In 1931 New Zealand Farmers' Trousers Began Exploding. On Clotheslines. By The Fire. While Being Worn. The Government's Own Weedkiller Was The Culprit.
In 1931, on a farm in New Zealand, a pair of trousers drying in front of the fire exploded. Then it happened on another farm. Then another. For the next few years, New Zealand, as a nation, had an exploding trousers problem.
To understand how a country's pants became ordnance, you need a weed. Ragwort: yellow, cheerful, and poisonous to livestock, and by 1930 it was swallowing the pastures of a nation that lived on butter and wool. Farmers were desperate, so the Department of Agriculture recommended a cheap miracle: a herbicide called sodium chlorate. It worked beautifully on the ragwort. Farmers sprayed it by the tankload, and being farmers with knapsack sprayers, they soaked their own clothes to the skin, day after day. What nobody thought to mention was the chemistry. Sodium chlorate does not rinse away as cloth dries. It crystallises into the fibre itself. And cotton or wool loaded with dry chlorate is no longer clothing. It is a contact explosive that happens to be shaped like trousers.
Then the reports began. Farmer Richard Buckley's trousers, drying in front of the hearth, went off with a bang like a shotgun, and he had to hurl the blazing remains out of the house. Other pairs detonated on clotheslines in the summer sun. Some went up from nothing but friction, halfway through an ordinary working day, and men were burned, some badly. The lucky ones were the ones not wearing their trousers at the time. Washing did not help. Waiting did not help. Across the dairy districts, farmers eyed their own drying laundry the way soldiers eye an unexploded shell, and the newspapers ran stories that read like war reporting from a laundry.
In time the chemistry was understood, the handling changed, and the great trouser crisis faded into a rural legend with the rare distinction of being entirely true. It is documented in the papers of the day, and in a solemn medical journal retrospective titled, genuinely, Beware, exploding trousers. In 2005, the historian who wrote the definitive study of the affair was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize, and television experimenters have since soaked, dried, and cheerfully detonated period-correct trousers on camera. New Zealand did beat the ragwort in the end. The ragwort, for its part, never blew anyone's pants off.
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