S05 Episode 2: The Unceasing Cloud - podcast episode cover

S05 Episode 2: The Unceasing Cloud

Sep 11, 202039 min
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Episode description

Back in 1802, brilliant Prussian naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt was introduced to guano, a natural fertiliser comprised of bat and bird excrement that had long been considered an extraordinarily effective fertiliser, used even by the ancient Incas. 

Humboldt’s subsequent promotion of guano to agriculturalists in Europe set in motion a chain of events that would not only change the world as we knew it, but change it in ways that we may struggle to ever recover from... 

Featuring the mysterious Phantom Gasser of Botetourt County.

Go to twitter @unexplainedpod, facebook.com/unexplainedpodcast or unexplainedpodcast.com for more info. Thank you for listening.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Introducing The Fountain Road Files, a new horror fiction podcast from Unexplained creator Richard McLane Smith. In March twenty twenty, twenty seven year old cafe worker Ben Williams began recording an audio diary of the coronavirus pandemic. Two months later, he was found dead in the South London flat where he was spending lockdown alone, or so he thought. Search the Fountain Road Files wherever you get your podcasts, and for more information go to the Fountain Road Files dot com.

In his famed and controversial seventeen ninety eight paper An Essay on the Principle of Population, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus outlined the theory for which he has since been immortalized. Mauthusianism, as it came to be known, broadly speaking, is the belief that the global human population will increase inevitably to the point where it could no longer be sustained by the resources available to it unless it is curbed by

either natural disasters or state intervention. Without such checks, Malthus believed many would be fated to a lifetime of financial poverty and destitution, as more and more people would be forced to scrap over ever diminishing proportions of food. Malthus's theory was undermined emphatically in the next hundred years by the sheer human capacity for ingenuity and its rapacious thirst

for commodities. Throughout the nineteenth century, although global population continued to increase at a rapid rate, it was more than compensated for by the equally rapid technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. With new tools such as the threshing machine, came the ability to farm far more intensively than ever before. But just as crucial was the introduction to Europe and the United States of an extremely unlikely nitrogen rich fertilizer.

It was back in eighteen o two that the brilliant Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt first came across it while trekking through Peru. Called guano by those local to the region, otherwise known as guano, this natural fertilizer, comprised of bat and bird excrement, had long been considered an extraordinarily effective fertilizer,

used even by the ancient Incas. Humboldt's introduction to guano set in motion a chain of events that would not only change the world as we knew it, but change it in ways that we may struggle to ever recover from. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McClane Smith. A veritable polymath, Humboldt had spent much of his early years studying a vast array of disciplines, including languages, geology, anatomy,

and astronomy, amongst many other things. He is credited with reintroducing the word cosmos into popular usage, and is also regarded as the first person to describe the phenomenon of human induced climate change. By his forties, Humboldt was already a well established member of the European science community when he received the blessing of the King of Spain to undertake an expedition to the America's Humboldt would spend the

next five years trekking extensively throughout the continent. After returning to Europe, Humboldt wrote effusively about the merits of guano, encouraging industrialists to look into the possibility of incorporating it

into Western agricultural practices. Within thirty years, as many began to see the benefits of it for themselves, millions of tons of guano, largely harvested by slaves from China, Africa, the Polynesian Islands, and Hawaii, was being exported and traded throughout Europe and the United States, as is often the way of such things. Before long, with the unquenchable desire for it, deposits of guano were all but exhausted. By

the eighteen seventies. This pitfall was swiftly overcome, however, with the discovery of vast quantities of natural sodium nitrate found in Chile around the same time. But as many were quick to recognize, sodium nitrate was also a finite resource, and much like the wants bountiful supply of guano, it

too would someday run out. By the eighteen nineties, the world, it seemed, was once again in a perilous position, with global population now fifty percent larger than it had been in Malthus's time, thanks in part art to dramatically increased crop yields, Fears of a Mouthusian catastrophe were once again being espoused. In eighteen ninety eight, Sir William Crooks, president of the British Academy of Sciences, through attention to this

