The Edwardian Home Hidden Killers

The dawn of a new century and the reign of a new King, Edward VII,

ushered in an age

of dramatic scientific changes,

stunning new inventions

and groundbreaking discoveries.

And it was in their homes that Edwardians experienced the full impact

of this leap forward into modernity.

It offered a brave new world, but these mod cons were all untried and untested,

and soon turned the Edwardian home into a hazardous place to be.

Absolutely lethal.

She covered her face in poison.

Vogue was advertising arsenic soap for that offending pimple.

Products that were brilliant...

..maybe not so brilliant...

..and downright dangerous!

Because they're so fine, they're easy to inhale when you breathe in,

they can get deep into the lungs and they stick there.

I'm going to search out these hidden killers...

..and reveal how science both created them

and then solved the problems they caused.

Welcome to the perilous world of the real Edwardian home!

This is a typical house of the Edwardian period.

It not only looked more modern than the houses of the Victorians, it even sounded different.

PHONE RINGS

TYPEWRITER

CAR STARTS

SEWING MACHINE WHIRS

Queen Victoria died in 1901.

Her son Edward VII became King,

and the era that bore his name began as the new century got underway.

And it seemed as though a world of opportunity was opening up.

HG Wells summed up the spirit of the age perfectly

when he wrote that Queen Victoria like a great paperweight sat on men's minds

and when she was removed their ideas blew all over the place haphazardly.

In other words, her death created the perfect conditions for new ideas to flourish,

and this of course had an impact on the home.

In the first five years of Edward VII's reign,

over 140,000 British patents were granted.

# But if that's your blooming game

# I intend to do the same

# Cos a little of what you fancy does you good... #

Like the Victorians before them the new Edwardian middle classes had the spare cash to purchase products

that would make their home lives more comfortable.

The most exciting new invention on the market was electricity.

It would not only transform every room of the Edwardian house,

but it would make possible a whole host of new domestic inventions and gadgets.

If there's one thing we take for granted, it's that this works.

But imagine how incredible it must have been when it was introduced,

this clean invisible magical energy that transformed the Edwardian evening into day.

So what problems could there possibly be?

Electricity in our modern homes is subject to all kinds of regulations,

but the unsuspecting Edwardian had no idea what damage it could do.

When it was first invented, it was considered to be quite magical.

It was clean of course

and it was... I guess they thought it was safe,

and it meant they could do things that they couldn't do before,

they could put on a light at the turn of a switch.

It completely transformed the amenities within the ordinary domestic house.

It was in the late-19th century that the components needed for electrification

began to be developed.

The vital invention was made by both Joseph Swan in Britain and Thomas Edison in America,

the incandescent light bulb.

Street lights came first,

and then, in the Edwardian period, individual companies began to produce electricity

to offer to domestic households.

Gas lighting and heating had become popular in Victorian times, but it was a dirty source.

As well as being potentially explosive, it left a residue of grime.

Electric light seemed to offer the perfect alternative.

It might seem an obvious thing

that electricity should replace gas,

but at the time

electricity companies and gas companies were very much in competition.

People had just got used to gas lighting

and now they're faced with new technology, something else

which they've been told to sort of take on and adopt in their lives.

This is instructions about how you'd use your Edison electric light,

and it says, "Do not attempt to light with match. Simply turn key on wall by the door."

It sounds quite bonkers to us today that you have to explain it in that way,

we know how we operate our electricity,

we know we go to the light switch, but then that wasn't so obvious.

At the turn of the century, electricity was far more expensive than gas,

but it was heavily marketed by the supply companies who could see the possibilities...

and the profits.

We get key figures like Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill choose to have it in their homes,

and this is widely reported in the press, so it becomes more attractive

and almost glamorous for some of the middle classes to take it on.

The newspapers were full of the wonders of electricity.

For example, the Dundee Courier in December 1906 praised its romantic story,

and said that, "Its rapid advance is more wonderful than any tale of wild Arabian fiction."

It seemed chic, modern and desirable.

If you were a sophisticated urban up-to-date family,

you needed electricity in your house, you needed electric lamps.

And those who didn't have it were simply seen as behind the times,

so if you really wanted to show off to your business associates

that you were the right type of person, you brought in the electric light.

And so gradually Edwardian homes began to be lit by electricity,

but it was a completely new, little understood force,

and electricity cables were just that, naked bare cables.

One touch and you could be electrocuted.

Early cases, the cables weren't actually insulated at all,

they just run through wooden runners,

and then they'd just be bare, running around the properties.

When they did catch on to insulation, they used the wrong material.

Originally they were made

just lined in paper and lead,

fantastic fire accelerant, brilliant!

