Pushkin.

In the episode You're About to Hear, I mentioned the new podcast Business History, and I thought you might want to hear a bit more about it.

Business History is hosted by two podcasting legends, Robert Smith and Jacob Goldstein.

Robert and Jacob tell the stories behind famous companies and iconic products, and chart financial booms and bursting bubbles and as they say in Hollywood.

This new show comes from the producers of Cautionary Tales.

Listen to Business History wherever you get your podcasts, or search Business History podcast on YouTube to see it in video form.

Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England, sparsely populated and largely rural.

Few great moments of history have been made here.

Large towns are also the people tend to live in small villages, engaged in such bucolic activities as potato farming and pig husbandry.

It seems hard to believe that Lincolnshire is on anyone's radar.

The county is famed for something though, being flat, and that flatness has given Lincolnshire a geopolitical significance.

It's perfect for air bases.

In the early summer of nineteen seventy four, Lincolnshire is home to v Force of the RAF.

The giant Vulcan bombers screaming up this long runway a part of Britain's nuclear deterrented.

If a Soviet Union launches a surprise atomic strike, these Royal Air Force crews have just a few minutes warning to get into the air and hit back, devastating karl Markstadt, Minsk or Moscow in retaliation.

The Vulcan pilots would doubtless have much on their minds given the mission ahead, but few wasted time in thinking of their return home.

The quite reasonable assumption is that the Russians would pulverize Lincolnshire and its runways while they were away.

It's late on a Saturday afternoon and farmer Gordon Atkinson is working in a sugar beet field near the hamlet of brandy Wharf, but a distant noise prompts him to look up from his labors.

I heard this rumble and thought it's going to be a thunderstorm, he said, But that rolling boom was no act of God.

Its origins were man made.

An enormous explosion has just ripped across northern Lincolnshire, and if that wasn't obvious to Gordon Atkinson.

It was all too clear to his elderly mother.

She's been spending a quiet afternoon at home twenty miles near at the epicenter of the detonation.

Her house was now as shambles.

The blast ripped the front door off its hinges and sent it rocketing up the staircase to the floor above.

If she could see, Missus Atkinson might have despaired at the state of her lounge, littered as it was with shards of glass and tatters of curtaincloth.

But she couldn't see.

The blast wave had come whooshing down the chimney stack, filling the house with a blinding, choking veil of soot.

People ten, twenty, even thirty miles from the explosion stopped in their tracks to look in the direction of Missus Atkinson's village.

Flicksborough, teenager Leduena Beckers was watching the football on TV with her four brothers, rushing to look out the window.

The family joked about what the source of the noise might be.

But then we saw the mushroom cloud, dark and ominous in the sky, said Ladrena.

All laughter in the Beckers household stopped had World War IREE really begun.

I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to another cautionary tale.

You've probably never heard of polycaprolactum, even by its snappier monica nylon six.

But I'll bet there's some nylon six within arms reach of you right now.

It's used in all manner of items.

It makes the bristles of toothbrushes and the strings of tennis rackets.

You can find it inside almost every electrical gadget, and since nylon six is used to fashion medical implants, you might even have some inside you.

Nylon six is strong, hard and tough.

It won't conduct electricity and doesn't taint foods it comes into contact with.

It's useful stuff, and it would be hard to imagine our world without it.

Flying a plane, driving a car, or even getting dressed in the morning would be a very different proposition without nylon six.

Nylon six was an invention of Nazi Germany.

The polymer was used to make parachute canopies, tires for warplanes, and the toe ropes of gliders.

But nylon six production really boomed in the post war years, with factories around the world pumping out the stuff.

Depending on where you lived, it might be marketed as Perlon, Nilotron, ultramid, or Jurathan.

I won't bore you with the details of its manufacture, but this story centers around the production of caprolactum, from which nylon six is made.

By the nineteen seventies, nylon six was in huge demand.

The fibers were so ubiquitous that there was even a fashion for people to carpet their entire homes wall to wall with the stuff.

To meet this clamor, a joint venture was launched by the Dutch State Mines and the British National Coal Board.

There had been a modest factory at Flicksborough making fertilizer from the mucky waste from local steel foundries, but now under the name Nypro, Flicksburg was getting into the glamorous world of polymers.

The plant would be transformed at the cost of many millions of pounds, and the workforce would swell into the hundreds.

