Today’s Polished Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is a deceptively simple, spectacularly lethal bundle of hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen atoms. It could be chemically treated to produce powdery white poisonous salts, usually potassium cyanide (KCN) or sodium cyanide (NaCN). As a group, the three cyanides quickly showed themselves valuable in industrial products. Hydrogen cyanide was used in pesticides, explosives, engraving, and tempering steel, as a disinfecting agent, in creating colorful dyes, and even in making nylon. Sodium cyanide became a favored tool of the mining industry, used to etch away useless rock and extract the gold contained inside. Potassium cyanide was also used in mining, as well as in photography, electroplating, and metal polishing. New York City toxicologist Alexander Gettler, tracking cyanide problems in New York, kept a list of accidental poisonings, such as those caused when someone with an open cut on a hand polished the family silver. The exposure was low enough that most people, after becoming miserably sick, survived. But Gettler had logged one fatality, following a meal served by a cook who failed to throughly wash out a pot after polishing it to a gleam inside and out. Gettler worried, no, he knew – that people using cyanides didn’t appreciate how dangerous they were: “It is of considerable practical significance that hydrocyanic acid is a poison for all members of the animal kingdom.” In other words, cyanides were useful, plentiful, easy to acquire – and astonishingly lethal.
Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook