#Target chimney sweep hat mary poppins movie
īut I hate to break it to you-that movie was something of a fraud. That’s probably based on watching Dick van Dyke doing a soft shoe in Mary Poppins as a kid. Now, I think most of us have warm feelings about chimneysweeps. The more chimneys there were, the more people needed chimneysweeps. And the soot inside chimneys can actually catch fire itself. If you’ve ever peeked inside a chimney, you might have noticed something-it’s filthy up there! There’s black gunk and soot all over. You had to have a proper brick chimney now.īut if chimneys made the city safer, they also had an unintended side effect.
Before, many people just knocked a hole in the roof for smoke to escape and called it good. More importantly, the city made chimneys mandatory. Even though straw roofs were quintessentially English, they were now illegal. They never wanted this to happen again, ever. But as the story of the chimneysweepers shows, it very much is.Īfter the Great Fire, city leaders in London made a decision. Now, we normally don’t think about cancer as a genetic disease. In those cases, a mutation shuts down someone’s DNA, and the person’s cells can’t function properly afterward.īut there are other, subtler types of genetic diseases as well, including the biggest genetic disease of all-cancer. When most people think of genetic diseases, they probably think of something like cystic fibrosis, or hemophilia, or sickle-cell anemia. It took a while, but the fire really did destroy their lives, via a genetic disease. Given that London also suffered from an outbreak of plague that year- and the fact that both events took place in a year ending in 6-6-6-well, you can see why many people believed the world was coming to an end.Īnd for some people, that was actually the case-namely, the iconic London chimneysweepers. Over the next few days, the fire consumed 13,000 homes and caused the modern equivalent of $1.3 billion dollars in damage. The flames eventually reached some warehouses along the Thames River that stored oil and tallow, and after those caught fire, the inferno was unstoppable. London didn’t have an organized fire brigade then, and a strong wind quickly pushed the flames down the street. And they were crowded so close together that the fire easily jumped from building to building. Most houses then were made of wood and had thatched straw roofs. About 1 o’clock in the morning, his house went up in flames. On September 2nd, a baker on Pudding Lane in London failed to completely put out a fire in his oven. This story start with the Great Fire of London in 1666. So today, I thought I’d right this cosmic wrong, and share this story with you all. This story didn’t make the cut for a simple, if aggravating, reason: I came across it too late in the process to include. One story especially leaps to mind, from my book on genetics, The Violinist’s Thumb. Whenever I give book talks at schools or colleges, one of the most common questions I get is this: Were there any stories you left out of the book? Stories that you wanted to include, but didn’t?Īnd the answer is-yes. Who did they employ to clean these narrow, soot-filled chimneys you ask? Very young boys. All these new chimneys meant there was a big demand for sweepers.
After the Great Fire, London officials made chimneys mandatory in all homes and buildings. In 1666, the Great Fire of London consumed about 13,000 homes and caused the modern equivalent about $1.3 billion in damage. In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean discusses the horrors of a particular genetic disease that was, literally, sweeping through London in the 1700s.
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