Of course, even for those committed to scrubbing away at fingers and instruments, many of which had wooden handles, soap alone didn’t always do the trick. Two years after Semmelweis’s death in 1865, Joseph Lister introduced the first link in the chain from acid to accident, but he did one thing more. Like the inventive minds behind Jim West’s sleeve-gun, Lister also provided the means to dispense acid, making it practical for doctors to use.
The operating room of the nineteenth century wasn’t much better than in the eighteenth century. No sterile sheets, no scrubs, and no rubber gloves. Surfaces consisted of wood, cloth, leather, and paper—all porous. By the end of the day, a surgeon’s apron hung stiff with blood, and though instruments might be cleaned, they weren’t sterilized between surgeries. In fact, a stiff apron was a sign of experience: surgery was grim work, pain a necessary reality. When Lister brought forth his ideas in the British Medical Journal in the 1860s, he faced timeworn traditions that went back to the sixteenth century and Andreas Vesalius. Many assumed that the air alone resulted in decomposition (or gangrene); essentially, infection was “brought about by the influence of the atmosphere.” In the disastrous treatment of the American president James Garfield, Dr. Willard Bliss even praised “laudable pus” as a good sign (rather than evidence the president had gone septic). Pasteur had demonstrated the inverse, and Lister championed germ theory in paper after paper. It did not make him popular; doctors like Bliss remained suspicious even after Lister claimed to prove it: “The septic property of the atmosphere depended not on the oxygen, [. . .] but on minute organisms suspended in it [author emphasis].”6 Oxygen merely fed the microorganisms and allowed them, in the right environment, to grow and multiply. The passive view of death “just happening” gave way to language that suggested virtual armies of germs were swarming healthy tissue. Lister’s theory required a hostile intervention, a weapon. He chose a notably volatile organic compound to—as he put it—“exercise a peculiarly destructive influence upon low forms of life.”7 Corrosive, noxious, horrible to the nose and dangerous to the touch, carbolic acid proved a very effective weapon indeed.
Lister’s earliest case studies applied the compound directly to the wound. It worked. It also burned away healthy tissue. He notes that even bone might be dissolved by the acid, but considering how often infection led to amputation and death, it seemed well worth the risk. Soon, Dr. Lister saved limbs that Dr. Liston would have hacked off. Even so, the acid cure could be, in itself, incredibly dangerous—if not to the patient, then to the doctor. Lister cautions that “carbolic acid and decomposing substances are alike,” the cure and the killer germs both, induced suppuration, or a pus-filled abscess. In other words, an ounce of cure might very well be deadly.
Misapplication and Mayhap
In February 1868, just a year after Lister published on the uses of carbolic acid as antiseptic, a woman in the “itch ward” of the Erdington workhouse was mistakenly rubbed down with carbolic acid rather than the usual sulfur and lime. She died in agony.8 On October 26, 1870, a sergeant-instructor of volunteers named Patrick McGrath swallowed an ounce of carbolic acid after mistaking it for bitters. He could neither speak nor walk, and his lips, gums, and tongue turned ashy white. He struggled for air and lingered, suffering, for thirteen hours before death.9 Clearly the antiseptic could be deadly when used incorrectly, but an article published in 1879 suggests that it might be just as devastating when used as directed. One Dr. Morrant Baker claimed that the method Lister recommended was “unnecessary and had serious drawbacks of its own.” Others considered carbolic acid poisoning to be the “real evil,” and several cases in August of 1881 seemed to prove it.10 Two deaths occurred during ovariotomy, a surgery to remove the ovaries, and the British Medical Journal attributed the fatalities to use of carbolic acid (rather than surgical complications).11 No one questioned the acid’s power to corrode and kill; quite the opposite. But even those who saw its uses frequently misunderstood the purpose. Angus Mackintosh, one of Lister’s students, claimed carbolic acid only worked because of the corrosion, and so any corrosive substance would do. As a chemical agent, he claimed, the acid encouraged the body to heal because it destroyed old tissue—a bit like encouraging growth by pruning a plant. Sound logic, but bad science; it would be similar to suggesting that chemotherapy works not because it kills cancer, but because killing cells somehow independently stimulates healing and is “good” for you. Mackintosh couldn’t have been more wrong about the process, but he was right about the consequence. Carbolic acid’s caustic quality did damage the fingers of doctors and assistants, scarring them, stealing sensation, and ending a few surgical careers—hardly a benign substance in the best of circumstances. Something must be done to mitigate its power, and so Lister devised an atomizer, a steam-propelled means of spraying acid into the atmosphere . . . simultaneously creating the first in a long line of acid “guns,” still so prevalent in our steampunk psyche [Fig. 16].
