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Just before we get into today’s topic on America’s attempt to steal a Soviet spacecraft, wanted to shout out the author of this script, Gilles Messier, also made a phenomenal shirt related to this topic. For those interested, you can check it out here. Now let’s get into it.
On October 4, 1957 at 7:28 PM Greenwich Mean Time, a massive R7 Semyorka rocket roared off the launch pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and soared into the night sky. The following morning, the world awoke to the stunning news: the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, into earth orbit. In Washington, DC, American politicians and military officials flew into a panic. Not only had the supposedly backwards Soviets achieved spaceflight years ahead of Western predictions, but the same R7 rocket which had placed Sputnik in orbit could also place a nuclear warhead anywhere in the Continental United States with less than 30 minutes’ warning. Worse still, unlike a manned strategic bomber, such intercontinental ballistic missiles could not be intercepted or shot down. Overnight, outer space became a new battlefield in the escalating Cold War. As the American government and aerospace industry geared up to compete in this newly-declared Space Race, intelligence agencies like the CIA sought to learn all they could about Soviet space technology. This proved a daunting task, for the closed nature of Soviet society made it all but impossible to infiltrate using human agents. As a result, analysts were forced to glean what little they could from grainy spy plane and satellite photographs and intercepted telemetry signals. But then, in late 1959, an unlikely opportunity suddenly presented itself: a chance to “kidnap” and examine a genuine Soviet space probe. This is the audacious story of the Great Lunik Heist.
As covered in our previous video ‘Kaputnik’: America’s largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite, early American efforts to respond to Sputnik 1 were less than successful, with the first attempted launch of an American satellite, Vanguard TV-3, embarrassingly blowing up on the launch pad on live television. This allowed the Soviets to steal a march with an impressive string of space firsts. On November 3, 1957, just one month after Sputnik 1, the Soviets launched the first living creature – a dog named Laika – into earth orbit aboard Sputnik 2. This was followed on May 15, 1958 by Sputnik 3, a more sophisticated satellite loaded with scientific instruments for measuring micrometeorites, cosmic rays, and other space phenomena. Significantly, the onboard tape recorder designed to collect and transmit data to earth failed during the flight, preventing Sputnik 3 from discovering the Van Allen Radiation Belts circling the earth. That discovery was instead made by the first American satellite, Explorer 1, launched on February 1st of that year.
In 1959, the Soviets achieved an even more spectacular cosmic hat trick with the Luna series of probes, the first spacecraft to visit another celestial body. The first of these was Luna 1, launched on January 2. Designed to impact the lunar surface, the small 361 kilogram or 797 pound spherical craft was powered by mercury-oxide batteries and was fitted with a radio tracking and telemetry transmitter and various instruments including magnetometers, micrometeorite detectors, Geiger counters, scintillation counters, and ion traps to study the local environment as it careened suicidally towards the lunar surface. Also carried aboard the probe and the carrier rocket were a pair of small hollow titanium “pennants” resembling soccer balls, each divided into 72 pentagonal sections engraved with the Soviet coat of arms, the letters CCCP, and the words SEPTEMBER 1959. These were fitted with a small explosive charges designed to shatter the sphere and scatter the sections over the lunar surface just before impact, effectively “planting the flag” on the moon. Unfortunately, a delayed signal from the ground-based control system resulted in the upper Blok E rocket stage burning for longer than expected, causing Luna 1 to miss the moon entirely and enter a heliocentric order. Though no longer transmitting, it remains in space to this day, orbiting between the earth and Mars.
Nine months later on September 12, the Soviets launched the nearly-identical Luna 2, which after a flight lasting 2 days, 14 hours, and 22 minutes, successfully impacted the lunar surface near the crater Archimedes, becoming the first manmade object to reach another celestial body. The mission was a major propaganda coup for the Soviets. At the time, the closest the American space program had come to the moon was around 60,000 kilometres or 37,000 miles with the Pioneer 4 probe, launched on March 3, 1959. It was widely believed that while the Soviets had more powerful rockets, American guidance systems were more sophisticated and accurate; however, Luna 2’s successful rendezvous with the lunar surface challenged this assumption. Indeed, so proud were the Soviets of this achievement that when Premier Nikita Khrushchev made his first and only state visit to the United States between September 15 and 27, 1959, he presented U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower with replicas of the titanium pennants carried aboard Luna 2.
But more impressive feats were still to come. On October 4, the second anniversary of Sputnik 1, the Soviets launched Luna 3 towards the moon. Two days later it became the first manmade object to enter a translunar trajectory. More sophisticated than any probe that had come before, Luna 3 featured solar panels to recharge its batteries; gas thrusters, solar sensors, and gyroscopes to maintain its orientation in space; and a complex yet ingenious system known as Yenisey-2 for taking and transmitting images back to earth. In this system, images were captured on regular photographic film, which was immediately developed in an onboard darkroom before being scanned by a television tube, encoded, and transmitted via radio. On October 7, as Luna 3 swung around the far side of the moon, the Yenisey-2 system captured 29 images of the lunar surface. The following day, as the probe swung back towards the earth, 17 of these images were successfully transmitted to earth, giving humanity its first-ever glimpses of this mysterious, hitherto unseen hemisphere. Amusingly, while the probe itself was Russian, the heat-and-radiation-proof photographic film it carried was American, having been recovered from a U.S. Air Force Genetrix spy balloon that crash-landed in the Soviet Union.
Before we continue with our story, it should be noted here that while the early Soviet space programme gave the impression of an unbroken string of successes, the reality was far different. Indeed, every successful mission was usually accompanied by several failures whose existence were kept top-secret for propaganda purposes. For example, the successful launch of Sputnik 3 on May 15, 1958 was preceded by a catastrophic rocket failure on April 27, while three attempts to launch a lunar probe on September 23, October 11, and December 4, 1958 ended in failure before the successful launch of Luna 1.
In any event, in late 1959 the Soviets, flush with victory, organized a touring international exhibition to show off the products of their great Communist economic system. Amid the usual displays of agricultural equipment and scale models of nuclear power plants were the crown jewels of the exhibition: full-scale models of Sputnik 1 and Luna 1, the latter encased in its upper rocket stage with glass-covered windows cut in its outer skin to show off the probe within. At least, everyone assumed they were models. But when some undercover CIA agents snuck into an exhibition after hours and examined the spacecraft closely, they became convinced that the Luna probe on display was, in fact, a genuine piece of space hardware. While the agents measured, sketched, and photographed every detail of the spacecraft’s interior, a more detailed examination in the exhibition hall was impossible. Immediately recognizing the opportunity to score a massive intelligence coup, the CIA thus hatched a daring plan to “kidnap” the Luna spacecraft.
It would not be easy. While on display the spacecraft was guarded round-the-clock by Soviet soldiers, while for transport between exhibition sites it was packed in a large wooden crate measuring 6 by 3.4 by 4.3 metres or 20 by 11 by 14 feet and shipped by rail and two sets of trucks. However, the operation was not entirely airtight; there were several weak points in the transport chain that the CIA could exploit. For example, while travelling by train the spacecraft was given no dedicated escort. And while Soviet agents were posted at the receiving train stations, communication with the exhibit organizers was poor and the agents were often unaware of what shipments to expect and when. They also did not inspect the crates’ contents when they arrived. These gaps in security allowed the CIA to pinpoint a few precious hours in which to secretly “borrow” the spacecraft – more commonly known in American circles by the pseudo-Russian moniker “Lunik.”
Sometime in late 1959 or early 1960 – the exact date remains classified – a crack team of four CIA agents from the Joint Factory Markings Centre left Langley, Virginia for Mexico City, where the Lunik had just finished being exhibited at the Auditorio Nacional. Under the cover of darkness, they stopped the truck carrying the spacecraft to the railway station, escorted the driver to a nearby hotel, and parked the truck in a nearby salvage yard, whose high walls concealed the agents from prying eyes. Meanwhile, CIA agents monitoring the railway station watched as the Soviet agents on duty returned home to their hotel rooms, apparently not realizing that a key piece of hardware had failed to arrive. The greatest heist in spaceflight history was on.
Back in the salvage yard, the agents set upon the massive crate with nail pullers, ropes, and crowbars. At first, the CIA worried that their forced entry would be easily spotted by the Soviets, but closer examination revealed the crate to be in rough condition from constant handling, allaying their fears. However, they soon discovered that the crate’s sides and ends were bolted together from the inside, leaving the top lid as the only viable access point. This meant that the spacecraft could not feasibly be removed from the crate for study; the agents would have to work inside the crate itself.
The agents thus pried off the lid and, wearing only socks on their feet so as not to scratch the spacecraft’s delicate skin, used rope ladders to climb down inside. There, they immediately encountered another unexpected obstacle: covering the single nut that secured the nosecone to the rocket stage was a small plastic seal bearing the Soviet coat of arms, which had to be broken in order to access the interior of the spacecraft. While this should have derailed the operation before it had even begun, thankfully the CIA had an ace up their sleeve: a local contact who could manufacture a replica seal overnight. This brief scare out of the way, the agents, armed with hammers, screwdrivers, cameras, flashlights, and – most importantly – metric wrenches, set about meticulously disassembling, measuring, and photographing every square inch – or rather, centimetre – of the Lunik.
This proved more challenging than anticipated, the awkward design of the rocket stage making it difficult to disassemble and inspect. For example, The rear bulkhead, the only means of accessing the engine compartment, was held in place by no fewer than 130 bolts! But working carefully and methodically the agents made steady progress. While much of the vital engine hardware and electronic equipment had been stripped from the vehicle, the agents were still able to photograph, measure, and weigh mounting brackets, propellant tanks, and other hardware to determine important parameters like propellant volumes, launch weights, and design stresses. This, in turn, would give clues as to the capabilities of Soviet launch vehicles. The agents also recorded the manufacturing marks on each component, allowing the manufacturing and supply chain of the Soviet space program to be better understood. Finally, several electrical connectors had been left in the stage; assuming that Soviet engineers and intelligence officers had intended to remove all electrical equipment, the CIA agents removed these components and brought them back to the United States for further analysis.
The agents worked from 7:30 PM to 4:00 AM the following morning, whereupon they set about carefully reassembling the spacecraft. This, too, proved more challenging than anticipated, as a 1967 CIA report reveals:
“The first job, re-securing the orb in its basket, proved to be the most ticklish and time consuming part of the whole night’s work. We spent almost an hour on this, one man in the cramped nose section trying to get the orb into precisely the right position and one in the engine compartment trying to engage the threads on the end of a rod he couldn’t see. After a number of futile attempts and many anxious moments, the connection was finally made, and we all sighed with relief.”
Finally their work complete, the agents installed the replica seal, nailed the crate shut, and reunited the truck with its driver. At 7 AM, the CIA agents monitoring the railway station watched as the truck arrived and the Soviet agents returned from their hotel, supervised the transfer of the Lunik crate onto a waiting train, and left without a trace of suspicion. The plan had gone off without a hitch: for more than eight hours, the CIA had succeeded in “kidnapping” and examining a sensitive piece of high-tech space hardware right under the Soviets’ noses.
The Soviets never found out about the daring heist. Indeed, even within the CIA the incident remained largely obscure until 1967, when employee Sydney Finer wrote a sanitized account of the caper titled The Kidnapping of the Lunik for the agency journal Studies in Intelligence. Outside the agency, the operation remained completely unknown until 1996, when American space historian Dwayne Day stumbled upon it in a batch of recently-declassified CIA documents and published an account in the British Interplanetary Society magazine Spaceflight. However, full details of the plot, including Finer’s 1967 article, were not officially declassified until 2019.
While the exhibition version of the Lunik had been stripped of its most sensitive components, the CIA’s brief eight-hour examination still yielded a wealth of valuable intelligence. As Sydney Finer’s 1967 article concludes:
“The results of analysis…included probably identification of the producer of this Lunik stage, the fact that it was the fifth one produced, identification of three electrical producers who supplied components, and revelation of the system for numbering parts that was used here and conceivably for other Soviet space hardware.”
By assessing the current state of the art of Soviet rocket technology, the United States was able to determine what the Soviet space program could and could not achieve without dramatic improvements in capability. This, in turn, allowed the U.S. space program to more effectively set its own goals and timelines and ultimately overtake the Soviets in the Space Race. The Lunik plot also dramatically showcased the CIA’s flexibility, ingenuity, and intelligence-gathering capabilities:
“But perhaps more important in the long term than these positive intelligence results was the experience and example of fine cooperation on a job between covert operators and essentially overt collectors.”
The Soviet Luna project carried on for another decade and a half, with fifteen missions being successfully flown between 1959 and 1976. Several of these missions achieved important spaceflight firsts. For example, on February 3, 1966, Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to soft-land on the moon and return images of its surface. Two months later on April 3, Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the moon. On September 24, 1970, Luna 16 touched down on the lunar surface, collected soil samples, and returned them successfully to the earth, while on November 17 of that year Luna 17 successfully deployed Lunokhod 1, history’s first robotic planetary rover. By this time, however, the United States had already landed three manned missions on the moon – Apollo 11, 12, and 14 – completely eclipsing the Soviet achievements. Indeed, in a forgotten and rather pathetic incident, on July 21, 1969, mere hours before Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ended their historic mission, the unmanned Luna 15 probe lost control and crashed into the lunar surface. Whoopsie-doodle!
Despite the Soviets’ early successes, soon a number of factors including a flagging economy, a string of failed launches, and the untimely death of chief designer Sergei Korolev allowed the U.S. space program to pull ahead, and by the late 1960s it became clear that the Americans had won the Space Race. In the early 1970s the Soviets cancelled their own manned lunar program and switched their focus to long-duration orbital spaceflight and the construction of permanent manned space stations, starting with Salyut 1 in 1971.
While today the U.S victory in the Space Race appears like a foregone conclusion, at the time this was far from the case – hence why the CIA was so keen to learn anything it could about Luna 1 and other Soviet Space hardware. Indeed, along with Operation Ivy Bells, a 1971 U.S. Navy caper covered in our previous video Silent Seas: the Top Secret, Greatest Cold War Naval Espionage Mission; and Project Azorian, an absolutely bonkers 1974 attempt to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, the 1959 Lunik heist epitomizes the lengths U.S. Intelligence was willing to go to gain the upper hand in the 50-year global undeclared conflict known as the Cold War.
If you liked that video, please do subscribe to this channel, and check out our video here on The Real Story Behind Apollo 13 diving into the differences between the real mission and what was shown in the movie Apollo 13.
Expand for ReferencesDavid, Leonard, ‘Lunik Heist:’ A real-life CIA Rocket Kidnapping Goes to Hollywood, Space Insider, November 17, 2024, https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/lunik-heist-a-real-life-cia-rocket-kidnapping-goes-to-hollywood
Clark, Abbi, The Lunik Plot: How the CIA Hijacked a Soviet Space Vessel, Grey Dynamics, August 4, 2025, https://greydynamics.com/the-lunik-plot-how-the-cia-hijacked-a-soviet-space-vessel/
Avilla, Aeryn, That Time the CIA Stole a Soviet Lunar Probe, Spaceflight Histories, June 30, 2023, https://www.spaceflighthistories.com/post/cia-soviet-probe
Hollings, Alex, How the CIA Hijacked a Soviet Spacecraft in 1959, Sandboxx, January 27,2022, https://www.sandboxx.us/news/the-cia-hijacked-a-soviet-spacecraft-in-1959/?ue-mini-cart-product-added
Teitel, Amy, The CIA’s Bold Kidnapping of a Soviet Spacecraft, Popular Science, October 21, 2015, https://www.popsci.com/cias-bold-kidnapping-soviet-spacecraft/
The Great Lunik Heist, Commonplace Facts, July 19, 2024, https://commonplacefacts.com/2024/07/19/lunik-heist-cia-soviet-spacecraft/
Finer, Sydney, The Kidnapping of the Lunik, Studies in Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, Winter 1967, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/THE KIDNAPING OF THE LUNI[15732838].pdf
The post The Incredible Soviet Probe Space Heist appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On the morning of July 27, 1943, U.S. Army Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Duckworth sat down to breakfast at Bryan Field near Galveston, Texas. Outside the wind howled as a category 2 hurricane bore down upon the coast. The storm had come as a complete surprise; as a precaution against U-boat attacks a radio blackout had been ordered for all ships in the Gulf of Mexico, preventing early warnings from reaching the shore. Colonel Duckworth’s breakfast companions were a group of visiting British pilots being trained to fly on instruments, who, upon learning of the approaching hurricane, bet Duckworth that his North American T-6 Texan, the standard American single-engine training aircraft, was too flimsy to fly through the eye of the storm. The wager was laughably small: a single highball cocktail. To their surprise Duckworth accepted, and what happened next would change the history of aviation and meteorology forever.
Born in Savannah, Georgia on September 8, 1902, Joseph B. Duckworth had aviation in his blood. After graduating as a U.S. Army Air Force Cadet in 1928, through the 1930s Duckworth served as an airline pilot for the Ford Motor Company, Curtiss-Wright Flying Service, and Eastern Airlines, accumulating over 12,000 flying hours and becoming intimately familiar with the art and science of instrument flying. Up until the early 1920s, most pilots only flew ‘contact’ – that is, in conditions that allowed them to maintain sight of the ground. But with the introduction of the U.S. Air Mail Service in 1918, the need to maintain delivery schedules spurred the development of Instrument Flight Rules or IFR, used for when pilots fly in zero visibility conditions such as at night or in bad weather.
In 1940, Duckworth was recalled to the Army Air Force as a Major and in 1942 was placed in charge of the instrument flying program at Bryan Field in Texas. What he found there shocked him. While airlines had made massive progress in the science of instrument flying, the Air Force was still languishing in the 1910s. He states,
“The first shock I received was the almost total ignorance of instrument flying throughout the Air Corps. Cadets were being given flight training as if there were no instruments and then directed to fly an aircraft across the Atlantic at night. Losses in combat were less than those sustained from ignorance of instrument flying alone.”
Indeed, while most training aircraft were equipped with the necessary instruments for blind-flying, such as gyrocompasses and artificial horizons, instructors told their pupils that “those were for airline pilots” and bizarrely instructed them to keep them locked to prevent damage to the delicate equipment. Wartime demand for aircrew had also led to training being dangerously truncated from one year in 1940 to six months in 1942, with the number of flying hours required to fly a multi-engined bomber in combat dropping from 1000 to only 3. So disgusted was Duckworth by this state of affairs that he later stated he wanted to:
“…cut [the Cadets’] prized silver wings in half and tell [them] that the other half would be given them if they survived six months.”
Duckworth’s first order of business was to evaluate the instructors, most of whom he found to be grossly under-qualified. He thus established the first Air Force Standardization Board to train and evaluate flight instructors. He also developed a completely new training program and manual to instruct pilots in instrument flying. And it worked: between May and October of 1942 the number of students at Bryan Field nearly doubled, but the accident rate fell by more than half. Thanks to this success, in November, Duckworth’s system was implemented across the entire Southeast Training Command, and his manuals would be used by the Air Force for decades to come. For this reason, Joe Duckworth is widely regarded in the Air Force as the father of instrument flying. Thus, when those British pilots made their bet with him about flying in a hurricane on that July morning in 1943, there were few men more qualified to take them up on it. But why would he want to?
Aerial weather tracking was nothing new in 1943. In August of 1935 a United States Weather Bureau station in Jacksonville, Florida detected a hurricane developing east of the Bahamas, which they determined would make landfall on the north coast of Cuba. But when the storm failed to arrive, on September 2, Captain Leonard K. Povey of the Cuban Army Air Corps took off in his Curtiss Hawk II biplane and soon spotted the hurricane heading north towards the Florida Keys. The Labour Day Hurricane of 1935 proved so destructive that Povey would recommend the establishment of a regular aerial hurricane patrol to avoid future tragedies. But until Duckworth’s flight in 1943, nobody had actually flown into a hurricane.
Knowing that official approval to do so would take hours to obtain – if at all – Duckworth headed straight to the airfield and enlisted the services of the only navigator on duty that morning, Lieutenant Ralph O’Hair. Such was O’Hair’s faith in Duckworth as a pilot that within minutes the pair were off the ground and flying south towards the Gulf of Mexico. As they passed over Galveston, air traffic control asked if they were aware a hurricane was approaching. When Duckworth nonchalantly answered “yes”, the tower simply asked where to send the search party if their aircraft disappeared. Minutes later, Duckworth and O’Hair plunged headlong into the storm.
O’Hair later described the flight as like “Being tossed about like a stick in a dog’s mouth.” But despite the British pilots’ dire predictions, the T-6 made it through in one piece and soon emerged into the calm eye of the hurricane. Duckworth lingered long enough to take some notes on the shape of the eyewall before turning around and plunging back into the howling 130mph winds. When he and O’Hair landed back and Bryan Field, waiting on the tarmac was weather officer Lieutenant William Jones-Burdick, who asked to be flown into the hurricane so he could take some measurements. And so it was that Duckworth took off once again and performed the historic feat a second time in one day.
Duckworth would later downplay the heroism of his accomplishment, explaining that airline pilots at the time regularly flew in high altitude Jet Stream winds of up to 150mph. But he would admit, with typical understatement that surely his British compatriots probably appreciated, that:
“The only embarrassing episode would have been engine failure, which, with the strong ground winds, would probably have prevented a landing, and certainly would have made descent via parachute highly inconvenient.”
While his superiors were alarmed by his unauthorized flight, there is no record of Duckworth being reprimanded for it. Nor is there any record of him receiving his promised cocktail, though his breakfast companions’ next meal undoubtedly contained some variety of crow.
At the end of the war, Joe Duckworth was promoted to Colonel and served as commander of Hickham Field in Hawaii, retiring from the Air Force in 1955. Over the next 9 years he taught physics at Albion College in Michigan, served as head of the Safety Bureau for the Civil Aeronautics Board, and became a consultant for the Aircraft Owners’ and Pilots Association before passing away at Battle Creek Community Hospital on July 26, 1964 – almost 19 years to the day from his historic flight
But the legacy of that flight lives on. The hurricane of July 27, 1943 killed 19 people and caused over $17 million in damage (or about $300 million today), prompting local authorities to abandon radio blackouts and the Air Force to establish the first dedicated aerial weather unit, the 3rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron or the Hurricane Hunters. Flying B-25 Mitchell medium bombers from Presque Isle, Maine and Gander, Newfoundland, the 3rd WRS was tasked with locating and tracking storms along the entire eastern seaboard, especially around the strategically vital Atlantic shipping lanes. The unit later received more sophisticated RB-29 Superfortress aircraft, with which it achieved the first medium-level penetration of Hurricane Love on October 19, 1947.
Deactivated later that year, the unit was reborn in 1951 as the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, which still operates to this day. Based at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, the 53rd operates a flight of 10 WC-130J Super Hercules transports, specially modified with a suite of sophisticated meteorological instruments. While nominally an Air Force Unit, the 53rd ultimately receives its orders from the U.S. Department of Commerce, forming part of a national strategy to minimize loss of life and property due to extreme weather events. As part of the National Hurricane Operations Plan, the 53rd maintains the ability to intercept up to 3 storms per day with a response time of 16 hours, its area of operations stretching from the Mid-Atlantic to the International Date Line in the Pacific. Crews can fly a variety of mission profiles, from simple low-level investigations to locate developing hurricanes to dropping weather buoys ahead of storms to missions where the aircraft remains in the eye of the hurricane for as long as possible, allowing the storm to be tracked with pinpoint accuracy. While satellite imagery has made tracking hurricanes much easier in recent years, certain data like barometric pressure or interior windspeed can only be measured directly using aircraft, meaning that units like the 53rd will continue to play a vital role in the United States’ hurricane management efforts for the foreseeable future.
Similar to, but distinct from the 53rd are the Hurricane Hunters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA based at Lakeland Linder International Airport in Florida. While the 53rd is primarily tasked with tracking and measuring storms as an emergency response, the NOAA Hurricane Hunters primarily conduct long-term scientific research. However, the Air Force maintains the post of Chief, Aerial Reconnaissance Coordination, All Hurricanes, or CARCAH, whose primary job we can only assume is trying to explain that title when not coordinating the activities of the two units in an emergency if required.
In line with its pioneering mission, over the years the 53rd has achieved a number of notable firsts. In 1973, Sergeant Vickiann Esposito, a weather buoy operator, became the first woman in Air Force history to qualify as aircrew, while in 1977 1st Lieutenant Florence Fowler became the first woman to be rated as a navigator.
As for the danger of flying into the world’s most powerful storms, like Colonel Duckworth 80 years before, the men and women of the 53rd see it as just another part of the job. As Majors Kendall Dunn and Tobi Baker explain:
“We fly into weather when all other aircraft have to stay at least 20 miles out to avoid it. Flying into storms, this is our type of combat.”
“This opportunity is unique, because you can say you’re one in 20 in the world that does your job. You get to experience something that mother nature produces, that not many others get to see with their naked eye. There’s nothing like breaking through the eye-wall and have an open sky above you and being encompassed by a bowl of clouds around you that has so much destructive power.”
And to think it all started with a simple wager over breakfast.
Expand for References
Colonel Joseph Duckworth, Morning Star, November 28, 1993, http://www.albionmich.com/history/histor_notebook/931128.shtml
Glines, Carroll, Duckworth’s Legacy, Air Force Magazine, May 1, 1990, https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0590duckworth/
Hard, Rufus, Ask Rufus: The Legacy of Joe Duck, The Dispatch, August 22, 2020, https://www.cdispatch.com/opinions/article.asp?aid=83068
Atkins, Randy, Col. Joe Duckworth Makes History – July 27, 1943, Star Tribune, July 27, 2009, https://www.startribune.com/col-joe-duckworth-makes-history-july-27-1943/51781242/?refresh=true
Gregg, Tim, Rellis Recollections: Bryan Field Officer Flew Into a Tropical Storm on a Bet, The Eagle, April 29, 2018, https://theeagle.com/brazos_life/rellis-recollections-bryan-field-officer-flew-into-a-tropical-storm-on-a-bet/article_5300c471-698f-5df7-866b-71dc4c92ea88.html
75th Anniversary of First Flight into the Eye of a Hurricane, NOAA, July 27, 2018, https://www.weathernationtv.com/news/75th-anniversary-first-flight-eye-hurricane/
Escher, Kat, Why does NOAA Still Send Pilots Into Hurricanes? Smithsonian Magazine, July 27, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-does-noaa-still-send-pilots-hurricanes-180964135/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR3QMoZcnkmj2HRbgPu1H_cFOy-QMPYVfHJaP_e8Bk4RF3TbLfu0vKO3ThY
The Mission of the Hurricane Hunters, Hurricane Hunters Association, https://www.hurricanehunters.com/mission.html
Carranza, Sgt. Christopher, Meet the Air Force Reserve ‘Hurricane Hunters’ Chasing Storms, USO, Aug 26, 2020, https://www.uso.org/stories/2458-meet-the-air-force-reserve-hurricane-hunters-chasing-storms-like-hurricane-dorian
Calitz, Garth, “Hurricane Hunters” The 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, Flightline Weekly, May 26, 2020, https://www.flightlineweekly.com/post/hurricane-hunters-the-53rd-weather-reconnaissance-squadron
The post The Dare That Led to the First Hurricane Hunter appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Ahhh the microwave oven: perhaps the most con of mod cons. Whether you’re zapping a mug of lukewarm coffee back to life, rewarming some leftovers, or heating up a frozen burrito for the fourth time this week, this handy little device will get the job done quickly and efficiently without the muss and fuss of a regular stove or oven. But have you ever wondered how this seemingly magical box manages to cook your food without flames or heat – or who invented it in the first place and why? Well, the answer may surprise you, for the key working component in this appliance found in every kitchen, break room, and hotel suite was once the most closely-guarded military secret in the world, a key technological breakthrough that was instrumental in winning the Second World War and shaping the modern world as we know it. This is the long and surprisingly fascinating story of the microwave oven.
The origins of the microwave oven stretch all the way back to the discovery of radio waves. In 1865, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell published the groundbreaking paper A Dynamical Theory of Electromagnetic Fields, in which he postulated that visible light is composed of interacting electric and magnetic fields and laid out the physical laws – today known as Maxwell’s Equations – governing the behaviour of these waves. Maxwell’s theories predicted the existence of an entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves, varying in frequency and wavelength. In 1888, German physicist Heinrich Hertz – whose name is now the official unit of frequency – succeeded in generating and detecting long, low-frequency electromagnetic waves, confirming Maxwell’s predictions. Hertz’s discoveries not only inspired later inventors like Guglielmo Marconi to develop wireless communications – aka radio – but also laid the groundwork for the discovery of the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. While the spectrum is continuous, for the sake of convenience it is usually divided into seven main regions or bands according to wavelength: radio waves down to 10 metres; microwaves, from 1 metre to 1 millimetre; infrared light, from 100 to 1 micrometers; visible light, from 700 to 400 nanometers; ultraviolet light, from 400 to 121 nanometers; X-rays, from 10 nanometers to 100 picometer; and finally gamma rays, 10 picometers and below.
In the 1910s and 20s, it was discovered that high-frequency electric currents and shortwave radio signals could induce heating in a variety of materials – including human tissue. This led to the development of diathermy, a method for electromagnetically heating muscles and other deep tissue still widely used in physiotherapy to this day. The application of this technology to the field of cooking was readily apparent, and at the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, electrical giant Westinghouse demonstrated the rapid cooking of foods like steak and potatoes by placing them between two metal plates attached to a 10 kilowatt, 60 megahertz shortwave radio transmitter. But while impressive, the required equipment was bulky, expensive, and dangerous, and the technique failed to take off. The dream of cooking food rapidly without flames would have to await the development of a revolutionary piece of technology, whose invention was driven by the needs not of medicine or gastronomy, but of war.
Our story properly begins in 1934, as Europe was once again gearing up for war. The inter-war period saw huge leaps in aviation technology, with aircraft going from rickety contraptions of wood, wire, and fabric to sleek, powerful, all-metal machines capable of flying at speeds of hundreds of kilometres per hour and altitudes of tens of thousands of metres. So advanced were these new weapons that military planners boasted that “the bomber will always get through” and that future wars would be ended swiftly and decisively by destroying the enemy’s military and industrial assets from the air. In the United Kingdom, these developments caused a not significant amount of anxiety, as the nation had already gotten a taste of the horrors of aerial bombardment during the first World War. Unfortunately, the Royal Air Force’s infrastructure for detecting and tracking incoming enemy bombers had barely evolved over the previous two decades, depending largely on the human aircraft spotters of the Royal Observer Corps.
Sound locating devices called acoustic mirrors were also installed at several RAF bases, but these were of dubious utility. While this equipment could give an incoming aircraft’s bearing, it could not measure its range, while the faint sound of distant aircraft was easily drowned out by other noises. Furthermore, as sound travels at slightly over 1,200 kilometres per hour and even bombers of the era could reach over 400 kilometres per hour, an aircraft’s position would have changed significantly by the time it was detected.
This forced the Royal Air Force to adopt the strategy of Standing Patrols, whereby fighters continuously circled likely approach routes to major targets, being relieved by other aircraft when their fuel ran out. As can be imagined, this was a very inefficient strategy, extremely costly in terms of aircraft, engine hours, and fuel, so in the late 1930s the RAF introduced specialized interceptor aircraft like the Hawker Fury and Hawker Hurricane which could remain on the ground and, upon receiving an attack warning, quickly take off and climb to operating altitude. However, there could never be enough of these aircraft to cover the entirety of the UK; some means of detecting incoming aircraft was still needed in order to vector the interceptors onto their targets.
Thankfully, a solution soon appeared in the form of Radio Detection or RD – what today is widely known as Radar. While the invention of radar is typically credited to the British, like all big, important ideas it was actually developed independently in several different countries at around the same time. During his 1888 experiments with radio waves, Heinrich Hertz discovered that these waves could be reflected off metallic objects. Similar effects were later observed by radio pioneers such as Marconi and British engineer Charles Samuel Franklin, who in a 1922 paper delivered before the Institution of Electrical Engineers wrote:
“I also described tests carried out in transmitting a beam of reflected waves across country … and pointed out the possibility of the utility of such a system if applied to lighthouses and lightships, so as to enable vessels in foggy weather to locate dangerous points around the coasts … It [now] seems to me that it should be possible to design [an] apparatus by means of which a ship could radiate or project a divergent beam of these rays in any desired direction, which rays, if coming across a metallic object, such as another steamer or ship, would be reflected back to a receiver screened from the local transmitter on the sending ship, and thereby immediately reveal the presence and bearing of the other ship in fog or thick weather.”
Indeed, such a device had already been patented in 1904 by German engineer Christian Hülsmeyer under the name Obstacle Detector and Ship Navigation Device. Based on contemporary radio technology, the device used a simple high voltage spark gap and a coherer receiver to project a burst of radio waves and listen for the echo, allowing ships, icebergs, and other hazards to be detected at night or in dense fog at ranges up to 3 kilometres. It could also measure the approximate range of a contact by triangulating the strength of the echoes from various angles. But while now widely recognized as the first practical radar set, unfortunately Hülsmeyer’s invention failed to attract any military or commercial interest.
But in 1933, physicist Rudolf Kühnhold, scientific director of the Kriegsmarine or German navy, began experimenting with radio devices for detecting and tracking ships at sea. After some initial failed experiments, he joined forces with amateur radio operators Paul-Günther Erbslöh and Hans-Karl Freiherr von Willisen and formed a private company called GEMA. In June 1934, the company built a 70-watt transmitter and receiver operating at a frequency of 600 megahertz and wavelength of 50 centimetres and succeeded in detecting large ships in Kiel harbour at a distance of 2 kilometres. Unlike Christian Hülsmeyer’s device, the range of contacts was determined by pulsing the radio beam and measuring the time it took for each pulse to travel back and forth. The echoes were also displayed visually on a Braun cathode-ray tube. In September 1935, GEMA successfully demonstrated their equipment to the Kriegsmarine, who immediately ordered it into production as the Seetakt, the world’s first operational ship-borne radar. The technology was also later adapted into the Freya early warning radar to defend German territory against enemy bombers. But while the Germans initially led the world in radar technology, development work was ordered halted shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. This was because German leaders assumed the war would be over in a matter of months; therefore, advanced technologies like radar and jet propulsion would not be needed.
Meanwhile in Britain, the development of radar was spurred by the most unlikely of circumstances. In 1934, articles appeared in German newspapers claiming that the German military was developing a “death ray” that used powerful radio beams to shoot down enemy aircraft. Intrigued – and apparently desperate for any military advantage, however far-fetched – Dr. Harry E. Wimperis, the Air Ministry Director of Scientific Research, contacted Dr. Robert Watson-Watt of the National Physical Laboratory’s Radio Research Station in Slough and asked him if such a death ray was feasible. Watson-Watt passed on the task to his colleague Arnold Wilkins, who later recalled:
“I received the request on a piece of torn off calendar. Watson Watt liked using that sort of thing being an economical Scotsman. The request, I soon deduced, was to assess the feasibility of a Death Ray, as he was asking me to calculate the amount of radio energy which must be radiated to raise the temperature of a man’s blood to fever heat at a certain distance.”
To the disappointment of science fiction fans everywhere, it took Wilkins less than half an hour to calculate that the power requirements of a working death ray were far too high to be practical. However, in his report he asked if there was anything else the Radio Research Station could do to help the Air Ministry. He soon remembered reading a Post Office report from the previous year claiming that an aircraft flying across an experimental VHF radio telephone link had caused the received signal to fade, and wondered whether such a radio beam could be used to detect and track aircraft at long distances. Discussing the matter with Watson-Watt, Wilkins realized that if they used a radio beam with a wavelength of 50 metres, the 25-metre metal tubing wings of the Handley Page Heyford – the RAF’s standard bomber at the time – would act as a half-wave dipole antenna, reflecting back a much stronger signal than previously assumed. Intrigued by this possibility, the Air Ministry Defence Committee commissioned Watson-Watt to prepare a scientific report on radio detection or RD, which he submitted on February 12, 1935 under the title Detection and Location of Aircraft by Radio Methods. In this remarkable paper, Watson-Watt not only laid out the fundamentals of radar, but predicted other technologies such as radio-based Identification Friend or Foe or IFF systems for aircraft. Impressed, the Air Ministry requested a live demonstration of his theories, scheduled for February 16.
In classic British make-do-and-mend fashion, Watson-Watt was forced to beg, borrow, and steal much of the equipment needed for this demonstration. For the transmitter he used the BBC’s shortwave radio station at Daventry, transmitting at a frequency of 6 Megahertz and a wavelength of 49 metres; and for the receiver he borrowed equipment built by the Radio Research Station’s Sir Edward Appleton to study the earth’s ionosphere and packed it into an ancient Morris Commercial van. He and Wilkins drove the van to a field outside the town of Weedon, near Daventry, where they set up their receiving aerials. The following day, witnessed by Air Ministry observer A.P. Rowe, the pair hunched over a glowing cathode ray tube display in the cramped van while RAF pilot Flight Lieutenant F.L. Blucke took off and flew his Heyford bomber at 3,000 metres on a predetermined course between Daventry and Weedon. As the bomber lumbered past at 144 kilometres per hour, the team watched as the glowing green dot slowly climbed up the tube, the signal only being lost when the aircraft was 13 kilometres away. According to legend, Watson-Watt triumphantly declared: “Britain is once more an island!”
With the basic principle of Radio Detection proven, Watson-Watt received £10,000 from the Air Ministry – an enormous sum in those days – to further develop the technology. In May 1935, he and his colleagues set up an experimental establishment on an island at Ordfordness in Suffolk, officially named the Ionospheric Research Station to conceal its true purpose. Progress was incredibly swift; after only a month the team succeeded in tracking a Westland Wallace aircraft out to a range of 27 kilometres, while just a week later they accidentally detected a flight of three RAF Hawker Hart fighters at a range of 32 kilometres and discovered they could track each aircraft individually. The team soon established the optimal wavelength for long-distance detection – 10 metres – and a convenient method for displaying the returned echoes. The cathode ray tube displays were fitted with a time base circuit that made a phosphorescent dot oscillate rapidly across the screen, forming a horizontal line. Echoes returned from aircraft would deflect the dot upwards, creating peaks along the line. The closer the contact, the further left along the line the peak formed, allowing the aircraft’s range to be determined. Altitude was measured by comparing the return of signals to two horizontal antennas mounted one above the other, while bearing was measured by comparing returns to two crossed aerials. This allowed the position of an incoming aircraft to be determined in three dimensions with a high level of accuracy at up to 200 kilometres. However, at the original signal pulse rate of 25 per second it could not detect aircraft at ranges under 30 kilometres; to solve this, the rate was increased to tens of millions of pulses per second. At this point the technology was still known simply as Radio Detection, but American researchers later gave it the name Radio Direction-finding And Ranging – or RADAR for short.
With all the technical details worked out, in early 1936 Watson-Watt’s team began constructing the first operational radar station at Bawdsey Manor in Suffolk, the transmitting and receiving aerials being mounted on 100-metre-tall steel and wooden towers. Initially used for technical development and training of future radar crews, in May 1937 the Bawdsey Manor installation became the first site of the Chain Home or CH radar network designed to defend England’s southern and eastern coastlines. By the time it became fully operational in the spring of 1939, Chain Home totalled 20 radar sites stretching from the Isle of Wight to the Firth of Forth. To detect low-flying aircraft, a second parallel network called Chain Home Low based on gun-laying radar sets operating at a wavelength of 1.5 metres was also installed. Along with the Royal Observer Corps, Chain Home formed the early warning component of the so-called Dowding System, named after Air Chief Marshal High Dowding, commander of RAF Fighter Command. The coordinates and heading of enemy bomber formations were transmitted from Chain Home and ROC stations to a filter room at Fighter Command Headquarters at Bentley Priory in London, where ground controllers – many of them members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force or WAAFs – plotted this information on a giant map and guided the appropriate fighter units to make the interception. By providing early warning and directing aircraft to specific targets, the Dowding System allowed Britain’s limited fighter force to be deployed with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
Compared to contemporary German and later wartime designs, Chain Home was relatively primitive and inefficient; instead of mechanically scanning a narrow beam, it projected a giant “floodlight” across the entire sky – a system which consumed huge amounts of power. Despite this, however, the network used readily-available technology, allowing it to be made operational just in time for the outbreak of the Second World War – a fact which would soon grant the British an enormous strategic advantage.
Meanwhile, the Germans watched with curiosity as the Chain Home towers began popping up along the English coast. While they assumed they had something to do with aerial defence, the stations looked so different from German designs that they could not be certain. So, in the spring of 1939, General Wolfgang Martini, head of the Luftwaffe signals branch, ordered the mysterious towers investigated. For this mission, he commandeered an unusual vehicle: the LZ-130 Graf Zeppelin, the last German rigid airship and the sister ship of the ill-fated Hindenburg. Fitted with signals intelligence equipment, Graf Zeppelin left its hangar in Frankfurt on July 12, 1939 and headed for Bawdsey on the English coast, cruising just out of sight of the experimental station. Yet instead of the pulsed radar signals they were expecting, the German radio operators just heard random static. No matter how they adjusted their equipment, they could detect nothing. After cruising up and down the English coast for several hours, the airship gave up and returned home empty-handed. She returned early the next month on another spy mission but was equally unsuccessful, leading the Germans to conclude that the British had no working early-warning system. Of course, Chain Home was, in fact, fully operational, and its operators accurately tracked the giant airship throughout its two spy flights. So why didn’t Graf Zeppelin detect their signals? The simple fact was that German radars worked at wavelengths of around 50 centimetres, and they expected the British equipment to be similar. But Chain Home worked on a much longer 10 metre wavelength; the Germans simply hadn’t set their detection equipment to the right frequencies.
This oversight was to have dire consequences in the summer of 1940 when the Luftwaffe set out to destroy the Royal Air Force on the ground and force the British to negotiate peace terms – an aerial struggle now known as the Battle of Britain. Though early in the battle the Germans made some dive-bombing raids against the Chain Home radar stations, this campaign was half-hearted and quickly abandoned. Not only did the Germans fail to recognize the vital importance of the stations, but the installations themselves proved difficult to attack and any damage inflicted was quickly repaired. This failure was to cost the Germans dearly for, aided by Chain Home and the Dowding System, within two months RAF Fighter Command succeeded in chasing the Luftwaffe out of the daylight skies, shooting down 1736 German bombers and fighters at a loss of just 915 British aircraft. The Germans thus switched to making nighttime raids against civilian centres like London, Liverpool, and Coventry, kicking off the infamous Blitz.
Developed just in the nick of time, the Chain Home radars played a vital role in saving the Royal Air Force from destruction and allowing Britain to survive to fight another day. But as the first phase of the Battle of Britain drew to a close, the system began to show its major shortcomings. While Chain Home and the Dowding System could track incoming enemy aircraft and vector fighters onto an interception course, the actual interceptions had to be made visually. However, when the Germans switched to night bombing this became all but impossible, and for the first few months of the Blitz Britain’s air defences proved all but useless against the nocturnal intruders. Solving this problem would lead to one of the greatest technological breakthroughs of the entire war.
Meanwhile, the RAF’s bomber command turned the tables on the Germans and began flying regular bombing raids on Germany and occupied Europe. But just like the Germans, the British quickly discovered that bombing in daylight was suicide, and atrocious losses at the hands of Luftwaffe fighters forced them to switch to night bombing. However, this created problems of its own, as navigating to a target and dropping bombs accurately in pitch-darkness proved all but impossible. Indeed, in the early days of the bombing campaign, it was determined that over 90% of bombs fell on open countryside several kilometres from the intended target. Even worse, by this time the Germans had recognized the utility of radar and developed their own, even more sophisticated version of the Dowding System known as Himmelbett or “four-poster bed” or the Kammhuber Line after Generalmajor Josef Kammhuber, commander of Luftwaffe night fighters. Early warning of incoming enemy bombers was given by a chain of coastal radars codenamed Freya – named after the queen of the Gods in Germanic mythology – operating at a wavelength of 1.2 metres. Once the bombers had passed the coast, they were then handed over to a network of smaller radars codenamed Würzburg operating at a wavelength of 50 centimetres which could accurately track individual bombers and direct searchlights, anti-aircraft guns, and night fighters towards them. As in the Dowding system, all this was coordinated from central command rooms largely staffed by female auxiliaries known as Luftwaffe Helferin. At first, German night fighters, like their British counterparts, had to make the actual interceptions visually, but from 1942 onwards they were increasingly equipped with the 61 centimetre FuG 202 Lichtenstein airborne intercept radar, whose distinctive branching aerials mounted to the aircraft’s nose were nicknamed “mattress” or “stag’s horns.”
The technical details of the Kammhuber Line, which inflicted unsustainable losses in the early days of the night bombing campaign, were soon worked out by British Intelligence by various methods, including signals intelligence, aerial reconnaissance photographs, the breaking of the German Enigma cipher, and even a daring raid on February 27, 1942 codenamed Operation Biting, in which a team of British airborne troops parachuted into a Würzburg site in Bruneval, France to capture pieces of the radar and some of its operators – but that is a story for another video. Once the British knew how the system and its various components worked, they very quickly set about developing countermeasures. The first of these was simply to form the bomber force into a single concentrated stream and fly them through a single point in the Kammhuber Line, swamping the Würzburg radars and preventing night fighters from being accurately guided towards individual targets. However, the Germans quickly countered this tactic by deepening the line to include multiple overlapping defensive sectors and placing large radar-controlled antiaircraft batteries around major industrial targets like factories.
Undeterred, the British turned to a series of increasingly-sophisticated electronic countermeasures. The first of these, codenamed Tinsel, Jostle, and Airborne Cigar, jammed night fighters’ radios by broadcasting white noise generated by microphones placed in the attacking bombers’ engines, preventing ground controllers from guiding them to an intercept. Later, when night fighters began being equipped with Lichtenstein airborne radar, another jamming device, codenamed Piperack, was developed to counter it. Mandrel was used to jam the Freya early-warning radars, Moonshine was a transponder which made a single decoy aircraft appear on radar like an entire flight of bombers, luring German air defences away from the main force; while Perfectos triggered the night fighters’ Identification Friend or Foe or IFF transponders, revealing their positions. Rather more devious – and amusing – was Operation Corona, in which German-speaking radio operators aboard the bombers impersonated the German ground controllers, causing mass confusion among the night fighter force. After learning of this deception, the Germans switched to using female ground controllers, assuming that the RAF would not send WAAFs up in operational aircraft. But the British were already one step ahead, and had set up a team of German-speaking WAAFs at a high-powered transmitting station at Hollywood Manor in Kent. This scheme often resulted in darkly hilarious scenes, as one WAAF, Ruth Tosek, later recalled:
“…they would say, “Das ist eine feind Stimme – an enemy voice don’t listen to it! Don’t listen to it!” And we would reply, “Sir Sind die richtige Stimme – We are the real voice.” This would go on until the pilot became completely confused and didn’t know who was who.”
But the most effective Allied radar countermeasure was, ironically, the simplest. Codenamed Window, this consisted of strips of aluminium foil cut to half the wavelength of the German Würzburg radar – 26.5 centimetres – creating a half-wave dipole antenna that would radiate back a much stronger echo than a random aircraft structure. Dropped in bundles from attacking aircraft, Window completely overwhelmed the radars, rendering them useless. Indeed, so effective was Window that for months the British hesitated to deploy it, fearing that the Germans would quickly copy it and retaliate in kind. Ironically, the Germans had developed an identical weapon codenamed Düppel, but also hesitated to use it for identical reasons. However, RAF Bomber Command losses soon became so high that Prime Minister Winston Churchill ultimately gave the order to “open the window.” The first large-scale operational use of this “doomsday” weapon was during Operation Gomorrah, the July 24, 1943 firebombing raid against the port city of Hamburg. As expected, Window proved devastatingly effective, completely blinding the German defences and leaving searchlights, antiaircraft guns, and night fighters to grope uselessly around the night sky. This allowed the 746 bombers to reach the city almost unopposed and deliver their deadly payloads. The summer of 1943 had been unusually hot and dry, turning Hamburg into a tinderbox and allowing the incendiary bombs to touch off a gigantic firestorm – a self-sustaining flame tornado that generated winds up to 240 kilometres per hour, sweeping citizens off their feet like dried leaves and sucking the air out of air raid shelters. The raid destroyed 61% of Hamburg’s houses and killed 51,000 of its citizens for the loss of just 12 RAF aircraft. Indeed, afterwards Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, stated that if raids of similar size had been conducted against just five more major German cities, the Allies could have won the war in 1943.
With their radar network rendered ineffective, the Germans switched to a tactic codenamed Wilde Sau or “wild boar”, in which night fighters flew above the enemy bomber streams and made their interceptions visually by spotting their targets silhouetted against the searchlights and fires on the ground below. Later, they also developed systems called Wurzlaus and Nuremberg that could distinguish between moving bombers and stationary clouds of Window or detect the specific reflections produced by spinning aircraft propellers. Night fighters were also equipped with Lichtenstein SN2 and Neptune radars operating at frequencies immune to Window and the Flensburg and Naxos devices, which allowed the fighters to home in on Allied bombers’ Monica tail warning radars and H2S ground-scanning radars. These advancements allowed the Germans to resume inflicting heavy losses against Allied bombers starting in early 1944. As a result, the Allies were forced to remove Monica from their aircraft and only turn on their radars at the last possible moment.
But if the Germans ever considered retaliating against Britain using Düppel, they would have found this countermeasure wholly ineffective thanks to a key technological breakthrough: a device capable of producing extremely short-wave centrimetric radar beams. The development of this device was initiated by the Royal Navy, which wanted a more precise radar to allow warships and patrol aircraft to detect small targets like surfaced U-boats and aim their guns in poor visibility and at long distances. In 1939, the Admiralty contacted a team at the University of Birmingham under Dr. Marcus Oliphant, who would later play a key role in the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Oliphant assigned the task of developing centimetric radar to research fellow John Randall and postgraduate student Harry Boot, who began experimenting with a device known as a Klystron. Used in many early radar sets, the klystron was a type of amplifying vacuum tube that bounced a beam of electrons between two resonant cavities, creating an oscillation that generated high-frequency radio waves. Unfortunately, klystrons could only generate practical radar beams at wavelengths down to 50 centimetres; at shorter wavelengths the power requirements became impractically high. Randall and Boot thus abandoned the klystron and focused on another device known as a split-anode magnetron. In November 1939, the pair sketched out an unusual device they dubbed the cavity magnetron. This consisted of a solid cylindrical anode made of copper with a central cavity and six smaller resonant cavities arranged around it and connected by slots. A cathode injected electrons into the central cavity while a powerful magnet caused the electron beam to swirl around its edge past the openings to the peripheral cavities, creating resonance in a similar manner to blowing air across the mouth of a bottle and – hopefully – generating wavelengths of 10 centimetres or less.
When Randall and Boot presented their concept to Oliphant he was not overly enthusiastic, but given the discouraging lack of success with other approaches he tacitly approved their experiments. With resources almost non-existent, Randall and Boot were forced to resort to the “string and sealing wax” approach that had characterized British physics for over a hundred years. High-voltage transformers were scrounged from the Royal Navy base at Portsmouth, while an old teaching electromagnet was unearthed in one of the university labs. Other components, like the copper anode and high-voltage rectifiers, Randal and Boot manufactured themselves. Emblematic of the make-do-and-mend nature of the endeavour, the ends of the prototype were vacuum sealed using two half-penny coins and sealing wax. The methods used to test the exotic new device were equally crude; to measure its power output, Randall and Boot connected the magnetron to a series of light bulbs, increasing the power until the bulb burned out before swapping in a new one. By this method they measured the maximum output at a whopping 400 watts. To measure the emitted wavelength, they used an apparatus known as a Lecher Line – a pair of parallel wires attached to the magnetron along which a light bulb could be slid, the bulb lighting up at each half-wavelength. To the pair’s astonishment, their first prototype produced a wavelength of 9.87 centimetres – almost exactly what they were aiming for.
News of the breakthrough at the University of Birmingham spread like wildfire through the British military establishment, who immediately ordered that top priority be given to its refinement and deployment. By June 1940 the General Electric Company laboratories in Wembley, Essex had developed the NT98, the first practical, mass-producible air-cooled cavity magnetron light enough to be installed in aircraft. These early magnetrons suffered from the problem of random frequency-jumping, but this was soon solved by Dr. J. Sayers by “strapping” alternate resonant cavities with heavy copper wires. So urgent was the need for these magnetrons that the first production models were manufactured in great haste using a drilling jig made from a Colt revolver cylinder. In August 1940, with Britain under threat of Nazi invasion, a delegation of scientists known as the Tizard Mission travelled to the United States bearing Britain’s most important technical breakthroughs – including an early production cavity magnetron. This gift allowed magnetrons to be mass-produced in American factories and opened the doors for further exchanges of key military technology.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the cavity magnetron to the course of the Second World War, with this now largely overlooked breakthrough ranking higher than more well-known technical developments like jet propulsion or the atomic bomb. Indeed, American historian James Phinney Baxter III later declared the magnetron to be “The most valuable cargo ever to reach these shores.”
In late 1941, British Bristol Beaufighter night fighter aircraft began being equipped with the Airborne Intercept or AI Mk.VII radar, which produced a narrow, 25 kilowatt beam with a wavelength of 9.1 centimetres that could accurately pinpoint enemy aircraft in pitch-darkness at a range of between 120 metres and 10 kilometres. Previous Airborne Intercept radars operating at a wavelength of 1.5 metres were plagued by random echoes from the ground below, limiting their effective range to around 5 kilometres. This technology allowed the Royal Air Force to finally sweep the Luftwaffe from British skies, bringing the dreaded Blitz to an end.
Meanwhile, centrimetric radars fitted Royal Navy and RAF Coastal Command aircraft like the Vickers Wellington, Consolidated B-24 Liberator, and Consolidated PBY Catalina allowed them to detect even the periscopes of submerged German U-boats. Previously, these aircraft were fitted with the less sophisticated Air to Surface Vessel or ASV Mk.II radar operating at a wavelength of 1.25 metres. While these sets allowed aircraft to detect a surfaced U-boat at a range of 100 kilometres, the Germans soon developed a detector called Metox that allowed them to crash-dive and escape before an attacking aircraft came into firing range. With the introduction of the magnetron-based ASV Mk.III, however, the U-boats had nowhere to hide and were forced to spend more and more time submerged, greatly reducing their effectiveness. More than any other breakthrough, the cavity magnetron helped turn the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest-fought of the entire war and the only one which Winston Churchill admitted truly frightened him.
The magnetron also played a major role in the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany and occupied Europe. As previously mentioned, when the British switched from daylight to night bombing early in the war, they discovered that accurately reaching and bombing specific targets using traditional methods like celestial navigation and dead reckoning was all but impossible. RAF Bomber Command thus switched from precision bombing of industrial and military targets like factories and airfields to a strategy of “Area Bombing” with incendiaries against large population centres. They also copied the pathfinder strategy pioneered by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz wherein an elite group of aircraft with highly-skilled navigators flew ahead of the main bomber force to mark the target with flares and incendiary bombs. To further increase their accuracy, the pathfinders soon adopted a variety of electronic navigation aids, another technique copied from the Germans. The first of these, codenamed Gee, was introduced operationally in 1942 and consisted of three transmitting stations designated A, B, and C spaced around 160 kilometres apart. These stations transmitted synchronized pulses such that depending on his position, an aircraft navigator would receive the pulses from one of the stations ahead of the others. If all the points where all three signals were received simultaneously were plotted, they formed long hyperbolic curves known as isochrones – similar to the isobar pressure lines on a weather map. These curves intersected with each other at certain points, forming a huge grid projected across the European continent – hence the codename “Gee” for “Grid” – against which aircraft could fix their position. The great advantage of Gee was that it was entirely passive, the receiving aircraft emitting no signals which could give away its position, and could be used by any number of aircraft at once. Also, unlike German beam systems, it gave no indication as to the target of a particular raid. Gee inspired the creation of a similar American system known as LORAN or LOng RAnge Navigation, which remained in use until the 1980s as a general maritime navigation aid for personal and commercial vessels.
However, while Gee could get a bomber to a particular city, it was not accurate enough to guide it over a specific target like a factory and had a maximum range of 250 kilometres – too short to reach the heart of Germany. Consequently, in early 1943 the British developed a more sophisticated system codenamed Oboe. Unlike Gee, Oboe was an active system, incorporating a special transceiver aboard the aircraft which received and returned signals from a pair of transmitting stations in Britain. The first, dubbed Cat, kept the bomber flying along a circular course intersecting with the target. If the pilot drifted off this course, he heard a string of Morse Code dots or dashes in his headphones as in the ubiquitous Lorenz blind landing system, prompting him to correct left or right. Meanwhile, the second station, codenamed Mouse, kept track of the bomber’s position and sent a signal when it was over the target, automatically triggering the release of bombs. The accuracy of Oboe was around 100 metres at 400 kilometres – enough to hit a factory in Germany’s industrial Ruhr area. However, it could not reach as far as Berlin and, being an active system, gave off signals that German night fighters could home in on. The British thus set about developing a self-contained navigation system whose reach would only be limited by the range of the aircraft carrying it.
This system took the form of H2S, a modified version of the Airborne Intercept radar pointed downwards, allowing ground features like coastlines, rivers and canals, and towns to be identified in pitch darkness or through thick cloud. This was accomplished using a rotating parabolic antenna caused in a streamlined radome and a circular plan position indicator with a persistent phosphor that refreshed itself with every rotation of the cursor – the classic image of a radar screen we are all familiar with today. The system was originally named BN for Blind Navigation, but was soon renamed H2S – the chemical formula of the pungent gas Hydrogen Sulphide – allegedly after a comment made by Professor Frederick Lindemann, scientific advisor to Winston Churchill:
“It was stinking because it ought to have been done years before!”
Interestingly, the RAF was initially hesitant to deploy H2S since it was feared that the Germans would capture and copy the top-secret magnetron technology. Indeed, experiments had proven that the copper anode at the heart of the magnetron was virtually indestructible and would likely survive even the most violent crash or self-destruct charge largely intact. Technicians were thus assigned to develop an alternate version using the well-known Klystron tubes, but this proved technically infeasible. In the end, the strategic benefits of deploying H2S were deemed to outweigh the risks, and the system was first deployed on a mission in January 1943 when Short Stirling and Handley Page Halifax bombers of 7 and 38 Squadrons successfully located and marked the city of Hamburg in extremely bad weather. H2S played a vital role in the latter stages of the Allied Bombing campaign in Europe, while a similar blind bombing radar called the AN/APQ-10 was used by American Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers against targets in Japan. As predicted, the Germans did manage to capture and copy magnetrons from downed allied aircraft and produce their own centimetric airborne intercept radar – codenamed Berlin – but these did not see service before the war ended.
One of the Allies’ greatest secret weapons, the cavity magnetron made an outsized contribution to the war effort, likely shortening the conflict by several years. This is particularly impressive given that Randall and Boot’s original prototype – including the halfpenny pieces used to seal the ends – is estimated to have cost only £200 – a bargain by any measure. Other radar technology played a similarly key role in the conflict. For example, tiny radar sets known as proximity fuzes were placed inside anti-aircraft artillery shells, allowing them to explode when they passed close to a target. Such fuzes were vital in allowing the U.S. Navy to fend off Japanese Kamikaze suicide aircraft attacks and the British to defeat the German V-1 flying bomb or “doodlebug” – and for more on this incredible battle, please check out our previous video A Wingtip and a Prayer: the Insane Way British Pilots Defeated Germany’s Secret Weapon. And radar altimeters based on tail warning radar sets were used to detonate the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, helping to deliver the killing blows that finally brought the war to an end.
By this point, you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with microwave ovens. Well, as you’ll recall from the very beginning of the video, microwaves are defined as electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between one metre and one millimetre – exactly the kind of radiation generated by a cavity magnetron. But while experiments with cooking food using shortwave radiation had been conducted before the war, it took a happy – and hilarious – accident for the wartime sword of radar to be beaten into the peacetime ploughshare of everyone’s favourite kitchen appliance.
In 1945, Percy Spencer, an engineer at the Raytheon Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was working on the magnetron of an active radar set when he reached into his pocket for a snack. To his surprise, he discovered that his Mr. Goodbar chocolate bar had somehow melted into a sticky mess. This effect had been observed by several other technicians, but Spencer was determined to know more. He thus embarked on a series of legendary experiments, as recounted in a 1958 Reader’s Digest article:
“He sent a boy out for a package of popcorn. When he held it near a magnetron, popcorn exploded all over the lab. Next morning he brought in a kettle, cut a hole in the side and put an uncooked egg (in its shell) into the pot. Then he moved a magnetron against the hole and turned on the juice. A skeptical engineer peeked over the top of the pot just in time to catch a face-full of cooked egg. The reason? The yolk cooked faster than the outside, causing the egg to burst.”
These experiments confirmed that it was indeed the microwaves emitted by the magnetron – and not something else like radiated heat – that was heating up the food. Today, we know that microwave ovens work because the constantly-changing electromagnetic field causes molecules like water and fat with a strong dipole structure – that is, one negatively and one positively-charged end – to rotate rapidly, generating heat that is transferred to the rest of the food. This is why dry, low-fat foods like crackers don’t heat up when placed in a microwave oven. Contrary to popular belief, however, microwave ovens don’t cook food “from the inside out.” Rather, this effect occurs when there is a greater concentration of absorbent moisture inside the food than on its surface – such as in the classic hot pocket with its tongue-searing molten lava filling. Also, microwaves emerging from the magnetron bounce around randomly inside the oven and interfere with themselves, producing zones of varying power density that can cook different regions of a food item at different rates. However, this effect is usually countered through the use of a turntable to slowly rotate the food or a motorized waveguide to more evenly distribute the microwaves around the interior of the oven.
While Spencer’s supposedly serendipitous discovery has become the stuff of legend, in reality the development of the microwave oven was a gradual process involving dozens of small discoveries and developments by multiple technicians. Nonetheless, on October 8, 1945, Spencer filed US patent 2,495,429 for a Method of Treating Foodstuffs, in which he outlined basic technical details such as the optimal frequency – 2.45 Gigahertz – power and cavity size for efficient cooking. Alarmingly, the oven design in his patent featured a conveyor belt for moving food past the magnetron and open ends which would have allowed face-melting microwave radiation to leak out of the appliance! In a follow-up patent filed in 1949, Spencer described the now-ubiquitous process of microwaving popcorn, while in a 1951 patent he described how to broil a lobster in a microwave by shoving a “pencil like rod” up its behind to prevent the tail from curling and becoming harder to cook. As if lobsters didn’t have it hard enough already…
Based on the work of Spencer and others – in particular engineers Lawrence Marshall, Fritz Gross, and Marvin Bock – in 1947 Raytheon produced the first prototype microwave oven, the first of which was installed in a Boston restaurant for testing. Another prototype was incorporated into a delightfully-named “Speedy Weeny” vending machine in New York’s Grand Central Terminal which dispensed freshly-microwaved hot dogs. Later that year, Raytheon finally launched the world’s first production commercial model under the brand name Radarange. But while today we think of microwave ovens as compact, convenient countertop appliances, the first Radaranges were absolute behemoths, standing 1.8 metres tall and weighing 340 kilograms. They consumed 3 kilowatts – three times as much as a modern microwave – and produced so much waste heat that they had to be water-cooled. With an eye-watering price tag of $5,000 – $68,000 in today’s money – these units were far out of reach for the average consumer and were intended for use in restaurants, cafeterias, airliners, and ship’s galleys – with one example being installed aboard the revolutionary nuclear-powered cargo ship and passenger liner N.S. Savannah in 1961.
In 1955, Raytheon licensed its microwave technology to appliance manufacturer Tappan, who introduced the first microwave oven designed for consumer use: the RL-1. Designed to be mounted to the wall like a conventional oven, the RL-1 still cost a whopping $1,295 – $11,000 in today’s money – resulting in disappointing sales. But technology was rapidly improving, and soon more reasonably-priced models with lighter, air-cooled magnetrons began to appear on the market. In 1964 the Sharp Corporation of Japan introduced the first microwave oven with a rotating turntable to address the traditional problem of uneven heating. And at around the same time, the Litton Company developed a magnetron that could survive a no-load condition – that is, running with nothing in the oven to absorb the microwaves – making microwave ovens much safer and long-lasting. Finally, in 1967, the Amana Corporation, a subsidiary of Raytheon, introduced the countertop Radarange, the first compact microwave oven as we would recognize it today. This model took an unusual approach to promoting even food heating, using a rotating wave guide or mode stirrer to distribute the microwave beam, allowing the food to remain stationary. With a price tag of $495 – $5,000 in today’s dollars – it was still very expensive, but with simplified designs and advances in manufacturing techniques the price gradually fell and throughout the 1970s and 80s microwave ovens began to be found in more and more homes. Indeed, while only around 40,000 microwave ovens were sold in the United States in 1970, by 1975 this number had risen to nearly one million. And while only 1% of American households owned a microwave oven in 1971, by 1986 around 25% did. By 1997, this figure had risen to an astonishing 90%. With the exception of Japan, where the popularity of microwaves benefitted from simpler and cheaper to manufacture magnetron designs, adoption has been slower elsewhere in the world, with 88% of Canadian, 65% of French, 5% of Indian, 40% of Russian, 38% of South African, and 16% of Vietnamese households owning a microwave oven by the turn of the 21st century.
And as microwave ovens became increasingly popular, manufacturers began adding additional features. For example, in the early 1970s Tappan began offering hybrid models that incorporated both microwave capability and conventional oven heating elements. In 1975, Amana introduced the first automatic defrost feature with their RR-4D model, while the following year their RR-6 model incorporated the first fully digital, microprocessor-controlled control panel. Since then, microwave ovens have more or less settled around a standard design, with different brands or models differing largely in their styling, control panel layout, and number of cooking modes like defrost, popcorn etc. Indeed, as of 2020, nearly all microwave ovens sold in the United States, regardless of brand, are manufactured by a single company: the Midea Group, headquartered in Beijiao, China. Most consumer microwave ovens consume between 600-1200 Watts of power and operate at the same 2.45 Gigahertz frequency established by Percy Spencer in 1945. As many telecommunications technologies operate at microwave frequencies, in 1947 Raytheon and General Electric petitioned the Federal Communications Commission or FCC to set aside a section of the electromagnetic spectrum for use by microwave ovens, medical diathermy machines, and other specialized equipment so as not to interfere with vital communications networks. The two allocated frequencies, 915 +/- 25 Megahertz and 2450 +/-50 Megahertz, are today known as the Industrial/Scientific/Medical or ISM bands. The 915 Megahertz frequency is commonly used by industrial microwave ovens as the longer wavelength penetrates deeper into the food and raises its temperature faster, speeding up the overall cooking process.
Interestingly, no matter how many power or specialized cooking settings a microwave has, the magnetron always operates at a constant power output. Different heat settings are thus achieved through duty-cycle modulation i.e. switching the magnetron on and off for different period of time. This way, the rate and total amount of energy deposited into the food can be controlled. For example, if a microwave is set to half power, then the magnetron will be switched on only half the time. Similarly, since ice absorbs microwaves less efficiently than liquid water, the defrost setting keeps the magnetron switched on for even less of the total cooking time, allowing the food to defrost slowly without overheating and prematurely cooking it. By contrast, inverter microwaves use solid-state switching gear as opposed to the traditional transformer and electronic relay, allowing them to operate the magnetron continuously at low power. This heats the food more slowly and evenly, preventing the formation of hot spots that can prematurely cook or ruin sensitive, sugar and fat-rich foods like meat, dairy, and desserts. In addition, inverter microwaves tend to be more energy-efficient than more traditional designs.
Given their ability to cook meat and fish, it goes without saying that the microwaves produced by a magnetron are potentially dangerous to living tissue. Particularly vulnerable is the eye which, having no cooling blood vessels of its own, is prone to overheating when exposed to microwaves, potentially resulting in the formation of cataracts later in life.Thankfully, the microwaves produced by a microwave oven are fully contained by the appliance’s metallic case, which acts as a Faraday cage – named after the great English physicist Michael Faraday. Faraday cages exploit the fact that rapidly-changing electromagnetic fields cannot penetrate a closed electrical conductor, and are widely used to protect sensitive electronic equipment from external radio frequency interference or RFI or – in this case – to prevent electromagnetic radiation from getting out. But the walls of a Faraday cage need not be solid; so long as any openings are smaller than the wavelength of the radiation in question, said radiation will be effectively blocked. This is why the window in the door of most microwave ovens is covered in a fine metal mesh. Further safety is provided by a set of interlock switches that prevents the magnetron from operating while the door is open. Thanks to these features, you can watch your microwave burrito spin round and round without fear of your face melting off.
And of course, no discussion of microwave ovens would be complete without addressing that most taboo of household scientific experiments: putting metal in the microwave. The reason this is generally frowned upon is because metallic objects like forks and aluminium foil act like radio antennas, absorbing microwave energy and converting it to an electric charge. If the object in question has sharp edges, these will concentrate this electric charge, exceeding the breakdown potential of the surrounding air and throwing off lightning-like arcs called corona discharges that can potentially start a fire. Even worse, smoother metallic objects can reflect microwaves back at the magnetron, causing feedback that can ultimately overload and destroy the component, rendering the entire oven useless. Finally, absorbed microwaves can cause metallic objects to become extremely hot, posing a burn hazard. Indeed, this effect is sometimes exploited by manufacturers of microwaved food. The packaging for pizzas, pies, and other items that would normally become soggy when cooked in a microwave often incorporate a thin metallic layer that absorbs and radiates heat back onto the food, creating a deliciously crispy crust. But unless you have a special microwave set aside specifically for mad scientific experiments, please take our advice: just don’t do it.
Now, while radar sets and microwave ovens are the most common and famous applications for the magnetron, they are far from the only ones. Indeed, high-powered microwave emitters are widely used in industry for applications as diverse as softening plastic before moulding, drying potato chips, and roasting coffee beans and peanuts. And newer, more exotic applications are being discovered all the time. For example, in 2023, researchers at Australia’s Macquarie University developed a method for using microwaves to selectively decompose the silicon in expired solar panels, allowing the other component materials like glass, plastic, and metal to be safely recycled. In the traditional recycling method, solar panels are crushed, heated to 1400 degrees Celsius, and treated with harsh solvents to dissolve away the plastic components – an energy-intensive and environmentally unfriendly process. Similarly, in 2022 researchers at Mitsui Chemicals in Japan announced a method for using microwaves to decompose polyurethane foam into its component chemicals without the use of toxic solvents. Meanwhile, a team at the Korea Electrotechnology Institute or KERI led by Dr. Sunshin Jung has developed a device designed to bombard agricultural fields with microwave radiation, selectively killing pests hidden under the soil without the need for pesticides. Even more exotic, engineers at Penn State University has devised a microwave-based method that could eventually be transported to the moon and used to smelt minerals found in the lunar dust or regolith – either to extract valuable metals like titanium or build permanent strictures on the lunar surface. In the grand tradition of cheeky tech acronyms, the team dubbed their creation Smelting with Microwave Energy for Lunar Technologies System for In-Situ Resource Processing – or SMELT.
From defeating the Nazis and Imperial Japanese to making dinnertime a bit more convenient to smelting metals on the moon, the cavity magnetron has come a long way, and stands as one of the greatest stories of swords into ploughshares in modern history. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a frozen burrito with my name on it…
Expand for ReferencesJohnson, Brian, The Secret War, Arrow Books, 1978
Ackerman, Evan, A Brief History of the Microwave Oven, IEEE Spectrum, September 30, 2016, https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-brief-history-of-the-microwave-oven
History of the Microwave Oven, Whirlpool, https://www.whirlpool.com/blog/kitchen/history-of-microwave.html
History of the Microwave, http://www.historyofmicrowave.com/
History of the Microwave Oven, Microwaves 101, https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/history-of-the-microwave-oven
Skolnik, Merrill, History of Radar, Encyclopedia Britannica, August 17, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/technology/radar/History-of-radar
NASA – Funded Student Team Builds Microwave System to Smelt Metal on the Moon, Penn State University, https://www.psu.edu/news/engineering/story/nasa-funded-student-team-builds-microwave-system-smelt-metal-moon/
Microwaves Heat the Soil to Eliminate Pests and Help Farmers Manage Soil Diseases, December 19, 2023, https://phys.org/news/2023-12-microwaves-soil-pests-farmers-diseases.html
Moore, Stephen, Japanese Project Aims to Recycle Polyurethane Foam Using Microwaves, Plastics Today, June 22, 2022, https://www.plasticstoday.com/advanced-recycling/japanese-project-aims-to-recycle-polyurethane-foam-using-microwaves
Patel, Prachi, The Surprising Appliance That Could Make Solar Panels Easier to Produce and Recycle, Anthropocene Magazine, April 27, 2023, https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2023/04/the-surprising-appliance-that-could-make-solar-panels-easier-to-produce-and-recycle/
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Running the gauntlet. Starting. Flogging with the cat ‘o 9 nine tails. Gagging. Clapping in irons. Hanging from the yardarm. While this all might sound like a super fun Saturday night with the misses when the grandparents are watching your kiddos for you, it turns out these are actually just a few of the dizzying array of corporal and capital punishments inflicted upon sailors of old – both navy men and pirates – to enforce discipline and punish a wide variety of crimes. But while most of these punishments are fairly well-known, you may have noticed two notable practices missing from the list: that old staple of pirate movies, “walking the plank”… and keel-hauling. Perhaps the most infamous of all nautical punishments, keel-hauling struck such fear into the hearts of sailors over the centuries that the term survives to this day as a byword for particularly harsh discipline. But what was keel-hauling? How did it work, who invented it, and was it actually a real thing? Or, like so much popular seamen lore, was it just the product of some adventure writer’s imagination? Well, put on your eyepatch and tricorn hat, strap on your peg-leg, as we dive into the reality of one of the Age of Sail’s most barbaric practices.
Punishments similar to keel-hauling are thought to date back to antiquity, though the actual historical record is rather sparse. Ancient Greek writings from the 5th Century B.C., contain references to katapontismós: to throw someone from a high place into water; and schinismόs: to tie someone up and drop them from a high place. However, the former may simply refer to the practice of tossing someone overboard; indeed, in his Histories, Herodotus uses the term when referring to an incident in which Persian King Xerxes I was caught in a storm at sea and forced some of his soldiers to jump overboard to lighten his ship. Similarly, schinismόs may refer to the perennial torture technique of strappado, in which the victim’s arms are bound behind them and winched up on a rope, dislocating their shoulders. Other executions by drowning are also recorded throughout antiquity, such as with the murderers of Ancient Greek poet Hesiod in 650 B.C.. and of 3,000 Phocian prisoners by Philip II of Macedon during the Third Sacred War of 356-346, well, I’ll go with B.C.E. this time for maximal commenting by using both in the same piece.
However, these accounts give no details of the methods or equipment employed. The most solid evidence of ancient keel-hauling comes from the Lecythos of Attica, a vase dating from around 480 B.C.E. which depicts sailors binding fellow crewmen and lowering them into the water.
While similar practices are mentioned in the Byzantine maritime code or Lex Rhodia of 700 CE as a punishment for piracy, detailed descriptions of the practice as we would recognize it today do not appear until a millennium later, with one of the earliest being from Christopher Frick and Christopher Schewitzer’s 1700 account A Relation of Two Several Voyages Made into the East-Indies:
“He that strikes an Officer, or Master of the Ship, is without hopes of pardon to be thrown into the Sea fasten’d by a Rope, with which he is thrown in on one side of the Ship, and drawn up again on the other, and so three times together he is drawn round the Keel of the Ship, in the doing of which, if they should chance not to allow Rope enough to let him sink below the Keel, the Malefactor might have his brains knockt out. This Punishment is called Keel-halen, which may be call’d in English “Keel-drawing.” But the Provost hath this Priviledge more than the other, that if any one strikes him on Shoar, he forfeits his hand, if on Board, then he is certainly Keel-draw’d.”
While this punishment was in use – both officially and unofficially – in the Royal Navy at this time, in British writings it is nearly always referred to as an exclusively Dutch practice – very often with a great deal of xenophobic disdain. For instance, William Falconer’s 1780 Universal Dictionary of the Marine defines the practice as:
“A punishment inflicted for various offences in the Dutch navy. It is performed by plunging the delinquent repeatedly over the ship’s bottom on one side, and hoisting him up on the other, having passed under the keel. The blocks, or pullies, by which he is suspended, are fastened to the opposite extremities of the main-yard, and a weight of lead or iron is hung upon his legs to sink him to a competent depth. By this apparatus he is drawn close up to the yard-arm, and thence let fall suddenly into the sea, where passing under the ship’s bottom, he is hoisted upon the opposite side of the vessel, As this extraordinary sentence is executed with a serenity of temper peculiar to the Dutch, the culprit is allowed sufficient intervals to recover the sense of pain, of which indeed he is frequently deprived during the operation. In truth, a temporary insensibility to his sufferings ought by no means to be construed into a disrespect of his judges, when we consider that this punishment is supposed to have a peculiar propriety in the depth of winter, whilst the flakes of ice are floating on the stream, and that it it is continued till the culprit is almost suffocated for want of air, benumbed with the cold of the water, or stunned with the blows his head receives by striking the ship’s bottom.”
Indeed, drowning was the least of the keel-hauling victim’s worries, and may well have been welcomed as a sweet release from his torments. The hull of the ship would likely have been encrusted with barnacles and other sea life, cutting the condemned to ribbons as they were hauled across it. For this reason, common practice was to perform keel hauling as quickly as possible – not to minimize the victim’s time spent underwater, but rather to ensure they were scraped along the hull rather than sinking down clear of it. If the ship was new or had recently been cleaned, the hauling was often performed end to end rather than beam-to-beam to extend the victim’s torment. And if, when hauled up, the victim was judged insufficiently drowned or maimed, they would often be thrown overboard and keel-hauled all over again or sometimes flogged on the ship’s deck. Some sources also describe a sponge being forced into the victim’s mouth, allowing them to draw at least one tiny extra breath while underwater.
Keel-hauling is thought to have been introduced to the Dutch Navy and Dutch East India Company or VOC sometime in the mid-17th century. One of the earliest recorded cases involved a sailor by the name of Jan Blank, who in October 1652 was convicted of desertion and, as punishment, was keelhauled, given 150 lashes, and sentenced to slavery for two years.
While records of keel-hauling aboard Dutch ships during this period are sparse, it was apparently a common enough practice to warrant depiction in Lieve Pietersz’s painting The keelhauling of the Ship’s Surgeon of Admiral Jan van Nes, completed sometime between 1660 and 1680. The painting depicts keel-hauling as a public punishment, with ships full of sailors gathered around to witness the spectacle. This suggests that the practice was largely reserved for the most serious offences and used to set an example for the rest of the fleet. In this way it served a similar function to the Royal Navy practice of “Flogging Around the Fleet,” in which the victim was rowed around the fleet in a small boat, receiving a certain number of lashes at each ship.
While the exact origin of keel-hauling is not known, it is likely the practice evolved from the older punishment of ducking or cucking, which also may just seem like a fun Saturday night for you, but in the original meaning included a victim briefly lowered into the sea or a river using a rope or specialized seesaw-like ducking stool. Though best known today for its use in identifying witches, in reality ducking was used to punish people – usually women – for a wide variety of crimes and socially unacceptable behaviours, including scolding, gossip, blasphemy, adultery, or bearing a child out of wedlock. In France, ducking evolved into a naval punishment wherein the victim was bound, tied to a rope, and repeatedly thrown overboard and hauled back up. A common variation on this punishment was “dry ducking”, in which the victim was thrown overboard as before but halted just short of hitting the water. Often cannonballs or other weights were attached to the victim’s feet to increase the shock and pain of the sudden stop. This punishment was infamously applied to François-Marie Perrot, governor of the French colony of Acadia (today parts of the U.S. state of Maine and the Canadian provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island) from 1785 to 1787. An extraordinarily corrupt man, during his brief tenure, Perrot amassed an enormous fortune by secretly trading furs with local indigenous peoples and issuing illegal licenses to New England fishermen. After being ousted as Governor, Perrot took refuge in St. John River, New Brunswick, where he was immediately captured by pirates and tortured using this technique until he revealed the location of his riches. He was soon rescued by French corsairs and returned to France, but died not long afterward, likely of some of the injuries inflicted by the pirates.
Meanwhile, in French service full keel-hauling differed slightly from the Dutch version in that the victim, hauling ropes, and weights were all tied to a small hatchway grating and the whole assembly thrown overboard.
Yet despite its enduring infamy, the heyday of keel-hauling as an official punishment – at least in western navies – was relatively brief, with the British Royal Navy banning its use in 1720 and the Dutch and French Navies in 1750. It did, however, continue to be used very rarely in an unofficial capacity. However, due to its association with barbarism and – well, the Dutch, the Royal Navy was very quick to deny any and all allegations of keel-hauling being performed aboard their ships. For example, the British Parliamentary record for September 4, 1880 contains the following exchange:
- P. A. TAYLOR: asked the Secretary to the Admiralty, Whether he is aware that a statement has appeared in certain Italian newspapers (Palermo and Messina) alleging that a Marine, of H.M.S. “Alexandra,” was lately condemned to be keel-hauled and died under the punishment; and, whether he will institute inquiries upon the subject? The hon. Gentleman added that the newspapers had been ostensibly sent to him by an English officer.
- SHAW LEFEVRE: Sir, it is wholly impossible that there can be any truth in the story reported in the Italian papers, that a Marine has been keelhauled on board the Alexandra, and died under the punishment. We have heard nothing about it, and I do not think it is necessary to insult the officers of the ship by asking whether it is true. The last reference to keel-hauling in the Navy is contained in a well-known story of the Emperor Paul of Russia, which shows that in his day there was a current belief on the Continent that this punishment was practised. When he came on board a man-of-war he asked to see the process, and when he was told that it would cause the death of the seaman, he offered one of his staff for the experiment. The editor of the Italian paper was about as well informed as the retailer of this anecdote. I do not think it necessary to make further inquiry.
However, the practice did persist officially in other navies for much, much longer, with perhaps the most infamous case taking place in Alexandria, Egypt, in September 1882. The event was recorded in gruesome detail by a correspondent from the London Morning Advertiser, revealing many of the more horrific aspects of the practice:
“Yesterday I tried to write a description of the most horrible sight. It was so revoltingly cruel, so barbarous, so infamously brutal, that I gave it up. Still, it is right that the people of England should know what sort of people even the friendly Egyptians are, and therefore this story of how two men were keelhauled from on board the Mehemet Ali,…
Just before noon the men were brought on deck and pinioned with their arms behind their backs, their hands before them, and ankle-irons confining their feet so that they could barely walk. The crew of the ship had been called on deck. The officers stood on the starboard side, the crew on the port, the victims at the mainmast. The officers were in the flaunting dress of their service, the men wore their cutlasses. An officer read the findings – at least that was what we supposed they were – of the court martial. This was a long and protracted ceremony. When he had done some men went aloft and made fast to the mainstay near the mast two blocks. From these they rove two stout lines in different directions. These were carried over the sides of the ship and weighted with a sounding-lead about 40 feet from the end. Then the lines were carried around the stern of the ship and brought forward, the leads sinking them under the keel. After that they were hauled on board, the leads detached, the two men were tied side by side, and both ropes made fast to them, one rope being tied to the waist of one, the other rope around the shoulders of the other. The arrangement of the tackles was to drag the men under the ship from either side by hauling on the fall or running end of the rope that fell from the leading blocks on the mainstay. These ropes, to enable the hauling parties to “walk away”, were led through a snatch-block on the deck The crew were then divided, half of them out to each rope, and the two wretches, being led to the side, were shoved overboard. They both screamed as they fell into the water and as the distance from the gangway to the surface was quite 14 feet, they must have been more or less hurt.
But this was only the beginning of their misery. The men on one side hauled taut the rope underneath the ship, and then the order to ‘walk away’ was given. The band played a solemn tune, something like the ‘Carnival of Venice’ in movement, except the tune was changed, and stamp, stamp, stamp, went the men. We saw the two wretches go under, and then the only movement was the ropes going through their blocks, one side coming out the other coming in, but slowly. We had no measurement of the ship, but as the rope acted directly – that is, there were no moving blocks – the distance around the bottom was exactly that covered by the men as they walked the deck, drawing the rope behind them, Thus we were able to make some estimate of the distance, and we calculated it at 50 feet from surface to surface.
Presently the two victims appeared on the other side They were hauled quite out of the water, and the rope by which they were hoisted was made easy and coiled up ready to pay out again. An officer – probably a doctor – went down and examined them. The one upon whom the strain of the rope had fallen was apparently lifeless. His face was turned toward us: it was bleeding and torn; his clothes were hanging in shreds and his hands were dripping with blood. His eyes were open, but they seemed to be filled with blood. The ship’s bottom, covered with barnacles, rasped upon the poor devils like nails. The other man seemed to be conscious. His back, as he hung in the air, was toward us, but he moved his head, we thought, and apparently to beg for mercy.
Evidently the officer reported them still alive, for when he had come on deck again the two men were lowered into the water, and the crew manning the rope that led up from the other side marched away with it, and once more the victims disappeared. From the time they went under the surface of the water until they reappeared at the other side of the ship was just 24 seconds. It seemed to us to have been an hour. The first frightful journey had terminated by their being scratched and torn; at the end of the second they were mutilated. The nose of one wretch was torn almost away, one ear was gone, and the shreds of the clothing he had worn clung to him only where they were held by his bonds. He was blood literally from head to foot. His companion’s condition was equally horrible. This time they were hoisted up to the rail and swung on board. Then we could see something of the action of the barbarous punishment, for they were not held off the side, but were scraped up along the ship, striking against the ringbolts, the chains, and every cruel obstruction until they swung in free over the deck. Then they were lowered down and released. They were both unconscious, even then dead. It may be hoped they were. Death must have been a welcome release.
An inquiry as to the facts made on board the ship elicited the reply that it was not a matter of public concern Nevertheless we were offered coffee and cigarettes. It is needless to say that we did not accept either. For my part I should have rather seen the entire ship’s company shot than accepted any hospitality at the hands of its officers.”
And that is the brief and horrific history of keel-hauling, a relatively rare punishment in the Age of Sail but one spine-chilling enough to persist for centuries in the popular imagination. At this point, however, you are probably wondering: what about that other favourite punishment for scurvy sea dogs: walking the plank?
Well, sorry to disappoint you, but unlike keel-hauling there is not a shred of evidence that anyone was ever forced to walk the plank during the so-called Golden Age of Piracy – typically defined as the 80-year period between the 1650s and 1730s, though the practice is known to have happened after its apparently fictitious origins. Indeed, the first written description of walking the plank appears near the tail end of this period in Daniel Defoe’s 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates, in which he describes Ancient pirates in the Mediterranean pushing a ship’s ladder out over the water and telling their Roman captives they were free to go – if they could swim the distance back to shore. Like all great literary devices, later writers took Defoe’s “plank” and turned it into a staple of pirate fiction, with the practice appearing in Charles Ellms’s 1856 bestseller The Pirates Own Book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island, and J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play and 1904 novel Peter Pan.
This is not to say, however, that nobody ever walked the plank – just that such incidents were incredibly rare and took place long after the Golden Age of Piracy. For instance, in 1769 mutineer George Wood, locked up in London’s Newgate Prison, confessed to the prison chaplain that he and his fellow mutineers had forced the officers on their ship to:
“…walk on a plank, extended from the ship’s side, over the sea, in which they were turned, when at the extreme end.”
In an even grimmer incident in 1788, the slave transport ship Garland ran short of food during its Atlantic crossing. In order to preserve their remaining stocks, the crew forced many of the slaves onboard to “walk the plank” to their watery doom. But there is some justice – however minor – to this story, for the food did eventually run out before Garland reached her destination, forcing the crew to resort to cannibalism to survive.
A handful of other cases of “walking the plank” are recorded throughout the 19th century. For example, in July 1822, the British sloop Blessing was captured by the Spanish pirate schooner Emmanuel in the Caribbean and her captain, William Smith, forced to walk the plank. In 1828 a similar fate befell the crew of the former Royal Navy Brig HMS Redpole, which, while carrying mail from Brazil to Britain, was captured and sunk by a Brazilian pirate vessel. And that same year, the Dutch brig Vhan Fredericka was captured by pirates near the Virgin Islands and her crew forced to walk the plank with cannonballs tied to their feet.
And that’s it: those are the few actual recorded cases of people being forced to walk the plank. As with so many fixtures of pirate lore such as parrots, eyepatches, peg legs, treasure maps, and – yes – even “talking like a pirate” – while there is a grain of truth to this practice, it was nowhere near as common as popular books, movies, shows, and other media would have us believe. But that hasn’t stopped us here from adopting walking the plank and keel-hauling as our official punishments for our basement dwellers when they try to do anything but work as god intended. Got to keep your employees properly motivated, you know?
Expand for ReferencesIoannidou, Christy, The Black Version of Water and Underwater Activity Drowning, Torture, and Executions Below the Sea in Ancient Greece During the Archaic and Classical Periods (Seventh to Fourth Centuries BC), The Association of Historical Studies, Koryvantes, Athens, Greece. http://doi.fil.bg.ac.rs/pdf/journals/arhe_apn/2020/arhe_apn-2020-16-1.pdf
Navy – Alleged Instance of Keel-Hauling, HC Deb 04 September 1880 vol 256 c1275, UK Parliament, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1880/sep/04/navy-alleged-instance-of-keel-hauling
Keelhauling – Royal Navy Torture Technique, The Way of the Pirates, https://www.thewayofthepirates.com/pirate-life/keelhauling/#google_vignette
Goldfarb, Kara, Keelhauling: Inside The Deranged Torture Method Used To Keep Sailors In Line, All That’s Interesting, October 22, 2022, https://allthatsinteresting.com/keelhauling
Falconer, William, An Universal Dictionary of the Marine: or, A Copious Explanation of the Technical Terms and Phrases Employed in the Construction, Equipment, Furniture, Machinery, Movements, and Military Operations of a Ship, 1780, https://archive.org/details/universaldiction00falc/page/n177/mode/2up
Parliamentary Papers, Volume 33, https://books.google.ca/books?id=_nUTAAAAYAAJ&dq=keelhaul+keelhauling&pg=RA1-PA58&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=keel&f=false
Keelhauling: the Atrocious Cruelty of it, With Details in the Recent Case in Egypt, The New York Times, September 22, 1882, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1882/09/26/102789113.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
Regali, Darius, Torture and Democracy, https://books.google.ca/books?id=-L8GtJY_J00C&pg=PA282&lpg=PA282&dq=keelhauling&source=bl&ots=ufr7aJBP10&sig=QitZyZba7xILPkpvM0M3aC6PU64&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=keelhauling&f=false
Keelhauling, in Living Color, Swordplay & Swashbucklers, https://benersonlittle.com/2017/01/23/keelhauling-in-living-color/
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Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive.
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.
We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man.
Steve Austin will be that man, better than he was before.
Better, stronger, faster.
So goes the iconic opening of the classic 1970s television series The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors as the titular astronaut-turned-cyborg secret agent. While the central premise of the show is pure science fiction, amazingly the exotic wingless spacecraft Austin crashes in the title sequence is not the product of some production designer’s fevered imagination. Rather, this sequence uses footage of an actual aircraft – the Northrop M2-F2 – which crashed during a test flight on May 10, 1967. The M2-F2 was one in a long line of experimental aircraft known as lifting bodies, which lack conventional wings and instead use their specially-shaped fuselages to generate lift. As discussed in our previous video $2 Billion Each – a Deep Dive Into the Incredible Engineering That Culminated in the B-2 Stealth Bomber, even in the earliest days of aviation, engineers realized that the conventional aircraft layout of two wings, a fuselage, and an empennage or tail was not necessarily the most effective. The quest for the ultimate flying machine – the aircraft boiled down to its purest, most aerodynamically efficient form – led to the development of the “flying wing”, which has no fuselage, tail surfaces, or other extraneous features. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the development of the lifting body was born of the desire to fly not within earth’s atmosphere, but outside of it, and may hold the key to making regular, affordable, and safe space travel a practical reality. This is the fascinating story of the bizarre aircraft without wings.
Our story begins in early 1944, as Nazi Germany prepared to unleash a new generation of terrifying secret weapons upon the Allies. Known as vergelstungwaffe or “vengeance weapons,” these would allow Germany to strike back at the British Isles as revenge for the round-the-clock bombing raids which had devastated German cities over the past year. The first of these, the Fieseler Fi.103 or V-1, was a small pilotless “flying bomb”, the ancestor of modern cruise missiles. Powered by a simple pulse jet engine and launched by a steam catapult from sites scattered around Northern France, the V-1 was guided by simple autopilot towards its target, whereupon an automatic system would dive the missile into the ground to deliver its one-ton high-explosive warhead. V-1 operations against London began on June 13, 1944, barely two weeks after the D-Day landings in Normandy; 9,521 would be launched, inflicting nearly 23,000 casualties, before the Allied advance across western Europe pushed the launch sites out of range – and for more on this, please check out our previous video On a Wingtip and a Prayer: the Insane Way British Pilots Defeated Germany’s Secret Weapon.
