Holy Shit, Dracula!

When you get one of the most infamous monsters in all of storytelling named after you, you know you've done something right. Or wrong. Depends on how you respond to the whole "No such thing as bad publicity" adage. Posthumously. Very posthumously.

ANYWAY.

I shouldn't be getting off track this early.

Vlad III "Motherfucking" Țepeș was a Voivode (warlord) of Wallachia back around the time when the Byzantine Empire finally had enough with being the legacy of old Rome and rebelled via being utterly vanquished by the Ottomans. Wallachia, being a nearby neighbor of Constantinople, had its own problems with potential Ottoman invasion. Vlad's father, Vlad II, dealt with this threat pragmatically.

That is to say, he allied himself with Ottoman Empire, paid them tribute, sent his sons to them as hostages, and in return was installed as Voivode of Wallachia.This is after he joined a chivalric order called The Order of the Dragon, which was dedicated to fighting the "enemies of Christianity" -- chief among which were the Turks themselves.

The best defense is a good mewling surrender.

As an aside: the Romanian word for "Dragon" is "Drac." Vlad II's association with The Order of the Dragon earned him the name "Vlad Dracul," or "Vlad the Dragon." I think you know where this is headed. Adding an "-a" to the end of a name makes it patronymic in this context. So Vlad III was also known as "Son of the Dragon," or "Dracula."

Vlad III's younger brother Radu got along famously with the Ottomans, and ended up converting to Islam. Vlad...not so much. He was constantly at odds with his captors, which meant he was constantly punished. This did nothing to improve the relationship. Eventually, his father and older brother were both killed, and Wallachia was taken over by a rival faction. The Ottomans' solution to this little problem was to install Dracula as Voivode.

Which went thusly.

This didn't work out so well. First, because he was immediately overthrown. Then he came back and described to the usurpers all the vicious fantasies he had about just...straight up destroying Turks. And that pleased them enough to make him Voivode again. When Sultan Mehmed II sent envoys to his childhood playmate, Dracula responded by saying, "Hey, envoys, you didn't tip your hats to me when you came in. You must really like those turbans." Then he had their turbans nailed into their heads.

The Sultan was understandably a bit miffed by this turn of events. He sent an army under Hamza Bey to "make peace" with Wallachia and "remove" Vlad III if necessary. Vlad apparently caught Bey sleepin', though, and launched a surprise attack that killed or captured almost every single man under Hamza Bey's command. Then Vlad went to work earning the epithet Țepeș, or "the Impaler."

And boy howdy, did he ever work hard to earn it. The more squeamish readers might want to go ahead and stop here. It's about to get graphic up in this blog.

See, impalement is one of those execution methods that isn't meant to just kill you. It's meant to keep you alive until you really, really want to die. They'd grease a stake, stick you on it (and I'm gonna let you use your imagination as to where exactly they put you), and try to avoid rupturing any of your internal organs. In that way, you could live up to eight excruciating days in blinding, horrific pain before you finally died.

Vlad did this to about 1,000 of Hamza Bey's men, and to Hamza Bey himself. Then he brought small bands with him and, using the fluent Turkish language and customs he learned in his youth, waltzed into various Ottoman camps and put everyone within them to the sword. Or the stake.

While Vlad treated himself to the steak.

Mehmed was displeased. He sent an army of almost 100,000 men in retribution, which Vlad the Impaler proceeded to dismantle and impale little by little over a series of stunning victories. Finally, it became too much. He was out of money, his mercenaries abandoned him, and he fled to Hungary where a rival imprisoned him.

For about a dozen years. Then he went back to Wallachia and took over again. Can't keep Dracula down. Or rather, you can. You just have to finally defeat him in battle to do it. Which is what happened about two months into his reign. The Turks brought his head back to Constantinople and everyone in the Ottoman empire changed their underpants and hoped no one like that would rise to power in the Balkans again.

Several hundred years later, an old writer named Bram Stoker was working on a vampire novel and came upon a tome that detailed some of the nastier figures in history. Vlad III Dracula turned out to be a perfect fit for the main villain, and the rest is pop culture history.

