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In the Beginning

Carbon disulfide is an elegant little molecule. Ethanol, for example, contains two carbon atoms. Carbon disulfide has just one. Like water, with its single oxygen and flanking hydrogen atoms, carbon disulfide is made of a one-plus-two combination, in this case a single carbon with two matching sulfur atoms, one on each side. Thus, the molecular formula for water is H₂O, and for carbon disulfide, CS₂ (for comparison, carbon dioxide, having a similar two-plus-one plan, can be rendered as CO₂).

To a modern practicing chemist, this formulaic shorthand of letters and numbers speaks volumes about the characteristics of the molecule in question. And even a basic science course would presume some fluency in such notations. This was not the case back when carbon disulfide was first synthesized, in 1796, by a German mining and metallurgical chemist named Wilhelm August Lampadius.¹ He announced his discovery by publishing a brief scientific report characterizing the novel substance that he had created by heating coal and mineral pyrite, a source of sulfur.² But beyond stating that the new material was a volatile liquid that seemed to be a sulfur-containing alcohol, which would have made it an unusual compound, Lampadius was not able to be more definitive about the structure of carbon disulfide.

Other chemists soon became interested, setting out to reproduce the experiment of Lampadius in a manner consistent with the basic scientific principle of first establishing consistent results before going further. Initially, though, finding a sulfur alcohol in the residue of carbon heated with sulfur proved to be elusive. Indeed, there were doubts whether the odd compound Lampadius claimed to have observed even existed. Then, when what seemed to be the same material was successfully re-created, arguments ensued about its structure: some French chemists got into a bit of a catfight over the precise elemental components of this new sulfur alcohol. Lampadius, along with both the groups in France, proved to be fundamentally wrong about the molecule’s structure.³

The riddle of carbon disulfide was finally solved, not in Germany or France, but rather through a British-Swedish collaboration. In 1808, the British scientific leader Humphry Davy published the results of his initial inquiry into the nature of Lampadius’s chemical.⁴ Davy confirmed that the molecule contained sulfur and carbon, but he could not clearly determine its other constituents, in particular whether the oxygen and hydrogen atoms that might make it an alcohol were present. It was a scientific protégé of Davy, Alexander Marcet, who deciphered the structure of carbon disulfide. Marcet did a key part of this work in collaboration with the great Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius in the summer of 1812 while Berzelius was on an extended working visit to London.⁵ For example, in one experiment out of a series performed that summer, on 22 July (after first breakfasting together) Marcet and Berzelius were able to show that only when burned in the presence of external oxygen did carbon disulfide yield carbon dioxide as a major by-product.⁶ On the same day in July, Wellington was fighting in the Battle of Salamanca, a victory that proved to be a turning point in the Peninsular campaign against the French.

When they announced their findings the following May in a paper subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Berzelius and Marcet proposed calling what had been thought of as a sulfur alcohol by the new name “sulfuret of carbon,” consistent with having conclusively established that the compound was made up solely of a two-to-one combination of sulfur and carbon.⁷ The absence of oxygen meant it could not be an alcohol. Other synonyms for the compound were coined as the nineteenth century progressed and as technical nomenclature and chemical spelling became standardized over the years that followed: bisulpheret of carbon, followed by carbon bisulphide, then finally carbon disulphide (and not until the twentieth century written as “carbon disulfide”). But the chemical composition of the molecule as determined by Marcet and Berzelius was never seriously questioned again.

It is not surprising that it took so many scientists, leading chemists of their day, to correctly discern the atomic makeup of carbon disulfide. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, working out the precise number and kind of atomic components in a molecule was a laborious and error-prone process. At the Royal Institution in London, where Davy and Marcet did their work, the laboratories could give a misimpression that this was a haphazard operation: there were crucibles and retorts in which test materials could be broken down by heat, acids, or caustics, along with apparatuses for condensing and distilling. In fact, Berzelius described the chaos of Davy’s workspace admiringly, noting that “a tidy laboratory is the sign of a lazy chemist.”⁸

To be successful, analytic work of the sort these chemists carried out required meticulous measurement and identification of the residuals left over from chemical and physical manipulation of the starting materials. In practice, such analyses also drew heavily on extrapolation from previous results of taking apart similar compounds with established formulae. The task is analogous to coming up with the recipe for a soufflé by scraping out and studying the remains from a charred ramekin. In the case of carbon disulfide, the experimenters were doing their work without ever having seen the metaphorical soufflé in question, let alone having tasted it. Nothing like carbon disulfide had ever been encountered before by the first scientists trying to figure out what it was.

Actually, carbon disulfide exists in nature, but it is characteristic of only a very few, quite particular niches. One favored environmental locale for carbon disulfide turns out to be volcanic formations, in particular fumaroles, which are geologic vents that release hot gaseous emissions. When such a formation is high in sulfur-containing compounds, carbon disulfide can be formed, and the fumarole is known as a solfatara. For example, the aptly named Solfatara volcano near Naples is famous for such fumaroles. It was at Solfatara (in an ancient sauna building) that scientists only recently isolated a type of bacteria that not only can metabolize carbon disulfide but also seems to thrive on the stuff.⁹ Such organisms, happy in volcanic mudpots, living off what is toxic to most creatures, have been labeled “extremophilic” by the biologists who study them, as if such bacteria were the unicellular equivalents of a thrill-seeking sports enthusiast.

There are also a handful of tree species that naturally synthesize carbon disulfide. The chemical may serve them as a protective agent, given carbon disulfide’s fungus-killing capabilities. One of the best-studied carbon disulfide producers is the noble valley oak (Quercus lobata), perhaps not coincidentally a very long-lived tree.¹⁰ The valley oak, like a solfatara, is associated with species of bacteria that manifest the unusual ability to digest and be nurtured by the sustaining carbon disulfide that their host so generously provides.

The chemists working in the Royal Institution early in the nineteenth century knew nothing of bisulphuret of carbon being released by fumaroles or produced by oak trees. Nor did they speculate on any direct practical applications for the odd substance they had finally characterized chemically. Lacking any real use, carbon disulfide remained little more than a chemical curiosity in the initial decades that followed its discovery. Indeed, even for the chemically curious, carbon disulfide was an arcane substance.

An excellent measure of carbon disulfide’s marginal status can be taken from the tutorials of young Miss Emily by Mrs. B., the protagonists in the hugely successful Conversations on Chemistry written by Jane Marcet. Although her husband, Berzelius’s collaborator Alexander Marcet, was a well-respected and highly successful chemist-physician, Jane Marcet came to be far more widely known. Her fame derived from the groundbreaking educational texts that she authored, each structured as a dialogue between a kindly, very smart tutor and her eager female charges. The publication that led off the series was Conversations on Chemistry. It first appeared in 1806, well before her husband’s work on carbon disulfide, and went through many editions. The author added new topics as she felt they were warranted (for instance, in the tenth edition Marcet introduced material on the steam engine), but carbon disulfide, it seems, did not merit inclusion among such updates.