The second V-weapon was even more technologically advanced – and terrifying. Known as the Aggregat 4 or simply the V-2 rocket, this was the world’s first operational ballistic missile. Fuelled by a combination of alcohol and liquid oxygen, the V-2 climbed to an altitude of 88 kilometres – touching the edge of outer space – before descending onto its target at twice the speed of sound. Unlike the V-1, which made a distinctive motorcycle-like sound and was eventually defeated by a combination of accurate anti-aircraft fire and high-speed fighter aircraft, the V-2 approached silently and was all but unstoppable. However, it was also far more complicated, unreliable, and expensive to manufacture, and its combat debut was delayed numerous times. While initial development was carried out at the Peenemünde Army Research Center on the Baltic coast, following Operation Hydra, a massive RAF air rad on August 17, 1943, testing was moved to Blizna in occupied Poland, outside the range of Allied aircraft. However, unexpected problems soon appeared as rocket after rocket began breaking up in mid-flight, causing twisted debris to rain down on the test range. Between November 1943 and March 1944, only four of the 26 successful launches reached the target area in Sarnaki, 200 kilometres to the north. Despite firing dozens more rockets over the following months, engineers were unable to determine the cause of the airbursts, though excessive propellant tank pressure was suspected. In the end, they were forced to implement a stopgap solution: metal sleeves nicknamed “tin trousers” placed over the propellant tanks to strengthen them. Operational V-2 launches finally began six months later. From September 7, 1944 to March 27, 1945, 3,172 V-2s were fired against targets in the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, killing some 5,000 people. However, the rockets themselves were largely built by forced labourers from concentration camps, some 10,000 of whom died in the process – making the V-2 the only weapon in history to kill more people in its construction than in combat.
But while the V-2 failed to turn the tide of the Second World War, it would play a significant role in shaping the postwar world order. At the end of the war, the Allied powers – including the United States and Soviet Union – captured large numbers of V-2s as well as the scientists and engineers that helped design them. These men were soon put to work developing the next generation of long-range ballistic missiles, which they combined with the other great technological breakthrough of the war – the atomic bomb – to create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Effectively unstoppable and capable of obliterating any city on earth at the push of a button, the intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM ultimately inspire the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD whose apocalyptic shadow would loom over the world for more than thirty years.
However, the designers of the first ICBMs faced the same problem which had previously plagued the German V-2 engineers: missiles breaking up as they fell back to earth. The initial solution was to place the warhead in a separate nosecone that would detach from the now-spent rocket fuselage and descend separately to the target. However, as this nosecone plunged through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, the air ahead of it would become compressed and heat up to temperatures of up to 2,800 degrees Celsius – hot enough to melt steel. If a means could not be found to dissipate this heat and protect warheads from burning up like meteors on reentry, then the expensive, cutting edge missiles would be all but useless.
Initially, it was assumed that the ideal form factor for atmospheric reentry was long and pointy – the classic science fiction “rocket” shape. After all, such a shape would “slice” cleanly through the air with minimal drag, reducing both compression and fictional heating. However, in the early 1950s a pair of American engineers, Harry J. Allen and Alfred J. Eggers, Jr, made a surprising discovery. Allen and Eggers worked at the Ames Research Centre in California, then run by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics or NACA. In 1958, NACA would be reorganized and renamed the National Air and Space Administration – NASA. Using models in a supersonic wind tunnel, Allen and Eggers determined that when long, slender rockets travelled through the air at supersonic speeds, the supersonic shock wave tended to hug the sides of the vehicle, depositing large amounts of heat directly into the airframe. It was this phenomenon which had caused the V-2’s propellant tanks to overheat and burst during reentry. Conversely, if the vehicle were instead made as flat and un-aerodynamic as possible, then the air would not be able to get out of the way fast enough, causing a high-pressure cushion of air to build up ahead of the vehicle. This cushion would not only insulate the vehicle, slowing the transfer of heat to its skin, but also deflect the shockwave away from it, dissipating heat into the surrounding atmosphere. Indeed, Allen and Eggers were able to demonstrate mathematically that the heat load experienced by a reentering vehicle was inversely proportional to its drag coefficient. Based on this rather counterintuitive finding, missile designers soon changed the shape of warhead reentry to high-drag “blunt bodies.”
But this was only part of the solution, for even with the proper shaping a great deal of heat would still get through to the reentry vehicle, threatening to damage or destroy the warhead. At first, this problem was addressed through the use of a heat sink – a large mass of metal like copper or beryllium that could absorb large amounts of thermal energy and prevent the warhead from overheating before it reached its target. This technique was first used in 1959 on the General Electric Mk.2 reentry vehicle for the Convair SM-65 Atlas D, the United States’s first operational ICBM – and to learn how this pioneering weapon inspired the creation of one of the world’s most versatile and beloved household products, please check out our previous video Who Invented WD-40? However, heat sinks were heavy and cumbersome and soon a new type of thermal protection system or TPS was developed: the ablative heat shield. This was composed of multiple layers of phenolic resin applied to the blunt face of the reentry vehicle; when the vehicle reentered the atmosphere, the accumulating heat would cause the resin to char and slough off – that is, to ablate – carrying the heat energy it had absorbed off into the atmosphere. This system was significantly more efficient than heat sinks, requiring relatively thin layers of lightweight resin and allowing much larger warheads to be carried. Ablative heat shields were first deployed on the G.E. Mk. 3 reentry vehicle for the Atlas, and are still used on effectively all military ballistic missiles to this day. As a side note, this design had been predicted by Robert H. Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, who wrote in 1920:
“In the case of meteors, which enter the atmosphere with speeds as high as 30 miles (48 km) per second, the interior of the meteors remains cold, and the erosion is due, to a large extent, to chipping or cracking of the suddenly heated surface. For this reason, if the outer surface of the apparatus were to consist of layers of a very infusible hard substance with layers of a poor heat conductor between, the surface would not be eroded to any considerable extent, especially as the velocity of the apparatus would not be nearly so great as that of the average meteor.”
Allen and Eggers’ discovery was initially classified as a military secret, but eventually published in 1958 – just as the newly-formed NASA was launching Project Mercury, the United States’ first manned space program. The Mercury spacecraft was designed by Maxime Faget, a Belize-born engineer working at NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia. Working from the principles uncovered by Allen and Eggers, Faget chose a truncated cone or frustum which would reenter the atmosphere wide end first, forming an ideal blunt body. This blunt end was further covered in a protective heat shield, while the sides of the capsule were covered in tiles made of Rene 41 – a high temperature nickel allow – to protect the cabin from stray heat transfer. The first two manned Mercury flights – Mercury-Redstone 3 on May 5, 1961, and Mercury-Redstone 4 on July 21 – were short suborbital hops conducted at relatively low speeds, so the capsules were fitted with heat sink-style heat shields made of beryllium. However, orbital flights would reenter at much higher speeds, so for all subsequent missions his was changed to a resin ablative heat shield.
Meanwhile, engineers in the Soviet Union discovered the same design principles as the Americans, though their implementation of said principles was often somewhat different. For instance, the Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft that carried Yuri Gagarin and other early cosmonauts into space featured a spherical descent module with ablative heat shield material applied all around, meaning it would protect the occupant no matter the orientation it reentered the atmosphere. However, this design often made for an unpleasant reentry experience, exposing the cosmonaut to rapidly-shifting G forces as the capsule tumbled through the atmosphere. The later Soyuz spacecraft, which is still in use today, switched to a hemispherical “headlamp”- shaped descent module more in line with American designs.
The ablative heat shield concept proved so elegant, reliable, and foolproof that it was retained on NASA’s subsequent Gemini and Apollo capsules and continues to be used on modern spacecraft like the SpaceX Dragon, Boeing Starliner, and Lockheed Martin Orion. Indeed, since the dawn of the space age, not a single manned spacecraft using an ablative heat shield has ever burned up on reentry. But while robust and reliable, ballistic space capsules have several major limitations. Incapable of being steered to a precision landing, they have to be brought down in large areas of open ocean (or, in the case of the Soviet and later Russian space programs, the vast wilderness of eastern Eurasia), require large naval or air fleets to locate and recover them. If, by contrast, a spacecraft could be landed near its launching point, recovery logistics and overall launch costs could be greatly reduced. Indeed, early in the development of the 2-man Gemini capsule, engineers proposed fitting the spacecraft with a steerable, hang-glider-esque parachute called a Rogallo Wing, invented in 1948 by NACA engineer Francis Rogallo. Controlled by cables linked to the astronauts’ regular flight controls, the Rogallo Wing would allow the crew to pilot their spacecraft to a regular landing on a runway, touching down on a set of retractable metal skids. But while extensive gliding tests were performed using mockup capsules, the system proved more difficult to perfect than anticipated, and in the interests of expediency the concept was abandoned in 1964 in favour of a more conventional round parachute and ocean splashdown.
The later Apollo spacecraft that carried American astronauts to the moon incorporated a degree of steering ability into its design. The conical shape of the capsule was carefully designed to produce a certain amount of lift during reentry, allowing it to be “flown” by the crew. This was accomplished by concentrating most of the capsule’s mass off to one side, offset from its aerodynamic centre of pressure. During reentry, the crew used the spacecraft’s reaction control system or RCS thrusters to spin the capsule around its vertical axis, varying the distance between the centre of pressure and centre of gravity and causing the capsule to “fly” at a steeper or shallower angle. In this manner, the crew could adjust their reentry trajectory, allowing them to land closer to the recovery fleet.
But the ultimate dream of spacecraft designers was a winged, fully-steerable vehicle – a “space plane” that could land on a runway like a regular aircraft. Indeed, plans for such a vehicle even predate the start of the Space Race. In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force began developing a small 2-man space plane called the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar – short for Dynamic Soarer – based on an earlier concept called the Silbervogel or “Silver Bird” developed by German rocket engineer Eugen Sänger – and for more on this astonishing design, please check out our previous video The Nazi Space Shuttle. Launched atop a modified Titan II ballistic missile, the Dyna-Soar would either enter earth orbit or skip along the top of the atmosphere – a manoeuvre called “boost-glide” – to carry out a variety of military missions, including high-altitude reconnaissance and orbital bombing. In 1958, the Air Force also launched a parallel project known as the Aerospaceplane – later the Recoverable Orbital Launch System or ROLS – to develop an even more advanced spaceplane that could fly directly into space without the need for a separate disposable booster – a capability known as Single Stage to Orbit or SSTO. The ROLS would incorporate numerous cutting-edge technologies, including a Liquid Air Collection System that would pull oxygen out of the air and liquefy it for use as rocket fuel. However, the Air Force struggled to find a practical use for Dyna-Soar and the ROLS was quickly found to be infeasible using available technology. Furthermore, manned space initiatives were gradually being taken away from the armed forces and consolidated at NASA. These and other factors led to both projects being cancelled in 1963. Meanwhile, NASA’s overriding goal of landing a man on the moon by President John F. Kennedy’s 1970 deadline led them to eschew advanced spaceplane designs in favour of simpler and more well-understood ballistic space capsules.
But while work on what would eventually become the Space Transport System or Space Shuttle would not begin in earnest until the early 1970s, both NASA and the Air Force conducted extensive studies on spaceplane design throughout the 1960s. One of the major design challenges when it came to spaceplanes – as it was for ballistic capsules – was atmospheric reentry. While a spaceplane would require wings in order to glide to a controlled landing, designers feared these structures would not be strong or heat-resistant enough to withstand the stresses of reentry. Furthermore, wings were heavy and would only be required at the end of a mission; it would thus be inefficient to lug them all the way into orbit, cutting into the spacecraft’s payload capacity. One radical solution first proposed by NASA engineer Robert D. Reed, was to eliminate the wings altogether and shape the spacecraft such that its fuselage generated all the lift. Such craft came to be known as lifting bodies – and it is here at last that we come to the main topic of this video.
The idea of using parts of an aircraft other than the wings to generate lift is nothing new; for example, many of the 1930s aircraft designs of Italian-American engineer Giuseppe Ballanca such as the Bellanca Aircruiser featured fuselages and wing struts shaped like airfoils to increase the vehicle’s aerodynamic efficiency. Later aircraft like the 1960s Short SC.7 Skyvan and McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle also use their fuselages to generate significant lift. However, it was not until the 1960s that the technology became available to produce a pure, wingless lifting body aircraft.
In 1962, NASA’s Flight Research Centre – later the Ames-Dryden Flight Research Centre and today the Armstrong Flight Research Centre – approved the construction of a test vehicle to investigate the flight characteristics of lifting body aircraft. Known as the M2-F1 – “M” for “manned” and “F” for “flight” – the vehicle had a tubular steel frame covered in a mahogany shell and was hand-built by engineers and craftsmen from NASA and the Briegleb Glider Company. Much of the woodworking was performed by master craftsmen Gus Briegleb and Ernie Lowder, the latter of whom had previously worked on billionaire Howard Hughes’s gigantic H-4 Hercules all-wood flying boat – AKA the “Spruce Goose.” All told, construction cost a mere $30,000 – largely taken from the research centre’s building maintenance budget. Due to the low-rent nature of the venture, the assembly workshop at El Mirage Airport was nicknamed the “Wright Bicycle Shop” – and to learn more about the amazing story of the real Wright Brothers, please check out our previous video How Did the Wright Brothers Win the Race Into the Air?
Completed in 1963, the M2-F1 looked like something straight out of science fiction – and like nothing even remotely capable of flight. Measuring only 6 metres long and 4 metres wide, it had a rounded, triangular body with a curved belly and flat top, earning it the nickname of “flying bathtub”. Two small vertical fins with rudders on either side of the fuselage provided lateral control, while a set of horizontal elevons controlled the aircraft in pitch and roll. These were actuated manually using conventional pushrod controls, while the fixed landing gear was scavenged from a Cessna 150 light aircraft.
Flight tests took place on the wide expanse of Muroc Dry Lake – today Rogers Dry Lake – in California’s Mojave Desert – home to both the NASA Armstrong Flight Centre and Edwards Air Force Base. At first, the M2-F1was towed along the lakebed behind a 1963 Pontiac Catalina convertible, with test pilot Milt Thompson making the first short hops on April 5, 1963. Unfortunately, the strange aircraft bounced uncontrollably on its landing gear, forcing Thompson to keep the nose down for fear of flipping over. Subsequent tests encountered the same problem, which was eventually traced to unwanted rudder movements. The flight controls were duly modified, and the problem disappeared. However, a new problem had appeared: the tow car was not powerful enough to lift the M2-F1 off the ground. The vehicle was duly hot-rodded to increase its power and fitted with a roll bar and a rearward-facing seat to allow the M2-F1 to be observed in flight. Soon, tow speeds reached 180 kilometres per hour, allowing Thompson to reach altitudes of around 6 metres before cutting the tow line and gliding freely for about 20 seconds. In total, Thompson performed some 400 auto tow flights, gathering valuable data on lifting body aerodynamics and handling characteristics.
On August 16, 1963, Thompson piloted the M2-F1 on its first high-altitude flight, towed behind a Douglas DC-3 transport aircraft. For these tests the “flying bathtub” was fitted with an ejection seat as well as a set of small booster rockets to allow the pilot to increase airspeed extend his landing by a few seconds if needed. One of the major questions which aircraft like the M2-F1 were designed to answer was whether a reentering spaceplane could make a safe landing completely unpowered or whether some kind of auxiliary propulsion – either a rocket or jet engine – was needed. On a typical test flight, the M2-F1 was towed to an altitude of 3,700 metres and released, whereupon it took around two minutes to spiral to the ground. Naturally inefficient as a glider, the aircraft had a terrifying sink rate 66 kilometres per hour and reached maximum speeds of 190 kilometres per hour. In total, the M2-F1 made 77 flights between August 1963 and August 1966, being flown by 10 different test pilots including legends Chuck Yeager and Bill Dana and future NASA astronauts Fred Haise and Joe Engle. Despite a handful of minor mishaps, the aircraft performed well, paving the way for further lifting body research. The pioneering M2-F1 was transferred to the collection of the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., but in 2015 was loaned out to the Air Force Flight Test Museum at Edwards Air Force Base where she remains on display to this day.
In 1963, as the M2-F1 was nearing completion, NASA contracted the Northrop Corporation – ironically known for their all-wing aircraft designs – to create a more capable advanced lifting body research vehicle, designated the M2-F2. Completed in 1966, the M2-F2, the aircraft was 1 metre narrower than its predecessor but weighed four times as much, being built of aluminium instead of wood. It also featured retractable landing gear for reduced drag and the provision for installing various types of rocket engines. The M2-F2 made its first unmanned captive flight on March 23, 1966, the aircraft being mounted to a pylon under the right wing of a modified Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber. On July 12, it made its first unpowered glide test with Milt Thompson once again at the controls, the aircraft being released from the mothership at an altitude of 12,000 metres and reaching a top speed of 720 kilometres per hour. A further fourteen glide tests were performed without incident. But on the sixteenth, conducted on May 10, 1967, disaster struck. As the M2-F2 approached the runway, test pilot Bruce Peterson experienced a phenomenon known as dutch roll – an uncommanded oscillation in roll and yaw. While Peterson managed to get the aircraft back under control, he became distracted by a nearby helicopter and drifted away from the runway. Finding it difficult to determine his height above the lake bed, Peterson fired his landing rockets to try and gain speed, but it was too late; the M2-F2 slammed into the ground before the landing gear could fully deploy and rolled over six times, coming to a rest upside-down. Miraculously, Peterson survived the impact and eventually made a full recovery, but unfortunately lost his right eye to an infection. It is footage of this dramatic crash which was later used in the opening title sequence of The Six Million Dollar Man.
The instability that triggered the crash was ruled to be pilot induced oscillation or PIO, caused by a lack of adequate lateral control. The M2-F2 was thus rebuilt as the M2-F3, which featured a ventral fin for greater directional stability. The M2-F3 was first flown on June 2, 1970 by test pilot Bill Dana. Two more unpowered glides followed before the aircraft was fitted with a 36 kilonewton thrust Reaction Motors XLR-11 rocket engine. Fuelled by alcohol and liquid oxygen, the engine featured four combustion chambers that could be individually lit to vary the overall thrust. The first powered flight took place November 25, 1970, with Bill Dana once again at the controls. Over the next two years Dana, along with test pilots John Manke, Cecil Powell, and Jerauld Gentry, made 24 powered flights, reaching a maximum altitude of 21,800 metres and a maximum speed of Mach 1.6. It is worth noting here the enormous advancements made in supersonic aerodynamics since Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in level flight on October 14, 1947. His aircraft, the Bell X-1, used the same engine as the M2-F3, yet despite looking far more aerodynamic than NASA’s “flying bathtub”, struggled to exceed Mach 1. In the course of the M2-F3’s research career, test pilots discovered that lifting bodies are inherently unstable and difficult to fly using traditional direct flight controls. Thus, on later flights the aircraft was fitted with a prototype stability augmentation or “fly by wire” system, which used computers to analyze the pilot’s control inputs and translate them into the rapid control surface movements needed to keep the aircraft flying stably. The aircraft was also fitted with an experimental side mounted control column or “side stick”; both technologies are widely used on modern aircraft. Following its retirement in 1972, the M2-F2 was also donated to the National Air & Space Museum and currently hangs in the National Mall building’s Milestones of Flight gallery.
In parallel with the M2-F3, Northrop also built and tested another lifting body demonstrator known as the HL-10 – “HL” standing for Horizontal Lander. Though similar in shape and dimensions to the H2-L1, the HL-10 had an inverted fuselage shape, with a flat bottom and curved top into which the cockpit canopy was faired. The aircraft cost $1.8 million to build, and to save money many parts were scavenged from other aircraft, such as landing gear from a Northrop T-38 Talon supersonic trainer and an ejection seat from a Convair F-106 Delta Dart interceptor.
The HL-10 was completed in January 1966 and made its first unpowered flight on December 22, piloted by Bruce Peterson – who the following year would crash spectacularly in the H2-F2. Shortly thereafter, the aircraft was fitted with an XLR-11 rocket engine, though the next 11 drops were flown unpowered to evaluate the aircraft’s handling characteristics. The first powered flight took place on October 23, 1968 with Jerauld Gentry at the controls, though the engine suffered a malfunction and Gentry was forced to land only three minutes after launch. On the next flight, on November 13, 1968, John Manke tried three times unsuccessfully to light the engine, while on the flight after that Gentry finally succeeded in making a full powered flight. The aircraft made a further 12 successful powered flights, reaching a maximum altitude of 27,440 metres and a maximum speed of Mach 1.86. On later flights, pilots made high speed approaches from high altitudes to study proposed landing profiles for space planes reentering the atmosphere – flights which involved landing at speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour. As with the H2-H2, three Bell 500 pound thrust hydrogen peroxide booster rockets were fitted to provide extra thrust during landing if needed and determine whether such boosting would be needed on future space planes. The data collected during these flights would later prove invaluable to the design of the Space Shuttle. The HL-10 is currently on display at Air Force Flight Test Museum at Edwards Air Force Base, along with the M2-H1.
But Northrop was not the only name in the lifting body game. In 1963, the United States Air Force contracted the Martin Marietta Corporation to design a number of lifting body demonstrators for spaceplane reentry research. The first of these, designated the SV-5D and later the X-23A PRIME for Precision Reentry Including Maneuvering reEntry (don’t you love a good forced acronym?), were small 2 metre long by 1.2 metre wide unmanned vehicles designed to be launched into space atop a Convair SM-65 Atlas ballistic missile. The vehicles were constructed from titanium, stainless steel, aluminium, and beryllium, coated in ablative heat shield material, and fitted with a nitrogen gas control system to allow them to perform maneuvers while reentering the atmosphere. Once the vehicles reached an altitude of 30 kilometres, they deployed a recovery parachute and were “snatched” in midair using a modified Lockheed JC-130B Hercules aircraft in a similar manner to the film canisters from Corona reconnaissance satellites – and for more on another batshit crazy Cold War system used to snatch people into the air, please check out our previous video The Real Story of Capturing an Ice Fortress with a Badass James Bond Film Device. Three X-23A missions were launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California on December 2, 1966, March 5, 1967, and April 19, 1967, but various technical failures caused the first two vehicles to sink into the Pacific Ocean before they could be recovered. However, the third mission was a complete success and the recovered X-23A is now on display at the Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.
Meanwhile, Martin built a piloted lifting body demonstrator called the SV-5P – later renamed the X-24A. Similar in design to the Northrop HL-10 though slightly larger, the X-24A had a flat bottom and curved top surface, was powered by an XLR-11 rocket engine, and fitted with two Bell solid propellant rocket motors for landing. Like the previous Northrop lifting body aircraft, it was also launched from a modified B-52 bomber. The X-24A made its first unpowered gliding flight on April 17, 1969 and its first powered flight on March 19, 1970, piloted both times by Jerauld Gentry. In total, the aircraft flew 29 times, reaching a maximum altitude of 21,800 metres and a maximum speed of Mach 1.52. In the early 1970s, the aircraft was rebuilt into a radically different flat wedge shape dubbed the “flying flatiron”, which first flew unpowered on August 1, 1973 with John Manke at the controls. The aircraft was flown 36 times before being retired on November 26, 1975, reaching a maximum speed of Mach 1.76 and successfully demonstrating that a reentering spaceplane could safely make a precision gliding landing without any additional thrust being required.
In the mid-1970s, various proposals were floated for an X-24C variant that would use supersonic combustion ramjet or scramjet engines to reach hypersonic speeds of up to Mach 8, but nothing came of these plans. Martin also built a pair of jet-powered versions of the X-24A called the SV-57 for pilot training purposes; however, they were unable to convince any test pilots to fly the aircraft, and they were never used. Also unrealized were plans to turn the Northrop HL-10 into the world’s first operational space plane by fitting it with a heat shield and reaction control system. Taking advantage of the large amounts of hardware left over from the Apollo moon landing programme, the proposed mission profile called for the HL-10 to be launched into earth orbit by a giant Saturn V rocket, mounted in the space usually reserved for the Lunar Module or LM. The crew would ride separately aboard a Apollo Command-Service Module or CSM as per usual. Once in orbit, a robotic arm would extract the spaceplane from its adaptor and bring it alongside the CSM, allowing the pilot to spacewalk over, power up the vehicle, and fly it back down to earth. However, the head of the NASA Flight Research Centre saw the scheme as an inefficient and expensive use of resources, and along with nearly all proposed post-Apollo missions, it was never flown.
And while the M2-F2, HL-10 and X-24 programmes gathered valuable data on lifting body aerodynamics, fly-by-wire control systems, and unpowered reentry profiles, in the end NASA opted not to use a lifting body design for the Space Transport System AKA the Space Shuttle. The main issue was with propellant storage; for the shuttle, NASA selected a combination of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, which must be stored in cylindrical pressure vessels. Such vessels are difficult to fit into the complexly-curved shape of a lifting body aircraft without creating a great deal of wasted space. Furthermore, lifting bodies have very small glide ratios descend at extremely high speeds, giving them a very restricted landing envelope and requiring very long runways. However, NASA wanted the shuttle to be able to land at a variety of alternate runways in case of poor weather at the primary landing site. As a result, the Space Shuttle was designed with a more conventional delta-winged configuration. This proved a fateful decision, as NASA was to learn during the STS-107 mission of the space shuttle Columbia. When the shuttle launched into orbit on January 16, 2003, a piece of insulating foam broke off the external propellant tank, striking the left wing and damaging the reinforced carbon-carbon composite leading edge. When the shuttle reentered the atmosphere two weeks later on February 1, hot plasma entered the breach and caused the shuttle to disintegrate in midair, killing all seven astronauts aboard. Had the shuttle used a lifting body design, such vulnerable edges would have been minimized and the vehicle may have survived reentry.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union was also pursuing its own spaceplane project, even more advanced and ambitious than American efforts. In 1960, the OKB-155 design bureau under famous Soviet aircraft designer Artem Mikoyan – the “M” in MiG – began working on a concept known as the Spiral OS, composed of three main components: a reusable GSR delta-winged, ramjet-powered supersonic launch aircraft; an RB two-stage rocket booster; and an OS orbiter. The GSR would boost the OS-RB combination to a speed of Mach 6 at an altitude of 30 kilometres, whereupon the RB would ignite and insert the OS into an initial 130 kilometre orbit. As this orbit could only be sustained for a short time before atmospheric drag caused it to decay, the OS would then fire its own engines to gain altitude. Meanwhile, the GSR mothership would return to base, ready to be used for another launch.
The design of the OS spaceplane itself was highly innovative, featuring variable dihedral wings. During reentry, these would be folded vertically to place them in the “shadow” of the heat shield and protect them from damage. During this phase, the specially-shaped fuselage would generate the required lift in the same manner as the American lifting-body proposals. Once the vehicle reached a safe speed, the wings would fold down horizontally, allowing the aircraft to land on a conventional runway. To increase landing range and provide capability for emergency go-around, a small turbojet engine was also fitted. Interestingly, the American Space Shuttle was originally supposed to feature such engines, but these were ultimately deleted to save weight. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Spiral OS was its turned-up nose, designed to reduce heating of the rear fuselage during reentry. This earned the vehicle the nickname Lapot – a traditional blunt-ended peasant’s shoe made of woven tree bark. To avoid cutting holes in the heat shield, the landing gear – comprising four metal skids – was stored in the upper, unshielded section of the spacecraft and folded down just before landing. Finally, in case of an emergency, the pilot could detach the entire cockpit from the spaceplane, which served as a miniature reentry capsule complete with heat shield.
These design features, along with the spacecraft’s unique launch profile, would have given the Spiral OS numerous advantages over the later NASA space shuttle. For instance, the folding wings, landing engine, unbroken heat shield, and pilot escape capsule would have made the spacecraft far safer and robust than the STS orbiter, likely allowing the crew to survive a Columbia-style reentry incident. Furthermore, the reusable aircraft launch system would have allowed the Spiral to reach any orbital inclination, carry two or three times the payload of a conventional launch vehicle of the same mass, and reduced the cost per launch by up to threefold.
The test project was to be divided into three phases. The first would involve unmanned models launched into space atop rockets in the same manner as the American X-23 PRIME. The second phase would involve the construction of a manned, jet-powered vehicle dropped from a modified Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” strategic bomber to test subsonic handling. This vehicle would later be fitted with rocket engines, allowing it to reach speeds of up to Mach 8. Finally, phase 3 would involve launching a manned, sub-scale spaceplane into orbit using a conventional Soyuz launch vehicle to prove out the vehicle’s systems and reentry capability. Interestingly, Soviet engineers initially had difficulty combining the Soyuz rocket with the Spiral, whose highly-asymmetric weight distribution tended to unbalance the launch vehicle. It was thus suggested that the spacecraft be towed into orbit behind the rocket. As the spacecraft was already designed to withstand the heat of atmospheric reentry, it could easily survive the rocket’s exhaust, meaning this idea was not as crazy as it sounds. Ultimately, however, engineers figured out how to fit the spaceplane atop the rocket.
But while official approval to build the Spiral OS was given in 1966 and a group of cosmonaut test pilots chosen the year before, enthusiasm for the project was hard to maintain among the upper echelons of the Soviet government, and following the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969, the project was cancelled before much hardware had been completed.
However, in 1974 the Spiral project was suddenly restarted in response to the American Space Shuttle program. Amusingly, the Space Shuttle greatly concerned the Soviets, who believed it could snatch their satellites out of orbit and return them to the United States for study. Spoiler alert: it could not. To collect subsonic atmospheric handling data for the new project, now designated the Experimental Passenger Orbital Aircraft or EPOS, the Mikoyan design bureau constructed a small, jet-powered version of the “Lapot” design known as the MiG-105. The aircraft made its first powered flight on October 11, 1976, and was first dropped from a Tu-95 mothership on November 27, 1977. In total, the MiG-105 made eight test flights with test pilot A.G. Festovets at the controls, until a hard landing in September 1978 resulted in the aircraft being written off and retired. Nonetheless, the test programme demonstrated the fundamental soundness of the design – including the variable-dihedral wings. Meanwhile, a series of small unmanned models were built to test heat shield materials and reentry manoeuvring. Known as Bespilotnyi Orbital’nyi Raketoplan or “Unpiloted Orbital Rocketplanes” – BOR for short – the models were launched into space from the Kapustin Yar complex in Astrakhan Oblast, Russia, atop Kosmos-3M rockets before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean, where they were recovered by Soviet Navy Vessels. Six different BOR models were built, with fifteen confirmed launches being conducted between 1969 and 1988.
By this time, however, the Spiral concept had been abandoned in favour of the Buran spacecraft, which externally appeared very similar to the NASA Space Shuttle. But once again the Soviet design was in many ways superior to its American counterpart. For instance, while the Space Shuttle carried its own hydrogen-oxygen rocket engines, the propellant being supplied from a large external tank, Buran was strapped to the side of standalone liquid-fuelled Energia super-heavy booster, eliminating the weight of onboard engines and allowing the orbiter to carry a larger payload. This configuration also eliminated the need for the dangerous and un-extinguishable solid rocket boosters or SRBs which triggered the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986.
Buran made its first – and only – unmanned flight on November 15, 1988, lifting off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, completing two orbits of the earth, and landing automatically on the runway back at Baikonur. A second unmanned flight was planned for sometime in 1993, but the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in the project’s cancellation. The prototype was placed in storage, only to be destroyed in 2002 when its hangar collapsed.
But while the 1960s dream of sleek, lifting body spaceplanes never came to fruition, the concept may be poised to making something of a comeback, with several proposed spacecraft concepts in recent years using elements of the lifting body design. These include the RSC Energia Kliper, the Orbital Sciences Corporation Prometheus, the Sierra Nevada Corporation Dream Chaser Space System, the ESA Hermes, the NASA HL-20 Personnel Launch System, the NASA/Scaled Composites X-38 Crew Return Vehicle, and the Lockheed Martin Venturestar. The latter concept is particularly ambitious, designed to combine single-stage-to-orbit or SSTO and horizontal landing capability – the holy grail of reusable spacecraft design. Due to budget cuts, technical failures, and other factors, nearly all of these projects were eventually cancelled, with only the Dream Chaser currently in active development. But the trials and tribulations of these modern projects are an enormous subject for a separate video; for now, while the future of the lifting body spacecraft seems uncertain, at least the experiments of the 1960s, 70s, 80s have shown the concept to be perfectly feasible. In other words: we can built it – we have the technology!
Expand for ReferencesNorthrop/Martin HL-10/X-24, Aircraft of the World, International Masters Publishers AB, 1998
Taylor, Michael, The World’s Strangest Aircraft, Regency House Publishing Ltd, 1996
Where Are They Now: M2-F1 Lifting Body, NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/where-are-they-now-m2-f1-lifting-body/
Project Habu, https://projecthabu.com/post/109735545635
Klinger, Dave, 50 years to Orbit: Dream Chaser’s Crazy Cold War Backstory, Are Technica, June 9, 2012, https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/09/the-long-complicated-voyage-of-the-dream-chaser-may-yet-end-in-space/
Spiral OS, Encyclopedia Astronautica, http://www.astronautix.com/s/spiralos.html
Unmanned Orbital Rocket Planes Type “BOR”, https://weebau.com/satcosmos/bor.htm
NASA Lifting Body, Encyclopedia Astronautica, http://www.astronautix.com/n/nasaliftingbody.html
The post Look, Ma: no Wings! The Strange World of Lifting Body Aircraft appeared first on Today I Found Out.
A relatively common trope today is that of the noble and honorable Samurai warrior opposed by their shadowy brother from another mother, the mystical and morally corrupt, black garbed assassin warrior known as the ninja.
These fabled shadow warriors of Japanese history have been a staple of modern pop culture since around the 1960s when super-spy James Bond encountered them on a trip to Japan in You Only Live Twice. Prior to this, ninjas were something few people outside of their homeland were aware of. This has contributed to the real-world history of the ninja and their origins being rather chock full of admittedly awesome myths and legends, all surrounding them like a thick, shadowy fog.
Something we feel the ninjas of history would feel proud of. Afterall, hiding and remaining unseen is sort of their whole deal… And, indeed, even in their time, they seemed to like to play up some of the stories that arose around what they were capable of and how they did what they did.
This all brings us to the topic of today- just who were the ninja and what did they actually get up to in reality?
To begin with, in a nutshell the ninja were elite, mercenary spies that also doubled as a type of swiss army knife of special forces, skilled in everything from sabotage, espionage, ambush, arson, assasination, to there is even evidence that they were highly trained in first aid and use of various medicines.
As historian Yamada Yüji notes, “You need to know the topography of the enemy’s position, the condition of his food supplies, the structure of his castle. It was the job of the shinobi [ninja] to obtain this kind of crucial information. They would infiltrate the enemy domain and ascertain the lay of the land…and create chaos through acts of sabotage and arson.”
On that note, debunking our first ninja myth, there’s no historical record of them dressing in the stereotypical ninja outfits we all know and love today. Because the thing was, wearing such garb would be one heck of a way for them to stand out in many types of missions.
As such, ninjas mostly seem to have worn the garb of everything from monk to farmer to servant- whatever a particular mission required, rather than any set uniform.
We’ll have some examples of them doing just this later on, but for now, ninjas so commonly wearing the clothing of farmers and the like even gave rise to the idea for a time that they were mostly simple farmers who simply took money for spying. While there certainly were individuals who did just that, when talking actual ninjas as we think of them, they were anything but simple, and there are even nobles who were samurai who are known to have been trained up in ninjitsu. More on this later.
But for now, let’s look at the origin of the ninja.
As you might expect, as in pretty much every other group since humans have been humaning, spies in some form have seemingly always existed. So pinpointing when exactly the ninja got their start isn’t fully clear, and this general timespan with which they popped up depends on how you choose to define them.
For example, if you choose to define the Japanese “ninja” as a person who eschews the usual “accepted” rules of engagement and employs subterfuge and guile in their information gathering and the like, ninja have been around as long as people have been living in Japan.
As for the name, that doesn’t really help out either and was around long before what most today would consider ninja. And for reference here, the more common name for ninja in Japan, shinobi, or shinobi no mono, simply roughly means “spy”, with a more literal translation being either “those who act in stealth” or “a person of stealth” or more aptly “sneaky person”.
As for the term ninja, this is just a different way to pronounce the Kanji characters here, though note, doesn’t appear to have been common until much more recently in history, particularly catching on in the Western world in the 20th century as the preferred name for this group.
But going back to ninja history “they’ve always sort of been around” is admittedly not all that satisfying an answer, which is presumably why Japanese folklore credits legendary hero Yamato Takeru as being, if not the first ninja, the alleged first figure in Japanese mythological history to ignore the traditional “rules” of combat to defeat their foes. In essence, becoming the first ninja if not literally, then spiritually.
Now, we’ll get into the better documented, less mythologized origins in a second, but for now, according to this legend, Yamato Takero was born a prince of the Yamato Kingdom sometime in the first century and spent the bulk of his life being a badass who repeatedly defied seemingly impossible odds time and time again using his peerless intellect and boundless creativity.
For example, one of the most popular legends about the wily prince, and the one that has him being singled out as either the first ninja or at least the folkloric origins of the term, is when he was tasked with putting down a rebellion. The prince, who at this point in the tale was known by his birthname, Wo-Usu, opted not to challenge the rebel leader directly, but instead donned the traditional garb of a shrine maiden and simply walked into his camp. This disguise is said to have worked flawlessly, in part because the prince was known to possess delicate, feminine features and also because he immediately set about getting the rebel leader drunk.
When the rebel leader was suitably soused, the prince revealed the deception and stabbed him to death with a concealed sword, with the rebel leader being said to have used his last ounce of strength to compliment the prince on the balls it took to strike him down at his literal seat of power. In addition to helping quell the rebellion, the act earned the prince the title of Yamato Takeru, which roughly translates to The Brave of Yamato.
For anybody daring to question the validity of any of this, you should first know that on his way home from stabbing the rebel leader to death in his own home, Yamato Takeru challenged and subsequently kicked the crap out of a handful of gods who opposed his father’s rule, as you do.
On top of that, at some point the prince also obtained the Kusanagi, a fabled weapon of Japanese history said to have been personally wielded by the sun goddess Amaterasu before falling into mortal hands. Not that the prince needed it, as the Brave of Yamato personally slayed countless foes with nothing but his wits. Though we imagine it was handy for lopping off god heads.
Proving once and for all that he really did these things and was the first ninja. I mean, how else do you think all those gods died off, hmmmm? Do you see any of those gods alive today?
Checkmate Yamato doubters.
As for his many exploits and growing confidence to be able to do anything, this eventually proved to be the cunning prince’s downfall when he was tasked with felling a mighty mountain god.
In this one, the prince was so supremely confident in his abilities that upon being given the task of killing this god, he boasted “As for the deity of this mountain, I will simply take him empty-handed.”
The god, offended by this boast, decided to take a leaf out of the prince’s book and confronted him on his journey up the mountain in the form of either a boar or snake and attacked him while his back was turned.
The duplicitous deity defeated the hero prince and because of his many sneaky exploits, today the legend of Yamato Takeru is now intrinsically linked with the mythological origins of ninja.
As for the actual history and origin of the ninja, for those who dare doubt the greatness of Yamato, schools for this backroom fighting using guerilla tactics have been around in Japan since at least the 12th century, with one of the earliest such started by a samurai by the name of Daisuke Togakure and a Chinese warrior-monk by the name of Kain Doshi… which if that isn’t a pairing made for Hollywood or a pretty kick-butt adventure game or novel, I don’t know what is.
But the product of these two’s work together was what is sometimes considered the first ninjitsu school. Although it should be noted that there is some contention over the historical accuracy of many elements of this origin story.
Moving on from there, the art of ninjitsu really seemed to ramp up in the ballpark of the 15th century, during the rather chaotic, war filled Sengoku Period, at least as far as being when the ninjas as we’d understand them today began to emerge and ply their shadowy trade for fun and profit en masse.
However, again, for centuries prior throughout Japan, feudal warlords and and their ilk would employ various asymmetric warfare tactics, or if we want to use the scientific term- “dick moves”, like burning down a rival’s castle or assassinating members of their leadership hierarchy when it suited them.
Further, such tactics aren’t unique to Japanese history, with militaries throughout all of human history making use of them. There is literally an entire chapter of The Art of War, written in the 5th century BCE, dedicated to setting the enemy on fire that not only encourages you to do so whenever possible, but to take advantage of the chaos it causes by stealing their stuff or attacking them as they try to put it out.
However, why the Sengoku Period is generally pointed to for the ninjas origins is that it was around this time that specific schools to train up such individuals started popping up around Japan, with the most famous and most skilled coming from the regions of Iga and Koka, though note, contrary to what is sometimes said, these were not the only places individuals wanting to become ninjas could be trained in Japan, just allegedly these two groups were the best.
For whatever reason, the clans here simply took the idea of such a special operations warrior spy and ran with it, becoming highly sought after for their prodigious skills. In fact, so associated with the craft were these regions that at a certain point, Iga-mono actually became a euphemism for “spy”.
As for potential factors that went into cultivating these talents, Iga and Koka were seen as being of little geographic, political or military importance by warring feudal lords during the Sengoku period and the years leading up to it, so the people there were largely left to do their own thing.
However, that’s not to say they didn’t have to defend themselves from time to time, and given their relative inability to do so with a grand army or any such if attacked, it’s speculated left the peoples of these two regions much more willing to think outside the box, throwing out many of the established honorable “rules” of war. Sure, poisoning the enemy commanders or sneaking in and burning buildings down with they or their warriors inside may not have been the honorable way to do battle, but it was a way that a handful of people could get the job done against a potentially vastly superior force.
Thus, in the end these so-called peasant-warriors banded together and came up with some rather ingenious ways to keep from being conquered, ultimately creating family clans that specialized in this art form, with, in turn, their remote location thought to have helped in maintaining secrecy on their training and how they went about doing what they did. Going further, by the mid-16th century, the Iga and Koka also formed an alliance and began working together.
Or to quote Yuji Yamada, the vice-president of the International Ninja Research Center, which my school counselor definitely should have told me was a job option,
“Iga farmers might have joined forces with local outlaw groups to fight for their sovereignty.”
Being humble farmers without access to military training or weaponry, the people of Iga and Koka instead took to weaponising whatever they had to hand. For example the kama, a small cutting tool not dissimilar from a sickle, is closely associated with ninjas, but sources suggest Iga and Koka villagers weren’t above using stuff as simple as a kitchen knife to defend themselves. Over time, and as the reputation of each village grew, and they began to train and arm themselves not out of necessity, but deliberately, such weapons and tactics weren’t abandoned. Simply refined.
Appropriately, the training, techniques and history of these proto-ninja were shrouded in secrecy and even today, we know precious little about any of it, with most information we do have been gleaned from three secret surviving ninja scrolls.
Which yes, are a thing.
As an aside, the aforementioned Yuji Yamada actually studies and teaches classes on these “ninjitsu manuals” meaning he’s technically a Professor of Ninja Studies.
Seriously, come on guidance counselors. Up your game! It was right there!!!!
And on that note, yes, it is possible to get a degree in Ninja-ology, with Yamada being one of the people who teaches that course at Mie University.
Sadly, something worth mentioning is that while a lot of sites reported on the course as being one you can take to “officially” be recognised as a ninja, Yamada has stressed in interviews on what exactly the course entails, that this is not the case. He states,“This is a course to learn about the ninja, not to become one.”
But in any event, at the same time the Iga and Koka were refining the art of ninjitsu, feudal lords of Japan fully realised how useful a skillset this was, and at some point realized the people of Iga and Koka were particularly exceptional at this style of warfare and began more or less proclaiming on high to these clans “Shut up and take my money.”
Moving on from there, contrary to popular belief, ninjitsu is not a martial art and any person claiming to teach it as such is likely in desperate need of a powerful laxative, owing to being full of crap.
That’s not to say ninja weren’t trained up in various fighting skills, just there’s no record of incorporating any specific rigid fighting style, and in fact of the three surviving texts outlining their training and the equipment they used, they do not mention fighting without a weapon even once. Instead, they were simply trained in use of a myriad of weapons, contraptions, and the like that could be helpful over the course of their duties.
As the Igaryu Ninja Museum sum up –
“A person who uses Ninjutsu is a ninja. Ninjutsu is not a martial art. Ninjutsu is an independent art of warfare that developed mainly in the regions of Iga in Mie Prefecture, and Koka in Shiga Prefecture, Japan.”
So, let us now look at some of the specific activities of these ninja mercenaries. Leading off with their propensity to burn things to the ground, in 1541 we have a combined force of Iga and Koka clan ninjas doing exactly that, as recorded in a 16th century diary, “This morning…, the Iga-shu entered Kasagi castle in secret and set fire to a few of the priests’ quarters. They also set fire to outbuildings in various places inside the San-no-maru. They captured the ichi-no-maru (inner bailey) and the ni-no-maru (second bailey).”
17 years later a group of 48 ninja burned the Sawayama Castle via first stealing a lantern bearing the family’s crest, at which point they then made replicas of that lantern. They then dressed as samurai and with the lanterns bearing the appropriate crest in hand, managed to get into the castle, at which point they set it on fire.
The stories of their abilities at burning things to the ground are both frequent and one of the few things they got up to that are relatively easy to see in documented history, or at least when it involved things like burning castles.
Getting back to the training of ninjas, the ninjitsu manuals mentioned previously seem to indicate that ninjas from the Iga and Koka clans adhered to an “all’s fair in love and war” philosophy. For example, a less-than-savory tip given to ninjas tasked with reconnaissance of a fortified position was to find a dead body, or, you know, make one… cut it open and then check the contents of the stomach. If the stomach contains meat and vegetables, it’s a good sign the location is well supplied. If it only contained staples such as rice or even no food at all, that’s a good indication those inside aren’t eating well- a rather valuable piece of information in a siege, for example.
Speaking of food, the manuals also include advice on avoiding food that would cause body odour and instead stick to hearty, simple staples. Nestled in there is also advice on portable foodstuffs for the ninja on the go.
For the curious, to stave off hunger, ninjas would mix “carrots, buckwheat flour, wheat flour, yam, licorice root, and rice flour which was steeped in sake for three years”.
Yes, three years.
This calorie-dense mixture was shaped into small balls and then dried out. The result was a so-called “hunger-ball” the size of a peach pit a ninja could carry on their person and use to satisfy their hunger in a pinch.
…Or possibly a practical joke played on us all by the ninjas, no doubt laughing their butts off thinking how later peoples would spend three years making this and then tasting the revolting results.
On that note, according to Max Miller of the phenomenal channel Tasting History, which fun fact is one of the only history channels I watch because, you know, I do this all day, so in my offtime watching other similar channels would be more like work… But Tasting History? Max Miller? Chef’s kiss… and a different angle on it all in focussing on cuisine.
But in any event, Mr. Miller spent three years making and then tasted these food balls and notes they are, in fact, disgusting.
Or to quote him directly, “It says to have three of these to stave off hunger, but maybe if you have three of these you just don’t want to eat anymore… Utter disappointment… It’s so bitter. They’re terrible. Absolutely terrible. The texture’s terrible. The flavor is terrible… Ya, 1 out of 10.”
I have literally never seen him more disgusted while chewing in any of his phenomenal videos.
In any event, the ninja also made a concoction of “crushed plum pulp, put with rye ergot (a fungus that grew on grass) and crystallized sugar”. The mixture would again be dried and formed into a ball that the ninja could carry on their person.
As for moving around, the ninja manuals detail numerous techniques for stealth as well as tips on conditioning. Some of these would seem intuitive, like walking on your tip toes to avoid noise, but the manuals stress drilling these movements until they are not just second nature, but something a ninja can do without exertion, particularly useful for avoiding heavy breathing.
On that note, the manuals also contain advice on breathing, as well as how to make footwear that’s particularly good for stealth, essentially just by attaching layers of cotton to the underside of sandals, as well as how to make things like makibishi, or caltrops, from commonly available materials like bamboo to help slow down pursuers. The scrolls even include tips on how to keep dogs from barking, as well as the best method of defending yourself if attacked by multiple people at once. If you’re curious on this one, they recommend focusing on attacking to your right, as well as throwing special powders the ninja would make into the eyes of your opponents, so you can use that great cardio training and stealth to get away.
This advice dovetails into information about conditioning which tells aspiring ninja to endlessly hone their bodies, encouraging the repetition of movements that would strengthen the body as well as practising things like climbing, running and swimming.
A speedy and quiet ninja is an alive ninja, after all.
There are also entire sections on both disguise and infiltration, which brings us back around to their garb. No mention here of ninjas seeming to have dressed in all black outfits with a cool, face-obscuring mask.
That would just be a great way to stand out and eventually identify that you were a ninja, which being identified as such was the last thing any ninja on a mission would want to have happen.
Instead, as mentioned, ninjas wore things like the traditional garb of a peasant farmer in their day-to-day life, or otherwise adopting similar disguises as necessary to infiltrate or blend in, everything from samurai to monk to traveling musician, with it being noted that, in order to disguise themselves as the latter, some ninjas would even learn how to play traditional instruments to an acceptable level to sell the ruse that they were just a simple traveling bard.
Ninjas were committed to the bit, essentially.
In the event they didn’t need to hide in plain sight and instead sneak into a place without being seen at all, it’s speculated they’d likely have worn dark blue rather than black, given black tends to stand out against the dark of night better, whereas dark blue typically blends exceptionally well.
Likewise it’s speculated that the outfits worn during such endeavors would also have been extremely baggy so as to disguise a ninja’s silhouette as much as possible, not dissimilar from a modern ghillie suit used by many militaries around the globe.
The folds of such an outfit could also be used to hide a great deal of weapons and tools necessary for the ninja’s mission.
Although, whether that’s actually what they wore when sneaking about at night or not, the ninja scrolls do recommend only bringing what you absolutely needed for a given mission so as not to get slowed down by carrying too much.
As to where the idea of them wearing the more stereotypical black, masked outfits today came from, this appears to have first popped up in Edo theater, with such entertainment also seeming to be where the idea that the ninjas were sort of the magical, dishonorable counterparts to the honorable samurai was likewise proliferated.
Despite the fact that, as mentioned, there are several known instances of individuals who were samurai, who were also trained up as highly skilled ninja as well. The two were not mutually exclusive- ninjitsu just being a skillset anyone could acquire with training, and a rather useful one for a warrior. These skills then tended to be passed down within families.
Let’s now jump back to their skills beyond stealth, with the various ninja groups developing a truly staggering amount of ways to ruin someone’s day.
As for weapons, they were once again trained in everything from knives, shears, farm implements, to even simple nails to do their deadly work. In fact, their seeming preference to train up in using weapons derived from farm implements is speculated to have also helped them pass as farmers carrying tools of their trade… that just so happened to also be capable of being used as a deadly weapon if one needed.
They also seem to have created a number of custom weapons for various purposes, though in some cases it isn’t actually clear whether they invented something, or simply found specific things useful for their work. This includes things like metal offcuts in the so-called Ninja Star, which made for a great small makeshift dagger of sorts in close quarters, while also could be thrown at opponents in a pinch. Noteworthy, actual evidence of their use, as in so much with ninjas, is hard to come by, given how secretive the groups were with regards to their craft.
Likewise, we have the ninjato sword, commonly wielded by ninjas in pop culture including perhaps the most famous ninja of all, Leonardo of the Ninja Turtles. Legend posits that the sword was created by ninjas to serve as an alternative to a katana and that its design reflects the ninja’s more direct, and quick fighting style, as well as its shorter size better suited for close quarters than a katana, and the straight edge also being better for stabbing.
They also allegedly used a variety of devices to deliver poisons, everything from blowguns to hollowed out eggshells filled with such substances, designed to be thrown directly into the face of opponents.
On top of this, there are references to various bits of everything from custom climbing equipment to even tiny collapsable boats and similar small collapsable ladders that they allegedly used. They also seemed to have been trained extensively in lock picking. The list goes on and on. Essentially, would a skill or tool be useful in infiltrating enemy camps or locations? Well, they probably had something for that.
And, of course, ninjas were masters of fire. This fact, along with their ability to seemingly just up and disappear, seems to have lent some credence among the masses to the ninja’s mystical abilities, when, in fact, they just developed a number of devices that utilized gunpowder, and were really quiet and quick.
On this note, what is generally well known is that rudimentary firearms were first introduced to Japan in the late mid 1500s by the Portuguese. What’s less well known is that the ability to make gunpowder was already known in the region, with the recipe said to have been gleaned from information learned from Chinese immigrants to Japan over the previous few centuries. While not widely used across Japan, at some point the villages of Iga and Koka not only became adept at the creation of a very rudimentary version of gunpowder, but were endlessly creative in utilising it.
This led to the creation of things like primitive flamethrowers, bottle rockets that could be used to send messages or alert people to their presence, small firecrackers that could distract or otherwise confuse an opponent, to even hand held grenades, with some designs for various gunpowder laden contraptions even appearing in the aforementioned ninja scrolls.
And just for fun, the show Ninja Truth, which had Mr. Ninja Professor himself, Yuji Yamada, in as an expert, decided to test some of these things using period appropriate tools and materials.
Perhaps the most impressive device uncovered by the team was a small gun that could be concealed inside of a dagger-like holster. Essentially, the ninjas had made a gun knife.
Which is incredibly ninja because, as everybody knows, nobody expects a gun knife.
Of course, the show was careful to clarify that even with historical documents, little discussed in the episode could be taken as gospel. In part because the documents, even being hundreds of years old, themselves are likely based on oral recollections, with things modified over time.
In the end, ninjas and their clans just kept an incredible amount secret while plying their trade, keenly aware that the less people knew about them and how they did what they did, the better they’d be able to leverage their reputation, and the more they could charge for their services, given the skills and devices they had that few others did.
In short, when it comes to ninjas, basically nothing can be taken as gospel.
As for what happened to the ninja, well, as the centuries rolled on, while warriors and spies continued to exist, the likes of the specialized classes of ninjas and Samurai went the way of the dodo.
That said, as they faded into history, their legends only grew in theater and other forms of entertainment- something that has continued to this day. This has given rise to a number of myths about both groups, though with arguably the myths about ninjas being far more outlandish, primarily owing to that so much of what they did was done in secret.
But bottom line, the more less perfected ninja were mostly just incredibly well trained spies and special forces operatives, many of whom hired out their services to various warring groups who needed a castle burned, intel from the inside of their enemy camps, or the like, with these skills still common among certain professions to this day, if perhaps the means in which the people get the job done may have changed over the years- from dressing as monks to infiltrate a castle, to wearing a suit and tie and bearing credentials of an academic at an educational symposium.
Which by the way, if you watch our video on what it’s actually like to be a spy in modern times, this is one of the top ways the various spy organizations the world over today recruit spies from other nations, with apparently many an educational symposium even secretly put on by entities like the CIA themselves in order to target specific PhDs, engineers, and the like they’d like to get their meathooks in.
In short, want a specific individual to be recruited as a spy who’s an expert in a certain branch of nuclear physics and working for your enemies’ program you’d like more information on? Well, fund an awesome symposium somewhere tropical that’s centered around their exact area of expertise and then make sure they get an invitation, maybe even all expenses paid if they’re willing to come present their latest paper at it. Then, you know, while they’re there, have one of your agents smooze them up, and ultimately offer them a deal if they seem like they might be open to it.
Expand for References2 days in Iga, the Ninja City
Bansenshūkai: A Shinobi’s Training Manual (Translated)
NINJA TRUTH – The Ninja and Guns (Video)
The Root of Ninja (Ninja Museum)
A primer on the history of “NINJA”
“Magic and Fire”, two skills of Iga-ryu Ninjutsu (Igaryu Ninja Museum)
Learn the History of the Ninja
Japan’s Shadow Warriors | The Legend of Ninja
Ninjas: Honest Guide to Japan’s True Shadow Warriors
The Real History of Ninjas
The History of the Ninja
Ninja by Miho Okamoto
People from Japanese Lore: Yamato Takeru
Japanese University Offers Reveals Secrets of Ninjutsu
Unmasking the Ninja
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/ninja_n?tl=true
https://aboutninjas.blogspot.com/2011/04/etymology.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninjutsu
https://www.history.com/articles/ninja-history-shinobi-feudal-japan
https://nightops.net/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=books:ninja_skills_-_antony_cummins.pdf
Deal, William E. Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006
Gentry III, Clyde. No Holds Barred: The Complete History of Mixed Martial Arts in America. Chicago: Triumph Books, 2011.
Man, John. Ninja: 1000 Years of the Shadow Warrior. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.
Sawyer, Ralph D. and Mei-Chun Lee Sawyer. The Tao of Spycraft. Boulder: Basic Books, 2004.
Sun Tzu, tr. Samuel B. Griffith. The Art of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.
Turnbull, Stephen. Ninja: Unmasking the Myth. Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2020.
Wert, Michael. Samurai: A Very Short Introduction Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
The post What Was Being a Ninja Really Like? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
“We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.”
These are the words of famed master of the pen, Oscar Wilde, in his Ballad of Reading Gaol, referencing his time spent at Pentonville Prison for, ironically, mastering working with a different type of pen…
As a brief aside, while many lament the initial thing that set forth a chain of events that saw Wilde imprisoned today, specifically his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, very surprisingly, unlike with the likes of the great Alan Turing and countless thousands others who were unjustly punished for their sexuality, it turns out there is a LOT more to the story of Wilde’s conviction that many a biographer skirts over, though to be fair this is in part because some elements of the original transcript from the original trial were only discovered in the year 2000. Reading through those, however, even in modern times and through a modern lens and sensibilities, Wilde would have almost certainly found himself behind bars, disgraced, and absolutely vilified pretty well universally on the interwebs.
But we’re not here to discuss Oscar Wilde, the full story of his conviction was simply a rabbit hole we were previously woefully ignorant of, and will share more on later in the Bonus Facts if you’re interested as well- though fair warning, it’s quite dark and, oof. Never look too deeply into your heroes, especially when they are from the past, which was of course, the worst.
But in any event, embedded in Wilde’s aforementioned poem, he references sweating on the mill. This was a device created by famed engineer Sir William Cubitt in the early days of Cubitt’s career, with the primary purpose of the surprisingly feature rich machine being both to punish prisoners in an excruciating way for upwards of 10 hours per day, while also isolating them in that task so that they could properly think about what they’d done wrong.
While Wilde may have abhorred the machine, having been forced to march on it for a couple years, another famous master wordsmith, Charles Dickens, would praise it, writing, “It is a satisfaction to me to see that determined thief, swindler, or vagrant sweating profusely at the treadmill… [knowing] he is doing nothing all the time but undergoing punishment.”
Here now is the story of when humans first started exercising for fitness’ sake, as well as the rather torturous invention of the treadmill, which saw prison death rates ramp up considerably once implemented, but paradoxically also seemed to be a major health boon to those that survived their monotonous march.
Contrary to what you might think, as long as humans have been humaning in a documented way, it would appear we have been deliberately exercising for the sake of health and fitness. From the Ancient Egyptians, who not only had forms of fitness training, but even acrobatic based sports they trained for, to the much more famous Ancient Greeks athletes, a subset of whom regularly trained for things like the Olympic Games, with some frankly incredible results.
For example, one of their favorite forms of exercise seems to have involved lifting and sometimes throwing stones of various sizes. If you’re wondering here, the Ancient Greek record for heaviest stone used in stone throwing, or at least as far as we are aware today, was a 316 lb or 143.5 kg stone found in Olympia, Greece. Based on an inscription on the stone, this was successfully thrown one handed, over his head by an apparently beast of a man named Bybon.
In another case, there is a surviving stone weighing 1058 lbs or 480 kg that has inscribed “Eumastas, the son of Critobulus, lifted me from the ground.” Note here, that’s only 6% under the current world record for deadlifting.
Beyond training for various sporting events, and seemingly just for physique in some cases, similar to modern humans, soldiers also commonly trained via doing things like digging, chopping wood, as well as used various weighted devices, for example training with practice weapons and armor that were significantly heavier than the real thing.
Through medieval times to the modern day, similar stone throwing and picking up, and military training exercises remained common.
Training for women throughout history tended to be similar, just generally geared towards lighter weights and focussing more on agility and speed, not too dissimilar to many today. However, it should be noted in modern times the science has shown pretty clearly that women should actually be training more or less exactly like men train with some cardio, which many women do a ton of, but also heavily focussing on low rep, heavy weights and big compound movements. This is something that’s even more important for post-menopausal women in order to fight the effects of hormone shifts that otherwise accelerate the loss of muscle and bone mass, but can be well countered with heavy weight training.
But going back to ancient times, the Ancient Greeks even had a women’s version of their Olympic Games called the Haraean Games, where every four years in Olympia unmarried women could race each other.
But in all, humans seemingly realized right quick that being in good shape is a key to health, happiness and longevity, with Plato writing in Theaetetus, “And is not the bodily habit spoiled by… idleness, but preserved for a long time by motion and exercise?… Then motion is a good, and rest an evil, to the soul as well as to the body…”
A notion that seemingly with every new scientific study on the subject continually confirms. As famed longevity researcher Dr. Peter Attia sums up, “Exercise is one of the few areas where there is very little ambiguity… If you compare the top 20% of strength in a given age and sex bracket to the bottom 20% of strength you are talking about 150% to 200% difference in [likelihood] of all cause mortality at any given time [in that person’s life]. When you do the same type of analysis with peak cardiorespiratory fitness, if you just compare the least fit 25% to the middle core percentile, that’s about 100% difference in all cause mortality… So, whether you’re talking about cardio fitness, whether you’re talking about strength training, the difference in how long you live is unparalleled by any other intervention… that we have. And then that says nothing about the impact that those things have on your quality of life. I always say this to my patients- if all this exercise didn’t lengthen your life by one minute, it would still be worth it in terms of the quality of life improvements it brings….”
However, while lifting heavy objects like stones were common throughout history, up until extremely recently in history, exercise devices like the treadmill weren’t exactly on anyone’s radar, though that’s not to say humans didn’t have a version of them.
For example, as far back as the 2nd century AD, the Chinese had what were essentially stair climber devices in the form of stepped wheels that a person would walk on, turning the wheel as they did so. As far as history is aware, these weren’t used specifically for exercise, but rather to perform some practical work, such as use as a water pump, or for milling. The Ancient Romans used a similar stepping device to help lift heavy objects, with the walking wheel incorporated into a type of crane.
Similar devices were also used with animal power doing everything from grinding grains, to churning butter, though most of these tended to resemble a hamster’s wheel, with the animal, or sometimes humans, driving it from inside the device.
Humans even enlisted the help of man’s best friend in these devices, creating a specific breed of tiny dog known as turnspits, which were not only made to walk inside such wheels for hours on end, but also sized right and trained to be used as foot warmers when they weren’t working. More on turnspit dogs and their development in the Bonus Facts later.
Around the same time the turnspit dog was trotting away in kitchens across Britain, the devise that would be dubbed by contemporaries the “Treadmill” was born.
At the time, there had been a gradual shift in thinking when it came to dealing with criminals, from the general philosophy of they are irredeemable so “hang ‘em all and let god sort them out,” to that maybe… just maybe, prisoners could actually be reformed and made into functional members of society.
And thus, prison populations began to rise as more and more people were incarcerated for lengthy periods instead of just killing them or shipping them off to America, though once that latter outlet dried up when the colonial terrorists rose up against their rightful King, there was the well known shift to sending criminals to Australia instead.
But in any event, simultaneous to all this, a few other shifts had occurred thanks to some prison reform acts that concerned many in the general public. For example, rather than prisoner’s family and friends required to provide food and other necessities for the inmates, the state began more systematically doing so itself, given the previous system had the glaring error that if individuals were held for any length of time and had no one on the outside to provide them sustenance, blankets and the like, they, you know, could starve or potentially freeze to death. While for some crimes this would have been deemed by many to be a just punishment, for most who were simply in prison for minor offenses, being forced to starve to death or the like was deemed unjust.
However, providing such necessities for inmates cost money and seemed then a punishment for the law abiding citizens in having to pay for the criminal’s upkeep while incarcerated. Further, many, who clearly had no concept of what prison was actually like, argued providing prisoners with the bare necessities of life would make it so people would want to commit crimes just so they could go to prison.
Another issue with mass incarceration had been observed by officials at the time- impoverished children living on the streets that were imprisoned for minor crimes like stealing food to eat, tended to see older, hardened criminals in prison exerting their influence on the children, recruiting the kids to more or less work for them or their associates in more serious crimes later, as well as even training them up in some of the skills needed for such while they all sat around in jail. In essence, these kids and sometimes other adults went in as simple petty criminals, and came out much more likely to commit crimes than they were before.
All combined, some among the law abiding masses were concerned that all the prison reforms happening were just making it more likely that more crimes would be committed, not less.
As such, support for the age old practice of using prisoners for hard labor, where they wouldn’t have time for such socialization, would potentially learn a useful trade, and could help pay for their necessities, began to ramp up.
The problem here was this irked many on the outside as well, as if prisoners were being made to do things like make shoes for cheap, this would hurt the law abiding cobblers of the world’s businesses. Further, those incarcerated for only short periods would not be around long enough to learn some of these trades in order to produce good quality products.
And, of course, such labor didn’t necessarily deter people from wanting to go to prison inherently. In short, it was generally felt they needed to suffer more during all this.
It was a dill of a pickle.
Enter William Cubitt in 1817, who felt he had a solution to all these problems. While Cubitt would go on to have a prestigious career as an engineer, even being knighted by Queen Victoria for his work on the Crystal Palace project in London in 1851, at the time he was just starting out, making agricultural machinery such as windmills at an ironworks in Ipswitch.
Contemplating the perceived issues with jails at the time, Cubitt thought up what would ultimately be called the treadmill to solve the problem.
This was essentially a long stepping wheel meant to be driven by walking humans- on its surface not too dissimilar to many similar hamster wheel designs, but having those driving it walk on the outside, rather than within.
The designs of the device also ultimately had a number of innovative features built in, including arguably the first true ergometer. In a nutshell, he created mechanisms within the device which tracked things like steps, revolutions, and general work done, and included bells that would ring for things like when a set step interval was complete, or if the rotation speed became too slow.
Much like modern treadmills and stair stepper devices, the contraption also included handle bars for the walking individuals to steady themselves with as they trudged along.
Finally, a shaft from the device was then provided for use in powering pretty much anything, but in particular commonly used for attaching to a milling device, hence the name- treadmill.
Cubitt described that with his device, “There would be no difficulty in establishing a mill or manufactory near the boundary wall of a prison through which only a single shaft or axle would have to pass to communicate the power and motion.” And that, “The operations of the convicts would be precisely the same as those which are now effected by the ordinary powers of wind, water, steam, or horses, and they would have no more concern with the object of the machinery, or manufacture, than any of the above-named agents.”
In all, this would make the prisoners contributors to society in their labor, not take the jobs of any skilled craftsman or the like, required no training to operate, was excruciating physically, while also giving the prisoners no mental stimulation or distraction or opportunity to socialize, leaving them nothing to do but step step step for hours on end while they thought about what they’d done to get in prison, and how horrible it was to be marching on the treadmill.
Towards this end of making sure the inmates had no chance to talk with one another or even look around, a tweak to the original design was later added putting little walls in place separating the prisoners as they walked.
As one contemporary news report titled “A Description of the Tread-Mill” sums up, “The tread-mill at Brixton, that “terror to evil-doers,” …is the invention of Mr. Cubitt of Ipswitch, and is considered a great improvement in prison discipline… To provide regular and suitable employment for prisoners sentenced to hard labour, has been attended with considerable difficulty in many parts of the kingdom; the invention of the Discipline mill has removed the difficulty, and it is confidently hoped, that as its advantages and effects become better known, the introduction of the Mill will be universal in Houses of Correction.”
As for duration of their marches, this varied based on time of year and which prison, but for example, at Warwick Gaol, the prisoners were noted as walking approximately 10 hours a day in the summer, with a rate which equated to ascending approximately 17,000 vertical feet, or 5100 meters, of steps in that span.
Noteworthy the prisoners would get short breaks, for example, the referenced Brixton Prison treadmill had enough room for about 24 prisoners to walk, with at intervals one of the sidemost poor souls getting off, the remaining shifting over, and a resting prisoner getting back on. This general cycle gave each prisoner about 12 minutes of rest every hour. As alluded to, this entire thing was then all regulated by a series of bells ringing at given step intervals, as well as a bell for if the prisoners slowed down too much.
And if you’re wondering, as for general punishment if a prisoner didn’t keep up the pace, this tended to see them given a variety of punishments, including dietary restrictions… Because, you know, the best way to get more physical exertion and endurance out of someone is to cut their already poor allotment of calories.
Some models were even designed to emphasize punishment over productivity, making the treadmill do nothing at all, simply using a weighted contraption to provide resistance to the convict’s treading, with the idea being it would be worse for the criminal knowing their extreme and monotonous labor was completely pointless.
Right from the start, Cubitt’s invention caught on like wildfire, within a few decades versions of which being installed in 109 of Britain’s 200 prisons, and also being utilized across the pond in American prisons as well within 5 years, with the first such American device costing $3,050.99 (about $84,000 today). This one could hold 16 prisoners at a time and could process about 40-60 bushels of corn per day.
That said, almost immediately after its implementation in the United States the utility of the device was questioned, with the Prison Discipline Society of Boston writing that “the treadmill… teaches the convict nothing that can be useful to him on his discharge. It is not a profitable employment of human power.”
Groups pushing this narrative around the treadmill tended to support expanding efforts to use prisoners as factory workers instead, with the rule of the day calling for, to quote, “downcast eyes, lockstep marching, no talking, and constant work when outside the cells”, as well as punishing violating any of the rules or not working hard enough with the whip.
Funny enough, this was all generally thought to be much more humane than the treadmill, as well as would help better solve the labor shortage many regions of the United States had at the time.
On that note, because the past was the worst, the treadmill was seen as a particularly good punishment for runaway slaves, with the slave owners even earning money during the punishment. As for pay here, in one such case in 1841, slave holders were paid 18.75 cents per day (about $7 today) per slave marching on the treadmill.
As the century of marching prisoners progressed, however, a rather curious thing was observed. On the one hand, prison administrators noted that, on the whole, many prisoners seemed to get healthier over time marching on the mill. As one jailer at Lancaster Country Gaol claimed, “On examining those men who have worked longest at the Wheel, I have found them in perfect health, and not withstanding their expression of dislike to the work, have admitted that they have gained weight since they have been so employed.”
Similarly, it was claimed that the health of female prisoners at Colbath Fields House of Correction in 1835, in the general case, would improve after months of walking on the treadmill.
On the other hand, there was a subset of the prison population who seemed to get much sicker and even much more likely to die after, or sometimes even during, their sessions on the treadmill.
So what was going on here?
In the former case, assuming the accounts of inmates getting healthier were accurate, and given the propensity for many of the inmates to be alcoholics, it’s thought that the combination of the inmates sobering up over their time in prison, combined with exercising most all day, every day, that this was a great boon to their health, even despite their generally poor diets in prison.
And, indeed, more and more studies in modern times show that while diet is extremely important for health in a variety of ways, as long as you’re not overdoing it with calories and otherwise maintaining relatively healthy body fat levels, even individuals with generally poor diets from a nutritional standpoint still tend to see huge health marker improvements with good, consistent exercise.
In short, the prisoners may have been eating crap food, and even potentially somewhat deficient in calorie intake, but nonetheless, exercising all day, combined with a lengthy period of being fully sober was seemingly markedly improving their health… or some of them. Or, at least, if they got through the initial weeks.
On that note, on the other hand, starting from a potentially physiological less than ideal place commonly found with alcoholism, combined with perhaps the body not being used to really any form of exercise, let alone suddenly marching 6-10 grueling hours per day on what essentially was a stair climber, is all a rather abrupt shock to the system. And, well, for some prisoners, their bodies couldn’t take that abrupt of a ramp up in exercise, and they would just up and die, usually of cardiovascular issues.
As a March 28, 1885 edition of the British Medical Journal titled “Death on the Treadmill” discusses, “At an inquest which was recently held at Durham, as to the cause of death of a prisoner, Wm Morgan, who died shortly after being taken off the trademill, and who was found to suffer from heart-disease, a state of things was revealed, according to the account in the local paper…. It seems that the death-rate at Durham Prison has averaged for some time back one a week. Whatever may be the number of inmates, this rate is excessive, so much so, indeed, as to be hardly credible…. We do not sufficiently recognize the fact that a large number of prisoners convicted of what might be termed moral offences- drunkenness, vagabondism, etc. are subject of organic disease of one or more vital organs, induced by habitual excess; and that, directly these are deprived of their customary stimulus and subjected to prison-discipline and low diet, the victim succumbs to the previously dormant disease.”
They go on questioning whether the use of the treadmill in prisons should be abolished, writing, “…the question naturally arises, Is the treadmill a fit punishment for any one? Or rather, should it not be relegated to the limbo of the stocks and other remnants of barbarism?… “The mill” is not useful, and has proved itself occasionally injurious. It would therefore, be well for those in whose hands penal authority lies, to see if they cannot devise some mode of punishment which, whilst sufficiently deterrent, shall be free from direct danger to life, and which would embrace in its energy some… more useful object than grinding wind.”
On top of this, some complained that using prisoners in this way was still negatively impacting law abiding millers, all leading to one report in an 1882 edition of the Scientific American coming up with an alternate use for the treadmill, “It is suggested that all the penal advantages of the old treadmill system may be regained, with better economic results than with the factory system, by attaching dynamo-electric machines to the cranks, and storing electrically the energy developed… In this way, the prisons and penitentiaries would be converted into sources of brute energy to be sold for outside use in running machinery, electric lighting systems and the like…. The rounders might not like the place so well, but the honest public would like it better. Ten days on the treadmill would sober off a beat as effectually as ten days of idleness and in the interval he might help to store up many foot-tons of available energy. …the storage cell would never give offense to the citizen who was trying to support a family by the voluntary production of boots or hats, while the indirect economy that would flow from a simplification of prison work, with the prompter utilization of the strength of criminals of all grades and conditions, might more than make up for the loss through the less profitable employment of a few skilled hands.”
But such suggestions weren’t headed. The treadmill was simply deemed too much of a punishment for what was often relatively minor crimes by most, especially given its propensity to cause some of those marching on it to simply up and die.
Of course, through a modern lens, this likely could have been avoided by simply giving people proper diet, and then more slowly ramping up their exercise, instead of just putting the already physiologically compromised individual on the treadmill and having them march away most of their waking hours.
But either way, the treadmill was officially banned in prisons in Britain in 1902 and by 1912 had completely disappeared from America as well, deemed to be too cruel of a punishment, and generally a mostly pointless use of their time.
That said, similar devices were still put in use using animals, including some designs featuring flat surfaces with a type of belt covering rollers, where the animal would be made to march along on.
On that note, in the early 20th century, one Claude Lauraine Hagen got the idea of making such a flat device for humans to walk on for exercise purposes. He describes the device in his 1913 patent, labeling it a “Training-machine” to help with fighting what was named the #1 killer in the United States at the time “diseases of the heart”.
As for his general design, this is a rather familiar one to all of us today- “a rectangular frame, in the side pieces of which are mounted a series of rollers… over which rollers I prefer to mount distributing and wear take-up belts forming additional treads as well, and over such take-up belts I provide a tread or toe gripped belt of a peculiar construction, preferably formed with lateral slats joined by flexible hinged joints… In order to secure a machine which will be adjustable, and have the narrowest possible tread when used for persons of various size, I provide inclined side posts having sliding therein or thereon supporting rods for side rails which as raised or lowered will also be brought more or less toward the center of the apparatus, whereby a. short person with short arms will not have to reach as far out.”
He even thought of how it would be delivered or potentially compactly stored, writing, “in order to make the device readily shipable, I provide such side posts with removable bolts to permit the same to be folded inwardly over the rectangular frame… “
Whether Hagen actually ever built a working prototype isn’t clear today, but this, and many other similar treadmills that came after, while similar in design to the modern variety, lacked any driving motor, requiring the person walking or running on it to provide the locomotive power, which is handy for exercise in some ways, but decidedly less than ideal if one wanted to go for a proper run on one.
The next major milestone in treadmill design, including an integrated motor, came thanks to one co-developed by cardiologist Dr, Robert Bruce at the University of Washington in the mid-20th century, meant to be used with his revolutionary Bruce Protocol for evaluating cardiac function. Before this, it was sometimes considered dangerous to stress test cardiac function in this way, as well as just generally impractical to take ECG’s and the like with the patient doing anything but sitting or lying down.
Dr. Bruces’ device and method, in contrast, allowed for monitoring the patient’s heart, breathing, etc. while they were physically exerting themselves at various levels from walking to running, with his treadmill even including changing incline levels.
Bruces’ device and protocol quickly caught on among physicians, and even some gyms began using his treadmill, but it was incredibly expensive and not even close to accessible to the home consumer.
…That is until engineer William Staub read a 1968 book by famed physician and “Father of Aerobics”, Dr. Kenneth Cooper, simply titled Aerobics. The summation of the argument in the book was that good cardiovascular health is conducive to a better and longer life, with Cooper suggesting a treadmill device as could be found in hospitals could revolutionize home fitness, getting more people running regardless of weather, time of day or night, or any outside concern of safety… the problem was, as Cooper wrote, those treadmills were impossibly expensive for home consumers.
After reading this, Staub went down to the shop at his company, Besco, and while his workers continued their normal work of making various parts for aircraft, he began designing and constructing a much simpler version of the treadmill than doctors were using. His prototype ultimately mostly just comprised of an electric motor, a belt, a frame and handle to hold onto, 40 rollers, and an on off switch.
After completing the prototype, Staub sent it to Dr. Cooper for his thoughts and feedback on the design. The good doctor loved it, decided to help fund the development of the commercial version, the PaceMaster which was initially sold for $399 or about $3300 today, and when it was in production, promoted it to his many fitness inclined acolytes.
The treadmill revolution had begun.
While sales were initially somewhat lackluster, within a decade of its launch, they had risen to some 2,000 treadmills sold per year, and a little over a decade after that in the 1990s, the company was selling about 35,000 units per year. Today around 50 million Americans, that’s about 1 in 6, use a treadmill every year, being one of the most popular pieces of home and commercial gym equipment in the world. As Dr. Cooper summed up of Staub’s invention, “He took away a lot of the excuses people had not to exercise. They don’t have to worry about the weather, safety or whatever may be. I don’t know how long he exercised for himself, but I know he didn’t die early.”
For the record on this one, Staub’s son noted his father did exercise regularly on his treadmill, all the way up to his death at the age of 96.
But going back to the treadmill, day or night, good weather or bad, the treadmill is there… Ready to be used as a place to drape your laundry.
Because, you see, in the general case, while handy devices, much like their wheeled ancestors, treadmills can still be quite torturous to use from the sheer monotony of walking, or running along, not going anywhere, just staring at your wall thinking about where your life went wrong…
Bonus Facts:
And now how about those promised Bonus Facts on turnspit dogs and the frankly disturbing tale of Oscar Wilde and why you should never look too deeply into your heroes:
First, the turnspit- considering how most dogs in the Western world these days are treated as a member of the family, it’s often easy to forget that the vast majority of our furry friends up until very recently were bred for a specific purpose. Perhaps no dog was bred for a more specific purpose than the now extinct aforementioned turnspit.
As mentioned, the turnspit was so named because it was literally bred just to run for hours on a tiny wheel that turned a spit.
You see, a few hundred years ago the generally preferred method for cooking a large piece of meat evenly was to put it on a spit and rotate it until it was fully cooked. Cooking meat thoroughly on a spit takes anywhere between 40 and 80 minutes per kilo depending on which meat it is you’re cooking. Needless to say, roasting an adult hog on the fire for a party took an incredibly long time.
Prior to the introduction of turnspits around the 16th century, the painstakingly tedious and unrelenting job of turning the spit was left to the lowest ranking member of the household, “usually a small boy”, though in larger households the size of the spit necessitated delegating the job to an adult. The job was tough, cruel and often resulted in the poor soul tasked with doing it suffering from burns, blisters and exhaustion. What made the job more difficult was that the spitjacks, as they were known, had to work in full uniform. In fact, during Tudor times, spitjacks working in Hampton Court were told that they had to stop working in the nude as well as to stop urinating in the fireplace, because nobody wants their meat smoked with evaporated pee… Or, I mean, if you do, we here at TodayIFoundOut don’t judge. Just, you know, not everybody has the same kinks.
While we’d like to say that spitjacks were replaced by dogs out of concern for their health, the truth is that dogs could work longer hours without a break and they didn’t need to be paid in anything other than food. This is why in the 16th century, spitjacks were phased out in favour of a small machine powered by an even smaller dog.
So were the dogs treated any better than the spitjacks? Nope. Turnspits were generally seen more as kitchen tools than fuzzy members of the household who needed just as many belly rubs and chin scratches as normal dogs.
Along with being subjected to the same long hours and awful conditions as the human spitjacks before them, turnspits would often be cruelly mistreated by their owners. For instance, to train them to run at the correct speed, a common method was simply to throw a hot coal into the dog’s wheel every time it slowed too much. During their off-time, the exhausted turnspits were known to work great as footwarmers, even apparently commonly brought to church for that exact purpose.
Turnspits were ultimately replaced by steam-powered machines and by the end of the 19th century the breed officially was declared extinct.
Despite the fact that, for a few centuries, the turnspit could be found in almost every large home in England, including the homes of royalty, nobody anywhere bothered to note down exactly what breeding process went into creating the dog that had ensured so many people had evenly cooked dinners. All we have to go on are historical descriptions of the breed which described it as “long-bodied”, “crooked-legged” and “ugly”. We also have a single stuffed specimen called Whiskey.
It’s not all bad though; the horrific treatment turnspits were subjected to is reportedly what inspired Henry Bergh to start the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which in turn has resulted in countless animals being saved from abuse and cruelty.
Oscar Wilde
Speaking of cruelty to living things, in the never look into your heroes rabbit hole files- let’s talk about Oscar Wilde, who was both the recipient of a measure of cruelty completely unjustly from a modern lens, but also paradoxically from a modern lens completely deserved it and much, much more. And, on that note, I assure you, no matter which way you swing or how much you love his work, you will not like him by the end of this video.
Confused?
Well, as many know, Oscar Wilde was ultimately found guilty of “gross indecency with certain male persons”, today often thus claimed he was more or less simply being unjustly punished for homosexual acts. And that’s very true. And the results were devastating, not just because of the two year prison sentence, but as Wilde would sum up, “lost wife, children, fame, honour, position, wealth.”
While Wilde and about 50,000 others would be given a posthumous pardon in 2017 after the passing of the Policing and Crime Act of 2017, it turns out the authorities issuing those pardons may have wanted to look closer at the court documents and evidence leveled against Wilde to see if he actually deserved a pardon… because while there was nothing grossly indecent about a subset of his acts, the ones with other consenting adults, there were a whole lot of others that were with an entirely less consenting, underage group. And, indeed, most of the three trials that evidence was brought to bear against him were hyper focusing on those youthful instances for good reason after a recent scandal that had rocked Britain, and the masses still pretty pissed off about it.
Before I go further, let’s just say this is about to get dark and so just fair warning, though I’ll do my best to avoid things getting too explicit, as many of the witnesses, including his victim’s, accounts were not shy about being. If you’d like to read the transcripts for yourself, they are readily available with a little googling.
But to begin with, it’s important to get some very brief context leading up to Wilde’s trials in 1895. Enter the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889. The full details of it are mostly irrelevant here, but suffice it to say a brothel catering to gay or bisexual men was unearthed on Cleveland Street, London at that point, with three key facts enraging the masses in the aftermath beyond the obvious one of homosexual acts at the time being considered evil- first, it was allegedly frequented by many elite of society, up to and including certain very prominent royals. Second, many of those offering their services from that establishment were very young teen boys. And third, there seemed to be a positively Epstein level effort to cover up who all were involved here, and even to help get those who were known to be involved off on abnormally light sentences, or sometimes no punishment at all.
For example, the ring leader of it all, Charles Hammond, was seemingly allowed to escape to France and later emigrated to the United States, with the Prime Minister himself pushing for no extradition proceedings or any effort at all to try to get him back and prosecute him. Those inclined to believe there was a major coverup happening here, which was basically everyone, conjectured this was because Hammond simply had too much dirt on too many very prominent individuals for any among the elite wanting him to get his day in court. Thus, he was more or less let go and the case against him was dropped.
This particular scandal had initially started when a 15 year old boy (and note here the age of consent in Britain at the time was 16) named Charles Thomas Swinscow was found with several weeks worth of wages at a time when messenger boys, as he was allegedly working as, were not allowed to carry personal cash during work. Police initially thought he must have stolen the money, but it later came out he’d simply been working as a prostitute for Hammond who, as noted, ran a brothel on Cleveland Street. In a nutshell, many of Hammond’s boys also worked as telegraph or messenger boys, or at least allegedly so, so it was easy to cover for why these lower class boys were going around to various prominent individuals’ homes.
While the masses were upset about the homosexual relationship side of things because the past was the worst, one thing they were more justifiably upset about even through a modern lens was the use of these lower class teens, including ones under the age of consent, for this purpose, with it seen as the elite exploiting and corrupting the telegraph boys with very little the boys could have done about it.
With all this still relatively fresh on the masses minds, and generally still irked that none of the elite had been made to pay for their crimes in such an operation, well, enter one of the elite in Oscar Wilde, who seems to have enjoyed the services of such telegraph boys himself and more or less shot himself in the foot making sure everybody ended up knowing about it.
While some in more modern times have defended Wilde claiming that the youngest boys were 16, which again is the age of consent in the UK, to begin with, regardless, paying for such services from someone under 18 is illegal today. And in any event, there were also plenty of accounts of him paying for the services of teens at least as young as 13 or 14, which was below the age of consent in Britain then too after the passing of The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which had, among other things, raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 in an effort to help suppress a major problem at the time of young teens of both sexes being forced to work in brothels or otherwise exploited by adults in this way.
Famed French author André Gide, who quite openly did the same, though noteworthy the age of consent at the time was 13 in France, so he could get away with not being shy about it, includes in his journal just such an occasion where he states Wilde had brought he and Gide two very young teens to spend the night with. In his journal, Gide glows about how great the night was for him and Wilde… But I’m not going to read the rather explicit journal entry here, because, frankly, I just don’t want to read it again.
But going back to Wilde’s legal issues because of such activities, they all started when Wilde made the monumentally stupid decision to sue the Marquis of Queensberry, John Sholto Douglas, the father of one of Wilde’s lovers, after Queensberry had written on a card for all to see that Wilde was a sodomite.
Wilde took offense to this, and decided to go after Queensberry to clear his name. This was despite that many of Wilde’s friends, who both knew well his activities and in some cases their own with Wilde, strongly advised he not do so because it would be relatively easy to prove in court that he had done these things given the sheer volume of individuals Wilde had slept with and how relatively open Wilde had been about it all.
Nevertheless, Wilde proceeded, resulting in Queensberry’s arrest and then needing to prove his statement against Wilde. He thus hired private investigators to gather evidence against Wilde and it was on- First with the trial against Queensberry, which ended after just three days when the evidence against Wilde was rather overwhelming and Wilde ceased trying to disprove it.
But, of course, now it was slightly more definitively publicly known that Wilde had likely done these things, which spurred another trial, this one a criminal one against Wilde himself.
On that note, looking over all the testimonies and evidence leveled against Wilde in the three trials, among other things prosecutors questioned Wilde about the slew of boys who he’d given, to quote “intellectual treats” to, such as fine clothes and even in one case a silver-mounted walking stick. On these, Wilde didn’t deny he’d done such in the general case, at which point the prosecutor further grilled him on why nearly universally these young boys were not sons of prominent companions or the like he might otherwise be expected to associate with, but almost universally just random, often impoverished and illiterate boys that he also seemed to not only lavish gifts on, but spend a lot of private time with, including overnight visits.
Wilde initially claimed he simply enjoyed the company of young boys for completely platonic reasons, stating, “I never inquired, nor did I care, what station they occupied.” And “I recognize no social distinctions at all of any kind, and to me youth, the mere fact of youth, is so wonderful that I would sooner talk to a young man for half-an-hour than be–well–cross-examined in court.”
When questioned further in one case where he took a newspaper boy and spent a weekend with him in a Brighton hotel, during which he appears to have attempted to cover up the boy’s origins by buying him a suit that included an insignia from an elite private boy’s school, Wilde claimed the choice of suit was simply because the boy had liked the school’s colors and the boy had picked it out himself.
In another instance, one of the boys had worked for Wilde’s publisher as an office boy, but with aspirations to someday be a great writer himself. The teen testified Wilde used this fact to cultivate a relationship with him, which included sexual contact, only to be fired from the publishing house not long after when his relationship with Wilde had been discovered.
In yet another instance, a chambermaid, Margaret Cotta, at the Savoy Hotel where Wilde frequently entertained his young teen “renters”, testified that Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas had met up at the hotel together, and the next morning when she went to clean their room, she found, to quote her, a “common boy, rough looking, about 14 years of age’ in Wilde’s bed, the sheets of which ‘were always in a most disgusting state… [with] traces of vaseline, soil…” and I’m just going to stop the quote right there because it gets much worse.
Others who worked at the hotel or various places frequented by Wilde, also testified that Wilde often unabashedly kissed many of the page boys, as well as, once again, frequently purchased gifts for them, had relatively large sums of money given to them for tips after he’d been closeted with them, the list goes on and on.
In yet another case, a 16 year old apprentice electrician Wallis Grainger testified that Wilde had taken him to a cottage, ironically the one near Goring-on-Thames that Wilde had written An Ideal Husband at- a play featuring blackmail and corruption- and “’came into my bedroom and woke me up and told me to come into his bedroom which was next door…” and just going to stop right there on that quote too.
Grainger also claimed that Wilde had stated that if Grainger ever revealed the nature of their relationship, Wilde would ensure he would find himself in, to quote Grainger, “very serious trouble.”
Wilde’s own governess to his sons, Gertrude Simmons, likewise testified against him, noting his frequently being extremely affectionate with certain young boys, including a young boat boy by the name of George Hughes.
The testimonies go on and on, which, granted, at the time it was not at all unheard of for individuals to bribe the impoverished to give false evidence. However, given the overwhelming amount of it both in these case, including the manny elements Wilde himself didn’t deny, as well as outside letters and journals only fully known about today from Wilde himself, friends and others, let’s just say few think the general thrust of what Wilde was being accused of was false, quite a bit of it being extremely illegal today, but even in his time in instances where the teen was under 16 would have been illegal for reasons that had nothing to do with the gender of the teen.
And it is at this point that I’m not really inclined to continue in our normally overly thorough way quoting countless primary documents and smoking guns, so as to leave no doubt it’s not a narrative we are spinning, but simply the facts as they were. In this case, frankly I just don’t want to read the quotes here, but go google to your heart’s content if you’re interested in greater detail.
Ultimately during the whole ordeal, Wilde gave his famous speech about “The love that dare not speak its name” which is today often hailed as a beautiful defense of homosexuality, and otherwise very much is in parts if one doesn’t read the context of the scope of what he was being tried for- not just his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas or other consenting adults, but with a myriad of young teens that had been roped into a prostitution ring.
Things become much less inspiring in the speech given Wilde explicitly references relationships between an older man with a younger, which technically does fit between himself and Douglas who was almost two decades his junior, but in the context of the rest of the trial, ooof. To quote Wilde,
“The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan… It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect…. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “the love that dare not speak its name”, and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”
In the end, while Wilde did get off during the first criminal trial owing to one of the jurors inexplicably refusing to convict him, the second didn’t go so well for him and he was sentenced to two years in prison.
While in prison, Wilde would lament in a letter to the Home Secretary, he had been “helpless prey of the most revolting passions, and a gang of people who for their own profit ministered to them, and drove [me] to… hideous ruin.”
That said, when he got out of jail and went into a sort of exile, he seems to have jumped right back into it, as his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas noted, “he was hand in glove with all the little boys on the Boulevard. He never attempted to conceal it.” And Wilde himself wrote in a letter to a friend, “Today I bade good-bye, with tears and one kiss, to the beautiful Greek boy. . . he is the nicest boy you ever introduced to me.”
In the end, Oscar Wilde was unequivocally one of the greatest wordsmiths to ever walk the earth, and one can at least still admire him for that. He was also unjustly vilified for his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and seemingly quite a few other consenting adult men… or I mean, kind of unjustly vilified, as it was still him cheating on his wife… a lot. Not exactly considered an acceptable behavior in most countries, outside of maybe France, as Simon and I cover in our BrainFood Show episode The Common Differences Between the U.S. and Europe. The statistics in France on this one are genuinely mind boggling, at least from an American perspective. Link below.
The point being, there is good reason Wilde has long been held as the poster child of how unjust a period of history was for gay or bisexual individuals, especially as it’s only been since the year 2000 that many of the testimonies and evidence leveled against Wilde have been publicly known. That said, there still was enough existing evidence, letters, and the like before this that some particularly sleuthy biographers should have long ago covered it all much more thoroughly for the masses.
But at the same time, of course, when looking at any individual from history too closely, well, you’re going to quite commonly find they were all extremely racist, sexist, and, much like Wilde, did things with people who were of an age that if done today, would see that person behind bars for a good long time. Thus, it’s generally advisable to judge people more on the morals and precepts of their own eras, rather than our own, lest there’s quite literally almost no one in history we could write about and admire for anything, except for Mister Rogers.
That said, it’s harder to continue admiring some than others.
In the end, basically every facet of Wilde’s trials and story with it on all sides is the quintessential example of two universal truths- never meet your heroes (unless that hero is Mister Rogers), and the past was the absolute worst.
