The magazine/website Popular Science, also known as PopSci, recently went through its archives and featured some of its articles from the 1920s and 1930s about Prohibition. The Prohibition was a time when alcohol was banned in the USA. The Prohibition Started on January 19th, 1919 and ended on Dec. 5, 1933. During the Prohibition, people started illegally brewing their own alcoholic beverages (those brewed drinks were called moonshine), and also smuggling them from other countries. One thing that the magazine reported a few times about was how over the course of the entire prohibition, thousands of people had died while drinking bad moonshine that was poisoned with a bit of wood alcohol. I looked up wood alcohol and it turns out that wood alcohol is just a name for methanol, which can be used as an antifreeze and a fuel. Over time the bootleggers got good at producing safe-to-drink moonshine. According to Pop Sci, the Prohibition produced a new breed of chemists: the bootleggers. Whether or not they were really chemists is more debatable. Surprisingly, even real scientists got in on the alcohol action: around 1920, a scientist name John C. Olsen created solid alcohols called jellied cocktails, but I read in a Google Books version of the February 1920 Pop Sci that he didn't want to share the formula for the jellied cocktail formula or sell his jellied cocktails. The reason these were legal is that the prohibition law, (the 8th amendment) only covered liquids.
I found all of these stories interesting, because they show how desperately Americans wanted alcohol, and the crazy things they would invent or risk in order to get it. The prohibition was finally cancelled for a number of reasons, one of them being increased violence because of the smuggling, but I think that it was an interesting period in history.
Sources:
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-09/archive-gallery-secret-science-behind-prohibition
http://bit.ly/dsxsMs
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