[cheerful bright music]
- Do you remember back when lawn care was warfare?
[lawnmower rumbling]
- 8 to 10 seconds for those whirring blades to stop
is a huge opportunity for disaster to strike.
- Do you know that there was a time when household DIY
could make you D-I-E?
- By the time you figure out there's a problem,
the fire is already raging within your walls.
- Or when your house fan said, "I dare you."
- They move a lot more air,
but they also take a lot more fingers.
People just accept this devil's bargain.
- These are the things we used to do,
for fun, for money,
or maybe out of boredom,
that we'll never see again.
Were they dangerous? Certainly.
Deadly? Occasionally.
But boy, wasn't it exciting?
[dramatic music]
[pensive music]
A big part of the American dream is owning your own home.
And for millions of families after World War II,
that meant a place in the suburbs
filled with the latest in home furnishings.
By the 1960s, nothing said modern comfort
quite like a brand new invention that was a little wild
and a lot of wet.
- When you look at the United States in the 1960s
versus the 1950s, there are some real changes in pop culture
that are obvious.
One place this shows up
is in how people decorate their homes.
- '50s furniture has structured edges, clean lines.
It's sophisticated, but very conservative.
- So by the '60s, informality is the thing.
Chairs get replaced by cushions
and then by the end of the decade,
everything is replaced with like a beanbag
that has no structure.
- [Natalia] In around 1967,
a student designer named Charlie Hall has an idea.
What if he can make something
with even less structure than a floor cushion?
- Charlie figures water would work best
for a big, flat surface.
Then it comes to him, how about a big, flat mattress?
- [Jason] It's an eight by eight vinyl mattress
and he dubs it the waterbed.
- [Hakeem] By 1971, Hall has a patent and his waterbeds
are in department stores around the country.
- [Negin] There is like a nationwide craze.
They have a really fun marketing campaign.
They have a poster that says ,
"Two things are better in a waterbed- one of them is sleep."
- [Henry] America's love affair with the waterbed
continues well into the '80s.
Eventually, one in every five beds sold is a waterbed.
- [Natalia] The market is crowded.
All these sellers are desperate to stand out,
so they release these over-the-top ad campaigns
where they're crowing about their low, low, low prices.
- Come and get your free money at Country Boy Waterbed!
- [Henry] At its height, there are over 1,200 companies
pumping up a $2 billion industry,
but competition drowns the market with cheap knockoffs.
- A bed filled with water is one place you definitely
don't wanna cut corners.
- [Jason] You could puncture it with a piece of jewelry.
Your dog or cat could jump on the bed
and if one of those claws goes through that thing,
all of a sudden, now you've got a flood.
It's all the dangers of water delivered in your mattress.
- A waterbed weighs nearly one ton.
That's like having a small car in your bedroom.
- [Henry] Rumors spread about heavy waterbeds
crashing through ceilings.
Now some of that might be urban legend,
but waterbeds do hide real dangers.
- There is a freak accident in 1976 in Ventura, California
where a woman is sleeping on her waterbed.
So this rogue wave gets created inside her waterbed which,
as you can imagine, sort of pops her out of the bed
and then the mattress sort of follows her
and it plops right out on top of her.
- By 1983, damage from waterbeds becomes such a problem
that 60% of California landlords ban them.
- [Henry] And surprisingly, the biggest risk from waterbeds
has nothing to do with water.
- So you had to heat the waterbed
if you didn't want the bed to be very, very cold.
So it used a pretty traditional heating coil of that era.
- Like many heating devices of this era,
these heaters lack safety devices
and are prone to causing electrical fires.
And you'd think that 200 gallons of water
would douse the danger,
but because water conducts electricity,
it can actually make an electrical fire worse.
- [Negin] So you see these stories throughout the '70s
and early '80s of mattresses bursting into flames
and then setting the entire bedroom on fire.
- [Austin] By the late 1980s,
the old heating coils are replaced
with newer, safer insulated pads that automatically shut off
when they hit a certain temperature.
- [Henry] What ultimately turns the tide on waterbeds
isn't fires or crushing the occasional owner.
It's just a shift in taste.
- Though you can find waterbeds today,
even though they're safer,
many apartment buildings don't allow them.
