20 Household Products From History That Secretly Poisoned Families

In 1898, Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company that is still in business today, trademarked diacetylmorphine as “Heroin.” Bayer named Heinrich Dreser, the head of its laboratory, as its creator. Around the world, pharmacies stocked and sold Heroin cough syrup without a prescription. It was promoted as a safe replacement for both morphine and codeine, even suggested as a remedy for infant and child bronchitis. Within a few years, there were reports of addiction and fatal respiratory depression. In the United States, the manufacture of heroin was outlawed.

Eben Byers, a Pittsburgh industrialist and amateur golf champion, ingested more than 1,400 bottles of Radithor, a radium tonic, from 1927 to 1930. It was marketed by William Bailey, an unlicensed businessman who ran his own laboratory in New Jersey. Most alternative health products don’t actually contain what they claim, but Radithor really did contain dissolved radium, which embedded itself in Byers’ bones. His jaw rotted away, and Byers died in March 1932. His very public death helped persuade federal authorities to shut down Bailey’s operation and start regulating the sale of radioactive substances.

In 1933, salons began using an untested chemical mixture to dye clients’ eyebrows and eyelashes, sparing women from applying mascara every day. The company that made the dye, the Cosmetic Manufacturing Company of Los Angeles, sold it to salons as Lash Lure, and the instructions called for plucking the eyebrow hairs first, leaving the skin open, then applying the mixture of chemicals and hydrogen peroxide directly to the eye area. The chemical reaction caused severe burns and scar tissue, leaving more than a dozen women permanently blind and killing a salon owner from a secondary infection. The outrage spurred Congress to pass a law giving regulators authority over the cosmetics industry.

Charlotte Winslow, a nurse, first prepared Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for her son-in-law Jeremiah Curtis to market. The syrup was promoted to calm infants and was advertised to help with colic and teething pains. What the label didn’t advertise was that it contained morphine and high-proof alcohol. Since the parents didn’t know exactly how much morphine was in the syrup, they would give their children more to quiet them down. Unfortunately, some of the babies overdosed and died from respiratory failure. It was sold throughout North America and Britain. The American Medical Association called it a “baby killer.” Within a few decades, it was taken off the market.

Among the worst offenders was Koremlu, a hair-removal cream that New York salon owner Kora Lublin sold in department stores as a safe way to remove facial hair. What Lublin didn’t tell her customers was that the cream’s active ingredient, thallium acetate, a heavy-metal compound, was also used as rat poison. While it killed hair follicles, it also seeped through the skin and into the bloodstream. After more than 120,000 jars were sold, thousands of women suffered side effects ranging from nerve damage and tooth loss to paralysis and blindness. At the time, the FDA had no legal authority over cosmetics, so it could only watch as Lublin was swamped with lawsuits.

Copper arsenite pigment, also known as Scheele’s Green, was widely used in Victorian times to color wallpaper, even in bedrooms and nurseries. However, in damp conditions, molds can grow on the wallpaper, feeding on the Scheele’s Green and releasing poisonous arsenic gas into the room. Wallpaper that is not sealed can also shed arsenic dust, which then collects on furniture and skin. Over time, residents in affected rooms can suffer from arsenic poisoning, which can cause neurological decline and is especially dangerous for infants. Evidence of the health problems caused by the wallpaper accumulated, and it went out of fashion within a couple of decades. Even Queen Victoria had it removed from Buckingham Palace.

For decades, Westclox, an American clockmaker, used radium-based paint to coat the numerals and hands of its alarm clocks, giving the timepieces a glow-in-the-dark quality that would illuminate a dark bedroom. The women who did the painting at the factory, known as dial painters, suffered terrible fates: many developed severe bone disease and died as a result of shaping their brush tips with their lips, though that’s a separate story from the clocks themselves. The amount of radiation dial painters were exposed to at work was much greater than what Westclox alarm clocks emitted at home, but anyone with one of these clocks on her nightstand would have been exposed to low levels of radiation on a regular basis.

Lehn & Fink, makers of Lysol disinfectant, advertised their product in women’s magazines for “feminine hygiene,” a euphemism at the time for birth control, since vice laws prohibited open advertising of contraceptives. Though the original formula contained the toxic coal-tar by-product cresol, Lysol remained America’s most popular over-the-counter form of birth control for years. Women used it internally as a douche despite the product causing chemical burns. In at least one study, it failed to prevent pregnancy half the time, and it has been linked by health officials to at least 193 deaths from poisoning. Lysol has used a different, safer formula for decades now.

For decades, parents around the world gave their fussy infants Steedman’s Teething Powders, a British teething remedy. But those powders were more than a quarter calomel, a mercury compound. And in about 1 of every 500 particularly susceptible babies, repeated doses resulted in a toxic mercury-poisoning syndrome called Infantile Acrodynia or “Pink Disease,” in which the child’s hands and feet swell and turn pink, and the child loses hair and teeth and becomes irritable. It was fatal in a significant percentage of children who developed it. But it wasn’t until decades later that a pediatric researcher finally linked mercury in teething powders to Acrodynia. Shortly thereafter, teething powders were withdrawn from markets around the world.

Hundreds of thousands of patented “Revigators,” designed by an Arizona salesman, were mass-produced and sold. Each Revigator was a glazed jug, lined with uranium ore. The thinking behind the product was that families would put tap water in the Revigator each night, allowing radioactive decay to fill the jug with radon gas, and then drink several glasses of the gas-infused water daily. The idea was to cure illnesses ranging from arthritis to stomach trouble in what was called “Nature’s way to health.” Modern testing found high levels of lead, arsenic, and vanadium that leached from the ore and even the Revigators’ lead spouts into the water.

