Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam here. If you've read
Speaker 1: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or seeing any of
Speaker 1: the movie adaptations, the character of the mad Hatter is
Speaker 1: bound to have left an impression. He's eccentric, to say
Speaker 1: the least, as he presides over a rollicking tea party
Speaker 1: that Alice attends. But the idea of being mad as
Speaker 1: a hatter in the British sense mad meaning crazy, not angry,
Speaker 1: it didn't come from Carol, And if you, like Alice,
Speaker 1: have a tendency to fall down rabbit holes, this phrase
Speaker 1: is an interesting one. Carol's book was published in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, but the Oxford English Dictionary puts the earliest
Speaker 1: known use of mad as a hatter in eighty nine.
Speaker 1: That's three and a half decades before any march Hares
Speaker 1: or Dormice sipped tea or the cheshire Cat made his
Speaker 1: famous claim of the general madness of the inhabitants of Wonderland.
Speaker 1: We're all mad here. The actual origin of the phrase
Speaker 1: mad as a hatter is unknown, but it's believed to
Speaker 1: be connected to mercury poisoning in hat Makers. Several years
Speaker 1: after Alice's Hatter first appeared in three, the phrase hatters
Speaker 1: shakes was used to describe the condition caused by mercury poisoning.
Speaker 1: The symptoms included muscle tremors and mental and behavioral changes.
Speaker 1: Wonderland's Hatter behaves strangely in the novel, as do most
Speaker 1: of the characters, but his friends seemed to accept his
Speaker 1: oddities as being normal. Today, mercury poisoning is known to
Speaker 1: the medical and scientific communities as aritism. The modern list
Speaker 1: of symptoms includes irritability and mania, both of which the
Speaker 1: hatter displays, but there's also sleep disturbance, depression, visual disturbance,
Speaker 1: hearing loss, and those tell tale tremors, at least the bladder,
Speaker 1: of which the Hatter does not seem to have, though
Speaker 1: to be fair, he only appears briefly. You may be
Speaker 1: glad to learn that although short term exposure to mercury
Speaker 1: can cause earism, it usually goes away if you can
Speaker 1: avoid further contact with mercury. Long term exposures such as
Speaker 1: that that dental professionals and chemical workers experience, can mean
Speaker 1: the symptoms persist. In any case, Aritism is a rare disease.
Speaker 1: After the tea party, during the playing card court trial
Speaker 1: to determine who has stolen the tarts, the hatter explains
Speaker 1: to the king that he has no hats of his
Speaker 1: own because he sells all of the hats he has,
Speaker 1: which brings us to the last stop in our rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: What does mercury have to do with hats? It was
Speaker 1: part of a process called carroting. In order to make felt,
Speaker 1: which is what many hats are made of, you have
Speaker 1: to get the fur of a beaver or rabbit to
Speaker 1: stick together in a matte of thick, stiff fabric, which
Speaker 1: means you have to get the fur off of the skin.
Speaker 1: To get the fur off of the skin cleanly, mercuric
Speaker 1: nitrate was used. It came to be known as carroting
Speaker 1: because the solution would turn the edges of the pelt
Speaker 1: orange as it dried. Modern haberdashers use hydrogen peroxide to
Speaker 1: remove the fur from the skin, which is a slower
Speaker 1: but much safer process. But apparently Louis Carol didn't mean
Speaker 1: to slander hatters via his tea party host of First
Speaker 1: The phrase mad hatter never appears in the book. He's
Speaker 1: merely called the Hatter. It's the other characters, like Alice
Speaker 1: and the cheshire Cat who consider him mad. Second Carol
Speaker 1: once responded to a query about the word play in
Speaker 1: this his most famous work by saying, I'm very much
Speaker 1: afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Today's episode was
Speaker 1: written by Kristen hall Geisler and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other Curiouser and
Speaker 1: Curiouser topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my
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