Dark Days

On June 17, 1794, Charles-Henri Sanson, high executioner of the First French Republic, guillotined more than 50 “conspirators” in 28 minutes, including an 18-year-old girl who seemed so fragile that “a tiger would have pitied her.” That night he wrote in his diary:

Terrible day. The guillotine devoured 54. My strength went, my heart failed me. That evening, sitting down to dinner, I told my wife that I could see spots of blood on my napkin. … I don’t lay claim to any sensibility I don’t possess: I have seen too often and too close up the sufferings and death of my fellow human beings to be easily affected. If what I feel is not pity it must be caused by an attack of nerves; perhaps it is the hand of God punishing my cowardly pliancy to what so little resembles that justice which I was born to serve.

(Quoted in Frances Larson, Severed, 2014.)

September 13, 2023September 12, 2023 | Death · History

A Late Solution

When the 15th-century Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius died in 1516, he left behind a three-volume work that was ostensibly about magic — specifically, how to use spirits to send secret messages over distances. Only when the Steganographia and its key were published in 1606 did it become clear that it was really a book of ciphers — the “incantations” were encrypted instructions for concealing secret messages in letters sent between correspondents.

Books I and II were now plain enough, but Book III remained mysterious — it was shorter than the first two books, and its workings were not mentioned in the key that explained the ciphers in those volumes. Scholars began to conclude that it was simply what it appeared to be, a book on the occult, with no hidden content. Amazingly, nearly 400 years would go by before Book III gave up its secrets — Jim Reeds of AT&T Labs finally deciphered the mysterious codes in the third volume in 1998.

It turned out to be still more material on cryptography. But it’s still not clear why Trithemius had couched this third book in magical language. Did he think that his subject was inherently magical, or was he simply trying to enliven a tedious subject? We’ll probably never know. “Trithemius’s use of angel language might … be a rhetorical strategy to engage the reader’s interest,” Reeds writes. “If so, he was vastly successful, even if he completely miscalculated how his book would be received.”

(Jim Reeds, “Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia,” Cryptologia 22:4 (October 1998), 291-317.)

Propriety

In 1913, as festivities were planned for the wedding of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s daughter, Berlin’s Hotel Adlon had to move the Kaiser’s brother-in-law from the fourth floor to the second because the tsar could not ride the elevator:

Russian court protocol governed every step the tsar took and nowhere did it mention an elevator. Thus there were no instructions for how the tsar and his retinue were to behave in such a situation. Should he enter the cab first? Was he permitted to keep his hat on? Who should operate the elevator’s crank? and God knows what else.

The protocol had survived unchanged from the days of Catherine the Great. Catherine, of course, had never ridden an elevator for the simple reason that there weren’t any back then, and that’s why the protocol contained not one word about this means of vertical transportation. … At any rate, an apartment on the second floor was prepared for Duke Ernst Gunther zu Schleswig-Holstein.

From Andreas Bernard, Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator, 2014.

September 8, 2023September 7, 2023 | History · Society · Technology

Inventory

Items that fell forward during the last moments of the Titanic, listed in Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember, 1955:

29 boilers
800 cases of shelled walnuts
15,000 bottles of ale and stout
30 cases of golf clubs and tennis rackets
30,000 fresh eggs
5 grand pianos
a 50-phone switchboard
8 dozen tennis balls
a jeweled copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
2 reciprocating engines
a 1912 Renault Type CB Coupe de Ville

Also tons of coal, a cask of china intended for Tiffany’s, dozens of potted palms, innumerable shuffleboard sticks, “tumbling trellises, ivy pots and wicker chairs in the Café Parisien,” and the ship’s enormous anchor chains, each link of which weighed 175 pounds. “Seen and unseen, the great and the unknown tumbled together in a writhing heap as the bow plunged deeper and the stern rose higher. The strains of ‘Autumn’ were buried in a jumble of falling musicians and instruments. The lights went out, flashed on again, went out for good.”

August 29, 2023July 12, 2024 | History

Living Memory

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/503203633/ — Image: Flickr

Part of New York is standing still. In 1978, artist Alan Sonfist reclaimed a rubble-strewn lot on the corner of West Houston Street and La Guardia Place in Greenwich Village and re-established the vegetation, soil and rock formations that had existed there before the Western settlers arrived.

“As in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs and natural outcroppings need to be remembered,” he wrote in a 1968 manifesto proposing the project. Interestingly, he’d hoped to do even more than this: “On Canal Street I propose to create a marshland and a stream; on Spring Street I propose to restore the natural spring; in front of City Hall I propose to restore the historical lake. There are a series of fifty proposals I have made for the City of New York.”

Only this one, called Time Landscape, has been realized. But it’s still growing after 44 years, a tiny piece of history that Sonfist says helps the city remember its heritage.

