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

The incredibly strange life of Boston Corbett.

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.

The History

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.

When the mail system was first organized, mail was delivered to local Post Offices and then recipients had to come out to pick up their own mail. Things started to change in 1863 when “city delivery” services began for urban areas with enough customers to make the option economical. This decision played a big role in city planning as it required streets to be named, houses to be numbered and sidewalks and lighting to be provided. As time progressed, more and more neighborhoods were offered the service.

In 1873, the Post Office became one of the first national government organizations instructed to regulate obscene materials. That’s because the Comstock laws made it illegal to send any obscene or indecent material through the post office. Interestingly, under the law, anything that promoted abortion, contraception or alcohol consumption was also illegal to send through the mail.

By 1891, city delivery had become so popular that the Post Office began experimenting with Rural Free Delivery. At the same time, they started increasing the number of deliveries made to large metropolitan areas. In fact, businesses in Brooklyn would often receive up to seven visits from the mail carrier per day. These multiple daily visits began to stop in the forties, but they continued in some areas, like New York City, all the way up until 1990.

The organization started urging residents to get mail boxes to help speed up the carrier’s day and by the 1920’s, this became a requirement for anyone getting mail.

Image Via tncountryfan [Flickr]

It’s been big news lately that the USPS has been discussing cutting Saturday services, but as it turns out, mail used to be delivered seven days a week all the way up until 1912. In fact, the reason Sunday service was cut was because people started visiting the post office so frequently on Sundays that religious leaders appealed to the government to close the offices on church days. The Sunday rule isn’t completely standard either. In some areas, where the largest religion in the area goes to church on Saturday, such as those with large Seventh-day Adventist populations like Loma Linda, CA, the post office is closed on Saturday instead.

Becoming (Mostly) Independent

Image Via angrywayne [Flickr]

In 1970, Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act, which eliminated the Postmaster General as a cabinet position and separated it from the government, creating the United States Postal Service. Because the president still appoints the Postmaster General, the USPS is legally an “independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States.” Because this makes it a quasi-governmental agency, it has sovereign immunity, eminent domain powers and the power to negotiate postal treaties with other nations. It also remains the only agency that can deliver first-class and third-class mail. Yes, the USPS has a legal monopoly over your ability to send mail.

Of course, other courier services exist, including bike messengers, UPS and FedEx, but they are limited to a very specific set of rules. For one, only USPS employees can legally put anything into a P.O. Box or a mail box. Couriers must drop your item onto the doorstep or hand it to someone directly. For another, it is illegal to use these services if the mail is not “extremely urgent” or if the courier cost is not at least six times what it costs to mail the item with first-class postage via USPS. You can also have one of your own employees deliver mail directly to the recipient.

If you’re wondering if these rules are actually enforced, I assure you, they are. While it’s not very common for them to raid a company, it has happened here and there. The most notable example occurred when inspectors raided Equifax’s corporate headquarters to evaluate if the company was really only sending “extremely urgent” pieces of mail through FedEx. When it was determined the letters were not urgent, the company ended up being given a $30,000 fine.

Proponents of the legal monopoly argue that without this rule, the USPS couldn’t afford to offer universal mail services to everyone in the country for the same rate. While other carriers can voluntarily provide universal mail services and rates, only the USPS is legally required to do so. Opponents argue that competition drives down rates and that if the market was open, all mail rates would drop. Additionally, they argue that the government could auction off the right to serve the public, including universal service restrictions and award the contract to the service that offered the best price. For now though, the decision to allow the monopoly has been given to congress and they have deferred to the USPS to make up their own rules about competition. Unsurprisingly, they haven’t given other companies much leeway.

By The Numbers

Image Via Bennett V [Flickr]

These days, the USPS is the 2^nd largest civilian employer in the US, behind only WalMart, but these numbers have been dropping steadily since their peak employment numbers in 1999. Back then, the company hired almost 800,000 employees and nowadays, they are down to about 550,000.

They also are the operator of the largest vehicle fleet in the U.S. Many of these vehicles are unique in that they have the driver’s seat on the right-hand side and do not have license plates. If you’ve ever wondered why the post office is always raising the price of stamps, consider this –for every penny increase in the average price of gas, the USPS must spend an extra $8 million per year to keep its fleet running. Given that the average price of gas rose about $.38 in 2011, that means the USPS will have to spend about $304 million more on gas this year over last.

Interestingly, while the USPS has the largest vehicle fleet in the world, they do not operate any of their own planes and instead contract with a variety of companies including UPS, FedEx, American Airlines, United Airlines and more. They also contract with Amtrak to offer train delivery on a few routes.

Since the internet has become more wide spread, fewer and fewer items have been making their way through the mail. In fact, first class mail services peaked in 1999 and have been dropping ever since. As a result, the company has been consistently working to increase productivity and reduce costs. Hence the reason for many location closures, staff layoffs and increased automation throughout all stages of the mail process. Even so, in the last few years, the company lost almost $12 billion last year and $8.5 billion the year before.

A Few Famous Postal Workers

If someone asked you to name a few famous people that have worked for the Post Office, most of you would have a hard time. That being said, the list is surprisingly long. Here are a few notable names along with their position in the company and the location where they worked:

• Charles Bukowski, Clerk, Los Angeles, CA
• Bing Crosby, Clerk, Spokane, WA
• Walt Disney, Substitute carrier, Chicago, IL
• William Faulkner, Postmaster, University, MS
• Conrad Hilton, Postmaster, San Antonio, NM
• Rock Hudson, Letter carrier, Winnetka, IL
• Abraham Lincoln, Postmaster, New Salem, IL
• William McKinley, Assistant postmaster, Poland, OH
• Bill Nye, Postmaster, Laramie, WY
• Harry S. Truman, Postmaster, Grandview, MO

For a bit more interesting information on the USPS, don’t miss this interesting article on what happens to your mail when they can’t read your handwriting. Now that you know more about the history of mail delivery, don’t forget to find your mail carrier and let them know that even though you missed Thank Your Mail Man Day, you still care.

Sources:   Wikipedia, Mental Floss, USPS

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.

Link

Thomas Edison: The Edison Doll and Concrete Homes

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.

In many ways, this suffered from the same problem as his doll –it was too ahead of its time. After all, concrete is a common element in modern architectural design. Of course, even if concrete homes have become more widely accepted in modern times, the idea of a concrete couch is still not very popular. To be fair, the furniture was constructed of special concrete foam, so it was as light as typical wood furniture and it was shaped and painted to look rather nice. Still, no one talks about the warm glow of concrete like they do about wood.

As for a concrete piano, well, only the outside would be made with his concrete foam, the rest would still be the typical wood and metal guts of ordinary pianos. While it might sound like a terrible idea, Judy Wearing, author of Edison’s Concrete Piano (if you like this article BTW, you really ought to check it out), actually encased her own home piano with concrete only to discover that the sound was actually improved, coming out clearer. As it turns out, maybe Edison was even more ahead of his time than we realize and concrete pianos have yet to find their hay day.

