The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

  The story of this poison did not begin in New York City—although Norris and Gettler would soon enough become involved in investigating its dangers. It began in the Standard Oil Refinery in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

  THE FACTORY looked harmless enough from the outside, a typical brick building with narrow windows set in stone. Inside, the familiar sounds of work—the hiss and clank of the pipes, the grumble and clatter of the retorts—could be heard. But then came the unfamiliar—a smell carried by vapors rising from the machinery, not the usual odor of gasoline but the dull, musty scent of tetraethyl lead.

  Five years earlier a chemical engineer working for General Motors had discovered that tetraethyl lead cured a stubborn knocking problem in car engines. Even GM’s best cars, including its elegant Cadillacs, had banged so loudly under the hood that it sounded to customers as if the engines were breaking apart. The noise was a by-product of the engine’s design, which involved a somewhat inefficient combustion process. This meant that the gasoline fuel was never completely burned away; the remnants of gasoline tended to heat, ignite, and explode, sometimes loudly enough to startle a driver into losing control.

  Tetraethyl lead—or TEL, in industrial shorthand—solved that problem. The compound was actually a nineteenth-century discovery from European laboratories. But a GM engineer, one Thomas Midgley Jr., saw a new use for it, building on research done by a scientific colleague, Charles Kettering. Both men realized that tetraethyl lead (a chemical blending of lead, carbon, and hydrogen) essentially smoothed out the rough patches in gasoline combustion. As the engine churned and burned fuel, the circulating lead formula and its by-products bonded with gasoline remnants that hadn’t ignited, buffering them over into nonexplosive materials. The innovative Midgley—he would later develop the chlorofluorocarbon coolant called Freon—tinkered with the formula until he felt he had just the right TEL mixture for gasoline going into motor vehicles.

  The additive was made in the “looney gas building,” the employee nickname for Standard Oil’s TEL processing plant. In the twelve months since the company began making the antiknock ingredient, plant laborers’ fear of the place had steadily increased. The men who worked there, in the clanking heat and drifting vapors, had become a little odd—moody, short-tempered, unable to sleep. They’d started getting lost on the familiar plant grounds, sometimes had trouble remembering their friends. And then in September 1924 the workers started collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of October, thirty-two of the forty-nine TEL workers were in the hospital, and five had died.

  Standard Oil issued a cool response: “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard,” according to the building manager. And those who didn’t survive had merely worked themselves to death. Other than that, the company didn’t see a problem.

  THE STATEMENT failed to impress the State of New Jersey, which ordered the plant closed. The local district attorney wasn’t impressed either. He called Charles Norris and asked to borrow his toxicologist for some independent research into the chemistry brewed in the hated building.

  Norris was pleased to accommodate that request. He hadn’t liked Standard Oil’s statement and had decided, in fact, to issue his own, explicitly contradicting the industry’s perspective on TEL: “The fact that it is readily absorbed and highly poisonous was discovered in Germany about 1854 when tetraethyl lead was discovered, and it has not been used in industry during most of its seventy years since then because of its known deadliness.”

  Investigators discovered that before the illnesses at Standard Oil, another TEL processor, the Dupont Company, had lost two workers at its Dayton, Ohio, plant. They had died from lead poisoning. Lead is well known for its tendency to damage the nervous system. And lead-laced vapors, like those emitted in TEL manufacturing, are absorbed through the skin and inhaled directly into the lungs. Months before the New Jersey workers died, several of the supervisors at the “looney gas building” had actually recommended that production be shut down.

  In answer to this new round of criticisms, Standard Oil went straight to the source. It brought in Midgley, the TEL developer, to hold a press conference at its Manhattan offices. He assured reporters that handled properly there was nothing dangerous about his prize discovery. To prove it, he washed his hands in a bowl filled with TEL. “I’m taking no chances whatever,” he said. “Nor would I take any chances by doing that every day.”

  The management at Dupont and Standard Oil blamed the workers for failing to protect themselves. Gloves and masks had been available at the refinery. It was the workers’ responsibility to wear them. But they weren’t well-educated men, a company vice president explained to the reporters, and may not have realized that working with TEL was “man’s work,” with all the risks implied.

  IT TOOK Gettler a full three weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, crazy, or dead. The compound was so rarely used, so new in American industrial production, that there were no readily available tests or much background information.

  Two years earlier the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Midgley for a record of all research into the health consequences of TEL. He ’d replied that no such research existed, and since then neither Dupont, GM, Standard Oil, nor the federal government had spent much time evaluating the compound.

  “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”

  Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that the TEL and its lead by-products form a recognizable distribution pattern, concentrating in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest amounts were spread through the lungs, indicating that most of the poison had been somehow inhaled; later tests showed that the masks used by Dupont and Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.