worrying predicament. It was his belief that unless a viable alternative to the natural but finite fertilizers could be found, soon food supplies would no longer be sufficient to sustain the global population. There was one great hope, however, he added, Since nitrogen made up seventy nine percent of the Earth's atmosphere, there was certainly more than enough of it to go around. All that was needed was for someone to find a way to convert it into a compound that plants could

feed off. In nineteen o nine, chemist Fritz Harbor was working as an assistant and lecturer at Carlsborough University in Germany. Though not especially well known at the time, Harbor had been steadily making a name for himself, specializing in the technology of dye for textiles and electrochemistry. That year, however, working in their lab at Carl's Ruhre, Harbor and his assistant Robert le Rosignon, would make one of the greatest

discoveries of modern science. Spurred on by the global hunt for a synthetic fertilizer to match the nutrient rich nitrates such as those from Chili, Harbor devised a process that successfully combined nitrogen from the air with hydrogen to create ammonia,

a nitrogen rich compound capable of fertilizing plants. Harbor's process was acquired by the German chemical company Baden Aneline and Soda factory in July the same year, who in turn assigned chemist Carl Bosch to scale it up for industrial use. With the help of what would become known as the Harbor Bosch BASF were producing industrial quantities of ammonia by nineteen thirteen, which couldn't come soon enough for the German nation.

With the outbreak of war in July nineteen fourteen. Recognizing that Chile's sodium nitrate deposits would not only be vital for agriculture but also the production of explosives, the German government attempted to secure access to it for themselves. However, the German naval fleet that was sent to complete the task was destroyed a few months later by the British Navy.

Left with no access to this vital resource, Carl Bosch and his team at BASF duly stepped in to help, turning their hands to generating vast quantities of ammonia at the military's request to produce nitric acid for use and explosives for its Harbor, who, thanks to the genius of the harbor Bosch process, was well known to the German government, was invited to take up a slightly different task and turn his talent for chemistry to figuring out how it

might best be used in the field of war. Harbor had little trouble excepting the task and quickly began experimenting with tear gas. But Harbor would go much further than that. Though many on both sides of the war had predicted a swift and early resolution to hostilities, by April nineteen fifteen a very different picture was beginning to emerge, with both sides now thoroughly locked in a seemingly endless war

of attrition. Fighting by this point was largely confined to the Western Front, a vast line of trenches and fiercely contested territory stretching south from the coast line of the North Sea through Belgium, France and Germany all the way to Switzerland. Located at the northern end of the front was the Epre Salient, a ten mile stretch of the line just to the east of the Belgium city of Epra as one of the few sections of the front at the time where the British, Canadian and French armies

had succeeded in pushing back into German occupied territory. The Epres salient was a vital, strategic and symbolic landmark. So heavily was this section contested, the German military became convinced that if they could just break through it, it would be such a blow to the opposition's morale that their

victory would be all but guaranteed. By April twenty second, the surrounding area had been obliterated by artillery shells from both sides, transforming the once rich and verdant farmland into hellish stretches of mud and twisted wire, pockmarked by vast yawning craters, and all of it strewn with the rotting corpses of fallen soldiers. The trenches not much better. Bogged down with water due to the low water table, they offered little respite from the elements. They too, were littered

with the bodies of the dead. After days of intense fighting around a nearby hill, the morning of the twenty second had begun with another period of heavy shelling as the German army once again did their best to disrupt the line. By early afternoon, however, the guns had fallen silent. At the northern section of the salient. French Algerian troops

waited nervously for whatever might come next. At just after five pm, with the light beginning to fade, the aerial bombardment began afresh, the shells pummeling down into the mud, becoming louder and louder with each passing minute. When suddenly one of the lookouts observed something unusual in the distance, a thick cloud of smoke slowly billowing towards across no man's land. Is there something interfering with your happiness or

