against a huge, important, powerful firm like that before,
Speaker 1: and another group of famous London laborers, the dark workers
Speaker 1: would certainly have noticed. They couldn't have missed it because
Speaker 1: they were married to match women. Matchwomen and dockers traditionally
Speaker 1: dated each other, knew each other, you know, they were
Speaker 1: each other's mothers and sisters. They all were. They were
Speaker 1: the same people, essentially the same Eastern people. Three months
Speaker 1: after the match women went on strike, more than one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand male doc workers at the Port of London
Speaker 1: started their own strike. These women are absolutely the inspiration
Speaker 1: for this huge strike of hundreds of thousands, which spreads
Speaker 1: and spreads all over its practically a general strike, really
Speaker 1: a national strike. It spreads all over the country and
Speaker 1: to other parts of the world as well. The leaders
Speaker 1: of the match Women provided guidance and encouragement to their
Speaker 1: male counterparts, so they all follow the match Women's example.
Speaker 1: They go out on strike and their demand for coming
Speaker 1: back to work as you must, let us form a union.
Speaker 1: Hundreds and hundreds of new unions form over the next
Speaker 1: few years. Just over a year later, the number of
Speaker 1: trade union members in Great Britain had more than doubled
Speaker 1: to nearly two million. Thanks to what the match Women began,
Speaker 1: Great Britain and other countries now have laws governing health
Speaker 1: and safety in the workplace, and from this eventually really
Speaker 1: grow the seeds of the Labor Party in Britain, and
Speaker 1: I'm very pleased that are lamented. Former leader of the
Speaker 1: Labor Party Jeremy Corbyn acknowledged my book and my work
Speaker 1: has said in s that the match Women were the
Speaker 1: mothers of the modern labor and trajing and movement, and
Speaker 1: that really was everything that I'd ever once said. Thanks
Speaker 1: in part to Phosphorus, a revolution in labor relations and
Speaker 1: workers safety swept over England and the world in the
Speaker 1: late nineteenth century, but for millions of others, there would
Speaker 1: be no hiding from phosphorus destructive capability. In the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: nearly three d years after hinnig Brand discovered phosphorus, his
Speaker 1: hometown of Hamburg would suffer an almost unimaginable tragedy at
Speaker 1: its hands. We all need a break from the constant
Speaker 1: cycle to learn something new, to gain new perspectives. The
Speaker 1: Great Courses Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to
Speaker 1: expand our knowledge on a variety of subjects or pick
Speaker 1: up a new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great Courses
Speaker 1: Plus while researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball,
Speaker 1: the Rise of Baseball is America's pastime, History of the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court, and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the
Speaker 1: dots on several stories from history. Right now, they're giving
Speaker 1: our listeners a special limited time offer a free month
Speaker 1: of unlimited access to their entire library. Sign up now
Speaker 1: through our special U r L go to the Great
Speaker 1: Courses Plus dot Com slash as. That's the Great Courses
Speaker 1: Plus dot Com slash o z y the Great Courses
Speaker 1: Plus dot Com slash As. It wasn't long before the
Speaker 1: qualities of phosphorus were harnessed for one of human kind's
Speaker 1: favorite pastimes, war ken Ashley. Again, bostrous was first adopted
Speaker 1: for military use because when the white phosphorus is exposed
Speaker 1: to oxygen, it burns and produces a heavy white smoke.
Speaker 1: So its original use was was just to produce smoke cover.
Speaker 1: You might have seen some of the photographs of World
Speaker 1: War One trench warfare where there is smoke covering the
Speaker 1: no man's land between the armies. And then it became
Speaker 1: used in for tracer shells, so you fired a bullet,
Speaker 1: the phosphorus would burn. You can see where the bullets
Speaker 1: were going particularly night, and think it very easy to aim,
Speaker 1: aim the bullet. And then came phosphorus bombs. They were
Speaker 1: first used by the Allies in World War Two. You know,
Speaker 1: after Hitler started bombing bombing England, that the retribution from
Speaker 1: the from the English was to do these massive raids
Speaker 1: with a thousand planes. And they decided to pick a
Speaker 1: pick a town and try and try and just moment
Speaker 1: repeatedly over several nights. The aim was to destroy an
Speaker 1: entire German city and to demoralize its inhabitants. It was
Speaker 1: called Operation Gomorrah, and for good reason. Starting in July
Speaker 1: and continuing for seven more nights, Allied bombing raids dropped
Speaker 1: over two thousand tons of burning phosphorus material on Hamburg,
Speaker 1: Germany's second largest city and where hitting Brandt had discovered
Speaker 1: the volatile element. At the time, it was the heaviest
Speaker 1: assault in the history of aerial warfare. It was like
Speaker 1: a volcano going off. The bombers said that he could
Speaker 1: see it from from halfway from England. This this huge firestorm.
Speaker 1: The asphalt streets of Hamburg literally boiled. The firestorm left
Speaker 1: more than thirty five thousand people dead, mostly women and children.