  Rubber gloves did protect the hands, but if TEL splattered and made any direct contact with the skin, it was absorbed extremely quickly. A few months after his press conference, Thomas Midgley Jr. left for an extended European vacation, seeking treatment for the effects of lead poisoning. As the press speculated, the inventor was either a liar or a daredevil—or perhaps he’d just inhaled too much “looney gas.”

  AFTER NORRIS released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. Afraid that the trend would accelerate, that they would be forced to find another antiknock compound, and that they would lose money on their investment, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations.

  Dupont and Standard Oil agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925 the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of a task force to conduct the investigation. The government promised that the scientists assembled would be efficient and finish the study by year’s end. The pro-business administration, under Republican President Calvin Coolidge, also made its own position obvious, at least to anyone who’d been following the story.

  Norris had persuaded the New York City health commissioner to issue that initial ban on TEL-laced gasoline, writing with his usual directness: “its use should be prohibited, for lead is going to be deposited in the machines and in closed spaces especially. It may be extremely dangerous to have gasoline containing this substance even in small amount.”

  The government-approved TEL task force did not include Charles Norris or Alexander Gettler—nor anyone from any city where sales
of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.

  GETTLER WENT BACK to his usual routine, once again investigating a bichloride of mercury case. That same May, a twenty-one-year-old White Plains woman had been rushed to the hospital after eating a fig from a box that her grandmother had sent her as a gift. The sick girl had been carried into treatment still clutching the box of fruit.

  Doctors recognized signs of an acute poisoning—the skin of her mouth was corroded, and she was vomiting blood. The hospital sent the figs directly to the medical examiner’s office. The next day Gettler reported that he’d found a silvery-white powder rubbed into the fruit. The figs were loaded with mercury bichloride.

  Detectives discovered that the grandmother had quarreled with the young woman’s parents over money. The daughter had supported her parents and refused to visit her grandmother again; her six-year-old brother had continued to visit. The older woman evidently regarded her granddaughter’s behavior as a deep betrayal. She had bought the figs, laced a basketful with mercury bichloride, and given it to the boy, telling him it was a gift for his sister and “not to eat any himself.”

  When detectives came to arrest the grandmother, she’d been waiting for them. “All right” was all she said, as she gathered up her handbag and hat. She was lucky, they told her—the girl would recover, and the charge would be only attempted murder. She didn’t answer them.

  BY THE END of summer, Norris found himself suffering from a rare exhaustion, worn down by the press of bodies piling up in his department.

  July had seen another death caused by hydrogen cyanide gas. It had been used to fumigate a leather storage facility. The gas then seeped through cracks in the wall and killed a man working in his shop next door. Gettler and Assistant Medical Examiner Thomas Gonzales visited with business owners, trying to persuade them to use a different fumigant. Norris also went to the health commissioner and asked him to ban the use of cyanide gas for extermination purposes in New York City.

  Its use should be eliminated in every state, Norris said. He strongly suspected the risks were greatly underestimated, that many “heart disease” cases in smaller cities were actually fumigation deaths. But those cities had no trained pathologists at hand to argue the case. New York did, and officials should take advantage of that, he said. This time the health commissioner agreed. After reviewing the records, he issued an official ban on the use of cyanide fumigation in the city.

  Norris might be stymied in persuading the federal government to better regulate poisons, but he could at least make a difference in his own city. He had learned to celebrate small victories too.

  STILL, the number of poison alcohol deaths continued to rise. The Bellevue morgue was seeing an average of two alcohol-poisoned bodies a day. Liquor syndicates were importing pure wood alcohol from Germany, leading Norris to issue yet another warning: “I hope it is understood that the purer the wood alcohol is, the deadlier it is.”

  Bootlegger street shootings continued unabated. So did fatal illuminating gas accidents, and lethal automobile crashes in the city streets. And “we have been swamped with unknown floaters and unknown babies,” Norris wrote to the health department, explaining why he had been slow in issuing death certificates. “It has been almost impossible for us to keep up with our work. Sometimes we have had as many as 15 to 18 cases in a morning at the Morgue, with 9 or 10 autopsies.”

  In July he decided to take his first vacation in seven years. Or kind of a vacation. He was going to a spa in Europe for treatment of exhaustion.

  AT THE END of 1925, Charles Webb was again in court to fend off his dead wife’s relatives’ demands for money. And he would be there again. And again. Not for another three years would all the legal actions be settled, giving him clear title to Gertie’s estate. She’d not been as rich as the rumors had it. Rich enough, though—the courts set the total value of her estate at $1,033,765, about half of what speculation had indicated.

  Webb received about $630,000 of it: most on the remainder went to paying his legal fees and court costs. He never moved back into the home he’d shared with Gertie; he sold the house and spent the rest of his years in a New York apartment. He continued to run a real estate company. But once the court battles were over, and the inheritance came to him, he set about keeping a promise he had made to his dying wife. She’d wanted a park in New York City as a memorial to her mother.