They even tried wrapping it in cloth, they wrapped it up in wood,

they wrapped it in basically anything they thought that might stop the electricity getting through

and somebody inadvertently touching it.

And earthing,

the ability to make a faulty circuit safe by re-directing it to the earth, simply didn't exist.

There was no earth, there was nothing at all.

So if you had a small child that could just run round and touch one of these things,

it was absolutely lethal.

Lethal or not, the fearless Edwardians kept inventing,

and found the new power source could be used for all sorts of domestic appliances.

Its full potential could be seen in the electric house,

the centrepiece of the 1908 Manchester Electrical Exhibition, the Tomorrow's World of its day,

and on display were all the must-have items for the ideal Edwardian home.

One excited visitor wrote a postcard about their visit...

What sort of items were available?

A whole range of things that we see now and we find commonplace in our homes today,

but also a whole other range of things which maybe we're not so familiar with.

All sorts of weird and wonderful appliances appeared,

some of which had not been seen before or since,

as suppliers tried to generate a demand for electricity beyond the electric light.

What's this?

That's actually an early electric curling tong,

and you just put your curling tong in there to heat up.

And this must have been quite a breakthrough to have an electric iron for the first time?

Up until now, irons had been heated on coal stoves.

In many ways I guess that is quite a breakthrough,

and one of the appliances that people probably were most fond of in the early days.

A look at the magazines and papers of the time reveals a fundamental lack of understanding

about how to use electricity safely even by some manufacturers.

In the Evening Telegraph of December 1908, it recommended the use of an electric tablecloth,

a device of which it says, "Up-to-date hostesses will not be long in taking advantage of."

One of the most unusual items is probably this one here.

This is a tablecloth, it's an illuminating tablecloth,

the idea is that you turn it the other way round,

so you'd have this side showing, and wired up inside here are just bare wire connectors.

You'd lay it down, you'd cover it with your cloth, basically plug your lamp on the base.

-Into the tablecloth?

-Directly into the tablecloth.

You're pronging through and making that connection.

I can see that's quite fun, but presumably it's also really dangerous?

-I mean, if you spilled something...

-Yes, yes, extremely dangerous.

Whoever in their right mind thought up putting a tablecloth

which stores water and food and all the rest of it,

and runs electricity through it is beyond me, but it was new.

That's what you used to need to do, and it was sold and marketed as being the new technology,

lamps that are on the table.

Thankfully, despite the marketing, this electrical wonder did not catch on...

They had the goods, but they didn't have the infrastructure we have today and here lay the problem.

They would use the light socket to run all sorts of pieces of equipment, possibly even electric heaters.

-From the wire going to the light?

-That's right, yes.

They would put an adaptor into the light socket,

they would then run a bulb plus another piece of equipment off that.

In extreme cases, they would add a number of adaptors

and have a number of different sorts of pieces of equipment coming off the light circuit.

And then you'd get this whole sort of cascade of adaptors coming out from the ceiling fitting,

what we'd call a Christmas tree, leading to lots of different pieces of equipment.

So, for example, people would be doing ironing off the lighting circuit,

they would maybe have an electrical heater running off the lighting circuit.

And, of course, every extra piece of equipment was adding an additional energy load to the system,

which is why we would get overheating of the system and potential fires.

Cos whenever they plugged lights in, or toasters or refrigerators,

they used to overheat,

and the current that would be running through the cable

would start melting the cable and then this cable would catch fire.

To demonstrate how quickly overloading can cause a fire, Martin applies a battery to wire wool.

The battery is too high a voltage for the wire,

mirroring what might have happened in the Edwardian home

when extra appliances were added to the electric light socket.

This overloading of one circuit is what caused fires in Edwardian homes.

It wasn't safety regulated in the way ours is now.

There were no consumer units,

miniature circuit breakers or any of that safety equipment that we now rely on.

Modern fuse boxes protect homes from this.

As soon as the system becomes overloaded, it cuts out...

..but back then the electricity would keep flowing.

There'd be a fire in the house.

And knowing your luck you'll be in bed when it happens, and there'd be no getting out.

Although the Institution of Electrical Engineers issued its first Wiring Regulations in 1882,

they were often ignored.

Part of the problem was that initially electricity was sold by individual local companies,

who each supplied a particular voltage of electricity to their local area,

so an iron used at home in Manchester wouldn't be compatible with one in Liverpool.

It was down to the individual generating company what voltage and what ampage

they put the electricity into the properties,

so even if you understood one system it didn't mean that if you went further down the road,

and bought electricity from someone else it would be exactly the same.

On its own and left alone, electricity isn't overly dangerous.

