Sir William Henry Perkin

For Perkin, the creation of the first synthetic dye was the beginning of a career that combined chemistry and business to great success. And he got to see the world of industry change in response to his innovation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we
have a little bit of housekeeping to do before we
get into today's episode. If you are a listener, you

(00:25):
may be wondering what happened to that trip to Italy.
We were planning that trip to Italy that we've been
planning since late for two years now. So, uh, it
was originally planned for a certain date, back up, pushed
back for a pandemic. We've pushed it a few times.
It is currently back on for May of two. Yes,

(00:47):
it had been originally planned to happen maybe essentially as
when this episode is coming out, but it seems much
safer for everyone to try to postpone it again for
hopeful fingers crossed last time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And if
you are interested in that trip, I can promise you

(01:08):
we had an absolute blast on our last trip and
we went to France, and I expect nothing but the
same on this one. We are going to do some
very fun stuff and if you're interested, you can go
to Defined Destinations dot com, slash Rome Dash Florence. That
will give you the whole scoop on all this planned. Uh,
And I know there's been some shifting. A lot of

(01:30):
people have stuck with it. So if you're one of
our listeners that registered way way back in the beginning,
in the before times, and you've stuck it out and
you're still planning to come with us, fantastic. If you
are someone who wasn't in on that and now you
think you want to, there are still some spaces left, uh,
so please take a peek at that. And if it
looks delicious and fun for you, and I think it's

(01:52):
going to be both of those things, we'd love to
have you with us. Yeah, all right, and now, uh
we are getting into today's topic. So this involves colors,
which is one of my favorite things to talk about.
So we mentioned the creation of Synthetic Die on the
podcast before, most specifically on episode on the history of Colors.

(02:13):
But the chemist who stumbled onto mauve Die, which you
will sometimes here pronounced mov as well, just how I
set it growing up, and now I've transitioned to move.
But if I say a mom, that's just because it's
ingrained from forty plus years before I decided to change
it up. Uh. That man is often latted as having
changed the world, which is a pretty significant thing to
say about a person. And William Henry Perkin is unique

(02:36):
in that he saw how quickly the world of industry
changed in response to his innovation. So today we're going
to talk about his life and how, yes, creating move
was the beginning, and that's something he did while still
quite young. But it wasn't as though he made this
discovery and then just let that be the thing that
defined him. He then hustled and turned that discovery into

(02:56):
a business and continued to innovate and he ushered in
a new field of commercially oriented chemistry. William Henry Perkin
was born on March twelfth, thirty eight, at three King
David Lane in Shadowell, London. His father was George Fowler Perkin,
who was a carpenter and a builder, And that might
sound like a really humble start, but the builder there

(03:19):
is more like a general contractor, and George Perkin was
really successful. His seven children, of which William Henry was
the last, had a private school and easy walking distance
of the family home. That was the Arbor Terrorists School,
which William Henry attended, and William was a very smart kid. Uh.

(03:40):
Pretty much every biography of him just mentions how curious
and intellectual he was for a child, and he was
interested in all kinds of things, from music to art
to science. And when he was fourteen, he took a
self portrait. Photograph has become a really common image that
pops up when you look at Perkin's name, and that's
notable considering that the dagara type had only been introduced

(04:02):
thirteen years earlier, when he was still a baby, and
by the time Perkin took his own photo, he had
been dabbling in photography for about two years, So that
speaks both to his ingenuity in new technology as well
as the family's wealth in being able to afford the
supplies needed for a budding fourteen year old photographer to
kind of muck around and play with things. Early in

(04:24):
his life, William was steered towards architecture as a career.
His father encouraged him in that direction, and that actually
seems like it could have been a pretty good match
for his intellect and temperament because it would have combined
his interest and curiosity and things like engineering and mechanics
with a natural ability and art. William is said to

(04:45):
have drawn and painted very well, and even started copying
over architectural plans while he was a boy, so he
seemed amenable to the idea of a career as an architect.
But the moment that got him passionately interested in chemistry
took place when he was still twelve years old. He
saw a friend doing some very basic experiments with crystals,