Sources: Neatorama, Edison Tin Foil, Sott

Leonardo Da Vinci: Water-Walking Shoes

(Video Link)

You already know Da Vinci was a brilliant man who invented everything from primitive flying machines to tanks and more, but while you probably already know that many of these concepts, particularly his airplanes and helicopters, you might not have heard of some of his less famous failures –for example, his water-walking shoes. The basic idea was to use inflated shoes that look sort of like water skis and a set of ski poles with inflated tips to walk across the water in order to invade enemy ships or cross over enemy moats. While tanks and planes have since become a reality, the need to walk on water has become less and less important over the centuries.

Regardless of the functionality, the shoes have a serious problem, even when they do actually keep the water-walker afloat. Namely, it’s near impossible to actually walk across water on these things no matter how good your balance and even if you can get going, you’re still going to look pretty darn silly. The shoes certainly aren’t silent or stealthy enough to be useful in a surprise invasion nor are they steady enough to use while fighting, rendering them useless as a military apparatus as Da Vinci intended.

Source: Museo di Leonardo Da Vinci

Gunpei Yokoi: The Virtual Boy

If you enjoyed mobile gaming back in the nineties, then you probably had a Game Boy and if you loved your portable Nintendo system, then you had one man to thank – Gunpei Yokoi, the Nintendo employee who created the device and helped Mario evolve from a lowly plumber to a fire-ball-shooting hero. Yokoi also worked on the beloved Metroid and Kid Icarus franchises.

While the game designer and inventor was responsible for some of the most legendary Nintendo creations, he was also at fault for what is still largely considered the company’s biggest failure to date –The Virtual Boy. The console was intended to be the first system that offered 3D graphics out of the box, but users were just not into the idea of strapping a screen to their face just to play their favorite game. The device was also considered to be utterly hideous and even after price cut after price cut, users still refused to buy the item. Nintendo blamed Yokoi for the failure and he left the company shortly after although some argue that it was unrelated to the Virtual Boy disaster.

Sources: Wikipedia #1, #2

Clive Sinclair: Mini Television

Sir Clive Sinclair may not be as famous as some of the other names on this list, but he actually had a huge impact on modern technology. He invented the first slim-line electronic pocket calculator, the first mass market computer sold in the UK for under £100, a fold-up bicycle and more. While his electronic vehicle released in 1985 was considered a commercial failure, it was at least an innovation in the right direction. His miniature television released in 1977 was a different story in failure.

The so-called “pocket television” was revolutionary for the time, given that ordinary televisions would often weigh more than 100 pounds. Upon announcement of its release, the public was thrilled about the concept of a portable television. Even so, Sinclair’s brick-sized invention was hardly practical and didn’t even fit in most people’s pockets. The screen was so tiny it was nearly impossible to see what was actually happening on your favorite show. As if that weren’t bad enough, reception for the tiny television set wasn’t exactly great, even when sitting in one place at your own home.  Sure a lot of people still complain about the tiny screens on their smart phones, but at least the video looks clean and the reception generally is good and that’s more than anyone could say about their pocket TV.

Source: Wikipedia, BBC

There are plenty of bad inventions out there, but let’s face it, most of them aren’t exactly made by the top minds of their time. That being said, even the best inventors have to fail here and there and I certainly didn’t have enough room to include all the terrible inventions by clever innovators, so if you have any other stories of terrible inventions by people known for their great creations, feel free to share them in the comments.

(Video Link)

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.

Link

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.

Link

Atlas

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]

Chronological and Chronic

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]

Echo

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.

Erotic

This word comes from the Greek character Eros, but you probably know him as his more famous Roman name –Cupid. Eros was the god not only of love, but of sexual desire. As a result, his interventions often cause gods and men to fall in love, often when already married.

Image Via Eric Pouhier [Wikipedia]

Hypnosis

Ever been in a highly-suggestible sleep-like state? Well, you can thank Hypnos for your condition as he was the god of sleep who lived in a dark cave where the sun never penetrates. His home had no doors or gates lest he be awakened by creaking of hinges. Other words have been derived from his Roman name, Somnus, most notably, insomnia.

Image Via McMillan and Gage [Flickr]

Morphine

The famous drug that puts you in a dream-like state actually got its name from Hypnos’ brother, Morpheus (you know, like the guy in the Matrix). Morpheus was the god of dreams and actually had the ability to take human form and appear in people’s dreams.

Narcissism

This might just be the most famous of all the myths on this list. Narcissus was a gorgeous man, half-nymph and half-god, who was so proud of his own looks that he disdained all who dared love him. Eventually, Nemesis (our next word on the list) punished him by luring Narcissus to a pool of water where he could see his own reflection. At this point, there are two endings to the tale, neither of them particularly good. In one version, Narcissus realizes he could never find anyone as attractive as himself, so he finally gives up and kills himself. In the other, Narcissus doesn’t realize it is an image and falls in love with the reflection, refusing to leave its side until he eventually succumbs to hunger.

Nemesis

These days, a nemesis is a rival or enemy, but if Nemesis was against you in ancient Greece, you must have done something bad to anger her. That’s because Nemesis was the god who took revenge against those who showed arrogance before the gods. Long ago, the term was used to simply mean someone who distributed fortune as it was deserved, good or bad. It wasn’t until the 4^th century that the word started to mean someone who felt resentment towards another.

Tantalizing

Next time you’re tantalized by something you can’t have, just think of poor Tantalus and how miserable he must have been. Of course, he kind of brought his punishment upon himself.

Tantalus was a half-god and half-nymph who was invited to dine at Zeus’ table in Olympus. He then stole ambrosia and nectar along with other secrets of the gods and brought them to the mortals. Later on, he offered his own son as a sacrifice to the gods and served him at a banquet. The gods learned of his plan and rebuilt the boy and brought him back to life, disgusted by Tantalus’ plan.

As punishment for his misdeeds, Tantalus was forced to stand in a pool of water below a fruit tree with low-hanging branches. Whenever he would reach down to take a drink, the waters would recede and whenever he reached up to pluck some fruit, the branches would rise up out of his reach. Thus Tantalus spent the rest of eternity being tantalized by water and food that he could never have.

These are, of course, only a handful of the hundreds and hundreds of Greek myths, many of which have played a fascinating role in modern English words –and I didn’t even include any of the Roman versions that have entered our lexicon. Do you guys know of any other Greek or Roman tales that have inspired common English words?

Sources: Your Dictionary, Grose Educational Media, Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9

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

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.

Link

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.

Link

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

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.

(YouTube link)

_______________________

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!

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

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.

(Image credit: Flickr user Roel Wijnants)

Nicholas was especially popular in Holland. The Dutch St. Nick was tall and gaunt, wore the traditional dress of a bishop, including the pointed bishop’s hat (a mitre), and carried a long shepherd’s staff. He also rode on a donkey, not in a sleigh. Later, it became a white horse. On St. Nicholas’s Eve, children left shoes filled with straw for the donkey, and by morning the straw was gone and their shoes were filled with presents.

ST. NICK ARRIVES IN AMERICA

In 1664, the flourishing Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was taken over by British forces -who renamed it “New York” after the Duke of York.

For the next 200 years or so, the Dutch citizens of the colony waged a losing battle to preserve what was left of their culture and traditions. One of the most active groups was an association of Dutch intellectuals who called themselves the “Knickerbockers.”