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Better Help wants you to start living a happier life today. Thinking the smoke was cover for an imminent attack, officers across the line screamed at their men to get ready, ordering their troops to stand too and mount the first step in preparation for a defensive charge. Gathering weapons, helmets and AMMO. The men threw themselves dutifully against the side of the trenches, hearts thumping in their chests as they

awaited the next order. Up above, officers gripped tighter on their revolvers as they braced themselves for the sudden onrush of German soldiers. But the soldiers never came. The officers could only look on with bemused stairs as that peculiar smoke, seeming a little thicker, now continued to draw nearer and nearer. It was almost beautiful the way it shimmered, a peculiar shade of yellow and green in the light. And then the smell hit them, an acrid whiff of bleach that

scraped at the back of the throat. Then the men began to cough and pull back, clawing at their necks. While some cried out for water, others were already on the ground, screaming in agony as they writhed about in the mud, frothing at the mouth and gasping for breath. And still the cloud of smoke kept coming until the entire trench had been engulfed. But it wasn't smoke at all.

It was chlorine gas. Just a kilometer away to the north, at the German line, the bald, bespectacled figure of Fritz Harbor watched with satisfaction as the gas he had so meticulously helped to manufacture continued on its southerly direction across the rest of the opposition's line. Harbor later said that his intention had been merely to use the gas to cause mass disruption, leaving the opposition forces a frayed and shaken but able to retreat to safety if need be.

It was, he claimed, merely a tactical attempt to bring a quick end to the war that would ultimately save lives in the long run. Harbor's technique was to place six thousand metal canisters containing one hundred and sixty eight tons of liquid chlorine along a six kilometer stretch of the German army's line. After waiting all day for the wind to change direction, the canisters were finally prized open,

turning the liquid chlorine instantly to gas. Up to one thousand, four hundred soldiers a thought to have died in the attack, and over two thousand were injured, the chlorine being so potent it corroded the soldier's silver buckles and badges to a greenish black. Harbor's hope that the gas attack would result in a fast resolution to the conflict did not come to pass. Not only did the German army fail to capitalize on the initial attack, it simply opened the

door to the development of even more devastating weapons. When an effective solution was found to combat the chlorine gas. For example, Harbor simply developed something even more lethal. Where chlorine gas had to be inhaled, nitrogen mustard needed only to settle on exposed skin to do lasting damage to the body. Symptoms of a mustard gas attack, as it would be called, ranged from extensive blistering to weeks spent

coughing and choking on blood until you died. Though many were quick to condemn the German high command, even some within the German military itself, for permitting such a heinous act, the other nations were equally quick to follow suit. Despite the British senior officer Sir John French being amongst the most vociferous of critics, describing the use of the gas as of barbarous disregard of the well known usages of civilized war, whatever that is, the British Army would launch

their own gas attack only five months later. By the end of the war, the British, French and Belgian forces had used more tons of gas than the German army. Out of the forty million or so casualties of the First World War, A hundred thousand are thought to have been killed by gas, with one million believed to have been wounded. Only ten years before, at the nineteen o seven Hague Convention, most nations involved in the war had

signed an agreement forbidding the use of poison or poisoned weapons. Nonetheless, the Harbor Bosch process would earn Fritz Harbor a Nobel Prize in nineteen eighteen, and the ammonia it's used to create today forms the basis of all manufactured nitrogen fertilizer, a method that is credited with feeding roughly a third of the global population and saving billions from starvation. There is perhaps a no more polarizing figure in science, and with the release of that gas in nineteen fifteen, there

was no putting it back in the canister. As reports of the attacks and those haunting images of soldiers in bug eyed gas masks drifted back from the front, few could fail to be disturbed by it. It had changed our concept of warfare indelibly, and as it would turn out, the specter of those thick, yellow tinged toxic clouds would disperse far wider and linger far longer than Harbor had

perhaps ever intended them to. On the evening of Friday, December twenty second, nineteen thirty three, out in the snow covered fields of Buddataut County in Virginia in the US, local farmer Clarence cal Huffman and his wife Mattie were preparing for bed when Mattie became aware of an unusual acrid odor in the air. Feeling suddenly overcome with nausea, she laid herself down and waited for it to pass.

