0:01

We all need a break from the constant cycle

0:04

to learn something new, to gain new

0:06

perspectives. The Great Courses

0:08

Plus streaming service is an excellent resource

0:10

to expand our knowledge on a variety of subjects

0:13

or pick up a new hobby. I've been

0:15

enjoying the Great Courses Plus while researching

0:17

this season of flashback lectures

0:20

like Playball, the rise of Baseball is America's

0:22

pastime, History of the Supreme Court,

0:24

and Battlefield Europe have helped me

0:27

connect the dots on several stories from

0:29

history. Right now, they're giving

0:31

our listeners a special limited time

0:33

offer a free month of unlimited

0:35

access to their entire library. Sign

0:37

up now through our special U r L go

0:40

to the Great Courses Plus dot com

0:42

slash Aussie. That's the Great

0:44

Courses Plus dot com slash

0:46

o z Y the Great Courses

0:48

Plus dot Com slash Assy.

0:54

Nobody knows for sure how many buckets

0:57

of urine Hinnig Brandt kept in his basement.

1:00

By some accounts, the seventeenth century

1:02

German chemist had more than fifty.

1:04

He used to collect the urine from his neighbors.

1:09

Why well, Brandt, like a lot

1:11

of great minds of his day, was in pursuit

1:14

of the elusive Philosopher's Stone,

1:16

the legendary substance capable of

1:18

turning base metals into gold

1:20

and ambitious scientists into very

1:23

rich men. Maybe it was the color.

1:25

It certainly wasn't the smell, but Hinnick

1:28

Brandt was convinced that by distilling human

1:30

urine he could somehow create gold.

1:35

He was wrong, of course, but in a vial

1:37

of boiled urine he discovered something

1:39

else in sixteen sixty nine. It

1:42

wasn't the Philosopher's Stone, but it was

1:44

an element that would prove just as valuable

1:46

and destructive phosphorus.

1:55

Welcome to Flashback, a podcast from

1:57

Azzie. I'm Sean Braswell. Today,

1:59

our tale of Unintended Consequences

2:01

centers on what would become known as the devil's

2:04

element, phosphorus. The

2:06

compound that Henni brand unleashed would change

2:08

history in some unexpected ways. It

2:10

would kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians

2:14

and also helped feed an entire planet.

2:17

And phosphorus was also the spark that lit

2:19

perhaps the greatest underdog story

2:21

in the history of human labor relations.

2:30

Phosphorus is the most important element

2:32

on the planet. This is kenn Ashley the

2:34

director of the River's Institute at the British

2:36

Columbia Institute of Technology and a

2:38

global expert on phosphorus. It's

2:40

really what sustains all life on the planet.

2:43

It's both inside is in our DNA and we

2:45

needed to having food to lived, and so it

2:47

really is the essence of life

2:49

on Earth. But like so many good things,

2:52

phosphorus has a dark side, and

2:54

for a while it was that dark side that dominated

2:56

the balance of its force on the planet.

3:07

Let's go back to hitting Brandt are urine

3:09

boiling seventeenth century German chemists

3:11

for a moment. In his laboratory in Hamburg,

3:13

Germany, Brandt tried to make magic

3:16

and his own fortune. What Henting

3:18

brand did, and you certainly wouldn't want to have

3:20

a neighbor doing this, is that he would take gallons

3:23

and gallons of urine

3:26

that he collected from around his local neighborhood,

3:28

and he boiled it, and he drove off all the moisture,

3:30

and then he'd keep heating it and heating it. After

3:32

months of experimenting with stagnant urine,

3:35

Brandt was eventually rewarded with a newly

3:37

created substance that glowed with an

3:39

eerie green light. And because

3:42

phosphorus blows in the dark, you

3:44

can imagine from an alchemist in the in the Middle

3:46

Ages there, if you found something that glowed in the dark,

3:48

you thought you were pretty close to the magic,

3:51

magic sort of compound. Then that could

3:53

transmutate let into gold. But

3:56

of course that's not what Brandt had found.

3:58

White phosphorus was what ning Brand

4:01

had found, and uh, and it's

4:03

not naturally found in nature because it's spontaneously

4:06

combust brand streams of gold

4:08

and wealth did not pan out with white phosphorus.

