Hunger Is the Best Sauce

During the siege of Paris, the city’s starving populace ate its horses, dogs, and cats, and eventually even turned to rats and zoo animals. In Paris in Its Splendor (1900), Eustace Reynolds-Ball gives the menu of a popular restaurant in the Latin Quarter at the beginning of January 1871, “which gives a good idea of the gastronomic straits to which the light-hearted Parisians were reduced”:

  • Consommé de Cheval au millet.
  • Brochettes de foie de Chien à la maître d’hôtel.
  • Emincé de rable de Chat. Sauce mayonnaise.
  • Epaules et filets de Chien braisés. Sauce aux tomates.
  • Civet de Chat aux Champignons.
  • Côtelettes de Chien aux petits pois.
  • Salmis de Rats. Sauce Robert.
  • Gigots de chien flanqués de ratons. Sauce poivrade.
  • Begonias au jus.
  • Plum-pudding au rhum et à la Moelle de Cheval.

See also Balloon Mail.

| History · Oddities

“If the Indians Hadn’t Spent the $24”

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/800285

In 1626 Peter Minuit, first governor of New Netherland, purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians for about $24. … Assume for simplicity a uniform rate of 7% from 1626 to the present, and suppose that the Indians had put their $24 at interest at that rate … and had added the interest to the principal yearly. What would be the amount now, after 280 years? 24 × (1.07)280 = more than 4,042,000,000. [The current value of Manhattan is] a little more than $4,898,400,000. … The Indians could have bought back most of the property now, with improvements; from which one might point the moral of saving money and putting it at interest!

— W.F. White, A Scrap-Book of Elementary Mathematics, 1908

| History · Science & Math

How the West Was Won

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Some scalping victims survived. At left is Robert McGee, who was scalped as a teenager by Sioux chief Little Turtle in 1864.

Texas settler Josiah P. Wilbarger was scalped by Comanches in August 1833. He later recalled that “while no pain was perceptible, the removing of his scalp sounded like the ominous roar and peal of distant thunder,” recounts James De Shields in Border Wars of Texas.

“Rapidly Wilbarger recovered his usual health, and lived for eleven years, prospering, and accumulating a handsome estate. But his skull, bereft of the inner membrane and so long exposed to the sun, never entirely covered over, necessitating artificial covering, and eventually caused his death, hastened, as his physician, Dr. Anderson, thought, by accidentally striking his head against the upper portion of a low door frame of his gin house, causing the bone to exfoliate, exposing the brain and producing delirium.” He died in 1845.

| History

Thinking Ahead

In 1936, angered by early bonuses being paid to World War I veterans, a group of Princeton students formed the Veterans of Future Wars. They said it was inevitable that the country would go to war within 30 years, and that young men would serve, so they demanded payment of $1,000 each in advance.

By June the group had 50,000 members in 584 chapters nationwide, all of whom adopted the group’s salute, “hand outstretched, palm up and expectant.” But it all blew over by April.

Ironically, nearly all the founding Princetonians did serve in World War II.

| History

Oh

Croesus asked the oracle at Delphi whether he should attack the Persians. She replied that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire.

Croesus attacked, but the Persians beat him back, invaded his kingdom, and threw him into chains. He sent another message to the oracle: “Why did you deceive me?”

She replied that she had not deceived him — he had indeed destroyed a great empire.

| History

“The Spectre Leaguers”

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Arriving home late one summer night in 1692, Ebenezer Babson surprised two men leaving his house in Cape Ann, Mass. As they fled, he heard one say to the other, “The man of the house is now come, else we might have taken the house.”

Babson removed his family to a nearby garrison, which by several bizarre accounts was then besieged for two weeks by phantoms dressed as gentlemen, in white waistcoats and breeches. Appearing in groups as large as 11, the “unaccountable troublers” reportedly spoke in a strange tongue, performed incantations, threw stones, beat upon barns with clubs, and made their way through a nearby swamp without leaving tracks. On each sortie from the garrison, they melted into the wilderness, sometimes arising after felled by gunfire.

The siege ended after a fortnight, apparently when the demons tired of their sport. This was the year of the Salem witch hysteria, and it’s likely that pranksters were involved in the later events. But Babson’s curiously specific account does leave questions about his own experience.

| History · Oddities

Penetrating

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The lectures of 19th-century seer Andrew Jackson Davis weren’t well attended, but perhaps they should have been. His 1856 book Penetralia predicted both the automobile and the typewriter:

Look out about these days for carriages and travelling-saloons on country-roads–sans horses, sans steam, sans any visible motive-power–moving with greater speed and far more safety than at present. Carriages will be moved by a strange, and beautiful, and simple admixture of aqueous and atmospheric gases–so easily condensed, so simply ignited, and so imparted by a machine somewhat resembling our engines, as to be entirely concealed and manageable between the forward wheels. …

I am almost moved to invent an automatic psychographer; that is, an artificial soul-writer. It may be constructed something like a piano; one brace or scale of keys to represent the elementary sounds; another and lower tier, to represent a combination; and still another, for a rapid recombination; so that a person, instead of playing a piece of music, may touch off a sermon or a poem!

| History · Oddities · Technology

Guy Talk

Clement Atlee was using the urinal in the House of Commons one day when Winston Churchill took up a position at the opposite end.

“Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?” Atlee asked.

“That’s right,” Churchill said. “Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it.”

| History