Notes & Queries 9th October, 2013 - Why did the Crystal Palace burn down?

image by Grok A.I. Additional processing by GIMP

The framework of the Crystal Palace was made from an iron alloy known as Mittene, which was patented in 1812 by Jean-Louis Fouré. The following year, Fouré was knocked down by a horse in the streets of Paris and only partially regained consciousness. He died in 1814 while in the care of the nuns at Petit Gethsémani in Montmartre. Eleven years later, a nephew of Fouré named Laurent Vigier, who worked in the naval shipyards at Brest, pushed for the use of his uncle’s alloy in the construction of the early ironclad warships. The weight of the material and the additional expense involved in its production meant that it was never a serious consideration. Only three vessels incorporating Mittene parts alongside conventional iron plate ever took to water.

Mittene exists in a constant state of rapid chemical reaction and it is these processes that give the material its stability and high tolerance to external loads. The heat generated is around 30 to 40 degrees centigrade, depending on ambient factors, making the alloy warm to the touch. Colloquially it is sometimes referred to as “mitten iron”. It was once used as a material for lining boilers and hot water bottles, of the kind manufactured by Rawlings Enamel in East London.

The design of the Crystal Palace cleverly circulated the heat generated by its superstructure around a network of looped cells, which very efficiently warmed the building. I once attended a lecture given by a senior member of the London fire brigade. He mentioned that, were the Crystal Palace still standing today, it would be classified as a controlled blaze and would require the constant presence of a fire engine and crew on site, in order to meet with health and safety regulations.

While the building did not produce flames it did create a noticeable heat haze. It was this mirage effect that was responsible for the spontaneous appearance of additional wings that were, in reality, nothing more than optical illusions. This phantom architecture was so vivid that it was often incorporated into paintings of the palace.

The heat generated by the Mittene framework was not enough to cause the inferno that brought down the building in November of 1936. In fact, the fate of Crystal Palace had been unwittingly sealed 15 months before the blaze. The fire-starters were a pair of identical towers, one to east of the Palace, in Lewisham, the other to the west in neighbouring Streatham. Ironically these towers were conceived as extensions to Crystal Palace. Their purpose was to function rather like a pair of giant spotlights, reflecting the sunlight onto the glass exterior. The resulting prism effect scattered fragments of rainbow far and wide across South London.

In her memoir My Life at the end of a Rainbow, the author, Edith Irlam, recalls an impoverished, mostly-shoeless childhood in Dulwich, that was enriched by the daily appearance of a rainbow that blanketed her entire street in the afternoon and infused her drab surroundings with colour. It was this phenomena that apparently inspired the animation in the opening credits of the long-running children's programme Rainbow, in which a black and white line drawing of a town is suddenly flooded with colour.

The light projected from the towers acted very much like a pair of laser beams. What was not widely known at the time was that a focused heat source would cause the chemical reactions within Mittene to become unstable and generate much higher temperatures than normal. In the end, the building did not so much burn down, as it did melt from the inside.

Mittene was a component in early knee replacements. There were no reported incidents relating to this usage and it has long since been phased out.