Imagine you are hard at work as a dairy farmer.
Your fields have been overrun by a particularly nasty weed called ragwort.
The cows won’t eat it and the ragwort is destroying the fertile soil.
What do you do?
You use a highly effective chemical to kill the weeds of course!
You find the herbicide works great!
You have saved your fields and your cows are happy.
Suddenly, you feel a burning sensation in the seat of your pants.
Your favorite pair of work trousers begin to smolder and then boom!
They explode into flames.
You jump out of your pants as fast as you can and run around the field in a panic as
the bonfire that was your pants slowly tapers out.
This might seem like a funny story, but for the farmers of New Zealand in the 1930’s
exploding trousers were all too real.
Being a farmer was already difficult work without having to worry about your pants catching
on fire.
Unfortunately, this happened to many farmers at the time.
At first the stories seemed too unbelievable to be true, but as more and more accounts
of exploding pants were told across New Zealand the media started to catch on.
Everyone was seeking an explanation for why people’s pants were exploding into flames.
At the time of the exploding trousers epidemic dairy farming was the main agricultural activity
in the country.
The trouble started when a weed called ragwort was introduced to the island of New Zealand.
It had no natural grazers to keep it in check, and therefore, grew rapidly.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if the cows could eat the ragwort, but the weed is poisonous
to cattle.
The ragwort began taking over vast amounts of grazing lands and killed the grasses that
the cows would eat.
The land became unsuitable for dairy farms.
A solution needed to be found or thousands of farmers would be out of business, and tens
of thousands of people would be out of milk.
Enter sodium chlorate, a chemical that kills ragwort efficiently.
The herbicide was so good at killing ragwort that the government made it accessible to
all of the farmers across New Zealand.
The ragwort problem was solved!
Yet, around the same time farmers' pants started to explode.
Was it just a coincidence?
One of the first accounts of exploding pants came from a farmer named Richard Buckley.
As the story goes, Buckley had been out all day spraying sodium chlorate on his fields
to kill the ragwort.
He came home after a long day and just wanted to rest.
He took off his trousers and hung them by the fire to let them dry and air out.
He then plopped down in his favorite chair and relaxed.
Several minutes later without any warning his favorite pair of trousers exploded into
flames.
Buckley was thrown back in his chair and landed on the floor.
He sat up and shook off the stars he was seeing from the explosion.
When he looked to where his pants had been hung he began to panic.
His favorite work pants were on fire.
He managed to throw them out of the house before the whole building burnt to the ground
with him in it.
Once the exploding trousers were outside they continued to detonate and burn for several
minutes before finally going out.
Richard Buckley looked at his smoking pants with disbelief and horor.
What just happened?
He was lucky that he hadn’t been wearing the trousers when they exploded!
That would have been extremely uncomfortable.
Richard Buckley’s account spread like wildfire across the country and the newspapers picked
up the story.
It wasn’t long after Richard Buckley’s tale of exploding pants hit the newsstands
before more accounts came flooding in.
One unlucky farmer was riding his horse through his pastures when he felt the seat of his
trousers warming up.
The friction between the saddle and the pants caused enough heat to set the pants on fire.
They then began to explode as the farmer launched himself off the horse and tried to pull off
his pants.
He suffered serious burns and was out a good pair of pants.
But in the end he got off lucky.
A number of farmers died from exploding trousers that they could not get out of.
Imagine coming home from a hard day's work after the sun has already set.
You unlock your door and walk into the dark house.
Your farmhouse doesn’t have electricity because you live so far off the beaten path.
You walk over to the wooden table where you always leave your box of matches to light
the lamps.
You strike the match on the matchbox and nothing happens.
You strike it again and the flame combusts to life.
A small spark jumps off the matchbox and onto your pants.
This small spark would be harmless any other day, but today you had been working in the
fields using sodium chlorate to kill those pesky ragwort weeds.
BOOM!
The harmless spark comes into contact with you chemical soaked pants and they explode.
Your house catches on fire and you are consumed in a fiery blaze.
This scenario happened to more than one farmer in New Zealand at the time of the exploding
trousers epidemic.
Other farmers got off easier.
Their pants detonated on the washing line instead of on their body.
There were accounts of pants being put out to dry or placed too close to an open flame
and exploding.
No farmers were harmed during these cases, but the number of lost trousers kept increasing
until the government stepped in to deal with the dangerous chemicals and exploding pants.
The government finally figured out that the exploding trouser epidemic was being caused
by the sodium chlorate and fibers in pants.
Sodium chlorate reacts with organic fibers such as cotton and wool and makes a highly
volatile material.
Unfortunately, most pants were made out of cotton and wool, which led to most pants of
farmers using sodium chlorate to explode.
The way that the sodium chlorate solution was made was by mixing the powder with water.
Then the farmers would spray the mixture onto the ragwort.
The spray killed the weeds.
However, the downside to the process was that it could be messy.
The chemical mixture would inevitably be sprayed or blown onto the farmer’s clothes.
It would then dry and the tiny crystals left behind embedded themselves in the cotton fibers
of the pants.
The slightest spark, or an increase in temperature, would cause the sodium chlorate crystals and
cotton fibers to ignite and explode.
There were also accounts of the sodium chlorate and cotton mixture igniting during a hard
impact.
Eventually the government, scientists, and concerned farmers figured out the cause of
the exploding pants.
The use of sodium chlorate declined rapidly after the farmers found out what was going
on.
Dairy farmers switched to less volatile herbicides and made sure to be extremely careful while
handling sodium chlorate.
But one of the biggest changes was when New Zealand dairy farming switched to sheep.
Ragwort does not bother sheep and they were happy to eat the weed that was in the farmer’s
fields.
The sheep population exploded as more and more farmers switched from cattle to sheep.
Even today sheep outnumber people almost six to one in New Zealand.
Recently the MythBusters put the mixture of organic fibers and sodium chlorate to the
test.
Their mission was to see if the stories that came out of New Zealand in the 1930s were
authentic, or if it wasn’t as bad as the news and eyewitness accounts made it out to
be.
Their findings: it was bad.
The MythBusters concluded that sodium chlorate and a pair of trousers could spontaneously
combust when subjected to normal wear and tear.
There did not even need to be an initial spark or flame involved.
They tried creating exploding pants out of fertilizer, gun cotton solution, black powder,
and the herbicide sodium chlorate.
The end result was that only the sodium chlorate was reactive enough to explode.
They concluded that most of the time the exploding trousers would give the farmer burns, but
they would most likely survive the initial explosion of their pants.
Being in a pair of exploding trousers was never a fun experience.
Farmers were badly burned and some even died when their pants detonated from a hard impact
or were too close to a flame.
Ragwort was a huge problem for dairy farmers, but exploding trousers were so much worse.
If you ever find yourself with a bunch of weeds in your garden, maybe just pull them
out by hand instead of using a volatile herbicide.
The chances of your trousers exploding will be almost zero.
Has anything as crazy as pants exploding happened to you?
Let us know in the comments!
Maybe your story will end up on The Infographics Show!
While you think why don’t you check out our episode on What Are The Weirdest Unsolved
Internet Mysteries?
Or maybe try A Real Case Of Spontaneous Human Combustion instead!
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