Bystander

Aug. 1, 1932, was a strange day for Londoner G.A. Hinkson:

Suddenly torrential rain fell only one hundred yards from where I was standing. The nearest trees in Kensington Gardens were almost hidden behind a milky mist of heavy rain. The rain-drops rebounding off the street created a layer of spray as high as the tops of the wheels of the taxis standing in the street. Where I was sheltering, hardly a drop of rain was falling. … Then the spray on the ground came nearer like a wave and receded. Suddenly it vanished completely.

From Meteorological Magazine, 64:159-60, 1932.

| Oddities

Northern Exposure

Ordered to join a jungle snake cult in his native Togo, Tété-Michel Kpomassie chanced to find a book about Greenland in a local Jesuit library. At the first opportunity he ran away.

Kpomassie’s 1981 autobiography, An African in Greenland, tells of his odyssey through West Africa and Europe seeking a route to the frozen island. He finally arrived in the mid-1960s, a black giant among the Inuit:

As soon as they saw me, all stopped talking. So intense was the silence, you could have heard a gnat in flight. Then they started to smile again, the women with slightly lowered eyes. When I was standing before them on the wharf, they all raised their heads to look me full in the face. Some children clung to their mothers’ coats, and others began to scream with fright or to weep.

Kpomassie happily spent the next two years driving a dogsled and hunting seal in a kayak. After eight years, he had reached the land of his dreams — a country with no trees and no snakes.

| Oddities

“Apparatus for Obtaining Criminal Confessions”

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=b3VXAAAAEBAJ

This one leaves me speechless. Helene Adelaide Shelby was unhappy with the low rate of criminal confessions, so in 1927 she invented a solution. The police put their suspect into the darkened chamber on the left, and he finds himself facing a floodlit human skeleton with glowing red eyes. The skeleton asks questions (via a megaphone in the mouth), and the suspect’s reactions are recorded by a camera and a microphone in the skull.

The effect produces “a state of mind calculated to cause him, if guilty, to make confession.” I’ll bet. What if he’s innocent?

| Crime · Technology

“Epistle Written in a Diving-Bell”

A lady, of the name of Morris, the wife of Major Morris, had lately the courage to descend in the diving-bell, at Plymouth, and was probably the first of her sex who has penetrated into ‘the dark unfathom’d caves of ocean.’ On this occasion, whilst under water, she wrote a note to her father, which concluded with the following lines:

From a belle, my dear father, you’ve oft had a line,
But not from a bell under water;
Just now I can only assure you I’m thine,
Your dutiful, diving, affectionate daughter.

— J. Taylor, Eccentric and Humorous Letters of Eminent Men and Women, 1824

| Oddities · Poems

Lenore in Indiana

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_Whitcomb_Riley,_1913.jpg

Convinced that the public would accept anything from an established author, James Whitcomb Riley bet his friends that he could prove it. He composed a poem entitled “Leonanie” in the style of Edgar Allan Poe and published it in the Kokomo, Ind., Despatch on Aug. 2, 1877:

Leonanie–angels named her;
And they took the light
Of the laughing stars and framed her
In a smile of white;
And they made her hair of gloomy
Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy
Moonshine, and they brought her to me
In the solemn night.

And so on. An accompanying article explained that the poem had been discovered on the blank flyleaf of an old book, and the conspirators scribbled it into a dictionary in case anyone asked to see it.

After the poem was published, Riley wrote a critique in the Anderson Democrat casting doubt on Poe’s authorship. But to his horror his poem was championed by critics and picked up in newspapers nationwide, and soon a Boston publishing house began asking for the original manuscript. The group finally confessed when a rival paper threatened to expose the hoax.

Riley won his bet, but ironically he went on to become a bestselling poet himself, writing in an Indiana dialect distinctive enough to invite lampoons of its own. Whether any of these has been passed off as real is unknown — but it would be poetic justice.

| Hoaxes · Literature

Big Love

This is the first screen kiss, shared in 1896 by May Irwin and John C. Rice in a scene from the play The Widow Jones.

Accustomed to stage dramas, many viewers were shocked at the closeup. “Neither participant is physically attractive,” wrote reviewer John Sloan, “and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was hard to bear. When only life-size it was pronounced beastly. But that was nothing to the present sight. Magnified to Gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.”

Only 30 years later, John Barrymore would bestow 127 kisses on Mary Astor and Estelle Taylor in Don Juan.

| Entertainment · Society

Who’s On First?

Stigler’s Law of Eponymy states that “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Examples:

  • Arabic numerals were invented in India.
  • Darwin lists 18 predecessors who had advanced the idea of evolution by natural selection.
  • Freeman Dyson credited the idea of the Dyson sphere to Olaf Stapledon.
  • Salmonella was discovered by Theobald Smith but named after Daniel Elmer Salmon.
  • Copernicus propounded Gresham’s Law.
  • Pell’s equation was first solved by William Brouncker.
  • Euler’s number was discovered by Jacob Bernoulli.
  • The Gaussian distribution was introduced by Abraham de Moivre.
  • The Mandelbrot set was discovered by Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia.

University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler advanced the idea in 1980.

Delightfully, he attributes it to Robert Merton.

| History · Science & Math

Infallible

[Bertrand] Russell is reputed at a dinner party once to have said, ‘Oh, it is useless talking about inconsistent things, from an inconsistent proposition you can prove anything you like.’ Well, it is very easy to show this by mathematical means. But, as usual, Russell was much cleverer than this. Somebody at the dinner table said, ‘Oh, come on!’ He said, ‘Well, name an inconsistent proposition,’ and the man said, ‘Well, what shall we say, 2 = 1.’ ‘All right,’ said Russell, ‘what do you want me to prove?’ The man said, ‘I want you to prove that you are the pope.’ ‘Why,’ said Russell, ‘the pope and I are two, but two equals one, therefore the pope and I are one.’

— Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, 1979

| Science & Math