So in essence, the waterbed party is over.
- For your average homeowner,
what could be more fearsome than the dreaded termite?
Well, back in the '50s and the '60s,
the solution was even more frightening.
- [Natalia] When World War II ends, America is rejoicing.
There are welcome home parades.
There are people making out in Times Square.
Most of all, you have all these ships filled with sailors
and soldiers who no one was sure were gonna make it home.
- The military is also bringing back
millions and millions of tons of surplus equipment,
all of which has been crated up and shipped from overseas.
- [Henry] But stowing away on the wooden crates
is something even more destructive than the weapons
and the hardware inside.
- We've gotten a hitchhiker ,
and that is the Formosan subterranean termite,
and they're dug into this wood.
They can come in groups of 10 million
coming straight into our ports and into our country.
- [Natalia] Very quickly before anyone knows what's going on,
these termites are getting everywhere.
- [Henry] As termites dig in,
American home builders are ringing the dinner bell.
- The 1950s is the high point of suburbanization.
Architects come up with the idea for concrete slab housing.
You just put down a concrete slab
and build the house right there.
- The problem is, that concrete is inevitably going to crack
and the termites can go through very teeny cracks
and they go straight into the wood of the house.
- [Henry] Quickly, the country
is in the thick of a termite infestation.
It eventually reaches a billion dollars a year in damage.
- [Lance] This is a super-powered termite.
It is very aggressive
and much more difficult to control
than any termites that we've ever had before.
So you start even seeing them in cartoons,
literally eating the wood in the walls very quickly.
[suspenseful music] [harp thuds dissonantly]
- [Henry] The cure everyone is screaming for
reveals itself by accident.
- [Announcer] Chlordane is available
in liquid or powder form.
- Chlordane is a surprise discovery
from a byproduct of synthetic rubber production
and it turns out, just by accident,
that this stuff is very deadly to termites.
- [Natalia] The promise is you can spray it.
You can dust it.
You can even paint it on surfaces
and termites will leave your house alone.
It's a miracle in a bottle and people run to it.
- [Austin] One ad shows a housewife
gleefully spraying it across her kitchen,
painting her furniture with it.
A pamphlet even recommends utilizing it on your clothing.
- [Henry] From the 1950s through the 1980s,
more than 30 million homes in America
are treated with chlordane.
The result, a dramatic drop in the termite population.
- [Natalia] It works, America wins.
The stuff is deadly on termites.
Problem is, it's really bad for humans too.
- [Lance] By the 1980s, people start to realize
there are symptoms: memory lapses, tremors, even seizures,
and they realize that something around their home
is making them sick.
- [Austin] After decades of telling people
that this stuff can be used everywhere,
painted on your house, worn on your clothes,
the government comes out and says,
"Oh, by the way, it's poisonous."
It just takes a little longer
for it to kill a person than it does a termite.
- [Henry] Chlordane, the miracle termite killer
is banned for good in 1988.
- Today, manufacturers are prohibited from producing
new chlordane for anti-termite use around a house.
If someone knowingly uses chlordane around a home,
there are criminal penalties in place that range from
a fine of $25,000 to a year of imprisonment.
- [Natalia] Decades later, the descendants of those
stowaway termites are still eating our homes.
Let's just hope that the next miracle cure
doesn't take us out too.
- Termites: temporary. Bad decisions: forever.
- Starting in the '50s,
disposable plates, cups, and utensils
made cleaning up after a party easier than ever.
But what do you do with all that trash?
For many families, the answer was simple:
Set it on fire.
- [Hakeem] These days, trash pickup is a complicated process.
First, you have to separate your recyclables
from your non-recyclable.
And then your recyclables,
they get broken down by category.
And don't even talk to me about yard waste.
- [Henry] It wasn't always like this.
Imagine a magical time in America
when we were all free to send our own trash
to oblivion right in our own backyard.
- Back when I was a kid, we burnt our trash.
There was two ways you went about it.
Well, you just put in a pile and you burned it there.
After we set the woods on fire,
we moved to the trash barrel.
- If you were a little bit more fancy,
you could spring for an actual incinerator.
