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When we heard of the death of Florence Green, the final surviving veteran of World War I, many people stopped and thought about the old people who are our living links to history. Robert Krulwich at NPR has a list of people and stories that span a lot of years, like the guy he met in 1973 who recalled living near Rasputin, the mad monk of Imperial Russia.
How could somebody talking to me in a diner on 7th Avenue have also talked to somebody that ancient? It just didn’t seem possible. Yet the old guy said, “Rasputin and my dad were friends. He used to come over for tea.”
I thought about it. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916. A 70-year-old man in 1973 would have been 13 when Rasputin was alive. It was not inconceivable that this guy had actually met Rasputin.
Other stories involve an eyewitness to the Lincoln assassination who appeared on television, Civil War widows who saw the 21st century, and the man who met both President John Quincy Adams and President John Kennedy. Link -via Breakfast Links
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Abraham Lincoln, our 16th U.S. president, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. He died the next day. Okay, what is this, a history class? Everybody knows that! But who shot Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth? Well, let’s find out by looking into the life of one of the strangest, little-known men who had a part in United States history. Let’s look at the strange life of Boston Corbett.
Thomas Corbett was born in England in 1832. He immigrated to Boston where he became a born-again Christian. He adopted the city’s name in honor of his conversion. But Corbett wasn’t your normal convert. His religious zeal knew no bounds.
Fearing temptation by prostitutes, he used a pair of scissor to castrate himself. After which, he casually attended a prayer meeting (he did receive medical attention afterwards). Corbett had been married earlier, but his wife died in childbirth.
During the Civil war, Corbett became a Cavalry sergeant. After the 1865 assassination of President Lincoln, his unit took part in the search for John Wilkes Booth. On April 26th, his unit surrounded the barn where Booth was hiding and set it on fire. Corbett saw Booth through a crack in the barn and fired a single shot, mortally wounding him.
“Providence guided my hand,” Corbett told his commanding officer. By an odd coincidence, Corbett’s bullet had struck Booth in the same spot Booth’s shot had hit president Lincoln. When told of this, Corbett said, “What a fearful God we serve.”
His reward money for killing Booth was $1,653.84, the exact same amount as every other man in his unit.
Corbett instantly became famous as “Lincoln’s Avenger.” He was flooded by requests for autographs and cheered when he walked the streets. But fame, once hot and heavy, gradually died down.
Boston Corbett started suffering from severe delusions. He imagined John Wilkes Booth’s men were stalking him and thought he was in grave danger. He fled to Kansas.
In 1887, he was given
a job as doorman to the Kansas House of Representatives. One day he showed up waving a gun, declaring the House adjourned. Corbett was declared insane and sent to an asylum. The following year he escaped, and no one ever heard of Boston Corbett again.
He is thought to have settled and spent the final part of his life in the forests of Hinckley, Minnesota. There is no conclusive proof of this, but the Great Hinckley Fire of September 1894 lists a “Thomas Corbett” on the list of the dead or missing.
Corbett was a hatter by trade. The mercury used to cure beaver pelts is thought to have contributed to his madness.
Visit guest author Eddie Deezen at his website.
Image Via allspice1 [Flickr]
If you didn’t already hear, Saturday was Thank A Mailman Day. While we missed the holiday itself, the fact is that mail carriers rarely get the respect and appreciation they deserve, which is why we’ve decided to go ahead and “deliver” you these fascinating facts about the USPS with the hope that you’ll find time in the upcoming week to say “thank you” to your mail carrier.
America got its first postal service in 1692 when King William gave Thomas Neale the power to erect “offices for the receiving and dispatching letters and pacquets,” essentially making him the US’s first Postmaster General.
The post office is so well-established in the states that the Constitution specifically grants congress the right “to establish post offices and post roads. In fact, Benjamin Franklin helped create the United States Post Office and served as the first Postmaster General.
After 1792 and up until the post office was divided from the government in 1971, the Postmaster General was a position on the Presidential cabinet and the person in the role served as the last person in the presidential line of succession –meaning that if the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the President pro tempore of the Senate, the Attorney General and every other cabinet member died in some sort of freakish accident, the leader of the post office would suddenly be in charge of the nation. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m certainly glad it never came to that.
