Franklin the Wizard

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

But the sage was not too grave to play a joke on his friends. One day, when they were walking in the park at Wycombe, he said that he could quiet the waves on a small stream which was being whipped by the wind. He went two hundred paces above where the others stood, made some magic passes over the water, and waved his bamboo cane three times in the air. The waves gradually sank and the stream became as smooth as a mirror. After they had marvelled Franklin explained. He carried oil in the hollow joint of his cane, and a few drops of it spreading on the water had caused the miracle.

— Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 1938

| History · Science & Math

Every Little Thing

hoover doodle

Herbert Hoover drew this doodle while being interviewed. When he tossed it in a White House wastebasket, a guest retrieved it and asked him to sign it. The guest then sold it to collector Thomas Madigan … who resold it for a substantial sum.

Thereupon the doodle was published in newspapers across the country, often with expert interpretations. “Generally this man is highly efficient, a man who figures things out and who is at his best tackling difficult tasks,” opined one for the Chicago Tribune. Another objected: “It is the normal thing for a man to do — to occupy himself scribbling with a pencil when talking over the telephone or listening to someone. It would be significant if the president did not do this.”

Before it was over, the doodle had been converted into a fabric pattern for children’s rompers, which even Hoover’s granddaughter was said to have worn. If the president had an opinion about all this, he kept it to himself.

| History

Dueling Doppelgängers

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

When World War I broke out in August 1914, Germany enlisted a large ocean liner, the Cap Trafalgar, to attack British merchant ships around Cape Horn. While at a supply base on Trinidade, it was surprised by the HMS Carmania, a British liner that had been similarly pressed into service by the British navy.

The two enormous ships squared off and fought a murderous sea battle. In the end the Cap Trafalgar sank, and the Carmania limped away to a Brazilian port.

An observer might still have wondered which side won — by an ironic coincidence, the Cap Trafalgar had been disguised as the Carmania and the Carmania as the Cap Trafalgar.

| History · Oddities

The Fateful L

Harry B. Partridge points out that most presidents whose names have contained a penultimate L — Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, Franklin Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy — have died in office or survived an assassination attempt. He speculates that Gerald Ford survived because he was born Leslie Lynch King Jr., and that Theodore Roosevelt was divinely spared because THEO means God. (James Polk died three months after leaving office.)

Partridge also notes that a name with patronymic prefix (Mc, Fitz, etc.) is invariably fatal. To date there have been only two: William McKinley and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

See Tecumseh’s Curse.

| History · Language · Oddities

An Eager Student

While a law student at Duke University, Richard Nixon broke in to the dean’s office with two friends to see their forthcoming grades.

“They replaced everything, took nothing, damaged nothing, and committed no indiscretions,” writes Conrad Black in his 2008 biography of the president. “Yet some Nixonophobes have suggested that this was a foretaste of felonious behavior, and of a propensity for office break-ins.”

| History

The Alexamenos Graffito

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

In 1857 archaeologists unsealed an ancient house on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Inside, carved into the plaster of one of the walls, they found this inscription.

It appears to show a donkey-headed figure attached to a cross. A young man raises his hand to it, perhaps in worship. Below this is written in crude Greek, “Alexamenos worships [his] God.”

It’s believed to be one of the first representations of the crucifixion of Jesus.

| History · Religion

Happenstance

As the Mayflower was crossing the Atlantic in 1620, passenger John Howland was swept overboard during a storm. He managed to sieze a trailing halyard and was pulled back to safety. His descendants in the New World have included:

  • Franklin Roosevelt
  • George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • Joseph Smith and Brigham Young
  • Humphrey Bogart
  • Benjamin Spock
  • Sarah Palin
  • Chevy Chase
  • Christopher Lloyd
  • Alec Baldwin

If Howland had lost his life in that storm, none of these people would have existed.

| History

Carried Away

“We request that every hen lay 130 to 140 eggs a year. The increase cannot be achieved by the bastard hens (non-Aryan) which now populate German farmyards. Slaughter these undesirables and replace them.” — Nazi Party news agency, April 3, 1937

“Quite a number of people … describe the German classical author, Shakespeare, as belonging to English literature, because — quite accidentally born at Stratford-on-Avon — he was forced by the authorities of that country to write in English.” — New York National Socialist organ Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter, quoted in The American Mercury, July 1940

“The rabbit, it is certain, is no German animal, if only for its painful timidity. It is an immigrant who enjoys a guest’s privilege. As for the lion, one sees in him indisputably German fundamental characteristics. Thus one could call him a German abroad.” — Gen. Erich Ludendorff in Am Quell Deutscher Kraft

“Proper breathing is a means of acquiring heroic national mentality. The art of breathing was formerly characteristic of true Aryanism and known to all Aryan leaders.” — Weltpolitische Rundschau, Berlin

| History

Immortalized

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

Ambassador Richard Washburn Child once dined with Calvin Coolidge at the White House.

After dinner, the president said he had something to show him. He led Child to one of the smaller rooms in the mansion, opened the door, and turned on the light.

“On the opposite wall hung a portrait of himself,” Child later recalled. “I thought it so very bad I could think of nothing to say.”

For a long moment the two men stood on the threshold. Then Coolidge snapped off the light and closed the door.

“So do I,” he said.

| Art · History