Remembrance

The Fireside Book of Humorous Poetry contains this resonant scrap of anonymous verse:

John Wesley Gaines!
John Wesley Gaines!
Thou monumental mass of brains!
Come in, John Wesley
For it rains.

In The American Treasury, Clifton Fadiman writes, “Mr. Gaines is believed to have been a Congressman.” And lo, a John Wesley Gaines did indeed serve in the House, representing Tennessee’s 6th district from 1897 to 1909. A Washington journalist wrote in 1907, “Down in Tennessee they started a song about Gaines which found its way to Washington, and every now and then you’ll hear some one giving him a line of it just to liven things up a bit.”

Gaines is largely forgotten today, but I find that gimlet little rhyme in 18 different treasuries. I wonder who wrote it.

| History · Poems

Viewpoint

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Bellini_Portrait_of_a_Young_Man.jpg

Why do people in bygone days wear such gloomy expressions? In the 16th and 17th centuries, smiling wasn’t encouraged in part because of poor dental hygiene. Louis XIV had no teeth, and the Mona Lisa may have been trying to hide gaps or stains in her smile.

Beyond the dental challenge, broad smiles and open laughter were often actively criticized, seen as reflecting a distressing lack of emotional control. Upper-class manners insisted that a boisterous laugh was a sign of poor breeding, really no better than a yawn or a fart. A French Catholic writer argued, in 1703, ‘God would not have given humans lips if He had wanted the teeth to be on open display.’ Children might smile, to be sure, but an adult should have learned to know better.

Fashionable audiences disdained laughing aloud — Molière said that this goal was not to entertain but to “correct the faults of men.” And in Protestant countries people sought to “walk humbly” in the sight of God — one writer commented that in his view, the Almighty “allowed of no joy or pleasure, but of a kind of melancholy demeanor or austerity.” This finally changed with the Enlightenment — John Byrom wrote in 1728, “It was the best thing one could do to be always cheerful.”

(Peter N. Stearns, Happiness in World History, 2020.)

| History · Society

Mnemonic

English history 1066-1154 as depicted by Mark Twain:

https://books.google.com/books?id=BW4yAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA3

He had discovered that taking notes using pictures helped to fix details in his memory, and in an 1899 essay he recommended the practice to children. An explanation of the diagram, starting at the bottom:

21 whales heading west: These represent William I, whose reign lasted 21 years (1066-1087). “We choose the whale for several reasons: its name and William’s begin with the same letter; it is the biggest fish that swims, and William is the most conspicuous figure in English history in the way of a landmark; finally, a whale is about the easiest thing to draw.”

13 whales heading east: William II, 1087-1100. The change in direction marks a change in leaders. “Make him spout his water forward instead of backward; also make him small, and stick a harpoon in him and give him that sick look in the eye. Otherwise you might seem to be continuing the other William, and that would be confusing and a damage.”

35 hens going west: Henry I, 1100-1135. “That is a hen, and suggests Henry by furnishing the first syllable.”

19 steers going east: Stephen of Blois, 1135-1154. “That is a steer. The sound suggests the beginning of Stephen’s name. I choose it for that reason. I can make a better steer than that when I am not excited. But this one will do. It is a good-enough steer for history.”

The essay was published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in December 1914, four years after Twain’s death.

| History · Humor · Literature

A Typographical Banknote

https://spink.com/lot/19031002340

In 1819, as the Bank of England struggled against counterfeiters, T.C. Hansard proposed a note that combined such a variety of typefaces that a lone forger couldn’t hope to duplicate it — the faces descended all the way to Diamond, the smallest available, and the bottom of each note would be filled with 140 lines of fine print containing hidden “private marks,” such as individual letters printed in italic or small capitals.

To create even the authentic version would have required a team of 20 people, from punchcutters to engine makers, to fulfill the typographical and other design flourishes. Hansard estimated that producing the first note would have cost as much as £2,000 and taken up to a year, “but after that the production will be so rapid, that with the labour of four Men only, without the assistance of any Steam Machinery, 40,000 Notes may be produced in a Day of the finest Workmanship, at the Expense, including Paper, of Half a Farthing each Note.”

In the end the proposal wasn’t adopted — small notes were withdrawn from circulation in 1821, and the search was dropped.