The first adhesive stamps were issued in 1842 and postage rates became standardized in 1845. Congress officially authorized postage stamps in 1847 and the first two general issue stamps featured Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. The two men were the only images seen on stamps until 1856, when a Thomas Jefferson stamp was issued. Throughout this time, other payment methods were still accepted but in 1856, postage stamps became mandatory for mail sent through the Post Office.
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Is giving a cow whiskey the secret to ensuring it will live a long healthy life? It might sound silly, but if Bertha, the world’s longest-living cow had a few shots every year before staring in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, then who knows, maybe it helps. Interestingly, Bertha also holds the record for most calves birthed by one cow.
Read about more long-living animals over at Mental Floss.
After all the impressive additions they’ve given this world, it’s easy to think of famous inventors as brilliant creators who can simply do no wrong. But the reality is that no one is perfect and just because someone came up with a device that revolutionized the world around them doesn’t mean they didn’t have their share of failures as well. Here are some of the less famous (for good reason) inventions of some of the greatest inventors on Earth.
Edison had over 2000 patents by the time he died, so it’s not really much of a surprise that among his innovations on the phonograph, the light bulb, the kinetoscope and the telephone, he also had some utter failures as well.
Interestingly, one of his worst failures was actually a great idea that was just too far ahead of its time for the current technology. The Edison Doll was the inventor’s attempt to bring the joy of the phonograph to children. While talking dolls are common place these days and widely loved by little girls around the globe, the problems with the Edison Talking Doll were many. For one thing, phonographs of the time still had to be manually cranked at the appropriate speed in order to play correctly. That’s asking a lot for a child to do with her toy. Another problem was that even when cranked at the proper speed, the doll sounded simply terrible because voice recording still wasn’t very good at the time. In fact, Edison himself admitted “the voices of the little monsters were exceedingly unpleasant to hear.” As if those two issues weren’t bad enough, the mini phonograph inside the doll was incredibly fragile –meaning even if a little girl did manage to play the sound at the right speed and not run away from the shrieking abomination, she’d almost certainly destroy the wax record after only a short amount of play time.
Of course, all the new technology didn’t come cheap and the doll would cost between $10 and $25 depending on the outfit she came in. That’s the equivalent of between $240 and $600 these days, which is a whole lot to spend on a doll that terrifies your daughter and breaks without any effort. Of 2,500 made, only 500 were sold and most of the dolls were returned. With all of these failures, it’s no wonder the doll was only sold for a few short weeks in early 1890. Of course, the rarity of the failure has only increased the doll’s value over the last century. These days, an Edison doll in good condition can easily go for over $15,000 –and that’s without the original phonograph, since most of the excess inventory was sold off without a sound device inside.
The terrible toy doll wasn’t Edison’s only failure though. In fact, his best-known failure was in his push for concrete housing complete with concrete furniture, even concrete pianos. Edison believed these cheap creations would be a good way to solve the housing crisis and allow low-income families to enjoy the finer things in life without spending a fortune. In 1917, he and Charles Ingersoll offered 11 concrete homes (that’s them above) up for sale for only $1,200 –a third of the cost of an average home. Even so, they didn’t manage to sell a single one.
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Did you know that the Daleks originated from Doctor Who’s take on the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The second serial presented on Doctor Who, a six-part story called “The Daleks,” was set on a distant world where the nightmare of 1962 actually came to pass; two nations, the Thals and the Dals, had been locked in an arms race for some indeterminate period of time, finally developing nuclear weapons, resulting in a full nuclear exchange between the two and irradiating the planet Skaro. The radiation was so severe that by the time our heroes arrive, the forests are petrified and full of mummified animals. Those who survived the exchange are now drastically mutated. The Thals have mutated full-circle, becoming a handsome race devoted to peaceful coexistence. They believe the Dals are either extinct or so horribly mutated that they cannot emerge from their frozen city. Neither is completely true; the Dals have mutated horribly, to the point where they have no skeletons and are no longer capable of independent life, but they have developed tank-like travel machines, equipped with life support and a formidable weapons system. They have become the Daleks.
For more interesting Doctor Who plots that originated from real events, don’t miss this great article on Mental Floss.
While your teachers may have spread lies about planetary plates shifting and causing the continents to separate, Dan Meth is brave enough to share the truth with us. Pangaea occurred when the continents were cuddling with one another, but when tensions started to rise and the honeymoon phase ended, the happy group had no choice but to split up.
