Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and Dave. Ce's here and Spirit. Jerry's here
Speaker 1: in Spirit, And let's go. Let's start talking about a color,
Speaker 1: a really interesting color.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the first of a two part series.
Speaker 1: On color, an accidental series, really, that's right.
Speaker 2: And this one we're gonna be talking about Shields green
Speaker 2: s E H E E L E or Schloss green.
Speaker 2: Schloss is pretty obviously spelled.
Speaker 1: I think, do you know, is that just another name
Speaker 1: for shield or something, or was that Carl Wilhelm Shield's
Speaker 1: hotel name? Like, how did it come to be Schloss
Speaker 1: as well?
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know. I thought you knew.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I have no idea.
Speaker 1: Actually, well I spilled the beans, Chuck. It is named
Speaker 1: after Carl Wilhelm Shiel, who was the guy who discovered it,
Speaker 1: so it's appropriate that it would be named after him.
Speaker 2: That's right. He was a German Swedish chemist, a pharmaceutical chemist.
Speaker 2: And here's the deal. He created this amazing kind of
Speaker 2: accidentally created this amazing shade of green that kind of
Speaker 2: took the world by storm. But the big problem with
Speaker 2: it is that it killed people. Yeah, it is a
Speaker 2: big problem and it killed that's not funny. I laughed
Speaker 2: because the way I said it.
Speaker 1: Well, it happened a long time ago, so you can
Speaker 1: laugh now. But it killed a lot of people in
Speaker 1: some really horrible ways. I was just kidding about laughing
Speaker 1: at misfortune. That's appropriately old anyway.
Speaker 2: Well, tragedy is our comedy is tragedy plus time. Right.
Speaker 1: Oh man, that's great. You should you should market that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just made it up.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it was a terribly toxic color. Paris Review
Speaker 1: wrote a really interesting article on it, and in it
Speaker 1: they called shields green blisteringly toxic. Yeah, and the thing
Speaker 1: that was toxic about it was arsenic, as we'll see.
Speaker 1: But Carl Wilhelm Shiel, he came up with it supposedly
Speaker 1: almost accidentally, according to Victoria Finley, who's a historian who
Speaker 1: wrote a book called The Brilliant History of Color and Art.
Speaker 1: God blessed Victoria Finley for not using a colon, but
Speaker 1: she said it was almost accidental. I don't know what
Speaker 1: he was doing. But he heated some sodium carbonate, he
Speaker 1: added some arsinious oxide, gave it a good stir, and
Speaker 1: then he added some copper sulfate, and when that happened,
Speaker 1: he found that he had a really, really brilliant green.
Speaker 2: That's right, it was brilliant. But he knew that it
Speaker 2: was toxic, and about a year before it was released
Speaker 2: to the public, he, as legend goes, wrote to a
Speaker 2: friend of his and said, Hey, I'm kind of worried
Speaker 2: about this stuff being toxic. And apparently it didn't matter,
Speaker 2: because people went nuts for the stuff. Arsenic had been
Speaker 2: around for a long time. People knew it was poisonous
Speaker 2: because it was a great murder poison for many, many years,
Speaker 2: because it has fairly unspecific symptoms as far as poisoning
Speaker 2: people goes. So up until eighteen thirty when the Marsh
Speaker 2: test was invented by James Marsh, which basically roots out arsenic,
Speaker 2: there was you know, it was a pretty good way
Speaker 2: to kill somebody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you said, I mean you could attribute the
Speaker 1: the symptoms of acute arsenic poisoning to a lot of things.
Speaker 1: You've got vomiting, abdominant pain, diarrhea, I mean, a lot
Speaker 1: over things can do that. Sure, what are you drinking arsenic?
Speaker 1: And then later on you've got numbnessing, tingling of the extremities.
Speaker 1: You could have been like I've been sitting too long,
Speaker 1: maybe muscle cramping and then you die. You go curpplots.
Speaker 2: That's right, And that's acute poisoning. The long term exposure
Speaker 2: and we're talking you know, over the order of you know,
Speaker 2: three to five years kind of thing. It can also
Speaker 2: be really bad. And usually find that in the skin,
Speaker 2: like you might have lesions, the color of your skin
Speaker 2: might change. Apparently, you can get very patchy, like hard
Speaker 2: patches on your feet and your palms, like the bottoms
Speaker 2: of your feet. Yeah, and it can give you cancer.
