My great grandmother used to tell me stories of how her father's house was the first one to get electricity in the whole area and people would actually come to visit just to see how a lightbulb would come on and they were all amazed.

After binge watching these I'm getting the feeling that the people of these Eras (Victorian/Edwardian) just collectively decided that life was simply far too long, and healthy living far too dull.

Can Absolute History and Dr. Lipscomb PLEASE do more of the Hidden Killers series? I’ve seen them all at least twice. They’re just that interesting and bizarre to me. I need more lol

“People got used to gaslighting” are we talking about Victorians or narcissists?

was a apprentice electrician in the late 1940s many of these Edwardian relics were still in use, fire irons were in almost every house , most cottages in mill towns had gas. Electricity was generated locally and was later Nationalised. Wiring then was gradually converting from lead covered to a rubber covering, Cottages were wired (Subsidised) with one 15 amp socket, and two light circuits one upstairs and one down. gas was retained for many years by tenants who could not afford extra lighting points.

I recall how, in the 1950s, my mother still used an electric iron plugged into a bayonet light fitting in the ceiling. I also remember how, always naive about risk, she heard a loose screw rattling inside her Hoover steam iron. She grabbed a table knife to push it out-but the iron was still 'on'. _There was almighty bang!_ The 'Ivorine' handle insulated her from the current, but much of the blade had melted like a welding rod. Domestic fuses were notoriously insensitive, unlike the super-sensitive RCDs that protect us in our homes today.

Honestly it's amazing humanity has survived for so long.

“Originally the cables were just wrapped up in paper and lead. A fantastic fire accelerant, brilliant.” 😂 I really like that guy.

I worked in a chemical works that made Azo dyes and needed dry ice for the process. This was made using ammonia as a refridgerant but the machine would often go wrong and we had to evacuate. Luckily there was a fire station opposite. After one such episode, were I can remember rushing downstairs through clouds of ammonia holding my breath, we got back in the lab later to find our cold coffees were ph 14!

I lived in an old building (around 140 years old now) that still had electrical wires wrapped in silk. They were no longer being used of course due to how dangerous and flammable they were, but it was still interesting to see.

Puts bleach and asbestos on the face "At least I look beautiful" Curls hair until it falls off "At least I look beautiful" eye drops that make you blind "Well... at least I look beautiful, I think." I am extremely grateful for the time I'm in now, and to the amount of work and progress that had to be made to get to this stage. It can be easy to forget how difficult it was.

The stories of the hat pins being used as a weapon of defense is perfectly true! My great-great-grandmother used one for precisely that purpose one winter evening on her way home from the linen factory.😆

The historian who talks about the grim & bleak nature of each of the invention had me in fits of giggles. He seems so passionate about the word 'lethal' and casually smiles on about horrendous deaths. XD

It's crazy how dangerous they knew asbestos is, but kept using it. I remember schools shutting down in the 80's to remove it.

It would be cool to see a video with a comparison of electrical sockets in the UK vs. USA. The UK sockets are much better designed for safety - each one has a switch, and they’re recessed so a loose plug doesn’t become a shock hazard. There’s also a fuse inside each plug. It goes beyond that - in bathrooms light switches are all suspended and non-conductive from the ceiling. I’d be curious to see statistics on accidental home electrocutions in the USA vs. UK.

Victorians: -[Fucking around like toddlers with gas lighting having absolutely no idea what they're doing] Edwardians: "Hold my beer" [plugs a lamp in underwater]

Dr. Kate Williams really does have a good storytelling voice and style. I'm telling you, if you wanted someone to tell you campfire stories really well, I think she'd be a shoe-in.

I think the Radium Girls deaths are the most horrific deaths I’ve ever heard of

Apparently one of the women who worked painting those Radium dials survived cancer-free due to the fact that she didn't lick her paint-brush because she disliked the taste! (stated on Qi)

I'm sorry, but, I could watch and listen to Suzannah read an entire phone book A to Z, and I would still be in awe. She is an absolute darling.

I’m a telephone infrastructure technician in the US Midwest and I work on lots of active trunk cables that have lead sheath and paper insulation on the wire pairs. Usually has a a few numbers missing on the cable identification code because it’s so old it’s been lost in the records. I recently worked on a damaged 1200 line trunk from 1944. We also regularly take training for dealing with asbestos in the underground tunnels and old building ceiling tiles and cement board siding

I chain watch these just to hear Nathan Goss say “It was lethal!” with a twinkle in his eye😂

I think this show balances the professionalism of TV with the efficiency of TRshow very well. Top work .

