June 17, 2020 • 30 mins
The discovery of one of the most hazardous elements on earth helped spark the greatest underdog story in the history of human labor relations.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
We all need a break from the constant cycle to
learn something new, to gain new perspectives. The Great Courses
Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to expand our
knowledge on a variety of subjects or pick up a
new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while
researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball, the rise
of Baseball is America's pastime, History of the Supreme Court,
(00:24):
and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the dots on
several stories from history. Right now, they're giving our listeners
a special limited time offer a free month of unlimited
access to their entire library. Sign up now through our
special U r L go to the Great Courses Plus
dot com slash Aussie. That's the Great Courses Plus dot
(00:45):
com slash o z Y the Great Courses Plus dot
Com slash Assy. Nobody knows for sure how many buckets
of urine Hinnig Brandt kept in his basement. By some accounts,
the seventeenth century German chemist had more than fifty. He
used to collect the urine from his neighbors. Why well, Brandt,
(01:11):
like a lot of great minds of his day, was
in pursuit of the elusive Philosopher's Stone, the legendary substance
capable of turning base metals into gold and ambitious scientists
into very rich men. Maybe it was the color. It
certainly wasn't the smell, but Hinnick Brandt was convinced that
by distilling human urine he could somehow create gold. He
(01:35):
was wrong, of course, but in a vial of boiled
urine he discovered something else in sixteen sixty nine. It
wasn't the Philosopher's Stone, but it was an element that
would prove just as valuable and destructive phosphorus. Welcome to Flashback,
(01:56):
a podcast from Azzie. I'm Sean Braswell. Today, our tale
of Unintended Consequences centers on what would become known as
the devil's element, phosphorus. The compound that Henni brand unleashed
would change history in some unexpected ways. It would kill
tens of thousands of innocent civilians and also helped feed
an entire planet. And phosphorus was also the spark that
(02:19):
lit perhaps the greatest underdog story in the history of
human labor relations. Phosphorus is the most important element on
the planet. This is kenn Ashley the director of the
River's Institute at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and
a global expert on phosphorus. It's really what sustains all
(02:42):
life on the planet. It's both inside is in our
DNA and we needed to having food to lived, and
so it really is the essence of life on Earth.
But like so many good things, phosphorus has a dark side,
and for a while it was that dark side that
dominated the balance of its force on the planet. Let's
(03:07):
go back to hitting Brandt are urine boiling seventeenth century
German chemists for a moment. In his laboratory in Hamburg, Germany,
Brandt tried to make magic and his own fortune. What
Henting brand did, and you certainly wouldn't want to have
a neighbor doing this, is that he would take gallons
and gallons of urine that he collected from around his
local neighborhood, and he boiled it, and he drove off
(03:29):
all the moisture, and then he'd keep heating it and
heating it. After months of experimenting with stagnant urine, Brandt
was eventually rewarded with a newly created substance that glowed
with an eerie green light. And because phosphorus blows in
the dark, you can imagine from an alchemist in the
in the Middle Ages there, if you found something that
glowed in the dark, you thought you were pretty close
(03:49):
to the magic, magic sort of compound. Then that could
transmutate let into gold. But of course that's not what
Brandt had found. White phosphorus was what ning Brand had found,
and uh, and it's not naturally found in nature because
it's spontaneously combust brand streams of gold and wealth did
not pan out with white phosphorus. I think Brand seems
(04:11):
to have had a tough life. He you know, he
discovered it, and then he people found out that he
had it, and they wanted to figure out how to
make it too. Of course, he wanted to keep it
secret because then that would mean he would get more
attention and he'd be able to earn an income. And
as is so often the case, the fame and the
money when not to the first inventor but to the
(04:33):
first salesman. A fellow German alchemist named Daniel Kraft stole
Brand's thunder and became phosphorus is first showman. Craft ended
up doing better with it because then he claimed that
he had discovered and he was going around to various
courts with nobility and showing it at night and sort
of bringing in in the dark room and pulling the
cover off and showing the glow in the dark. Still
(04:55):
no one knew quite what to do with phosphorus. It
did not turn anything into gold. You could only entertain
the European aristocracy so long with glow in the dark urine. Eventually,
phosphorus was extracted from animal bones and later from mining
phosphate rocks, but it really wasn't until the nineteenth century
that phosphorus truly came into its own. That was an
(05:15):
eighty seven when an English chemist named John Walker invented
what was called the lucifer, or what we refer to
today as the match. The tiny splints of wood with
white phosphorus tips soon became a transformative invention. Matches were
absolutely essential before electricity. You didn't have hot water, you
(05:36):
didn't have lighting, you didn't have hot food unless you
had matches. This is Louise Raw, historian and author of
Striking a Light. The Bryanton may match women and their
place in history. Most Victorian homes were lit by candles
or gas lights and heated by coal. Fires and matches
were a huge step forward from previous methods of starting
(05:57):
a fire, and we see them from the eighteen fists
onwards being sold absolutely everywhere. Everywhere that people would gather,
everywhere that smoke us would gather, there'd being perhaps a child,
usually a little boy or a girl with a tray
or a basket of matches, eagerly selling them to people.
But the ones really making the money off the groundbreaking
product were the match manufacturers. And the leading matchmaker in
(06:20):
the UK was a company started by two quaker grocers,
William Bryant and Francis May. Brian and May made in
sort a variety of goods, and they quickly realized that
producing matches was something that could be done very cheaply.