Conversations on Chemistry, beyond the editions overseen by Marcet herself, also served as the basis for minimally altered “adaptations” published in America under the cover of other authorships. It is in one of these texts that carbon disulfide finally makes a brief appearance. Dr. Thomas P. Jones, in New Conversations on Chemistry (1831), lifted verbatim many sections of the original Marcet text and abridged others. One of Marcet’s revisions had addressed Humphry Davy’s invention of the safety lamp for coal miners (which had followed not long after her husband’s work on carbon disulfide). Jones appended to this an added monologue put into the mouth of Mrs. B. as she patiently instructs Emily: “There is a curious compound of sulphur and carbon, which may receive passing notice. . . . This sulphuret, or rather bisulphuret of carbon is very inflammable, acrid to the taste, and has a very offensive odor. It may be formed by passing the vapour of sulphur over fragments of red-hot coal. The fact of the existence of such a combination is all that would at present interest you in regard to it.”¹¹

Although they did not directly consider practical uses for carbon disulfide, Marcet and Berzelius commented on the chemical’s high volatility, noting that it was even greater than that of ether, which was well appreciated for its rapid vaporization. Marcet even went on to carry out additional experiments demonstrating the powerful cooling effect of carbon disulfide as it quickly evaporated.¹² Thirty years later, when ether anesthesia was first introduced in 1846, the next generation of experimenters quickly turned to other similarly volatile substances to test their therapeutic potential.¹³ By 1847, James Simpson at the University of Edinburgh had introduced chloroform anesthesia, to great renown. He went on to study a number of other candidate anesthetics from among recognized volatile substances, publishing his results the following year. Among the test agents he investigated was carbon disulfide: “I have breathed the vapour of bisulphuret of carbon, and exhibited [that is, exposed] it to about twenty other individuals, and it is certainly a very rapid and powerful anaesthetic. One or two stated that they found it even more pleasant than chloroform; but in several it produced depressing and disagreeable visions and was followed for some hours by headache and giddiness, even when given only in small doses.”¹⁴

When Simpson tried out carbon disulfide in clinical applications, it was even more unsatisfactory. In the end, he recommended against any clinical use for carbon disulfide, adding that yet another drawback was the very unpleasant odor of the substance, characterized as the stench of putrid cabbage.

Simpson’s was the first human experimentation with carbon disulfide; it was followed soon thereafter by animal data. Two months after Simpson’s report, Dr. John Snow, another key figure in the early history anesthesiology, published his experimental results from exposing mice to inhaled carbon disulfide. The mouse that was subjected to the lowest dose manifested violent tremors until taken out of its exposure jar, after which “it flinched on being pinched; attempted to walk but fell over on its side: it had no appreciation of danger at first, but it quickly recovered.” Additional test mice, exposed to higher concentrations, fared less well. The final test mouse, “after running about for a minute, fell down, and stretched itself violently out, and died.” Snow was impressed by the dangerously powerful effects of inhaled carbon disulfide, marked by profound toxicity combined with its volatility. And as he was to show six years later when famously investigating a London cholera outbreak attributable to contaminated drinking water, Snow did not shy away from the human health implications of what he had observed with carbon disulfide: “Indeed, I feel convinced that, if a person were to draw a deep inspiration of air, saturated with its vapour at a summer temperature, instant death would be the result.”¹⁵

Unfortunately, it was not only the potent anesthetic effects of carbon disulfide that were beginning to be recognized. Carbon disulfide’s powerful solvent capabilities, too, came to wider attention in the 1840s. In 1845, William Gregory’s influential Outlines of Chemistry, for the Use of Students appeared. He provides instructions for how to synthesize bisulphuret of carbon, describes its physical properties, and ends by delineating its utility as an effective solvent:

It dissolves sulphur and phosphorous readily; and these solutions, by spontaneous evaporation, yield fine crystals of those elements. It also dissolves camphor, essential, oils, and resins.

Sulphuret of carbon is occasionally used as an external application in burns; and it promises to be useful as a solvent for resins, many of which it dissolves readily, and thus forms varnishes, which from its great volatility, dry very rapidly.¹⁶

Thereafter, the solvent properties of carbon disulfide drove its success. There had never been another solvent like it.

Before the discovery of carbon disulfide, scientists had only a few choices when it came to dissolving things. Water, the fluid of life, was always first. It fills the inland sea of every cell in a microscopic recapitulation of the primordial oceans in which biological systems first evolved. Each cell’s viability depends on that fluid, rich in the salts and nutrients dissolved within it. Water is not the only solvent in nature. Alcohols of all sorts, and that includes consumable ethanol, do a pretty good job of getting substances to go into a solution. Whatever its other virtues, wine is as good a solvent as water, and usually even better. Turpentine is another ancient solvent, since antiquity obtained from the resinous discharges of various trees.¹⁷ Turpentine is a natural mix of multiple related chemicals that are grouped together as terpenes. These molecules are more complex than either water or ethanol, with the great advantage of being better than alcohol at dissolving oils (water being of nearly no use at all for that purpose).

For the first millennia of human history, water, alcohol, and turpentine were it when it came to solvents. The early alchemists struggled against the limitations imposed by their relative weak dissolving powers. The very term “solvent,” derived from a root meaning “to loosen or dissolve,” reflects the roadblock this presented. The alchemists came up with a way around this problem in the form of a universal solvent, referred to as the “alkahest.”¹⁸ Chemistry, in the modern sense, had not yet come into being: the alkahest was purely a product of conjecture, not experiment; but the alchemists that promoted its virtues were not dissuaded by the absence of any confirmation of its existence. The term “alkahest,” a pseudo-Arabic formulation meant to echo the names of chemical entities that did exist (including alcohol), was as much a fiction as the solvent it claimed to describe. It could not slice or dice, but the alkahest was said to be able to dissolve anything and everything and yet not destroy the basic essence of the substance it put into solution.

The absurdity of a universal solvent was clear. After all, what vessel would be capable of holding the alkahest without itself disintegrating? The new chemistry, as it began to emerge, sought to discover real rather than mythical new solvents. When distilled wine was mixed with sulfuric acid, the result was a novel substance initially called sweet oil of vitriol, first produced in the sixteenth century.¹⁹ Two hundred years later, in the early 1700s, this solvent, finally having been characterized in laboratory experiments, was renamed “ether.”²⁰

Carbon disulfide was a far more powerful dissolving agent than ether, and in many ways a more potent solvent than newer agents that soon followed. It was the unusual ability of carbon disulfide to dissolve both phosphorous and sulfur that led to its initial commercial applications. The first such use for carbon disulfide was in a major emerging technology of the day, electroplating. This process, introduced at the beginning of the 1840s, applied exceedingly thin layers of precious gold or silver to objects made of less expensive base metals. Electroplating was able to displace a far more labor intensive and technically limited process called Sheffield plate, which mechanically layered silver on copper and then fused the hybrid with heat. Electroplating moved the industry from its former center at Sheffield to Birmingham, England, where Elkington, Mason and Company held all the key patents for this new and highly lucrative technology.

A brilliant young chemist and inventor named Alexander Parkes had gone to work for Elkington. The key breakthrough that made electroplating commercially viable was the discovery that metals could be put into solution using cyanide and then drawn by electrical current and deposited on a target metal object. Parkes took the basic Elkington process as his starting point. To it, he added a special flourish that got around the fundamental limitation of requiring a metal object of some sort to serve as the electrically charged recipient of the superimposed metal coating. Parkes figured out a way to electroplate an organic, nonmetallic object through a sequential process in which he first dipped it in a solution of phosphorous dissolved in carbon disulfide, followed by a silver nitrate coating. A metallic silver coating resulted, serving as the base metal layer that could then be plated with additional silver, gold, or copper.²¹

Elkington’s stock-in-trade included tea services, tureens, and many other objects for both special occasions and everyday use. Harriet Martineau, a prime defender of the Victorian cultural and political high ground, glowingly described Elkington’s operation in its heyday. Martineau was most impressed by some of the special-order items she saw, including a decorated commemorative object: “The group of palm-tree and oak, overshadowing the sick Hindoo, and the soldier-surgeon stopping over him, lancet in hand; the piece of testimonial plate presented to the surgeon of a regiment.”²²

Within the broader Elkington inventory, Parkes’s unique metal-plated natural objects essentially served as technological vanity items meant to trumpet the seemingly unlimited manufacturing horizons stretching out around the Birmingham factory. Thus, on 29 November 1843, when Prince Albert paid a high-profile visit to a series of Birmingham industrial sites, the day ended with an extended tour of the Elkington facility.²³ A high point of the visit was the presentation to the Prince Consort of a delicate object of virtue plated using the Parkes method. This event even became something of an urban legend, purporting that what had been presented was nothing less than a silvered spider web. Indeed, such an object would have achieved the ultimate in refined delicacy, marrying art and science in a way that could only have very much pleased Prince Albert. Harriet Martineau, following up on this story with a reporter’s nose for fact-checking, determined that the object had actually been a silvered rosebud, which happed to have attached to it a bit of cobweb unintentionally plated at the same time.²⁴ In any case, the prince was charmed.

