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the upper classes were surreptitiously fed salts of bromine to sedate them, calming down the natural vigour and exuberance of youth. It was delivered to them via their own personal salt shaker at the table, which was supposedly there as a mark of the children’s importance and status within the family—but was really there to keep them quiet, and in their place. This made it surprisingly easy to have ‘good’ children who complied (while lying around doped to the eyeballs) with the old adage: ‘Children should be seen, but not heard.’
    So, if salts of bromine (the bromides) do have any effect in reducing libido, it’s mainly as a minor side effect of their prime use as a sedative. In other words, after taking bromide, you would have a very sleepy person on your hands, not a fully alert person with a mysteriously absent libido.
    If there is a lack of libido in military recruits, it is more easily explained by their extreme exhaustion, anxiety, change of lifestyle and close contact with many other similarly exhausted colleagues.
    Spike Milligan, who served with the British Army in World War II, had his own take on the effects of bromide. In his book Rommel? Gunner Who? , Spike wrote: ‘I don’t think that bromide had any lasting effect, the only way to stop a British soldier feeling randy is to load bromide into a 300 lb shell and fire it at him from the waist down.’
Born to the Purple Reign
The phrase ‘born to the purple’ today means somebody born into a wealthy, powerful and noble family. But 2,500 years ago, it specifically referred to especially powerful members of the Imperial Family. In the 4th century BC, the Greek historian Theopompus of Chios wrote that ‘purple for dyes fetched its own weight in silver at Colophon…in Asia Minor’.
This purple story relies on our New Best Friend, bromine.
Back then, purple dye was incredibly rare. At the time, there was only one source, the predatory sea snail gastropod Murex brandaris. If you poke or disturb this 60-90 mm long gastropod, it will squirt a yellow mucous secretion from its hypobranchial gland. This secretion can be processed to yield the purple dye, which was called ‘Tyrian Purple’ because the snails were first harvested around the sea port Tyre, in what is now southern Lebanon. The dye could also be extracted by crushing the snail’s shell; however, you could do this only once. By annoying the snail you could get the dye as often as you liked. It took about 12,000 snails to produce 1.4 g of Tyrian Purple – which was only enough to dye the trim of a cloak.
The Phoenicians were the first to extract this dye. The production and use of this Tyrian Purple was very tightly controlled by the elite. It was also called ‘Imperial Dye’ or ‘Imperial Purple’, because its use was restricted to the nobility. The Greeks and the Romans prized the dye, partly because it did not fade. In his Natural History , Pliny the Elder wrote:‘…the Tyrian hue…is considered of the best quality when it has exactly the colour of clotted blood, and is of a blackish hue to the sight, but of a shining appearance when held up to the light; hence it is that we find Homer speaking of “purple blood”.’
In the 1700s and 1800s, various related sea snail species that produced a similar purple dye were discovered (in the eastern Pacific and the western Atlantic oceans).
The chemical name of this dye is 6,6’-dibromoindigo – and as you can tell from the ‘bromo’ in the name, it contains bromine. The chemical formula was discovered only as recently as 1909, by the chemist Paul Friedlander.
Flat Tyre
From 2,000 to 4,000 years ago, the Phoenicians used Tyre as a port. The city originally had two parts – one on an island about 800 m off the coast and another on the mainland.
Tyre and its inhabitants suffered mightily at the hands of Alexander the Great.
He laid siege to it for seven months, and finally took it in 332 AD. He completely wiped out the mainland city,