So in eighteen sixty one they came to bow in
East London, very very poor East London was then, and
(06:40):
set up what they called the fair Field Works, this
match production site, and very quickly starts to make lots
of money. The two men quickly went from being Quaker
grocers to Victorian industrial royalty. They became incredibly rich, multimillionaires
really the equivalent so of even possibly billionaires, enormous country
(07:01):
states entertaining the great and goods. Bryant and May's newfound
wealth did not trickle down to their workforce. But in
the heart of London's impoverished East End, a chemical reaction
of sorts was brewing. The potent mixture of stark inequality
and the hazardous effects of white phosphorus was about to
result in the salvation of millions of future workers. The
(07:24):
catalyst for this remarkable reaction hundreds of brave, mostly teenage girls,
willing to take a stand like none that the industrial
world had ever seen. That's next. Do you have an
(07:46):
interesting tale about unintended consequences from history or your own life,
Please share it with us by emailing flashback at ausi
dot com. That's flashback at oz y dot com. History
(08:13):
can feel like a moving target. Sometimes it can be
hard to pin down what happened decades ago, much less centuries.
Often the stories we do pin down and tell for
generations are not the whole story, And to get that
story you have to go beyond the scholars who work
in the ivory towers. Luise raw Again, I called myself
an accidental historian. I kind of fell into historian ng
(08:37):
By accident, I got very involved in the trade union movement,
and then it was through that that I got a
chance to learn what we call labor history, which is,
you know, the history of working people, so it's not
your kings and queens necessarily, it's ordinary working people. As
part of her job, Raw was given the chance to
take a history course. One day she was given an assignment.
(09:00):
It my mom thinking, oh my god, an essay. You know,
I hadn't done anything like that since I was at school,
and I sweated blood over that first esset. Raw decided
to write about the only women covered in the course,
the so called match girls. The best Match Girls strike
was considered to be a colorful footnote in British labor history,
a curiosity that occurred right before the strike of male
(09:21):
doc workers in London that most scholars think was the
true landmark event. In the course, you could in those
days learn the history of working people and just think
that women weren't involved at all, which I've subsequently found
out isn't true, but it was very much told as
a story of working men. Rock wouldn't find a whole
lot of material on the match women to write her essay.
(09:44):
So she went digging and the company Branon May, the
match making company, had ceased to exist in the UK
in night, and they've given all their records to this
little local library. So literally, down in the basement of
this library were the Brighton May records. Were they kind of,
you know, just brought to me and dumped in front
of me all these huge boxes. Raw set to work
(10:06):
and really quickly discovered, to my surprise, that the story
I'd been told really wasn't the way things happened, and
it was actually a much more interesting and far more
important story one traditional historians had not done justice. Raw
wrote her essay and later a critically acclaimed book. Here
(10:27):
I was, this trade unionist and not particularly well educated,
did not expect to be inadvertently kind of challenging the
great historians who had written about this, But there you go.
That's that's how it turned out. The story Louise Raw
uncovered in the basement of the local library was an
(10:48):
epic Dickinsian tale of perseverance and courage in the face
of a corporate giant's appalling treatment of some of its
most vulnerable workers. Mostly they were women and girls, and
they were really famous in the area. The match girls,
they were treated badly and they were very much looked
down on as well. They were as I discovered, something
(11:10):
like a really cool girl gang. They really looked after
each other. They knew that the one thing they had
was strength in numbers, so they really supported one another.
Which it's just as well because the employers didn't. You
could tell how poorly the women were paid just by
looking at them. They were extremely small and pale and
frail looking, and even for East End working class women
(11:33):
who were not you know, through no fault of their own,
were not the healthiest of people. Some of the workers
were girls as young as nine. They were working twelve
hour days from six in the morning to six at night,
standing up the whole time. Most most of the work
was done standing up, so it's really exhausting. Um. What
made matters worse is that Brian's may find them as well,
(11:58):
which was actually illegal under the Factory Acts at the time.
But they find them for the slightest infraction. Really, if
the girls were laughing, or if they were talking or
just generally mucking about a bit, as teenage girls will,
then the foreman would find them. But the workers situation
was even worse than that, something that a crusading activist
and journalists named Annie Besson soon discovered. Annie Besson was
(12:22):
a socialist of a kind. She was for women's right.
Since she was becoming quite a socialist. She interviewed the
women and they told her about their terrible working conditions,
about the fines that they suffered, and also about the
biggest curse I suppose of matchmaking, which was fossy jaw.
Fossy jar was an occupational disease of the jar caused
(12:45):
by exposure to phosphorus white faster us is incredibly toxic
and it was being pumped in the air throughout Brian
and May's match factory. There was no escape. There wasn't
even a separate dining area for workers, so they would
bring in a bit of bread for home, and working
class girls lived on stale bread and tea. That was that.
(13:05):
That was their daily diet, no vegetables, no fruit, and
by the time you got to eat at the phosphorus
particles in the air have settled onto your bread, so
you've got this awful, deadly seasoning that you can't see,
but it's there on your food. The first symptoms of
fazzy jar were too thick and a swollen lower jar,
then your gums, cheeks and jar would develop putrid abscesses.
(13:28):
But the worst thing about it, the most horrendous and
really sad aspect of it, is that your jawbone is
decaying while you're still alive, and women would spit bits
of bone the size of peas apparently out of these abscesses.
It was a terrible situation. The met women endured these
horrors for years. Enter any bescent. So the match women
(13:52):
told any Besson all of this, and she recorded it
in this really hard, hissing, brilliant ascal. It's only short article,
it's only a few columns, but it's called white Slavery
in London, which is a really attention grabbing title. The
article appeared in June. In it, Any Psson did not
(14:12):
just recount the women's hazardous working conditions. She emphasized the
gap between them and the quote monstrous dividends being paid
to Briant and May's shareholders. It did not go over
well with the company. Brian toon May read this article
and they are furious. They've worked really hard on their
pr Brianson May, they're very like a modern company in
(14:34):
that respect, you know, there are no slouches in getting
good publicity and presenting their good side to the public.