He's missing some of that Wallachian charm.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Great War!

One hundred years and two days ago, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after a series of political machinations that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Due to a tangled web of alliances and escalations, this declaration of war was followed by at least half a dozen others in less than a week. The next four years tore Continental Europe apart, both figuratively and literally.

This is Beaumont-Hamel after almost a century of healing.

World War I isn't as sexy as its sequel. It's much messier. There's not a clear "bad guy" to hate. I mean, if you're looking for a villain, you're not going to do much better than friggin' Hitler. No such luck in The Great War. The villain there was the war itself. The trenches. The ineffectual artillery barrages and futile charges into certain death. The gas.

Which...you know...fuck that noise.

All told, nearly 18 million men, women, and children died as a direct result of the war. That's close to 2% of the population of the participating countries. Some fared worse than others. Serbia may have lost as much as 18% of their population, which...Jesus, can you imagine what that would do to your country? That's not to mention the specific battles like the Battle of the Somme, where the first day of the fighting cost 20,000 allied lives and resulted in a single mile change in the battle lines.

It was horrific, to say the least. And a lot of people will tell you it started because of a sandwich. Because several assassination attempts failed on the day Franz Ferdinand's death set the wheels in motion, and Gavrilo Princip happened to sit down and ruminate on the day's events with a sandwich from a deli that happened to be exactly where the Archduke's car would stop after the driver got turned around. Rest assured, though, that the sandwich had nothing to do with it.

It wasn't a coincidence. Princip went there not to ruminate, but because he suspected that the motorcade would come that way. Aside from that, the bare fact is (and I can't believe I find it necessary to explain this) sandwiches don't cause world wars. Not even a little bit. World Wars are caused by tangled webs of diplomacy, mass escalation at crises, and overconfident world leaders whose only experience with war is in fighting a vastly technologically inferior foe.

Which was this whole other thing

If it wasn't Franz Ferdinand, it probably would have been someone else. Germany, France, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary were positively itching for a fight. Germany was once the voice of reason. Otto von Bismark kept the whole thing together more or less by sheer force of will for quite some time. But then he was sacked, and the world began its inexorable march toward a preview of Armageddon. And no, I don't mean the campy oil industry wet dream film.

After the Great War came and went, nothing would ever be the same. My pet example of the effects of World War I is Dadaism. The avant-garde art movement was born of a complete rejection of everything in civilization up to that point, because that's what got us into this mess. Realism, reason, and logic were thrown out the window, and artists embraced the absurd. Because when you're dealing with constant explosions, fruitless sacrifices, and gas that melts your face and lungs, what else are you going to embrace?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Oxygen Catastrophe

Let's say your an obligate anaerobic organism, and it's roughly two and a half billion years ago. You're hanging out on Earth, and you've pretty much got the whole place on a string. The world is your oyster (except those don't exist yet, so the world is your...I don't know, other, smaller type of obligate anaerobe).

One day, a new guy shows up. Or several million new guys, because they're bacteria and they come in large groups. These new guys, the cyanobacteria, are pretty different. They go through this whole process of photosynthesis and end up producing oxygen, and it's kind of weird. You're not a fan. In fact, the stuff is toxic to you.

More like toxygen, amirite? Guys? Hehe. Classic.

Luckily for you, dissolved iron and organic matter ends up capturing most of the oxygen, so you continue on your merry way for another 200 million years or so. At that point, the oxygen sinks become fully saturated. That means oxygen starts becoming a part of the atmosphere. For you and all your friends, that's a bad thing. A very, very bad thing.

The "anaerobic" part of "obligate anaerobic" means "without air/oxygen." The "obligate" part means oxygen will straight murder you. Which is exactly what happened. The same event that started Earth's atmosphere down the path toward being breathable also caused one of the largest mass extinctions of all time. It was essentially an apocalypse. The only survivors were the culprits -- who passed on the trait of photosynthesis to future generations -- and a few varieties of anaerobic bacteria that could tolerate the new atmosphere.

Oxygen was basically the Cthluhu of the obligate anaerobic world.

