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Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
Dear wwh,
What a treasure trove of information is in your paragraph about matches! You've lit a flame or two in my brain...
My great grandfather was a country doctor, and, the classic ending to a country doctor's life, he died of pneumonia contracted after getting off his horse to cross a creek in Dinwiddie on a bad winter's day...Dr. John Chambers, buried out in the family graveyard beyond the grove. I've got his dictionary!!! And his grammar text, which has all kinds of clauses identified that we never heard about in school.
Book regards,
WW
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409 |
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Joined: Apr 2002
Posts: 200
enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Apr 2002
Posts: 200 |
A truly lovely story here:
The French found the odor of [the original fricton-matches] so repellent that in 1830 a Paris chemist, Charles Sauria, reformulated a combustion compound based on phosphorus. [But] Dr. Saura ... but unwittingly ushered in a near epidemic of a deadly disease known as "phossy jaw." Phosphorus was highly poisonous. Phosphorus matches were being manufactured in large quantitiles. Hundreds of factory workers developed phossy jaw, a necrosis that poisons the body's bones, especially those of the jaw. Babies sucking on match heads developed the syndrome, which caused infant skeletal deformities. And scraping the heads off a single pack of matches yield enough phosphorus to commit suicide or murder; both events were reported.
[Finally,] the first nonpoisonous match was introduced in 1911 by the Diamond Match Comapany. ... And as a humanitarian gesture, which won public commendation from President Taft, Diamond forfeited patent rights, allowing rival companies to introduce nonpoisonous matches. The company later won a prestigious for the elimination of an occupational disease.
Diamond simulateously solved another problem. The Sauria formula had a very low ignition point and lit at the slightest friction; many fires were ignited by rats gnawing on match heads at night. The new Diamond compound had a much higher ignition point and a taste entirely unattractive to rats.
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Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
Isn't Ted going to write an amusing story about Phossy/Fosse and Matches?
Blazing regards,
WordWatcher
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 3,467
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 3,467 |
Bill:
With all due respect, I don't think you're right about the phosphorus on the watch dials. If I correctly remember a parent's telling me during my childhood, the people w4ere painting radium onto the watch dials. The radium was causing cancers in the lips, tongue, jaw and perhaps esophagus.
TEd
TEd
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,819 |
The radium was indeed radioactive and induced cancers of the mouth and lips, as well as other head and neck cancers in the women who painted the dials. Radium also can cause cancers of the bone because it is absorbed into the bone like calcium.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Dear TEd:Besides radium, there are several other methods of making "glow in the dark" watch dials. There are various non-radioactive phosphorus compounds that will glow in the dark after being exposed to light. Some modern compounds can glow for 10 to 15 hours after a relatively short exposures to bright light.
Tritium, like radium, is radioactive, but it is much safer. Tritium, a form of hydrogen, has a reasonably
short 12 year half life so it doesn't have the long term dangers that radium has, and it decays into
harmless helium. The beta particles that tritium gives off can not even penetrate the outer layer of dead skin on your body, let alone the watch crystal and watch case.
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 1,289 |
Sir William Osler was not just a famous physician at Johns Hopkins. He was one of the original four members of the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine at its founding (the others being Drs. Halsted, Welch and Kelley). Osler was the chief and, along with the others, revolutionized the teaching of medicine. It was these four doctors who got medical training away from an apprenticeship program and into rigourous academic training with practical work with the patients in the hospital, to which the med. school was attached. They also developed the system of internship and residency. Osler was the author of a textbook which was a compendium of medical scholarship and practice at the time. Halstead, who taught and practiced surgery, was the inventor of many surgical procedures, most notably the radical mastectomy which, although a cruel procedure, saved many women from death by breast cancer. Kelley was a gynecologist and surgeon and the inventor of the Kelley clamp, among other things. Welch was the pathologist; JHU Med school library is named for him.
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Posts: 618
addict
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addict
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 618 |
It was these four doctors who got medical training away from an apprenticeship program and into rigourous academic training with practical work with the patients in the hospital, to which the med. school was attached. They also developed the system of internship and residency.
And I hold them personally responsible for all my pain.
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 819
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 819 |
Now, back on thread: Anybody know where I can find a decent slide rule maker? How abut a buggy whip shop? Blacksmiths are pretty well marginalized. Whalebone corset makers are hard to find. Even vacuum tubes for radios are now specialty items.
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