The steampunk aesthetic is, above all, about craft. In the foreword to Vintage Tomorrows by Henry Jenkins, he describes steampunk fans as thinkers and tinkerers, Victorian-steeped “hackers” who wanted to give a material, corporeal “shape” to what they read about and imagined.12 It shouldn’t be surprising, then, to find so many items related to the genre (and to cosplay or costuming and outfitting the genre) on Etsy, one of the largest compendiums of handmade goods. Among the goggles and gizmos, corsets and top hats, you can find an assortment of steampunk “weaponry,” such as Elisha’s Acerbic Liquescence Atomizer. Andrew W. B. Elis developed this device for his Etsy shop TheGOAD (The Guild of Advantageous Development). Inspired by a computer role-playing game, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Elis assembled the “gun” from a repurposed bug sprayer, clear glass jar, hand-wound copper tube, brass couplings, decorative front sight, and velvet-lined display box locked with a skeleton key.13 The item is just for show (and would not fit up Jim West’s sleeve in any case), but it bears striking resemblance to historical analog. And to be fair, Lister’s carbolic acid sprayer, with its gleaming brass dome, glass carafe, and pinhole nozzles, looks far more like a weapon than a sterilization unit. Chief curator James Edmonson of the Dittrick Museum suggests that the sprayer probably worked like a kettle, heating and pressurizing water that, once vaporized, would turn the phenol into a fine mist. The wooden handle provided a means of positioning the device, which likely grew red-hot when in use. At roughly a foot and a half in height, the sprayer was portable but hardly convenient to carry around. They could weigh as much as 10 pounds, and the yellow cloud smelled of acrid tar.
Given the limitations, the carbolic acid sprayer could not distribute the mist with precision or accuracy. Unlike the Liquescence Atomizer, the device had no “site” mechanism and would never hit a target; it relied instead on overspray. Doctors’ notes and letters describe “dripping” walls with carbolic acid clinging to surfaces like stinking beads of sweat. Frank Emory Bunts, one founder of the Cleveland Clinic, described the social consequences as well; having worked in a fog of yellow steam all week, his presence managed to clear church pews on Sunday. The smell lingered, becoming associated with hospital wards and making it impossible for doctors and patients to quite leave the operating room behind. By 1885, newer tech replaced the device, and many said “good riddance.” Aseptic medicine had replaced antiseptic medicine; instead of spraying their hands, their beards, the wound, and everything else with foul-smelling vapors to kill the germs already there, physicians sterilized instruments and operating rooms, and provided gowns and gloves to keep germs out in the first place. The sprayer’s tenure ended abruptly, relegated to the display cases of museums, but the idea—a weaponized means of spraying acid—carried on in fiction, as in fact.
Vitriol and Vengeance
“The vitriol was eating into it everywhere and dripping from the ears and the chin. One eye was already white and glazed. The other was red and inflamed. The features which I had admired a few minutes before were now [. . .] blurr
ed, discoloured, inhuman, terrible.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Illustrious Client”
Arthur Conan Doyle’s now famous hero, Sherlock Holmes, has appeared across multiple genres and—from Basil Rathbone’s WWII-era Sherlock to the current BBC hit starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a twenty-first-century sleuth—in multiple time periods. Alan Moore features him (and his nemesis Moriarty) in The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, and he’s even made an appearance on Star Trek. His predilection may be for solving crimes, but his career begins in chemistry. Test tubes and vials are hallmarks of the series, and in “The Case of the Illustrious Client,” the doctor and detective face off with chemical weaponry. The key scene, one that Doyle manages with all the gusto of a medical man who has likely seen such cases, features a spurned lover’s revenge on the inconstant Baron Adelbert Gruner. Her weapon of choice, sulfuric acid or, as it was known to the Victorians, vitriol, clings and burns, forever distorting the Baron’s handsome features. The story exonerates the thrower (Kitty Winter) because Gruner’s crimes against women and his intention to marry and ruin (or murder) a young lady with connections casts him as the villain. However, true tales of vitriol throwing rarely serve the ends of justice, and though the papers still branded it a “woman’s crime of passion,” vitriolic vengeance was far more common among the industrial contests—the “loom-breakers” and masters fighting over mechanization of factories.