FATHER KNICKERBOCKER

Writer Washington Irving was a member of the group, and in 1809 he published a satirical version of Dutch traditions in a book called The Knickerbocker’s History of New York. It contained several dozen references to “Sinter Klaas” (an adaptation of “Sint Nikolass”), including a tale of how he flew across the sky in a wagon and dropped presents down chimneys for good little girls and boys -not just on Christmas, but on any day he felt like it.

Irving “created a new popularity for the bishop,” Teresa Chris write in The Story of Santa Claus. “He saw Saint Nicholas in America not in clerical robes, but as a jolly fellow, like the good Dutch burghers.” And New Yorkers loved the image.

Irving’s description of the saint rapidly became known to New Yorkers. The English settlers enthusiastically adopted the joyful Dutch celebrations of St. Nicholas’ Day, but they gradually merged them with their own traditions of celebrating Christmas or the New Year. It is not hard to see how Sinter Klaas became Santa Claus in the mouths of English-speaking New Yorkers.

SANTA’S HELPER: CLEMENT CLARKE MOORE

A most important contributor to the modern image of Santa was a professor of divinity in New York -Dr. Clement Clarke Moore.

When Moore, a friend of Washington Irving, sat down to write his children a Christmas poem in 1822, he was heavily influenced by Irving’s vision of Sinter Klaas and his flying wagon and gift-giving. But Moore made a few more alterations to make the story more believable. For example, Chris writes, “The clogs that the Dutch children left by the chimney corner on December 6 became something all children could relate to in cold weather -stockings.” And the wagon became a “miniature sleigh” pulled by “eight tiny reindeer.”

The sleigh and horse with its bells was a common means of transport in New England…And for it to be pulled by reindeer gave St. Nick an exotic link with the North -a land of cold and snow where few, if any people traveled and hence was mysterious and remote.

Moore described Santa as a dwarfish “jolly old elf,” dressed in furs who goes down chimneys to give children their gifts. Moore even gave the reindeer names: Dasher, Dancer, prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen. Other Christmas stories have portrayed St. Nicholas on a white horse, or with one or two reindeer -one version even had him in a cart pulled by a goat- but Moore’s account was so vivid and compelling that it became the standard.

RELUCTANT HERO

Moore never intended for anyone other than his children to hear A Visit From St. Nicholas -in fact, for more than 20 years he refused to admit he was the author (apparently because he was afraid it would damage his standing in the stuffy academic community of the 10th century). But his wife liked the story so much that she sent copies to her friends …and somehow the poem wound up printed anonymously in the Troy, New York Sentinel on December 23, 1823. It eventually became known as The Night Before Christmas. It was so popular that within a decade it had become a central part of the Santa legend…as well as the best-known poem in American history.

Now Santa had a personality and a mission, and was permanently linked to Christmas. But what did he look like?

SANTA’S HELPER: THOMAS NAST

In the mid 1800s, it was popular to draw St. Nick either in his bishop’s robes or as a man with a pointed hat, long coat, and straight beard. Sometimes he even had black hair.

This changed in 1863, when Harper’s Weekly hired 21-year-old Thomas Nast to draw a picture of Santa Claus bringing gifts to Union troops fighting the Civil War. The Santa that Nast drew combined Clement Moore’s description of St. Nicholas in his poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas” with, believe it or not …Uncle Sam. Nast’s Santa was a jolly, roly-poly old man who wore a star-spangled jacket, striped pants, and a cap.

“The drawing boosted the the spirits of soldiers and civilians alike alike because it showed that the spirit of Christmas had come to the Civil War,” says historian James I. Robertson. It was so popular, that every year, for 40 years, when the magazine asked Nast to draw Santas, he stuck with the same concept -although he did drop the stars and stripes in favor of a plain wool suit. “Hence,” Robinson says, “the American Santa Claus took shape by repetition. We just became accustomed to this same figure.”

A GROWING IMAGE

Nast added new little details every Christmas: one year he showed Santa pouring over a list of naughty and nice children; another year showed him in a toy workshop in the North Pole.

Nast also went on the become the most famous political cartoonist of the 19th century -he’s responsible for giving the Democratic Party its donkey and the Republican Party its elephant- but his Santa drawings are his best remembered works.

In fact, Nast almost singlehandedly established the Santa “image” as it is today… except in one major area: the color of his suit. That was a product of Coca-Cola.

SANTA’S HELPER: HADDON SUNDBLOM

In 1931, the Coca-Cola company hired an artist named Haddon Sundblom to create the artwork for a massive Christmas advertising campaign they were preparing.

Until then, the soda was primarily a summer drink, with sales dropping off sharply in the cooler winter months. Coke hoped to reverse this trend by somehow linking the drink to the winter holidays…and they decided the most effective way to do that would be to make Santa a Coke drinker. Sundblom was told to create a painting of Mr. Claus that the company could use in magazine advertisements.

Sundblom’s first brainstorm was to dump Nast’s black-and-white Santa suit in favor of one in Coca-Cola red and white. Then he managed to find a real-life retired Coca-Cola sales rep named Lou Prentice who looked so much like Santa he could be used as a model. Prior to the Sundblom illustrations,” Mark Pendergrast writes in For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, “the Christmas saint had been variously illustrated wearing blue, yellow, green, or red… After the soft drink ads Santa would forever be a huge, fat, relentlessly happy man with a broad belt and black hip boots-and he would wear Coca-Cola red… while Coca-Cola has had a subtle, pervasive influence on our culture, it has directly shaped the way we think of Santa.”

SANTA’S HELPER: ROBERT MAY

More commercial influence: In 1939, Montgomery Ward hired ad man Robert May to pen a Christmas poem that their department store Santas could give away during the holiday season.

He came up with one he called “Rollo the Red-Nosed reindeer.” Executives of the company accepted it, but didn’t like the name Rollo. So May renamed the reindeer Reginald -the only name he could think of that preserved the poem’s rhythm. Montgomery Ward rejected that name, too. Try as he might, May couldn’t come up with another name that fit -until his four-year-old daughter suggested Rudolph. the rest is history. When the poem was put to music and recorded by singing cowboy Gene Autry, it became the second-bestselling single in history.

________________________________

The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

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.

Link

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.

Link

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

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.

Link

Columbus Discovered The World Was Round

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).

Washington Could Not Tell A Lie

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.

Part of the reason for the many myths surrounding Mr. Washington was a “biography” by Mason Locke Weems titled The Life of George Washington, with Curious Anecdotes Laudable to Himself and Exemplary to his Countrymen.  Aside from a ridiculously long title, the book featured a number of tales about Washington’s bravery and honesty –most of which, like the cherry tree story, are completely fabricated.

While we’re on the subject, Washington also did not have wooden teeth. While the president did wear dentures, they actually featured teeth made of a variety of substances, including gold, ivory, lead, human teeth and animal teeth, but no wood.

Sir Walter Raleigh Introduced Europe to New World Treats

Most of the stories told about this famed explorer are exaggerations, if not outright lies. He was hardly handsome and although he was a charming gentleman, he certainly never laid his cloak over a puddle so Queen Elizabeth could walk by without dirtying her shoes.