(05:06):
and he would later write about how much this got
him thinking about chemistry and its possibility, saying quote the
possibility also of making new discoveries impressed me very much.
I determined if possible, to accumulate bottles of chemicals and
make experiments. Shortly after this revelation, William started attending the
City of London School. He took chemistry classes as not

(05:31):
an elective because that wasn't even an option, but as
sort of an ala carte add on to his class
schedule for an extra seven shillings each term. Perkin was
enrolled in lunchtime classes twice a week, so he needed
to skip his lunch to go to class, and he
was willing to do it because not only did Perkin
perform chemistry experiments also when he was at home under

(05:53):
advisement of his chemistry teacher, Thomas Hall, but he also
attended additional chemistry lectures around London him he clearly was
into this. He went to London Hospital to hear Henry
Leatherby speak on the subject, and then he was also
able to get permission from Michael Faraday to sit in
on his electricity lectures at the Royal Institution. Perkin enrolled
at the Royal College of Chemistry in eighteen fifty three

(06:16):
at the age of fifteen. He had needed to convince
his father that this was a good plan. He had
gotten his chemistry teacher to help him in that effort.
One of the reasons that George Perkin was initially pretty
wary of the idea was that chemistry as a career
was not really established. There just weren't many jobs to
be had. But between William and his teacher, Thomas Hall,

(06:39):
they made the case that this field had potential, and
George Perkin finally acquiesced and at the Royal College of Chemistry.
Perkin studied under August Wilhelm von Hoffman, and William quickly
showed a very high degree of aptitude as well as
dedication to the field of chemistry, and Hoffman made Perkin
an honorary assistant. He's aims to have been just about

(07:01):
obsessed with this field. As he mentioned, he was doing
so much extra work in chemistry, and at this point
he converted his room at home into a rudimentary lab.
He recalled this setup later in life, writing quote, my
private laboratory occupied half a long room and a few
shelves for little bottles, and a table in my fireplace.
I had even constructed an oven. I worked with an

(07:23):
old brazilious alcohol lamp, and I did the burnings with
charcoal in a shed. And in this laboratory I worked
nights and during vacations. Perkin wrote his first published work
on the production of menap philamine through combining cyanogen chloride
with napthaline in eighteen fifty six. He was also promoted

(07:44):
to a staff position in the lab that year, and
then when he was eighteen, Perkins started his famous projects
which he intended to synthesize quinine, and this was a
vacation project. The school was closed for Easter break, so
his teacher and mentor Hoffmann had suggested years earlier, back

(08:04):
in eighteen forty nine that naphthaline could be used to
prepare synthetic quinine, and quinine, of course, is in high
demand for its curative powers, specifically for treating malaria, so
finding a way to synthesize it in a lab instead
of having to extract it from a bark was a
rather thrilling prospect. And again Perkin was a striver, and

(08:25):
coal tar, which was rich in amino compounds and was
considered a pollutant, was also considered a potential solution to
this problem. But the quinine alluded Perkin. His first attempt
resulted in a reddish brown material that was not at
all what he was after, and his second attempt he
combined analyne sulfate with potassium dichromate, and this resulted in

(08:49):
a black precipitate, still not quinine. And then there are
two versions of this story, and one version he was
washing his lab equipment after this failure, and note the
black goo he had created left a purple residue and
that it stained a cloth. And in the other he
decided to try to salvage something out of this unsuccessful

(09:10):
result and tried an extraction of the black precipitate with methanol.
What he got was a move matter whichever of those
versions played out, and it's possible that it could be
kind of some overlap between them. He ended up with
a purple substance that got the name moving. Okay, that's
not a particularly common word, so in planer terms, he

(09:33):
had accidentally discovered how to synthesize purple dye using an
abundant source material that was considered garbage. So the name
mouve is derived from the old French word for mallow
because of that plant's pale purple flowers, so that's why
it's called moving. There's a lot of writing about how
much credit has to be given to Perkin regarding his

(09:55):
insight here, and that's because it would have been easy
to see that his result was not quinine as he
had hoped, and then to write up the experiment and
discard the seemingly incorrect result. But Perkins saw that he
had possibly come up with something interesting, even if it
had missed his intended target. So he next replicated the process,

(10:17):
and then he started refining it to always get the
move material on purpose. His older brother, Thomas Dix Perkin,
assisted him in these experiments, and then he got the
idea to test it as a die and to see
if it had potential as a commercial product. So he
first did a series of experiments dyeing silk samples with
his movin, and then he sent those samples to the J.

