20 Household Horrors That Forced Safety Laws Into Existence

Eben Byers was a wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist and amateur golf champion. He started consuming Radithor in 1927, a concoction of distilled water spiked with radioactive radium that was widely touted as a health tonic during the 1920s radium craze. Byers drank approximately 1,400 bottles of the substance over a span of three years. Eventually, his jawbone disintegrated as a result of internal damage from the radium. He died in 1932. Although no law existed to stop the company from selling it, public outcry following Byers’s death led regulators to ban such quack cures involving radioactive substances.

In the late 1950s, American parents frequently used thin plastic dry-cleaning bags as waterproof covers for crib mattresses. The lightweight film generated a static charge that would suck onto an infant’s face and completely enclose the nose and mouth. Over 80 infants suffocated as a result. New York was among the first states to enact legislation requiring that such packages be labeled with a printed warning telling parents to keep thin plastic out of reach of children.

Harvard chemist Dr. Charles Robert Sanger discovered that in a damp bedroom, the mold growing on the copper arsenite, nicknamed Scheele’s Green, was releasing arsenic gas into the air. He made the discovery while researching arsenic pigments. Sleepers in these rooms were chronically sick. Massachusetts was the first to pass a true law in 1900, placing limits on the amount of arsenic in wallpaper and textiles. In England, the dye simply fell out of favor, pushed off shelves by consumer boycotts rather than any new legislation.

During the 1950s, kids playing hide-and-seek would occasionally crawl into fridges sitting in the yard or basement. The door latched securely from the outside. The inside was airtight and soundproof, so the kid could become trapped, unable to escape and impossible to hear. Each year, dozens died this way. The Refrigerator Safety Act of 1956 mandated that all new refrigerator doors had to open from the inside using no more than 15 pounds of force. That legislation forced companies to develop the refrigerator magnet seal we know today.

Before the 1910s, the typical American kitchen had a box of “strike-anywhere” matches. Because they used white phosphorus, these matches caught fire if rubbed on almost anything, sometimes starting house fires. Kids sometimes ate the sweet-smelling match heads, which led to fatal internal bleeding and liver failure. The factory workers who made the matches also developed a horrible phosphorus-induced jaw disease. In 1912, President Taft put such a high tax on white-phosphorus matches that the safer red-phosphorus versions quickly became standard.

In the 1930s, Ruth deForest Lamb of the Food and Drug Administration recorded thousands of products sold in American homes where no testing was required. A popular eyelash dye called Lash Lure, applied at home or by cosmetologists in salons, resulted in corneal scarring, permanent vision loss, and at least one fatality. Years later, a liquid antibiotic contaminated with an industrial antifreeze solvent caused 107 deaths, including those of many young children. Public outrage prompted Congress to pass the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which mandated that a drug or cosmetic be proven safe before being sold.

Homeowners in the 1910s and 1920s often installed early automatic water heaters in their basements. The early tanks were sealed steel vessels with no means of relief if the thermostat stuck closed. Water continued to boil inside, but because the vessel was sealed, the pressure built up until the tank ruptured, sending scalding water and expanding steam through the house. It was enough to level a home. The national boiler code was revised in 1915, and cities soon required temperature and pressure relief valves in every plumbing code that followed.

Koremlu was a hair removal cream that was sold for home use in the early 1930s, marketed to women who wanted smoother skin. The cream contained thallium acetate, a heavy-metal rat poison, which, when applied to the skin, was absorbed and caused nerve damage, loss of hair and teeth, and, in some instances, permanent paralysis. At the time, there was no regulation of cosmetics, and when this case became public, thanks to the work of Ruth deForest Lamb, an FDA official, it helped lead to the eventual regulation of cosmetics in 1938.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans were wearing brushed-rayon sweaters, known as torch sweaters, and children’s fleece-lined rayon cowboy play chaps. The raised, fluffy fibers trapped oxygen, so brushing against a gas stove, fireplace, or match would set the fabric ablaze in seconds as flames raced across the surface. After public outcry over the resulting burns and deaths, Congress passed the Flammable Fabrics Act in 1953, instituting the country’s first federal flame test for clothing fabric.

Philadelphia surgeon Dr. Chevalier Jackson treated countless children who had swallowed lye, a caustic cleaning agent that was sold without a label and easily mistaken for flour or sugar stored under kitchen sinks. The chemical burned their throats to the point that it took several visits to Jackson’s office just to be able to swallow again. After 25 years of lobbying, Jackson received his reward in 1927 when President Coolidge signed the Federal Caustic Poison Act, requiring poison labels and a printed antidote on all lye and similar household chemicals.