So people think Brianton may are quite a nice firm
that are looking after their work as well, and this
is really messing things up for them. The first thing
the company does in response put pressure on the match
women themselves. They try to get them to sign a
(14:56):
paper which is a pre prepared statement say that Annie
Besson has lied, that everything she said is untrue, and
that you know they love working for finding the old
foss jewel is no problem at all, and they're all,
you know, one big happy family and treated marvelously. Remember
these women had no trade union, they had no employment contracts,
(15:16):
and they knew that if they did the slightest thing
wrong they would be fired. But they refused to sign
the paper. The foreman report that they come back to
collect the papers and every single one in every single
workshop on this huge factory site is blank. The women
just won't sign. The first attempt to intimidate the match
(15:37):
women hadn't worked. The next thing that they do is
try to sack one girl, and they make up a
reason for it because they don't want to admit that
they're just doing it because I think she's probably one
of the people who've spoken to Annie Bessent. So they
visibly enforcibly removed one of the women from the factory.
And also the match women had this tremendous solidarity, absolutely
(15:59):
no questions are They stick up for each other. So
when she goes out the door, so do they. They
lay down their tools and they go streaming out of
this factory out on to the fair Field Road, out
onto the Bow Road and they start parading the neighborhoods.
That's right. In the summer, workers, mostly young women and girls,
(16:22):
walked out of Brian and May's match factory in East London.
It was a bold act of defiance. And what I
love about the way they get their message across because
you know, no Facebook, no Twister in those days, so
how do you do it? But they are very clever
and they know that although they're supposed to be powerless,
one thing they do have is numbers. They can make
(16:42):
a lot of noise and they do. They march the
streets of Bow singing very disrespectful songs about their employers
and how terrible their employers are and what they'd like
to do to their employers, which is not nice. The
women marched all over London, including straight through Trafalgar Square,
they saying, quote, We'll hang old Brian on the sour
apple tree, to the theme of Glory, Glory, hallelujah. Observers
(17:06):
started putting their heads out of their home and office
windows to see what the first was about. So people
throw down money, They throw down pennies and farthings, and
the match women catch the money that's failing through the
air in the long aprons that they wear to work,
and that is their first strike funds. The young women
start to get organized. They organized themselves brilliantly into a committee,
(17:29):
had a vote on who was going to represent them
on the strike. Committee went back in put their demands
to Brian and May, who basically told them not interested.
You're all SATs no matter what you do. We're not
listening to you. Bran and May outrage you know here
we are. We're a rich Victorian gentlemen and these wretched
rough set of girls as they called them, these common
(17:49):
working people are trying to tell us what to do.
They were absolutely not having it. Things did not look
good from the match women at the start, When they
first walk out, local papers are saying, well, I mean,
how dare they're They're very lucky to be employed by
these lovely, top hated gentlemen who are so well esteemed
and friends with government and friends of the great and
(18:10):
good and famous, and lucky to have jobs. The tide
really turns quickly, because this is only around two weeks
this strike, and the paper start to become much more sympathetic.
The press started to shame Bryant and May and accusing
their shareholders of profiting off the jars of poor women
and girls. So the share price tumbles and Branton May
(18:31):
are forced into a climb down, incredibly reluctant, with very
very very bad grace. Indeed, But the women, in around
two weeks go back to work triumphant, and the first
thing they demand is the right to form a trade union.
The metal women had not only improved working conditions for themselves,
(18:53):
they had ignited a chain reaction that would do the
same for millions of other workers in the years ahead.
We like to think that histories all great individuals, that
it's kings and queens. We're quite happy with that individual
heroes and heroines. But you know, a sort of rabble
of working class Irish, uneducated girls taking matches into their
own hands, or you know, a bit scary, sounds a
(19:16):
bit revolutionary, so we tend to talk that down. Historians
might not have taken much note of that victory, but
other workers at the time certainly did. Working people are
not stupid, and you would have to be stupid not
to notice a large, large group of workers, four Drew
women were on strike achieving what had never been achieved.
(19:37):
People are gone on strike, but no one had had
a victory against a huge, important, powerful firm like that before,
and another group of famous London laborers, the dark workers
would certainly have noticed. They couldn't have missed it because
they were married to match women. Matchwomen and dockers traditionally
dated each other, knew each other, you know, they were
each other's mothers and sisters. They all were. They were
(19:59):
the same people, essentially the same Eastern people. Three months
after the match women went on strike, more than one
hundred thousand male doc workers at the Port of London
started their own strike. These women are absolutely the inspiration
for this huge strike of hundreds of thousands, which spreads
and spreads all over its practically a general strike, really
(20:20):
a national strike. It spreads all over the country and
to other parts of the world as well. The leaders
of the match Women provided guidance and encouragement to their
male counterparts, so they all follow the match Women's example.
They go out on strike and their demand for coming
back to work as you must, let us form a union.
Hundreds and hundreds of new unions form over the next
(20:42):
few years. Just over a year later, the number of
trade union members in Great Britain had more than doubled
to nearly two million. Thanks to what the match Women began,
Great Britain and other countries now have laws governing health
and safety in the workplace, and from this eventually really
grow the seeds of the Labor Party in Britain, and
(21:03):
I'm very pleased that are lamented. Former leader of the
Labor Party Jeremy Corbyn acknowledged my book and my work
has said in s that the match Women were the
mothers of the modern labor and trajing and movement, and
that really was everything that I'd ever once said. Thanks
(21:24):
in part to Phosphorus, a revolution in labor relations and
workers safety swept over England and the world in the
late nineteenth century, but for millions of others, there would
be no hiding from phosphorus destructive capability. In the twentieth century,
nearly three d years after hinnig Brand discovered phosphorus, his
hometown of Hamburg would suffer an almost unimaginable tragedy at
(21:47):
its hands. We all need a break from the constant
(22:08):
cycle to learn something new, to gain new perspectives. The
Great Courses Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to
expand our knowledge on a variety of subjects or pick
up a new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great Courses
Plus while researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball,
the Rise of Baseball is America's pastime, History of the
(22:29):
Supreme Court, and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the
dots on several stories from history. Right now, they're giving
our listeners a special limited time offer a free month
of unlimited access to their entire library. Sign up now
through our special U r L go to the Great
Courses Plus dot Com slash as. That's the Great Courses
(22:50):
Plus dot Com slash o z y the Great Courses
Plus dot Com slash As. It wasn't long before the
qualities of phosphorus were harnessed for one of human kind's
favorite pastimes, war ken Ashley. Again, bostrous was first adopted
for military use because when the white phosphorus is exposed
(23:13):
to oxygen, it burns and produces a heavy white smoke.