English is a fascinating language, particularly in that most of our words come from other languages. While most words come from some sort of root words that have travelled from ancient languages to more modern lexicons, some come from myths and stories of gods and goddesses, particularly from stories from ancient Greece. Here are a few fascinating English words with roots dating back to stories of Zeus and his fellow gods.
If you’re familiar with Greek myths, then you’ll immediately recognize the name of the Titan who was forced to hold up the heavens after angering the Olympians. Even if you didn’t recognize his name from myth though, you certainly recognized the modern use of the term for a group of maps. The connection is logical, but it wasn’t used in the cartography until the sixteenth century.
Image Via Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez [Wikipedia]
These words may not seem to have much in common definition-wise, but there is a good reason they start with the same root –they are both related to time. Chronology deals with the way events happened over the course of time and chronic describes something that takes place over a long period of time. Wondering where we got these words? Well, they are all related to Chronos, the god of time.
Image Via Jorbasa [Flickr]
This is one of the more famous Greek stories-turned-words. In the ancient tales, Echo was a mountain nymph who talks excessively with her gorgeous voice. Her voice was so lovely that she would often distract Zeus’ wife Hera with her long and entertaining stories while Zeus would sneak away and make love with the other mountain nymphs. When Hera found out about Echo’s role in her husband’s activities, she punished her by taking away her ability to speak, except in repetition of the words of others.
There are many differing ends to the story, but in all of them, Echo eventually dies in some heartbreaking manner, leaving her voice to haunt the earth, where it can still be heard to this day.
This adorable old picture would have made a great postcard. It is part of a collection of photographs of Dutch life published in the 1906 book De Aarde en haar volken (The Earth and Its People). See more at IllustratedPast.com. Link -via Everlasting Blort
1968 Saigon - FATESCAPES/Osudové krajiny
If that photo above looks strangely familiar, that's because, chances are, you actually have seen it before visual artist Pavel Maria Smejkal artfully erased the people in Eddie Adam's General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon.
James Estrin wrote this interesting post for The New York Times's photography blog Lens:
“Fatescapes” examines both the role and limitations of the photographic image as a historical document. “I remove the central motifs from historical documentary photographs,” Mr. Smejkal wrote in an e-mail. “I use images that have become our cultural heritage, that constitute memory of nations, serve as symbols or tools of propaganda and exemplify a specific approach to photography.” [...]
Using a simple Photoshop tool, Mr. Smejkal has reshaped these images and challenged us to confront the relationship of photographer, image and history in a manner that is profoundly unsettling. Viewing “Fatescapes” encourages you to wonder if it even matters whether Mr. Adams’s general was misrepresented or if Mr. Capa’s photo was not what it purported to be.
Who says Photoshopping ain't art? Link | Artist's gallery at Photo Art Centrum
Previously on Neatorama: 13 Photographs That Changed The World
Alexander Graham Bell and his Volta Laboratory Associates began research into recording sound in the early 1880s. They tried a variety of recording mediums, such as glass, wax, rubber, and metal. The experimental materials were eventually donated to the Smithsonian Institution, but they were not played back for fear of damaging the original material. But new technology is able to detect the recorded sound without scratching the cylinders and discs.
The recordings in the museum’s collection are in fragile condition due to their age and experimental nature. Until now, the technology to listen to the recordings without damaging the discs and cylinders was not available. The noninvasive optical technique used in this project to scan and recover sounds was first studied by Berkeley Lab in 2002–2004 and installed at the Library of Congress in 2006 and 2009. The process creates a high-resolution digital map of the disc or cylinder. This map is then processed to remove evidence of wear or damage (e.g., scratches and skips). Finally, software calculates the motion of a stylus moving through the disc or cylinder’s grooves, reproducing the audio content and producing a standard digital sound file.
The new preservation laboratory at the Library of Congress has hundreds of early recordings, including 200 from Volta Laboratory, to work on, and four of them are digitized for you to listen to at the Berkeley Lab website. Link -via reddit
If you’re a regular Neatorama reader, than you probably already know that Egyptian mummies were regularly burned as firewood in the past, but you might not be aware of some of the other tragedies befalling historical artifacts featured in this great Cracked article. If you couldn’t tell by the image, you might not want to read it right after eating lunch.