Local newspapers soon filled up with recruitment ads for chemists, engineers, shorthand typists and canteen staff.

It was expected the complex would use as much power as a city of half a million people, all to produce seventy thousand tons of cap prolactum per year.

It would be Britain's biggest, indeed its only caprolactum plant.

Nypro was essentially putting all its eggs in one basket, and to many this reasoning seemed sound.

Building a single mega factory offered considerable economies of scale.

It would simplify transport and logistics, and allow Nipro to strike bulk buying deals for energy and raw materials.

So in sleepy rural Lincolnshire, on a curve of the Broad River trend, the Nypro works quickly took shape.

Gargantuan cranes hoisted gleaming steel processing tanks into place.

Chimneys and cooling towers went up, as did tall spindleaf flarestacks.

After dark, their flames, along with countless strings of lights, picked out the silhouette of the plant against the night sky.

Dennis Lawrence was one of Nipro's employees.

He loved the job.

He told his family the plant was just so modern, so clean, but all was not well at nightprob The target was to produce seventy thousand tonnes of caprolactum per year, but by nineteen seventy four.

Two years into the expansion, only forty seven thousand tons were likely to leave the factory gate.

For Nipro to turn a profit, they needed to make more of the stuff, and quickly.

The heart of the factory was a series of six identical steel reactor vessels.

These cylindrical tanks were installed in a line and connected by pipework.

The first, sixteen foot tall vessel was the highest in this chain.

The second vessel was placed fourteen inches lower, and so on.

Thus gravity would aid the flow of chemicals from one down to the next, and the chemical inside was liquid cyclo hexaane, which was pressurized, heated, and then blasted with compressed air as it traveled through the vessels.

The boss is at Nipro had high hopes for this part of the plant, but so far its operation was proving troublesome.

Nypro worker Dennis Lawrence confided to his wife that there had been leaks.

She didn't like the sound of that and worried for his safety.

Cyclohexaye is, after all, an incredibly flammable liquid, and when it escape since the open air, it tends to vaporize, forming a deadly combustible cloud.

Dennis, a part time firefighter, had told his wife that if the cyclohexane tanks ever went up, there'd be no hope for anyone on the site.

The management was alive to these risks.

Arriving workers were frisked for cigarettes and lighters, and the technicians who worked closest to the chemicals wore special shoes to reduce the risk of creating a spark.

That said, it was feared that even someone shifting too quickly in a fashionable nylon shirt could produce enough static charge to ignite an explosion.

Naturally, when a six foot long crack was discovered in the fifth of the six steel reactor vessels in March nineteen seventy four, the whole array was immediately closed down and allowed to cool off.

It was swiftly decided that vessel five should be removed, but that a costly shutdown could be avoided if the remaining vessels were pressed back into service connected with a temporary pipe where reactor five should have been.

This pipe would simply have to be designed and built on site.

No one in authority thought this close or hazardous decision.

They were said to regard it as no more than a routine plumbing job, but unfortunately we don't always know what we don't know.

A mechanical engineer might have told them that fabricating such a pipe was fraught with difficulties.

But amongst all the newspaper ads for cooks and clerks and draftsmen to join the workforce at Flicksborough, there was also a situation's vacant notice for a mechanical engineer, and that position had yet to be filled.

Cautionary tales were returned shortly.

The plans for the temporary pipe were supposedly sketched out in chalk on the floor of the factory's workshop, and if that sounds worryingly cavalier, you haven't heard the half of it.

The existing pipes carrying pressurized and scalding hot liquid cyclohexane from vessel to vessel measured twenty eight inches across, but no spare piping of that size could be found laying around the niproplant.

Instead of delaying the repair to order some a handy length of twenty inch pipe was substituted, roughly half the capacity of the original.

Pushing the cyclohexane from a broad pipe into a thinner one creates issues, but some rough calculations reassured the nprobosses that the smaller pipe could take the strain.

But the original twenty eight inch pipes ran straight, and by removing React of five, the NPRO workers now needed its smaller replace to accommodate the considerable drop in height from vessel four to vessel six, So they gave the new pipe a dog leg by welding two joints along its length, So now the pipe ran straight, drop down, ran straight, a bit more, drop down again, and then joined React to vessel six.

If they'd consulted the relevant safety standards, the men putting these kinks in the pipe would have known that their welds weren't up to the task.

For when you force a moving liquid to change direction, it puts extra strain on the points where your pipe bends.