Parkes’s use of carbon disulfide to dissolve phosphorous essentially used one chemical curiosity to produce another. But his next invention based on the dissolving properties of the compound proved to be much more far-reaching in its commercial impact. On 25 March 1846, Alexander Parkes filed British patent no. 11,147 for “the change upon caoutchouc, gutta percha, and their compounds, by employing agents in a state of solution capable of producing such change.”²⁵ The key step that Parkes included in his patent was that of dissolving sulfur in carbon disulfide and then immersing in that solution any objects intended to be treated, thus causing the desired “change.”

By “change upon caoutchouc” (that is, India rubber), Parkes meant vulcanization, but he could not have known of that term in March 1846. The first known appearance of “vulcanization” was in another British patent, filed by Thomas Hancock of Charles Macintosh and Company just one week before that of Parkes. The Hancock patent was for a further refinement of a very different sulfur treatment process for rubber, one that Hancock had developed a few years earlier and that was also for changing the character of caoutchouc, but ultimately called vulcanization.

Whether or not in plating a rose Parkes was simply painting the lily (in fact, gilding it), such frivolities were never going to be a major part of the electroplating business. In contrast, any successful method for vulcanization had the potential to be a very big deal indeed. Without vulcanization of one sort or another, natural rubber is next to useless for most applications, too gooey or too brittle by turns. But once changed, rubber can be transformed into any number of highly marketable products. Because the financial stakes were so high, at the time of Parkes’s invention Hancock and Charles Goodyear were already waging a bitter transatlantic fight over who held primacy to the original vulcanization patent.

Parkes’s simple technique for dissolving sulfur in carbon disulfide and then dipping rubber-made goods into the solution was ingenious and novel. Unlike the Hancock-Goodyear method, Parkes’s did not use heat and pressure to introduce sulfur into the final product. For that reason, his method came to be known as cold-process vulcanization in order to differentiate it from the Hancock-Goodyear hot-process technique. Given the obvious originality of Parkes’s discovery, Hancock had no basis for fighting its patent, so he negotiated to take over the sole rights to its use.

Hot-process-vulcanization establishments were large-scale mega-factories of their day, with huge mixers churning together, under pressure and heat, rubber combined with sulfur and other additives, and then squeezing this mix through massive calenders working like a group of huge, synchronized rolling pins. Constructing and running such plants required large capital investments and significant technical engineering know-how. In contrast, Parkes’s cold-process technology was easily adaptable to small-scale operations where any number of handy rubber items could be produced easily, quickly, and relatively cheaply, feeding a growing consumer appetite for such objects.

In 1847, shortly after adding Parkes’s cold-process invention to his vulcanization portfolio, Thomas Hancock published Personal Narrative of the Origin and Progress of the Caoutchouc or India-rubber Manufacture in England, noting at the outset: “In writing a personal narration it is impossible to escape the very disagreeable necessity of frequently repeating the pronoun I,—my readers must excuse this unavoidable egotism” (emphasis in the original).²⁶

One of the plates that illustrates Hancock’s narrative, titled “Domestic Articles,” shows a wide range of objects that seem to have changed little in the last one hundred and fifty years (although plastic may have since replaced natural rubber).²⁷ These include bathing caps (one for men and another for women), an infant pacifier, a playing ball, and even home exercise equipment in the form of stretchable “chest expanders.” Other rubber paraphernalia shown are less timeless, such as an “invalid cushion” and a handy “sponge bag” (and a matching rubber soap bag). But the one consumer item that arguably was the biggest beneficiary of mass production using the Parkes process for dipping small rubber objects is not illustrated among Hancock’s potpourri of domestic household objects: the India rubber condom.

The dipped-rubber consumer goods industry, restricted by patent limitations, did not become widespread in Great Britain. Across the Channel and beyond the reach of such patents, however, France proved to be fertile ground for this type of manufacturing, well suited to precisely the sort of small-scale workshops that had long characterized production in and around Paris. The first English-language appearance of the term “French letter” as slang for “condom,” which dates from this period, may derive from the geographic concentration of this product of the cold-process-vulcanization industry.²⁸ What is certain is that such manufacturing grew dramatically in that time and that place.

The rapid expansion in carbon disulfide vulcanization in France can be gauged by the attention it began to receive in technical texts. Even as late as 1849, when a major text on applied industrial chemistry appeared—a two-volume, more-than-six-hundred-page work by the French chemist Anselme Payen—carbon disulfide was relegated to a brief reference in a single footnote.²⁹ Only two years later, the 1851 updated edition of the same text highlighted on its title page that the book had been augmented with chapters covering a number of new chemicals and their applications, specifically noting among them carbon disulfide in the rubber industry. In his revised text, Payen warns that carbon disulfide’s use in cold vulcanization can be not only inconvenient, but even dangerous to workers on account of the chemical vapors present, cautioning that such work was best done in an open space with good ventilation.³⁰

Payen was a major presence in applied chemistry in mid-nineteenth-century France. Among his many accomplishments, in 1839 he became the first to chemically name cellulose, identifying it as a principal constituent of wood.³¹ This discovery would prove critical in later applications of carbon disulfide. And although Payen may have been an authoritative voice in many technical aspects of industrial chemistry, his cautions regarding the potential dangers of handling carbon disulfide went unheeded.

In 1853, two years after the new edition of Payen’s text appeared, no less a medical figure than Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne provided the first published notice of carbon disulfide toxicity to the human nervous system. Duchenne, after whom a major form of muscular dystrophy would later be named, made a presentation to the Medical-Surgical Society of Paris on muscle atrophy, a core interest of his, in relation to various neurological and psychiatric disease manifestations. Although Duchenne gave only brief mention to carbon disulfide exposure among vulcanization workers, his observation was ominous: the chemical appeared to cause a disease whose symptoms resembled general paresis of the insane, that is, the mental derangement seen in end-stage syphilis. Duchenne underscored the point by stating that he had been presented a recent case of this syndrome by a colleague at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris.³²

Duchenne’s patient zero did not remain an isolated case. Early in 1856, another Parisian physician, Auguste Delpech, gave a brief report to an afternoon meeting of the French Academy of Medicine, describing his clinical experience with cases of carbon disulfide–caused disease.³³ The unfortunates he examined suffered from a frightening range of symptoms. They experienced agitated sleep with vivid and disturbing dreams when able to sleep at all, followed the next day with sleepiness and a sense of inertia. Overall, the patients complained of compromised memory, confusion, and, in extreme cases, extremely abnormal behavior that could be characterized as maniacal. Other complaints induced by carbon disulfide included headache, muscle weakness, and numbness. End-stage syphilis symptoms would have been bad enough—what Delpech was describing seemed to be even worse.

Delpech was thirty-seven years old when he made this first report to the academy, but he was already a professor of medicine associated with the University of Paris, and he had a long-held interest in neurological manifestations of disease.³⁴ Carbon disulfide became the central focus of his work for years to come. Continuing to sound the alarm on the dangers of carbon disulfide, Delpech published the details of one of his cases in a medical newspaper of the time, L’Union Medicale.³⁵ Twenty-seven-year-old Victor Delacroix, Delpech reports, after three months of using carbon disulfide as a solvent to patch and repair rubber objects, began to manifest nervous system disease. By the time Delpech examined him, the patient appeared aged beyond his years, a broken man whose “sexual desire and erections were abolished.” Delacroix experienced marginal improvement after a convalescence completely removed from further exposure. But the impotence remained.

In another publication that appeared the same month as the case report on Delacroix, Delpech detailed animal experiments that he had performed with carbon disulfide.³⁶ Apparently unaware of earlier animal experimentation by the British anesthesiologist Snow, Delpech had rapidly dispatched two pigeons, but was able to preserve a test rabbit long enough for it to display paralysis. Later the same year, Delpech published a further expansion of his work as a seventy-nine-page freestanding monograph.³⁷

Delpech did not leave off there. He continued to amass clinical experience with carbon disulfide poisoning over the next seven years, finally publishing in 1863 his definitive work on the subject.³⁸ In a scientific paper more than a hundred pages long, Delpech extensively details twenty-four case histories of cold-vulcanization workers specifically engaged in what he terms the “inflated rubber industry.” This employment involved the mechanical distension of rubber objects that were then dipped into a carbon disulfide solution before being dried in the open air of the crowded workrooms where this manufacturing typically was done. The two principal products of this trade, Delpech reports, were colored balloons and condoms, the latter with a “special destiny for export.”