With Mattie finally drifting off to sleep, Cow was just about to join her when he too caught a whiff of the unusual odor. Being a farmer, Cow was all too aware that it wasn't uncommon around those parts for thieves to use gas to knock out livestock before stealing it. In recent years, some enterprising burglars had even utilized gas to knock out guard docks before ransacking people's homes. Hurriedly lighting a lantern, Cow grabbed his gun and quickly made

his way to the back door. Pulling it open, he held up the lamp and stared out into the chill of the night, seeing little but empty fields and the usual trees standing bare and skeletal in the dark. He felt suddenly all too aware of just how isolated he and his family were. With his wife and children to think about, he decided it best to call in the police. Special officer Oscar Lemon arrived thirty minutes later to find Cow waiting for him on his porch, shotgun in hand.

His wife and children roused from bed by the excitement, waited expectantly side. After he explained the situation to Lemon, Cow joined him in making a quick circuit of the property. Their home, a large stone building known locally as the Brian McDonald Junior House, was one of the more recognizable properties in the county, a likely target, perhaps for unwanted attention.

As the officer flicked his flashlight about looking for anything unusual, Lemon noticed one of the windows to the enclosed front porch was slightly open. Shining the light underneath it, He spotted the print of a small, high heeled shoe in the dirt, unlike anything anyone in the family owned, and

neither did anyone remember leaving the window open. As unlikely as it sounded to offers a Lemon, it seemed that someone might have tried to poison the family with gas, with the possibility that used the porch window to pipe it into the property. After checking in on Mattie, who was by then feeling better, Officer Lemon suggested that the family tried to get some rest and call back if anything else strange occurred, with Lemon then leaving the property

around one am. It was a few hours later when Cal and Mattie were awoken by the sound of coughing and spluttering coming from their children's bedrooms. Lighting the lamp again, the couple rushed through to the hallway just in time to see their twenty year old daughter, Alice, stumble from her bedroom, seemingly unable to breathe, before collapsing on the floor,

yelling that they were under attack again. Ashby Henderson, a neighbor who was staying with the family at the time, thought he saw a movement outside a window and dashed out of the house to investigate. Cal joined a moment later, but after a few minutes scanning the area, they saw nothing. Local doctor, the twenty eight year old Samuel Driver, arrived on the scene shortly after, only to find Alice completely unresponsive.

Turning her on to her front, he attempted resuscitation, splaying her arms out to the side like wings and carefully pushing down on her back as he lifted her arms up by the side. After a minute or so, the family were much relieved to see the young woman finally coming round, no longer smelling the gas. It seemed this second apparent attack was over. With not much else to be done, the family thanked the doctor and made their

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to redeem and for more details. Once again, that's unexplained eight zero. To get eighty dollars off your first month plus free shipping on your first box, go to greenchef dot com. Forward slash unexplained eight zero to redeem and for more details. A few days later, over in Cloverdale, just three miles south of the Huffman Home, Clarence and Lucy Hall were attending a Christmas church service with their three children. Returning to their house at nine pm, the

couple noticed a sickly acrid smell in the air. Within moments, their eyes were beginning to sting. Telling the others to wait outside, Clarence moved in further to investigate, only to stop suddenly looking as though he might keel over at any moment. Watching on in horror, Lucy dashed in to grab her husband and pulled him back outside. Doctor William Breckenridge, who attended the scene shortly after, suggested that what happened to Clarence was consistent with the effects of inhaling some

kind of gas. The following night, with the Halls staying at Lucy's parents home for safety, Lucy's sister Ada was having past the Hall's home with her husband when they saw a figure in the dark poking about with a flashlight near a window of the house. When they pulled in for a closer look, the figure drove off swiftly into the night. The following day, the news hit the papers that a mysterious assailant nicknamed the Phantom Gasser, was on the loose in Badatak County that appeared to be

releasing a poisonous gas into people's homes. Having at first assumed it to be little more than kids messing about. After a third apparent attack on local welder Albert Kelly offered Sir Lemon stepped up his efforts to catch the perpetrator, with the community, like much of America, only just getting back to its feet. After the ravages of the Great Depression, this was the last thing they needed on their hands.