So its original use was was just to produce smoke cover.
You might have seen some of the photographs of World
War One trench warfare where there is smoke covering the
no man's land between the armies. And then it became
used in for tracer shells, so you fired a bullet,
the phosphorus would burn. You can see where the bullets
(23:34):
were going particularly night, and think it very easy to aim,
aim the bullet. And then came phosphorus bombs. They were
first used by the Allies in World War Two. You know,
after Hitler started bombing bombing England, that the retribution from
the from the English was to do these massive raids
with a thousand planes. And they decided to pick a
(23:57):
pick a town and try and try and just moment
repeatedly over several nights. The aim was to destroy an
entire German city and to demoralize its inhabitants. It was
called Operation Gomorrah, and for good reason. Starting in July
and continuing for seven more nights, Allied bombing raids dropped
(24:17):
over two thousand tons of burning phosphorus material on Hamburg,
Germany's second largest city and where hitting Brandt had discovered
the volatile element. At the time, it was the heaviest
assault in the history of aerial warfare. It was like
a volcano going off. The bombers said that he could
see it from from halfway from England. This this huge firestorm.
(24:40):
The asphalt streets of Hamburg literally boiled. The firestorm left
more than thirty five thousand people dead, mostly women and children.
Some were burned alive, some suffocated, others were sucked up
into the air. The upward draft was so was so
much it even it even just it suffocated people even
if they weren't burnt, just because of lack of oxygen,
(25:01):
because the amount of fire going on, the oxygen was combusted,
so it was. It was a pretty brutish, sort of
crude attempt to break the will of the people by
just destroying everything. A year and a half later, the
Allies firebombed another German city, Dresden, the day after the
Audi had strike at Dresden. The seventeen bombers of the
eighth United States Air Force gave us a here repeat
(25:22):
for BOMs. Dresden is a heap of ruins. It has
been smashed to atoms. One of the unfortunate souls in
Dresden during the fire bombing was the American writer Kurt Vonnegut.
After the bombing, as Vonnegut put it in his classic
novel slaughter House five, Dresden was like the moon then
quote one thing was clear. Absolutely everybody in the city
(25:44):
was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were,
and that anybody moved in it represented a flaw in
the design. We've about the destructive capacity of phosphorus, but
the element, in the form of phosphates plays a hugely
(26:05):
productive role for humanity as well. Three quarters of the
planet is kept alive today because because the phosphorus that
grows the food that keeps us alive has been dug
under the ground. It is thanks to phosphorus based fertilizers
that we can produce food at the scale we do today.
But like so many commodities found largely in the ground,
it is a scarce resource. So there's a real shortage
(26:28):
of phosphorus, and geopolitically, it's I think it's going to
become deep flashpoint of the twenty one century because so
few people, so few countries control most of the phosphorus
and the planet. Just five countries Morocco, China, the US, Jordan,
and South Africa control of the world's remaining phosphate rock reserves,
and there's no good replacement for phosphorus once we run out.
(26:51):
Every person, an animal on the planet depends on phosphorus,
and there are roughly ten animals for every person. In reality,
there's around seven d any billion people equivalents on the
planet right now, burning through fosters at a frightening rate.
And anything keeps me up, wakes me up at night.
It's uh, it's a dual threat of climate change and
a global foster's shortage that leads to mass starvation and
(27:14):
the legs we've never seen before. Researchers are experimenting with
yes urine to help develop new fertilizers to address this
phosphate shortage, but as of yet, there has not been
a breakthrough to rival hinting brands over three centuries ago.
So what did we learned today? First, there's a chance,
(27:35):
a slight chance, that that crazy neighbor of yours collecting
urine in his basement is actually onto something. Second, any
one of us can become an accidental historian like Louise Raw.
It just requires some persistence and a willingness to challenge
what you've always been told. And finally, it takes an
awful lot of nerve to take on a corporate giant
as a lowly factory worker, but it certainly doesn't require
(27:59):
any balls. Flashback is written and hosted by me Sean Braswell,
senior writer and executive producer at Ozzie. It was produced
by Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran, Orio Digiza, and Shannon Williamson.
Chris Hoff engineered our show special thanks to the crew
(28:20):
at I Heart Radio podcast Networks, especially Sophie Lichterman and
Jack O'Brien. Make sure to subscribe to Flashback on the
I Heart Radio app or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Flashback is the latest podcast from Azzi, a modern media
company producing original TV series, festivals, news and podcasts for
curious people. Ozzie's unique storytelling focuses on the new and
(28:42):
the next, whether that's forward, looking news and features, bold
new perspectives on TV, or brand new ways of looking
at history today. In my lecture notes a couple of
interesting and somewhat disturbing facts which connect phosphorus to some
of the topics we covered in earlier episodes of Flashback. First,
(29:05):
did you know that, well many American states were banning
abortion and contraception in the late nineteenth century, desperate Swedish
women were resorting to a very dangerous method of abortion.