To this day, Delpech’s 1863 opus holds its place as the classic descriptive account of carbon disulfide poisoning. The two dozen cases reinforced his initial findings of years before: the intoxication manifested wide-ranging, devastating neurological symptoms, both physical and psychological. Delpech’s wealth of clinical experience allowed him to further refine his assessment of the natural history of the disease at hand. He was able to demarcate between two distinct phases of carbon disulfide intoxication: first came a period of illness marked by mental disturbances that could be quite profound; a later phase was associated with distal nervous system manifestations, including muscle weakness and numbness of the arms and legs.

Sexual disturbance played a prominent role in the syndrome that Delpech described. In the first flush of illness, he documents multiple cases of inappropriate male sexual arousal. Case 10 was a prime example: a twenty-year-old troubled with constant erections. Nor was this genre of toxic effect limited to men. For Madame D., case 19, carbon disulfide induced genital agitation, aphrodisiacal excitation, and abnormal menstrual bleeding. In the second phase of carbon disulfide poisoning, the primary sexual manifestation that Delpech remarked upon was impotence, the same problem that troubled the very first patient he had described.

Two of Delpech’s cases in the 1863 series manifested frank exposure-related insanity. There was also an even more disturbed, twenty-fifth case that fell outside the cohort because Delpech never had the opportunity to directly examine her. She had become progressively deranged, and in the end she intentionally self-asphyxiated with carbon disulfide vapor. It was a death by acute inhalation of exactly the sort that John Snow had predicted based on his laboratory studies when he rejected carbon disulfide as an anesthetic for human use.

Importantly, Auguste Delpech did not see himself as simply a passive chronicler of the industrial plague he was witnessing. In his earliest reports, he recommended that carbon disulfide vulcanization be completely forbidden in small rooms, and that even in larger work spaces, direct contact with the toxic substance should be reduced if it could not be eliminated entirely. Becoming more sophisticated in his proposed interventions, by 1863 he was promoting the adoption of a protective device originally devised by one of his patients. It was a kind of glove box apparatus that presaged the equipment used in the next century to handle radioactive substances. Delpech reports that the worker’s invention, despite its simplicity and potential efficacy, was derided as nothing more than a “magic lantern.”³⁹

Delpech was not alone in his early concerns over the hazards of carbon disulfide or even in striving for better workplace protections. The French Academy of Sciences, which awarded an annual prize on the topic of unhealthy work activity, received a paper in 1858 that proposed placing open wooden boxes of quicklime on the floors of workshops using carbon disulfide, in order to absorb the toxic fumes.⁴⁰ Still, little was done to improve the lot of the workers. Delpech noted that there had been in his experience only a single case in which a worker injured by carbon disulfide took legal action against his boss, winning in court thanks to Delpech’s expert opinion.

Medical reports of carbon disulfide toxicity continued to appear. A medical thesis for the Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1874, for example, included five new observations of cases of workers poisoned by carbon disulfide.⁴¹ Three of them were only fifteen years of age. Another medical thesis, published two years later, added four more new cases, all seen in the hospital service of Dr. Delpech, including Louis Herbunot, who worked making balloons; Arthur Bahin, who made balloons and condoms; and a patient named A. Surtout, who did the same work. The fourth patient, Mlle. Louise Genet, was discreetly described as simply working in vulcanization.⁴² The year was 1876, the twentieth anniversary of Delpech’s first poisoning report.

Delpech, who died in 1880, devoted the better part of his career to the study of carbon disulfide’s deleterious effects. This toxic substance caused distinct neurological deficits that could be easily assessed by direct physical examination, but it also induced far less easily quantifiable impairments in mental perceptions. Thus, in this work, Delpech was the forerunner of an evolving discipline, the novel science of the mind.⁴³

In the decade that followed, the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot was widely acknowledged as that new science’s rising sun. In particular, it was out of Charcot’s promotion of hysteria as a medical construct that modern precepts of psychiatry began to crystallize. As laid down by Charcot, the clinical presentation of hysteria combined multiple physical complaints that seemed to be features of a neurological syndrome. Muscle weakness, which could be as extreme as paralysis, was common. Often, the manifested pattern of weakness did not conform to any known anatomic lesion or nervous system pathway. Delving deeper, the astute clinician could uncover many other problems that also commonly troubled the classic hysteric. Sexual dysfunction, in particular, was a notable complaint. Needless to say, hysteria was a disease that especially afflicted women, although male exceptions to the norm were noted.

A century later, when hysteria as a diagnostic entity had long since been abandoned, a discordance between symptoms and physical findings (or laboratory data) would come to be labeled in pejorative medical slang as the presence of a “high serum porcelain level” (that is, the patient is a “crock”).⁴⁴ But in late-nineteenth-century France—and thanks to Charcot’s wide influence—hysteria was taken to be an established medical fact throughout the allopathic medical world.

It stands to reason that carbon disulfide, an intoxicating agent capable of both physical and mental effects, including prominent psychosexual manifestations, would be of interest to Charcot. Late in 1888, in one of his famous “Tuesday lessons,” Charcot took up the question. With the afflicted case present, the demonstration began: “You have without doubt, gentlemen, more or less heard talk of the carbon disulfide industry. This industry includes the preparation of carbon disulfide itself, as well as subordinate industries, among which one must cite the example of the fabrication of vulcanized rubber. Hygienists and clinicians are concerned with these industries because of certain accidents, principally neurological, to which its workers are subject. . . . The patient you have before your eyes offers a perfect example of this genre.”⁴⁵

In this lesson, Charcot acknowledged the previous contributions to the field of the late Dr. Delpech and the current work of Charcot’s junior colleague Dr. Pierre Marie, who had called the case at hand to the professor’s attention. Charcot described the patient’s pre-morbid status: always sober (never drinking to excess) and tranquil of manner. Charcot also provided a detailed and revealing occupational history. The patient had worked in the rubber trade for seventeen years, but in the few months before his illness he had begun performing a new and particularly odious task: manually cleaning out vulcanization vats laden with carbon disulfide. Six weeks before the lesson, the patient had collapsed on the job, literally anesthetized by the high level of carbon disulfide vapors to which he was subjected.

The prodromal symptom before collapsing, Charcot was keen to comment, was a sensation of burning in the scrotum. It was half an hour before the rubber worker could be aroused from his comatose state, and then, stuporous, he had to be carried home. He remained bedridden for the following two days. Recurrent nightmares of fantastic and terrible animals characterized his convalescence, if it could be called that: he continued to be weak, suffered from twitching, and experienced vision loss.

This constellation of mixed neurological complaints could signify only one syndrome according to the formula of Charcot—hysteria. Male hysteria was uncommon, Charcot himself admitted in the lesson, but not unheard of. The patient’s despondent mood sealed the deal: female hysterics (typically petit bourgeois) were detached in regard to their condition, whereas males, commonly working class, whose hysteria was often linked to a traumatic event, were not indifferent to their debility.⁴⁶

In fact, this was not hysteria. The patient’s acute response to high levels of carbon disulfide fit with what the British anesthesiologists, Simpson and Snow, had shown in human and animal experiments. The patient’s residual illness was in every way consistent with the chemical toxicity of carbon disulfide, which Delpech had documented so well. Yet despite this, Charcot took this case to be a confirmation—rather than refutation—of the diagnostic entity of hysteria, which he championed. So strong was the authority of his opinion on this matter that even years after the general diagnostic label of hysteria fell out of fashion, “Charcot’s carbon-disulfide hysteria” persisted in use as an industrial-medical diagnostic label.⁴⁷

After Charcot, carbon disulfide poisoning continued to fascinate the next generation of French neurologists, many of them leaders in the field. The neurologist who had provided Charcot with his teaching case, Dr. Pierre Marie (one of the namesakes of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease) wrote a full paper on carbon disulfide, further expanding upon the case presented in Charcot’s lesson.⁴⁸ Dr. Georges Gilles de la Tourette (of Tourette’s syndrome) wrote on the subject of carbon disulfide.⁴⁹ In the same period, Georges Guillain (of Guillain-Barré syndrome) did as well.⁵⁰ As with Charcot (and Delpech before him), these French neurologists consistently alluded to frequent genital involvement associated with carbon disulfide intoxication, either excitation or impotence or both, sequentially.

