Hidden Killers Of The Victorian Home Page #3

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So you're saying that

hundreds of thousands of people,

mostly perhaps children,

died as a result of that?

There are many studies, one of which

was a series of post mortems

done in London in the 1890s,

and they did postmortems

on 1,300 children who had died.

30% of those children had died as

a result of TB - non-pulmonary TB...

Almost certainly that came from milk.

If we extrapolate that up,

it's considered likely

that half a million children

died of TB from milk

during the Victorian era.

Despite these horrendous deaths,

the purification of milk with alkali

was not banned by legislation

in the Victorian period.

And the problem of

adulterated food continued,

until gradually, consumer pressure

led manufacturers

to advertise their wares as

"pure" and "unadulterated".

The next hidden killer lies

not in the room,

but between the levels

of the Victorian house.

The dangers weren't just the result

of products introduced

into the home,

they were built into the very fabric

of the new Victorian houses.

One of the most common death traps

was right under their feet.

Stairs have always been dangerous.

Even with today's

building regulations,

at least 300,000 accidents occur

every year in the UK.

But in Victorian times

it was even worse.

There's numerous accounts of people

falling down staircases

and breaking their necks

or breaking their legs

and dying later of septicaemia.

Why were there so many deaths

and injuries from stairs?

The finger points to

the urban population boom.

The number of Victorians

per square mile

increased from 390 in 1871

to 558 by 1901.

Houses were thrown up

and packed into smaller plots

with little concern about

regulation or standardisation.

The problem was is the way

that the house styles changed.

Houses become very much more narrow.

So what you've got is

very high ceilings, 10-11 feet,

with a very narrow frontage.

It's a straightforward

geometrical problem

because if you've got 11 foot

and only a very short space

to get into it,

the staircase has to be steep.

In middle-class homes, the stairs

that were most likely to be

cheaply constructed, to be

the steepest and the narrowest,

were those that led

to the servant quarters.

Upstairs/downstairs came

from the difference in staircases

from the decorated staircase

which was the main one

in the house which was there

as a show of wealth.

It was a...

It was a statement to say, "Look,

this is how much money I've got."

As you came through the front door,

there's these wonderful double

bullnose stairs, highly decorated

with spindles and volutes

and balustrades and goosenecks.

You had people spending

thousands and thousands

and thousands of pounds

on these staircases.

And then the downstairs staircase

was for the servants.

It was built out of the cheapest soft

wood that you could possibly buy.

You'd be lucky if there was

handrails and spindles.

Rises of nine, ten, 12 inches.

Safety really wasn't high

on the agenda.

Tragic really,

because by 1847, visionary builder

Peter Nicholson had calculated

how to build a safer staircase,

transforming the art

of stair-building into a science.

He came up with a mathematical

formula for working out

the rise and go of a staircase.

He worked out that

if you went up a certain height,

you could travel a certain distance

with great ease

and he developed

a formula around that.

Nicholson's formula considered how

someone could take a normal stride

yet still allow them to rise

six to eight inches with every step.

Until you get those factors right

then the stairs is always

going to be a dangerous place.

There is a science to stair building

but in the rush to throw up houses,

it was a science that was

often overlooked

in the late Victorian period.

I've come to Manchester

Metropolitan University

to see what modern science

can tell us

about the dangers

of the Victorian stairs.

I've been wired up to

a motion-capture device which will

track every step I take to find out

how my body adapts to the stairs.

Professor Costas Manganaris...

OK, I'm just going to clip you

into the harness.

..and Professor Neil Reeves are

experts in biomedical research

and are going to demonstrate

two staircases.

We'd like you to go

to the top of the staircase,

stand facing this way

and just walk down

at your own comfortable speed

as you would normally.

This first staircase has been set

to dimensions similar to

a main Victorian staircase,

following Nicholson's principles.

The going, or width, of each step

has been set to 11 inches

and the height, the rise,

to 12 and a half inches.

Well, apart from all the get-up,

it felt pretty easy

coming down those stairs.

I'd be happy running up and down

those, no problems at all.

Now they set the stairs

as they might have been

in the servants' quarters.

This definitely breaks

Nicholson's formula.

With the going narrower

and a steeper rise.

Can you walk down

as you would normally?

Predictably, this is not comfortable

at all.

In fact I'm really having

to slow down,

change the way I take

each step and hold the handrail.

Imagine if I had to carry

a tray or the linen,

and couldn't see where my foot fell

because of a long skirt.

If we measure your foot,

this is about 26 centimetres,

which is much larger than the 17.5

centimetres room you had.

I had to turn it sideways.

You had to turn your foot sideways.

Well, otherwise...

Otherwise, what will happen is

an important part of the foot

will come out of the edge

and then you would have an increased

likelihood of encountering a slip.

Yes, yes, and I have

fallen down the stairs before

so I was very conscious of

not wanting to do it. Absolutely.

From the data input,

the scientists reveal

that on the servants' staircase,

we are six times more likely to fall

than on the grand one.

It may seem obvious that a steeper

staircase would be more dangerous,

but there was another

hidden danger -

many Victorian homes were built

with non-uniform steps.

This video of a New York subway

stairs illustrates what happens when

one stair out of 16 is a fraction

of an inch higher than the others.

Professor Jake Pauls,

a specialist in stair safety,

studied the stairs

and worked out that this tiny change

has a dramatic impact on the misstep

and fall incidents that is not

equated to any other stair defect.

In other words,

you're more likely to fall

if the stair is not uniform

than for any other reason.

What is it about that video?

What does it tell us?

Well, I think what it tells us

is that people get used to

a very regular stair pattern

very quickly, so after a few steps.

And if, all of a sudden,

there's a step that's very different,

it poses a difficulty to people.

This is why it's more likely

for someone to have an accident

or slip on that irregular step.

If you had given me

two that were the bigger ones

and then a smaller one, I almost

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