(10:39):
Polar and Son die house to get their opinion. And
the letter he got back from Robert Polar read quote,
if you're discovery does not make the goods too expensive,
It is decidedly one of the most valuable that has
come out for a very long time. This color is
one which has been very much wanted in all classes
of goods, and could not be obtained fast on silks,

(11:02):
and only at great expense on cotton yarns. I enclose
you a pattern of the best lilac we have on cotton.
It is died by only one house in the United Kingdom.
But even this is not quite fast, and does not
stand the tests that yours does, and fades by exposure
to air. So this letter had to be a rather

(11:24):
thrilling read for a young man who had been drawn
to chemistry as a preteen because of the potential of
discovering new things. And this person is basically like, yes,
you did, and we really wanted. A close friend of his,
Arthur H. Church, who was also an assistant at the
lab at the Royal College of Chemistry, suggested that Perkin
get a patent on his die as quickly as possible.

(11:46):
There was a little bit of a hiccup here, because
normally the Patent office would only grant patents to inventors
who were twenty one or older. William was younger than that.
But William and his brother prepared a sample and then
on the advice of legal counsel, he applied for a
patent anyway, that was granted on August eight. So coming up,

(12:08):
we're going to talk about how Perkin turned this discovery
into an industry, but first we will pause for a
sponsor break. Once Perkin had refined his method for creating
moving and he had run it by those dyers, his

(12:30):
next move was to set up a plant to make it.
This was the start of an incredibly lucrative career in
chemical manufacture, but it was at the time not a
sure thing at all. Even though his purple, which he
called a few different things, including moving analgine purple and
tyrian purple, had received enthusiastic support from the die mill.

(12:52):
This was not an industry that really existed at the time.
Other diyes were still sourced from nature, not created synthetically,
and he and be certain that die mills would be
willing to use his product, or that they would be
happy with the result. Keep in mind, Perkin was still
a teenager at this point. He was really smart, sure,
but he had absolutely no experience in the textile industry

(13:14):
or in manufacturing. He had been able to conduct some
experimental die runs at J. Puller and Son, and based
on those he'd been able to refine his formulas to
meet the needs of specific dyeing scenarios as potential problems
had been identified. So it worked a different way on
silk than it did on cotton, and he kind of
worked with them to figure out the best ways to
get the optimal result. But even though all of this

(13:37):
work had already been done, the risk in setting up
a plant was still very significant. On top of all
of that, there was the matter of perkins job and
his mentor august Bill Ham von Hoffman. When Perkin approached
him to discuss his plan to become a full time
chemical manufacturer, it did not go spectacularly well. Even though

(13:59):
Perkin had sample to show how well his die actually worked.
But regardless of whether his professor was impressed with the
work itself, he was chagrined that Perkin would step away
from academic life to drop down to what the academic
community saw as a demeaning manufacturing job, even if he
did own the place. It's a little snooty um. All

(14:22):
of this gave Perkins confidence a little bit of a wobble,
So he consulted another die expert in London and gave
him some of the die to test, and that dire
named Thomas Keith, responded very positively to the results and
he urged Perkin to absolutely move forward with his business.
But even so, securing capital for it again for a young,

(14:43):
unproven man and a young unproven industry, was a hurdle
that was proving hard to overcome. Another boost to any
wavering on perkins part came from his father. While George
Perkin may have initially doubted the lucrative possibilities of a
career in chemistry, by the time Williams Moving die had
been refined, he was really a believer. He offered to