Driven by the relatively large number of exposed cold-process-vulcanization workers in France, the clinical investigation of carbon disulfide toxicity was largely, but not entirely, a Gallic enterprise up until the 1890s. As time progressed and the industry spread geographically, physicians elsewhere also began to pay attention to the problem. In Germany in particular, scientific papers and entries in medical texts on the subject of carbon disulfide began to appear with increasing frequency in the later nineteenth century. This new interest coincided with a shift in the center of gravity for psychiatric practice from France to Central Europe.

In 1899 there appeared an exhaustive publication marking the culmination of that transition. Die Schwefelkohlenstoff-Vergiftung der Gummi-Arbeiter unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der psychischen und nervösen Störungen und der Gewerbe-Hygiene [Carbon Disulfide Poisoning in Rubber Workers, with Special Consideration of Mental and Neurological Disorders and Industrial Hygiene] is a dense monograph more than two hundred pages long.⁵¹ Its author, Dr. Rudolf Laudenheimer, presents the clinical details of no fewer than forty-two cases of carbon disulfide intoxication. Sets of patients fall into various subgroups (cases 18 through 22, notably, suffered from mania).

Laudenheimer was not a generalist with an interest in the nervous system, as Delpech had been (Laudenheimer eclipsed Delpech’s previous record number of twenty-four cases with this publication), nor was Laudenheimer a neurologist championing hysteria, on the model of Charcot. Laudenheimer was a full-fledged psychiatrist. After his foray into this subject, he apparently left poisoned factory workers far behind. Two years after publishing his magnum opus on carbon disulfide, he opened an exclusive spa-sanatorium where his patients included prominent artists and intellectuals of Munich’s fin de siècle avant-garde.⁵²

In contrast to France and Germany, and despite being the original homeland of Parkes and the cold process for vulcanization, Great Britain showed scant interest in carbon disulfide toxicity during these years. There was a brief flurry of concern when, in 1863, the ponderously named Commission of Inquiry into the Employment of Children and Young Persons in Trades and Manufactures not Already Regulated by Law visited the Charles Macintosh India rubber manufactory. The commission was reassured that even though carbon disulfide was used by Macintosh, no adverse effects from it had been noted by the employer.⁵³

Despite the denials of Macintosh and the commission’s glossing over the problem, working conditions in the British rubber industry in the late nineteenth century were not appreciably better than those in France or Germany. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary, under its entry for “gas” as an inflected verb, gives “to be gassed: to be poisoned by a gas,” citing as the earliest usage in that sense an 1889 appearance in the Liverpool Daily Post: “ ‘Gassed’ was the term used in the india-rubber business, and it meant dazed.”⁵⁴

Not all British clinicians accepted at face value the claim that all was well in the India rubber curing rooms. Those treating the poisoning cases that resulted from carbon disulfide exposure were aware of the problem and took notice in particular of the compound’s capacity to damage the nerves of sensation, especially the faculty of vision. Indeed, multiple British medical publications on the subject of optic nerve damage (a condition known as amblyopia) appeared in this period.⁵⁵

Moreover, in addressing amblyopia, doctors catalogued other nervous system deficits caused by carbon disulfide as well. For example, when Dr. James Ross of the Manchester Infirmary in 1886 treated a twenty-four-year-old (identified as J.N.) poisoned by carbon disulfide in rubber vulcanization, he was careful to include a detailed mapping of the patient’s color vision deficits. In addition, Ross included a complete neurological profile that, in a nod to the French literature on the subject, also addressed J.N.’s impairment in sexual function: “The patient lost all sexual desire a few weeks after he began work in the curing-room, and even at the present time he never has any erections. The loss of this function was not preceded by a stage of sexual excitement.”⁵⁶

Benjamin Ward Richardson was the most notable British physician with an interest in carbon disulfide during those years. He was a proponent of an eclectic mix of public health interventions, at one point even promoting tricycle riding for its exercise benefits. Richardson was also an early animal rights advocate; being familiar with the early anesthesia literature, he saw carbon disulfide as an ideal vehicle for the painless euthanasia of unwanted pets.⁵⁷ But Richardson also cared about humans. In 1879, he wrote a tract on the general subject of occupational health, intended not for his medical peers, but for workers themselves; it was written in a plain style and published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In this pocket-size book that could easily fit in a work smock, Richardson includes specific warnings on the dangers of carbon disulfide, cautioning that those exposed to it (he singled out balloon makers) could be “rendered imbecile and insane.”⁵⁸

Poisoning from carbon disulfide continued to be endemic in the British rubber trade. As late as 1902, Dr. Thomas Oliver, later knighted in recognition of his prominence as a physician expert in occupational disease, described the deplorable current state of affairs in the British rubber trade. Oliver wrote of factory girls who, at a work shift’s end, “simply staggered home,” only to wake in the morning to a headache that could be relieved solely by “renewed inhalation of the vapour.” Oliver described fits of insanity leading to suicide: “Sad as this state of things is, it is nothing to the extremely violent maniacal condition into which some of the workers, male and female, are known to have been thrown. Some of them have become the victims of acute insanity, and in their frenzy have precipitated themselves from the top rooms of the factory to the ground. In consequence of bisulphide of carbon being extremely explosive, vulcanization by means of it has generally to be carried on in rooms, one side of which is perfectly open. This open front is usually protected by iron bars.”⁵⁹

Reports from the United States were almost entirely absent from the medical literature on carbon disulfide poisoning in the rubber industry in the nineteenth century. One notable exception was a description of an outbreak of insanity among factory workers treated at the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane.⁶⁰ The first case, a twenty-seven-year-old, was committed in April 1887, raving and incoherent. Twelve days later, a second case came in, a clinical match to the first. In fact, the two men worked at the same factory. In August of that year, a third co-worker appeared: “M.B., male, age thirty-one, married, a Hebrew, born in Austria,” who had been “in a condition of great mental excitement, disturbing the neighborhood by loud noises and violent praying.”

The treating physician for these cases, Dr. Frederick Peterson, was chief of clinic of the Nervous Department of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He could not accept that some kind of bizarre coincidence explained the identical employment histories of all three cases. When the workers regained their sense enough to describe their work, Peterson learned that their rubber factory jobs exposed them to carbon disulfide. Peterson believed that it was important to make it known that this poison, so well recognized in Europe, had come to America. Eventually, he reported these cases in the prestigious Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (later renamed the New England Journal of Medicine). He attributed the delay in the dissemination of his findings to a lack of needed cooperation. In effect, Peterson was stonewalled, and he did not hesitate to state the reason: “I have delayed in publishing these cases for some years, thinking that I might hear of other similar ones, or that I might acquire more information from the owners of the factory or from doctors in attendance upon their employees, but it is astonishing what a large amount of ignorance and secretiveness develops among the authorities connected with any factory, when questions arise as to the unhealthful conditions under which the operatives pursue their vocations.”⁶¹

Amblyopia was the other manifestation of carbon disulfide poisoning in the rubber industry documented in the United States, perhaps because of the interest in such optic nerve damage in Britain. The first U.S.-reported case worked in a job at the intersection of two growth industries: the rubber trade and bicycle manufacturing. Dr. F. C. Heath described his patient:

Miss T., visited my office early in the summer of 1900, complaining of weak eyes, saying there was a fog before them. Her sight was then about normal, far and near, but the eyes soon tired and the pupils were a little dilated. She had worked in the Indiana Rubber Company from Jan. 1, 1900, to the last of March, 1900, when she was unable to continue. She spliced the inner tubes of bicycle tires which she washed with bisulphide of carbon and chloride of sulfur solution, from open cans except the last two weeks, then from stoppered cans. She and her mother described her symptoms as great nervousness, excitability, irritability of temper.⁶²

Dr. Heath is surprisingly forthcoming in his report. Over and above naming the employer, he recounts that he was later called to testify in a legal suit brought by the patient against Indiana Rubber for $5,000 in damages. Heath admits that he was not a strong witness; since the patient’s eyesight had not been quantitatively impaired, he did not feel that he could state for the record that she had amblyopia. After being out for two days, the trial jury came back with a compromise award reduced to $500, one-tenth of the original claim. When Heath later saw the patient in medical follow-up, her pupils were more dilated, her eyesight was worse, she had lost peripheral vision, and there was pallor of optic disc (the optic nerve ending in the eye), all findings consistent with amblyopia, but this was after the trial.