Speaker 2: It's you know, it's a known carcinogen. Now, I don't
Speaker 2: think it was at the time. I think they just
Speaker 2: thought this is a heck of a good poison.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the thing. Even though I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: it's clear that Sheiel spilled the beans himself, but somebody
Speaker 1: did because it was common knowledge that Siel's green was
Speaker 1: toxic with arsenic and yet as we'll see, people used
Speaker 1: it all the time. It took off like gangbusters basically
Speaker 1: the moment it was available as a pigment. And it's
Speaker 1: not because the people of the age were dumb or
Speaker 1: didn't care about dying. In their experience, arsenic was kind
Speaker 1: of hit or miss. Some people it seemed to poison
Speaker 1: very acutely. Other people seem to be fine as far
Speaker 1: as a cute poisoning goes. And there wasn't an a
Speaker 1: awareness yet of long term exposure poisoning exactly. And what's
Speaker 1: ironic is it turns out it seems to have been
Speaker 1: Shields Green that introduced the Victorian public to the idea
Speaker 1: that you could suffer really horrible consequences from long term
Speaker 1: exposure to arsenic, even though along the way you don't
Speaker 1: seem like you have acute poisoning exactly.
Speaker 2: Uh, maybe we should take our break here, maybe, And
Speaker 2: we've kind of hinted around about how this stuff took off.
Speaker 2: We'll talk more about that right after this.
Speaker 1: Jo so ask you should know.
Speaker 2: So we promised talk of Shields Green really take the
Speaker 2: world by storm, and boy did it. It was in
Speaker 2: all kinds of clothing. I mean, they went nuts worth
Speaker 2: because it it was like this natural green that they
Speaker 2: had never seen before, no one had ever been able
Speaker 2: to replicate, like this really gardeny vegetable green. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: so they went nuts worth. It was in soap, It
Speaker 2: was like in stuff they ate. It was in beauty products,
Speaker 2: it was on stamps that you know, posted stamps that
Speaker 2: you licked like Costanza. What else. It was on wallpapers,
Speaker 2: it was in toys, like children's toys.
Speaker 1: On behalf of all the pedants out there. I want
Speaker 1: to point out that she wasn't a Costanza yet she
Speaker 1: died licking the envelopes that were going out as a
Speaker 1: wedding invitation. So she wasn't a Costanza yet never made
Speaker 1: it to Costanza. You think someone would have emailed that totally.
Speaker 1: I can name, like at least a handful of people
Speaker 1: by name who would.
Speaker 2: Have right, You're probably right. So again, it's taking the
Speaker 2: world by storm. It's in everything, and especially in sort
Speaker 2: of depressing smoggy Revolution Victorian London. All of a sudden
Speaker 2: they had this brilliant green all around and they love
Speaker 2: the stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because, like you said, the industrial Revolution had already
Speaker 1: happened and its full smoggy effects were being felt, and
Speaker 1: people had moved to the city. But yet they were
Speaker 1: not so far removed from the country that they had
Speaker 1: a real affinity and fondness for country rural life. Right,
Speaker 1: So all of a sudden there's this green here that
Speaker 1: again I got to go to the Paris Review because
Speaker 1: they this article he wrote out. It was so great.
Speaker 1: They said that it was not too yellow, wasn't too teal.
Speaker 1: It was a middle green, and it had full saturation.
Speaker 1: It was very vibrant, because up till then, the greens
Speaker 1: that they'd come up with, I think that were based
Speaker 1: on copper, they were not vibrant. It was green, but
Speaker 1: it was a kind of a dumpy green. This was
Speaker 1: suddenly like a green and everybody just loved it. And
Speaker 1: like you said, they used it in every way they
Speaker 1: possibly could.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like when they went to Sherwin Williams, they're like,
Speaker 2: what kind of greens you got, and they're like, they're
Speaker 2: all dumpy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't you have that schloss green? You mean sheields green?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So reports all of a sudden, after you know,
Speaker 2: this becomes the color of the season, start to roll
Speaker 2: in a little bit. Children were quote wasting away in
Speaker 2: their green rooms. People these women that wore these dresses
Speaker 2: were falling ill. Apparently there were these they would wear
Speaker 2: them in these elaborate hats that color green. And there
Speaker 2: was a doctor, doctor A. W. Hoffman, who was an
Speaker 2: analytical chemist that did some testing and he found that
Speaker 2: the average head piece with schloss green had enough arsenic
Speaker 2: to poison twenty people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so people are starting to become aware, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this stuff is really bad. Like we knew it was toxic,
Speaker 1: but it's really really bad. So there was actually a
Speaker 1: public push that centered on the death of a nineteen
Speaker 1: year old artificial flower maker named Matilda Sure, and she.