(15:05):
finance the startup of a die plant. To be clear,
George Perkin was wealthy, but he was still taking a
huge risk here. He put most of his assets on
the line for his son, so if this business failed,
he would be cleaned out financially. That's gotta be um,
both a huge sense of trust and like feeling very

(15:28):
loved and believed in by your parents, and also stressful. Um,
I'm so glad you believe in me. Please don't let
me ruin you. Uh. There was an additional and immense
element of support that came from William's brother, Thomas Dicks Perkin.
We mentioned that he had already helped will with his
his experiments, and Thomas had a head for business and

(15:48):
he had learned about construction from their father, and so
he became William's partner essentially with the intent that William
could handle the development and science part of the business
and Thomas would take care of any business administration. So
once he had signed on to manage such things, William
Perkin was in a fairly good place to start this business,
even though it did still have risks. And soon they

(16:10):
had set up Perkin and Sons as a company and
they bought a plot of land at Greenford Green in Middlesex.
From there, they had to start not just a business,
but really a whole industry from scratch. No one had
plans for a chemical manufacturing plant, so they had to
be drawn up according to what they thought they would need. Additionally,

(16:31):
Perkins Company had to figure out a supply chain for
the raw materials that they needed in large quantities. That
posed its own problem. For example, the ben zine that
was required could only be sourced from a coaltard distiller
in Glasgow, but the ben zine that the company offered
was crude and required a whole other distillation process once

(16:52):
it got to the plant, And that same sort of
problem happened again and again with other materials. But Perkin
and his brother worked through these issues and in December
of eighteen fifty seven they delivered their first order to
Thomas Keith and Son's Dyres. Almost immediately, it became apparent
that while the pigment itself was consistent, the way that

(17:13):
fabrics took the die was not. And William had worked
on this a little bit at the Polar Company, but
there were still some things to work out. So silk,
for example, would take the die so rapidly that if
it wasn't applied in a completely uniform manner. The color
would be darker or more intense anywhere the fabric had
been in the die longer than another. Perkin worked with

(17:34):
dyers to fix this problem, and similarly found ways to
ensure that other textiles less prone to quickly bond with
die would also uptake the pigment, and soon he had developed,
of course, not only this die, but also fixatives as
well as application processes that textile dyers then implemented. Perkin
ran into another problem with the die business due to

(17:55):
a paperwork error. The patent that Perkin and sons held
in France for perp Will Die was invalid, and soon
front plants started creating moving for die houses there that
cut Perkin out of a significant revenue source. And this
was particularly true because France became absolutely insessed with this die.
Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon the Third, warr and set

(18:17):
this trend for the entire country to want purple garments,
and even bigger unofficial endorsement came from Queen Victoria, though
Queen Victoria wore a gown died with Perkins moving to
her daughter's wedding, and from there the popularity of the
color spread throughout Europe and the US at a really
rapid pace. Despite losing out on that French business, and

(18:40):
because of the high profile appearance of his die on
the Queen's Gown, perkins own business was booming. And keep
in mind he had only just set up this die
manufactured plant, and people were already setting up kind of
copycat plans to do die in France, so he had
already started this entire new industry. His moving die cost
a hundred and twenty pounds per kilo, but it also

(19:02):
took a lot of raw material to produce, so according
to Perkins calculations, it took one pounds of coal to
get ten pounds twelve ounces of coal tar, which he
used to get the moving and from that ten pounds
twelve ounces. The yield of moving after all of the
chemical processes were complete was just one quarter of an ounce.