Speaker 1: Some were burned alive, some suffocated, others were sucked up
Speaker 1: into the air. The upward draft was so was so
Speaker 1: much it even it even just it suffocated people even
Speaker 1: if they weren't burnt, just because of lack of oxygen,
Speaker 1: because the amount of fire going on, the oxygen was combusted,
Speaker 1: so it was. It was a pretty brutish, sort of
Speaker 1: crude attempt to break the will of the people by
Speaker 1: just destroying everything. A year and a half later, the
Speaker 1: Allies firebombed another German city, Dresden, the day after the
Speaker 1: Audi had strike at Dresden. The seventeen bombers of the
Speaker 1: eighth United States Air Force gave us a here repeat
Speaker 1: for BOMs. Dresden is a heap of ruins. It has
Speaker 1: been smashed to atoms. One of the unfortunate souls in
Speaker 1: Dresden during the fire bombing was the American writer Kurt Vonnegut.
Speaker 1: After the bombing, as Vonnegut put it in his classic
Speaker 1: novel slaughter House five, Dresden was like the moon then
Speaker 1: quote one thing was clear. Absolutely everybody in the city
Speaker 1: was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were,
Speaker 1: and that anybody moved in it represented a flaw in
Speaker 1: the design. We've about the destructive capacity of phosphorus, but
Speaker 1: the element, in the form of phosphates plays a hugely
Speaker 1: productive role for humanity as well. Three quarters of the
Speaker 1: planet is kept alive today because because the phosphorus that
Speaker 1: grows the food that keeps us alive has been dug
Speaker 1: under the ground. It is thanks to phosphorus based fertilizers
Speaker 1: that we can produce food at the scale we do today.
Speaker 1: But like so many commodities found largely in the ground,
Speaker 1: it is a scarce resource. So there's a real shortage
Speaker 1: of phosphorus, and geopolitically, it's I think it's going to
Speaker 1: become deep flashpoint of the twenty one century because so
Speaker 1: few people, so few countries control most of the phosphorus
Speaker 1: and the planet. Just five countries Morocco, China, the US, Jordan,
Speaker 1: and South Africa control of the world's remaining phosphate rock reserves,
Speaker 1: and there's no good replacement for phosphorus once we run out.
Speaker 1: Every person, an animal on the planet depends on phosphorus,
Speaker 1: and there are roughly ten animals for every person. In reality,
Speaker 1: there's around seven d any billion people equivalents on the
Speaker 1: planet right now, burning through fosters at a frightening rate.
Speaker 1: And anything keeps me up, wakes me up at night.
Speaker 1: It's uh, it's a dual threat of climate change and
Speaker 1: a global foster's shortage that leads to mass starvation and
Speaker 1: the legs we've never seen before. Researchers are experimenting with
Speaker 1: yes urine to help develop new fertilizers to address this
Speaker 1: phosphate shortage, but as of yet, there has not been
Speaker 1: a breakthrough to rival hinting brands over three centuries ago.
Speaker 1: So what did we learned today? First, there's a chance,
Speaker 1: a slight chance, that that crazy neighbor of yours collecting
Speaker 1: urine in his basement is actually onto something. Second, any
Speaker 1: one of us can become an accidental historian like Louise Raw.
Speaker 1: It just requires some persistence and a willingness to challenge
Speaker 1: what you've always been told. And finally, it takes an
Speaker 1: awful lot of nerve to take on a corporate giant
Speaker 1: as a lowly factory worker, but it certainly doesn't require
Speaker 1: any balls. Flashback is written and hosted by me Sean Braswell,
Speaker 1: senior writer and executive producer at Ozzie. It was produced
Speaker 1: by Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran, Orio Digiza, and Shannon Williamson.
Speaker 1: Chris Hoff engineered our show special thanks to the crew
Speaker 1: at I Heart Radio podcast Networks, especially Sophie Lichterman and
Speaker 1: Jack O'Brien. Make sure to subscribe to Flashback on the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Flashback is the latest podcast from Azzi, a modern media
Speaker 1: company producing original TV series, festivals, news and podcasts for
Speaker 1: curious people. Ozzie's unique storytelling focuses on the new and
Speaker 1: the next, whether that's forward, looking news and features, bold
Speaker 1: new perspectives on TV, or brand new ways of looking
Speaker 1: at history today. In my lecture notes a couple of
Speaker 1: interesting and somewhat disturbing facts which connect phosphorus to some
Speaker 1: of the topics we covered in earlier episodes of Flashback. First,
Speaker 1: did you know that, well many American states were banning
Speaker 1: abortion and contraception in the late nineteenth century, desperate Swedish
Speaker 1: women were resorting to a very dangerous method of abortion.
Speaker 1: They would swallow the heads of phosphorus matches and the
Speaker 1: hopes of inducing a miscarriage. And Second, perhaps the most
Speaker 1: insidious use of phosphorus in war has been its use
Speaker 1: in chemical weapons. In fact, by nineteen forty four, Adolph
Speaker 1: Hitler and the Nazis had developed a powerful phosphorus based
Speaker 1: nerve gas for which there was no defense, and as
Speaker 1: things went south in the war, Hitler's generals urged him
Speaker 1: to make use of his secret weapon, but for some reason,
Speaker 1: the fewer never played that ace up his sleeve to
Speaker 1: dive deeper. Head to Assie dot com slash flashback. That's
Speaker 1: oz Y dot com slash Flashback. There you can find
Speaker 1: my other or lecture notes from today's episode featuring extended interviews,
Speaker 1: links to further reading and more information on the unintended
Speaker 1: consequences of elements like phosphorus, as well as links to
Speaker 1: other hidden stories from history uncovered by me and other
Speaker 1: reporters at Aussie