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In 1858 a candy seller in Bradford accidentally killed 21 people with peppermint humbugs, and when investigators traced the arsenic back to its source they found it had been sitting in British kitchens, bakeries, and candy shops for decades.A candy seller in Bradford, England known locally as Humbug Billy accidentally bought a batch of peppermint humbugs laced with arsenic instead of sugar and sold them from his market stall. Twenty one people died. Two hundred more fell seriously ill. And when investigators traced the source of the arsenic they discovered it had not come from a factory accident or a deliberate poisoning. It had come from the green food dye that was being used in candy, cake decorations, drinks, and baked goods across Britain as a standard ingredient. The Victorians had been eating arsenic for decades and calling it a color choice.The dye was called Scheele's Green, invented in 1775 by a Swedish chemist named Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and it produced a vivid, brilliant green that no natural dye could match. The problem was that it was made from copper arsenite, a compound that Scheele himself understood was poisonous when he formulated it, and which he expressed moral concerns about in a letter to a colleague in 1777, one year before mass production began. The color was too beautiful and too profitable to stop. By 1858 it was estimated that one hundred million square miles of Scheele's Green wallpaper existed in Britain alone, and it was in the paint on the walls, the dye in the dresses, the color on the children's toys, the icing on the cakes, and the powder dusted onto the artificial flowers sold in shops across London.The flower makers were the ones who showed everyone what was happening. In 1861 a nineteen year old woman named Matilda Scheurer died in London after years of dusting artificial leaves with green powder at her workbench. Her doctor documented her final days. The whites of her eyes had turned green. She told him that everything she looked at appeared green. Her fingernails had turned green. She convulsed three times before she died and her autopsy found arsenic throughout her body. The case made the newspapers and suddenly the connection that doctors had been quietly suggesting for thirty years became impossible to ignore. A physician named Dr. William Hinds had already published his findings in 1857 after papering his own study with Scheele's Green, becoming ill every evening he worked in the room, removing the paper, and watching his symptoms disappear. He wrote that a great deal of slow poisoning was going on in Britain. He was correct and nobody had listened.William Morris, the most celebrated designer in Victorian England and the man whose wallpaper patterns still appear in museums and gift shops today, continued using Scheele's Green in his designs through the 1870s despite the mounting evidence. He also happened to be the heir to Devon Great Consols, at that time the largest arsenic producer in the world, and the profits from the mine had funded the founding of his design company. When doctors told him his miners were falling ill from arsenic exposure he told them they were suffering from witch fever. He eventually stopped using the pigment under public pressure but never acknowledged that it had harmed anyone. And the theory about Napoleon dying slowly in his green-painted exile rooms on Saint Helena, surrounded by damp walls releasing arsenic gas into the air of his favorite color, remains one of the most argued footnotes in the history of poisoning.The Bradford candy poisoning of 1858 finally pushed British legislators into action and ten years later, in 1868, the UK set the first legal limits on arsenic in food. The color green fell so completely out of fashion in Britain following the scandal that seamstresses reportedly refused to work with it for generations afterward. The Victorians were poisoning themselves with their wallpaper, their candy, their dresses, and their cake decorations, and the people who knew about it kept quiet because the color was simply too good to give up. eatshistory.com- Donnie