(19:24):
But still, this was a superior option to natural means
of accruing enough purple pigment to achieve a saturated purple
tone in textiles, and perkins synthetic version was more color fast.
He had had the good fortune to stumble onto a
synthetic purple at exactly the right time purple had been
on the rise in popularity, and the options to get

(19:47):
it had been limited until his discovery. Just a couple
of years into their chemical manufacturing venture. It became a
parents of William, Thomas and George that the original plant
just couldn't keep up with demand. A new facility was
built in eighteen fifty nine, and from there they expanded
their catalog to include more colors. The most popular remove

(20:08):
another purple tone that was called Britannia Violet and Perkins Green.
Over time, their color offerings were not used exclusively in
the textile industry because Perkin and Sons Dies were the
first synthetic guys to make their way onto postage stamps.
Coming up, we're going to talk about how Perkin eventually
stepped away from this industry he had created and what

(20:29):
happened to his life after that. But first we'll hear
from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class.
Going a synthetic red dye proved to be difficult to
create for a number of years. Thomas Dick's Perkin had

(20:50):
actually patented a magenta manufacture process in eighteen fifty nine
that the plant used briefly, but that involved handling mercury,
and that process was shut down complete Lee when their
workers started to become ill. Perkin, working to find an
improved process, produced artificial alizarin that's a crimson dye from
Anthracyne in eighteen sixty nine, and when he filed his

(21:13):
patent on it, he discovered that another patent for essentially
the same process had been filed the prior day by
chemists working for the German company B A. SF. While
they were both issued patents, Perkin then refined the technique
with a different process and that made him able to
manufacture it before B. S F could get it to market.

(21:33):
This seemed like a big potential problem, but the two
companies eventually came to an agreement that allowed Perkin and
Son the English market pretty much on their own to monopolies.
William Henry Perkin married for the first time in eighteen
fifty nine when he was twenty one. His bride, Jemima
Harriet Lasette, was his first cousin. This couple had two
children together. They were William Henry Perkin Jr. Who was

(21:56):
born in eighteen sixty and then another son, Arthur George,
again the following year. Unfortunately, though Jemima died of tuberculosis
in eighteen sixty one, which left William Sr. With two
infant sons. Perkin remarried five years later to Alexandria Caroline
Malwow who went by Sasha. He and Sasha had a son, Frederick,

(22:17):
followed by four daughters, Sasha, Lucy, Annie, and Helen Mary.
The die manufacturing plant was a thriving business, but the
Perkin brothers were also constantly operating at kind of a
breakneck pace, and part of that for William was that
he wanted to continue his other experiments, which were not
exclusively in the development of pigments. Perkin had another significant

(22:40):
chemistry achievement in eighteen fifty eight. That year, he worked
alongside another scientist B. F. Deppa, and the two produced
the first lab created version of glycine. Glycine is an
amino acid, and that was the first amino acid produced
in a lab setting. With the same collaborate. Later, Perkins

(23:00):
synthesized tartaric acid two years later in eighteen sixty and
he was publishing about these findings and other experiments throughout
his time running the business. Yeah, he kept his hand
in in the scientific world throughout another process that Perkins
developed while he was still in the synthetic die business
was what's called the Perkin reaction. I am not a chemist,

(23:21):
and I will mess this up if I try to
extrapolate from a definition into Planer terms. So I am
going to read the Miriam Webster definition of a Perkin
reaction here, and it is quote A reaction for making
an unsaturated aromatic acid as cinemic acid by heating and
aromatic aldehyde with an acid and hydride as acidic and

(23:41):
hydride in the presence of a base as sodium acetate
or potassium carbonate. I don't want to dunk on Miriam
Webster because I used Miriam Webster all the time, but
I still have a number of questions after he read that.
But basically what this means is that using this method,
it's a lot of chemistry stuff, and I feel foolish

(24:01):
that I don't grasp chemistry well enough to really be
able to say more about it. He was able to
synthesize the first artificial perfume. You made a compound called
kumar in which smells like fresh moan hay. To be clear,
though Perkin did not make this into a perfume. He
just developed Kumaran, and it was later used in perfumes
and as a flavoring for sweets. Today, perkins work, both

(24:24):
in this area and others, is cited as the launching
point for organic chemistry and all of the many industries
which have developed through it. After seventeen years in the
dye industry, William Perkin reached a point where he wanted
to be doing his research more than he wanted to
be running a business, and so on January one, seventy four,

(24:45):
Perkin and Sons was officially sold for a hundred and
five thousand pounds. While Perkin was undoubtedly ready to start
a less frantic pace of his life with his finances
secure from the deal, there were some problems with this sale.
The plant at Greenford Green was not well run by
its new owners, which was Brooke, Simpson and Spiller. They