They would swallow the heads of phosphorus matches and the
hopes of inducing a miscarriage. And Second, perhaps the most
insidious use of phosphorus in war has been its use
in chemical weapons. In fact, by nineteen forty four, Adolph
(29:29):
Hitler and the Nazis had developed a powerful phosphorus based
nerve gas for which there was no defense, and as
things went south in the war, Hitler's generals urged him
to make use of his secret weapon, but for some reason,
the fewer never played that ace up his sleeve to
(29:53):
dive deeper. Head to Assie dot com slash flashback. That's
oz Y dot com slash Flashback. There you can find
my other or lecture notes from today's episode featuring extended interviews,
links to further reading and more information on the unintended
consequences of elements like phosphorus, as well as links to
other hidden stories from history uncovered by me and other
reporters at Aussie
We all need a break from the constant cycle to
learn something new, to gain new perspectives. The Great Courses
Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to expand our
knowledge on a variety of subjects or pick up a
new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while
researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball, the rise
of Baseball is America's pastime, History of the Supreme Court,
(00:24):
and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the dots on
several stories from history. Right now, they're giving our listeners
a special limited time offer a free month of unlimited
access to their entire library. Sign up now through our
special U r L go to the Great Courses Plus
dot com slash Aussie. That's the Great Courses Plus dot
(00:45):
com slash o z Y the Great Courses Plus dot
Com slash Assy. Nobody knows for sure how many buckets
of urine Hinnig Brandt kept in his basement. By some accounts,
the seventeenth century German chemist had more than fifty. He
used to collect the urine from his neighbors. Why well, Brandt,
(01:11):
like a lot of great minds of his day, was
in pursuit of the elusive Philosopher's Stone, the legendary substance
capable of turning base metals into gold and ambitious scientists
into very rich men. Maybe it was the color. It
certainly wasn't the smell, but Hinnick Brandt was convinced that
by distilling human urine he could somehow create gold. He
(01:35):
was wrong, of course, but in a vial of boiled
urine he discovered something else in sixteen sixty nine. It
wasn't the Philosopher's Stone, but it was an element that
would prove just as valuable and destructive phosphorus. Welcome to Flashback,
(01:56):
a podcast from Azzie. I'm Sean Braswell. Today, our tale
of Unintended Consequences centers on what would become known as
the devil's element, phosphorus. The compound that Henni brand unleashed
would change history in some unexpected ways. It would kill
tens of thousands of innocent civilians and also helped feed
an entire planet. And phosphorus was also the spark that
(02:19):
lit perhaps the greatest underdog story in the history of
human labor relations. Phosphorus is the most important element on
the planet. This is kenn Ashley the director of the
River's Institute at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and
a global expert on phosphorus. It's really what sustains all
(02:42):
life on the planet. It's both inside is in our
DNA and we needed to having food to lived, and
so it really is the essence of life on Earth.
But like so many good things, phosphorus has a dark side,
and for a while it was that dark side that
dominated the balance of its force on the planet. Let's
(03:07):
go back to hitting Brandt are urine boiling seventeenth century
German chemists for a moment. In his laboratory in Hamburg, Germany,
Brandt tried to make magic and his own fortune. What
Henting brand did, and you certainly wouldn't want to have
a neighbor doing this, is that he would take gallons
and gallons of urine that he collected from around his
local neighborhood, and he boiled it, and he drove off
(03:29):
all the moisture, and then he'd keep heating it and
heating it. After months of experimenting with stagnant urine, Brandt
was eventually rewarded with a newly created substance that glowed
with an eerie green light. And because phosphorus blows in
the dark, you can imagine from an alchemist in the
in the Middle Ages there, if you found something that
glowed in the dark, you thought you were pretty close
(03:49):
to the magic, magic sort of compound. Then that could
transmutate let into gold. But of course that's not what
Brandt had found. White phosphorus was what ning Brand had found,
and uh, and it's not naturally found in nature because
it's spontaneously combust brand streams of gold and wealth did
not pan out with white phosphorus. I think Brand seems
(04:11):
to have had a tough life. He you know, he
discovered it, and then he people found out that he
had it, and they wanted to figure out how to
make it too. Of course, he wanted to keep it
secret because then that would mean he would get more
attention and he'd be able to earn an income. And
as is so often the case, the fame and the
money when not to the first inventor but to the
(04:33):
first salesman. A fellow German alchemist named Daniel Kraft stole
Brand's thunder and became phosphorus is first showman. Craft ended
up doing better with it because then he claimed that
he had discovered and he was going around to various
courts with nobility and showing it at night and sort
of bringing in in the dark room and pulling the
cover off and showing the glow in the dark. Still
(04:55):
no one knew quite what to do with phosphorus. It
did not turn anything into gold. You could only entertain
the European aristocracy so long with glow in the dark urine. Eventually,
phosphorus was extracted from animal bones and later from mining
phosphate rocks, but it really wasn't until the nineteenth century
that phosphorus truly came into its own. That was an
(05:15):
eighty seven when an English chemist named John Walker invented
what was called the lucifer, or what we refer to
today as the match. The tiny splints of wood with
white phosphorus tips soon became a transformative invention. Matches were
absolutely essential before electricity. You didn't have hot water, you
(05:36):
didn't have lighting, you didn't have hot food unless you
had matches. This is Louise Raw, historian and author of
Striking a Light. The Bryanton may match women and their
place in history. Most Victorian homes were lit by candles
or gas lights and heated by coal. Fires and matches
were a huge step forward from previous methods of starting
(05:57):
a fire, and we see them from the eighteen fists
onwards being sold absolutely everywhere. Everywhere that people would gather,
everywhere that smoke us would gather, there'd being perhaps a child,
usually a little boy or a girl with a tray
or a basket of matches, eagerly selling them to people.
But the ones really making the money off the groundbreaking
product were the match manufacturers. And the leading matchmaker in
(06:20):
the UK was a company started by two quaker grocers,
William Bryant and Francis May. Brian and May made in
sort a variety of goods, and they quickly realized that
producing matches was something that could be done very cheaply.
So in eighteen sixty one they came to bow in
East London, very very poor East London was then, and
(06:40):
set up what they called the fair Field Works, this
match production site, and very quickly starts to make lots
of money. The two men quickly went from being Quaker
grocers to Victorian industrial royalty. They became incredibly rich, multimillionaires
really the equivalent so of even possibly billionaires, enormous country
(07:01):
states entertaining the great and goods. Bryant and May's newfound
wealth did not trickle down to their workforce. But in
the heart of London's impoverished East End, a chemical reaction
of sorts was brewing. The potent mixture of stark inequality
and the hazardous effects of white phosphorus was about to
result in the salvation of millions of future workers. The
(07:24):
catalyst for this remarkable reaction hundreds of brave, mostly teenage girls,
willing to take a stand like none that the industrial
world had ever seen. That's next. Do you have an
(07:46):
interesting tale about unintended consequences from history or your own life,
Please share it with us by emailing flashback at ausi
dot com. That's flashback at oz y dot com. History
(08:13):
can feel like a moving target. Sometimes it can be
hard to pin down what happened decades ago, much less centuries.