Expand for Referenceshttps://patents.google.com/patent/US1064968
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Rules_for_the_Government_of_Gaols_Houses/yANSAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45495/the-ballad-of-reading-gaol
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106197?mag=treadmills-were-meant-to-be-atonement-machines&seq=1
https://keyj.com/william-staub-inventor-of-the-treadmill-dead-at-96/
https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/2012/08/07/treadmill-inventor-dies-at-age-96/29112694007/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physical_training_and_fitness
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4w8bVrKRqQDP4fKl0b8XzdW/the-dark-history-of-the-treadmill
picture o the treamill https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1008xn/p04nx3fv.jpg
https://www.hunker.com/13731659/history-of-treadmill/
Treadmills Were Meant to Be Atonement Machines
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106197?mag=treadmills-were-meant-to-be-atonement-machines&seq=2
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26079642?mag=treadmills-were-meant-to-be-atonement-machines&seq=1
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https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106197?mag=treadmills-were-meant-to-be-atonement-machines&seq=31
Stairway to Redemption: America’s Encounter with the British Prison Treadmill
https://www.etymonline.com/word/treadmill
The History of the Treadmill
The History of Physical Fitness
https://www.lesmills.com/us/clubs-and-facilities/research-insights/audience-insights/history-of-health-clubs-how-gyms-have-evolved-through-the-ages/
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Oscar Wilde in prison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde
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The post The Dark Origins of the Treadmill and Why Oscar Wilde was the Worst appeared first on Today I Found Out.
At exactly 5:30 AM on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb, codenamed Trinity, detonated over the desert in New Mexico, unleashing in an instant the power of 18,000 tons of TNT. The atomic age had begun. As night turned to day and a fireball 200 metres across rose into the sky, the scientists of the Manhattan Project who had built the bomb reacted in different ways. Some were jubilant, others more somber. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the project, famously recalled a line from the Hindu scripture (ba-ga-vad gee-ta) Baghavad Gita: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds”; while Kenneth Bainbridge, director of the Trinity test, was more blunt, stating: “Now we’re all sons of bitches.” Elsewhere around the test site, money frantically changed hands as scientists settled a series of private bets. Some had wagered that the test would be a dud, or that it would reach just a fraction of its predicted yield. But others, including Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, had wagered on a more disturbing outcome: that the intense heat of the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, setting off an unstoppable chain reaction that would wipe out all life on earth. This apocalyptic bet has since become an infamous part of nuclear lore, but does it have any basis in reality? Could the Trinity test – or any nuclear weapon, for that matter – actually have set earth’s atmosphere ablaze?
Well, let’s dive into it, shall we?
Fear of a nuclear reaction running amok goes back to the earliest days of nuclear weapons research. In his 1969 memoir Inside the Third Reich, former Nazi Minister of Armaments Albert Speer recalled a conversation between Adolf Hitler and physicist Werner Heisenberg, head of the German atomic bomb project:
“Heisenberg had not given any final answer to my question whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control with absolute certainty or might continue as a chain reaction. Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star.”
However, the notion of a nuclear weapon setting fire to the atmosphere originated with Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, who would go on to design the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. In a 1991 interview, German physicist Hans Bethe, director of the Manhattan Project’s theoretical division, recalled the origins of the idea:
“One day at Berkeley [in 1942]… Teller came to the office and said, “Well, what would happen to the air if an atomic bomb were exploded in the air?” The original idea about the hydrogen bomb was that one would explode an atomic bomb and then simply the heat from the atomic bomb would ignite a large vessel of deuterium… and make it react. So Teller said, “Well, how about the air? There’s nitrogen in the air, and you can have a nuclear reaction in which two nitrogen nuclei collide and become oxygen plus carbon, and in this process you set free a lot of energy. Couldn’t that happen?” And that caused great excitement. Oppenheimer got quite excited and said, “That’s a terrible possibility.””
When more detailed calculations seemingly confirmed that Teller’s scenario was indeed possible, Oppenheimer tracked down Arthur Compton, director of the Manhattan Project’s metallurgical laboratory, while he was on vacation with his family in Michigan. The pair spent many hours on the shores of Oswego Lake furiously debating Teller’s prediction. In 1959, Compton was interviewed by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning writer Pearl S. Buck for a feature in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled The Bomb – the End of the World? which helped bring the atmospheric ignition theory to public attention:
“Hydrogen nuclei,” Arthur Compton explained to me, “are unstable, and they can combine into helium nuclei with a large release of energy, as they do on the sun. To set off such a reaction would require a very high temperature, but might not the enormously high temperature of the atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode hydrogen? And if hydrogen, what about hydrogen in sea water? Might not the explosion of the atomic bomb set off an explosion of the ocean itself? Nor was this all that Oppenheimer feared. The nitrogen in the air is also unstable, though in less degree. Might not it, too, be set off by an atomic explosion in the atmosphere?”
“The earth would be vaporized,” I said.
“Exactly,” Compton said, and with that gravity! “It would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run the chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!”
Later in the piece, Buck states:
“If, after calculation, [Compton] said, it were proved that the chances were more than approximately three in one million that the earth would be vaporized by the atomic explosion, he would not proceed with the project. Calculation proved the figures slightly less – and the project continued.”
Nonetheless, the possibility of destroying the world continued to weigh on the Manhattan Project scientists’ minds, so over the course of 1943 and 1944, several more individuals tried to put the matter to rest once and for all. As Hans Bethe explained in his 1991 interview:
“Teller at Los Alamos put a very good calculator on this problem, Emil Konopinski, who was an expert on weak interactors, and Konopinski…showed that it was incredibly impossible to set the hydrogen, to set the atmosphere on fire.”
Further calculations conducted by Hans Bethe and Edward Teller appeared to confirm Konopinski’s results, allaying any lingering doubts and allowing the Trinity test to proceed as planned. Teller and Konopinski, along with Cloyd Marvin, later summarized their findings in a 1946 paper titled Ignition of the Atmosphere With Nuclear Bombs, in which they concluded that:
“…whatever the temperature to which a section of the atmosphere may be heated, no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started. The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions. This is true even with rather extravagant assumptions concerning the reactivity of the nitrogen nuclei of the air. The only disquieting feature is that the “safety factor” i.e. the ratio of losses togas of energy, decreases rapidly with initial temperature, and descends to a value of only about 1.6 just beyond a 10-MeV temperature. It is impossible to reach such temperatures unless fission bombs or thermonuclear bombs are used which greatly exceed the bombs now under consideration. But even if bombs of the required volume (i.e. greater than 1000 cubic meters) are employed, energy transfer from electrons to light quanta by Compton scattering will provide a further safety factor and will make a chain reaction in air impossible.”
For the uninitiated, MeV stands for Mega Electron-Volt, and is a unit of energy equivalent to 1.6×10-13 Joules. Also, Compton scattering, named after Arthur Compton, refers to the elastic transfer of kinetic energy from a photon to an electron – or vice-versa.
Interestingly, the difficulty of igniting a chain reaction in atmospheric nitrogen foreshadowed the difficulties Teller would later encounter in developing his fusion-based ‘Super” or hydrogen bomb. Initially, Teller assumed that the heat and pressure of a conventional nuclear weapon would be sufficient to induce fusion in liquid Deuterium or Heavy Hydrogen. When this turned out not to be the case, Teller and Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam were forced to develop an entirely different mechanism known as radiation implosion to initiate a fusion reaction – but that is a subject for another video.
Yet despite Bethe, Teller, and Konopinski’s reassuring calculations, some continued to harbour grave doubts, as Bethe later recalled:
“But of course, it spooked Compton. In [his] mind it was not set to rest. He didn’t see my calculations. He even less saw Konopinski’s much better calculations, so it was still spooking in his mind when he gave an interview at some point, and so it got into the open literature, and people are still excited about it.”
But what about Enrico Fermi’s infamous bet in the lead-up to the Trinity test? Well, according to Bethe, this was actually intended as a joke:
“Fermi, of course, didn’t believe that this was possible, but just to relieve the tension at the Los Alamos Trinity test, he said, “Now, let’s make a bet whether the atmosphere will be set on fire by this test.” And I think maybe a few people took that bet.”
Among those who took Fermi’s bet were U.S. Army soldiers assigned to guard the test site, who apparently needed some serious instruction in logic, given that if that had actually happened, they’d never have been able to collect their winnings. Either way, some of these soldiers were so disturbed by the possibility of incinerating the world that they asked to be relieved from their duties prior to the test – provoking considerable fury from Kenneth Bainbridge.
But in any event, outside of Fermi’s facetious wager, the bets among the Manhattan Project scientists concerned the explosive yield of the test. Edward Teller, for example, predicted 45 kilotons of TNT. Physicist Isidor Rabi chose 18 kilotons – ultimately winning him the betting pool – Hans Bethe 8 kilotons, Robert Oppenheimer 0.3 kilotons, and Ordnance Department leader Norman Ramsey zero kilotons – a complete dud. The latter scenario was the one most feared by Bainbridge, who later wrote:
“My personal nightmare was knowing that if the bomb didn’t go off or hangfired, I, as head of the test, would have to go to the [test] tower first and seek to find out what had gone wrong.”
In the end, however, the test went exactly as planned, and of the more than 2,000 nuclear weapons that have been detonated since July 16, 1945, not one has set the atmosphere on fire. This includes the Tsar Bomba dropped by the Soviet Union on October 30, 1961, which at 50 Megatons remains the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.
But like all good stories, the idea of atmospheric ignition simply refuses to die. In 1975, Horace C. Dudley, a professor of radiation physics at the University of Illinois Medical Center, published a letter of concern titled The Ultimate Catastrophe in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in which he reiterated Teller and Compton’s apocalyptic predictions from the 1940s. The letter prompted a rebuttal from Hans Bethe, who stated:
“There was never any possibility of causing a thermonuclear chain reaction in the atmosphere. There was never “a probability of slightly less than three parts in a million,” as Dudley claimed. Ignition is not a matter of probabilities; it is simply impossible…[furthermore] it is totally unnecessary to add to the many good reasons against nuclear war, one which simply is not true.”
Nonetheless, Dudley’s letter attracted considerable attention among U.S. Government policy makers, prompting Roger Batzel, director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, to weigh in on the debate:
“I will not comment directly on the several pejorative comments made about nuclear energy production and weapons research. Nor will I attempt to clear up Professor Dudley’s confusion over variable half-lives, the availability of “aether energy,” the earth’s gravitational field, or the reproducibility of large-scale physical phenomena…In summary, extremely conservative calculations have demonstrated that it is completely impossible for either the earth’s atmosphere or sea to sustain fusion reactions of either thermonuclear or nuclear chain reaction type. In particular, such reactions cannot be triggered by the explosion of nuclear weapons, even those having unrealistically high yield and impractically high yield-to-weight.”
In response, Dudley published another letter proposing a number of other – equally unlikely – runaway chain-reaction scenarios. The debate was put to rest by Bernard Felt, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who wrote:
“However, since Dr. Dudley chose in his rebuttal to give new emphasis to the possibility of a hydrogen plus hydrogen reaction in the ocean, Dr. Bethe would be fully justified in wishing to respond to this, thereby setting off a chain reaction which we could probably not contain.
Rather than risk this contingency, I take the liberty of noting that, contrary to Dr. Dudley’s assertion, the hydrogen plus hydrogen reaction does differ in kind from that of deuterium plus deuterium, to the extent that this reaction requires temperatures and pressures comparable to those occurring in the interior of the Sun. Dr. Bethe’s point about the impossibility of a fusion chain reaction in the oceans therefore remains well-taken.”
Ironically, within just a few years the debate over the effects of nuclear war would shift from one of global incineration to global refrigeration as scientists like Richard Turco and Carl Sagan developed the idea of “Nuclear Winter” – the hypothetical cooling of the earth’s climate due to smoke and dust thrown up by nuclear explosions blotting out the sun. But this, too, is a subject for another video. For now, let us be thankful that the apocalyptic nuclear Sword of Damocles which has hung over humanity’s head for 80 years has yet to fall en masse, and that theories of global incineration and nuclear winter remain firmly in the realm of speculation.
Expand for ReferencesYiu, Yen, The Fear of Setting the Planet on Fire With a Nuclear Weapon, Inside Science, July 15, 2020, https://www.insidescience.org/manhattan-project-legacy/atmosphere-on-fire#:~:text=It%20was%201%2C500%20times%20more,set%20the%20atmosphere%20on%20fire.
Horgan, John, Bethe, Teller, Trinity, and the End of Earth, Scientific American, August 4, 2015, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/bethe-teller-trinity-and-the-end-of-earth/#:~:text=Dark%20humor%3A%20Shortly%20before%20the,according%20to%20physicist%20Hans%20Bethe.
Konopinski, Emil; Marvin, Cloyd, & Teller, Edward, Ignition of the Atmosphere With Nuclear Bombs, Los Alamos National Laboratory, August 14, 1946, https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf
Testing the Bomb, https://mytext.cnm.edu/lesson/testing-the-bomb/
The post Is It Really Possible for a Nuke to Ignite the Atmosphere? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Few brands are as closely associated with the idea of “luxury” as Rolls-Royce, a car manufacturer so fancy schmancy that the company’s official website doesn’t even bother to list how much the things it sells are. Rolls-Royce knows that for anyone serious about buying one of their automobiles, price is not a concern. And to be clear, what you can get for said insane amount of money is likewise insane in customization, which we’re going to now talk about because it’s a lot more interesting, and occasionally bizarre, than even we originally thought when dreaming up this topic.
But in any event, to this end, Rolls-Royce, who as a company can be fairly certain that the average person strolling into one of their showrooms likely has a credit card with a limit rivalling the GDP of a small nation, offers clients a level of customisation and self-expression seldom seen outside of old episodes of Pimp My Ride or the Need For Speed games to the point that literally every every car they sell is one of a kind. Or as we like to call the brand- Billionaire Build a Bear.
One thing we should clarify first though is that even with a luxury brand like Rolls-Royce there are levels to the fanciness on offer with the price increasing accordingly. Now, we know we said in the introduction that Rolls-Royce themselves don’t list how much their cars cost because that would be tacky and only for plebians, but it’s not hard to find out how much they sell for by consulting things like trade magazines or browsing the secondary market.
With this in mind the least you’d be looking to spend on a new Rolls-Royce is about £250,000 (about $310,000) for a stock Rolls-Royce Ghost which online auction site Auto Trader describes as the brand’s “entry level model”. Meanwhile a Rolls-Royce Phantom will set you back a cool £350,000 (about $450,000). If this is too rich for your blood, older models, like from the 70’s, sometimes pop up for sale for as little as £10,000 (about $12,000). As good a deal as this may sound be warned, older models of many luxury cars are very often a huge pain in the butt to fix and maintain, with collectors frequently bemoaning that you can easily spend more than a car’s listed value, just to get it to run
But who cares if a car runs, as long as it’s flashing you are extremely wealthy and not at all an effort to compensate for your insecurities….
Moving on, while these prices give us a good baseline for what a Rolls-Royce would cost you, the company is keenly aware that nobody with Rolls-Royce money is looking to buy a stock model to drive around in. They want to show that crap off like their trophy wife who definitely is with them because they love them.
As such, while the cost of a base model of each car the company sells is easy enough to find, the real cost can balloon to several times that when you take into account all of the extra stuff the company offers prospective clients.
So how about an example.
Let’s start with perhaps the single simplest thing to pick from when buying a car. The colour. Which according to Nick Osy de Zegwart, a bespoke sales manager for the brand, notes as being generally the first thing he’ll discuss with a customer. With that in mind how many options do you think seem reasonable? 50? 100? 1000?
Well, take that last number and multiply it by 40 because as standard Rolls-Royce offers customers a choice from a selection of over 44,000 different colour swatches. Keep in mind, these are the default choices the company offers and, if you so choose, you can just make up your own colour with the company offering a bespoke colour matching service where a member of their design team will create a custom colour based on any item or object you can think of. As an idea of how specific this service is, the company, when prodded, has admitted to colour-matching a car to a client’s dog. Specifically an Irish Setter, which the company notes was not harmed during the colour matching process. Dogs aside, other objects the company has matched the colour of cars to include one client’s favourite shoe, a shade of lipstick and in one case, a rubber glove the buyer just really liked the colour of… We don’t want to know….
The colour can be further customised with a variety of finishes. These range from standard rich people stuff like microscopic flakes of gold or crushed pearl to make it shine to specially engineered super-paint capable of reflecting light in every colour of the visible spectrum. In regards to the last one, that’s not hyperbole with the company reportedly spending in excess of a year developing a literal one-of-a-kind paint they dubbed “Lunaflair” for a single client whose only prompt was that they wanted the colour of their car to resemble an optical phenomenon called the lunar halo, an eerily beautiful and rare optical illusion caused by the “refraction of moonlight from ice crystals in the upper atmosphere”. An effect paint engineers at Rolls-Royce were ultimately able to replicate after, as noted, a year of solid experimentation. Which means that the actual list of colours a client can choose from is theoretically infinite as the engineers in charge of the process are seemingly skilled enough to colour match vague abstract concepts.
Once a client decides on a colour or even the inspiration for a colour, Rolls-Royce will then patent the steps that led to its creation so that nobody else can use it. At least not without asking first with the company noting that anybody wanting to use the same custom colour as another needs their written permission to do so.
To ensure the colour matches exactly and that nothing contaminates it the people tasked with ultimately painting a given car aren’t allowed to wear makeup and are only permitted to wear a specific brand of deodorant provided by Rolls-Royce.
But we’re not even done with colour yet because something the Rolls-Royce Commissioning Suite, where a bunch of these initial decisions are made, contains is a special light custom made for the purpose capable of replicating the exact way and angle the sun shines in different regions of the world. This light will then be shone onto a model Rolls-Royce painted in whatever shade the customer requests so that they can see what the car would look like sitting on their own driveway, wherever that happens to be.
While selecting the colour they want their motorcar to be (as a brand this is near exclusively how Rolls-Royce refers to the vehicles it sells because “car” would be too common we guess) customers can also decide whether or not they’d like their purchase to sport a coachline when it’s finished. Deceptively simple looking, this aesthetic addition is literally the final touch added to the vehicle and at the time of writing this script, every single one is painted by a single guy. Mark Court.
A man who cut his teeth painting the signs that appear outside of pubs, Court reputedly has the steadiest hand of any man in Britain and is so trusted by the brand that he is allowed to paint each line freehand. A final flourish of skill akin to a painter signing their latest masterpiece. As with everything else on the car, this coachline can be tailored to the customer’s liking and it’s common for designers to incorporate elements of the buyer’s personality into the finished product. This can be as simple as stylised initials or as complex as a perfect replica of the owner’s family crest. As you might imagine, a lot of people buying these things have family crests because, sure, why not?
This said, while the coachline is seen as a symbol of the brand, customers don’t necessarily have to have one added because, well, it is their car after all. However, if at any point the customer changes their mind about this, Rolls-Royces will fly Mark out, anywhere in the world, to add it. This is in keeping with the company’s ethos of luxury being synonymous with service and it will similarly fly out engineers to fix faults at the customer’s convenience if they so desire.
But back to Mark Court- the level of trust placed in him is inordinate and it’s noted that if, at any point, he made a mistake, the entire car would need to be sandblasted back to stock and entirely repainted. When asked about the pressures of this and whether or not he’s ever made a mistake Court’s response in a company video released in 2019 was simply -“I don’t make mistakes. I work for Rolls-Royce.”
Moving to the interior of the car, this is similarly customised entirely to the customers tastes and whims with virtually every aspect of the interior being customisable in some way, shape or form. Again, the colour of everything can be bespoke and made to match either the outside of the car or whatever the customer fancies.
Now we know what you’re thinking, surely there’s a limit to this, right? Like Rolls-Royce does have a reputation to maintain at the end of the day and surely they’d step in or tastefully try to steer a customer in another direction if they started asking for stuff that would look fugly. Well apparently not with the previously quoted Nick Osy de Zegwart stating as much in an interview in 2016. Specifically de Zegwart, when asked to comment on any “strange combinations” of colour and style he’d seen noted flatly – “We’re not the taste police.”
Adding that each bespoke Rolls-Royce is “an expression of one’s personality”, which means that whatever the customer wants, the customer gets. To this end some of the weirder things Rolls-Royce have included in the interior of vehicles they’ve made include a speedometer in the backseat so the customer could ensure their driver wasn’t speeding, a cigar humidifier and a cup holder.
If that last one doesn’t sound impressive we should clarify that this was a special cup holder specifically designed to carry the customer, a sumo wrestler’s, favourite brand of drink. Which the company ensured would fit exactly by flying to Japan, buying one and then tailoring the cup holder to its exact measurements.
Keeping with the interior, most stock Rolls-Royce models come with leather seats as standard. Which sounds far too pedestrian and it probably won’t surprise you to learn that the leather seats in a Rolls-Royce are a literal cut above the fare offered in other cars. For starters Rolls-Royce only uses leather sources from bulls.
Why?
Well leather from a bull is generally less prone to imperfections owing to the fact bulls can’t get pregnant, which means their skin doesn’t typically get stretch marks. Likewise, bulls destined to cushion the buttholes of occasional assholes are raised in high altitude environments as such places tend to have less biting insects which could, again, impact the ultimate quality of leather made from the animals they bite. Even with all of these measures taken though sometimes there are issues, even if the imperfections are literally unobservable to the human eye and only visible on spectrometer tests the company conducts, because of course they do. In these cases, Rolls-Royce will discard the leather. With the company famously selling leather that doesn’t meet its exacting standards to the high-end fashion industry.
For customers who don’t want to sit on part of the corpse of a cow, other options for interiors include goat, ostrich and a number of artificial options. Though ultimately the interior can be made from whatever material a customer wishes. Even if said material is illegal, though for this one Rolls Royce won’t be involved for legal reasons.
But it turns out when researching, we stumbled across an article from 2021 about a Rolls-Royce that was seized by Italian authorities sporting crocodile leather seats sourced from an endangered example of the species. To be clear, Rolls-Royce does offer crocodile leather as an option, but this particular car had seats made from a special kind of crocodile you’re very specifically not allowed to turn into a car headrest. Noteworthy, however, according to the Financial Express, these modifications were made after the car was purchased from Rolls-Royce, who as a rule, do not offer such options making this one of the few requests the company will not comply with while crafting a bespoke vehicle. However, the fact the owner’s response to being told no was to immediately get an aftermarket dealer to install them anyway just goes to show that nothing is off limits when it comes to customising one of these cars if you’re rich enough. We’re just glad Hannibal Lector never had a taste for these vehicles…
Keeping with the seats even the thread used to stitch the leather is customisable and as with everything else, Rolls-Royce keeps a huge number of options on hand. Again though this is only a baseline and the thread can be whatever colour the customer wants to the point that Rolls-Royce once spent a year developing a new type of thread that was the exact same shade of candy apple red as a car’s exterior after a customer complained none of the default red options on offer looked red enough.
Moving onto panelling, this is also entirely customised to the buyer’s own tastes, though there are some caveats the company has to make for the sake of safety. For example there’s an oft repeated story about the company taking a tree on a customer’s property that was struck by lightning and incorporating that into stuff like the dashboard. This is true, though the process to do so was more of a pain in the butt than you’d expect because the company had to perform things like stress and impact tests on the parts they constructed from the wood to ensure it adhered to industry-wide safety standards. Tests that were difficult to ensure were done properly with the finite amount of material the company had available. Difficult, but not impossible with the company eventually being able to do exactly as the customer asked and fold wood from their beloved tree into the car’s interior.
One of the more notable things sported by high-end Rolls-Royces is what’s called the Starlight Headliner, essentially a constellation of glittering stars woven into the car roof interior. In reality these “stars” are created by a series of fiber optic lights painstakingly woven into the interior and powered by over 2km of cables discreetly hidden away in the car’s bodywork. This constellation is, you guessed it, entirely bespoke and can be reflective of the night sky from any place and time on Earth. Just tell the team where and when you want the stars to be from and Rolls-Royce will confirm with an observatory what the stars looked like from the exact spot at the time and weave a facsimile of it into the roof of the interior so that every time you look up, it’s as if you’re looking at the night sky from that time and place. Other options for roof interiors include bespoke embroidery and even artwork, with the company, on at least one occasion, finding a way to put a whole painting into the roof of someone’s car.
To ensure customers can enjoy this luxury in peace without having to hear the ramblings of the plebians on the street, Rolls-Royce cars are crammed full of a pretty extreme amount of sound proofing with the company going out of its way to eliminate every possible source of noise from the obvious stuff like the engine to less obvious things you might not notice but still cause some noise like the squeak of the windshield wiper as it slaps aside water that dare touch the car.
Amusingly the company had to re-engineer their cars after it emerged they were soundproofing the cars too well.
You see, when Rolls-Royce began selling the appropriately named Ghost they were soon inundated with complaints from customers that found the near totally silent ride incredibly off-putting. With the car being so quiet that something as simple as a person adjusting their weight on the seat would sound super noisy in the eerie silence of the interior. To address this engineers removed some soundproofing and worked with acoustic engineers to ensure that the sounds the car did happen to make would harmonize together into a persistent “soft whisper”.
The end result is a car ride so smooth and quiet that Rolls-Royce has admitted that at least one wealthy patron from Asia had an entire bed fitted into the back of their car as it quickly became the one place they could relax and be fairly sure nothing short of a bomb going off would wake them up.
Speaking of which Rolls-Royce can of course be customised to sport defensive options like armour plating, though our queries about whether or not they can add machineguns like that one Aston Martin James Bond drives went unanswered for some reason.
Moving on from there, one of the final things the company does to make sure the car is totally watertight is submit it to monsoon-like conditions by spraying it with several dozen high-pressure jets for several minutes straight at all angles. After this, an engineer armed with an endoscope, you know the thing doctors use to check up your butt for possible medical issues, gives the car a once over. If a single drop of water is found somewhere it shouldn’t be, the entire car will be scrapped and the process of building it will begin again. At least according to company press releases, which we imagine are at least a little embellished for marketing reasons. Afterall, one would presume just fixing the issue that caused the drop to get in would be a bit more economical and faster than making the customer wait for an entirely new build…
But in any event, whilst a car is being built for a customer other options the customer can decide upon include whether or not the final product will sport the brand’s iconic Spirit of Ecstasy hood adornment or a more simple badge. This can again be customised, to an extent, with gold or jewel encrusted options being popular and a rumour that at least one was custom made to make it look as though the Spirit was dunking a basketball for a client who played the sport.
Last, but not least, a customer can customise themselves an umbrella which, as standard, is hidden away inside the door of most stock Rolls-Royce models. It is a British brand after all. As with everything else, customers can remove this option if they wish and have the cavity filled or altered to dispense Pringles or something.
Now, all of this sounds ridiculous but so far we’ve only talked about the base options Rolls-Royce offers because there’s a level beyond even this only offered to those with truly obscene amounts of money. Called Coachbuild, this ultra-exclusive bespoke service literally cannot be bought, with Rolls-Royce only offering it to clients they deem worthy of the absolute highest level of service they offer.
Described by the brand as the “most exclusive division of Bespoke” and the “automotive equivalent of haute couture”, the options afforded to anyone qualifying for this service are truly unlimited with the collaboration between client and brand beginning, to paraphrase Rolls-Royce, from the first line drawn on a sketchpad by one of their “artisans”.
Cars made by this arm of the company can take literal years to produce and each is a bonafide work of automotive art that is, as Rolls-Royce themselves boast -“A truly singular creation.”
Owing to the highly secretive nature of the clients such a service would naturally serve, details not filtered through the company themselves about Coachbuild cars are hard to come by but they very often describe one-of-a-kind details and embellishments. For instance the car we mentioned earlier with the specially-made paint that reflected the sun the same way as an optical phenomenon? That was one of these cars.
Other known Coachbuild cars incorporate similarly outlandish and unique colour-schemes, like the Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptail, a car directly inspired by a single item, the Black Baccara rose. A flower said to be adored by the unnamed matriarch of the family which commissioned the car, which for the curious, took in excess of four years to make.
Which is admittedly impressive, but at the end of the day, it is just a car- a means to get from point A to point B comfortably. A car that likely cost more than most people’s homes and in some cases more than entire blocks of homes. Something the editor of this script, Daven’s, 1987 Toyota Tercel has been doing for him since all the way back in 1995 and still going strong with that sweet, sweet old car smell mixed with mild oil fumes from the exhaust, and a ceiling panel that may not have stars, but does definitely constitute a ceiling panel… despite having long since lost its needless covering fabric. And gas mileage? Please. The average Rolls-Royce absolutely cannot compete at nearly half of the perfection of that sky blue, two door Tercel. Your move Roycey.
Expand for ReferencesBespoke Craft – Rolls-Royce
The Man Who Paints Every Rolls-Royce Coachline
How do you buy a Rolls-Royce? (Video)
Rolls-Royce Bespoke Facts
The World of Bespoke (Rolls-Royce’s own website)
The Coolest Designs Rolls-Royce Customers Commissioned In 2023
Rolls-Royce Bespoke: Custom build your own car in the magic Atelier Room (Video)
This Rolls-Royce Spectre has a unique rainbow paint finish
Rolls-Royce Phantom with exotic crocodile leather interior seized by authorities
The Rolls-Royce Ghost was so eerily quiet inside the engineers had to make it louder
The post Billionaire Build a Car- The Car Brand Where Every One is Literally One of a Kind appeared first on Today I Found Out.
For those who didn’t grow up in the late 20th century, it may seem strange to learn that for a time many people genuinely believed things like that humans randomly burst into flames for no apparent reason, with the occasional speculative news report or Unsolved Mysteries episode highlighting the latest instance, as well as that there was an area dubbed the Bermuda Triangle where almost certainly aliens were snapping up ships and planes for, we can only assume, maximal probage. This all brings us to the topic of today- how did the idea of the Bermuda Triangle first become ingrained in public consciousness, and was there ever actually any evidence of weird things happening there, or is it just yet another instance of the truism that humans will believe anything if a human in a suit says it on TV or it’s otherwise published in book form?
To begin with, let’s start with what exactly constitutes the Bermuda Triangle. While there is some disagreement among Bermuda Triangle truthers, the commonly accepted boundaries of the Triangle are the area formed if you drew direct lines on an oceanic map between the ports of Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico where allegedly a lot of weird stuff happens.
What kind of weird stuff? Well, legend holds that ships and planes passing through the Triangle occasionally just up and disappear like your dad when he went out for milk that one time.
Now, the skeptics among you may hear that and think, “Well, the ocean is pretty big and a generally dangerous place to exist, especially back before GPS and awesome satellite weather, so maybe a handful of the planes and ship traffic in that region just sank or something? I mean, it is a super high trafficked part of the ocean.”
Now, this is a very reasonable explanation.
But hear us out- what about if instead it was actually aliens?
This level of reasoning is essentially how the idea of the Bermuda Triangle took hold.
More specifically, the first to speculate towards this very reasonable and in all ways rational idea can be traced to an article written in 1964, titled, appropriately enough, The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.
This article was written for Argosy magazine by a man named Vincent H. Gaddis. A guy who basically spent his entire journalistic career applying the question “Okay, but what if an alien did it?” to everything.
Only slightly hyperbole, we should also point out that Gaddis penned other such essays as “New Evidence for Atlantis” and “Career of a Cursed Car”.
He also, funny enough, was one of the early pushers of the idea of humans spontaneously combusting.
On that note, for anyone who’s read some of Gaddis’s many pieces, as we, unfortunately, just had to do for work, it is clear that Gaddis was, in fact, in desperate need of a laxative, owing to being full of crap.
But as for his Bermuda Triangle piece, he notes that the Bermuda Triangle was already an observable phenomenon known to the sea-faring world, but that the air and sea captains of earth were hiding it from us landlubbers.
We can only presume because it’s not a good conspiracy theory if we don’t include potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people needing to be involved to make it check out.
Helpfully in his piece, he defines the area well and, despite his saying it was an existing well known thing, gives us the first known instance of both the idea and the name “Bermuda Triangle”. He states,
“Draw a line from Florida to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third line back to Florida through the Bahamas. Within this area, known as the “Bermuda Triangle,” most of the total vanishments have occurred.”
Defying all expectation, the article does go on to contain some factual elements, notably details concerning a number of ship and plane disappearances that occurred within the confines of the Triangle, some of which are genuinely fascinating. For example, Gaddis recounts the story of Flight 19, one of the most enduring mysteries in aviation history. Or, at least, that’s what a lot of people say. In fact, when you look at the details, there’s really no mystery at all here.
To sum up the tragedy of Flight 19 as quick as we can before we get back to the Bermuda Triangle- on Dec 5th, 1945, five American bombers, collectively given the designation Flight 19, were tasked with a training bombing exercise.
After bombs released, flight leader Lt. Charles Taylor had a problem. He radioed, “Both my compasses are out and I’m trying to find Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.”
We’re going to go ahead and give Taylor the benefit of the doubt that he was, in fact, being honest about his compasses, and it all wasn’t just an elaborate ruse to avoid having to go to Florida, as any sensible human would try for because, Florida.
But as you might imagine, without working compasses, at the time navigation over the ocean can be somewhat difficult, though not impossible if one knows where you started and can see the sun, which the flight could. And, of course, there were all the other planes in the flight that did have working compasses.
For whatever reasons, Taylor simply refused to listen to any of them or anyone on the ground or boats in the water who tried to help him, and was convinced he knew where they were. Such that when one of his students radioed to him “Dammit, if we could just fly west we would get home; head west, dammit,” he seemingly denied the request.
On that note, Port Everglades Air Sea Rescue Unit 7 crew heard further exchanges between the pilots, with some of the students arguing with Taylor about their position, including discussing their own compass readings, but Taylor continued to go with what he thought was right, and the students continued to follow, despite disagreeing with him and that catastrophic disaster was sure to follow if Taylor was wrong.
At the time, Taylor was convinced heading west would lead to disaster because he thought that would just take them over the Gulf of Mexico.
That said, they did, for a time, do the sensible thing and split the difference and fly northwest, but Taylor eventually second guessed himself, radioing, “We didn’t fly far enough east; we may as well just turn around and fly east again.”
A bold move when you know North America is definitely to the west somewhere and the Atlantic definitely to the east.
Why none of his students simply noped out of his increasingly illogical instructions, it’s generally just chalked up to he was the instructor and in the position of authority, and they probably felt they had to follow orders like good soldiers.
Whatever the case there, it turns out Taylor had a bit of a history of losing his bearings, including two recent previous instances of needing to ditch into the sea when just such a thing happened. One instance occurred on June 14, 1944, and another around 7 months later on January 30, 1945, all leading up to this Flight 19 instance about 11 months after that finally doomed not only himself, but the entire Flight of planes.
In the end, as night descended and winds and stormier weather over the Atlantic picked up, Taylor’s last message of “All planes close up tight … we’ll have to ditch unless landfall … when the first plane drops below 10 gallons [38 liters], we all go down together.” clearly indicates aliens were involved in the disappearance and not simple faulty navigation and a flight leader in desperate need of Crew Resource Management training.
This is a concept that didn’t really become a defacto thing until decades later to avoid precisely the issue this Flight exhibited in spades- where the pilot in command or flight leader is clearly making mistakes, but those beneath them either don’t speak up when they see it because they are of lower position in authority, or the PIC simply refuses to listen to outside input from subordinates when given, sometimes leading to catastrophic results, as happened with Flight 19.
In the end, shortly before their complete disappearance, the flight’s position was triangulated based on their radio broadcasts to be far out to sea north east of the Bahamas. Had they simply headed west, as some among Taylor’s flight suggested, they’d have been fine. Other than, you know, now finding themselves having to exist in Florida.
Instead, Flight 19 was never seen or heard from again. To date there has never been any wreckage found and a massive, multi-day search and rescue operation utilising the combined might and resources of the Navy and Coast Guard in the days that followed didn’t find so much as a shred of evidence that the planes touched down anywhere in the roughly 250,000 square miles of ocean they searched.
Going back to while the planes were still in the air, the tower at Fort Lauderdale, upon it becoming clear that the Taylor and co were lost, began putting together a search and rescue. Part of this included diverting two PBM Mariner flying boats taking part in training exercises nearby with the 13 man crew of each plane being updated in real-time on the estimated location of Flight 19.
Adding to conspiracy theorist fodder, one of these rescue planes also disappeared, and unlike the crew of Flight 19, without any evidence anything was amiss, with the last transmissions recorded from this crew being a routine acknowledgement of its updated mission parameters before it also inexplicably disappeared.
In all, 27 souls were lost that day. The 14 man crew of Flight 19 and the 13 rescuers sent to find them.
Getting back to Gaddis, to his credit his recollection of the events that day in his article are fairly accurate, though he makes a few notable and telling omissions in his retelling. For example, Gaddis makes note of an “explosion” that was seen in the sky around 7:30 in the evening. A detail that does appear in official reports. With the observation being credited to the crew of the merchant vessel, the S.S. Gaines Mills.
However, in his article, Gaddis writes this off as a coincidence, claiming that the explosion happened several hours after Flight 19 made its final radio transmission, ultimately concluding that the explosion the crew of the Gaines Mills saw was probably “an exploding meteor”.
In truth, the explosion occurred in the exact area Navy radar teams lost contact with the rescue craft. In addition, the Captain of the Gaines Mills, Shonna Stanley, would specifically note in his message to the Fort Lauderdale tower that he and his crew sailed through both wreckage and burning gasoline in an ultimately fruitless search for potential survivors, to quote the message, in part –
“At 1950, observed a burst of flames, apparently an explosion, leaping flames 100 feet high and burning for ten minutes …Stopped, circled area using searchlights, looking for survivors. None found.”
A detail Gaddis failed to mention for some reason.
Gaddis also failed to mention that the Navy search team took samples of the water around where the Gaines Mills searched and this water developed, to quote “an oily film”. Sadly a literal more in-depth search couldn’t be conducted due to the roughness of the seas at the time, but this detail combined with the fact that the Gaines Mills reports of a large fireball in the sky were corroborated by other vessels in the area led to the Navy concluding that the PBM-5 taking part in the search had simply exploded in mid-air.
Clearly Aliens… Or perhaps that the PBM was well known for being unsafe and at risk of such a catastrophic failure. You see, the flying gas tank, as the plane was also sometimes called, held almost 10 tons of gas, with flexible fuel lines having an annoying tendency to come loose and leak, especially in heavy turbulence conditions. While leaking fuel isn’t necessarily a catastrophic issue, in some rare cases it can be beyond the obvious problem of running out of fuel.
In this case, it is assumed that a fuel line came loose, ultimately caused a fire and, as any pilot knows, if you have a fire in an airplane, you’re going to have a bad time. Which is why in the general case if one occurs, the rule of the day is to throw everything else to the wind and while someone aboard is attempting to get the fire out if they can, the pilot in command is to get the plane on the ground as fast as safely possible without ripping off the wings. In this case, they seemingly had no such major warning, with fuel leaking, igniting, and the entire near fully fueled plane going up in a fireball.
As for Flight 19 itself, officially the cause of the disappearance today is listed as “Cause unknown”, though initial findings placed the blame squarely on Lt. Taylor, noting that he was “guilty of mental aberration”. Read, he got lost, panicked, and refused to listen to anyone on the ground or any of his subordinates in Flight 19 with regards to their position. He simply knew better, explicitly basing his positional thoughts on some islands he had spotted he was convinced were part of the Florida Keys.
Of note here, directly before this exercise, Taylor had been based out of Miami, and even during the flight at one point mistakenly identified himself as MT-28, or Miami Torpedo Bomber, and presumably simply saw some islands that reminded him of part of the keys, even though that’s not at all where they were flying that day.
While all of this may seem monumentally stupid on Taylor’s part, and it was rationally, for anyone who’s ever watched any of the many awesome videos from the Air Safety Institute on various real world aviation accidents, you’ll see this sort of thing is shockingly common in aviation accidents. Something goes wrong. Pilot panics to some extent, and as a result generally starts making increasingly irrational decisions and increasing irrational radio calls, with ever escalating panic, not so much because of the initial problem per se, but more so as a result of the aftermath of panicking. Sometimes this irrationality is aided by hypoxia at high altitudes, but not strictly necessary. Panicking humans often do and say weird things regardless.
In contrast, as those Air Safety Institute documentaries often show, pilots who keep their heads, even in seemingly catastrophic conditions, have a remarkable tendency to get themselves on the ground safely despite it all.
As to why the official explanation of what happened here got changed to “Cause unknown,” this came as the result of a complaint filed by Taylor’s mother who didn’t appreciate her deceased son being blamed for the deaths of everyone on Flight 19, and someone among the military brass deciding to not rub salt in her open wound, changing the official cause of accident from blaming Taylor’s decision making in it all to “Cause Unknown.”
Back to Gaddis, his careful massaging of the facts of Flight 19 as well the details of other similar cases of plane and ship disappearances within the confines of Bermuda Triangle (which if you recall, he himself seems to have made up and defined) allowed him to spin the narrative of the area being a hotbed for mysterious, unexplainable phenomenon.
The problem is, it isn’t.
Like at all.
In the many decades since Gaddis wrote his piece, many studies have been done on the so-called Bermuda Triangle by everyone from insurance brokers to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and none have found any proof whatsoever that planes or ships are more likely to crash, sink or otherwise vanish without a trace when traveling within the commonly accepted boundaries of the Triangle than any other part of the ocean. Or to quote how the NOAA put it in a 2010 press release –
“There is no evidence that mysterious disappearances occur with any greater frequency in the Bermuda Triangle than in any other large, well-traveled area of the ocean.”
In essence- the ocean is unfathomably big and deep. Ships and planes are not. Finding one that has disappeared in its depths, even if you know exactly where it sank, is often an effort in futility.
For instance, consider the Titanic, the wreck of which took about seven decades of searching to find despite the area in which it sank being widely known and billions of dollars, if adjusted for inflation, being spent searching for it over that span.
As an aside, because this is wild, attempts to recover the wreck of the Titanic, or at least all of the stuff and people aboard, began almost immediately after it sank, with one company tasked by the families of those on board seriously considering dynamiting the area of the ocean in which the ship sank. The thinking being that the explosions would destroy the wreckage and launch all of the bodies out of the water like meaty missiles.
Back to the Bermuda Triangle, despite there being no evidence that the area is more dangerous than any other comparably trafficked section of ocean, Gaddis’ article captured the attention of the more conspiratorially minded, culminating in the publication of a book titled simply, The Bermuda Triangle.
Published in 1974 and written by a guy called Charles Berlitz, the book is noted as being the thing that really put the Bermuda Triangle on the map. With it covering and expanding on many of the same ship and plane disappearances noted by Gaddis in his original article a decade prior. Like Gaddis, Berlitz wasn’t exactly entirely accurate in his retelling of events and wasn’t above pulling stuff out of his circular, rather than triangular, sphincter when it suited his narrative.
This, in turn, led to the book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, published in 1975.
Largely written as a literary response to Berlitz’s book by sceptic and clear individual on the alien’s payroll, Lawrence (Larry) Kusche, the book examined hundreds of official reports to interrogate Berlitz’s claims and found that much of what he wrote was of quality similar to the leavings of horses.
Kusche found that not only did Berlitz misrepresent many facts – for instance noting that Navy brass were “baffled” by certain disappearances, when in reality they’d simply accepted the grim reality that sometimes planes and ships sink and that it is generally impossible to recover the bodies aboard or wreckage swallowed by the waves- but also Berlitz just made stuff up. Inventing, among other things, fictitious radio transmissions that never happened.
To quote Kusche summing on his findings –
“What isn’t misinterpreted by Berlitz is fabricated”
As an aside, Kusche also wrote a book about the disappearance of Flight 19 in 1980, which similarly poured over the official report of the incident by the Navy Board of Investigation and is today considered one of the most comprehensive overviews of the incident and pretty clearly illustrates what likely happened.
Kursche is definitely working for the Pentaverant you guys.
Following up on all this is Australian scientist, Karl Kruszelnicki, who has made metaphorical waves over the last few years with his groundbreaking conclusion that the ocean is really big and that finding missing ships and planes lost in it is akin to finding a needle in an ocean sized haystack. And that, to quote the results of his groundbreaking research, –
“The number [of ships and planes] that go missing in the Bermuda Triangle is the same as anywhere in the world on a percentage basis.”
Nevertheless because, humans, Berlitz’s book nonetheless ignited the imaginations of the public and other speculative fiction writers, with the latter in the aftermath generally regurgitating the work of Berlitz, occasionally adding their own spin to it, crediting the disappearances listed (many of which have logical, accepted explanations) to everything from aliens to a black hole.
Thus, while it is largely agreed that ships and planes don’t disappear within the confines of the Triangle more often than they do any other popular, commonly traversed area of the ocean and that the disappearances that do occur generally have reasonable explanations (bad weather, human error, sea-faring werewolves ect …) some have decided that it is totally actually aliens. Or mermen. Or ghosts. Or maybe even a rogue sea monster.
There’s of course no proof of this, but then again, there’s also no proof that it wasn’t aliens.
Checkmate scientists.
As for those who adhere to this aliens explanation, and why this specific part of the ocean over all the rest, some speculate the aliens use it as a sort of space-Walmart, picking up a ship or plane when they need parts or human beings to probe in various ways. Apparently the aliens haven’t heard of modern dating apps… I mean, many members of Grindr would probably even welcome the probing. No non-consensual abductions required.
For those who don’t buy that aliens are responsible, we also happened upon conspiracy theories positing that the Triangle contains a wormhole, with there being some disagreement about exactly where this wormhole leads. Some say to an earth-like alien planet billions of light years away, others an alternate dimension, and some the far off past or future. All we do know is that wherever the ships, planes and unfortunate people aboard go, it is a one-way trip, similar to the hypothesis that they actually find themselves at the bottom of the ocean.
On that note, then there are theories that posit that the Bermuda Triangle threat comes not from the sky, but below the waves. While a random, rogue sea monster or very angry and committed super-sized whale or shark is a popular hypothesis, our favourite we found is that the Bermuda Triangle is actually located directly above the fabled lost city of Atlantis and that its denizens randomly sink ships or shoot down planes for reasons.
This is actually one of the hypotheses Charles Berlitz proposed in a later book about Atlantis being totally super real you guys despite it very explicitly just being something Plato pulled out of his butt and everyone understood it as such, even his contemporaries- see our video What Did the Grees Really Say About Atlantis, but nevertheless Berlitz suggesting that the people of Atlantis used a special magic crystal to both shield themselves from view, and also attack passing ships and planes that get too close. From the air we guess.. And, you know, just some of them. Not all the thousands upon thousands of others traversing the region…
Also, because we can’t not mention this, at some point Berlitz claimed to have somehow obtained one of these crystals but then inexplicably lost it. Which is why he couldn’t show it to journalists when asked. He totally had one though. Wake up Sheeple!
Speaking of which, Berlitz even suggested in some of his writings that the people of Atlantis actually worked in tandem with aliens to hide their existence and that the super-advanced technology they used to hide themselves from view or summon hurricanes and ship-swalling whirlpools was based on gifts given to them by little green men that had visited the Earth eons ago.
We can only hypothesize to build Pyramids. I mean, the pyramids are triangular too. Just saying… The truth is out there.
But in all serious, we think the aforementioned Larry Kusche said it best when discussing these sorts of obviously false narratives that many cling to despite all evidence to the contrary, from Flat Earth to Bermuda Triangle to Moon Landing Conspiracy to so much related to politics-
“Actually, there is an issue of greater importance than whether “paranormal forces” are at work anywhere. In this age of information explosion and social media, it is worrisome that so many people believe so many things without requiring any supporting evidence, that they employ little skepticism, have such a lack of curiosity, and such a bias toward what they want to be true, that they ignore what is true… Once false information becomes “common knowledge,” no matter how thoroughly it might be shown to be false, the false version will continue to be believed by some, either because they remain uninformed about the correct information or because they refuse to accept any information that is contrary to the beliefs they hold… The need for skepticism, for paying close attention to detail, is of critical importance in everyday life… Skepticism and critical thinking are important in politics when voters let their emotions rule rather than becoming informed on the positions of the candidates. It is important in issues of health, such as the vaccination/autism controversy, which is resulting in diseases that were virtually wiped out to start coming back…”
In the end, it’s easy to mock Flat Earthers, Bermuda Triangle believers, the list goes on and on, but human brain human braining ensures that literally all of us believe some things that are just as easily disproven, or disbelieve some things that are easily proved true with even a modicum of actually looking into it. Yet so often no amount of evidence presented to us can shake us from our firm belief, and often such evidence presented to us has the opposite effect, such that, much like Flat Earthers, we’re soon willing to make bizarre logical leaps just to find a way to rationalize continuing to believe what we believed before, despite all evidence presented to us to the contrary.
And, worse, when that clear evidence contrary to what we believe comes from experts in a given field, it can drive us to simply distrust that source of information about anything, despite their expertise and our relative lack of it. Leading to a greater problem in that, at the end of the day, if we’re conditioned to distrust the literal experts in a given field, rather than the result being us better informed on some specific issue, we’re simply more easily misled by those who aren’t experts, particularly those who are especially good at spinning narratives that usually contain a modicum of truth to hook our brains, then loading a whole lot of crap on top that isn’t true at all, but furthers the individual’s agenda. Whether that be in politics, or simply selling more of their books as in the case of Bill Kaysing’s bizarre and ever changing ideas that kicked off the Moon Landing Hoax conspiracy theory, see our video on the subject for more on that, or the aforementioned Charles Berlitz with the Bermuda Triangle thing.
Cascading to global levels, leading many to simply distrust all experts in a given field, such as scientists of a given branch, and in the most extreme case even some believing that these individuals are all simply in on some mass cover up of the truth on a given issue, despite how nonsensical that is when talking countless thousands of experts the world over who would all have to be in on it.
No expert is right all the time. Everyone gets things wrong. Science itself is all about trying to figure out where what we currently believe true may be wrong and studying to move the state of knowledge to more and more accurate to reality, with any good scientist being the first to point out all the ways they’ve been wrong once it’s revealed, which, of course, all just adds fodder for those trying to discredit them. After all, if they were wrong about X, and admitting it no less, who’s to say they aren’t wrong about Y…
Well, the data can often answer that one way or the other on many things. But who’s got time to look into that?
And on top of all that, scientists themselves are also subject to such biases of thinking and beliefs, particularly with regards to things they learned in their schooling days and haven’t looked into since as they focussed on other areas of their field, complicating all of this.
But all that aside, on the whole, at any given time, by virtue of having become experts in some field, the experts are going to know what they’re talking about far better than the non-experts, from random internet commenters to arguably the worst of spreaders of misinformation in particularly vocal politicians on any side of the political spectrum. With usually the more extreme on one end of the political spectrum or other being the worst offenders of all, and the moderates, well, more moderate and balanced in the general case.
In all though, the whole Bermuda Triangle thing is really just a representation of how all our brains are wired taken to the extreme. And every human who has ever humaned into adulthood has exhibited similar thought processes about some given issue, despite the data clearly saying something else from what we believe.
Kursche sums up what we need to try to battle this innate tendency- “Skepticism. Critical thinking. Honesty,” including with ourselves about what we believe, why we believe it, and whether we or our sources of information really actually know anything about a given thing or not.
Expand for ReferencesThe Geography of the Bermuda Triangle
Unraveling the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle
Summary Bibliography: Vincent H. Gaddis
Bermuda (or “Devil’s”) Triangle – Sceptics Dictionary
The Mystery of Flight 19 – Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale Museum
The Loss of Flight 19
The Lost Patrol – Naval Aviation News
The Legends & Lore of the Bermuda Triangle
Air, Sea Mysteries Show It Is Still a Big World – Arizona Daily Star
The Deadly Bermuda Triangle – Vincent Gaddis Article Transcript
A Scientist Says He’s Solved the Bermuda Triangle, Just Like That – Popular Mechanics
7 Chilling Conspiracy Theories About the Bermuda Triangle – Popular Mechanics
What is the Bermuda Triangle? – NOAA Report
For decades, we blamed aliens and Atlantis. Science says the Bermuda Triangle story is very different – The Economic Times
The post The Truth About the Bermuda Triangle appeared first on Today I Found Out.
“I think three women who were pregnant went into labour that evening.”
This is a quote from BAFTA winning horror writer Stephen Volk discussing perhaps his most infamous work, Ghostwatch. A BBC special released in 1992 that resulted in a quantifiable percentage of the British public watching at home believing that the spirit of a child-molesting ghost had flown out of their TV and into their toilet.
Which is a hell of a sentence and one that requires a not insignificant amount of explanation to make any sense, so settle in as we tell you the story of how one of the most infamous moments in British television history came to be.
Firstly it’s important to note that while Ghostwatch was never marketed as anything other than a work of fiction, the efforts the BBC went to, to clarify this fact left a lot to be desired. For starters literally the first thing anybody would see before the program started proper were the name of the writer, the aforementioned Stephen Volk, and the banner for the BBC’s, at the time, flagship anthology drama series, Screen One. Both of which were added, reportedly moments before the show was set to air, specifically to clarify to viewers that the whole thing was fake. Apparently Volk wasn’t too happy with this decision as he believed the British public would realise the events of the show were a work of finely crafted fiction, stating in a later interview –
“I was, I guess, writing for myself – aged between 12 and 14 – and I thought of myself watching and thinking, ‘well this is interesting, I don’t believe it.’”
Which sounds reasonable until you remember that this was a show airing in the early 1990’s, so to anybody tuning in to watch who happened to miss the literal first 30 seconds of the program, all they saw were a bunch of spooky goings-on purported to be real airing on the BBC- a highly respected broadcaster not exactly known for playing practical jokes on its viewers, at least on days besides April 1st. Briefly, over the years the BBC has aired several joke segments on April 1st which it similarly purported to be real. These include but are not limited to a news report from the London zoo about the acquisition of the rare creature from the Himalayas called the Lirpa Loof (An anagram of April Fools) noteworthy for taking massive, purple dumps and a Panorama segment about Switzerland’s annual spaghetti harvest which claimed spaghetti grows on trees on 3 mile long farms.
But in any event, compounding this was the fact that this began airing at 9:25 PM on BBC1, an uncommon timeslot generally used only by the BBC at the time due to the fact that, as a rule, the BBC doesn’t and in fact can’t run ads against its content. (The BBC is publicly funded so doesn’t need to for anyone curious). This meant that for channel hoppers not wanting to watch the fair being offered on the other terrestrial channels available, which at the time was limited to BBC2, ITV and the appropriately named Channel 4, they probably missed the only couple of seconds in the 91 minute broadcast that clarified it was fiction.
Then there’s the fact that Ghostwatch aired directly after the evening news, sport and weather, so for anyone who stood up to leave the room to make a cup of tea or something after the news would have also been likely to miss this disclaimer and make the assumption that the program was, similarly, factual in nature.
To be clear, that’s not us stereotyping about the British and their love of tea here, it is an actual, observable and studied phenomenon that the British powergrid experiences a massive surge in demand every time a popular TV show ends as a quantifiable percentage of the population stands up to make themselves a cup of tea. We’ve, naturally, made a video about this before for anyone curious about the mechanics. So it’s reasonable to assume that a good number of people tuning in to watch Ghostwatch missed the disclaimer for whatever reason.
But we’re not done because the show was also hosted by actual BBC journalists and presenters including Sir Michael Parkinson, one of the most trusted voices in broadcasting at the time, and Sarah Greene who was similarly known for hosting factual programming and was generally a trusted authority figure among both older and younger viewers seeing as she’d cut her teeth in the industry hosting the popular children’s program, Blue Peter.
In any event, with that out of the way we should probably discuss what the show was actually about and the short version is that the whole thing was presented as a “live” broadcast which saw Parkinson (in the studio) and Greene (on location) investigating a supposed haunting in a small British home located on Foxhill Drive in Northolt, West London. In reality there is no Foxhill Drive in Northolt but the name was suitably generic-sounding enough that nobody besides maybe someone who lived in Northolt would realise it wasn’t a real place.
Getting back to the program, after an introduction from the hosts, who play the whole thing completely straight and repeatedly insist that the broadcast is not only live, but intends to conclusively prove whether or not ghosts and the paranormal are real, we cut to an interview with the Early family which consists of a mother, Pamela and her two daughters Kim and Suzanne. During the interview Pamela dryly describes numerous ghostly goings on that have occurred around the home and generally projects the air of someone who is just so freaking tired of all the ghostly nonsense.
Unlike the presenters who were well known British television personalities, Pamela, Kim and Suzanne were all played by relatively unknown actors with the actress playing Pamela, Brid Brennan largely having nothing but minor bit parts prior to starring in Ghostwatch. Kim and Suzanne meanwhile were played by real-life sisters, Cherise and Michelle Wesson, neither of whom were known or established child actors at the time – Ghostwatch is literally Cherise’s only known credit as an actress – which makes their performances in the broadcast all the more impressive. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
During the interview the chief thing the family complains about experiencing is a mysterious banging noise from within the house’s walls. A noise Pamela, in an attempt to comfort her daughters, attributes simply to knocking pipes, prompting the family to refer to the malevolent entity terrorising their home as, Mr. Pipes.
Interspersed with this is supposed archive footage of Suzanne and Kim being harassed by Pipes in which a distinctly humanoid figure can vaguely be seen in the corner of their room. It’s at this point we should also probably note that during the entire broadcast viewers at home were encouraged to call in with their own thoughts and observations and you better believe a whole bunch of people called in to point out the fact the footage, that remember was purported to be real, had what appeared to be a large, menacing man stood in the bedroom of two little girls who were terrified that someone or something was trying to hurt them.
For the curious, the number shown was real and would result in anyone who called being connected to the BBC’s usual call-in line which would play a pre-recorded message informing them that the show wasn’t real but that they were still invited to share any spooky or ghostly phenomenon they’d personally experienced. None of these calls were acknowledged during the show since it wasn’t actually live but the hosts, to maintain the ruse, would frequently act as though they were responding to enquiries, questions or comments from the British public.
Perhaps the best example of this being right at the start of the show when Parkinson, whilst showing the previously mentioned footage of the Early sisters again, notes that many callers had noticed a strange, vaguely humanoid figure stood in the background before adding that he personally couldn’t see what they meant. But here’s the part that makes this decision go from a clever way to draw people’s attention to a detail they may have missed to something that puts the broadcast on par with the likes of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. After a few minutes they show the footage again, this time with the figure edited out and have an actress playing a “parapsychologist” called Dr. Pascoe joke about how people at home are probably seeing things.
To be clear, there absolutely was a figure in the initial bit of footage shown with the entity being physically portrayed a local character actor called Keith Ferrari, but they then digitally removed him from the shot when showing it again and even had the actress playing Dr. Pascoe draw a line around where he initially stood on the footage and laugh about how it was probably a shadow people mistook for a ghost or something. As for what Ferrari physically looked like when playing Mr. Pipes, the nature of the show and the poor quality of the overall footage in some parts make it hard to see for sure, but if behind the scenes images of Ferrari in costume are anything to go by, Mr. Pipes is a large, stocky man with countless bleeding slashes across his face and gouged out, perpetually bleeding eyes.
Getting back to the hauntings, a lot of credit needs to be given to the performances of the Wesson sisters, Cherise and Michelle, in selling the reality of the whole thing, with each sister delivering some truly unnerving performances during the show. For example at one point Kim, played by Cherise, talks about she saw Mr. Pipes staring at her from a crack in the door to the closet below the stairs, describing him as “disgusting” before showing a crude drawing of the entity she made which presenter Sarah Greene, in an attempt to break the tension, jokingly places on the fridge. To which Kim responds that Mr. Pipes will be pleased because he likes everything to be cold.
Likewise Suzanne, played by Michelle, talks about how she first knew something was amiss when she sensed a presence standing at the foot of her bed, watching her sleep. Suzanne then explains how she assumed the presence was her mother until it left without tucking her in.
We cannot possibly overstate how creepily and well-delivered this line is. Oscar worthy.
Moving on, during the early stages of the broadcast the tension is repeatedly broken by actor/comedian Craig Charles who is playing an elevated version of himself and, in the context of the broadcast, is tasked with interviewing residents of Foxhill Drive while Parkinson handles calls and guests in the studio and Greene interacts with the family.
While Charles himself doesn’t appear to be taking anything seriously, he is responsible for one of the earliest scares in the broadcast, leaping out of a cupboard wearing a halloween mask to scare Greene as she initially explores the Early home. There’s also a moment later in the broadcast where Charles is purportedly interviewing a man who tried to exorcise the house where you can just about see Ferrari, in full Mr. Pipes getup, standing in the distance observing the cast and crew
In fact, throughout the broadcast Ferrari can be seen multiple times if you watch closely enough. For instance in one shot he can be seen in the reflection of a glass door and in another he can be spotted emerging from the background of the studio as Pascoe and Parkinson listen to the sounds of guttural screaming purportedly captured in the Early home. This was done to suggest that Mr. Pipes could be summoned by replaying the sounds of his torturous screams out loud, which millions of televisions across Britain were now doing inadvertently.
Back to the broadcast, it largely spends the next few minutes cutting between the studio, the house and Charles and we learn that Mr. Pipes seems to have a special interest in Suzanne with the show noting how she had, on multiple occasions, awoken to find mysterious unexplained scratches and contusions on her face. As this is discussed a photo of Suzanne with such injuries is shown on screen. For the curious, the photo was genuine and made by having a member of the BBC’s own special effects department make up Michelle Wesson as if she’d been repeatedly scratched about the face.
After a few more minutes both girls ask to be put to bed which is when the show starts to get really weird.
You see, up until this point in the broadcast all of the spooky goings on were being reported on secondhand however after the girls go to bed a bunch of bizarre unexplainable things happen that again, the show presents as being absolutely real. For starters the crew notes that the house is inexplicably freezing cold despite the abundance of people and camera equipment present. Temperature gauging equipment that was jury-rigged to always show a specific, lower reading is then presented to sell this as genuine as the host explains that a sudden, inexplicable feeling of cold is a tell-tale sign that somewhere is absolutely, totally mega haunted. Reminder, this show aired on Halloween and British houses are notoriously drafty so you can probably imagine how those watching at home, growing increasingly invested in the narrative felt upon hearing that.
Then a bunch of random stains appear in the living room seemingly caused by a ghost since nobody was in the room at the time and unlike a regular spill or leak, the stains are perfectly round. Which just isn’t right. After this loud scratching and of course, banging can be heard from upstairs.
As the crew become increasingly flustered and attempt to find the source of the noise, a distraught Kim and Suzanne appear to inform the crew that there’s someone in the kitchen. When the crew run downstairs to see what’s going on a loud banging can be heard that increases in volume and intensity until they enter the kitchen, at which point it abruptly stops. Though they do find a bunch of creepy drawings of Mr. Pipes strewn about the floor.
Ultimately it is determined that the noises are being caused by Suzanne who is discovered hiding in a closet banging against the pipes, though she insists through tears that it wasn’t her and that she was only making the noises this time out of fear the television crew were going to leave and nobody would believe or help them.
At this point in the broadcast Parkinson, clearly annoyed and in full journalist mode, begins to aggressively grill Suzanne and insists to Pascoe that the whole thing is clearly a hoax and that no further investigation is required.
The broadcast then cuts to Parkinson in the studio as he takes calls from viewers who share their own stories of the paranormal, none of which phase the veteran presenter who jokes and dismisses most of what he hears. At one point drawing attention to a call being cut off and a camera glitching out as, perhaps, the work of a bored poltergeist.
Following this the broadcast quickly takes on a decidedly more distressing tone as Greene calls the studio to report that the house is showing signs of ghostly activity. In particular loud, random scratching noises from within the walls which itself is cut off by a blood curdling scream from Suzanne who the camera crew find has fresh, bloody scratches across her face.
What follows is largely considered one of the broadcast’s more disturbing moments when Parkinson dryly states the girl could have easily scratched at her own face, prompting her mother to grab her hands and scream about her neatly trimmed fingernails making this impossible. What makes this moment especially upsetting is just how flatly the whole thing is presented with Pamela’s sheer exasperation with the whole ordeal being palpable. This is in addition to erratic camera work that further sells the broadcast and panic being exhibited by everyone present as genuine.
As the show continues further details about the history of the house and the potential identity of Mr. Pipes are revealed such as the Early home being the former abode of a child murderer known as Mother Seddons who would drown babies in the house during Victorian times, as revealed by a purported caller to the show. Another caller offers an alternate explanation, stating that a “very disturbed man” called Raymond Tunstall had previously lived in the home.
The caller, who identifies as a social worker familiar with the case, explains how Raymond was a child molester that frequently spoke of a mysterious female presence that urged him to commit the heinous acts of abuse towards children he would ultimately be arrested for. Whether this female presence is the aforementioned Mother Seddons is never explicitly mentioned but that’s the jump viewers were likely expected to make in their own heads. Anyway, the caller further explains how Raymond hanged himself in the cupboard under the stairs and that his body was mutilated beyond recognition by his pet cats. Getting back to reality, this is why Ferrari was made up to look as though his face was slashed to hamburger meat and also as if his left eye had been violently gouged from his head. The cats did it.
As this is happening, the footage from the house shows the crew and the Early family becoming increasingly panicked to the point that the, up to this point, staid and professional Parkinson breaks character and urges his co host to remove the children from the home for their own safety. This doesn’t happen as both children display increasingly disturbing behaviour.
For example at one point Suzanne speaks with what appears to be the voice of a violently angry man and screams at everyone to leave and at another point, speaks as though in a trance but is only able to garble lines from well known nursery rhymes and children’s stories. Kim meanwhile scrambles away from the crew only to be found hiding in a corner babbling about how Mr. Pipes thought her stuffed rabbit had been bad and needed to be punished. At which point the camera turns to find said rabbit with its eyes gouged out.
While all this is happening the house displays evidence of an angry poltergeist being present. Things fly off the walls, doors slam and the sound of scratching and banging continues, being occasionally joined by the wailing or screeching of cats. At one point a crew member is even knocked unconscious by an unseen entity, collapsing in front of the camera with a bloody head wound as the feed cuts off. The last audible thing being heard, besides the commotion of course, being one of the children screaming that someone is hurting them.
As the studio scrambles to get the camera feed back Parkinson angrily tells the studio to stop taking calls as Pascoe, noticing a mysterious wind whipping about the set, tells him that they’ve inadvertently caused a seance and brought whatever entity is present into the studio and potentially just placed everyone watching at home at risk of similarly being attacked.
The feed then cuts to footage from outside the Early home showing that the emergency services have been called and are having trouble locating Greene, Suzanne and an unnamed cameraman. All of whom are still trapped in the home and footage shows are still being harassed by, well, whatever the hell is in the house.
The whole thing culminates in a screaming Greene barricading herself below the stairs with Suzanne as the sounds of whipping wind, screaming cats and thunderous banging can be heard. The feed abruptly cuts to show the same thing happening in the studio. The final thing the cameras show is Parkinson stumbling towards the camera in a trance like state mumbling childrens rhymes under his breath in a voice that isn’t his own.
Now with how wild the ending to the broadcast was you’d think that maybe people would have gotten that maybe the whole thing was an elaborate and well-produced work of fiction, especially considering that it aired on Halloween. But remember, the broadcast was played entirely straight and at no point besides the literal first few seconds, was the fact it was fictional ever acknowledged.
As a result a good number of people watching at home were fully convinced that what they’d just seen was genuine. How many is impossible to say with any certainty but we can make an educated guess based on the numbers that we do know.
For starters the broadcast had an estimated viewership of about 11 million people making it the 8th most watched thing on British television that week. Taking into account Britain’s population of about 57 million at the time, this means almost a fifth of British households watched part or all of the broadcast. Of this 11 million people an estimated 1 million called or attempted to call the BBC during the broadcast, which according to a commentary track of the broadcast created by the British Film Institute comprised mainly of –
“a mixture of complaints, praise and enquiries as to whether the show was real or not”
Exactly how this would break down isn’t elaborated upon but the wording would suggest that as many people called to complain or praise the broadcast as did just to ask about its veracity. Which would conservatively amount to a hundred thousand people or so.
One person we know for sure was convinced of its authenticity is Michael Parkinson’s own mother who, according to the presenter, was one of the thousands who called in to ask what was going on. He apparently hadn’t bothered to tell her about the fictitious nature of the program and she’d tuned in thinking he was presenting a genuine documentary and become worried when things in the studio turned, poltergeisty.
Perhaps the most affected though were children and many complaints came from parents who were annoyed, frustrated or angry at the BBC for scaring the everloving shit out of their kids. Ironically, this exact complaint was raised during the broadcast by one of the aforementioned staged calls, during which a distressed mother chastises Parkinson for upsetting her children. Adding that they’re watching the show in an apparent trance and that their father was injured when a glass table exploded, covering the walls in blood and also that all of the clocks in her home had mysteriously stopped at exactly 9:30 PM. In response a bemused Parkinson shrugs and tells the mother that her children should probably be in bed and not watching a show airing so late. Seemingly unbothered by details like the clocks stopping at the time the program began to air, her children being almost catatonic or her husband being injured.
And initially the response from the BBC and producers on the show was basically this, that the show was clearly a work of fiction and aired after the watershed (the time in the UK where it’s acceptable to air shows with more adult themes or content as it’s assumed young children will be asleep) so they didn’t have anything to apologise for. Also, it’s worth mentioning that like the staged call in the show, numerous people reported experiencing things that they credited to ghosts or the innumerable forces of darkness like clocks stopping or objects falling off of shelves. It’s impossible to verify any of these of course but according to the BBC they received a lot of calls from people making such claims, including one from a vicar chastising them for potentially allowing the devil into people’s homes.
The attitude at the BBC shifted when the Broadcasting Standards Commission weighed in and deemed that producers actually hadn’t done enough to establish the show as a work of fiction and that their insistence on the show being unsuitable for children fell kind of flat when one of the presenters, Sarah Greene, was explicitly known for their work on children’s television. With the BSC ruling, in part that –
“In Ghostwatch there was a deliberate attempt to cultivate a sense of menace.”
Drawing particular attention to the graphic and unsettling nature of some elements of the broadcast like a child being attacked on camera and repeated references to sensitive subjects like child abuse and baby murder. It was also revealed during this time that the BBC only had five operators working their phone lines during the broadcast of Ghostwatch so a good number of people calling never would have gotten the message about the show being fictional.
After this ruling producers quickly changed their tune and apologised while the BBC shelved the broadcast indefinitely and told staff to never talk about it ever again. Contrary to a popular rumour, Ghostwatch is neither banned nor all that hard to find, it can be bought on DVD, Blu-Ray and even found on streaming services like Shudder. Not to mention the countless gloriously low quality clips of it you can find on YouTube. However, Ghostwatch has never been broadcast in its entirety on British television since 1992, which is probably where the stories of it being banned stem from. Exactly why isn’t clear though the most common explanation is that BBC execs simply didn’t want to deal with any more controversy related to the broadcast and shelved it. At least in the UK as the BBC has re-aired Ghostwatch in other territories.
Back to the UK though and the aftermath of that initial airing, the newspapers of course had a field day with the broadcast, gleefully reporting on the scores of terrified children and adults left in its wake. Our favourite example of this undoubtedly being the story of a woman who sent the BBC a terse letter requesting that she be compensated for the price of a single pair of jeans because the broadcast had literally caused her husband to shit himself in fear.
Likewise there were reports of pregnant women going into labour, although to be fair we’re pretty sure that happens all the time regardless so…., and parents who had trouble getting their kids to sleep for weeks following the broadcast. The latter being something that was especially frustrating for parents because the noises described on the show, loud, random knocking from the walls at night, is very common in older British homes as they settle. Also, and we probably shouldn’t ignore this, the broadcast very specifically said that the malevolent entity on the show targeted children and was, in all likelihood, the vengeful spirit of a child molesting serial killer who themselves was possessed and influenced by the spirit of another child murderer.
As mentioned though, Ghostwatch has aired unedited in other territories and can now be easily obtained on DVD or viewed online which we recommend people do as the show’s notoriety results in one aspect of its production being overlooked. It being arguably one of the earliest modern found footage horror movies, predating the likes of The Blair Witch Project by almost a decade. In fact, it has long been rumoured that The Blair Witch Project was partially inspired by Ghostwatch and there are a number of similarities in tone, style and content between the two ideas. Most notably the commitment to the documentary style and use of unknown actors to sell the idea as real. Blair Witch director Eduardo Sánchez has denied any link between the two, stating that he only became aware of Ghostwatch after the release of his film. Oren Peli, the creator of the Paranormal Activity franchise meanwhile has directly listed Ghostwatch and writer Stephen Volk as an influence.
To be clear it’s by no means the first found footage movie with stuff like Cannibal Holocaust which purports to be real being released way back in 1980, but the actual look and style of Ghostwatch is curiously modern despite being over 3 decades old.
In addition Ghostwatch predates almost every single one of those crappy ghost hunting shows by well over a decade and features elements present in them to this day like the use of night vision cameras and temperature sensors to “detect” any paranormal presence. Again, something that is rarely acknowledged or noted in discussions of Ghostwatch in favour of talking about its notoriety or the fact it made a guy shit himself. Which admittedly is a pretty good hook and is why it’s how we’re ending this video.
Expand for References
‘Ghostwatch’: When the BBC Terrified the Nation with a (Fake) Haunted House Documentary
WHAT IS GHOSTWATCH?
Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtains – How TV Ruined Your Life – Video
Cult TV classic ‘Ghostwatch’ at 25: ‘our show made a man shit his pants’
Kim Newman on Ghostwatch
THE GHOSTS IN THE LIVING ROOM
Ghostwatch: The BBC spoof that duped a nation
How we made: BBC mockumentary Ghostwatch
The post That Time the BBC Made One of the Creepiest Broadcasts of All Time appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Lasting from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War was among the most dangerous periods in all of human history. For over four and half decades, the communist east and the capitalist west eyed each other suspiciously across the Iron Curtain, locked in a deadly game of nuclear brinksmanship known as Mutually-Assured Destruction or MAD. Maintaining this balance of terror involved a vast fleet of aircraft, submarines, and missiles, armed with enough nuclear firepower to annihilate human civilization dozens of times over. It was a complex and delicate system, one in which even a minor mishap could spell disaster. And while mercifully all-out nuclear war never broke out, the Cold War saw plenty of near-misses, with one of the worst and most controversial being a plane crash which threatened to destroy an entire Arctic ecosystem and strained diplomatic relations between two NATO members to the breaking point. This is the forgotten story of the 1968 Thule [“Tool-ay”] incident.
On October 4, 1957, history changed forever when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. While the beachball-sized craft did little more than transmit a series of beeps, its mere presence filled American military planners with existential dread. For the same rocket that carried Sputnik into orbit, the R-7 Semyorka, could also place a nuclear warhead anywhere in the continental United States within 30 minutes, wiping out the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal without warning. And unlike manned nuclear-armed bombers, such Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or ICBMs could not be intercepted or shot down, making them the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Almost overnight, the balance of the Cold War shifted firmly in the Soviets’ favour.
In response to this new threat, in 1958 General Thomas Power, commander of the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command or SAC, initiated a system of airborne alert in which a fleet of nuclear-armed Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers would be kept in the air at all times. This way, even if the rest of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was wiped out by a Soviet surprise attack, SAC could maintain second-strike capability. The largest of these operations, codenamed Chrome Dome, was launched in 1960. For nearly eight years, up to twelve B-52s taking off from eight SAC bases within the United States flew continuously along one of three long-range routes: one northwest around Alaska and Japan, one northwest over Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, and one east over the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. This brought the aircraft as close as possible to Soviet territory, allowing them to dash across the border and attack their designated targets the moment the order was given. These gruelling missions could last up to 24 hours – a feat made possible through the use of air-to-air refuelling by KC-135 tanker aircraft.
In August 1961, a fourth route was added to Chrome Dome known as Hard Head or Thule Monitor, which called for a single B-52 to orbit Baffin Bay and keep watch on the the U.S. Air Force Base at Thule, Greenland. Perched high above the Arctic Circle halfway between Washington, D.C. and Moscow, the island of Greenland – an autonomous Danish territory since 1814 – was of vital strategic importance to the United States – so much so that in 1946 the U.S. Government attempted to purchase it from Denmark. While the Danes refused the offer, as staunch NATO allies they nonetheless allowed the U.S. military to station aircraft on the island, resulting in the construction of Thule Air Force Base between 1951 and 1953. In 1958, Thule became home to the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System or BMEWS, a network of powerful radars and computers designed to provide early warning of a Soviet ballistic attack over the North Pole. In the eyes of North American Aerospace Defense or NORAD, the BMEWS radars at Thule would likely be the first site to be targeted by a Soviet surprise attack. The job of the Thule Monitor was thus to continuously confirm that the Air Base was still intact and whether any loss of communication was due to a Soviet attack or just regular technical difficulties – and for more on another bizarre incident involving this site, please check out our previous video That Time the Moon Nearly Started World War 3 (and Other Silly Cold War Shenanigans)
As can be imagined, so many nuclear-armed aircraft in the air 24 hours a day was a massive and complex task – and a dangerous one. Accidents could – and did – happen. The first major incident took place on January 17, 1966, when a Chrome Dome B-52G collided with a KC-135 tanker aircraft during a mid-air refuelling over the Mediterranean Sea. The tanker exploded, killing all four crew aboard, while four of the seven crew aboard the B-52 managed to eject safely. The bomber was carrying a standard load of four B28 thermonuclear gravity bombs, each with a yield of 1.1 megatons of TNT. Thermonuclear or “Hydrogen” bombs comprise two main sections: a conventional nuclear warhead called a primary and one or more secondary stages containing Lithium Deuteride fusion fuel. When the bomb is detonated, radiation from the primary converts the fusion fuel in the secondary stages into hydrogen and compresses it, fusing the hydrogen and releasing massive amounts of energy – and for more on these terrifying weapons, how they work, and how they were developed, please check out our previous video Who Invented the Hydrogen Bomb? One of the B28 bombs from the disintegrating bomber plunged into the Mediterranean, sinking in 780 metres of water, while the three others fell to earth near the small fishing village of Palomares, Spain. The conventional explosives in two of these weapons detonated on impact with the ground, vaporizing the plutonium cores and contaminating nearly 3 square kilometres of Spanish countryside. Thankfully, due to numerous built-in safeguards, this did not trigger a full-scale nuclear detonation. While the remains of these three bombs were quickly located and cleaned up, recovery of the fourth took considerably longer, the weapon finally being raised on April 7, 1966 after a two and a half month search by a fleet of nearly 30 U.S. Navy vessels – and if this sounds somewhat familiar, yes: the search for the lost Palomares bomb is a major plot point in the 2000 film Men of Honour starring Robert de Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr.
The 1966 Palomares crash dramatically revealed the extreme risks involved in Operation Chrome Dome. At the same time, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara pushed to cancel the operation altogether, arguing that the BMEWS radars and newer, more sophisticated ICBMs like the LGM-30 Minuteman made the scheme redundant. SAC and the Joint Chiefs of Staff vehemently opposed this suggestion, but eventually agreed to a scaled-down version of Chrome Dome which involved fewer aircraft but retained the Thule Monitor mission. Barely two years would pass before McNamara finally got his wish, thanks to another deadly accident whose fallout – both literal and political – dwarfed even that of the Palomares Incident.
Around noon on January 21, 1958, a B-52G of the 380th Strategic Bomb Wing with the callsign HOBO 28 took off from Plattsburgh Air Force Base, New York, and headed north to take up its station on the Thule Monitor route. Aboard were seven men: pilot and commander Captain John Haug; copilot Captain Leonard Svitenko; radar navigator Major Frank Hopkins; Electronic Warfare Officer or EWO Captain Richard Marx; gunner Staff Sergeant Calvin Snapp; substitute navigator Captain Curtis Criss; and mandatory third pilot Major Alfred D’Amario. Like the aircraft in the Palomares crash, HOBO 28 was armed with a standard load of four 1.1-megaton B28 thermonuclear gravity bombs.
The flight to Thule and the first air-to-air refuelling were uneventful, and at around 6PM local time HOBO 28 arrived on station and began flying a long, figure-eight shaped orbit along the length of Baffin Bay at an altitude of 10,600 metres. Though the cabin heaters were turned up to full blast, the crew soon grew uncomfortably cold. This prompted Major D’Amario, the spare pilot, to open an engine bleed valve, which vented hot air from the aircraft’s jet engines into the cabin heating ducts. Unfortunately, a malfunction caused this bleed air to barely cool before it entered the ducts, and over the next few minutes the cabin grew uncomfortably hot,. Then, at 6:22, Captain Marx, the Electronic Warfare Officer, reported smelling burned rubber. Searching around the cabin, the crew quickly discovered a small fire burning under the instructor navigator’s seat at the rear of the lower cabin deck. Shortly before takeoff, Major D’Amario had stuffed a number of cloth-covered foam-rubber cushions under this seat; unfortunately, it happened to sit directly over one of the cabin heating vents, and under the full blast of the hot bleed air from the engines, the cushions had ignited.
The cabin quickly filled with thick black smoke, prompting Captain Criss, the navigator, to open the celestial navigation astrodome in an attempt to clear the air. While the crew fought heroically to smother the flames with fire extinguishers, stowage bags, clothing, and other pieces of gear, the blaze soon spread out of control. Captain Haug alerted Thule of his situation and steered the aircraft towards the air base, hoping to make an emergency landing. But at 6:30 the fire burned through a bundle of cables, causing the bomber’s electrical system to fail. At 6:37, upon spotting the lights of Thule directly below, Haug ordered the crew to bail out. Of the seven men aboard, six managed to eject safely, while the seventh, co-pilot Svitenko, was on a rest break on the lower deck and not strapped into an ejection seat. He attempted to bail out through a lower escape hatch but struck his head on the way out, suffering fatal injuries.
The now-pilotless aircraft kept flying northwards before making a 180 degree turn and plummeting earthward. At 6:39 it slammed into the sea ice covering North Star Bay at a speed of 900 kilometres per hour, the 102 tonnes of jet fuel aboard erupting into a massive fireball. As in the Palomares crash, the conventional explosives in the hydrogen bombs detonated on impact, scattering Plutonium across the ice – though once again no nuclear detonation was triggered.
Thanks to Captain Haug’s airmanship, all but two of HOBO 28’s crew landed within 3 kilometres of the Air Base. Haug and D’Amario actually landed among the buildings of the base itself, and informed base vice commander Colonel Paul Copher of the crash within minutes of each other. All available personnel and even the Base’s fleet of taxis was mustered to search for and rescue the other airmen. However, the combination of winter darkness, rough ice conditions, and -30 degree temperatures made this an exceedingly difficult task. Colonel Copher thus turned to Jens Zinglersen, the local representative of the Royal Greenland Trade Department, who organized teams of local Greenland Inuit to search the ice using dogsleds. In this manner, three of the surviving airmen were rescued within two hours of the crash while the body of Captain Svitenko was discovered after eight hours. The last man, gunner Staff Sergeant Snapp, had landed nearly ten kilometres south of Thule. He wrapped himself in his parachute and spent a very uncomfortable night on an ice floe before finally being rescued 21 hours later, alive but suffering from hypothermia. For his actions, Zinglersen was later awarded the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal.
Meanwhile, over the following nineteen hours helicopters from the 54th Air Rescue and Recovery Squadron flew nine sorties over North Star Bay to survey the crash site. Debris was strewn over an area of nearly seventy-five square kilometres, while smoke from the burning jet fuel had blackened an area of ice stretching one kilometre downwind of the impact area, heavily contaminating it with jet fuel and pulverized plutonium and uranium from the hydrogen bombs. Spotting none of the larger pieces which usually survive plane crashes – such as the tail and wingtips – observers initially reported that the aircraft had broken through the ice and sunk to the bottom of the bay.
Within hours of the crash, the incident was reported to civilian and military authorities in the United States and officially declared a Broken Arrow – U.S. military terminology for a major incident involving nuclear weapons but which carries no risk of triggering a nuclear war. Other related terms include Bent Spear – a minor incident involving nuclear weapons or materials; Empty Quiver – the loss or theft of a functional nuclear weapon; Nucflash – the accidental, unauthorized, or unexplained deployment or detonation of a nuclear weapon; and Dull Sword – a minor incident which impairs the function or deployment of nuclear weapons. But apart from the loss of one airman and four nuclear weapons and the massive environmental hazard posed by the toxic and radioactive materials scattered across the ice, the Thule crash was also a major diplomatic disaster. Since 1957, Denmark had maintained a nuclear-free policy outlawing nuclear weapons on all Danish territory – including Greenland. However, the United States Air Force concluded internally that the Chrome Dome overflights were permitted under the 1951 U.S.-Danish defence agreement, even though this agreement did not mention nuclear weapons. And while the Danes were not informed of the Greenland overflight and Thule Monitor missions, they were aware that the U.S. Air Force operated nuclear-armed bombers in the general area. Indeed, in the years leading up to the 1968 crash, several Chrome Dome B-52s had made forced landings at Thule, though given the emergency nature of these events they were not considered violations of Denmark’s nuclear-free policy. The timing of the Thule crash was particularly unfortunate, coming only 48 hours before a Danish national election. Wishing to avoid an international scandal, the U.S. Embassy in Denmark urged the Air Force:
“… to stress that [the] crashed plane was ‘diverted’ to Thule and not on [a] ‘routine flight to Thule’.”
This would remain the official narrative of the event for nearly two decades.
Four days after the crash, a meeting was convened between U.S. and Danish officials and technical experts to assess the situation and develop a decontamination plan. Those in attendance included Dr. Wright Langham, Biomedical Research Leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory; Dr. H.D. Bruner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Biology and Medicine; Professors Jürgen Koch and Otto Kofoed-Hensen, physicists from the University of Copenhagen; H.L. Gjorup, a health physicist from the Danish Atomic Research Establishment; and Dr. Per Grende, director of the Radiation Hygiene Laboratory at the Danish National Health Service.
Eager to place responsibility squarely on the Americans, the Danish delegation was initially bullish in their demands, insisting that not a single piece of debris should be thrown or allowed to fall into North Star Bay, that every square centimetre of contaminated ice and snow be removed and transported to the United States, and, according to U.S. delegation member Colonel Jack C. Fitzpatrick:
“…for us to promote to do a long term (many years) ecological study in which they could participate – this would be of academic scientific interest but is not at all necessary nor indicated and was not mentioned at all by our group.”
However, as more data became available about the crash site, the Danes gradually relaxed their stance. For example, core samples revealed that nearly all the uranium and plutonium from the hydrogen bombs was securely frozen within the crust of blackened ice and did not pose an inhalation or ingestion hazard. It was also determined that the aircraft had not, in fact, gone through the ice; rather, the sheer force of the impact along with the detonation of the onboard ordnance had all but obliterated the airframe, leaving few large pieces of debris aside from the engines and landing gear wheels. The Danes thus agreed to a scaled-down decontamination whereby only the ice at the impact site down to the water and the black crust on the remaining ice would be removed. It was estimated that this would recover up to 90% of the contamination. The rest would be allowed to melt and enter the Bay, where dilution in nearly 50 cubic kilometres of water would bring concentrations down below acceptable levels for drinkability. The Americans also agreed to a smaller-scale environmental monitoring project, focusing on keystone species like plankton, mussels, little auk, and seals.
The delegates also had to decide what to do with the hundreds of tons of contaminated snow and ice that would be collected in the cleanup operation. The initial plan called for it to be melted, the contaminants filtered out, and the decontaminated water returned to the environment, but this was rejected as too expensive. Instead, the Americans proposed storing the contaminated water in oil drums and burying them in permafrost just outside the base. This, too, was rejected – this time by the Danes – so a compromise was reached whereby the drums would be temporarily stored at Thule and gradually transported back to the United States for disposal.
With an agreement hammered out, the enormous task of decontaminating the crash site could finally begin. The operation, officially codenamed Project Crested Ice but nicknamed “Dr. Freezelove” was placed under the command of USAF General Richard Hunziker. A large base of operations dubbed Camp Hunziker was built next to the crash site, with dormitory huts, radio communications facilities, latrines, generators, and a heliport. In addition to nearly 700 military and civilian personnel, large numbers of Greenland Inuit were also recruited. They not only participated in the cleanup operations themselves but also constructed igloos at Camp Hunziker and provided dog sled transport to and from the crash site until a pair of ice roads could be completed. As General Hunziker later remarked:
“…one of man’s most technically complex endeavours had gone astray and that recovery from its effects must depend upon the most primitive of methods.”
This infrastructure allowed for 24-hour operations – a vital capability as the rapidly-approached spring thaw threatened to release the trapped contaminants into the bay.
Four days after the crash, a “zero line” was established around the crash site outside of which no significant radioactive contamination could be detected. This was used throughout the operation as a decontamination checkpoint; all men and vehicles crossing the line were decontaminated by scrubbing them down with water or by removing their protective clothing, which was then packed into containers for disposal. Biological uptake of radioactive material was also monitored via nose swabs and urine samples, though according to official reports none showed plutonium contamination above acceptable levels. However, many personnel who participated in Project Crested Ice later claimed that few such precautions were taken, and that they suffered lifelong health issues as a result- but more on that later.
Phase I of the operation – removal of all debris not embedded in the ice – was underway by mid-February and was completed within a month, whereupon Phase II – removal of contaminated snow and ice – began. Graders and other heavy equipment was used to scrape off the top blackened layer of ice and dump it into wooden boxes, which were then transported to a special area of Thule Air Base known as the “tank farm”. Here, the contaminated material was transferred into more robust metal containers for temporary storage and eventual transportation back to the United States. Clear weather allowed for speedy progress, but perpetual winter darkness, temperatures as low as -40 degrees Celsius and high winds of up to 40 kilometres per hour caused endless problems, including constant breakdowns of heavy equipment and radiation monitoring instruments. Indeed, one of the three daily work shifts had to be devoted entirely to keeping this equipment up and running. Yet despite these challenges, Operation Crested Ice succeeded in collecting more than 400 cubic metres of contaminated snow and ice, which were packed into 11 large fuel tanks, 14 engine containers, and 163 50-gallon fuel drums. These and the collected aircraft debris were gradually shipped back to the United States, with most of the contaminated water being sent to the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina for permanent storage and the recovered hydrogen bomb components to the Pantex nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility near Amarillo,Texas. According to contemporary estimates, this material accounted for nearly 93% of the total contamination at the site – even better than the operation planners had hoped for.
But among that unrecovered 7% was a very important – and sensitive – piece of material. Within weeks of Operation Crested Ice getting underway, it became clear that the bomb debris recovered from the crash site accounted for only 3 of the 4 weapons aboard HOBO 28. The fourth, it appeared, had melted through the ice and lay somewhere at the bottom of North Star Bay. In August, the Air Force sent a recovery ship carrying a General Dynamics Star III submersible to search for the missing bomb. Due to top-secret nature of the weapon’s design, the purpose of the search mission was not disclosed to the Danish government, with an internal USAF memo from July 1966 stating that:
“Fact that this operation includes search for object or missing weapon part is to be treated as confidential NOFORN [no disclosure to foreign governments]…For discussion with Danes, this operation should be referred to as a survey repeat survey of bottom under impact point.”
Unfortunately, the search was plagued by technical difficulties and eventually abandoned, with William Chambers, a former nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos later explaining that:
“There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components … it would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn’t find them.”
Officially, the United States Air Force maintained that all four bombs had been completely destroyed, and that no major components had sunk intact to the seafloor.
Project Crested Ice officially ended on September 13 when the last container of contaminated water from the crash site was loaded on a ship bound for the United States. All told, the operation is estimated to have cost $9.4 million – around $82 million in today’s money. Among the stranger items on the bill were the number of polar bear skins to replace traditional Inuit pants contaminated in the cleanup.
While many of the major effects of the Thule Incident took decades to emerge, others were more immediate. The day after the crash, Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered all nuclear weapons removed from airborne alert flights, effectively bringing Operation Chrome Dome to an end. And while unarmed alert missions continued to be flown for several years, in a bid to placate the Danish government SAC B-52 crews were instructed to avoid Greenland airspace.
The Thule Crash revealed to military planners a disturbing possibility which had not previously been considered: if HOBO 28 had crashed into the BMEWS radar antennas instead of the sea ice, the sudden loss of communications from both the aircraft and Thule Air Base would have been indistinguishable from the effects of a Soviet first strike, potentially triggering a nuclear exchange. To help avoid this possibility, on September 30, 1971 the United States and Soviet Union signed the Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Risk of Nuclear War, in which each side agreed to inform the other of any similar incidents involving nuclear weapons. In support of this agreement, much-needed upgrades were made to the Moscow-Washington Hotline – and for more on this legendary and often misunderstood system, please check out our previous video Did the US President Ever Actually Have a ‘Big Red Phone’ Connected Directly to Moscow?A satellite communications link was also installed at Thule in 1974 to supplement its unreliable submarine cable link to the mainland. Finally, the Thule Crash revealed that the explosives used in nuclear weapons were not chemically stable enough to survive a plane crash, prompting a massive redesign of the United States nuclear arsenal.
While at the time the Thule Crash triggered significant public outrage in Denmark, the U.S. response was sufficiently swift and thorough that friendly relations between the two nations were preserved and the incident soon faded from memory. But rumours of a cover-up continued to circulate, and nearly two decades later in 1987 the Danish press revealed for the first time that not all the bombs aboard HOBO 28 had been fully accounted for, and that parts of one might still lie at the bottom of North Star Bay. In response, Danish officials and scientific experts, including University of Copenhagen physicist Otto Kofoed-Hensen, repeated the official narrative that all four bombs had been completely obliterated in the crash. At the same time, however, the Danish parliament commissioned the Danish Institute of International Affairs or DUPI to conduct a more detailed investigation. The Institute’s report, released in 1995, was a political bombshell, revealing not only that HOBO-28’s incursion into Greenland airspace had been routine and not an anomalous diversion, but that the Danish government had been fully aware of the Thule Monitor and other Chrome Dome missions. The report blamed then-Danish Prime Minister Hans Christian Hansen, who in a 1957 meeting with U.S. Ambassador Val Peterson over the construction of the BMEWS radar, failed to explicitly mention Denmark’s nuclear-free policy, effectively giving the United States tacit permission to deploy nuclear weapons on Greenland.
