"A man's pair of trousers exploded with a loud report. Fortunately the owner was not in them at the time" the North Island’s Hutt News printed on August 12, 1931. "Although dazed by the force of the explosion, was able to seize the garment, which was hanging before the fire, and hurl it out on to the grass outside.

“There is nothing visible to warn the owner that the affected portion of the dried out clothing may catch fire (or even explode) by coming near a fire (there need not be actual contact with flame or spark), or by friction, or by the concussion of a sudden blow. Even sunheat can cause ignition.”

Farmers sprayed sodium chlorate on ragwort – an introduced species with poor effects for livestock – and trousers with the residual chemical became flammable.

• Watson, J. (2004). The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers: Reflections on an Aspect of Technological Change in New Zealand Dairy Farming between the World Wars. Agricultural History, 78(3), 346–360. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3744710

Things like this always make me wonder what kinds of things we're doing now which people will look back on as ridiculous and dangerous like we are now with ragwort-killer coated trousers which explode

EDIT: thank you Gwaydms for catching that!

>ragwort-killer coated trousers which explode

dangit, we love to have reading comprehension don't we

It's the herbicide, not the herb.

yeah as soon as I saw your comment I reaslied what I'd done, the joy of a long day looking at a screen, haha

I read a comment or something once from a chemical engineer who said that, of gasoline/petrol hadn't become ubiquitous a century ago, there's no way regular people would want to buy or handle it without tons of safety precautions.

It's toxic as shit and a flammable solvent.

I have too, but just for fun.

Cars will be one of them.

1000 years from now, “TIL people use to strap themselves to a tank of highly combustible fluid using combustion engines to get around, they would literally give licenses to drive these things to just about anybody”.

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Ha! For sure, "millions of big metal blocks on wheels propelled by explosions... wow how did they even survive".

This article brought to my mind the exploding Android phones from a couple years back as something I'm certain will be looked at in the same way

What will they be replaced with, teleporters?

2000 years from now, "TIL people use to actually destroy themselves, killing themselves in the process, and digitally print an exact replica of themselves, just so they can buy some ice cream at the 7-11."

There is a myth busters episode about this

The iRobot movie takes place in the near future, relevant scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAU-UyiJ8A&ab_channel=Electech

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Then they decided putting lead in it was a good idea. Guess that made for good serial killer podcasts, so we got that.

Probably all the electronics that are rushed to shelves and burn peoples houses down.

Or wrapping most of our food in petroleum biproduct

A biologist friend once told me that many small rodents cannot tolerate certain antibiotics including penicillin.

Thus if this first great antibiotic had been required to be tested as thoroughly as modern pharmaceuticals are we likely would not have it until far later, possibly too late to treat infected WWII soldiers & thus put at rist the allies winning the war.

They have cars that don’t run on gas now, it’s wild, you should look into it

Yeah and they very pointedly made sure not to say Sodium Chlorate.

So take that corporate lawyers.

Gasoline used to be sold at drug stores (late 1800s) and was used as a delousing agent. It was a byproduct of refining crude oil (they were mainly after kerosene to use as lamp oil). When Bertha Benz took her famous road trip in the first automobile in 1888, she topped up at drugstores along the way.

They didn't say it to avoid people doing the same or to avoid big chlorate and their high powered lawyers?

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I've said this a few times; at some point we'll look back at surgery as barbaric. People from the future will find it abhorrent and astonishing that we used to cut people open to make them heal.

Is this the origin of "Liar liar pants on fire"?

No, it was spiritual forces. SMH when will science learn

Some of both I expect. I don't blame them. The recipe for gun cotton they kept quiet too. Because well warranted reasons.

I saw a documentary about that - doctor travelled back in time to give a kidney dialysis patient a pill to get her kidneys working again.

Don't worry, they knew that the lead was a bad idea when they started. Leaded gasoline should probably be considered a crime against humanity.

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Thomas Midgely Jr, the principal developer of lead in gasoline, also developed one of the first CFCs (Chlorofluorocarbons.) In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted polio, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.

So he kind of took care of himself. The one man who probably caused more harm to the environment than any other individual in history.

“These devices spewed known poisons everywhere.”

She literally had to stop in every village to buy out the supply, because they only sold it in small bottles and their engine wasn’t exactly fine-tuned for fuel-efficiency.

The legend goes that following that experience she suggested to set up what we would now call “gas stations” along the roads…

Can any Kiwis confirm if we're now to call New Zealand "Aotearoa"? And does pronunciation follow the same rules as Hawaiian and Samoan, where you just pronounce each letter individually?

Cars.