4:11

I think Brand seems to have had a tough life. He

4:14

you know, he discovered it, and then he

4:17

people found out that he had it, and they

4:19

wanted to figure out how to make it too. Of course,

4:21

he wanted to keep it secret because then that would

4:23

mean he would get more attention and he'd be able

4:25

to earn an income. And

4:28

as is so often the case, the fame and

4:30

the money when not to the first inventor

4:32

but to the first salesman. A fellow

4:34

German alchemist named Daniel Kraft stole

4:37

Brand's thunder and became phosphorus

4:39

is first showman. Craft ended up doing

4:42

better with it because then he claimed that he had discovered

4:44

and he was going around to various courts

4:47

with nobility and showing

4:49

it at night and sort of bringing in in the dark room

4:52

and pulling the cover off and showing the glow in the dark.

4:54

Still no one knew quite what to do with

4:56

phosphorus. It did not turn anything

4:59

into gold. You could only entertain

5:01

the European aristocracy so long

5:03

with glow in the dark urine. Eventually,

5:05

phosphorus was extracted from animal bones

5:08

and later from mining phosphate rocks, but

5:10

it really wasn't until the nineteenth century that phosphorus

5:13

truly came into its own. That

5:15

was an eighty seven when an English

5:17

chemist named John Walker invented what

5:19

was called the lucifer, or

5:21

what we refer to today as the match. The

5:24

tiny splints of wood with white phosphorus

5:26

tips soon became a transformative

5:29

invention. Matches were absolutely

5:31

essential before electricity.

5:34

You didn't have hot water, you

5:36

didn't have lighting, you didn't have hot

5:38

food unless you had matches.

5:41

This is Louise Raw, historian and

5:43

author of Striking a Light. The Bryanton

5:45

may match women and their place in history.

5:48

Most Victorian homes were lit by candles

5:50

or gas lights and heated by coal. Fires

5:53

and matches were a huge step forward from

5:55

previous methods of starting a fire, and

5:57

we see them from the eighteen fists onwards

6:00

being sold absolutely

6:02

everywhere. Everywhere that people would

6:04

gather, everywhere that smoke us would gather, there'd

6:07

being perhaps a child, usually a little

6:09

boy or a girl with a tray or a basket

6:11

of matches, eagerly selling them to people.

6:14

But the ones really making the money off the groundbreaking

6:16

product were the match manufacturers.

6:19

And the leading matchmaker in the UK was a

6:21

company started by two quaker grocers,

6:24

William Bryant and Francis May.

6:26

Brian and May made in sort a variety of goods,

6:29

and they quickly realized that producing matches

6:31

was something that could be done very cheaply.

6:34

So in eighteen sixty one they came

6:36

to bow in East London, very very

6:38

poor East London was then, and

6:40

set up what they called the fair Field Works, this match

6:43

production site, and

6:45

very quickly starts to make lots

6:48

of money. The two men quickly went from

6:50

being Quaker grocers to Victorian

6:52

industrial royalty. They became

6:54

incredibly rich, multimillionaires

6:56

really the equivalent so of even possibly billionaires,

7:00

enormous country states entertaining

7:02

the great and goods. Bryant and May's

7:05

newfound wealth did not trickle down to their

7:07

workforce. But in the

7:09

heart of London's impoverished East End, a

7:11

chemical reaction of sorts was brewing.

7:14

The potent mixture of stark inequality

7:16

and the hazardous effects of white phosphorus

7:19

was about to result in the salvation of

7:21

millions of future workers. The

7:24

catalyst for this remarkable reaction hundreds

7:26

of brave, mostly teenage girls,

7:29

willing to take a stand like none that the

7:31

industrial world had ever seen. That's

7:34

next. Do

7:45

you have an interesting tale about unintended consequences

7:48

from history or your own life, Please

7:50

share it with us by emailing flashback at

7:52

ausi dot com. That's flashback

7:54

at oz y dot com.

8:13

History can feel like a moving target. Sometimes

8:16

it can be hard to pin down what happened decades

8:18

ago, much less centuries. Often

8:21

the stories we do pin down and tell

8:23

for generations are not the whole story,

8:26

And to get that story you have to go

8:28

beyond the scholars who work in the ivory

8:30

towers. Luise raw Again, I

8:33

called myself an accidental historian.

