When we think of the nineteenth century we tend to think of it as the age of steam – the age of the steam engine, steam-powered factories, and iron and steelworks. In order to produce this steam, an easy source of ignition was needed. Up until the nineteenth century, fires would be lit with a flint and steel which would be struck together to release sparks. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the match was invented and its invention brought with it a new occupational disease.

The first kind of match invented was called the lucifer match or the ‘strike-anywhere match’. Sir Isaac Holden MP claimed to be the inventor, saying that he demonstrated them in a chemistry lecture he gave in London. One of the men in the audience wrote to his father, who was a chemist, about it and ‘shortly afterward lucifer matches were issued to the world’.

The tip contained white phosphorus, sometimes also called yellow phosphorus, which worked by a chemical reaction whenever the tip was struck and allowed it to be lit when it was struck against anything. White phosphorus, however, is highly toxic and produced a condition called phossy jaw or phosphorus necrosis of the jaw, a kind of bone cancer. In match-making factories, the people who worked as ‘mixers’, ‘dippers’, and ‘boxers’ would be exposed to vapours from the phosphorus. These fumes caused the bones in the jaw – usually the lower jaw – to start to rot. Sufferers would begin by experiencing painful toothaches, the gums would swell, and the infected bone would glow a greenish-white colour in the dark. Pus would start to form, causing tooth loss. Slowly the dead bone would separate from the living bone until the entire jaw bone had necrosed.

The only treatment was to remove the infected jaw, leaving the patient seriously impaired. If this was not done in time, the disease would spread to the brain causing serious brain damage, before causing organ failure and death.

The first case of phossy jaw was reported in Vienna in 1839 by the Austrian physician Lorinsor, who by 1844 reported 22 cases of the condition in match stick workers, establishing that the disease was caused by white phosphorus. By this time, however, the sale of lucifer matches had exploded, with women predominantly working in the factories that made them. By 1890, 60 tonnes of white phosphorus was being used in the match manufacturing industry in Britain. 50% of this was used by Bryant and May, a company established in 1843 at first to import matches but which then began to manufacture them.

Annie Besant’s article for The Link, 14 July 1888

Bryant and May became notorious for their treatment of their workers in 1888 when one of the most famous early instances of industrial action took place – the Match Girls’ Strike. This strike took centre-stage in the British press at the time. It started after the journalist Annie Besant wrote an article for the weekly paper The Link in July 1888 on the working conditions in match factories. In it Besant argued that the women involved in match manufacturing were dying for 4 to 13 shillings a week, with the average salary being 11 shillings and 2 pence per week, and often less due to illegal fines and deductions for materials made on their wages. Besant also noted that the workers ate their food in the same rooms that they were working in, ‘so that the fumes of the phosphorus mix with their poor meal and they eat disease as seasoning for their bread’ When the foremen noticed the swelling of the jaw that was one of the first signs of phossy jaw, she wrote, they sent the worker home and she got ‘no pay during her absence’.

The management of Bryant and May tried to get their workforce to sign a paper contradicting the facts in Besant’s article and after a group of women refused to do so the organiser of the group was dismissed, supposedly for refusing to follow the foreman’s instructions, setting off the strike. Approximately 1400 women and girls refused to work, forming the Matchgirls’ Union and approaching Annie Besant to help them make their demands. Several prominent figures, including George Bernard Shaw and William Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, joined the campaign for better working conditions in the factory, with many advocating the boycott of Bryant and May’s lucifer matches, while other newspapers like The Times labelled Besant and the strike’s supporters as agitators and ‘pests of the modern industrialized world’.

After three weeks terms were made and the company announced that it would re-employ the sacked employee, end the fines system, introduce a system so that complaints could be taken to the managers instead of having to go through the foremen, and that food would be eaten in a separate room.

Despite the publicity caused by the strike, white phosphorus continued to be used in Bryant and May’s manufacturing of matches until 1901, and it wasn’t until 1910 that the use of white phosphorus in matches was banned in Britain.

Advert for Salvation Army safety matches

The sad fact is that white phosphorus continued to be used for so long not because there wasn’t an alternative, but because of production costs and consumer demand. Since the 1850s Bryant and May had been importing ‘safety matches’ from Sweden, which used less toxic red phosphorus instead of white and needed to be struck against the side of the box. After 1855 Bryant and May started manufacturing them themselves, but they were not as popular and were far more expensive to produce and therefore more expensive to buy. In 1891 the Salvation Army opened its own factory producing safety matches in an effort to improve the working conditions of match manufacturers, but they continued to use child labour to box the matches to try to keep the costs down so that they could compete, and they still cost three times the price of lucifer matches, so eventually the factory had to close and was taken over by Bryant and May in 1901.

