Danbury Hats and Mercury

[rlk]

The Mad Hatter Mercury Mystery
http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=wracklines

 

[Lefty]

Interesting, but it contains a bit of nonsense too. The author seems to think that Disney is the same as Walt. The town apparently decided to "borrow" the St. Clement legend (the patron saint of hatters) for their own town story. The Clement story is in Debbie Henderson's book, Hat Talk, and can be also be found in this blog.

Until Mr. Bowers finally gets that book on Norwalk finished, Danbury is hat city.

 

[Aerol]

I can't give you a name, but I can give you a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease

 

[Woodfluter]

http://www.epa.gov/iris/subst/0073.htm

This is sort of heavy-going for the non-technical person. I'm sort of used to reading them. EPA is convinced that methyl mercury is a potent neurotoxin and lays out the evidence, with references. In some cases, effects may take decades to appear. Possibly also a carcinogen, but the evidence for that seems weaker.

Anecdotes about playing with mercury a few times don't really mean much. I did that too - back when dimes and quarters were real silver, we'd take some Hg from the H.S. chem lab and rub it onto the surface and they'd get very shiny. Kept them in our pockets and rubbed them for luck.

However, there's the route of exposure to consider, through the skin vs internal organs (including lungs in the case of vapors). Also the impact of a few high doses vs long-term exposure at lower doses (producing different relative risks for different compounds), possible non-linearity of impacts with increasing concentrations, lots of things.

On top of that, life is fundamentally a crap shoot. Meaning your likelihood of being affected may be different from the next person's and laws of probability prevail. Your uncle might have smoked 3 packs of unfiltered Camels per day and died at 102 from old age with strong lungs, but he was out on one tail of the bell curve. Oh, and I didn't even get into the effects of exposure to a combination of risk factors, some of which have been shown to increase probability of disease severalfold.

Most non-scientists want a simple answer, but reality is very messy. Dangerous means a lot of bodies will get hurt, while some won't!

- Bill

Whoops, obligatory hat content:
They sure made a lot of nice hats in Danbury!

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

I can't get too excited about this. My dad brought home liquid mercury in vials from work and we would play with it with our bare hands on the kitchen's food preparation counter. Actually, I seem to remember we did this in school when I was a kid. I suppose that might account for my 99 percentile SAT scores. Without the mercury I might have been Einstein, I suppose, and the Grand Unification Theory would have been finally found.

The methyl mercury in fish stuff is also complete BS. There are no actual victims. Give me a name!

Reminds me of a story someone told me. He was a cook at a camp out west somewhere and one evening they cooked some French fries in oil in which they had also immersed a thermometer. They ate their fries, but were horrified to find that the thermometer had broken!
They went to the doctor and the doctor was quite unconcerned because the mercury they may have ingested was elemental, not a compound that could be readily absorbed by the body. Seems that the elemental form of mercury simply can not be absorbed by the human body.

 

[Lefty]

It's not just about mercury, but here's Danbury Hatters' Union article from 1950.

This one is mostly about mercury and labor.

personal memories of the big hatters' strike

 

[mayserwegener]

Thanks for posting. Similar strikes happened at Johann Hückel´s Söhne. When I get a chance I will post what I have in the German - Austrian thread.

 

[Jedwbpm]

I love to see my tax dollars at work. Most of us in CT know about the Hat Industry in Danbury and Norwalk. My Mother-in-law's family is from Danbury and they all worked in the hat factories at one time or another. As I have written in other threads they love to argue about who had the worst job [video=youtube;Xe1a1wHxTyo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo[/video]. My Daughter goes to Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. They used to be know as the WCSU Hatters up to a few years ago when they changed it to Colonials. That river and area has been the industrial center of the county for decades. So it was not just hats that polluted the Hussie as we call it. No one is realy worried about it. It was only a few years ago that they let you eat the fish out the the river again. This story reminds me of Casablanca There is Gambling here I don't believe it.

Jeff