Today, modern science recognizes vitriol as “hydrated sulfates” of iron, copper, magnesium, and zinc—meaning the crystals are mixed with water. Named Vitreus for the Latin word for glass, “oil of vitriol” (or “oil of glass”) derived from heat-treating the salts.14 A Sumerian word dating to 600 B.C.E. demonstrates its long history, showing up in discourses by Pliny the Elder (C.E. 23–79) and later by the Greco-Roman physician Galen.15 For the vitriol thrower, however, it’s the effects and not the history that most matter. “The crime of vitriol throwing,” says surgeon P. Gaskell, author of The Manufacturing Population of England in 1833, “consists of putting into a wide necked bottle a quantity of sulphuric acid [. . .] and throwing this upon the person of the obnoxious individual.” The caustic nature renders it “a formidable weapon,” immediately destructive to skin and clothing.16 The Reformers’ Gazette carries a case study of one such attack, and the consequent execution of Hugh Kennedy in 1831. A servant in Glasgow, Kennedy “willfully and maliciously” threw a great quantity of vitriol on a fellow servant while he slept. The man awoke in agony, one of his eyes quite literally burned away. The gallows, says the editor, was the only thing the man deserved for the crime, which “has become so common in this part of the country, as to become almost a stain on the national character”:
It is so savage and cowardly, that fiends only, in the human form, can be guilty of committing it. The Spanish Stiletto is nothing to it; and we hesitate not to say, that if this crime of throwing vitriol, revolting as it is to the laws of God and man, be not henceforth and forever abandoned in this country, the severest punishment that one human being can inflict upon another ought to be applied to its guilty authors.17
The writer goes on to suggest what that might be, namely ripping their arms off so they can no longer throw acid. The outcry against vitriol throwing increased in proportion to cases, and cases coincided with industrial clashes. Near the century’s end, George Shattuck Morison reflected on all that had come before and all that was likely to follow: “The danger is that the destructive changes will come too fast.”18 Men will lose their utility, argued Morison, they will not be able to adapt to new jobs as quickly, and the old jobs will be managed by mechanical means. Textile workers who saw their hard-spun labor being reproduced on massive scale by looms that needed neither to sleep nor eat—but that also had no hungry children to feed. Where the machine did not replace humans, it summarily enslaved them with economic shackles. In May Kendall’s 1894 poem “The Sandblast Girl and the Acid Man” occupational hazards (including the dangers of acid glass-etching) mix with poverty to prevent successful family-making:
I’m vastly better off than some!
I think how the many fare
Who perish slowly, crushed and dumb,
For leisure, food and air.
Tis hard, in Freedom’s very van,
To live and die a luckless churl.
Tis hard to be an acid man,
Without a sandblast girl! (ll. 65–72)
Verne’s technocratic dystopia paints the same picture: the decades-long struggle between laborers and masters revolved not so much upon a right to wages as a right to live; this was war, and the battle raged on with vitriolic consequences.
Gaskell’s work on artisans and machinery takes a long look at what he called “mechanical substitutes for human labor.” The once thriving class, he suggests, had been reduced to “misery, demoralization, dependence, and discontent” in the wake of steam machinery.19 Working for upwards of sixteen hours a day on about six shillings a week (about five pennies in today’s market), they saw the advent of machines as an end to their livelihood, removing any chance for improvement. The hopelessness of it stretches from Dickens and Verne to the German expressionist film Metropolis in 1927: “It would have been well if steam and mechanism, in breaking up a healthy, contented, and moral body of labourers, had provided another body, possessing the same excellent qualities, as men,” says Gaskell—but the machines are hardly citizens, and instead the new means of manufacturing bred hostility and secrecy.20 In the midst of this misery, the “spirit of revolt” rises, with murderous results. Though Gaskell’s work essentially frees the masters (what he calls “their best benefactor, the enterprising and frugal capitalist”) from blame, he also provides a Victorian view of what motivated and in some cases pardoned the vitriol throwers. The masses, who could not arm themselves with better, had found in acid the perfect malicious weapon.