It's when you bring in the human factor, that's when electricity becomes dangerous.

There were countless stories in the newspapers

of the many and varied ways people had managed unwittingly to electrocute themselves.

Being electrocuted, the effects of that depend on several things.

The current, the duration of the electric shock that you have,

and also the voltage.

If you have a very low current electric shock for a sufficient duration,

it can affect the beating of the heart.

If you disturb that electrical flow around the heart,

each of the individual heart muscles can contract individually,

and so there's no concerted effort and so no blood would be pumped around the body.

So damaging the heart with an electric shock is particularly dangerous,

and that can happen even at a quite low current.

If you have a very high current, you typically get a burn where the electricity enters

and possibly leaves the body, and that may cause instant death as it causes the heart to stop.

Though slow to address the dangers of electricity,

Edwardians credited it with all kinds of health-giving properties which led to some strange practices.

What is that?

-It's got a space-age element to it, hasn't it?

-It does, doesn't it?

It's well-used, it's an early sun-ray lamp, it was meant to encourage sort of good health.

The theory was that this would make you healthier,

and there are adverts from a bit later on

where they show babies positioned in front of these.

The therapeutic use of electricity also extended into the medical profession

where it was applied to a range of physical and mental illnesses.

Have you got any other surprising items?

Yes, there are some surprising items.

This is a fairly early massage machine, electric massage machine.

It's a bit like a ray gun, I think, that one.

It does look sort of like a ray gun, or a sort of microphone, you think Elvis.

And this was for massage?

Ostensibly for massage, it was often used for more intimate sort of purposes as well,

-but it was sold as a massage machine.

-Oh, that's what this is? Right!

OK...

Some of the things Edwardians got up to in their own homes

revealed how little they understood this deadly force.

To my amazement I even found an extraordinary headline in the Daily Mail.

A man accidentally electrocuted himself during his daily beautifying routine.

He was using an electrical gadget

which was plugged in at the mains and was designed to enhance and inflate his pecs.

A man's fatal vanity...

Eventually, the Edwardians were given the option of a wall socket instead of the light,

but this brought up another issue.

At the time both the plug and the socket contained metal,

which created a small spark when they came into contact.

The spark is typical of any piece of equipment which is being plugged in or plugged out

when the equipment is live, so as two pieces of metal come into contact or out of contact

when they are live, then a spark will occur.

As most Edwardian homes were still using a lot of gas which was prone to leaking,

this small spark could be enough to cause a big explosion.

Explosion just waiting to happen from the tiniest amount of gas,

and your windows and doors and you would be on the street

awaiting the undertaker, I would imagine!

Over time, improvements were applied that lessened the dangers.

It wasn't till 1908, 1909 that Edison came up with the idea of a rubber socket

which went on to a plug which had a fuse in, which obviously saved any shocks when you were touching it.

It saved any problems with insulating and it saved this problem of overheating.

But with its varying currents, assortment of sockets and plugs,

no earth or fuse box, Edwardian electricity was a dangerous business,

especially as it was often installed and maintained by DIY enthusiasts.

Anyone could really wire up their homes,

so potentially you've got people not knowing what they were doing getting into big trouble.

Even one of Edison's own friends killed himself,

he electrocuted himself, and that's somebody who knew what he was doing.

By 1915, there were 600 separate electricity suppliers across the country.

The demands of war led the Government to take steps to set up electricity commissions

to make the generation and supply of electricity more efficient.

And then the Government actually made a declaration that we would all use the same currentage, voltage,

it would all come through the same way and it was the start of the grid.

Despite all its early dangers, electricity became the utility of choice for the modern Edwardian.

By 1913, most of the one million new middle-class homes that had been built in Britain

had electricity wired in and people were learning to use it with care.

Change was not just afoot in technological terms.

Edwardian society was also changing dramatically.

This was an age of great social reform and, above all, it was an age of female advance.

Although women were still employed in service,

other options existed now in factories and shops,

which inevitably had an impact on the home.

Increasingly the Edwardian housewife, particularly the middle- and lower-class housewife,

she really felt she shouldn't have to spend her entire day doing housework,

and so there was a real growth of labour-saving devices,

of ways in which the Edwardian woman could save her time,

could not be doing the drudgery of the old days.

Where technological and social change met was in finding an alternative to an unpleasant chore

that had traditionally fallen to women, the building and cleaning-up of open coal fires.

Anyone who could find a way to dispense with this onerous task was on to a winner.

By the turn of the century, in cities particularly, gas and electric fires were rivalling coal.

Some of them used a new wonder material.

A resilient mineral that was non-flammable, insulating and provided clean energy.