It's a store-bought, steel trash oven
with a chimney to vent the smoke safely away.
- [Natalia] Because the chimney cuts down on embers,
it's meant to be safer,
and because it brings air in, the fire burns really hot,
making sure that whatever you put in there burns to dust.
- [Henry] By the early '50s in Los Angeles alone,
there are 1.5 million homes with backyard chimneys
where mom, dad, or junior
can start their very own trash fire.
- Picture the scene, you're walking down this tidy,
suburban, white picket-fence neighborhood in post-war America
and everyone smiles and waves.
And behind every house,
a billowing black cloud of plastic fire smoke.
- [Hakeem] Because the incinerator builds up
such incredible heat,
you gotta be really careful when you open it
because the extra oxygen
can make that thing spit out fire like a dragon.
[fire crackling]
- [Austin] In 1957 alone,
there are over 2,000 property fires
in the greater Los Angeles area.
- There is a science to fire that most people don't realize.
Plastic burns hotter than wood and more toxic.
And that's where you start getting like,
"I just burned down a block."
- [Henry] With fears around backyard fire spreading,
the home appliance industry introduces
what they promise to be a cleaner,
safer alternative to the backyard chimney.
- What is it?
- Well, it's a simple gas disposer
that takes care of all the waste.
- Why go outside and risk burning down your neighborhood
when you can just burn your trash
right inside your own house?
- [Austin] The kitchen incinerator
does not eliminate any of the old dangers.
It brings them into your house
where they create a whole new breed of dangers.
- When you burn things indoors, you're gonna create fumes
and some of them are colorless
and odorless, like carbon monoxide,
and you could kill your entire family with this.
- [Lance] And of course, we're burning a lot of new things
that are coming out in the consumer market
that might be causing cancer,
that might be causing asthma.
All sorts of stuff that today would be regulated,
wasn't regulated then.
- [Henry] By 1965, enough people have been burned
or sickened by rampant trash fires
that the government steps in.
- There's the Solid Waste Disposal Act
that prohibits the burning of household garbage
and it also funds household local trash pickup.
- [Hakeem] Taking out the trash used to be fun.
It was almost a science project,
and now it's just a chore with a bunch of rules.
- Now back in the '70s,
foam insulation was a miracle product.
You sprayed it in, you sealed it up,
and you never had to think about it again,
or so you thought.
- In the 1970s, the winters are really cold
and there are several massive blizzards on the East Coast
that lock people inside for days on end.
- At the same time that these brutal winters are hitting,
there's an energy crisis
that is skyrocketing the price of oil.
- [Bryant] People are desperate to keep their homes warm
and to keep their bills lower.
- [Kavitha] For decades, people would insulate their homes
using straw or crumpled newspaper.
You're basically making your house into a tinder box.
So fires rage throughout.
- In the '50s, you have Rockwool
and fiberglass, this pink fiberglass,
and they're really helpful,
but they're kind of like materials that still leave gaps.
- [Henry] Just in time
for the heating crisis of the late 1970s,
a new option arrives, one that seems to check all the boxes:
Spray foam insulation.
- Spray foam insulation is kind of like
shaving cream for your walls.
You spray it in, it's got these resins
and it's got these hardeners.
So it goes in, it expands,
so it fills all the nooks and crannies,
plugs all the little holes,
and then it hardens, and it doesn't cost very much.
[foam hissing]
- [Negin] And this stuff keeps your house cool in the summer,
warm in the winter, and people save a lot of money.
- [Henry] From the mid '70s to the early '80s,
the number of American houses using spray foam
increases 20 fold.
- Most of the applications for spray foam insulation,
these are all retrofits.
They spray it and people go to bed in that house that night.
- [Henry] As families drift to sleep,
they discover their new insulation
doesn't quite pass the sniff test.
- There's this odor that's wafting through the whole house
and it seems to be coming from inside the walls.
- [Kavitha] What the people are smelling is formaldehyde gas,
and you might remember formaldehyde
as the fluid that they use
to preserve frogs in science class.
- Formaldehyde makes really good
embalming fluid for corpses,
not so great for living people.
Turns out when you breathe it in,
it attacks your pulmonary and nervous system.