When Americans began switching from coal gas to natural gas in the 1920s and 1930s, they also lost a vital safety feature. Natural gas is colorless and odorless, meaning a leak would not be detected until a spark ignited it. Following a series of residential explosions and the 1937 school gas explosion in Texas, the state passed the Gas Odorization Law mandating that utilities add mercaptan, a sulfur-based chemical that gives off a pungent, rotten-egg smell to alert people of a leak.

Prior to 1900, many immigrant families crowded into small rooms in a single apartment building. Many rooms didn’t even have windows. When a fire broke out in the hallway or on a lower floor at night, it quickly filled the dark stairwells with smoke, trapping families asleep in their windowless rooms. The New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 banned the practice of housing people in windowless rooms. It also required exterior steel fire escapes and lit hallways at night.

In Victorian Britain, homes had no electric lighting, and those who opened their medicine cabinet to grab a bottle in the middle of the night did so in complete darkness. Since liquids such as carbolic acid were stored in plain glass bottles similar to the containers used for cough syrup, there were several recorded cases of families accidentally drinking poison, thinking they were taking a remedy. Under the Pharmacy Act of 1868, certain dangerous poisons were mandated to be dispensed from cobalt-blue or ribbed glass containers that could easily be identified by feel in the dark.

As toddlers gnawed on the sweet-tasting chips of flaking paint and licked the dust on the windowsills of older Baltimore homes, they were consuming the deadly metal lead. The neurotoxin led to convulsions, brain damage, and even death in very young children. In June 1951, the Baltimore City Health Department enacted Regulation 17, the first law anywhere in the nation to outlaw the use of lead paint inside homes, decades before the federal government finally passed a national ban.

Dr. Leonard Colebrook, a British surgeon in charge of a burn-treatment unit, noted that many of his patients had suffered in much the same way, by brushing against a portable gas or electric heater that lacked a protective grille covering its exposed, red-hot element. Their clothing immediately burst into flames, and in Britain more than 300 people perished this way each year. Colebrook’s evidence led to legislation, enforced from 1953, that forbade the sale of any home heater without a protective grille.

The Victorian and Edwardian British child’s nightgown was a loose garment made of flannelette, a cheap and fuzzy cotton fabric that would immediately burst into flames if the hem were to come into contact with an open coal fire. The Children and Young Persons Act of 1908 became the first piece of legislation that made it an offense for parents of children under the age of seven to leave an open fire unguarded and without a fireguard fitted, for which they could be fined up to £10.

After World War II, American kitchens and garages were packed with heavy metal appliances. Washing machines, drills, and irons all had metal cases and were plugged into two-prong outlets. But if the wiring inside became damaged, the metal case of the appliance would become live, and anyone standing on a damp floor or even just touching a wet sink or faucet might receive a nasty shock. In 1947, the national electrical code required that all laundry-room outlets be grounded, followed by a requirement for grounded outlets throughout the home in 1956. That’s when the third pin came about: to conduct any stray electricity safely to the ground.

In 1950s Chicago, families in multi-unit apartment buildings often heated their units with portable kerosene heaters, which were unvented and could not be turned off if they were tipped over. These heaters emitted carbon monoxide directly into the unit. A child or animal tipping over the heater could cause burning kerosene to spill onto a wooden floor. After a number of deaths from heating fires during winter, Chicago’s city council outlawed the use of unvented kerosene and gas heaters in housing units in 1958. This ordinance was subsequently adopted by many other North American cities.

American houses of the 1930s had gas ranges with pilot lights, those small, always-burning flames used to ignite gas burners. If the pilot light was blown out by a draft or an accidentally bumped valve, gas would quietly fill the kitchen until someone lit a match, causing an explosion. Between 1938 and 1939, the gas industry required new ranges to carry a safety valve that automatically shut off the flow of gas to a stove within 45 seconds of the pilot light going out.

In the 1860s, kerosene replaced whale oil as the primary source of light for parlors after dark in both Britain and America. For economic reasons, manufacturers sometimes left flammable naphtha and gasoline in the lamp oil. As a lit lamp heated in a confined space, the vapors accumulated inside. They ignited and shattered the glass reservoir, scattering fire across the room. Britain and the American states countered with oil inspection legislation, mandating minimum safety requirements and appointing inspectors to sample oil at the point of sale.

This content was created with the help of AI.