By 1775 the Swedish scientist, Carl Scheele, had finally created an artificial green colourant, a notoriously difficult colour to replicate convincingly, by heating sodium carbonate, adding arsenious oxide, stirring until the mixture was dissolved, and then adding copper sulphate to the final solution. It produced a striking green, accurately reflecting the hues found in nature, not too yellow, not too teal, without grey tints or any underlying hint of brown. It was cheap to produce.
Earlier in the decade Scheele had also produced a bright yellow paint from chlorine and oxygen which was later known as Turner’s patent yellow after the British manufacturer who had stolen the patent. With his green Scheele had better luck, although he did have some misgivings, admitting to a friend in a letter that he felt users should be made aware of its potentially poisonous attributes.
It struck a chord at the time, the onset of the industrial revolution with its dark, smoky, satanic buildings was counterbalanced by a rise in movements such as the Romantics who idealized the countryside and sought to replicate its beauty. Alive now to the charms of nature, they started to copy it in carvings and as designs in fabrics. Green was the colour most synonymous with nature and Scheele’s Green provided the closest approximation to it that was available.
The foul atmosphere and the overly warm sitting rooms heated by a roaring fire were anathema to bouquets of flowers and to compensate a craze began for artificial flowers. Workshops sprang up, often ill-lit fetid places, where young women worked away in grim conditions for a pittance. The biggest danger, though, came from the material they were working with.
In 1859 Dr. Ange-Gabriel-Maxime Vernois visited one workshop in Paris, walking among the tables, stopping to examine the hands of the ateliers. Their nails, cuticles, arms, and even the dreases of their elbows were caked with brilliant green dust, which, of course, was arsenic-laced dye, and after long exposure deadly poisonous. In London a 19-year-old flower maker, Matilda Schurer, died on November 20, 1861. During her final illness she vomited green waters, the whites of her eyes turning green, and everything she saw looked green. The autopsy revealed that the arsenic she had inhaled while at work, dusting artificial leaves with green powder to make them appear more lifelike, had reached her stomach, liver, and lungs.
Scheele’s green was also used to dye clothing and to colour costume jewellery. Where it made contact with the skin it could leave the with a rash or some form of skin irritation or, at worst, an oozing sore. It also made its way into foodstuffs, bakers using it as food, colouring, one London chef using it to make an amazingly green dessert and killing three diners in the process, and restaurants to their drinks to give them extra pizzazz.
In 1858, twenty-one people died in Bradford from arsenic-laced boiled sweets, adulterated because of the high cost of sugar, sold by Humbug Billy. “On a wave of public revulsion” the Bradford tragedy led to the passing of the Adulteration of Food and Drink Act 1860 and were instrumental to the restrictions imposed on chemists in the Pharmacy Act 1869.
However, the damage caused by Scheele’s Green did not stop there, as we shall see next time.
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