Shortly after the report’s publication, Danish Foreign Minister Niels Petersen reassured the Danish press that while nuclear weapons had been flown through Greenland airspace, none had ever been deployed on the island itself. However, a few days later Petersen received a letter from the U.S. government informing him that this was not the case, and that nuclear weapons had, in fact, been stationed at Thule. Faced with a major political scandal, the Danish government took the unusual step of admitting guilt and allowing access to hundreds of previously-classified documents in the Danish National Archives. These documents confirmed that nuclear weapons had indeed been deployed at Thule on two separate occasions: the first in 1958 when two airborne alert weapons and 15 non-nuclear weapon components were stored on the base for eight months; and the second between 1959 and 1965 when 48 nuclear-armed AIM-4 Falcon air-to-air missiles were deployed for defence against Soviet strategic bombers. This revelation that the Danish government had knowingly pursued two contradictory national policies regarding nuclear weapons eroded the Danish people’s trust in their democratic institutions, triggering a political scandal known as – naturally – “Thulegate.”
At the same time, however, the DUPI report concluded that, just as American and Danish experts had long maintained, no large, intact bomb components had survived the crash and sunk to the bottom of North Star Bay, famously declaring that:
“There is no bomb, there was no bomb and the Americans were not looking for a bomb. No nuclear weapons have been left on the bottom of the sea in Thule, nor was any secondary left.”
Rather, the Star III submersible deployed in August 1968 was only searching for the “spark plug” – a cylindrical rod of uranium at the centre of the bomb’s secondary capsule which helps initiate the fusion reaction.
But what of the greatest potential legacy of the Thule Crash: its environmental impact? Samples taken over the intervening six decades have revealed measurably increased levels of plutonium as far as 20 kilometres from the impact site, while the bodies of marine animals such as mussels, fish, birds, and seals have exhibited plutonium concentrations as high as 3000x normal levels. However, according to current models, even these elevated levels likely pose little threat to the environment – and to learn more about the horrifying way we discovered how much plutonium is too much, please check out our previous video That Time US Scientists Injected Plutonium Into People Without Their Knowledge.
But the human cost of the Thule Crash may be far greater – though more difficult to measure. While official records claim that every measure was taken to limit exposure to toxic and radioactive contaminants, many personnel who participated in the cleanup remember differently, with Jeffrey Carswell recalling:
“I was never given any protective equipment; I just went out in whatever you normally wore at work. You had this special team with the airmen in full protective equipment climbing on top of these 50,000 gallon drums and containers and I was down there, on a daily basis, (with) no protective equipment.”
Like many of the workers, Carswell later developed various mysterious illnesses:
“I was referred to a specialist and they discovered I had a particular condition that needed to be operated [on] straight away…My doctor said that my particular condition was caused by exposure to radiation and plutonium.As we found out when we started talking to colleagues, a lot of those of us who were there at the time had problems of various types, all sorts of shocking problems that is, for sure, linked to what happened at Thule.”
Indeed, in 1986 Danish prime Minister Poul Schlüter commissioned the Danish Institute for Clinical Epidemiology to conduct a health impact study of Danish decontamination workers at Thule. The Institute’s final report, released one year later, concluded that cancer rates among these workers was 40% higher than those who had visited Thule before and after the crash, and 50% higher than the general Danish population. While the Institute could not definitively link these cancers to radiation exposure at Thule, these findings prompted 200 former cleanup workers to sue the United States government for damages in 1987. While the lawsuit was ultimately unsuccessful, it did lead the government to declassify thousands of documents, triggering a chain of revelations that would eventually lead to Thulegate. It also prompted the various branches of the United States Military to carry out regular health monitoring of personnel who come into contact with radioactive material.
In 1995, another study found that of 1,500 former Thule cleanup workers sampled, 410 had died of cancer. In response, the Danish government paid 1,700 workers compensation of 50,000 kroner – around $7,000 American – each. However, all subsequent attempts to obtain compensation from the Danish government have failed, with a 2011 report by the Danish Board of Health concluding that:
“…the total radiation dose for representative persons in the Thule area for plutonium contamination resulting from the 1968 Thule accident is lower than the recommended reference level, even under extreme conditions and situations.”
But the workers and their representatives are not convinced, with Jens Zieglersen, head of the Association of Former Thule Workers, stating:
“I think it’s a cover-up. We are getting older and the Danish authorities and the Danish government will wait and keep their mouths sealed for another 15, 20 years; then there’s no-one left that remembers and who was a part of the accident back in the days of ’68.”
But perhaps the worst-affected by the 1968 Thule Crash were the Greenland Inuit who live around the Air Base, and who rendered such valuable service during the cleanup operations. Despite the claims of the Danish and American governments, the Inuit have noticed higher rates of cancers and other radiation-related illnesses among their people and the animals they subsist on, with local hunter Ussaaqqak Qujaukitsoq stating:
“There were two times when I hunted, when the seal’s insides were dried out. Something must have happened to them…If we think about the walruses and the other birds that have eating grounds on the bottom of the ocean, we will see the impact of it.”
Sadly, this is but one of many injustices the Greenland Inuit have suffered at the hands of the United States and Danish governments, who in 1957 displaced two of their villages 100 kilometres in order to make way for Thule Air Base – today known as Pituffik Space Base. Due to its strategic location, Pituffik remains as vital as ever to North American Aerospace Defense, with the original BMEWS radars being replaced in 2001 with a far more sophisticated, $40 million AN/FPS-132 Solid State Phased Radar Array System or SSPARS. Though the 1968 Thule Crash was one of the worst nuclear weapons accidents in history in terms of long-term environmental, health, and political impacts, it was far from the only one.
As covered in our previous videos That Time the Moon Nearly Started World War 3 (and Other Silly Cold War Shenanigans), When Dropping a Wrench Almost Cause Armageddon, as well as Did a Scientific Experiment Really Nearly Start WWIII in 1995? over on our sister channel Highlight History, the tense, highly-complex environment of Cold War nuclear brinksmanship resulted in dozens of perilous accidents and near-misses that brought the world within a hair’s breadth of total disaster. It’s a wonder we survived the 20th Century at all.
Expand for ReferencesJanuary 21, 1968 – Thule, Greenland, The Broken Arrow Project, https://scalar.usc.edu/works/brokenarrowproject/1968—thule-greenland
Vanderklippe, Nathan, The Crash, the Inuit, and the Bomb, Up Here, October/November 2012, https://www.uphere.ca/articles/crash-inuit-and-bomb
Jorgensen, Timothy, 50 Years Ago: Thule Incident, EarthSky, January 21, 2018, https://earthsky.org/earth/thule-jan1968-us-bomber-crash-greenland/
Operation Crested Ice, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, https://st.llnl.gov/news/look-back/operation-crested-ice
Project Crested Ice: the Thule Nuclear Accident, History & Research Division, Headquarters Strategic Air Command, Aril 23, 1969, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb267/03.pdf
Christensen, Svend, The Marshal’s Baton: There Is No Bomb, There Was No Bomb, They Were Not Looking for a Bomb, Danish Institute for International Studies, 2009, https://www.diis.dk/files/media/publications/2009/diis_rp_2009-18.pdf
Hancock, W., AEC Observers’ Interim Report of Thule Accident, Atomic Energy Commission, February 26, 1968, https://web.archive.org/web/20081218233558/http://www.thulesagen.dk/thuledoc/0106883.pdf
Corera, Gordon, Mystery of Lost U.S. Bomb, BBC News, November 10, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7720049.stm
Corera, Gordon, Radioactive Legacy of “Lost Bomb”, BBC News, November 10, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7720466.stm
Denmark’s Thulegate: U.S. Nuclear Operations in Greenland, The Nuclear Information Project, http://www.nukestrat.com/dk/gr.htm
Kristensen, Hans, Secrecy on a Sliding Scale: U.S. Nuclear Weapons Deployments and Danish Non-Nuclear Policy, https://web.archive.org/web/20071030090330/http://www.nautilus.org/archives/nukepolicy/Denmark/index.html
The post Fire, Ice, and Plutonium appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On September 1, 1939, 66 infantry divisions, 2,750 tanks, and 1,315 aircraft of the German Wehrmacht thundered across Germany’s eastern border into neighbouring Poland, plunging Europe into the Second World War. Two weeks later on September 17, the Soviet Red Army followed suit, invading Poland from the east with 33 divisions. The Polish armed forces, brave but outnumbered and outgunned, could do little to resist the savage two-front onslaught. In the wake of the advancing Wehrmacht troops and tanks followed the Einsatzgruppen or “task forces” – special SS death squads tasked with rounding up and executing priests, politicians, and other members of the Polish intelligentsia who might resist the occupation; as well as Jews, Romani, and the mentally ill, whom Nazi ideology deemed to be untermenschen or “subhuman.” The Polish government capitulated on October 6, and by the end of 1939 the occupying Germans and Soviets had murdered nearly 80,000 Poles. Millions more would follow over the next five years. Yet amidst this orgy of murder and destruction, Major Ernst Bloch, an agent of the Abwehr or German Army Intelligence Service, was dispatched on a seemingly unthinkable mission: to locate and rescue Rabbi Yosef Schneerson, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe – one of the most beloved and influential Jewish thinkers and leaders in modern history. This is the unlikely forgotten story of how the Nazis saved a major Jewish figure from the jaws of their own genocide.
The Hasidic Jewish movement of Chabad [“Ha-bad”, with a fricative on the H] was founded in 1775 by rabbi Schneur Zalman in the Russian village of Liozno – now Liozna in Belarus. Named after the combination of the words Chokmah, Binah, and Da’at – Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge – Chabad was heavily based upon Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism and emphasized such concepts as intellectual inquiry being the gateway to understanding God and the idea that people are not inherently good or evil but rather face a continuous inner struggle between these two extremes. In 1796, Rabbi Zalman published the Tanya, the foundational text of Chabad. Today, the movement preaches 10 basic Mitzvahs or commandments: Ahavas Yisroel, or the love of one’s fellow Jew; Chinuch or Torah Education; Torah Study; the donning of Tefillin – leather boxes containing Jewish texts wrapped around the left arm and head during weekday morning services; the affixing of a mezuzah or scriptural scroll on the doorpost of a house; observing Tzedakah or the giving of alms every weekday; the possession of Jewish holy books; the lighting of Shabbat and festival candles; the following of Kashrut or Jewish dietary laws; and the following of Taharas Hamishpocho or the Torah perspective on married life.
In 1813, Rebbe Zalman’s successor, Dovber Schneuri, moved the seat of the movement to the village of Lyubavitchi in Smolensk Oblast, where he established a long-lived dynasty of Rebbes. In 1915, the fifth Rebbe, Shalom Dovber, left Lyubavitchi and relocated the movement – now commonly known as Chabad-Lubavitch – to the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
Rabbi Dovber’s only son, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, was born in Lyubavichi on June 21, 1880. From an early age, Yosef was groomed to become the next Lubavitcher Rebbe, being appointed his father’s personal secretary at age 15 and attending numerous rabbinical conferences in Kovno and Vilna – today Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania – to discuss various issues affecting Jews across the Russian Empire. In 1897 he married Nechama Schneerson, great-grand-daughter of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Tzemach Tzedek or third Rebbe, in 1898 he was appointed executive director of the Teshivah Tomchei Tmimim talmudic seminary, founded by his father the previous year. Throughout his long career, Schneerson proved himself a brilliant religious scholar, a skilled civic organizer, and a staunch advocate for the rights and welfare of Russian Jews, who were often persecuted by the Tsarist and later Bolshevik governments. In 1901 he worked with various business leaders across the Russian Empire to establish textile factories in the cities of Dubrovna and Mahilyow which ultimately employed some 2,000 Jewish employees, while during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese war he arranged the shipment of kosher food to Jewish conscripts serving in the Russian army. Meanwhile, he petitioned government officials and bankers in various European countries to use their influence to end pogroms or antisemitic riots in Russia. For these activities he was arrested four times by the Tsarist government, but released every time due to lack of evidence.
Schneerson’s activism only increased following the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the Jewish community found itself in opposition to the official Bolshevik policy of State Atheism. This policy, which sought the eradication of all religion across the Soviet Union and the world, was overseen by a special branch of the Communist Party known as the Yevsektzia. Throughout the 1920s, Schneerson established a network of underground yeshivot or traditional religious schools across Russia in order to preserve Jewish culture. Then, upon the death of his father on March 21, 1920, he assumed the title of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe.
In 1924, the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, forced Schneerson to leave Rostov-on-Don and relocate to Leningrad – today Saint Petersburg. There he continued his underground activities, dispatching Chabad representatives and founding seminaries across the Soviet Union to strengthen Jewish communities. But on March 21, 1927, as Schneerson was observing the yahrzeit or anniversary of his father’s death, three Cheka agents burst into his synagogue to arrest him. According to legend, Schneerson responded to the armed men by saying:
“This little toy [your gun] has made many a man change his mind. That little toy can intimidate only the kind of man who has many gods-passions, and but one world-this world. Because I have only one God and two worlds, I am not impressed by your little toy.”
Schneerson was imprisoned in Leningrad’s infamous Shpalerna Prison, and following a show trial was convicted of counter-revolutionary activities and sentenced to death. Thankfully, following protests from Western governments and the International Red Cross, his sentence was commuted to three years’ exile to the city of Kostroma and then banishment to Riga in Latvia. There he established another Talmudic seminary and organized the state-controlled factory production of Matzah or unleavened bread for the celebration of Passover. Today, Rebbe Schneerson’s release from Soviet prison is celebrated annually by the Chabad-Lubavitch community
In 1929, Schneerson visited the Holy Land – then in the British Mandate of Palestine – before travelling to the United States, arriving in New York City on September 17th aboard the ocean liner SS France. Some 600 followers gathered at the docks to meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe, while 100 New York City Police officers were assigned as his security detail. During his eight-month visit, Schneerson travelled to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Washington D.C., where he met with President Herbert Hoover – among several world leaders who had petitioned for his release. Schneerson’s goal was to spread awareness of the plight of Russian Jewry, who due to Soviet policy were easily censored and forbidden to leave the country. Due to this dangerous political climate, Schneerson’s American followers urged him to remain in in the United States, but he refused, the newspaper The Jewish Record reporting that:
“A movement has begun among Chabad Chassidim to have the Lubavitcher Rebbe remain in America. A committee was organized under the name of “Agudas Chassidei Chabad,” in which are represented all of the Chabad shuls of Chicago. The committee will develop plans that will enable the fulfillment of this wish, for the Rebbe to stay in America…The committee, under the leadership of Rabbi [Chaim Tzvi] Rubenstein, presented their wish to the Rebbe. While the Rebbe hasn’t yet given a positive response, he stated clearly that he cannot even begin to consider their plan, unless it would be understood that his coming [to America] would also mean the establishment of a Yeshivah Tomchei Temimim in whichever community he would choose to reside.”
At the time, the establishment of a traditional Yeshiva in the United States was not a popular one, with American Jews viewing such establishments as outdated holdovers from the Old Country incompatible with progressive American values. As a result, Schneerson dismissed the United States as too irreligious and returned to Riga, where he remained until 1934 when he again relocated to Otwock, a suburb of Warsaw. Then, in September 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and this is where our story finally begins.
Initially, Schneerson refused to leave Otwock, remaining to tend to his community as best he could. But once it became clear that the Polish Army could not hold out much longer, Mordecai Dubin, a Chabad follower and member of the Latvian parliament, arranged for Schneerson and his family to settle in Riga. However, to reach the Latvian capital the Rebbe would have to reach Warsaw and catch a train north – a perilous 60 kilometre journey along a road frequently bombed and strafed by Luftwaffe aircraft. Nonetheless, the now 59-year-old Rebbe, overweight and suffering from multiple sclerosis, left Ostwock along with his family and a group of devoted followers – only to find the Warsaw Train Station destroyed. They were thus forced to seek refuge among Chabad followers in the Warsaw Ghetto while day after day German aircraft systematically flattened the city’s Jewish neighbourhoods. It seemed only a matter of time before Schneerson and his family were either killed or arrested.
But across the Atlantic, an unlikely rescue was being organized. Though at the time the Chabad movement in America was small, a small group of followers led by Brooklyn rabbi Israel Jacobson managed to hire Washington lobbyist Max Rhoade to petition for the Rebbe’s relocation to the United States. Rhoade contacted dozens of politicians including Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis; Sol Bloom, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives; and New York Senator Robert Wagner, who on September 22 sent a telegram to U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull informing him that:
“Prominent New York citizens concerned about whereabouts of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, … present location unknown.”
Four days later, Mordecai Dubin in Riga telegrammed Rabbi Jacobson, describing his failed rescue attempt and urging him to:
“Save lives. Rabbi and family. Try every way. Every hour more dangerous. Answer daily what accomplished.”
Rhoade’s lobbying campaign quickly picked up steam, with Phillip Rosen, head of the American Jewish Joint Committee’s European office writing to the U.S. representative in Riga:
“Greatly interested world famous rabbi Schneersohn … now Muranowska 32 Warsaw. Urge your doing utmost to effect his protection and removal to Riga …”
And on September 29, New York attorney Arthur Rabinowitz wrote Justice Brandeis requesting:
“… any aid you can render possibly through Ben Cohen … feel justified in troubling you by extreme danger to Schneersohn’s life and his great moral worth to world Jewry.”
Benjamin Cohen was a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s so-called “Brain Trust” and the author of several major pieces of New Deal legislation. As a former counsel for the American Zionist Counsel, Cohen was a staunch defender of the welfare of Jews around the world. Yet despite mounting pressure from within his administration, President Roosevelt, then running for a third term, was reluctant to intervene in the rapidly-escalating European war. At the time, isolationist and anti-semitic sentiment in the United States was at an all-time high, stoked by such figures as legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh and Catholic preacher and broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin. But Max Rhoade persisted, and by doggedly badgering figures such as Brandeis, Cohen, and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., he finally succeeded in convincing the Roosevelt Administration to intervene on Rebbe Schneerson’s behalf – if only to throw the American Jewish community a bone and keep them quiet.
Luckily, while the American government had little interest in helping European Jewry, the government of the Third Reich had a keen interest in maintaining good diplomatic relations with the United States and keeping them out of the war. Benjamin Cohen thus contacted diplomat Robert Pell, whom he knew to be friends with German diplomat Helmut Wohlthat, head of Germany’s four-year economic plan. As Cohen suspected, Pell confirmed that Wohlthat was willing to cooperate, seeing the rescue of Rebbe Schneerson as a small price to pay for continued good relations. Pell conveyed this message to Secretary of State Hull, who telegrammed Wohlthat at the U.S. consul in Berlin to approve the extraction of the Rebbe from occupied Poland.
There was just one problem: Poland was under military and not civilian administration. Wohlthat thus appealed to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr or German Army Intelligence Service. Secretly opposed to Nazi ideology, throughout the war Canaris committed numerous acts of internal sabotage and resistance against the regime, including passing vital intelligence to the Allies, helping 500 Jews escape the Netherlands in 1941, engineering the continued neutrality of Francoist Spain, and participating in the unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944. Canaris was eventually arrested on July 23, 1944, convicted of treason, and executed by hanging at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp on April 9, 1945.
To rescue the Rebbe, Canaris selected Major Ernst Bloch, a highly decorated Abwehr operative. A veteran of the First World War, in the interwar period Bloch served in a commercial branch of military intelligence that spied on visiting businessmen. He was also half-jewish on his father’s side – what in the pseudoscientific Nazi racial hierarchy was known as a mischlinge or “half-breed.” Despite their precarious position within Nazi society, more than 60,000 half-jews (AKA mischlinge first grade) and 90,000 quarter-jews (mischlinge second grade) served in the armed forces of the Third Reich. These included high-ranking officials such as Field Marshal Erhard Milch, head of the Reich Air Ministry or RLM, and amusingly, certain individuals used by the Reich Propaganda Ministry as examples of “ideal Aryans”. However, many important mischlinge like Milch or Bloch were granted official “German Blood Certificates” confirming them to be true Aryans or simply had their Jewish heritage conveniently ignored.
According to Bryan Mark Rigg, author of the 2006 book Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Admiral Canaris laid out Bloch’s improbable mission in stark terms:
“You’re going to go up to Warsaw and you’re going to find the most ultra-Jewish Rabbi in the world, Rabbi Yoseph Yitzchak Schneersohn, and you’re going to rescue him. You can’t miss him, he looks just like Moses.”
Despite his background, Bloch was a fully assimilated Christian and had little affinity towards the Jewish community. Yet he followed his orders dutifully and dispassionately. Along with two assistants, Unterfeldwebel or Sergeant Klaus Schenk and Grefreiter or PrivateJohannes Hamburger, he travelled to Warsaw and began searching the city’s enormous Jewish Ghetto for Rebbe Schneerson. According to Bryan Rigg, it proved a difficult task:
“He would go up to ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews, wearing a Nazi uniform with swastikas, and say, ‘I’m looking for the Rebbe.’ And they’d say to him, ‘Yeah, and we want to shave off our beards and join the German army.’ Then they would walk away.”
In late October, Bloch was provided with the Rebbe’s last known address, Bonifraterska 29, only to discover that the building had been destroyed. This information was passed on to Max Rhoade back in New York City, who on November 14 sent a telegram to the International Red Cross in Geneva informing them that:
“German military officer detailed to locate Rabbi Joseph Issac Schneersohn … Schneersohn not apprised officer’s mission. Hope you can devise method of communicating information to Schneerson … detailing of German officer done at request of Schneersohn’s friends … urgent … take advantage opportunity.”
The Red Cross duly dispatched a messenger to Warsaw with a telegram guaranteeing safe passage to Riga for Schneerson and his family and instructing the Rebbe to immediately turn himself in to the Gestapo. The messenger eventually succeeded in locating Schneerson, who had been hiding out in the Warsaw Ghetto under miserable conditions and was in failing health. Reluctantly, Schneerson contacted Major Bloch, who soon arrived at the Rebbe’s hideout. As Schneerson’s grandson Shemaryahu Gurary later recalled:
“It was so overwhelming. As soon as we got to the door they rushed right in. There was primarily one guy, and he used every dialect of German that you could think of. During the time the soldiers were there my grandfather was calm and composed on the outside. He was a sick man and it got to him after a while. He was a very strong personality, but not very strong physically. He was exhausted.”
But Schneerson was far from safe. The Schutzstaffel or SS, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, intensely distrusted Admiral Canaris and the Abwehr, and sought out any excuse to discredit and dismantle the organization. Bloch thus faced the daunting task of smuggling Rebbe Schneerson and his entourage out of Warsaw without under the noses of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD – the SS Security Service run by the notorious Reinhard Heydrich. This was made especially difficult by the fact that Schneerson and his entourage refused to shave their beards or remove their traditional clothing. Bloch thus decided to take his 19 charges to Berlin to throw the SD off the scent, passing them off as political prisoners. As Shemaryahu Guary remembered:
“We had to go through various military checkpoints. with one person who was our escort. We marveled at his way of handling things…On the train … if a conductor came over, [Bloch] would handle the conversation. The difficulty was making sure nobody kicked us out of the compartment we were in. I remember one episode when an angry German officer came up to us and said, ‘Why are these Jews sitting in the compartment when the officers are in the corridor?’ Bloch had to do quite a bit of explaining, and he did.”
In Berlin, Schneerson and his entourage were taken to the city’s Jüdische Gemeinde or Jewish Community Centre, where they met with the Latvian ambassador to Germany and received their Latvian visas. The next day Bloch escorted the group to the Latvian border, which they crossed without incident. On December 17, Mordecai Rubin wrote to Rabbi Jacobsen in New York that “Rabbi and family arrived well Riga.”
But while the Rebbe and his followers expected swift passage to the United States, they soon ran into political resistance. Breckenridge Long, head of the Visa Section of the State Department, was a rabid anti-semite and refused to grant the group immigration visas. Once again, however, the American Chabad community intervened, with Max Rhoade invoking a 1921 exception to the quota for European immigrants allowing passage to religious ministers with active congregations in the country. In January 1940, Long reluctantly issued the visas, and Rebbe Schneerson left Riga along with his mother Sarah, his wife Chana, his son Berka, his grandson Shemaryahu, and his followers Chaim Hodakov and Nissan Mindel and their families. They left just in time; in October 1939, under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union forced Latvia to accept the stationing of 30,000 Red Army troops in their territory, who swiftly deposed and murdered many government officials and installed a puppet government headed by Augusts Kirhensteins. In August 1940, the country was absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic while in June 1941 it was invaded by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Barbarossa.
From Riga, Rebbe Schneerson and his entourage travelled by plane to neutral Sweden, landing in Stockholm before sailing to Gothenburg where they boarded the ocean liner SS Drottingholm. Finally, on March 19, 1940, six months after the German invasion of Poland, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, arrived in New York City to great fanfare. The following year, the Rebbe succeeded in extracting his son-in-law, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, from Marseille in Vichy France before the borders were closed down.
In 1944, Major Ernst Bloch was ousted from the Abwehr on suspicion of involvement in the July 20 assassination plot. He joined the Volkssturm or national militia and was killed in the spring of 1945 while defending Berlin against the Soviet Red Army. Due to his role in saving Rebbe Schneerson and other Jews during the war, in 2010 Israeli rabbi Baruch Kaminsky and Harvard scholar Dan Orbach petitioned the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to be recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations – gentiles like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg who helped protect Jews from Nazi persecution. However, they were unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, Rebbe Schneerson settled in the Crown Heights neighbourhood of New York City and, despite his failing health and the skepticism of his followers, worked tirelessly to build up the Chabad movement and Orthodox Judaism in North America. He founded the first Lubavitcher Yeshiva or seminary in New York City and established numerous printing houses to publish and distribute his own voluminous religious writings and those of his predecessors. In 1948 he established a Lubavitcher village called Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv in the newly-created state of Israel, while the following year he became a U.S. citizen. On account of his failing health, Schneerson arranged for a federal judge to officiate the ceremony at his home rather than travelling to a courthouse. However, Schneerson’s health soon caught up with him, and he died on January 28, 1950 at the age of 69. He was buried at Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, with his gravesite, known as “the Ohel”, becoming a popular site of prayer and reflection for Chabad followers and other Jews. His son-in-law and successor as Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, would go on to become a renowned religious scholar and leader in his own right, helping to greatly expand the Chabad Lubavitch Movement around the world. He was even considered by many Chabad adherents to be the jewish Messiah. Menachem Schneerson died in 1994 at the age of 92 leaving no named successor, leading the Chabad community to declare him the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. As a result, his predecessor Yosef Schneerson is often referred to as the Frierdiker or “Previous” Rebbe or sometimes Rayatz – a contraction of Yosef Yitzchak.
Today, Chabad-Lubavitch is among the largest Hasidic movements in the world, boasting nearly 100,000 adherents worldwide and performing humanitarian and religious outreach work in dozens of countries. The survival and thriving of the movement and its dynasty of spiritual leaders owes much to the miraculous rescue of Rebbe Yosef Schneerson from the jaws of the Third Reich – an unlikely mission which remains one of the most obscure and surprising chapters of the Second World War and illustrates the often baffling contradictions that lie at the intersection of ideology, faith, and international diplomacy.
Expand for ReferencesBahr, Bob, How Chabad’s Beloved Rebbe Was Saved, Atlanta Jewish Times, October 12, 2012, https://www.atlantajewishtimes.com/how-chabads-beloved-rebbe-was-saved-from-the-nazis-by-the-nazis/
Price, Larry, The Nazi Who Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Tablet Magazine, July 14, 2019, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/nazi-saved-lubavitcher-rebbe
About Chabad-Lubavitch, Chabad.org, https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/36226/jewish/About-Chabad-Lubavitch.htm
Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneerson, the “Rebbe Rayatz” (1880-1950), Chabad.org, https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/425/jewish/The-Rebbe-Rayatz.htm
Landa, Yosef, The Historic Visit by the Sixth Rebbe of Chabad to St. Louis, Chabad.org, https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3715920/jewish/The-Historic-Visit-by-the-Sixth-Rebbe-of-Chabad-to-St-Louis.htm
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880 – 1950), Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/rabbi-yosef-yitzchak-schneersohn
The post That Time the Nazis Went on a Quest to Save a Major Jewish Leader appeared first on Today I Found Out.
“I never shall forget the way, That Blood upon this awful day, Preserved us all from death. He stood upon a little mound, Cast his lethargic eyes around, And said beneath his breath : “Whatever happens we have got, The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”
This passage, from Hillaire Belloc’s 1898 poem The Modern Traveller, infamously captures the awesome destruction wrought by one of modern warfare’s key innovations: the machine gun. Putting the firepower of dozens of soldiers into the hands of just one, this weapon allowed the western colonial powers to conquer half the known world, ground the First World War into a bloody stalemate, helped the Nazis blitzkrieg their way across Europe, and remains a vital part of every army’s arsenal to this day. Yet despite its outsized impact on combat, the modern machine gun is less than a century and a half old. Why did it take so long for this weapon to be developed, and who was responsible for the vital breakthrough? Well, lock and load as we delve into the fascinating history of the machine gun.
Automatic fire has long been a part of warfare, with volleys of arrows fired by masses of archers playing a key role in battles from antiquity to the late middle ages. Placing such firepower in the hands of a single soldier, however, was another matter entirely. In the late 15th Century, Italian renaissance man extraordinaire Leonardo da Vinci sketched a number of ingenious engines of war in his notebooks, including an arrow-firing “machine gun” comprising no fewer than sixteen crossbows mounted on a rotating wheel. One version of this device was driven by a man-powered treadmill, which automatically cocked the bowstrings as it rotated. Yet another sketch depicts a spring-powered catapult with multiple arms for throwing stones in rapid succession. In Leonardo’s day, cannons were just starting to appear on the battlefield, but they were slow and tedious to reload; so, naturally, Leonardo also designed artillery pieces featuring multiple barrels to increase their firepower. As with most of Leonardo’s inventions, however, there is no evidence that any of these weapons were ever actually built.
The weapon commonly cited as being the world’s first “true” machine gun is the Puckle Gun, patented in 1718 by London lawyer James Puckle. However, strictly speaking this is not quite accurate, since a machine gun is typically defined as a weapon which can fire multiple shots in quick succession by turning a crank or – by the modern definition – pulling the trigger. Rather, Puckle’s gun is more accurately described as a rapid-firing revolver cannon, more akin to a modern revolver. That said, it was amongst the first, if not the first gun, to ever be called a machine gun when, in a 1722 shipping manifest, it was noted that the ship had on board “2 Machine Guns of Puckles.”
Curiously modern looking in its design, the Puckle Gun boasted a 3 foot long barrel and was designed to sit atop a tripod. It could also swivel and be aimed in any direction extremely rapidly with little effort by the operator due to how well balanced it was.
Once the prototype was completed in 1717, Puckle approached the British Navy who, at the time, were having a lot of trouble with Ottoman pirates. You see, the large, broadside cannons their ships were equipped with were a poor weapon of choice to use against tiny, fast moving vessels that could quite literally run circles around the bigger craft.
Puckle felt his gun was perfect for this use-case. Ships could quite easily have several of the Puckle guns mounted all around the perimeter of the deck and fire at approaching pirates with incredible speed for the age.
Intrigued, officials from the English Board of Ordnance were sent to observe a demonstration of the gun in 1717 in Woolwich. Unfortunately for Puckle, while they were reportedly impressed with the speed at which it could launch projectiles of death, and how quickly it could be reloaded, they decided to pass.
Their objections to it were primarily that it featured an unreliable flintlock system and it was too complex to be easily manufactured, including requiring many custom made components that gunsmiths at that point didn’t have, all combined making it difficult to mass produce. On top of that, it didn’t exactly lend itself to a variety of tactical situations due to its size.
Unperturbed at the initial rejection, Puckle continued to refine the design, patenting a better version of the gun a year later in 1718. Said patent, No. 418, describes the gun as being primarily for defensive purposes and notes that it is ideal for defending “bridges, breaches, lines and passes, ships, boats, houses and other places” from pesky foreigners.
A natural salesman, Puckle went as far as putting advertising of sorts right in his patent, with the second line of said patent reading: “Defending KING GEORGE your COUNTRY and LAWES – Is Defending YOUR SELVES and PROTESTANT CAUSE”
This is an idea Puckle would double down on by including engravings on the gun itself featuring things like King George, imagery of Britain and random bible verses.
To doubly sell potential investors on the value of the gun as a stalwart defender of Christian ideology, Puckle’s patent also describes how the gun could, in a pinch, fire square bullets.
What does this have to do with religion?
Puckle thought that square bullets would cause significantly more damage to the human body and believed that if they were shot at Muslim Turks (who the British were fighting at the time), it would, to quote the patent, “convince [them] of the benefits of Christian civilisation”.
The gun could also fire regular, round projectiles too (which Puckle earmarked as being for use against Christians only). On top of that, it also fired “grenados”, shot, essentially comprising of many tiny bullets- you know, for when you really wanted to ruin someone’s day.
Puckle began selling shares of his company to the public in 1720 for about 8 pounds a piece (about £1,100 pounds or $1,600 today) to finance construction of more advanced Puckle Guns, one of which was demonstrated to the public on March 31, 1722.
During said demonstration, as described in the London Journal: “[O]ne man discharged it 63 times in seven Minutes, though all while Raining, and it throws off either one large or sixteen Musquet Balls at every discharge with great force…”
Despite the impressive and reliable display, the British military on the whole was still uninterested in the newfangled technology.
That said, there was at least one order, placed by then Master-General of Ordnance for Britain, Duke John Montagu, for two of the guns to bring along in an attempt to capture St. Vincent and St. Lucia in the Caribbean. Whether these ever ended up being used or not isn’t clear.
Summing up Puckles’ failed invention and company, one sarcastic reporter for the London Journal quipped that the gun had “only wounded [those] who have shares therein.” Burn.
In any event, it would be another century and a half before the first true rapid-fire weapon appeared on the battlefield: the French mitrailleuse. Invented in 1851 by Belgian Army Captain Toussaint Fafschamps, the mitrailleuse comprised a cluster of fifty rifled barrels mounted on a conventional wheeled artillery carriage. The ammunition, consisting of a lead bullet and paper cartridge fired by a spring-loaded needle, was held in a removable breech block which was inserted into the rear of the weapon. The operator then turned a crank on the side of the breech, which fired each barrel in quick succession. While Fafschamp’s design was adopted by the Belgian Army, it was soon improved by engineers Louis Christophe and Joseph Montigny, who in 1859 presented their 37-barrel version to French Emperor Napoleon III. Impressed, Napoleon ordered the immediate development of an improved version under the greatest of secrecy, paying for the whole project out of his personal funds. This resulted in the French Army officially adopting a 25-barrel mitrailleuse designed by Jean-Baptiste de Reffye in 1865
While today machine guns are mainly used like rapid-firing rifles for laying down suppressive fire or engaging quick-moving targets, the operational doctrine for the mitrailleuse was somewhat different. For much of history, artillery was equipped to fire not only single solid cannonballs or explosive shells, but also large numbers of smaller projectiles called grapeshot or canister shot for use against infantry at close range – effectively turning them into giant shotguns. In French, this type of ammunition is known as mitraille – hence the name mitrailleuse. However, in 1858 the French Army adopted a Beaulieu 4-pounder rifled field gun, which while considerably more accurate and long-ranged than earlier artillery, was not well-suited to firing anti-personnel rounds. Consequently, as Reffye pointed out:
“In combat are found many circumstances where infantry, finding itself within range of artillery, the latter cannot resist the rapid fire of the rifle and, if the infantry, not letting itself be intimidated by the detonations of the pieces and the bursting of the shells, marched resolutely towards batteries themselves undefended by infantry, it would soon reduce them to silence by eliminating their crews…Since the war of secession in America, one has sought to build a weapon which could imitate the rapidity of fire of the rifle, while surpassing it in range, reliably striking infantry and cavalry at distances where canister loses its effectiveness. The bullet-canon has thus been developed to go into action between 900 and 2500 metres, with more accuracy than the old grape-shot which seems almost to have fallen into disuse nowadays.”
Thus, the mitrailleuse was conceived not as a rapid-firing rifle, but as a longer-ranged version of canister shot, with the weapons being deployed alongside regular artillery batteries. The mitrailleuse first saw combat during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, but despite the Napoleon’s high hopes for his Army’s high-tech “secret weapon”, it proved a disappointment. However, this had more to do with French doctrine than the design of the weapon itself, for on those rare instances when it was used at close range, it proved devastatingly effective. As one observer noted at the September 1, 1870 Battle of Sedan:
“On the heights, close to Floeing, there was placed a battery of Mitrailleuses. There is, opposite to that, a round hill with wood on the top; and out of this wood and from behind this hill came the Prussian columns. As they came out they were swept down by these Mitrailleuses, and they did not succeed. They could not make any progress, but were obliged to go back again, and go round on the reverse slope of the hill, checked by the Mitrailleuse.”
But despite the mitrailleuse being the first rapid-fire weapon to see combat in large numbers – indeed, in modern French the term mitrailleuse means “machine gun” – it is more properly classified as a volley gun than a proper machine gun since the ammunition is loaded manually rather than automatically. Much closer to the modern definition was the Gatling gun, patented by American inventor Dr. Richard J. Gatling in 1861. Unlike the mitrailleuse, whose barrels were fixed, the Gatling gun’s ten barrels rotated around a central shaft, driven by a hand crank. As a barrel rotated into the top position, a cartridge dropped from a gravity-fed hopper and was automatically loaded into the chamber. When the barrel reached the bottom position, the cartridge was fired. The empty cartridge was then ejected from the chamber before the barrel reached the top position and the whole cycle began anew. The use of multiple barrels allowed each one to cool off between firings, preventing the weapon from overheating and allowing it to sustain continuous fire at a rate of up to 200 rounds per minute.
Gatling’s inspiration for creating his gun was surprisingly humanitarian. As a physician, Gatling knew that the vast majority of casualties in war were not caused by bullets or shells but disease. Thus, as he later wrote to a friend in 1877:
“It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine – a gun – which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.”
But like all weapons intended to be so powerful they would end war, the Gatling gun only succeeded in increasing its efficiency and bloodiness. While the Union Army refused to adopt the weapon during the Civil War on the grounds of complexity and cost, Gatling guns did see use at the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in the spring of 1865. Based on its brutal effectiveness in that battle, the Army finally adopted the Gatling gun the following year. Other nations soon followed, including the British Empire, Argentina, Peru, Siam, and Korea. But while the Gatling gun was originally intended for use by and against modern, industrialized armies, it was most effectively employed against poorly armed opponents in colonial wars. For example, the British Empire used Gatling guns to devastating effect against the Zulu in South Africa and the Mahdists in Sudan, while back in the United States the weapon was widely deployed against Native Americans and striking workers.
Several other hand-cranked machine guns were developed during this period including the single-barrelled Agar or “coffee mill” gun, introduced in 1861 and used in limited numbers during the Civil War – mainly to guard bridges, narrow passes, and other strategic targets. There was also the Gardner Gun and the multiple-barrelled Nordenfelt gun, both used in small numbers by the British Army and Royal Navy. But while such manually-operated firearms were eventually superseded by more advanced self-loading types, the Gatling gun mechanism lives on in modern aircraft-mounted rotary-barrelled cannons like the M61 Vulcan and the GAU-8 Avenger, which are driven by electric motors. And in 1963, General Electric miniaturized the mechanism to chamber the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge, creating the famous M134 Minigun immortalized in such films as Predator and Terminator 2. Thanks to their electric drives and the self-cooling properties of the multi-barrel design and the high speed, these weapons are able to reach blistering rates of fire up to 6,000 rounds per minute.
But while closer to the modern definition of a machine gun, the Gatling, Agar, Gardner, Nordenfelt and their ilk still lacked one critical feature: self-loading – the ability to use the leftover energy from a fired cartridge to cycle the action automatically. While many inventors throughout the 19th Century attempted to develop such a weapon, they were all stymied by the same technical limitation: gunpowder. Virtually unchanged since its invention in China in the 9th Century, black gunpowder created large amounts of residue or fouling that quickly clogged up the mechanisms of early would-be machine guns, making sustained fire impossible. In 1886, however, the French Army introduced an innovation that would change the face of warfare: Poudre B or “smokeless powder”, which burned hotter, faster, and cleaner than traditional gunpowder. And as luck would have it, just two years earlier an American inventor had patented the perfect weapon to use this new powder.
Born in 1840 in Sangerville, Maine, Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was a prolific inventor, his various creations including a bronchitis inhaler, the first automatic fire sprinkler system, an early version of the lightbulb, and an amusement park ride called the “Captive Flying Machine” which is still used to this day. He was also one of many inventors competing with the Wright Brothers to build the first powered, heavier-than-air flying machine. But Maxim’s greatest claim to fame would come as a result of a chance encounter in 1882. As he later recounted to the Times of London:
“I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: ‘Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.’ ”
Over the next four years, Maxim toiled in his London workshop to perfect such a weapon, which he inevitably dubbed the Maxim Gun. Unlike its predecessors, the Maxim Gun was recoil-operated, using the recoil impulse generated by each cartridge firing to push back the sliding barrel and cycle the weapon’s action – no hand-cranking or other external power source required. The weapon was fed from a long cloth belt of ammunition while its barrel was wrapped in a metal jacket full of cooling water, allowing it to sustain firing rates as high as 600 rounds per minute for long periods of time. When first introduced, the Maxim gun was designed to use then-standard black powder cartridges; however, it was soon adapted for the newly-invented smokeless powder.
In 1886, with funding from the Vickers engineering firm, Maxim founded the Maxim Gun Company to produce and sell his invention. Though it was more reliable and could deliver greater firepower than any other weapon on the market, the real genius of Maxim’s design lay in its adaptability; by swapping out just a handful of parts, the weapon could be made to shoot just about any cartridge. This made the gun an immediate international bestseller, with over 30 countries ordering Maxim guns in dozens of different calibers. Like the Gatling gun before it, the Maxim soon became closely associated with colonial conquest – especially during the late 19th Century “Scramble for Africa.” For example, during the 1893-1894 Matabele War in what is now Zimbabwe, British Maxim guns succeeded in holding off a force of 5,000 Ndebele warriors – killing some 1,600. Indeed, the battle was so lopsided that some surviving warriors committed suicide by throwing themselves onto their spears.
Like Richard Gatling 20 years before, many believed that the Maxim Gun would make war between civilized nations unthinkable, bringing about a new era of peace. As the New York Times argued in 1897:
“These are the instruments that have revolutionized the methods of warfare, and because of their devastating effects have made nations and riles give greater thought to the outcome of war before entering…They are peace-producing and peace-retaining terrors.”
But they were to be proven tragically wrong just 17 years later with the outbreak of the First World War – a conflict synonymous with the Maxim gun and industrialized slaughter. Though far more troops were killed by artillery than machine guns, the latter had an outsized psychological impact, cutting down scores of men like corn beneath the scythe and turning no-man’s-land between the trenches into impassable death traps. But the bloody stalemate the Maxim gun helped preserve also drove innovation in machine gun design. While reliable and deadly, the regular Maxim gun was heavy, awkward to move around, and required a team of at least four men to operate efficiently. Regaining the type of mobile warfare which had dominated the early months of the war required lighter, handier weapons that could be carried and operated by fewer men and deployed on the move. This requirement led to the development of a new generation of light machine guns like the British Lewis Gun, the French Chauchat, and the American Browning Automatic Rifle, which – along with improved tactics involving the coordinated use of artillery, aircraft, and tanks – eventually helped break the stalemate and bring about the Armistice of 1918. The machine gun’s place in modern warfare was secured.
While the Maxim Gun has largely been superseded by more modern designs, the OG machine gun continues to see service to this very day, with many examples recently showing up in the conflict in Ukraine. But what did Sir Hiram Maxim think of his most famous creation’s deadly legacy? While outwardly pleased by his success, Maxim at least seemed aware of the disturbing hypocrisy of the world around him. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Maxim – a lifelong bronchitis sufferer – invented a new type of medical inhaler which dispensed soothing pine vapour. The invention drew scorn from his fellow inventors, who accused him of “prostituting his talents” on quack science. To this accusation, Maxim responded:
“This is indeed a very curious world. I was the first man in the world to make an automatic gun. It is astonishing to note how quickly this invention put me on the very pinnacle of fame. Has it been anything else but a killing machine, very little would have been said of it. From the foregoing it will be seen that it is a very credible thing to invent a killing machine, and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering.”
Expand for ReferencesBelloc, Hillaire, The Modern Traveller, Edward Arnold, London, 1898, https://archive.org/stream/moderntraveller00belluoft/moderntraveller00belluoft_djvu.txt
Johnson, Ben, The Puckle Gun or Defence Gun, Historic UK, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-Puckle-or-Defense-Gun/
Leonardo da Vinci – Weapons of War, Italian Renaissance Art, https://www.italian-renaissance-art.com/Da-Vinci-weapons.html#gallery[pageGallery]/9/
Marder, Patrick, Mitrailleuse, Debellum, https://web.archive.org/web/20060620004234/http://www.debellum.org/mitrailleuse.asp
Gatling Gun, History, September 9, 2021, https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/gatling-gun
LaFrance, Adrienne, People Thought Machine Guns Might Prevent Wars, The Atlantic, January 26, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/maxim-guns/428253/
The Gatling Gun, Civil War Guns, January 26, 2018, https://civilwarguns.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-gatling-gun.html
Part II – Manually Operated Guns, https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/ref/MG/I/MG-2.html
McCollum, Ian, Union Repeating Gun, Forgotten Weapons, https://www.forgottenweapons.com/manual-machine-guns/union-repeating-gun/
Bocetta, Sam, Machine Gun – How Hiram Maxim’s Deadly Invention Changed History, Military History Now, October 24, 2017, https://militaryhistorynow.com/2017/10/24/machine-gun-how-hiram-maxims-rapid-fire-invention-changed-history/
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Ah, instant ramen: friend to starving students and broke individuals everywhere. A convenient and delicious source of cheap calories, it is the perfect meal for getting through exam season or stretching a dollar until the next paycheque arrives. Available in a dizzying array of styles and flavours, instant ramen is enjoyed all around the world, with an estimated 290 million servings being consumed every single day. But while associated today with college dorms, businesspeople on the go, or convenient late-night snacks, the origins of this noodley treat are surprisingly dark, going back to a time when Japan teetered on the brink of starvation.
Ramen first appeared in Japan around the late 19th or early 20th Century, being copied from similar noodle dishesintroduced by Chinese immigrants. These noodles, however, were produced in the traditional manner and took considerable time to prepare. The instant noodles we know and love today, which are deep-fried and require only minutes of immersion in boiling water to prepare, are a more recent invention, emerging in the wake of the Second World War.
Unsurprisingly to anyone who has ever cracked a history book, the War was devastating for Japan, with American firebombing raids destroying vast swaths of cities like Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka, among other better known catastrophes… In the early period of American occupation, Japan suffered widespread food shortages, pushing many Japanese citizens to the brink of starvation. With strict rationing and prohibitions against selling street foot in place, black markets for food popped up all across the country, mostly run by the Yakuza – the Japanese mafia. In response, the American occupying forces distributed large stocks of surplus wheat, encouraging citizens to use the flour to bake bread. But this distinctly western solution to Japan’s food crisis did not sit well with one man, who would go on to revolutionize the global food market.
Momofuku Ando was born in 1910 on the island of Formosa – today Taiwan. After moving to Osaka, Japan, in 1933, Ando pursued a number of business ventures, including a salt company named Nissin. According to his biography, immediately after the war Ando was wandering through the ruins of Osaka when he came across a group of people shivering in the cold as they lined up for a bowl of black-market ramen: “The faces of the people who were slurping warm ramen looked happy. The Japanese really like noodles. Looking at the line in front of the stall, Ando got a feeling that there was a big demand hiding there.”
This sight had a profound impact on Ando, supposedly inspiring his famous motto: “Peace prevails when food suffices.”
However, Ando was confused by the government’s policy of promoting bread production. During a chance encounter with Kunidaro Arimoto of the health ministry, he argued: “With bread, you need toppings or side dishes. But the Japanese are eating it only with tea. It is not good for their nutritional balance. In the East, there is a long tradition of eating noodles. Why not also promote noodles, which the Japanese already enjoy, as a flour-based food?”
In response to this criticism, Kunidaro supposedly replied: “Well, why don’t you solve this problem?”. Whether that conversation really happened exactly like that or not, this is precisely what Ando did.
Ten years later, Ando purchased second-hand noodle-making equipment and set up a food laboratory in his backyard shed. Over several months he experimented with various combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques to create the ideal postwar food for the masses, which he determined must be a) tasty, b) non-perishable, c) capable of being prepared in less than 3 minutes, d) inexpensive, and e) safe and healthy. Reportedly inspired by his wife frying tempura vegetables, Ando discovered that flash-frying cooked noodles not only dehydrated them – rendering them shelf-stable – but also opened up tiny voids in their surface, allowing water to better penetrate and more quickly cook the noodles. Eventually, Ando perfected the process for cutting, pressing, and frying noodles into small blocks, which could be mixed with boiling water and a packet of dehydrated soup stock to create a tasty meal within minutes. For the first version of the product, Ando chose chicken stock, since it seemed hearty, nutritious, and distinctly American.
Ando’s invention first hit the market on August 25, 1958 under the brand name “Chikin Ramen.” Ironically, while today instant ramen is often one of the cheapest foods available, at the time it was considered something of a luxury item, with a single packet costing 35 yen – six times more than a bowl of fresh ramen. Consequently, sales were initially slow to take off. Thankfully, Ando proved himself a savvy businessman, and thanks to a series of clever marketing campaigns sales of Nissin products skyrocketed, with the company selling 13 million packages in its first year. This number quickly grew to 200 million servings in 1963 and 3.5 billion in 1968, making instant ramen one of Japan’s most ubiquitous and beloved foods almost overnight.
By the mid-1960s, however, market saturation caused Nissin’s sales in Japan to plateau, and Ando set his sights on a new market: the United States. With Japanese dishes like Sukiyaki all the rage in the U.S, Ando figured that instant ramen would be as big a hit with Americans as it was with the Japanese. His intuition proved correct, but it was on a business trip to the United States in 1966 that Ando made a fateful observation. Instead of preparing instant ramen in a pot and serving it in a bowl like the Japanese, Americans crumbled the noodles into Styrofoam coffee cups and poured hot water over them.
Inspired by this alternative preparation method, on his return to Japan Ando developed a brand-new product: Cup Noodles, in which the instant noodles were pre-packaged in a paper – later styrofoam – cup, combining the functions of cooking vessel and serving bowl into one conveniently portable package. Further innovations included the addition of dehydrated vegetables to the soup stock mix and a peel-away foil lid inspired by a container of nuts Ando had eaten on a trans-pacific flight. Wanting to make the product appear cosmopolitan and modern, Ando hired Otaka Takeshi – who created the logo for the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair – to design the packaging, which featured large English words in a bold psychedelic font and gold bands inspired by expensive dinner plates.
Nissin Cup Noodles launched in 1971, and just like Chikin Noodles they were initially seen as a pricey luxury item. Furthermore, their intended function clashed with Japanese culture, which saw eating while walking as rude. But ever the savvy salesman, Ando decided to market Cup Noodles directly to Japan’s novelty-minded youth, setting up public tasting events in Tokyo’s fashionable Giza shopping district. The most successful of these, held on November 21, 1971, succeeded in selling more than 20,000 noodle cups in only four hours.
In a further stroke of genius, the event was held directly across from Japan’s first McDonald’s restaurant, helping to cement in the public’s mind the association between cup noodles and western cosmopolitanism. Building on this momentum, Nissin later introduced cup noodle vending machines – among the first of their kind in Japan – that automatically added water to the cups, making the product even more convenient for people on the go.
And in a dramatic example of there being no such thing as bad publicity, in 1972 Nissin received unexpected national exposure thanks to the Asama Sanso Incident, in which members of the left-wing United Red Army broke into a holiday lodge below Mount Asama and held the wife of the lodge keeper hostage for nine days. News footage of the incident prominently showed police officers eating cup noodles in order to stay warm, further promoting the product as a convenient and delicious meal for busy people.
Cup Noodles proved even more popular than Chikin Noodles, completely surpassing the older product’s sales by 1989. Today, cup noodles outsell packaged noodles in Japan by more than twofold.
Indeed, so influential are cup noodles that they completely changed Japanese dining culture. As the product is difficult to eat with chopsticks while walking, Ando decided to change the way people ate and packaged each cup with a small plastic fork.
Like Chikin Noodles, Cup Noodles proved spectacularly popular in the United States, the country that inspired their creation. Nissin opened its first overseas factory in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1973, and today Americans consume over 4.5 billion servings of instant ramen every year. Since its debut in 1958, instant ramen has spread to nearly every corner of the globe, with 103 billion servings being consumed annually. The largest single market is China, which consumes over 40 billion servings per year, followed by Indonesia at 12 billion, India at 6 billion, Japan and 5.7 billion, and Vietnam at 5.2 billion. In 2000 poll, Japan voted instant ramen the country’s top invention of the 20th Century, beating out traditional heavyweights like miniaturized electronics and Toyota cars.
The secret to instant ramen’s global appeal lies partly in its extreme adaptability, for it can be made in near-limitless flavours and combined with local ingredients to suit nearly any palate. It can even be adapted to be eaten in outer space. In 2005, Nissin developed a special instant ramen package for Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi’s mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Dubbed “Space Ram”, the meal combined a compressed ball of noodles with a special thickened broth that would not break up and float away in microgravity.
Yet despite his company’s extraordinary success, Momofuku Ando never forgot his original goal of ending world hunger. In 1997, he founded the World Instant Noodles Association, an organization dedicated to distributing instant noodles in areas ravaged by war, poverty, and natural disasters. These efforts came full-circle in 2011 following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, when instant noodles were used to feed thousands of displaced Japanese citizens.
Momofuku Ando’s died in 2007 at the age of 97, a beloved national hero with two museums dedicated to his life and inventions. His funeral, held in a baseball stadium and officiated by 34 clergy members, was attended by two former prime ministers, with Yasuhiro Nakasone delivering a eulogy in which he praised Ando as “the creator of a culinary culture that postwar Japan can be proud of.”
And that is a legacy worth raising a glass – or a noodle cup – to.
Expand for ReferencesSanchez, Rudy, The History of Instant Ramen, The Die Line, August 18, 2020, https://thedieline.com/blog/2020/8/18/the-history-of-instant-ramen?
Cam, Lisa, What’s the Story behind Instant Ramen Noodles – and How Did Post-War America Influence Their Invention? Style, April 1, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/3077785/whats-story-behind-instant-ramen-noodles-and-how-did
Freedman, Alisa, How Cup Noodles Became the Instant Ramen for Americans, Smithsonian Magazine, December 8, 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-cup-noodles-became-instant-ramen-for-americans-180979183/
Sumampong-Apique, Tessie, A Brief History of Ramen and Instant Noodles, Spoon University, December 2, 2017, https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/a-brief-history-of-ramen-and-instant-noodles
Morgan, Clancy & Cheng, Shirley, How Momofuku Ando’s Instant Ramen Created a Multibillion-Dollar Industry, Insider, January 15, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/momofuku-ando-instant-ramen-cup-noodles-2021-1
Leibowitz, Karen, The Humble Origins of Instant Ramen: From Ending World Hunger to Space Noodles, Gizmodo, June 22, 2011, https://gizmodo.com/the-humble-origins-of-instant-ramen-from-ending-world-5814099
The post The Brink of Starvation- The Inspiring Tale of Inventing Instant Ramen appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Reach into your pocket and pull out your cell phone. Even if you are rocking the most ancient, stripped-down flip phone from 2002, the object in your hands is still a marvel of modern electronics technology, packing billions of tiny switches into just a few cubic centimetres of space. By contrast, the Apollo Guidance Computer that sent humans to the moon contained only 17,000 switches, while the three-storey building-sized SAGE computer used for North American aerospace defence in the 1950s contained 50,000. This tremendous feat of miniaturization was made possible by advances in integrated circuit manufacturing, in which entire computers composed of parts just a few billionths of a meter across are etched into the surface of tiny silicon chips. But these developments would never have happened were it not for one key breakthrough made nearly 80 years ago – a discovery that forever changed the course of technology – and the world. This is the story of the transistor, one of the single most important inventions in modern history.
In the first half of the 20th Century, electronics design was dominated by one key piece of technology: the vacuum tube.
During Thomas Edison and his team’s thousands of experiments trying to create an economically viable incandescent lightbulb, there was a rather insanely revolutionary and far more unique device Edison accidentally invented in parallel with the lightbulb that was just one of his lightbulbs with a slight twist. But unfortunately for Edison, he did not realize the implication of what he’d just made in one of his thousands of tests, and how revolutionary it could be if refined a bit, and in the right applications. Because of his failure to realize any of this, nor be the one to perfect it for commercial use, despite his patent for the device, Edison is almost never given credit for his contribution on this world changing invention. Which is unsurprising as, as is a theme you’re probably picking up on, it’s the person who ultimately did the thing in its perfected commercial form, rather than was the first to come up with the thing, that usually gets credit in popular history.
On this one, enter English physicist John Ambrose Fleming, who was an advisor to Edison Electric Light. He would be inspired by Edison’s device to create his revolutionary Fleming valve vacuum tube in the early 20th century.
But going back to Edison’s original device, at one point during his experiments on the lightbulb, he and his staff were trying to figure out why carbon from the filament seemed to be jumping across the vacuum to the walls of the bulb. Clearly some current flow was involved. So in order to try to figure out what was going on here, Edison created a special bulb with a third electrode placed in between the legs of the filament, and then connected that to a galvanometer to measure the current. What he found was that if, relative to the filament, the plate was put at a negative potential, there would be no current between the plate and the filament. However, if the plate was at a positive potential, and the filament heated up enough, there would be a large current flow between the filament to the plate through the vacuum. Importantly in this, the electrons can only flow one way, from the hot element to the cold one, creating a rudimentary diode.
Edison ultimately patented the device for its potential use as a sort of voltage regulator, but seemingly did not understand the implications beyond that. Importantly, he did show it off at the International Electrical Exposition in Philadelphia in 1884, with one William Preece bringing several of these bulbs back to England and coining the term “Edison Effect,” also now known as “thermionic emission,” in a paper he published the following year on the phenomenon. And, of course, as noted, a couple decades later Fleming was inspired by all this and ultimately did his thing, as did others like Lee de Forest in the United States and the electronics age was born.
Vacuum tubes came in two basic varieties, which allowed electricity to be controlled in particular ways. The diode or thermionic valve, invented by Fleming in 1904, consisted of an evacuated glass bulb containing two basic components: a fine metal wire anode and a plate-shaped cathode. When current was run through the anode, as alluded to in the Edison test, the filament heated up red-hot and began giving off electrons via a process called thermionic emission. These electrons were then caught by the cathode, allowing the current to pass through the diode. If, however, the current was reversed, the lack of a filament on the cathode prevented it from heating up and emitting electrons – meaning the current could not flow in that direction. Diodes thus functioned like one-way valves – hence their alternative name – and were widely used as rectifiers for detecting radio signals, replacing the temperamental crystal detectors previously used in commercial radio sets.
The triode or Audion, invented by de Forest in 1906, was similar to the diode but with an extra component: a metal grid between the anode and the cathode. Applying an electric charge to the grid repelled electrons coming from the anode, allowing the number that made it through to the cathode to be adjusted. This meant that a weaker current could be used to control a stronger one, allowing weak signals – like those from a radio receiver or telephone – to be effectively amplified. de Forest’s invention launched the modern era of electronics, making possible such breakthroughs as long-distance telephone and radio communications. Triodes were also widely used as electronic switches, being more reliable and less prone to wear than electromechanical relays. Indeed, the earliest electronic computers like the British Colossus – used to break the German Lorentz cipher – and the American ENIAC – used to generate ballistics tables for naval guns – used thousands of networked vacuum tubes to perform high-speed calculations.
However, vacuum tubes had a number of serious shortcomings. For one thing, their filaments needed to heat up in order to work, such that old electronic equipment like radios and television sets often took anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to fully power up. They were also fragile, consumed large amounts of power, and generated large amounts of heat, meaning early electronic computers required massive air conditioning plants to keep their processors cool. And while subminiature vacuum tubes just a few centimetres long were developed, these power and heat issues placed a lower limit on the size of electronic circuits. For such devices to be made truly compact and portable, a new, more compact and energy-efficient type of electronic switch was needed.
Ironically, the solution to this problem would ultimately be found in an older technology. As mentioned at the start of the video, early commercial radio sets used a device called a crystal detector to pick up radio signals. Also known as a cat’s whisker detector, this device comprised a crystal of lead sulphide or galena and a small spring called the cat’s whisker mounted on a pivoted handle. To use this type of radio, the user touched the cat’s whisker to various parts of the galena crystal until they found a spot that rectified the radio signal and allowed it to be heard over headphones.
As can be imagined, this device was finicky to use and took a great deal of practice to master. The crystal detector worked by forming a temporary metal-semiconductor junction, also known as a Schottky diode after its discover, German physicist Walter H. Schottky.
Galena, along with iron pyrite, carborundum, silicon, germanium, and several other substances, belongs to a class of materials known as semiconductors. Neither excellent conductors like most metals nor full-blown electrical insulators, semiconductors can have their electrical properties modified by treating or doping them with various impurities such as arsenic or phosphorus. Such doping produces either an N-type semiconductor, which has an excess of electrons in the outer shells of its atoms; or a P-type semiconductor, which has an excess of missing electrons – known as electron holes. Sandwiching a P and N semiconductor together produces a PN-junction. At the interface between the two semiconductors, the difference in electric charges causes a so-called diffusion current to flow, with electrons flowing from the N side to the P side and electron holes flowing from the P side to the N side. This in turn results in the formation of two adjacent layers of positive and negative change – known as the depletion region.
When an external current is applied from the N to the P side – that is, in the direction of the internal diffusion current – it will flow freely through the diode. If, however, the current is applied in the opposite direction, it will cause the depletion region to grow, forming a barrier through which the current cannot flow. A PN junction thus performs the same function as a vacuum tube diode, allowing current to only flow in one direction.
In a metal-semiconductor junction like a crystal detector, the semiconductor is N-type while the metal acts as the P-type semiconductor, with the interface between the two forming a depletion region or Schottky barrier like in a PN junction.
The PN junction diode was discovered in 1939 by Bell Labs researcher Russel Ohl when he accidentally cut a section of a silicon ingot across the PN junction and noted its rectifying qualities. During the Second World War, self-contained Schottky and PN diodes developed for use in military radars, as vacuum tubes could not operate on the required frequencies. These devices were the first truly solid-state miniaturized electronic components, and pointed the way toward the use of semiconductors to create a new, efficient analogue to the triode vacuum tube.
Interestingly, a design for a type of semiconductor-based electronic switch now known as a Field-Effect Transistor or FET was patented as early as 1925 by Austrian-American inventor Julius Lilienfeld. However, as sufficiently pure semiconductors were not available at the time, Lilienfeld was unable to construct a working prototype, and his design remained little more than a footnote in the history of electronics. It would not be until after the Second World War that his ideas would finally become a reality.
The effort which resulted in the development of the first practical transistor was spearheaded by Mervin Kelly, director of research at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Dissatisfied with the poor efficiency and reliability of vacuum tubes, in the late 1930s Kelly assembled a solid-state physics research team to come up with a semiconductor-based alternative. This work was interrupted by the Second World War, but resumed soon after. Strangely, this project was of relatively low priority for Bell, for while the triode or Audion had originally been developed for long-distance telephony, by the late 1940s the Bell Telephone System was based not on vacuum tubes, but complex yet reliable electromechanical devices known as Strowger Switches. A solid-state switch, if practical, was only anticipated to have limited, specialized applications, such as military radio and radar equipment.
Kelly assembled a diverse team of theoreticians, experimentalists, and engineers, including John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, Robert Gibney, Bert Moore, John Pearson, and the aptly-named William Shockley. Of these, it was the trio of Bardeen, Brattain, under the supervision of Shockley, who would ultimately make the vital breakthrough. While the often difficult Shockley preferred to work alone at home, Brattain and Bardeen formed a productive partnership, embracing the free-wheeling, anything-goes research culture of Bell Labs by working unsupervised late into the night.
The first design the team investigated was proposed by Shockley, and worked similarly to Julius Lilienfeld’s 1925 concept. Built around a block of silicon, like a vacuum tube the device had an anode and cathode – now named the source and drain – at either end, but instead of a grid used a third electrode called a gate to control the flow of electricity through the device. In theory, when current was applied to the gate, the electric field generated would impede electrons from flowing between the source and drain. In practice, however, the design failed to work. Nevertheless, Shockley was convinced his design was workable, and pushed Bell Labs to file a patent with himself named as sole inventor. To Shockley’s dismay, however, Bell had recently unearthed Lilienfeld’s original patents and informed Shockley that his idea was not original.
After much experimentation, Walter Brattain determined that the failure of Shockley’s design was due to a buildup of electrons on the surface of the silicon blocking the gate’s electric field. At the suggestion of Robert Gibnet, he and Bardeen tried getting around this problem by dunking the prototype in distilled water, filling in the air gap between the gate and the silicon and enhancing the strength of the electric field. Incredibly, this actually worked – though nowhere near as efficiently as the team had hoped. As Shockley later noted:
“This new finding was electrifying…at long last, Brattain and Gibney had overcome the blocking effect.”
Replacing the water with a chemical called glycol borate produced better results, but the device still had a slow response time and could not handle high frequencies – a key requirement for use in radio and radar equipment. Eventually, the team abandoned silicon as the substrate and focused instead on germanium, whose manufacture had already been perfected for use in diodes. But this material exhibited the same barrier effect as silicon, and though the team tried countless remedies like freezing the germanium with liquid nitrogen, full-scale amplification still continued to elude them.
It was at this point that a pair of serendipitous accidents nudged the team in the right direction. For their newest prototype, Brattain grew a thin layer of oxide on the surface of the germanium crystal and deposited an even thinner layer of gold onto this, hoping that the oxide would insulate the gold from the germanium. At first this seemed to work, but Brattain soon realized that the oxide layer had actually been washed away, meaning the gold was in direct contact with the germanium. This indicated that the device was not operating according to the field effect as Shockley had predicted, but some other, still unknown phenomenon.
On another occasion, while measuring the amplification or gain in a prototype, Brattain accidentally shorted out and ruined one of the gate electrodes by touching it with the emitter electrode. But when he placed the emitter close to the gate electrode, he suddenly observed the gain the team had been searching for.
Based on this, Bardeen suggested placing the emitter and gate electrodes extremely close to each other – within 50 micrometers – to enhance the effect. To accomplish this, Brattain wrapped a piece of thin gold foil around the point of a plastic triangle, cut a thin slit in the foil with a razor blade, and forced this pair of closely-spaced contacts into a crystal of germanium with a spring. Two electrodes known as the emitter and collector were connected to both halves of the gold foil, while a third base lead was connected to the germanium crystal, which had been specially prepared so that it consisted of two layers: an upper P-type layer full of electron holes and a lower N-type layer with excess electrons. In this configuration, the current flowing from the collector to the base was modulated by applying a current to the emitter.
On December 16, 1947, Brattain and Bardeen tested their new design for the first time. To their delight, it worked perfectly, exhibiting a 30 percent gain in power and voltage gain of 15% at a frequency of 1,000 Hertz. Carpooling home that night, Brattain exclaimed to his colleagues that they had just conducted the most important experiment of their lives and swore them to secrecy until Bell Labs officially announced their discovery. Bardeen, however, could not help sharing the news, telling his wife at dinner that “We discovered something today.” His wife, distracted by the couple’s children, reportedly replied: “That’s nice, dear.”
By contrast, William Shockley, on sabbatical in Europe at the time, was enraged to discover that not only had he not been directly involved in the team’s breakthrough – but that they had strayed so far from his original field-effect concept. It was a bitterness which was to prove surprisingly productive.
On June 30, 1948, Bell Labs officially announced Brattain and Bardeen’s discovery, which by now had acquired a new name: transistor. The term had been coined by fellow Bell engineer and part-time science fiction writer John Pierce as a contraction of “trans-resistor”. Unfortunately, however, the announcement of the transistor received little attention in either the popular or scientific press. Not only were there few apparent applications for the device, but it was fragile, temperamental, and difficult to manufacture. Furthermore, even its inventors didn’t understand exactly how it worked.
Meanwhile, Shockley, fuelled by jealousy and indignation, doggedly pursued his quest to one-up his colleagues. While attending a meeting of the Physical Society in Chicago in late 1947, he began filling his notebook with page after page of detailed notes describing a new type of transistor, consisting of one layer of P-type semiconductor sandwiched between two layers of N-type semiconductor. By January 23, 1948, Shockley had come up with a workable design, which worked similarly to a PN diode but with three terminals: the emitter, the collector, and the base. When a positive current was applied to the base, it disrupted the depletion region between the semiconductor layers by draining away excess electrons, allowing current to flow between the emitter and the collector. Bardeen and Brattain’s transistor worked in a similar fashion, only the currents travelled through a thin layer at the top of the germanium crystal. One month after Shockley perfected his theoretical design, Bell Labs filed four patents for semiconductor amplifiers – both Brattain and Bardeen’s original point contact design and Shockley’s bipolar junction or NPN transistor.
Though Shockley’s design was successfully demonstrated on April 2, 1950, the first commercial transistors, produced by Western Electric in 1951, were of the point-contact type. But while these saw limited use in long-distance telephone switching gear and military equipment, it soon became clear that the junction transistor was far more robust and easy to manufacture, and this became the standard design going forward.
Still, for several years the transistor remained a solution looking for a problem. It was not until 1952 that New York-based firm Sonotone introduced the lightweight transistorized hearing aid – the first consumer product to make use of the new technology. Two years later, researcher Gordon Teal at Texas Instruments figured out how to replace germanium – which was unreliable and sensitive to heat fluctuations – with silicon, producing an even more reliable and robust transistor. That same year, Texas Instruments and Industrial Development Engineering Associates unveiled a groundbreaking product: the Regency T-1, the world’s first portable, fully-transistorized radio. Though plagued by technical problems, the radio was an instant hit, selling over 150,000 units over its brief production run.
It is difficult to overstate the cultural impact of the TR-1 and its descendants. Previously, consumer radios were heavy, bulky devices restricted to the home living room. With transistor radios, however, consumers – particularly teenagers – could take their music wherever they wanted – an ability that profoundly shaped the development of youth culture.
The transistor also helped reshape the global economic landscape. As American manufacturers began increasingly focusing on Cold War military contracts, foreign entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to cash in on the emerging consumer electronics market. Among these were Japanese engineers Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, who in 1946 founded an electronics company called Tokyo Teletech. In 1958, the company changed its name to Sony. Soon, inexpensive Sony transistor radios and television sets began flooding the global market, establishing Japan as a global leader in consumer electronics and finally bringing the era of the vacuum tube to an end.
Meanwhile, the importance of Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley’s discoveries were finally recognized when, in 1956, the trio shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for “…their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.” But their elation was short-lived, for by then Shockley’s ruthless pursuit of sole credit for the invention of the transistor had broken the team apart. Shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize, Shockley moved to Palo Alto California and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the first tech company in what would come to be known as Silicon Valley. But while Shockley’s clout initially attracted the best and brightest to his company, his difficult personality and tyrannical management style soon drove them away.
One group of exiles known as the “traitorous eight” went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which in 1959 developed the world’s first practical integrated circuit or microchip. Two of the eight, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, later founded the Intel Corporation, today one of the world’s largest manufacturers of microprocessors.
After losing his company, in 1963 Shockley accepted a position at Stanford University as a professor of Engineering and Applied Science. And it is here that his career took a dark turn. Despite holding no degree in genetics or related disciplines, Shockley began vocally promoting pseudoscientific theories about race, intelligence, and eugenics, declaring, for example, that:
“My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro’s intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment.”
Such was Shockley’s conviction that miscegenation – AKA race mixing – posed an existential threat to the United States that he ran as a Republican candidate in the 1982 Senate Election on the single-issue platform of opposing the, to quote, “dysgenic threat” posed by African-Americans and other minority groups. He came in eighth place in the primary, receiving a paltry 0.37% of the vote. By the time Shockley died in 1989 at the age of 79, he had become a pariah, with his obituary in the Los Angeles Times stating:
“He went from being a physicist with impeccable academic credentials to amateur geneticist, becoming a lightning rod whose views sparked campus demonstrations and a cascade of calumny.”
Meanwhile, the co-discoverers of the transistor fared somewhat better. In 1951, John Bardeen left Bell Labs for the University of Illinois, where he began investigating the phenomenon of superconductivity – the ability of certain materials to attain zero electrical resistance when cooled to extremely low temperatures. This pioneering work earned him the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics, making him the only person in history to win this award twice. He died in 1991 at the age of 82.
Walter Brattain continued to work at Bell Labs until 1967 before joining the faculty at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where he remained until his retirement in 1976. He died in 1987 at the age of 85. Thus, while the transistor launched a multi-billion-dollar global industry, beyond their Nobel Prizes none of its three inventors significantly benefited financially from their discovery.
In any piece discussing the origins of the transistor, we would be remiss in not pointing out that Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley were not the sole people working on the transistor when they came up with it. At around the same time as semiconductor research was ramping up at Bell Labs, Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, German physicists working at the Compagnie de Friens et Signaux in Paris, were investigating similar germanium-based modulation devices. In June 1948, they succeeded in building a working point-contact transistor remarkably similar to Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley’s 1947 prototype. Shortly thereafter, however, Mataré and Welker were dismayed to learn that Bell Labs had already beaten them to the punch. Nevertheless, in 1949 their employer became the first company in Europe to commercially produce transistors.
It should also be mentioned that less than a decade later a number of inventors including Ian Ross, John Wallmark, and Mohammed Atalla developed workable Field-Effect Transistors or FETs. Today, FETS – in particular Metal Oxide or MOSFETs – are the most widely used transistor type in the world, being particularly well-suited to miniaturization. Indeed, while the earliest commercial transistors were on the order of one centimetre in size, modern integrated circuit transistors are so inconceivably tiny that the world’s most powerful single computer chip at the time of the writing of this piece – the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine 2 – contains an unfathomable 2.6 trillion of them.
Expand for ReferencesTransistorized! PBS, https://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/
Watkins, Thayer, The History of the Transistor, San José State University, https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/transist.htm
The Transistor – an Invention Ahead of its Time, Ericsson, https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/products/other-products/the-transistor–an-invention-ahead-of-its-time
Dufresne, Steven, History of the Diode, Hackaday, August 15, 2016, https://hackaday.com/2016/08/15/history-of-the-diode/
Zorpette, Glenn, How the First Transistor Worked, IEEE Spectrum, November 20, 2022, https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-history
Iwai, Hiroshi & Misra, Durga, The Transistor Was Invented 75 Years Ago: a Big Milestone in Human History, The Electromechanical Society, 2022,https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.F13224IF/pdf
Steber, George, The Story of the Transistor, Nuts and Volts, https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/the-story-of-the-transistor
Woodford, Chris, Transistors, ExplainThatStuff, December 8, 2021, https://www.explainthatstuff.com/howtransistorswork.html
The post Incredible Engineering- Inventing the Transistor appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Selfie stick. Electrical banana. Pocket pleaser. Magic wand. Divorce maker. Buzz Nightgear. Battery Operated Boyfriend. These are but a few colourful euphemisms for womankind’s best friend, found in millions of nightstand drawers across the globe: the vibrator. If you are a connoisseur of strange product origins then you’ve likely heard the quirky and unlikely story of the vibrator’s creation, which goes something like this: during the Victorian era, women were regularly diagnosed with female hysteria, a catch-all condition covering everything from fainting, insomnia, irritability, nervousness, or excessive sexual desire – really, any inconvenient symptom a woman could exhibit. The most popular treatment for female hysteria was the pelvic or clitoral massage, performed by a doctor in a clinical setting. Being completely ignorant of the female orgasm, doctors dismissed the resulting shudders and moans of ecstasy as mere “paroxysms”, maintaining that as no vaginal penetration was involved, pelvic massage had nothing to do with sex.
As the popularity of this treatment exploded, doctors devised various mechanical vibrating machines to relieve their aching fingers and wrists, speed up the massage process, and allow them to service many more patients per day. And thus, an iconic sex toy was accidentally born.
It’s an entertaining story, one which has been told and retold in countless books, documentaries, and even scientific papers, and inspired several works of popular entertainment including Sarah Ruhl’s award-winning 2009 stage play In the Next Room and the 2011 film Hysteria starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jonathan Pryce.
It is also completely false without a shred of evidence backing any of it. Something only extremely recently revealed.
That’s right: despite being widely reported as historical truth, the popular account of the vibrator’s creation is, in fact, a fantasy, concocted by a single historian based on dubious interpretations of historical records. Yet this narrative has remained largely unchallenged for more than two decades since, exposing worrying truths about how falsehoods can spread through popular culture and how academic research is fact-checked and published.
This is the scandalous story of the great vibrator myth.
The popular tale of the vibrator’s unlikely origins first appeared in the 1999 book The Technology of Orgasm by American historian Rachel Maines. The book proved hugely popular upon its release and received multiple awards, including the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Prize for “distinguished contributions to public history,” as well as the the American Foundation for Gender and Genital Medicine and Science or AFGGMS Science and Biennial Book Awards. While controversial at first, Maines’s conclusions have since become near-universally accepted, being cited in dozens of academic papers and books, popular histories, and sex manuals; and directly inspiring dramatic works like the aforementioned In the Next Room and Hysteria.
Yet despite reviewers praising the book for opening up an entirely new area of historical inquiry, in the years following The Technology of Orgasm’s publication, few researchers made any attempt to replicate or expand upon Maine’s research. That is, until 2018, when Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, historians from the Georgia Institute of Technology, decided to examine the sources cited in Maine’s book. As Lieberman later stated:
“From what I knew of the history of sexuality, it sounded unlikely that doctors would be [regularly performing pelvic massages]. When I checked the sources, that was when I first really thought, okay, there’s something up with this.”
What Lieberman and Schatzberg discovered was shocking. As they bluntly state in their 2018 paper A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm, published in the Journal of Positive Sexuality:
“…we could find no evidence that physicians ever used electromechanical vibrators to induce orgasms in female patients as a medical treatment. We examined every source that Maines cites in support of her core claim. None of these sources actually do so…Maines provides remarkably few citations in support of them, instead padding her argument with a mass of tangential citations that obscure the lack of support for the core argument. But none of the sources she cites even suggest what she is arguing, at least not to a reader who is not already convinced that these practices occurred.”
But before we dive into Lieberman and Schatzberg’s thorough debunking of Maines’s conclusions, it is worth noting that one fundamental pillar of her argument is largely accurate. For thousands of years, physicians did indeed recognize an affliction called female hysteria. However, the definition and purported causes of this disorder have varied widely over the centuries. The term itself derives from the Greek hystera, meaning “uterus” or “womb”, and was originally associated with the ancient concept of the “wandering womb”. This is exactly what it sounds like: the belief that the uterus can randomly wander around a woman’s body, putting pressure on various internal organs and causing all manner of health problems. This concept dates to at least the 5th century B.C.E., first appearing in the writings of Ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates of Kos and Artaeus of Cappadocia. However, at this time the term hysteria was not yet used, nor was the “wandering womb” theory universally accepted. Indeed, 3rd Century C.E. Roman physician Claudius Galen attributed the condition to the buildup of so-called “female seed”, which grew sour and poisonous unless regularly expelled via sexual intercourse. Unwed women and widows were thought particularly vulnerable. Early treatments for female hysteria included – naturally – marriage, as well as burning sweet or foul-smelling herbs to draw or push the uterus back to its natural position once again proving that humans are stupid.
Following a brief period in the Middle Ages when hysteria was largely attributed to demonic possession, because sure, why not, the wandering womb theory came back into vogue in the 16th century, along with a variation on the ancient theory of humorism. This held that all diseases were caused by an imbalance of four vital fluids or humours: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. As in the classical era, the most commonly-prescribed treatment for a wandering or congested womb remained marriage and regular sexual intercourse with the sufferer’s husband.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, however, the wandering womb theory had finally been abandoned in favour of more “scientific” explanations. For example, German physician Anton Mesmer, a pioneer of hypnosis and the source of the term “mesmerize”, believed that hysteria was caused by a build-up of a type of energy he called “animal magnetism”, and that this energy could be redirected using magnets or electrically-charged metal rods. Meanwhile, French physician Joseph Raulin believed hysteria to be a “vaporous ailment” caused by air pollution in crowded urban areas. This was in keeping with contemporary miasma theory, which held that many diseases were caused by breathing in poisonous vapours or miasmas. Indeed, the term malaria literally translates as “bad air”, reflecting the belief that this disease was caused by poisonous vapours emanating from swamps and marshes. Interestingly, Raulin, along with many of his contemporaries, believed that both men and women could suffer from hysteria but that women, being constitutionally weaker and lazier, were far more susceptible… The past everybody.
By this time, the diagnosis of hysteria had grown to encompass a dizzying variety of ailments, with French physician François Bossier de Sauvages de Lacroix listing among the possible symptoms:
“…a swollen abdomen, suffocating angina [chest pain] or dyspnea [shortness of breath], dysphagia [difficulty swallowing], […] cold extremities, tears and laughter, oscitation [yawning], pandiculation [stretching and yawning], delirium, a close and driving pulse, and abundant and clear urine.”
In the mid-19th century, hysteria came to be seen as more of a neurological or psychological disorder than a physiological one. French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot characterized hysteria as a form of epilepsy and in the 1870s conducted extensive studies on hysteric patients at the Pitié-Salpêtrière charity hospital in Paris, capturing the various physical symptoms of the disorder in a series of widely-published photographs. He also developed various hypnotic methods for treating hysteria, based on the earlier work of Anton Mesmer. Others, however, took a decidedly more chauvinistic view of the disorder, with Harvard medical professor Edward Hammond Clarke claiming in his 1875 treatise Sex in Education that modern food, clothing, and education drew energy away from women’s reproductive organs, inflicting all manner of ailments. Clarke argued that women be barred from higher education, lest it lead to, to quote, “…physiological disasters [such as]…nervous collapse and sterility.” …
Others, like physician Frederick Hollick and psychiatrist L.E. Emerson, blamed hysteria on excessive sexual desire, promiscuity, masturbation, or sexual abuse in childhood.
Treatments for hysteria also become more varied and extreme. For instance, in the 1850s American physician Silas Weir Mitchell began prescribing the “rest cure”, which confined the patient to bed for weeks or even months on end. While this might not sound too bad, it is worth noting that patients were also forbidden from reading, writing, talking, or engaging their minds in any way, causing many to quickly and inexorably lose their sanity. Such was the case with American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman who, after being prescribed the rest cure by Dr. Mitchell himself, recounted her experiences in the classic 1892 horror short story The Yellow Wallpaper.
But it could always be worse; in extreme cases, women diagnosed with hysteria could be forcibly committed to psychiatric institutions and even subjected to surgical interventions including hysterectomy and clitorectomy – and to learn more about the horrifying history of anti-masturbation measures and discover whether flicking the bean or flogging the dolphin actually does any harm, please check out our previous video Is ‘Choking the Chicken’ Actually Bad For You?
Thankfully, advancements in psychiatry along with the early feminist movement eventually caused female hysteria to fall out of fashion as a legitimate medical diagnosis. However, as late as 1968, the condition was still included in the second edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – AKA the DSM-II. It would not be removed until the publication of the DSM-III in 1980.
It is here, however, where actual medical history and the narrative presented in The Technology of Orgasm part ways. In their 2018 paper, Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg break down Maines’s thesis into three main arguments before debunking each in turn. These are: a) pelvic massage was a long-established and widely-practiced treatment for female hysteria; b) Victorian doctors were unaware of the female orgasm or the role of the clitoris, and thus considered pelvic massage non-sexual since it involved no penetration; and c) the mechanical vibrator was developed specifically to make pelvic massage easier and more efficient.
As noted, in each case, Lieberman and Schatzberg found shockingly little hard evidence for Maines’s claims, writing that:
“If vibrating the clitoris were indeed a standard medical therapy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one would expect direct historical evidence of the practice, either from proponents or critics. Medical discourse at the time was very contentious. Physicians regularly lauded and attacked therapies that used new technologies, especially electrical devices, so historians would expect to find debates about clitoral vibration in medical journals. Vibrators were widely promoted for other medical therapies in this era. The American Medical Association was, in fact, quite critical of such vibrator treatments. Furthermore, any medical procedure that could have been perceived as sexual would surely have attracted the attention of censorious moralists. Yet Maines insists that these treatments were not seen as sexual, so according to her own logic, physicians would have had no reason to conceal the practice. Sometimes absence of evidence is really evidence of absence.”
And Lieberman and Schatzberg are far from alone in their criticism. Previously, classical historian Helen King of the Open University London questioned the claim that pelvic massage was a long-established treatment for hysteria, arguing that Maines had cherry-picked and misinterpreted many of her sources:
“Maines wants a line of history going all the way back to the time of Hippocrates, so she was determined to find doctors massaging their female patients to orgasm in the earliest written sources…but a Roman satire, describing ‘anointers’ at the baths who masturbate a woman to orgasm, is very different from saying doctors really did this. It’s a satire – it’s supposed to be outrageous… [Maines also does this by] reading a description about what happens when the womb is rubbed during intercourse and making that into a passage about masturbation by a doctor.”
Similarly, many sources which purportedly demonstrate the ubiquity of pelvic massage in the 18th and 19th centuries actually describe very different therapies:
“…medical sources that describe pelvic and gynecological massage in detail show that the practice was not sexual, did not involve the clitoris, and did not produce an orgasm. The term “pelvic massage” usually meant uterine massage, a treatment frequently used for conditions such as dysmenorrhea or uterine prolapse….Furthermore, none of her English-language sources even mentions production of “paroxysms” by massage or anything else that could remotely suggest an orgasm. This lack of evidence by itself undermines the core of her claim.”
Going back to Lieberman and Schatzberg, they note multiple instances where Maines distorts or misinterprets her sources in service of her narrative:
“Maines’ second key claim is that genital use of vibrators was a standard treatment for hysteria and related ailments, such as neurasthenia. [The] sources she cites contradict this claim. Some of her cited sources do not even mention hysteria, while most of her sources on hysteria do not mention vibrators. Even when medical sources did endorse vibration treatment for hysteria, it was rarely a primary treatment, and never recommended for application to the vulva…
[In one example], Maines twists a quote to make it seem to support her claim about clitoral massage for hysteria:
In 1903 Samuel Howard Monell effectively summarized the demand of physicians since Hippocrates for some simple means of getting results with their hysterical patients:
“Pelvic massage (in gynecology) has its brilliant advocates and they report wonderful results, but when practitioners must supply the skilled technic with their own fingers the method has no value to the majority.” For physicians in this line of work, the vibrator was a godsend: “Special applicators (motor-driven) give practical value and office convenience of what to what otherwise is impractical.”
On its face, this quote appears to be strong evidence. However, the context of the quote shows otherwise. Maines implies that Monell was discussing hysterical patients; however, nowhere in the book does he mention treating hysteria with pelvic massage. In fact, the quoted passage occurs in a discussion of massage for “fractures, dislocations, and sprains.”
Even more questionable is Maines’s claim that Victorian doctors viewed clitoral massage as non-sexual and thus unproblematic. By the 16th Century, when marriage and regular intercourse were commonly prescribed to release built-up “female seed”, physicians such as Pieter van Foreest and Gioanni Matteo da Grado vigorously opposed any substitute procedure such as the manual manipulation of the genitals by either the patient or a doctor. Such manipulation was seen as explicitly sexual, and only recommended as a last resort – and even then, it was only ever performed by female midwives, not male doctors. Thus, the claim that Victorian doctors 300 years later would be unaware of the sexual nature of clitoral massage is patently absurd. In The Technology of Orgasm, Maines herself even states that:
“Theodore Thomas, for example, wrote in 1891 that the purpose of the clitoris was ‘to furnish to the female the nervous erethrism which is necessary to a perfect performance and completion of the sexual act’ and went on to observe that orgasm could be produced by clitoral stimulation ‘outside of intercourse’”
Indeed, that vibrators could be used for sexual stimulation was well-understood by contemporary doctors like the amusingly-named American gynaecologist James Craven Wood, who wrote in 1917:
“The greatest objection to vibration thus applied is that in overly sensitive patients it is liable to cause sexual excitement… [but if] the vibratode is kept well back from the clitoris, there is but little danger of causing such excitement.”
Hallie Lieberman further drives home the absurdity of Maines’s claim in a 2020 New York Times article, writing that:
“Imagine arguing that at the turn of the 20th century, female nurses were giving hand jobs to male patients to treat them for psychological problems; that men didn’t realize anything sexual was going on; that because female nurses’ wrists got tired from all the hand jobs, they invented a device called a penis pump to help speed up the process. Then imagine claiming nobody thought any of this was sexual, because it was a century ago.”
On this note, in The Technology of Orgasm, Maines outlines her second major claim by stating:
“…the androcentric definition of sex as an activity recognizes three essential steps: preparation for penetration (‘foreplay’), penetration, and male orgasm. Sexual activity that does not involve at least the last two has not been popularly or medically (and for that matter legally) regarded as ‘the real thing’…since no penetration was involved, believers in the hypothesis that only penetration was sexually gratifying to women could argue that nothing sexual could be occurring when their patients experienced the hysterical paroxysm during treatment.”
In reality, as Lieberman and Schatzberg point out:
“…the historical evidence demonstrates that penetrative use of vibrators was actually a standard medical practice. Most vibrator companies produced penetrative vaginal attachments, and nearly every vibrator sold to physicians included these…ironically, when Maines argues that massage with vibrators only occurred on the vulva, her sources demonstrate the opposite point: they show that massage occurred inside the vagina…
Furthermore, of the sources Maines cites in support of this claim, only one explicitly recommended using electrotherapeutic devices on the vulva, a 1909 book by female physician May Cushman Rice. However, Rice was not referring to treating hysteria, but rather to the use of high-frequency electrodes to treat vulvitis, inflammation of the vulva. A few pages later, she suggested treating vaginismus (vaginal muscular spasms) by applying internal vaginal electrodes. Again, Rice never mentioned hysteria or hinted at anything that could be interpreted as sexual stimulation. As with the other sources we discuss, Rice’s work lends no support to Maines’ core claims.”
If, as Maines claims, Victorian doctors saw vaginal penetration as a prerequisite for sexual activity, then such attachments would not have been so widely and openly used. That they were, however, strongly suggests that this claim is false – and to learn more about the late 19th/early 20th century fad of electrotherapy and the weird and wonderful devices used to administer this treatment, please check out the video on the subject over on Our Own Devices, the personal channel of this video’s author, Gilles Messier.
In the end, Lieberman and Schatzberg’s paper completely demolishes every major argument made in The Technology of Orgasm. Not only did clitoral massage for the treatment of hysteria not have an extensive history stretching back to antiquity, but it was rarely – if at all – practiced even in the Victorian era. And while vibrators were widely used in Victorian medicine, they were not invented to increase the efficiency of clitoral massage, being used instead to treat other gynaecological ailments. Thus, the amusing and scandalous story of the vibrator’s creation is just that: a story, pieced together from carefully cherry-picked and conveniently misinterpreted sources. It is, in other words, seemingly a work of academic fraud. More on what Maines herself has to say about this in a bit.
But, what, then, is the real story? How did the ubiquitous sex toy we know and – er – love today actually come to be? Most sources which follow Rachel Maines’s narrative credit the invention of the electric vibrator to British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville. In the 2011 film Hysteria, Granville, played by actor Hugh Dancy, is shown creating the device to more efficiently “service” his patients and later becoming hugely wealthy off his invention. But while Joseph Granville was a real person and did indeed invent an electric vibrator in the 1880s, he did not use his device for the treatment of hysteria, in fact explicitly warning against this application. Rather, he used it almost exclusively on men to treat a wide variety of ailments from chronic pain to deafness. The only sexually-related application mentioned in any of his writings is the stimulation of the perineum – the area between the genitals and anus – to treat male impotence.
Further, according to Maines’s narrative, the legitimate medical use of these devices provided vibrator manufacturers with a plausible cover under which to market their wares. As Lieberman and Schatzberg explain:
“[Maines] argues that the electromechanical vibrator was able to become a mainstream consumer appliance in the early 1900s because it was considered to be a medical device, not a sexual one. The vibrator’s sexual uses remained hidden for over two decades until the late 1920s, when stag films began showing women using vibrators for sexual pleasure. As a consequence, vibrators lost their “social camouflage… as a home and professional medical instrument,” doctors stopped using them in their practice, and mainstream companies stopped marketing them.”