  Webb donated the empty plot she’d owned on the city’s Upper West Side. It comprised almost two acres of rolling land in Washington Heights—a nice little stretch between West 189th and West 190th streets, along the edge of Broadway as it ran north through the city. In addition to the land—which the city valued at $300,000—Webb gave another $25,000 for a playground and $50,000 for a maintenance fund.

  The new park was designed in a series of terraces, descending toward Broadway. A central stairway, constructed of stone, led to walking paths, which in turn meandered through shady sitting areas. Along one edge, Webb ordered the construction of a silvery stone wall. Embedded in the stone, he had placed a small plaque dedicating the park to Gertie A. Gorman. It was—and is—a beautiful little park. But it also stands for an end, a closure, and, most of all, a tribute to someone loved and lost.

  SIX

  CARBON MONOXIDE (CO), PART I 1926

  IN LATE JANUARY 1926, a snow-sprayed wind glittering around him, a reporter from the New York Times shivered on a certain street corner, the one an irate letter writer had described as the noisiest in Manhattan—“the nadir of quietness.” At the designated intersection, Sixth Avenue and 34th Street, the journalist attempted to interview a traffic cop about that complaint. But the reporter worried that his task might be impossible. As he later wrote, while he could see the officer’s lips moving, he couldn’t hear a word of the answer.

  “Bang, flop, bang, flop. A flat-wheeled surface car jolted its way over the tracks, with every nut and every bolt protesting. Blah! Blah! Blah!!! Went the semi-siren of a lumbering truck,” he wrote, trying to re-create the blast of sound around him. The vehicular rush ran so thickly here, the city had assigned six officers to the one corner. The reporter had simply picked the policeman he could see best, the tallest of traffic guardians. The two men surveyed the chaos of automobiles before them: Maxwell Traveling Sedans, Dodge Brothers limousines, Packard’s new six-cylinder touring sedans, Nash Specials, Chandler Metropolitans, the occasional Jordan Victoria, Willys Knight’s compact four-passenger coupe, stretched-out Cadillac Suburbans, sporty Buick Country Club Specials, and Ford Model Ts, a motorized stampede of mostly black, boxy vehicles, some in the old open design, many with the new flat roofs, all with blaring horns and round staring-eye headlamps.

  “Hey,” the police officer shouted at a speeding driver. “He put his whistle between his lips and presumably blew it,” the reporter noted. Nine more motorized vehicles went by, sixty-nine pedestrians, two baby carriages, and three more surface cars—the name for streetcars, to distinguish them from the railcars screeching overhead on the elevated tracks.

  The traffic cop leaned down and put his lips to the writer’s left ear: “It’s the noisiest place in the world.”

  OTHER POLICEMEN might have argued for that honor, at other street corners, in countless other cities. Traffic jammed intersections across the country, bred by the automobile craze of the 1920s. Everyone wanted a car—for the speed, the independence, and yes, the status. Four million new cars had been sold nationwide in 1925, and automobile manufacturers predicted with absolute confidence that those numbers could only rise. The National Automobile Show, held at Manhattan’s Grand Central Palace, showcased more than five hundred new models in 1926—bigger cars, more powerful cars, cars riding on the new, cushier balloon tires. Cheaper cars. The Dodge brothers (Horace and John) had reduced the price of their luxury Type A sedan from $1,280 to $1,045, in an effort to lure more customers.

  In New York City a personal automobile offered escape from standing
on a snow-slushed sidewalk waiting for a surface car, and from risking one’s life in the rackety elevated trains. Reliable public transportation had yet to be realized; Mayor Hylan blamed strong resistance and political lobbying by private transportation companies: “Let the people know that selfishness is still rampant in this city.” At party headquarters these denunciations of lucrative donors were not appreciated. In 1926 he was replaced as mayor by Tammany Hall’s new favorite, the luxury- and limousine-loving James J. Walker.

  Even Charles Norris had developed car fever.

  His examiners had been taking taxis to death scenes. They’d wasted hours waiting for those city-chartered cabs, and more hours walking, after the cars failed to start. “I understand that the taxicabs at present time are in very poor condition” and are constantly breaking down, Norris wrote to the city’s transportation manager. Please, could some cars be permanently assigned to the medical examiner’s office? He could make do with a meager two.

  Norris received an apologetic refusal; the city had no cars to spare at the moment. The new mayor’s office was using them all.

  Frustrated, Norris turned his own private car, and chauffeur, over to department use. He did persuade Bellevue to pay the chauffeur’s $1,000-a-year salary. The driver was as necessary as the car itself, as most of Norris’s city-born employees didn’t know how to drive. For that matter, it seemed, neither did the people who were, at the moment, careening around Sixth Avenue in their newly purchased automobiles.