- [Adam] And people start having health problems,
and it's all linked back to the foam.
- [Henry] By 1982,
over 2,000 people lodge complaints
about formaldehyde poisoning.
Meanwhile, a study reveals
that long-term exposure can cause cancer.
- By the early 1980s,
the government bans this formaldehyde insulation.
But what about the homes with this product in it?
- [Kavitha] This insulation is everywhere in these homes
and it's stuck to whatever it touches.
So removing it basically means
ripping your entire house apart and scrubbing every beam.
Some families actually just abandoned
their formaldehyde-filled homes and those homes sit empty
and sell for way under market value.
- [Negin] Oh my God, there's so many horrible reasons
that you would have to flee your home,
but like, trying to reduce your heating bill
shouldn't be one of them.
- Warm, cozy, and just a little deadly.
- Remember back when staying cool
meant one of those old-fashioned metal fans
aimed right at your face?
No plastic safety cage. No safety switch.
Just a steady breeze coming from those rotating blades.
What could possibly go wrong?
- Some version of a fan is probably as old as heat.
We know at least in ancient civilizations,
the Romans are using them, the Greeks are using them,
the Egyptians are using them.
We're using them all the way through the Middle Ages.
When the Industrial Revolution comes along,
it allows you to make a lot of things move mechanically.
- [Jason] In 1882, Schuyler Skaats Wheeler
attaches a motor to a two-bladed propeller
and creates the world's first electric fan.
- [Henry] It's not only functional,
it's a sharp design in every sense of the word.
- These early fans are really pretty.
They're very simple.
But they are, essentially, a base and a motor
and then these brass blades
that have sort of a loose covering on the outside
that's trying to kind of show you, this is the blade space,
don't put anything in here.
But you could definitely put stuff in there, for sure.
- They're just like danger blades
whirling around at high speeds.
So as you can imagine, some problems arise.
- [Jason] The priority is in getting fans to move more air
to increase sales, so the blades get bigger
and the motors get more powerful.
- [Natalia] New airplane propeller technology
teaches fan engineers that if they want more airflow,
they need lighter and sharper blades.
So they start making them out of aircraft aluminum
and really sharpening that leading edge.
- [Negin] So the blades now spin at like 55 miles an hour.
They cut like a knife.
It's like sitting in a room full of naked blenders.
- [Jason] They move a lot more air,
but they also take a lot more fingers,
and yet, people don't seem to care because they work.
People just accept this devil's bargain.
- [Henry] The baby boom brings a new generation of injuries
and problems, because for a kid,
an electric fan isn't just an appliance; it's a toy.
- Fans, they sing a siren song to toddlers.
They just draw them in.
- The gaps in the cover of the fan were so big,
a kid could put their whole hand through it.
- [Henry] In the '50s and '60s,
emergency rooms treat a steady stream of kids
who get too friendly with an electric fan.
- It's not until 1978,
like 100 years after the fan is invented,
that OSHA mandates that floor and desk fans,
their fan guards cannot have more than a half inch opening,
so little fingers can't get inside.
- Every time I would get near those old fans
at my grandparents' houses, I was always like,
"Yes, what are we gonna slice in this insane thing?"
Just looking at them, you're like, those look sharp.
And it sort of had a cage around it, but it didn't really.
- Remember when you were a kid,
did you ever come home all sweaty
and stick your head in the freezer,
and it felt so good you wished you could climb right inside?
Bad idea.
- [Kavitha] In post-war America, GIs and their families
are moving out to the suburbs and away from cities.
So instead of going to the local grocer every day,
they need to stockpile their groceries and freeze them.
- [Austin] People are freezing so much
that they're gonna need an extra freezer
and the refrigeration industry has your solution.
It's called the chest freezer.
- [Adam] The chest freezer was essentially this big,
well, arctic coffin,
and because the capacity was so massive,
moms could do one big shop, load up the freezer
with loads of meat and loads of dinners.
- [Henry] Between 1949 and 1960,
the number of homes with a separate freezer
soars from 1 in 20, to 1 in 5.
- [Austin] Unlike today, when you firmly
have to push your freezer to close it,
these heavy metal doors would just
slam down if you let them shut.