The new material was hailed as a miracle. Its name, asbestos.

Asbestos was seen as a wonderful material, because it didn't burn.

It was a very versatile material,

you could weave it, which was superb,

and you could use it as an insulator...

It's good for soundproofing,

it's good for thermal efficiency, it was good for fire resistance.

It was really the wonder stuff.

It was strong and it was very, very cheap.

Asbestos is naturally occurring and had been used for thousands of years,

but never on an industrial scale.

By 1909, it was embedded in all sorts of manufacturing processes.

In the late-Edwardian period, they were turning 190,000 metric tons of asbestos over,

they were mining...a phenomenal amount coming out of South Africa, Russia, Canada, America,

all being imported into Britain, and then off to the asbestos factories.

Every day was like Christmas Day,

because when they walked through the factory it was snowing, and it was asbestos dust.

Edwardians were happily working with what we now know to be a carcinogenic killer.

The first person to alert the authorities to the possibility there could be a problem

was a factory inspector.

The earliest account of the health hazard of working with asbestos came from Lucy Deane,

one of the first female Inspectors of Factories in the UK.

Writing in 1898, she included asbestos work

as one of the four dusty occupations under observation that year,

quote "on account of their easily demonstrated danger to the health of workers".

Deane's report notes that...

If you look through the records, there are instances around about the late 1800s

of actually, there was a 19-year-old asbestos worker who they carried out a postmortem on,

and they actually found fibrous substances in his lungs.

Asbestos fibres are very, very fine, about a hundredth of the width of a human hair,

so you can't really see them with the naked eye, but, because they're so fine, they're easy to inhale.

When you breathe in, they can get deep into the lungs and they stick there.

Initially they cause scarring, something called asbestosis with fibrosis and scarring of the lungs,

which starts to replace normal lung tissue with fibrous scars,

which means that the lungs aren't doing their job properly.

But although Deane raised the alarm, her findings were ignored for many years.

People might have noticed it caused difficulty with breathing, but nothing was done.

They didn't really know what it was and they used to just put it down to bronchial problems,

or, you know, breathing problems of some description,

but they were starting to think that there may be something in these new substances

that weren't good when they actually mixed with humans.

What the Edwardians didn't appreciate at the time was the exact deadly nature of asbestos.

This is what a lung looks like when it's been destroyed by asbestos fibres.

The real danger of asbestos is in causing a particular cancer called mesothelioma.

This affects the pleurae, and it's an abnormal growth.

It can encase the lungs and spread throughout the body.

It's almost completely untreatable, and it certainly was in the early part of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, because of its amazing qualities,

by now asbestos was being used in all sorts of products throughout the home.

It was actually quite good for lining water tanks, so unfortunately we then put asbestos inside water tanks,

and then we were taking water out of the tanks, through lead piping with asbestos...

it's a case of how many problems did you want to put in one place

and then reap the benefits years down the line?

They started making floor tiles, ceiling tiles, it was lining their boilers,

they made gutters out of it.

You could make a cistern for your toilet out of it, your toilet seat even...

The amount of applications asbestos actually had in gutters, in fascia board, in tiles,

in Artex, it's in just about everything!

It was the most hidden of hidden killers, sometimes waiting years to do its worst...

and to the least suspecting members of the household.

There are quite a few stories of the wives of asbestos workers developing mesothelioma,

and that's thought to be because they're washing their husbands' clothes,

and are being exposed to the asbestos fibres in that way,

so it's not just people who work with asbestos who can develop these problems.

The dangers of asbestos in the home were different to the problems in the factory.

When asbestos remained undisturbed in the fabric of a building,

its fibres would not be released into the air.

It's really disrupting asbestos that causes the problem so that you breathe in the fibres.

So we hear today about buildings that are being condemned because they have a lot of asbestos in the walls.

That probably wouldn't cause any problem to somebody walking through the building,

but if you were to knock it down, those fibres could get into the atmosphere and be breathed in.

The other problem with asbestos is it has a long latent period.

It can take 20, 30, even 40 years for mesothelioma to develop after exposure,

so it wasn't something that happened immediately. It took a long time.

And it took a long time for the danger to be acknowledged in the factories too.

They did a series of postmortems on 30 people in a factory

where only two people had actually survived this factory,

and they looked for common trends that was the problem,

and it was all about this fibrous build-up inside their lungs,

and that's when asbestosis actually got its name, it was where it really came from.

Partly because of cover-ups, partly because of a desire not to know,

the dangers of asbestos didn't become public until the 1920s.

The first asbestosis diagnosis by the British Medical Journal was not until 1924,

and legislation took much longer to follow.