Similarly, while he helped popularize tobacco in England, even encouraging the queen to light up, he was not the first person to bring the plant into the county. And he was far from the first person to light up a pipe in Europe. In fact, tobacco was first brought to Spain in 1518 and it had certainly spread north to London by 1578, when Raleigh first brought it back to England.

Same story with the potato, which was first brought to Spain in 1570 and quickly spread throughout Europe. As for who first brought them from America to England, it may have been Raleigh, but it just as likely could have been Sir Francis Drake.

So why is Raleigh credited with being so chivalrous to the queen and for bringing these New World specialties back to England? Largely thanks to American school teacher and writer James Baldwin who, like the other “historians” listed here, felt justified in making up falsehoods if they helped emphasize the importance of a historical figure. Baldwin completely made up the story about the Queen and Sir Raleigh and claimed that he was the first man to bring potatoes and tobacco not only to England, but to all of Europe.

Of course, if you’ve ever wanted a scapegoat for all the misinformation still being printed in school books, Baldwin might just be your favorite lying historian. While none of his books are still in print, the author wrote so many successful text books that it was estimated that around the early twentieth century, half of all American school books were written by the liberty-taking historian.

Paul Revere’s Ride to Concord

“Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” There’s a reason this story always starts off so poetically –this line comes from a poem. The poem in question is “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and while it may be a great poem, it’s hardly a historical retelling of that fateful night. Longfellow’s story was only created to help stir up some much needed patriotism shortly before the Civil War started.

Paul Revere was only one of about forty men that were involved with the incident. Longfellow only chose to focus the story on Revere because his name made a perfect match in the first line of the poem. To be fair though, only a few of the men have ever been identified and Revere did play a big role in planning and executing the plan, but he never actually finished his ride, since he was caught in a roadblock on the way to Concord.

Humorously, the poem itself never mentions Revere screaming “the British are coming,” but that has since become one of the biggest parts of the story of his ride. This newer addition is unsurprisingly totally untrue. There’s a good reason the riders didn’t go around screaming at the top of their lungs –over 20% of the population was still loyal to the crown and would have happily reported this sort of information to the British if given a chance. Instead of screaming down the streets, the riders instead went directly to the homes and meeting halls of the patriots they knew.

Not all of Longfellow’s poem is completely bunk though. Revere really did suggest the “one if by land, two if by sea” lantern system and he really did stealthy row his ship across the Charles River sneaking next to the British warship HMS Somerset. Those details have to count for something, right?

Marco Polo Brought Pasta to Europe

Surely at some point you’ve heard someone claim that Asians were the first people to make pasta and that Marco Polo brought the creation back to Europe where it flourished, particularly in Italy. Like many of the other stories listed here, this one is completely fabricated. But while the rest of these fictionalized stories were at least created by well-meaning writers who were just trying to make history a little more interesting, this one was made by a marketing team in order to make their product seem more exciting and exotic.

Pasta as we know it has nothing to do with Marco Polo. In fact, the pasta that he describes in his Travels are actually what we call “dumpling skins” not “pasta.” While historians debate the official definition of pasta and then the official date that it was invented, they agree that at the latest, durum wheat pasta was brought to Sicily by the Libyans in the late 7^th century–about six centuries before Polo visited China.

So where did the Marco Polo pasta story come from? Actually, that “fact” was first printed in the Macaroni Journal, a 1920’s trade industry publication created by an association of food industry conglomerates who were trying to increase pasta consumption in the United States.

There are still plenty more historical untruths being taught to kids around the country, many of which came from the same imaginative writers that invented the myths in this article. Do you happen to know any other historical fictions that are still being taught to school children?

Sources: Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, Read Book Online, National Center, Write Spirit, Cracked #1, #2

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

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

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)

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.

Link Via BuzzFeed

Born in 1729, Maria grew up in a castle in Lohr, Germany. The castle is a museum today, and if you visit, you’ll be able to look into a certain famous mirror. It’s believed that Maria’s father, Prince Philipp Christoph von Erthal, gave the looking glass to his second wife as a gift.

That’s right, the mirror, the dwarves and the poison (although not served in an apple) are all here in these two fascinating stories.

Link

In my opinion, the Joker is the ultimate comic book villain. From the beginning he has been one badass dude, killing with laughter in a time when comic book deaths were few and far between.

He is the ultimate nemesis, a criminal so chaotic, so insane, that Batman’s logical mind simply cannot keep up. The Joker has seen his character remodeled over the years, but not as much as many of the other comic book heroes and villains that get facelifts, proving that the Joker’s creators more or less had it right the first time.

ComicsAlliance has an interesting and insightful article detailing the history of the clown prince of crime, read on if you want to see just how far the Joker has come over the years.

Link

Color has always played a key part in the style of video games, and the evolution from 2 to millions of on-screen colors parallels the advancement in game console technology. This bright, cheery infographic shows how far video game colors have come from the days of Pong and Pac-Man.

Link

“The game that ties you up in knots” sprang from the imagination of a St. Paul-based ad man / inventor named Reyn Guyer in 1965. Guyer’s firm, the Reynolds Guyer Agency of Design, was hired to do a local back-to-school promotional display for Johnson brand shoe polish. As Guyer tinkered with a colored polka dot paper mat to highlight kids’ shoes, he realized he might be onto something bigger – a game where people acted as the game pieces. Guyer first called his invention King’s Footsie, testing it out on some fellow artists and designers. The fun that four people were having while crammed into provocative shapes onto a 4 x 6 mat was all Guyer needed to see.

But that’s just the beginning of the story. Twister didn’t sell well at first, but eventually became a classic board game without a board. Link

Those funny false teeth that move on their own -it seems like they’ve been around forever. But they were the invention of Eddie Goldfarb in the 1940s. They were called Yakity-Yak Talking Teeth. Collector’s Weekly has everything you ever needed to know about chattering teeth, from their inspiration, how they work, and how they became a hit. Link -Thanks, Ben!

Being buried alive is a fear that has been with humanity for a long, long time. As early as the Greeks one can find stories of people being prematurely pronounced dead and accidentally burned alive on their funeral pyres. At various moments throughout history, this fear, this Taphephobia, has actively gripped the Western mind. The terror wasn’t without it’s basis in reality.

One circumstance in which live burials are thought to have often taken place were during outbreaks of disease such as the black plague. Due to the rapid spread of the disease victims were buried almost immediately after death, and sometimes beforehand. These circumstances would repeat themselves again with the cholera outbreaks throughout Europe.

Throughout the enlightenment, doctors were learning more about the human body and death. As they learned to revive people who were previously considered dead (such as drowning victims via the recently invented mouth to mouth resuscitation) doctors began to question if all the people they were burying had truly been dead. With increasing reports of premature burial, by the late 1700s the fear of being buried alive had fully taken hold of the Western mind.