There's even a spring-loaded, self-latching mechanism
that makes sure that no cold air escapes.
- [Henry] The problem is sometimes leftovers
aren't the only thing that ends up inside these freezers.
- Most of kids' playtime is imagination based.
So the chest freezer looks like the coolest thing ever.
It's got a latch and you could hide for hide and seek.
- [Austin] These super heavy steel doors do their job
a little too well.
Once they're shut, nothing can get out.
- [Kavitha] People start finding that they'll go to their garage
to get something out of this freezer and they'll open it
and to their horror, their child is inside.
- [Austin] Maybe an adult here is giggling or yelling
and makes it there in time to open the freezer.
But sometimes, they're too late and the unthinkable happens.
- [Henry] Trapping incidents routinely make headlines
in local papers, and in 1956, the government
cracks down with the Refrigerator Safety Act.
- [Bryant] The focus of the law is the door.
And the door now will have a seal with a magnet,
which means it can't lock from the inside.
So if you play hide and seek and climb inside,
you can get out now.
- [Austin] The law changes how the new freezers are built,
but it doesn't compel people to give up the old ones.
They work just fine.
- [Negin] And eventually, these freezers start breaking down.
Families get rid of them.
The only problem is, now they're outside
in an alley or something
and kids are still playing in these empty freezers.
- [Henry] Into the 1960s, '70s and '80s,
hundreds of trapping incidents continue to make headlines
and they involve all types of freezers and refrigerators.
- In 1986, awareness of freezer entrapment
finally peaks with a very special
and dramatic episode of "Punky Brewster".
In the landmark episode,
Punky's friend Cherie climbs inside of a freezer
and gets trapped.
Punky finds her, she performs CPR, and saves her life.
[Cherie coughing] - Ah, she's breathing.
- [Kavitha] It seems a little corny,
but this messaging actually does work
and kids do start to get the point.
- [Austin] New laws come out
that require you to remove the door
from your fridge and freezer before you dispose of it.
Obviously, no door?
It's gonna take the fun out of hiding in it.
- [Negin] Growing up in the '80s,
you're just fed this message that abandoned freezers
are really deadly.
You'd see them on the side of the road and you'd, ugh,
you know, they scared.
Nowadays, they get to just look at a freezer
and think, "Oh, ice cream."
- Great for frozen pizza
and that 10-pound roast you got on sale,
not great for hide and seek.
- Back in the '50s,
behind those beautiful white picket fences,
suburban lawns were the picture of order.
But the tools we used to achieve that perfection
were utter chaos.
- [Jason] In the early 20th century,
most people mowed their lawns with a non-powered push mower.
Mowing the lawn was grueling. It took forever.
So these push mowers are just slow.
- [Henry] As American backyards get bigger,
demand grows for better lawn care tools.
- [Kavitha] Leonard Goodall is a mechanic in Kansas.
He's actually been on a lifelong mission
to create outdoor tools that are better mechanically.
- [Jason] In the 1930s, Goodall invents a new design:
a lawnmower with a gas-powered engine, and it's a revelation.
After the Depression and World War II
and suburbia exploding,
this gets adopted into the mainstream in a big, big way.
- When you start this thing up, it sounds like a muscle car.
You pull the cord, this mower roars to life.
- [Henry] Goodall's invention kicks off a lawn care arms race.
By 1960, over 4 million power mowers are sold.
- This thing's got a 20 inch blade
that's driven by a 3,600 RPM engine
that spins the blade at 215 miles per hour.
- For comparison, that blade is spinning faster
than the prop on a P-51 Mustang fighter plane.
It's a beast.
- [Henry] But grass is not the only thing
that these power mowers are chewing up.
- [Jason] Unlike modern mowers,
these mowers didn't have any safety features.
But they were new and people didn't really appreciate
their destructive power.
They were giving them to kids to do their chores with.
- These newfangled lawnmowers with these engines
are shooting out rocks at incredibly high speeds.
I mean, that blade hits that rock at 700 pounds of force
and fires it off at a velocity
similar to that like a bullet.
- [Nicole] So on these early mowers,
there's no protections on these things.
If you hit a rock, where's it gonna go?