8:35

I kind of fell into historian

8:37

ng By accident, I got

8:39

very involved in the trade union movement,

8:42

and then it was through that that I got

8:44

a chance to learn what

8:46

we call labor history, which is, you know, the history

8:48

of working people, so it's not your

8:51

kings and queens necessarily, it's ordinary working

8:53

people. As part of her job, Raw

8:55

was given the chance to take a history course. One

8:58

day she was given an assignment. It my mom

9:00

thinking, oh my god, an essay. You know, I hadn't

9:02

done anything like that since

9:05

I was at school, and I sweated blood

9:07

over that first esset. Raw decided

9:09

to write about the only women covered in the course,

9:12

the so called match girls. The best

9:14

Match Girls strike was considered to be a colorful

9:16

footnote in British labor history, a

9:19

curiosity that occurred right before the strike

9:21

of male doc workers in London that

9:23

most scholars think was the true landmark

9:25

event. In the course, you could

9:28

in those days learn the history of

9:30

working people and just think that women weren't

9:32

involved at all, which I've subsequently

9:35

found out isn't true, but it was

9:37

very much told as a story of working

9:39

men. Rock wouldn't find a whole lot of

9:41

material on the match women to write her essay.

9:44

So she went digging and the company

9:46

Branon May, the match making company,

9:49

had ceased to exist in the UK in

9:51

night, and they've given all their

9:53

records to this little local library.

9:56

So literally, down in the basement of this library

9:58

were the Brighton May records. Were they kind of, you

10:01

know, just brought to me and dumped in front

10:03

of me all these huge boxes. Raw set

10:05

to work and really quickly

10:08

discovered, to my surprise,

10:11

that the story I'd been told

10:13

really wasn't the way things happened,

10:16

and it was actually a much more interesting and

10:18

far more important story one

10:20

traditional historians had not done justice.

10:23

Raw wrote her essay and later a

10:25

critically acclaimed book. Here I was,

10:27

this trade unionist and not particularly

10:30

well educated, did not expect

10:32

to be inadvertently

10:35

kind of challenging the great historians

10:37

who had written about this, But there

10:39

you go. That's that's how it turned out. The

10:44

story Louise Raw uncovered in the basement

10:47

of the local library was an epic

10:49

Dickinsian tale of perseverance

10:51

and courage in the face of a corporate

10:53

giant's appalling treatment of some of its

10:55

most vulnerable workers. Mostly

10:58

they were women and girls, and

11:00

they were really famous in the area. The

11:02

match girls, they were treated

11:04

badly and they were very much looked down

11:06

on as well. They were as

11:09

I discovered, something like a really cool

11:11

girl gang. They really looked

11:13

after each other. They knew that the one thing they had

11:16

was strength in numbers, so they really supported

11:18

one another. Which it's just as well

11:20

because the employers didn't. You

11:22

could tell how poorly the women were paid just by

11:25

looking at them. They were extremely

11:27

small and pale and frail

11:30

looking, and even for East

11:32

End working class women who were not

11:34

you know, through no fault of their own, were

11:36

not the healthiest of people. Some

11:39

of the workers were girls as young as nine.

11:41

They were working twelve hour days

11:43

from six in the morning to six at night,

11:46

standing up the whole time. Most most

11:48

of the work was done standing up, so it's

11:50

really exhausting. Um. What

11:53

made matters worse is

11:55

that Brian's may find them as

11:57

well, which was actually illegal under

11:59

the Factory Acts at the time. But they

12:01

find them for the slightest infraction.

12:04

Really, if the girls were laughing, or

12:06

if they were talking or just generally mucking

12:08

about a bit, as teenage girls

12:10

will, then the foreman would find

12:12

them. But the workers situation

12:14

was even worse than that, something that a crusading

12:17

activist and journalists named Annie Besson soon

12:19

discovered. Annie Besson was

12:22

a socialist of a kind.

12:24

She was for women's right. Since she was becoming

12:27

quite a socialist. She interviewed

12:29

the women and they told her about

12:31

their terrible working conditions,

12:34

about the fines that they suffered, and

12:36

also about the biggest curse

12:39

I suppose of matchmaking, which was fossy

12:41

jaw. Fossy jar was an occupational

12:43

disease of the jar caused by exposure

12:45

to phosphorus white faster us

12:48

is incredibly toxic and it was being pumped

12:50

in the air throughout Brian and May's match

12:52

factory. There was no escape. There

12:54

wasn't even a separate dining area for

12:57

workers, so they would bring in a bit of

12:59

bread for home, and working

13:02

class girls lived on stale

13:04

bread and tea. That was that. That was their daily

13:06

diet, no vegetables, no fruit, and

13:09

by the time you got to eat at the phosphorus

13:11

particles in the air have settled

13:14

onto your bread, so you've got this awful,

13:16

deadly seasoning that you can't see,

13:19

but it's there on your food. The first

13:21

symptoms of fazzy jar were too thick and

13:23

a swollen lower jar, then your

13:25

gums, cheeks and jar would develop putrid

13:27

abscesses. But the worst thing about

13:29

it, the most horrendous and really sad

13:32

aspect of it, is that your

13:34

jawbone is decaying while you're

13:36

still alive, and women

13:38

would spit bits of bone the size

13:41

of peas apparently out of these abscesses.