On the twenty eighth of December, Offer, Sir Lemon, received word that an unknown man and woman were seen passing Kelly's home around the time he claimed to have been attacked. The couple had driven back and forth a number of times in a nineteen thirty two Chevrolet. However, a check on the vehicle's license plate failed to identify the owner.

A few weeks later, several miles away, in an area known as Howl's Mill, Missus Moore, a woman staying at the home of Gertrude and Homer Hilton with her baby, was alerted to the sound of muffled voices coming from somewhere in the yard. Keeping her eye on her baby, who was fast asleep in its cot, she listened quietly as she heard the sound of rustling footsteps drawing closer to the window. Moments later, missus Moore smelled gas. It was followed by a sudden, numbing sensation that seemed to

be spreading slowly into her limbs. Hearing her cries for help, the Howls dashed downstairs to find her. Outside shivering on the front step with her baby, but no sign of anyone else around Homer. Hilton gathered up his shotgun and took a seat in the front room, vowing to keep watch or night, but nobody came. The following day, Homer spread news of the attack to his neighbors Sally and Tom,

who in turn passed it on to their children. Before long, their son Roy was sharing it with their neighbors Laura and Emmett Lee, who, like an invisible virus, brought the news into their home, sharing it with each of their ten children. As a panic spread among them, the Lees spent the rest of the day plugging up holes in their property, using tin to patch up their windows, terrified that any gaps might provide an opportunity for the phantom

gasser to pipe a gas into their home. That night, with everyone sleeping together in an upstairs room, Emmett watched over them all with his shotgun. Sometime later, as they were drifting off to sleep, they heard a piece of tin rattling in one of the windows. Emmett ran immediately to the landing and stared down into the darkness below, demanding to know who was there. Hearing the rattle again. He pulled open a nearby window, stuck out his gun and fired a quick warning shot into the air, and

then all was still. With news of the mysterious gas attacks spreading rapidly throughout the community, the once open and friendly citizens of Buddatok County had begun to retreat into their homes, locking all their doors and windows and eyeing

their neighbors with suspicion. Families and the more isolated parts of the county slept at their friends homes for added security, while many had taken to patrolling the roads at night or sitting out on their front steps nervously chewing on tobacco, their breath billowing about them in the cold air as they kept their eyes fixed ahead for any hint of

a shadow moving about in the darkness. Vague reports circulated of unknown vehicles being seen in the area on the night of the attack on the Hall property, and some also claimed to have heard muffled voices near their properties too shortly before missus Moore had apparently done at the

Hilton house. Visiting the home of another apparent victim, doctor Samuel Driver became convinced that the gas being used was chlorine On Tuesday's sixteenth of January, local resident mister Duval arrived at his home shortly after eleven thirty pm, a quiet place not far from Cloverdale, to find that his family had been attacked. After calling off a Sir Lemon to alert him, they arranged to meet up to search the local area. En route, Duval spotted a man standing

by the side of the road. Realizing he'd been seen, the man sprinted straight off to a car parked nearby and jumped into the passenger side. The vehicle sped off before de Vaal could give chase. Later, when he returned to the site with Officer Lemon, the pair discovered another print in the dirt next to where the car had been parked up a small, high heeled shoe, just like the one found at the Huffman property back in December.

By January twenty second, nineteen thirty four, news of the phantom gassa had gone national, with The New York Times declaring Virginians are terrorized by gas thrower who flees in the night after making victims ill. The following week, in one of the more shocking incidentss five friends were gathered at the home of Ed Stanley in an area known as Colon Siding when the phantom gassa struck again. The friends were sat chatting amiably in the front room when

one of them, Oscilia Weddle, began choking uncontrollably. The friends looked on in terror as Cecilia fought for air, when suddenly they too began to choke, before being overcome with a collective nausea. Suspecting they'd been gassed, one of the group, Frank Guy, staggered to his feet and clawed opened the front door. As the others helped to drag Acilia out of the house, Frank caught sight of four men running

off toward a nearby wood. Racing back inside, he picked up the family's shotgun and took aim at the men, but as the shot rang out, the men were nowhere to be seen. With fear having completely gripped the county, the local Board of Supervisors convened for a meeting the next day. In desperation, the board announced a five hundred

dollar reward for the capture of those responsible. This move was followed swiftly by the Virginia State Assembly, where delegates from Baddatort and neighboring Roanoke County introduced a bill promising a prison sentence of up to ten years for anyone in court attacking the public with toxic gas, and so it continued into February. Only now the gassa and its associated panic had begun to spread further, affecting residents of