If vitriol cases of the early nineteenth century primarily consisted of attacks against industrial magnates, why did Victorians consider it a “female” crime? Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist (1835–1909), used elements of physiognomy, eugenics, social Darwinism, and a considerable dose of prejudice to suggest that criminals were born rather than made. “Criminal atavism,” meant the degeneration of hereditary traits, a kind of genetic code for crime. Lombroso would assert that vice-ridden parents gave birth to vice-ridden children, easily picked out by virtue of their physical abnormalities (and thus privileging a specific race and class as having the most correct features and regular conduct). The implication? A hopeless inability to ever rise in society, and appalling treatment of minorities. But not everyone agreed. Gabriel Tarde shared Gaskell’s (and Friedrich Engels’s) views on the roots of poverty: environment has everything to do with it. But Tarde saw it as a crime of imitation. In his opinion, every evil crime originated in the urban center and then was passed (often through sensationalized media) to the rest of the region. And here is where the “vitriol as female crime” comes into circulation. Tarde blames Paris (considered by him a hotbed of vice, rather than Tesla’s city of lights) for “the feminine idea of throwing vitriol in the face of a lover.” The first instance, he claims, originated 1875 when a Parisian widow threw acid; the crime was shortly thereafter copied by others, and others, and others.21 There are plenty of holes in the theory, not least because acid had been weaponized far earlier. Then again, copycatting itself made its way to newsprint in 1881. A young actress threw vitriol over her lover, and when asked how she thought of it, she claimed to have read it in the papers—in an article dealing, principally, with the outbreak of woman’s revenge crimes.22
There were a number of cases where women attacked other women, sometimes perpetrated by unknown adversaries. In some cases, the effects were noted on clothing only after the attack, with no means of recompense of even of finding the perpetrator. Important exceptions—and this includes Kitty Winters from “Illustrious Client”—were those women who went after the men themselves, often for abandonment or
infidelity. Historian Ruth Harris provides the details of several: a French tapestry worker named Amélia murdered her husband by vitriol for abandoning her while pregnant, a domestic servant attacked the father of her unborn child, and a woman by the name of Désirée attacked both her former lover and his wife.23 At trial, most claimed to be in the right, justified by their maltreatment—but just as many were diagnosed as “hysterics,” mentally deranged and dangerous. The media covered cases with apparent glee, and frequently memorialized the event with images. When the crime involved a woman, newspapers recounted the trial at length, savoring details of her charms, her clothing, her letters, her words, even to the point of sexualizing and fantasizing her character.24 Vitriol throwing became synonymous with the exotic femme fatale. Though most throwers were industrial revolutionaries, targeting factory managers or the machinery itself, the press sensationalized the female crime.
It’s an odd pairing: domestic deviant and loom-breaking factory worker. What would make acid their weapon in common? Ann-Louise Shapiro, in Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, suggests the vitrioleuses were women “dangerous through their very domesticity—who transformed the ordinary and the womanly into the menacing.”25 This should sound familiar. Inanimate machines or automatons become horrific if sentient; what if they refuse their servile duties and swarm together to overthrow mankind? It’s a common trope. The Terminator, I, Robot, Metropolis, and many, many others suggest that machines are the enemy. But in light of the disenfranchised masses clamoring at the gates for food, shut out by the (middle-upper-class) masters of automated factories, we have to question what exactly we fear. Is it the machine? Or the disenfranchised? Laborers outnumber foremen just as slaves outnumbered masters—and even women, should they come together for a single cause, might be just as dangerous to the established order. Vitriol, cheap and easy to obtain, became the weapon of the marginalized and subjugated, and in its ability to dissolve physical forms (the very mark of identity), it represented chaos and anarchy. It’s Kitty’s weapon against the Baron, and it’s the weapon of the literally disenfranchised Victor Freemantle in “Night of the Bubbling Death” (he wants to be recognized as his own country, his own sovereign state). This is a world without edges, claims the acid thrower. In a gruesome and deadly manner, acid levels the playing field. Because acid is power.
Clockwork Futures Page 24