Science is a field based largely on theory and experimentation, which is why you have to be pretty darn certain you are right if you’re willing to test your ideas on yourself. For example, in the picture above:
In 1929 in the basement of the Eberswaled Hospital in Germany, surgical resident Werner Forssmann inserted a ureteral catheter tube into his elbow, feeding it through a vein up to his heart. He used a mirror as his assistant, since he had restrained his nurse to the operating table. He then took an x-ray of his chest (at left) to determine the catheter had indeed made it to the right atrium.
Learn about more dedicated, and brave, scientists over at Mental Floss.
Every once in a while, you think you’ve found the most perfect gift ever. But does it compare to the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the United States? Mental_floss has a roundup of the biggest, costliest, and most thoughtful gifts ever given. For example, General Sherman notified his boss of an impressive Christmas gift he worked hard to obtain in 1864.
General William T. Sherman had been working his troops hard to secure ports from the Confederate Army during the Civil War. After he captured Atlanta in September 1864, Sherman and some of his men disappeared for about six weeks; the White House received no communication from them and President Lincoln feared the worst. Then, on December 22, Sherman sent Lincoln a telegraph with the message: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”
Read the stories of the other 14 gifts at mental_floss. Link
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Apollo 8 wasn’t just a NASA mission; it was the biggest, coolest, most mind-blowing Christmas special of all time.
The men of Apollo 8 -Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders- had their work cut out for them. They were slated to become the first humans ever to leave the Earth’s orbit, enter lunar orbit, and see the far side of the Moon. But as their launch date approached in December 1968, NASA added an even more terrifying task to the crew’s to-do list: public speaking. The agency wanted the astronauts to host a live broadcast from the spacecraft on Christmas Eve. Worse still, the men were given only one cryptic instruction: “Say something appropriate.”
The astronauts were in a tough spot. When millions of people of different faiths and backgrounds are listening, what exactly constitutes appropriate? To make matters trickier, 1968 had been a grim year for Americans -the Vietnam War was raging, and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had both been assassinated. How could the astronauts simultaneously orbit the Moon, introduce millions to outer space on TV, and buoy the American spirit?
The men were stumped. They began enlisting the help of media experts, who were mostly just as clueless as they were. The answer finally came from the wife of Joe Laitin, a former reporter who’d worked as a public affairs officer under five presidents. She made an elegant, simple suggestion: Why not just read from the book of Genesis?
The astronauts jumped at the idea. They reasoned that genesis had a broad enough appeal across religions to add a hint of spirituality without ostracizing non-Christians. Borman, the mission’s commander, had the first ten verses typed onto fireproof paper and tucked the sheet into his flight plan. The astronauts had their script.
The broadcast began with the crew showing some of the first images of Earth ever seen from space. Lovell remarked, “The vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there in Earth.”
Viewers were captivated. But as airtime dwindled, Anders revealed that the crew had a special message for all the people of the planet. He started with the familiar “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth…”
He read the first four verses; Lovell read four more. Borman recited the last two and ended the show, saying, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with a good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -all of you on the good Earth.”
In the end, the crew’s effort paid off. Half a billion people tuned in, making it the largest TV event in history at the time, and the reception was overwhelmingly positive; even Walter Cronkite admitted that he had tears in his eyes. Of course, not everyone on Earth was thrilled; one atheist activist sued NASA for interjecting religion into a government project, but the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit. Enough nitpicking! The Christmas Eve special won an Emmy, and Time made the crew the magazine’s “Men of the Year” for 1968. The broadcast was truly out of this world.
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The article above, written by Ethan Trex, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!
A lot of wars get left out of our history books because they left no changes in maps or the balance of power. However, some of these lesser-known wars lasted for hundred of years! There are also declared wars in which no one was killed, and, in the case of the Paraguayan War, hundreds of thousands killed for no apparent reason.
The President of Paraguay, Francisco Solano Lopez, was a huge admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte. He fancied himself a skilled tactician and excellent commander, but lacked one thing, a war. So to solve this problem, in 1864 he declared war on Paraguay’s three surrounding neighbors, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The outcome of the war? Paraguay was very nearly annihilated. It is estimated that 90% of its male population died during the war of disease, starvation, and battles with enemy armies. This was perhaps one of the most needless wars in history since Lopez had almost no reason to declare war on his more powerful neighbors.