So back then, people got inside these metal boxes which they drove themselves, hurtling them around even residential areas. There were licenses, but almost anyone could get one and everyone had one.

That sounds dangerous.

Oh yes, thousands of people died every year. But AI wasn’t good enough to steer them yet.

But why did the use them in cities???

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Fossil fuels! If we manage to survive and outgrow them, they’ll eventually be as alien to us as murdering sperm whales for lamp oil is to us now.

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>Can any Kiwis confirm if we're now to call New Zealand "Aotearoa"?

I like the name Aotearoa, but New Zealand is still our better known and probably official name. There is talk about changing it to Aotearoa. Call us it if you want :)

Māori has slightly different vowels and language to other Pacific languages. They are reasonably close to Hawaiian and Samoan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yac8HTQ9YLQ

This video has a fine pronunciation. In practise, the vowel blend of A and o blend into one, and ea and oa are said separately.

Oh the Whales Documentary, I love that

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Honestly, we have exploding phones and manually controlled cars. Those are the two biggest things people will look back at and go... But why?

Damn with the heat I’m packing o would have been quite lethal…

Anecdotally, but: Aotearoa is used more commonly than "New Zealand" when talking to people in the country that live here, generally. It's fairly common in NZ English to use te Reo Maori words in place of English ones, and it's growing more and more popular to use Aotearoa in this sense.

No one will get at you for using "New Zealand" though. I think even the people who are pro "Aotearoa" mainly would like the country to be called "Aotearoa - New Zealand"

If it were today it would be used as an argument as to why gas cars are impossible as there's no infrastructure.

Loved this, thank you for sharing! 👖

In larger cities, and amongst certain groups, absolutely, using 'Aotearoa' instead of 'New Zealand is becoming common place, however (anecdotally) most people will still use "New Zealand" over "Aotearoa"

It's OK, I read the chemical in question as "Sodium ChlorIDE" not "Sodium ChlorATE".

Was wondering how table salt killed weeds then made trousers explode...

Are you sure it was chemicals? Maybe they just told too many lies.

That I don't understand, as creating gun cotton is basically just a nitration which is one of the more basic chemical reactions out there.

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I’ve just stuck two pencils up me nose and I’m off to Hartlepool to buy some awhchway awchway

Not quite today, but… lead in gasoline up til 1995. Also an honorable mention is modern vehicle safety, as the crumple zone in vehicles used to be whatever poor souls happen to be in the car at the time. Head on collision? Hope the passenger doesn’t mind having an engine ejected onto their lap. :/

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"The trousers, Grommit!!! They've gone all wrong!!" - Wallace, in one the greatest short films ever.

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Resetting complex bone fractures will probably always require it. You can't migitech a femur to heal properly when its in three pieces, each an inch apart and stabbed into the surrounding muscle.

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That seems like a reference to someone having their legs sticking into hell, to me.

Lost redditor?

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PFAS and neonicotinoids

We do this now.

• Trepanation (drilling or scraping a hole in the skull) to release the demons out. (Seriously, but sometimes worked because of cranial pressure from severe head trauma, they just didn't know that)
• Lobotomy, severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal lobe with an implement resembling an icepick, done up till the 1970's
• Bloodletting ie draining your blood to restore the balance of humors. Just tap an artery and let some blood out till your better.
• Malaria therapy. You got syphilis? We'll give you malaria, cause the fever is so hot and prolonged, it will kill the syphilis.
• Cough syrup used to be made from morphine
• Mercury drops was a common medical tonic.
• Heroin was also a cough syrup as well.
• Leeches anyone? Common up till the 1800's, people used leeches, usually in reference to bloodletting.

Heating food in plastic packaging in microwaves has always weirded me out. I won’t be shocked if that’s someday looked at as foolish in hindsight.

>Leeches anyone? Common up till the 1800's, people used leeches, usually in reference to bloodletting.

And maggots!

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Are your trousers exploding or are you just happy to see me?

Leeches and maggots are still used in medicine

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I mean I heard the same thing in Star Trek, but its better than the alternative. Would it really be humane to just let everyone suffer and die until we invent lasers and magic drugs? So I don't think its barbaric really. You work with what you have.

They barely handle it now. Lotta engineering in fuel delivery.

> a flammable solvent.

Gasoline has weird properties as both. It has a strange set of heats of ignition.

I always liked the driver having a spear ( the central bar in the steering column ) pointed at their thorax.

Funny enough, the early diesel tractors with hot bulb ignition they had back then could pretty much run on any kind of oil.

Kind of wierd, as I believe you could buy the stuff in the US without any kind of permit.