And then folks dreamed up many ways to avoid this horrific fate, which you can read about. Link

(Image credit: Illustrator Harry Clarke)

Lewis Hine took this family photo in 1909. The caption at Shorpy reads:

January 22, 1909. Tifton, Georgia. “Family working in the Tifton Cotton Mill. Mrs. A.J. Young works in mill and at home. Nell (oldest girl) alternates in mill with mother. Mammy (next girl) runs 2 sides. Mary (next) runs 1½ sides. Elic (oldest boy) works regularly. Eddie (next girl) helps in mill, sticks on bobbins. Four smallest children not working yet. The mother said she earns $4.50 a week and all the children earn $4.50 a week. Husband died and left her with 11 children. Two of them went off and got married. The family left the farm two years ago to work in the mill.” Photo and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Not long after the photo was taken, the seven youngest children were sent to an orphanage. Historian Joe Manning wondered what happened to the family. He did the research and reconstructed the story of Catherine Young, her children, and their descendants. It’s a fascinating read, which includes the history of Georgia’s cotton mills and evolving child labor laws. Link -via Metafilter

If you grew up playing the game Oregon Trail, you know how easy it is to die along the way, from dysentery, cholera, diphtheria, typhoid, or the measles. Hey, at least you learned about the diseases, right? Mental_floss takes a look at how bad those diseases really were at the time the West was being settled, and how far we’ve come in the treatment, prevention, and eradication of them today. Isn’t medical science great? Link

Little known fact, it was not actually an iceberg, but Godzilla that caused the Titanic to sink.

Link

This post is not about the Wall Street protesters, well, yes it is, but not about the Occupy Wall Street protest of 2011. A century ago, people were not any happier about what went on in New York City’s financial district.

On September 16, 1920, an explosion at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in downtown Manhattan killed 39 people and wounded hundreds more. It would be the deadliest terror attack on American soil until the Oklahoma City bombing 75 years later. Despite its proximity to the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, the Wall Street bombing of 1920 has more in common with the public sentiment at the Occupy Wall Street protests in lower Manhattan today—with one notable exception. Today’s protesters are committed to nonviolence. The anarchists of yesteryear were not. They largely failed in their attacks on capitalism and Wall Street—and their tactics turned public sentiment against their cause.

That bombing was the culmination of decades of violence on Wall Street, which involved suicide bombs, union-busting mercenaries, and gunfire. After the 1920 bombing, cooler heads prevailed, and everything was hunky-dory on Wall Street …for about nine years.  Link

Have you ever participated in a séance or tried to contact the “spirits” using a Ouija board? You probably don’t realize it, but the modern conception of communicating with the dead only dates back to the late 1840s. Here’s the story of the hoax that started spirit-mania.

BUMP IN THE NIGHT

In 1848 a devout Methodist farmer named John Fox and his family began to hear strange noises in their Hydesville, New York, farmhouse. The noises continued for weeks on end, until finally on one particularly noisy evening, Mrs. Fox ordered the two children, 13-year-old Margaret and 12-year-old Kate, to stay perfectly quiet in bed while Mr. Fox searched the house from top to bottom. His search shed no light on the mystery, but afterward, Margaret sat up in bed and snapped her fingers, exclaiming, “Here, Mr. Split-foot, do as I do!”

“The reply was immediate,” Earl Fornell writes in The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox. “The invisible rapper responded by imitating the number of the girl’s staccato responses.”

Mrs. Fox began to make sense of what she was hearing. “Count ten,” she told the spirit. It responded with ten raps. So she asked several questions; each time the spirit answered correctly. Next, Mrs. Fox asked the spirit if it would rap if a neighbor was present; the spirit said yes. So Mr. Fox ran and got a neighbor, the first of more than 500 neighbors and townspeople who visited over the next few weeks to watch Margaret and Kate interact with the spirit. As long as either Margaret or Kate was present, the spirit was willing to communicate.

MURDER MYSTERY

Using an alphabetic code that Margaret and Kate devised, “Mr. Split-foot” explained that in his Earthly life he’d been a peddler, murdered by the person who lived in the farmhouse. The spirit identified the killer as “C. R.” Some citizens tracked down a man named Charles Rosana, who’d lived in the house years earlier, but with no body and no evidence other than the testimony of a ghost, he was never charged.

At that point, Mrs. Fox decided to send Margaret and Kate to live with their older sister, Leah Fish, in Rochester. As soon as the girls left Hydesville, the strange noises and spirit visitations stopped.

KID STUFF

When they arrived in Rochester, Margaret and Kate let their older sister, Leah, in on the secret: the whole thing -the rappings, the spirits, “Mr. Split-foot,” the “murder,” and everything else- was a hoax. “We wanted to terrify our dear mother,” Margaret told the New York Herald in 1888.

The girls started out by tying a string to an apple and bouncing it repeatedly on the floor, but soon discovered they could make loud popping noises by cracking the joints in their big toes. They also figured out how to project the sounds around the room, in much the same way that ventriloquists throw their voices, which helped make the rapping sounds convincing.

THE SOUND OF MONEY

By now the prank had gone on too long; Mrs. Fox was so upset by the idea of her two young girls talking to dead people that Margaret started feeling guilty and decided to put an end to it. She and Kate staged one last “farewell” rap session, then had the “spirits” announce that their Earthly work was done and that they would no longer try to make contact with the living.

The only problem was that their sister Leah made her living running a music studio, and when Margaret and Kate had come to live with her, their notoriety scared away all her pupils. So Leah convinced them to help her by forming a spiritualist society and staging a series of public demonstrations of spirit rapping in Corinthian Hall, the town’s largest auditorium. Price of admission: $1 per person.

The audiences of these shows were fooled by the mysterious rappings, and within weeks a number of “spirit circles” formed in Rochester and began hiring the Fox sisters to perform séances in private homes. When people began to tire of listening to Mr. Split-foot, the sisters discovered they could communicate with the spirits of such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and William Shakespeare.

It was from this modest beginning -two young girls figuring out how to make mysterious noises by popping their big toes, and an intimidating third sister figuring out how to exploit it- that “Split-foot” spiritualism went on to become what may have been the fastest-growing spiritual movement in the history of the United States.

IN THE RIGHT PLACE, AT THE RIGHT TIME

The Fox sisters didn’t know it, but they were perfectly poised to fill the spiritual void created by advances in 19th-century science and the Industrial Revolution. According to Earl Fornell:

The appearance of these emissaries from another world was particularly welcome, for the rise of science in the early decades of the 19th century had, to some extent, brought into question the validity of older religious dogmas. Such reform movements as Utopian socialism, temperance, abolitionism, and feminism arose from a demand for a better life on earth, since science seemed to promise no afterlife… Still another endeavor was a frenzied search for positive and immediate proof of the immortality that science seemed then to set aside.

TRUE BELIEVERS

The possibility of talking to the departed took the public imagination by storm. Here are a few examples of how deeply “spiritualism” pervaded the culture:

* A judge in upstate New York developed a reputation for consulting the spirits before handing down rulings.

* Some enthusiasts became so convinced that life was better “on the other side” that they committed suicide rather than waste a lifetime waiting for paradise.

* In 1853 some New Yorkers formed a group called the Free Spirit Love Society, which forbade extramarital affairs in all instances …except those in which the adulterer “entered into a new relation under the guidance of spiritual affinities or attractions.” At its peak the society boasted of more than 600 members.

