Lincoln Enslaved

On April 2, scores of students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute swooped down on banks and stores in Troy, N.Y., demanded that bills from $5 to $100 be changed for pennies. By April 4, tellers and storekeepers became suspicious, but it was too late. The students had cornered the penny market, having collected 250,000 coppers. Sales had to be made in round sums or not at all. Next day, same students re-invaded Troy, gave merchants 75¢ and 25 pennies for every $1 purchase, announced they were ‘TaxCENTinels.’ Their aim is to make U.S. citizens tax-conscious by showing that hidden taxes amount to 25% of merchandise prices.

— Life, April 18, 1938

| Society

Sky Chariot

http://www.google.com/patents?id=3UU_AAAAEBAJ&printsec=drawing&zoom=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Balloons are nifty, but they’re hard to steer, and conventional motor-driven propellers are too heavy. So in 1887, Frenchman Charles Wulff proposed tying eagles to the car to form living propellers.

The birds would wear shoulder straps to keep them in place. The man in the car shouts his destination into a speaking tube, and the conductor uses a hand wheel and rollers to point the birds in the appropriate direction “quite independently of their own will.” A net can be lowered to stop them from flapping.

What could go wrong?

| Technology

Customer Service

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckleheaded Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds & blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again to-day. Haven’t you a telephone?

— Letter from Mark Twain to the Hartford City Gas Light Company, Feb. 12, 1891

| Literature · Society

Error on the G String

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

Fritz Kreisler had already gained immortality as a violin virtuoso when in 1935 he revealed that he was also a composer — for 30 years he had been performing his own compositions in concert but attributing them to Vivaldi, Couperin, Porpora, and Pugnani.

In the uproar that followed, Kreisler argued that as a young man he’d had no reputation; audiences would not have paid to hear the compositions of an unknown violinist. That was just the point, opined the Philadelphia Record: Fans had bought the pieces, and indeed other violinists had performed them, thinking them the work of established composers.

The Portland Oregonian agreed: “What if Fritz Kreisler had died without making confession that over a period of thirty years he had been composing music and signing to it the names of half-forgotten composers of former times? What if he had left no list of his works?”

Which raises an interesting question: How many such hoaxes have succeeded? How many of our great works of art are undiscovered forgeries?

| Art · Hoaxes

Burning Time

You have two one-hour fuses: If you light one, it will be consumed in exactly one hour.

Unfortunately, they’re badly made — some sections of each fuse burn faster than others. You know only that each full fuse will burn in one hour.

Using only these two fuses (and matches to light them), how can you tell when 45 minutes have passed?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Last Words

On being told the house doctor was coming, Max Baer said, “No, dummy, I need a people doctor.”

Hart Crane, jumping overboard: “Goodbye, everybody!”

Edison emerged from a coma to say, intriguingly, “It is very beautiful over there.”

James Joyce, fittingly: “Does nobody understand?”

Mahler: “Mozart!”

William Saroyan: “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”

Ernest Shackleton, to his doctor: “You are always wanting me to give up something. What do you want me to give up now?”

| Death