“Calculation and Memory”

William Lawson, teacher of mathematics in Edinburgh, who died in 1757, when employed about twenty years before his death as preceptor to the sons of a gentleman, was induced by his employer to undertake an extraordinary piece of mental calculation. Upon a wager laid by his patron, that the numbers from 1 to 40 inclusive could, by memory alone, be multiplied continually–that is, 1 multiplied 2; the product then arising, 2, by 3; the next product, 6, by 4; the next, 24, by 5; and so on, 40 being the last multiplier–Mr. Lawson was, with reluctance, prevailed upon to attempt the task. He began it next morning at seven o’clock, taught his pupils their Latin lessons in the forenoon as usual, had finished the operation by six in the evening, and then told the last product to the gentlemen who had laid the wager; which they took down in writing, making a line of forty-eight figures, and found to be just. … When the operation was over, he could perceive his veins to start, like a man in a nervous fever; the three following nights he dreamed constantly of numbers; and he was often heard to say that no inducement would ever again engage him in a like attempt. A fair copy of the whole operation, attested by the subscriptions of three gentlemen, parties in the wager, was put into a frame with glass, and hung up in the patron’s dining-room.

— Chambers’s Journal, Sept. 27, 1856

| Oddities · Science & Math

Hearing Trouble

  • AURAL means heard; ORAL means spoken.
  • RAISE means erect; RAZE means tear down.
  • SUCCOR means aid; SUCKER means hoodwink.
  • ENUMERABLE means countable; INNUMERABLE means uncountable.
  • ERUPT means burst out; IRRUPT means burst in.
  • ERADICATE means pull up by the roots; IRRADICATE means root deeply.
  • PETALLESS means lacking petals; PETALOUS means having petals.
  • RECKLESS means careless; WRECKLESS means careful.
| Language

Action!

This is the Roundhay Garden Scene, the earliest surviving motion picture, shot in 1888 in the Leeds garden of Joseph and Sarah Whitley.

The scene is only 2 seconds long, but it seems to have conveyed a queer curse. Sarah died only 10 days after the shoot; director Louis Le Prince vanished from a French train two years later; and actor Alphonse Le Prince was found dead of a gunshot in 1902. There’s a novel in here somewhere.

| Death · Entertainment · Oddities

“Power of Short Words”

Bible scholar J. Addison Alexander was once asked whether one could write as forcibly in monosyllables as in long words. He responded with a poem:

Think not that strength lies in the big round word,
Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak.
To whom can this be true who once has heard
The cry of help, the words that all men speak
When want or woe or fear is in the throat,
So that each word is gasped out like a shriek
Pressed from the sore heart, or a strange wild note,
Sung by some fay or fiend? There is a strength
Which dies if stretched too far or spun too fine,
Which has more height than breadth, more depth than length.
Let but this force of thought and speech be mine,
And he that will may take the sleek fat phrase,
Which glows and burns not, though it gleam and shine–
Light but not heat–a flash, but not a blaze!
Nor is it mere strength that the short word boasts;
It serves far more than wind or storm can tell.
Or roar of waves that clash on rock-bound coasts,
The crash of tall trees when the wild winds swell,
The roar of guns, the groans of men that die
On blood-stained fields. It has a voice as well
For them that far off on their sick-beds lie;
For them that weep, for them that mourn the dead;
For them that dance and laugh and clap the hand
To joy’s quick step, as well as grief’s slow tread;
The sweet plain words we learn at first keep time,
And though the theme be sad, or gay, or grand,
With each, with all, these may be made to chime,
In thought, or speech, or song, or prose, or rhyme.

| Language · Poems

Turnabout

In 1805, during his return from India, the Duke of Wellington stayed briefly in a house on the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic.

By an odd coincidence, when Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo 10 years later, the deposed emperor was exiled to the very same house — while Wellington occupied his former palace.

“You may tell Bony,” the duke wrote to a friend, “that I find his apartments at the Elisée Bourbon very convenient, and that I hope he likes mine at Mr. Balcom’s. It is a droll sequel enough to the affairs of Europe that we should change places of residence.”

| History · Oddities

Dead Heat

Monument inscription, Whitby churchyard, North Yorkshire:

Here lies the bodies of FRANCIS HUNTRODDS and MARY his Wife who were both born on the same Day of the Week Month and Year (viz) Septr ye 19th 1600 Marry’d on the day of their Birth and after having had 12 Children born to them died Aged 80 Years on the same day of the year they were born September ye 19th 1680 the one not above five hours before ye other.

Husband, and Wife that did twelve Children bear,
Dy’d the same day; alike both aged were,
Bout eighty years they liv’d, five hours did part,
(Ev’n on the marriage day) each tender heart.
So fit a match, surely, could never be
Both, in their lives, and in their deaths agree.

| Death · Oddities

“Reported Capture of the Sea-Serpent”

In February 1852, the New York Tribune published an account by a Charles Seabury, master of the whaleship Monongahela, of a titanic struggle with a sea serpent in the South Pacific. The crew harpooned the 103-foot monster on Jan. 13 and killed it with lances the following morning:

None of the crew who witnessed that terrible scene will ever forget it; the evolutions of the body were rapid as lightning, seeming like the revolving of a thousand enormous black wheels. The tail and head would occasionally appear in the surging bloody foam, and a sound was heard, so dead, unearthly, and expressive of acute agony, that a thrill of horror ran through our veins.

The serpent was too large to get into port, so the crew resolved to save the skin, head, and bones. As they were dissecting the creature they encountered the brig Gipsy, to whom Seabury gave his story. “As soon as I get in I shall be enabled to furnish you a more detailed account.”

That’s the story. But neither Seabury, his serpent, nor his detailed account ever appeared, and the Gipsy later told the Philadelphia Bulletin that it had never met such a ship. By that time the original 2700-word account had run in Galignani’s Messenger, the Illustrated London News, the London Times, and Spenerishe Zeitung.

Zoologist editor Edward Newman concludes, “Very like a hoax, but well drawn up.” You can decide for yourself — the original account is here.

| Hoaxes · Oddities