The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pennsylvania, May 21, 1924
And everybody else..
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, February 23, 1925
Our entire government in the 1920s tried to kill themselves. Incredible.
Hey, being dead is guaranteed to eliminate your cold and prevent you from ever getting another.
It was dilute, obviously. It turned out that it doesn’t work, but if you think it’s silly that it was tried, keep in mind that adding dilute chlorine to water is an effective and widespread technique for preventing waterborne disease.
The dilute chlorine in water is a totally different thing than chlorine gas. Chlorine gas is covalent chlorine, which is extremely deadly, rather than ionized Chlorine, which is a component of table salt and common in seawater.
So yes, it’s silly that it was tried.
This is not accurate (and you can’t disinfect drinking water with table salt).
The active form of chlorine in chlorinatedwater is hypochlorite. Think bleach, not table salt, though it’s also formed by dissolving elemental chlorine in water and that’s more common than using hypochlorite salts in large-scale purification. This is still a covalent form (though it’s a polyatomic ion rather than a neutral molecule), and just like elemental chlorine is a strong oxidizing agent that is toxic at high concentrations.
In fact, while the mechanism of chlorine toxicity is not completely understood, the formation of hypochlorite is believed to be an important component.
I would attribute this to the disinfection vogue of the early 20th century as the discovery of germ theory sunk in, the one that got us washing food and grading meat and swishing mouthwash against “halitosis” and putting Lysol in your baby bottle and douches in your vagina, all using diluted hazardous acids and cleansers