This is all bad, but we're still not finished.

The forces acting on the pipe's two bends would also cause a so called turning moment, causing the metalwork to shift and twist in worrying ways.

To counteract these forces, they need to secure the whole structure firmly.

But as they hoisted their replacement pipe into place, the NYPRO workers merely perched it on some flimsy scaffolding poles.

Each original pipe was fitted with a bellows joint, essentially a rubber section that could expand and move to help absorb some of the forces acting on the rigid metalwork.

No one thought to ask the manufacturer of these rubber joints if they were strong enough to absorb the forces at play in this jerry rigged pipework.

If the replacement pipe began to buck and squirm, would these bellows joints just split apart.

A mechanical engineer would immediately have spotted all these dangers, but there wasn't one on site.

A chemical engineer around the npro operation.

He was no doubt highly trained in his own field, but such was narrow back then and wouldn't have included even the most basic mechanical concepts.

It was an electrical engineer who oversaw the repair crew, and he wasn't educated to degree level.

And the workmen themselves can hardly have been expected to spot the flaws in the design lots more, they were working at breakneck speed to complete the job.

The crack in Vessel five had been spotted on March the twenty seventh nineteen seventy four.

Once it had been lifted clear, the design, building and installation of the replacement pipe had taken just thirty hours.

There followed a rather half hearted attempt to test the dog legged assembly.

Gas rather than liquid, was pushed into the pipe that pressures approximating the normal operation of the system.

The normal operation mine no thought was given to an abnormal spike in pressure.

The system, of course had a safety valve to release pressure if such a spike became too much and threatened to burst the vessels and original pipes, but the replacement pipe was never tested to see if it would fail before this safety valve kicked in.

So on April fools Day nineteen seventy four, just five days after the vessel cracked, Flicksburgh was back at work oxidizing highly flammable cyclohexaane.

The management and board of Nipro were no doubt delighted by this performance.

The outward flow of capro lactum could resume, and so too could the inward flow of money.

Whenever you centralize production, when you put all your eggs in one basket, as Nipro had, you can really considerable gains.

But this always comes with Risk.

In a recent episode of the new podcast Business History, host Jacob Goldstein looked at the success of the American airline Southwest.

Southwest began as a budget regional carrier out of Texas, but it's no Frill's approach soon made it a major national airline, able to turn a profit each and every year for forty seven years.

That's an unrivaled feat in the aviation world.

One of the secrets to this success was standardization.

While other airlines might have mixed fleets of Boeing seven for seven jumbo jets or Airbus A three eighties or smaller short haul aircraft, Southwest has only really ever operated the Boeing seven three seven.

This made life much easier and cheaper for Southwest.

Pilot's, flight attendants and ground crew only had to learn the foibles of a single aircraft type.

Thus training time was reduced.

When staff went circle planes broke down, substitutions were easier and flights could continue.

But in twenty eighteen came the first of two deadly crashes involving a Boeing seven three seven Max.

Neither flight was operated by Southwest, but the authorities grounded all aircraft of that Type seven three seven maxes made up a third of Southwest's fleet, a crippling blow to its operation that lost it nearly a billion dollars in revenue.

So what you gain in savings can be lost in resilience.

At Flicksborough, night Pro had discovered the risks of building one mega factory to make caprolactum.

A single crack to react to vessel had halted production, disappointing important customers and further delaying the day when the troubled plant would turn a profit.

It's little wander then that a solution was hurriedly decided upon and a temporary fix, the bodge together dog leg pipe installed.

In fact, Nipro was so desperate to get back to work that the cause of the crack in Vessel five wasn't investigated, nor were the other vessels checked for the signs of any impending failure.

So throughout April and May of nineteen seventy four, cyclohexane was driven through the oxidizing system without mishap.

The temporary fix the bent pipe knocked up on site became permanent.

The temporary fix was folly, but not seeking to upgrade it compounded that error.

Look around your home, or car or workplace.

You might well see a fixture or appliance somewhere that broke and was quickly repaired in a less an ideal way, Perhaps afraid electrical cable was wrapped up with adhesive tape, or an important office IT system that fell over and was brought back online with a temporary workaround for every complex problem, wrote the essayist h L.

Mencan there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.

Mencan had a point.

So called band aid solutions are tempting, but in the long run can prove to be more damaging than the problems they were meant to solve.

Take the example of patching up an IT system.