Often the stories we do pin down and tell for
generations are not the whole story, And to get that
story you have to go beyond the scholars who work
in the ivory towers. Luise raw Again, I called myself
an accidental historian. I kind of fell into historian ng
(08:37):
By accident, I got very involved in the trade union movement,
and then it was through that that I got a
chance to learn what we call labor history, which is,
you know, the history of working people, so it's not
your kings and queens necessarily, it's ordinary working people. As
part of her job, Raw was given the chance to
take a history course. One day she was given an assignment.
(09:00):
It my mom thinking, oh my god, an essay. You know,
I hadn't done anything like that since I was at school,
and I sweated blood over that first esset. Raw decided
to write about the only women covered in the course,
the so called match girls. The best Match Girls strike
was considered to be a colorful footnote in British labor history,
a curiosity that occurred right before the strike of male
(09:21):
doc workers in London that most scholars think was the
true landmark event. In the course, you could in those
days learn the history of working people and just think
that women weren't involved at all, which I've subsequently found
out isn't true, but it was very much told as
a story of working men. Rock wouldn't find a whole
lot of material on the match women to write her essay.
(09:44):
So she went digging and the company Branon May, the
match making company, had ceased to exist in the UK
in night, and they've given all their records to this
little local library. So literally, down in the basement of
this library were the Brighton May records. Were they kind of,
you know, just brought to me and dumped in front
of me all these huge boxes. Raw set to work
(10:06):
and really quickly discovered, to my surprise, that the story
I'd been told really wasn't the way things happened, and
it was actually a much more interesting and far more
important story one traditional historians had not done justice. Raw
wrote her essay and later a critically acclaimed book. Here
(10:27):
I was, this trade unionist and not particularly well educated,
did not expect to be inadvertently kind of challenging the
great historians who had written about this, But there you go.
That's that's how it turned out. The story Louise Raw
uncovered in the basement of the local library was an
(10:48):
epic Dickinsian tale of perseverance and courage in the face
of a corporate giant's appalling treatment of some of its
most vulnerable workers. Mostly they were women and girls, and
they were really famous in the area. The match girls,
they were treated badly and they were very much looked
down on as well. They were as I discovered, something
(11:10):
like a really cool girl gang. They really looked after
each other. They knew that the one thing they had
was strength in numbers, so they really supported one another.
Which it's just as well because the employers didn't. You
could tell how poorly the women were paid just by
looking at them. They were extremely small and pale and
frail looking, and even for East End working class women
(11:33):
who were not you know, through no fault of their own,
were not the healthiest of people. Some of the workers
were girls as young as nine. They were working twelve
hour days from six in the morning to six at night,
standing up the whole time. Most most of the work
was done standing up, so it's really exhausting. Um. What
made matters worse is that Brian's may find them as well,
(11:58):
which was actually illegal under the Factory Acts at the time.
But they find them for the slightest infraction. Really, if
the girls were laughing, or if they were talking or
just generally mucking about a bit, as teenage girls will,
then the foreman would find them. But the workers situation
was even worse than that, something that a crusading activist
and journalists named Annie Besson soon discovered. Annie Besson was
(12:22):
a socialist of a kind. She was for women's right.
Since she was becoming quite a socialist. She interviewed the
women and they told her about their terrible working conditions,
about the fines that they suffered, and also about the
biggest curse I suppose of matchmaking, which was fossy jaw.
Fossy jar was an occupational disease of the jar caused
(12:45):
by exposure to phosphorus white faster us is incredibly toxic
and it was being pumped in the air throughout Brian
and May's match factory. There was no escape. There wasn't
even a separate dining area for workers, so they would
bring in a bit of bread for home, and working
class girls lived on stale bread and tea. That was that.
(13:05):
That was their daily diet, no vegetables, no fruit, and
by the time you got to eat at the phosphorus
particles in the air have settled onto your bread, so
you've got this awful, deadly seasoning that you can't see,
but it's there on your food. The first symptoms of
fazzy jar were too thick and a swollen lower jar,
then your gums, cheeks and jar would develop putrid abscesses.
(13:28):
But the worst thing about it, the most horrendous and
really sad aspect of it, is that your jawbone is
decaying while you're still alive, and women would spit bits
of bone the size of peas apparently out of these abscesses.
It was a terrible situation. The met women endured these
horrors for years. Enter any bescent. So the match women
(13:52):
told any Besson all of this, and she recorded it
in this really hard, hissing, brilliant ascal. It's only short article,
it's only a few columns, but it's called white Slavery
in London, which is a really attention grabbing title. The
article appeared in June. In it, Any Psson did not
(14:12):
just recount the women's hazardous working conditions. She emphasized the
gap between them and the quote monstrous dividends being paid
to Briant and May's shareholders. It did not go over
well with the company. Brian toon May read this article
and they are furious. They've worked really hard on their
pr Brianson May, they're very like a modern company in
(14:34):
that respect, you know, there are no slouches in getting
good publicity and presenting their good side to the public.
