In North Wales the Welsh word for ‘now’ is ‘rwan.’ In South Wales it is ‘rwan’ spelt backwards, viz., ‘nawr.’ It is conjectured that the first North Walian who made use of the word was standing on his head at the time, and that his pronunciation became general.
— The Cambrian, May 1901
From Edward Falkener’s Games Ancient and Oriental and How to Play Them (1892), a magic pentagon. “It will be observed that the five sides of each pentagon are all equal, and that the five diameters, from one angle to the centre of the opposite side, are each 459, which is nine times the central number 51, which is also the mean number, the series being 1-101. And, further, that the inner pentagon is 510, or 10 times the mean number; the next pentagon 1,020, or 20 times the mean; the next 1,530, or 30 times the mean; and the outside pentagon 2,040, or 40 times the mean.” Evidently this was devised by Mikhail Frolov for Les carrés magiques (1886). (08/25/2015 Reader MJ has perfected this further, making each side of the outermost ring total 459, the same as the diagonals.)
From the Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1768, a “magic circle of circles” by Benjamin Franklin:
The numbers run from 12 to 75. Each ring and each radius, added to the central number 12, gives 360, the number of degrees in a circle. The dashed lines define four additional sets of circles, with centers at A, B, C, and D, each with five rings; each ring, when added to 12, also gives the total 360. (The 12 is added arbitrarily to bring the total to 360; remove it and the whole arrangement remains magic.)
From the inimitable R.V. Heath:
This 8×8 magic square can be cut into four smaller magic squares. When these four are stacked in the order indicated they produce a pandiagonal magic cube, each of whose rows, columns, and diagonals produces the total 130. Also: “The original eighth-order magic square has the additional property that if either set of alternate rows and either set of alternate columns be deleted — and this can be done in four ways — the remaining 16 numbers form a fourth-order magic square of magic constant 130.” (From Howard Whitley Eves, Mathematical Circles Squared, 1972.)
(Thanks, Ray.)
There was one moment in Stratford the other afternoon when I really did feel I was treading upon Shakespeare’s own ground. It was in the gardens of New Place, very brave in the spring sunlight. You could have played the outdoor scene of Twelfth Night in them without disturbing a leaf. There was the very sward for Viola and Sir Andrew. Down that paved path Olivia would come, like a great white peacock. Against that bank of flowers the figure of Maria would be seen, flitting like a starling. The little Knott Garden alone was worth the journey and nearer to Shakespeare than all the documents and chairs and monuments. I remember that when we left that garden to see the place where Shakespeare was buried, it didn’t seem to matter much. Why should it when we had just seen the place where he was still alive?
— J.B. Priestley, Apes and Angels, 1927
Educator Bronson Alcott punished students by making them punish him:
“One day I called up before me a pupil eight or ten years of age, who had violated an important regulation of the school. All the pupils were looking on, and they knew what the rule of the school was. I put the ruler into the hand of that offending pupil; I extended my hand; I told him to strike. The instant the boy saw my extended hand, and heard my command to strike, I saw a struggle begin in his face. A new light sprang up in his countenance. A new set of shuttles seemed to be weaving a new nature within him. I kept my hand extended, and the school was in tears. The boy struck once, and he himself burst into tears. I constantly watched his face, and he seemed in a bath of fire, which was giving him a new nature. He had a different mood toward the school and toward the violated law. The boy seemed transformed by the idea that I should take chastisement in place of his punishment. He went back to his seat, and ever after was one of the most docile of all the pupils in that school, although he had been at first one of the rudest.”
Some of this may have been wishful thinking. Alcott’s grand ideas were often poorly received, and he found it a struggle to support his family, including daughter Louisa May. He once told his mother he was “still at my old trade — hoping.”
“If I love you, what business is it of yours?” — Goethe
In 1900 three lighthouse keepers vanished from a remote, featureless island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. The lighthouse was in good order and the log showed no sign of trouble, but no trace of the keepers has ever been found. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll explore the conundrum of the men’s disappearance — a classic mystery of sea lore.
We’ll also ponder the whereabouts of Robert Louis Stevenson’s birthday, admire Esaw Wood’s quest for a wood saw that would saw wood, and wonder why drinking a glass of water might necessitate a call to the auto club.
On May 29, 1856, Abraham Lincoln spoke “like a giant enraged” for 90 minutes before a crowd of a thousand people at a political convention in Bloomington, Ill. Strangely, no one knows what he said. According to legend his oratory held the audience so spellbound that no one thought to record a word of it; more likely it was such a passionate denouncement of slavery that his political advisers thought it wisest to suppress it. But it electrified the audience, and the convention led to the establishment of the state Republican party.
“What actually did Lincoln say that evening in May, 1856, that made such a stupendous impact … and in ninety minutes transformed Lincoln from a circuit-riding Illinois lawyer and office-seeker into a national leader?” asks Elwell Crissey in Lincoln’s Lost Speech (1967). “Here we encounter a fascinating enigma in American history.”
Ulysses Grant, by contrast, had a “perfect speech” that he used on several occasions beginning in 1865. From Grant: A Biography (1982), by William S. McFeely:
In the afternoon there was a dinner at which tediously predictable worthies of New York — John A. Dix, Horace Greeley, and a divine or two — gave speeches. At the close of the tributes, Grant rose and, as he had done in St. Louis more than a year earlier, gave the speech which was to become his trademark. The New York Times report included the response of his audience: ‘I rise only to say I do not intend to say anything. [Laughter] I thank you for your kind words and your hearty welcome. [Applause].’
French anatomist Honoré Fragonard (1732-1799) blurred the line between science and art by arranging human and animal bodies in fanciful poses. By replacing the eyeballs with glass replicas and injecting a distorting resin into the facial blood vessels, he achieved some remarkably expressive effects — his Fetus Dancing the Jig is best left to the imagination.
Florence’s Museum of Zoology and Natural History preserves a collection of wax models that were used in teaching medicine in the 18th century (below). Modelers might refer to 200 corpses in preparing a single wax figure. “If we succeeded in reproducing in wax all the marvels of our animal machine,” wrote director Felice Fontana, “we would no longer need to conduct dissections, and students, physicians, surgeons and artists would be able to find their desired models in a permanent, odor-free and incorruptible state.” Goethe praised artificial anatomy as “a worthy surrogate that, ideally, substitutes reality by giving it a hand.”
(From Roberta Panzanelli, ed., Ephemeral Bodies, 2008.)
In 1964 British meteorologist Allan Crawford visited tiny, freezing Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic, the most remote island in the world, to investigate the possibility of establishing a weather station there. When his helicopter touched down near a shallow lagoon in the island’s interior he found a surprise:
There was an abandoned whaleboat in quite good condition, though lying at the bottom of the lagoon, gunwales awash. What drama, we wondered, was attached to this strange discovery? There were no markings to identify its origin or nationality. On the rocks a hundred yards away was a forty-four gallon drum and a pair of oars, with pieces of wood and a copper flotation or buoyancy tank opened out flat for some purpose.
Thinking that castaways might have landed on the uninhabited island, Crawford’s party made a brief search but found no human remains. The boat’s presence has never been explained.
(From Crawford’s book Tristan da Cunha and the Roaring Forties, 1982.)
