Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam here. If you've read Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or seeing any of the movie adaptations, the character of the mad Hatter is bound to have left an impression. He's eccentric, to say the least, as he presides over a rollicking tea party
that Alice attends. But the idea of being mad as a hatter in the British sense mad meaning crazy, not angry, it didn't come from Carol, And if you, like Alice, have a tendency to fall down rabbit holes, this phrase is an interesting one. Carol's book was published in eighteen sixty five, but the Oxford English Dictionary puts the earliest known use of mad as a hatter in eighty nine.
That's three and a half decades before any march Hares or Dormice sipped tea or the cheshire Cat made his famous claim of the general madness of the inhabitants of Wonderland. We're all mad here. The actual origin of the phrase mad as a hatter is unknown, but it's believed to be connected to mercury poisoning in hat Makers. Several years after Alice's Hatter first appeared in three, the phrase hatters shakes was used to describe the condition caused by mercury poisoning.
The symptoms included muscle tremors and mental and behavioral changes. Wonderland's Hatter behaves strangely in the novel, as do most of the characters, but his friends seemed to accept his oddities as being normal. Today, mercury poisoning is known to
the medical and scientific communities as aritism. The modern list of symptoms includes irritability and mania, both of which the hatter displays, but there's also sleep disturbance, depression, visual disturbance, hearing loss, and those tell tale tremors, at least the bladder, of which the Hatter does not seem to have, though to be fair, he only appears briefly. You may be glad to learn that although short term exposure to mercury can cause earism, it usually goes away if you can
avoid further contact with mercury. Long term exposures such as that that dental professionals and chemical workers experience, can mean the symptoms persist. In any case, Aritism is a rare disease. After the tea party, during the playing card court trial to determine who has stolen the tarts, the hatter explains to the king that he has no hats of his own because he sells all of the hats he has, which brings us to the last stop in our rabbit hole. What does mercury have to do with hats? It was
part of a process called carroting. In order to make felt, which is what many hats are made of, you have to get the fur of a beaver or rabbit to stick together in a matte of thick, stiff fabric, which means you have to get the fur off of the skin. To get the fur off of the skin cleanly, mercuric nitrate was used. It came to be known as carroting because the solution would turn the edges of the pelt
orange as it dried. Modern haberdashers use hydrogen peroxide to remove the fur from the skin, which is a slower but much safer process. But apparently Louis Carol didn't mean to slander hatters via his tea party host of First The phrase mad hatter never appears in the book. He's merely called the Hatter. It's the other characters, like Alice and the cheshire Cat who consider him mad. Second Carol once responded to a query about the word play in this his most famous work by saying, I'm very much
afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Today's episode was written by Kristen hall Geisler and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other Curiouser and Curiouser topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.