Scheele's Green: The Beautiful Color That Poisoned Victorian Homes

Carl Wilhelm Scheele, born on 9 December 1742 in Stralsund, was one of the great chemists of his century: he independently discovered oxygen, chlorine and manganese.¹

In 1778 he also produced an intense green pigment, copper arsenite. It became known simply as Scheele's green.² Scheele, who worked with arsenic and cyanide without proper ventilation, died at 43, his health most likely damaged by his experiments.¹

Because it was inexpensive and vividly colored, Scheele's green became extremely popular in the 1800s, in countless home goods from ball gowns and curtains to confectionery.²

Above all, it went on the walls. In 1858, British manufacturers estimated there were one hundred million square miles of green wallpaper in Britain alone.²

Doctors began to report families falling ill in green rooms and recovering once they left. In one case, a whole family, parrot included, was back to full health within a week.² The medical journal The Lancet backed a campaign against the pigment after its founder, Thomas Wakley, was said to have narrowly escaped death from the green walls of his own offices.²

For years nobody could explain it: the pigment did not give off fumes at room temperature. The answer came in 1891. The Italian physician Bartolomeo Gosio showed that fungi living in damp wallpaper paste could turn the arsenic into a gas.²

The great designer of the Arts and Crafts movement dismissed the scare. Arsenic has been found in several of his early wallpaper designs, from 1864 to 1875.²

He also owned shares in his father's mining company, Devon Great Consols, then the largest producer of arsenic, and it has been argued that its income helped fund his firm, Morris & Co.²