To get an idea of just how big the Oxygen Catastrophe was (and yes, that is an official name for it), just imagine the same thing happening today. Instead of oxygen, imagine it's an element that humans can't breathe. One that might cause dangerous fluctuations in the living conditions on Earth for the majority of its species. Something like, I don't know, carbon dioxide.

Oh, wait...

Well this isn't totally comforting.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Blackbeard!

Edward Teach was a mean fellow. Born in Bristol (probably) and forged in the fires of Queen Anne's War, he took to the sea as an apprentice to Benjamin Hornigold when the war ended. Hornigold, at the time, was a notorious pirate. Teach would strike out on his own after Hornigold's retirement, and the New World would shudder at the mere mention of his nickname: Blackbeard.

Blackbeard captured a frigate, equipped her with 40 guns, named her Queen Anne's Revenge, and set to work crafting an alliance of pirates. With a veritable army behind him, he accomplished remarkable feats of bold buccaneering, including the blockade and capture of Charleston, South Carolina. He made a fortune by ransoming the entire population, then settled down nearby.

Teach was a skilled propagandist. He cultivated his image as a pirate boogeyman so that violence was rarely necessary. He wore his famous beard as thick as a wolf's fur and curled it up around his ears, inviting victims to compare him to a savage beast. Whenever he boarded ships or spoke to captives, he tied cannon fuses to his hat and lit them, creating a terrifying image of shadow and smoke that would make a Balrog feel right at home.

Dude, sweet hat.

At this point, the British offered a general pardon to all pirates if they would only please knock it off, for god's sake. Blackbeard graciously accepted, then almost immediately took to the seas again for more sweet, sweet booty.

At that point, the Governor of Virginia got a little bit pissed off. He made it his mission (or rather, the mission of his underlings) to track down that wascally piwate if it was the last thing he did. So he sent Lieutenant Robert Maynard after him. Through a secretive blockade and clever subterfuge, Maynard found Blackbeard on Ocracoke Island off the coast of North Carolina, relatively isolated, relatively drunk, and fully off guard.

Despite being outnumbered, drunk, and caught unawares, Teach managed to get to one of his ships and fire off a well-timed broadside that instantly shredded one third of Maynard's men and put one of his three ships out of commission. Confident in his impending victory, Blackbeard had his men grapple Maynard's ship and board it. This was exactly what Maynard wanted.

Careful, Teach! Maynard's been playing Yu-Gi-Oh since it launched!

The moment the pirates were aboard, Maynard's sailors burst from the hold and attacked. The pirates, still lightly buzzed, were taken by surprise and immediately lost the initiative. Somewhere between ten and twelve pirates were killed. Although Maynard lost almost as many men, the battle was over when Blackbeard died. Of course, the reason Maynard lost almost as many men was that Blackbeard just would not die. The two of them locked together in combat, and Blackbeard utterly wrecked Maynard's shit, breaking his sword and moving in for the kill just before another sailor slashed his neck and stopped him.

It took as many as five gunshots and twenty sword slashes to bring that beast of a man down. When he fell, his men quickly surrendered. Maynard cut off Teach's head and attached it to the front of his ship so that the whole sailing world would know who was going to collect Blackbeard's bounty.

Which was kind of a dick move, if we're being honest

His death, of course, did little to diminish his legend. The man with the wild beard and fiery cap took more mortal wounds than a bear before he fell. For that and for all his misadventures, when we think "pirate" we think "Blackbeard."

You know, until Johnny Depp ruined it.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Toba Catastrophe!

I believe we've established by now that supervolcanic eruptions would suck harder than the vacuum of space. In case you needed a little extra evidence of that, let's take a look at the eruption of the Lake Toba supervolcano. It happened around 70,000 years ago, and was terrifying.

The Toba Supervolcano Eruption may have been the single largest volcanic event in the known history of the planet. It spewed so much ash into the air that all of South Asia was covered with about six inches of it. Six inches of ash. Over an entire sub-continent. That's about 800 cubic kilometers of volcano vomit.

Why, yes, I am an adult. Why do you ask?