Rubber treatment was the dominant but not the sole market for carbon disulfide in these years. For example, even as Delpech was reporting his first cases of poisoning in Paris in 1856, the chief military pharmacist for France in Algeria, Dr. Auguste-Nicolas-Eugène Millon, was promoting the use of carbon disulfide to extract the essence of perfumes from the native flowers of North Africa, a potentially lucrative enterprise.⁶³ Other uses of the chemical for its solvent properties also led to occasional poisonings, for example, in two young men in Australia who used it to extract oil from shale rock⁶⁴ and in a horse groom who tried to do away with himself by drinking two ounces of carbon disulfide, which was used to clean harnesses.⁶⁵ Carbon disulfide even found a place on the druggist’s shelf as a compounding agent for selected cure-alls, including a combination with alcohol promoted as a treatment for rheumatism.⁶⁶ Nonetheless, all of these applications were inconsequential as sources of large-scale exposure.

But a major use for carbon disulfide outside of vulcanization emerged in the 1870s. It became the first widely promoted synthetic chemical pesticide. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, a new scourge nearly obliterated viticulture in Europe. A small, aphid-like insect attacked the roots of grape vines, initiating a process that choked off nutrients and led to crop failures across the Continent. This disaster, of biblical proportions for the wine industry, came to be known as the “phylloxera plague.” There seemed to be no cure and no way to halt the progression of an infestation that marched inexorably from vineyard to vineyard. Then, in 1873, a seemingly miraculous intervention began to be promoted.⁶⁷ Carbon disulfide, like a deus ex machina, arrived on the scene. Injected into the soil with pumps or even tilled in with specially designed plows, carbon disulfide in liberal amounts was reported to control the dread infestation. If the disease was far gone, the affected plots could be sterilized with even more carbon disulfide, enough to kill not only the insects but the grape vines as well, at least saving any nearby untainted vineyards. This destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it strategy was known at the time as carbon disulfide extinction treatment.

The grape vines of America were threatened as well, but in the end the U.S. grape crop never succumbed to widespread phylloxera loss. This was not because of chemical treatments, but thanks to naturally resistant rootstock. When this rootstock was eventually transplanted to Europe, it proved to be a cure for the disease. But before then, hundreds of thousands of pounds of carbon disulfide were used in a failed attempt to control phylloxera (the standard treatment was at least 150 pounds of the chemical per acre). Yet there seems to be no documentation of what happened to the agricultural workers who used it. After all, they were far from cities and unlikely to come under the care of a neurologist.

The same was true for those who may have become ill from other uses of carbon disulfide as a pesticide. Some of these applications have long histories. Even before the phylloxera bonanza for the carbon disulfide market, the toxic chemical had been proposed as a grain fumigant. Carbon disulfide also had established itself as a preferred extermination agent for gophers and ground squirrels because its vapors, heavier than air, sank down effectively into animal burrows.

We do have the record of one rural poisoning incident, from the casebook of Dr. C. L. Bard of Ventura, California. His report reads like one of the Grimms’ tales:

In the year 1882 there resided twenty-five miles distant from Ventura, two brothers, Alois and Ludwig Albrecht by name, who occupied a small cabin on a government claim. Honest, industrious and genial, they existed on the best of terms with their neighbors, who entertained for their good qualities the highest appreciation. Early one morning Alois sallied from the cabin and proceeded to the home of Robert Stocks, his nearest neighbor, with whom he never had had the slightest difficulty, or misunderstanding. Finding him in the barn, he entered into conversation by saying neither he nor his brother had felt well for some days, and finally, after accusing him of having poisoned them, drew out a pistol and shot him in the breast. Stocks fell to the ground and the assassin believing that he had killed him, started to town to report the matter to a friend.

I was summoned to attend Stocks, and on the way met the German, and I shall never forget the spectacle that he presented. Mounted on a horse which he urged to the greatest speed, he reminded me of Don Quixote in his memorable crusade against the windmills. Arriving in town, he was persuaded to go to the sheriff, by whom he was locked up for safe keeping. He expressed no regret for the deed; said that before shooting Stocks, he saw poison on his hands; and that it would be useless to search for his body, as he saw the Devil carry it away.⁶⁸

Dr. Bard goes on to tell how, when Ludwig arrived in town, he declared that his brother had not shot anyone and was being detained as a part of a Masonic conspiracy. A justice of the peace let Alois out on bail the next day. Soon after, he “removed his coat, made a pillow out of it, laid down in the hall, and placing a pistol to his head, blew out his brains.” Ludwig returned, kicking the corpse and saying it was only a wax model. Ludwig was sent back to Germany, but eventually returned, according to Dr. Bard, once more “mentally sound.”

Dr. Bard continued to care for Stocks, who recovered, and took advantage of a house call to inspect the nearby Albrecht cabin. The living arrangement had the brothers sleeping in the same low-to-the-ground bed, separated by a loose partition from a second room. What Bard found there explained the seeming folie à deux: “In the rear room, on a bench which stood close to the partition, was a fifty-pound can of bisulphide of carbon, which had never been opened, but which had been leaking for some time through a small hole in the bottom and but little of its contents remained. An odor, similar to that of decayed cabbage, pervaded the cabin, and was due to the escaping liquid. The can stood two feet above the pillows of the sleepers, and the vapor of the bisulphide of carbon, heavier than the atmospheric air, would necessarily descend to their faces.”⁶⁹

The gophers and ground squirrels nearly had their revenge on at least one California poison manufacturer. In the spring and summer of 1883, advertisements carried in the Los Angeles Times claimed: “Read and Foster’s Bisulphide is safe, cheap and effective, and can be applied by anyone at any time without the least danger. The vapor of this material is heavier than air, and by its pressure reaches quickly every crack, crevice or department in the hole, destroying immediately all animals and insects contained therein.”⁷⁰ For good measure, the advertisement also included a printer’s fist [] highlight, “A boy can use it without danger.” To get the message out even more clearly, the advertising copy began to be shortened with the simple header “Death to Squirrels and Gophers!”⁷¹ One such advertisement even continued to run on 14 July 1883, the day after Charles Foster, the Foster of Read & Foster, was arrested for the attempted murder of A. H. Judson, a prominent Los Angeles business figure. The case quickly went to trial, and Foster was acquitted. His successful defense: temporary insanity due to the inhalation of carbon disulfide fumes at his own factory.⁷²

The use of carbon disulfide as a pesticide continued into the twentieth century, but never again on as grand a scale as in the midst of the phylloxera crisis. At the same time, carbon disulfide was also falling out of favor in the rubber industry. Limited legal controls to protect workers finally came into play, first in Britain and later in Germany and France.⁷³ More important, carbon disulfide was being chemically engineered out of the vulcanization process. A new group of chemical compounds, called rubber accelerators, became the preferred agents. Although some of these chemicals were synthesized from carbon disulfide, thus still exposing chemical-manufacturing workers to its dangers, in the rubber trade the old hazard was largely reduced, albeit not eliminated.

