December 27, 2023 • 13 mins
Can you imagine a color so alluring that even though you know it’s toxic you’d still use it to your heart’s content? The Victorians certainly could.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Dave. Ce's here and Spirit. Jerry's here
in Spirit, And let's go. Let's start talking about a color,
a really interesting color.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yeah, this is the first of a two part series.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
On color, an accidental series, really, that's right.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
And this one we're gonna be talking about Shields green
s E H E E L E or Schloss green.
Schloss is pretty obviously spelled.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I think, do you know, is that just another name
for shield or something, or was that Carl Wilhelm Shield's
hotel name? Like, how did it come to be Schloss
as well?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Oh, I don't know. I thought you knew.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Actually, well I spilled the beans, Chuck. It is named
after Carl Wilhelm Shiel, who was the guy who discovered it,
so it's appropriate that it would be named after him.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
That's right. He was a German Swedish chemist, a pharmaceutical chemist.
And here's the deal. He created this amazing kind of
accidentally created this amazing shade of green that kind of
took the world by storm. But the big problem with
it is that it killed people. Yeah, it is a
(01:21):
big problem and it killed that's not funny. I laughed
because the way I said it.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Well, it happened a long time ago, so you can
laugh now. But it killed a lot of people in
some really horrible ways. I was just kidding about laughing
at misfortune. That's appropriately old anyway.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Well, tragedy is our comedy is tragedy plus time. Right.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Oh man, that's great. You should you should market that.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yeah, I just made it up.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
So yeah, it was a terribly toxic color. Paris Review
wrote a really interesting article on it, and in it
they called shields green blisteringly toxic. Yeah, and the thing
that was toxic about it was arsenic, as we'll see.
But Carl Wilhelm Shiel, he came up with it supposedly
almost accidentally, according to Victoria Finley, who's a historian who
(02:08):
wrote a book called The Brilliant History of Color and Art.
God blessed Victoria Finley for not using a colon, but
she said it was almost accidental. I don't know what
he was doing. But he heated some sodium carbonate, he
added some arsinious oxide, gave it a good stir, and
(02:30):
then he added some copper sulfate, and when that happened,
he found that he had a really, really brilliant green.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
That's right, it was brilliant. But he knew that it
was toxic, and about a year before it was released
to the public, he, as legend goes, wrote to a
friend of his and said, Hey, I'm kind of worried
about this stuff being toxic. And apparently it didn't matter,
because people went nuts for the stuff. Arsenic had been
(02:58):
around for a long time. People knew it was poisonous
because it was a great murder poison for many, many years,
because it has fairly unspecific symptoms as far as poisoning
people goes. So up until eighteen thirty when the Marsh
test was invented by James Marsh, which basically roots out arsenic,
(03:20):
there was you know, it was a pretty good way
to kill somebody.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Yeah, like you said, I mean you could attribute the
the symptoms of acute arsenic poisoning to a lot of things.
You've got vomiting, abdominant pain, diarrhea, I mean, a lot
over things can do that. Sure, what are you drinking arsenic?
And then later on you've got numbnessing, tingling of the extremities.
You could have been like I've been sitting too long,
(03:45):
maybe muscle cramping and then you die. You go curpplots.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
That's right, And that's acute poisoning. The long term exposure
and we're talking you know, over the order of you know,
three to five years kind of thing. It can also
be really bad. And usually find that in the skin,
like you might have lesions, the color of your skin
might change. Apparently, you can get very patchy, like hard
(04:10):
patches on your feet and your palms, like the bottoms
of your feet. Yeah, and it can give you cancer.
It's you know, it's a known carcinogen. Now, I don't
think it was at the time. I think they just
thought this is a heck of a good poison.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, that's the thing. Even though I'm not sure if
it's clear that Sheiel spilled the beans himself, but somebody
did because it was common knowledge that Siel's green was
toxic with arsenic and yet as we'll see, people used
it all the time. It took off like gangbusters basically
the moment it was available as a pigment. And it's
(04:44):
not because the people of the age were dumb or
didn't care about dying. In their experience, arsenic was kind
of hit or miss. Some people it seemed to poison
very acutely. Other people seem to be fine as far
as a cute poisoning goes. And there wasn't an a
awareness yet of long term exposure poisoning exactly. And what's
(05:05):
ironic is it turns out it seems to have been
Shields Green that introduced the Victorian public to the idea
that you could suffer really horrible consequences from long term
exposure to arsenic, even though along the way you don't
seem like you have acute poisoning exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Uh, maybe we should take our break here, maybe, And
we've kind of hinted around about how this stuff took off.
