Today’s Illuminating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
When New York City Medical Examiner Charles Norris started his job, he’d decided to track every accidental illuminating gas death that occurred on his watch. During his first month in office – January 1918 – there were sixty-five such fatalities, an average of two a day.
The details of those deaths made it obvious that carbon monoxide does not discriminate in its victims. In the right circumstances, it will kill anyone. A newly married couple in an elegant brownstone just off Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side were killed by gas escaping from a defective rubber hose; a woman living in midtown Manhattan was killed by gas escaping from tubing leading to a stove; a man on the Lower East Side was poisoned by gas escaping from a radiator; a man on the Upper West Side fell into bed drunk and failed to notice that the flame had blown out on two gas jets that fed the lamps in his room; a city inspector was killed by illuminating gas while inspecting the water meter in a basement; a man on Morningside Avenue, on the Upper West Side, was killed by gas escaping from a small gas heater in the bathroom.
In 1925 the details were of the same order, but the number of fatalities had gone up. That January fifteen people were killed by gas in one terrible day. Among them – a man in Yonkers, killed by gas escaping from an unlighted burner on a stove; a baby, dead when his mother placed him by a poorly fitted stove for warmth; a Long Island man, killed by a leaky furnace; a Bronx man, his wife, and a guest staying in their apartment, dead due to another unlighted stove burner; a young mother and her baby, killed in Brooklyn by a faulty gas heater.
The U.S. Bureau of Mines, which had been investigating carbon monoxide risks in coal mines, released a report in the summer of 1926 stating that “the public generally does not appreciate the danger from gas leaks.” The government was also weary of people reporting that a trained killer had set off a bomb when in actuality someone had merely left a gas jet open and then lit a cigarette. The bureau wanted to reassure the country’s citizens that not every residential explosion was the work of the Black Hand Society (an extortion syndicate which believed in theatrical demonstrations such as blowing up cars or apartment to get the message across).
It was usually the result of common carelessness.
Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook
Morbid Trinket Du Jour!
Ken sent me a link to a very attractive little trinket.
“Hey for under $7 and free shipping, you can’t go wrong.” [Well, the shipping shows as .21 for me now, but that’s practically free!]
