A runaway wave of 323,000 gallons of beer flooded a London slum in 1814, killing eight people
the gist
On 17 October 1814, one of the 22-foot wooden vats of fermenting porter at Meux and Co's Horse Shoe Brewery in London burst. The escaping liquid knocked the valve off another vessel and destroyed several large barrels, releasing between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons of beer. The wave smashed the brewery's back wall and swept into the St Giles rookery, a crowded slum. Eight people died, five of them mourners at a wake for a two-year-old boy held by an Irish family. The inquest recorded that they died accidentally. The brewery nearly went bankrupt, but avoided collapse after the Excise office gave a rebate on the lost beer. The disaster led the industry to gradually stop using large wooden vats.
so what
The accident shows how industrial scale and dense housing could turn an everyday process into a disaster, and it helped end the use of giant wooden fermentation vats.
fun fact
The Dominion Theatre in London now stands on the site of the old Horse Shoe Brewery.
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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