When the Huguenots (Calvinist French Protestants forced to leave France after the Edict of Fontainbleu, which made Protestantism illegal in France) arrived in Britain in the late seventeenth century they brought with them a new method for making felt, and a new occupational disease – erethism, or mad hatter syndrome.

The new method involved the treating of fur from animals such as rabbits, hares and beavers with a diluted solution of mercuric nitrate. The skins were then dried in an oven before being stretched over a bar in a cutting machine. The pelts were then sliced off in thin shreds and layered onto a conical mould, where they would be pressed and shrunk with steam and hot water. The resulting felt could then be dyed and made into fine hats. The method was referred to as carroting as the mercuric nitrate solution turned white fur a reddish brown colour.

The advantage of this method was that it made the outer stiff hairs on the pelt soft and limp, and twisted and roughened them so that they matted together more easily. The problem was that the treated felt released mercury as a vapour, and felt-making tended to be done in small, confined and poorly ventilated spaces.

As a result, hatters began to present the symptoms of mercury poisoning. These included physical symptoms, such as slurred speech, headaches, weakness and tremors; and neurological problems, such as personality changes – irritability, anxiety, low self-confidence, depression, apathy, and shyness – as well as memory loss, delirium, and hallucinations.

These symptoms were known to be caused by mercury, which had long been prescribed as a cure for syphilis by being rubbed on the skin, injected or taken orally. A night with Venus, it was said, was followed by a lifetime with Mercury. However, there were no laws to regulate the use of mercury in industry, meaning that the symptoms of mercury poisoning in hatters were prevalent enough that the expression ‘mad as a hatter’ emerged in 1829, the same year a report on the syndrome was published in St Petersburg.

In 1860 a report was published in the Transactions of the Medical Society of New Jersey by J. Addison Freeman on ‘Mercurial Disease Among Hatter’s, and in 1869 the French Academy of Medicine also described the health risks associated with hat making. In France this led to a law being passed in 1898 to protect hatters, however in the United States mercury was used in hat making until 1941, despite the fact that in 1888 a new method using hydrochloride was patented.

In Britain in the 1890s, factory inspectors began taking note of any deaths and illnesses linked to working with mercury. Their evidence led, in 1899, to mercury poisoning becoming a disease that must be reported under the Factory and Workshop Act of 1895. While the aim had been to try to assess the scale of the danger from exposure to mercury for hat makers and the makers of scientific equipment, the new regulations demonstrated that mercury was used in a wide variety of industries.

In the twentieth century in Britain the problem of mercury poisoning continued to be discussed and investigated, however, little changed in terms of legislation. An article in the medical journal the Lancet in 1912 speculated that the continued use of mercury in hat making may pose a risk to the wearers of felt hats, as ‘a “hat body” may contain as much as 0.138% of mercury’. In 1919 at the International Labour Organisation conference, the question was raised as to whether the use of mercury in hat making should be banned as it had been demonstrated in France that it was not needed. However, the suggestion was not taken any further.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, however, mercury had been used less and less in hat making anyway, and ventilation had significantly improved, meaning that from the beginning of the twentieth century the number of cases reported was low enough that it was never considered a big enough problem to require specific legislation and so it simply remained monitored. From the 1940s hydrogen peroxide became used to create felt instead.

Many have argued that the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) is meant to be suffering from mercury poisoning due to his occupation. Others have objected that the Mad Hatter does not demonstrate the shyness and difficulty socially interacting with others that characterised mad hatter syndrome, arguing that the Mad Hatter was based on the real life furniture dealer Theophilus Carter, who was often called the mad hatter due to his eccentric character and the fact that he always wore a top hat. In either case, the strong links between hat making and aberrant behaviour in the nineteenth century are evident.

These associations have been built into many later depictions of Carroll’s character. In Tim Burton’s movie adaptations of Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Through the Looking Glass (2016) the orange marks on the Mad Hatter’s skin and the orange colour of the Mad Hatter’s hair recall the symptoms associated with carroting and Johnny Depp said of his interpretation of the character that he had been ‘poisoned […] and it took effect in all of his nerves. It was coming out through his hair and through his fingernails, through his eyes’.

