50 YEARS AGO

“Personal Factors in Accident Proneness.” Dr. J. A. Smiley... has made full use of his position as medical adviser to an aircraft-manufacturing company to study the accident histories of 6,450 men, and to examine in detail 87 men classified as accident prone... His thesis may briefly be stated — accident-prone individuals are usually emotionally disturbed, with associated hypothalamic misfunction which, it is tentatively suggested, produces minor imbalance of adrenalin and acetylcholine with concomitant behaviour disturbance... [they] also show ‘anxiety’ sweating in interview, albumin in the urine specimens collected during medical examination, a seven-fold increase in peptic ulcer incidence and a more than four-fold increase in incidence of other medical symptoms... The problem remains, however, whether these men may adequately be described as accident prone... the main conclusion to be drawn is that proneness to report minor injury can be added to the list of other known clinical signs of emotional disturbance.

From Nature 25 June 1955.

100 YEARS AGO

Prof. E. Wiedemann, of Erlangen, sends us a short statement of observations described in his work on electric discharges... He agrees with Mr. Jervis-Smith as to the action of ozone, and advises persons who work for a long while with influence machines not to have these machines situated in the working room. “Ozone belongs to the poisonous gases, and is the more dangerous, since the injurious effects are not manifest at the time; on the contrary, breathing the gas produces at first a feeling of exhilaration, but afterwards it has a depressing effect on the nervous system... During my observations I have suffered somewhat severely from nervous disturbance (hyperesthesia of the feet) due to breathing ozone. These lasted for one or two years. Moreover, I always experience discomfort after performing experiments in my lectures on Tesla discharges.”

From Nature 22 June 1905.