August 23, 2022August 22, 2022 | Art · History

The Little People

In medieval chess, each of the eight pawns was associated with a commoner’s occupation. From king rook pawn to queen rook pawn:

Laborer (farmer)
Smith
Notary
Merchant
Physician
Innkeeper
City watchman or guard
Ribald or town courier

The merchant stood before the king, the doctor before the queen.

Jacopo de Cessolis used the game as the basis for a series of sermons on morality — he says that a philosopher invented the game to show his cruel king “the maners and conditicions of a kynge of the nobles and of the comun people and of theyr offices and how they shold be touchid and drawen. And how he shold amende hymself & become vertuous.”

(From Christopher Kleinhenz’s Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, 2004.)

August 18, 2022August 17, 2022 | Entertainment · History · Society

Homecoming

The Treaty of Versailles contains a macabre clause:

ARTICLE 246. Within six months from the coming into force of the present Treaty, … Germany will hand over to His Britannic Majesty’s Government the skull of the Sultan Mkwawa which was removed from the Protectorate of German East Africa and taken to Germany.

Mkwawa was a tribal leader in German East Africa who opposed colonization. After his defeat in battle, the Germans had sent his skull to Berlin. When the United Kingdom inherited the colony after World War I, the British sought to return the skull to the Wahehe people, but there was some confusion as to its whereabouts. It wasn’t actually returned until 1954, when Tanganyika governor Sir Edward Twining tracked it down in the Bremen Museum. It now resides at the Mkwawa Memorial Museum in Kalenga, Tanzania.

(Thanks, Jon.)

August 11, 2022August 10, 2022 | History

Primate Wanted

The ACLU found John Scopes by running a newspaper ad seeking a teacher willing to test the law about teaching human evolution in the classrooms of Tennessee. From the May 4, 1925, edition of the Chattanooga Times:

We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts. Our lawyers think a friendly test case can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job. Distinguished counsel have volunteered their services. All we need now is a willing client.

Scopes wasn’t a biology teacher but had filled in for one using a textbook that accepted evolution, and that was enough to set the “monkey trial” moving forward.

Strangely, the disputed textbook was the one that Tennessee required its high school teachers to use that year. Clarence Darrow later quipped in his autobiography, “It seems strange that the Dayton school board did not adopt the first and second chapters of Genesis as a modern textbook on biology.”

August 10, 2022August 9, 2022 | History · Science & Math · Society

Alterations

white house alterations

As the 19th century advanced, the White House began to seem increasingly cramped. In 1889, the centennial of the U.S. presidency, First Lady Caroline Harrison suggested adding an art wing to the east and an administrative wing to the west, with glass-enclosed palm gardens, plant conservatories, and a lily pond completing the quadrangle, creating a private inner courtyard (top). Congress shot it down.

In 1900 Army engineer Colonel Theodore Bingham offered his own plan, which would add a massive two-story cylindrical wing at each flank, with domes and lanterns patterned after those at the Library of Congress (middle and bottom). The project stalled with McKinley’s assassination.

In 1902 the architectural firm McKim, Mead and White finally renovated the mansion, doubling the size of the family living quarters and providing a new wing for the president and his staff. The modern White House still largely reflects this design.

Related: In 1947, when Harry Truman proposed building a balcony on the south face of the White House, critics raised a unique objection:

Some quarters in Washington are wondering, half in fun, if President Truman’s controversial balcony on the White House will make $20 bills inaccurate and outmoded. The $20 bill bears a picture of the south portico of the White House, where Mr. Truman has announced he wants to build his balcony. If that structure is added, the currency will be pictorially incorrect.

That’s from the Chicago Tribune, Feb. 1, 1948. “Treasury officials scoffed at the idea that the balcony might make it necessary to print a new issue of $20 bills. They agreed that the bureau of engraving and printing is proud of the accuracy of its currency engravings, but said there is a limit to accuracy.” But subsequent issues of the bill were quietly updated to reflect the new addition.

August 9, 2022August 8, 2022 | History

Child Abuse

Nominative determinism is the theory that people gravitate toward occupations that reflect their names. In 1994 New Scientist noted that a new book, Pole Positions: The Polar Regions and the Future of the Planet, had been written by one Daniel Snowman, and that another, London Under London: A Subterranean Guide, received just two weeks later, had been written by Richard Trench. Psychologist Jen Hunt of the University of Manchester pointed out an article on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology whose authors were A.J. Splatt and D. Weedon.

If the theory is valid, then the naming of children is more momentous than we think. Harry Truman’s vice president, Alben William Barkley, above, was originally named Willie Alben Barkley, and contended that no one named Willie Alben could be elected superintendent of the county poorhouse. He changed his name to Alben William.

“In fact,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I think one of the graver shortcomings of my long career as a lawmaker was my failure to introduce a bill making it mandatory for parents to postpone the naming of their children until the youngsters are old enough to pick out a name for themselves.”

July 30, 2022July 29, 2022 | History · Language · Society