Victorian and Edwardian motto sounds a lot like that catch phrase that goes... "I'm here for a good time not a long time."

these "deadly historical home" videos are so interesting! I really hope you do more, my favorite so far is the victorian home.

It still blows my mind that ice was shipped in from the Arctic, the price of ice must have been so high on a hot summers day!

All the contributors to these productions are brilliant. I love hearing all these experts' perspectives and observations. So informative.

I have been an electrician for many years.. I remember reading about all this stuff in school.. Some of the problem is you can't see electricity and years ago they lined boiler rooms in military barracks with asbestos. Guess where the electrical panels were? I wouldn't do a job if there was asbestos in the area..

I'm afraid of some modern items that are potentially dangerous, but like my predecessors, I feel these things are just too cool not to try! A couple of my favorite items are my electric heated vest and gloves that run off of batteries. The gloves are waterproof. I don't think the vest is.

The asbestos thing is real. In the 50's through the early 80's, my father worked in the Navy and then later in shipyards. Among his duties was installation of asbestos insulation into the ships he helped build. He would come home covered in the stuff so Mom would wash his coveralls in the family washing machines. He died of mesothelioma in 2004. It took Mom longer to die from asbestosis from having washed his work clothes. I'm sure us kids inhaled or ingested some of the fibers as well although none of us show signs of it yet. We're all in our late 50's and early 60's at this point. Of all five of us, only I would really have any true symptoms but that's because I worked in the industrial hygiene and asbestos abatement field for a year just out of college as a newly minted scientist. To this day, over thirty years later and even with having used the latest in modern respirators and protective clothing, I still have to get regular chest x-rays to monitor my health from my one year's worth of exposure. Oh yeah, don't think of fiberglass as the latest wonder either. It's even worse when it gets into your lungs because it has sharp cutting edges that don't just lodge in your lung tissue like asbestos does; they saw their way through your lungs. With every breath, that glass moves and cuts through your alveoli (little air sacs in the lungs that facilitate the transfer of oxygen from the air to your bloodstream), reducing how effective the blood/oxygen transfer works.

It makes us think of how many substances we may me using today that are considered safe, and they may be banned in the future

Please do more of these! Hidden killers is SO interesting!!!

My ancestors bought a summer home in Maine in the 1880s (2nd house built in this beach town). It had no insulation and was bare pinewood. Ungrounded insulated wires stretched throughout the home in plain view, directed by strategically placed porcelin guides. Plugging things in often caused sparks. We are fortunate that, over 90ish years before my retired grandfather remodeled it, no fire ever occurred.

I'm loving this channel. Just found it last week and can't keep away from it.

I gave this a thumbs up. I think it was a great show! The wires didn't burn up because of "too high a voltage" though, rather it was because of too high a current, and no breakers, which they did mention.

The electric tablecloth is the one I just can't understand why anyone thought that would be a good idea...."Hay Tim you know what this dining room could really use, no what? The possibility of random high voltage electric shocks.

Year ago we asked our grandmother, who was born in the early 1880s , what the greatest invention of her lifetime was. She said: Electricity. She used to tell stories of the the lamp lighter, gaslight, candles and lanterns.

I adore Susannah as a presenter. She's fantastic. I'd love to see more shows with her navigating.

There are still open pit mines of asbesto in Brasil, operated by Eternit, the same company condamned in Italy (actually prescribed due to an endless trial) for huge contamination and thousands of deaths started in the '80s in the Casale Monferrato area. Also the italian national railway company, in early '80s let the empolyee work with no protection againsts asbesto. A friend of mine, killed by mesothelioma 3 years ago, told me they packed the asbesto fibers from the vagon insulation into a ball and use to play soccer with that during the lunch break. Despite the danger was so well and long known, most of the large companies never used PPE to protect workers against this threat, up to 1990.

Ah yes. The period where people expires faster than their perishable foods

This is brilliant, thank you for your dedication to search and share this history!

Everbody gangsta till an Edwardian lady pulls out her 14 inch hair pin

Thanks for repackaging these documentaries for us. They're very well made and interesting.