We'll talk more about that right after this.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Jo so ask you should know.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
So we promised talk of Shields Green really take the
world by storm, and boy did it. It was in
all kinds of clothing. I mean, they went nuts worth
because it it was like this natural green that they
had never seen before, no one had ever been able
to replicate, like this really gardeny vegetable green. Yeah, and
(06:18):
so they went nuts worth. It was in soap, It
was like in stuff they ate. It was in beauty products,
it was on stamps that you know, posted stamps that
you licked like Costanza. What else. It was on wallpapers,
it was in toys, like children's toys.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
On behalf of all the pedants out there. I want
to point out that she wasn't a Costanza yet she
died licking the envelopes that were going out as a
wedding invitation. So she wasn't a Costanza yet never made
it to Costanza. You think someone would have emailed that totally.
I can name, like at least a handful of people
by name who would.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Have right, You're probably right. So again, it's taking the
world by storm. It's in everything, and especially in sort
of depressing smoggy Revolution Victorian London. All of a sudden
they had this brilliant green all around and they love
(07:16):
the stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah, because, like you said, the industrial Revolution had already
happened and its full smoggy effects were being felt, and
people had moved to the city. But yet they were
not so far removed from the country that they had
a real affinity and fondness for country rural life. Right,
So all of a sudden there's this green here that
again I got to go to the Paris Review because
they this article he wrote out. It was so great.
(07:39):
They said that it was not too yellow, wasn't too teal.
It was a middle green, and it had full saturation.
It was very vibrant, because up till then, the greens
that they'd come up with, I think that were based
on copper, they were not vibrant. It was green, but
it was a kind of a dumpy green. This was
suddenly like a green and everybody just loved it. And
(08:00):
like you said, they used it in every way they
possibly could.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Yeah, Like when they went to Sherwin Williams, they're like,
what kind of greens you got, and they're like, they're
all dumpy.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yeah, don't you have that schloss green? You mean sheields green?
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah, exactly. So reports all of a sudden, after you know,
this becomes the color of the season, start to roll
in a little bit. Children were quote wasting away in
their green rooms. People these women that wore these dresses
were falling ill. Apparently there were these they would wear
(08:34):
them in these elaborate hats that color green. And there
was a doctor, doctor A. W. Hoffman, who was an
analytical chemist that did some testing and he found that
the average head piece with schloss green had enough arsenic
to poison twenty people.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yeah, so people are starting to become aware, like, Okay,
this stuff is really bad. Like we knew it was toxic,
but it's really really bad. So there was actually a
public push that centered on the death of a nineteen
year old artificial flower maker named Matilda Sure, and she.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Was Sure a real jerk.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Yeah, I said that in my head, Chuck, I'm glad
you put it out there. She died in November of
eighteen sixty one, and she had I don't remember how
long she'd worked, but she'd worked for many years in
a little, tiny, cramped workshop dusting artificial flowers with a
shields green pigment, and so she inhaled it. It was
all over her fingers and her nails. So she ate it,
(09:36):
and by the time she died and was autopsied, it
was in her stomach, it was in her liver, it
was in her lungs. Before she died, her eyes had
turned green, and she reported to her doctor that everything
she looked at had a green tint to it. That's
how arsenic laden this poor girl was.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, the direct quote is that she vomited green waters.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, you don't want to see that.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
You don't want to see that. So, like you said,
the prescott behind this finally because there was an actual,
you know, real human death to point to, and Parliament
got involved, and you know, this is sort of one
of the first first big regulatory acts for something like this.