I think sometimes it was ignorance, other times it was for a profit,

there was so much money to make out of it.

The death rate in factories led to a decline in the use of asbestos, and it is banned today,

but it remains hidden in many buildings.

A lot of people don't actually know about the widespread applications of asbestos.

I've no doubt it is still in properties today.

Even now, over 100 years later, there are annually more deaths in the UK due to mesothelioma

than deaths caused by road accidents.

And it could be argued we won't know the final death toll for another hundred years.

To this day, asbestos remains a true hidden killer.

But it wasn't all doom and gloom.

This was an age of firsts.

Innovations of the Edwardian era include such fantastical breakthroughs

as the first powered sustained successful flight by a machine heavier than air,

the first mass production of motor cars, the first vacuum cleaners,

and electric washing machines being manufactured in the UK.

In other words, the Edwardians were laying the foundations of our modern world.

Lots of these were the big inventions that transformed life outside the home,

but there were also the smaller items that made day-to-day domestic life easier and more comfortable,

things we take for granted today.

All of the items and activities that the modern middle-class Edwardian needed

could be bought from these pages.

A hundred years previously, most of them would probably not have existed,

let alone have been available for mass consumption.

It's in the kitchen where we find the greatest technological marvels of the Edwardian age,

making domestic life easier

and sometimes shorter.

If you were really up-to-date and had money to burn,

what could be more desirable than a brand-new refrigerator?

Food preservation was a major issue in Edwardian times.

Initially, they made purpose-built cold cabinets to store food.

They were carved out of timber lined with sawdust, it could be rabbit fur,

and then your item was put inside and packed with ice.

Ice was shipped in from the Arctic and distributed to people's homes.

But no matter how well insulated the ice would not last long.

They wanted some other way of doing it and technology gave them the answer, I suppose.

So what came after ice? How did we get to the first fridges that used chemicals?

To find out, I've come to South Bank University in London

to meet refrigeration expert Professor Graeme Maidment.

So is this enormous thing an early fridge?

Yes, it's an early invention of a fridge, dates probably around 1870, that sort of thing.

This unlikely-looking fridge has been rebuilt from early designs. It was never actually manufactured,

but is perfect to illustrate the first attempts at refrigeration.

When a version did come on to the market, it wasn't cheap.

The earliest commercial fridges, early-20th century, would have been about £700, that sort of price,

and compared to a Model T Ford which was maybe £500, so more expensive than a car.

So early fridges were the plaything of the Edwardian rich,

and did not become affordable to the masses until much later.

And how did it work?

Refrigeration uses the principle of evaporation of a liquid to gas to produce a cooling effect,

and if I can show you with a little experiment...

In this can we've got some butane, which is a common refrigerant that we use today.

If we spray it, you can see it actually produces cooling as it hits the surface and evaporates.

Wow, yes!

At first it's warm, but then it gets really cold very fast.

The evaporating gas draws heat, this is how a fridge works.

The Edwardian engineers understood they needed to create a cycle where a gas could evaporate, draw the heat

and return to liquid, continuously.

The refrigerant would have been in these pipes here

and would have made this small container within here cold.

Just this little thing in the middle here?

Absolutely! I know it's huge, isn't it?

The whole machine is massive just for a small amount of cooling.

-Yes. You could get a pint of milk in there and that's about it.

-That's it.

-What's all this, then?

-Well, that's basically making the refrigerant back to a liquid again.

We got a compressor that pumps it, this is a hand-driven one so you'd have had a servant driving this...

That's a terrible job.

That's awful! You'd have to be doing this all day 24 hours a day in order to keep that pint of milk cool!

Absolutely!

It took time for the technology to develop to cope with the chemicals they knew could work.

This prototype was developed before electricity and well before rubber sealants.

You can see here, you know, the sort of components that we would have used,

the refrigerant wouldn't have stayed within the system, it would have leaked out.

The trouble was that the early fridges weren't actually sealed fridges.

So they used these gases and there would be a certain amount of seepage and leakage from these fridges.

And this is what made the early fridges so hazardous.

The dangers of the early fridges were actually in the chemicals that they used as the refrigeration.

They had ammonia which was pretty flammable and pretty toxic.

If you breathe in ammonia gas, it's immediately very toxic,

so the eyes would start to water, the throat would become sore,

it can cause chest pain, difficulty in breathing,

and if you have enough of it, it can cause circulatory collapse and even death.

You had sulphur dioxide, which was extremely toxic, and then you had methyl chloride.

Only certain gases will turn from liquid to gas in the way required.

Unfortunately, these properties also made them exceptionally dangerous.

Gases like methyl chloride also had other uses.