The truth, however, is much more nuanced. When the first mechanical vibrators were introduced in the 1880s, they were touted as a miraculous technological panacea capable of treating hundreds of ailments including insomnia, paralysis, neuralgia, epilepsy, tuberculosis, sciatica, lumbago, gout, deafness, vomiting, constipation, impotence, haemorrhoids, and even wrinkles. They remained popular with all manner of medical practitioners until 1915, when the American Medical Association issued a public statement declaring vibrators marketed for medical use to be a “a delusion and a snare”. Faced with the collapse of the lucrative medical market, vibrator manufacturers pivoted to selling their wares directly to the public. Early 20th century newspapers and magazines were packed with ads for personal vibrators of all shapes and sizes. At the time, obscenity laws such as the 1873 Comstock Act forbade manufacturers from advertising sexually-related products, forcing them to focus instead on the health and lifestyle benefits of their wares. Early vibrator advertisements often featured glamorous-looking women massaging themselves in bed or the bath, with the ad copy for the Arnold Vibrator promising:
“Every woman can have a faultless complexion and youthful, finely proportioned figure. There is no further need of powder, paint, pads, or other deceptions.”
And while many of these products were sold with dildo-like attachments, these were strictly marketed for treating uterine complaints and other non-sexual uses….
However, as time went on, manufacturers grew more and more explicit in their marketing, filling their advertisements with images of shirtless men and women in low-cut tops with coy taglines like “Invented by a woman who knows a woman’s needs.” Of course, physicians and moral guardians were perfectly aware of what these products were being used for behind closed doors, with one 1912 men’s advice book warning that:
“Various electric vibrators have been abused by the unscrupulous … to give vibratory massage of the generative organs … a sensation similar to that of masturbation.”
But thanks to the narrow tightrope of plausible deniability vibrator manufacturers managed to walk, there was nothing the prudes could do to stop this illicit trade. Indeed, when in the 1950s the U.S. Food and Drug Administration launched a major campaign against personal vibrators, their concerns had nothing to do with masturbation. Rather, they sought to crack down on the outlandish and unsubstantiated health benefits still being claimed by vibrator manufacturers.
But thanks to obscenity laws and conservative social attitudes, it was not until the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s that women began to more freely talk about masturbation and vibrators. In the late 1960s, New York sex educator and artist Betty Dodson began hosting women-only masturbation workshops to help women regain the sexual knowledge long denied them by society, writing in 1974 that:
“I have found that the vibrator gives me the strongest and most consistent form of stimulation and is especially good for women who have never experienced orgasm.”
One of the vibrators used in Dodson’s workshops, the Hitachi Magic Wand, went on to become one of the most popular and recognizable sex toys in the world, being ranked the “No.1 Greatest Gadget of All Time” by Mobile Magazine in 2005. Today, the discerning consumer can choose from thousands of exotic and sophisticated vibrators to suit any taste, from internally-inserted “love eggs” and pocket-sized “bullets” to larger, more elaborate models like the “rabbit” with attachments for both vaginal and clitoral stimulation. Many models feature wireless or USB charging, different vibration intensities and rhythms, and can even be be synched to a user’s favourite songs – including, of course, “Good Vibrations.” But in many parts of the world – including the United States – social progress has lagged far behind technological progress. For instance, several U.S. states including Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama both have “obscene devices laws” prohibiting devices “…designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs” carrying penalties of up to $10,000 and one year in jail. Vibrators also remain illegal in many nations including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and Vietnam. For this reason, manufacturers carry on the age-old tradition of marketing their products as “personal massagers.”
Getting back to the main subject of this video, given how radically the real history of the vibrator deviates from the narrative presented in The Technology of Orgasm, why did it take nearly two decades for anyone to scrutinize and debunk Rachel Maines’s claims? In the conclusion of their 2018 paper, Lieberman and Schatzberg attempt to give an explanation:
“Our answer to this question must be somewhat speculative. Fundamental to its reception is the book’s sex appeal. It tells a scandalous story of transgressed boundaries, of dimwitted doctors providing women with sexual satisfaction. Maines has historicized the doctor-patient fantasy, a staple of erotica.Yet, unlike the porn fantasy, Maines’ narrative can be discussed without social reproach because of its academic respectability.
Yet the book’s appeal isn’t just sexual. Maines’ story fits narratives of progress in sexual knowledge, allowing readers to see themselves as worldly sophisticates in contrast to the clueless, desexualized Victorians. Physicians look particularly ignorant in this account, having no clue what the clitoris was, let alone an orgasm. Maines also portrays women as victims of profit-hungry physicians. Such victim narratives were a staple of feminists critiques of medical care in the 1970s. Women have no real agency in Maines’ account, as the historical actors are all male physicians, and women’s voices are completely absent. However, readers can still view the female patients as heroes who subvert patriarchy by procuring orgasms under the guise of medical treatment. The story is thus paradoxical—women are victims, but the tools used to victimize them bring them orgasms, a delicious irony.”
The salacious allure of Maines’s narrative is seconded by Helen King, who writes:
“[That story] just appeals to people now. It’s like some porn movie scenario with the doctor that – nudge, nudge – knows what the problem really is.”
In other words, Maines’s narrative was just too good to not be true so people ate it up.
But the general public falling for an entertaining story is one thing; the fact that it took nearly twenty years for any scholars to fact-check Maines’s book speaks to deeper issues within the field of academic history. As Lieberman and Schatzberg argue:
“The success of Technology of Orgasm thus serves as a cautionary tale for how easily
falsehoods can become embedded in qualitative fields….The success of her book suggests that academics rarely check each others’ facts carefully, especially when repeating stories that they want to be true.
…[Indeed] We believe that Technology of Orgasm is not an isolated case. The same pressures to
publish that produce flawed research in the natural sciences and quantitative social sciences also exist in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. In the humanities and qualitative social sciences, these pressures encourage narrow, banal, and irrelevant research, often disguised by horrid prose and vapid theorizing…
There are few safeguards against flawed empirical research in the humanities. Scholarly
publishing rarely involves any sort of fact checking. Peer reviewers and readers for academic
presses are not expected to confirm a manuscript’s empirical claims, beyond what they already
know. Book reviewers likewise rarely examine citations or sources. Far more fact-checking
occurs in a typical magazine article than in a scholarly publication, despite complaints from
journalists about a decline in the practice. Because fact-checking is not a routine
practice in scholarly publication, factual challenges to scholarship, particularly in the field of
history, are rare, and can be perceived as personal attacks rather than part of the scholarly
Process…
Unless a spirit of fact checking and fearless critique is built into the culture of scholarly publishing, false historical narratives like Maines’ will continue to be published and even praised.”
In many ways, the unchallenged publication of The Technology of Orgasm resembles an inadvertent version of the Sokal Affair, an infamous scholarly hoax which similarly revealed a disturbing lack of academic rigour in the humanities. In 1996, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University and University College London, submitted a deliberately nonsensical academic paper to the journal Social Text to find out whether:
“…a leading North American journal of cultural studies…[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
As expected, the paper, titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, was not subjected to peer review by an expert and duly appeared in the journal’s spring/summer issue. Three weeks later, Sokal published an article in the magazine Lingua Franca revealing the paper to be a hoax, causing much embarrassment and controversy.
Speaking of embarrassment, in response to Lieberman and Schatzberg’s paper, Rachel Maines expressed surprise that it took twenty years for someone to challenge her claims, stating in an interview with The Atlantic that:
“What I said was that this was an interesting hypothesis, and as [Lieberman] points out — correctly, I think — people fell all over it. It was ripe to be turned into mythology somehow. I didn’t intend it that way, but boy, people sure took it, ran with it.”
But Lieberman, Schatzberg, and other critics have rebutted this excuse, citing the definitive language used in The Technology of Orgasm as evidence that Maines intended her conclusions to be more than just an “interesting hypothesis.”
But so what, you might ask? After all, popular history is full of distorted, mythologized, or downright false facts? Well, unfortunately, our interpretation of social and cultural history can have a profound impact on our everyday lives, even hundreds of years after the fact. For example, the Technology of Orgasm was directly cited in two recent legal cases challenging the constitutionality of state laws banning the sale of sex toys: State of Louisiana vs. Christine D. Brenan in 2000 and Williams v. Prior in 2002. In the former case, Maines’s purported historical evidence convinced the court that:
“…the state’s obscene-devices statute fails rational-basis review under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution…[and that] the legislature cannot make a device automatically obscene merely through the use of labels.”
While in the latter, the judge ruled that:
“That evidence has convinced this court that there exists a substantial history, legal tradition, and contemporary practice of deliberate state non-interference in the private, consensual, sexual relationships of married persons and unmarried adults.”
However, if Maines’s historical narrative is shown to be false, it is possible that these rulings may be overturned in the future.
But more fundamentally, as Hallie Lieberman writes:
“[The] myth isn’t harmless. It’s a fantasy that contributes to the ways we still misunderstand female sexuality and that perpetuates harmful stereotypes that continue to resonate in our laws and attitudes.”
Expand for ReferencesCassella, Carly, The Vibrator’s Origin Story is Fantastically Scandalous, But It’s Also Probably Fake, Science Alert, September 12, 2018, https://www.sciencealert.com/no-evidence-victorian-hysteria-origin-vibrators-failure-peer-review-new-study#
Lieberman, Hallie & Schatzberg, Eric, A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm, Journal of Positive Sexuality, August 2018, http://journalofpositivesexuality.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Failure-of-Academic-Quality-Control-Technology-of-Orgasm-Lieberman-Schatzberg.pdf
Lieberman, Hallie, (Almost) Everything You Know About the Invention of the Vibrator is Wrong, The New York Times, January 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/opinion/vibrator-invention-myth.html
Henriques, Martha, The Vibrator: From Medical Tool to Revolutionary Sex Toy, BBC, November 7, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181107-the-history-of-the-vibrator
Bell, Jen, A Short History of the Vibrator, Clue, December 6, 2021, https://helloclue.com/articles/culture/a-short-history-of-the-vibrator
Horwitz, Rainey, Medical Vibrators for Treatment of Female Hysteria, Arizona State University, February 29, 2020, https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/medical-vibrators-treatment-female-hysteria
Cohut, Maria, The Controversy of ‘Female Hysteria’, Medical News Today, October 13, 2020, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/the-controversy-of-female-hysteria
State v. Brenan, Case Text, https://casetext.com/case/state-v-brenan-1
The post The Great Vibrator Myth appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On July 20, 1969, the whole world gathered around their flickering television sets and watched in awe as astronaut Neil Armstrong who, if not for someone secretly slipping his very late application to the astronaut program into the pile wouldn’t have even been there (more on this in the Bonus Facts later), climbed down the leg of a strange, spidery vehicle, stepped onto the surface of the moon, and spoke the immortal words: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” …Followed by the much less memorable second words, “I can – I can pick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.”
But for the first time in history, a human being had set foot on another world. The historic flight of Apollo 11 was the culmination of a massive eight-year effort to realize President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth by the end of the decade. But the road from the earth to the moon was far from a smooth one, beset by numerous hurdles and setbacks. For example, the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew in a launch pad fire on January 27, 1967 prompted a complete redesign of the Apollo spacecraft, while ongoing problems with the Saturn V rocket’s massive F-1 rocket engines nearly resulted in the cancellation of the entire Apollo programme. But perhaps the greatest challenge of all was deciding how to land on the moon in the first place. Solving this seemingly trivial question proved far more difficult than expected, requiring years of careful study and the heroic persistence of an obscure but determined engineer. This is the story of how we learned to land on the moon only a little over a half century after humans were still hitching up covered wagons to go places.
By the time President Kennedy announced Project Apollo in May 1961, scientists and engineers at NASA had already been studying methods for manned lunar flight for several years. Initially, the preferred approach was the simplest; known as Direct Ascent, this involved launching one big spacecraft directly to the moon, landing the whole thing on the surface, lifting off again, and returning to earth. This was the approach seen in nearly all science fiction media up to that point, from Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From The Earth to the Moon and its 1902 film adaptation to the 1929 German film Woman in the Moon, the 1950 American film Destination Moon, and the 1954 Tintin comic book Explorers on the Moon. An early concept for Direct Ascent prepared by North American Aviation showed a spacecraft comprising three sections or modules: at the top was the cone-shaped Apollo capsule or Command Module housing the three-man astronaut crew and fitted with a heat shield to allow the spacecraft to reenter the earth’s atmosphere at the end of the mission. Below this was a cylindrical Service Module containing the oxygen tanks, fuel cells, communications gear, and all the other equipment required to keep the crew alive during the mission. And finally at the bottom was a large Descent and Ascent Stage with landing legs and rocket engines to land the whole vehicle on the lunar surface and lift it back off again.
While theoretically straightforward, in practice the Direct Ascent strategy suffered from a host of practical drawbacks – chief among them being that it was extremely heavy. The Command Module needed to be robust enough to survive the heat and stress of atmospheric reentry, while the Service Module needed to carry all the equipment and consumables needed for the entire mission to the moon and back. All this mass needed to be safely soft-landed on the moon and blasted off again, requiring the use of a massive Descent/Ascent stage and large quantities of fuel – so large in fact, that despite the moon’s gravity being 1/6th that of earth, early estimates put the total mass of the spacecraft at a whopping 90 metric tons! Such a gargantuan spacecraft would, in turn, require an equally gargantuan rocket to haul it from the earth to the moon and back. Known as the Nova, this behemoth would have stood nearly 110 metres or 360 feet tall, weighed 4.5 million kilograms or 9.9 million pounds, and had a first stage delivering a total thrust of 61,925 kilonewtons or 13.9 million pounds force. By comparison, the Saturn V rocket that ultimately took men to the moon stood 86 metres or 282 feet tall, weighed 2.8 million kilograms or 6.2 million pounds, and had a first-stage thrust of 34,500 kilonewtons or 7.75 million pounds force. Not only were engineers unsure if the Nova could even be constructed by the end of the decade, but the rocket would have been too powerful to launch from the pads at Cape Canaveral; indeed, one proposal called for the rocket to be launched from hollowed-out cliffs in Hawaii. Another early concept proposal called for Nova to be fitted with nuclear rocket engines, which would have required launching it from an uninhabited island or a giant barge to prevent contaminating populated areas with radioactive fallout.
There were other, equally concerning flaws with the concept. For instance, nobody knew what the surface of the moon was like or whether it was stable enough to launch a giant spacecraft from. Also, in order to better withstand the G-forces of launch and reentry, the crew lay with their backs to the Command Module heat shield, meaning they would somehow have to land on the moon while facing away from the lunar surface.
Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket engineer and director of the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, favoured an alternative approach known as Earth Orbit Rendezvous or EOR. Instead of being launched all at once with one massive super-rocket, the lunar spacecraft would instead be launched in pieces aboard many smaller Saturn C-5 rockets and assembled in earth orbit before setting off for the moon. Several variations of this scheme were proposed: in one, the spacecraft sections were launched into orbit pre-filled with rocket propellant; while in another they were launched empty and topped up with propellant by another spacecraft just prior to departure. And in yet another, the spacecraft was assembled by astronauts based aboard an earth-orbiting space station built ahead of time.
But while Earth Orbit Rendezvous eliminated the need to develop a giant and potentially troublesome super-rocket, it soon became clear that this approach was just as problematic and risky as Direct Ascent. For one thing, assembling such a spacecraft would require NASA to perfect techniques for orbital rendezvous and docking – the feasibility of which was unknown at the time and would not be demonstrated until the Gemini 6, 7, and 8 missions in 1965 and 1966 – and for more on how the former mission nearly ended in fiery disaster, please check out our previous video That Time NASA Almost Turned Two Astronauts into Roman Candles. Further, spreading the spacecraft components over multiple launches actually increased overall risk, since even a single failed or aborted launch would likely result in a mission being cancelled. Even a delayed launch could have serious consequences, for cryogenic rocket propellants like liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen could potentially boil away into space by the time the spacecraft was ready for departure. The use of an orbiting space station as an assembly dock and home base would help mitigate some of these risks, but would also likely push the project far beyond President Kennedy’s 1970 deadline. And on top of all of this, once they reached the moon the crew would still face the same problem of safely landing a massive spacecraft on the lunar surface and blasting off again.
It is worth noting here that many of the difficulties NASA faced in selecting a lunar landing profile stemmed from a combination of politics and locked-in design decisions. The basic Apollo Spacecraft design had been conceived in 1960 by Maxine Faget, chief designer at NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia, as a more sophisticated, general-purpose successor to his primitive Mercury Capsule, which carried the first American astronauts into space. Faget chose a crew size of three so the spacecraft instruments could be continuously monitored in three eight-hour shifts, while the size of the spacecraft and the volume of oxygen, fuel, and other consumables carried aboard it were chosen based on a 14-day mission – the maximum time anticipated for a trip to the moon and back. These design decisions resulted in a spacecraft weighing around 4 metric tons. However, at the time lunar missions were seen as a far-off goal, and little thought was given to how the Apollo spacecraft would actually land on the moon. But after the Soviet Union leapfrogged the United States with a string of spectacular space “firsts” including the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957; and the first manned orbital flight of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961, the U.S. government scrambled to choose a spaceflight goal that would allow them to beat the Soviets. Earth-orbiting space stations and manned lunar flybys were quickly rejected as the Soviets could likely accomplish these feats using existing hardware; the only mission that would require both superpowers to develop new launch vehicles from scratch – giving the US a chance to pull ahead – was a manned lunar landing. Maxine Faget’s Apollo design was thus pressed into service as America’s lunar spacecraft far ahead of schedule.
Meanwhile, aerospace contractor McDonnell-Douglas had submitted a number of proposals for Direct Ascent mission profiles using their own 2-man Gemini capsule or a simplified, 2-man version of the Apollo spacecraft – missions which could very feasibly be flown by the end of the decade using a great deal of off-the-shelf hardware. However, by the end of 1961 all the major government contracts for Project Apollo had already been handed out, and neither NASA administrator James Webb nor U.S. Vice President Lyndon Johnson – chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council – were willing to take the main spacecraft contract away from North American Aviation. Both Wernher von Braun and Jerome Wiesner, science advisor to the President, fought tooth and nail to have McDonnell-Douglas’s proposal accepted, until finally being silenced by the Kennedy administration. Thus, despite the many logistical advantages of the two-man direct-ascent approach, all subsequent lunar landing proposals were locked in around the more sophisticated – but far heavier – 3-man Apollo spacecraft. The political shenanigans behind North American retaining the Apollo contract would later come to light in the wake of the January 27, 1967 Apollo 1 fire, when shoddy workmanship and questionable design choices led to astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee perishing in an oxygen fire during a routine dress rehearsal at Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 34.
The NASA administration soon split into two camps, each vehemently defending its favoured approach. In many cases preferences were driven by more than simply numbers; for example, Earth Orbit Rendezvous would require the construction of a space station, a lifelong dream of Wernher von Braun’s which would have many scientific applications beyond the moon landing. It would also require the construction of significantly more launch hardware – an attractive proposition for contractors seeking lucrative government contracts.
But as the debate raged on over the merits of Direct Ascent vs. Earth Orbit Rendezvous, a third possibility began quietly circulating among NASA engineers – an approach known as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous or LOR. First proposed by the Chance Vought Company in 1960, LOR challenged the primary assumption at the heart of the other proposed mission profiles: that the entire spacecraft had to land on and take off from the lunar surface. Instead, the Chance-Vought engineers proposed constructing a lightweight landing vehicle which the astronauts would use to descend to the lunar surface, leaving the rest of the spacecraft in lunar orbit. Once the astronauts had completed their mission, they would lift off from the lunar surface in the lander, rendezvous and dock with the orbiting spacecraft, and discard the now-redundant lander before returning home. As the lander didn’t need to withstand the stresses of launch and reentry like the main crew capsule, it could be made extremely lightweight, greatly reducing the size and weight of the rocket needed to launch the entire combination to the moon. In July 1961, NASA Langley engineer James Chamberlin – a Canadian who had previously worked on the ill-fated Avro CF-105 Arrow interceptor project – fleshed out this concept in a proposal based on the 2-man Gemini capsule. Along with the capsule itself, his proposed mission would carry one or two simple, open-cockpit lunar landers or “bugs”. On reaching lunar orbit, one of the astronauts would leave the capsule, spacewalk over to the “bug”, and fly it down to the lunar surface. Once his mission was complete, he would lift off, rendezvous with the Gemini, and spacewalk back to the capsule before returning home. Chamberlin calculated that the Gemini-based mission could be accomplished using a single Saturn C-3 – a one million kilogram or 2.2 million pound launch vehicle originally designed for the Earth Orbit Rendezvous approach – and the 2-man Apollo-based mission using the slightly larger C-5. Yet despite its many advantages, Chamberlin’s LOR concept was immediately rejected by NASA as too risky, too limited, and – for the reasons previously mentioned – politically threatening to North American Aviation’s Apollo spacecraft design.
Yet Langley continued to explore the LOR concept, modifying it to use an enclosed and pressurized Lunar Excursion Module or LEM which could dock with the 3-man Apollo spacecraft, allowing two astronauts to transfer between the two vehicles without having to perform a spacewalk. But once again NASA rejected the proposal as it involved performing a rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit – considered at the time to be far too risky. If the two astronauts aboard the LEM were unable to dock with the main spacecraft, they would be left stranded 384,400 kilometres from home – far away from any possible rescue. For this reason, NASA continued to focus on approaches which kept the entire spacecraft together throughout the entire mission.
Now enter the hero of our story, a NASA Langley engineer named John C. Houbolt. Born in Altoona, Iowa but raised in Joliet, Illinois, he obtained a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois in 1942. That same year, he joined the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory – then operated by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics or NACA – as an assistant civil engineer in the Structures Research Division. However, he soon transitioned into aerodynamics, obtaining a doctorate in aerothermodynamics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich in 1957 before returning to Langley, becoming Associate Chief of the Dynamic Loads Division in 1960 and Chief of the Theoretical Mechanics Division in 1962 – after NACA had become the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA. Prior to his involvement in the Space Program, Houbolt’s main claim to fame were his investigations into the phenomenon of propeller whirl mode flutter, which was involved in the crashes of two Lockheed L-188 Electra airliners in 1959 and 1960.
As the debate over lunar landing profiles began to heat up, Houbolt and his small research group in the Theoretical Mechanics Division, including engineers Clinton E. Brown and William H. Michael Junior, quickly latched onto the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous concept, which they calculated would be the most fuel and hardware-efficient approach and the only one capable of placing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. There is some debate as to who actually originated the concept; as previously mentioned a version of LOR was submitted by James Chamberlin in July 1961, while Clinton Brown conducted various studies on lunar parking orbits. Houbolt, however, later claimed to have independently come up with the same idea.
What is certain, however, is that Houbolt soon became the single most vehement champion within NASA for Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, aggressively championing the concept at every possible opportunity. But so deeply entrenched were the Direct Ascent and Earth Orbit Rendezvous camps that everywhere he went Houbolt faced stiff resistance. At one meeting attended by Maxime Faget, Wernher von Braun, and NASA Associate Administrator Robert Seamans, following Houbolt’s pitch of LOR, Faget suddenly sprang from his seat and angrily declared: “His figures lie! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Meanwhile, Houbolt’s supervisor ordered him to drop the matter, pointing out that selecting lunar landing profiles was well outside his department’s jurisdiction. Yet Houbolt persisted, and in November 1961 he decided to cut through the red tape and write a now-legendary letter directly to Robert Seamans. This move violated every protocol at NASA and placed Houbolt’s career on the line, a fact he plainly acknowledged:
“Dear Dr. Seamans :
Somewhat as a voice in the wilderness, I would like to pass on a few thoughts on matters that have been of deep concern to me over recent months. This concern may be phrased in terms of two questions:
- If you were told that we can put men on the moon with safe return with a single C-3, its equivalent or something less, would you judge this statement with the critical skepticism that others have?
- Is the establishment of a sound booster program really so difficult?
I would like to comment on both these questions, and more, would like to forward as attachments condensed versions of plans which embody ideas and suggestions which I believe are so fundamentally sound and important that we cannot afford to overlook them. You will recall I wrote to you on a previous occasion. I fully realize that contacting you in this manner is somewhat unorthodox; but the issues at stake are crucial enough to us all that an unusual course is warranted.
Since we have had only occasional and limited contact, and because you therefore probably do not know me very well, it is conceivable that after reading this you may feel that you are dealing with a crank. Do not be afraid of this. The thoughts expressed here may not be stated in as diplomatic a fashion as they might be, or as I would normally try to do, but this is by choice and at the moment is not important. The important point is that you hear the ideas directly, not after they have filtered through a score or more of other people, with the attendant risk that they may not even reach you.”
But after this rather humble and apologetic introduction, Houbolt got straight to the heart of the matter, arguing that NASA’s approach to selecting a lunar landing profile was flawed, overly restrictive, and riddled with entrenced bias:
“The greatest objection that has been raised about our lunar rendezvous plan is that it does not conform to the “ground rules”. This to me is nonsense; the important question is, “Do we want to get to the moon or not?”, and, if so, why do we have to restrict our thinking along a certain narrow channel. I feel very fortunate that I do not have to confine my thinking to arbitrarily set up ground rules which only serve to constrain and preclude possible equally good or perhaps better approaches.
…Three ground rules in particular are worthy of mention: three men, direct landing, and storable return. These are very restrictive requirements. If two men can do the job, and if the use of only two men allows the job to be done, then why not do it this way? If relaxing the direct requirements allows the job to be done with a C-3, then why not relax it? Further, when a hard objective look is taken at the use of storables, then it is soon realized that perhaps they aren’t so desirable or advantageous after all in comparison with some other fuels.
…Perhaps the substance of this section might be summarized this way. Why is NOVA, with its ponderous ideas, whether in size, manufacturing, erection, site location, etc., simply just accepted, and why is a much less grandiose scheme involving rendezvous ostracized or put on the defensive?”
He then followed this with a thorough mathematical breakdown demonstrating the inherent advantages of LOR, before concluding that:
“Naturally, in discussing matters of the type touched upon herein, one cannot make comments without having them smack somewhat against NOVA. I want to assure you, however, I’m not trying to say NOVA should not be built, i’m simply trying to establish that our scheme deserves a parallel front-line position. As a matter of fact, because the lunar rendezvous approach is easier, quicker, less costly, requires less development, less new sites and facilities, it would appear more appropriate to say that this is the way to go, and that we will use NOVA as a follow on. Give us the go-ahead, and a C-3, and we will put men on the moon in very short order – and we don’t need any Houston empire to do it.
In closing, Dr. Seamans, let me say that should you desire to discuss the points covered in this letter in more detail, I would welcome the opportunity to come up to Headquarters to discuss them with you.
Respectfully yours,
John C. Houbolt”
Unorthodox and insubordinate as it was, the letter succeeded in getting Seaman’s attention, with the former Administrator stating in 2008 that:
“It was rather strident in the way it was written. My first reaction was, ‘I’d like some way to get that son of a gun off my back.’”
Nonetheless, Seamans was swayed by Houbolt’s arguments, and he replied by promising to put LOR into active consideration. With Seaman’s backing, resistance to Houbolt’s plan soon began to crumble. Further tradeoff analyses revealed the risk of rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit to be much lower than had previously been assumed, while in June 1962, Wernher von Braun, long a staunch advocate of Earth Orbit Rendezvous, unexpectedly reversed course and announced he was now backing LOR. One month later on July 11, NASA Administrator James Webb held a press conference in which he officially announced Lunar Orbit Rendezvous as the chosen mission profile for Project Apollo, stating that it was:
“…most desirable from the standpoints of time, cost, and mission accomplishments.”
Suddenly, the once-maligned John Houbolt became a NASA hero; upon learning of the selection, Houbolt’s supervisor shook his hand and declared:
“I can safely say I’m shaking hands with the man who single-handedly saved the government $20 billion.”
In 1963, Houbolt was awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, the citation for which read:
“[For his] foresight, perseverance, and incisive theoretical analysis of the concept of lunar orbit rendezvous, revealing the important engineering and economic advantages that led to its adoption as a central element in the U.S. manned lunar exploration.”
It is worth noting here that in addition to Direct Ascent, Earth Orbit Rendezvous, and Lunar Rendezvous, a fourth lunar landing profile was also proposed, known as Lunar Surface Rendezvous or LSR. This involved landing an unmanned spacecraft loaded with fuel ahead of the astronauts, who would then land nearby and transfer the fuel into their own tanks, allowing them to lift off from the lunar surface.While this approach reduced the payload that had to be carried by any one launch vehicle, it was deemed far too risky and never seriously considered.
But our story is far from over, for while straightforward on paper, actually implementing Lunar Orbit Rendezvous was a whole other matter. On July 25, 1962, NASA sent out invitations to eleven aerospace contractors to bid on the contract for the Lunar Excursion Vehicle or LEM – of which nine submitted detailed proposals. On November 7, the Grumman Aerospace Corporation of Bethpage, New York – which had conducted extensive preliminary studies on lunar landing vehicles – was selected as prime contractor, with development costs estimated at $350 million. The company had its work cut out for it; at the time, the United States had only a few hours of cumulative spaceflight under its belt, and the Grumman engineers were being tasked with building a spacecraft that could land two astronauts on the surface of another world and return them safely to orbit. There were countless unknowns. How easy would it be for two spacecraft to rendezvous and dock in lunar orbit? How would the astronauts guide the LEM down to the lunar surface and make a soft landing – and what would await them when they touched down? No spacecraft – unmanned or otherwise – had yet landed on the moon or even taken high-resolution pictures of its surface; in the early days of the Apollo Programme, it was feared that the lunar surface might be covered by several metres of fine dust or regolith, which would swallow up a landing spacecraft or make it tilt severely to one side, preventing it from safely lifting off again. And could all these tasks be accomplished using a vehicle light enough to be launched to the moon by a single Saturn C5 rocket – by now renamed the Saturn V? With the 1970 deadline uncomfortably close, much of the hardware would have to be designed before any of these questions could be definitely answered; educated guesses were the order of the day.
The design and development of the Lunar Excursion Module – or simply the Lunar Module, as it was later renamed – is a huge subject worthy of its own separate video. However, we will attempt to summarize it here as best we can. Early on, engineers settled on a strange, insect-shaped vehicle comprising two main sections: a lower descent module with legs and a rocket engine to allow the vehicle to touch down on the lunar surface, and an upper ascent stage containing the pressurized crew cabin. The whole vehicle would be stored aboard the Saturn V rocket in a cone-shaped shroud or adapter just behind the Apollo CSM. After lifting off from the earth, the CSM, LM, and SIVB [“S-four-B”] upper rocket stage would enter a parking orbit around the earth, allowing the crew to make last-minute checks before making a Trans Lunar Injection or TLI burn to send them on their way to the moon. Shortly thereafter, the CSM would detach from the rocket stack, turn around, dock with the LM, and extract it from its adapter. Then, upon reaching lunar orbit, two astronauts – dubbed the Commander and the Lunar Module Pilot – would enter the LM through a short tunnel, undock from the CSM, and descend to the lunar surface, leaving the third crew member, the Command Module Pilot, orbiting overhead. On completion of the mission, the crew would fire the ascent stage engine, using the now-spent descent stage as a launch pad to send them back into orbit where they would rendezvous with the Command Module Pilot aboard the CSM. Once the crew were safely aboard the CSM, the LM ascent stage would be discarded and the CSM would fire its engines, sending the crew back towards the earth.
While conceptually simple, in practice this basic configuration spawned hundreds of unforeseen design challenges, mainly relating to that universal enemy of spacecraft designers: weight. To allow the LM and the already overweight Apollo CSM to be launched to the moon by a single Saturn V rocket, the lander had to weigh under 10 tons. However, the estimated mass quickly ballooned to over twice that figure, forcing engineers to make numerous clever design decisions in a bid to slim the vehicle down. For example, the original design had the two astronauts strapped into seats in the middle of the ascent stage, but this configuration required the use of large – and very heavy – windows to give them adequate visibility for landing. But designers soon realized that in 1/6 earth’s gravity, human legs are perfectly adequate as shock absorbers. The seats were thus deleted and the cabin reconfigured to have the astronauts land the LM while standing up, secured in place by a system of pulleys and cables. This placed the astronauts’ heads closer to the windows, allowing them to be made much smaller and lighter while preserving the overall field of view. Another major weight-related problem had to do with the heat shielding needed to protect the LM from the extremes of the lunar environment, which could reach 121 degrees celsius in direct sunlight and -133 degrees in the shade. In this case, the problem was solved using brand-new technology: a lightweight, metal-coated Mylar plastic film developed by DuPont, which gave the finalized LM its distinctive gold foil-wrapped appearance. Further, while early concepts featured smooth, rounded surfaces, the final vehicle was largely constructed from a complex array of flat panels closely faired around the various internal components, with the descent stage going from a cylinder to an octagonal prism. The result was a truly alien-looking vehicle unlike anything which had come before, a true spacecraft designed purely for use in the vacuum of space. In a desperate bid to save weight, Grumman engineers made each body panel only as thick as it absolutely needed to be, with some being only as thick as a few layers of tinfoil. This meant that workers at the Grumman factory had to take special precautions lest a dropped tool puncture the hull. Indeed, to eliminate dust, loose fasteners and other debris that might float out, injure the astronauts, or short out electronics, the LMs were constructed in some of the first industrial “clean rooms” under sterile conditions, with workers wearing full “bunny suits” with hair nets, booties, gloves, and face masks. And just to make sure nothing was missed, the completed vehicles were placed in a special jig and turned upside down to shake out any remaining foreign objects.
Other design decisions concerned the unique challenges of landing on the moon. For example, more landing legs ensured greater stability – especially if one of those legs broke on impact – but increased the vehicle’s overall weight. Extensive drop tests conducted with models revealed that four legs were an adequate compromise, and this was integrated into the final design. To avoid having to use hydraulic shock absorbers in the vacuum of space, the legs were fitted with blocks of rigid plastic foam that would crush on impact, absorbing most of the shock of landing. Originally, the astronauts were to enter and exit the LEM cabin by climbing up and down a simple rope – the assumption being that this would be easy in lunar gravity. However, tests using a full-scale mockup and a counterweight system to simulate reduced gravity proved this assumption wrong, and instead the descent stage was rotated to place one of the four landing legs in line with the ascent stage hatch and its “porch”, and ladder rungs added to the leg strut. The hatch itself was originally round, but was eventually redesigned to be square to fit the astronauts Portable Life Support System or PLSS backpacks.
The finalized Lunar Module, whose design was frozen in April 1963, measured 7 metres tall and 9 metres across with the landing legs extended and, despite Grumman’s best efforts, weighed in at 15 tons – fully half again as much as the original design goal. Thankfully, however, the Saturn V design team led by Wernher von Braun succeeded in squeezing 20% more payload capacity out of the rocket, allowing this weight increase to be accommodated. The descent stage of the LM was powered by a 45,000 Newton thrust, fully throttleable rocket engine manufactured by TRW Inc., which burned a combination of Aerozine 50 and nitrogen tetroxide. These propellants are hypergolic, igniting on contact with one another, meaning no separate igniter was needed and the astronauts only had to open a pair of propellant valves to light the engine – and for more on how these nasty substances contributed to a now-forgotten nuclear disaster, please check out our previous video When Dropping a Wrench Almost Caused Armageddon. In addition to the descent engine and propellant tanks, the descent stage also contained wedge-shaped Scientific Equipment or SEQ Bays for storing tools, scientific instruments like the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package or ALSEP and – on Apollos 15-17, the Lunar Roving Vehicle or LRV – AKA the “Moon Buggy” – and for an exhaustive breakdown of the ALSEP system, please check out the video on Our Own Devices, the personal YouTube channel of this video’s author. The descent stage also housed a continuous wave doppler radar to provide the astronauts with their altitude and rate of descent above the lunar surface.
Meanwhile, the ascent stage was powered by a 16,000 Newton thrust Bell Aerospace rocket engine, also fuelled by Aerozine 50 and Nitrogen Tetroxide. These propellants also fuelled the reaction control system or RCS thruster quads that allowed the LM to be manoeuvred in the vacuum of space. Due to the corrosive nature of these propellants, the ascent engine could only be ignited once before having to be rebuilt, meaning the first time a production engine was fired was when the LM lifted off from the lunar surface. If it failed, the astronauts would be stranded with no hope of rescue. Understandably, a huge amount of effort was devoted to ensuring the ascent engine would fire the first time, every time; failure, as they say, was not an option.
In addition to the ascent engines and thrusters, the LM also contained the pressurized cabin for the Commander and Lunar Module pilot, flight controls, batteries, oxygen tanks for the life-support system, navigation and communications systems, and everything else needed to land on the lunar surface, keep the astronauts alive for the duration of their mission, lift off again, and rendezvous and dock with the orbiting CSM. This included a hatch and docking ring at the top of the module, which allowed the LM to dock with the CSM and the crew to transfer from one vehicle to another through a short tunnel. Originally, a second docking port was integrated into the forward ingress/egress hatch to allow the LM crew to take an active role in docking. However, this was eventually deleted in the name of weight savings and responsibility for docking given to the Command Module Pilot. Early on, it was unknown whether the crew would be easily able to perform the procedure of pulling away from the SIVB rocket stage, turning around, docking with the LM, and extracting it from its adapter. Therefore, various rigid and flexible tether mechanisms were devised to assist this process. However, the ten 2-man Gemini missions flown between 1965 and 1966 demonstrated that orbital manoeuvres – including the dreaded rendezvous and docking – were far easier than expected to perform, so these features were deemed unnecessary. Meanwhile, the Ranger and Surveyor unmanned probes, launched between 1961 and 1968, determining that the lunar surface was mostly solid with only a thin coating of dust. The LM and the astronauts inside would be in no danger of sinking into oblivion.
Without aerodynamic forces to provide resistance and damping, the LM was an extremely difficult and unforgiving machine to fly. As a result, Bell Aerospace was contracted to construct three strange, spider-like aircraft known as the Lunar Landing Training Vehicles or LLTVs. Nicknamed the “flying bedstead” by the astronauts, the LLTVs were powered by a downwards-facing 19 Kilonewton thrust General Electric CF700 jet engine and controlled by hydrogen peroxide thrusters, allowing the unusual handling characteristics of the LM to be replicated on earth. The unusual vehicle proved tricky and even dangerous to fly – so much so that on May 6, 1968, astronaut Neil Armstrong was forced to eject from his LLTV when it suddenly flew out of control, barely escaping with his life. His quick reaction and overall skill at piloting the “flying bedstead” were among the many factors behind Armstrong’s eventual selection as the commander of Apollo 11. Hardly remembered today, the unorthodox-looking LLTV was considered by many astronauts to be the “unsung hero” of Apollo, without which a successful lunar landing would have been impossible.
With most of the major unknowns regarding Lunar Orbit Rendezvous now resolved, NASA was finally ready to test the Apollo hardware in the harsh environment of outer space. The first flight of a production Block 1 Apollo CSM took place during the February 26, 1966 launch of AS-201, the spacecraft being lofted on a suborbital trajectory by a Saturn IB rocket. The test was partially successful, the spacecraft suffering serious – but easily corrected – failures in its engine and guidance system. AS-201 was followed on August 25, 1966 by AS-202, which was entirely successful and convinced NASA that the CSM was ready for manned flight. However, the tragic deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts in a pad fire on January 27, 1967 revealed a laundry list of faults with the Block 1 spacecraft, requiring it to be completely redesigned. Meanwhile, development work continued on the larger Saturn V rocket and the Lunar Module, with the first unmanned launch of the former, Apollo 4, taking place on November 9, 1967. The flight, which completed 3 orbits of the earth, was a complete success, reassuring NASA that achieving a manned lunar landing by the end of the decade just might be possible.
A pre-production Lunar Module was supposed to have been flown aboard Apollo 4, but when the vehicle arrived at Cape Canaveral, NASA engineers discovered hundreds of design and construction flaws. NASA was unwilling to delay its launch schedule, and so Apollo 4 flew without a Lunar Module. The first unmanned LM test flight instead took place on January 22, 1968 during the Apollo 5 mission, the spacecraft being boosted into orbit by a Saturn IB. The main objectives of the flight were to confirm that the LM’s descent engine could be reliably fired multliple times, to test the vehicle’s control and manoeuvring systems, and conduct a “fire in the hole” test where the ascent engine was fired while still attached to the descent stage – the procedure that would be used to lift off from the moon or during an aborted descent. Due to a fault in the second SIVB stage guidance computer, the spacecraft achieved a lower orbit than expected. However, flight director Gene Kranz – who would later famously direct the Apollo 11 and 13 missions – quickly improvised an alternate test procedure and succeeded in carrying out all the mission objectives. This success led to the cancellation of a second unmanned LM test, greatly advancing the Apollo Programme timetable. However, an incomplete “boilerplate” LM test article was flown aboard Apollo 6, the second and last unmanned test flight of the Saturn V rocket. This flight also carried a Block I CSM with a number of Block II modifications developed in the wake of the Apollo I fire – including a new, easier-to-open crew hatch. Interestingly, Apollo 6 carried a large number of cameras, the footage from which is often used in documentaries to represent the launch of Apollo 11 and other manned missions. However, the footage is easily distinguished by the fact that the CSM is painted white; on manned missions the spacecraft were left their natural silver colour.
The first manned flight of the Block II CSM took place from October 11-22 aboard Apollo 7, crewed by Commander Wally Schirra – a veteran of the Mercury and Gemini programmes – Command Module Pilot Donn Eisle, and Lunar Module Pilot Walter Cunningham. Apollo 7 was supposed to be followed by an orbital test of the Lunar Module, but the political desire to achieve a spaceflight spectacular to intimidate the Soviets led to this flight being reconfigured as a lunar orbital mission. Crewed by Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, Apollo 8 was flown between December 21 and 27, 1968 and marked the first time in history that humans visited another celestial body and observed the far side of the moon.
The first manned orbital test of the Lunar Module was moved to the Apollo 9 mission, crewed by commander James McDivitt, Command Module Pilot David Scott, and Lunar Module Pilot Rusty Schewickart. Flown between March 3 and 13, 1969, Apollo 9 succeeded in fully proving out the LM design as well as achieving a number of spaceflight firsts, including the first docking and extraction of a LM from its adapter; the first independent flight of a pure spacecraft designed only for use in space; the first flight test of an independent life support system – i.e. the PLSS backpack the astronauts would later use on the lunar surface; the first manned “fire in the hole” test of the LM ascent stage engine; and and the second docking of two manned spacecraft after the Soviet Soyuz 4 and 5 mission on January 14, 1969. The mission also reintroduced a practice that would become standard on all subsequent Apollo missions. Prior to the March 23, 1965 Gemini 3 mission, Commander Gus Grissom – who would later perish in the Apollo 1 fire – dubbed his spacecraft the “Molly Brown” – a cheeky reference to the Broadway musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Grissom’s July 21, 1961 Mercury-Redstone 4 mission, during which a malfunctioning hatch led to the capsule sinking and Grissom nearly drowning in the Atlantic ocean – and for more on this forgotten near-disaster, please check out our previous video Forgotten History: NASA and the Sinking Spacecraft. Unfortunately, NASA administrators did not share Grissom’s macabre sense of humour, and banned all future astronauts from naming their spacecraft. However, the Apollo 9 crew pointed out that once separated, the CSM and LM would need different callsigns to differentiate them. The Apollo 9 Command Module arrived at the Vertical Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral wrapped in blue plastic, which reminded the crew of a giant candy; the CSM was thus dubbed “Gumdrop.” Meanwhile, the LM was given the callsign “Spider” for obvious reasons.
Apollo 9 was followed by Apollo 10, the final “dress rehearsal” of the Apollo program. Crewed by Commander Gene Cernan, Lunar Module Pilot Thomas Stafford, and Command Module Pilot John Young and flown between May 18 and 26, 1969, Apollo 10 carried out all the steps of a lunar mission except for the actual descent and landing, with Cernan and Stafford bringing the Lunar Module Snoopy within 15.6 kilometres of the lunar surface before firing the ascent stage engine and reuniting with Young aboard the CSM Charlie Brown. But if the astronauts were tempted to disobey orders and become the first men to land on the moon, it would have been a one-way trip, as Gene Cernan later explained:
“A lot of people thought about the kind of people we were: ‘Don’t give those guys an opportunity to land, ’cause they might!’ So the ascent module, the part we lifted off the lunar surface with, was short-fueled. The fuel tanks weren’t full. So had we literally tried to land on the Moon, we couldn’t have gotten off.”
George Mueller, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, further clarified:
“There had been some speculation about whether or not the crew might have landed, having gotten so close. They might have wanted to, but it was impossible for that lunar module to land. It was an early design that was too heavy for a lunar landing, or, to be more precise, too heavy to be able to complete the ascent back to the command module. It was a test module, for the dress rehearsal only, and that was the way it was used.”
But while they did not land on the moon, on their return to earth the Apollo 10 crew did set a record for the highest speed attained by a manned vehicle: 39,987 kilometres an hour – a record which still stands to this day.
With the functionality and reliability of the entire Apollo system now proven, NASA was finally ready to take the next step and attempt a manned lunar landing. Apollo 11, crewed by Commander Neil Armstrong, Lunar Module Pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, lifted off from Cape Canaveral on July 16, 1969. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed into the Lunar Module Eagle, separated from the CSM Columbia, and fired the Eagle’s descent engine, starting their descent towards the lunar surface. However, five minutes later a pair of computer alarms – 1201 and 1202 – began to sound, putting the mission in jeopardy and proving that the LM still had some kinks to work out. After several tense minutes, software engineers determined that the alarms were caused by the LM’s landing and rendezvous radars both being switched on at the same time, leading to an “executive overflow” condition. The error was quickly corrected, and Armstrong and Aldrin continued the descent. However, the astronauts soon ran into further trouble as they realized that the guidance computer was sending them towards a large boulder field on the edge of the 91 metre-wide West Crater. With only 90 seconds of propellant left, Armstrong took manual control deftly guided the Eagle over the crater and towards a smooth area on the far side. At 8:17 PM UTC on July 20, 1969, Eagle touched down on the lunar surface – with only 25 seconds of propellant to spare. On shutting down the descent engine, Armstrong spoke the historic words:
“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
To which fellow astronaut Charlie Duke, acting as Capsule Communicator or CapCom, replied, slurring his words in relief:
“Roger, Twan—Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”
Watching from Mission Control in Houston that day was the man whose insight and perseverance had made this historic moment possible: John Houbolt. Despite the accolades he had received from NASA, Houbolt had left the agency in 1963 to work for the consulting firm Aeronautics Research Associates. Nonetheless, in July 1969 he was invited to Mission Control by none other than Wernher von Braun, whose dearly-held Earth Orbit Rendezvous concept he had overturned. According to Houbolt, moments after the Eagle touched down on the lunar surface:
“…a wonderful thing happened. Von Braun turned to me … and says, ‘Thank you, John. It is a good idea.’”
Houbolt returned to NASA Langley in 1976 as Chief Aeronautical Scientist, in which role he published more than 120 technical papers before retiring in 1985 to become a private consultant. He died of Parkinson’s in 2014 at the age of 95.
Aside from the program alarms during descent, Apollo 11 encountered only one other issue with the LM: on re-entering the cabin, one of the astronauts’ PLSS backpacks accidentally snapped off the plunger on an ascent engine circuit breaker. Thankfully, the astronauts were able to close the breaker by simply shoving a pen into the hole, and the liftoff carried on as planned.
Indeed, the strange-looking Grumman Lunar Module proved itself a solid and reliable flying machine, suffering only a handful of relatively minor failures throughout its career. For example, during the descent of Apollo 14’s LM Antares on February 14, 1971, the guidance computer began displaying intermittent abort signals. The cause of the fault was traced to a small ball of solder which had come loose beneath a control panel and drifted into a switch, shorting it out. Commander Alan Shepard and Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell’s initial solution – tapping the panel with a pen – worked at first, but the faulty signal soon reappeared. If the signal reappeared after the descent engine had fired, it would automatically trigger an abort, firing the ascent stage engine and sending the LM back into lunar orbit. Unfortunately, the guidance computer’s software was literally hard-wired in the form of “rope memory” and could not be altered in flight. Instead, software engineers at NASA and MIT came up with a clever workaround, which in simple terms convinced the computer that it was already in abort mode, preventing it from triggering an actual abort. Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell entered the fix into the LM’s display keyboard or DSKY with just minutes to spare, and he and Shepard made a successful landing – and for more on this and other heroic software fixes that saved NASA missions, please check out our previous video Where Did the NASA Expression “Steely-Eyed Missile Man” Come From?
The subsequent Apollo mission, Apollo 15, was the first of the so-called “J missions” designed for longer-duration stays on the lunar surface. The LM was thus modified to carry more weight in consumables like oxygen and equipment like the Lunar Roving Vehicle or LRV. Among these modifications was an extended descent engine bell for added thrust. However, this left very little clearance between the bell and the lunar surface – a fact Apollo 15 Commander David Scott would learn the hard way. The astronauts had been trained to shut off the descent engine as soon as the probes on the LM’s landing legs signalled ground contact in order to prevent exhaust and lunar dust from being blown back into the engine and potentially causing an explosion. But when Scott carried out this procedure, the Lunar Module Falcon was already travelling faster than usual and slammed to the lunar surface at 2.1 metres per second. The hardest landing in Apollo history, the impact crumpled the engine bell and tipped the LM over at a 9 degree angle, but neither of these proved critical and the rest of the mission was a success.
But of course, nowhere did the LM prove its worth more than during the ill-fated flight of Apollo 13. On April 13, 1970, while en route to the moon, an oxygen tank aboard the CSM Odyssey exploded, severely crippling the spacecraft and placing astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert in mortal danger. Wishing to preserve whatever power they could for reentry and splashdown, the crew powered down Odyssey and moved into the LM Aquarius, using it as a lifeboat. Though Aquarius required several improvised modifications – including, famously, a MacGyvered adaptor to make the CSM’s square CO2 scrubber canisters fit the LM’s round canister holes – Grumman’s strange “bug” nonetheless performed above and beyond its designed capabilities, keeping the astronauts alive throughout the harrowing four-day journey to the moon and back. So proud was Grumman of this achievement that they cheekily sent North American Aviation, prime contractor for the CSM, a $312,421.24 invoice for “towing” the LM most of the way to the moon and back. The invoice included $400,004 in mileage fees, $536.05 for charging the CSM’s batteries, and an $8 per night lodging fee for an “additional guest in room” – AKA Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert. Amusingly, North American formality refused to pay, arguing that its CSMs had already ferried three Grumman LMs to the moon free of charge.
Even before Apollo 11 touched down on the moon, a division of NASA known as the Apollo Applications Program or AAP was formed to find future scientific uses for Apollo hardware. This included long-duration missions on the lunar surface, and for this purpose a number of advanced versions of the Lunar Module were devised. For example, the Apollo LM Taxi was a standard LM fitted with hydrogen fuel cells and extra oxygen and hydrogen tanks to allow astronauts to remain on the moon for up to 14 days. Meanwhile, the Apollo LM Shelter was a small “moon base” comprising a standard LM with its ascent stage engine and propellant tanks removed and replaced with more consumables storage. Together with the LM Taxi, the LM Shelter would allow astronauts to extend their stay up to three months – or even longer with the help of the Apollo LM Truck, an unmanned, remotely-guided LM designed to deliver food, oxygen, and other supplies to the lunar surface. However, changing politics, flagging public interest in space exploration, and severe budget cuts led to nearly all the proposed Apollo Applications Projects missions being cancelled in 1968. The only one to make it off the drawing board was Skylab, an earth-orbiting space station constructed from a modified Saturn V SIVB rocket stage. Launched into orbit on May 14, 1973, Skylab was visited by three three-man crews between May 25, 1973 and February 8, 1974 before being deorbited and burning up in the atmosphere on July 11, 1979. The Skylab program marked the last operational use of a Grumman Lunar Module, the descent stage of which formed the base of the Apollo Telescope Mount solar observatory. In total, 15 Lunar Modules were manufactured and 10 operationally flown, with the remaining 5 either being used for ground testing or intended for the cancelled Apollo 18-20 missions. Today, three original production vehicles are on display at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Long Island, New York; and the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Various test articles are also on display in other museums.
Given the success and cultural impact of the Apollo missions, it is easy to forget that the Race to the Moon was, well, a race – one with one other competitor: the Soviet Union. As was often the case throughout the Space Race, the Soviet approach to landing on the moon was in many ways similar to NASA’s but in other ways very, very different. But that, dear viewers, is a subject for another video.
Expand for References60 years ago: NASA Decides on Lunar Orbit Rendezvous for Moon Landing, NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/history/60-years-ago-nasa-decides-on-lunar-orbit-rendezvous-for-moon-landing/
Apollo Lunar Landing, Encyclopedia Astronautica, http://www.astronautix.com/a/apollolunarlanding.html
Apollo Direct 2-Man, Encyclopedia Astronautica, http://www.astronautix.com/a/apollodirect2-man.html
Text of John Houbolt’s Letter Proposing Lunar Orbit rendezvous for Apollo? Space Exploration Stack Exchange, https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2823/text-of-john-houbolts-letter-proposing-lunar-orbit-rendezvous-for-apollo
John C. Houbolt, NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/langley/john-c-houbolt/
Neuman, Scott, Meet John Houbolt: He Figured Out How to Go to the Moon, But few Were Listening, NPR, July 18, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/07/18/739934923/meet-john-houbolt-he-figured-out-how-to-go-to-the-moon-but-few-were-listening
Apollo LM, Encyclopedia Astronautica, http://www.astronautix.com/a/apollolm.html
The post How NASA Learned to Land on the Moon appeared first on Today I Found Out.
It was 8:15 AM on May 5, 1961, and astronaut Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. was facing an unexpected crisis. Chosen to be the first American – and the second human – in history to blast into space, at 5:15 AM Shepard had been strapped into his Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7 and the hatch bolted shut behind him. Liftoff was scheduled for 7:20 AM, but a series of delays caused by cloud cover over Cape Canaveral and various technical glitches resulted in Shepard sitting atop his Redstone rocket for over three hours. Soon, an unwelcome feeling began to creep over Shepard’s body, growing worse and worse with every passing minute. At first he tried to ignore it, but eventually the feeling became so unbearable Shepard was forced radio his Capsule Communicator or CapCom: he had to urinate – badly. Mission Control was stunned. No one had even considered how Shepard was supposed answer the call of nature; after all, his suborbital mission was only supposed to last 15 minutes. It was a problem which has plagued astronauts ever since, prompting engineers to develop a variety of weird, wonderful – and sometimes disgusting – solutions. This is the story of how astronauts boldly “go” where no one has gone before.
Prior to the Space Race, little thought was given to how future astronauts would relieve themselves during missions. The first system for collecting urine during long flights was developed in 1955 for pilots of the Lockheed U2 spy plane, who, flying at altitudes in excess of 21,000 metres, had to wear partial-pressure suits in order to survive. This system took the form of an in-dwelling catheter, a small plastic tube threaded up the pilot’s urethra into their bladder which automatically siphoned urine through a hose into a collection bag. As you can imagine, this system was extremely uncomfortable and decidedly less than popular with pilots. It also ran the risk of irritating or damaging the urethra walls and causing urinary tract infections. Later, an external system was developed that used a condom-like latex sleeve that rolled over the pilot’s penis. But while significantly more comfortable than the catheter, this Urine Collection Device or UCD was not without its problems. Indeed, in a 2010 survey of U2 pilots based at Beale Air Force Base in California, 60% of respondents reported problems with their UCDs, including poor fit, leakage, and skin irritation from prolonged contact with urine.
Furthermore, due to the extreme secrecy within the CIA – which operated the U2 – external UCD technology was not shared with NASA. And while in 1957 a group of British inventors patented a similar device for use with pressure suits “or equipment whose position or body harness makes normal urination highly inconvenient or impossible” which diverted urine into a bag of absorbent material, this design does not appear to have reached NASA planners either.
Following the launch of Project Mercury – the first American manned space programme – in 1958, the United States Air Force sponsored a study on human waste collection in a spacecraft. For the short-duration Mercury missions then being planned, faecal collection was not deemed necessary, though urine collection would likely be required. The study examined contemporary urine collection devices then on the market and concluded that the designs in use aboard military aircraft were inadequate due to excessive leakage – a problem that would only be exacerbated by microgravity. Instead, the final report recommended the use of commercial UCDs used in hospitals on bedridden male patients, which formed a tight seal around the penis and featured a one-way valve to preventback flow. Strangely, however, NASA seemingly ignored this and similar studies, and both the original Mercury Seven astronauts’ training and the testing of the Mercury Spacecraft and the Navy Mk.IV space suit were conducted entirely without any form of UCD. Indeed, when a 12-year-old Pennsylvania schoolgirl wrote to NASA in February 1961 to ask:
Dear Sir,
In our science class we were talking about the first man that would go into space and we would like to know where they go to the toilet when there [sic] up in space and there’s no gravity.
Yours truly,
Brenda Kemmerer
…Dr. Freeman H. Quimby of NASA’s Office of Life Science Programs replied that “…the first space man is not expected to have ‘to go’”. As the first spaceflights would last only 15 minutes, astronauts were simply expected to “hold it” until brought aboard the recovery ship after splashdown.
…which brings us back to the morning of May 5, 1961, and Alan Shepard’s awkward pre-flight dilemma. While NASA records indicate that a urine collection container was installed near the capsule’s entrance hatch, this would have been impossible for Shepard to use, being firmly strapped into his form-fitting flight couch. And letting Shepard out to use the regular facilities would have required the pad crew to laboriously unfasten the 70 bolts holding the hatch shut, further delaying the launch. Unable to resist the urge any longer, Shepard requested permission to urinate in his spacesuit. At first Mission Control refused, fearing that the urine would short out the biosensors monitoring Shepard’s vital signs. But when Shepard suggested they simply switch the sensors off, they relented, and a very relieved Shepard proceeded to – well, relieve – himself. Due to Shepard’s supine, legs-up position, the urine pooled in the small of his back and soaked into his one-piece wool undergarment, where the cool pure oxygen flowing through the spacesuit quickly dried it out. The crisis averted, the countdown resumed, and at 9:34 AM Shepard blasted off into the wild blue yonder, reaching an altitude of 187.5 kilometres before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean 487 kilometres east of Cape Canaveral. Though less impressive than Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s historic orbit of the earth less than a month before, the flight of Mercury Redstone 3 finally put the United States firmly in the Space Race – and for more on the – shall we say less than stellar – early days of the U.S. space program, please check out our previous video ‘Kaputnik’: America’s Largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite.
Alan Shepard’s embarrassing experience as an incontinent ballistic missile prompted NASA to pursue a practical UCD design in time for the next Mercury mission – the July 21, 1961 Mercury-Redstone 4 flight of astronaut Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom. A popular legend holds that Dolores B. “Dee” O’Hara, nurse to the Mercury Seven astronauts, cobbled together the first UCD on the eve of Grissom’s flight using a condom and a woman’s girdle. In reality, Grissom wore two pairs of rubber incontinence pants such that the urine would collect between the two layers. He was also denied his morning coffee – a known diuretic. In the event, Grissom never ended up needing to relieve himself, which is perhaps unsurprising given the sphincter-tightening turn his mission took shortly after splashdown – and for more on how America’s second astronaut was nearly lost at sea, please check out our previous video Forgotten History: NASA and the Sinking Spacecraft.
Meanwhile, NASA assigned James McBarron to oversee efforts at B.F. Goodrich – the company that produced the Mercury astronauts’ Navy Mk.IV spacesuits – to develop a standardized UCD for subsequent spaceflights. The company was unable to produce a satisfactorily leak-proof system, leading McBarron, along with Al Rochford and Joe Schmitt of NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Center Suit Laboratory, to tackle the problem themselves. McBarron purchased condoms from various commercial manufacturers and tested them for fit and durability until he found the ideal brand, then worked with that manufacturer to develop the finalized urine-collection sleeve. The final UCD consisted of an elasticized belt worn beneath the astronaut’s spacesuit, to which was attached the latex sleeve, a short rubber hose, a one way valve to prevent flow reversal, a clamp to seal off the system after splashdown, and a flat polyethylene collection bag. The whole assembly was held in place by a set of tight-fitting undergarment.
Another popular myth associated with the early American space program is that NASA had to change the size classifications on its UCDs in order to accommodate the astronaut’s legendary egos. This story seems to have originated with engineer Donald Retake – nicknamed “Dr. Flush” due to his extensive work on astronaut waste-collection systems – who stated in the 2008 Science Channel documentary series Moon Machines:
“Inside the urine collection assembly, which we call the pee pouch, is a one liter bag. And the attachment to the body was a condom with a hose on the end of it which allowed the urine to flow freely into the bag. The condoms initially came in three different sizes: small, medium and large. But few astronauts, whatever their real dimensions, refused to accept that they were anything but large. We changed the names to large, gigantic, and humongous.”
Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins repeated this anecdote in his 1974 autobiography Carrying the Fire: an Astronaut’s Journeys, writing that:
“…Then it’s time to don a triangular yellow plastic urine bag by inserting the penis into a rubber receiver built into one corner of it. There are three sizes of receivers (small, medium, large), which are always referred to in more heroic terms: extra large, immense, and unbelievable.”
In reality, this sizing system seems to have been merely an informal joke among the astronauts rather than a psychological trick played by NASA. Indeed, whatever their preconceptions and insecurities, the astronauts quickly learned from experience what size of sleeve to use, as Apollo 9 astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweickart later recalled:
“There’s always the possibility that in maneuvering around in a suit you can end up pulling off the condom, and there’s always — we have three sizes you know, small, medium and large — in diameter, and there’s always this little ego thing about which one you do pick. Of course the smart guy picks the right size, because it’s very important. But what happens is, if you get too small a size it effectively pinches off the flow and you just turn yellow because you can’t go; and if, on the other hand you’ve got an ego problem and you decide on a large when you should have a medium, what happens is you take your first leak and you end up with half of the urine outside the bag on you. And that’s the last time you make that mistake. So it’s a cute little trick there.”
Whatever the case, McBarron’s UCD was first used during the February 20, 1962 Mercury-Atlas 6 mission, during which astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. Over the course of his three orbits, Glenn used his UCD once, depositing 756 millilitres of urine into the collection bag. Remarkably, this is over 30% greater than the capacity of the average male bladder – a result of the strange effects of microgravity on human physiology. Normally, gravity pulls urine towards the bottom of the bladder, causing the walls to gradually expand. When the bladder is approximately two-thirds full, nerves begin to register this expansion and signal the body that it is time to urinate. In microgravity, however, urine tends to collect in a sphere, and does not begin to press on the walls until the bladder is already far beyond its regular capacity. While overshadowed by his other achievements, in its own modest way John Glenn’s orbital whiz was a milestone in space systems engineering – which is probably why his UCD has been on public display at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C. since 1970.
Though sometimes prone to leakage if improperly sized or fitted, James McBarron’s UCD design became the NASA standard throughout the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. During flights to and from the moon, Apollo astronauts could connect their UCDs via a hose to a Urine Transfer System or UTS, which collected the urine in an onboard tank. Most of this urine was then vented overboard, but some was retained for analysis by flight surgeons after the mission. And when the astronauts were working on the lunar surface, the urine drained into a polyethylene bag worn under their spacesuits. Amusingly, while only second to step off the Lunar Module, Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin did achieve a space first of his own, becoming the first person to relieve themselves on the lunar service. The act, performed just before Aldrin stepped off the Lunar Module ladder, remains a minor a source of pride for the astronaut, with Aldrin later stating:
“Everyone has their firsts on the moon, and that one hasn’t been disputed by anybody.”
Unfortunately, however, the experience was somewhat less tidy than Aldrin might have hoped. Mission commander Neil Armstrong’s landing was so soft that the Lunar Module’s legs didn’t compress as much as expected. So when Aldrin jumped off the ladder onto the lunar surface, he fell farther than anticipated and the resulting jolt damaged his UCD, causing urine to collect not in the proper bag, but rather in one of Aldrin’s spacesuit boots. That’s right: throughout the mission’s historic 2 hour, 31 minute lunar EVA, Buzz Aldrin was walking around with urine sloshing around in his boot. We’ve all been there, Buzz…
The UCD remained in use into the early Space Shuttle program, when it was replaced by the Disposable Absorption Containment Trunk or DACT – effectively an advanced set of adult diapers. The DACT was developed in response to NASA’s 1978 opening of the astronaut corps to female candidates, whose anatomy was incompatible with the original UCD. They were first flown in space on April 4, 1983 by the all-male crew of STS-6, the first mission of the Space Shuttle Challenger, while two months later on June 18 they were worn by the United States’ first female astronaut, Sally Ride, during the STS-7 mission. However, NASA quickly realized that the custom-fabricated DACTs were not economical, and that it would be far more cost-effective to purchase commercial off-the-shelf adult diapers. Known as Maximum Absorbency Garments or MAGs, these units replaced the DACT starting in 1988 and contain enough sodium polyacrylate material to absorb two litres of urine or other bodily fluids. They are still worn by American astronauts under their launch entry suits during liftoff and reentry and under their Extravehicular Mobility Units or EMUs during extravehicular activities or “spacewalks” – and for more about the surprising engineering challenges of working out in the hostile vacuum of space, please check out our previous video Touching the Void: the Story of the Space Jet Pack.
At this point in the video, you’ve likely noticed that we’ve left out an important part of the waste-disposal equation. Namely: #2. Yes, that #2. Even more than urine collection, early NASA planners and engineers were loath even to consider the problem of solid waste management, and simply chose to sidestep the issue entirely. After all, early Mercury missions weren’t supposed to last more than a day – and for more on the incredible badassery of the last and longest Mercury mission, please check out our previous video “I’ll do it Myself” – the Greatest Feat of Piloting in Space. However, in order to avoid accidents, in the days leading up to a mission astronauts were fed a “low residue” diet high in protein and low in fibre – for example steak and eggs, which has since become the traditional pre-flight breakfast for American astronauts. This diet also minimizes the production of intestinal gases, which in the reduced atmospheric pressure of a spacecraft cabin can expand and produce severe pain. Even today, Russian cosmonauts follow a similar practice. Though the Soyuz spacecraft typically takes only a few hours to reach the International Space Station, depending on orbital maneuvers crews can sometimes spend several days in orbit before docking. And while the Soyuz does feature a rudimentary space toilet – more on that later – cosmonauts don’t like to use it, and will often combine their low-residue diet with a pre-flight enema to completely clean out their bowels.
But while this strategy worked well enough for Mercury, as NASA transitioned over to the longer-duration Gemini and Apollo flights, the problem of collecting #2 could no longer be ignored. But the solution they came up with, the Fecal Collection Assembly or FCA, would prove to be one of the most reviled pieces of hardware in the history of spaceflight. Manufactured by the Whirlpool Corporation, the FCA consisted of a small clear plastic bag with an adhesive gasket intended to seal the opening to the astronaut’s bare buttocks. Ordinarily, back on earth bowel movements are separated from the anus by good old gravity, but in the microgravity of space, this does not occur. The FCA thus featured a small pouch or cot in its side wall into which the astronaut could insert their finger to help dislodge stubborn turds. Lovely. Once the deed was done, the FCA came packaged with sheets of toilet paper and wet wipes with which the astronaut could clean themselves, which were disposed of inside the bag along with the astronaut’s…leavings. But if this whole process already sounds completely undignified – especially if performed in front of others in the cramped confines of a spacecraft – brace yourselves, because it gets even worse. Unlike urine, there was no mechanism to jettison the filled FCAs, which instead had to be stored onboard. But without further treatment, the bacteria-riddled droppings would quickly ferment and produce gases like methane, causing the bags to inflate and possibly burst – resulting in the most literal manifestation of the expression “the shit hitting the fan.” Each FCA thus came packaged with a packet of germicidal liquid, which the astronaut was supposed to insert into the bag before sealing it. They would burst the packet by squeezing it, then thoroughly knead the germicide into the poop to ensure that all the gas-generating bacteria were killed.
As you can imagine, astronauts hated using the FCAs, and tried to avoid defecation by any means possible, such as simply holding it in or eating only half of their assigned meals – and to learn more about how astronauts stay properly fed and hydrated in space, please check out our previous video What’s Up With Space Food? And really, you can’t blame them. As NASA’s own officials history states:
“The fecal collection system presented am even more distasteful set of problems. The collection process required a great dead of skill to preclude escape of feces from the collection bag and consequent soiling of the crew, their clothing, or cabin surfaces. The fecal collection process was, moreover, extremely time consuming because of the level of difficulty involved with use of the system. An Apollo 7 astronaut estimated the time required to correctly accomplish the process at 45 minutes. Good placement of fecal bags was difficult to attain; this was further complicated by the fact that the flap at the back of the constant wear garment created an opening that was too small for easy placement of the bags.”
Furthermore, improper use of the FCA could lead to disgusting situations, as the crew of Apollo 10 – the dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 lunar landing – discovered in May 1969:
[Lunar Module Pilot Eugene] Cernan: “Where did that come from?”[Commander Tom] Stafford: “Get me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air.”[Command Module Pilot John] Young: “I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine.”Cernan: “I don’t think it’s one of mine.”
Stafford: “Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.”
Young: “God Almighty” (laughter)
Cernan: “Here’s another goddam turd. What’s the matter with you guys? Here, give me a —”
(laughter from Young and Stafford)
Stafford: “It was just floating around?”
Cernan: “Yes.”
Stafford (laughing): “Mine was stickier than that.”
Young: “Mine was too. It hit that bag —”
Cernan: “I don’t know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it (laughter).”
Young: “What the hell is going on here?”
Just who was responsible for this close encounter of the turd kind remains a mystery to this day, though we did a deep dive investigation on it and our theory of who done it in our video To Boldly Go Where No Fecal Matter Has Gone Before if you care to watch after this video.
And even if waste remained safely inside the bags, with space inside the Gemini and Apollo capsules at a premium, finding storage for used bags and other trash quickly became a challenge. This lack of adequate waste disposal led Gemini V astronauts Leroy “Gordon” Cooper and Charles “Pete” Conrad to dub their August 1965 mission “eight days in a garbage can.” Gemini VII astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell fared even worse, orbiting the earth for 14 days in a space no larger than the front seat of a Volkswagen Beetle with no good way of disposing of their trash. Yet despite their enduring notoriety, FCAs remain in use to this day as a backup in case the space toilets aboard the ISS fail.
By the end of the 1960s, it became clear that if astronauts were to spend long periods of time in space, they needed a more comfortable – and dignified – means of answering nature’s call. The Soviets were the first to fly a proper space toilet, which has been standard equipment on the Soyuz spacecraft since its maiden flight in 1967 – and to learn more about this flight’s tragic ending, please check out our previous video The Most Disastrous Space Mission Ever Executed. This installation was made possible by the Soyuz’s large elliptical orbital module, which sits above the bell-shaped descent module and is jettisoned just before reentry. Like nearly all space toilets developed since, the Soyuz facilities consist of two main parts: a suction hose with a funnel for collecting urine, which is vented into a chamber lined with absorbent foam; and a commode which uses a fan and airflow to suck faeces into plastic bags, which are then sealed and stored onboard.
Meanwhile, the first American space toilet was flown aboard the Skylab space station, which hosted three crews between May 1973 and February 1974. Like the Soyuz facilities, the Skylab toilet – designed by the Fairchild Republic Corporation – used a fan to suck faeces into a plastic bag. The astronauts then used an electric heater and vacuum from outside to dry the excrement, preventing it from fermenting and fouling the space station air. A separate suction hose was used to collect urine. Adding to the sanitary arrangements, Skylab was unique in being the first and last spacecraft in history to feature a microgravity shower. This was enclosed in a telescoping cylindrical curtain and featured foot restraints, a water sprayer nozzle on a flexible hose, and a vacuum system for carrying away wastewater. Astronauts were provided with 420 terrycloth towels, colour-coded to each astronaut. Today, astronauts aboard the ISS keep themselves clean using wet wipes, no-rinse shampoo, and similar products.
For the Space Transport System or STS program – better known as the Space Shuttle – NASA developed a new, more sophisticated space toilet known as the Waste Collection System or WCS. Like earlier systems, the WCS used a vacuum hose to collect urine, though it featured two different detachable heads for male and female astronauts. The male head was funnel-shaped, while the female head was elliptical, with small holes around the rim to allow airflow and prevent excessive suction. The collected urine was then jettisoned overboard. For #2, the WCS featured a special seat with foot stirrups, handholds, a seatbelt, and roller-coaster-esque thigh restraints to hold the astronaut in place. Early versions of the design featured a rapidly-spinning “slinger/shredder” mechanism to break up the waste and direct it onto the walls of the collection tank; however, astronauts understandably objected to having what amounted to a giant garbage disposal so close to their private parts, so the design was changed to use a suction fan as in earlier space toilets. This fan distributed the waste onto the walls of a cylindrical collection tank; after they were finished their business, astronauts would open a valve to expose the tank to the vacuum of space, flash-freeze drying the contents and preventing odours from forming. Toilet paper, wipes, and other hygiene products were placed in sealed plastic bags and disposed of in a separate compartment.
To ensure a tight seal and minimize leakage, the hole in the WCS seat was only 100 millimetres or 4 inches in diameter – much smaller than on a conventional toilet. Precise positioning of the user’s body was therefore essential, and prior to flight astronauts underwent extensive training on a space toilet simulator – no, really – at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas. This simulator featured lights to indicate to the trainee if they were in the proper position, as well as an internal camera to allow an instructor to check the trainee’s alignment (and you thought your work onboarding was awkward…). As every body is different, each astronaut quickly learned what position worked best for them. As veteran American astronaut Mike Massimo explains:
“I think of Peter Fonda in Easy Rider. That’s the right position for me.”
Adding to the indignity, the genuine article aboard the Space Shuttle itself featured a microphone so flight surgeons back on earth could monitor the astronauts’ bowel sounds and gauge their overall digestive health. This, in turn, led to the creation of what has to be the least glamorous job in the history of space exploration. In the early days of the Shuttle program, NASA was often contracted by the U.S. military to deploy top-secret surveillance satellites from the orbiter’s cargo bay. Military intelligence worried that the microphone on the WCS might accidentally pick up conversations about the classified payload, and so some unfortunate officer was tasked with listening to days of astronaut bowel sounds to ensure that no national secrets leaked out. Now your boring day job doesn’t sound so bad, does it? The only saving grace is that while the flight surgeon could hear an astronauts’ every sound, their fellow crewmates couldn’t. Despite the WCS being separated from the rest of the cabin by only a thin curtain, the sound of various pumps and other onboard systems was so loud that the astronauts could use the facilities in relative sonic privacy.
But while far superior to the hated Apollo FCA bags, the WCS was not without its faults, and over the Space Shuttle’s 30-year service life the system suffered a number of major malfunctions. During STS-3, the third shuttle flight in March 1982, the WCS failed on its first use, forcing the two-man crew, Commander Jack Lousma and Pilot C. Gordon Fullerton, to use FCA bags for the rest of the eight-day flight. On September 3, 1984 during STS-41D, the maiden flight of the Space Shuttle Discovery, a malfunction in the liquid disposal system led to the formation of a 60 centimetre or two foot long frozen “pee-sicle” on the orbiter’s hull. Thankfully, the following day mission commander Henry Hartsfield Jr. managed to break off the obstruction using the Shuttle’s Remote Manipulator Arm – AKA the Canadarm. The WCS also had a more fundamental design flaw: sometimes bits of freeze-dried faeces would flake off the tank walls and float out through the bowl into the cabin, fouling the air – ew.
But the most serious malfunction of the WCS occurred on November 23, 1989 – Thanksgiving Day – during STS-33, Discovery’s ninth flight. Early that morning, mission Commander Fred Gregory awoke to use the facilities. Everything went well at first, but when Gregory made to seal off and depressurize the collection tank, the valve connecting the tank to the outside opened but the slider valve connecting the tank to the bowl failed to close. Suddenly, the cabin – and Gregory’s backside – were exposed to the vacuum of space, suctioning him fast to his seat. To make matters worse, the vent for topping up the Shuttle’s atmosphere with fresh oxygen was located right above the WCS. So not only was Gregory stuck in place, the Shuttle’s precious air roaring past his most delicate bits, but he was also being doused with a shower of ice-cold, recently liquefied oxygen. Immediately the cabin depressurization warning klaxon blared, and Gregory’s crewmates rushed over to the rescue. Mission specialist Story Musgrave managed to wrestle the stuck slider valve shut, freeing a grateful – if very chilled – Gregory, but now the crew if STS-33 faced an unpleasant dilemma: if they could not fix the troublesome valve, they would be forced to use the dreaded FCA bags for the rest of the five-day mission. Unsurprisingly, the crew overwhelmingly voted to scrub the mission and return to earth early rather than face this option. However, this would have required the Shuttle to come down at one of its alternate landing sites in Africa, as it was off-track for a conventional landing at the Kennedy Space Centre.
Thankfully, after consulting with Mission Control, the astronauts determined that by ripping off the front cover of the WCS and clamping a pair of vise-grip pliers to the slider valve lever, they could continue to safely use their cosmic commode – proving that Clint Eastwood was right in Gran Torino: you can fix anything with duct tape, WD-40, and vise grips. Their scatological scare averted, the crew tucked in to their Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, potatoes, and broccoli, and enjoyed a largely uneventful mission.
In the year 2000, NASA introduced a new toilet for use aboard the International Space Station, which had just begun construction two years before. Though broadly similar to the Space Shuttle WCS, the ISS toilets use not a single collection tank, but rather 20 litre or 5 gallon micro-perforated plastic bags held in an aluminium container. The microperforations allow air but not liquids or solids to flow through the plastic, allowing the toilet fan to pull waste to the bottom of the bag. Once full, the containers are sealed and, along with the rest of the space station’s trash, loaded aboard unmanned Grumman Cygnus or Russian Progress supply spacecraft to burn up in the atmosphere. So now you know: if you look up into the night sky and see a particularly bright shooting star, there’s a good chance it might be burning astronaut poop.
Yet despite numerous improvements to the design, using the ISS toilet is still far from a pleasant experience, with most astronauts listing going to the bathroom as their least favourite part of spaceflight. As veteran astronaut Peggy Whitson – who holds the NASA record for most time spent in space at 665 days – explains:
“After [the collection bag] starts getting full, you have to put a rubber glove on and pack it down.”
Meanwhile, urine is collected much as it has been for decades: using a separate vacuum hose with male and female adaptors. However, since water is such a precious commodity and very heavy and bulky to launch into orbit, urine is not jettisoned overboard as in previous systems but rather recycled into potable drinking water via a sophisticated reclamation system called the Water Processor Assembly or WPA, which uses a series of micofilters and catalyst beds to remove and neutralize contaminants. As NASA astronaut Jessica Muir explains.:
“We recycle about 90% of all water-based liquids on the space station, including urine and sweat. What we try to do aboard the space station is mimic elements of Earth’s natural water cycle to reclaim water from the air. And when it comes to our urine on ISS, today’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee!”
As in previous space programmes, some of the astronauts’ waste is stored and returned to earth for analysis by flight surgeons. Urine is first collected in plastic bags very similar to the Urine Collection Devices used by the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts. Syringes are then used to extract samples, which are stored in a special compartment called the Minus Eighty Degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI) until they can be returned to earth by a Soyuz or Dragon spacecraft.
As of this recording, solid waste is not processed to extract its moisture, though NASA is working on it. In 2021, the agency also sent a Brine Processor unit to the ISS to reclaim the remaining water that can’t be processed by the WPA. The goal is to achieve at least 98% reclamation before sending the first humans to Mars. So good news for all you Dune fans out there: real-life stillsuits may be just around the corner!
Currently, there are three toilets aboard the ISS, located in the Zvezda, Nauka, and Tranquility modules. Like the earlier Shuttle WCS, these toilets have a less-than-perfect track record, with the most serious failure occurring on May 21, 2008 when the pump for the liquid waste collection system broke. At the time, there was only one toilet aboard the ISS, forcing the astronauts to use bags or the toilet aboard the attached Soyuz spacecraft for urine collection. The solid waste system remained unaffected. Thankfully, the launch of STS-124 was scheduled for launch just 10 days later, so a replacement pump was overnighted from Russia to the Kennedy Space Centre in the diplomatic pouch and successfully delivered to the ISS on June 2. It is estimated that the three toilets aboard the ISS suffer some kind of breakdown – thankfully almost always minor – around once every month.
But with NASA preparing to send astronauts back to the moon and eventually to Mars, even the relatively advanced toilets aboard the ISS are no longer adequate. Consequently, in 2018 NASA introduced the next generation of space waste disposal: the Universal Waste Management System or UWMS. Costing $23 million to develop, the UWMS is 40% lighter, 65% more compact, and significantly more energy-efficient than the existing ISS toilets, allowing it to be more easily integrated into the Orion capsules slated to travel to the moon on the upcoming Artemis missions. When installed aboard the ISS or Mars-bound spacecraft, the UWMS will connect to onboard water-reclamation systems, while on shorter duration missions like Artemis the waste will simply be stored in a tank for later disposal. UWMS is also designed for greater comfort and ergonomics, with a tilted, form-fitting seat and an elongated, integrated funnel that allows astronauts to urinate and defecate at the same time. Greater care was also taken to make the new toilet convenient for both men and women to use.
But while the UWMS represents the current state of the art of space toilet design, one major spaceflight problem remains unsolved: how to adequately manage waste collection in a spacesuit. Currently, this is handled through the use of Maximum Absorbency Garments – AKA adult diapers – but this is only adequate for current EVAs, which typically last only a few hours. Longer-duration EVAs such as those astronauts might encounter on future missions to the Moon or Mars are a completely different animal. Collection of urine is fairly straightforward, but for men only. The specifics of female anatomy, including the shape of the genital region, the presence of pubic hair, and the realities of menstruation, greatly complicate the process. While some of these problems could be mitigated by, for example, having female astronauts shave off their pubic hair and go on birth control to regulate their menstrual cycles, this is beyond what NASA is willing to ask of its astronauts. Instead, the agency is seeking an entirely hardware-based solution. For example, in 1981 NASA patented a female urine collection device with a vaginal insert to prevent stray urine droplets or particles of faeces from drifting into the vagina and causing infections. However, such a system has not yet been successfully integrated into any practical spacesuit.
The problem of solid waste disposal is even more vexing, as containment is far more difficult to achieve and fecal matter is far more difficult to handle automatically than liquid waste. Consequently, in 2016 NASA launched the wonderfully-named Space Poop Challenge, which offered $15,000 to any inventor who could come up with a practical spacesuit waste management system. The top prize was clinched by flight surgeon and family physician Dr. Thatcher Cardon, who developed his prototypes on evenings and weekends with the help of his wife and kids. Cardon’s system features a small access port integrated into the crotch of the spacesuit, to which various bags and hoses can be attached to remove solid and liquid waste. According to Cardon, the port could also be used to perform emergency abdominal surgery and other procedures. But while innovative, the system is nowhere near ready for actual use in space, and as of this recording the problem of long-term waste management in a spacesuit has not yet been solved. But with NASA working tirelessly on the problem, we can all rest assured that when the first astronaut takes the first dump on the planet Mars, they will be aided by the very best technology humanity can concoct.
Expand for ReferencesBoldly Go! NASA’s New Space Toilet Offers More Comfort, Improved Efficiency, for Deep Space Missions, NASA, September 17, 2020, https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/boldly-go-nasas-new-space-toilet-offers-more-comfort-improved-efficiency-for-deep-space-missions/
Lea, Robert, How do Astronauts Use the Bathroom in Space? SPACE, March 4, 2024, https://www.space.com/how-do-astronauts-go-to-bathroom-in-space-toilet-guide
Eveleth, Rose, Even Astronauts Have Accidents, Smithsonian Magazine, June 11, 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/even-astronauts-have-accidents
Pomeroy, Ross, Alan Shepard Wet His Spacesuit: the Science and History of Space Urination, RealClear Science, June 7, 2013, https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/06/the-science-and-history-of-space-urination.html
Hollins, Hunter, Forgotten Hardware: How to Urinate in a Spacesuit, Advances in Physiology Education, March 11, 2013, https://journals.physiology.org/doi/epdf/10.1152/advan.00175.2012
Thompson, Amy, NASA Just Sent a New $23 Million Space Toilet to the International Space Station, Smithsonian Magazine, October 9, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/nasa-just-sent-new-23-million-space-toilet-international-space-station-180976037/
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Brueck, Hilary, From Peeing in a ‘Roll-on-Cuff’ to Pooping Into a Bag: a Brief History of How Astronauts Have Gone to the Bathroom in Space for 58 Years, Business Insider, July 17, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-nasa-astronauts-pee-and-poop-in-space-2018-8
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McKinnon, Mika, Astronauts: Pooping in Apollo Bags is So Bad We’d Rather Land Early, Gizmodo, November 30, 2015, https://gizmodo.com/astronauts-pooping-in-apollo-bags-is-so-bad-wed-rather-1745287570?_gl=11752p4c_gaMTEyMjgxOTQ4NC4xNzIyNzE4MDE0_ga_V4QNJTT5L0*MTcyMjcxODAxMy4xLjEuMTcyMjcxODA0OS4yNC4wLjA.
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Caffeine. Alcohol. Nicotine. These are the three most widely-consumed drugs in the world. Every day, around 80% of the world’s population – around 6.4 billion people – consumes caffeine – typically in the form of coffee, tea, or cola – with the average consumer’s daily intake being around 200 milligrams. Meanwhile, 32.5% of the world’s population – around 2.4 billion people – consume alcohol – mainly in the form of wine and beer – with an average daily consumption of 1.2 standard drinks or 17 grams of pure ethanol. However, for various reasons including health concerns, religious prohibitions, or simple personal preference, many people are unable to enjoy an energizing cup of Joe in the morning or a cold, relaxing brew at the end of the day. Thankfully for those who still wish to enjoy the taste of these drinks without any of the negative effects, a wide variety of options are available, including decaffeinated coffees and teas and non-alcoholic wines and beers – many of which are virtually indistinguishable from their more psychoactive counterparts. But how are these remarkable beverages produced? How do manufacturers remove one of their most fundamental components while leaving the taste largely unchanged? Well, pour yourself a hot – or cold – one as we dive into the fascinating history and chemistry of caffeine and alcohol-free drinks.
We begin our story with the decaffeination of coffee and tea. The first person to extract caffeine from coffee beans was German chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, who in 1819 isolated the active ingredient of the deadly nightshade plant Atropa belladonna – a toxic alkaloid today known as atropine. During the Renaissance, women dripped extract of deadly night shade into their eyes to dilate their pupils and achieve a fashionable doe-eyed look – hence the name belladonna, meaning “beautiful woman.” Runge determined that atropine was responsible for this dilating effect, testing the compound on the eyes of cats. This research soon came to the attention of German poet and polymath Wolfgang von Goethe, who, having just received a shipment of coffee beans, asked Runge if he could isolate the active stimulant compound. Runge obliged, and in 1820 succeeded in extracting and identifying caffeine. However, this is where his research on the matter ended; he did not further investigate the chemistry of caffeine nor seek to use his extraction process commercially to produce decaffeinated coffee. That breakthrough would have to wait nearly a century.
The father of decaffeinated coffee as we know it today was Ludwig Roselius, a coffee roaster’s apprentice from Bremen, Germany. Roselius’s quest against caffeine was a personal one: his father’s death in 1902 was attributed by the attending doctor to his drinking too much coffee. However, the method for removing it from coffee was discovered entirely by accident. As the story goes, one day Roselius received a shipment of coffee beans which had accidentally been soaked in seawater. After drying, roasting, brewing, and tasting the beans, Roselius found to his surprise that the saltwater had removed most of the caffeine while leaving the flavour largely intact aside from a slight saltiness. Based on this discovery, in 1905 Roselius patented a decaffeination method and in 1906 founded the company Kaffee Handels-Aktiengesellschaft or Coffee Public Trading Company – better known as Kaffee HAG. Roselius’s decaffeinated coffee beans would soon be sold across Europe under the brand name Sanka – a contraction of the French sans caféine – and in the United States as Dekafa.
Kaffee HAG’s process, known as the direct organic solvent method or Roselius method, involved steaming green, un-roasted coffee beans with ammonia-laced water until they became saturated with water and swelled to double their original size. The beans were then washed with an organic solvent like benzene or chloroform, which dissolved and flushed out the caffeine. Finally, the now-decaffeinated beans were dried and packaged for shipment to roasters and distributers. Later, Kaffee HAG developed a different decaffeination process known as the indirect solvent method. In this process, the green beans were soaked in hot water to effectively produce a raw coffee containing both caffeine and other flavour molecules. This fluid was then moved to another area and treated with organic solvents to remove the caffeine, before being returned to the beans. This process was repeated several times until all the caffeine was leached out of the beans, whereupon the beans and raw coffee were dried together, producing beans containing all their original flavour molecules except caffeine.
Kaffee HAG proved an instant success, with its innovative product, advertised as beneficial for the heart and nerves, meshing well with the various health and natural food movements of the 1910s and 20s. However, the company received a particular boost in the 1930s from an unexpected source: the Nazis. As part of their Lebensreform or “life reform” movement – intended to preserve the health and vitality of the Aryan Race, the Nazis promoted a more natural, “clean” lifestyle that eschewed supposed “poisons” like refined sugar, alcohol, tobacco, meat, and caffeine. Nazi propaganda railed against the dangers of caffeine, creating the perfect environment for Kaffee HAG to promote its products. At the 1937 Reichsausstellung Schaffendes Volk, a festival celebrating the accomplishments of the German people, over a dozen cantinas served Kaffee HAG decaffeinated coffee; while at the 1936 Nuremberg Rally the company supplied Kaba, a chocolate milk drink, to over 42,000 members of the Hitler Youth. The irony, of course, is that while the Nazis were decrying caffeine as poison, German soldiers and even many civilians were being actively supplied with Pervitin – a form methamphetamine – in order to ward off fatigue and boost performance both on and off the battlefield. Furthermore, Roselius’s decaffeination process left behind traces of benzene which, as a known carcinogen, was likely more dangerous to drinkers’ health than caffeine. For this reason, the modern direct decaffeination process uses safer solvents such as dichloromethane or ethyl acetate.
And despite his steadfast support of Hitler and his many attempts to join the Nazi party, Ludwig Roselius was never accepted as a party member for a number of reasons. For example, in 1932 – just prior to the Nazis’ rise to power – Kaffee HAG advertised its coffee as being Kosher and stated that:
“Anyone who drinks Kaffee HAG is dear and important to us. Which political affiliation or creed he is, is for us completely irrelevant.”
Furthermore, Roselius was a Freemason, supported various artists known to be members of the Communist Party, and patronized architectural projects frowned upon by the Nazi party. And while Third Reich health policies certainly played a large role in Sanka’s success in Germany, some historians have pointed out that similar Nazi campaigns against tobacco and alcohol were largely unsuccessful. Sanka’s appeal, they argue, lay more in its status as a luxury product, costing three times as much as regular coffee.
Nor did Kaffee HAG’s affiliation with the Nazis affect its popularity elsewhere. Indeed, Sanka is still sold around the world to this day, being a subsidiary brand of the Kraft Heinz multinational food corporation. Interestingly, in addition to being the first successful brand of decaf coffee, Sanka played another, influential role in modern coffee culture. To help its product stand out, Kaffee HAG sold Sanka in glass jars with distinctive bright-orange labels. During the First World War, the American subsidiary of Kaffee HAG was confiscated by the Office of Alien Property Custodian and turned into an independent American company, which in 1932 was purchased by General Foods. To help promote its new product, General Foods distributed coffee pots to cafes and restaurants across the country with handles or lids painted bright orange. This practice made it so easy for waitstaff to distinguish between regular and decaf coffee and became so ubiquitous that to this day orange coffee pots are universally associated with all decaf coffee – not just Sanka. And for more on another popular beverage that originated in the Third Reich, please check out our previous video How World War II Created One of the World’s Most Popular Soft Drinks.
In 1933, just as Ludwig Roselius and Kaffee HAG were starting to cosy up to the Nazi Party, a new decaffeination process known as the Swiss Water Method was developed which did not use any toxic organic solvents – only water. Originally invented by the Swiss Coffee S.A. company, the process was not truly perfected for another 5 decades, being finally introduced to the market in 1988 by the Swiss Water Decaffeinated Coffee Company of Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. The Swiss Water Process is based around a substance called green coffee extract or GCE, produced by soaking green coffee beans in hot water and passing the resulting raw coffee through a series of activated charcoal filters to scrub out the caffeine molecules. The decaffeination process begins by soaking green coffee beans in GCE. As the GCE is hypotonic or deficient in caffeine compared to the beans, caffeine will leach out of the beans into the GCE. However, as the concentration of other compounds in the GCE is identical to that in the beans, those components stay put. Once equilibrium has been reached, the GCE is drained away, scrubbed of caffeine, and the process repeated. The Swiss Water Process takes around 8-10 hours start-to-finish and can remove 99.9% of the caffeine from coffee beans without the use of chemicals while preserving the beans’ original flavour profile. Coffee decaffeinated via this process is thus often marketed as more “natural”, “organic”, and “healthy” than other brands. However, because water is used in the early stages of the process, coffee decaffeinated using the indirect organic solvent method is also often marketed as “water-processed” – so buyer beware!
