A second bouquet of scammers

This is a second excerpt from (and promo for) my recent Kindle e-book, Not Your Usual Clever Ideas  (https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B072BCKBVQ) . For the other one, scroll down a bit, or click here: http://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com.au/2017/10/a-bouquet-of-scammers.html

The real hey-day of adulteration came with the industrial era, with large towns and better transport to carry the toxic concoctions away. Crooks in a small village were too likely to be caught in the act, or tracked down when there crimes came to light. In a large city, the sellers of adulterated foods could always blame their suppliers if the need arose. Then again, a larger world trade and new discoveries made many more adulterants possible.

In the 19th century, “cider” claimed to be prepared from concentrated apple juice, might well turn out to be sugar, fruit essence and aniline dye, with no trace of apple juice. Sweet potatoes, chicory and rye might find their way into coffee—the rye was detected when a South Brooklyn family showed symptoms of ergotism, caused by a fungus that attacks rye.

Used tea leaves might be dressed with gum and treated with iron sulfate for green tea, or black-lead for black tea, or with any mix of ferric ferrocyanide, lime sulphate, turmeric, the leaves of beech, elm, chestnut, plane, oak, willow, poplar, hawthorn, sumach, holly and sloe. There were no doubt others that were never identified.

Chocolate might be expanded by the addition of flour, starch, sugar, cocoa-nut oil, lard, tallow, sweet ochre and chalk. Sugar might contain gamboge (a resinous pigment), starch, flour, pipeclay, plaster of Paris, chalk, and even copper carbonate, lead, and mercury bisulfate.

In the middle of the 19th century, Scientific American offered a copper diammine test for detecting copper in pickles, and a test for lead in beer that involved adding sodium sulfate and looking for a precipitate of lead sulfate, while beer was to be boiled down, burning it and treating the ash with ammonia to being out the tell-tale copper diammine blue.

In London, brewers were accused of adding strychnine to beer to add a bitter taste, which they denied. Tobacco's devotees were equally at risk. Snuff might contain red lead or lead chromate, though tobacco, it seems, was poisonous enough. Either that, or the ingenuity of the crooks wasn't up to the challenge.

There was also a test to identify counterfeit guano, the 19th century's wonder additive for boosting farm production. Soon the crooks were busy, diluting the valuable Peruvian guano, but the scientists were hot on their tail, explaining how a bushel of guano weighs about 70 pounds, but if clay, marl or sand is added, it will weigh more. Then there was another test: when Peruvian guano was burned, it should lose 55 to 60% of its weight, and its ash should be white, dissolving readily without effervescence in dilute muriatic acid, leaving an insoluble residue of around 2%.

One invention caught my eye in a Scientific American paragraph from December 1855. It said that a miner at Mount Alexander (a goldfield near Bendigo) named Thomas Golightly had a process to cast quartz. The products, he claimed, were as good as chinaware. It added that he had come upon this while trying to extract gold by melting the quartz. The journal added that they had no later information on it.

I hate an unclosed story, and queried the Australian Historical Newspapers database, and found a flurry of Thomas Golightly stories and advertisements in 1854-5. The first owner of that name was a “medical galvanist” who seems to have practised his calling, treating rheumatism in Sydney, while training up two other galvanists in the Sydney area, after which he announced that he would practice in Maitland, north of Sydney. He announced that he would lecture there on galvanism, but after that, there is no trace of Thomas Golightly, medical galvanist.

Six months later, another of the same name, clearly somebody with a bit of an interest in science, appears, announces a discovery, and then disappears again. There is a mystery here: did he have to flee, and if so, was it from the law, creditors or a wronged wife? I suppose I will never know, but my greatest regret is that we cannot drink from Golightly cups and dine from Golightly plates, all produced from that easily-obtained material, quartz.

Another easily-obtained material in the appallingly unhygienic 19th century was rat skins. Even as they improved their hygiene, the Victorians made more homes for rats, and in 1850, Scientific American declared that rats were bring hunted in the sewers of Paris for their skins. But what would people use them for? 

A few years later, a gentleman in Liskeard, Cornwall, somebody with both time and ingenuity made himself a suit, entirely out of 670 rat skins, collected over three and a half years. It included hat, neckerchief, coat, waistcoat, trousers, tippet, gaiters and shoes. There was probably a limited demand for that sort of apparel, and the rat skins would need to be disguised.

While it wasn't mentioned in the article, the heading made it clear that the skins, obtained after their owners were lured by mutton tallow and killed, were destined to become gloves. The purchaser was named as John Warton, a rich leather dresser from London, who planned to buy them all. In short, the reader would understand, these would become kid gloves.

In 1864, the journal described the making of kid gloves, mentioning that egg yolk was used to make the leather supple, and stating bluntly that rat skins were not used. Given that the article failed to mention the important role played in dressing the leather by “pure” (white, dry dog droppings), the article may have been a bit of Victorian spin, perhaps.

Practical people knew back then that everything could be used to make something, though self-important British lordlings, promenading superciliously around the Australian goldfields used to be puzzled at the cry that went up: “Who killed the donkey?”. The common herd knew in their hearts that the only stuff that could be used to make a white top hat was the hide of an ass. Who could deny this delightful piece of folklore, given the match the hat then made with its wearer?

