An Extraordinary Coincidence

As Thomas Young was struggling to decipher the Rosetta Stone, a traveler gave him a parcel of Egyptian manuscripts. Among the baffling hieroglyphics he noted three names written in Greek: Apollonius, Antigonus, and Antimachus. As he was puzzling over the rest, a friend gave him some papyri he had purchased at Thebes in 1820. Two of these contained some Greek characters, and Young began to examine them impatiently.

He “could scarcely believe that I was awake, and in my sober senses” when he saw the words Antimachus Antigenis and, a few lines further back, Portis Apollonii. It was a Greek translation of the very Egyptian manuscript he had been wrestling with!

“I could not, therefore, but conclude, that a most extraordinary chance had brought into my possession a document which was not very likely, in the first place, ever to have existed, still less to have been preserved uninjured, for my information, through a period of near two thousand years: but that this very extraordinary translation should have been brought safely to Europe, to England, and to me, at the very moment when it was most of all desirable to me to possess it, as the illustration of an original which I was then studying, but without any other reasonable hope of being able fully to comprehend it.”

“This combination would, in other times, have been considered as affording ample evidence of my having become an Egyptian sorcerer.”

September 21, 2010September 20, 2010 | History · Oddities

Two Revolutionaries

The key to the Bastille resides at Mount Vernon.

The Marquis de Lafayette had served under George Washington during the American Revolution, and when the French political prison fell in 1790 he sent the key to his former commander.

“Give me leave, my dear General,” he wrote, “to present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few days after I had ordered its demolition,–with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a tribute, which I owe, as a son to my adoptive father, as an Aide-de-Camp to my General, as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.”

September 7, 2010 | History

King Bomb

On Oct. 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the most powerful weapon in human history. At 50 megatons, “Tsar Bomba” was 5,000 times more powerful than the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima. Its flash was visible 1,000 kilometers away, its mushroom cloud rose 40 miles, and the atmospheric disturbance it created circled the earth three times.

One cameraman wrote: “The clouds beneath the aircraft and in the distance were lit up by the powerful flash. The sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent. At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging. The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. Slowly and silently it crept upwards. … Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing. It seemed to suck the whole earth into it. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.”

A more distant observer heard only an indistinct blow, “as if the earth had been killed.”

The bomb had little value as a practical weapon, but it gave Khrushchev crowing rights and advanced us all along a dangerous road. Four hundred years earlier, Leonardo had prophesied, “Men will seem to see new destructions in the sky. … There shall come forth from beneath the ground that which by its terrific report shall stun all who are near it and cause men to drop dead at its breath, and it shall devastate cities and castles.”

(Thanks, Matt.)

August 18, 2010August 25, 2010 | History · Technology

Cincinnatus

Shortly after the American Revolution, a movement arose urging George Washington to declare himself king.

The general rejected the scheme as “big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my country.”

This brought him an unlikely admirer: George III remarked that refusing a crown would make Washington “the greatest man in the world.”

August 12, 2010August 25, 2010 | History

The Editorial Lash

Thomas Jefferson writhed under the criticisms of the Continental Congress as it reviewed his draft of the Declaration of Independence. Seeing this, Benjamin Franklin took him aside. “I have made it a rule,” he said, “whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draftsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I will relate to you.

“When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprenticed hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself. His first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription. He composed it in these words: John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money, with a figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments.

“The first he showed it to thought the word hatter tautologous, because followed by the words makes hats, which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word makes might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats; if good and to their mind they would buy, by whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words for ready money were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Every one who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood, John Thompson sells hats. ‘Sells hats?’ says his next friend; ‘why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What, then, is the use of that word?’ It was stricken out, and hats followed, the rather as there was one painted on the board.

“So his inscription was ultimately reduced to John Thompson, with the figure of a hat subjoined.”

July 27, 2010December 18, 2010 | History · Literature

Blowing in the Wind

A dust storm approaches Spearman, Texas, April 1935. Vance Johnson, a resident of western Kansas in the 1930s, described similar storms there:

The darkness was dust. The windows turned solid pitch; even flower boxes six inches beyond the pane were shut from view. … Dust sifted into houses, through cracks around the doors and windows — so thick even in well-built homes a man in a chair across the room became a blurred outline. Sparks flew between pieces of metal, and men got a shock when they touched the plumbing. It hurt to breath[e], but a damp cloth held over mouth and nose helped for a while. Food on tables freshly set for dinner ruined. Milk turned black. Bed, rugs, furniture, clothes in the closets, and food in the refrigerator were covered with a film of dust. Its acrid odor came out of pillows for days afterward.

During a dust storm in January 1895, J.C. Neal of Oklahoma A&M College reported “flashes of light that apparently started from no particular place, but prevaded [sic] the dust everywhere. As long as the wind blew, till about 2 a.m., January 21, this free lightning was everywhere but there was no noise whatever. It was a silent electrical storm.”

July 23, 2010August 26, 2010 | History · Science & Math

Show Your Work

On its final exam each year, beginning in 1931, the Japanese Naval Academy asked its students, “How would you carry out a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor?”

July 19, 2010December 18, 2010 | History

Art History

In 1989, a Philadelphia financial analyst visited a flea market in Adamstown, Pa., spotted an old painting whose frame he liked, and purchased it for $4.

When he removed the frame, he found a folded document between the picture canvas and the wood backing. And the document appeared to be the Declaration of Independence.

It was. He had discovered an original printing of the Declaration from its first printing in 1776. Sotheby’s auctioned it for $2.42 million in 1991, then again for $8.14 million in 2000.

“This was how Congress voted to disseminate the news of independence,” said Sotheby’s vice chairman David Redden. “So it was printed up from Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration and then sent around by couriers to the armies in the field, to the newly independent colonies, to the committees of public safety, and surely to the British, too.”

How it got into the painting is unknown.

July 16, 2010July 15, 2010 | History · Oddities

The Early Bird

Rutherford B. Hayes took the oath of office two days ahead of schedule, in a secret ceremony at the White House on March 3, 1877, attended by President Grant.

Hayes’ opponent, Samuel Tilden, had won the popular vote but lost the electoral college, and rumors were circulating that he planned to claim the presidency for himself.

That didn’t happen, and Hayes was inaugurated peacefully on March 5.

But, arguably, for those two days in March the United States had two presidents.

July 8, 2010August 26, 2010 | History