13:44

It was a terrible situation. The met

13:46

women endured these horrors for years. Enter

13:49

any bescent. So the match

13:51

women told any Besson all

13:54

of this, and she recorded it in

13:56

this really hard, hissing, brilliant

13:59

ascal. It's only short article, it's only

14:01

a few columns, but it's called white

14:03

Slavery in London, which is a really

14:05

attention grabbing title.

14:08

The article appeared in June. In

14:11

it, Any Psson did not just recount the women's

14:13

hazardous working conditions. She emphasized

14:15

the gap between them and the quote monstrous

14:18

dividends being paid to Briant and May's shareholders.

14:21

It did not go over well with the company.

14:24

Brian toon May read this article

14:26

and they are furious.

14:29

They've worked really hard on

14:31

their pr Brianson May, they're very like

14:33

a modern company in that respect, you

14:35

know, there are no slouches in getting

14:38

good publicity and presenting their good

14:40

side to the public. So people think

14:42

Brianton may are quite a nice firm that are looking

14:44

after their work as well, and

14:47

this is really messing things up for them.

14:49

The first thing the company does in response put

14:52

pressure on the match women themselves. They

14:54

try to get them to sign a paper

14:57

which is a pre prepared statement say

15:00

that Annie Besson has lied, that

15:02

everything she said is untrue, and that

15:04

you know they love working for finding the

15:07

old foss jewel is no problem at all,

15:09

and they're all, you know, one big happy family

15:11

and treated marvelously. Remember these

15:13

women had no trade union, they had no employment

15:15

contracts, and they knew that if they did

15:18

the slightest thing wrong they would be fired.

15:20

But they refused to sign the paper.

15:23

The foreman report that they come

15:25

back to collect the papers and

15:27

every single one in every single

15:29

workshop on this huge factory site

15:32

is blank. The women just won't

15:34

sign. The first attempt to intimidate

15:36

the match women hadn't worked. The

15:38

next thing that they do is try to sack

15:41

one girl, and they make up

15:43

a reason for it because they don't want to admit

15:46

that they're just doing it because I think she's probably

15:48

one of the people who've spoken to Annie Bessent.

15:51

So they visibly enforcibly removed

15:53

one of the women from the factory. And also

15:55

the match women had this tremendous

15:57

solidarity, absolutely no

16:00

questions are They stick up for each other. So

16:02

when she goes out the door, so do they.

16:05

They lay down their tools and

16:07

they go streaming out of this factory

16:09

out on to the fair Field Road, out

16:12

onto the Bow Road and they start

16:14

parading the neighborhoods. That's

16:17

right. In the summer, workers,

16:20

mostly young women and girls, walked out

16:23

of Brian and May's match factory in East

16:25

London. It was a bold act of defiance.

16:28

And what I love about the way they get their message

16:30

across because you know, no Facebook,

16:32

no Twister in those days, so how do you

16:34

do it? But they are

16:36

very clever and they know that although they're supposed

16:39

to be powerless, one thing they do have

16:41

is numbers. They can make a lot of noise

16:44

and they do. They march the streets

16:46

of Bow singing very

16:48

disrespectful songs about their employers

16:50

and how terrible their employers are and what they'd like

16:52

to do to their employers, which is not nice. The

16:55

women marched all over London, including

16:57

straight through Trafalgar Square, they saying,

16:59

quote, We'll hang old Brian on the sour

17:01

apple tree, to the theme of Glory,

17:03

Glory, hallelujah. Observers

17:06

started putting their heads out of their home and office

17:08

windows to see what the first was about.

