Thief Catcher

I was reading a Computerworld Shark Bait entry, "What is this orange stuff on my fingers" about a computer operator back in the day who was caught looking at confidential salary information from the data center director's desk. The person narrating the story was not the person who found the key, but someone who worked on the same shift who found that his hands were turning color, first orange and then purple.

"Ah-ha" I thought, "gentian violet." (You can take a chemist out of the lab, but you can't take the lab out of the chemist.) I thought I'd post a comment, but, being the wussy type, I wanted to check my facts first.

I remember a memoir by a pharmacist who suggested to a newspaper seller that he could catch the person who was stealing newspapers by sprinkling gentian violet on the to paper, but to only handout papers from below the top. A few days later the pharmacist forgetting his suggestion, paid for a paper, took one from the top, and, because his hands became stained, was accused of being the thief.

In the story the pharmacist referred to gentian violet (hexamethyl pararosaniline chloride) as "thief catcher". Searching on the web was an adventure. I couldn't find a good reference for "thief catcher", but eventually found several links to "Thief Detection Powder". From the descriptions, it appears that some of the powders are gentian violet. (There were others which did not produce a visible skin stain, but are related to a dye I used many years ago: fluorescein. The dye became visible under UV light.)

But, the web is a marvelous thing: in searching for "thief catcher" I stumbled across a description of the notorious housebreaker Jack Sheppard, whose jail breaking exploits could have served as inspiration for Mission Impossible or MacGyver exploits, and Jonathan Wild the King of Thieves or the First Criminal Underworld Boss.

It was in one of the links concerning "thief catcher" that I came across "Chartism", as in "Chartism came to permeate English political and cultural discourse during this period", the period being the 1830-1850, and knew that "chartism" would eventually be a term I'd be using to confuse a debate and add to the general impression that I know "all kinds of weird stuff".

It's what happens when wanders the web. Gotta love the web.