Tea at Trianon: Fake Silk

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Fake Silk

From Undark:

There could have been no more knowledgeable or better-placed recipient of such an urgent appeal. Alice Hamilton was a leading U.S. authority on the toxicity of carbon disulfide, the compound that appeared to be causing the rayon illnesses. Back in 1915, as a medical expert working with the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, she had studied its use in the rubber industry — though even then it was falling out of favor, in part because of its well-recognized dangers.

Hamilton had inspected nine rubber factories for the bureau. Of 16 cases of mental illness she tallied, one worker had been briefly committed to an insane asylum and several others had experienced other nervous system complaints. One man had worked for only a month before he began to show signs of derangement: “He was Hungarian and spoke no English, and the foreman did not recognize his condition until he became very much excited and unmanageable. He was sent home, and his wife reported that he acted so strangely and was so uncontrollable that she took him to a doctor. When the latter asked him about his work he told a rambling tale of lumbering down a river, and could not be convinced that he had ever worked in a rubber factory.”

Carbon disulfide was not the only toxic substance Hamilton encountered. Aniline, a compound added to rubber to accelerate the manufacturing process called vulcanization, was of special concern because it poisons the blood, giving it a bluish tinge and causing acute oxygen deprivation. In one rubber plant in Akron, Ohio, the problem was so endemic that its workers were called the “blue boys.”

Then there was thiocarbanilide, a vulcanizing accelerant produced by combining aniline with carbon disulfide in a kind of toxic perfect storm. In 1919, during a visit to a major producer of the compound in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, Hamilton noted symptoms that suggested both aniline and carbon disulfide poisoning: “They have had a man suffer from intense headache and nervousness so that he could not sleep.”

Now, in 1933, carbon disulfide seemed to be wreaking havoc among workers in the relatively new industry that was transforming plant fiber into the wildly popular artificial silk called viscose rayon. And while rubber making could use other chemicals in the vulcanization process, viscose rayon absolutely depended on carbon disulfide. (Read more.)