The fourth common method used to decaffeinate coffee – and tea, by the way – is perhaps the most exotic: the supercritical carbon dioxide method. As we all learned in elementary school, matter can exist in three basic forms: solid, liquid, and gas (and yes, I hear all you pedants screaming: also plasma – but that is outside the scope of this discussion). Which of these states a particular substance exists in depends on two factors: pressure and temperature. For example, at low temperatures and pressures, Carbon Dioxide is a gas. At low temperatures and high pressures it is a liquid, while at even lower temperatures and higher pressures it is a solid – what we typically call dry ice. However, above 304.128 Kelvin and 7.3773 Megapascals – what is known as the critical point – Carbon Dioxide undergoes a strange transformation, attaining a state halfway between a liquid and a gas. This phase, known as supercritical carbon dioxide, is an excellent and versatile solvent, and widely used in industry for countless tasks including dry cleaning clothing, extracting essential oils and other plant compounds, cleaning pesticides from grain and other crops – and extracting caffeine from coffee beans and tea. Compared to regular organic solvents, supercritical carbon dioxide does less damage to extracted compounds, evaporates completely when its pressure is increased, and leaves behind no toxic residues. And while it is more expensive than other methods, it can more quickly process large volumes of coffee beans. Furthermore, it more efficiently extracts pure caffeine as a byproduct, which can then be sold for inclusion in caffeine pills, cold medications, energy drinks, and other products – and for more on another state of matter that seemingly defies logic, please check out our previous video The Weirdest Substance Known to Science.
But whatever process is used, today decaf coffee makes up around 12% of total global coffee consumption – a number that is steadily growing year by year. However, it is important to not that while coffee and tea treated with the aforementioned processes are marketed as “decaffeinated”, they are not, in fact, entirely caffeine-free. Indeed, according to FDA regulations, coffee is considered decaffeinated when at least 97% of its original caffeine content has been removed. Beyond this, the actual caffeine content will vary significantly from brand-to-brand. So if you are someone whose body is sensitive to even small amounts of caffeine, it is probably best to avoid decaffeinated coffee or tea altogether and stick to herbal tea, hot chocolate, and other alternatives. Or you may want to try out one of the newest entries in the field of decaffeinated beverages: naturally caffeine-free coffee. Coffeea charrieriana, also known as Charrier Coffee, is a member of the Coffea genus native to Cameroon in Central Africa whose beans naturally contain no caffeine. Though cultivated and sold by a few coffee producers, Charrier coffee is widely considered inferior-tasting to its more famous caffeinated cousin, Coffea arabica, and has yet to catch on even with regular decaf coffee drinkers. However, several efforts are underway to hybridize Coffea charrieriana and Coffee arabica – or even genetically modify either species – to produce a naturally caffeine-free cultivar that preserves the flavour profile of regular coffee.
Low and non-alcoholic wines and beers, on the other hand, have a much longer history – if only because these beverages are significantly older than coffee and tea. In the Middle Ages, brewers commonly produced small beer containing only 2-3% alcohol by volume, which was drunk by absolutely everyone – including children. Regular drinking water was often contaminated with bacteria and parasites, which were killed off by the boiling and fermentation processes used in brewing.
De-alcoholized wine and beer, however, are more recent developments. Seeking to prevent inebriation among his parishioners, in 1869, American Methodist minister and teetotaler Thomas Bramwell Welch invented a flash-pasteurization process to prevent grape juice from fermenting. The resulting product, dubbed “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine”, was marketed to churches as a non-alcoholic substitute for communion wine. The company Welch founded and which bears his name still exists today, and is best known for its line of grape and other fruit juices, jams, and snacks. Four decades later in 1908, the vineyard of Maria Jung in Rüdesheim am Rhein, Germany, experienced an unexpected slump in sales. Upon contacting her usual clients, Jung discovered that they were increasingly choosing to abstain from alcohol for health reasons. After pondering the problem, Jung came up with an innovative solution: why not use the distillery the family also owned to boil off the alcohol, producing non-alcoholic wine? Her son Carl – no relation to the famous psychoanalyst – soon developed a vacuum distillation process that better preserved the original flavour of the wine, and a German tradition of non-alcoholic wine was born.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the development of de-alcoholized beer was largely spurred by the passing of the 1919 Volstead Act, which made the sale and consumption of “intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes” illegal in the United States. The Act defined “intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes” as those containing more than 0.5% alcohol by content – a cutoff which rankled alcohol producers. 0.5%, they complained, was less than the alcohol content of sauerkraut and not based on any scientific data on intoxication. In reality, legislators had simply borrowed this figure from the Internal Revenue Service, which used it to distinguish taxable beverages from non-taxable ones. Yet despite mass protests by alcohol producers and labour organizations – including a 20,000-man march down New York’s Fifth Avenue on July 4, 1919 – the Government held firm, and in the face of Prohibition breweries, wineries, and distilleries were forced to take creative measures in order to stay in business. Many major breweries, including Schlitz, Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and Miller responded by producing “near beers” or “malt beverages” like Bevo, Pablo, Vivo, and Famo, which were regular beer which had been boiled to bring the alcohol content below the 0.5% limit. Amusingly, near beer was often surreptitiously delivered to customers with a separate package containing the alcohol which had been boiled off, which could be re-inserted into the beer using a syringe to create so-called “needle beer.” Yet while near beer was likely better than nothing for thirsty Americans, the flavour that resulted from the de-alcoholization process left much to be desired, leading one dissatisfied customer to quip: “Whoever called it near beer was a poor judge of distance!”
Other Prohibition dodges were even more brazen. In addition to near beer, many breweries produced malt extract, which, while perfectly legal in itself, could easily be mixed with water and yeast to produce home-brew beer. Similarly, Fruit Industries Ltd, a front company of the California Vineyardist Association, sold bricks of grape concentrate called Vine-Glo. Though officially intended for making grape juice, the Vine-Glo bricks came packaged with an oddly specific – and very cheeky – warning:
“After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine.”
With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the market for non-alcoholic wine and beer suddenly dried up – not to be revived for another four decades. In the 1970s, Texas-based oil worker Manny Zelzer spent a great deal of time travelling to and from the Middle East. There, many of his friends colleagues had developed a taste for American beer, and asked him to bring some back from home. However, due to Islamic prohibitions, many Middle Eastern countries had banned the production or importation of alcohol. Zelzer got around this problem by boiling his favourite brands to remove the alcohol before importing them. This de-alcoholized beer proved so popular that Zelzer soon launched his own brand, Texas Select, which by the 1980s was being sold across the Middle East and in countries such as Japan, Canada, and Korea. This was followed in 1990 by the launch of O’Doul’s, still one of the most popular non-alcoholic beers on the market. While initially slow to catch on, non-alcoholic beers and wines steadily grew in popularity thanks to growing public concerns over the negative health impacts of alcohol. Health concerns also spurred the development of low-calorie light beers, which tend to have a lower alcohol as well as carbohydrate content. Today, the non-alcoholic drinks market is worth over $11 billion worldwide.
One of the major reasons non-alcoholic wine and beer took so long to become popular is their poor reputation when it comes to taste. Unlike caffeine, ethanol is difficult to remove without stripping out beneficial flavour compounds like esters, flavonoids, and monoterpenes; or increasing the concentration of unpleasant-tasting compounds like tannins and acids. Furthermore, alcohol itself contributes enormously to the texture and flavour profile of these beverages, and can leave them tasting bland and watered-down when removed. This problem is most prominent in wine, which on average contains around 12% alcohol by volume. Beer, by contrast, contains on average 5% alcohol by volume and is comparatively easier to de-alcoholize without affecting flavour. Furthermore, beer typically contains other flavourings like hops which can potentially mask any flavour deficiencies produced by the de-alcoholization process.
Today, several different methods are used to lower or eliminate the alcohol in wine, beer, and cider. These techniques are classified according to when in the production process they are applied: pre-fermentation, fermentation, or post-fermentation.
Reducing alcohol content pre-fermentation involves reducing the amount of sugar in the grape juice or mash which the yeast can convert into ethanol. This can be done in a variety of ways. For example, trimming the vine leaves at various points in the growing process or harvesting the grapes early can reduce the amount of sugar that accumulates in the grapes themselves. Even simpler, the grape must or juice can be diluted with water prior to fermentation to reduce the sugar concentration. However, this act is actually illegal in many major wine-producing nations including Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, and South Africa. Alternatively, the juice or mash can be passed through microfilters or treated with special enzymes like glucose oxidase to remove some of the sugar. Of course, some sugar must be retained otherwise fermentation cannot occur. During fermentation itself, alcohol production can be reduced by halting fermentation early or by using of alternative, non-Saccharomyces cerevisiae or NS yeasts which generate less ethanol than traditional yeast varieties. However, most wines and beers produced using these techniques still fall above the 0.5-1.2% alcohol concentration required to be classified as low-alcohol or alcohol-free, while the few that meet this requirement are typically inferior in taste. For this reason, most non-alcoholic wines and beers are produced by removing the alcohol after fermentation.
As previously discussed, the traditional method of removing alcohol from wine and beer was simply to boil it off. However, this tended to give the resulting product an unpleasant “cooked” or “burnt” flavour. This problem was largely solved by vacuum distillation, the technique developed in 1908 by German winemaker Carl Jung. The boiling point of liquids is dependent on ambient pressure; the lower the pressure, the lower the temperature needed, which is why water will boil at only 68 degrees Celsius atop Mount Everest as compared to 100 degrees at sea level. In vacuum distillation, the pressure in the still is reduced so that the temperature of the wine never exceeds 48 degrees, helping to preserve its flavour. Of course, many other volatile compounds including ethyl esters and aliphatic alcohols escape along with the ethanol, but these are typically separated out via fractional distillation and re-added to the de-alcoholized wine along with concentrated grape juice, tannins, natural flavours and other compounds to restore the original flavour profile. The primary advantage of vacuum distillation is efficiency, with the process being capable of bringing the alcohol content of wine down to as low as 0.02% in a single pass. The process is also widely used by wineries to make finer adjustments to the alcohol content of regular wines. However, despite measures to capture and restore volatile flavour compounds, some losses are inevitable, which is why more sophisticated de-alcoholization processes are increasingly being used to satisfy customers’ discerning palates.
One of the first major improvements to vacuum distillation technology was the spinning cone column or SCC, developed in 1991 by Australian food chemist Andrew Craig. This consists of a tall stainless steel column containing a rotating shaft and a series of spinning and stationary cones. The wine is injected at the top of the column and flows over the spinning cones, which produce centrifugal force that spreads the wine into a thin film. Air is then pumped out of the vessel and steam injected from the bottom in two stages. The first, conducted at 30 degrees Celsius, strips the wine of its volatile flavour compounds; while the second, conducted at 40 degrees, strips it of its alcohol. The volatile compounds are then re-introduced to the de-alcoholized wine in order to restore its flavour. By promoting greater evaporation rates at even lower temperatures, SCC allows for more efficient de-alcoholization and greater flavour preservation than traditional vacuum distillation, though it still suffers from unavoidable losses of volatile flavour compounds.
Due to its lower alcohol content and the need to preserve carbonation, beer is typically not de-alcoholized using vacuum distillation or SCC. Instead, a variety of “cold” methods are used including reverse osmosis. Very similar to the dialysis process used to clean the blood of patients with kidney disease, reverse osmosis involves forcing the beverage at high pressure through a semi-permeable polymer membrane surrounded by a stripping fluid – typically water. Typically, water will diffuse from a region of low solute concentration to one of high solute concentration (in this case, the beverage) but when high enough pressure is applied to the concentrated solution, the reverse occurs, and the ethanol from the beverage diffuses through the membrane into the stripping fluid, leaving most other compounds behind and preserving the original flavour. Furthermore, the process works at temperatures as low as 1-5 degrees Celsius, eliminating the danger of denaturing flavour compounds through heating. However, reverse osmosis also has a number of disadvantages – namely inefficiency, with the process only reducing alcohol by 0.7-1.5% per pass. Furthermore, the process requires the original beverage to be diluted with water prior to processing – which, as we’ve previously discussed – is illegal to do with wine in many regions.
A related process is osmotic distillation or evaporative perstraction. Like in reverse osmosis, the beverage is forced at high pressure past a semi-permeable membrane, on the other side of which a stripping fluid – typically water – is forced in the opposite direction, forming a counter-flow diffuser. In this method, the pressure of the beverage causes the ethanol to evaporate and diffuse through the membrane, whereupon it condenses in the stripping fluid and is carried away. Like reverse osmosis, osmotic distillation is carried out at low temperatures, preventing the denaturing of flavour compounds, but is slightly more energy-efficient.
Finally, the last major method used for de-alcoholizing wine and beer is nanofiltration, in which the beverage is forced through a semi-permeable membrane covered in tiny pores ranging from 1-10 nanometers in size, which allows nearly all the flavour compounds in the beverage to pass through while leaving ethanol molecules behind. This method allows larger volumes to be processed faster than reverse osmosis or osmotic distillation, reduces alcohol content by about 7-10% per pass, and operates at lower pressures, making it more energy-efficient.
And that, dear viewers, is how caffeine and alcohol-free drinks are made. Thanks to more than a century and a half of technological innovation, we can now enjoy some of our favourite vices while suffering almost none of the consequences – and isn’t that the very essence of human civilization?
Expand for ReferencesSamoggia, Antonella & Rezzaghi, Tommaso, The Consumption of Caffeine-Containing Products to Enhance Sports Performance: an Application of an Extended Model to the Theory of Planned Behaviour, Nutrients, February 2021, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7912121/#:~:text=About 80% of the world,1,2,3].
The Lancet: Alcohol is Associated With 2.8 Million Deaths Each Year Worldwide, British Liver Trust, August 24, 2018, https://britishlivertrust.org.uk/the-lancet-alcohol-associated-2-8-million-deaths-annually-worldwide
Sedaka, Matthew, Why the Nazi Party Loved Decaf Coffee, Atlas Obscura, November 15, 2017, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/decaf-coffee-nazi-party
Understanding the Weird History of Decaffeinated Coffee – and How It’s Made, Compass Coffee, https://www.compasscoffee.com/blogs/the-daily-grind/understanding-the-weird-history-of-decaffeinated-coffee
Where Does My Decaf Coffee Come From? Illumin, https://web.archive.org/web/20120208025517/http://illumin.usc.edu/204/where-does-my-decaf-come-from/
Dowling, Stephen, How do You Decaffeinate Coffee? BBC News, September 18, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180917-how-do-you-decaffeinate-coffee
Emmaline Soken-Huberty, The History of Decaf Coffee Somehow Involves Nazis, Gildshire Magazines, December 17, 2017, https://www.gildshire.com/history-decaf-coffee/
Debczak, Michele, Why are Decaf Coffee Pots Orange? Mental Floss, July 14, 2020, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/626383/why-are-decaf-coffee-pots-orange
Mehri, Yucef, Unveiling the Secrets of Decaf, Wolfsonian, April 16, 2021, https://wolfsonian.org/blog/2021/13/
Sam, Faisal et. al., Techniques for Dealcoholization of Wines: Their Impact on Wine Phenolic Composition, Volatile Composition, and Sensory Characteristics, Foods, October 2021, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8535880/
Mazzeo, Jacopo, The Science Behind Non-Alcoholic Beer and Wine Production, SevenFifty Daily, July 25, 2022, https://daily.sevenfifty.com/the-science-behind-non-alcoholic-beer-and-wine-production/
The History of Non-Alcoholic Beer in America, NA Beer Club, https://nabeerclub.com/history-non-alcoholic-beer/
Miller, Carl, We Want Beer: Prohibition and the Will to Imbibe, Beer History, https://beerhistory.com/library/holdings/prohibition_1.shtml
Alberts, Janelle, The Complex History of Non-Alcoholic Wine, Yahoo Life, April 25, 2024, https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/complex-history-non-alcoholic-wine-171549807.html
Oster, Lauren, The Science Behind Nonalcoholic Wine, Smithsonian Magazine, September 21, 2022, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/the-science-behind-nonalcoholic-wine-180980805/
The post How do They Make Decaf Coffee and Tea and Non-Alcoholic Beer and Wine? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On this channel, we have covered our fair share of weird, wonderful, and sometimes utterly bonkers German ‘secret weapons’ from the Second World War, from rocket-powered fighters that sometimes dissolved their pilots alive to midget submarines cobbled together from old torpedoes, piggyback bombers crammed with explosives, jet fighters designed to be flown by children, and even weaponized space shuttles. But when it comes to insanity, few weapons can compare to the Bachem Ba 349 Natter. Less a fighter jet than an antiaircraft missile with a man strapped inside, the crude, hastily-built Natter was one of many ingenious attempts to save Germany from the relentless Allied bombing campaign. This is the story of one of the most desperate weapons of the Second World War.
By 1944, German cities were being pounded to rubble by round-the-clock Allied bombing raids, with the Americans bombing by day and the British by Night. With many of its factories and airfields damaged or destroyed by the bombing and the bulk of its forces already committed to the Eastern Front, the German Air Force or Luftwaffe found itself desperately short of aircraft, fuel, and pilots, and struggling to hold off the Allied onslaught. The Nazi High Command thus turned to a variety of high-tech “wonder weapons” in a desperate attempt to stem the tide. These weapons included the Messerschmitt Me-262 Schwalbe, the world’s first operational jet fighter; the rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet; and guided surface-to-air missiles like the Rheintochter, Enzian, Schmetterling, and Wasserfall. However, none of these advanced weapons came close to solving the problem – for a variety of reasons. As covered in our previous video The German Rocket Fighter That Dissolved Its Pilots Alive, while the Komet was faster than any contemporary Allied fighter aircraft, the fuels used by its engine were extremely volatile and had a tendency to blow up – or, as the title of that video suggests, dissolve its pilots – during rough landings. It also had an extremely short endurance, forcing Komet squadrons to be stationed close to the targets they were protecting and the aircraft to glide to a landing once their fuel ran out. This made the aircraft extremely vulnerable. The very same problem afflicted the Me-262 jet fighter, with the majority being shot down by marauding Allied fighters as they came in for a landing. Meanwhile, while Germany’s various guided missile projects showed promise, they were too complex and developed too hastily and too late to become viable weapons by the time the war ended. They were also developed separately by different branches of the German armed forces, leading to wasteful duplication of effort and competition for scarce resources. But what truly doomed these projects was the large quantities of raw materials and manpower they required to produce – resources Germany was swiftly running out of. So, on September 10, 1944, the German Air Ministry or RLM issued a set of requirements for an “Emergency Fighter” that could be produced in large numbers using non-strategic materials and semi-skilled labour and flown by pilots with only minimal training. One design to come out of these requirements was the Heinkel He-162 Volksjager or “people’s fighter”, which we have already covered in our previous video The Jet the Nazis Designed to be Flown by Children. But a far more radical was a concept submitted by engineer Erich Bachem of Fieseler Aircraft Works in Kassel.
38 years old at the time, Fieseler had until 1942 been the technical director of Fieseler, where he had contributed to the design of the highly-successful Fi 156 Storch military liaison aircraft. In February 1942, however, he left the company to form Bachem-Werke GmbH, an aircraft parts supplier based in Waldsee. Bachem’s submission for the Emergency Fighter Program neatly solved most of the issues which had plagued previous air defence weapons, such as the need for vulnerable runways for takeoff and landing; and the need for sophisticated automatic guidance systems. Instead of taking off from a runway, Bachem’s rocket-powered fighter was launched vertically from a tower like a missile, though unlike a missile it was guided to its target by a human pilot. After completing its mission the craft, which had no landing gear, simply split apart, with the pilot and the expensive rocket engine parachuting back to earth to be reused for a future mission.
A similar design had been proposed by Wernher von Braun, designer of the infamous V-2 ballistic missile, back in 1939, but this had been rejected by the RLM. And despite Germany’s desperate situation and the many advantages of Bachem’s design, it too was turned down in favour of the more conventional Heinkel P.1077 proposal. Undeterred, Bachem sought the help of decorated Luftwaffe ace and General Adolf Galland to push through his design, but once again the RLM was uninterested. Thankfully, however, the inter-service rivalry rampant in Nazi Germany soon came to Bachem’s rescue as his design caught the attention of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Impressed by the proposal, Himmler signed an order to build 150 aircraft using SS funds, tapping SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler to head the development effort. Kammler had already played a leading role in another secret weapons program, creating the infamous Mittelwerk underground factory at Nordhausen, where V-2 ballistic missiles were built using slave labour. Indeed, Kammler proposed a similar arrangement for producing this new interceptor, but Erich Bachem vehemently opposed this suggestion. Meanwhile, realizing that the SS was developing an aircraft outside their jurisdiction, the RLM placed their own order for 50 airframes, which they officially designated the Bachem Ba 349 Natter. And as side note, while many sources translate “Natter” as “adder” or “viper”, the term actually refers to non-venomous species such as the common European grass snake.
Measuring only 6 metres long and 4 metres wide, the Natter was a very basic aircraft, with simple, stubby rectangular wings and cruciform tail surfaces. Built mainly of wood held together with glue, the Natter could be assembled from poor-quality materials by semi-skilled labour in as little as 1000 man-hours. The craft was powered by the same Walter HWK 109-509 rocket engine as the Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet, which burned a combination of Hydrazine Hydrate and Hydrogen Peroxide fuel to produce 1140 kilograms of thrust. However, since the Natter was launched vertically, additional power was provided on takeoff by four Schmidding SG-34 strap-on solid rocket boosters producing 1,200 kilograms of thrust each. The Natter was launched from a 20-metre tall triangular launch tower which could be more easily concealed than the large runways used by the Komet, with the wings fitting into guide slots to prevent the aircraft from twisting as it rose. Once free of the tower, the Natter would be guided to its target altitude of around 6,000 metres by a simple autopilot or – as was later planned – via radio guidance from the ground. Thanks to its top speed of 1,000 kilometres an hour, the Natter would reach operational altitude in just 4.6 minutes, whereupon the controls would unlock, allowing the pilot to guide his aircraft towards the incoming allied bomber formation. At this point the main engine would have run out of propellant, turning the Natter into a high-speed glider. Once aligned with his target, the pilot would jettison the aircraft’s plastic nosecone to reveal the main armament: a battery of nineteen Heber R4M 55mm Orkan or twenty-four 73mm Henschel Hs 297 Föhn unguided rockets. These weapons – when they actually managed to hit their targets – were highly effective, with one Me-262 pilot describing their effects as:
“Shattered fuselages, broken-off wings, ripped-out engines, shards of aluminium and fragments of every size whirled through the air. It looked as if someone had emptied out an ashtray.”
It was also proposed to arm the Natter with the same 30mm MK 108 autocannon as the Me-262 and even a concrete nose for use in ramming attack, though Erich Bachem vehemently nixed the latter proposal, insisting that his design was not a suicide weapon. Indeed, the Natter’s pilot was provided with a steel armour plate behind his seat and an armoured windscreen to increase his chances of surviving a mission.
Once his main armament was expended, the Natter pilot would quickly descend to an altitude of around 3,000 metres, flatten out his glide slope, and initiate the escape sequence. This involved the pilot unlatching his harness, jettisoning the canopy, and releasing a lock at the base of his control column. This allowed him to tilt the column forward and unlock the nose release mechanism. He would then pull another lever on the cockpit floor to release the nose, which would be pulled free of the fuselage by aerodynamic forces. This, in turn, would deploy a small ribbon parachute from the fuselage, pulling it away and throwing the pilot forward via inertia. Once clear of the aircraft, the pilot would open his own parachute and descend to the ground, while the rear fuselage parachuted separately for eventual recovery and reuse. Each mission would take less than 10 minutes from start to finish, with the Natter having an operation radius of around 12 kilometres – enough to defend a single factory or other strategic site. This made the Natter a form of point defence interceptor – a role now largely filled by unmanned guided missiles.
Wind-tunnel tests conducted at the Institute for Aerodynamics for Berlin in September 1944 revealed the design to be stable at speeds of up to 500 kilometres per hour, allowing preliminary development to proceed as planned. The first prototype, designated M1, was manufactured at Bachem’s new factory at Waldsee in the Black Forest and delivered in October 1944. Fitted with temporary landing gear and towed behind a Heinkel He 111 bomber, the aircraft was used for a series of captive glide tests. While the first four flights went perfectly, during the fourth the Natter became unstable, forcing test pilot Erich Klöckner to bail out. When it was determined that the tow cable and temporary landing gear had interfered with the craft’s aerodynamics, pilot Hans Zübert made a daring untethered gliding flight to prove the design once and for all. The aircraft performed perfectly, allowing the project to proceed with powered flights.
The first vertical, unmanned launch of the Natter took place on December 18, 1944 at Ochsenkopf near Württemburg. As the Walter rocket engines were not yet ready, the aircraft was powered only by the Schmidding boosters. Unfortunately, due to a design flaw in the launch tower, the aircraft crashed soon after liftoff. The next launch on December 22, however, was completely successful, as were the next 10 launches. In early 1945, the Walter engines finally arrived, and a full-up test launch with all engines and a dummy pilot was conducted on February 25. Once again the launch went perfectly, with the dummy being recovered intact. However, the residual propellants in the engine exploded on impact with the ground, destroying the rear fuselage.
Though Erich Bachem pushed for further unmanned tests, the SS was anxious to get the Natter into combat and ordered that a manned flight be completed as soon as possible. A 28-year-old Luftwaffe test pilot named Lothar Sieber volunteered to make the flight, which was scheduled for February March 1. The test aircraft, M23, was fitted with a radio telemetry system to record flight data and an intercom to allow Sieber to communicate with the launch bunker before launch. During the flight itself, however, Sieber would be on his own – just like the anticipated future pilots of the Natter. Just prior to launch, Erich Bachem briefed Sieber as he lay on his back in the cockpit, reassuring him that the aircraft was stable and would be easy to control should it start going off course. Minutes later, all five rocket engines ignited with a deafening screech and the Natter roared up the launch tower, making Lothar Sieber the first human in history to ride a vertically-launched rocket. This feat would not be repeated until April 12, 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to reach outer space. But soon after the Natter cleared the launch tower, things started going seriously wrong. At an altitude of around 150 metres, the Natter suddenly pitched up by 30 degrees and entered an inverted loop, slowly pulling back to near-horizontal before disappearing into the clouds. About 30 seconds later, the aircraft slammed into the ground a few kilometres away, killing Sieber instantly. It was later determined that the canopy latch had not been properly secured, causing the canopy to fly open and knock Sieber unconscious. The autopilot then disengaged as designed, allowing the aircraft to plunge uncontrolled to the earth. Intriguingly, data collected from the telemetry system indicated that on his way down, Sieber briefly became the first human to break the sound barrier – and for more on another Luftwaffe pilot who claimed to have accomplished the same feat and survived, check out our previous video Did a German Pilot Break the Sound Barrier 2 Years Before Chuck Yeager? on our sister channel Highlight History.
Despite this tragedy, the SS pressed on with the project, though the next – and final – 10 test launches were all unmanned. In April 1945, ten aircraft and eight pilots were earmarked for the Natter’s first operational mission, codenamed Operation Crocus. The launch towers for this operation had already been constructed at the end of February in a forest called Hasenholtz just south of Stuttgart. The first missions were scheduled to be flown on April 20 – Adolf Hitler’s birthday – but on that day the U.S. 10th Armoured Division overran the area, forcing the Natter crews to destroy their aircraft and retreat to Waldsee. 18 days later Nazi Germany surrendered, the Natter having never seen combat. Today, only one complete Natter survives at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C, captured by American troops in Piztal, Austria, in May 1945.
Though the Natter was certainly among the most creative and cost-effective of Nazi Germany’s anti-bomber weapons, even had it been introduced earlier it is doubtful it would have had any impact on the course of the war. The aircraft’s operational range was simply too small, and its immobile launch towers too vulnerable to Allied air attack. And even if German industry, stretched thin as it was, had managed to produce large numbers of Natters, Germany simply had too few trained pilots to fly them. The plain truth was that Nazi Germany had already lost the war, and like all its fellow ‘wonder weapons’, the Natter program was simply a case of too little, too late.
Expand for ReferencesKing, J.B. & Batchelor, John, German Secret Weapons, BPC Publishing Ltd, 1974
Bachem Ba 349 B-1 Natter (Viper), National Air and Space Museum, https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/bachem-ba-349-b-1-natter-viper/nasm_A19600313000
The “Natter” – First Manned Rocket, German Patent and Trade Mark Office, https://www.dpma.de/english/our_office/publications/milestones/airandspacepioneers/natter/index.html
The Bachem Ba 349 “Natter” (Viper), Military History, November 4, 2019, https://www.military-history.org/back-to-the-drawing-board/the-bachem-ba-349-natter-viper.htm
Dorr, Robert, Bachem Ba 349 Natter, Defense Media Network, August 30, 2013, https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/my-brilliant-mistake-the-bachem-ba-349-natter/
Alex, Dan, Bachem Ba 349 Natter (Adder/Viper), Military Factory, February 26, 2020, https://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.php?aircraft_id=103
The post Nazi Germany’s Utterly Bonkers Wooden Manned Missile appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On the afternoon of September 7, 1940, the people of London heard a sound they had been dreading for years: the ominous drone of aero engines. High above, the sky filled with waves of German bombers, and a torrent of high explosives and incendiaries began to rain down on the British capital. The bombardment continued through the night, and by the following morning the East End and the London Docks were ablaze and 1,000 Londoners lay dead and hundreds more severely injured. The Blitz had begun. Over the next 76 days, London and other southern British cities like Bristol, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Sheffield would suffer near-continuous aerial bombardment, losing more than two million houses and over 100,000 civilian casualties. Throughout the bombing campaign, the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command fought valiantly to beat back the invaders, soon forcing the Luftwaffe to abandon daylight bombing in favour of night raids. Yet despite the blackouts enforced across the country, German bomber crews always seemed to find their targets and bomb them with uncanny accuracy. Through brilliant detective work, British Intelligence soon discovered the reason: the Germans had a secret weapon, a series of invisible radio beams that could guide their bombers directly to their targets even in pitch darkness. The British effort to uncover the secrets of these beams and develop the means of jamming them was one of the great unsung technical achievements of the war, and proved decisive in turning the tide of the Blitz. This is the forgotten story of the Battle of the Beams.
Our story begins in November 1939, two months after Nazi Germany launched their invasion of Poland and ignited the Second World War. On November 2, an anonymous source – later identified as German mathematician and physicist Hans Meyer – mailed two letters to the British Embassy in Oslo, Norway, which immediately passed them along to MI6, British Foreign Intelligence Service. The Oslo Report, as it became known, contained a bonanza of information on German weapons then under development, including radar, remote controlled bombs, long-range rockets, and acoustic torpedoes. And among the technologies summarized in the report was one that would soon become of utmost interest to British military planners: a single-beam radio apparatus that could accurately measure a bomber aircraft’s heading and range, allowing it to be guided onto its target. One of the greatest intelligence leaks in military history, the Oslo Report gave the Allies an invaluable scoop on many of the advanced German weapons they would later face on the battlefield.
Fast-forward to early 1940. The eight-month period between Britain and France’s declaration of war on September 3, 1939 and Germany’s invasion of France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940 saw relatively little military action on either side, being sarcastically referred to as the “Phoney War” or “Sitzkrieg.” However, the German Luftwaffe did conduct a number of small-scale reconnaissance and bombing raids over the British Isles during this period, and in March 1940 the Royal Air Force shot down a Heinkel He-111 bomber of Kampfgruppe or KG 26 near London. Inside the wreckage, British military intelligence found a small scrap of paper belonging to the aircraft’s navigator, which bore the mysterious note:
“Navigational aid: Radio Beacons working on Beacon Plan A. Additionally from 0600 hours Beacon Dühnen. Light Beacon after dark. Radio Beacon Knickebein from 0600 hours on 315º.”
A few days later another He-111 from KG 26 was shot down, aboard which was discovered a diary containing the following entry:
“5.3.40. Two thirds of Staffel on leave. In afternoon tidied about Knickebein, collapsible boats, etc.”
The word Knickebein baffled intelligence analysts. Literally translating as “crooked leg”, it was also the name of a legendary raven in Germanic mythology who had the ability to see over great distances. In search of answers, they turned to Squadron Leader Samuel Felkin, the chief Air Intelligence interrogator based at Trent Park in Cockfosters, North London. A grand 18th century country manor, at the outbreak of war Trent Park was commandeered by the Air Ministry as a centre for interrogating captured German airmen. In addition to formal interrogation, the “Cockfosters Cage” – as it became known – also made use of microphones hidden throughout the estate to eavesdrop on private conversations between unsuspecting prisoners. During one interrogation, Squadron Leader Felkin asked a German bomber navigator about the mysterious “Knickebein.” Though initially evasive, the prisoner eventually revealed that it was a radio navigation system “like X-Gerät”, but used a shortwave signal whose beam was less than a kilometre wide over the target.
This information was duly passed to Professor Reginald Victor (or R.V.) Jones, a physicist who in 1939 had been appointed Assistant Director of Scientific Intelligence at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough. Throughout the war, Jones would play a vital role in teasing out the secrets of advanced German military technology, including radar and the long-range V-weapons. In a May 23, 1940 report titled Indication of New German Weapons to be Used Against England, Jones wrote:
“It is possible that they have developed a system of intersecting beams, so that they can locate a target such as London with sufficient accuracy for…indiscriminate bombing. No information is available concerning the wavelength to be employed, but the accuracy expected by the Germans is something like a half mile over London fro the western frontier of Germany. Efforts are still being made to determine the probable wavelengths so that counter measures can be employed.”
Soon, the need to learn more about this system would become extremely urgent, for on May 10, 1940 the Germans launched Fall Gelb, the invasion of France and the Low Countries. In only six weeks, the British Expeditionary Force was pushed back to the coast and evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, while a defeated France capitulated and signed an armistice with the Germans – and for more on this unnecessarily humiliating process, please check out our previous video Yet Another of Hitler’s Ultimate Dick Moves. With France now conquered, the Germans turned their attention to subduing the British Isles.
In the tiniest of silver linings, the lightning invasion of France provided British Military Intelligence with valuable information on the mysterious Knickebein system. But this intelligence came not from crashed German aircraft or the interrogation of Prisoners of War, but a far more powerful and closely-guarded source: the cracking of the German Enigma cipher, codenamed ULTRA. The invasion of France moved so rapidly that forward units of the Luftwaffe were forced to communicate with each other via radio. These signals were in turn picked up by radio listening stations of the British “Y” Service and passed to the ULTRA codebreakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire for decipherment. On June 5, 1940, the Y service intercepted a signal sent from a German bomber flying over England to the Chief Signals Officer of the Luftwaffe’s Fliegerkorps IV, which when deciphered read:
“Knickebein, Kleve is established at a point 53º24’ North and 1º west.”
Analysts immediately recognized Kleve as the German spelling of Cleves, a town in the Lower Rhine region of Germany and famously the birthplace of Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife of English King Henry VIII. The town made perfect sense as a site for a radio navigation beacon, being the westernmost point in Germany and thus the closest to the British Isles. Meanwhile, the coordinates in the message were traced to a point near Retford, Nottinghamshire, where the Great North Road or A1 highway intersected the 1º West meridian. Amusingly, the Air Ministry originally assumed that the message indicated that a spy had set up a secret radio navigation beacon in the area, and dispatched troops and police officers to find and arrest him. However, when the message reached R.V. Jones, he interpreted to mean that the transmitting bomber had picked up the navigation beam from Cleves at that location. Indeed, other intelligence revealed that aircraft of Fliegerkorps IV’s squadrons – specifically KG4 and KG37 – had been operating over England on June 5. Tracing the line from Cleves to Retford, Jones further deduced that the beam had been intended to guide the bombers to Sheffield, but had been misaligned.
Armed with this information, on June 12 Jones met with Group Captain Lyster F. Blandy, Deputy Director of Signals Intelligence; and Professor Frederick Lindemann, Jones’s old tutor at Oxford and official Scientific Advisor to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. To Jones’s dismay, Lindemann immediately dismissed the feasibility of a long-range navigational beam, arguing that at the high frequencies indicated by captured Luftwaffe airmen, radio signals would be blocked by the curvature of the earth and would be unable to reach England from Germany.
Undaunted, Jones unearthed a paper by one T.L. Eckersley, a radio propagation expert from the Marconi Company and a consultant for the Y Service, which indicated that a VHF signal transmitted from Cleves should indeed be detectable over England. And there was more good news. Back at the Cockfosters Cage, a conversation between a group of German airmen about Knickebein was secretly recorded in which one prisoner boasted that the British would “never find” the mysterious system. As luck would have it, on October 28, 1939 – just two months after the outbreak of war – a Heinkel He-111 of KG 26 was shot down and crash-landed near Edinburgh, Scotland, and its radio equipment captured intact and thoroughly examined. Jones contacted the man who had examined the equipment, one Squadron Leader Cox-Walker (and yes, that was his real name!), and asked him if there was anything unusual about it. At first, Cox-Walker said no: the bomber was equipped with a standard FuG10 short-wave transceiver and an EBL2 Lorenz Blind Landing Set. But then, after a moment, he exclaimed:
“Wait a minute – yes, you know we were surprised that [the Lorenz set] seems so much more sensitive than they would need for blind landing.”
Jones had his answer. Developed in 1932 by German firm C. Lorenz AG and first used on a large scale by national airline Lufthansa, the Lorenz Blind Landing System was designed to allow pilots to find and align themselves with a runway at night or in bad weather. The system comprised a set of antennas mounted at the end of the runway which transmitted two overlapping Morse Code signal beams: one composed of dots and the other of dashes. The timing of the dots and dashes was arranges such that where the two beams overlapped, the signals merged into a continuous tone, known as the equisignal. To use the system, a pilot located one of the two beams using an onboard radio receiver and adjusted his course laterally until he heard the equisignal in his headphones. He then continued along that course, adjusting left or right if the equisignal gave way to a string of dots or dashes. In this manner he could be guided onto the centre of the runway in even the poorest visibility. Knickebein worked the same way but in reverse, with the aircraft flying away rather than towards the transmitting antennas. However, thanks to the high signal frequencies used, the beams were only a few hundred metres wide by the time they reached London and other southern English cities – accurate enough for strategic bombing.
However, while the Lorenz system could give a bomber the correct heading towards a target, it could not give its range – that is, the proper point at which to drop its bombs. For this reason, a second beam operating at a different frequency was used, the two antennas being arranged so that the beams intersected over the target. As a particularly cooperative Luftwaffe prisoner of war codenamed A231 explained:
“As soon as the aircraft picks up the beam, the pilot flies a level course, seeing that the Turn and Bank Indicators…and the Artificial Horizon all read zero. He then flies along the beam.”
Once close to the target, the navigator switched to the second beam frequency. As soon as the aircraft entered the equisignal of that beam, the bombardier released the bombs. A231 also sketched out the prototype Knickebein antenna he had seen at the Reich Air Ministry or RLM development centre at Rechlin, which was identical to an antenna photographed by the Royal Air Force at Hörnum in northern Germany but which military intelligence had been unable to identify. The name Knickebein or “crooked leg” was derived from the asymmetric shape of the transmitting antenna, though the connection to a far-seeing mythological raven was likely also intentional. As we shall see, this would not be the first time the Germans would pick a far-too-obvious codename to their own detriment.
Once again, Jones presented his findings to Frederick Lindemann who, thoroughly convinced this time, wrote to Winston Churchill on June 13 that:
“There seems to be some reason to suppose that the Germans have some type of radio device with which they hope to find their targets. Whether this is come for of RDF or some other invention, it is vital to investigate and especially to seek to discover what the wavelength is. If we know this, we could devise a means to mislead then…with your approval I will take this up with the Air Ministry and try to stimulate action.”
Churchill, in turn, passed on Lindemann’s recommendation to Secretary of State for Air Sir Archibald Sinclair, adding a note that:
“This seems most intriguing, and I hope you will have it thoroughly examined.”
Air Marshall Philip Joubert was duly appointed to head an official investigation into Knickebein, with the first priority being to determine what frequencies at which the twin beams were transmitted. He wouldn’t have long to wait. On June 18 Air Intelligence received an assortment of papers captured from German aircraft shot down over France before the Dunkirk evacuation, one of which confirmed the location of a second Knickebein transmitter at Bredstedt in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany. More valuable intelligence soon fell into British hands – literally. Indeed, use of Knickebein led to many German bomber crews becoming careless, with some even leaving their navigation lights on. This made them highly vulnerable to British night fighters, which, in the absence of effective airborne intercept radar, normally found it almost impossible to locate and shoot down German aircraft in the dark. On June 19, a Heinkel He-111 of KG4 was shot down whose navigator’s log revealed the first beam frequency to be 31.5 megahertz. Two days later a German navigator bailed out of his bomber only to realize that he still had his logbook on him. He valiantly proceeded to shred the book into tiny pieces, but was arrested before he could fully destroy the evidence. The book was painstakingly pieced back together like a jigsaw puzzle, revealing – among other things – that the second beam frequency was 30 megahertz.
With this vital information in hand, all that remained was to actually detect the beams as they crossed over England. To this end, Wing Commander Robert S. Blucke of the Blind Landing Development Flight at Boscombe Down had three Avro Anson training and maritime patrol aircraft fitted with American-made Hallicrafters S27 receivers – the only radios available in the UK that could detect the high-frequency Knickebein beams. Indeed, it is rumoured that an Air Ministry representative bought up the entire stock of Webb’s Radio shop in Soho – on credit. Never designed for use aboard aircraft, the radios had to be extensively modified for the task – for example, being adapted to run off an aircraft’s 28 Volts DC electrical system rather than the typical 250 Volts AC household supply. And while the Ansons were ageing and rather rickety aircraft by this point, they were all that could be spared. This was, after all, the height of the invasion scare, when even de Havilland Tiger Moth training biplanes were being fitted with bomb racks in a desperate hopes of fending off landing German troops.
One of the modified aircraft, its radio manned by a volunteer from the Y Service, made its first flight on June 19, but this was cut short by a faulty generator. The crew tried again the following day, but failed to intercept the beams. And before another flight could be attempted, on June 21 a meeting was called at 10 Downing Street chaired by Prime Minister Churchill and attended by Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air; Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Aircraft Production; Henry Tizard and Robert Watson-Watt, two of the inventors of radar; and Frederick Lindemann. Amusingly, R.V. Jones discovered the meeting invitation on his desk after the meeting had already begun, and was forced to scramble to Whitehall to present his findings. In Their Finest Hour, the second volume of his book series The Second World War, Winston Churchill recalled:
“Being master and not having to argue too much, once I was convinced about the principles of this queer and deadly game I gave all the necessary orders that very day in June, for the existence of the beams to be assumed and for all counter-measures to receive absolute priority. The slightest reluctance or deviation in carrying out this policy was to be reported to me.”
However, that same afternoon, Jones was pulled into another meeting at the Air Ministry attended by members of the RAF Signals Office and the Air Ministry Research Establishment, including Lindemann and Marconi Company consultant T.L. Eckersley. To Jones’s shock, Lindemann proceeded to restate his previous opinion that VHF signals like those supposedly used by Knickebein could not possibly reach England from Germany due to the earth’s curvature. To his even greater shock, Eckersley backed this view, stating, as another attendee recalled:
“…in his opinion the reception at any distance of this wavelength was quite impossible and that he’d stake his reputation on the statement.”
As Jones later wrote:
“It was an absolute blow from my point of view because if that really were true, all the fuss that I had been the cause of would now be exploded, and what would happen to me for the rest of my life was problematic…I pointed out to Eckersley that I’d used one of his own papers to convince Lindemann; that this showed quite clearly that the beams would go that far. “Oh,” he said, “well you don’t want to believe that, I was showing how far they might go but I don’t really think they would go as far as that.””
Nonetheless, Jones managed to convince the committee to allow the modified Ansons at Boscombe Down to make one final flight in search of the Knickebein beams. That same evening, an Anson crewed by one Flight Lieutenant Bufton and a Corporal Mackie from Y service took off and began zig-zagging across the Wiltshire countryside. Within minutes, they succeeded in locating the two Knickebein beams at 31.5 and 30 megahertz – exactly as Air Intelligence had predicted. Tellingly, the beams crossed over the Rolls Royce Aircraft Engine Plant in Darby, the only establishment producing the legendary Merlin V12 engine that powered the Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane fighters that were soon to become vitally important to Britain’s survival. Jones was ecstatic, writing that:
“It is fitting to close the account as far as scientific intelligence is concerned. In the course of ten days the matter has developed from conjecture to certainty…several technical points remain to be cleared up, but their elucidation is only a matter of time…if our good fortunes hold we may yet pull the crooked leg!”
Stubbornly, Eckersley stood his ground, declaring that the navigation beams “…did not extend any great distance within our coastline…are in the nature of freaks” But Jones had made his case, and soon a new unit dubbed 80 Wing commanded by RAF Signals Office Group Captain E.B. Addison was established to develop countermeasures against Knickebein.
This could not have come at a better time, for on June 10, 1940, the Luftwaffe finally launched a concerted bombing campaign against British airfields and aircraft factories in an effort to destroy the Royal Air Force on the ground. The Battle of Britain had begun. Though this campaign is often characterized as a prelude to invasion, in reality the Germans were ill equipped to invade the British Isles, and the bombing was instead intended to destroy Britain’s fighting ability and force the government to the negotiating table. Famously, however, the pilots of RAF Fighter Command, aided by the Chain Home early warning radar network and the highly-efficient Dowding System of command and control, proved more than a match for the German intruders. Furthermore, the Luftwaffe had been developed as a tactical air force for providing close air support to advancing troops, not as a long-range strategic force. Escort fighters like the Messerschmitt Bf-109 thus had only enough fuel to linger 15 minutes over England, whereupon they were forced to cross back over the channel, leaving the bombers sitting ducks for British fighters. Consequently, onSeptember 7 the Germans switched to the strategic or “terror” bombing of civilian centres, a campaign forever seared into the British consciousness as The Blitz. At first the Germans bombed by both day and night, but as in the earlier phase of the battle the unescorted bombers proved horrendously vulnerable to British fighters in daylight, and raids were soon conducted exclusively at night. By this time, further Knickebein transmitters had been constructed near Cherbourg and Dieppe on the coast of newly-occupied France. Being much closer to Britain, these transmitters generated stronger signals to guide the night raiders to their targets.
At first, the British were all but helpless in the face of this nocturnal onslaught. With effective airborne and gun-laying radar still under development, searchlights and anti-aircraft guns were woefully inaccurate and night fighters effectively blind. But there was one hope: jam the Knickebein beams and lead the bombers away from their targets. This was easier said than done, for no radio sets commonly used in the UK at the time could transmit at the high frequencies used by the navigation beams. However, someone in the Air Ministry realized there was a type of device that could: diathermy machines. Still used to this day in physical therapy, diathermy sets use high-voltage, high-frequency electricity to induce heating in deep muscle tissue. Operating at frequencies in excess of 30 megahertz, they were ideal for interfering with the Knickebein beams. In another very British feat of subterfuge, a diathermy expert from Harley Street in London was instructed to don a Flight Lieutenant’s uniform and commandeer as many diathermy sets as he could find from hospitals and private clinics. These were modified into 150 watt VHF radio transmitters and installed across the country, many in rural police stations in towns like Glastonbury and Wimborne Minster.
Unfortunately, the modified diathermy sets proved underpowered and ineffective. However, the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Matravers near Swanage soon succeeded in developing a more powerful jamming transmitter codenamed Aspirin – a reference to the official codename Headache for the navigation beams. Eventually, 28 Aspirin jammers would be installed along the Channel coast. Meanwhile, 80 Wing – now renamed 190 Squadron, flew nightly missions in radio-equipped Ansons and Armstrong-Whitworth Whitley medium bombers to locate the navigation beams, these flights being supplemented by stationary VHF receivers mounted on Chain Home radar towers at Ottercops, Bawdsey, West Beckham, Stanton Wold, and Dover. The beams proved relatively easy to find due to the peculiar German habit of switching on the transmitters long before a raid began. British Intelligence assumed this was done to train the transmitters’ crews, but could not understand why the Germans insisted on aiming the beams over the British Isles rather than the vast area of Europe they now controlled. It was one of many careless mistakes that would eventually cost the Germans dearly.
Once the location and bearing of the Knickebein beams was established, the appropriate Aspirin transmitters would be switched on to lead them off-course. Aspirin worked by transmitting a spoof signal of Morse Code dots, which would overlap and mask the original signal and make it almost impossible for bomber crews to locate the correct equisignal. When used correctly, this countermeasure could be spectacularly effective, as revealed by an Air Ministry report on a Heinkel He-111 bomber of KG55 that was brought down during a night raid on Birmingham:
“This particular aircraft had an individual target, an aircraft factory to the north of Birmingham…they picked up the beam (at 13,000 feet) over the Channel and started to fly along it. After a time the equi-signal became variable and then disappeared altogether, and no matter how they tried they could not pick it up again. Panic then seems to have overtaken the crew of the aircraft. They complained that the electrical apparatus of the aircraft had gone wrong and that neither the compass nor the artificial horizon were functioning properly and that the night was so dark the pilot could not keep the aircraft on a level course…the [radio] operator, however, insisted that his apparatus continued to function, which tends to disprove the notion that that the electrical apparatus had gone out of order. Eventually the observer jettisoned the bombs and then he and the [radio] operator bailed out. The pilot and a gunner were killed when the aircraft crashed.”
But the Germans were quick learners, and soon began switching on their navigation beams just before a raid was launched, giving the British less time to find and jam them. They also sometimes aimed the beams at a dummy target before switching them to the real target, but this often confused bomber crews nearly as much as the British. More experienced bomber pilots could defeat Aspirin by flying along one edge of the beams rather than down the equisignal, but such airmen were few and far in between. As mentioned earlier, the Luftwaffe was designed as a tactical daylight air force, and most pilots had little experience in night instrument flying. Consequently, most bomber crews opted to navigate by what few landmarks they could make out on the dark ground below – particularly the River Thames. They also made extensive use of regular non-directional radio beacons installed back in Germany and France. By determining the bearing of two or more known beacons using the aircraft’s radio direction finding or DF loop, a navigator could accurately fix his position. However, the British were also aware of this method, and devised equally clever countermeasures to defeat it. For example, civilian BBC radio stations were grouped into clusters operating at a common frequency and were shut off whenever an enemy aircraft came within 25 miles. This way, no single station could be used as a navigation beacon. The British also developed an elaborate system whereby radio receivers on the coast picked up German radio beacon signals and relayed them via General Post Office telephone lines to transmitters further inland for re-broadcasting, creating a confusing mess of signals that made it impossible for German navigators to fix their position. This technique, known as “Meaconing”, was impervious to any callsigns, codes, or other identifiers the Germans might try to integrate into the radio signal, as these would just be automatically rebroadcast.
But while clever, there was only so much Asprin and Meaconing could do, and by January 1, 1941 the Blitz had succeeded in killing some 13,000 people, injuring 16,000, and inflicting millions of pounds of property damage in cities including London, Bristol, Southampton, Plymouth, and Liverpool. Meanwhile, British Intelligence learned that the Germans were preparing to deploy a new, more sophisticated radio navigation system – the mysterious “X-Gerät” mentioned by the captured Luftwaffe airman back in early 1940. Slowly, through radio intelligence and Enigma decrypts, they pieced together how the system worked. Unlike Knickebein, X-Gerät used not two but four beams, codenamed after German rivers: Weser, Rhein, Oder, and Elbe, the transmitters located on the Hague Peninsula and in Calais-Boulongue.
Weser was the pilot approach beam and worked similarly to Knickebein, giving bomber pilots their bearing towards the target. However, it operated at a much higher frequency – 65-75 megahertz – allowing the beam to be narrower and thus more accurate. But this made the beam difficult for pilots to find, so a wider Knickebein “coarse” beam was added to guide them towards the “fine” beam equisignal. The three other beams, meanwhile, were transmitted crosswise to the Weser beam at specific intervals: Rhein at 30 kilometres from the target, Oder at 10 kilometres, and Elbe at 5 kilometres, giving the bombardier sequential signals as to when to drop his bombs. This system allowed for a bombing accuracy of as little as 100 metres at 300 kilometres – greater even than was usually achievable with daylight bombing. Unlike Knickebein, however, which used standard blind landing equipment already installed on all Luftwaffe bombers, X-Gerät needed specialized receiver equipment. A special unit, KGr100, was thus formed whose aircraft would use X-Gerät to find the target, which they would then mark using flares and incendiary bombs. Following waves of bombers would then home in on the flares and fires to drop their own payloads. Such “pathfinder” tactics would later be adapted to devastating effect by the Allies in their own strategic bombing campaign against Germany.
X-Gerät greatly worried R.V. Jones and the rest of the Air Ministry, for early intelligence indicated that the “fine” navigation beam was transmitted at a wavelength of only 10 centimetres – far beyond the ability of British radio equipment to jam. The only hope of countering the system was thus to jam the lower-frequency “coarse” beam and make it more difficult for German pilots to locate the narrow “fine” beam. To this end, the British modified a number of gun-laying radar sets into countermeasures code-named “Bromide.” It would later be determined that the fine beam was not, in fact, transmitted at 10 centimetres; indeed achieving this narrow a wavelength required a special piece of equipment called a cavity magnetron, which had just been invented by John Randall and Harry Boot of the University of Birmingham and which would go on to become one of the Allies’ most decisive secret weapons. The Germans, meanwhile, would not develop their own magnetrons until much later in the war, after reverse-engineering examples recovered from downed Allied aircraft. The “fineness” of the main X-Gerät beam, it turned out, was the result of the complex structure of the radio transmission itself. As an aside, while top-secret at the time, cavity magnetrons are now found in nearly every household, being the key component of microwave ovens – but that is a fascinating story for another video.
The Bromide sets were ready by early November 1940, just in time for an anticipated large-scale raid codenamed Moonlight Sonata. Targeted against the historic medieval city of Coventry, the attack began on the evening of November 14. Over the next 10 hours, German aircraft dropped 503 tons of high explosives and over 30,000 incendiary bombs on the city, killing 500 people, severely injuring 1200 more, and demolishing over 60,000 buildings including Coventry Cathedral. One of the most devastating raids of the entire bombing campaign, the “Coventry Blitz” went almost entirely unopposed, with the city’s anti-aircraft batteries only managing to shoot down a single German bomber.
Strangely, the Bromide jamming sets appeared completely ineffective, and it would not be long until their designers found out why. One week earlier on November 6, a Heinkel He-111 of KGr100 crash-landed in the surf at West Bay near Bridport in Dorset. One crew member was killed on impact, but the three others waded ashore and were soon captured, apparently surprised to find their captors English; thanks to Meaconing, the navigator thought they had crash-landed in Spain! The wreck of the aircraft was soon recovered and its X-Gerät equipment examined. Far more sophisticated than Knickebein, the receiver used a visual rather than auditory system to indicate the aircraft’s position relative to the target. This consisted of a clock-like bombing computer with three hands, coloured green, black and red. When the aircraft crossed the Rhein beam, the navigator heard a brief audio signal prompting him to set up the computer. Then, when the aircraft crossed the Oder beam 10 kilometres from the target, the green and black hands began to sweep across the dial. When the aircraft crossed the Elbe beam 5 kilometres from the target, the green hand stopped, the black hand reversed back to the 12 o’clock position, and the red hand began sweeping from the black hand towards the green. As this interval represented 5 kilometres of travel, when the red hand reached the green an aircraft travelling at a constant speed would be over the target and the bombs would be automatically released. Not only was this system far more difficult to fool than a human navigator listening to Morse Code signals over headphones, but the equipment included a very narrow band pass filter that blocked any signals that differed from the genuine Weser beam by more than 50 kilohertz. During the Coventry Blitz, the modulation of the Weser beam was set to 2,000 hertz while the Bromide jammers were set to 1,500 hertz – far outside the filter pass band. The jammers therefore had no effect.
Learning from their mistakes, the British duly modified the jamming frequencies and by early December 1940 17 Bromide transmitters were deployed across the country. At the same time, Whitley bombers of 109 Squadron carried out 10 raids against the X-Gerät transmitters on the French coasts, but due to poor visibility these had little effect. Though the Bromides succeeded in fooling several bombers, the skilled crews of KGr100 never relied exclusively on X-Gerät and used multiple navigation methods to find their targets. The British thus switched to a completely different strategy codenamed Starfish. Starfish or Decoy Fire Sites sites comprised large arrangements of oil burners set up in open countryside which at night would resemble a burning town or factory and trick bombers into dropping their bombs on the wrong target. Even more elaborate were the so-called Q Sites which used arrangements of dummy buildings and aircraft and both stationary and moving lights to simulate airfields, factories, and other installations. This strategy proved remarkably effective, with a contemporary report stating that:
“Starfish have attracted the attention of the enemy on numerous occasions, drawing a considerable number of bombs. On the other hand, there have been some occasions, particularly when visibility conditions were good, when Starfish were ignored. Outstanding successes were achieved at Cardiff on 4 March 1941, at Bristol 16 March and at Portsmouth on 17 April. On the first occasion Home Security Specialists reported that no less than 102 high explosive bombs had been aimed at the Starfish. The total weight of bombs being 25 tons…300 bombs were dropped on the Downside Starfish, Bristol…the largest number of bombs ever collected by a decoy fire fell on the Sinah Common Starfish near Portsmouth. No less than 170 bombs, 26 landmines 20 oil bombs and innumerable incendiary bombs were dropped, representing 95% of the total effort against Portsmouth.”
It appears that the Germans were at least somewhat aware of the Starfish and Q sites, with a common story telling of a Junkers Ju-88 mocking the British by attacking one of the sites with wooden bombs.
In the end, X-Gerät was largely defeated by setting up a “false Elbe” beam just 1 kilometre after the Oder beam. As the bombing computer was automatically triggered by these beams, the premature signal would cause the bombs to be released four kilometres early. However, this tactic was not always effective, as by now the Germans had learned to only switch on the X-Gerät beams at the last possible moment, making it difficult for the British to properly set up the false Elbe beam in time.
But once again, the Germans had another trick up their sleeve, and in early 1941 Y Service listening stations began picking up a new navigation signal transmitted at between 42 and 39 Megahertz. At the same time, Enigma decrypts revealed the installation of a transmitter codenamed Wotan near Cherbourg and Brest in occupied France. Suspecting that the name contained a clue to the transmitter’s function, R.V. Jones contacted Professor Frederick Norman at the codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park:
“He said, “Well, he was the head of the German Gods.” Then he said, “Wait a minute, one eye! One beam!” He shouted down the telephone. “One beam! Can you make a system work with one beam?” And I said I could use one beam in the ordinary war and then for example we could use the ranging system mentioned in the Oslo report. He said “That will be it!” And so we started to look…”
As luck would have it, in November 1940 an Enigma message had been intercepted instructing the Luftwaffe to designate“Target No.1 for Y”. Target No. 1 was known to be a codename for the Royal Armoured Corps depot in Bovington, Dorset, and as the message was sent to only a single transmission station, this confirmed that the new navigation system – known as Y-Gerät – used only one beam. Once again, the Germans’ penchant for clever, far too descriptive codenames had worked against them. It was a mistake which in the postwar period would lead the British to develop a truly bizarre system of weapons naming known as the Rainbow Codes – and for more on this, please check out our previous video Death by Blue Peacock: Britain’s Bizarre and Deadly Cold War “Rainbow Codes.”
The directional function of Y-Gerät worked similarly to Knickebein and X-Gerät, with pilots following a narrow guide beam. Instead of cross-beams, however, the range of an aircraft was determined using a transponder system, with the onboard FuG 28a transceiver receiving a signal from the ground station and immediately re-broadcasting it back. By comparing the modulation phase of the two signals, the transit time and thus the range of the aircraft could be accurately determined using only a single beam. Even better, a pilot did not have to ride the beam the entire way; as the ground station could determine his aircraft’s position at any time, they could radio course corrections to keep him on-target.
Despite all this, however, Y-Gerät had a number of glaring weaknesses. Firstly, being an automatic system it was potentially easier to fool than an experienced human radio operator. Second, the re-transmitted transponder signal could be homed in on by suitably equipped night fighters. Thirdly, only one aircraft could be guided by each ground station at a time, making the whole system much easier to disrupt. And finally, the system operated at 45 Megahertz – an unintentionally poor choice of frequency, as it would turn out. Indeed, of all the German navigation beam systems, Y-Gerät proved the easiest to defeat. The countermeasure the British developed, codenamed Domino, comprised a radio receiver at Swains Lane in Highgate which picked up the Y-Gerät beam and transmitted it via telephone landlines to the BBC television transmitter at Alexandra Palace in North London, where it was boosted and rebroadcast. The site of the first experimental public television broadcasts in the 1930s, the station was shut down on the outbreak of war but reactivated when it was realized it operated at the same 45 Megahertz frequency as Y-Gerät. This jamming scheme worked so well that for weeks the Germans thought there was some inherent technical flaw with Y-Gerät itself. When they finally realized that the British had been jamming their signals from the outset, the Luftwaffe completely lost faith in electronic navigation aids. By this time, however, the German bombing campaign against Britain was coming to an end. The introduction of new fighters like the Bristol Beaufighter equipped with the compact and powerful Airborne Intercept or AI Mk.IV radar finally succeeded in sweeping the intruders from the night sky, while at the same time Adolf Hitler began redeploying his forces east in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. After 8 months and 5 days, the Blitz officially came to an end on May 11, 1941. While the so-called ‘Battle of the Beams’ was just one part of a much larger effort to counter the German aerial onslaught, it was nonetheless a vital one, as Jones later recalled:
“This had been our only defence: night fighters, until airborne radar was good enough, were powerless anti-aircraft guns were inaccurate, therefore we could not stop the bombers. Our only hope was to throw them off. Well, we didn’t always succeed but we did certainly on a few number of occasions, with the result that a good many people were alive at the end of the war who otherwise wouldn’t have been and a good deal less vital damage was done…If one thinks of what could have happened if with Knickebein all the German Air Force could have bombed accurately. Well, we saw what happened when things went wrong as at Coventry…That could have happened every night.”
But the Battle of the Beams was to have another, even greater impact on the course of the war. From 1942 onwards, the Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Force carried out a concerted campaign of round-the-clock strategic bombing against Germany and occupied Europe. Pathfinder units, first deployed during the Blitz, played a key role in this campaign, as did electronic navigation aids like GEE, Oboe, and the H2S ground-scanning radar. By the time Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, the bombardment had left countless German cities and towns in ruins and over 600,000 German citizens dead. By demonstrating the effectiveness of strategic bombing tactics, the Germans had ironically contributed to their own demise. As the commander of RAF Bomber Command, Air Marshall Arthur “Bomber” Harris, famously stated on June 3, 1942:
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind…”
Expand for References
Johnson, Brian, The Secret War, Arrow Books, 1978
The “Whirlwind” of Bomber Harris, Air & Space Forces Magazine, September 1, 2011, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0911keeperfile/
7 September, 1940, This Day in Aviation History, September 7, 2023, https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/7-september-1940
Battle of the Beams, Bletchley Park, https://bletchleypark.org.uk/our-story/battle-of-the-beams/
Hutton, Robert, ‘Battle of the Beams’: Germany’s Invisible Secret Weapon That Could Have Devastated Britain, History Net, July 10, 2021, https://www.historynet.com/battle-of-the-beams-the-time-germany-devised-an-invisible-weapon-that-could-devastate-britain/
Hogg, Ian & Batchelor, John, Allied Secret Weapons, Phoebus Publishing, 1975
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A revival of the fantasy genre in recent years has also brought about a revival of historical fiction set in the Middle Ages. With an endless array of titles, we are sure that you can easily visualise scenes from some Hollywood, TV or streaming service production, in which mounted knights charge at a line of terrified spearmen, tattooed Vikings pillage an unfortunate monastery, or some poor sod gets fried in boiling oil while storming a castle.
Decades ago in popular perception, knights and jesters sported lively colours, a fashionable bob hairstyle, and armour was usually shining. In more recent years, it seems more like Medieval Europe is constantly smothered in grey and mud, and knights are more interested in oppressing peasants than abiding to their alleged code of chivalry, which, accurate. See our video Did Any Medieval Knight Ever Rescue a Damsel in Distress.
But for whatever reason, popular culture is besotted with the Middle Ages.
The King. The Queen. The Emperors. The Monarchs. Whether evil or righteous, they are frequently portrayed as wielders of absolute power, whose will and authority are uncontested.
It only takes their word to bestow incredible fortune on the story’s protagonist or redress some criminal wrong. And it only takes their whim to heavily tax the poor, burn down some village, behead a jester whose jokes are no longer funny. Or more directly, to unleash a war for their own gain.
But how much of any of that representation corresponds to reality? What kind of power did a Medieval monarch actually have?
To begin with, let’s define what we mean by ‘Middle Ages’. There is no universal consensus amongst historiographers, but the majority tend to agree that this is the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire, 476 AD, to the fall of Constantinople, in 1453. Given this is a period about 1,000 years long during which nations and empires rose and fell across the planet, while systems of government underwent gradual and profound changes, let’s just say addressing the question of what amount of power was actually wielded by a given monarch in that vast period is rather complex. BUT a complex topic has never stopped us before, so let’s give it a good old college try looking at some of the most notable leaders in England, France, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Abbasid Caliph, as well as the Great Khan of the Mongols, and what kind of power they actually had.
And we begin with a pivotal event that took place on June 15, 1215, when an assembly of English barons asked King John to sign one of the most important documents in human history.
That document was the Magna Carta, today described by the British parliament as
‘The first document to put into writing the principle that the king and his government was not above the law. It sought to prevent the king from exploiting his power, and placed limits of royal authority by establishing law as a power in itself.’
As for the story behind all this, the much maligned John, also known as ‘Lackland’, reigned over England for a whopping 27 years, from 1189 to 1216. In the year before his death, on June 15, 1215, he agreed to signing the aforementioned ‘Great Charter’.
Leading up to all this, John and his Northern and Eastern barons had not exactly been the best of pals. First, he had exacerbated tensions by increasing taxes, necessary to raise an army against France. These individuals may have been happy to forgive him if they’d gone on to win a war and potentially acquire spoils for all to share in. But when France and King Philip II proceeded to wipe the floor with the King John’s forces as happened at the Battle of Bouvines on July 27, 1214, let’s just say the King’s subjects were displeased.
The debacle precipitated the enmity with the barons, which escalated into a full rebellion. Amongst their many gripes, the noblemen resented John’s autocratic and tyrannical rule. As we shall explore later, it was customary in England to involve councils of barons and bishops in lawmaking, something that the ‘Lackland’ had been accused of not doing.
To be fair, John had simply applied the same leadership style of his predecessors of the House of Angevin, his father Henry II, and his brother Richard the Lionheart.
Sometimes, they didn’t consult with the barons.
Sometimes they did!
Sometimes they didn’t, but said they had!
But again, vassals are quicker to forgive a victorious leader who makes them rich with their victories.
In the end, to make peace with his nobility, King John agreed to sign what may be defined as a loose blueprint for modern constitutions. Naturally given the era and who was pushing for the changes, the Charter made little effort to protect the rights of common folk, focusing instead on the rights of the clergy and the large landholders. But it did introduce important concepts, such as protection from illegal imprisonment, exile and confiscation of land, and the introduction of a relatively fair judicial system. Furthermore, it formalised a permanent council of barons, a predecessor to the modern Parliament.
On top of that, to quote the document,
“‘No ‘scutage’ or ‘aid’ may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent, unless it is for the ransom of our person, to make our eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry our eldest daughter. For these purposes only a reasonable ‘aid’ may be levied …
To obtain the general consent of the realm for the assessment of an ‘aid’ – except in the three cases specified above – or a ‘scutage’, we will cause the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons to be summoned individually by letter.’”
In other words: the King needed the consent of the barons and the clergy before imposing new taxes. And what if the King tried to confiscate goods instead of cash? It stated,
‘No sheriff, royal official, or other person shall take horses or carts for transport from any free man, without his consent … Neither we nor any royal official will take wood for our castle, or for any other purpose, without the consent of the owner.’
Of course, there was always the risk that the judicial system could be manipulated to get rid of adversaries, and confiscate their lands and possessions. Well, not any more in theory, as it states:
‘In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.’
Which is followed by our favourite clause, which reads like a poem:
‘To no one will we sell,
to no one deny, or delay,
right or justice’
The Charter also features interesting articles about freedom of movement:
‘It shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm.’
And then we come to the Council of Barons:
‘The barons shall elect twenty-five of their number to keep, and cause to be observed with all their might, the peace and liberties granted and confirmed to them by this charter.’
So, there you go, some hard checks to prevent the British monarchs from doing as they please!
…Of course, there would be some hiccups, and John himself would almost immediately renegue on his word, begging Pope Innocent III for help – forgetting that the Pontiff had excommunicated him a few years earlier!
In any event, despite all this, the signature of the Magna Carta was a great victory for the barons and set the template for constitutional monarchy. But we should not be swayed into thinking that before 1215 England monarchs held absolute, tyrannical powers. John and the Angevins were more the exception than the rule, and even during their Pre-Carta reigns, they had to keep their despotic tendencies in check.
As to why, it’s important to understand where these individuals derived their powers and what their job was. Specifically, their job description included: governing and administering their kingdom; protecting it from external and internal threats; issuing laws; and ensuring justice was served. To perform these duties, they could, and did, levy taxes on their subjects.
But the legitimacy of their position depended on four sources of power:
First, their subjects. Monarchs needed to be recognised as such, and to be supported by their subjects. As most of their subjects were virtually powerless, in practice this meant that Kings and Queens needed the support of the clergy and the landowners – especially aristocratic landowners, who were also the major providers of military power.
Second, their ancestry. A monarch had to be the direct heir of a previous ruler, or the spouse of an heir.
Third, they needed military power, essentially ‘muscle’ to defend their status as rulers and possessions. Very often, their own position as ruler was the result of a successful invasion or civil war.
Fourth, their power tended to derive from religion. European monarchs needed the backing of the church, and especially the Pope, to claim that it was God’s will if they wore a crown.
In all, if you think about it, this is not terribly different from how rulers today tend to get in power and keep it, albeit, to an extent at least, nixing the ancestry requirement.
But in medieval times, three out of four sources of legitimacy and power depended upon external actors to a monarch’s inner circle: the clergy, the landed aristocracy, and the military – the latter two closely intertwined.
Thus, a monarch – even before the Magna Carta – could not go about his or her reigning business without the support of these powerful forces.
As such, the necessary cooperation between the monarch and the barons or similar ruling class was sometimes formalised via a ‘coronation oath’, a practice common in England. The King would swear it at this coronation, and use this oath as a sort of ‘mission statement’, spelling out the general principles to which he would abide.
William the Conqueror’s oath, for example, promised
‘To maintain the Church of God and all Christian people in true peace; to prohibit all orders of men from committing injustice and oppression, and to enjoin the observance of equity and mercy in all judgments’
The Church and the barons, of course, would take note. If the King swayed from his mission statement, they would feel morally justified to rebel. Kings knew it, and thus, in theory at least, imposed themselves a healthy dose of self-restraint. According to Medieval Historian Professor Joel T. Rosenthal,
‘When a king pursued a course of action that flirted too closely with tyranny, or when he appointed men whose origins were thought to debase or sully their positions, he was likely to face noble opposition.’
On top of all this, a European monarch’s actions were also bound to another set of regulations, the so-called ‘feudal contract’.
This was part of the widespread feudal system, itself borne out of a very tangible concern- geography. Kingdoms such as England and France at the time could not be effectively ruled by a single centre of gravitational power, therefore monarchs were forced to decentralise the administrative functions of their government.
Citing again the example of William the Conqueror, the Norman steamroller knew very well that decentralised power was the way to go, and thus divided England into large plots of land, or ‘fiefs’, entrusting them to noblemen or barons, whatever you like to call them.
The barons, in turn, divided their lands into smaller plots, and assigned them to their vassals, who were often knights. Each knight swore fealty to his ‘suzerain’, i.e. the baron, in an act called ‘homage’. As a requirement of this ‘homage, the vassal had to collect taxes on the suzerain’s behalf and provide an agreed number of troops should they be required.
The barons then amassed the taxes, devolving a portion to the King. And just like their knights, the barons were expected to raise a certain number of troops, both skilled knights or part-time men-at-arms when the Kingdom was at war.
At the bottom of the ladder you had peasants, labourers and craftsmen, who just paid taxes to everybody, including the Church.
Through the feudal system, the monarch had thus access to a fairly reliable method to maintain law and order over his realm, to collect revenue, and to raise armies.
The ‘feudal contracts’, however, had to be respected by both parties. For example, when it came to military levies, the King could only ask for a certain number of troops, and for a set number of days in a given year.
A King could slam his fist on the table and angrily demand for more soldiers, sure. But barons could just as well refuse. What would the King do, send an army to impose his will? Not usually under this system as most of his army likely came from the barons themselves.
That said, he could hire mercenaries, right?!?! Well, it’s not so simple once again. No barons on the Crown’s side equaled no taxes, and no taxes meant empty coffers.
That is why European medieval monarchs were forced to cooperate with their aristocratic subjects. This cooperation had been a long-standing practice in England since the late 10th Century, since King Aethelstan had instituted the first ‘witan’ or ‘assembly of magnates’, which included bishops, archbishops and ‘thegns’, or landed gentry.
The practice was adopted also by William the Conqueror, who instituted an additional, smaller council of officials and barons which conducted the daily routine of government administration: the ‘curia regis’ or ‘Assembly of the King’.
William’s son, Henry I, recognised the importance of barons in his coronation charter, acknowledging that he had been crowned
‘By the common counsel of the barons of the whole kingdom of England’
He also relied heavily on the advice of the ‘curia regis’, summoning it a total of 27 times over a span of 35 years. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was more than his dad ever did.
By the late 12th Century, the ‘Council of Magnates’, i.e. the successor of the Anglo-Saxon ‘witan’, had grown in importance. So much so that chroniclers referred to it as ‘The Great Council’.
This was summoned whenever the King needed counsel on affairs of state, had to levy a new tax, or enact a new law.
And that’s an important point: lawmaking. As much as Medieval monarch wished to wield supreme legislative power, in practice they were limited by their counsellors. Early 13th century cleric and jurist Henry de Bracton wrote
‘Let him, that he be not unbridled, put on the bridle of temperance and the reins of moderation, lest being unbridled, he be drawn toward injustice … The King has a superior, namely, God. Also the law by which he is made King. Also his curia, namely, the earls and barons, because if he is without bridle, that is without law, they ought to put the bridle on him.’
Let’s now look at England’s great rival, France.
By the end of the 12th Century, the authority of the French Crown was arguably weaker than his English counterpart. The feudal system was much stronger, and local lords even had the right to issue their own laws, which completely superseded legislation emanating from Paris.
The French Crown exerted some direct authority only over a small region around the cities of Paris, Orleans and Compiègne, whilst being surrounded by the large holdings, ruled by de-facto independent Counts, or directly controlled by England.
Enter the ‘giga-chad’ of Western Europe, Philip II ‘Augustus’, crowned in 1180 and dying in 1223.
Throughout his reign, this warrior King directly led numerous campaigns against the English and his own vassals to reclaim direct control over France. And indirectly, he contributed to the Crown’s intervention in the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 to 1229. This was a conflict of genocidal proportions, sanctioned by Pope Innocent III against the Cathar heresy in the southern French region of Languedoc. A staunchly independent territory, the prosperous Languedoc was eventually brought under total royal control as a result of the Crusade.
In matters of administration, Philip II was able to put the French nobility in check by allying himself with the local powerful clergy, as well as the rising merchant classes. These budding middle-classes became the emerging powers, especially in larger towns and cities, and were happy to support the Crown financially and militarily.
As Philip gradually eroded the power of barons, he replaced them with a new class of appointed administrators, the bailis, the senechals, and the provosts. These officials were in charge of collecting taxes, recruiting troops and administering justice.
But, of course, power is always a negotiated commodity, and even Philip had to involve his aristocracy in the running of the country. Philip had inherited from his father Louis VII an institution akin to England’s ‘Council of Magnates’ or ‘Great Council’. This was the ‘Royal Council’, an assembly of aristocrats and bishops.
Philip made it permanent, and expanded it by including a Chancellor in charge of government administration, and even clerks of non-aristocratic origin. The Council provided, well, counsel, to the King in matters of internal policy, foreign relations and war. Moreover, this assembly participated in the drafting of legislation, which finally overruled the plethora of locally-issued laws.
Philip, nonetheless, always maintained a high degree of control over his Royal Council, as its size and composition were entirely subject to his discretion. After Philip’s death, his successors found it necessary to expand the size of the Council, hiring large numbers of clerics with legal knowledge. Eventually, in 1239, this group of experts became a separate body, becoming the first incarnation of the French Parliament.
Such levels of centralisation were unheard of in France’s neighbour, the Holy Roman Empire, where the feudal system was ramped up to 11. Centuries later, philosopher Voltaire would famously describe it as such:
‘The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire’
With its large population and land mass, roughly corresponding to today’s Germany and neighbouring territories, the Holy Roman Empire had the potential to easily outclass other European states of the early 13th Century.
But despite the best efforts of its nominal emperors, it never became a centralised nation, remaining a loose union of disparate states.
The Emperors maintained direct control only over a small fraction of their dominion, called the ‘Reichsgut’
The remainder of the Empire was directly and independently administered by a collection of Dukes, Counts, Marquesses and high-ranking clergymen, collectively known as ‘Princes’. The emperors could call upon them for support in matters of war and foreign policy, but in exchange they had to progressively devolve more and more of their power.
We should also point out that the emperor himself was elected by the Princes, meaning that a prospective candidate had to dish out favours and promises if he wanted their vote.
In 1220, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was elected to the throne. He is widely regarded as one of the most intelligent, effective and progressive monarchs of his time, with the right vision to build a modern, centralised state. But Frederick was also the sovereign of the Kingdom of Sicily, in Southern Italy, and that’s where he focused most of his attention and reforms. To keep the Princes happy north of the Alps, Frederick had to extend and formalise the amount of their power, which he did so by signing the self-explanatory ‘Statute in favour of the Princes’.
In this document, the local rulers of the Holy Roman Empire were referred for the first time as
‘Owners of their own lands’
Which essentially relinquished almost all executive power into their hands.
Let’s take a breather to recap now.
European monarchs’ powers were limited to a higher or lesser degree by the oaths and contracts negotiated with their ruling classes. The extent of these limits depended on the sovereign’s own strategic vision, goals, ambitions, and access to resources. The balance of power between the centre and the periphery thus manifested via the councils of magnates and the feudal administrative system.
We should mention at this stage that the feudal system addressed the issue of delocalised administration, sure, but it may have borne out of external economic pressure, exerted by Islamic expansion.
This is according to Dr Basrowi, Lampung University, and Dr Ajat Sudrajat, University of Jakarta, Indonesia. In their paper Islam and European Feudalism in the Mid-Century, they argue that early Islamic expansion across the Middle East, North Africa, Spain and Southern Italy, cut off much of Europe from lucrative trade routes with said territories.
‘Since the Muslims dominated the Mediterranean Sea in the 8th century, European economy had a drastic deterioration … commerce was ruined or nearly dead. The fall of commerce in this field had pushed Europe to reuse land as a life source.’
In other words, the two scholars describe how feudalism was instituted as a viable way to maintain the productivity of agricultural land, thus ensuring the self-sufficiency of European kingdoms in the absence of foreign commerce. It is an interesting argument, which raises the question of whether feudalism was a system imposed for administrative reasons, or developed to address economic pressure from the Muslim world.
In the second case, we might go one step forward and posit that the Muslim expansion created the system which curtailed the absolute power of European rulers.
In the 11th century, the Italian Maritime Republics – Pisa, Amalfi, Genoa and Venice – resumed trade with the Islamic polities in the Mediterranean. According to the Indonesian scholars, the reawakening of commerce diversified the European economy, initiating the gradual and slow decline of the feudal system. Italian-driven trade also propelled the banking sector, of which Florence was one of the early major centres.
With a diversified economy, declining feudal system, and easy access to cash loans from banks, eventually European monarchs were less reliant on the consensus of barons, and were able to centralise their government apparatus – and their powers.
But we are venturing into the late- and post-Medieval eras, so we’ll stop there.
But at this point, we have mentioned the Islamic world, so we’ll take the cue to evaluate the amount of power wielded by rulers in those regions, focusing on the Abbasid Caliphate.
In the Muslim world, a Caliphate is roughly equivalent to an Empire in European terms. The first Islamic Caliphate was the Umayyad one, which propelled the early Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean from the year 661 to 750. After its collapse, the Umayyad empire was replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate. The latter, too, fractured in 861, but was consolidated again in 1118, centred around Baghdad. This Abbasid revival lasted until 1258, and its most successful ruler was Caliph Abū al-Abbās Aḥmad ibn al-Hasan al-Mustaḍi.
Also known as Al-Nasir, or ‘The One who Gives Victory’, this Caliph ruled from March 1180 to October 1225. So, slap bang in the time period we are focusing on!
So, let’s ask the same question once again: what kind of power did the Caliph have? Well, pretty much absolute, it appears. At least more extensive than the power wielded by his European counterparts.
According to Professors Aftab Hussain Gillani and Mohammad Tahir, Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan:
‘In theory the Caliph was still subject to the rule of the sharia, the holy law of Islam. But in practice, these checks on his authority were not effective since there was no machinery other than revolt for its enforcement. The Abbasid caliphate was thus a despotism based on military force claiming almost divine right to rule.’
The Abbasid Caliphs upheld their legitimacy by defining themselves as
‘The vicegerent of God (Khalifatuallah) and God’s shadow on the earth (Zillallahi ala’l -ard)’
Thus the Pakistani Professors define Caliph Al-Nasir as
‘An autocrat claiming a divine origin for his authority, resting it on a salaried bureaucracy.’
But this despot applied healthy principles of meritocracy:
‘Pedigree was no help to advancement, but only the favour of the sovereign, and an official hierarchy thus replaced the Arab aristocracy.’
The Abbasids rulers, and Caliph Al-Nasir in particular, took much inspiration from the ruling practices and the bureaucracy of the Sassanid Empire, modern-day Iran. Thus, Al-Nasir hired many Persian administrators, and welcomed talent from other non-Arab regions, including non-Muslims.
However absolute, the rule of the Caliph required the employment of regional and local governors. Unlike European barons, who inherited their title from their parents, local Abbasid governors had to be appointed directly by the Caliph, via a ‘deed of investiture’. This method favoured meritocracy, but it also ensured that the territories of the Caliphate would be administered by loyal officials, a direct projection of the sovereign’s power.
Local officials, once appointed, had pretty much free reign in how they administered their cities and regions, especially if distant from the capital Baghdad. The central government only interfered when trouble was brewing, or when the taxes went unpaid. .
Another difference from European kingdoms was the centralisation of military power:
‘The army, too, belonged to the court, the nucleus of it being concentrated in the Caliph’s residence.’
European kingdoms still relied on baron’s armies for funding and manpower, while the Abbasid Caliphate was already able to pay for and maintain a centralised military. How could they afford so much cash?
Well, first of all the Abbasid Caliphate controlled some of the most lucrative land trade routes in the world, as it was strategically placed along the legendary Silk Road.
Then, came the worldwide and well-established tradition of rapine war, i.e. raiding enemy territory to plunder their riches.
Next, good old boring taxation.
And when the Caliph was short on cash, he could apply the practice of Iqta, sometimes mistakenly described as equivalent to the feudal system. The Iqta was actually a land grant, awarded to army officers for limited periods of time. The lands granted as part of the Iqta were owned by non-Muslims, who paid the kharaj, a type of property tax.
The original owners of the land in question legally maintained their property, but paid the kharaj to the officer who had received the Iqta grant. The officer pocketed the kharaj, then paid a smaller tithe to the Caliph, keeping the balance as his salary.
Now, the Abbasid armies, however well funded, were largely composed of mercenary troops. Which might pose a risk in themselves to the absolute rule of the monarch. What if they asked for a pay raise? What if they become too powerful, an empire in their own right? Better keep them under control!
For this reason, the Abbasid Caliph devolved part of his military power to a newly instituted official, the ‘shahna’, translated as ‘commissary’ or ‘military governor’, who also had
‘The duty of keenly watching the moves of the game on the part of [the Caliph’s] rivals’
To be precise, Abbasid forces were not entirely in the palm of the Caliph or his ‘shahna’.
Large, peripheral regions could be entrusted to a specially appointed ruler, a Sultan. Sultans had almost total sovereignty over their territory, so much so that their title could be inherited. They could also raise and command armies on their own, and even wage war as they saw fit. A well-known example is the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, Saladin: while formally subordinate to Al-Nasir,, had the agency to initiate numerous wars against European Crusaders and rival Muslim dynasties.
Besides military authority, Al-Nasir and his predecessors also devolved part of their executive power to the ‘Wazir’ or Minister, often rendered in the west as ‘Vizier’.
(That’s Jafar, basically!)
‘The Wazir stood next to the caliph and acted as his alter ego … vested with absolute and
unfettered discretion in all matters concerning the state. With the help of their … wazirs, the Abbasids were able to streamline the existing administrative structure.’
In 1258, the Abbasid Caliphate collapsed under the attacks of a Mongol ruler called Hülegü, who happened to be the grandson of Temujin, better known as Genghis Khan, or ‘universal ruler’.
Temujin had founded the Mongol empire in 1206, becoming its first Khagan, or emperor. Between that date and his death in 1227, the Mongol dominion expanded into the largest contiguous land empire in history, extending from the Pacific Ocean to the Danube river.
That makes him the most powerful monarch we discussed so far, sure. But ruling over such vast and diverse lands is no easy task.
As much as he was swift and ruthless in battle, Temujin was not a full-on despot, who relied on meritocracy, a well-oiled administration, and a complex source of legitimacy, blending divine authority with pragmatic law-making.
Let’s first address local government. According to Professor Beverly May Carl, Dedman School of Law, Dallas, Genghis Khan had little interest in directly ruling over every single conquered land, as long as it provided revenue.
His empire’s provinces were managed via a military-feudal system, in which authority was entrusted to commanders who had proved themselves on the battlefield, or capable civilian officials. Very often, the latter were recruited amongst the conquered population, provided they had the right leadership skills. Local governorships were not inherited, and new local administrators had to earn their position.
Provincial governments enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy, as it respected the customs and religious practices of the subjects. Yet, they were still expected to enact a number of provisions mandated from Temujin’s court, relayed by an army of fast messengers on horseback. These messengers had access to supply stations placed at regular intervals along the many roads of the empire, and took less than one month to traverse the length of the Khaganate.
Temujin’s central court provided services similar to the European councils of magnates or the Caliphate’s officials. This body was organised over two main layers: an inner circle, composed of Temujin’s ‘urugh’, or ‘Golden Kin’. His family, in other words.
Before you scream: ‘hang on, what about meritocracy, then?’ – allow us to clarify. The second layer of central administration was entrusted to professional clerks and officials. At the start of Temujin’s rule, these were picked amongst hostages kidnapped from rival clans, but later the Khagan imported talent from China, Persia, and other subject territories.
While serving the vision of Temujin, these two layers also contributed to keeping him in check. The Khagan had to weigh in the contributions and goals of several disparate factions, and thus his government style was never autocratic.
Which brings us to the question of legitimacy. Temujin and his Golden Kin firmly believed that their right to rule had a divine origin, as the ‘Blue Eternal Heaven’ had bequeathed them the World, for them to conquer.
According to Prof Carl, however, Temujin did not consider himself to be anointed by God, let alone his ‘viceregent’ on Earth – unlike European or Muslim monarchs.
If Temujin was to be subjected to a higher authority, that would be his own Great Law, a legal body drawn from the customs and traditions of nomadic tribes, as well as the pre-existing laws of conquered nations.
The Great Law contained legislation which errs a tad on the draconian side, such as imposing the death penalty on cattle rustlers. But it also had some rather progressive concepts for its time. The most important of which was that nobody, not even the Khagan or his Golden Kin, were exempt from the Great Law.
This all brings us to a slightly different kind of monarch of a sort who on the surface had very little way of enforcing his will, but arguably was one of the most powerful individuals in the world during his reign. This individual directly controlled only a small territory in central Italy, had a very small military and lacked what we would call today ‘power projection’, at least in traditional terms. Moreover, he was an elected monarch, with no possibility to sire official heirs.
We are referring to the Pope of the Catholic Church.
In the period we have taken into consideration, this position was filled by two formidable individuals, Innocent III and Honorius III. Despite the limitations of their temporal power, these rulers were recognised by Catholic monarchs and barons as successors of Saint Peter, and heads of the Church.
As such, they could wield and project an enormous amount of influence over worldwide affairs. Some of the most notable tools at the Popes’ disposals included:
Excommunication. Described by Britannica as a
‘Form of ecclesiastical censure by which a person is excluded from the communion of believers, the rites or sacraments of a church, and the rights of church membership but not necessarily from membership in the church as such’
Considering that European monarchs often based their legitimacy on the Catholic faith, being excommunicated was quite a big deal. As mentioned earlier, King John begged Pope Innocent III for forgiveness in 1215, after a previous quarrel had led to his excommunication.
Which leads us to the second tool:
Vassalage!
As a prerequisite for revoking excommunication, Innocent effectively placed John under his vassalage, requiring the payment of an annual tax of 1,000 marks.
If a monarch brushed off excommunication, and refused to become a vassal of the Pope, the Pontiff could issue an act of
Deposition!
In other words: declaring that a monarch or baron no longer had the right to rule, and their lands were up for grabs! The principle of deposition was developed by the Papacy at the end of the 12th century, with Innocent and Honorius being the first to use it as a threat.
In particular, they used it to threaten rulers accused of being heretics, or simply of failing to persecute heresy. In a notable example, in 1217 Honorius III wrote to King James I of Aragon, scolding him for his support of Cathar heretics in French Languedoc. Should the King continue to do so, the Pope would declare Aragon open to invasion.
Which leads nicely to the most spectacular and visible of Papal ‘power tools’:
Calling for a Crusade!
Cathars and their local allies had been fighting against crusader forces since 1209, when Innocent III had issued a call for a Crusade against them. In very basic terms, it only took for a Pontiff to write a letter along the lines of
‘Whomsoever fights in a holy Crusade against the infidels and/or the heretics for a period of 40 days, shall be absolved of all sins’
And boom! Just like that, thousands of professional knights, men-at-arms and improvised soldiers with apparently guilty consciousness would rock up in Southern France or the Levant, ready to skewer, or be skewered by, the enemies of Catholicism.
Throughout their rule, the two Popes directly initiated three major conflicts: the 4th and 5th Crusades against Muslim states in the Levant, and the Albigensian Crusade. The 4th Crusade was a complete FUBAR, ending with the devastation of Byzantium. While the Albigensian Crusade resulted in an estimated one million deaths, and the almost total annihilation of Languedoc culture of Southern France.
So, yeah – pretty powerful guys. But how much of that was unbridled power?
Just like the other monarchs mentioned so far, the Popes, too, listened to the advice of an assembly, in this case their Curia, composed of Cardinals. Honorius III, in particular, placed great importance on the counsel of these prelates.
And, according to Dr Benedict Wiedemann, University College London, it was through the Curia that European rulers could exert their own influence over Papal affairs. Many of the Cardinals comprising the Curia also served, or had served, as nuncios, or Papal legates abroad. While working in the European capitals, some of these ambassadors had developed close relationships with monarchs, barons, even knights.
Thus, when the prelates were summoned to the Curia, their friends abroad could take the occasion to plead for their favour, steering Papal policies in a favourable direction. In other words, as much as the likes of Innocent and Honorius could exert control across Europe, their own decisions may have been influenced by other leaders.
But summing up all of this, the tyrannical, all-powerful, Medieval monarch is a bit of an exaggeration brought about by popular culture. Granted, especially in movies, it is easier and more entertaining to portray characters with absolute agency, rather than filming lengthy scenes of negotiations in which a King or a Kaghan has to moderate the opinions of dozens of barons or salaried clerks.
Now, up to a point they could have their way with the plebeians to an extent, at least until some evolution in law that occurred throughout all this, but a great way to piss off a baron would be to mess with his subjects too much, thereby potentially hurting his own labour force and ability to do his thing, let alone if extreme enough fermenting a peasant revolt, which is never good for business. From this, you might be unsurprised to learn that the Braveheart idea of Jus Primae Noctis, right of the ruler to sleep with any bride on her wedding night, does not have ever appeared to have been a real thing either. While subjects weren’t exactly generally treated well, there were limits to what even humans back then would tolerate from their rulers. The barons needed the people’s support to an extent. And the king needed the barons’ support, so none of them could get along very long pissing off their underlings too much.
That said, as we covered in depth in our video: Did Any Medieval Knights Ever Rescue a Damsel in Distress, let’s just say neighbouring barons attacking an enemy’s land were happy to slaughter and maim the lower classes on a whim, often precisely because it hurt their enemy’s standing amongst their own subjects and took away some of their labour forces. Afterall, one of the main points of even the barons was to keep the common man relatively safe from such things.
As an example of this sort of thing and how common it appears to have been, we have one 12th century chronicler Orderic Vitalis extolling the virtues of a knight for choosing NOT to slaughter a large group of peasants. As outlined in historian Catherine Hanley’s book War and Combat, 1150-1270: “he describes a raiding expedition undertaken by a young knight, during which his men destroy the homes of a group of peasants and kill their livestock. The peasants themselves flee to huddle around a cross; the knight spares their lives, and this charitable deed, according to [Vitalis] deserves to be remembered forever.”
Indeed, so brave; so noble.
In contrast, a 12th century knight and lord Waleran Count of Mellent was noted as simply cutting off one of the feet of any peasants he encountered while in his enemies’ lands. The idea being that lord now had not only just lost a useful worker, but also had an extra crippled and unhappy individual on his hands to manage, assuming the individual survived the de-feeting encounter with Count Waleran.