Oh, it's coming out fast and it's probably gonna hit you.
- [Austin] These early mower blades are made of rigid steel
that if they hit something, will break
and fly in any direction.
- [Jason] The word for that big hunk of hot metal
that's flying out there is shrapnel.
It can break a car window, it can land in your house
or it can embed itself in your leg.
- Projectiles are only one problem.
Because the shroud around the blades has these gaps,
these early mowers are notorious
for ripping through sneakers and eating toes.
- [Henry] A bigger danger arises
when people try to stop using them.
- [Kavitha] Today's mowers have an automatic kill switch
that shut the blades down when you let go,
but Goodall's mower will just keep going
until you actively shut it down.
And even then, the blades keep spinning for like 10 seconds.
- [Hakeem] 8 to 10 seconds?
Waiting 8 to 10 seconds
for those whirring blades to stop
is a huge opportunity for disaster to strike.
People hit a stick or a rock, so they turn off the engine
and flip it over to see what's wrong,
forgetting that the blades are still spinning
and they can take off a finger.
- [Kavitha] By the late '70s,
the power mower is sending 65,000 people a year
to the ER with accidents.
- In 1979, the Consumer Product Safety Commission steps in.
It institutes a number of reforms.
One of these is the dead-man switch
and that means as soon as you let go, the motor cuts off.
In addition, they add shields on the side
to block rocks from flying all over the place,
and they make the blades stronger so they don't shatter.
- [Hakeem] The feeling of pulling that cord
and hearing it turn over and start up,
ah, pure magic nostalgia.
Yeah, they were dangerous,
but they taught us a valuable lesson.
Sometimes the machines we love can kill us,
so act accordingly.
[lawnmower rumbling]
- Remember when kids were allowed to run free
and would drink straight from the garden hose?
Back then, what we didn't know couldn't hurt us,
or could it?
- [Austin] In the days before video games and cell phones,
do you know what kids did to entertain themselves?
They went outside.
- [Jason] You're outside playing.
It's a hot summer day.
You would just refresh yourself with the garden hose.
- [Brian] Drinking from the hose is a core memory.
For people of my generation, it was it, man.
You were punished for going inside your house,
and that would be chores or some other nonsense.
- [Dan] If you went inside,
there was always the chance your parents would tell you,
you weren't allowed to play with your friends anymore.
So drinking out of a hose was a way to get a drink
without having to risk going inside
and having mom tell you to stop.
- [Jason] You can still taste it.
You crank the spigot, you lift it up to your lips,
and you got that first sip and it was off.
It didn't taste right, but you know what?
You drank it anyway and you went right back to playing.
- [Henry] Turns out that strange taste isn't the water,
it's your hose.
- [Martin] In late 1941,
the Japanese military pushes toward the Dutch East Indies
and the United States is cut off,
almost entirely, from rubber.
- [Dan] They had to come up with a synthetic version.
This was called the Emergency Rubber Project.
- [Martin] What this project produces
is a synthetic alternative to rubber.
The only problem is that
what makes this material malleable is lead.
- [Dan] After the war, this rubber substitute,
which is called PVC, becomes this universal material
that's used in all kinds of things, including garden hoses.
And when one of these synthetic hoses
sits out in the sun for days or weeks
or whole summers on end, they break down,
and those chemicals that are in the PVC
leach into the water that's inside the hose.
- It's more than just a disgusting flavor.
This hose water contains up to
100 times the safe level of lead.
You're actually ingesting the stuff
that goes into literal bullets.
- [Rebecca] Lead is a neurotoxin.
In other words, it destroys neurons
and you actually can have not just cognitive defect,
you can lose your mind, effectively,
because of chronic exposure to lead in small amounts.
- I thought it was the copper end of the hose,
the taste of the copper coming in my mouth.
As it turns out, it was the taste of poison.
- [Henry] After a series of damning Consumer Reports,
hose manufacturers finally upgrade their formula.
- [Austin] It's kind of too little, too late.
By the early 2000s, consumers are,
one, wary of their municipal water
and, two, more likely to buy bottled water.
On top of that,
kids are more likely to be playing video games
or chatting with their friends indoors.
Drinking from the hose is sort of over and it's sort of sad.