Even bigger were the long term effects. All that ash and sulphur dioxide is not so great for the global climate, as it turns out. There is some debate on the issue, but it has been suggested that the Earth's most recent ice age was either ushered in by, or a direct result of the Toba Catastrophe. For six years after the eruption, the planet was consumed by a volcanic winter. The following 1,000 years were a period of global cooling.

Which was just murder for the poor tauntauns

Right now, some of you are thinking, "Hey neat! A solution to global warming! Maybe a supervolcano eruption wouldn't be so bad after all!"

To you I say, "Nay." For there is a minor detail I left out before. Human beings were around before the Toba eruption. Afterward (or so goes the theory), we very, very nearly weren't. By some accounts, humanity sank into a genetic bottleneck in the aftermath of Toba. In fact, the human population of Earth may have dropped to around 10,000 people. By comparison, there are seven billion people today. That difference in population is literally too large to meaningfully display on a computer monitor.

10,000 is about one person per twenty square miles. It's not enough people to make up a city in some parts of the world. You'll find significantly more people per day in any one of the parks of Disney World than there were people in existence after the Toba Event.

And the rides in the apocalypse weren't nearly as fun.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Krampus!

Do you ever feel like there's something missing in the way we teach our children how to celebrate Christmas? We tell them that, if they behave and stop looking through daddy's browser history, Santa Claus will come to town and give them toys and presents. If not, they get a lump of coal.

And some light trauma.

I mean, either way they're getting something, right? And let's be honest, a lump of coal ain't half bad. Just wait until they learn you can set it on fire. That's gonna lead to some entertainment. And possibly tragedy.

The story is incomplete. The good news is that the rest of the story is already out there. In Europe. Alpine Europe. You know, like Bavaria, Austria, and Croatia. They have a figure who works with Santa Claus, taking up the much needed role of the menacing bad cop. And if history has taught us anything, it's that Austria knows how to produce menacing figures.

This particular menace is known as Krampus, and is utterly terrifying.

Light trauma is for pansies.

In contrast to Santa Claus, Krampus visits the home of naughty children to bring them no gifts but torment and suffering to match their misdeeds. The more you learn about him the more you wonder how anyone in Alpine Europe makes it to adulthood without deep psychological scarring.

First of all, Krampus brings a birch switch with him to whip the mildly naughty kids into shape. Corporal punishment. That's not so bad, right? And it's not! At least, not until you learn that the birch is a common phallic symbol in folklore. So in a subtle way, our story begins as a cautionary tale about a demon who will straight up dickwhip your children if they talk back to you.

While making that face.

That's just the kind-of-naughty kids. If you were really bad, your Christmas treat was to be picked up by Krampus' freakishly long, eldritch tongue, slapped into a basket, and carried off either to his lair or to Hell itself, where undisclosed horrors would be visited upon you in retribution for the grief you've caused your parents.

Gosh, Timmy, we'd love to help, but you've been kind of a dick this year...

In case you're wondering (a) where those horrifying real-life images came from and (b) whether this custom of arcane yuletide terror is a mere cautionary tale, I can answer both of those questions at once. Every year, as part of the Christmas Season, young men in Alpine countries dress up as Krampus for a festival that consists mainly of said men scaring the shit out of every child they can find.

So the next time you find that your little boy or girl is unresponsive to the idea that Santa won't bring them exactly what they want if they continue being awful, consider sweetening the pot with a casual mention that the fury of a horned, cloven-hoofed, long-tongued demon is the alternative.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

And holy shit.

Holy Shit, D. B. Cooper!

On November 24, 1971, 36 passengers and 6 crew members of an airliner found their afternoon flight interrupted by an inconvenient but exceedingly polite passenger who identified himself as Dan Cooper.

Cooper, after enjoying a cigarette and bourbon, passed a note to one of the attractive young flight attendants. When she took it, she looked at him, deduced that he was a lonely businessman looking for some company, and dropped it into her purse without looking at it.

