You Can’t Keep a Bad Man Down

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Galvanised_Corpse.jpg

Frankenstein nearly came true in 1803, when Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini ran electric current through the newly dead body of murderer George Forster.

The prison record states that “on the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.”

One witness reportedly died of fright, but there was really no cause for alarm. If Forster had returned to life, the prison planned to re-execute him — after all, he’d been sentenced to “hang until he be dead.”

| Death · Oddities

In a Word

librocubicularist
n. one who reads in bed

Update: An alert reader points out that this is not a proper English word — it was proposed by Christopher Morley in his Haunted Bookshop (1919):

‘All right,’ said the bookseller amiably. ‘Miss Chapman, you take the book up with you and read it in bed if you want to. Are you a librocubicularist?’

Titania looked a little scandalized.

‘It’s all right, my dear,’ said Helen. ‘He only means are you fond of reading in bed. I’ve been waiting to hear him work that word into the conversation. He made it up, and he’s immensely proud of it.’

In any case, etymologically librocubicularist should mean merely “someone who does something with a book in a bedroom.” Apologies for the error, and thanks to Eadwine for pointing it out.

| Language

Do Animals Have Emotions?

In 1984, a pet kitten was given to Koko, the Stanford University gorilla who communicates through sign language.

She cared for it as a baby gorilla until December of that year, when the cat escaped from her cage and was run down by a car.

When her trainers told Koko what had happened, she gave the signs for two words.

They were “cry” and “sad.”

| Science & Math

“The Tartarian Lamb”

Tartarian Lamb

Another sighting of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, previously discussed here:

This singular production of nature, which is one of the curiosities of the East, though not commonly known, has heretofore engaged much of the attention of the learned naturalists. To the eye, though a perfect vegetable in its internal form, particularly at a distance, it carries an exact resemblance of the animal whose name it bears. It has four stalks or stems, which appear like feet, and the body is covered with a brownish kind of down, which has the medicinal quality of stopping blood; its head also bears an exact resemblance to the representation we have given of it.

— Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum, 1803

| Oddities

Collateral Damage

In 1958 the U.S. Air Force mistakenly dropped an atom bomb on South Carolina. A B-47 was over Mars Bluff when navigator Bruce Kulka accidentally released the device. Its fissionable core was stowed elsewhere, fortunately, but the bomb still contained thousands of pounds of conventional explosives. It fell 15,000 feet into the home of William Gregg, where it created a mushroom cloud and left a 75-foot crater.

Presumably they raised his insurance rates.

| Oddities

Breakfast of Champions

Christopher Columbus's Egg Puzzle

“Christopher Columbus’s Egg Puzzle,” as it appeared in Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles (1914):

The famous trick-chicken, Americus Vespucius, after whom our great country was named, showed a clever puzzle wherein you are asked to lay nine eggs so as to form the greatest possible number of rows of three-in-line. King Puzzlepate has only succeeded in getting eight rows, as shown in the picture, but Tommy says a smart chicken can do better than that!

Can you?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Oops

Ohio didn’t become a state until after World War II. Thomas Jefferson had approved its boundaries in 1803, but Congress didn’t start formally admitting new states until nine years later. It was 1953 before anyone realized this, and Eisenhower hastily recognized the Buckeye State retroactively. Hopefully no one noticed.

| History