Interesting that the anti-asbestos sentiment did not gain much traction where I live. I think it is due to the fact most asbestos mined here contains very little amphibole (the brittle, needle-like form which is much more prone to getting airborne and inhaled), being almost all chrysotile (long, strong and soft fibers). Around 90% roofs here are covered with Asbesto-cement sheets (I believe it was called Eternite in the U.S.).

In Camberley the local Electricity Company persuaded the owners of houses in my parents street to convert from gas lighting to electric lighting, by offering "free" installation in exchange for a weekly payment, When we moved into our house in 1957, the previous owner's had paid for their own installation, but some house owners were still paying this charge on their electricity bills. The gas lighting points were still visible in the rooms, where the pipe work had been plugged off. Also street lighting was gas powered and the local council employed gas lighters to turn on the street lights. In fact the street light was placed on the road and not moved on to the footpath until all electric street lights were installed. The electric cables were two core with a lead sheath with the sheath acting as the earth wire and gas pipes were made of a lead composite. My parent's had the house rewired with three core plastic sheath wiring.

Asbestos was also used on ironing boards, the part where the iron would sit when hot and not being used. This was in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. I remember my mother having such an ironing board. After a lot of wear and wet from steam irons, it started to break up. Makes me wonder if this is why she died of lung cancer. We will never know.

in 1983 i started to work in the containerglass industry. the containers were very hot during the production process so were the molds and other equipment of the machines. the gloves we were using at the time to protect us from the heat were from asbestos, and i think that was about the time that was changed to other materials a few years later. quite scarry when you hear now when it was first discovered how dangerous that stuff is

The kind of house I grew up in. Built in 1880s, lead pipes, ancient electrics, asbestos and an outside loo.

I LOVE Dr. Kate Williams. Her mannerisms when she explains things makes me feel like she is spilling some tea. 😂😂😂

Yikes! I grew up in the time when asbestos was in everything. Mixed into the plaster on our walls, the floor tiles in our house, the roofing tiles,...and lead enamel paints on all the wood around the doors and windows. Asbestos brakes shoes, and all the ducts in our house were wrapped in it, & inside of the hot water tank. We had "cooking" mittens, filled with it, and trivets made of it, to place hot pans upon. Every house I have lived in, even since childhood, has been filled with asbestos made items. I grew up in a 1940s house, and my present house was built in 1910. At one point I rented an apartment that was built 1890.

the hostess playing dumb when the edwardian vibrator gets pulled out had me rolling.

Wow really makes you think what killers we might be missing today

As a child I was always terrified by the enormous gas geyser that loomed above the bath taps in my grandparents' Victorian/Edwardian house.

As I watch this, an early photograph of my great grandmother as a young wife sits behind me. A classic Edwardian woman, her hair is done up in a pompadour style and looks out calmly, yet with a strange intensity. I always thought she, and the similar photograph of my great grandfather taken the same day, looked quite nice, respectable, and intelligent. Now I'm watching this and thinking, "You people were nuts! How did you live to reproduce? Did she go bald from all this garbage stuff? Did she happily try and heat her home with asbestos? What about my great grandfather? Given that my grandfather considered himself a DIY expert (he wasn't), I would imagine that he got it from his dad. How did he not fry himself with DIY electricity?" My grandfather passed away last year at the age of 99. I'm wondering how long his parents lived. They were dead well before I was born, but my mom was the youngest in her large family and my grandfather was one of the youngest in his, so they may have been old... or not. Now I'm curious.

I dig the gentleman who is apparently enthralled by the fact that plugging in an appliance in the Edwardian era could end up with you being instantly and forcefully ejected from your home by a gas explosion! I don't know if his delivery is intentional, but boy is it entertaining to watch! lol

I love how many women professionals this channel has

Makeup in 1900: here put some heavy metals on yourself Makeup in 2000: Turns out just regular dirt works and isn't poisonous.

It's amazing how humanity didn't kill itself off 😂

I cant wait for them to make one about the *dangers of cell phones* in 2020

Jesus fuck we really took a steep hill in terms of science, couple thousand years of wood working and suddenly we're on the moon

When my dad was a young man, he had many jobs in the small Kansas town he lived in. He told me the story about repairing an elderly women's electrical ceiling socket in her dinning room. The socket was above her prized dinning table and she demanded dad place a bowel under the socket so that the "juice" that came from the outlet would not damage her table. Funny to my dad, but a real concern to the old women.