This kind of thing wasn't that common back then, so
I think in less than ten years Parliament said all right,
(10:22):
this is we're going to do something. It's called regulating
and limiting arsenic in food. And everyone went what.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
And all of the wigs stood up and said, nanny state,
ny state exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
And then the little button on top of this episode
is that some people believe that Napoleon died of a
stomach cancer that was perhaps brought on by this green
poisoning because when he lived in exile in Saint Helena
on that island, he loved that color and he had
that wallpaper in his room and apparently was breathing this
(10:58):
stuff in because of the moisture.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Right yeah, Open Culture wrote that he so he loved
his baths and the wallpaper was in his bathroom, and
they said that anytime it was damp from you know,
a hot bath, or apparently Saint Helena itself was pretty
damp and moldy as an island. The arsenic dust in
that shields green would become vaporized and Napoleon would breathe
(11:23):
it in. And it's not just some random theory like,
it's actually fairly widely considered at least possible that that's
what he died of. We just don't know what he
died of. Napoleon thought he was being poisoned by British agents.
I think someone else said he probably died of stomach cancer,
but it's entirely possibly died from inhaling shields green from
(11:46):
his wallpaper in his bathroom.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Well, they could have very well led to the stomach
cancer for sure.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
And there is a documented case of somebody becoming ill
from their shields green wallpaper. Right.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah. There was an embass in the nineteen fifties to
Italy named Claire booth Luce who had arsenic poisoning, and
just like Napoleon thought someone was poisoning him, the CIA
got involved and thought, well, the Soviets are poisoning this
woman who was an ambassador for us, and they went
(12:19):
in did some investigating, and sure enough, her ceiling in
her bedroom had arsenic in it, and apparently the washing
machine from the floor above would would rattle and shake
and that would release arsenic dust and she would just
breathe that stuff in all night when she slept and
it killed her.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Pretty nuts, huh, pretty nuts? Well, big thanks to Open Culture,
Paris Review, artist Network, Jezebel, and my dear wife you
me for suggesting this one in the first place.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Oh, is that her idea because of her schloss green headdress.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah, she's into Schwass screen antiques. I love it, well,
Chuck said, he loves it everybody, And you know what
that means? Short? Stuff?
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Is that stuff you should know? Is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Dave. Ce's here and Spirit. Jerry's here
in Spirit, And let's go. Let's start talking about a color,
a really interesting color.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yeah, this is the first of a two part series.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
On color, an accidental series, really, that's right.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
And this one we're gonna be talking about Shields green
s E H E E L E or Schloss green.
Schloss is pretty obviously spelled.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I think, do you know, is that just another name
for shield or something, or was that Carl Wilhelm Shield's
hotel name? Like, how did it come to be Schloss
as well?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Oh, I don't know. I thought you knew.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Actually, well I spilled the beans, Chuck. It is named
after Carl Wilhelm Shiel, who was the guy who discovered it,
so it's appropriate that it would be named after him.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
That's right. He was a German Swedish chemist, a pharmaceutical chemist.
And here's the deal. He created this amazing kind of
accidentally created this amazing shade of green that kind of
took the world by storm. But the big problem with
it is that it killed people. Yeah, it is a
(01:21):
big problem and it killed that's not funny. I laughed
because the way I said it.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Well, it happened a long time ago, so you can
laugh now. But it killed a lot of people in
some really horrible ways. I was just kidding about laughing
at misfortune. That's appropriately old anyway.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Well, tragedy is our comedy is tragedy plus time. Right.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Oh man, that's great. You should you should market that.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yeah, I just made it up.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
So yeah, it was a terribly toxic color. Paris Review
wrote a really interesting article on it, and in it
they called shields green blisteringly toxic. Yeah, and the thing
that was toxic about it was arsenic, as we'll see.
But Carl Wilhelm Shiel, he came up with it supposedly
almost accidentally, according to Victoria Finley, who's a historian who
(02:08):
wrote a book called The Brilliant History of Color and Art.