(25:07):
rapidly lost clients. This led the purchasers to claim that
the Perkins had misled them, and they sued the Perkins,
citing deception bordering on fraud. This matter was finally settled
in March eighteen seventy five, with a judge ruling in
the Perkins favor. Yeah, he was basically like they put
together a huge dossier of like, here's everything we left

(25:29):
these people, We told him how to do it. They
did it wrong, and the judge was like, yep, they
sure did. So. With this legal matter completed, William Perkins
set up his home lab, He built a new house,
and he settled into a life of research. This all
sounds like a really idyllic retirement, but he was still
just thirty seven at this point. He was a young man.

(25:51):
In the years between founding the chemical plant and selling it,
he had managed to write and publish almost two papers
per year on a variety of organic chemists three subjects.
Once he was free of the time limitations of industrial work,
his publishing output only went up, and he wrote and
published papers on his research right up until the end
of his life. He also continued to enjoy art and

(26:13):
music throughout his life, and he was able to enjoy
more of these pastimes and share them with his kids
in his post industry years. In nineteen o six, the
fiftieth anniversary of perkins synthesis of moving, he was knighted
and there were jubilee celebrations to mark the half century
birthday of his revolutionary chemical accident. The official name of

(26:35):
this anniversary festivity was the International Celebration of the Coultar
Color Jubilee. It consisted of a lot of events for Perkins,
who his hand all around Britain and abroad. When he
traveled to the US that year, he was elected an
honorary Fellow of the American Chemical Society. As part of
that honor, he was given a silver punch bowl, and

(26:57):
he said it would be good for lemonade. This is
a good natured nod to his being a teetotaler. Perkin
never drank. At that same ceremony he was given the
Perkin Medal of the American Chemical Society. That was the
first That medal is still issued annually for quote innovation
and applied chemistry resulting in outstanding commercial development. One of

(27:19):
these celebration events, which took place at the Royal Institution,
this is kind of like the culmination event was described
this way. Quote Sir William H. Perkin, on his appearance
was received with loud and prolonged cheers. There was a
large attendance of representatives of scientific societies and of commercial
organizations interested in the coal tar color industry. A great

(27:41):
many ladies were also present at that event. The Chairman
of the Royal Institution, Professor R. Medola, gave a brief
speech which included quote, the object for which we are
assembled on the present occasion is so well known to
most of you that, in the view of the long
program before us, I do not propose to occupy your
attention myself for more than a very few moments. It will,

(28:05):
I am sure, be your wish in the first place,
that we should take this opportunity of offering our hearty
congratulations to the founder of the cold tar color industry
on having lived to witness the consummation of his labors,
which we are celebrating on this fiftieth anniversary. Yes, so
there was no doubt during his lifetime that people thought
he had really, uh completely invented this entire new field.

(28:30):
And when Perkin wrapped up his time at the jubilee,
concluded his final speech with quote, when I look back
on my life and consider all the ways I have
been led above all, I thank God to whom I
owe everything, for all his goodness to me, and ascribe
to him all the praise and honor. Perkin was Methodist,
and his religion was an integral part of his identity.

(28:51):
And how he lived his life. He made a lot
of money in the chemical color industry, and he gave
a lot of it away. He provided a fund to
build a Methodist church in Sudbury, and he thought being
a job creator was one of the best achievements of
their company's success. In July of nineteen oh seven, Perkin,
who had just gotten through all of this travel, which

(29:13):
was celebrating him but really took a toll on him,
started to feel ill and he did not seek medical
help for several days because he was a bit wary
of doctors. He also didn't think whatever was going on
with serious. He did speak with a dietitian because he
did not realize that he had pneumonia, and that also
his appendix had burst. A doctor was finally called in,

(29:34):
but it was too late, and Perkin died on July fourteenth,
nineteen o seven. Perkins obituary and the Journal of the
Society of Dires and Colorist Threat in part quote his
neighbors at Sudbury loved him for his quiet philanthropy. His
generous courtesy and kindness of heart were striking characteristics which
strangely attached him to all those with whom he was