But going back to the kings and queens, medieval monarchs also had to contend with some very practical headaches when it came to administering their lands. They could not project their central authority everywhere at once, thus they needed to keep their vassals and administrators on their side, so that they could govern locally on their stead.
They also needed money, so, once again, they needed the cooperation of a delocalised structure to bring in those sweet tithes and taxes.
And they needed soldiers to wage wars! Thus, monarchs were careful not to rub their vassals the wrong way, lest they refused to fund and raise new levies.
The Abbasid Caliph and the Mongol Kaghan may have enjoyed more direct control and power over their Empires, thanks to larger, centrally funded, professional or semi-professional armies who could enforce their rule. Nonetheless, they still had to delegate part of their power to courts of skilled advisors, networks of decentralised governors, and military commanders. All of whom had to be kept happy lest they stage a rebellion!
Besides, as was the case of Temujin, they may have chosen not to place themselves above the Law.
The case of the Papacy in the early 13th Century is an interesting and rather unique one due to the skill of the individual Popes and their ability to combine a very effective set of tools. But their own power was subject to the influence of their cardinals, and external pressure from other rulers as well. In all cases a delicate dance between monarchs and their wealthy underlings, and the underlings with their subjects in the dust whose labours everything else was built on.
So, in conclusion: did medieval monarchs wield great amounts of power?
Sure, they were unelected Heads of State, Heads of Government, Heads of the Army and Chief Legislators after all. But their power was a result of a constant negotiation with those who advised them, funded them and fought for them, and thus subject to some level of checks and balances, even if by modern standards, rather insufficient in many respects.
BONUS FACT
We mentioned court jesters a couple of times, so it was interesting to discover how they were actually treated by their employers. Pretty well, it turns out.
According to chronicler Thomas Blount, writing in 1679, during the reign of either King Henry I or Henry II of England, a certain jester called Roland enjoyed particular favour at court. So much so, that for his services, he had been rewarded with a country manor in Hemingston, Suffolk, surrounded by 110 acres of land.
But there was a catch: Roland had to pay rent. Not in cash, mind you but by performing one job, once a year at Christmas:
‘Before our Sovereign Lord the King of England he should perform at the same time and only once, one jump, one whistle, and one fart’
It appears that this privilege was revoked, and either Roland and his successors had to pay an annual rent of 26 shillings and 8 pence. But for a good amount of time, Roland the Jester, aka Roland the Farter, was allowed to live in a sweet pad in Southern England at the cost of one fart per year!
Much more on the life of a court jester can be found in our video: What was it actually like to be a court jester in medieval times?
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https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/magna-carta/
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https://academic.oup.com/book/32805/chapter-abstract/274636469?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=true
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https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/khan1/hd_khan1.htm
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/mongols/mongol-government/4DEE13CA9B2862092D4D7F3C6D6AE809
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https://rowlandgenealogy.com/roland-the-farter-one-jump-one-whistle-and-one-fart/
The post What Kind of Power Did a Medieval Monarch Actually Have? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Pretty much as long as Santa has been Santaing, kids have been trying to send him messages through various means, including, of course, in written form. But when these written messages are mailed, what do the post offices’ the world over actually do with the letters? Well, it turns out, some rather interesting things in some regions, such as in the United States where a letter to Santa addressed correctly actually has a decent chance of not just getting answered by a letter from Santa, but also with some or all of the gifts requested being mailed to the child who wrote the letter if the family could use the help that Christmas. How does this work? Well, hitch up your reindeer, get out your lunge whip and ho-hos, and let’s go to town on this one, shall we?
First, a brief background on the whole sending letters to Santa thing. Throughout the surprisingly long history of some version of Saint Nick, there have been a variety of manifestations of this bastion of holiday cheer. Things started to solidify into more of what we typically think of as Santa today during the 19th century. Specifically, on December 23, 1823, the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, better known today as The Night Before Christmas, was first published. The poem appeared in the New York Sentinel with no author listed, having been delivered for publication by a friend of Clement Clarke Moore, who was a professor of Greek and Oriental literature and who is generally considered today to have been the author. However, Moore didn’t claim authorship of the poem until long after it was published. It is thought he was initially hesitant because he was a very well respected scholar and didn’t want to be associated with what is essentially a fantastical children’s poem. However, he was later convinced by his own children to include it in his 1844 anthology of his works, and from then on reluctantly admitted he wrote it.
In any event, as alluded to, before this poem was published, traditions surrounding St. Nicholas were numerous with no real set, near universally accepted idea of “Santa Claus” like we have today. Elements of the Santa tradition that ended up being popularized by this poem include: the names and number of Santa’s reindeer (Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen, with the latter Donder and Blitzen meaning “Thunder” and “Lightning” by the way); Santa’s means of transportation; that Santa Claus visited houses on Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day; the overall appearance of Santa Clause; and that Santa brought toys to children.
One interesting thing to point out, however, is that while the general appearance, in terms of the flowing beard, rosy cheeks, etc., of Santa Claus was popularized by this poem, the Santa we know today has had one very big change over Moore’s description- namely that Santa is now big. If you go back and read the actual poem, you’ll note that Moore described St. Nick, (who he never called Santa Clause) as “a little old driver,” with a “little round belly… chubby and plump.” He also described St. Nick riding a “miniature sleigh” with “eight tiny reindeer” that had little hooves. This, of course, explains how St. Nick was able to fit down a chimney without any magical means necessary- he was a tiny little elf.
Moving on from there, it was political cartoonist Thomas Nast’s various late 19th century Santa likeness that cemented the modern image of Mr. Claus. Appearing in Harper’s Weekly, these depictions showed him as a rotund, happy, white bearded man with a giant sack of toys. It was also Nast, in the description, who gave him a North Pole located workshop, elves and a wife – Mrs. Claus. For the last 140 plus years, our vision of Santa Claus is pretty much what Moore and Nast helped popularize.
Not only helping along our traditions of what Santa looks like, more pertinent to the topic at hand, in 1879 Nast also created an image depicting a child mailing a letter to Santa which seems to have ramped up the practice.
This brings us all back to the letters. Letters have been exchanged with Santa for centuries, with many surviving examples, for example, from the early 19th century. Noteworthy in these early instances, it seems it was common to have Santa write the kids letters as well. With most of the surviving early 19th century examples having largely been about the behavior of the kids and offering advice to the child on this front, which was a huge part of the point of Santa in the earliest days.
Essentially, it was common to use Santa as a way to get better obedience from the littles, not unlike today really where, as Christmas approaches, many a parent leverages the whole “he knows if you’ve been good or bad” thing to manipulate kids to better behavior. For example, to encourage them to not tell lies, via telling the kids Santa Clause is watching them… for some reason even when they are sleeping… which we’re guessing has nothing at all to do with kids’ propensity to get out of bed after being tucked, despite their parents telling them not to. On that note, also that Santa won’t bring them the presents they have asked for if they don’t do as they are told. Bringing in the other tried and true staple of parenting- bribing the little ankle biters.
Incorporating yet another long time staple of parenting, physical violence against their person, one of the first known images of Santa Claus in the U.S. was not a jolly old fellow, but rather an 1810 depiction of him holding a switch over a crying child. Another early depiction shows him leaving a beating rod as a gift, with a note telling the parents to use it on said child with impunity whenever he strays from a virtuous path- the gift that keeps on giving the whole year.
As the century progressed, things became a little less abusive, for instance we have this mid-19th century example of a letter written by Fanny Longfellow, who wrote to her kids from Santa about various ways they could improve, such as, “You have picked up some naughty words which I hope you will throw away as you would sour or bitter fruit… Try to stop to think before you use any, and remember if no one else hears you God is always near.”
Of course, many of these letters were never actually mailed, rather traditionally left next to some form of a fireplace to be picked up or left by Santa. However, as the 19th century progressed, it seems to have become more and more common to actually mail letters through the postal system to Santa, particularly as postage became cheaper and cheaper.
As for the types of things the kids writing these letters used to ask for, one 19th century example that ultimately got quoted in a contemporary edition of The Times, stated the child wanted, “a big wagon—not so very big—four wheels, two packs pop-crackers, a Mother Hubbard book.” Other letter writers requested things like “a stick of pomade” for their dad, prayer books, writing desks, coal for their fires to keep warm in the winter; there is even one adult woman who wrote to Santa asking for a “tall, stately, well bred… man of wealth with a steady income.” Essentially, in the early going people seem to have been fairly practical for the most part, though requests for dolls and candy and other such more fun items became more and more of a thing as the century progressed.
As for someone outside of Santa specifically fulfilling the requests being mailed, this, for the most part, wasn’t a thing in the 19th century, outside of some specific exceptions. For example, in 1894 one letter by a girl named Fannie was selected out by Connecticut’s postmaster Harris Eames and read, resulting in Eames deciding to rally people to respond. He later stated of this, “On Christmas eve … everybody walked up the steps on tiptoe and deposited the load of presents against the front door … When everything was safely in place the door was given a thunderous knock, and the crowd fled in haste to the gate and then all hid behind the little fence … The door slowly opened, and for a moment Fannie’s night-gowned figure stood framed in the doorway. She saw Santa Claus’s gifts and with shrieks of delight, called to her mother.”
As for the rest of the letters, as the Post Office didn’t deliver to the North Pole, these generally found their way to the dead letter office for further processing. As one article published in a 1906 edition of The Times noted, “The Christmas season has no charm for the prosaic employees of the Dead Letter Office. It means only a lot of extra work and bother for them.”
Now, as we’ve noted in our video What Happens to Undeliverable Mail with No Return Address?, normally, for example with the U.S. Postal Service’ dead letter office, they go to pretty extreme lengths to try to track down a recipient or return address for various undeliverable mail. This includes allowing their recovery clerks to open the letters or packages, making them the only individuals in the US legally allowed to open another real person’s mail without it being a federal crime. Noteworthy here, the postal service states over half of all dead mail eventually makes it to the recipient or back to the original sender. The problem with letters to Santa is that he is, shall we say, outside of their ability to deliver to. And, as such, they simply sorted the letters to Santa out and destroyed them.
However, this all began to change around the early 20th century, when certain charitable organizations started expressing interest in becoming Santa’s helpers via responding to these letters to Santa. And so it was that in 1907, Postmaster General George Meyer decided to allow postal centers, if they wanted, to give these letters to Santa to various organizations or people that wanted them for the purpose of fulfilling the requests in some of them. While, again, technically illegal to open someone else’s mail, when it comes to letters to Santa, nobody seemed intent on prosecuting anyone who opened these. However, because humans like to complain about every little change no matter how positive the intent, there was, nonetheless, considerable backlash about this after the fact. Thus, the following year, Postmaster General Meyer decided not to continue the experiment and the letters then were all funneled once again to the dead letter office and ultimately destroyed.
However, deciding listening to the minority’s negative Nancyness wasn’t a good general policy, in 1911, a new Postmaster General, Frank Hitchcock, decided to renew the program and decreed that any letters “addressed plainly and unmistakably to ‘Santa Claus’” be sent to “responsible institutions or individuals.” By 1913, this became a permanent thing. However, once again, not without controversy, with various individuals over the years attempting to ruin the fun for everyone. Chief among them was a not so fine fellow by the name of John Gluck. Gluck helped found the Santa Claus Association in 1913, with the organization functioning as a sort of middle man between kids and Santa via the US Postal Service. Collecting funds and gifts to use to fulfill the wishes in the letters sent through U.S. Mail.
The problem here was that Gluck seemingly never had any intention of answering letters, and instead just thought it was a great way for people to give him money that he could then just keep for himself instead of buying Christmas gifts for impoverished children as was the original intent here. As for the scope of the massive sum of money he stole from children over the course of about a decade and a half, in 1915 alone he conducted a fundraiser which raised $300,000 (about $5 million today) for a new building for the growing association… and then proceeded to pocket most of the money. He continued to collect massive sums of money every year until the fact that he was keeping most of the money was discovered in 1928. Naturally, USPS ended their association with the organization, though Gluck got off scot-free and afterwards simply moved with his wife to Florida where they started a real estate company. He ultimately died in 1951 at the age of 73, and has since no doubt been roasting in Hell as a guest of Krampus the Christmas Demon.
Despite such controversies, the USPS program, now called Operation Santa, has endured with great success at what it is actually intended to do- helping Santa make Christmas morning a little nicer for impoverished kids. Fast-forward to the 1960s and Johnny Carson helped further popularize the whole thing via reading off such letters on the Tonight Show and encouraging people to get involved in the program.
We’ll get into the modern and exceptionally cool version of Operation Santa shortly, but it’s also noteworthy that there exists another program of simply having Santa answer letters that exists as a part of most nations of the world’s postal systems. For example, across the pond in the UK, the Royal Mail will make sure letters sent to Santa / Father Christmas, Santa’s Grotto, Reindeerland, XM4 5HQ will receive a response from Santa within about 10 days starting at the end of November. In Canada, their postal system has the same service, but with perhaps the best address for Santa thanks to its post code- specifically, to receive a reply from Santa in Canada, you write to Santa Claus, North Pole, H0H 0H0. And, again, it seems that most countries have a similar program to make sure kids’ letters get answered so long as letters to Santa are received in time, with most postal systems requiring such letters be mailed somewhere in the ballpark of by December 10th, give or take a few days.
Going back to the United States’ Operation Santa, this has evolved over more modern decades and in the last couple years has gone digital, with it being exceptionally easy for anyone to sign up and become one of Santa’s helpers in adopting one or more letters to fulfill.
The exact process here is this. First, if you would just like Santa to reply with a letter with no gifts, you simply mail your kids’ letters to something like Santa Claus, North Pole, including postage like you would on any other letter you mail. If you would like the response sent back to be postmarked from the North Pole, you may also mail the letter to The North Pole Postmark, Postmaster 4141 Postmark Dr, Anchorage AK 99530-9998. If you want, you can also include a response letter in a self addressed and stamped envelope, which will then, in this case, be postmarked from the North Pole and sent back to you.
However, if you’re a parent who really needs to make sure Santa hits your house on Christmas, you can instead address your kids’ letter to Santa Claus, 123 Elf Road, North Pole, 88888. They also recommend making sure to put all your kids’ letters into one envelope so if the letter gets accepted by one of Santa’s helpers every kid in the house gets a response. Further, they strongly recommend you include a letter from you, the parent, describing your family’s situation in detail and what you could use some help with and why, as well as the names and ages of your children, any relevant clothing and shoe sizes, etc. All of this significantly increases the odds of your kids’ letters getting fulfilled, at least in part. One thing that will not increase your odds is mailing many such letters from the same household as their system will pick up on this fact and reject multiples.
From there, these letters are processed via scanning and redacting any and all identifying information. They are then placed in a database accessible online, where Santa’s helpers can go to access them and see if there are any letters they might like to volunteer to take care of on some level, with each helper able to take up to 15 such letters if they so choose. The helpers are also free to fulfill the requests in whatever way they please. On that note, once the helper opts into accepting handling of the letter, they then can purchase and mail up to six packages to the child’s home via U.S. Priority Mail.
You might at this point wonder how Santa’s helpers can mail to some anonymous family out there? Well, once you accept a letter to Santa, you are sent a QR code which the USPS’s system uses to know what address to ultimately deliver the packages to without anyone but the postal service knowing where it’s going. Noteworthy here, it is also completely anonymous on the sender’s side as well. You are, after all, Santa’s helper, so the gift ultimately came from Santa in the system.
In this way, tens of thousands of children each year in the U.S. who write to Santa directly receive their gifts from Santa via USPS and Santa’s helpers.
As for what happens to the letters after all this processing, they are simply destroyed the same as any other letters where the recipient is outside of the coverage area of any world postal system.
Bonus Fact:
Arguably one of the most famous editorials ever written (still the record holder for the most reprinted English newspaper editorial of all time) was published on September 21, 1897 in the New York Sun. It didn’t address matters of importance in the city, in the country, or even in the world at large. So what was it about? In September of 1897, a little girl named Virginia O’Hanlon was deeply troubled. Some of her school friends insisted that Santa Claus didn’t exist. When she went to her father, Dr. Philip F. O’Hanlon, with her concerns he suggested she write to the Sun, as the family often did.
So she wrote a letter, determined to find out the truth.
“Dear Editor—
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon”
This letter ended up on the desk of veteran Sun writer Francis P. Church, who had worked for the paper for over twenty years. Allegedly Church “bristled and pooh-poohed” when his editor handed him Virginia’s letter asking him to compose a reply. And yet, he produced a masterpiece that became a beloved holiday touchstone – by his deadline and in under 500 words.
The editorial, which was eventually republished in 20 different languages, certainly hit home with young Virginia and her parents. Virginia recalled during a 1914 interview that,
“It used to make me as proud as a peacock to go along in the street in the neighborhood and hear somebody say, ‘Oh, look. There’s Virginia O’Hanlon. Did you see that editorial the New York Sun had about her?’ And father and mother were even prouder than I, I think. They still show the editorial to callers and just talk people’s arms off about it.”
The editorial’s message still resonates just as strongly over a century later:
“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.
We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”
”Expandhttps://www.postoffice.co.uk/write-to-santa
https://www.santaclaushouse.com/santaletter_faq.asp
https://www.royalmail.com/christmas/letters-to-santa
What Happens to Undeliverable Mail with No Return Address?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus
This Day in History: September 21st- There is a Santa Claus
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/12/anonymous-publishing-night-christmas-interesting-christmas-staple-origins/
https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/letters-from-santa.htm
https://time.com/4147998/history-letters-to-santa-claus/
https://time.com/vault/issue/1989-11-13/page/105/
https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/operation-santa.htm
https://auspost.com.au/about-us/supporting-communities/literacy-education/santa-mail
https://beanelf.org/contact-us/
https://beanelf.org/seeking-gifts/
https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/our-company/giving-back-to-our-communities/write-a-letter-to-santa.page
What Does The Post Office Do With Letters To Santa?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/what-happens-all-those-letters-sent-santa-180967542/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/brief-history-sending-letter-santa-180957441/
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/santa-letters.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Duval_Gluck
The post Where Do Letters to Santa Actually Go? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, a massive Allied invasion force comprising some 5,000 ships, 1,200 aircraft, and 160,000 troops steamed across the English Channel towards the beaches of Normandy. It was the opening act of Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious invasion in history and the battle that would finally secure an Allied foothold in western Europe and mark the beginning of the end for the German Third Reich. The challenge facing the planners of Overlord was enormous, for the European coast was defended by the Atlantic Wall, a formidable chain of concrete bunkers, gun emplacements, minefields, and beach obstacles stretching from the tip of Norway to the Spanish Border. If Overlord was to have any chance of succeeding, these fortifications had to be overcome. To this end, Allied engineers came up with a variety of weird and wonderful ‘secret weapons’, from specially-modified tanks designed to swim ashore, clear minefields with whirling chains, and defeat bunkers with powerful mortars and flamethrowers to giant floating harbours called Mulberry. They even had an undersea oil pipeline called PLUTO to supply fuel to the thirsty invasion force. But perhaps the most outlandish device proposed for Overlord was a giant rocket-propelled Catherine wheel designed to roar up the invasion beaches and deliver a ton of explosives against the enemy defences. This is the story of the ‘Great Panjandrum,’ the most hilariously absurd secret weapon of the Second World War.
In a previous video, we covered the development of Hajile, a failed wartime scheme to airdrop cargo more quickly and accurately by using rockets rather than parachutes to slow its fall. Like Hajile, the Great Panjandrum was the brainchild of the British Admiralty’s Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development or DMWD, a collection of eccentric scientists and engineers nicknamed the “Wheezers and Dodgers” tasked with developing creative solutions to tough wartime problems. Among the DMWD’s members was Sub-Lieutenant Nevil Shute, an aeronautical engineer later to gain fame as the author of novels such as On the Beach and A Town Like Alice. When, in early 1943, the DMWD was given the task of developing a weapon capable of demolishing a reinforced concrete wall 10 feet tall and 7 feet thick, Shute calculated that it would take an explosive charge of at least one ton to blow a hole wide enough for a tank to roll through. Actually getting such a charge to the wall, however, was another matter entirely, for the abundance of land mines, barbed wire entanglements, machine gun nests, and other defences on the invasion beaches would make a manned demolition mission near-certain suicide.
The answer came in the form of RAF Wing Commander C.R. Finch Noyes, who had previously designed an early version of the “bouncing bombs” used in the famous Dambusters raid of May 16, 1943. Noyes presented the boffins at DMWD with a sketch of a truly outlandish device: a pair of gigantic steel wheels 10 feet in diameter and 1 foot wide, connected by a cylindrical drum containing 4,000 pounds of high explosive. Arranged around the rims of the wheels was a battery of cordite solid-fuel rockets, which would propel the device off a landing craft and up the beach at 60 miles per hour, skimming effortlessly over landmines and through barbed wire before crashing into the target, whereupon the wheels would collapse and the explosives would detonate against the base of the wall. Amazingly, Noyes’s proposal was taken seriously, and within a month a prototype was constructed in great secrecy at Leytonstone in Northeast London and transported under cover of darkness to Appledore in Devon, headquarters of the Combined Operations Experimental Establishment or COXE. The site was specifically chosen to test secret weapons for the Overlord invasion as the beaches in the area closely resembled those of Normandy. Shortly after arriving at COXE, Noyes’ weapon was dubbed “The Great Panjandrum” after a famous piece of nonsense verse by 18th Century writer Samuel Foote, which ends with the line “…till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots”.
The first test of the Great Panjandrum was scheduled for September 7, 1943 near a seaside resort town with the absurdly British name of Westward Ho! Despite the great secrecy which had attended the weapon’s construction, the test was conducted in plain view of the public beaches, and soon attracted a large crowd of curious onlookers. As such a device had never been constructed before, the DMWD team replaced the explosives in the central drum with the equivalent weight of sand, and fitted the wheels with only 18 rockets. As the intrigued holidaymakers looked on, the ignition switch was thrown, the wheels erupted into brilliant rings of flame, and the Great Panjandrum trundled down the landing craft ramp, across the surf, and up onto the beach. At first all went well and the strange weapon rolled straight and true, but soon rockets began failing and flying off the wheel and the whole device veered off to the right and flipped over onto its side, ending its inauspicious first run stranded and wreathed in thick flame and smoke.
Concluding that the Panjandrum was underpowered, the DMWD team doubled the number of rockets to 36 and moved the test site to Instow Beach near the Torridge river estuary. But while this upgraded version travelled twice as far up the beach, it also suffered from rocket shedding and wound up on its side. To improve stability, the engineers added a third central wheel and tried again, this time launching the Panjandrum from a wooden ramp mounted at the low-tide line rather than an actual landing craft. Unfortunately, when the firing switch was thrown, nothing happened, and as the engineers struggled to find the fault in the firing circuit, the tide washed in and engulfed the Panjandrum, causing the middle wheel to collapse. It was a pathetic but appropriately absurd end to the third test.
3 weeks later, the engineers returned once again with a new version of the Panjandrum, which dispensed with the central third wheel and increased the number of rockets to 70. To the team’s delight the weapon initially roared up the beach at its designed speed, but a moment later rockets once again began to fail and shear off, sending the Panjandrum careening back into the sea, where it overturned and the remaining rockets exploded, sending up a giant column of spray. Realizing that the original unguided concept was unworkable, the engineers next added a system of steering cables mounted to spools on the landing craft, which could be differentially braked to nudge the Panjandrum left or right. Nevil Shute was placed in charge of operating these brakes, and as the new design roared off the launch ramp, it seemed as though the system just might work. However, after a few seconds the Panjandrum began to veer off-course, prompting Shute to tap the brakes to correct its trajectory. In response, the cable simply snapped, sending the Panjadrum careening once more into the ocean.
At this point, the team’s growing pessimism was relieved somewhat by DMWD’s announcement that absolute accuracy was no longer deemed necessary; Panjandrum just had to be capable of travelling in the general direction of the enemy. And so, in January 1944, a group of high-ranking military officials gathered at Devon to observe what would turn out to be the final test of this troublesome weapon. As author Brian Johnson recounts in his 1978 book The Secret War, the results were…less than surprising:
“At first all went well. Panjandrum rolled into the sea and began to head for the shore, the Brass Hats watching through binoculars from the top of a pebble ridge. Then a clamp gave: first one, then two more rockets broke free: Panjandrum began to lurch ominously. It hit a line of small craters in the sand and began to turn to starboard, careering towards [cinematographer Louis] Klemantaski, who, viewing events through a telescopic lens, misjudged the distance and continued filming. Hearing the approaching roar he looked up from his viewfinder to see Panjandrum, shedding live rockets in all directions, heading straight for him. As he ran for his life, he glimpsed the assembled admirals and generals diving for cover behind the pebble ridge into barbed-wire entanglements. Panjandrum was now heading back to the sea but crashed on to the sand where it disintegrated in violent explosions, rockets tearing across the beach at great speed.”
But perhaps the most memorable episode of the whole spectacle was when one army officer’s Airedale dog – appropriately named Ammonal after the high explosive – chased after one of the careening rockets, nearly being killed in the process. Amazingly the whole debacle was captured by Klemantaski’s camera and is now preserved online for posterity.
Unsurprisingly, this spectacular failure marked the end for the Great Panjandrum, which, along with dozens of other weird and wonderful proposals, never made it to the beaches of Normandy. As with Hajile, Panjandrum’s failure lay mainly in the limitations of contemporary solid rockets, which were based on the gun propellant cordite and were difficult to ignite simultaneously. Indeed, in 2009, the town of Appledore celebrated the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings by building and launching a 3/4-scale replica of Panjandrum. Powered by modern solid-fuel rockets and packed with fireworks instead of high-explosives, the recreated Panjandrum functioned exactly as Wing Commander Noyes had intended, rocketing 50 metres up the beach in a straight line.
Strangely, however, it is possible that Panjandrum was actually intended to fail right from the start. A great deal of Operation Overlord’s ultimate success was thanks to a massive deception campaign called Operation Bodyguard, which convinced the Germans that the target of the invasion was not Normandy but the Pas-de-Calais – and for more on this, please check out our previous video The Bizarre Story of the Massive Fake Army That Defeated the Nazis and Helped End WWII.According to some historians, The Great Panjandrum was nothing more than a hoax, carried out in service of this overall deception. This theory makes a certain amount of sense, given that a weapon like Panjandrum would have been more useful against the heavier defences of Calais than those of Normandy. The fact that the weapon was tested in plain sight of the public also calls into question the seriousness of the overall project. But as Canadian chemist Charles Goodeve, who headed the DMWD for much of the war, later revealed:
“We did much more unlikely things than panjandrum.”
And given the many, many weird and wonderful WWII weapons and operations we’ve covered on this channel so far, that isn’t difficult to believe at all.
Moving on from the rocket powered wheel bomb, during the war, Britain was taking a beating from the German ships and submarines and were looking for something to build a ship out of that couldn’t be destroyed by torpedoes, or at least could take a major pounding without incurring a fatal amount of damage. With steel and aluminum in short supply, Allied scientists and engineers were encouraged to come up with alternative materials and weapons.
A scientist named Geoffrey Pyke was the king of absurd inventions (as you’ll hear about in the Bonus Facts in a bit, along with his hilariously absurd but nonetheless effective method of escaping a German prison camp, which he did successfully using said method). But for now, the king of all of his countless alternative ideas was to build a 2,000 foot long, 300 foot wide and two million ton carrier. Pyke named his project Habbakuk, a biblical reference that seemed to mirror the project’s goal: “…be utterly amazed, for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.” (Habakkuk 1:5, NIV) Unlike in the Bible though, the ship’s name was spelled with two b’s and one k, which is thought to be simply a spelling error that was repeated so many times that it became official.
Besides the ship’s size, what was so different about Pyke’s vessel was that it would be built of ice. There is no real limit on the availability of ice; it’s easy to make, fairly durable (except in warm temperatures), buoyant, and very easy to repair when damaged. Further, repairs can be made extremely quickly with the right equipment, even during a battle.
The ship was also to include 40 dual-barreled gun turrets, as well as other anti-aircraft guns, and an airstrip that could accommodate up to 150 fighter planes or twin-engined bombers.
Pyke was able to sell Winston Churchill on his plan in 1942, including Churchill stating it should be given the highest priority.
In testing, though, it was discovered that ice might not be as strong as the ice-bergs that Pyke modeled his idea on. It turned out that ice frozen into blocks for the hull could be broken very easily with something as small as a hammer. The project was temporarily abandoned as a result.
However, later that year, a New York polytechnic firm added cellulose- sawdust, wood chips and paper shreds- to water and froze it for a much more promising base structure for such a ship. Not only was it stronger than straight frozen water- with as little as 4% of wood pulp added it made it as strong as concrete, pound for pound- it was also much slower to melt and more buoyant. Pykrete, named after Geoffrey Pyke, could also be cut like wood and easily milled into shapes like metal.
There was one problem though- melting and refreezing would cause warping in the structure. Tests showed that a pykrete ship would eventually sag unless consistently cooled to around 3° Fahrenheit. To maintain this, the ship’s surface would have to be covered in insulation and it would need a refrigeration plant and duct system.
To test the feasibility of getting around this problem, a small scale version of the Habakkuk was constructed in Alberta, Canada’s Lake Patricia to experiment with insulation and refrigeration possibilities and to see how it would stand up to artillery shelling. The test ship was 30 feet wide by 60 feet long, weighed 1,000 tons and was kept refrigerated with a one-horsepower engine, which was sufficient to keep it from melting even through the hot summer months.
In ballistic testing, it was determined that a direct torpedo hit would only cause about a 10 foot crater in the hull, which was insignificant given the size of the proposed ship. Thus, it would be nearly impervious to torpedo attacks for all practical purposes, as it would take a huge number of torpedoes and other bombs to sink the ship. So even if the ship was broken up, the Axis powers would have had to invest a massive amount of their resources in a given area to do it (particularly considering the arsenal of aircraft the ship carried), which would have weakened them significantly on other fronts during the attack. If they were unsuccessful, the ship could be easily and quickly repaired right on the spot.
So overall, the test ship made the full size version seem like it might actually work out.
Further, at this point, it was estimated that construction on the real Habakkuk would cost a miniscule $2.5 million (about $32 million today), which is an extreme bargain for a ship like this.
However, there were still some hurdles to overcome. The rudder on such a ship would have to be massive. How to effectively mount this in the structure in a way that would be resistant to attack was a problem, as was controlling such a rudder. Also, the amount of wood pulp needed would have impacted paper production; while this ship used significantly less steel than most, the steel tubing it did need for reinforcing the structure would have depleted reserves for conventional, proven warships; a huge amount of cork would also be required to insulate the ship; and, finally, the ship’s top speed of just six to seven knots (6.9 to 8.1 mph) was deemed too slow, even with it being fairly torpedo-proof in terms of the main structure itself.
In the end, these problems, combined with the fact that during the planning phase the range of aircraft had increased significantly to the point where the need for a floating island became less necessary, ultimately sunk the planned ship.
That said, while the plan to build Habakkuk was short-lived, its prototype was surprisingly resilient. It took three hot summers to completely melt the smaller version of the boat.
Bonus Facts:
Speaking of Pyke and absurd secret weapons, beside an Ice ship, Pyke once suggested using thousands of balloons with microphones and transmitters attached as a way of triangulating enemy positions. He was not aware at the time of the advancements and development in radar technology. Yet another oddball invention Pyke came up with to help in the war was a screw-propelled snow vehicle. The vehicle would be propelled by having two cylinders with flanges in a screw thread-like fashion spinning in opposite directions and varying their speed to facilitate turns. The M29 Weasel put an end to the potential of Pyke’s snow vehicle seeing the light of day.
Yet another idea of Pyke’s was to use pykrete to quickly construct buildings and protective barriers in a mobile war. In the end, this was deemed impractical given the amount of equipment, water, and pulp that would need to be lugged around.
Another idea of Pyke’s, this one to solve the problem of transporting equipment from ships to shore in the many places where a harbor wasn’t available, was to create massive pipe systems from the ships that would be extended to shore and beyond as the soldiers advanced… literal supply lines. Equipment could be packed in airtight containers that would be whisked through the pipes to the waiting soldiers. Ultimately a more practical idea was developed using floating trucks and floating concrete structures.
A similar idea was to extend the piping system to quickly transport not only equipment, but soldiers too, particularly over difficult to cross terrain. Soldiers would be given oxygen masks and propelled through the pipes via water flowing through. In order to get around the inevitable problem of soldiers panicking while they’re whisked through these pipes they can’t get out of until they reach the end, he recommended drugging them first if they felt they’d have a problem with it. As he said, “The whole experience (of riding in a pipe) however should be far less unpleasant, and take very much less time to become used to, than parachute jumping, or being bombed.”
Another of Pyke’s genius ideas, this time after the war, was to get around the energy crisis by having trains not be propelled by conventional fuels, but by human power. His idea was to equip each train car with dozens of bicycle-like contraptions. Passengers would then be expected to pedal. This would cause people to eat more (needing more calories), which was a problem given post-war food shortages. Pyke felt this was fine because while certain foods were in short supply, sugar was plentiful and a pound of sugar, converted to energy via the human digestive system, would produce more energy than from burning a pound of coal or oil, which there was a shortage of.
Despite only a few of his ideas having some merit to them, with most being amazingly impractical, Pyke was kept around for a time simply because the Chief of Combined Operations, Louis Mountbatten, felt that Pyke’s steady stream of outlandish ideas was good for the other members of his staff to hear, to try to get them to think a bit more out of the box.
One idea of Pyke’s that did pan out was his idea on how to escape from a German prison camp… the one he found himself in at the time. Most of his fellow prisoners thought he was crazy even then, as even if he was able to get out of the camp, it was felt he would either starve, be caught, or killed, before getting out of Germany itself. He proved them all wrong becoming the first to successfully escape from the camp he was in. In his fashion, he meticulously studied all accounts of escape attempts to date by others and why and where they failed. He then devised a plan, at which point he and Edward Falk, a fellow inmate, began a rigorous exercise routine to prepare for their journey.
His plan went as so, with the beginning being every bit as seemingly impractical as many of his other ideas, but nonetheless working: first, use the fact that there was an athletic equipment shed that, while regularly checked by soldiers, was checked at a time of day when, if the sun was out and it was the right time of year, the sun’s rays would glare off a window and cause the soldiers looking into the darkened shed to not be able to see properly. Thus, even though he and Falk could see the guard and weren’t well hidden, the guard could not see them in the small shack. After hiding out, they then managed to slip out of the camp at night with the supply of food they’d been rationing. Following a truly harrowing journey, they made it to what they thought was the border and were caught… turns out, though, they were actually in the Netherlands when caught and were not caught by a German soldier, as they initially thought, but a Dutch one. They had made it.
Sadly, Pyke’s story does not have a happy ending, with the eccentric genius ultimately committed suicide in 1948 by ingesting an entire bottle of sleeping pills and leaving a note to say it was intentional.
Expand for ReferencesJohnson, Brian, The Secret War, Arrow Books, London, 1978
Davies, Alex, Well That Didn’t Work: the Rolling Rocket Bomb Designed to Kill Nazis Almost Killed a Dog Instead, WIRED, January 28, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-rolling-rocket-bomb-designed-kill-nazis-almost-killed-dog-instead/
Carlton, Genevieve, The True Story of the Panjandrum, A Disastrous Experimental Weapon of World War II, All That is Interesting, December 1, 2022, https://allthatsinteresting.com/panjandrum
The post WWII’s Most Absurd Secret Weapons appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In September 2013, food critic Matt Gross sat down at the Second Annual New York City Hot Sauce Expo and prepared to face a daunting challenge. Before him on the table lay three small, dark red, shrivelled peppers, which he was to eat as quickly as he could. Gross, a veteran spice connoisseur or “chilihead”, completed the challenge with ease, downing the three peppers in a little over 21 seconds. While at first the peppers seemed to have little effect, around a minute later they finally began to kick in:
“Dots of sweat started breaking out under my eyes, and then on my forehead. The burning began—not in the front of my mouth, where the capsaicin would have been had I really, really chewed the [peppers]—but in my throat, where the fiery flurry had flowed. I danced a little jig. I waved at everyone. I theatrically brushed my brow.
[But] this was pain I could take, pain I could savour. I could get through this—all I had to do was wait. And really, all I had to do was wait five or six minutes for the heat to reach a peak. After that, the pain and swelling began to subside, and the endorphin rush began to kick in. I felt great. No: I FELT GREAT! I was bouncing around, full of energy, talking to anyone and everyone I could.”
But this endorphin rush – the chilihead’s equivalent of the so-called “runner’s high” – came at a steep price, for later, as Gross was returning home from the expo:
“Sometime after 5:30, I began to notice a burning sensation just beneath my sternum. Strange, I thought: Why did it take so long for this to begin? Slowly, it began to grow in intensity, but still I thought nothing of it…But then, as I…descended into Penn Station to catch the subway home to Brooklyn, it got worse. Much worse. My breathing became laboured. I broke out in a cold sweat. I was hunched over, taking baby steps through the station. Finally, I had to pause, and sat on a ledge. To my right, a homeless man in a similar posture of misery. To my left, the same thing. The smell was not good. And yet all I wanted to do was curl up there on the ground and wait it out…It was like a white hot ball of nickel implanted just above my stomach—and again it made my want to stop in my tracks and lie down on the rain-drenched sidewalk till it passed.”
Gross had just experienced the searing wrath of the Carolina Reaper, which at 2 million Scoville Units holds the Guinness Record for the world’s hottest pepper. But what on earth is a Scoville Unit? How is the spiciness of peppers actually measured? And just what causes that burning sensation in the first place? Well, stock up on milk, antacid, and triple-ply toilet paper as we dive into the fiery and fascinating world of hot peppers.
What we commonly call “chili peppers” are the fruits of plants belonging to the genus capsicum, originally native to the Americas but now cultivated worldwide. What gives chilis their spicy kick is the compound 8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide – better known as capsaicin. A white, waxy solid in its pure form, capsaicin is a powerful tissue irritant and mild neurotoxin which directly stimulates the TPRV1 pain receptor channel in mammals. This means that spiciness is not actually a flavour but rather the sensation of pain. It also means that hardcore chiliheads are technically engaging in a form of masochism. Fun. So potent is capsaicin that even small amounts can overload nerve endings to the point of inducing numbness, making the compound useful as a topical analgesic for muscle pain, arthritis, and other mild aches.
Capsicum plants evolved to produce capsaicin in order to deter mammals from eating their fruits, for herbivorous mammals tend to have grinding molar teeth that can destroy the seeds before they can pass through the digestive system. Instead, capsicum seeds are largely dispersed by birds, whose nervous systems are impervious to the effects of capsaicin.
While capsicum plants have been cultivated and consumed for centuries, it was not until 1912 that a method for quantitatively measuring their spiciness or piquancy was developed by American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville. Though remembered today for his spiciness scale, during his lifetime Scoville was best known for his 1895 treatise The Art of Compounding, which remained a standard pharmacological textbook well into the 1960s. In 1912, Scoville was working for Detroit-based pharmaceutical giant Parke-Davis, which was developing a capsaicin-based topical ointment known as Heet Liniment. In order to determine the exact dose of capsaicin required for this ointment, Scoville first had to develop a calibrated scale for spiciness and an experimental method for gauging the spiciness of various peppers. In this method, known as the “Scoville organoleptic test,” chilis are dried, ground into a fine powder, and mixed into a solution of alcohol, water, and sugar. This mixture is then given to a panel of 5 tasters to consume. As the perceived spiciness of any given food varies widely from person to person, this panel allows an average value to be obtained. The pepper solution is then progressively diluted with water and given back to the panel until all members can no longer detect any spiciness. The number of dilutions needed to cross the sensory threshold, rounded to the nearest multiple of 100, thus becomes the heat rating of the pepper, expressed in Scoville Heat Units or SHU. For example, if a saturated pepper solution had to be diluted 50,000 times before the tasters can no longer detect it, that pepper is given a Scoville number of 50,000 SHU.
To give an idea of just how this scale works, a Bell Pepper, which contains no capsaicin, has a rating of 0 SHU, while the average Jalapeño clocks in at 3,500-8,000 SHU. The Scotch Bonnet, Red Savina habanero, and Bhut Jolokia or “Ghost Pepper” – previously among the hottest in the world – top out at 580,000 SHU, while police-grade pepper spray and the Carolina Reaper reach 1.5-2 million SHU. Chemically pure capsaicin, meanwhile, sits at a whopping 16 million SHU.
In the end, however, Parke-Davis never managed to perfect the use of capsaicin as a topical analgesic, and while Heet Liniment is still sold today, its active ingredient is methyl salicylate, a relative of acetylsalicylic acid or Aspirin. And while Wilbur Scoville’s scale is still used today, his method for measuring spiciness is not. The major flaw with Scoville’s organoleptic test was its dependence on human perception, which is extremely subjective and varies widely according to a number of factors, including a person’s age, the number of pain receptors in their mouths, their particular palate, and their experience with eating spicy foods. Sensory fatigue can also affect the test results, causing tasters’ palates to become less sensitive over time. Heat ratings for the same pepper can thus vary by as much as 50% between different laboratories. Consequently, since the 1980s high-performance liquid chromatography or HPLC – which measures the rate at which different compounds in a mixture migrate along a column of porous material – to determine the precise capsaicin content of different peppers. This method yields results in what the American Spice Trade Association refers to as “pungency units” – equivalent to one part capsaicin per million parts dried pepper mass. These units can easily be converted into Scoville Heat Units by multiplying them by 16. But while this method is far more accurate than the old organoleptic test, measuring spiciness is still not an exact science. The spiciness of any given pepper of the same species can vary widely due to seed lineage, growing conditions and other factors, while the spiciness of a sauce made from a given pepper depends on its water content. For this reason, the Scoville rating of a particular pepper variety is based on an average of multiple samples, while the heat of sauces is adjusted according to something called the “D-value”, defined as the total mass of the sauce divided by the mass of its dry chili component.
Indeed, the tendency of peppers of the same variety to vary widely in spiciness is the reason the Carolina Reaper still retains the Guinness World Record, despite several ostensibly spicier peppers having been developed since. For many years, the world’s hottest pepper was the 577,000 SHU Red Savina Habanero, discovered in 1994 by Frank Garcia of GNS Spices Inc. in Walnut, California. In 2007, however, the Red Savina was dethroned by a variety of the Indian Bhut Jolokia or “Ghost” pepper grown by New Mexico State University, which clocked in at 1,001,304 SHU. But even this was outdone in 2011 by the Carolina Reaper, created by Ed Currie of the delightfully named Puckerbutt Pepper Company of Fort Mill, South Carolina. Created by crossing a Pakistani Naga with a Red Habanero from St. Vincents in the Caribbean, the Carolina Reaper was officially certified at 2 million SHU. Currie has since bred a new pepper called “Pepper X” which he claims reaches 3.18 million SHU, but unfortunately the spiciness of each individual pepper varies so widely that the average SHU falls below that of the Carolina Reaper. Similarly, the “Dragon’s Breath” pepper created by English chili farmer Neal Price and Nottingham Trent University has been measured at 2.48 million SHU, but once again its high variability has prevented it from dethroning the venerable Carolina Reaper.
While the Scoville scale was originally developed to measure the effects of capsaicin, other plant compounds can also stimulate the same pain receptors. These include piperine, the active ingredient in black pepper, and gingerol, found in – you guessed it – ginger – which register at 100,000 and 60,000 SHU, respectively. But by far the most potent non-capsaicin compounds are Resiniferatoxin and Tinyatoxin produced by Euphorbia resinifera and Euphorbia poissonii, cactus-like plants native to northern Nigeria. These substances, also known as RTX and TTX, stimulate the same TPRV1 nerve channels as capsaicin, but are 1,000 times more potent, meaning that their pure forms would have a truly incomprehensible Scoville heat rating of 16 Billion SHU. Thankfully, these toxins haven’t found their way into any hot sauces, though they are used by the people of northern Nigeria as natural pesticides. Furthermore, due to the ability of RTX and TTX to selectively target pain receptors while leaving other nerve cells untouched, these compounds are currently being studied as possible treatments for chronic pain.
All of this brings us to an important question: since capsaicin is a neurotoxin, could you actually die from eating too many hot peppers? The answer, interestingly, is yes. A 1980 study by researchers at Mahidol University in Thailand determined that, extrapolating from experiments conducted on rats, around 170 grams of pure capsaicin is enough to kill an average 150 pound or 68 kilogram person. Death in these experiments resulted from the powerful inflammatory response triggered by the capsaicin, which caused widespread dilation of the subject’s blood vessels and a catastrophic drop in blood pressure. Thankfully, however, consuming this much capsaicin would require you to eat 3 pounds or 1.4 kilograms of dried and powdered Carolina Reaper in a single sitting – a daunting ordeal that is likely all but impossible for the average person to endure. So for all you diehard chiliheads out there: you are safe – though the same likely can’t be said of your bathroom….
Expand for References
Hulquist, Mike, Pepper X – Latest News and Information, Chili Pepper Madness, February 23, 2018, https://www.chilipeppermadness.com/news/pepper-x-latest-news-and-information/
Hottest Chilli Pepper, Guinness World Records, August 11, 2017, https://guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/hottest-chili
Saelinger, Tracy, ‘World’s Hottest Pepper’ Will Make You Choke, Sweat, and Cry for Mercy, Today, September 29, 2017, https://www.today.com/food/pepper-x-t116798
Hultquist, Mike, Carolina Reaper: Hottest Pepper in the World – All About It, Chili Pepper Madness, July 9, 2019, https://www.chilipeppermadness.com/chili-pepper-types/superhot-chili-peppers/carolina-reaper/
Hulquist, Mike, The Scoville Scale, Chili Pepper Madness, June 18, 2019, https://www.chilipeppermadness.com/frequently-asked-questions/the-scoville-scale/
The Scoville Heat Scale, Chilli World, https://www.chilliworld.com/factfile/scoville-scale#TheScovilleScale
Yglesias, Matthew, Wilbur Scoville Invented the Way We Measure Hot Peppers’ Spiciness, Vox, January 22, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/1/22/10810564/wilbur-scoville-google-doodle
Gross, Matt, What’s it Like to Eat the World’s Hottest Chile Pepper? Bon Appétit, March 31, 2014, https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/article/eat-worlds-hottest-chiles
Do, Thomas et al, Determination of the Content of Capsaicin and Dihydrocapsaicin in Twelve Varieties of Chilli Peppers Using Liquid Chromatography With UV/VIS Detection, Mendel University, Brno, Czech Republic, November 2017, https://mendelnet.cz/pdfs/mnt/2017/01/96.pdf
Glinsukon, T, et al, Acute Toxicity of Capsaicin in Several Animal Species, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand, 1980, https://www.sciencedirect.com/sdfe/pdf/download/eid/1-s2.0-0041010180900768/first-page-pdf
The post How Do They Actually Measure the Heat of Hot Peppers? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
It is the ultimate naval weapon. Lurking unseen beneath the waves, it can travel the world’s oceans at will and appear without warning, unleashing a deadly salvo of ship-killing torpedoes or world-ending nuclear missiles before melting away back into the depths. It is, of course, the submarine. But the stealthy, ultra-sophisticated nuclear submarines of today did not suddenly appear fully-formed; they are the product of more than a hundred years of slow, painstaking, and often dangerous technical development, full of countless failed experiments, dead ends, and lost lives – not for nothing is submarining called the “silent service.” And while the submarine as a viable weapon is only a little over a century old, serious attempts at waging underwater warfare go back much further – all the way back, in fact, to the American Revolutionary War, when a primitive, hand-cranked wooden submersible made history’s first attempt to attack and sink a warship from below. This is the forgotten story of the Turtle, the world’s first combat submarine.
The ability to strike silently and invisibly from below the waves has enticed naval planners for centuries. In the late 15th century, OG renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci sketched out various designs for military diving suits and submersibles, and even claimed to have devised a method for remaining underwater for extended periods. However, he never described these methods in detail, writing in his notebook:
“I do not describe my method of remaining under water and how long I can remain without eating. And I do not publish nor divulge these, by reason of the evil nature of men, who would use them for assassinations at the bottom of the sea by destroying ships, and sinking them, together with the men in them.”
Sure, Leonardo…
It would be another 100 years before the world’s first navigable submarine was built by Dutch engineer Cornelis Jacobzoon Drebbel, court inventor to King James I of England. Constructed in the manner of two wooden rowboats joined together and covered in leather to make it watertight, Drebbel’s craft was propelled by oars fitted through flexible leather gaskets and featured a rudder for steering and pigskin bladders connected to the exterior of the hull which acted as ballast tanks. Ordinarily, the necks of the bladders were tied off using string; to dive the vessel, the strings were untied, allowing water to rush in. To surface, the crew squeezed the bladders, forcing the water out and increasing the vessel’s buoyancy. Even more impressive, Drebbel’s design reportedly included a system for maintaining a breathable atmosphere. Though the details were not recorded, it is likely that Drebbel heated potassium nitrate or saltpeter to generate oxygen and laid out trays of sodium hydroxide or lye to absorb carbon dioxide. Between 1620 and 1624 Drebbel constructed three submarines of increasing size, with the third and final model being propelled by six oars and capable of carrying up to 16 passengers. This craft was tested in the River Thames many times, with contemporary reports claiming that it could travel from Westminster to Greenwich and back in around three hours while submerged at a depth of 3-4 metres. King James himself is even said to have taken a short ride, making him the first monarch to travel underwater. However, several historians argue that these claims are highly exaggerated, and that Drebbel’s craft was little more than a semi-submersible capable only of drifting with the current. Whatever the case, despite 15 years of development and demonstrations, Drebbel failed to interest the Royal Navy in his design, and the project was ultimately abandoned.
Though many inventors over the following decades would try their hand at creating military submarines, it would not be until the late 18th century that technology that technology had advanced sufficiently to make this dream a practical reality. Enter David Bushnell and the Turtle.
David Bushnell was born on August 30, 1740 in Westbrook, Connecticut, the son of farmers Nehemiah and Sarah Bushnell. The early part of his life is poorly documented and appears to have been largely uneventful, with Bushnell spending much of his spare time on the family farm reading up on various scientific and technical topics. It was not until 1766, following the death of his parents and two sisters, that he decided to spend his inheritance and pursue a formal education. In 1771 at the age of 31, he was accepted into Yale College.
At Yale, Bushnell and colleague Phineas Pratt researched the problem of detonating gunpowder charges underwater, which was previously thought impossible. However, starting with two ounces of gunpowder and gradually working his way up, Bushnell eventually developed a waterproof explosive charge capable of sinking a military vessel, which contained two pounds of gunpowder and was set off by a clockwork timer connected to the flintlock sparking mechanism from a musket. Though known today as naval mines, at the time such devices were referred to as torpedoes after the torpedo fish or electric ray, which delivers a powerful electric shock to stun its prey. Thus, when Rear Admiral David Farragut issued his immortal command “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” at the 1864 Battle of Mobile Bay,he was referring to stationary mines and not modern motor torpedoes, which would not be perfected for another half-century.
After graduating from Yale, Bushnell returned to his brother Ezra’s farm near Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where he began building a small, one-man submersible to stealthily deploy his ingenious torpedoes against enemy warships. At the time, tensions between the British authorities and the American colonies were steadily rising. They would eventually boil over on April 19, 1775 with the firing of the “shot heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord, which touched off the American Revolutionary War.
Built in cooperation with his brother Ezra, Phineas Pratt, and brass worker and clockmaker Isaac Doolittle, Bushnell’s pear-shaped craft measured 2.3 metres long by 1.8 metres deep by 1.8 metres wide and was built from oak staves bound together with iron hoops like a barrel. As the two halves of the hull resembled turtle shells, the vehicle was dubbed the Turtle. The hull was topped by a small brass conning tower with glass viewports which could be hinged open for ingress and egress, and was propelled through the water by a pair of brass propellers – one on the front for horizontal motion and one on top for vertical motion. Incredibly, this was the first recorded use of screw propellers on a vessel of any kind – predating the widespread adoption of this technology on steamships by nearly one hundred years. These, like all the Turtle’s brass fittings were designed and cast by Isaac Doolittle.
Inside the hull, the operator drove the forward propeller using a set of foot pedals and steered the Turtle with a rudder connected to a wooden tiller. The craft was kept upright by lead ballast, and submerged and surfaced by pumping water in and out of ballast tanks under the operator’s feet. For navigation, the operator was provided with a depth gauge and a compass, the needles of which were fitted with pieces of bioluminescent foxfire fungus so that they could be read in the dark. The hull held enough air for around 30 minutes of submerged operation, whereupon the operator was forced to surface and replenish the air using a bellows and a set of ventilator pipes attached to the conning tower. The Turtle was armed with a single 150 lb gunpowder charge with a clockwork delay fuze, which could be screwed into the hull of a target ship using a hand-cranked auger.
Due to the builders’ commitment to secrecy, records of the Turtle’s development and testing are spotty. It is known that in 1771 Bushnell met with Jonathan Trumbull, the governor of Connecticut, seeking funds to help complete the submarine. Trumbull duly forwarded Bushnell’s request to Thomas Jefferson and General George Washington. And on November 9, 1775, one of Bushnell’s Yale classmates, Dr. Benjamin Gale, wrote to Silas Deane, a delegate to the Continental Congress:
“I now write with the greater freedom, as I conclude by the time this reaches you the machine will be in camp. Lately he has conducted matters and his designs with the greatest secrecy, both for the personal safety of the navigator as to produce the greatest astonishment to those against whom it is designed, if this projection succeeds, of which I make no doubt, as I well know the man and have seen the machine while in embryo, and every addition made to it fills me with fresh astonishment and surprize. And you may call me a visionary, an enthusiast, or what you please, – I do insist upon it, that I believe the inspiration of the Almighty has given him understanding for this very purpose and design. If he succeeds, a stipend for life, and if he fails, a reasonable compensation for time and expense is his due from the public.
What astonishment it will produce and what advantages may be made by those on the spot, if it succeeds, is more easy for you to conceive than for me to describe.
I congratulate you and my country in the begun success of our Arms to the northward, and the prospects of further success. Make my most respectful compliments to Dr. Franklin and our Delegates, your associates; and am, most respectfully your sincere friend and most humble servant.”
Soon after, Benjamin Franklin visited Bushnell in Old Saybrook and toured the still-incomplete Turtle. While Franklin and Jefferson, avid inventors in their own right, were intrigued by the project, Washington was initially hesitant to commit any more of the Continental Army’s already stretched budget. However, he eventually relented and some funds were released.
Nonetheless, construction and testing of the Turtle proceeded slowly, the project being beset by numerous technical difficulties. For example, the operation of the submarine required considerable stamina and coordination on the part of the operator, who not only had to crank the propellers and operate the rudder, but also navigate, continuously adjust the craft’s depth, and also perform the complex task of fixing its explosive payload to the target. Indeed, during initial testing at Ayer’s Point on the Connecticut River, David Bushnell discovered he was far too frail to pilot the craft, and instead designated the task to his brother Ezra of the Continental Army. Another unexpected difficulty was that in cold weather, the foxfire fungus fixed to the instrument dials lost its luminescence, making the instruments impossible to read. On December 7, 1775, Dr. Benjamin Gale wrote to his colleague Silas Deane asking:
“…[if you could] enquire of Dr. Franklin whether he knows of any kind of phosphorus which will give light in the dark and not consume the air. He has tried a candle, but that destroys the air so fast he cannot remain under water long enough to effect the thing.”
However, no solution was forthcoming, forcing Bushnell and his colleagues to sideline the Turtle over the winter months. These delays elicited considerable skepticism and annoyance throughout the Continental Army, with militia leader Samuel Osgood writing to John Adams in October 1775 that:
“The famous Waters Machine from Connecticutt is every Day expected in Camp. It must unavoidably be a clumsy Business as its Weight is about a Tun. I wish it might succeed [and] the Ships be blown up beyond the Attraction of the Earth for it is the only Way or Chance they have of reaching St. Peters Gate.”
Indeed, while the Turtle was originally intended to counter the blockade of Boston Harbour, by March 1776 the British fleet had already withdrawn to Halifax in Nova Scotia. However, the Royal Navy still occupied New York Harbour, which soon became the Turtle’s new target. In the late summer of 1776, General Washington met with David Bushnell to finalize the plan of attack, and the completed Turtle was transported from Old Saybrook to Long Island Sound. On August 27, the Battle of Long Island ended with the British taking control of the western half of the island, forcing the Turtle to be moved again to New Rochelle on the Hudson River. At the same time, Ezra Bushnell suddenly fell ill, and David asked General Samuel Parsons to find volunteers. Sergeant Ezra Lee of the Continental Army soon stepped forward, and spent two weeks familiarizing himself with the submarine’s operation. Finally, in early September, 1776, Turtle was towed to lower Manhattan and made ready for its first mission.
At 11 PM on September 7, 1776, Sergeant Lee climbed aboard the Turtle and set off down the Hudson River into New York Harbour. His target was HMS Eagle, a sixty-four-gun ship of the line and flagship of Admiral Richard Howe, moored off Governor’s Island. It was hoped that destroying such a valuable and symbolic target would deal a serious blow to British morale. The journey to the anchorage was a gruelling one, with Lee having to fight a stiff tidal current and navigate the harbour in near-complete darkness. His thirty-minute air supply also forced him to surface frequently along the way. But at last, two hours after casting off, he reached the Eagle undetected and set about deploying his deadly cargo.
But once again, Lee ran into serious problems. Still fighting the current, overwhelmed by having to simultaneously operate the propellers, rudder, ballast pump, and torpedo auger, and likely suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning, Lee struggled to keep the Turtle in position beneath the Eagle. Worse still, when he tried to drill into the Eagle’s hull, the auger refused to penetrate. It is often claimed that Lee was defeated by copper plates on the hull designed to counter wood-eating shipworms; however, the Eagle had not yet been fitted with such plates, and in any case the plates themselves were paper thin and would have offered no resistance to Lee’s auger. More likely, the wood was simply harder than anticipated or Lee had accidentally struck an iron plate connected to the ship’s steering mechanism. Whatever the case, with daylight approaching an exhausted Lee soon abandoned the attempt and surfaced the Turtle to replenish his air supply. He was soon spotted by British soldiers stationed on Governor’s Island, who rowed out in a small boat to investigate. Thinking quickly, Lee armed and released his torpedo and started heading back to base. Upon spotting the small floating shape, the soldiers grew suspicious and withdrew, allowing Lee to slip away. The torpedo drifted into the East River, where it eventually detonated, throwing up a huge column of spray.
Though unsuccessful, the September 7, 1776 attack on HMS Eagle marked the first time in recorded history a submersible craft had been used in combat. Over the next few months two more, less well-documented attacks were carried out against British shipping, though these, too, were unsuccessful. And before the Turtle could be deployed again, the sloop serving as its tender was sunk by British forces on November 20, 1776 during the Battle of Fort Lee. Bushnell claimed to have successfully salvaged the submarine, though due to budget constraints it was never used in combat again. To this day, the ultimate fate of the historic craft remains a mystery.
Undaunted, Bushnell continued to develop various schemes involving underwater explosives. On August 13, 177, he launched an attack against the British frigate HMS Cerberus in Black Point Bay, Connecticut – a mission later recorded by physician and writer James Thacher in his Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War:
“In the year 1777, Mr. Bushnell made an attempt from a whale-boat, against the Cerberus frigate lying at anchor, by drawing a machine against her side, by means of a line. The machine was loaded with powder, to be exploded by a gun-lock, which was to be unpinioned by an apparatus to be turned by being brought alongside of the frigate. This machine fell in with a schooner at anchor astern of the frigate, and concealed from his sight. By some means it became fixed, and exploding, demolished the schooner.
Commodore Simmons…discovered about eleven o’clock in the evening a line towing astern from the bows. He believed that some person had veered away by it, and immediately began to haul in. A sailor, belonging to the schooner, taking it for a fishing line, laid hold of it, and drew in about fifteen fathoms. It was buoyed up by small pieces of wood tied to it at stated distances. At the end of the rope a machine was fastened, too heavy for one man to pull up, for it exceeded one hundred pounds in weight. The other people of the schooner coming to his assistance, they drew it on deck. While the men were examining the machine, about five minutes from the time the wheel had been put in motion, it exploded, blew the vessel into pieces, and set her on fire. Three men were killed, and the fourth blown into the water, much injured.
On examining round the ship, after this accident, the other part of the line was discovered, buoyed up in the same manner. This the commodore ordered to be instantly cut away, for fear of hauling up another of the infernals, as he termed it. These machines were constructed with wheels, furnished with irons sharpened at the end, and projecting about an inch, in order to strike the sides of the vessel when hauling them up, thereby setting the wheels in motion, which in the space of five minutes causes the explosion. Had the whole apparatus been brought to operate on a ship at the same time, it must have occasioned prodigious destruction.”
Then, on January 1778, Bushnell launched a salvo of floating mines down the Delaware River, hoping they would contact and destroy British ships anchored in Philadelphia harbour. However, the British had arranged their ships to avoid being struck by floating river ice, and this in turn protected them from the mines. The only casualties of the attack were two young boys who stumbled upon a mine and were killed in the resulting explosion. Nonetheless, the attack caused great consternation among the British forces, which was lampooned in a humorous ballad by composer Francis Hopkinson titled The Battle of the Kegs:
‘Twas early day, as poets say,
Just when the sun was rising,
A soldier stood, on a log of wood,
And saw a thing surprising.
As in amaze he stood to gaze,
The truth can’t be denied, sir,
He spied a score of kegs or more, 1
Come floating down the tide sir.
A sailor, too, in jerkin blue,
This strange appearance viewing,
First damn’d his eyes, in great surprise,
Then said, “some mischief’s brewing.
“These kegs, I’m told , the rebels hold,
Packed up like pickled herring,
And they’re come down, t’ attack the town,
In this new way of ferrying.”
The soldier flew, the sailor too,
And scared almost to death, sir,
Wore out their shoes to spread the news,
And ran till out of breath, sir.
Following this failed attack, both the Connecticut government and the Continental Army refused to fund further work on mines or other underwater explosives. Instead, General Washington commissioned David Bushnell as a captain-lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in which he served with distinction. Following the end of the Revolutionary War, Bushnell slipped into obscurity, moving first to France and then to Warrenton, Georgia where he worked as a schoolteacher and studied and practiced medicine until his death in 1824.
Though his inventions had little impact on the course of the war, Bushnell was nonetheless widely admired and respected by his superiors, with George Washington stating in a 1785 letter to Thomas Jefferson:
“Bushnell is a man of great Mechanical powers – fertile of invention – and a master in execution. He came to me in 1776 recommended by Governor Trumbull (now dead) and other respectable characters who were proselites to his plan. Although I wanted faith myself, I furnished him with money, and other aids to carry it into execution. He laboured for sometime ineffectually, and though the advocates for his scheme continued sanguine he never did succeed. One accident or another was always intervening.
I then thought, and still think, that it was an effort of genius; but that a combination of too many things were requisite, to expect much success from the enterprise against an enemy, who are always upon guard. That he had a machine which was so contrived as to carry a man under water at any depth he chose, and for a considerable time and distance, with an apparatus charged with powder which he could fasten to a ships bottom or side and give fire to in any given time (sufficient for him to retire) by means whereof a ship could be blown up, or sunk, are facts which I believe admit of little doubt. But then, where it was to operate against an enemy, it is no easy matter to get a person hardy enough to encounter the variety of dangers to which he must be exposed: 1, from the novelty, 2 from the difficulty of conducting the machine, and governing it under water on account of the currents, and 3 the consequent uncertainty of hitting the object of destination, without rising frequently above water for fresh observation, which, when near the vessel, would expose the adventurer to a discovery, and almost to certain death
To these causes I always ascribed the non-performance of his plan, as he wanted nothing that I could furnish to secure the success of it. This to the best of my recollection is a true state of the case.”
Indeed, while the basic concept of the Turtle was sound, Bushnell was limited by the technology of his day. Human muscle power alone was insufficient to counter the strong currents and other forces encountered under real combat conditions, while the need to manipulate several controls at once quickly grew overwhelming for even the most experienced operator. And without a means of storing or generating extra oxygen and absorbing carbon dioxide, the Turtle’s submerged endurance was highly limited. In future submarines, all these various functions would be divided among multiple crewmen, greatly easing the operation of the vessel.
Interestingly, some historians suggest that the Turtle as described by Bushnell was never actually used in combat, and that the entire story was either propaganda or that the 1776 attack on HMS Eagle was carried out using a covered rowboat and not a true submersible. Whatever the case, today David Bushnell is widely regarded as the father of the combat submarine, with two U.S. Navy submarine tender ships being named in his honour – one in 1915, and another in 1942.
But it would be another century before a submarine finally succeeded in sinking an enemy vessel in combat. On the evening of February 17, 1864, the Confederate submarine CSS H.L. Hunley attacked the Union sloop-of-war USS Housatonic, one of dozens of ships blockading the harbour at Charleston, South Carolina. Powered by a long hand-crank driven by seven men, the Hunley carried a 61 kilogram spar torpedo – a metal canister of gunpowder fitted with a barbed harpoon head and fitted to the end of a 7 metre long pole. The torpedo was designed to be rammed into the side of the target ship, whereupon the submarine would retreat to a safe distance and pull a long cord attached to the firing mechanism, setting off the charge. While the mission was successful, the Hunley and her crew were never heard from again, the wreck not being rediscovered until 1995. Though crude and highly dangerous like her predecessor the Turtle, the Hunley nonetheless provided naval planners with a tantalizing glimpse of what was to come.
Expand for References
Parrish, Thomas, The Submarine: a History, Penguin Group, New York, 2004
David Bushnell, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Turtle-submarine
“Turtle” Submarine, Connecticut River Museum, https://ctrivermuseum.org/turtle-submarine/
Rockwood, Heather, The Turtle: Submarine Warfare During the American Revolution, The Beehive, June 22, 2022, https://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2022/06/the-turtle-submarine-warfare-during-the-american-revolution/
Bushnell’s Turtle: a Revolutionary Submarine, American Battlefield Trust, July 25, 2022, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/head-tilting-history/bushnells-turtle-revolutionary-submarine
The Submarine Turtle: Naval Documents of the Revolutionary War, Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/s/submarine-turtle-naval-documents.html
Hanlon, Mike, Cornelius Drebbel Built Three Submarines in the 1620s – They All Worked, New Atlas, February 16, 2005, https://newatlas.com/cornelis-drebbel-built-three-submarine-in-the-1620s-they-all-worked/3715/
The post Who Invented the Submarine? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If you ever read the Iliad, you might find yourself asking a few questions: Why does the story pick up nine years into the war? Where’s the Trojan Horse? Wait, they don’t sack Troy in this poem? Will Achilles ever stop whining? What about his heel? Reading the Iliad for the first time can be frustrating. The events the Trojan War is most known for don’t happen in the story. Instead, the Iliad has a tight focus on a sliver of time during the war. The Iliad and Odessey were just two poems in a collection of epics that told a much greater story. Yes, the Iliad had sequels and prequels that can be broken down into smaller cycles kind of like Marvel’s phases. Sometimes separate from the Iliad and The Odyssey, we call these poems the Epic Cycle. I am not talking about later additions to the lore either like Virgil’s Aeneid or later adaptations of the poems into plays. Most of the Epic Cycle were composed around Homers’ epics as companion pieces to fill in the gaps. Homer might have even written some of them. Sadly we will never know because none of them survive except for Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey. So what were in these lost sequels?
To begin with, it’s important to note that the Greeks started writing with the Phoenician inspired script largely to preserve the epics of Homer and other early poets like Hesiod. Of course, there might not have ever been a Homer or a Hesiod, and these poems all come from some distant oral past. That is the generally held modern theory. These poems were passed along and performed by reciters called rhapsodes. At a certain point, the Greeks started writing with a modified Phoenician script to preserve these poems. There is debate about how much a rhapsode can change the poem during each retelling, and it’s why scholars think there is a lot of formula in the Greek poems. Even in translation, if you read the Iliad and Odyssey you’ll notice a repetition of sorts. Names usually appear with epithets like Swift-Foot Achilles and White-Armed Hera. These might be mnemonic devices to help the rhapsode with his verses. These are oral poems first, and by far the longest in the Epic Cycle. The Iliad and Odyssey are both 24 books long. The other poems are shorter, usually a handful of books.
Like Homer’s poems, the Cyclical poems were written in hexameter, but historically scholars appraise the fragments to be at a lower poetic quality than Homer’s. Of course, it should be explicitly pointed out that those scholars were judging the quality of poems they do not have in front of them. And only relatively recently did they get called out by newer generations of academics for uncritically passing judgement on the missing poems.
That out of the way, what about the stories? What does the big picture of the Trojan war look like? Well, the Cycle starts at the beginning, the literal beginning of Greek myth with the Titanomachy. This poem is named after the battle between the Olympic gods and the Titans, the previous generation of Greek gods. Much of the same ground is covered in Hesiod’s Theogony, with variations. If the Brad Pitt movie is all you know of the Iliad, it might surprise you why a prologue to the story starts with the birth of the gods. Unlike that movie, the gods are very active characters in the Iliad and the Epic Cycle, so much so that a prologue dedicated to their origins makes perfect sense.
After the Titanomachy is the Theban portion of the cycle. Ever heard of Oedipus? He’s a firm part of the Theban cycle, made up of the Oedipodeia, The Thebais, and the Epigoni. The first poem in the cycle, the Oedipodeia, is the literary source for all the Greek and Latin plays about Oedipus. There are key differences between the Epic version and the theatre versions of Oedipus’ story, however; one such difference is he never bore children by his mother Jocasta in the poem. The Thebais is also the source for many plays and poems this time about the siege of Thebes, an event that spins out of the Oedipodeia. The Epigoni covers a second siege of Thebes.
Why is Thebes so important to the Trojan War? The next poem might explain why the Theban Cycle is considered a prologue. The accepted understanding is that these two wars were the closing chapters of the age of heroes. This was a time when the gods were more in contact with humanity, enough to routinely have demi-god children with humans. Many characters in these two conflicts are demi-humans, such as Achilles whose mother was Thetis, and Aeneas whose mother was Aphrodite. The Titanomachy and Theban Cycle are sometimes excluded from the Epic Cycle because they have little to do with the Trojan War directly. That said, their literary heritage is just as important as the Iliad. Many Greek and Latin adaptations became important in their own right like Oedipus Rex, and the Thebiad by Statius. They had an impact on the Greek and Roman classical world, the medieval Latin West, and Byzantine culture. The entire Theban cycle is worth its own discussion, but for now we have the Trojan War to get to.
The real story begins in the Cypria, which not only begins the Cycle proper, but is the direct prequel to the Iliad. The Cypria fills in how the conflict starts, up to the opening scene of the Iliad and prepares for events after it. By fill in, I mean really fill in. With the boom in cinematic universes since Iron Man, have you ever seen a movie that tries too hard to front load future films? Think your Iron Man 2, your Batman Vs. Superman, and your Amazing Spider-Man 2. By surviving accounts, that was the Cypria. The story includes the beauty contest of the gods that sets events in motion. Zeus and an advisor god conspire to start the Theban and Trojan Wars. Why? Population control. This is also why we spent three whole epics telling the events surrounding the Theban wars: it is phase 1 of Zeus’ plan with the Trojan war being phase 2. There were simply too many of us, and we sinned too much, so we had to be put in our place. Zeus is also warned that the child of the goddess Thetis is destined to be stronger than him if fathered by another god. Thus, Zeus decides to marry her off to a mortal.
How do they set up the conflict? At the wedding of Thetis to the mortal Peleus, Zeus had the goddesses Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera fight over a golden apple. The disagreement turns into a beauty contest and they pick Paris Alexander, Son of King Priam of Troy to judge. Each goddess attempts to bribe Paris, but Aphrodite’s bribe has him hot and bothered. She promised him the beautiful Helen. The only problem? Not only is Helen married to King Menelaos, but Menelaos made a pledge with her suitors to form a coalition if harm ever came to Helen. Aphrodite assures Paris that she’s got this, and he chooses her as the fairest. She advises him to build ships and introduces him to her son, Aeneas, future mythical ancestor of the Romans. Thinking with his groin, Paris makes the trip to Sparta and is received hospitably by its king, Menelaos. Aphrodite has Helen and Paris meet, they slip between the sheets, and together pull off the heist of the Bronze age. They grab most of Menelaos’ treasures and sail off to Troy where they get married.
Menelaos is clearly unhappy about this development, he goes to his brother, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. Agamemnon takes Menelaos around Greece to unite all of Helen’s previous suitors and other allies to go fight Troy. Of the people they visited was Odysseus at Ithaca. Odysseus had foresight, and he knew this war was going to drag longer than it should. He was also the new father of a baby boy, Telemachus. Thus, Odysseus pretended to be insane to avoid the war. The Achaeans saw through him, however, and grabbed baby Telemachus, and threatened to cut him if Odysseus didn’t drop the act. Having been backed into a corner, he agrees to go. They recruit Achilles, son of Thetis and Peleus from the wedding that started this whole conflict. In case you were wondering, Achilles is supposed to be 15 at this point.
Thetis tries to warn Achilles of his future, but he goes off with the Achaeans. In one episode he marries and fathers a son, Neoptolemus. Along they come across the city of Teuthrania. Thinking it was Troy, they attack the city, honest mistake. Figuring out their mistake, they move on. While stopping to hunt, Agamemnon boasts he’s a better hunter than Artemis. Big mistake. For his words, Artemis sends a storm to ground the ships. After consultations the Achaeans decided the only way to make Artemis happy is for Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter to her, because every good story needs child murder. Agamemnon sends for her with a lie; that she is to marry Achilles as payment for joining the coalition. However, Artemis it turns out, isn’t happy with the sacrifice but horrified. Thus, she swaps out Agamemnon’s daughter for a deer on the altar before she is sacrificed. Later, Achilles kills a king beloved by the god Apollo. His mother warned him earlier that if he was to kill that king, Apollo would eventually kill him. During that excursion one of the leaders, Philoctetes, gets bitten by a snake. The Achaeans found the smell of his festering wound so offensive that they left him on an island with his most treasured possession, the bow of Hercules. Throughout all these diversions, Achilles and Agamemnon bicker and clash quite a bit.
Near the end of the poem they arrived at Troy. The embarkation at Troy wasn’t peaceful, the Trojans met them on the shores and a bloody battle ensued until the Trojans were beaten back inside the city walls. The Achaeans sent a delegation, possibly Odysseus and Menelaos to demand Helen and Menelaos’ stolen goods. The Trojans tried to kill the delegation, but they managed to escape and started besieging Troy. Achilles wants to know what he’s fighting for, so his mother and Aphrodite have him meet Helen. Whatever was said during their meeting convinces Achilles to stay and he leads the Achaeans on a rampage through the Trojan countryside. He kills two of Paris’ brothers, captures and sells another into slavery, and comes face-to-face with Aeneas in his hometown of Ida. The Achaean leaders walk out with plenty of loot and slaves, including Briseis for Achilles, and Chryseis for Agamemnon. Only problem is, Chryseis’s father is a priest of Apollo, and he wants her back, setting us up for the opening scenes of the Iliad.
If you haven’t read the Iliad, I’ll help you out this one time with a very condensed version, and unlike the rest of the Cycle, you can read the Iliad if you want to. Chryseis’ father comes to the Achaeans and begs for his daughter back. Agamemnon turns him away and in despair the priest prays to Apollo to give him his daughter back. Apollo unleashes a plague on the Achaeans. Having had enough, they petition Agamemnon to give Chryseis up. Not wanting his reputation damaged, Agamemnon agrees only if he takes Achilles’ prize from the same raids, Briseis. Achilles is forced to give her up, and Achilles isolates himself and begins to sulk, and sulk hard. He prays to his mother to punish the Achaeans so they see his value. The tide of war turns on the Achaeans and they begin to lose. Eventually Agamemnon is willing to give Briseis back to Achilles, but that’s not good enough for him. Instead, Achilles sends his closest friend Patroclus on the battlefield wearing his armor. Paris’ brother and crown prince of Troy Hector kills Patroclus and takes the armor for himself. Achilles is finally ready to go into battle to avenge his friend. He kills Hector, and rides around with Hector’s corpse dragging behind his chariot. King Priam goes to Achilles and begs him to let him have Hector’s remains for a proper burial. Achilles has post murder clarity and realizes Priam is just a father that wants to bury his son. He lets Priam have Hector’s body and the war continues.
After the Iliad is the Aetheopia. The Trojans get reinforcements from their Thracian and Ethiopian allies. Among those reinforcements is an Amazonian, Penthesilea (who killed Queen Hippolyta, Wonder Woman’s mother if you want to throw that into the mix. Penthesilea was absolved of this sin through a ritual King Priam held for her.) She quickly becomes Achilles’ rival, but he manages to kill her. An Achaean named Thersites teases Achilles. He claims Achilles fell in love with Penthesilea before he killed her. Thersites must not have read the previous epic, the one about Achilles’ wrath, because if he had, he would know it’s best not to upset the man. Achilles kills Thersites for his teasing, only to realize, “yeah, I guess he’s right, I did fall in love with the Amazon.” The Achaeans aren’t happy about the murder and Odysseus takes Achilles to make sacrifices to the gods and is absolved. In the next battle the Ethiopians arrive and Achilles fights them. In the fight Paris shoots Achilles’ ankle with an arrow guided by Apollo, this is the Achilles’ Heel. Achilles dies and the Achaeans and Trojans fight over his body. Ajax and Odysseus bring his body and armor back to the Achaean camp while fighting off the Trojans. At his funeral, Thetis and her sisters come to mourn Achilles. The Achaeans make a grave mound and hold funerary games for the fallen hero. Several pieces of his armor are given away to winners of the contests, but Ajax and Odysseus clash over his weapons.
The clash is resolved in the beginning of the Little Iliad. Odysseus wins the contest and Ajax goes insane, needlessly destroying the Achaeans’ provisions before killing himself. This may have put a time crunch on the Achaeans to finish the war. After consulting a prophecy, they see what they need to do to win the war. Part of the prophecy is to return with the bow of Hercules. They fetch Philoctetes with Hercules’ bow and heal his snake bite. Odysseus fetches Achilles’ son Neoptolemos. With Neoptolemos and Philoctetes on board, the Achaeans battle with the Trojans. Philoctetes is the one who kills Paris in battle, Menelaos gets an opportunity to disfigure the body of the man who cuckolded him, and they leave the body for Priam to bury.
Athena guides them to collect timber from Aeneas’ town of Ida and they start to build the infamous Trojan Horse. While they do this, Odysseus sneaks into Troy to get a layout of the city. While spying he meets Helen, and she helps him plan the attack. At the end of the poem, a select group of Achaeans get into the wooden horse and are pulled to the walls of Troy. The rest of the Achaeans burn their tents, and leave the coast in their ships, to await the signal from their friends inside the horse. The Trojans tear down a section of their wall to pull the horse in.
The Sack of Troy starts a little earlier. It shows the Trojans deliberating about the Horse. Some think it’s a ruse, and advocate to push it off the cliffs into the ocean, while others are convinced it’s a sacred gift to the protector of the city, Athena. To destroy it would be sacrilege. Apollo tries to warn the Trojans by sending two snakes to kill the seer that predicted it was a trap. Probably walking away with the wrong idea, the Trojans decide to accept the gift, I can’t see why the warning was misunderstood. They bring the Horse in and start to party; the war is over. Aeneas reads the writing on the wall and decides to head out to Ida, and if you believe the Romans, to found Rome. The Trojans hold festivities. After all a ten-year war is now over. They get drunk and fall asleep. The Achaeans slip out of the Horse, signal their allies at sea, and the sacking of Troy begins. The internal and external assault works, and the Achaeans take the city. Neoptolemos kills King Priam, Menelaos gets what he came for, and along with Helen, the women of Troy are divided up among the Achaeans. After looting Troy they set fire to it, and kill stragglers in the surrounding area.
The Returns is a side-quel of the Odyssey. It tells what happened to the other heroes on their way home and how their stories end. The Odyssey even recounts some of these returns. I’ll just summarize the return of three characters we mentioned so far. Menelaos and Agamemnon fight about how to get home, ultimately going their separate ways. At first Menelaos loses many of his ships and gets stranded in Egypt. Legend says he upsets the Egyptians by sacrificing two boys, and they force him out. Whatever the case, eventually he makes it home. Achilles’ ghost warns Agamemnon of what would happen on his return. His wife Clytemnestra had taken a lover. When Agamemnon arrives at Mycenae he’s murdered by Clytemnestra and her lover. Veterans of the Trojan War later avenge Agamemnon and kill his murderers. Neoptolemos follows his grandmother Thetis’ advice and makes his journey inland, eventually bumping into Odysseus.
After the Returns comes the Odyssey, and after the Odyssey is the Telegony. The Telegony is far removed from the events of the Trojan War and continues the story of Odysseus after his further 10 year journey. Just like the Iliad, you can read the Odyssey for yourselves, but the important parts to understanding the Telegony are thus: While he was off fighting, suitors began to harass his wife Penelope thinking that Odysseus is dead. They wanted to seize Odysseus’ lands for themselves. His son Telemachus, schemes with his mother and grandfather to keep this from happening. Penelope comes up with ruses to keep delaying the time when she is forced to pick a suitor. On his journey home, Odysseus comes across the witch Circe. He lives with her for a year and fathers a son, Telegonus. He returns home, slaughters Penelope’s suitors with the help of his son Telemachus, and returns to power in Ithaca.
The Telegony opens with Odysseus burying the suitors and resuming his duties on Ithaca and the surrounding territory. After getting used to his old life again, Odysseus and Telemachus sail to the Thesprotians. Odysseus marries their queen and leads them into a defensive war against an invading force. Odysseus is so good, that gods come down to challenge him in combat. After saving the Thesprotians, he returns home with Telemachus. In another twist, His son by Circe, Telegonus, sets off to find his father. He arrives at Ithaca to raid it and ends up unknowingly killing Odysseus, possibly with a stingray’s barb. He realizes his mistake, so he takes his half brother Telemachus and Penelope to his mother. She makes them immortals and the boys swap moms; with Telegonus marrying Penelope, and Telemachus marrying Circe. And, finally, this is how the Age of Heroes ends in Greek mythology.
What happened to these poems? Why do we have the Iliad and the Odyssey, but not the others? From what we understand, the critical reception to these poems was mixed. Even very early, figures like Herodotus doubted that the Cyclical Epics attributed to Homer, were by Homer. Aristotle, Horace, and others criticized the poems for not being as good as Homer’s narratively or poetically. Despite the criticism they were very popular in their day. The smaller size of the poems meant that it was easier to own a copy. This is why you see many plays and adaptations based on them; they got around.
Much like Marvel’s main films vs their Disney+ spin offs, the Cyclical Epics were always overshadowed by the Iliad and Odyssey, and that was probably their downfall. The two poems along with Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days held a canonical status in Hellenic culture and religious life. Eventually the negative reception of the Epic Cycle and canonicity of the Homeric poems left the Cycle reduced to prose summaries. Sometimes these summaries are attached to copies of Homer’s poems, sometimes they are part of larger collections. The Greeks and Romans were happy enough reading prose summaries of these poems. Eventually with Christianity moving in and the culture rapidly changing, the Homeric Epics took on a different canonical form: that of Greek literature. The Epic Cycle was already considered inferior so they stuck to summaries so much that a Christian philosopher from the 6th century claimed he could no longer find the complete epics in verse.
Other than the obvious, what did we lose? Other works stepped in for both the Latin and Greek worlds that filled in the gaps or expanded the story. What we lost was a substantial tradition of Greek epics, of which we have very little surviving. Not only are they worth knowing in their own right, but the prose summaries are… off. Sometimes they contradict each other, mostly they contradict surviving fragments of the poems. It is very clear the prose summaries smooth the poems over to make them fit more in line with the Iliad and Odyssey. This applies stylistically, and narratively. After all, the narratives were usually criticized as lacking unity by ancient critics. The big picture isn’t just incomplete, it’s very wrong. Maybe there were different versions of these poems, perhaps the tradition of prose summaries got distorted down the line.
The biggest loss in all of this is how much this could have helped us understand Greek mythology. The Homeric poems contain many diversions into myth and history, and even the contents of the poems are great sources for our understanding of Greek myths. We know from surviving references that the Epics diverged into myths as well. That said, with the negative reaction against them, if we ever found complete papyrus scrolls of the Epic Cycle, we, perhaps, shouldn’t expect a ground shaking reaction like the Dead Sea Scrolls had for the Bible. Much like if scholars a couple thousands years from now randomly discover She-Hulk, they’ll likely be quite disappointed compared to the no doubt still surviving Infinity saga.
Expand for References
https://archive.org/details/ExcidiumTroiae
Davies, Malcolm. The Epic Cycle, Bristol: Bristol Classics Press: 1989.
Evelyn-White, Hugh G. trans Hesiod Homeric Hymns and Homerica, Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1914.
Fantuzzi, Marco and Christos Tsagalis ed. The Greek Epic Cycle: A Companion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Foley, John Miles ed. A Companion to Ancient Epic, London: Blackwell, 2015.
Homer, Murray, AT trans. The Iliad, Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1924.
Smith, R. Scott and Stephen M. Trzaskoma trans. Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company: 2007
West, Martin L. trans. Greek Epic Fragments, Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 2003.
The post A Much Greater Story- The Iliad’s Lost Sequels appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Of all major military conflicts of the Twentieth Century, the Second World War stands apart. Not only was it the deadliest conflict in modern history, claiming an estimated 85 million lives, or about 1 in every 25 people, but it was also arguably history’s first truly technological war. While many now-ubiquitous military technologies such as aircraft, tanks, and submarines saw their combat debut in the First World War, it was during the Second that they were refined into truly effective weapons – along with other key innovations such as radar, guided missiles, and nuclear weapons. One of the less glamorous but nonetheless important developments of the war was the use of parachutes to rapidly deliver troops and equipment behind enemy lines – a technique that proved instrumental in dozens of operations, from the German invasion of the Low Countries in 1940 to the Allied D-Day landings in 1944. But the parachutes at the time had their limitations: they could not be steered, and they delivered their payloads to the ground slowly, making them vulnerable to drifting off-target and being damaged by anti-aircraft fire. In an attempt to solve this problem and make airborne delivery faster and more accurate, in 1944 the British Admiralty conducted a series of bizarre experiments to explore the use of retrorockets to slow the descent of falling payloads, eliminating the need for parachutes altogether. This is the story of Hajile, one of the Second World War’s most intriguing – and hilariously unsuccessful – ‘secret weapons.’
The Hajile project was undertaken by the British Admiralty’s Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development or DMWD, founded in 1941 as an offshoot of the Inspectorate of Anti-Aircraft Weapons and Devices. In true cheeky British fashion, this name was soon corrupted to the “Instigator of Anti-Aircraft Wheezes and Dodges”, creating the DMWD’s enduring nickname of the “Wheezers and Dodgers.”
In any event, the DMWD was one of many similar groups established by the British early in the war, leveraging the unique talents of a ragtag group of scientists, engineers, and other eccentric misfits to develop creative and often bizarre solutions to difficult wartime problems. Over its brief 4-year history, the DMWD would employ a number of colourful characters, including motor racing photographer Louis Kemantaski; engineer Barnes Wallis, inventor of the “bouncing bomb” used in the famous 1943 Dambusters raid; and engineer Nevil Shute Norway, later to become famous as the author of novels like On the Beach and A Town Like Alice. Headed by Canadian chemist Charles Goodeve and headquartered at HMS Birnbeck – a converted pier at Weston-super-Mare in Somerset – DMWD tackled all sorts of unconventional projects, including radar countermeasures and ship camouflage, amphibious assault techniques, anti-submarine weapons, and – of course – Hajile.
The concept behind Hajile was straightforward enough: instead of a parachute, air-dropped payloads were fitted with a set of downward-facing cordite solid-fuel rockets which were fired just before impact, quickly slowing the payload and delivering it safely to the ground. This would allow the payload to free-fall for most of its descent, allowing it to be more accurately dropped onto landing zones and protecting it from enemy fire. In practice, however, this scheme proved anything but simple to pull off. One of the key technical difficulties of the Hajile concept was how to reliably trigger the rockets at the exact right moment– too late and the payload would either plough into the ground at terminal velocity or bounce back into the air, while too early and it would pick up enough additional speed after to be damaged on impact. To solve this problem, the boffins at the DMWD developed a plumb-bob that hung a certain distance below the payload, and which would fire the rockets as soon as it touched the ground.
Initial trials were conducted by simply dropping a concrete block fitted with rockets from a tall crane. Unfortunately the project got off to an inauspicious start as the first block, fitted with too few rockets, simply buried itself in the ground, while also being dramatically engulfed in a wreath of flame and smoke. Witnessing this impressive spectacle, one of the observers, Captain G.O.C. Davies, exclaimed: “Look at it! It’s Elijah in reverse!” – referring to the biblical prophet who ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire. The comment resulted in the project being officially dubbed Hajile – literally Elijah in reverse.
Moving on to the second drop, this ended much like the first, while in the third the engineers fitted the block with too many rockets, causing it to launch itself several dozen feet into the air before crashing back to the ground.
These early tests also revealed the difficulties inherent in designing a reliable triggering device, for the plumb-bob had to be simultaneously heavy enough not to be blown upwards by strong winds during descent and sensitive enough to detect soft terrain like long grass.
Following these disappointing trials, the Hajile team decided to conduct all further experiments over the sea, which would not only provide an ideal flat surface to test triggering devices, but also hopefully allow test rigs to be recovered intact. For these water based tests, rather than a crane, the test articles were dropped from a Lancaster heavy bomber – much as they would once Hajile entered service. Unfortunately, the first few drops landed too far away to be successfully recorded, so the engineers asked the Lancaster pilot to drop the next payload closer to the pier…. What could go wrong?!?
To their horror, the pilot took their request a little too literally, as team member Gerald Pawle later recalled:
“As [Hajile] came screaming through the air the watchers on the pier gazed open-mouthed. Then, suddenly realizing that it was going to score a direct hit, every one started running for dear life down the long plank roadway. The concrete “bomb” landed squarely on the roof of D.M.W.D.’s engineering shop. It sheared through a massive steel joist and then demolished the covered way leading to the steamer jetty. Happily there were no casualties, though the Wren [WRNS – Women’s Royal Naval Service] cooks preparing lunch a few feet from the wrecked shelter thought the end of the world had come.”
Whoopsa-doodle!
Following this hair-raising incident, the Hajile team finally began to make some progress when they increased the number of rockets from four to eight. In this configuration, the test blocks came to a complete stop just a few feet above the water before sinking slowly beneath the surface. Buoyed by this encouraging success, the Hajile team decided to move on from concrete blocks to actual payloads, and attended to convince the Royal Navy to provide them with a number of jeeps for testing. Understandably, the Navy was skeptical about risking perfectly good vehicles on such an unproven and potentially destructive device, and the DMWD was forced to procure its jeeps from the United States Navy instead. Unfortunately, the Royal Navy’s fears proved well-founded as the first test drop ended in spectacular failure. Snowfall had dampened the rocket fuses, causing the rockets to fail and the jeep to hit the ground at terminal velocity, completely destroying it. After two weeks of tinkering, the team was ready to try again. This time, the rockets fired right on cue, but when the smoke cleared the team discovered the jeep lying upside-down.
Further tests were no more successful, with the system proving maddeningly difficult to get working reliably. As for the flipping issue, one major problem was the difficulty of getting the primitive cordite rockets to ignite simultaneously, a shortcoming that caused many test articles to flip over or tumble end-over end. Moving on from there, matching the thrust of the rockets to the weight of the payload also proved tricky, leading to many payloads crashing to the ground at high speed or being launched erratically back into the air.
Ultimately while the team ultimately came tantalizingly close to perfecting the system, the end of Hajile finally came on June 6, 1944 – the day of the D-Day landings – when an electrician accidentally triggered the rockets on a test rig while the engineering team was gathered around it. The resulting blast injured several people, including photographer Louis Kemantaski who was blinded for several days after receiving a blast of sand to the eyes. With the strategic need for Hajile quickly fading, the project was temporarily shelved and then abandoned completely as the war – and the DMWD – came to an end.
The hilarious failure of Hajile aside, the DMWD did make a great many useful contributions to the war effort, developing such successful devices as the Hedgehog and Squid anti-submarine mortars, methods for protecting ships against magnetic mines, and the Mulberry floating harbours used during the D-Day landings. However, on the other end of things, the Hajile was not that only of the DMWD’s bizarre misfires. Among the group’s more eccentric undertakings was a scheme called “Kentucky Minstrels”, which sought to disguise reflective rivers and canals – used by German bombers as navigation aids at night – as roads by coating them in a substance derived from coal dust. While the actions of wind and tide ultimately made the scheme impractical, on at least one occasion the effect proved remarkably convincing, when a man out walking his dog at night mistook a camouflaged canal for an asphalt road and ended up unexpectedly soaked.
But perhaps the “Wheezers and Dodgers’s” most bizarre creation was the “Great Panjandrum” – a giant rocket-propelled explosive wheel designed to be launched from a landing craft, rapidly roll up an invasion beach, and destroy coastal defences with a bang. Like Hajile, Panjandrum was a spectacular failure – but that is a subject for another video.