Read about ten of these obscure and bizarre conflicts ay Listverse. Link -via The Daily What
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The following article is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John’ Bathroom Reader.
Ever wonder how the Santa Claus of 21st-century Christmas lore came about? Here’s the story of how an almost completely unknown bishop became the most recognized holiday character in Western civilization.
A MAN NAMED NICHOLAS
In the fourth century A.D., a man named Nicholas became the bishop of a village called Myra in what is now Turkey.
That’s all we know about him.
Nevertheless, Bishop Nicholas of Myra was later canonized and went on to become the most popular saint in all of Christianity. He is the guardian saint of Russia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Norway, and Greece. He is the patron saint of children, virgins, pawnbrokers, pirates, thieves, brewers, pilgrims, fishermen, barrel makers, dyers, butchers, meatpackers, and haberdashers. He has more churches named after him than any of the apostles. And he has evolved into one of the best-known characters in the world -the fat, jolly, red-suited Santa Claus who delivers presents on Christmas Eve, St. Nick.
How did it happen? It took centuries.
MAKING A SAINT
It’s a pretty safe guess that the real Nicholas of Myra was a kind and generous man, because most of the legends attributed to him describe kind acts toward children. Here are two of the most famous:
1. The Three Daughters. Nicholas was walking past a house when he overheard a man telling his three daughters that he was selling them into prostitution because he didn’t have enough money for the dowries that would make them desirable wives. Later that night, Nicholas snuck back to the house and threw a bag of gold through a window. He did the same thing the following night, and then again a third night, providing enough gold for all three daughter’s dowries. (According to a later version of the story, one of the bags landed in a stocking that was hung out to dry over a fireplace.)
Because of this, he became the patron saint of young brides and unmarried women. And because he delivered financial aid at a time when the girls needed it the most, pawnbrokers made him their patron saint. To this day, the symbol of the pawnbroker trade is three balls of gold -a spinoff of St. Nick’s three bags of gold.
2. The Three Boys. For centuries, it was common to paint St. Nicholas holding his three bags of gold. But not every artist painted them well …and at some point during the Middle Ages, artist painting new pictures of the saint began mistaking the bags for three human heads. To explain this image, a second legend evolved. According to this tale, St. Nicholas checked into an inn during a terrible famine and was surprised when the innkeeper served him meat -which had been unobtainable for months- for dinner. Suspecting the worst, Nicholas snuck down into the cellar and found the pickled bodies of three murdered young boys floating in a barrel. He restored the boys to life and helped them escape.
ST. NICK AND KIDS
These tales helped make St. Nick the patron saint of children. And to honor him, Europeans began giving gifts to their children on the eve of the feast of St. Nicholas, which fell on December 6.
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Sure the names of most spies aren’t common knowledge, but History has a fascinating list of spies whose names you don’t recognize, but probably should learn. Nancy Wake, at left, leads off the list for her daring exploits in WWII.
Until she developed a reputation as the elusive “White Mouse,” as her enemies dubbed her, she brazenly flirted with German soldiers to waltz through checkpoints. In 1943, aware that her hunters were finally closing in, Wake fled to Spain and later to Britain, where she convinced special agents to train her as a spy and guerilla operative. In April 1944 she parachuted into France to coordinate attacks on German troops and installations prior to the D-Day invasion, leading a band of 7,000 resistance fighters.
Read more about Nancy and the rest at the link.
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In a recent interview with Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, it was revealed that Spock was originally intended to be a female and Nichols was slated to play the famous Vulcan. As it turns out though:
There was also a female character known as Number One, a cold, efficient and logical woman to play against the hot headed, libidinous Kirk. She was intended to by played by Majel Roddenberry, then Majel Barrett. Gene Roddenberry was dating her at the time, but hadn’t yet divorced his estranged wife. The studio producing Star Trek was uncomfortable A) with a woman as such a central character and B) with the scandalous nepotism of the whole thing. They also didn’t particularly like Spock as a character, and so as a compromise Roddenberry eliminated Number One, made a Spock the emotionless one, and promoted him to First Officer.
And thus, Nichols was instead cast as the legendary Lieutenant and the rest, as they say, is history.