In one scene, an adapter in a ceiling light socket powers many wired circuits and devices. When I grew up in the 1950s, I did this in my play room, eventually powering an amateur radio 50 watt transmitter, two receivers, and several other devices. I even ran some bare wires along a wall that I could use to solder in power wires for experiments. I was careful and never got shocked, although a brief short circuit once melted part of a bare wire into a copper drop. Of course, in 1900 people didn't know how to be careful around bare wires!

the shed in my yard was full of asbestos when I was a child and I've lived around it my whole life. I used to crawl through that shed and it was literally crumbling apart. I remember piles of asbestos dust that I would crawl all over and disturb, releasing even more asbestos into my lungs, breathing heaps of it in. my mother always hated that shed but we weren't allowed to get rid of it because of some land dispute. nice to know that I'm going to have my lungs disintegrate in 20 years :)

I had an old house that actually still had the "knob and tube" wiring in the walls. It's a wonder it didn't burn down.

7:56...I'm not sure if this chap is just an overall happy guy or has a morbid sense of humor but it's entertaining to see his smirks and half chuckles just after mentioning accidental deaths.

I think the brand was Westclock, and when I was growing up, they marketed an alarm clock with a radium face of the hands and the numbers. It was called "Big Ben". There was no mention of any danger. Later in life I purchased a digital LCD wristwatch which had a tritium backlight. It glowed at all times and allowed you to see the time when it was dark. At some point there was a train wreck in Arizona and a boxcar filled with tritium was derailed and they brought out HazMat personnel to protect the public and contain the tritium. I thought it strange that I was wearing this stuff on my wrist. At some point these watches were no longer offered.

as soon as the lady mentioned asbestos, I KNEW. My great-grandfather worked in a brick plant that heavily used that stuff, and he died from inhaling too much of it. It was so bad that even my great-grandmother had issues just from cleaning his clothes.

Thank you for these informative documentaries. I lived in a beautiful old house. I loved it. It came with alot of charm and a greedy house owner. There were electric wires wrapped in cloth, a gas stove in a kitchen with no window or ventilation, old white paint that I suspect had lead in it, and so on. The perfect house for the intrepid adventurer. but when three layers of paint got loose and I would look at a bright green wall paint, I moved out. I never even bothered to check if there was arsenic in it.

My father (born 1943)was one of the millions of Americans who were "treated" for benign issues, with radiation. He had cystic acne and in the 1950's they used radiation ton that. I remember him having thyroid cancer in the mid 1980's and had to have his thyroid removed. He survived that episode, but late died of colon cancer in 1990, no idea if the radiation from his adolescence caused it, or something else. Sad that they did not verify that things were safe. Sad that things labelled as "cosmetics" are still not really verified as safe or effective. We need to do better.

Electrician here, and many things in this video are absolutely horrifying.

Being the mother of several pets, I cannot thank enough for the invention of vacuum cleaners.

I can remember my gran plugging the iron into the light socket in her 1930s house, indeed our own 1950s house had only two 5 amp wall sockets in the living room. Woolies was selling adaptors for light sockets well into the 60s.

To be fair, the curling wand probably wasn't all that terribly different from the 450-degree electric curling wands we use today.

Better and more informative content then any tv channel these days.

If I recall, asbestos was removed from hospitals in Ontario and New Brunswick in the 1990. I was pleased when I learned this as nobody wants to go to the hospital with various health concerns only to die of asbestos. Now I'm hearing this has been going on for so long (Edwardian times) I am utterly disgusted that asbestos continued for so long. smh

My grandfather helped bring electricity to rural Alberta in the 60s, and worked around asbestos all the time, I’m shocked he’s as healthy as he is

In the 1970’s, there was a Marvel Comics villain called Asbestos Lady. She was one of the archenemies of The Human Torch, who she fought off with a gun that shot asbestos bullets, and protected herself from his flames with an asbestos-lined uniform. No surprise, she later died from mesothelioma.

Claw foot bath and brass taps weren’t rusted or tarnished. My aunt still has both and she’s kept them sparkling. Her dad built the family home in 1901

i clicked this thinking it would be your usual youtube top ten list but i ended up getting quite an in depth education. thanks! really fascinating stuff

I watched this once before and found it mind numbing . It's a wonder more people didn't perish. This is a great video and watch your site as much as possible.

What a great production and such interesting info - top notch!

It’s crazy to think about how many people have had to die for me to be safe and cozy

My guy in the plaid shirt seems to be feeling the weight of everything he's relaying in such a deep way its a whole mood.

