The artist Benvenuto Cellini (1500 – 1571) was a goldsmith and musician, and also one of the greatest sculptors of the Renaissance. He seems also to have been kind of a thug. He killed quite a lot of people, first… Read More
During the first part of the 20th century, detectives used a grey powder to dust for fingerprints at a crime scene. It was a mixture of chalk and mercury. Many suffered chronic mercury poisoning.… Read More
During the early 19th century construction of the cathedral of St. Isaac in St. Petersburg, Russia, workers gilded the domes with a gold-mercury amalgam. Sixty workers died of mercury poisoning.… Read More
By the time Elizabeth I was on the throne (in 1559), the ideal of female beauty was a snow-white face, with daubs of red on each cheek. To achieve the deathly pallor, women relied on ceruse, which is white lead.… Read More
My eighth grader’s history textbook allocates half a page to Lewis and Clark. It explains in painfully dull detail how in 1803 President Jefferson sent the expedition to explore the new territory he’d just bought from the French (hello, how… Read More
Both men and women Egyptians loved to adorn themselves with jewelry and other gewgaws. Gold was so plentiful in Egypt that it cost half of what silver did.