- [Brian] I wouldn't go back in time
and not drink from the hose.
I think I gained more
from being outside drinking from the hose
than I lost with whatever health problems I'm gonna develop.
- Today, we worry about toxins,
but back then, we just grabbed the hose, took a long sip,
and went right back to being kids.
- Back in the '50s and '60s,
homeowners were delighted by the innovative new appliances
that were suddenly available everywhere.
Our houses with their old electrical wiring,
they were less enthusiastic,
and they had ways of letting us know it.
- [Austin] In September 1882, Thomas Edison pulls off
what appears to be a magic trick.
He illuminates a cluster of homes
in Manhattan with electricity.
The dream of an electrically illuminated home
is just around the corner.
- [Jason] For centuries homes, have been lit by an open flame,
candle, a lamp, so house fires are rampant.
So electric light is going to put a stop to that.
- [Lance] By 1920, still only about
one in three houses in America has electricity.
And between 1920 and 1950,
that will go from about 35% to about 90%.
- [Jason] These early electrical systems
are called knob and tube wiring,
and they're really only designed to take on
the load of houses' electrical lights.
But once electricity takes off,
inventors see the opportunity
of a whole new era of electrical appliances.
- ♪ What a thrill to be so free ♪
♪ When you live electrically
- [Austin] Suddenly everything's electrified.
There's electric irons. There's refrigerators.
There's stoves. There's washing machines.
Everything is electrified.
- [Jason] These new appliances,
they draw far more power than the lights
these systems were designed fo,
and it creates widespread problems.
- [Reporter] Home becomes more dangerous than the highway.
Although it has fewer fatal accidents,
it's the scene of four million more injuries
than result from traffic.
- [Lance] Most people are still living in houses
that were built in the 1920s or before
and so whatever wiring's in there,
it's meant not to hold a lot of power.
It's just gonna power a few light bulbs.
[can opener whirring]
- [Natalia] Older homes can't handle
all these newfangled gadgets
because they're not wired for that much wattage.
I mean, just one toaster oven needs like 1,300 watts
and the average house can only handle 1,440 or so total.
- [Austin] Some of these homes only had four circuits
with a very small fuse box to keep it all safe.
As people add appliances,
they're overloading these circuits
and the fuses are going to pop.
- [Henry] With the house in the dark,
it is usually DIY dad to the rescue.
- This is still an era
where people really did their own repairs on things.
So they started doing their own upgrades
to their electrical systems,
whether they understood them or not.
- [Martin] What American dads quickly figure out
is that you can defeat that safeguard
by backing the fuse out, placing a copper penny,
then you thread the fuse down on top of the penny.
Then that circuit's never gonna pop,
but you have also removed the one guardrail
that's there to prevent the house from burning down.
- In some ways, this is worse than the age of oil lamps
and candles because the source of danger,
the wires, are hidden behind the walls.
Today, modern electrical wiring is sheathed in insulation,
but back then, it's just a copper wire covered in fabric
and they're gonna get hot.
So by the time you figure out there's a problem,
the fire is already raging within your walls.
- [Henry] By 1959, there is an electrical fire
every seven minutes in America.
- [Lance] In the years that follow,
the problem just keeps getting worse
because people are plugging more and more
into more and more outdated homes and electrical systems.
That is a hazard. That is a terror.
- [Martin] That was my childhood in the '70s.
We'd have a regular electrical grid
inside the house that, during the holiday season,
we would completely overload.
We might die on Christmas,
but at least let's get through it.
- [Lance] Finally, authorities start
to realize something's wrong.
In 1974, they pass the Fire Safety and Prevention Act,
and at least for new construction, houses are built
so that they can handle much more power.
Instead of coming through a fuse box,
you're gonna have a breaker box
so you can control a lot more power.
- [Austin] Home insurance companies now ask
for inspections, and modern dads figure
it's probably better off
to pay a couple bucks to an electrician
rather than burn the house down on Christmas Eve.
But we sort of lost something in a comforting era of,
"Oh, Dad'll go fix it."
- Today, we flip a switch without a second thought.
Gone are the days when every new appliance was an experiment,
and not every house passed that test.