Kind of like this, but a little more sordid

Cooper spoke up and told her she might want to consider how she was handling the message. So she took it out and read it, and to her surprise it was not a charming message, nor was it a phone number. It was a friendly notification that the man in the seat had a bomb and was hijacking the plane, and would she please sit down next to him and act natural. She complied, and he laid out his demands. The plane was to land, and he was to be given $200,000 and a ride to Mexico City, stopping for fuel in Reno.

Deftly setting me up for the line, "I fueled a plane in Reno just to watch it fly."

The strange part about this is that, outside of his original threat, Dan Cooper never showed even the slightest inclination toward violence. He was thoughtful, polite, and apparently concerned for the well-being of all the people he was threatening to blow up. He allowed all the passengers and most of the crew (including the one he initially told about the bomb) to leave the plane when it landed.

Then he got his money and a parachute. When the plane took off again, he opened the back door and, apparently, jumped out. When the plane landed in Reno, he was long gone. To this day, nobody knows whether his insane get rich quick scheme succeeded. Conditions were dark and rainy, far from ideal for a safe jump.

The investigation that followed the incident started with a suspect named D. B. Cooper - a long shot, as police were pretty damn sure he wouldn't have used his real name. He was quickly ruled out, but that didn't stop the media from calling the hijacker by the name D. B. Cooper for the rest of eternity.

In 1980, a breakthrough (almost) occurred. An eight-year-old kid, in the process of helping his vacationing family to build a fire near the Columbia River, found three deteriorating wads of cash. The family turned in the fat stacks to the proper authorities, who positively identified them as money paid in ransom to Dan Cooper. One of the stacks was missing a few bills, and the nature of their deterioration indicated that they had been deposited by one of the river's tributaries, making it nearly impossible to determine where they had actually fallen into the water.

Fat Stacks

Since 1980, there have been no major developments. If you happen upon any old currency from around 1971, you can actually find out in an online database whether you're holding a piece of airline history. It hasn't happened yet, so don't get too excited. On the other hand, do. Because despite being what we would invariably refer to today as a terrorist, Dan Cooper was so mysterious and well-mannered that small towns in Washington hold festivals in his honor.

It just goes to show you that a little politeness is all you really need to forgive things like air piracy and threatening to blow up a plane full of people.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Eyam!

Remember the plague?

Well, the village of Eyam certainly does.

Eyam is a small village in central England with a population of around 1,000. It is best known for one of the boldest and most suicidal efforts to stop the Plague in British history. In 1665, a tailor in Eyam received a package of cloth from London that was full of Plague-infested fleas. Within a week, he was dead and the disease was spreading throughout the village. When residents began to consider fleeing to neighboring towns, the local rectors stepped in and asked everyone to voluntarily brave the horrific tempest of the plague and close themselves off from the outside world.

How I would've reacted.

The town agreed. A system was established where merchants and couriers would drop supplies off at The Coolstone outside of town. Money for the shipment would be left there soaked in vinegar, which was believed to prevent infection. It may have actually been true - the acetic acid in vinegar does function as an antibacterial agent.

I'm sorry if the smell of my PLAGUE-PROOF FRIES bothers you.

Aside from that indirect exchange, Eyam ceased all contact with the outside world. The plague tore the village apart for fourteen months. Deaths were constant and well-documented. Families were asked to bury their own dead for fear of quickening the spread of the plague, and in one case that caused a woman to bury her husband and all six of her children over the span of eight days. Incredibly, she survived the pestilence, never even becoming ill.

After fourteen months, it became clear that the plague had run its course in Eyam, and the village opened its borders once again. When the plague hit, the population of Eyam was 350. When the quarantine ended, there were only 83 people left. Almost 80% of the people of Eyam died within about a year. There are debates over whether the decision even did any good to stem the tide of the plague, but I think we should just let them have that one. Give them an A for effort, if nothing else.

Good hustle, you guys. I'm proud of you.

It's not every day that 350 people will accept horrific disease and almost certain death because it might help a bunch of people they probably don't even know. But that's exactly what happened in Eyam.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Platypus!