* In 1856 a Bordentown, New Jersey, man died just days before he was supposed to marry his fiancé. Rather than cancel the wedding, the man’s family and his bride-to-be turned it into a wedding-funeral, hiring a medium to marry the bride to her fiancé’s corpse before it was laid to rest.

SHE KEEPS GOING… AND GOING… AND GOING…

The public’s desire to believe was so great that the Fox sisters were able to keep their hoax going for more than 40 years. The spiritualism craze faded somewhat in the late 1850s but came roaring back following the outbreak of the Civil War, as thousands of bereaved families tried desperately to get in contact with loved ones killed in battle.

Even First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln brought spiritualists to the White House so that she could speak to her dead sons Tad and Willie. In 1872, seven years after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Mrs. Lincoln visited Fox several times and each time came away convinced that, through Margaret, she’d made contact with “the real presence of the spirit of her husband.”

UNHAPPY MEDIUMS

One of the curses of founding this fraudulent movement was that Margaret and Kate had to spend most of their time in the presence of true believers. Both women grew to hate their lives; both became alcoholics. And though Leah Fish had grown rich off years of public performances, Margaret and Kate had not.

By the late 1870s, Margaret was still giving public performances, but she was suffering from depression and worked only a few hours each week -just long enough to make the money she needed to “drown my remorse in wine,” as she put it. Somehow, she managed to keep going for another ten years.

Then in September 1888, a reporter for the New York Herald asked Fox to comment on the case of another spiritualist, who’d recently been exposed as a fraud. Margaret told the reporter that spiritualism was bogus and promised one day to give “an interesting exposure of the fraud.”

BAD RAP

Rather than wait, the Herald sent a reporter the next day. As promised, Fox delivered -and over the next few hours laid out her bizarre life story in lurid detail. There was no truth to spiritualism, she told the reporter, and she said she more than anyone else should know it.

“I have explored the unknown as far as a human can,” she told the reporter. “I have gone to the dead so that I might get from them some little token… I have tried to obtain some sign. Not a thing! No, the dead shall never return.”

And in case anyone didn’t believe her -in fact, many spiritualists blamed booze for the “false confession”- Fox gave a public confession and demonstration of her methods at New York’s Academy of Music. The New York Herald described the scene:

Everybody in the hall knew they were looking at the woman principally responsible for spiritualism. She stood upon a pine table, with nothing on her feet but stockings. As she remained motionless, loud distinct rappings were heard, now behind the scenes, now in the gallery. She had a devil’s gift in a rapping ventriloquism, from which spiritualism had sprung to life, and here was the same toe rapping it out of existence.

DIDN’T SEE THIS COMING

The cash Margaret Fox made selling her story didn’t last long. Neither did the money she made on tours exposing the fraud of spiritualism. When the public’s interest in her exposé dried up, she became so desperate for money that she recanted her confession and went back out on the séance circuit. She toured the country for the next five years, until finally in 1893, like her sister Kate, she died drunk, broke, and alone.

The funeral arrangements were handled by a friend of Margaret’s, Titus Merritt, “the mortician,” Fornell writes, “at whose establishment she often spent long nights, sitting amongst the corpses watching for some signs of spirit life.”

The signs never came.

_________________________

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

So here’s the story: it’s 1728 and you live in Amberg, a little Bavarian town somewhere north of Munich. You and your lady friend really, really want to get married, but there is a little snag; the council laws permit only homeowners to marry, and you’re still stuck renting a place. But all is not lost! You pick up a little strip of empty land between two other buildings – just 2.5 meters wide. You run up a quick wall on the front, another on the back, slap a roof on top, and presto – you’re a homeowner. The council falls for it, and allows you to get married.

But now what? Well, it’s not liveable, so you head back to the rental place to live, but you recoup your investment by selling the Eh’häusl (Little Wedding House) to the next couple with the same problem.

Link to story. Link to hotel site.

(Image: Google Street View)

Which is the Real First? Historians May Never Agree

If you’ve ever wondered why so many dramatic titles have all been lumped under the title of “comic books,” that’s because the whole medium started out as a way for publishers to put together compilations of their  newspaper comic strips. While historians debate what defines an actual comic book, and thus, what the earliest comic book is, one of the earliest American contenders is 1842’s The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, which was a hardcover book featuring an array of chronological stories about M. Vieux Bois.

The earliest contender for a comic book in the format we recognize was The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats, printed in 1897. The magazine was a reprint of the newspaper strip Hogan’s Alley, which starred the Yellow Kid. Hogan’s Alley was already one of the earliest weekly comic strips and when the black and white, 5×7 inch magazine was released on newsstands, it may have been the first real comic book as well and even featured the words “comic book” on the back cover.

The first monthly comic book was Comics Monthly, first printed in 1922. The magazine would reprint a variety of newspaper comic strips from that month and its success was short-lived, folding after only one year in print.

The first comic book printed in a format we’d recognize and on a monthly basis featuring some material created specifically for the magazine was 1933’s Famous Funnies, which many historians believe to be the first true comic book. The original Famous Funnies was distributed exclusively at Woolworths, but was later sold at news stands for the price of ten cents an issue.

With a number of publishers printing existing comic strips in magazine form, it was only a matter of time before someone started creating original material specifically for comic books instead of newspapers. The first comic book featuring all new material was New Fun, which was printed in 1935 by National Allied Publications, which would eventually evolve into a little company now known as DC Comics.

Making Comics Super

Once comic books got going, it wasn’t long before superheroes entered the picture. While there are tons of contenders for first comic book, practically everyone agrees that Superman, introduced in 1938’s Action Comics, was the first ever superhero. Interestingly, the character almost never made it into the public consciousness. The creators, Siegel and Shuster tried to pitch the idea to newspaper syndicates for years and had pretty much given up on it when DC editor Vin Sullivan dug their story out of a slush pile and decided to run it as a secondary story in the first issue of Action Comics. Despite the fact that he wasn’t even in the lead story, Superman was featured on the cover and he quickly outshined practically all the other comic books DC had published up until that time. In fact, the term “superhero” comes from Superman and before that, heroes were ordinarily called “mystery men” or “masked heroes.”

These days, Action Comics #1 is arguably the most valuable comic book on the market and of the four comics to ever be sold for over one million dollars, two of them were Action Comics #1 issues.

After Superman’s meteoric rise to fame, it wasn’t long before other superheroes entered the fray, including Wonder Woman, Batman, Captain America, Green Lantern and Aquaman. Of all these characters, Captain America was the first to be given his own book without being tested in other stories first. Strangely, while he’s one of the lesser-known of the classic heroes these days, Captain Marvel was actually the most popular character at the time, outselling even Superman.

For a short while, superheroes dominated the marketplace, creating what historians call the Golden Age of Comics, but after WWII ended, it wasn’t long before the public grew weary of the infallible characters. Comic publishers started dropping superhero titles and instead began publishing more Western, sci fi, crime and horror comics. By 1952, the superhero trend was so dead that practically all the hero books were out of print with the exception of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Unfortunately, this ended up being the end of the industries hey day.