Here and there, industrial poisonings still occurred in the rubber industry, especially when carbon disulfide was used as a solvent to transform rubber into a malleable spread or even to turn it into glue. In one such outbreak, a physician in France asked, “Is there a ‘Leather Madness’?” when reporting on eight out of thirty employees who became deranged while working in one department of a single factory.⁷⁴ There seemed to be no explanation for the epidemic. Although senior colleagues told the doctor simply to mark it up to a “curious coincidence,” he pursued the question, eventually discovering that carbon disulfide was being used in the workroom as a solvent to make rubber glue for leather.

In the twentieth century, carbon disulfide poisoning would no longer be an endemic human by-product of rubber vulcanization. Yet even as this source of carbon disulfide poisoning was finally on the wane, after producing fifty years of madness and blindness and paralysis and impotence, a novel and every bit as dangerous industrial practice was being introduced. This new manufacturing process had certain commonalities with the rubber business. Most saliently, it started with a natural raw material and treated it in a chemically intensive manner. The chemical manipulation of rubber started with a natural raw material that could be obtained from a limited variety of trees. In practical terms, in fact, natural latex rubber could be commercially derived from only a single New World species, Hevea brasiliensis.⁷⁵ Successful cultivation was achieved in plantations distant from the tree’s native range, most prominently in Southeast Asia, but geographic limitations always played a major role in the politics and profits of the natural rubber business. Moreover, the commercial market for rubber products still had a limited scope, even with the sales boom provided by rubber tires first for bicycles and then for automobiles.

The new industry that came to depend on carbon disulfide had a far grander vision. Its potential feedstock stretched to the horizon, and its target consumer was not an adult who desired a condom or a child who fancied a balloon or even a baby who might need a new pair of (rubber-soled) shoes. Rather, the potential user of this new product was every man, woman, and child who had to be clothed. This was a technology that sought a revolutionary break with the past. It meant to leave behind earlier traditions of combing wool, scutching flax, ginning cotton, and, most importantly of all, reeling silk. A new synthetic textile industry, unprecedented in human history, sought to accomplish nothing less than taking cellulose, the abundant vegetable building block of every stalk and trunk, and transforming it into man-made silk. Noble man would be able to accomplish what heretofore had been the purview of the lowly caterpillar or the lurking spider.

Scientists and inventors had speculated about this sort of breakthrough years before it finally took on even a semblance of technical feasibility. Yet finally, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, artificial silk began to be made on an industrial scale. From the very beginning of synthetic fiber making, multiple manufacturing techniques came online nearly simultaneously. They differed from one another in key, separately patentable points. But all were predicated on the use of chemical processes to transform cellulose into filaments that could be twisted, wound, and spun. The thread and yarn produced could then be woven or knit in any way that far more expensive natural silk might be used—cheaply enough, in fact, to compete with other textiles, even cotton.

The first important artificial-silk-making process introduced was patented in the mid-1880s. In 1905, the Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists, a traditional organ of the British textile industry, published a three-part review of the topic, titled “Different Imitations of Natural Silk,” that tallied no fewer than seven distinct processes to transform cellulose.⁷⁶ Of these, four survived a start-up phase and went on to become commercially viable.

The first method introduced, and initially the dominant process, took cellulose and modified it with nitric acid. The defining characteristic of this fiber was its nitrocellulose formulation; it was commonly known after the name of its French inventor as Chardonnet silk. The molecular makeup of the nitrocellulose, unfortunately, was similar to that of explosive guncotton. Moreover, its production required a number of relatively expensive materials, including a final treatment to reduce the material’s inherent flammability. Or as the Society of Dyers and Colourists succinctly noted, the multistep processes required to produce nitrocellulose “show two distinct drawbacks; they are dangerous and very costly.”

Two of the other types of artificial silk that emerged at this time were not at first as prominent as Chardonnet silk, but did go on to find their own market niches. One of these new inventions, first patented in France soon after nitrocellulose, originally was known as Parisian artificial silk, the better to differentiate it from Chardonnet’s product, since he hailed from Besançon, far from the capital. When the Parisian patent lapsed, German inventors refiled it, going into production with what eventually became known Bemberg silk, after its major corporate producer. The manufacturing technique for this product, technically the cuprammonium process, put cellulose into a solution of copper and ammonia and then passed this through tubes shooting into a sulfuric acid bath. Cuprammonium was less dangerous to fabricate than nitrocellulose, but even more expensive.

The other new product, cellulose acetate, took a very different approach. Instead of manipulating cellulose without making any fundamental changes to the molecule, its production required the addition of a new organic chemical that formed a repeating side group bound to the long chain of the parent cellulose. The initial chemical characterization and manufacturing of this product was carried out in Germany. But unlike either nitrocellulose or cuprammonium silk, there was also an important American presence in the nascent cellulose acetate industry. This Yankee know-how was personified by an industrial chemist named Arthur Dehon Little.

Long before building his A. D. Little consulting empire, Little worked as a chemist in the paper industry, where his attention was drawn to the potential applications of modified cellulose-based fibers.⁷⁷ Little’s partner was a fellow chemist named Roger B. Griffin. Little handled the clients of their chemical firm, and Griffin worked at the lab bench doing analyses. It was there that Griffin suffered from fatal burns in a laboratory fire in 1893.⁷⁸ Little filed his first cellulose acetate patent one year later and continued to be actively engaged in further technical innovations in acetate-silk-related business ventures in the decades that followed.⁷⁹

But Little was also deeply involved as a key technical consultant to the American start-up of yet another artificial-silk process, one whose market would go on to dwarf that of the competing technologies of nitrocellulose, cuprammonium, and cellulose acetate combined. On 24 June 1899, at the instruction of his client, a lawyer named Daniel C. Spruance, Little sailed to England. Little’s assignment was to meet with Dr. Charles Cross, co-inventor with Edward Bevan of the viscose method for producing artificial silk fiber. Further, Little was to directly assess the manufacturing process at facilities in England and on the Continent. Then, having fully explored the territory, he was to report back to Spruance on the best approach for exercising his options to purchase the exclusive rights for U.S. domestic commercialization of viscose.⁸⁰

Impressed with what he learned during his sojourn, Little detailed his experiences in a typewritten account over four hundred pages long: “Report to Daniel C. Spruance, esq. on the Technical development of Viscose on the Continent of Europe and in Great Britain.” It included a precise description of the multistep process involved in viscose making. Little describes the core features that define viscose and highlights the key chemical constituent that characterizes its manufacture to this day—carbon disulfide.

What Cross and Bevan had discovered and patented in 1892 was that carbon disulfide, small and elegant, was uniquely capable of liquefying cellulose without fundamentally changing its structure. The cellulose–carbon disulfide solution, a syrupy concoction whose consistency allowed it to be forced through fine apertures, yielded filaments amenable to thread making and then to weaving. There were tricks to the trade, needless to say. The cellulose starting material first had to be treated aggressively with caustic solutions, and the mixture of carbon disulfide and cellulose needed to mature a bit, ripening in industrial vats like a not-so-fine wine, in order to create the ideally viscous solution. That syrup was called xanthate. At the end of the process, to resolidify the xanthate into filaments, extrusion into a bath of sulfuric acid was required. Doing so niftily forced out the carbon disulfide, regenerating the native cellulose. The process was both efficient and less costly than competing artificial-silk-making methods. Caustics and acids were downright cheap; carbon disulfide was relatively inexpensive as well. In fact, its cost was low enough that there was no real economic impetus to methodically recapture the carbon disulfide coming from the extrusion baths. Arthur Little was unequivocal in his recommendations to Daniel Spruance: “I regard the rights possessed by the American Viscose Co. and of which you may obtain control under your main option as an extremely valuable piece of property which is probably worth many times the price named in that option and it is certainly well worth acquiring at the figure given. Assuming that you should see fit to act upon this advice I would recommend the immediate equipment of a small, well-located factory to be utilized mainly for the purpose of developing the process and extending its applications.”⁸¹