It was really only a matter of time before I got around to this one. Platypodes (that's the Greek plural form. There is no correct plural form. Look it up.) are what happened when nature had a few extra animal parts lying around and was drunk. They have the bill of a duck (hence the colloquial name), the feet of an otter, the tail of a beaver, and the good sense to live in Australia, home of the weird-ass animals of the world. It's also one of the five species of mammal that lays eggs.

That's something that really shouldn't be possible. Egg-laying is traditionally one of the red flags that say "NOT MAMMAL" in large, imposing letters. However, since the Platypus and its cousins have hair, produce milk, and generally play ball with the rest of the criteria, scientists decided to give them a pass.

Similar to how we sometimes allow this to be called a sport.

That's despite the Platypus flaunting its cloaca around the neighborhood. Where most mammals have various orifices for having a wee, a poo, or a baby, the Platypus streamlined the process into a single cloaca. I assume the main advantage of this technique is that it inspires a great deal of sympathy in other species for Platypus. "I'm not eating that thing," says the Rakali. "He's got it rough enough already with that cloaca business. No wonder they lay eggs."

At times, sympathy is not enough, and the Platypus is threatened. At other times, a human will spot a goofy specimen, and upon seeing its wittle beak and lovey-dovey eyes, will attempt to cuddle it. In both cases, the interlopers are in for one of the shittiest days of their lives. Because those cute little otter feet that Mr. Platypus boasts are good for both swimming and administering an excruciatingly painful venom.

Counter-intuitively, this should strike fear into your heart.

Platypus venom is known for two things: not killing you and making you wish it would. When a human is stung by the Platypus' spur, the area around the sting almost immediately swells, and the swelling rapidly spreads. Instead of wrecking shit in your body and causing pain as a result, Platypus venom goes straight to the pain receptors in your brain and manually flips your pain switch. Because it takes such a direct route, traditional opiate analgesics like morphine do literally nothing for you.

And he stares at you mercilessly all the while.

After a few days, the pain fades away. By which I mean it is replaced by hypersensitivity to any other pain. As in, "The wound feels better but every time you stub your toe you'll be fairly convinced that it needs to be amputated." While there are no deaths on record from Platypus venom, it may be one of the meanest venoms that nature has ever produced.

The Platypus is weird. Weird as hell. So weird, in fact, that when sketches of it first reached Europe, it was almost universally dismissed as a hoax. When a pelt arrived in England, scientists were still skeptical. Some even demanded to examine the body so they could find the stitches they just knew were holding that goddamn beak in place. Eventually, they had to admit that such a thing could possibly exist.

Truly, the Bigfoot of the Nineteenth Century. Except real.

And if you ever see one in the wild, then for god's sake, don't touch it. You will know the deepest depths of pain if it's in a foul mood.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Guadalajara Explosions!

On April 18, 1992, residents of the Analco district in Guadalajara, Mexico started complaining to their local government that the streets smelled funny. The next day, plumes of white smoke were spotted coming out of storm drains and sewers, and the smell got worse. Some people were understandably confused when they turned on their faucets and were greeted not with the water of life, but with gasoline.

This was a bad thing.

Albeit convenient if you didn't feel like driving out of your way, I guess.

City workers were dispatched to investigate, and they reported dangerous levels of gas fumes in the sewers. Probably not enough to cause any damage, they insisted. So the mayor advised everyone to go about their business while the city worked out a solution to the smell and the very obviously tainted water supply. Because that's no big deal, right? What's the worse that could happen?

If you answered, "The whole goddamn city could blow the hell up," congratulations! You understand basic safety rules concerning gasoline. The City of Guadalajara, sadly, did not. No one was evacuated before the gas lines below the Analco district violently exploded. 11 times.

One would have sufficed, I'm sure.

The explosions utterly destroyed five miles of streets and up to a billion dollars' worth of property. That's on top of the 252 deaths, 500 injuries, and 15,000 people rendered homeless by the damage.

So how did this happen? Aside from gross negligence in the face of increasingly worrisome signs of a gas leak, how did the damn leak get there in the first place? Well, if you've ever experienced a water leak in an older house with mixed metals in the plumbing, you may already know the reason.

