In 1919 a bizarre catastrophe struck Boston’s North End: A giant storage tank failed, releasing 2 million gallons of molasses into a crowded business district at the height of a January workday. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Boston Molasses Disaster, which claimed 21 lives and inscribed a sticky page into the city’s history books.
We’ll also admire some Scandinavian statistics and puzzle over a provocative Facebook photo.
Of sweetness, Shakespeare wrote: “A little more than a little is by much too much.” Boston learned this the hard way in the Molasses Disaster of 1919, when someone tried to fill a weak tank with 2.3 million gallons of the thick syrup.
“A muffled roar burst suddenly upon the air,” wrote the Boston Herald. “Mingled with the roar was the clangor of steel against steel and the clash of rending wood.”
The tank collapsed, sending a giant wave of molasses sweeping through the North End. Even in the January cold, the wave would have been 8 to 15 feet high and traveled at 35 mph. It broke the girders of the elevated railway, lifted a train off its tracks, and tore a firehouse from its foundation. Twenty-one people stickily drowned, and 150 were injured. Cleanup took six months; one victim wasn’t found for 11 days.
No one knows the cause, but it’s been noted that molasses was used in making liquor, and the disaster occurred one day before Prohibition was ratified. It appears the owners were trying to distill molasses into grain alcohol before the market dried up. Write your own pun.
In 1815 an American ship ran aground in northwestern Africa, and its crew were enslaved by merciless nomads. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the desperate efforts of Captain James Riley to find a way to cross the Sahara and beg for help from Western officials in Morocco.
We’ll also wade through more molasses and puzzle over a prospective guitar thief.
In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell two stories about people who spent years confined in miserably small spaces. North Carolina slave Harriet Jacobs spent seven years hiding in a narrow space under her grandmother’s roof, evading her abusive owner, and Irishman Patrick Fowler spent most of World War I hiding in the cabinet of a sympathetic family in German-occupied France.
We’ll also subdivide Scotland and puzzle over a ballerina’s silent reception.
While [Thomas Edison was] an operator at one station, the telegraph office was greatly infested with cockroaches. Mr. Edison tacked several zinc strips to the walls at intervals of an eighth of an inch, and applied the positive and negative poles of a battery alternately to the strips. He next smeared the walls above the strips with molasses. The long legged bugs came up, and as they stepped from strip to strip, they ‘closed the circuit,’ received the electric shock and dropped dead by scores. Water pails put at the proper places received their bodies as they fell.
— James Baird McClure, ed., Entertaining Anecdotes From Every Available Source, 1879
London faced a surreal emergency on Oct. 17, 1814, when a giant beer vat ruptured in a St. Giles brewery. The resulting wave collapsed the neighboring vats, and 323,000 golden gallons poured into the West End.
“All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent, which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath,” wrote a correspondent to the London Knickerbocker. “A roar, as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils.”
The flood filled neighboring basements and causing several tenements to collapse. In all, eight people were killed — “by drowning, injury, poisoning by porter fumes, or drunkenness.”
American disasters are sweeter but less stimulating.
How to Cure Cancer. — Boil down the inner bark of red and white oak to the consistency of molasses; apply as a plaster, shifting it once a week; or, burn red-oak bark to ashes; sprinkle it on the sore till it is eaten out; then apply a plaster of tar; or, take garget berries and leaves of stramonium; simmer them together in equal parts of neatsfoot oil and the tops of hemlock; mix well together, and apply it to the parts affected; at the same time make a tea of winter-green (root and branch); put a handful into two quarts of water; add two ounces of sulphur and drink of this tea freely during the day.
— Barkham Burroughs’ Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889