Won’t Someone Think Of The Children

True crime and horror comics may have been incredibly popular with comic book readers in the fifties, but for parents, these titles were seen as a devastating attack on their children’s innocence. When Dr. Frederic Wertham released his book, Seduction of the Innocent, blaming comic books for causing “maladjustment” in the children of the day, parents became even more alarmed and more organized. Soon enough, distributors were refusing to sell comics, schools were holding comic book burnings and the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency started to take an interest in comic books. By the mid-1950’s, 75% of comic publishers had been forced out of business. It wasn’t long before industry heads realized that if they wanted to stay in business, they had to start censoring themselves.

In September 1954, the main publishers formed the Comics Magazine Association of America and their leader established a strict set of guidelines for publishers to follow, known as the Comics Code Authority. The CCA seal was affixed to all comics that met their guidelines and soon it became impossible to get a distributor to carry any title that didn’t bear the CCA mark.

CCA rules banned the use of the words “horror” or “terror” in a comic’s title. Vampires, werewolves, walking dead, ghouls, etc. were prohibited. Women had to be drawn without any exaggeration of their physical qualities. While “crime” was allowed to be in the title, it had to be in a smaller print than the rest of the title. No acts of seduction could be featured in any way. No drug use could be portrayed. And, when crime was shown, those committing the offenses could not display any gain from the act.

Interestingly, one classic comic book, Mad, was able to circumvent these rules by switching to a magazine format after the CCA was enacted.

Rules Are For Squares

As the sixties counter culture started to expand, a new movement in comic books was quickly born, eschewing the CCA in favor of sex, drugs and violence. The first underground comic was Frank Stack’s 1962 work, The Adventures of Jesus. In order to escape harassment in his bible-belt home, Stack published the title under the name Foolbert Sturgeon.

Many of the comics used the word “comix” on their covers to help identify them as being non-mainstream. The “X” was also a way to indicate that the content was made for adults. Rather than being delivered to newsstands like traditional comic books, these commix were mostly sold through head shops. Unfortunately, this also ended up putting an end to the movement in the mid-seventies as legislators started cracking down on the sale of paraphernalia and the head shops were closed. This meant mail order was one of the only ways for people to order the underground titles.

Loosening The Noose

Fortunately, mainstream publishers took notice of the success of the underground comics and in 1971, the CCA was revised to allow for sympathetic depiction of criminal behavior and corruption among public officials, the suggestion of seduction, vampires and werewolves.

It wasn’t long before Marvel started to push the boundaries of the remaining rules. The same year, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare approached Stan Lee and asked him if he could include a few story lines that would warn kids about the dangers of drug use. Lee agreed and wrote a special three-part Spider Man story that included someone being saved by the hero after falling off a building because he was high and one of Spider Man’s friends was revealed to be a drug addict. Lee tried to get the issues approved, but the CCA administrator was sick and the acting administrator refused to let drug use be shown in the issues.

Having the U.S. government on his side, Lee published the comics anyway and despite lacking the CCA approval seal, the issues sold well and were praised by critics. The media coverage embarrassed the CCA and soon the code was revised to allow the depiction of drug use if it was present as a vicious habit.

The End of A (Censorship) Era

As the years passed, comic books began to take a dark turn and became increasingly gritty and many were intentionally printed for adult readers. As a result, fewer and fewer titles bothered to seek CCA approval. By the 2000s, advertisers no longer cared whether or not the issue was approved or not and new publishers didn’t bother to join the CCA no matter how light-hearted their material was.

In 2001, Marvel withdrew from the CCA in order to establish their own ratings system that was based on potential age groups for each comic. In 2010, Bongo Comics quit using the code and in the beginning of 2011, so did DC, opting to use a similar system as Marvel. A day after DC quit, so did Archie Comics –the last publisher still using the code, and with that, the code became defunct.

I know a lot of our readers are comic book fans, so those of you who have knowledge in the area, do you have any good trivia to add? Or even some favorite moments from your favorite comic books?

Sources: Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, Mental Floss #1, #2

I was surprised when I learned just how well Bill Murray could pull off the look of an 1800′s Russian general. But he’s not the only celebrity that looks right in the role. Replaceface features an array of modern celebrities in this classic portrait style.

Link Via BuzzFeed

We all know the inspiring story of Charles Lindbergh being the first person to fly across the Atlantic, but as it turns out, he’s only the first person to do it by himself. In fact, eight years before he made the flight, two British men completed the same journey.

And that’s not the only incorrect first you were taught in school. Jackie Robinson wasn’t the first black man to play professional baseball and Copernicus wasn’t the first person to realize the earth revolved around the sun. Cracked has all the details.

Link

I was astonished by the story, too, though not because of the strangeness of the coincidence. It bothered me, because the details are new (you’ll struggle to find a telling of the tale that dates to before 2003), and because it simply doesn’t ring true. That’s not because the modern version isn’t broadly faithful to the facts; it’s not even utterly implausible that Princip might have stopped off at Schiller’s for a bite to eat. No, the problem is that the story is suspiciously neat–and that the sandwich is a quintessentially Anglo-American convenience food. The dish was named in the 1760s for John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who was in the habit of requesting his meat placed between two slices of toast so he could lunch at his desk. But it took time for the idea to cross the Channel, and I find it hard to believe the sandwich would have featured on a Bosnian menu as early as 1914.

Dash found the surprising origin of the story, which gives us a glimpse of how, and why, our understanding of history tends to change over time. Read the entire account at the Smithsonian history blog Past Imperfect. Link

The History Of A Legend

The Times was founded on September 18, 1851 by journalist/politician Henry Jarvis Raymond (that’s him above), who eventually became the second chairman of the Republican National Committee, and former banker George Jones(below). Originally the paper went by the name of the New-York Daily Times and was sold for one cent. Rather than just diving into the news of the day, the first edition attempted to explain why the editors created it and what positions the paper would take on issues, stating:

We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good;—and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform. We do not believe that everything in Society is either exactly right or exactly wrong;—what is good we desire to preserve and improve;—what is evil, to exterminate, or reform.

Within only a few years, the paper changed its name to The New York Times and in 1858, the paper was doing well enough to move into its own building, making it the first newspaper in New York City to be housed in a building built specifically for its own use. Ten years after its original release, it started adding a Sunday edition. Prior to this time, it was fairly rare for any paper to print on a Sunday, but public demand for news updates about the Civil War caused the change in papers around the country.

Given that the paper was started by a Republican politician, it’s not surprising that it was originally a supporter of the party’s ideals and candidates in its early years. But in the 1880’s, the paper started becoming independent and in 1884, it supported Grover Cleveland in his run for president on the Democratic ticket. This infuriated a lot of the paper’s Republican readers and The Times lost a lot of its readership as a result.

Within two years, the newspaper was acquired by Adolph Ochs, who also owned The Chattanooga Times. Ochs was responsible for coming up with the paper’s slogan, which is still in use, “All The News That’s Fit To Print.” While we take the slogan for granted these days, at the time, it was intended to be a sassy commentary about the paper empires of Pulitzer and Hearst, which were both known for their sensationalist yellow journalism.

In 1904, Och moved the paper to an area called Long Acre Square. While the original name might not sound familiar, you might recognize it by its more recent name –Times Square. The Times is even responsible for the tradition of the ball dropping on New Year’s Eve, which started when the paper moved into the building. The Times was also responsible for putting up the electronic news ticker Times Square is known for, although these days, the ticker is now ran by another company.