Produced in Germany and distributed throughout Europe, Doramad Radioactive Toothpaste, made by the Berlin company Auergesellschaft, was marketed as a modern technological marvel. It contained thorium, a radioactive element used in the manufacture of gas lantern mantles, and the company claimed that the “radium rays” emitted by the toothpaste could kill germs and whiten teeth. Europeans used the product until production ceased around the end of World War Two, and later research into radioactivity confirmed just how dangerous it had been.

Laird’s Bloom of Youth was a liquid face lotion manufactured in New York by George W. Laird. Bloom of Youth was advertised to whiten and improve the complexion of the face, a highly desirable feature since paleness was associated with higher class status. Laird’s Bloom of Youth contained lead acetate and lead carbonate, which were absorbed through the skin with daily use. Dr. Louis Sayre reported to the American Medical Association on several cases of lead poisoning or “lead palsy,” a form of chronic lead poisoning characterized by the wasting of muscles in the wrist, resulting in a limp, paralyzed hand known as “wrist drop.” Sayre’s report led to no regulatory action, since no federal cosmetics authority existed at the time.

Drugstores sold Cocaine Toothache Drops for just a few cents a box. Parents would rub some of the drops advertised as an “Instantaneous Cure” on a crying child’s gums to relieve toothaches. The drops, manufactured by New York’s Lloyd Manufacturing Company, did their advertised job of numbing a child’s aching teeth. But repeated use of the drops meant cocaine was seeping into a child’s system, sometimes resulting in addiction and other behavioral problems. Cocaine’s power to numb nerves was first identified by an Austrian eye doctor, and the toothache drops could be legally purchased over the counter until the passage of new federal drug laws.

Beginning in the early 1920s, Agene, nitrogen trichloride gas, was used to bleach most commercial white flour in Britain and North America. The chemical reacted with gluten in wheat to produce a neurotoxin, which caused dogs to suffer bouts of seizures and hallucination-like frenzied episodes, a condition termed “canine hysteria.” Dogs developed the symptoms if fed bread or even table scraps containing agenized flour. A British nutritionist carried out the definitive research into the condition, after which Agene was banned. No adverse effects were noted in humans, who are much less sensitive to the effects of the chemical than dogs.

Grimault’s Cigares de Joy and Schiffmann’s Asthmador, both sold in drugstores, were marketed as actual treatments for asthma, endorsed by mainstream doctors of the time. The cigarettes contained no tobacco; they consisted solely of dried thorn-apple and deadly nightshade leaves. Smoking them released atropine, which does in fact dilate constricted airways and relieve an asthma attack, but also introduced toxins that cause dry mouth, blurred vision, tachycardia, and hallucinations. They were eventually rendered obsolete by pharmaceutical inhalers.

Bromo-Seltzer was invented by Isaac Emerson, a druggist from Baltimore, as a popular headache and hangover remedy. Originally, Bromo-Seltzer contained sodium bromide and was sold in blue bottles. It also originally contained acetanilide, a toxic coal-tar pain reliever. Daily ingestion of acetanilide was known to cause blood disorders. Bromo-Seltzer could cause bromism, a condition characterized by confusion, paranoia, hallucinations, and skin problems. During the 1930s and 1940s, bromide-induced psychosis accounted for a significant percentage of patient admissions to state mental hospitals. Bromo-Seltzer has used safer pain relievers for decades now.

Pyrene fire extinguishers, with their distinctive brass pumps, were found in millions of mid-century vehicles, kitchens, and garages. The Pyrene liquid, carbon tetrachloride, was a very effective suppressant for electrical and grease fires. The drawback was that if it was sprayed on very hot flames or metal, the heat could break the chemical down to produce phosgene gas, the infamous poison gas of World War One! This could fill the lungs of an unsuspecting extinguisher user instead of putting out the fire. Residential extinguishers were eventually phased out.

In the past, companies sold stovetop mats, iron pads, toaster warmers, and oven gloves made out of asbestos. They were advertised as non-flammable kitchen helpers. Every day, housewives would put these items on open burners to cook their meals. The constant heating would weaken the material and release fibers of asbestos into the food they were cooking and in the air around them. Asbestos caused lung disease and various types of cancer, like mesothelioma, which usually appeared many years after exposure. These products were finally banned for consumer use.

After World War Two, Standard Oil of New Jersey reformulated FLIT to include DDT. Families used hand sprayers to fog FLIT in kitchens, bedrooms, even in babies’ cribs. Theodor Geisel (later to become famous as children’s author Dr. Seuss) drew illustrations for FLIT’s long-running “Quick, Henry, the FLIT!” ad campaign. Unfortunately for Standard Oil, Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, revealed the long-term effects of DDT, which, though seemingly harmless at first, persisted in the environment and in animal and human tissues. Eventually, the federal government banned its use.

The Dutch Boy brand of interior paint was up to 50% white lead by weight. Marketed as “washable, durable, and sanitary,” Dutch Boy was often used to paint children’s bedrooms. The National Lead Company, which made Dutch Boy, promoted its lead paints for nurseries even as it became aware of research linking lead to ill health. Unfortunately, Dutch Boy paint flaked as children’s rooms grew dingy. Lead chips and paint dust tasted sweet to toddlers, who gnawed windowsills and stuffed chipping paint in their mouths. Though a neurologist documented permanent brain damage in children from lead paint, it wasn’t until 1978 that lead paint was federally banned.

This content was created with the help of AI.