Before steam power became widespread, some locomotives were powered by horses on treadmills. This version, dubbed Impulsoria by Italian inventor Clemente Masserano, was driven by four horses that walked continuously at their best speed; a gearbox could be set to forward, reverse, or neutral.
The “horse locomotive” successfully climbed a hill at trials in London in 1850 and was displayed at the Great Exhibition the following year. It was hoped that a final version might reach 20 mph, outrunning the steam engines of the day, but mechanical engines soon surpassed it.
The last surviving person to witness Lincoln’s assassination died in 1956. Samuel J. Seymour, born in 1860, was 5 years old when his godmother took him to see Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.
They sat opposite the president’s box, which was draped with flags, and she lifted him up when Lincoln entered. “He was a tall, stern-looking man,” Seymour told the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1954. “I guess I just thought he looked stern because of his whiskers, because he was smiling and waving to the crowd.”
The play began and “all of a sudden a shot rang out — a shot that always will be remembered — and someone in the president’s box screamed. I saw Lincoln slumped forward in his seat.” The crowd began to stir and Seymour saw the assassin John Wilkes Booth tumble over the balcony rail and land on the stage. He called, “Hurry, hurry, let’s go help the poor man who fell down.”
Lincoln died the following morning, and the fleeing Booth was killed 12 days later. Seymour carried the memory of the experience with him for 90 years, until his death on April 12, 1956, at age 96. “That night I was shot 50 times, at least, in my dreams — and I sometimes still relive the horror of Lincoln’s assassination, dozing in my rocker as an old codger like me is bound to do.”
02/19/2016 UPDATE: In February 1956, two months before his death, Seymour appeared on the American game show I’ve Got a Secret, where contestants had to guess his claim to notability:
connictation
n. a twinkling or winking with the eye
An example of the quick wit of W.S. Gilbert, from actor Rutland Barrington’s 1908 memoir:
“On one occasion, when rehearsing Pinafore, he said, ‘Cross left on that speech, I think, Barrington, and sit on the skylight over the saloon pensively.’ I did so, but the stage carpenter had only sewn the thing together with packthread, and when I sat on it it collapsed entirely, whereupon he said like lightning, ‘That’s expensively!'”
This drawing appeared in L’Illustration in May 1845 — it’s a “caniposte” railway that allegedly was used to carry express mail in Belgium. Two dogs are harnessed to a small wagon that runs on a narrow-gauge railway. They chase a stuffed hare, or, in “improved models,” a piece of raw meat.
Was this ever really used? “Despite evidence of the drawing, one has doubts!” writes J.R. Day in More Unusual Railways (1960). “Nevertheless the author has seen a large dog drawing a small cart in the streets of Salzburg, so perhaps it is not so unlikely after all.”
02/18/2016 UPDATE: A reader in Bruges tracked down the original story and offers some details:
Two ‘eccentric’ Brits apparently found associates for the construction of such a railway, meant for the transport of fresh fish from the seaport of Blankenberge to Bruges (some 12 km or 7.5 miles). The standard configuration would have been 4 hungry dogs, 2 barrels of fish and one piece of meat hung out in front; a different one (depicted) would consist of 2 hungry dogs, express mail and a motorized (‘dead or stuffed’) hare.
The railway was proposed but never actually built. ‘Some will consider it barbaric, other deem it impossible, and everyone will find it ridiculous; but people wil get used to it, and very soon one will wonder how we never thought of it any earlier.’
If we’re given 32 stones, each a different weight, how can we find both the heaviest and the second heaviest stone in 35 weighings with an equal-arm balance?
Think of the stones as tennis players in a singles tournament. The heavier the stone, the better the player. Each weighing in the balance represents a game between two players, with the better (heavier) player going on to the next round of the tournament.
Since there are 32 players, the tournament will have 5 rounds, with 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1 matches. Each match produces a loser, so this system will eliminate 31 of the 32 players. The best player is unbeatable, so he’ll emerge as the winner no matter how the early rounds are arranged.
How can we find the second-best player? He didn’t win the tournament, so he must have been eliminated at some point. But the only player good enough to beat him is the strongest player, so the two of them must have faced one another in some match. If we refer to the record of the pairings, we can find the five players that the champion eliminated on his way to the top. One of these is the second-best player.