God blessed Victoria Finley for not using a colon, but
she said it was almost accidental. I don't know what
he was doing. But he heated some sodium carbonate, he
added some arsinious oxide, gave it a good stir, and
(02:30):
then he added some copper sulfate, and when that happened,
he found that he had a really, really brilliant green.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
That's right, it was brilliant. But he knew that it
was toxic, and about a year before it was released
to the public, he, as legend goes, wrote to a
friend of his and said, Hey, I'm kind of worried
about this stuff being toxic. And apparently it didn't matter,
because people went nuts for the stuff. Arsenic had been
(02:58):
around for a long time. People knew it was poisonous
because it was a great murder poison for many, many years,
because it has fairly unspecific symptoms as far as poisoning
people goes. So up until eighteen thirty when the Marsh
test was invented by James Marsh, which basically roots out arsenic,
(03:20):
there was you know, it was a pretty good way
to kill somebody.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Yeah, like you said, I mean you could attribute the
the symptoms of acute arsenic poisoning to a lot of things.
You've got vomiting, abdominant pain, diarrhea, I mean, a lot
over things can do that. Sure, what are you drinking arsenic?
And then later on you've got numbnessing, tingling of the extremities.
You could have been like I've been sitting too long,
(03:45):
maybe muscle cramping and then you die. You go curpplots.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
That's right, And that's acute poisoning. The long term exposure
and we're talking you know, over the order of you know,
three to five years kind of thing. It can also
be really bad. And usually find that in the skin,
like you might have lesions, the color of your skin
might change. Apparently, you can get very patchy, like hard
(04:10):
patches on your feet and your palms, like the bottoms
of your feet. Yeah, and it can give you cancer.
It's you know, it's a known carcinogen. Now, I don't
think it was at the time. I think they just
thought this is a heck of a good poison.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, that's the thing. Even though I'm not sure if
it's clear that Sheiel spilled the beans himself, but somebody
did because it was common knowledge that Siel's green was
toxic with arsenic and yet as we'll see, people used
it all the time. It took off like gangbusters basically
the moment it was available as a pigment. And it's
(04:44):
not because the people of the age were dumb or
didn't care about dying. In their experience, arsenic was kind
of hit or miss. Some people it seemed to poison
very acutely. Other people seem to be fine as far
as a cute poisoning goes. And there wasn't an a
awareness yet of long term exposure poisoning exactly. And what's
(05:05):
ironic is it turns out it seems to have been
Shields Green that introduced the Victorian public to the idea
that you could suffer really horrible consequences from long term
exposure to arsenic, even though along the way you don't
seem like you have acute poisoning exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Uh, maybe we should take our break here, maybe, And
we've kind of hinted around about how this stuff took off.
We'll talk more about that right after this.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Jo so ask you should know.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
So we promised talk of Shields Green really take the
world by storm, and boy did it. It was in
all kinds of clothing. I mean, they went nuts worth
because it it was like this natural green that they
had never seen before, no one had ever been able
to replicate, like this really gardeny vegetable green. Yeah, and
(06:18):
so they went nuts worth. It was in soap, It
was like in stuff they ate. It was in beauty products,
it was on stamps that you know, posted stamps that
you licked like Costanza. What else. It was on wallpapers,
it was in toys, like children's toys.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
On behalf of all the pedants out there. I want
to point out that she wasn't a Costanza yet she
died licking the envelopes that were going out as a
wedding invitation. So she wasn't a Costanza yet never made
it to Costanza. You think someone would have emailed that totally.
I can name, like at least a handful of people
by name who would.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Have right, You're probably right. So again, it's taking the
world by storm. It's in everything, and especially in sort
of depressing smoggy Revolution Victorian London. All of a sudden
they had this brilliant green all around and they love
(07:16):
the stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah, because, like you said, the industrial Revolution had already
happened and its full smoggy effects were being felt, and
people had moved to the city. But yet they were
not so far removed from the country that they had
a real affinity and fondness for country rural life. Right,
So all of a sudden there's this green here that
again I got to go to the Paris Review because
they this article he wrote out. It was so great.
(07:39):
They said that it was not too yellow, wasn't too teal.
It was a middle green, and it had full saturation.