(Virginia Hewitt, “Beware of Imitations: The Campaign for a New Bank of England Note, 1797-1821,” Numismatic Chronicle 158 [1998], 197-222.)

| Crime · History · Technology

“A Mind-Bogglingly Slow Job”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crusadertankandgermantank.jpg

Released in 1978, The Campaign for North Africa has been called “the most complicated board game ever released.” On each turn a player must:

  • Plan strategic air missions
  • Raid Malta
  • Plan Axis convoys
  • Raid convoys
  • Distribute stores and consume stores
  • Calculate spillage/evaporation of water and adjust all supply dumps
  • Determine initiative
  • Determine weather (hot weather = more evaporation of water)
  • Distribute water
  • Reorganize units
  • Calculate attrition of units short of water and stores
  • Begin building construction
  • Begin training
  • Rearrange supplies
  • Transport cargo between African ports
  • Bring convoys ashore
  • Deploy Commonwealth fleet
  • Ship repair
  • Plan tactical air mission if airplanes are fueled
  • Begin air mission
    • Fight air-to-air combat
    • Fire flak
    • Carry out mission, return to base, airplane maintenance
  • Place land units on reserve
  • Movement:
    • Move units, tracking fuel expenditure and breakdown points vis-a-vis weather
    • Enemy reaction
    • Move more units
  • Combat:
    • Designate each tank and gun as deployed forward or back
    • Plot and fire barrages
    • Retreat before assault
    • Secretly assign all units to anti-armor or close-assault roles
    • Anti-armor fire
    • Adjust ammunition
    • Deploy destroyed tank markers and update unit records to reflect losses
    • Carry out probes and close assaults
  • Release reserves
  • Move rear trucks
  • Begin repair of breakdowns
  • Make patrols
  • Repeat all movement and combat steps a second time
  • Repeat all movement and combat steps a third time

His opponent then completes the same sequence, and that constitutes just one game turn.

Reviewer Luke Winkie estimated that “If you and your group meets for three hours at a time, twice a month, you’d wrap up the campaign in about 20 years.” Reviewer Nicholas Palmer added, “No doubt the first ten years are the hardest.”

| Entertainment · History

Also-Ran

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cycloped_horse-powered_locomotive.jpg

The Rainhill trials, held in October 1829 to test the suitability of locomotives to run on the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway, brought a surprising entrant: Mathematician Thomas Shaw Brandreth offered Cycloped, a car powered by a horse on a treadmill.

It was no match for the other competitors, all of which were steam locomotives. Engineer George Stephenson’s Rocket won the day — and an important place in transportation history.

| History · Technology

Getting There

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Britannia_Atlas_Newmarket_to_Wells_and_Bury_Edmunds_1675.jpg

English mapmaker John Ogilby completed a startling project in 1675: a road atlas of 17th-century Britain, offering strip maps of most of the major routes in England and Wales. He wrote to Charles II:

I have Attempted to Improve Our Commerce and Correspondency at Home, by Registring and Illustrating Your Majesty’s High-Ways, Directly and Transversely, as from Shoare to Shoare, so to the Prescrib’d Limts of the Circumambient Ocean, from the Great Emporium and Prime Center of the Kingdom, Your Royal Metropolis.

It used a consistent scale of one inch per mile, with each mile comprising 1760 yards, a standard that later mapmakers would follow. You can see the whole atlas here.

| History · Science & Math

Looking On

Some say “If God sees everything before
It happens — and deceived He cannot be —
Then everything must happen, though you swore
The contrary, for He has seen it, He.”
And so I say, if from eternity
God has foreknowledge of our thought and deed,
We’ve no free choice, whatever books we read.

— Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde

| History · Religion

War and Peace

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Swans_in_Ypres_%28I0004765%29.jpg

The swans of Ypres were well known to practically nearly every battalion which tasted the fighting in the Ypres salient. In June 1915 the shelling of this area was particularly severe, but the small family of swans, which lived in the moat below the ramparts of the stricken city, glided placidly on the water and survived this and the terrible bombardments of the subsequent three years. Great was the excitement among our troops when, in 1917, the swans began nesting operations. On one occasion a German shell fell within a short distance of the nest, but the bird which was then sitting took no notice, except that, for a moment, she fluttered from the concussion. The triumph of the parent birds came when, during the fearful fighting of the third battle for the city, two cygnets were hatched.

— Hugh Steuart Gladstone, Birds and the War, 1919

| History

Einstein’s Sink

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Einstein_Wasbak.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

This antique sink has been in use by the physics faculty of Leiden University since 1920, the year that Albert Einstein was made professor by special appointment.

It stood originally in the large lecture room of the old Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory, and it accompanied the department to the Leiden Bioscience park in 1977.

In more than a century of use, it’s earned its renown: Its users also include Paul Ehrenfest, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Albert Fert, and Brian Schmidt.

In 2015, when it became clear that sink would not accompany the department to a new science campus in 2025, a petition to “save the sink” received 197 signatures in a month. The faculty board agreed to move it to a lecture room in the new Oort building.

See Something Else.

| History · Science & Math