Martha Tabram

In the early morning hours of Aug. 7, 1888, a London resident noticed a woman lying on a stair landing in his apartment building. He assumed she was a vagrant, and another hour passed before someone discovered she was dead — she had been stabbed 39 times in the body and neck.

Was Martha Tabram an early victim of Jack the Ripper? Like Jack’s other victims, she was a poor prostitute knifed in the early morning in a secluded but public area in Whitechapel. (Jack struck first on Aug. 31.) But Martha’s throat was not cut nor her body eviscerated, as Jack’s “canonical” victims’ were, and an autopsy suggested a weapon longer and stouter than Jack’s.

Martha’s murder was never solved. If Jack didn’t kill her — who did?

See also Långrocken.

| Crime

Math Notes

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| Science & Math

Heat Wave

A blast of hot air passed from south to north through portions of New Ulm and Renville County last Sunday evening. It lasted only a minute or two, but so intense was the heat that people rushed out of their houses believing them to be on fire.

— Minneapolis Tribune, July 10, 1879

| Oddities

What’s In a Name?

Henry Honychurch Gorringe (1841-1885) certainly deserved a hero’s remembrance. A naval officer and captain of the USS Gettysburg, he discovered an undersea mountain and moved Cleopatra’s needle from Egypt to New York.

Instead, he’s remembered for a verse by Arthur Guiterman:

In Sparkill buried lies that man of mark
Who brought the Obelisk to Central Park,
Redoubtable Commander H.H. Gorringe,
Whose name supplies the long-sought rhyme for “orange.”

| Language · Poems

Boo?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FremantlePrisonWindowIllusion.JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Undoctored photo of a church window at Fremantle Prison in Western Australia.

Skeptics say the image in the center is just rippled glass. Believers say it’s the face of Martha Rendell, who was hanged there in 1909 for killing her children.

“I can believe anything,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “provided that it is quite incredible.”

| Oddities

“Curious Post-Office”

The smallest post-office in the world is kept in a barrel, which swings from the outermost rock of the mountains overhanging the Straits of Magellan, opposite Terra del Fuego. Every passing ship opens it to place letters in or take them out. Every ship undertakes to forward all letters in it that it is possible for them to transmit. The barrel hangs by its iron chain, beaten and battered by the winds and storms, but no locked and barred office on land is more secure.

— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882

| Oddities · Society

Franklin’s Mint

Lesser-known maxims from Poor Richard’s Almanack:

  • Happy that Nation, — fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting.
  • He that is rich need not live sparingly, and he that can live sparingly need not be rich.
  • Kings and bears often worry their keepers.
  • Proclaim not all thou knowest, all thou owest, all thou hast, nor all thou can’st.
  • Would you persuade, speak of Interest, not of Reason.
  • Those who are fear’d, are hated.
  • Many complain of their Memory, few of their Judgment.
  • Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
  • Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.

And: “Mankind are very odd Creatures: One Half censure what they practise, the other half practise what they censure; and the rest always say and do as they ought.”

| Literature