The police mug shot was invented by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon in the early 1880s. Those mug shots were accompanied by body measurements for criminal identification in what was called the Bertillon System. By 1896, the New York Police Department was using the Bertillon System, and the image here is of the first NYPD mug shot. See a gallery of early mug shots at Flavorwire. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
(Image credit: NY State Division of Criminal Justice Services)
A 400-year old cottage was discovered by a construction crew near Pendle Hill (in northern England) that is believed to have been the home of one of the Pendle Witches. The eleven women known as the Pendle Witches were found guilty of murdering ten people with witchraft in 1612, and all but one were hanged for their supposed crimes.
Archaeologists believe this cottage has ties to witchcraft because they found the remains of a cat set inside a brick in the wall. From BBC News:
It is believed the cat was buried alive to protect the cottage’s inhabitants from evil spirits…
Simon Entwistle, an expert on the Pendle witches, said: “In terms of significance, it’s like discovering Tutankhamen’s tomb.
“We are just a few months away from the 400th anniversary of the Pendle witch trials, and here we have an incredibly rare find, right in the heart of witching country. This could well be the famous Malkin Tower – which has been a source of speculation and rumor for centuries.
“Cats feature prominently in folklore about witches. Whoever consigned this cat to such a horrible fate was clearly seeking protection from evil spirits.”
It will be interesting to see what develops in this case, perhaps the witches will be found innocent four centuries later.
Link –via BoingBoing
Does your tree need a little more intelligence? If so, you might benefit from one (or all) of these great ornaments featuring some of the most famous women from science history.
Link Via The Mary Sue
Comments Off The moral of the story is: if you are going to sail off the coast of Wales on December 5th, you may want to change your name to Hugh Williams. But is this a true story? Any records from these incidences seem to be at least second-hand. I found a post at The Scuttlefish that may shed a bit of light on how “coincidental” the story really is. And be sure to check out the comment from Hugh Williams. Link
From the Rosetta Stone to a Charlie Chaplin film, not all amazing discoveries were actually intentional. Cracked has a great list of shocking discoveries that were complete accidents.
From George Washington and his cherry tree to Sir Walter Raleigh’s chivalry towards Queen Elizabeth, we have all heard our share of historical myths that do more to illustrate the person in question’s personality than to shine a light on their actual life story. Here are a few historical myths created by inventive writers that still made their way in to history books and elementary schools everywhere.
We’ve all heard the story about how Christopher Columbus was the first person to realize the Earth was round. But despite the fact that many of us were told this story in elementary school, this is about as far from historical truth as you can get.
The Columbus story was actually started by Washington Irving, who, despite calling himself a historian, was much more of a historical fiction writer. As a matter of fact, you may recall his name from his most famous work, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
While Irving’s Columbus novel did feature a lot of historical fact and the author spent hours researching the navigator’s life, he also added a lot of his own fictional plot twists to make the story more interesting. Even so, certain fictional aspects from his story did work their way into the public consciousness and eventually, into the history books.
In actuality, the idea of a round Earth dates all the way back to Grecian times in 600 B.C. By the time Columbus was born, it had been proven mathematically and someone who argued the world was flat would be considered just as crazy then as someone who believed the same thing today.
As a matter of fact, Columbus was the one who was completely wrong in his calculations, not the general public. That’s because navigators of the time completely (and correctly) disagreed with how big Columbus thought the world was and thus, how long it would take to get to India.
Columbus was so stubborn that even after he located a new continent, he refused to admit that his calculations were wrong and that he was anywhere except India -hence his insistence on calling the natives “Indios,” Spanish for “Indians.” In fact, because Columbus refused to admit he didn’t sail to the Indies, it wasn’t until a year after he died that America was identified as a new continent by Amerigo Vespucci (the continent was eventually named in his honor).
This is the old story that says that even as a youngster, George Washington was so honest that he could not tell a lie to his father no matter how angry good ol’ dad was that someone would cut down his favorite cherry tree.
For some reason, this seems to be a story that teachers like to tell young children as though it was fact, only to tell children that it isn’t true once they grow older. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like teaching kids history might be a little easier if we don’t treat the first president of the USA like Santa Claus.