The water pipes in Guadalajara were relatively new, and the city didn't want to spend too much money putting them in. They opted for zinc-coated iron for the material, not taking into account the fact that, in order to save money on excavation, the new pipes were being installed right next to steel gasoline pipes. When you stick those two metals together, science happens!

The kind of science you don't want on your water pipes or (especially) gas pipes.

Specifically, a chemical reaction that results in corrosion which, when water is added to mix, leads to even more corrosion. I don't think I need to tell you (especially since you already know the result) why all this corrosion right next to a gas pipe is bad news bears.

The moral of the story here is that plumbing is complicated, and can blow up not just your house, but an entire city district.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Phossy Jaw!

Did you know that lighters were invented before matches?

It's true! It makes sense when you think about it. Lighters are really no more than an advanced form of flint and tinder with a bit of flammable liquid added to the mix. Matches, on the other hand, are a fairly novel idea. They use a phosphorous coating and frictional heat to create a reaction that produces fire. Pretty neat, huh?

Nowadays, matches are usually tipped with either phosphorus sesquisulfide or red phosphorous. Back in the 19th Century, they used something else. Something called White Phosphorous. Does that name sound familiar? Well, brace your stomach, because here's why:

(I'M NOT JOKING, TURN BACK NOW IF YOU'RE SQUEAMISH)

Oh, so it's like a bomb or...

Oh, that does look pretty terrifying, but...

HOLY JESUS GOD, WHY?

White Phosphorous is known for it's use as a smoke-producing and incendiary weapon. Meaning it burns shit like hellfire. And it has a nasty tendency to cling stubbornly to human flesh. It can catch just about anything on fire, and being anywhere near it when it burns is guaranteed to ruin your whole goddamn day. It is nasty, it is violent, and it is a clear message from the gods to run in the opposite direction whenever you see it.

Jesus. Okay, Here's a couple of pictures to take our minds off of that gruesome display above:

Happy thoughts.

Happy Thoughts!

HAPPY THOUGHTS!

That feels better. Okay, so back to matches. White Phosphorus, in addition to being a key ingredient in the hellfire of Satan's own arsenal, produces a nasty vapor that you really shouldn't breathe in over a long period of time. When you do, as people in matchmaking factories were wont to do in the latter half of the 19th Century, you develop a condition known as Phossy Jaw.

[I considered putting another picture here, but I decided that I've put you through enough gore this week.]

Phossy jaw is also known as "Phosphorus necrosis of the jaw," and is pretty much exactly what it says on the package. For their service in the factories, Victorian-era matchmakers were rewarded with their very own glow-in-the-dark jaw bones! Pretty cool, sure, but said jaw bones were also malformed, abscessed, and smelled very literally like death. 

Loyal employees were also granted unending anguish as their jaws slowly decomposed on their living faces. Finally, they were given the option of either paying a fee they usually couldn't afford to have a Victorian-era doctor (yikes) remove parts of their jaw (double yikes), or they just plain died of organ failure.

In 1888, a big group of matchgirls collectively bargained their way into saying, "Fuck this shit," and went on strike. For their trouble, they got some awareness. That's it. Nothing concrete, people just started to openly acknowledge the fact that they were willfully imposing a horrifying disease upon thousands of people because they wanted a stick that could light itself on fire.

Which, admittedly, is a little bit neat.

Three years later, the Salvation Army, to their credit, became the first match company to use the slightly less efficient (but infinitely safer) red phosphorous in their matchmaking process, and they paid better wages to boot.

The next few decades saw various countries banning the use of white phosphorus in match production and, in the case of the United States, placing a punitive tax on it that made it impractical. An international ban was put in place by Berne Convention in 1906. 

In 1898, Albright and Wilson patented a method of safely producing phosphorus sesquisulfide for the manufacture of matches. They sold the patent to the Diamond Match Company, to whom President William Howard Taft personally wrote a public letter begging them, for the good of humanity, to release the patent. They did, and match production became relatively safe for workers from that point on.

No, really. That happened.

Next time you light a match, consider all the abscessed, necrotic, excruciatingly painful jaws that litter the history of that flammable little wooden stick you hold.

Holy shit.