Roanoke County. Two at least one resident required oxygen and hospitalization, only to be discharged the following day with no apparent side effects. By mid February, after a sudden spate of false alarms throughout Badda, tort and Roanoke Counties, reports of

mysterious gassings began to tail off. With no concrete clues or evidence with which to mount an investigation, police were forced to abandon any efforts to hunt down the phantom, if indeed there had ever been one at all, And slowly, but surely, the people of that quiet corner of rural Virginia returned to their normal lives, not quite sure what it was they had experienced, only that for a brief moment, a very real fear had stalked the land, a fear

born in a laboratory two decades before and unleashed on the world in a toxic cloud of death thousands of miles away in a field in Belgium, and before long new fears would emerge to take its place. It's unlikely that when Alexander von Humboldt was espousing the virtues of guano that he could ever have known just how much it would change the world, nor how over one hundred years later it would indirectly lead to the development of

devastating chemical weapons. And despite being one of the first to understand the effects of human made climate change, it is also unlikely he would have predicted what impact bat excrement would ultimately have on the environment. As it is.

The explosion of crop yields that started with guano, accelerated by processes such as harbor bosch and later the Green Revolution, has meant we are now farming more intensively than ever before, and though we might be right to congratulate ourselves on the ingenuity it took to get here, we are once again facing a moment of crisis, both Malthusian and otherwise.

A study published in Bioscience Journal in twenty seventeen predicted that despite our increased yields, population growth is once again approaching a point of catastrophe, suggesting that food production would need to increase by somewhere between twenty five to seventy percent to compensate. And yet, just taking the impact of nitrogen fertilizers derived from the harbor Bosch process as one example, we are paying a hefty price for those increased yields.

Applying too much nitrogen as destabilized the natural nitrogen cycle, with more being created than can ever be absorbed. This in turn has led to a steady depletion of nutrients in the soil, making it ultimately less efficient for farming, with much of it ending up back in the atmosphere as nitrous oxide an ozone depleting greenhouse gas, the traps heat at a staggering three hundred times the rate of carbon dioxide. Today, there is twenty percent more nitrous oxide

in the atmosphere than only two hundred years ago. When the nutrients become depleted in the soil, even more nitrogen based fertile lisa is applied to make up the shortfall, creating a disastrous cycle of diminishing returns. And if that wasn't damaging enough, As the demand for food goes up with the population, so too does the demand for land to grow it, and where that land doesn't currently exist, it is made often by clearing rich, vital, and ancient

forest ecosystems. Mouthless may yet be proved right in the long run, but its crucial mistake back in seventeen ninety eight was to underestimate the human capacity for problem solving. Doubtless we create many more with the ones we solve, and there is no cosmic obligation to care about each other or the planet even. But perhaps there is reason not to despair, though we might sometimes be more ruthless when our backs are against the wall. So two are

we at our most resourceful, compassionate, and brilliant. Perhaps, instead of devising new ways to produce and consume more, what's needed, just as it was back in Malthus's day is just a new way of thinking. History tells us that for better or worse, we will find it. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now do so via Patreon To receive access to add three episodes, discount or merchandise, as well as brand new

video and audio content exclusive to Patreon members. Just go to patron dot com forward Slash Unexplained Pod. To sign up, or if you'd like to make a one time donation, you can go to Unexplained podcast dot com Forward Slash Support. All donations, no matter how large or small, are greatly appreciated. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never been before being covered on the show, is now available

to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like

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