You may get everyone in the office back up on their computers, but a rushed line of code, like a rotten brick in a wall, can make the whole edifice less sturdy, and a cheap fix often proves expensive in the longer term.

Bodgies and band aids make it harder to maintain an IT network, then weeks or months down the line, a catastrophic outage destroys your business.

It's the same at home.

If you're ever tempted to wrap her freyed electric cable with some tape.

Don't here's the advice of the London Fire Brigade.

Always replace faulty leads.

Is it worth risking your loved ones and your home for the sake of a few pounds.

That's exactly the kind of advice Lodwena Becker's father, who might have endorsed teenage Lduena and her four brothers remember, were settling down at home on June the first, nineteen seventy four to watch football on TV.

Their dad, Hohob, was setting off for work at the night Prop pile, but paused because he noticed something amiss.

Loduena doesn't recall what it was, a rattley door handle perhaps, or a loose paving stone, but she does remember her dad stopping immediately to put it right.

He was always meticulous with keeping things in good working order, she said.

The fix completed, who began his slightly delayed drive to Flicksborough and his plant for Who Becker's was Nightpro's general manager and the man who had green licked that dog legged pipe.

Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.

Dennis Lawrence was also on the afternoon shift at Nypro that sunny June Saturday.

It was his term to supply refreshments, so he'd stopped to pick up some tea and sugar.

Dennis enjoyed the camaraderie of working in the plant's control room.

At forty eight, he was older than the other lads, who called him Granddad, but he was a popular member of the team.

Indeed, he was so avuncular that he'd played Santa Claus at the staff party the previous Christmas.

Dennis was in a particularly good mood that Summer's day.

He'd weathered some financial difficulties, but had just made the final repayment on his bankruptcy debts.

He was in the clear at last.

The control room was the brains of the plant, and it never stopped making Capra.

Lactam was a twenty four to seven business, but on a Saturday there was no need for Nipro's draftsmen, clerks and cooks.

Instead of three hundred workers year, around seventy people were working across the site.

There were men in workshops, storehouses and laboratories dotted all over the estate.

Thomas Crooks, the security guard, was on duty.

A tanker truck driver had parked up at the factory too.

A day or so earlier, several leaks had been detected in the five remaining reactor vessels.

These leaks came and went, seeming to fix themselves.

No inspection was made since the special spark proved tools needed to work so close to the flammable cyclohexane had been locked away and couldn't be accessed.

In the control room, Dennis Lawrence was making the tea while his colleagues were diligently monitoring their dials and meters keeping up the constant balancing act to maintain the right pressure and right temperature to convert cyclohexane into caprolactum.

But things were much more relaxed in a workshop to the north.

Instrument technician John Irvin hadn't had much to do since clocking on at three five PM was fast approaching, so he thought he'd start on his packed lunch of sandwiches before anyone could call to report a faulty gauge.

It made scant progress when a noise boomed across the plant, followed by a whoosh like the approach of an express train.

Through the workshop window, John could see men running into the control room while others left it with equal urgency.

The technician put down his sandwich and made for the door to join those fleeing.

The first boom John had heard was the temporary pipe between reactive vessels four and six breaking open.

The woosh that was hots cyclohexane escape into the air and forming a vast flammable cloud drifting across the chemical works.

It was only a matter of time before this cloud encountered a spark or flame.

You see the explosion before you hear it, said John, A tsunami of flame coming towards me at great speed.

That's when I screamed, and then there was a tremendous gust of wind, and I remember being lifted off the ground and then something hitting me on the head.

When John regained consciousness, the workshop had collapsed on him.

The ceiling was down, the walls punched in, windows shattered, and the contents of the room flung around.

Fortunately, some sturdy workbenches had withstood the blade and sheltered the young technician from being crushed.

They also offered him an escape route, a tunnel to exit the building.

Thus began a hellish journey.

Every one of John's fingers had been broken, but on hands and lacerated knees, he crossed the glass and sharp rubble.

I crawled, and I was screaming, but I couldn't even hear my own screams.

The blast had deafened John.

That wasn't his most urgent problem, though, because the explosion also left him blinded.

He scrabbled madly from room to room, eventually finding himself outside.

He knew the layout of the plant, but now stumbled sightless to an unfamiliar landscape, repeatedly crashing into unexpected obstacles.

Disoriented John most feared plunging into an acid storage pit he knew was somewhere along his route.

