Episode 3100
1858 Bradford sweets poisoning
Thu, 2025-Oct-30 01:48 UTC
Length - 1:54
Direct Link
Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia's finest articles.
The featured article for Thursday, 30 October 2025, is 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning.
In 1858 a batch of sweets in Bradford, England, was accidentally adulterated with poisonous arsenic trioxide. About five pounds (two kilograms) of sweets were sold to the public, leading to around 20 deaths and over 200 people suffering the effects of arsenic poisoning.
The adulteration of food had been practised in Britain since before the Middle Ages, but from 1800, with increasing urbanisation and the rise in shop-purchased food, adulterants became a growing problem. With the cost of sugar high, replacing it with substitutes was common. For the sweets produced in Bradford, the confectioner was supposed to purchase powdered gypsum, but a mistake at the wholesale chemist meant arsenic was purchased instead.
Three men were arrested—the chemist who sold the arsenic, his assistant, and the sweet maker—but all three were acquitted after the judge decided it was all accidental and there was no case for any of them to answer. The deaths led to the Adulteration of Food or Drink Act 1860, although the legislation was criticized for being too ambiguous and the penalties for breaching it too low to act as a deterrent. The deaths were also a factor in the passage of the Pharmacy Act 1868.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:48 UTC on Thursday, 30 October 2025.
For the full current version of the article, see 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning on Wikipedia.
This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.
Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.
Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.
Until next time, I'm generative Stephen.
|
|