Interestingly, while The New York Times was still printed in this building up until 1997, they stopped using it as their main business headquarters only nine years after moving in –despite the fact that the area retains their name.

When Och first bought the paper, its readership was down to only 9,000, by the early twenties, it had 780,000 readers. Throughout this time, the paper also achieved an international reputation for accuracy and fairness at a time when most papers were known to be partisan rags. Ochs’ family is still in charge of the paper to this day.

Controversies That Made The Paper

For most of us, the biggest story The New York Times was directly involved with was Pentagon Papers, but the newspaper has been involved in many other major news stories long before Nixon was even born.

You probably already know how corrupted Boss Tweed was during his rule of New York, but did you know that The Times played a major role in his undoing? While the paper was working to stop the corrupt politician for a while, their campaign really gained steam after the Orange riot of 1871 that left 60 people dead and 150 injured.

Days after the riot, public sentiment turned against Tweed and the Times campaign started receiving a lot of support. The Times started to receive information from past Tweed supporter, County Sheriff James O’Brien who provided the paper with evidence of embezzlement by Tammany Hall. Despite being offered $5 million not to print the evidence, the Times went forward with the story and soon Tweed was out of power and eventually arrested.

While it wasn’t nearly such a scandal, the paper received a lot of international attention when managing editor Carr Van Anda found a mistake in the hieroglyphic interpretation on King Tut’s tomb back in 1922.

In 1960, The Times published a full-page ad that described actions taken against civil rights protesters. The ad falsely accused the police force of Montgomery, Alabama, of a number of wrongdoings. While nothing in the ad mentioned Montgomery Public Safety commissioner L.B. Sullivan, he felt that the criticisms could be considered as defamation because it was his duty to supervise the police department. He asked the paper to issue a retraction, but The Times refused on the grounds that he was not actually mentioned in the ad. Sullivan then sued and won $500,000 in a court judgment.

The Times appealed and eventually the case went to The Supreme Court who ruled on the paper’s behalf, explaining that press reports must contain “actual malice” against public officials or celebrities in order to be considered defamatory. This had a welcome effect on the publishing industry, as many papers were afraid to criticize officials and companies during the Civil Rights movement for fear that they could be accused of defamation or libel.

Only ten years later, The Times was involved with another groundbreaking Supreme Court decision, this time involving the president of the United States himself. Yup,  I’m referring to the Pentagon Papers. If you aren’t already familiar with the story, the Pentagon Papers were a series of documents relating to the secret history of the U.S. Department of Defense’s role in the Vietnam War. The papers revealed that the government had intentionally conducted air strikes over Laos and the coast of North Vietnam even while the government was promising the public they wouldn’t expand the war. As The Times began publishing the documents, Nixon worked with Attorney General John Mitchell to get an injunction commanding the paper to cease publication of the excerpts.

Unsurprisingly, the paper appealed and the case eventually went before the Supreme Court, bundled in with the issue of the Watergate tapes that were being published by The Washington Post. While the court ruled that the injunctions were illegal and that the public had the right to know the information, the fact that each justice wrote an individual opinion on the matter left little protections for future occasions involving similar circumstances. Even so, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate tapes both had a major impact in the country’s politics, ultimately resulting in the termination of the war and the resignation of Nixon.

Changes To The Icon

While The Times has tried to stay pretty true to its roots, it has changed drastically throughout its publishing history. One of the most popular additions to the paper took place on February 15, 1942 when first Sunday Times crossword puzzle was published.

1946 was a big year for the paper, as it was the first year The Times published their fashion section and the first time they started publishing an international edition. In 1967, the company stopped publishing their international edition, instead opting to work together with the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post to publish the International Herald Tribune in Paris.

The paper was one of the last to start publishing color photos and it wasn’t until October 16, 1997 that they printed their first color image on the front page. If you were curious, the first color image was of Tony Fernandez who earned the Cleveland Indians a place in the World Series with an 11^th inning home run.

Most of the recent changes are cost-cutting measures, which makes sense since the paper’s circulation has been dropping drastically (like all newspapers in our internet-powered culture). In 2006, The Times narrowed its printing size by one and a half inches, making it the same size as most standard newspapers. This resulted in a 5% reduction of news coverage and a projected savings of $12 million per year.

In 2009, the paper broke a 150 year-long tradition by publishing an ad on the front page. The Times promised that while they were now offering some front page space, they would still refuse to sell any ad space on the upper half of the page.

Things That Make The Times Special

The New York Times is a huge paper and to get all that news takes a lot of reporters –the company currently employs 1200 in their main newsroom, which is twice the size of The Los Angeles Times. The Times has 10 news bureaus in New York State, 11 throughout the rest of the country and 26 international bureaus. All of that reporting is certain to bring in some great stories, which is why it’s not too surprising that The New York Times has more Pulitzer Prizes than any other paper in the world, ranking in at 106 as of 2010. In 2002, they even set a record for most awards given to any one paper in one year, receiving seven Pulitzers that year.

The paper still has a number of aspects that few others adhere to. For example, there is no single headline on the first page. Instead, the most important story of the day usually appears on the top right column. They also are one of only a handful of papers not to feature a comics page or to have their own editorial cartoonist on staff.

The paper was one of the first in the nation to announce same-sex commitment ceremonies in their weddings section, making the change in 2002. Within only two years of their decision to start printing these announcements, 500 papers in the country followed suit.

Image Via Haxorjoe [Flickr]

With more than a century and a half of history, there’s plenty more to be said about The Times, but I can’t possibly cover it all here. Before I go though, I would like to add one more fun bit of trivia about the paper –the book that spent the longest time on their best seller list was The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, which was on the list for about 13 years and 4 months –now that’s one heck of a record.

Have any interesting New York Times trivia? Add it in the comments!

Sources: Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, #4, The New York Times Co.

Students did not receive their diplomas until they demonstrated a proficiency in their trade. The school helped them achieve this by establishing a job placement office that arranged employment for the girls after they finished their training. The girls were instructed to report back to the schoolabout their work experiences, and the employers were encouraged to report back on performance of the girls, and all of this information was recorded in the card packets. So these aren’t just scholastic records—they’re also employment records. Much like the teachers’ assessments, comments from the students’ employers run the gamut from encouraging (“Thank you for sending me such a smart little girl—she is all I would desire and does your school credit in every way”) to heartbreaking (“Terrific odor of perspiration, have to lay off”).

Lukas is in the process of finding the families of the women to share the information. In the first article of a series at Slate, he gives an overview of the records and the story of how he got them. Future installments will tell the stories of twelve of the women in the records. Link

I like to imagine that this photo was taken to show that this woman loves her scuba diver husband, but who knows. BuzzFeed has a great collection of hilariously strange vintage photographs including the one above. Half the fun is looking at the pictures and the other half is making excuses for why they were created.

Link

You probably know that Socrates was forced to die by drinking poison, but did you know that he was made to drink hemlock, which essentially shuts down the body and allows the mind to continue functioning until death finally sets in?

For more interesting information about poisons and the people who used them, enjoy this great Mental Floss article by Miss C.

Link