Franz Reichelt dreamed big. In 1911 the Austrian tailor designed a garment that he hoped would serve as a combination overcoat/parachute. Never one for half measures, he tested it by leaping from the Eiffel Tower.
The sad/romantic results were caught on film, including Reichelt’s long hesitation on the brink, his fatal fall and a measurement of the hole he left behind.
“If you’re not failing every now and again,” said Woody Allen, “it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.”
Lyrics to “Coon! Coon! Coon!”, billed as “The Most Successful Song Hit of 1901”:
Although it’s not my color,
I’m feeling mighty blue;
I’ve got a lot of trouble,
I’ll tell it all to you:
I’m cert’nly clean disgusted
With life, and that’s a fact
Because my hair is wooly
And because my color’s black.
My gal, she took a notion
Against the colored race.
She said if I would win her
I’d have to change my face;
She said if she should wed me,
That she’d regret it soon,
And now I’m shook, yes, good and hard,
Because I am a coon.
CHORUS:
Coon! Coon! Coon!
I wish my color would fade.
Coon! Coon! Coon!
I’d like a different shade.
Coon! Coon! Coon!
Morning, night and noon.
I wish I was a white man
‘Stead of a Coon! Coon! Coon!
I had my face enameled,
I had my hair made straight.
I dressed up like a white man,
And cert’nly did look great.
Then started out to see her,
Just shortly after dark,
But on the way to meet my babe
I had to cross a park;
Just as I was a-thinking
I had things fixed up right,
I passed a tree where two doves
Sat making love at night;
They stopped and looked me over,
I saw my finish soon.
When both those birds said good and loud,
“Coo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oon.”
In August 1660, an Englishman named William Harrison disappeared while walking from his home in Campden to Charingworth, about two miles away.
His manservant and son set out to find him, but Harrison’s bloodstained hat, shirt, and collar were soon discovered on the main road between Chipping Campden and Ebrington. There was no body.
In the furor that followed, the manservant accused his own mother and brother of killing Harrison for his money. He convinced the jury by acknowledging that the idea had been his own, and thus he was putting himself in jeopardy by admitting it. Why would he lie about such a thing?
All three were hanged in 1661. The following year, the missing man reappeared. He said he’d been abducted by pirates, sold into slavery, and escaped.
Why did the manservant lie, bringing a death sentence on himself and his family, if all were innocent? His confession has never been explained.
“Advice to Young Ladies”:
— Enquire Within Upon Everything: The Great Victorian-Era Domestic Standby, 1894
The first known serial killer was actually a woman, known as Locusta, a professional poisoner who lived in Rome during the first century A.D.
In 54, she killed the Emperor Claudius with a poisoned dish of mushrooms, and the following year she was convicted of a separate poisoning. Hearing of this, Nero rescued her from execution — so she could poison Britannicus for him.
They made a good partnership, Nero guaranteeing her safety during his lifetime, but when he died the Romans took an awful revenge. According to legend, Locusta was publicly raped by a specially trained giraffe, then torn apart by wild animals. Talk about cruel and unusual.
Recruiting poster, 1917.
George Bernard Shaw said, “Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.”
In the 1920s, the U.S. military devised a contingency plan for attacking Canada. After a first strike with poison gas, we’d occupy Halifax, invade Montreal and Quebec from New England, strike at the Great Lakes from Detroit and Buffalo, and impose a naval blockade on British Columbia.
At the same time, Canada’s Col. James Sutherland Brown developed a counter-invasion strategy where flying air columns would occupy Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. Gen. George Pearkes called it a “fantastic desperate plan [that] just might have worked,” but it was withdrawn in 1931.
A young boy who drowned on the Titanic. Despite the frightful loss of life, the evacuating passengers generally behaved honorably — giving women first place in the lifeboats, for instance, regardless of their class. 55 percent of third-class women survived, compared to 33 percent of first-class men.
“In the town of Ratisbon a certain young man who had an intrigue with a girl, wishing to leave her, lost his member; that is to say, some glamour was cast over it so that he could see or touch nothing but his smooth body. In his worry over this he went to a tavern to drink wine; and after he had sat there for a while he got into conversation with another woman who was there, and told her the cause of his sadness, explaining everything, and demonstrating in his body that it was so. The woman was astute, and asked whether he suspected anyone; and when he named such a one, unfolding the whole matter, she said: ‘If persuasion is not enough, you must use some violence, to induce her to restore to you your health.’ So in the evening the young man watched the way by which the witch was in the habit of going, and finding her, prayed her to restore to him the health of his body. And when she maintained that she was innocent and knew nothing about it, he fell upon her, and winding a towel tightly about her neck, choked her, saying: ‘Unless you give me back my health, you shall die at my hands.’ Then she, being unable to cry out, and growing black, said: ‘Let me go, and I will heal you.’ The young man then relaxed the pressure of the towel, and the witch touched him with her hand between the thighs, saying: ‘Now you have what you desire.’ And the young man, as he afterwards said, plainly felt, before he had verified it by looking or touching, that his member had been restored to him by the mere touch of the witch.”
— “How, As It Were, [Witches] Deprive Man of His Virile Member,” Malleus Maleficarum, 1487
“I do not think we should like to dine with a Chinese gentleman, or Mandarin, as he would treat us to strange dainties, as — a roast dog, a dish of stewed worms, a rat pie; or, perhaps, a bird’s-nest. But the bird’s-nest would be the best of the list, for it is not like the kind of bird’s-nests which you have seen, but is made, I believe, of the spawn of fish, and looks something like isinglass. It is the nest of a sort of swallow, is about the size of a goose’s egg, and is found in caverns along the sea shores; so it is not so bad as it seems at first. And the rats are as large and fat as some of our rabbits, being fed on fruits and grain, purposely for eating; as also are their dogs, for eating.”
— From The World’s Fair; or, Children’s Prize Gift Book of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Describing The Beautiful Inventions And Manufactures Exhibited Therein; With Pretty Stories About the People Who Have Made and Sent Them; And How They Live When at Home