17:10

So people throw down money, They

17:12

throw down pennies and farthings, and the match

17:15

women catch the money

17:17

that's failing through the air in the long aprons

17:19

that they wear to work, and that is

17:22

their first strike funds. The

17:24

young women start to get organized. They

17:26

organized themselves brilliantly into a committee,

17:29

had a vote on who was going to represent them on the

17:31

strike. Committee went back

17:33

in put their demands to Brian and May, who

17:35

basically told them not interested.

17:38

You're all SATs no matter what you do. We're not listening

17:40

to you. Bran and May outrage you know

17:42

here we are. We're a rich Victorian gentlemen

17:44

and these wretched rough set

17:47

of girls as they called them, these common

17:49

working people are trying to tell us

17:51

what to do. They were absolutely not having it.

17:54

Things did not look good from the match women at the

17:56

start, When they first walk out,

17:59

local papers are saying, well, I

18:01

mean, how dare they're They're very lucky to

18:03

be employed by these lovely, top

18:05

hated gentlemen who are so well

18:07

esteemed and friends with government and friends

18:10

of the great and good and famous, and lucky

18:12

to have jobs. The tide really

18:14

turns quickly, because this is only around two weeks

18:16

this strike, and the paper start

18:19

to become much more sympathetic.

18:21

The press started to shame Bryant and May

18:23

and accusing their shareholders of profiting

18:25

off the jars of poor women and girls.

18:28

So the share price tumbles

18:30

and Branton May are forced into

18:33

a climb down, incredibly

18:35

reluctant, with very very

18:37

very bad grace. Indeed, But

18:40

the women, in around two weeks

18:42

go back to work triumphant, and

18:44

the first thing they demand is the right

18:46

to form a trade union. The

18:50

metal women had not only improved working conditions

18:52

for themselves, they had ignited a chain

18:55

reaction that would do the same for millions of

18:57

other workers in the years ahead. We

18:59

like to think that histories all great

19:01

individuals, that it's kings and queens.

19:04

We're quite happy with that individual

19:06

heroes and heroines. But you know, a sort

19:08

of rabble of working class Irish,

19:11

uneducated girls taking matches into

19:13

their own hands, or you know, a bit scary,

19:15

sounds a bit revolutionary, so we tend to

19:17

talk that down. Historians might

19:20

not have taken much note of that victory,

19:22

but other workers at the time certainly did.

19:25

Working people are not stupid, and you would

19:27

have to be stupid not to notice

19:29

a large, large group of workers,

19:32

four Drew women were on strike

19:35

achieving what had never been achieved. People

19:37

are gone on strike, but no one had had a victory

19:40

against a huge, important, powerful

19:42

firm like that before, and another group

19:44

of famous London laborers, the dark

19:46

workers would certainly have noticed.

19:48

They couldn't have missed it because they were married

19:51

to match women. Matchwomen and dockers

19:53

traditionally dated each other, knew

19:55

each other, you know, they were each other's mothers

19:57

and sisters. They all were. They were the

20:00

same people, essentially the same Eastern people.

20:03

Three months after the match women went on strike,

20:05

more than one hundred thousand male doc

20:07

workers at the Port of London started their

20:09

own strike. These women are absolutely

20:12

the inspiration for this huge strike

20:14

of hundreds of thousands, which spreads

20:17

and spreads all over its practically a general

20:19

strike, really a national strike. It spreads

20:21

all over the country and to other

20:24

parts of the world as well. The leaders

20:26

of the match Women provided guidance and encouragement

20:28

to their male counterparts, so they all

20:31

follow the match Women's example. They

20:33

go out on strike and their demand for coming

20:35

back to work as you must, let us form a

20:38

union. Hundreds and hundreds

20:40

of new unions form over the next

20:42

few years. Just

20:45

over a year later, the number of trade union

20:48

members in Great Britain had more than doubled

20:50

to nearly two million. Thanks to

20:52

what the match Women began, Great Britain

20:54

and other countries now have laws governing health

20:56

and safety in the workplace, and from

20:59

this eventually really grow the seeds

21:01

of the Labor Party in Britain, and

21:03

I'm very pleased that are lamented.