A German author looked at the plant world and declared that of 278 families, there were just 18 species for which no practical use was known. There were 740 plants used in building and another 48 could be used to roof them. Then there were the 615 known to produce poisons, 50 that gave a sort of coffee, 129 yielded a tea and 250 provided weaving fibres. There were 1350 assorted edible fruits, berries, and seeds, 460 vegetables and salads, 31 yielding sugar, rubbery substances came from more than 100, 44 could be used to make paper.

Soap could be made from 47 plants, 140 were a source of tannin, 330 yielded greases and oils, 389 provided resins and gums, 650 produced dyes while “vinous drinks” could be obtained from 200. And that was without counting 103 cereals, 37 onions, 32 arrowroots and 40 species of palm.

He might have failed to mention seaweeds, but the inventors knew about it. Thomas Ghislin (or Ghisling) patented (US Patent 40619) a material that was referred to as a “plastic compound capable of being moulded, embossed and stamped into various articles useful in the ornamental arts, like gutta percha, as it becomes very hard and durable when cold.” The ingredients include members of the Laminaria (kelps), caustic lime, sulfuric acid, India rubber, naphtha, coal-tar, sulfur, resin and alum.

Others were making artificial whalebone for horn, to be used as the ribs of umbrellas, but one clever Briton, unnamed by Scientific American, took out a patent in 1848 for an alpaca umbrella, which would cost more, but be waterproof, look better and resist fading. Perhaps the maker could have joined forces with Mr. A. B. Balcon, who exhibited a clever umbrella lock in Boston in 1847. This did not prevent theft of the locked umbrella, but it did stop an unauthorised appropriator using it.

Sadly, no picture of either of these has come down to us, leaving me with the image of a portly gentleman, trudging through wet streets, bearing aloft an alpaca on a stick.

Some inventors preferred to go for old materials, even rock. Somewhere around 1855, Honoré Baudre completed the first version of his silex piano, also called a flint piano or a lithophone. This used a set of carefully about 40 selected flints that delivered musical notes, set up rather like a xylophone, but on an iron frame. The set included two pieces of schist, which seemed to be the only rock capable of delivering two of the tones in his scale.

He played the instrument in Paris for some twenty years, mainly for the amusement of friends, but he toured his device to London at the end of 1875, when The Times said there but 28 stones which delivered a “some very sweet sounds” as M. Baudre struck them with two other pieces of flint.

Every kind of waste material was valued in the 19th century, and for the most part, the people were far from squeamish about matters relating to bodily functions. This did not extend far enough to encourage Francis Peters and George Clem of Cincinnati to explain the rationale behind their US Patent 90298 of 1869, which was for a privy seat made of four rollers in a square, able to be sat on but designed to make it impossible for anybody to stand on it.

You have to wonder about their manners in those days! Four years earlier, in 1865, German chemist Justus von Liebig went to London to oversee the application of London sewerage to agriculture. His verdict was discouraging, reported Scientific American in July:

Baron Liebig is engaged, through the corporation of London, in a controversy upon the question whether grass will grow upon sea-sand if nutriment be supplied in solution. The corporation proposes to grow Italian rye-grass on-the English sands by impregnating the sand with London sewage -in solution; but Baron Liebig tells the-Lord Mayor that the scheme is not feasible.
— Scientific American 1 July 1865, 3

People worried about the huge waste of nutrients that were running through their sewers and out to sea. Some suggested the earth closet, as a way to preserve the minerals that people were starting to realise crops needed, but nobody took any notice. In 1916, chemist Sir William Tilden wrote that “…practically the whole of the nitrogen from the food of the human population is irrecoverably wasted”.

— Sir William Tilden, Chemical Discovery and Invention in the Twentieth Century, London, 1916, p. 395.) 

In France, scientists had been exploring ways of artificially ageing wine. One favoured method involved covering bottles in horse dung in a cellar and heating it, but the researchers discovered that gentle heating in an oven, with bottles partially filled, before topping them up and re-corking was best. The horse dung could be left to fertilise the vineyards,

Sometimes though, there would be things that we just could not use. In the 1950s, Egon Larsen, science writer and my boyhood hero for his eternal optimism, the man who wanted to gamma-sterilise the washing, was optimistic about the wastes of nuclear plants:

Solid wastes can be disposed of by incineration, closed storage, open burial, or drainage out to sea. Incineration is especially valuable for treating animal carcases and as a means to reduce the volume of the solid waste, but it gives rise to active gases and ash. The discharge of the gases should be clear of windows. Burial may be used on permanently enclosed sites at levels depending on the rainfall so that local groundwater is not contaminated. Even highly radio-active solid wastes can be disposed of safely in the sea provided all relevant factors are kept in mind: movement of the surface water, the breeding and migratory habits of fish, and the possible hazard to seaweed where it is harvested for food, fertilization, or industrial use.
— Egon Larsen, Atomic Energy, Pan Books, 1958, p. 136.

Well, that was probably better than letting people take it into their sheds and playing with it!