No, the hair was NOT "covered with asbestos" during early permanent waving! The hair was wound onto rods, and each rod was wrapped with a foil-backed fabric pad soaked in perming solution, then clamped with a heating clip, connected to a "chandelier" of electric wires. The danger was that, if the solution in the pad dried up too quickly, the hair could start to smoulder. To cool it, the hairdresser would pour water onto it, which would, of course, often give the client a bit of an electric shock.

My grandmother who was born in 1927 always referred to radiation as radium. I eventually realized why

The problem was that there weren't any codes or regulations yet. Now every city publishes an electrical code, and there are industry-wide standards.

My grandmother's house had gas jets which had been refitted with electric lights when those debuted. The electric light fittings in many cases were designed to retrofit to the gas jets directly, leaving the original gas jet pointed up, the lamp would point down, and they ran the wires inside the gas pipes. Even better: since nobody was certain the newfangled electricity thing was going to stick, they left the gas connected to the same pipes. The wires passed into and out of the pipes through rubber-sealed fittings. They were still working in the 1970s (without the faintest smell of leaking gas) when I tried them out. Even in the attic, because the attic was minimally finished for use by live-in servants. (my grandmother was never that wealthy, but the previous owners of that house probably were)

16:34 "This is an early 'massage machine" Suzannah: 😏

My dad has a small collection of vintage radios. Last summer when I visited I brought with me a Geiger counter I had recently built and went around the house testing random stuff. When I walked into the room in the basement where the radios sat on a shelf, the counter started to show some increased activity. I initially had no idea what the source was, so I walked around the room until I heard the counter start screaming in front of the radios. Narrowed it down to a single radio: a Crosley D-25 White Bakelite Dashboard Clock/Radio-specifically, the hands on the clock. The paint had long worn down to a dull metallic green, but the radium that was painted on 70+ years ago was still very much radioactive. The weird (or scary) thing is, that my dad also has a radio from a similar era with an identical clock component in it (in fact it was sitting right next to the radioactive one), but with white hands. Presumably someone had restored it at some point, likely having disturbed or scraped off the radium paint to repaint the hands, possibly unaware of the extremely dangerous dust they were exposing themselves to.

The way he talks about how refrigerators caused tons of deaths which a smile on his face, 🤠

3:20 Electricity 22:00 Asbestos (Also used in Australia) 31:50 Refrigerators 39:30 Make up/Beauty 50:19 Radium

Cave Johnson: "Ah, the good old days when everything was made of asbestos."

Asbestosis was a massive problem for builders as well, my uncle worked as a builder in the early 60s and died of asbestosis in 2011(actually was a stoke but it destroyed his immune system like a permanent flu) legislation took far too long, I was unaware people have known the dangers for like 100 years but business is business asbestos was cheap expeserly as insulation for homes..

I remember that houses covered with asbestos plates was a not an uncommon sight when I was a kid in the late 80s and 90s. Next to us was a very big house that was pretty much an asbestos fortress. In the late 90s they were torn down and replaced with wood paneling. I rememeber that it was a very strict and time consuming process. The asbestos houses are almost completely gone now. But there are still a few houses left here that are completely covered in it. 46:07 My grandmother once told me that when she was a young girl in the late 1940s and early 1950s they used to straighten their hair with the clothes iron. And it was not the modern, easy to use electrical type. It was the old fashioned cast iron type that they had to fill up with burning coal. If they were not carefull they would burn their hair. And if you were extra unlucky you could completely ruin it.

I've been binging the Hidden Killers series and I'm just amazed that we didn't go extinct during the Victorian and Edwardian period

Imagine in 75-120 years when people are doing "The Perilous World of the 2020's Home" and are amazed at all of our death traps 😳

sad part is that nothing's really changed and death for profit is still just as prevalent just hidden elsewhere. eg. sackler family,monsato etc

I love history. The narrator is both beautiful and knowledgeable. Thank you for making this video.

In the 1970s, people still used copper pennies inside of a fuse box to "get by" until a proper fuse could be purchased. It was a common practice in rooming houses and flea bag hotels. Cheap college student housing, was where the worst electrical abuses occurred with outlet cluster sockets and cheap extension cords going everywhere. Hobos & squatters used to put bent steel hangers and paper clips into electric outlets, to cook on and light their cigarettes.

Victorian home: *focused on the pompous look of importance* Edwardian home: *a victorian home with some light bulbs*