Little, in his recommendations, offered no cautionary advice about any potential safety or health complications of working with carbon disulfide, a chemical for which there was a half century of accumulated misadventure in the rubber trades. English manufacturers certainly understood the risk of carbon disulfide explosion, but also were aware of at least some of the adverse health effects of viscose manufacturing, too. One of Cross and Bevan’s earliest viscose laboratory workers, a chemist named Edwin Beer, kept a journal during his early years of employment. More than once Beer documented explosions, including one that occurred in 1901 when his co-worker tried to solder a piece of equipment meant to draw off carbon disulfide. Fortuitously, the door to the lab had been left open, and Beer was blown out into the street without serious injury. Beer also documented persistent eye troubles in multiple journal entries, noting as early as 1898 an April visit for the problem to a Harley Street (London) consultant. In 1900, the colleague who later caused the explosion wrote off his own loss of a billiards championship to disturbed vision, stating, “[I] would have won, but I saw two balls and hit the one that wasn’t there.” Beer noted later, in hindsight, that carbon disulfide could cause “intoxication, and even madness,” and also believed that exposure to it could lead to hair loss, perhaps contributing to his own baldness.⁸²

Although ignoring the hazards of carbon disulfide, Little otherwise was very attentive to details in his report; an appendix lists all the individuals and corporate entities involved with the American Viscose Company and Cross and Bevan’s patent rights.⁸³ In this list, Little acknowledges the thirty-five shares held by Mary Griffin, the widow of the former partner who had died in the line of duty. Commenting on carbon disulfide as a poison may have been beyond the scope of the technical report that Little was engaged to compose. And after all, he was a chemist, not a medic. But having lost a partner to a laboratory conflagration, Little might have been more sensitive to the dangers of carbon disulfide explosion, at least.

That small factory that Little so strongly recommended Spruance to organize soon came to into being, well located in Lansdowne Borough, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia. It did not take long for trouble to emerge. On 8 February 1904, a young man identified as H.R., who worked at the new factory, turned up at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital Dispensary complaining of weakness, especially in his legs, but his troubles went far beyond that:

His work kept him in the bisulphide room all day. When he would first go into the fumes he would feel exhilarated, became loquacious, and passed for a jolly fellow. When he cleaned casks he would be almost overcome, and he would have to come out frequently for fresh air. After he had been at work for about a month he began to have headache. . . . He was depressed, taciturn, and irritable when he would go home; his memory was poor, and his appetite failed, for he tasted and smelt the carbon bisulphide constantly. He slept poorly. These symptoms continually became worse. Later the weakness extended to the legs until they became worse than the arms, and he was so debilitated that he had great difficulty in getting up the stairs. His sexual power was lost.⁸⁴

A few weeks later the same physicians treated a second worker from the Lansdowne factory. This man came in complaining of nervousness and, rather than impotence, sexual excitement. At nearly the same time, a third worker from Lansdowne presented for care at the University of Pennsylvania, suffering from “weakness and mental depression after leaving the works, although while there he was often exhilarated”; he was cared for by a doctor who did not know of the other two cases.⁸⁵ These treating physicians had no trouble clearly identifying carbon disulfide as the cause of the illness, and both publications documenting the cases were careful to cite relevant works that thoroughly described the chemical’s poisonous effects. Indeed, in the activist tradition of Delpech, the physicians involved in the first two cases did not shy away from recommending preventive measures: “Masks and nose-pieces seem to be of no use. A vacuum hood placed over the open vats would draw off a good deal of the gas; moreover, if the workmen were rotated between this work and some other, there would be less of the poisoning gas.”⁸⁶

A Philadelphia suburb may have marked the far western border of what was becoming a rapidly expanding international presence for viscose manufacturing, and its easternmost outpost was established in 1909 in the town of Mytishchi, near Moscow.⁸⁷ An early Russian interest in viscose had been spearheaded by no less a personage than Dmitri Mendeleev himself, of periodic table fame. In 1900, Mendeleev prophesied:

The work on viscose just started in 1899 and now is in its first, or embryonic, stage of development and therefore it is best to talk about it with caution. But . . . the victory of viscose will be a new triumph of science: just as the discovery of beet sugar freed the world of its dependence on the tropics, the discovery of viscose may free the world in relation to cotton. . . . Russia with its heartland of forests and grass could, with the production of viscose, provide the entire world with a colossal amount of fiber.⁸⁸

The Mytishchi Viskosa factory, however, was no realization of Mendeleev’s arcadia. Not long after the factory opened, the regional sanitary inspector (a man named Lebedev), the plant’s director, a factory mechanic, and another worker were all killed in a carbon disulfide explosion. But conditions went from bad to worse when, in 1911, the enclosure that had covered the manufacturing line was removed to accommodate new equipment. By 1913, Dr. Vasily K. Khoroshko of Moscow’s Imperial Medial University reported four cases of carbon disulfide poisoning in the factory’s small workforce of six production laborers.⁸⁹ Khoroshko, who had a prominent career as a neurologist in prerevolutionary Russia and later in the Soviet Union, detailed the impairments in workers’ nervous system function, including a thirty-three-year-old named Sareicheff whose vision was so adversely affected that he could not differentiate “a cow from a horse.” In his paper, Khoroshko also thoroughly reviewed the medical literature on carbon disulfide, from Delpech through Laudenheimer, including recent German publications on the rubber trade. But unaware of the U.S. cases in Lansdowne, Khoroshko incorrectly assumed that his were the first cases of carbon disulfide poisoning to be reported in the new viscose industry.

Meanwhile business in Lansdowne had not been going well: originally operating as the General Artificial Silk Company, the facility was not as effective in generating profits as in producing disease. From its founder, Spruance, the business was taken over by his major shareholder, Silas Petit, and its name was contracted to Genasco. By 1908, Silas was dead; his son, John Read Petit, replaced him. “Genasco” may have been pithier than the original moniker, but the business still sputtered. Not so for Cross and Bevan’s original operation in England. After being taken over by Samuel Courtauld and Company, it became integral to a powerful manufacturing concern. Courtauld and Company made John Read Petit an offer that he did not refuse—Courtauld bought back the patent rights that Petit held and set about establishing its own American subsidiary operation.⁹⁰

Lansdowne was abandoned, and a new facility was constructed in another Pennsylvania town, Marcus Hook. Production began there in 1911 as the American Viscose Company, the same name as the entity for which Arthur D. Little had done his original consultation a decade before. Despite the old name, this was meant to be a new beginning for the industry. Indeed, the 1911 founding at Marcus Hook is the date most often claimed as the establishment of the viscose industry in America.

From the start, under Courtaulds sheltering wings, the American Viscose Company had a clear vision of how it meant to present itself. This included nothing less than a model industrial village for its workers, designed by Emile G. Perrot, an American architect, who first went to England to study similar projects there. In Discussion on Garden Cities, a small, hand-sewn Arts and Crafts–style pamphlet promoting the project, Perrot sings the praises of his patrons: “It is to the credit of the owners that they have deviated from the stereotyped American practice of building houses in rows, on straight streets, in which no attempt is made to relieve the monotony of design, nor conduce to the general uplift of the surroundings, instead they have taken into account the physical and intellectual needs of the workers and created an Industrial Village on Garden City Lines.”⁹¹

An auditorium, a gymnasium for boys and one for girls, and a library were part of the plan. There were to be no outhouses allowed. It was a new day for viscose and America, and the industrial village at Marcus Hook was meant to be its equivalent of a shining city on a hill. Lansdowne was forgotten, utterly.

Most importantly, no further mention of ill health within the U.S. rayon industry would be made, at least publicly, for another twenty years. There were no follow-up investigations from the University of Pennsylvania, and Khoroshko’s Russian-language report languished in obscurity, never to be cited in the West. Treating cellulose with large quantities of carbon disulfide, which emerged as downstream fumes when the liquid viscose was sprayed out into baths of acid, was a process every bit as dangerous as dipping rubber condoms in vats of the same poisonous solvent. To think otherwise in the face of what was already well known about carbon disulfide was little more than an exercise in make-believe. And yet physicians and hygienists in the United States as well as in Britain, France, Germany, and all the other European viscose-producing countries ignored the obvious hazards of this process, and the owners and managers of the viscose factories, who were most familiar with the facts on the ground, were more than satisfied to maintain this convenient fiction. All were silent, but carbon disulfide, the old rubber industry hazard, was back with a vengeance.