Match-Making in Britain from 1827 to 1910: The Dangers of White Phosphorus in Lucifer Match Production
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout the nineteenth century the British match-making industry used white phosphorus in the production of lucifer matches, despite the knowledge taht the chemical could cause a deadly disease known as phosphorus necrosis. Until the 1890s, due to cover-ups made by match-making companies, the British government was unaware of the scale of phosphorus necrosis cases and had been led to believe that the chemical was being used safely. However, even after journalists exposed the truth, the British government and match-making companies were still unwilling to ban white phosphorus because of the economic and social consequences of shutting down lucifer match production. It was not until a chemical alternative was found that both the match-making industry and the British government were prepared to ban the use of white phosphorus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".