They actually used gases that in the First World War

unfortunately were used to gas people in the trenches.

If you have any length of period of being exposed to these gases,

then you can get frostbite on the inside of your lungs.

Your blood can pool on your heart.

We're talking absolutely lethal materials to be using in a fridge.

So not only were they poisonous, but they could be a fire hazard.

These chemicals were volatile

and could explode under certain conditions.

Caused hundreds of deaths.

The ammonia, typical, tiniest of leaks and it's just an explosion waiting to happen.

It would wipe everyone in the room out.

Pretty lethal stuff.

Ether will auto-ignite with a temperature about 160 degrees C,

which is quite a low temperature, and actually there's lots of things in our house

that operate with a temperature of 160 degrees C,

so switching on a light switch potentially could do that.

So when the Edwardians were introducing all sorts of electric items into their homes,

they were putting things that could actually set the ether on fire without a naked flame?

That's right. That's why it's not a good refrigerant for a domestic fridge.

BOOM!

The proud owners of the first fridges which by then were electric, were paying a small fortune

for a product riddled with dangerous design faults.

Just as well fridges didn't go into mass production until the 1950s,

by which time the technology could control the chemicals.

So what do we use now?

We use HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons, we also use some of the old refrigerants as well still,

we use ammonia and carbon dioxide, but we can use them in a better way,

because we've got better materials to contain them.

They're actually sealed fridges now, the systems are actually a closed loop.

So you have a compressor, you have a gases inside there.

We're starting to use smaller amounts of the gases.

They're more efficient, and as long as you actually sort of dispose of them properly, then they can be OK.

So although they were using dangerous substances they'd hit on something that really worked?

Absolutely, yeah, that's completely right.

I'm going upstairs to the bedroom in search of the next killer...

..one that particularly affected half the population.

One of the consequences of the liberating social change of the period was that make-up,

which the Victorians had denounced as the mark of a loose woman, became increasingly acceptable.

The new Edwardian woman needed a little rouge and a dash of lipstick to look up-to-date.

The desire to look beautiful remains a constant through the ages,

but what is considered attractive in each era differs.

The art of beauty, we always want to do the same things,

and what distinguishes the Victorian period

from the Edwardian period

is that in the Victorian period

you were supposed to perfectly beautiful with no assistance whatsoever.

In the Edwardian period, you could use a little bit of help.

By now make-up is being sold over the counter in the new department stores,

and the products were advertised to Edwardian women by actresses famed for their beauty.

Actresses were seen

as more acceptable by the Edwardians.

One particularly famous actress,

Lillie Langtry, was actually noted very much for her beauty,

and she really capitalised on this by lending her name to various beauty products,

including face creams in this period.

Lillie Langtry here, advertising Pear's soap,

and she was apparently paid £132, which was exactly what she weighed.

Lillie Langtry's beauty was known to have caught the eye of the King,

so it became a style to be copied, but beauty came at a cost.

Make-up used was not subject to any safety testing.

Many new products made bogus claims, but were dangerous, and in extreme cases a killer!

The Edwardian women was told to make herself beautiful to catch a husband

and to keep a husband, and by doing so she covered her face in poison.

The dangers began before any make-up had been applied, with face cream.

An Edwardian lady had to have a pure lily-white skin

to distinguish herself from the sun-tanned working classes,

and some of the most dangerous products are things like this...

-This is Harriet Hubbard Ayer moth and freckle lotion.

-What is that?

Moths were sort of liver spots,

it was a 19th-century term for liver spots and discolorations on the skin.

And a lot of them were, well, pretty much... camphor, bleach, ammonia...

anything you could choose to sort of blanch your skin because you had to have a pure lily-white skin.

As late as sort of 1909, Vogue was advertising arsenic wafers

which you would take to get rid of any poor skin issues,

and arsenic soap for that offending pimple.

On top of these layers of poison, they put a dusting of toxic powder.

Poisonous chemicals have very bright and distinctive colours,

so there were lead compounds, for example, that were very white,

and so women liked to use it on their skin as part of a face powder,

and that would be absorbed through the skin and could cause chronic lead poisoning.

Different things were used for rouge.

Cochineal, which was made from crushed insects, that's fine, but vermillion came from mercury.

Mercury's a heavy metal and it's very bad for the body,

it can affect several different organs,

particularly the brain, the lungs and the kidneys.

It can cause problems with sensation,

unable to feel things, maybe unable to see, and can cause you to go mad eventually.

Even the eyes weren't safe.

There was a product for darkening your eyelashes and your eyebrows

which actually made your cornea fall off, and several people went blind.