It was very vibrant, because up till then, the greens
that they'd come up with, I think that were based
on copper, they were not vibrant. It was green, but
it was a kind of a dumpy green. This was
suddenly like a green and everybody just loved it. And
(08:00):
like you said, they used it in every way they
possibly could.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Yeah, Like when they went to Sherwin Williams, they're like,
what kind of greens you got, and they're like, they're
all dumpy.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yeah, don't you have that schloss green? You mean sheields green?
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah, exactly. So reports all of a sudden, after you know,
this becomes the color of the season, start to roll
in a little bit. Children were quote wasting away in
their green rooms. People these women that wore these dresses
were falling ill. Apparently there were these they would wear
(08:34):
them in these elaborate hats that color green. And there
was a doctor, doctor A. W. Hoffman, who was an
analytical chemist that did some testing and he found that
the average head piece with schloss green had enough arsenic
to poison twenty people.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yeah, so people are starting to become aware, like, Okay,
this stuff is really bad. Like we knew it was toxic,
but it's really really bad. So there was actually a
public push that centered on the death of a nineteen
year old artificial flower maker named Matilda Sure, and she.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Was Sure a real jerk.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Yeah, I said that in my head, Chuck, I'm glad
you put it out there. She died in November of
eighteen sixty one, and she had I don't remember how
long she'd worked, but she'd worked for many years in
a little, tiny, cramped workshop dusting artificial flowers with a
shields green pigment, and so she inhaled it. It was
all over her fingers and her nails. So she ate it,
(09:36):
and by the time she died and was autopsied, it
was in her stomach, it was in her liver, it
was in her lungs. Before she died, her eyes had
turned green, and she reported to her doctor that everything
she looked at had a green tint to it. That's
how arsenic laden this poor girl was.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, the direct quote is that she vomited green waters.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, you don't want to see that.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
You don't want to see that. So, like you said,
the prescott behind this finally because there was an actual,
you know, real human death to point to, and Parliament
got involved, and you know, this is sort of one
of the first first big regulatory acts for something like this.
This kind of thing wasn't that common back then, so
I think in less than ten years Parliament said all right,
(10:22):
this is we're going to do something. It's called regulating
and limiting arsenic in food. And everyone went what.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
And all of the wigs stood up and said, nanny state,
ny state exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
And then the little button on top of this episode
is that some people believe that Napoleon died of a
stomach cancer that was perhaps brought on by this green
poisoning because when he lived in exile in Saint Helena
on that island, he loved that color and he had
that wallpaper in his room and apparently was breathing this
(10:58):
stuff in because of the moisture.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Right yeah, Open Culture wrote that he so he loved
his baths and the wallpaper was in his bathroom, and
they said that anytime it was damp from you know,
a hot bath, or apparently Saint Helena itself was pretty
damp and moldy as an island. The arsenic dust in
that shields green would become vaporized and Napoleon would breathe
(11:23):
it in. And it's not just some random theory like,
it's actually fairly widely considered at least possible that that's
what he died of. We just don't know what he
died of. Napoleon thought he was being poisoned by British agents.
I think someone else said he probably died of stomach cancer,
but it's entirely possibly died from inhaling shields green from
(11:46):
his wallpaper in his bathroom.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Well, they could have very well led to the stomach
cancer for sure.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
And there is a documented case of somebody becoming ill
from their shields green wallpaper. Right.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah. There was an embass in the nineteen fifties to
Italy named Claire booth Luce who had arsenic poisoning, and
just like Napoleon thought someone was poisoning him, the CIA
got involved and thought, well, the Soviets are poisoning this
woman who was an ambassador for us, and they went
(12:19):
in did some investigating, and sure enough, her ceiling in
her bedroom had arsenic in it, and apparently the washing
machine from the floor above would would rattle and shake
and that would release arsenic dust and she would just
breathe that stuff in all night when she slept and
it killed her.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Pretty nuts, huh, pretty nuts? Well, big thanks to Open Culture,
Paris Review, artist Network, Jezebel, and my dear wife you
me for suggesting this one in the first place.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Oh, is that her idea because of her schloss green headdress.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah, she's into Schwass screen antiques. I love it, well,
Chuck said, he loves it everybody, And you know what
that means? Short? Stuff?
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Is that stuff you should know? Is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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