21:07

Former leader of the Labor Party Jeremy

21:09

Corbyn acknowledged my book

21:11

and my work has said in

21:14

s that the match Women were the mothers

21:17

of the modern labor and trajing

21:20

and movement, and that really was everything

21:22

that I'd ever once said. Thanks in

21:24

part to Phosphorus, a revolution in labor

21:27

relations and workers safety swept

21:29

over England and the world in the late nineteenth

21:31

century, but for millions of others,

21:33

there would be no hiding from phosphorus

21:35

destructive capability. In the twentieth

21:37

century, nearly three d

21:40

years after hinnig Brand discovered phosphorus,

21:42

his hometown of Hamburg would suffer an

21:45

almost unimaginable tragedy at

21:47

its hands. We

22:06

all need a break from the constant cycle

22:09

to learn something new, to gain new

22:11

perspectives. The Great

22:13

Courses Plus streaming service is an excellent

22:15

resource to expand our knowledge on a variety

22:17

of subjects or pick up a new hobby.

22:20

I've been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while researching

22:22

this season of flashback lectures

22:25

like Playball, the Rise of Baseball is America's

22:27

pastime, History of the Supreme Court,

22:30

and Battlefield Europe have helped me

22:32

connect the dots on several stories from

22:34

history. Right now, they're giving our

22:36

listeners a special limited time offer

22:38

a free month of unlimited access to

22:40

their entire library. Sign

22:43

up now through our special U r L go

22:45

to the Great Courses Plus dot Com

22:47

slash as. That's the Great

22:49

Courses Plus dot Com slash

22:51

o z y the Great Courses

22:54

Plus dot Com slash As. It

23:00

wasn't long before the qualities of phosphorus were

23:02

harnessed for one of human kind's favorite

23:04

pastimes, war ken

23:06

Ashley. Again, bostrous was

23:09

first adopted for military use because

23:11

when the white phosphorus is exposed

23:13

to oxygen, it burns and produces

23:16

a heavy white smoke. So its original use

23:18

was was just to produce smoke cover.

23:20

You might have seen some of the photographs of World

23:22

War One trench warfare where there is

23:25

smoke covering the no man's land between

23:27

the armies. And then it became used

23:29

in for tracer shells, so you

23:32

fired a bullet, the phosphorus would burn. You can see

23:34

where the bullets were going particularly night, and think it

23:36

very easy to aim, aim the bullet. And

23:38

then came phosphorus bombs. They were

23:40

first used by the Allies in World War Two.

23:43

You know, after Hitler started bombing

23:46

bombing England, that the retribution from

23:48

the from the English was to

23:50

do these massive raids with a thousand

23:53

planes. And they

23:55

decided to pick a pick a

23:57

town and try and try and just

24:00

moment repeatedly over several nights. The

24:02

aim was to destroy an entire German

24:04

city and to demoralize its inhabitants.

24:07

It was called Operation Gomorrah, and

24:09

for good reason. Starting in July

24:13

and continuing for seven more nights, Allied

24:16

bombing raids dropped over two thousand

24:18

tons of burning phosphorus material on

24:20

Hamburg, Germany's second largest

24:22

city and where hitting Brandt had discovered

24:25

the volatile element. At the

24:27

time, it was the heaviest assault in the history

24:29

of aerial warfare. It was like

24:31

a volcano going off. The

24:34

bombers said that he could see it from from

24:36

halfway from England. This this

24:38

huge firestorm. The asphalt

24:41

streets of Hamburg literally boiled. The

24:43

firestorm left more than thirty five thousand

24:45

people dead, mostly women and children.

24:48

Some were burned alive, some suffocated,

24:51

others were sucked up into the air. The

24:53

upward draft was so was so much

24:56

it even it even just it suffocated

24:58

people even if they weren't burnt, just because of

25:00

lack of oxygen, because the amount of fire going on, the

25:02

oxygen was combusted, so it was. It

25:04

was a pretty brutish, sort of crude

25:07

attempt to break the will of the people by just destroying

25:09

everything. A year and a half later, the

25:12

Allies firebombed another German city,

25:14

Dresden, the day after the

25:16

Audi had strike at Dresden. The seventeen

25:19

bombers of the eighth United States Air Force gave

25:21

us a here repeat for BOMs. Dresden is

25:23

a heap of ruins. It has been smashed to

25:25

atoms. One

25:28

of the unfortunate souls in Dresden during the

25:30

fire bombing was the American writer Kurt

25:32

Vonnegut. After the bombing, as

25:34

Vonnegut put it in his classic novel slaughter

25:37

House five, Dresden was like

25:39

the moon then quote one

25:41

thing was clear. Absolutely everybody

25:43

in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless

25:46

of what they were, and that anybody moved

25:48

in it represented a flaw in the design.

