By Richard T. Cartwright, PE, CHMM, (IHMM, AHMP and APICS) Fellow. Richard died April 21, 2025; honoring the work he did with hazmat history is one small way to keep his memory alive.
The saying, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” is more than a cliché. It is a reminder that we must constantly be learning from the past. Here’s a look back at major historical events that happened today in the world of hazardous materials.
October 31, 2008
State media in China reported melamine had been routinely added to animal feed. It was also found in contaminated milk and eggs. Melamine was used to reduce production costs while maintaining protein count for quality inspections. Melamine has high nitrogen levels and most food tests do not distinguish between nitrogen and non-nitrogen protein sources.
October 31, 2003
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration released a report concluding that cloned farm animals and their offspring pose little scientific risk to the food supply. This could eventually lead to products derived from clones or their offspring onto the nation’s grocery shelves. No federal rule prohibits selling food products derived from clones or their offspring, but producers say they are observing a voluntary moratorium. Farmers’ elite cloned animals could be used as breeding stock to upgrade the genetics of entire herds. Milk from cloned cows and meat from the offspring of cloned cows and pigs might be the first to enter our food supply.
October 31, 1992
The Vatican admitted erring for over 359 years in its formally condemning Galileo Galilei for entertaining scientific truths such as the Earth revolves around the sun, which the Roman Catholic Church long denounced as anti-scriptural heresy. In 1633, Galileo was forced by the Roman Inquisition to repent, and spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest. Galileo was a 17th century Italian mathematician, astronomer and physicist remembered as one of history’s greatest scientists.
October 31, 1983
A massive tire inferno emerged in Mountain Falls, Virginia. A mushroom cloud of black smoke, 300 feet wide and 4,500 feet high, rose from autumn-colored ridges of the Appalachian Mountains. Nearby residents wondered if it was an early Halloween prank gone wrong. Seven million tires burned for 9 months at the Rhinehart tire recycling facility. The good news is that this incident changed state and federal tire recycling laws.
October 31, 1927
Narinder Singh Kapany, American physicist, was born in India. He is widely acknowledged as the father of fiber optics. Kapany coined the term “fiber optics” for technology transmitting light through fine glass strands. Fiber optic use in endoscopy to high-capacity telephone lines has changed our medical, communications, and business world. While growing up in northern India, his teacher informed him that light only traveled in a straight line. He took this as a challenge and made the study of light his life’s work. Soon after publishing his report of successfully transmitting images through fiber optical bundles, he moved to the U.S. to teach.
October 31, 1918
The Spanish flu-virus epidemic struck the United States, where 21,000 people died in just one week.
October 31, 1871
Henry Rogers, American inventor, patented a process for separating volatile hydrocarbons from crude oil by repeated vaporization and condensation. His invention included elements of modern refinery fractionating towers. It improved the earlier process of extracting kerosene by simple atmospheric distillation in kettle stills.
October 31, 1846
The Donner party, trapped in the Sierra Mountains, soon began building their winter camp at Truckee (now Donner) Lake, having failed to get through the mountain pass filled with hazardous frozen dihydrogen monoxide (snow).
October 31, 1835
Adolf von Baeyer, German research chemist, was born. He is known for advancing organic chemistry and the chemical industry through his work on organic dyes and aromatic hydrocarbon compounds. Baeyer synthesized indigo and studied benzene, cyclic terpene, acetylene and polyacetylene. From his research, Baeyer’s strain theory of carbon rings was derived.
October 31, 1815
Sir Humphrey Davy, English chemist, patented a miner’s safety lamp. Miners constantly encountered firedamp, an explosive mix of methane gas and air. The flame of the safety lamp is surrounded by a copper or iron gauze cylinder, with openings no more than 1/24-inch. This fine gauze prevents the flame passing through, but fails if it’s coarser. The wire absorbs or conducts away the heat of the flame contained inside the lamp, so it does not explode the gas outside the lamp. If firedamp is present, a pale blue flame appears around the central flame. This warns a miner to leave the area immediately.
Historical hazardous materials management events are posted 365 days a year at this LinkedIn discussion group.