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Dust – a seemingly innocuous substance that makes many people sigh as they think about having to get out the feather duster. Yet as several high profile campaigns over the last couple of years – such as IOSH’s No Time to Lose campaign – have highlighted, breathing in many kinds of dust, especially those created by construction, can have serious effects on people’s health.

What we tend to think about less is the flammable risk associated with dust. What many people don’t realise is that many of the powders we have in our homes are extremely flammable under the right circumstances. Things like flour, coffee, sugar, cocoa, corn flour, and chilli powder have the potential to cause massive explosions if they are released into the air as a dust and then exposed to an ignition source, such as an open flame, static electricity or even a very hot surface. This is because of each dust particle’s very large surface area compared to its mass, which means that it will burn much faster and catch on fire with much less energy than when the same substance is in a pile. This means that even materials thought of as nonflammable or as slow burning can be extremely flammable in their dust form. It takes as little as 2 grams per cubic foot of air for the household powders listed above to become ignitable. 

If combustion occurs in a confined space, the pressure that builds up can cause shockwaves, doing serious structural damage to buildings, and sending objects and debris flying. These explosions can then shake up more dust, causing a second explosion.

While it is unlikely that people will be exposed to these hazards in their homes, in the factories and mills that produce these powders the dangers are very real. It is estimated that 2000 dust explosions occur in factories and refineries a year in Europe. While many of these are relatively minor, throughout history there have been many, at times disastrous, combustible dust explosions.

The first recorded dust explosion was in 1785 in Turin, when flour dust in Giacomelli’s Bakery Warehouse came into contact with a lamp, injuring two employees. Throughout the nineteenth century there were many dust explosions throughout Europe and the United States, several of which completely destroyed the mills they took place in. The most notable was in 1878 in Minnesota, when a buildup of flour in a mill caused an explosion that killed 18 people. The blast was so powerful that limestone blocks were sent flying, and windows in neighbouring towns were broken. 

In the early twentieth century, in 1916, a dust explosion at the Quaker Oats Cereal Factory in Petersborough, Ontario killed 23 of the factory’s workers and destroyed the entire building. An explosion of a silo storing 4500 tons of a mixture of ammonium sulphate and ammonium nitrate fertiliser in Germany in 1921 is estimated to have killed between 500 and 600 people and injured 2000 more.

The worst flour mill explosion on record occurred in Westwego, Louisiana in 1977, when a buildup of grain dust came in contact with static electricity. The explosion caused 49 silos to catch fire, killing 36 workers, many from being crushed by the collapsing silos. Building code reforms for grain silos were based off this event.

In 1981, there was a dust explosion at the Bird’s Custard Factory in Banbury. A hopper – a container used to hold particles that have been collected from expelled air – became overfilled, creating a dust cloud of corn flour that ignited due to nearby electrical equipment. The explosion blew the roof off the building and 9 workers were injured. As custard is made when heat and water are added to custard powder, the water from the fire engines that came to put the fire out created gallons of custard inside the building, which then came pouring out.

More recently, in 2008, there was a dust explosion at the Imperial Sugar Refinery in Georgia that killed 13 workers, hospitalising 40 more. The main damage was caused by a second explosion as sugar stirred up by the first explosion ignited, demonstrating the importance of proper housekeeping.

Imperial Sugar Refinery, Georgia

All dust explosions are preventable. Under the Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations 2002 (DSEAR) companies are required to:

• Identify what dangerous substances there are in their workplace and what the fire and explosion risks are;
• Put control measures in place to either remove those risks or, where this is not possible, control them;
• Put controls in place to reduce the effects of an incident involving dangerous substances;
• Prepare plans and procedures to deal with accidents, incidents and emergencies involving dangerous substances; and
• Identify and classify areas of the workplace where explosive atmospheres may occur, and avoid ignition sources in those areas.

In a workplace containing potentially flammable atmospheres, employers must make sure that any explosion safety measures are confirmed as being safe by an expert in the field of explosion protection. 

Unfortunately, when dust explosions happen it is often due to poor maintenance, deficient housekeeping, inadequate inspection regimes, or because something has been missed in a risk assessment. In all of these situations Amalgamate can help, whether it is by doing hazard identification exercises and hazardous operations reviews to make sure that all potential hazards have been considered and that adequate controls are in place, or by carrying out regular systems audits and site inspections. 

Contact us on 0141 244 0181 or visit our consultancy page.