So people think Brianton may are quite a nice firm
that are looking after their work as well, and this
is really messing things up for them. The first thing
the company does in response put pressure on the match
women themselves. They try to get them to sign a
(14:56):
paper which is a pre prepared statement say that Annie
Besson has lied, that everything she said is untrue, and
that you know they love working for finding the old
foss jewel is no problem at all, and they're all,
you know, one big happy family and treated marvelously. Remember
these women had no trade union, they had no employment contracts,
(15:16):
and they knew that if they did the slightest thing
wrong they would be fired. But they refused to sign
the paper. The foreman report that they come back to
collect the papers and every single one in every single
workshop on this huge factory site is blank. The women
just won't sign. The first attempt to intimidate the match
(15:37):
women hadn't worked. The next thing that they do is
try to sack one girl, and they make up a
reason for it because they don't want to admit that
they're just doing it because I think she's probably one
of the people who've spoken to Annie Bessent. So they
visibly enforcibly removed one of the women from the factory.
And also the match women had this tremendous solidarity, absolutely
(15:59):
no questions are They stick up for each other. So
when she goes out the door, so do they. They
lay down their tools and they go streaming out of
this factory out on to the fair Field Road, out
onto the Bow Road and they start parading the neighborhoods.
That's right. In the summer, workers, mostly young women and girls,
(16:22):
walked out of Brian and May's match factory in East London.
It was a bold act of defiance. And what I
love about the way they get their message across because
you know, no Facebook, no Twister in those days, so
how do you do it? But they are very clever
and they know that although they're supposed to be powerless,
one thing they do have is numbers. They can make
(16:42):
a lot of noise and they do. They march the
streets of Bow singing very disrespectful songs about their employers
and how terrible their employers are and what they'd like
to do to their employers, which is not nice. The
women marched all over London, including straight through Trafalgar Square,
they saying, quote, We'll hang old Brian on the sour
apple tree, to the theme of Glory, Glory, hallelujah. Observers
(17:06):
started putting their heads out of their home and office
windows to see what the first was about. So people
throw down money, They throw down pennies and farthings, and
the match women catch the money that's failing through the
air in the long aprons that they wear to work,
and that is their first strike funds. The young women
start to get organized. They organized themselves brilliantly into a committee,
(17:29):
had a vote on who was going to represent them
on the strike. Committee went back in put their demands
to Brian and May, who basically told them not interested.
You're all SATs no matter what you do. We're not
listening to you. Bran and May outrage you know here
we are. We're a rich Victorian gentlemen and these wretched
rough set of girls as they called them, these common
(17:49):
working people are trying to tell us what to do.
They were absolutely not having it. Things did not look
good from the match women at the start, When they
first walk out, local papers are saying, well, I mean,
how dare they're They're very lucky to be employed by
these lovely, top hated gentlemen who are so well esteemed
and friends with government and friends of the great and
(18:10):
good and famous, and lucky to have jobs. The tide
really turns quickly, because this is only around two weeks
this strike, and the paper start to become much more sympathetic.
The press started to shame Bryant and May and accusing
their shareholders of profiting off the jars of poor women
and girls. So the share price tumbles and Branton May
(18:31):
are forced into a climb down, incredibly reluctant, with very
very very bad grace. Indeed, But the women, in around
two weeks go back to work triumphant, and the first
thing they demand is the right to form a trade union.
The metal women had not only improved working conditions for themselves,
(18:53):
they had ignited a chain reaction that would do the
same for millions of other workers in the years ahead.
We like to think that histories all great individuals, that
it's kings and queens. We're quite happy with that individual
heroes and heroines. But you know, a sort of rabble
of working class Irish, uneducated girls taking matches into their
own hands, or you know, a bit scary, sounds a
(19:16):
bit revolutionary, so we tend to talk that down. Historians
might not have taken much note of that victory, but
other workers at the time certainly did. Working people are
not stupid, and you would have to be stupid not
to notice a large, large group of workers, four Drew
women were on strike achieving what had never been achieved.
(19:37):
People are gone on strike, but no one had had
a victory against a huge, important, powerful firm like that before,
and another group of famous London laborers, the dark workers
would certainly have noticed. They couldn't have missed it because
they were married to match women. Matchwomen and dockers traditionally
dated each other, knew each other, you know, they were
each other's mothers and sisters. They all were. They were
(19:59):
the same people, essentially the same Eastern people. Three months
after the match women went on strike, more than one
hundred thousand male doc workers at the Port of London
started their own strike. These women are absolutely the inspiration
for this huge strike of hundreds of thousands, which spreads
and spreads all over its practically a general strike, really
(20:20):
a national strike. It spreads all over the country and
to other parts of the world as well. The leaders
of the match Women provided guidance and encouragement to their
male counterparts, so they all follow the match Women's example.
They go out on strike and their demand for coming
back to work as you must, let us form a union.
Hundreds and hundreds of new unions form over the next
(20:42):
few years. Just over a year later, the number of
trade union members in Great Britain had more than doubled
to nearly two million. Thanks to what the match Women began,
Great Britain and other countries now have laws governing health
and safety in the workplace, and from this eventually really
grow the seeds of the Labor Party in Britain, and
(21:03):
I'm very pleased that are lamented. Former leader of the
Labor Party Jeremy Corbyn acknowledged my book and my work
has said in s that the match Women were the
mothers of the modern labor and trajing and movement, and
that really was everything that I'd ever once said. Thanks
(21:24):
in part to Phosphorus, a revolution in labor relations and
workers safety swept over England and the world in the
late nineteenth century, but for millions of others, there would
be no hiding from phosphorus destructive capability. In the twentieth century,
nearly three d years after hinnig Brand discovered phosphorus, his
hometown of Hamburg would suffer an almost unimaginable tragedy at
(21:47):
its hands. We all need a break from the constant
(22:08):
cycle to learn something new, to gain new perspectives. The
Great Courses Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to
expand our knowledge on a variety of subjects or pick
up a new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great Courses
Plus while researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball,
the Rise of Baseball is America's pastime, History of the
(22:29):
Supreme Court, and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the
dots on several stories from history. Right now, they're giving
our listeners a special limited time offer a free month
of unlimited access to their entire library. Sign up now
through our special U r L go to the Great
Courses Plus dot Com slash as. That's the Great Courses
(22:50):
Plus dot Com slash o z y the Great Courses
Plus dot Com slash As. It wasn't long before the
qualities of phosphorus were harnessed for one of human kind's
favorite pastimes, war ken Ashley. Again, bostrous was first adopted
for military use because when the white phosphorus is exposed
(23:13):
to oxygen, it burns and produces a heavy white smoke.