Miraculously, he negotiated the catwalk over the acid pool without tottering in.

At that point, I got hopelessly lost, said John.

I stood up a few times and waved my hands around and shouted for help.

No one answered his card.

Blinded and surrounded by raging fires, a badly wounded technician slumped down in the rubble, defeated.

I just thought I was going to die.

John then felt a hand on his shoulder.

On seeing the explosion, two off duty night pro workers had rushed the plant, using a broken down door as a stretcher.

He carried John to safety.

A volunteer ambulance crew had also hurried to the disaster, and without anesthetic, began to stitch up the worst of the many wounds across John's face.

They managed to clean me up as best they could, said John, who assumed it was just the blood from these cuts that was obscuring his vision.

His injuries would, however, prove to be life changing.

Twenty two year old John Irvin would never see again.

Five miles away, the family of Dennis Lawrence gazed dumbfounded towards the explosion.

Had nypro really gone up?

People were phoning up to say, that's exactly what had happened.

Dennis's daughter, I was sure he'd be fine, but missus Lawrence had no illusions.

Your dad isn't coming back, she said, calmly, as silence descended on the family home.

She was right, and Dennis wasn't the only fatality.

Thomas Crooks, the security guard, was dead.

The visiting tanker driver dead too.

Across the plant, twenty eight people had perished.

The toll was heaviest in the control room, where Dennis had worked.

There were eighteen people in there, none of them survived and lost with them were all the records of what happened leading up to the blast.

It was estimated that the cyclo hexayne ignited with the force of around their tons of TNT, easily the biggest peacetime explosion in British history.

It's a miracle, then, that no one beyond the factory gates was killed.

When farmer Gordon Atkinson arrived home close to the plant, he found his mother shaken, but thankfully alive.

It was like a ghost village, he said.

There were curtains blowing out of broken windows, roofs lifted and set back wrong, fire raged on at night, pro for ten full days, and specialist coal mine rescue teams were drafted in to recover the buried dead.

The factory workers helped in this grim task, but were sent away for a cup of tea whenever the corpse of a colleague was uncovered.

Nobody got counseling in those days, said one micro employee.

You just had to grin and bear it and get on, and that's what we did.

Questions immediately arose about the wisdom of Nypro building a cap prolactum megaplant, stockpiling such vast quantities of chemicals on a single site undoubtedly resulted in the huge scale of the explosion.

The shockwaves of the disaster spread far beyond rural Lincolnshire.

With its sole caprolactum maker reduced to rubble, the already shaky UK economy tottered too.

Vast sums were wiped off the stock market as chemical companies, textile weavers and carpet makers faced a draft of raw materials.

There was even a run on nylon stockings in the shops as consumers panic boart ahead of looming shortages and expected price rises.

Hoobe Becker's, the general manager at Nipro, had missed the explosion by a few minutes thanks to a decision to stop for a little bit of DIY before leaving home.

He now set about defending the safety culture at his plant, likening it to the stringent procedures observed at say, a nuclear power plant.

When a court of inquiry was convened, Hoobe gave detailed evidence and supplied copious notes about the decision to replace reactor Vessel five with a temporary pipe.

He argued that all necessary protocols had been followed.

The inquiry, though hampered by the total destruction of data from the control room concluded that there had been a litany of errors in the design, construction and installation of that pipe.

The integrity of a well designed and constructed plant was thereby destroyed.

Redit's report.

In other words, a cheap band aid solution had devastated a multi million pound operation, claiming many lives in the process.

No one faced prosecution for the blast.

Health and safety legislation was still being debated in Britain's Parliament, but the night pro blast informed the formulation of these new laws.

Henceforth, no one could install such a flimsy pipe and still claim they'd followed the rules.

The Flicksburgh plant was rebuilt, this time with greater attention to safety and survivability.

The control room, for example, would be placed further from danger and built to withstand any future explosion.

The new boss, same as the old boss, Hooper Becker's, stayed on as the general manager, and his family remained in the area.

His teenage daughter, Luduena, enrolled in the local college.

Walking into the common room, she noticed another student in a T shirt.

One of his arms was extremely scarred.

She remembers from his hand right up to the sleeve.

Ludweena asked the boy what had happened.

His reply was simple and direct.

Your dad's factory did that.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly.

It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise bend A.

Dafh Haffrey edited the scripts.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.

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