25:59

We've about the destructive capacity of phosphorus,

26:02

but the element, in the form of phosphates

26:04

plays a hugely productive role for humanity

26:07

as well. Three quarters of the planet is kept

26:09

alive today because because

26:11

the phosphorus that grows the food that keeps

26:13

us alive has been dug under the ground.

26:16

It is thanks to phosphorus based fertilizers

26:18

that we can produce food at the scale we do today.

26:21

But like so many commodities found largely in

26:23

the ground, it is a scarce resource.

26:26

So there's a real shortage of phosphorus,

26:29

and geopolitically, it's I think it's going

26:31

to become deep flashpoint of the twenty one century

26:33

because so few people, so few countries

26:35

control most of the phosphorus

26:38

and the planet. Just five countries Morocco,

26:40

China, the US, Jordan, and South

26:43

Africa control of

26:45

the world's remaining phosphate rock reserves,

26:48

and there's no good replacement for phosphorus

26:50

once we run out. Every person,

26:52

an animal on the planet depends on phosphorus,

26:55

and there are roughly ten animals for every

26:57

person. In reality, there's around seven d

27:00

any billion people equivalents on the planet right

27:02

now, burning through fosters at a frightening rate.

27:04

And anything keeps me up, wakes me

27:06

up at night. It's uh, it's a

27:08

dual threat of climate change

27:10

and a global foster's shortage that leads to mass

27:12

starvation and the legs we've never seen

27:15

before. Researchers

27:17

are experimenting with yes urine

27:19

to help develop new fertilizers to address

27:21

this phosphate shortage, but as of yet,

27:24

there has not been a breakthrough to rival hinting

27:26

brands over three centuries ago. So

27:33

what did we learned today? First, there's

27:35

a chance, a slight chance, that

27:37

that crazy neighbor of yours collecting urine

27:39

in his basement is actually onto something.

27:42

Second, any one of us can become an accidental

27:45

historian like Louise Raw. It just requires

27:47

some persistence and a willingness to challenge

27:49

what you've always been told. And

27:52

finally, it takes an awful lot of nerve

27:54

to take on a corporate giant as a lowly

27:56

factory worker, but it certainly

27:58

doesn't require any balls. Flashback

28:06

is written and hosted by me Sean Braswell,

28:08

senior writer and executive producer at Ozzie.

28:11

It was produced by Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran,

28:14

Orio Digiza, and Shannon Williamson.

28:17

Chris Hoff engineered our show special

28:19

thanks to the crew at I Heart Radio podcast

28:21

Networks, especially Sophie Lichterman and

28:24

Jack O'Brien. Make sure to subscribe

28:26

to Flashback on the I Heart Radio app or

28:28

listen wherever you get your podcasts. Flashback

28:31

is the latest podcast from Azzi, a modern

28:33

media company producing original TV series,

28:36

festivals, news and podcasts for curious

28:39

people. Ozzie's unique storytelling

28:41

focuses on the new and the next, whether that's

28:43

forward, looking news and features, bold

28:45

new perspectives on TV, or brand new

28:47

ways of looking at history

28:56

today. In my lecture notes a couple of interesting

28:58

and somewhat disturbing facts which connect

29:00

phosphorus to some of the topics we covered in

29:02

earlier episodes of Flashback. First,

29:05

did you know that, well many American states were banning

29:07

abortion and contraception in the late nineteenth

29:10

century, desperate Swedish women were

29:12

resorting to a very dangerous method

29:14

of abortion. They would swallow the

29:16

heads of phosphorus matches and the hopes

29:18

of inducing a miscarriage. And

29:21

Second, perhaps the most insidious use

29:23

of phosphorus in war has been its use in

29:25

chemical weapons. In fact, by

29:27

nineteen forty four, Adolph Hitler and the Nazis

29:30

had developed a powerful phosphorus based

29:32

nerve gas for which there was no defense,

29:35

and as things went south in the war, Hitler's

29:37

generals urged him to make use of his secret

29:39

weapon, but for some reason, the

29:42

fewer never played that ace up his sleeve

29:52

to dive deeper. Head to Assie dot com slash

29:55

flashback. That's oz Y dot com

29:57

slash Flashback. There you can

29:59

find my other or lecture notes from today's episode

30:02

featuring extended interviews, links to further

30:04

reading and more information on the unintended

30:06

consequences of elements like phosphorus,

30:08

as well as links to other hidden stories from history

30:11

uncovered by me and other reporters at

30:13

Aussie