Antique 1910s Carbon Bisulphide Label ☠️ Very Rare, Causes You To Go Insane!

Why Did Carbon Bisulphide Carry a Poison Label? ☠️ Antique 1910s Pharmacy Label

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 and the fire warning, followed by the seller's name and address — is one the law actually wrote down, just across the Irish Sea. Northern Ireland's Petroleum (Bisulphide of Carbon) Order of 1930 wanted the words "Bisulphide of Carbon, Highly Inflammable" on any vessel of the stuff going by road, together with the name and address of the sender. C. Charnley's little label carries all of it — the chemical and the warning up top, then the name and the address, The Grove Pharmacy, Wilmslow — and the shop even squeezed in its telephone number, 4X.

🧠 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. The same Grove Pharmacy put out labels for Charnley's Blood Mixture and Gee's Linctus — 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.

And the shop kept going for well over a century. Charles Charnley was advertising as a dispensing chemist on Grove Street, Wilmslow, by 1875, and in time the business became Charles Charnley Ltd, The Grove Pharmacy, 50 Grove Street, with a second shop at 20 London Road in Alderley Edge, still taking its turn on the local Sunday chemists' rota in the 1960s and 70s. The TELEPHONE 4X on this label dates it nicely: the shop's newspaper ads give the number as 4X from 1909 to 1913, and by 1914 it was 59, later 3059 and, by 1979, Wilmslow 523059. In July 1998 the Wilmslow paper called it the town's oldest chemist shop, dating back to Victorian times, and talked to 87-year-old Charles Charnley, whose ancestors, it said, founded the business in 1863. The firm's own later labels say Est. 1864, so the family and the printer were a year apart, which I think is pretty charming after 135 years.