Speaker 2: Was Sure a real jerk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I said that in my head, Chuck, I'm glad
Speaker 1: you put it out there. She died in November of
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty one, and she had I don't remember how
Speaker 1: long she'd worked, but she'd worked for many years in
Speaker 1: a little, tiny, cramped workshop dusting artificial flowers with a
Speaker 1: shields green pigment, and so she inhaled it. It was
Speaker 1: all over her fingers and her nails. So she ate it,
Speaker 1: and by the time she died and was autopsied, it
Speaker 1: was in her stomach, it was in her liver, it
Speaker 1: was in her lungs. Before she died, her eyes had
Speaker 1: turned green, and she reported to her doctor that everything
Speaker 1: she looked at had a green tint to it. That's
Speaker 1: how arsenic laden this poor girl was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the direct quote is that she vomited green waters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you don't want to see that.
Speaker 2: You don't want to see that. So, like you said,
Speaker 2: the prescott behind this finally because there was an actual,
Speaker 2: you know, real human death to point to, and Parliament
Speaker 2: got involved, and you know, this is sort of one
Speaker 2: of the first first big regulatory acts for something like this.
Speaker 2: This kind of thing wasn't that common back then, so
Speaker 2: I think in less than ten years Parliament said all right,
Speaker 2: this is we're going to do something. It's called regulating
Speaker 2: and limiting arsenic in food. And everyone went what.
Speaker 1: And all of the wigs stood up and said, nanny state,
Speaker 1: ny state exactly.
Speaker 2: And then the little button on top of this episode
Speaker 2: is that some people believe that Napoleon died of a
Speaker 2: stomach cancer that was perhaps brought on by this green
Speaker 2: poisoning because when he lived in exile in Saint Helena
Speaker 2: on that island, he loved that color and he had
Speaker 2: that wallpaper in his room and apparently was breathing this
Speaker 2: stuff in because of the moisture.
Speaker 1: Right yeah, Open Culture wrote that he so he loved
Speaker 1: his baths and the wallpaper was in his bathroom, and
Speaker 1: they said that anytime it was damp from you know,
Speaker 1: a hot bath, or apparently Saint Helena itself was pretty
Speaker 1: damp and moldy as an island. The arsenic dust in
Speaker 1: that shields green would become vaporized and Napoleon would breathe
Speaker 1: it in. And it's not just some random theory like,
Speaker 1: it's actually fairly widely considered at least possible that that's
Speaker 1: what he died of. We just don't know what he
Speaker 1: died of. Napoleon thought he was being poisoned by British agents.
Speaker 1: I think someone else said he probably died of stomach cancer,
Speaker 1: but it's entirely possibly died from inhaling shields green from
Speaker 1: his wallpaper in his bathroom.
Speaker 2: Well, they could have very well led to the stomach
Speaker 2: cancer for sure.
Speaker 1: And there is a documented case of somebody becoming ill
Speaker 1: from their shields green wallpaper. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. There was an embass in the nineteen fifties to
Speaker 2: Italy named Claire booth Luce who had arsenic poisoning, and
Speaker 2: just like Napoleon thought someone was poisoning him, the CIA
Speaker 2: got involved and thought, well, the Soviets are poisoning this
Speaker 2: woman who was an ambassador for us, and they went
Speaker 2: in did some investigating, and sure enough, her ceiling in
Speaker 2: her bedroom had arsenic in it, and apparently the washing
Speaker 2: machine from the floor above would would rattle and shake
Speaker 2: and that would release arsenic dust and she would just
Speaker 2: breathe that stuff in all night when she slept and
Speaker 2: it killed her.
Speaker 1: Pretty nuts, huh, pretty nuts? Well, big thanks to Open Culture,
Speaker 1: Paris Review, artist Network, Jezebel, and my dear wife you
Speaker 1: me for suggesting this one in the first place.
Speaker 2: Oh, is that her idea because of her schloss green headdress.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's into Schwass screen antiques. I love it, well,
Speaker 1: Chuck said, he loves it everybody, And you know what
Speaker 1: that means? Short? Stuff?
Speaker 2: Is that stuff you should know? Is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.