Very Rare Antique 1910s - 1920s Carbon Bisulphide Label, Causes You To Go Insane! ✨

Size: 2 3/4" x 1 1/4" ~ Crisp navy print on cream card, with a touch of foxing along the blank back — this one was never pasted to a bottle.

⚗️ Carbon Bisulphide, Highly Inflammable

Carbon bisulphide — carbon disulfide today — was a real working chemical, not a curiosity, and a dispensing chemist like C. Charnley kept it in stock for real reasons. It was a solvent for rubber vulcanizing and for viscose rayon manufacture, and in smaller retail quantities it went out over the counter as a fumigant, killing weevils in stored grain. It also has an extremely low ignition point, which is exactly why "Highly Inflammable" sits right under the chemical's name in the label's own bold caps.

That pairing — the chemical's name, the fire warning, and the seller's own name standing in for an address — was the standard way of labeling it for anyone moving it by road: Northern Ireland's Petroleum (Bisulphide of Carbon) Order of 1930 spells out exactly that wording. C. Charnley's label follows the same shape, with the Grove Pharmacy standing in for the sender.

🧠 What the Label Doesn't Say

What the label leaves out is the part that makes the title of this listing more than a joke. Carbon bisulphide vapor could take a person's mind along with their skin and lungs, and doctors had been saying so for decades before this label was printed. The French Academy of Medicine heard about it from Auguste Delpech as early as 1856. By 1902, the physician Thomas Oliver was touring india-rubber works in Manchester, a short ride up the line from Wilmslow, and found workers who had become, in his own words, "the victims of acute insanity" — some driven to throw themselves from the upper floors, the open windows of the vulcanizing rooms barred with iron to stop them. Decades later, Alice Hamilton surveyed Pennsylvania's viscose rayon mills and turned up the same pattern: severe neurological and psychiatric symptoms in the workers with the heaviest, longest exposure. None of that made it onto a small chemist's label. Just the name, and a warning to keep it from a flame.

🏪 C. Charnley's Grove Pharmacy, Wilmslow

C. Charnley ran the Grove Pharmacy in Wilmslow, Cheshire, long enough to leave a paper trail: the shop's own prescription register and recipe books, kept from 1866 to 1940 — medicine, household preparations, even veterinary recipes — now sit in London's Wellcome Collection. This particular label never got near a bottle. Flip it over and the back is clean: no glue, no residue, just a little foxing at the edges — stock that sat in a drawer rather than going out the door.

It wasn't the shop's only line, either. I also carry Charnley's Blood Mixture and Gee's Linctus labels from the same Grove Pharmacy — gentle tonics and a seriously hazardous industrial chemical, sold out of the same shop, on the same shelves. That combination doesn't survive intact very often: I've turned up exactly one other example of this printing anywhere, and that one is stuck to a bottle rather than loose like this.