Now if these five players hold a mini-tournament among themselves, the second-best player will win it. This can be done in another four matches, for a total of 35 matches.
From the Leningrad Mathematical Olympiad, via Ross Honsberger’s Mathematical Delights, 2004.
Seeing the earth from a distance has changed my perception of the solar system as well. Ever since Copernicus’ theory (that the earth was a satellite of the sun, instead of vice versa) gained wide acceptance, men have considered it an irrefutable truth; yet I submit that we still cling emotionally to the pre-Copernican, or Ptolemaic, notion that the earth is the center of everything. The sun comes up at dawn and goes down at dusk, right? Or as the radio commercial describes sunset: ‘When the sun just goes away from the sky …’ Baloney. The sun doesn’t rise or fall: it doesn’t move, it just sits there, and we rotate in front of it. … Everyone knows that, but I really see it now. No longer do I drive down a highway and wish the blinding sun would set; instead I wish we could speed up our rotation a bit and wing around into the shadows more quickly. I do not have to force myself to call this image to mind; it is there, and occasionally, I use it for other things, although admittedly I have to stretch a bit. ‘What a pretty day’ makes me think that it’s always a pretty day somewhere; if not here, then we just happen to be standing in the wrong place. ‘My watch is fast’ translated into no, it’s not, it’s just that you should be standing farther to the east.
— Astronaut Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire, 1975
In 1969, California attorney Russell Tansie sued God for $100,000 on behalf of his legal secretary, who blamed Him for destroying her Phoenix home with a bolt of lightning in 1960:
Plaintiff is informed and believes that defendant (God) at all times mentioned herein is responsible for the maintenance and operation of the Universe, including the weather in and upon the State of Arizona, and that on or about August 17, 1960, defendant so maintained and controlled the weather, in, around and upon Phoenix, in such careless and negligent manner as to cause lightning to strike the plaintiff’s house, setting it on fire and startling, frightening and shocking the plaintiff.
Tansie added that God “did this with full knowledge and that the act was committed with malice and ill will.” He hoped to win a default judgment when the defendant failed to appear in court. I don’t know the outcome; maybe they reached a settlement.
When a party of 13 dines at London’s Savoy Hotel, the management wards off bad luck by setting a place for Kaspar, a two-foot-tall statue of a black cat.
According to legend, when diamond magnate Woolf Joel held a dinner party for 14 guests at the hotel in 1898, one guest dropped out, and another predicted that the first person to leave the table would die. Joel left first and was shot dead a few weeks later.
To allay any further trouble, architect Basil Ionides sculpted Kaspar in 1927. When he joins a dining party, the cat has a napkin tied around his neck and is served like a regular diner, with a full place setting, champagne and wine.
Winston Churchill so admired Kaspar that he called for his attendance at every meeting of the Other Club, the political dining society that he founded with F.E. Smith. Kaspar has attended every fortnightly meeting for the last 88 years. Presumably he has a tell-all memoir in the works.
If a lion hunts a herd of antelope, what rules govern the herd’s behavior? One intriguing possibility is known as selfish herd theory: Rather than acting to benefit the group as a whole, each member positions itself so that there’s at least one other animal between it and the predator. This produces a pattern known as a Voronoi tesselation — if each dot in the diagram above is an antelope, then the surrounding colored region is the area that’s closer to that antelope than to any of its neighbors. If a lion enters your cell, then you’re the antelope that’s going to get eaten.
This understanding helps to explain some herd behavior. Each animal wants to make its “domain of danger” as small as possible and to be as far as possible from the predator. Dominant animals tend to get prime positions near the center, subordinate animals get pushed to the fringes, and the whole formation evolves continuously as predator and prey move about.
Studies have shown that groups of fiddler crabs tend to take up Voronoi patterns fairly quickly when a predator first appears, and to huddle together when the danger increases as each tries to reduce its surrounding polygon. This actually leads some to move toward the predator as they try to reach the center and put others between the hunter and themselves. Those that violate the movement rules tend to get picked off, which reinforces the evolutionary strength of the strategy.