One of the things women liked to use in the early-20th century was belladonna.

This was obtained from a plant, and when drops are put in the eyes

it makes the pupils dilate, which is meant to signify desire and arousal,

and so made women look more attractive.

One of the problems with this, of course, is that it's a drug,

and when it's absorbed it can have an effect on the rest of the body.

At best, it would probably have caused blurred vision and a dry mouth

and, at worst, a very irregular heartbeat,

and even blindness.

You didn't know what was in these things.

There was no description of content or anything like that because there was no legal obligation to do so.

A lot of new treatments were encouraged at this time, all in the name of beauty.

The crowning glory of an Edwardian woman was her hair,

and to be truly fashionable it had to be curly, coiffed and big,

a process that often destroyed what it was meant to enhance.

These elaborate hairstyles took a lot of effort,

effort that inevitably led to unsafe practices with horrible consequences.

There was a big problem in the Edwardian period of female baldness.

Why were women going bald?

People were using very dangerous hair dyes which was one of the causes,

but the other big cause... I mean, you'd have been fine with your fabulous curls,

but everybody curled their hair... and so if you're doing that...

allow me to demonstrate... This would give you a sort of a crimp...

-Yes.

-For travelling, you might have a little one like that,

so you were curling your hair the whole time,

and the dangers of burning with this were absolutely extreme.

Tongs like these were heated in the fire and applied straight on to the hair,

often burning it off.

But worse was to follow.

Karl Nessler came up with the first permanent-waving machine in 1906,

but not before he'd burnt his wife's hair off twice.

Goodness me!

So definitely there's a reason for baldness if ever I saw one!

Nessler's wonder machine involved wrapping the hair around rods,

and covering it with alkaline paste, and, most dangerously of all, asbestos.

Gas was then used to steam the curls tight.

It would take 6 hours.

It was extremely popular.

Once your hair was right, you had the challenge of adding a hat and so introduced another danger.

Look at that whacking great hat!

You couldn't put your hat on your head without huge hat pins. These were up to 14 inches long.

And that was another very dangerous thing, because you've got all that incredibly sort of sharp pointed end.

Ladies were banned from wearing unprotected hat pins on omnibuses in case they scratched people.

Suffragettes had their hat pins removed when they went into court in case they stabbed people,

and Edwardian novelists did lovely sort of vignettes of ladies preserving their virtue

by stabbing an aggressor or a dirty old man with a hat pin.

Ironically, while she was killing herself to look beautiful,

the Edwardian middle-class woman was herself a killer, of wildlife.

The biggest killer in the Edwardian home was undoubtedly the Edwardian lady herself,

with her taste for hats decorated with the most exotic feathers and sometimes even whole dead birds.

Thousands of songbirds,

egrets, birds of paradise, slaughtered in the name of millinery.

A public outcry led to the end of the fashion for dead birds on hats,

and to the establishment of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Birds in 1904.

Women however continued to be the willing victims of the beauty industry.

Bald, blind, burnt, scarred, Edwardian make-up was a dangerous business.

In fact, the early-20th century was poised on the verge of the mass production of cosmetics,

and the explosion of a whole new industry...

..one that would test their products first before releasing them on consumers.

Standing on the shoulders of their ingenious Victorian forefathers,

Edwardian inventors continued to expand the scientific horizon, and yet...

Edwardian optimism was not as unambiguously confident and certain

as the heady days of the mid-Victorian period.

Things were moving fast and the speed and consequences of change rightly concerned many commentators.

Their great hopes of the future were matched by serious anxieties about what that future might bring.

And many of their fears were justified, for their new explosive freedom

introduced into the family home some of the biggest killers ever.

When Marie Curie discovered radium in 1898

and won a second Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911,

she not only showed that women could be successful scientists, she also pioneered a new science.

In terms of the home, though, the discovery took killers to a nuclear level.

Radium was known as the wonder element.

Deemed capable of preventing disease, and conferring medicinal benefits,

it was used by doctors and quacks alike.

Radium first came to the public's attention as a treatment for cancer,

but it seemed to give off an energy that could be harnessed in the home

in ways Madame Curie could not have imagined when she discovered it.

I've come to the University of Surrey's Department of Nuclear Physics

to explore radium with Professor Patrick Regan.

So, Paddy, why were people so excited about radium in the early-20th century?

Here is this magic material that appears to come from nowhere,

it's the changing of the element uranium, spontaneously apparently, changing into another element,

this new chemically separated material radium, and it emanates energy.

This is the birth of nuclear physics.

So what is radium and why is it a problem?

Radium is a radioactive compound,

and so most of its effects are due to the radioactivity.

