Years ago, I remember working at a chemical company in college, making Benzoyl Peroxide (used to whiten bread and clear your skin of acne, among other things). We mixed sodium hydroxide (lye) with hydrogen peroxide in large tanks, then carefully dripped Benzyl Chloride into it (so much by weight over a specified time frame so the rate was ideal), and what was produced were crystals of Benzoyl Peroxide and salt water.
Comparing the product from the shifts when I ran the apparatus to that produced by other workers showed considerable differences in size and shape of the particles, all due to very tiny differences in the process by which we mixed the stuff together. The bulk mixing of lye and hydrogen peroxide wasn't anywhere near as critical as the addition of the Benzyl Chrloride. One gal who worked a shift following mine damn near blew up the plant when she really f***ed up. The temperate of the mixing vat was getting way too high.
Normally, when the water is allowed to filtered out in big cloth lined tubs, even when the particulate is still 60% water by weight, Benzoyl Peroxide can burst into flame upon contact with something as benign as a rusty nail. I've seen it happen. So the supervisor decided to flush the mis-reacting stuff down the plant's sewer system with plenty of water. Unfortunately, the mixture reacted with chemical residues already in the sewer system, and I was told the ground shook while manhole covers were popping off and splashing plastic-like fragments everywhere. We didn't see that gal around anymore.
Now suppose someone wants to test the hypothesis that I am describing an actual historical event.
While there was a time I could give the chemical combinations involved by weight in moles and explain the process with reference to electron valences, etc, as long as the actual manufacturing process is still known in the distant future in which my description is being read (in reality, the stuff will ultimately be banned in 100 years because it threatened a tree frog species in Brazil), the process could be verified as relatively accurate. But what if I read it in a book and never made the stuff for real (I really did, I swear)? So, accuracy of detail is no guarantee of actuality.
You could check newspaper accounts, but I do not think they would have publicized such an event voluntarily. Only a few years prior, one of their sheds for drying the Benzoyl Peroxide exploded when someone let the floor dry out and the wheel of a cart caused a few grains to detonate - did I mention that the stuff can be detonated by friction? - and in another case another mixing building had exploded - thank God for "blow-out" walls and a 3 foot thick concrete barrier with an equally thick glass window. But in a few hundred years all the copies of Elyria Ohio newspapers will have turned to dust, and the few samples of newspapers to have survived were of major events like the end of WW2 or the fall of Saigon. Lack of corroborating documentation turns out to prove nothing at all either.
Perhaps the truth of my statements can be contested on the basis that I have an ideological agenda (I lied) to promote some radical tree frog extinction prediction by excoriating the production of the substance I feel will lead to their ruin. How could anyone ever prove my intent? Even if I myself never mentioned it (being unaware at the time of what would happen in 100 years) my mention of the volatility of Benzoyl Peroxide could me construed by some as "proof" that the problem was known decades before the matter of possible extinction of the tree frog became a well known issue. Imagination consequently does not prove or disprove anything either. Pity.
So, it comes down to simply being my anecdotal account of a glitch that once happened in the production of a chemical in a certain place and time (summer 1977). It can be added to accounts of slaughterhouse workers slicing off fingers which get ground into sausage along with the sawdust that was sprinkled on the floor to soak up the blood. All such accounts can be used to advance the hypothesis that things can always be done better, from metering Benzyl Chloride into vats of sodium peroxide particles and water (why didn't we have some more accurate manner to meter the drip into the vat?) or the slaughtering and cutting up of animals, or to the safety of eating sausages made that way.
What does this prove? Nuttin'.
DCH