What plant was ultimately responsible for trousers exploding in New Zealand in 1931?
You could look at “The significance of Mr Richard Buckley’s exploding trousers; reflections on an aspect of technological change in New Zealand dairy farming between the world wars” by James Watson in Agricultural History Vol 78, p346 (2004) – or more easily look at New Scientist 11th December 2004, p48. I do like the title of the first one, though…. [Dec 11 04 4:18 PM] Baloo55th writes: They’d just started to use sodium chlorate as a weedkiller on the ragwort (which is hard to get rid of) and hadn’t yet found out that when you get it together with wool or cotton, and a bit of heat, perhaps, you get rather interesting results…