It has a very long half-life. That means that it remains radioactive for years and years.

And so you don't just swallow a bit, and within ten minutes the radioactivity's gone.

It continues to do you harm, probably for the rest of your life.

One of the problems is that the body treats radium like calcium,

and so it absorbs it into the bones and that's where the radium does a lot of its damage.

It damages the bone marrow which is the place

where our body makes all of the blood cells that it needs.

This is called aplastic anaemia,

when all of the bone marrow is destroyed,

so that none of your blood products are made,

and this is one of the awful side effects of radium.

But this horror had yet to unfold in the early-20th century.

The burgeoning scientific discoveries of the period

provided the Edwardians with what seemed, at least at first, as fun.

Radium as isolated by Marie Curie was an incredible discovery,

it was a really world-changing discovery.

What we might see as the most important, in medical use,

that wasn't what the Edwardians were interested in.

They were delighted by the fact that it could create luminous paint.

The public imagination was fired by the idea of radium, its energy and luminosity

thrilled and excited them, leading to a radium craze in Europe in 1903.

Corsets, for example, corsets that kept you warm for anti-rheumatism.

You could buy radium socks, radium underwear, you could get chocolate with radium in it.

Could this be a hidden killer?

Radium was even available in toothpaste and water.

It was the energy that radium emitted that made it appeal to the Edwardians.

They truly believed that by ingesting radium the body would absorb this energy.

So they used it in everything they could.

They even had radium spas,

where you could go and relax in the spa water surrounded by radium.

Reports rather strangely also of condoms that had radium included in them.

Men in particular thought luminous paint on their watch faces was pretty thrilling.

So it was absolutely everywhere, anywhere you looked, they used radium.

It was a magic substance, it was seen as a sort of panacea for everything.

It would be years before the damaging effects of radium were discovered.

And it was one particular product that gave us the clue.

One of the most popular items to buy for the home at this time was the luminous clock,

and it was radium that made it glow in the dark.

Radium on clocks was seen as a safety measure in the home,

because it meant that if you woke up in the middle of the night,

and there was a banging downstairs, you would know what time it was immediately from your clock,

so they were sold as a safety precaution,

as something that would really help you stay safe in the home.

Such was the popularity of the luminous clock, a whole new industry grew up around its manufacture.

Young women were employed to paint the dials.

The girls who used to do that used to lick the tips of their brushes to give a fine point,

and in doing so they would transfer some of the radium in the paint on to their lips.

It was these working practices that led to the discovery of how fatal radium can be.

Nowadays we can measure that extremely accurately,

so we can measure literally one radioactive decay at a time.

We've got a Geiger counter here, so, Suzy, if you just bring that in...

Using modern-day measuring techniques and this sample of luminous green paint,

similar to that of the clocks dials, we can show that the paint is producing alpha radiation.

But when you place a barrier, similar to the glass on a clock face,

between the paint and the Geiger counter, the radiation is reduced,

and the damage it would do to the skin will be less.

Putting it in basically attenuates the alpha particles...

If alpha particles are external to the body, they do basically no biological damage,

or very little biological damage at all.

If you ingest radium inside you, it's a bone-seeking chemical,

it will go into the surfaces of the bone

and it will deposit its radioactive energy into that bone tissue.

This is what happened to the women painting the clock dials.

They developed something called radium jaw,

which was necrosis of the bone, the bone was eaten away in their jaw,

and it would also then go on to cause all the systemic effects, the effects on the rest of the body.

But this radium jaw was very typical of women who worked with radium.

If it deposits enough energy in the right way, it can change the DNA in some of the cells in that region

and that can lead to cancers.

These days we have a much better understanding of radium, what it is and how to deal with it.

The tragic thing is what was known and what was hidden during the Edwardian period.

One of the interesting things about this is that we believe that the people who owned the factories

that were using radium and the scientists who were developing it

knew of some of the dangers and took great care not to expose themselves to radium.

But unfortunately they didn't take the same precautions with their workers.

That was really one of the first pieces of strong scientific empirical evidence

that ingesting of radium was deleterious to health.

They even tried to smear the reputation of the women

by suggesting that a lot of the problems that they had was due to syphilis,

and not radium at all.

The damaging and often fatal side effects of radiation exposure

were only realised in the late 1920s.

Much of the progress of the Edwardian era still shapes us today,

and some of the problems are still with us too.

Over time, though, the killers were gradually unveiled,

and as a result these mod cons and innovations continued to develop.

But without this first burst of creativity we wouldn't be where we are today,

or have benefited from the resulting safety measures.

With all the new materials and technologies we're exposed to these days,

we may well be storing up our own hidden killers for the future.