So its original use was was just to produce smoke cover.
You might have seen some of the photographs of World
War One trench warfare where there is smoke covering the
no man's land between the armies. And then it became
used in for tracer shells, so you fired a bullet,
the phosphorus would burn. You can see where the bullets
(23:34):
were going particularly night, and think it very easy to aim,
aim the bullet. And then came phosphorus bombs. They were
first used by the Allies in World War Two. You know,
after Hitler started bombing bombing England, that the retribution from
the from the English was to do these massive raids
with a thousand planes. And they decided to pick a
(23:57):
pick a town and try and try and just moment
repeatedly over several nights. The aim was to destroy an
entire German city and to demoralize its inhabitants. It was
called Operation Gomorrah, and for good reason. Starting in July
and continuing for seven more nights, Allied bombing raids dropped
(24:17):
over two thousand tons of burning phosphorus material on Hamburg,
Germany's second largest city and where hitting Brandt had discovered
the volatile element. At the time, it was the heaviest
assault in the history of aerial warfare. It was like
a volcano going off. The bombers said that he could
see it from from halfway from England. This this huge firestorm.
(24:40):
The asphalt streets of Hamburg literally boiled. The firestorm left
more than thirty five thousand people dead, mostly women and children.
Some were burned alive, some suffocated, others were sucked up
into the air. The upward draft was so was so
much it even it even just it suffocated people even
if they weren't burnt, just because of lack of oxygen,
(25:01):
because the amount of fire going on, the oxygen was combusted,
so it was. It was a pretty brutish, sort of
crude attempt to break the will of the people by
just destroying everything. A year and a half later, the
Allies firebombed another German city, Dresden, the day after the
Audi had strike at Dresden. The seventeen bombers of the
eighth United States Air Force gave us a here repeat
(25:22):
for BOMs. Dresden is a heap of ruins. It has
been smashed to atoms. One of the unfortunate souls in
Dresden during the fire bombing was the American writer Kurt Vonnegut.
After the bombing, as Vonnegut put it in his classic
novel slaughter House five, Dresden was like the moon then
quote one thing was clear. Absolutely everybody in the city
(25:44):
was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were,
and that anybody moved in it represented a flaw in
the design. We've about the destructive capacity of phosphorus, but
the element, in the form of phosphates plays a hugely
(26:05):
productive role for humanity as well. Three quarters of the
planet is kept alive today because because the phosphorus that
grows the food that keeps us alive has been dug
under the ground. It is thanks to phosphorus based fertilizers
that we can produce food at the scale we do today.
But like so many commodities found largely in the ground,
it is a scarce resource. So there's a real shortage
(26:28):
of phosphorus, and geopolitically, it's I think it's going to
become deep flashpoint of the twenty one century because so
few people, so few countries control most of the phosphorus
and the planet. Just five countries Morocco, China, the US, Jordan,
and South Africa control of the world's remaining phosphate rock reserves,
and there's no good replacement for phosphorus once we run out.
(26:51):
Every person, an animal on the planet depends on phosphorus,
and there are roughly ten animals for every person. In reality,
there's around seven d any billion people equivalents on the
planet right now, burning through fosters at a frightening rate.
And anything keeps me up, wakes me up at night.
It's uh, it's a dual threat of climate change and
a global foster's shortage that leads to mass starvation and
(27:14):
the legs we've never seen before. Researchers are experimenting with
yes urine to help develop new fertilizers to address this
phosphate shortage, but as of yet, there has not been
a breakthrough to rival hinting brands over three centuries ago.
So what did we learned today? First, there's a chance,
(27:35):
a slight chance, that that crazy neighbor of yours collecting
urine in his basement is actually onto something. Second, any
one of us can become an accidental historian like Louise Raw.
It just requires some persistence and a willingness to challenge
what you've always been told. And finally, it takes an
awful lot of nerve to take on a corporate giant
as a lowly factory worker, but it certainly doesn't require
(27:59):
any balls. Flashback is written and hosted by me Sean Braswell,
senior writer and executive producer at Ozzie. It was produced
by Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran, Orio Digiza, and Shannon Williamson.
Chris Hoff engineered our show special thanks to the crew
(28:20):
at I Heart Radio podcast Networks, especially Sophie Lichterman and
Jack O'Brien. Make sure to subscribe to Flashback on the
I Heart Radio app or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Flashback is the latest podcast from Azzi, a modern media
company producing original TV series, festivals, news and podcasts for
curious people. Ozzie's unique storytelling focuses on the new and
(28:42):
the next, whether that's forward, looking news and features, bold
new perspectives on TV, or brand new ways of looking
at history today. In my lecture notes a couple of
interesting and somewhat disturbing facts which connect phosphorus to some
of the topics we covered in earlier episodes of Flashback. First,
(29:05):
did you know that, well many American states were banning
abortion and contraception in the late nineteenth century, desperate Swedish
women were resorting to a very dangerous method of abortion.
They would swallow the heads of phosphorus matches and the
hopes of inducing a miscarriage. And Second, perhaps the most
insidious use of phosphorus in war has been its use
in chemical weapons. In fact, by nineteen forty four, Adolph
(29:29):
Hitler and the Nazis had developed a powerful phosphorus based
nerve gas for which there was no defense, and as
things went south in the war, Hitler's generals urged him
to make use of his secret weapon, but for some reason,
the fewer never played that ace up his sleeve to
(29:53):
dive deeper. Head to Assie dot com slash flashback. That's
oz Y dot com slash Flashback. There you can find
my other or lecture notes from today's episode featuring extended interviews,
links to further reading and more information on the unintended
consequences of elements like phosphorus, as well as links to
other hidden stories from history uncovered by me and other
reporters at Aussie
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