(29:56):
personally acquainted. Aside from the fact that every ing from
anesthetics to artificial sweeteners are often traced back to the
work that Perkin did, he also left a legacy in
chemistry through his children. Perkin's sons all had careers that
followed in their father's footsteps. William Henry Perkin Jr. Was
considered Great Britain's finest organic chemist during his life, and

(30:20):
Arthur eventually became head of the Department of color Chemistry
at University of Leeds. Frederick, his son from his second marriage,
became a pioneer in low temperature carbonization. So his his
tendrils in science just kept like going on and on
and on and on. Uh, and we are still I
think you could make a firm case enjoying the benefits

(30:42):
of his work today. UM. I obviously love the color purple.
H He's an interesting one and UH seems to have
maintained a fairly kind and low key attitude throughout his life.
We'll talk about that a bit more in our behind

(31:02):
the scenes. UH. And now I have a listener mail
about some of our Halloween fun This one is about
haunted houses and it's from our listener Barb who writes
High Ladies. I love the show and especially look forward
to your October episodes. I'm also a huge fan of
haunted houses, so after hearing this week's episode on the
history of them, I knew I needed to write in.

(31:24):
As a kid, I have fond memories of going through
our local haunted house each year with my dad. It
was an old, possibly even abandoned house on the end
of my block and was run by the j C's.
My dad started taking me as a pretty young child,
maybe four or five. His favorite story to tell us
about the first time we went at the end of
the haunted house, just as you exited, there was a

(31:45):
person who would chase you with a quote chainsaw. I'm
pretty sure it was just the motor without a blade,
but that sound was scary enough in the dark, my
dad said. I jumped a few feet in the air,
and my feet were moving before they hit the ground.
I was out of there. One might think this experience
would keep me away. Nope, not me. I was hooked.
We went every year, sometimes more than once. When I

(32:07):
was a little older, I would talk my friends into
going with me as well. I even dragged my now
husband to a haunted Schoolhouse, which had become one of
my favorites to visit as a date. I had no
idea about the changes in safety measures for haunted houses
over the years. Are Haunted House at the end of
the block moved to a new location in the early nineties,
so your episode shed some light on why that might

(32:28):
have been. Thanks so much for all the spooky October episodes.
I had the pleasure to see you in person at
the October Live event in Chicago and meet you afterwards.
You were both so gracious and a delight to me.
I hope you can come back to our area once
live shows start back up. Thanks again, Barb, Barb, I
hope so too. I hate three UM, I missed touring
and I love Chicago. I would love to do UM.

(32:51):
I don't know that Tracy would agree. I would do
like a two month long tour of every city we've
ever hit, and then some because we haven't done it
in so long. Know I it's as long as we
had like a break day every three days. We take
a break day four maximum. Yeah, because day five of

(33:12):
a tour I would be anymore. That's how I would like.
I would wake up in the middle of the night
to go to the bathroom, and my body would try
to take me to wear the room had the bathroom
in a different hotel, and I would wind up in
a corner like where am I? Yes, I think there
was a time where you texted me once and asked

(33:33):
me what airport I had landed in, and I told
you I did not know, um. And then when I
got to the baggage claim, I recognized the airport and
was like, oh, here's where I am. I'm fine because
we were in a city with multiple airports and I
was like, I don't know. Um. You know, that's how
it works when you're touring. Your brain gets a little
fuzzy on your whereabouts. But Barb, thank you again so much,

(33:55):
and I'm glad that that was a fun episode, and
also like, I just love hearing people's life long affinities
for haunts and all of the fun that Halloween in
October can bring. First sure, if you would like to
write to us, you can do so at History Podcast
at i heeart radio dot com. You can also find
us on social media as missed in History, And if
you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, that's super duper easy.

(34:18):
You can do it right now. If you want, you
can find that on the I heart Radio app or
anywhere else you listen to your favorite podcast. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

(34:38):
favorite shows.