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The economy was tanking. Millions lost their jobs. Stocks were down. And since bankers seemed to be riding out the bad times better than anyone, the government appointed a commission to look into who was to blame for the crash. But this was 1933, and Ferdinand Pecora was chief counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Banking and Currency.
Assigned to probe the causes of the 1929 crash, he led what became known as the “Pecora commission,” making front-page news when he called Charles Mitchell, the head of the largest bank in America, National City Bank (now Citibank), as his first witness. “Sunshine Charley” strode into the hearings with a good deal of contempt for both Pecora and his commission. Though shareholders had taken staggering losses on bank stocks, Mitchell admitted that he and his top officers had set aside millions of dollars from the bank in interest-free loans to themselves. Mitchell also revealed that despite making more than $1 million in bonuses in 1929, he had paid no taxes due to losses incurred from the sale of diminished National City stock—to his wife. Pecora revealed that National City had hidden bad loans by packaging them into securities and pawning them off to unwitting investors. By the time Mitchell’s testimony made the newspapers, he had been disgraced, his career had been ruined, and he would soon be forced into a million-dollar settlement of civil charges of tax evasion. “Mitchell,” said Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, “more than any 50 men is responsible for this stock crash.”
That was just the beginning. The proceedings became a “circus” and a media sensation. Read about how Pecora unearthed the dirty secrets of the banking industry that led to the Great Depression at Past Imperfect. Link
The Dole Air Race of August 16, 1927 was from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii, for a prize of $35,000. Fifteen planes were registered. Eleven qualified to start. Two crashed on the way to the starting point, and another crashed during a test flight before the race. Things only got worse once the race began.
On the morning of August 16, the eight remaining planes queued up for their opportunity. They drew lots for flight order and took off one by one. As people cheered, things went bad in a hurry.
One plane, the El Encanto, simply shot off the edge of the runway, and tumbled over her wing. Another the Pabco Flyer got into the air… until she didn’t, landing some 7000 feet away in a marsh. Three more planes took off only to promptly return with technical difficulties.
Of the fifteen planes that had entered the race, only four planes, the Golden Eagle, Aloha, Woolaroc, and Miss Doran, were actually able to attempt the journey. The results of the ill fated race would soon be known.
The carnage didn’t stop there. Nor did it stop once the race was over. Read more about the deadly Dole Air Race at Atlas Obscura blog. This story is part of a regular feature they call Morbid Monday. Link
If you went to the Black Friday sales last night (or early this morning, depending on the store) you may be sick of the retail experience right now, but you can sit down, relax, have a nice drink, and read about how your favorite and not-so-favorite stores got started. Considering that most started out small and spread across the country, a store could be a pretty big deal before you ever got a chance to hear about it, much less shop there. For example, the business that became Toys “R” Us started back in 1948!
In 1948, 25-year-old World War II veteran Charles Lazarus began selling baby furniture in his father’s bike shop in Washington, DC. Recognizing the demand for children’s toys, Lazarus soon broadened his inventory and renamed the store Children’s Supermart. He opened Baby Furniture & Toy Supermarket in 1952, using backwards R’s in the sign to grab attention. Five years later, he opened Children’s Bargaintown, which became the first Toys “R” Us, in nearby Rockville, Md. The store’s giraffe mascot, Dr. G. Raffe, was renamed Geoffrey shortly before Lazarus sold Toys “R” Us to Interstate Stores in 1966.
Mental_ floss has the lowdown on this and ten other big box stores. Link
(Image by Flickr user dcmaster)
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Before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, the Calvinist group spent about ten years in the Dutch town of Leiden. You probably don’t know much about what happened to them there. Historian Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs spent years piecing the story together, and has documented his findings in a new book. Meanwhile, you can taker a photographic tour of Leiden and the places that the Pilgrims lived, worked, met, and worshiped, at Smithsonian. Shown here is the Church of St. Louis, which served as a guildhall during the time of the Pilgrims. Link
(Image credit: Leiden American Pilgrim Museum)
Even if you’ve never been to New York, you’ve certainly seen enough movies and tv shows filmed there to get an idea of what it looks like these days. If you want to see what it looked like around the early half of the last century though, you might want to head to The Jewish Museum New York’s website and enjoy some of their featured photos taken by The New York Photo League. Of course, if you’re in the city, you really should head to the museum itself to enjoy the full gallery in person.
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