- In the post-war years,
families discovered the potential
of a whole new room in the house, the basement.
It stopped being a dark storage space
where the furnace lived.
It became a place for ping pong, board games,
the suburban rec room.
But beneath the old sofa and shag carpet,
something lethal was lurking.
- [Jason] Before the 1960s, most basements were unfinished.
Basements were just where you stored gardening equipment,
sometimes canned produce that you would make yourself.
- But by the 1960s, times are changing.
The baby boom is in full swing
and families need more space.
- [Jason] They realize, okay, maybe that old cellar,
that old basement, we can repurpose that.
Now enter, the rec room.
- [Negin] Everyone who had a basement rec room
knew that that's where the actual fun is.
That's where you let loose.
That's where you get a little dirty.
No one cares about what that looks like, so it's fun.
- We had a basement kind of rec room vibe when I was a kid
and I always liked it.
It's where I would go and I'd watch TV and lay on the floor.
My parents had this old kind of shag carpeting down there
that was really period correct.
It's funny because you're 10 feet away from everybody else.
You're in the basement,
but it feels like a totally different spot.
- [Henry] But by the 1980s,
families discover that the most fun room in the house
hides an invisible threat,
one that no one ever thought to look for.
- [Martin] It's 1984.
Stanley Watras, who lives in Boyerstown, Pennsylvania,
is reporting for work at the Limerick Nuclear Power Plant.
But as he reports to the nuclear power plant,
he sets off the sensors that detect radiation.
[alarm blaring] [Geiger counter ticking]
- [Rutledge] It's never been set off
by a person coming in before,
which means he's radioactive.
- [Martin] They begin tracing his steps
and all of the arrows point back to his home.
The levels of radiation in Stanley's basement
are 675 times higher than the safe threshold.
An equivalent of a chest x-ray every 20 seconds.
[Geiger counter clicking]
- [Rutledge] So there's poor Stanley,
who's basically, just glowing at this point
like he's been bathing at Chernobyl.
But then they start to realize like,
oh, this isn't just a Stanley problem.
- [Henry] The source of the radiation in the Watras home?
it's something natural that's been hiding,
under their house for millennia
and it's not just Stanley's home that is contaminated.
- [Hakeem] Radon gas is naturally occurring.
It's emitted from the ground
and it's a byproduct of uranium decay.
- [Austin] So usually the radon just escapes
into the atmosphere where it's diluted harmlessly.
Now that what they find is the radon is seeping
from the uranium through the bedrock
into your basement where it accumulates.
It can't escape and it is irradiating
where you and your family play Twister.
- [Lance] This is truly the atomic age.
The lava lamp is not the only thing
glowing in your rec room.
- [Hakeem] Now, with this incident
with Stanley and his family,
America learns that average American households
have to worry about this.
- [Henry] When the Watras incident hits the news,
it causes a radon panic.
- EPA investigations show that one in 15 homes
has dangerous levels of radon, but it occurs randomly.
So the only way you can know
if your basement rec room is trying to kill you,
is to get the air tested.
- [Negin] So you could be sitting in your rec room
watching a movie about nuclear annihilation,
and then an ad comes on that's like,
"You might have radon in your basement."
It's terrifying.
- [Rebecca] After years of research, we found out
that the second most common cause
of lung cancer is actually radon exposure.
- [Henry] The level of exposure that the Watras family has,
it's equivalent to smoking
more than 100 packs of cigarettes per day.
- [Austin] Congress institutes the Indoor Radon Abatement Act,
which incentivizes homeowners to seal those cracks
and, essentially, radon-proof their basements.
- [Negin] So it was that easy.
Seal your basement and get rid of the radiation
coming up from your shag carpet.
In the end, these radon remediation companies
got really rich and the rest of us
got rec rooms that weren't radioactive.
I don't think American rec rooms
ever really came back from that.
The salad days of rec rooms are over.
[TV clicks]
- Thinking back on the dangers
that lurked around our houses,
from the unassuming garden hose,
to the toxic bug treatments,
to freezers that could trap us inside,
sometimes peril came with the territory.
But no matter what the problem
throughout our hazardous history,
there was no place like home.
[dramatic music]