In December 2005, tired of endless credit-card offers, West Hollywood realtor Gary More scrawled NEVER WASTE A TREE across one application and mailed it in.
Chase Visa issued a card to “Never Waste Tree.”
He cut it up.
Crime and Punishment
Apparently vexed by bicycle thieves, Adolph Neubauer had a bright idea in 1899: Crank needles up through the seat when the bike isn’t in use “and thus prevent any one from mounting the bicycle without serious injury.”
He got the patent in 1900. Whether it worked is unknown.
Red Ink
More notable errors in the New York Times:
- “A report misidentified the document on which John Hancock put his famous prominent signature. It was the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.” (July 14, 1985)
- “An article about Ivana Trump and her spending habits misstated the number of bras she buys. It is two dozen black, two dozen beige and two dozen white, not two thousand of each.” (Oct. 22, 2000)
- “A recipe for juniper-flavored gravlax misstated the amount of kosher salt. It is one-half cup, not four cups.” (Nov. 26, 2000)
- “A report in the ‘Sunday’ pages included erroneous data from the Farmer’s Almanac about occurrences of full moons. The last month with no full moon was February 1980, not February 1866. The next month without a full moon will be February 1999, not some month 2.5 million years from now.” (Feb. 25, 1996)
- “An article misstated the title of the 1955 film that made James Dean a star. It is ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ not ‘Rebel With a Cause.'” (May 8, 2000)
See also Erratum.
Fast Friends
England and Portugal have been allies for 600 years:
It is cordially agreed that if, in time to come, one of the kings or his heir shall need the support of the other, or his help, and in order to get such assistance applies to his ally in lawful manner, the ally shall be bound to give aid and succour to the other, so far as he is able (without any deceit, fraud, or pretence) to the extent required by the danger to his ally’s realms, lands, domains, and subjects; and he shall be firmly bound by these present alliances to do this.
That agreement was signed in 1386. It’s the oldest surviving alliance in the world.
Unquote
“Cleanliness is almost as bad as godliness.” — Samuel Butler
Embarrassing Duels
In June 1836, congressmen Daniel Jenifer of Maryland and Jesse A. Bynum of North Carolina met on the dueling ground in Bladensburg, Md. Jenifer had denounced Andrew Jackson’s party and refused to retract his statement. The two men stood 10 feet apart, both fired six times, and, amazingly, both missed six times. They called it a draw.
In The Field of Honor, his 1883 history of dueling, Benjamin Cummings Truman records a strange contest between Capt. Raoul de Vere and Col. Barbier-Dufai, of Paris. The two agreed to settle a quarrel by entering a coach with daggers in their right hands and with their left arms tied, and fighting while the coach was driven twice around the Place du Carousel. Both died.
Even stranger: A Spaniard and a German both loved the daughter of Maximilian II, but the emperor did not want to risk their lives in a conventional duel. Instead he promised the girl’s hand to whichever man could wrestle his opponent into a bag.
“The two gentlemen expressed their willingness to engage in even so ridiculous a contest for so superior a prize, and fought in the presence of the whole court, the contest lasting more than an hour, the Spaniard finally yielding, having been put fairly into the bag by the German, Baron Eberhard, who took it and its Castilian contents upon his back, and very gallantly laid them at the feet of the young lady, to whom he was married the following day. This is the only duel or tournament of the kind on record.”
See En Garde!
First to Market
In March 1964, David Threlfall sent a unique request to bookmaker William Hill: “I’d like to bet £10 that a man will set foot on the surface of the moon before the first of January 1970.”
He’d heard President Kennedy’s 1961 address challenging the United States to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and “I thought if a bookmaker was prepared to offer reasonable odds it would be a commonsense bet.”
The bookmaker disagreed and put the odds at 1,000 to 1. Threlfall accepted, and the bet was placed on April 10.
As the Apollo program advanced, the odds began to drop, and people began to offer Threlfall thousands of pounds for his betting slip. He held on to it, though, and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, he received the reward for his forethought — a check for £10,000.
Side Business
Here’s proof that one leg of a triangle always equals the sum of the other two.
ABC is our triangle. Extend it make a parallelogram, as shown, and divide the parallelogram into a grid. Obviously,
AB + BC = (AG + HJ + KL + MN) + (GH + JK + LM + NC).
Now let the grid grow increasingly fine: Instead of dividing the parallelogram into a 4×4 grid, make it 5×5, then 6×6, and so on. With each iteration, the stairstep figure described above will approximate AC more closely, and yet its total length will always equal AB + BC. Thus, at the limit, AB + BC = AC. Where is the error?
(From Henry Dudeney’s Canterbury Puzzles, via W.W. Rouse Ball’s Mathematical Recreations and Essays, 1892.)
Next Stop
A woman proceeding by the elevated railroad, by the side of the Niagara Falls, asked the engine-driver, ‘If the rope broke, where she would go to?’ The driver told her that ‘If one broke they would have the other one to hold them.’ The woman then said, ‘Well, driver, if that broke, where should I go to?’ ‘Well,’ said the driver, ‘it just depends upon what sort of a life you have led.’
— Tit-Bits From All the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals and Newspapers in the World, Dec. 3, 1881
The 65th Square
By Eric Angelini, Europe Echecs, 1990.
White adds one square at the edge of the board and then mates in two.