Print’s Past: A toxic relationship

Collodion, used for the wet process, was a material called “gun cotton” dissolved in ether. 

You would breathe that in all day to the extent that it would take a couple of hours on your way home to stop exhaling. You would absorb it into your lungs and people used to ask me on the train “Do you work in a hospital?” It smelled like a hospital. 

We used potassium cyanide. They came in one-ounce “eggs”. The first job every morning was to mix up a gallon of water and put eight of those pellets in. It was enough to kill everyone in the shire.

You would fill a gallon jar three quarters full and you’d pick these pellets up with your hand and push them into the jar and then you’d hold your hand over the top of the jar while you shook it up. Then you’d give your hands a bit of a rinse before you had your morning tea. 

One of the worst practices we had in the wet collodion process was that we used silver nitrate solution, which was clear until you got it on your hands and the following day or the weekend and it suddenly became black. The way to fix this was that on Friday before you knocked off work, you would go and soak your hands in iodine. If you thought you’d got any on your face, you’d soak your face in iodine too.

The chemistry behind this is that silver combined with iodine becomes a silver halide so you’d get silver iodide, and silver iodide is soluble in cyanide. So you’d wash your hands in cyanide. To neutralise the cyanide, we used to go into a copper sulphate bath and that would neutralise it. Of course if you had any cuts or that, the copper sulphate would attack that. When you think back on it, our ignorance of chemicals and occupational health and safety it was just abysmal – absolutely abysmal. 

Ken Lindop and John Jarvis

Print’s Past excepts are drawn from interviews held by Benjamin Thorn, curator of the Armidale Museum of Printing, and are due to be published in a forthcoming book.

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