Another, related wartime project was the “Jumping Tank”, an attempt to use rockets to make light armoured vehicles like the Valentine tank and Universal Carrier leap over obstacles like canals or anti-tank ditches. Needless to say, this insane concept proved completely unworkable and the project was quickly scrapped.
Interestingly, while Hajile proved an abject failure, the concept of slowing air-dropped payloads using retro-rockets was later revived and successfully implemented – albeit as an enhancement rather than a replacement for parachutes. For example, ever since the first manned spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation have opted to recover their space capsules on land rather than at sea like the American space program. There are several reasons for this; firstly, unlike the Americans, the Russians do not possess a large enough naval surface fleet to perform efficient ocean recoveries. Secondly, during the Cold War, having spacecraft land within Russia’s vast territory made them less likely to be captured by the enemy.
However, this recovery method brought with it a key safety issue: achieving a ground landing soft enough to prevent the cosmonauts from being injured required a parachute far larger than could be carried in the cramped capsule. The Vostok capsule flown by Gagarin solved this problem by having the cosmonaut eject and land separately from the spacecraft. However, the later Voskhod and Soyuz capsules landed with their crew still inside and used a system of solid-fuel retro-rockets to lessen the impact speed. On the Voskhod capsule, these rockets were mounted on the parachute shroud lines, while on the Soyuz – which is still in use today – they are located under the heat shield which is jettisoned just prior to landing. These six rockets are triggered by a gamma ray altimeter codenamed Kaktus-2V between 1.1 and 0.8 metres from the ground, slowing the capsule from around 10 metres per second to around 2.5 – resulting in a relatively light impact cosmonauts describe as a “light thump.” However, as it is possible that the retro-rockets may fail, the crew couches are designed to withstand the impact of landing under only a parachute – though this is a decidedly less comfortable experience.
In the 1970s, the Soviets also developed a Hajile-like landing system for the BMD-1, a lightweight armoured fighting vehicle designed for use by airborne troops. Weighing only 7.5 tons, the BMD-1 can be carried by nearly any Russian transport aircraft and a handful of heavy-lift helicopters, and airdropped using a large multi-canopy cargo parachute. As this parachute lowered the vehicle at a bone-crunching 15-20 metres per second (about 65 km/h or 40 mph), the original operation doctrine called for the BMD-1 and its crew to be dropped separately onto the battlefield. In practice, however, the two tended to drift and land far apart, making it difficult for the crew to find and reach their vehicle. The Soviets thus began experimenting with dropping the BMD-1 with the driver and gunner aboard, using a system of retrorockets mounted on a drop pallet to slow the vehicle’s impact speed to a more reasonable 7 metres per second. Other crew members, who dropped separately, were given radio receivers tuned to a beacon on the vehicle, allowing them to easily locate their mount after landing. The system entered service in 1975 and its still in use today – validating the Hajile principle some 30 years after the fact.
Expand for References
Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development (DMWD), Nevington War Museum, https://www.nevingtonwarmuseum.com/directorate-of-miscellaneous-weapons-development.html
Infantry Tank Mk.III, Valentine, The Online Tank Museum, November 27, 2014, https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/gb/tank_infantry_mkiii_valentine.php
“Hajile”, https://www.goodeveca.net/CFGoodeve/hajile.html
Here is How Soyuz Returns to Earth, Russian Space Web, https://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz-landing.html
Soyuz Landing, NASA, September 15, 2011, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/soyuz/landing.html
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On the 25th of April, 1917, the British satirical magazine Punch ran an evocative political cartoon. In it, a stern Kaiser Wilhelm II, dressed in full regalia, stands before a young German army recruit. Pointing out the window to a giant factory belching black smoke, he declares: “And don’t forget that your Kaiser will find a use for you—alive or dead.” The ominous image referred to a disturbing rumour which had been circulating since the beginning of the Great War: that Germany, chronically short of fats and other raw materials, had taken to processing the corpses of its own fallen soldiers to produce soap, candles, lubricants, explosives and other vital war materiel. The facilities where this gruesome process was carried out – known as Kadaververtungsanstalten or “corpse factories” – became symbolic of the brutality, callousness, and depravity of Imperial Germany, and did much to inspire the Allies to fight on until the end. There was only one problem: the corpse factories didn’t actually exist. Starting as a morbid soldier’s rumour and stoked by British and French propaganda, the corpse factory myth was a stark example of how a big enough lie, told often enough, can come to be accepted as truth. This is the fascinating story of the Great War’s biggest hoax.
Rumours of Germans were rendering battlefield corpses to extract raw materials first began circulating in mid-1915, with British socialite Lady Cynthia Asquith writing in a diary entry dated June 16:
“Quite a pleasant dinner. We discussed the rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap. I suggested that [politician Richard] Haldane should offer his vast body as raw material to [Minister of Munitions David] Lloyd George.”
Similar stories soon began to appear in British, American, and French newspapers. In 1916, Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers published a book of satirical cartoons, one of which depicted bodies of German soldiers being tied into neat bundles and loaded onto a cart. The caption, written by British essayist Horace Vachell, claimed:
“I am told by an eminent chemist that six pounds of glycerine can be extracted from the corpse of a fairly well nourished Hun… These unfortunates, when alive, were driven ruthlessly to inevitable slaughter. They are sent as ruthlessly to the blast furnaces. One million dead men are resolved into six million pounds of glycerine.”
These rumours, however, largely died down until February 26, 1917, when the Shanghai newspaper The North China Herald reported on a meeting between Chinese President Feng Guozhang and German Admiral Paul von Hintze, stating that the President was horrified when:
“…the Admiral triumphantly stated that they were extracting glycerine out of dead soldiers!”
Later, on April 10, the England-based Belgian newspaper l’Independence Belge ran a lengthy article describing, for the first time, the location and operation of a corpse factory in grisly detail:
“We have known for long that the Germans stripped their dead behind the firing line, fastened them into bundles of three or four bodies with iron wire, and then dispatched these grisly bundles to the rear… the chief factory of which has been constructed 1,000 yards from the railway connecting St Vith, near the Belgian frontier, with Gerolstein, in the lonely, little-frequented Eifel district, south-west of Coblenz. The factory deals specially with the dead from the West Front. If the results are as good as the company hopes, another will be established to deal with corpses on the East Front… The trains arrive full of bare bodies, which are unloaded by the workers who live at the works. The men wear oilskin overalls and masks with mica eyepieces. They are equipped with long hooked poles, and push the bundles of bodies to an endless chain, which picks them with big hooks, attached at intervals of two feet. The bodies are transported on this endless chain into a long, narrow compartment, where they pass through a bath which disinfects them. They then go through a drying chamber, and finally are automatically carried into a digester or great cauldron, in which they are dropped by an apparatus which detaches them from the chain. In the digester they remain for six to eight hours, and are treated by steam, which breaks them up while they are slowly stirred by machinery.”
Six days later, the first english-language description of a corpse factory appeared in London Times and the Daily Mail. Titled Through German Eyes, the short article quoted from a piece in the German newspaper Berliner Lokal-Anzinger, in which reporter Karl Rosner recounted:
“We pass through Evergnicourt. There is a dull smell in the air, as if lime were being burnt. We are passing the great Corpse Utilization Establishment (Kadaververwertungsanstalt) of this Army Group. The fat that is won here is turned into lubricating oils, and everything else is ground down in the bones mill into a powder, which is used for mixing with pigs’ food and as manure.”
From here, the story spread rapidly with Rosner’s account appearing in dozens of Allied newspapers along with translations of the April 10 l’Independence Belge article. By April 30, it had even reached the floor of the British House of Commons, where Robert Outhwaite, Member of Parliament for Hanley, asked:
“May I ask if the Noble Lord is aware that the circulation of these reports has caused anxiety and misery to British people who have lost their sons on the battlefield, and who think that their bodies may be put to this purpose, and does not that give a reason why he should try to find out the truth of what is happening in Germany?”
Officially, the Government stated that it had no evidence to either confirm or deny the rumours, and refused to endorse the story. However, Lord Robert Cecil, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, rather pointedly admitted that:
“In view of other actions by German military authorities there is nothing incredible in the present charge against them… I confess I am not able to attach very great importance to any statements made by the German government.”
This tacit – but unofficial – endorsement only helped to fan the flames, and the story continued to circulate throughout the Allied powers – especially the United States, which had just entered the War. One of the most widely-read accounts was the anonymously-written pamphlet A ‘Corpse-Conversion’ Factory: A Peep Behind the German Lines, published by Darling & Son in mid-1917. The story was a propagandists’ dream, not only painting the Germans in a suitably barbaric light, but indicating that the British naval blockade of German ports – the cause of the nation’s severe fat and glycerine shortages – was having the intended effect. Indeed, despite the frequent protestations of the German government, the story was widely believed up until the end of the war and, along with other, better-documented German atrocities, likely influenced the harsh terms imposed on Germany by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.
With the end of the war, the story soon faded from the public consciousness, only to dramatically reemerge nearly a decade later. On October 26, 1925, the New York Times reported that Brigadier John Charteris, Conservative MP and former Head of British Military Intelligence, had admitted to fabricating the entire story. Charteris, who was speaking at a private dinner of the National Arts Club in New York City, allegedly stated that the hoax had been concocted in early 1917 to get China to join the war against Germany. Stumbling upon two photographs – one showing the bodies of German soldiers being gathered for burial and another showing a train car full of horse carcasses bound for processing into fertilizer – Charteris had swapped the captions to make it seem like the Germans were processing their own dead soldiers. He then dispatched the photographs to various Chinese newspapers and let the story grow from there. An underling even suggested forging the diary of a German soldier to further sell the ruse, but this idea was rejected. In any case, this clever piece of black propaganda ultimately proved effective, for on August 14, 1917 China joined the war on the side of the Allies.
Indeed, when the corpse factory story first began to circulate, the German government immediately suspected it was the product of accidental or deliberate mistranslation. In German, the word Kadaver refers to the carcasses of animals and not human bodies, which are instead known as Leichnam. On May 11, 1917, one day after the detailed corpse factory article appeared in l’Independence Belge, Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman addressed the German Reichstag or parliament, claiming:
“No reasonable person among our enemies can have been in any uncertainty about the fact that this has to do with the bodies of animals and not of human beings. The fact that the word cadavre in French is used for human beings and animals has been exploited by our enemies. We have rectified this subtle misunderstanding, which, against its better knowledge, has been used by the enemy press to mislead public opinion. In neutral countries, in so far as there is a tangible slanderous intention, criminal proceedings will be taken.”
Several Allied newspapers – including the French Paris-Midi and American New York Times – also clued in on the mistranslation, and thus refused to credit the story. Several outlets also suggested that the whole story was an April Fool’s joke – a long-held tradition of German newspapers. Similarly, in June 1917 the London Times published a captured German Army order which made reference to a Kadaver factory. The order was issued by an organization abbreviated as VsdOK, which the Times interpreted as Verordnungs-telle or “instructions department.” Soon after, however, the German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung revealed that it actually stood for Veterinar-Station or “veterinary station” – further suggesting that the Germans were processing horse carcasses, not human bodies.
Charteris’s alleged confession caused outrage in Britain and Germany, with key Government figures like Charles Masterman, former head of the War Propaganda Bureau, also denied that the story was a deliberate fabrication:
“We certainly did not accept the story as true, and I know nobody in official positions at the time who credited it. Nothing suspect as this was made use of in our propaganda. Only such information as had been properly verified was circulated.”
Brigadier Charteris himself claimed that he had been misquoted, explaining that:
“Certain suggestions and speculations as regards the origin of the Kadaver story which have already been published in [Bertrand Russell’s book] and elsewhere, which I repeated, are, doubtless unintentionally, but nevertheless unfortunately, turned into definite statements of fact and attributed to me. Lest there should still be any doubt, let me say that I neither invented the Kadaver story, nor did I alter the captions in any photograph, nor did I use any faked material for propaganda purposes. The allegations that I did so are not only incorrect, but absurd.”
The book Charteris referred to is Those Eventful Years by philosopher Bertrand Russel, in which he speculated that:
“Any fact which had a propaganda value was seized upon, not always with strict regard for truth. For example, worldwide publicity was given to the statement that the Germans boiled down human corpses in order to extract from them gelatine and other useful substances. This story was widely used in China when that country’s participation was desired, because it was hoped that it would shock the well-known Chinese reverence for the dead… The story was set going cynically by one of the employees in the British propaganda department, a man with a good knowledge of German, perfectly well aware that “Kadaver” means “carcase,” not “corpse,”
Despite these vehement denials, the revelation that the feared ‘Corpse Factories’ were a complete hoax angered the British public, with the Richmond Times Dispatch reporting on December 6, 1925:
“A few years ago the story of how the Kaiser was reducing human corpses to fat aroused the citizens of this and other enlightened nations to a fury of hatred. Normally sane men doubled their fists and rushed off to the nearest recruiting sergeant. Now they are being told, in effect, that they were dupes and fools; that their own officers deliberately goaded them to the desired boiling-point, using an infamous lie to arouse them… In the next war, the propaganda must be more subtle and clever than the best the World War produced. These frank admissions of wholesale lying on the part of trusted Governments in the last war will not soon be forgotten.”
While the London Evening Standard demanded:
“It is vital that he deny the statement instantly. . . Its effect is to discredit British propaganda past, present and future.”
In Germany, fury over the corpse factory hoax reached such a pitch that in December 1925 British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain was forced to issue an official statement that there was no truth to the story.
But if the hoax didn’t originate with Charteris, where, then, did it come from? Despite the British Government’s denials, it is still possible that the hoax was at least partially propagated by British Military Intelligence the War Propaganda Bureau. Indeed, during the war both organizations employed large numbers of established or up-and-coming writers, including John Buchan, author of The 39 Steps, and Winnie-the-Pooh creator A.A. Milne, who in 1918 penned the following poem:
In MI7B
Who loves to lie with me
About atrocities
And Hun Corpse Factories
Come hither, come hither, come hither
Here shall we see
No enemy
But sit all day and blather
Later, another member of MI7, Major Hugh Pollard, would claim that he invented the corpse factory myth to amuse his cousin.
Most modern historians, however, doubt that the corpse factory story was deliberately concocted, with propaganda historian Randal Martin speculating that:
“…the real source for the story is to be found in the pages of the [newspapers owned by Lord] Northcliffe…The corpse-rendering factory was not the invention of a diabolical propagandist; it was a popular folktale, an ‘urban myth’, which had been circulated for months before it received any official notice.”
This is not to say, however, that the story wasn’t occasionally embellished and circulated by official sources as a convenient piece of propaganda. For example, an official investigation conducted in 1925 revealed that in 1917, the German newspaper Berliner Lokal-Anzinger had reported on the discovery of a railway carriage filled with dead German soldiers destined for Liege, Belgium, but which was accidentally diverted to the Netherlands. A Belgian newspaper immediately picked up the story, but deliberately distorted it to suggest that the bodies were destined for a soap factory. This deliberate lie formed the basis for the infamous article in l’Independence Belge.
While today the corpse factory hoax might seem like a laughable story from a more gullible time and a trivial event in a war that claimed nearly 40 million lives, this particular piece of propaganda would go on to have tragic real-world consequences. When the Second World War broke out and the first reports of the Nazi Holocaust began to leak out of Germany, lingering doubts over alleged German atrocities during the previous war led many to dismiss these new allegations. This was especially true of rumours that the Nazis were processing the bodies concentration camp victims into soap and other goods, with the American magazine The Christian Century reporting in 1942:
“The parallel between this story and the ‘corpse factory’ atrocity tale of the First World War is too striking to be overlooked.”
Indeed, according to Historian Joachim Neander :
“There can be no doubt that the reported commercial use of the corpses of the murdered Jews undermined the credibility of the news coming from Poland and delayed action that might have rescued many Jewish lives.”
Even after the Nazis surrendered and Allied troops entered the death camps, many still refused to accept the true, horrific scale of the Holocaust. This refusal persists to this day, with the widely-believed – but now thoroughly debunked – myth of death camp victims being rendered into soap being one of the favourite rhetorical devices used by Holocaust Deniers. It is a chilling reminder of the very real and very dangerous power of misinformation.
Expand for ReferencesFirst World War ‘Corpse Factory’ Propaganda Revealed, The Guardian, October 26, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/26/first-world-war-propaganda-corpse-factory-1925#:~:text=Rumours%20abounded%20throughout%20the%20first,to%20the%20British%20naval%20blockade.
The Corpse Factory and the Birth of Fake News, BBC News, February 17, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-38995205
Corpse Factories in Germany, Spartacus Educational, https://spartacus-educational.com/FWWcorpse.htm
Hunt, David, World War 1 History: Britain “Exposes” Germany’s Corpse Conversion Factory, Owlcation, July 6, 2022, https://owlcation.com/humanities/World-War-1-History-Britain-Exposes-Germanys-Corpse-Conversion-Factory
MacGregor, Steve, The German Corpse Factory – Great Piece of British Propaganda, War History Online, February 6, 2019, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/the-corpse-factory.html
Neader, Joachim & Marlin, Randal, Media and Propaganda: the Northcliffe Press and the Corpse Factory Story of World War I, Global Media Journal, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2010, https://www.proquest.com/docview/888152833
Dickson, Sam, The German Corpse Factories “the Most Appalling Atrocity Story: of WWI According to Some, The Vintage News, March 31, 2016, https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/03/31/the-german-corpse-factories-the-most-appalling-atrocity-story-of-wwi-or-brit-propaganda-at-its-best-2/
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In the modern world, if you step out your door and travel to neighboring cities or even countries, you’ll generally be greeted by a slew of familiar food related franchises for your respective region, with some of the most popular in the world today including McDonald’s, Subway, Starbucks, KFC, Dunkin, and the like. In all of these, with some small variation, you’ll be able to get the staple food and beverage items from those restaurants you can get anywhere else in the world at the same branded establishment. But it was not always this way. In fact, this has been a relatively recent phenomenon in the era of humans humaning. And before all these better known restaurant chains today, there was one that kicked it all off that, for fascinating reasons, managed to go from 1 restaurant to the second largest supplier of meals outside of the home in America behind only the U.S. military, then even more rapidly disappeared from existence. In fact, despite their dominance through most of the 20th century, because of how rapid their fall was, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone born after around the 1990’s who even remembers them at all, outside of perhaps recognizing the name from a small branch of Wyndham hotels. We are, of course, talking about Howard Johnson’s restaurants which introduced the world to the concept of restaurant franchising, spawning a now staple of the industry world wide. Here now, is the fascinating story of how Howard Johnson’s went from 0 to over 1000 locations and back to 0 in under a century.
Our story today begins with a middle school dropout not coincidentally named Howard Johnson. Born in 1897, as to why Johnson left school around 8th grade, his father, John Johnson, owned a cigar business, and, once his primary education was out of the way, Howard absconded to help run that business. This was something he continued to do for around 15 years, only taking a slight break, as it were, to serve in France during WWI. Unfortunately for the Johnsons, however, while the cigar business provided great practical lessons for the young teen in how to operate a business, market, sell, etc., with the rise in popularity of cigarettes, the company began to struggle, ultimately going into massive debt. Things only got worse when Johnson’s father up and died at the age of 57 in 1923.
Deciding to voluntarily take over his father’s debts and try to keep the company going, rather than just starting from scratch on a new venture, Johnson got to work attempting to salvage the sinking ship, but all his efforts were in vain. Unable to make the business profitable, he sold it within a year to pay off some of the debt, and otherwise worked odd jobs to try to pay off the rest.
But in all this, he also kept his eye out for a new venture that might be more lucrative, and in 1925 he found a possibility in a struggling little newsstand and pharmacy located at Beale Street in Wollaston, a part of Quincy, Massachusetts. Johnson was working at that establishment when the owner suddenly died. With the owner’s son little interested in keeping the business, Johnson negotiated to buy it for $2000 (about $35,000 today), drumming up the funds via a $500 loan from his mother and $1500 loan from a doctor friend.
His second struggling business in hand, he renamed the establishment Howard D. Johnson Co. Patent Medicines and Toilet Articles, and got to work to see if he could turn it around. First, he hired paper boys to go forth and sell his newspapers to the local community, rather than waiting for them to come purchase the papers from his shop. Next, as the soda fountain was the most lucrative part of the company, he began experimenting with ways to augment that side of the business, in particular focussing on ice cream meant for making sundaes and floats.
As for this, he eventually came up with a slight modification on normal ice cream of the era, with stories varying on how he settled on his now famous final recipe, either purchasing it from a German ice cream pushcart vendor, doing his own experiments, or that he simply used a recipe of his mother’s- with some accounts stating he did all three. Whatever the case there, what Johnson settled on was essentially doubling the butterfat in a normal ice cream recipe, both making his ice cream different than his competitors, while also being something customers seemingly loved. In the initial going, he offered three flavors using this base recipe- vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. But in the aftermath as ice cream sales very quickly rose at his establishment, through further experimentation, he came up with his soon to be famous 28 flavors, including such things as Butter Pecan, Caramel Fudge, Fudge Ripple, Peanut Brittle, Coffee, and Butterscotch.
And it was on. With sales absolutely exploding in the aftermath, Johnson used the extra funds to expand to a second location in Wollaston in 1927, and then the next year opened several seasonal stands along the beaches of Massachusetts, primarily selling soft drinks, ice cream, and hot dogs, in all reportedly grossing some $240,000 (a little over $4 million today) in 1928, allowing him to easily pay off his and his deceased father’s remaining debts. On top of that, around this time he was able to get a $50,000 loan from Granite City Bank in Quincy to start a fully fledged restaurant on the ground floor in the bank’s new headquarters building, which at the time was the tallest building in the city.
As to why he wanted to expand into a full restaurant, with the rise of the automobile and progressively better roads connecting cities and towns, Johnson saw a huge opportunity and a need being unmet. At the time, when people traveled the country by car, the eating establishments along the way tended to vary widely in quality and fare, with little way for most to judge what they were going to get. He also foresaw that such travel across the country would only continue to become more and more popular as roads continued to be steadily improved and more and more people owned cars.
Thus, Johnson had a plan- create a restaurant with high quality meals that would remind people of home, then rinse and repeat that same restaurant throughout the nation along the highways, and make sure everything from service to look of the building inside and out to food would be the exact same regardless of which of his restaurants you ate at. A little bit of home no matter where you went.
And so it was that as the Great Depression was about to kick off, Johnson opened his first such fully fledged Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Quincy. It would eventually grow to include such culinary staples as tender-sweet fried clams, which were a creation of the Saffron Brothers in Ipswich, Massachusetts, essentially just fried clams that had their bellies removed. Beyond this, it had many home style favorites like steak, mashed potatoes, chicken pot pies, hamburgers, hotdogs, etc. As for his overall philosophy? Top quality, but without making it too fancy. He stated, “If you say Halibut Dante, the average American will never buy it. But if you say halibut with cream and tomato sauce, he’ll not only buy it, but he’ll say it’s great.”
Naturally given the stock market crash of 1929, his business expansion plans were abruptly put on hold… Undeterred, as the Depression wore on and he couldn’t get a loan to open additional locations, nor did he have the extra capital on hand himself for it, he decided to think outside the box. What if instead of him fronting the cost, someone else did so and they could just use his restaurant model, brand, suppliers, and recipes in exchange? Essentially, what if he franchised his business model and brand?
While you’ll sometimes hear that Howard Johnson was the first to ever institute the idea of franchising, this is an exaggeration. For starters, franchising in some form has been around since at least medieval times in landowner franchise-like agreements. And even in America franchise like agreements were a thing from the early going. For example, Ben Franklin instituted a franchising model on September 13, 1731 when he and one Thomas Whitmarsh entered into a deal allowing Whitmarsh to create a separate printing operation to print and sell such things as Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac in the region of South Carolina, but with Franklin retaining the rights to enter into similar contracts with others elsewhere, and with Whitmarsh required to maintain all operating expenses and the location and the like.
Fast-forwarding to the next century, various businesses, some of which are still around today, started exploring the franchise model. One of the largest early adopters of the model was Harper Method Hair Parlour in 1891, started by one Martha Harper who’d worked as a domestic servant from the age of 7 to 32, at which point she used her life’s savings of $360 (about $12,000 today) to start the first Harper Method Hair Parlour, which set the model for what most salons after would soon copy. In particular, she began training other poor domestic servants in her trade and then allowing these women to franchise her model, brand, and product lines with huge success, rapidly growing to some 500 locations in the company’s over century long run. Other early modern franchise pioneers included the likes of General Motors and Coca Cola. However, with regards to restaurants, the idea was still quite novel and mostly untested. So while Howard Johnson didn’t invent the idea, as is often claimed, it was Johnson who was about to put the entire business model in the spotlight in a major way, and see countless restaurant chains afterwards copy him to worldwide success.
Going back to his second location, unable to get a loan and lacking the capital thanks to the Great Depression, in 1932 Johnson reached out to a friend of his, Reginald Sprague, whose father owned a primely located tract of land near the water in Orleans, Massachusetts. Johnson thus pitched the idea of Sprague opening a Howard Johnson’s restaurant there with Sprague paying for everything on the restaurant side, but getting to use Howard Johnson’s brand and reasonably successful restaurant template and product, including his extremely popular ice cream. In exchange, Howard Johnson would get a cut of the sales.
Sprague agreed. And the one restaurant became two, though initially leaving Sprague some $17,000, about $384K today, in debt. Remarkably, however, by the end of the first summer business was already booming at a whopping 700 meals served per day, plus ice cream sales. Thanks to this, despite only being opened seasonally, within two years the second Howard Johnson’s location was operating debt free.
Naturally, Johnson didn’t stop there. Despite the Great Depression raging, Johnson managed to expand to 41 restaurants by the end of 1936 and his company ballooning to over 100 by 1939.
As for this rapid growth despite not exactly being the best timing given the Great Depression, Johnson would state, “I think that building my business was my only form of recreation. I never played golf. I never played tennis. I never did anything after I left school. I ate, slept, and thought of nothing but the business.”
As to what he was thinking of when thinking about business, as alluded to, he made sure every restaurant looked the same and had the very distinctive bright orange roof and blue spire for easily recognizing the restaurant from a distance, as well as was among the first restaurants to ever put their name and logo on a giant pylon to be extremely visible from the road, now a staple of the industry for such establishments. On that note of highways, he also targeted areas where there were turnpikes or significant bends in the road where people would have to slow down or stop, and then be staring right at his restaurant when they did so.
On top of this, on the inside, he eventually hired famed interior designer Dorothy May Kinnicutt Parish, aka Sister Parish, perhaps most famous today for her work in the White House, to set the inside look. He also ultimately hired Christian Dior to design his waitress outfits, and fast-forwarding a bit to 1961 hired famed chefs Pierre Franey and Jacques Pepin, the latter of which turned down an offer to work as JFK’s personal chef in the White House to instead work on perfecting the Howard Johnson’s menu.
On this note of hiring Franey and Pepin, Johnson instituted a system of having his head corporate chefs start by working the line at actual restaurant locations to get a feel for everything, then come up with the best staple products they could, and then figure out how to freeze them for reheating and final preparation at the actual locations. In all accomplishing this via a sort of central commissary to make it easier and cheaper for all the restaurants in the chain to get their needed meals, while minimizing the need for skilled chefs, but still ensuring the exact same quality and product regardless of location.
On top of that, he created the Howard Johnson’s Bible outlining in incredible detail how every facet of the restaurant should be run and food prepared so everything was perfectly consistent from location to location.
Again, the idea being, if you went to any Howard Johnson’s, you’d get exactly what you expected based on whatever you were familiar with at your home Howard Johnson’s.
On top of that, he introduced a rather unique at the time idea of a kid’s menu with smaller portions, cheaper prices, and food more tailored for the pallet’s of our little human parasites, as well as making the kid’s menus into things that would help entertain the little ankle biters while their parents ate and talked, such as masks, maps, etc. He also started a birthday club where those that signed up would get a birthday card, which was essentially a gift card for one free meal, a piece of cake, and even balloons at certain locations.
In short, extreme quality and consistency was a hallmark of Howard Johnson’s at this point at every location, and something Howard Johnson himself was obsessed with. Something Pepin would later discuss in depth in his book The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen.
The culmination of all this was a business model and brand that often saw any new Howard Johnson’s location become debt free and profitable within a year of opening- a remarkable feat for any business, let alone a restaurant. Needless to say, the fact the whole thing was more or less idiot proof if one just followed the template exactly made it an extremely attractive business to start if one had the capital to open one. As for the utilization of the franchising model and the success franchise owners were seeing in it, Johnson would state, “This is what I like best. Help a good man to make a go of it himself.”
That said, whenever he had the money or could secure it, Johnson generally did prefer to own any new locations outright for more direct control.
But in any event, now having successfully not just weathered the Great Depression, but thrived in it, by the end of 1941, Howard Johnson’s had grown to nearly 200 locations, a mix of company owned and franchised.
…Of course, in December of 1941, the next major hurdle for the company hit when the United States decided it would like to join a lot of the rest of the world in trying to punch Hitler and Emperor Hirohito in the face.
In the aftermath, between war rationing and significantly fewer people traveling the roads, countless restaurants quite abruptly went out of business, with Howard Johnson’s feeling the sting as well, almost overnight shrinking down from 200 to just 12 struggling locations. Further, even at those dozen surviving locations, many of the staple menu items like their ice cream were difficult to keep on the menu thanks to things like sugar rationing.
On the verge of bankruptcy, to stay afloat, Johnson began supplying the military with the frozen food from his commissary that used to supply his restaurants, with most of these meals now going to recruits, war workers, and school children.
Finally, on September 2, 1945, Japan officially surrendered. Much like the nations involved in that war, Howard Johnson’s business had been bloodied, but survived. But things were about to turn around.
With the nation about to prosper as it never had since Johnson started his restaurant chain, and even the less affluent now often owning cars and ready to travel the roads, Johnson’s business was about to explode to a level no other restaurant in history had ever achieved up to this point.
Just 5 years after the war’s end, the company was back at over 200 locations, and grossing a new company record of $115 million that year, or about $1.4 billion today. Or, to put it another way, in modern dollars each location averaging about $7 million per year in gross sales. Three years later, they were up to 400 locations spanning 32 states, about 1 in 4 of which were at turnpikes, which were the most profitable of all locations.
Things only got even better when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, nation changing legislation spurring the creation of the United States interstate system in 1956. Within a little over a decade of this, Howard Johnson’s had ballooned to over 1,000 locations and was at this point second only to the United States military in the country for number of meals served annually to people outside of the home.
Leading up to this peak, Howard Johnson also saw that by jumping into the hotel industry, he could double down on things, and thus he began the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodges in 1954, often placed right next to his restaurant locations. In the Motor Lodges, he also followed the model of what you got at one Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, is exactly what you’d find at any of them. So, for the road weary traveler, they could now stop not just for a familiar home-cooked style dinner, but could also find a consistent, quality place to sleep for the night too.
By 1965 near the company’s peak, while fast-food upstarts like McDonalds were also rapidly rising, in McDonald’s case with now some 700 locations, Howard Johnson’s company gross sales were still more than the upstarts in McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC combined.
So, with such dominance and perfected model, and similar restaurant chains still booming today… what happened? How was it that within only a couple decades of this peak the chain would be all but extinct?
Well, it turns out there were a number of factors involved that all more or less hit the company at the same time. But perhaps the most pertinent change was the transition of leadership from Howard Johnson to his son, Howard Brennan Johnson in 1959, though with Howard Johnson himself staying involved as CEO until 1964 and Chairman until 1968, and then peripherally involved until his death at the age of 75 in 1972.
Brennan Johnson did have some success in the early going, first by taking the company public in 1961 bringing in some $125 million (about $1.3 billion today), as well as continuing expansion efforts with these funds, including starting other chains such as Ground Round Grill and Bar which peaked at over 200 restaurants, but has since dwindled to only 15 today. He also converted many of the Howard Johnson’s locations on toll ways to Burger Kings owned by Howard Johnson’s for further diversification, as well as diligently working to buy out most of the franchise locations in hopes of phasing out the franchising model for the company.
So that was all the good side. What went wrong?
For starters, fast-food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC were gaining market share like crazy, increasing competition, which was in part why Brennan Johnson had purchased many Burger King franchises and tried to expand to other restaurant offerings as well.
You see, unlike Howard Johnson’s more varied fare and more traditional offerings people were used to eating at home, these newer chains and their simpler menus could make the food much cheaper and quicker, and even eventually offered drive through options if you didn’t want to get out of your car. As an example, around this time you could get a burger at McDonald’s for 15 cents (about $1.50 today), whereas a burger at Howard Johnson’s cost 35 cents (about $3.50 today). On top of that, stopping at Howard Johnson’s took a lot more time and with no drive thru option to boot, in all not nearly as convenient, nor as cheap.
On top of this, while such things as a steak and mashed potato dinner while on the road has its advantages, the offerings of fast food establishments tended to cater to the human desire for greasy deliciousness, as in the likes of mouth watering KFC, in all appealing to more people’s pallets and desire to get chonky. And, as we all know, matters weren’t helped by the Colonel apparently putting addictive chemicals in his 11 herbs and spices that make you crave it nightly…
That said, then, as now, there was a rising crowd looking for the more home style cooking when not at home, or even just a place to eat when you wanted to take the family out or meet with friends and socialize, instead of inviting them to your home where they’d be confronted with the chaotic state you live in, closely resembling a dystopian landfill, but with air fresheners… Or you could clean. But why do that when you could all just go to Howard Johnson’s?
Thus, to try to adjust for the loss of traveler sales with the rise of fast-food, some Howard Johnson’s locations moved away from highways and into populated centers. They also began experimenting with revamping other aspects of the restaurants, like some locations offering 24 hour service similar to many diners, opening cocktail lounges for hangouts, as well as expanded seating.
Next up, right around the time Howard Johnson himself died in 1972, the nation experienced a major recession, followed by equally major gas shortages, all keeping people from traveling or eating out as much. Note, at this point some 85% of revenues for the company were still generated from travelers.
With the revenues on the decline, the younger Johnson then began a series of moves that only accelerated the company’s demise. First, ceasing all expansion efforts. Johnson would state of this, “My expansion plans got stalled in the 1974 oil embargo. I overreacted. I stopped all expansion, and once you stop, you know how hard it is to get the monster going again.”
Second, Johnson began analyzing how to cut costs, noting that they were spending about 48% of their gross revenues on the food itself. So, in an effort to try to compete better with the likes of McDonald’s and other such fast-food chains in prices, he tried to find ways to reduce food costs and number of employees at each location. In so doing, he extremely quickly torpedoed the quality of food and service you could find at a Howard Johnson’s, and consumers noticed… Rapidly.
Speaking of bad public perception, at least among some, leading up to all this, in the late 1950s a franchise owner in Dover, Delaware refused to serve black people. This would otherwise not have been significantly newsworthy in the era, but Howard Johnson’s was one of the most famous brands in the nation at the time, and on top of this, most famously that location refused to serve one Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, official representative of Ghana. In the end, this prompted something of an international incident and an apology from none other than President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who also invited Komla to come have breakfast with him and Vice President Richard Nixon at the White House. As for Howard Johnson’s side, he apparently personally told the Dover franchise owner that segregation was not allowed in any Howard Johnson’s. But it didn’t stop there. In 1961 another black diplomat, this time one William Fitzjohn was denied service at a Hagerton, Maryland Howard Johnson’s, sparking yet another international incident, with this time John F. Kennedy being the one to apologize publicly.
This spurred countless sit ins, boycotts, and protests at various Howard Johnson locations, even one such organized by future presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 1962- all prompting Howard Johnson to issue a statement that he and his company opposed racial segregation, and noting, “Where it has been possible to change the operation of our company-operated restaurants in the South to conform to our national policy of service without discrimination, this has been done.”
Noteworthy, Howard Johnson’s also had an established corporate policy against discrimination of any sort, and in certain regions local Howard Johnson’s even became something of hangouts for members of the LGBTQ community, such as in the case of locations owned by Dick Leitsch, Craig Rodwell, and John Timmins in New York, with these three all members of one of the very early gay rights groups, Mattachine Society.
While none of this latter is perhaps noteworthy today, at the time in New York many establishments refused to serve anyone who was openly gay, and it was even deemed illegal, according to the State Liquor Authority, to serve gay customers alcohol because the past was the worst.
But these franchise owners did it anyway at their Howard Johnson’s locations. And in one case very publicly with the Howard Johnson’s in Greenwhich Village used for a “Sip-In”, but not in the way the organizers of the Sip-in had originally hoped. You see, they were looking for a place to refuse them service so they could sue and challenge the law, so naturally targeted one of the biggest chains in the world in Howard Johnson’s for maximal publicity. Unfortunately for them and fortunately for Howard Johnson’s, one Randy Wicker who was involved recounts, “We went to Howard Johnson’s. Said we’re homosexuals and we wanna order a cocktail. And the woman said ‘no trouble!’” and happily served them. Leaving them to have to go find another establishment who would not do so, eventually settling on a bar called Julius’s that had recently been raided by police officers when the undercover officers posing as gay men had successfully entrapped and then arrested some of the customers there for agreeing to partake in homosexual acts with them. Needless to say, Julius was not interested in serving those involved in the sip-in lest he get in trouble again, and the whole affair was front-page news in the aftermath, spurring the New York State Liquor Authority to change its rules, though undercover officers still continued to do their thing for some time because the past was the worst.
But in any event, beyond some of the bad press, declining quality of food, and rise in fast-food establishments able to make their food faster, cheaper, and more convenient, then there was the quality of service and of the general establishment at each location, which likewise around the time of Howard Johnson’s death quickly became inconsistent, as there was no real strong measure ever implemented to insure such, outside of their handbook and apparently Howard Johnson himself spending his time randomly popping around to different locations to inspect them. As a brief aside, Johnson apparently sometimes didn’t feel the need to even announce who he was when doing such surprise inspections, and in one case he headed back to one location’s freezer without a word to the staff, resulting in employees calling the police on him. The officer who showed up dutifully asked for Johnson to identify himself, to which Johnson stated simply, “I’m Howard Johnson.” With the cop quipping back, “And I’m Christopher Columbus.”
But in any event, with Howard Johnson now in the grave and all efforts to overhaul the company not just not succeeding, but seeing it decline even more rapidly, Brennan Johnson and the board decided it was time to sell the company in 1979 to Imperial Group PLC of London for $630 million, or about $2.7 billion today. What Imperial Group got for their investment was 1,040 restaurant locations and 520 motor lodges, only about 25% of which belonging to franchisers.
While there was still time to adjust and fix everything and the Howard Johnson’s brand recognition was almost unparalleled in the regions they operated, little progress was made in a turnaround and, in 1985, Imperial Group gave up and sold off the chain to Marriott Corp for $314 million (about $900 million today). Within a year, Marriott then sold off the motor lodge and trademark to Prime Motor Inns.
As for the restaurant side, the now extremely dated menu, a growing reputation for poor quality food and service, and the expense and inconvenience vs the rising stars in fast food all combined were continuing to sink the brand.
So why did Marriott buy it when they clearly had no interest in fixing any of this? Well, as Ray Krock of McDonald’s so astutely pointed out during a speech at the University of Texas in 1974, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not in the hamburger business. My business is real estate.”
Marriott simply wanted the locations themselves to convert to more profitable Big Boy and other fast food locations, as well as to add all the Burger King locations Howard Johnson’s owned to their own portfolio. And so it was that within two years of their acquisition, Marriott had made almost all of the company owned locations disappear, leaving only a subset of the franchised locations untouched to die a slow and agonizing death.
To try to turn things around, the remaining location owners created the Franchise Associates Incorporated, with its chairman noting in 1987, “We have the concept, but it desperately needs to be modernized, internally and externally. Howard Johnson was allowed to become tired and stale. We must get rid of that plastic image… Anything can be salvageable if a great deal of time and money and effort is put in it. And Howard Johnson needs all those same things.”
Unfortunately for them, they were never able to expand from here outside of one single Howard Johnsons’ ice cream shop in Puerto Rico. They did briefly in 1990 debut a prototype remodel of Howard Johnson’s in Canton, Massachusetts, but the location and changes proved to be a dud. Further efforts were made to modernize the menu, with likewise no success.
And so it was that by 1995 there were only 84 Howard Johnson’s locations left. A decade later, they were down to just 8. It was also around this time the Howard Johnson branded frozen food line in grocery stores likewise disappeared thanks to the closing of the Fairfield Farms Kitchens’ Brockton, Massachusetts plant, and another similar plant in Georgia likewise closing a couple years later.
The final Howard Johnson’s restaurant from the original chain, located in Bangor, Maine, closed in September of 2016, leaving just one left in Lake George, New York. However, other than the name, at this point this location had no real connection to the former Howard Johnson’s given the menu was quite different, among other changes. Finally, in March of 2022, this last Howard Johnson’s restaurant closed its doors forever.
Today you’ll still find the Howard Johnson’s brand used by Wyndham Worldwide, with some 300 Howard Johnson’s hotels in over a dozen countries. Wyndham also now owns the rights to the restaurant and food brand as well, with occasional rumors that they plan on re-introducing the restaurant brand that started it all. But, to date, nothing has ever come of it. It would seem all that will ever remain of the restaurant side of Howard Johnson’s is its place in history- helping to give rise to the now ubiquitous restaurant franchising model and the many practices now common with that we all take for granted today.
Expand for Referenceshttps://uh.edu/hilton-college/About/Hospitality-Industry-Hall-of-Honor/Inductees/Howard-Dearing-Johnson%20/
https://www.wshu.org/2022-02-04/lgbtq-stories-the-sip-in-paved-the-way-for-gay-rights
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140905192215-33803259-lesson-from-kroc-s-success-mind-your-own-business
Howard Johnson Goes From One Restaurant to 1000 to Zero
http://www.orangeroof.org/
https://www.vacationsmadeeasy.com/SavannahGA/articles/HowardJohnsonHowOneManChangedanIndustry1.cfm
https://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/story/lifestyle/2022/06/07/howard-johnson-restaurant-once-stood-south-palm-beach/7496850001/
Howard Johnson’s and 20th Century America
The History Of Howard Johnson’s Restaurant
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/entertainment/books/2013/09/01/a-life-in-28-flavors/44303725007/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Johnson%27s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Parish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchising
https://www.franchise.org/blog/the-history-of-modern-franchising
https://paulcollege.unh.edu/rosenberg/pioneers/howard-d-johnson
https://www.eater.com/2017/2/14/14601970/last-howard-johnsons-lake-george-new-york
https://newengland.com/yankee/history/howard-johnsons-restaurant/
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/howard-johnsons-franchise/499157/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/651843/howard-johnsons-restaurant-history
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,937922,00.html
Howard Johnson’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Deering_Johnson
https://people.umass.edu/q4/0%200%20Profiles/Johnson_2005.pdf
https://americanbusinesshistory.org/the-first-giant-restaurant-chain-howard-johnson-rise-and-fall/
The post From Zero to One Thousand to Zero- The Rise and Fall of Howard Johnson’s appeared first on Today I Found Out.
It is one of the most iconic and enduring images in American history: a hollow-cheeked, white-haired figure with bushy eyebrows and a pointy goatee dressed in a tophat and tails emblazoned with the stars and stripes, pointing sternly at the viewer and declaring I WANT YOU FOR THE U.S. ARMY. This, of course, is Uncle Sam, the flamboyantly-dressed personification of the United States government. Whenever the nation has need of her people, you can be sure this flag-bedecked figure will be there to unite them in patriotic fervour. But where did Uncle Sam come from, and was he ever a real person? Well, pull on your striped pants and star-spangled top hat as we dive into the fascinating history of this All-American icon.
Despite his ubiquity today, Uncle Sam was far from the first personification of America. When Europeans first began to colonize the continent in the 16th Century, the preferred symbol of the exotic and untamed New World was the “Indian Queen”: a nude and voluptuous Native American woman astride a giant armadillo and brandishing a tomahawk. Over the next two centuries this figure slowly evolved – first into the tamer and more feminine “Indian Princess” and then into the neoclassically-inspired figure of Columbia. Named after Christopher Columbus, Columbia was in keeping with the other female personifications of nations at the time, such as Britannia for England, Caledonia for Scotland, Hibernia for Ireland, Marianne for France, and Italia Turrita for Italy. Many of these figures were, in turn, inspired by Minerva and Libertas – the Ancient Roman goddesses of wisdom and liberty. Many early depictions of Columbia show her in a classical toga and high-laced sandals, and either wearing or carrying a Phrygian Cap or pileus– a pointed cap with a turned-down peak given to freed slaves in the Roman Republic and a popular symbol of liberty. Other common accessories included a shield of the United States, a sword, a laurel wreath, a bust of George Washington, and a bald eagle. However, Columbia’s appearance was never really finalized, with later depictions showing her sporting a dress bedecked with the stars and stripes or even just the popular fashion of the period she was drawn. And while she managed to remain a popular symbol of America alongside Uncle Sam for more than a century, her popularity rapidly declined after 1924 when she was chosen as the logo of American film studio Columbia Pictures. Thereafter, the preferred female personification of the United States became Lady Liberty, made famous by the colossal statue in New York harbour gifted to the nation by France in 1886.
A more direct foreign counterpart to Uncle Sam, however, was John Bull, a male personification of England traditionally depicted as a portly country yeoman wearing a top hat, frock coat, and waistcoat – the latter often emblazoned with the Union Flag. Created in 1712 by John Arbuthnot, a close friend of British satirists Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, John Bull was originally a satirical character meant to poke fun at the British Whig Party but quickly evolved into a patriotic symbol of the practical and good-natured British everyman. Alongside France’s Marianne and decidedly less allegorical figures like Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, he would remain a popular stock character for political cartoonists until the end of the Second World War.
But the most direct ancestor of the Uncle Sam we know and love today was the now largely-forgotten character of Brother Jonathan. Dating from the Revolutionary War period, Brother Jonathan represented the stereotypical New England Yankee: brash, unsophisticated, and boorish but sly, independent, and scrappy. In this sense he had much in common with another popular allegorical figure of the time: Yankee Doodle, made famous by the classic patriotic song, more on this and why Yankee Doodle called the feather in his hat Macaroni in the Bonus Facts in a bit.
Like Yankee Doodle, Brother Jonathan started out as British caricature of the uppity American colonist, but was soon reclaimed as a symbol of the 13 colonies’ defiance of the British Crown; indeed, in most cartoons, ballads, and stage plays of the era, he is shown tricking, humiliating, and otherwise triumphing over British officials and soldiers and even John Bull himself. By the end of the Revolutionary War, the figure of Yankee Doodle had largely been absorbed into that of Brother Jonathan, with the latter acquiring the distinct appearance of a tall, thin, clean-shaven man dressed in striped pants and a top hat – usually second-hand and ill-fitting to illustrate the American values of thrift and practicality. In 1825, Brother Jonathan was immortalized as a symbol of New England by John Neal’s novel Brother Jonathan: or, the New Englanders, written to familiarize British readers with US language and customs. But just where the name “Brother Jonathan” came from is unclear. Tradition holds that the name originated with Connecticut governor John Trumbull, an ardent patriot whom George Washington affectionately referred to as “Brother Jonathan”. However, there is little evidence to support this, and the name likely originates from the English Civil War of 1642-1651, during which Puritan Roundheads and other forces opposed to King Charles I were disparagingly referred to as “Jonathans.” In the 18th Century, this by now common epithet was likely applied to the equally defiant American colonists.
But as time went by, the irreverent but largely heroic figure of Brother Jonathan began to take on more sinister undertones, becoming the mascot of the nativist Know-Nothing Party and appearing in political cartoons opposing the immigration of the Irish and Chinese and voting rights for African-Americans. Yikes. By the end of the American Civil War and the start of Reconstruction in 1865, Brother Jonathan’s utility as a national unifying symbol had come to an end. Not only was he a stereotypical Northern Yankee no self-respecting Southerner would identify with or rally behind, but he also represented a spirit of scrappy self-reliance and opposition to government authority that was quickly becoming passé. The Civil War had significantly increased the power and reach of the United States Government, and post-war America needed a new figure to symbolize Government authority and promote national unity. Enter Uncle Sam.
Unlike all the national personifications we have thus far discussed, Uncle Sam is unique in being the only one based on a real person – that is, if the official U.S. Government narrative is to be believed. As the story goes, the real-life Uncle Sam was one Samuel Wilson – no, not The Falcon from Marvel comic books, but a meat packer from Troy, New York. Born in Menotomy, Massachusetts – today known as Arlington – on September 13, 1766, Wilson was a childhood friend of one John Chapman, who would go on to become the legendary folk hero Johnny Appleseed.
While Wilson was still a child, he and his family moved to Mason, New Hampshire, where he served as a drummer boy on the village green. On the evening of April 18, 1775 – at the same time as Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride – Wilson’s drumming alerted the villagers of approaching British forces and allowed local militiamen to halt their advance. In 1781 at the age of fourteen, Wilson joined the Continental Army, where he served in a supporting role mending fences and tending, slaughtering, and butchering cattle to feed his fellow soldiers. His military service was brief, ending shortly after the British surrender at Yorktown on October 19, 1781.
In 1789, Wilson moved to Troy, New York, where he opened a meat packing plant. He soon gained a reputation for generosity, honesty, and fair dealing, and became affectionately known to the townspeople as “Uncle Sam.” In is this reputation which won him a contract to supply salted pork and beef to the U.S. Armed Forces during the War of 1812. To help distinguish meat earmarked for government use, Wilson began marking the barrels with the letters US for “United States” – an abbreviation which had not quite entered the vernacular at this point. On October 12, 1812, a group of government officials were touring the plant when one inspector inquired about the strange lettering on the barrels. A nearby worker, unfamiliar with the abbreviation, replied that it must stand for Uncle Sam. And thus a legend was born. American soldiers soon began referring to meat from Sam Wilson’s plant – and eventually all U.S. Government rations and equipment as “Bounty from Uncle Sam” or “Property of Uncle Sam” and even to themselves as “Uncle Sam’s Men.” By 1820, cartoons featuring Uncle Sam began appearing in New England newspapers, though at this point he looked very similar to the earlier Brother Jonathan: clean-shaven and dressed striped pants and a black top hat and tailcoat. He was also considerably fatter than his modern incarnations, resembling Benjamin Franklin in many early depictions. It was not until the 1830s that Uncle Sam was given his bright red pants, and not until the early 1860s that acquired his distinctive beard and gangly, hollow-cheeked physique – an appearance inspired by then-president Abraham Lincoln. This look, along with Uncle Sam’s iconic flag-themed outfit, was largely the creation of political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who is also credited with creating the modern image of Santa Claus and the donkey and elephant symbols of the Democratic and Republican parties. Nast originally used the figure of Uncle Sam to promote his utopian vision of the American Republic, such as in his 1869 cartoon Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner, in which Uncle Sam, along with his female counterpart Columbia, shares a harmonious turkey dinner with black, Chinese, Irish, Jewish, and other guests. But Nast’s vision was unusual for his time, as evidenced by an 1877 parody of his cartoon by George Frederick Keller which depicts the same scene as one of chaos, with all the guests behaving rudely and digging into their own national dishes rather than sharing Uncle Sam’s turkey. The message is clear: these people have no place at the American table. Indeed, the character and purpose of Uncle Sam have varied wildly depending on the national mood or who he was being depicted by. Originally a figure of internal unity, he became a symbol of American foreign intervention and military might, such as during the U.S. annexation of Hawaii in 1897 the Spanish-American War of 1898. Once an avowed foe of British national symbol John Bull, after the United States joined with Britain and other nations in crushing the Chinese Boxer Rebellion in 1900 the two became best of friends. The early 20th Century also saw Uncle Sam co-opted by corporate propaganda directed against labour organizations like the International Workers of the World, who were widely seen as foreign agitators bent on subverting and destabilizing the United States.
But the definitive and enduring depiction of Uncle Sam – the iconic I WANT YOU recruiting poster – would not come about until 1916, two years into the First World War. Though the United States would not join the conflict until the following year, by this point its entry seemed all but inevitable. Consequently, in July of that year the magazine Leslie’s Weekly commissioned illustrator James Montgomery Flagg to create an image urging Americans to prepare for war. Flagg based his design off an earlier and equally iconic British poster featuring Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, pointing at the viewer with the words BRITONS – LORD KITCHENER WANTS YOU. JOIN YOUR COUNTRY’S ARMY. GOD SAVE KING. Using himself as his model, Flagg painted Uncle Sam in the same pose, with the illustration first appearing on the cover of the July 6, 1916 issue of Leslie’s Weekly accompanied by the words WHAT ARE YOU DOING FOR PREPAREDNESS? When the United States finally entered the First World War in April 1917, Flagg’s illustration was adapted into a recruiting poster, over four million of which were printed by war’s end.
This, at least, is the official story of Uncle Sam’s origin. Indeed, in 1931, a tombstone was erected at Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, where Samuel Wilson died in 1854, bearing the words:
“In loving memory of ‘Uncle Sam’, the name originating with Samuel Wilson.”
Three decades later in 1961, the Eighty-Seventh Congress of the United States under President John F. Kennedy passed an act declaring:
“The Congress salutes ‘Uncle Sam’ Wilson of Troy, New York, as the progenitor of America’s National Symbol of ‘Uncle Sam.’”
While in 1989 Congress officially recognized Wilson’s birthday of September 13 as “Uncle Sam Day.”
However, considerable doubt surrounds Samuel Wilson’s claim to the origin of the Uncle Sam legend. For one thing, the earliest known mention of the character predates Wilson’s contract with the U.S. Government by two years. A footnote in an 1810 edition of the Baltimore magazine Niles’ Weekly Register defines Uncle Sam as “…a cant [slang] term in the army for the United States”, suggesting that the name was already well known by this time. Furthermore, the classic story of how one of Wilson’s plant workers mistook the abbreviation US for “Uncle Sam” comes from the May 12, 1830 edition of the New York Gazette. In that issue, Pheodorus Bailey, then Postmaster for New York City, recounted how he was among the government inspectors touring the Troy plant on October 12, 1812 when he overheard the worker make the fateful misunderstanding. The fact that this story was first written down nearly two decades after the alleged incident casts serious doubt on its authenticity.
But while Samuel Wilson may not, in fact, have been the inspiration for Uncle Sam, in a sense the figure we are familiar with today was a real person – or, rather, two real people. For while James Montgomery Flagg based his 1917 recruiting poster on himself, when tasked with updating the image during Second World War, he chose as his model a man named Walter Botts. Born in 1900 in Jackson Township, Indiana, Botts was a professional jazz trumpeter and sometime model who had previously posed for legendary illustrator Norman Rockwell. According to Botts, Flagg chose him because he
“…had the longest arms, the longest nose, and the bushiest eyebrows.”
And given that Flagg and Botts’ depictions are the ones that have endured to this day, it can be argued that they, and not Samuel Wilson, are the real Uncle Sam.
Bonus Fact:
Going back to Yankee Doodle and what the deal was with calling feathers macaroni, as with a lot of older songs, the tune and music that we today associate with “Yankee Doodle” was actually written much earlier than the 18th century. The melody may have been heard as early as the 1500s in Holland, with rather nonsensical lyrics about the harvest and farmers receiving their wage in buttermilk.
Over the next two centuries, that particular melody bounced around Europe and was re-appropriated for various other little jingles – like describing the struggles of English Puritans or used in nursery rhymes. For instance:
“Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it, nothing in it, nothing in it, but the binding round it”
– a rhyme that may or may not have been written before the tune started being used for Yankee Doodle). Another theory is the Hessians were the ones who originally brought the tune to the colonies from Germany, where it was being used in a drinking song.
Much like the origin of the melody, where the well-known lyrics came from is also not definitively known. One popular theory is that similar lyrics were first used to make fun of Oliver Cromwell, the 17th century English political and military leader, for fancying himself a fashionable person. The purported lyrics are sometimes said to have begun
“Yankee doodle come to town, upon on a Kentish pony.”
However, this seems unlikely considering the word “Yankee” didn’t come along until years after Cromwell, with the first known documented instance appearing in 1683- used by Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam (today’s New York) to disparage their English colonist neighbors in Connecticut.
Stemming from the Dutch “Janke” meaning “Little John,” “Yankee” was definitely intended as a belittling remark and became the European way to describe all American colonists, more or less being the equivalent of calling someone a “country bumpkin”, “redneck,” or “dumb hick” today.
The first known documented instance of the tune and the words “Yankee” and “doodle dandy” being put together in the same song, it seems, was around the 1750s during the French and Indian War. Prior to fighting for their independence against the British, the colonists were, of course, subjects of the English. Therefore, when the French and Brits went to war over territories in the New World in 1753, the colonists were recruited to join in on the English side.
Legend has it, whether true or not is anybody’s guess as no known hard, direct documented evidence has survived supporting this oft-told story, that a British army surgeon named Dr. Richard Shuckburg (who is known to have existed) saw the colonist recruits amble up to join the regular soldiers. Compared to the well-assembled and well-manicured English army, the colonists were a mess. Wearing “fashions that hadn’t been seen in England in a hundred years” and holding every weapon except those “familiar to the fresh, well-drilled British troops,” Dr. Shuckburg couldn’t help but laugh… and write a song. While not exactly the song we’ve come to know, the song that supposedly inspired Yankee Doodle, whether actually written by Dr. Shuckburg or not, went like this:
Brother Ephraim sold his cow
And bought him a commission
And then he went to Canada
To fight for the nation;
But when Ephraim,
he came home
He proved an arrant coward,
He wouldn’t fight the
Frenchmen there
For fear of being devoured.
Sheep’s head and vinegar
Buttermilk and tansy
Boston Is a Yankee town,
Sing “Hey, doodle dandy!”
The original sheet music for this noted that the song should be sung “through the nose, & in the West Country drawl & dialect.” In other words, it was meant to not only be mocking in lyrics, but tone. As for “Brother Ephraim,” this is thought to refer to Colonel Ephraim Williams of the Massachusetts militia, who ultimately was killed at the Battle of Lake George during the French and Indian War.
Upon completing the lyrics, purportedly Dr. Shuckburg gave it over to the Continental marching band who played “amid shouts of laughter in the English ranks.”
Whoever really wrote it, by 1768, the Boston Journal of the Times noted that the British were playing “that ‘Yankee Doodle’ song,” though the Times didn’t elaborate on what the lyrics were to this version. At this point, the song was constantly being remixed with slightly different lyrics, tunes and meanings, as was common for pretty much all popular songs at the time.
What united many of the earliest versions of this song was the not-so-subtle mocking of colonists as nothing more than moronic, unsophisticated, country yokels. For instance, after George Washington was made commander of the rebel armies, some unknown individual wrote the following lyrics,
Then Congress sent great Washington,
All clothed in power and breeches,
To meet old Britain’s warlike sons
And make some rebel speeches
Yet another version included the lines,
Yankee Doodle came to town,
For to buy a firelock, (a musket)
We will tar and feather him,
And so we will John Hancock.
A slightly more familiar version to those of us today is also one of the earlier known versions, generally credited to Harvard sophomore and American Minuteman Edward Bangs:
Father and I went down to camp,
Along with Captain Gooding,
And there we saw the men and boys
As thick as hasty pudding.
Yankee Doodle keep it up,
Yankee Doodle dandy,
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy
Continuing to turn the lyrics around, with the colonists variously either taking pride in the song and/or directly mocking the British, we have lyrics like
Yankee Doodle is the tune
That we all delight in;
It suits for feasts, it suits for fun,
And just as well for fightin’.
Historians aren’t completely sure when the verse about sticking “a feather in his hat and calling it macaroni” came to be. The oldest known print version of this didn’t appear until all the way in 1842, published in London in the book The Nursery Rhymes of England by James Orchard Halliwell, though this particular lyric is obviously thought to date back to the American Revolution, partially due to the term being used here, which dates it somewhat, and how mocking the use of it was.
Stepping back a little to a term related to “macaroni,” there’s an interesting side tale about the evolution of the word “doodle” to one that’s more used today – “dude.” According to esteemed etymologists Barry Popik and Gerald Cohen, “dude” was first used in the 1880s as a way to describe young New York City men who had an affinity for being flamboyantly well-dressed, well-manicured and overly pretentious – in other words, a “dandy.” Using the very words that were used to mock colonists a hundred years earlier – “doodle dandy” – people started to call these 19th century men that as well, as a means to essentially call them pretentious fools. Later, this got shortened to “doodles,” then to “doods.” Eventually, the spelling was changed to “dude.” (And if you’re curious, the original female equivalent was dudine.)
Back to the related term “macaroni”- this term pertains to the habit of rich 18th century English men going on so-called “Grand Tours.” Sort of like the more modern “gap year,” young adult men who could afford it would take long trips around Europe, learning about the culture, art and history of neighboring countries. Particularly those from “new money” would sometimes come back with more refined tastes – like an appreciation for French art, fancy exotic clothes and Italian food.
These individuals’ often over the top attempts at trying to appear refined upon their return- speaking a mix of Latin and English and wearing foppish attire complete with massive “Macaroni” wigs and not one, but two pocket watches- were occasionally mocked for this. One of the nicknames they were given at this time was “macaronis.” The individuals were also considered to be part of the informal “Macaroni Club” and would refer to flamboyant fashion and the like as “very macaroni.” As for the origin of the term itself, it is presumed to originally derive from the fact that macaroni was a relatively exotic food for the British and must have been something at least some of these individuals raved about upon their return to England.
The Oxford Magazine described the so-called Macaroni Club members in 1770 as follows:
There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up among us. It is called a macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.””
In other words, when the particular lyrics “stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni” were added to the Yankee Doodle song, the author was essentially saying that colonists were such low class, moronic fools that they thought by sticking a simple feather in their hat, they were being extremely refined and fashionable.
In the end, there were possibly even hundreds of versions of Yankee Doodle in popular circulation during the American Revolution, some initially used by the British to mock their rebellious subjects. In turn, the Americans embraced the song, creating countless versions of their own and other times simply taking pride in the lyrics which were supposed to be mocking.
This brings us to October 19, 1781 when General Cornwallis formally surrendered to American and French forces at Yorktown, Virginia. Legend has it that, as a way to mock the defeated troops, famed French commandeer and hero of the American Revolution Marquis de Lafayette ordered the band to play “Yankee Doodle,” with the victorious soldiers singing along.
Expand for ReferencesPanati, Charles, Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, Harper & Row, New York, 1987
Elder, Natalie, Uncle Sam: The Man and the Meme, National Museum of American History, September 13, 2013, https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/uncle-sam-man-and-meme
Passey, Brian, What’s the Deal With Uncle Sam? The Spectrum, July 3, 2015, https://www.thespectrum.com/story/life/2015/07/03/what-the-deal-with-uncle-sam/29669929/
Walter Botts, the Man Who Modeled Uncle Sam’s Pose for J.M. Flagg’s Famous Poster, Vintage Everyday, August 31, 2016, https://www.vintag.es/2016/08/walter-botts-man-who-modeled-uncle-sams.html
The Female Form as Allegory, https://web.archive.org/web/20191023185114/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/LIBERTY/origins.html
Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner – Two Coasts, Two Perspectives, Thomas Nast Cartoons, https://web.archive.org/web/20160305182430/http://thomasnastcartoons.com/selected-cartoons/uncle-sams-thanksgiving-dinner-two-coasts-two-perspectives/
Brother Jonathan, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Brother-Jonathan/318130#:~:text=The%20origin%20of%20the%20term,consulting%20him%20on%20special%20problems.
Tensley, Brandon, Meet Brother Jonathan, the Predecessor to Uncle Sam, Smithsonian Magazine, September/October 2023, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/meet-brother-jonathan-the-predecessor-to-uncle-sam-180982818/
Braun, Adee, Before America Got Uncle Sam, it Had to Endure Brother Jonathan, Atlas Obscura, July 4, 2019, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/brother-jonathan-uncle-sam
The post The Truth About Uncle Sam and Calling Americans Yankee appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If I say the word “balloon”, the image that pops into your head is likely a benign one – a colourful helium party balloon, perhaps; or a hot air balloon drifting serenely over a city. But, as with pretty much all of mankind’s creations, these seemingly docile flying machines can and have been turned into weapons of war. As we’ve previously covered in our video The Fascinating Tale of the World’s First Air Force, from the Napoleonic Wars of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries all the way to the First World War, tethered observation balloons were widely used to scout enemy defences and direct the fall of artillery fire; while today balloons still play a key role in military communications and intelligence gathering. Balloons have also been used in more directly offensive roles, the most famous example being the Japanese Fu-Go campaign of WWII in which nearly 10,000 hydrogen-filled paper balloons were launched across the Pacific towards North America. Armed with incendiary charges, Fu-Go were intended to set fire to forests on the American west coast. More on this fascinating tale and the bizarre results of this rare direct attack on the U.S. mainland during the war in the Bonus Facts in a bit. But the Japanese were not the only belligerent nation to use balloons as a weapon of war; halfway across the world, the United Kingdom also launched its own balloon offensive, which proved shockingly effective. This is the story of Operation Outward, Britain’s forgotten balloon blitz.
The idea for Operation Outward came about largely by accident. Throughout the Second World War, Britain, like many other nations, made extensive use of barrage balloons to defend cities, factories, naval bases, and other strategic targets. These were large, kite-shaped hydrogen balloons tethered to the ground by steel cables. Attacking aircraft flying below the balloons risked having their wings sheared off by the cables, while flying higher to avoid them resulted in poorer bombing accuracy. However, in high winds barrage balloons sometimes broke loose and drifted across the countryside, wreaking havoc as their trailing mooring cables shorted out power cables and other electrical infrastructure. In early 1940, such incidents prompted Air Vice Marshal Owen Tudor Boyd, head of the Royal Air Force’s Balloon Command, to note:
“Since the outbreak of the war, I have had constant complaints from the electricity distributors regarding the damage done in this country by [barrage] balloons that have broken away from their moorings…advantage might be taken of this to impede and inconvenience the enemy.”
Boyd proposed launching bomb-carrying balloons from France, to be carried over Germany by the prevailing winds. The positions of the balloons would be tracked via radio triangulation, and the bombs dropped by radio command when the balloons drifted over a worthwhile target. Boyd’s plan was met with significant skepticism, with some critics arguing that such weapons were ungentlemanly and that, in the most British way to say it possible, “…attacks of this nature should not be originated from a cricketing country”. Others feared that such an attack would lead the Germans to retaliate in kind. In the end, however, the fall of France and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in June 1940 rendered the whole debate moot.
Yet not long afterward, another freak event revealed that Boyd’s plan might yet still be feasible. On the night of September 17, 1940, a number of barrage balloons broke loose in a gale and drifted across the North Sea to Denmark and Sweden, where they shorted out power lines, blocked railways, and even knocked down a radio transmission tower. When reports of the damage inflicted reached the British War Cabinet a week later, Prime Minister Winston Churchill demanded that the use of offensive balloons against Germany be investigated. With the Army shut out of mainland Europe and British cities suffering near-daily bombardment by the Luftwaffe, Churchill was desperate for any means – however unorthodox – of striking back against the Germans.
The British Air Ministry was initially skeptical, arguing that free balloons were too inaccurate and too expensive to be a feasible weapon. They also reiterated earlier warnings about possible German counter-attacks. Meanwhile, the Admiralty was much more enthusiastic, with the plan’s greatest champion being Captain Gerald Banister, Director of Boom Defence for Royal Navy harbours. Banister pointed out that winds above 16,000 feet or 5,000 metres tended to blow from west to east, making it very difficult for the Germans to retaliate in kind. Furthermore – and more importantly – the Navy had in its storehouses some 100,000 2.4-metre latex weather balloons that were otherwise surplus to requirements and could easily be pressed into service.
Banister’s plan, soon dubbed Operation Outward, called for the balloons to trail long metal wires which, like rogue barrage balloons, would short out any high-voltage power lines they drifted across. This would trip circuit breakers, overheat and damage the power lines, and even start fires. And while the German power grid was largely protected against being shorted out to the ground, it was very vulnerable to shorts across the different phases of the transmission lines. Trials conducted in Britain as well as a survey of the German electrical grid not only revealed that the balloons would be highly effective against electrical infrastructure, but that they had a 10-75% chance of encountering high-voltage power lines during a 50 kilometre flight along the ground.
To time the balloons’ flight across the North Sea, they were fitted with a crude ballast control mechanism. At launch, a piece of slow-burning fuse was lit, timed to burn out over German-occupied territory. As the balloon rose, decreasing air pressure caused the envelope to expand until, at around 25,000 feet or 7,600 metres, an internal cord halted the expansion and the balloon’s ascent. A pressure release valve then opened, slowly releasing hydrogen gas and causing the balloon to gradually descend towards its target. Finally, the fuse burned out and released the bung on a can of mineral oil, which dripped out, lightened the balloon, and halted its descent. The fuse also released the power-line shorting cable, consisting of 200 metres of hemp cord attached to 90 metres of 15 gauge steel wire. The balloon then drifted along just above the ground until it encountered power lines.
While the original Operation Outward plan was designed to attack electrical infrastructure, incendiary payloads were soon added in the hopes of igniting large areas of German pine forest and heathland and diverting hundreds of people to firewatching and firefighting duties – people who might otherwise be employed in more vital war work. Three different kinds of incendiary payloads were devised, codenamed Beer, Jelly, and Socks. Beer comprised a basket containing 7 or 8 No.76 Special Incendiary Grenades – also known as Self-Igniting Phosphorus or SIP Grenades. Developed for use by the Home Guard – Britain’s emergency anti-invasion force, the SIP was a half-pint glass bottle filled with white phosphorus, benzene, and a strip of crude rubber- the latter of which gradually dissolved to render the mixture sticky like napalm. When the slow-burning fuse on the Outward balloon burned out, the basket was released, dropping the grenades onto the target. On hitting the ground, the glass bottle shattered and the white phosphorus ignited on contact with air – and for more on this and other weird and wonderful weapons used by the Home Guard, please check out our previous video The Badass Story of the Dad’s Army.
Jelly incendiaries were rectangular 4.5 litre metal canisters filled with jellied gasoline – AKA napalm – while Socks were long, thin canvas bags packed with sawdust, soaked in paraffin wax, and fitted with fuses. Three socks were connected together to form a triangle designed to catch on the crown of a tree and set it alight. Two other payloads, codenamed Lemon and Jam, were also developed, the former containing a small explosive charge and the latter propaganda leaflets. The Lemon bombs were actually left over from an earlier scheme codenamed Operation Albino, which involved releasing large numbers of explosive-armed balloons to take down intruding enemy aircraft.
In all, each Outward balloon would cost only 35 shillings – around £120 today – to manufacture, while the whole operation would involve only a few hundred personnel. The shoestring nature of the project was a large part of its appeal, for the cost in fuel, ammunition, and aircraft maintenance needed for the Germans to shoot down a single balloon would always exceed what it cost for the British to launch it. So even if Operation Outward inflicted little physical damage, it would still be an effective economic weapon. Thus, despite continued opposition from the Air Ministry, Operation Outward was approved by the British Chiefs of Staff in September 1941 and a launch site set up near HMS Beehive, a Royal Navy shore establishment near Felixstowe in Suffolk.
Given the cover designation of a “Boom Defense Unit”, the entire organization comprised a little over 230 people: six Royal Navy and Royal Marines officers, 80 Royal Marines, and 147 members of the Women’s Royal Navy Service – better known as the Wrens. Support was also provided by RAF Balloon Command – who supplied the hydrogen gas to fill the balloons – and the Naval Meteorological Service. Balloons were launched from the nearby Felixstowe Ferry Golf Club, with the balloons being filled from truck-mounted hydrogen cylinders inside canvas tents or plywood windbreaks. Though this may seem a rather benign assignment, it did in fact have its dangers, as former Wren balloon launcher Antoinette Porter later recalled:
“The balloons were packed in french chalk which got into the back of your throat rather badly. We used to put the residue on the floor and, during our cocoa break, slide up and down and fall over… These monstrous balloons were housed in three sided tents which, as inflation progressed, created friction…balloon to canvas…causing a great risk on instant combustion. So out came our buckets and stirrup pumps and we sprayed balloon and tent. As the nearest tap was 100 yards away we were all forced into a chain gang…[yet] in spite of our simple precautions [anti-flash hoods and fireproof gloves]the balloons did, quite frequently, explode causing the nearer Wrens to be flash burned and the further ones to get an instant sun tan with singed eyebrows and hairline. Fortunately I was never near enough to get badly burned but many of my pals were not so lucky and were carted off to Trimley St Mary Hospital to be plastered with gentian violet or acriflavine…not a pretty sight!”
Yet the Wrens took such hazards in stride, bringing to their unusual duty the kind of patriotic cheekiness that characterized the British wartime spirit:
“We also wrote (very tame but we thought very daring and rude) messages on the balloons to Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and any other poor German who saw them. And of course, the black messages, when inflated, became very large. I remember such things as, ‘Death to all Germans’, ‘Balls to Hitler,Goering and Goebbels’, and, ’Take this you Bastards’…One Wren brought a battery radio which endlessly churned out lovely music… [including] ’I don’t want to set the world on fire’ which we adopted as own Boom Defence song and sang in our lorries.”
Once filled, the balloons were carried to another part of the golf course to be fitted with their payloads. The slow-burning fuses were then lit, and the weapons released. For ideal wind conditions, balloons were typically released between the hours of 10 AM and 4 PM.
The first launches took place on March 20, 1942. Within days, dozens of reports began trickling in from the Continent about forest fires and power outages inflicted by Outward balloons. Many of these reports came from local resistance movements, while others were gleaned from newspaper articles in Nazi-occupied countries, where the German authorities tried to spin the British attacks in a negative manner. The operation’s greatest success came on July 12, 1942 when a wire-carrying balloon struck a 100 kilovolt transmission line near Leipzig. The circuit breakers at the nearby Böhlen power station failed, causing one of the 16.5 megawatt generators to be thrown out of synchronization. The rotor began to vibrate until it finally bent and tore the generator apart, starting a fire that burned the station to the ground. All told, the 35 shilling balloon inflicted an estimated 1 million pounds of damage and knocked 250 megawatts of generating capacity offline for months. A more common – if less spectacular – occurrence was for a balloon to short out and sever one or more cables on a transmission line, creating unbalanced forces that caused the whole electricity pylon to collapse.
And there was more good news, for Allied intelligence learned that the Germans were deploying up to 250 fighter aircraft per day in an attempt to shoot down the Outward balloons – an expenditure of resources far in excess of the balloons themselves. Large numbers of personnel were also being diverted to fire watching, firefighting, and electrical repair duties – just as the Operation Outward planners had intended. Better still, German efforts to protect electrical infrastructure against the wire-carrying balloons proved largely ineffective. At first, the authorities issued orders to shut down power lines in the bath of drifting balloons and to increase the sensitivity of circuit breakers. However, these measures proved difficult to implement and led to even more power disruptions. In an attempt to prevent electricity pylons from collapsing, the Germans also developed a new kind of cable clamp that would let the cables fall to the ground if subjected to large unbalanced loads. But ice buildup or wind also caused the clamps to release, once again resulting in widespread power outages. Worse still, because the clamps had been designed by a prominent member of the Nazi party, it took months for their effectiveness to be questioned and the original clamps replaced.
Buoyed by these successes, in July 1942 the British Admiralty established a second launch site at Oldsters Bay near Dover and a third at Waxham in Norwich. By August, Wrens at all three sites were launching up to 1,800 balloons per day. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Being unguided, the Outward balloons were an indiscriminate weapon, and many ended up drifting over neutral territories. For example, on the evening of January 19, 1944, two trains collided in Laholm, Sweden, when an Outward balloon knocked out lighting on the railway. On another occasion, a group of Outward balloons got caught in an eddy and drifted back towards England, knocking out the power grid in Ipswich. British citizens also often mistook the balloons for German parachutes, triggering numerous local invasion scares. Finally, there were also internal difficulties, with the Air Ministry and the Admiralty constantly bickering over control of the project – because of course they did. However, as the Navy had the surplus balloons and the Air Force the hydrogen to fill them, the two services had no choice but to grudgingly cooperate.
But as air operations over Europe intensified in the lead-up to D-Day, it was feared that Operation Outward balloons would pose a significant danger to Allied aircraft. As a result, from May 1944 balloon launch operations were significantly scaled back, the mass launches being replaced by a “trickle” of balloons launched at 10 minute intervals. Wire-carrying balloons were also all but eliminated, replaced with incendiary balloons which posed little danger to aircraft. Furthermore, this new system freed up hydrogen supplies for use in barrage balloons, which were desperately needed to protect the invasion beaches in Normandy and defend against the German V-1 flying bomb offensive – and for more on the latter, please check out our previous video A Wingtip and a Prayer: the Insane Way British Pilots Defeated Germany’s Secret Weapon. But as the Allies gained air superiority over Europe and pushed their way closer towards Germany, Operation Outward became increasingly redundant, and the last balloons were launched on September 4, 1944. In total, 99,142 balloons were launched over the course of 899 days, split evenly between wire-carrying and incendiary types.
But what did Operation Outward actually accomplish? Surprisingly for such a crude weapon, quite a lot. Though official records are rather spotty due to official censorship and the destruction of documents near the end of the war, Outward balloons caused over 500 major power interruptions in Germany and 5,000 in occupied France, and started hundreds of forest fires across Europe. A 1946 report estimated the total damage inflicted at £1.5 million – nearly £58 million in today’s money – and that’s not including the significant resources and manpower diverted by the Germans in a futile attempt to counter the British Balloon Blitz. As Captain Gerald Banister’s final report concluded:
“…the evidence obtained shows that these Outward attacks were a continual menace to the whole German electric supply system for even minor incidents caused continual interruptions to the power supplies with damage to the equipment involving diversion of manpower on repair work, to say nothing of production delays. The destruction of Böhlen alone however was an ample reward for these operations…the result of the operation was out of all proportion to the man-power and material employed.”
In other words, Operation Outward was a perfect example of the unconventional, make-do-and mend approach to warfare that served the British so well throughout the conflict. Indeed, it is a testament to the effectiveness of the British approach to balloon warfare that the only real strategic success of the Japanese Fu-Go program was when, on on March 10, 1945, a lone balloon shorted out high voltage transmission lines near Toppenish, Washington State. This temporarily knocked out power to the Hanford Engineer Works, which produced the Plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
And the basic principle of the Outward Balloons is still used today in the form of “graphite” or “blackout bombs” such as the American BLU-114B. Dropped from aircraft or delivered by guided missile, graphite bombs burst and scatter thin carbon-fibre filaments over their targets, shorting out and disabling electrical infrastructure. Such weapons were widely used by Coalition forces in 1991 Persian Gulf War to knock out Iraq’s power grid, and again by NATO against Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo conflict. And in more recent years, South Korea has also developed an arsenal of graphite bombs as a safeguard against invasion by the North. It just goes to show that a weapon doesn’t need to be complicated to be effective – and that the next time you’re given a helium-filled party balloon, it’s probably best to avoid walking near power lines.
Bonus Fact:
Going back to the Japanese balloons, Fu-Gos, called fire balloons in the U.S., were approximately 70 feet tall, 30 feet in diameter and, fully inflated, held about 19,000 cubic feet of hydrogen. Launched from the Japanese island of Honshu, they were ultimately found in many states including Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Michigan and Iowa. Some were also found in Canada and a few turned up in Mexico.
As for the impetus for them, through experimentation, Japanese researchers found that at just over 30,000 feet altitude, the jet-stream could carry a large balloon about 5,000 miles across the Pacific in three days in late autumn when the stream was strongest. They then developed an extremely clever, and simple, mechanical device to automate the flight of the balloons and release the explosives. To prevent too much fluctuation in altitude as the temperature changed in the night vs. the day, engineers created a system controlled by barometric sensors. If the altitude got too low, below 30,000 ft, a small charge would fire, ejecting two sandbags mounted on a spoked wheel containing other sandbags and the explosive devices themselves. When the temperature heated up in the day time and the balloon rose above 38,000 feet, barometric-controlled valves would automatically open, releasing hydrogen and thus lowering the balloon to the desired level.
The control system was set up to last just three days at which point (in theory) there would be no sandbags left, just the incendiary devices ready to be released once the balloon dipped below 30,000 ft. At this point, the balloon would theoretically be over the U.S. and incendiary devices ranging from 5 kg to 15 kg would be released. A fuse would also be lit which would burn for approximately 84 minutes before igniting the balloon itself with its 19,000 or so cubic feet of hydrogen then exploding.
The balloons themselves were made of “washi,” a tough paper made of mulberry bushes. It was only available in limited sizes, about the size of a map, so it was glued together with paste, often by teenage girls.
And so it was that in the early months of 1945, the American people were starting to notice that something strange was happening. Balloons and explosions had been seen in many states and seven balloons were handed over to the military by bewildered citizens. U.S. fighter planes tried to intercept the balloons but they were only able to destroy about twenty, as the balloons typically flew at very high altitude and were amazingly fast and difficult to track down once a report of one came in.
However, in the end these clever devices didn’t exactly have the intended effect. Of the 10,000 or so launched, Japanese military officials estimated only about 10% of them would reach America. Approximately 342 of the balloons were found or seen in North America, and the result was minimal property damage and just six people killed (we’ll get to that tragic story and how it likely easily could have been prevented had the government not governmented).
That said, had the balloons been launched in the summer, rather than late autumn and winter, they may have started significant fires as had been originally planned. Further, one incident involving a fire balloon could have had major implications on the war. The balloon descended on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, landing on power lines and cutting power to the nuclear reactor cooling pumps. Fortunately, backup generators restored power before there was any damage or a nuclear meltdown.
As for how the Japanese had managed to get the balloons into North America, this was at first something of a mystery. Most military officials didn’t believe they had come all the way from Japan. Many thought Japanese soldiers were coming ashore on North American beaches and launching the balloons. The mystery was solved when scientists with the Military Geology Unit analyzed the sand from some of the recovered sandbags, examining its microscopic sea-life and mineral composition, and determined the exact beach it had come from, which indeed was not in North America, but in Japan.
Despite the ineffectiveness of the balloons, authorities were still concerned. Their ability to start fires couldn’t be denied and there was also the potential psychological effect they could have on the American people. More importantly, they knew the Japanese had been working to develop biological weapons and a balloon carrying such payloads could potentially do major damage in that way.
To help get around the potential panic, people who found the balloons and reported it to the authorities were sworn to secrecy. In 1945 though, Newsweek ran an article on the weapons, and a similar story appeared in another periodical the next day. The U.S. Office of Censorship (yep, that existed for about four years) sent a notice to the media, asking them not to mention the balloons or balloon-bomb incidents.
Exercising their rights, the press of course continued to notify the U.S. public of the dangers of approaching such balloons if encountered… Or, actually, in reality they complied with the U.S. Office of Censorship and no further reporting was done on the balloons at this time.
This likely contributed to the single successful balloon attack of the war. A pregnant woman, Elsie Mitchell, her husband Pastor Archie of the Bly Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, and five Sunday school children were out for a picnic. While Archie was discussing good fishing spots with a couple construction workers who were working on the road where the group had stopped, Elsie and the kids went to search for a good spot for their picnic. In the process, they found one of the balloons.
Not knowing anything about it, the kids and Elsie went to investigate, with the last words Archie ever heard his wife say, according to the Oregon newspaper, The Mail Tribune, being “Look what I found, dear!”
Richard Barnhouse, one of the construction workers, reported to the Tribune what happened next: “There was a terrible explosion. Twigs flew through the air, pine needles began to fall, dead branches and dust, and dead logs went up.”
When the construction workers and Archie rushed over, they found Elsie and the children’s bodies on the ground around a gaping hole in the earth. Their clothes were on fire, which was quickly put out. All of them but one of the young girls, Joan Patzke, died instantly from the blast. Joan lived for a few minutes after, but then passed away.
After these deaths, the U.S. Office of Censorship rescinded their former blackout on mention of the balloons and the public was informed of them and told if they found any to keep their distance and contact the authorities.
After six months of launches, the balloon attacks stopped abruptly in April of 1945. Allied forces had blown up two Japanese hydrogen plants, cutting resources needed for the balloons. In addition, Japanese commanders, seeing the balloon attacks weren’t very effective relative to the resources expended, discontinued the program.
Expand for References
Fact File: Blackout Bombs, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2865323.stm
Schaefer, Kate, Warbirds and War Balloons: Operation Outward, Historic UK, February 22, 2024, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/History-of-Britain/Barrage-Balloons-Operation-Outward/
Operation Outward, Stratopedia, https://stratocat.com.ar/stratopedia/328.htm
Barnett, Glenn, Another Way to Bomb Germany, Warfare History Network, June 2021, https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/another-way-to-bomb-germany/
Nye, Logan, Britain’s Highly Successful Balloon Attack Against the Nazis, We Are the Mighty, Maria 29, 2020, https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/operation-outward-british-balloons-ww2/
Drapeau, Raoul, Operation Outward: Britain’s World War II Offensive Balloons, IEEE, https://site.ieee.org/ny-monitor/files/2011/09/OPERATION-OUTWARD.pdf
Porter, Antoinette, Tuppence a Day Danger Money, WW2 People’s War, BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/19/a3112219.shtml
Free Balloon Operations in World War Two, http://www.bbrclub.org/free_balloon_operations_in_world.htm
The post The Deadly Bizarre Balloon Blitz Barrage appeared first on Today I Found Out.
A revival of the fantasy genre in recent years has also brought about a revival of historical fiction set in the Middle Ages. With an endless array of titles, we are sure that you can easily visualise scenes from some Hollywood, TV or streaming service production, in which mounted knights charge at a line of terrified spearmen, tattooed Vikings pillage an unfortunate monastery, or some poor sod gets fried in boiling oil while storming a castle.
Decades ago in popular perception, knights and jesters sported lively colours, a fashionable bob hairstyle, and armour was usually shining. In more recent years, it seems more like Mediaeval Europe is constantly smothered in grey and mud, and knights are more interested in oppressing peasants than abiding to their alleged code of chivalry, which, accurate. See our video Did Any Medieval Knight Ever Rescue a Damsel in Distress.
But for whatever reason, popular culture is besotted with the Middle Ages.
The King. The Queen. The Emperors. The Monarchs. Whether evil or righteous, they are frequently portrayed as wielders of absolute power, whose will and authority are uncontested.
It only takes their word to bestow incredible fortune on the story’s protagonist or redress some criminal wrong. And it only takes their whim to heavily tax the poor, burn down some village, behead a jester whose jokes are no longer funny. Or more directly, to unleash a war for their own gain.
But how much of any of that representation corresponds to reality? What kind of power did a Mediaeval monarch actually have?
To begin with, let’s define what we mean by ‘Middle Ages’. There is no universal consensus amongst historiographers, but the majority tend to agree that this is the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire, 476 AD, to the fall of Constantinople, in 1453. Given this is a period about 1,000 years long during which nations and empires rose and fell across the planet, while systems of government underwent gradual and profound changes, let’s just say addressing the question of what amount of power was actually wielded by a given monarch in that vast period is rather complex. BUT a complex topic has never stopped us before, so let’s give it a good old college try looking at some of the most notable leaders in England, France, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Abbasid Caliph, as well as the Great Khan of the Mongols, and what kind of power they actually had.
And we begin with a pivotal event that took place on June 15, 1215, when an assembly of English barons asked King John to sign one of the most important documents in human history.
That document was the Magna Carta, today described by the British parliament as
‘The first document to put into writing the principle that the king and his government was not above the law. It sought to prevent the king from exploiting his power, and placed limits of royal authority by establishing law as a power in itself.’
As for the story behind all this, the much maligned John, also known as ‘Lackland’, reigned over England for a whopping 27 years, from 1189 to 1216. In the year before his death, on June 15, 1215, he agreed to signing the aforementioned ‘Great Charter’.
Leading up to all this, John and his Northern and Eastern barons had not exactly been the best of pals. First, he had exacerbated tensions by increasing taxes, necessary to raise an army against France. These individuals may have been happy to forgive him if they’d gone on to win a war and potentially acquire spoils for all to share in. But when France and King Philip II proceeded to wipe the floor with the King John’s forces as happened at the Battle of Bouvines on July 27, 1214, let’s just say the King’s subjects were displeased.
The debacle precipitated the enmity with the barons, which escalated into a full rebellion. Amongst their many gripes, the noblemen resented John’s autocratic and tyrannical rule. As we shall explore later, it was customary in England to involve councils of barons and bishops in lawmaking, something that the ‘Lackland’ had been accused of not doing.
To be fair, John had simply applied the same leadership style of his predecessors of the House of Angevin, his father Henry II, and his brother Richard the Lionheart.
Sometimes, they didn’t consult with the barons.
Sometimes they did!
Sometimes they didn’t, but said they had!
But again, vassals are quicker to forgive a victorious leader who makes them rich with their victories.
In the end, to make peace with his nobility, King John agreed to sign what may be defined as a loose blueprint for modern constitutions. Naturally given the era and who was pushing for the changes, the Charter made little effort to protect the rights of common folk, focusing instead on the rights of the clergy and the large landholders. But it did introduce important concepts, such as protection from illegal imprisonment, exile and confiscation of land, and the introduction of a relatively fair judicial system. Furthermore, it formalised a permanent council of barons, a predecessor to the modern Parliament.
On top of that, to quote the document,
“‘No ‘scutage’ or ‘aid’ may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent, unless it is for the ransom of our person, to make our eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry our eldest daughter. For these purposes only a reasonable ‘aid’ may be levied …
To obtain the general consent of the realm for the assessment of an ‘aid’ – except in the three cases specified above – or a ‘scutage’, we will cause the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons to be summoned individually by letter.’”
In other words: the King needed the consent of the barons and the clergy before imposing new taxes. And what if the King tried to confiscate goods instead of cash? It stated,
‘No sheriff, royal official, or other person shall take horses or carts for transport from any free man, without his consent … Neither we nor any royal official will take wood for our castle, or for any other purpose, without the consent of the owner.’
Of course, there was always the risk that the judicial system could be manipulated to get rid of adversaries, and confiscate their lands and possessions. Well, not any more in theory, as it states:
‘In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.’
Which is followed by our favourite clause, which reads like a poem:
‘To no one will we sell,
to no one deny, or delay,
right or justice’
The Charter also features interesting articles about freedom of movement:
‘It shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm.’
And then we come to the Council of Barons:
‘The barons shall elect twenty-five of their number to keep, and cause to be observed with all their might, the peace and liberties granted and confirmed to them by this charter.’
So, there you go, some hard checks to prevent the British monarchs from doing as they please!
…Of course, there would be some hiccups, and John himself would almost immediately renegue on his word, begging Pope Innocent III for help – forgetting that the Pontiff had excommunicated him a few years earlier!
In any event, despite all this, the signature of the Magna Carta was a great victory for the barons and set the template for constitutional monarchy. But we should not be swayed into thinking that before 1215 England monarchs held absolute, tyrannical powers. John and the Angevins were more the exception than the rule, and even during their Pre-Carta reigns, they had to keep their despotic tendencies in check.
As to why, it’s important to understand where these individuals derived their powers and what their job was. Specifically, their job description included: governing and administering their kingdom; protecting it from external and internal threats; issuing laws; and ensuring justice was served. To perform these duties, they could, and did, levy taxes on their subjects.
But the legitimacy of their position depended on four sources of power:
First, their subjects. Monarchs needed to be recognised as such, and to be supported by their subjects. As most of their subjects were virtually powerless, in practice this meant that Kings and Queens needed the support of the clergy and the landowners – especially aristocratic landowners, who were also the major providers of military power.
Second, their ancestry. A monarch had to be the direct heir of a previous ruler, or the spouse of an heir.
Third, they needed military power, essentially ‘muscle’ to defend their status as rulers and possessions. Very often, their own position as ruler was the result of a successful invasion or civil war.
Fourth, their power tended to derive from religion. European monarchs needed the backing of the church, and especially the Pope, to claim that it was God’s will if they wore a crown.
In all, if you think about it, this is not terribly different from how rulers today tend to get in power and keep it, albeit, to an extent at least, nixing the ancestry requirement.
But in mediaeval times, three out of four sources of legitimacy and power depended upon external actors to a monarch’s inner circle: the clergy, the landed aristocracy, and the military – the latter two closely intertwined.
Thus, a monarch – even before the Magna Carta – could not go about his or her reigning business without the support of these powerful forces.
As such, the necessary cooperation between the monarch and the barons or similar ruling class was sometimes formalised via a ‘coronation oath’, a practice common in England. The King would swear it at this coronation, and use this oath as a sort of ‘mission statement’, spelling out the general principles to which he would abide.
William the Conqueror’s oath, for example, promised
‘To maintain the Church of God and all Christian people in true peace; to prohibit all orders of men from committing injustice and oppression, and to enjoin the observance of equity and mercy in all judgments’
The Church and the barons, of course, would take note. If the King swayed from his mission statement, they would feel morally justified to rebel. Kings knew it, and thus, in theory at least, imposed themselves a healthy dose of self-restraint. According to Medieval Historian Professor Joel T. Rosenthal,
‘When a king pursued a course of action that flirted too closely with tyranny, or when he appointed men whose origins were thought to debase or sully their positions, he was likely to face noble opposition.’
On top of all this, a European monarch’s actions were also bound to another set of regulations, the so-called ‘feudal contract’.
This was part of the widespread feudal system, itself borne out of a very tangible concern- geography. Kingdoms such as England and France at the time could not be effectively ruled by a single centre of gravitational power, therefore monarchs were forced to decentralise the administrative functions of their government.
Citing again the example of William the Conqueror, the Norman steamroller knew very well that decentralised power was the way to go, and thus divided England into large plots of land, or ‘fiefs’, entrusting them to noblemen or barons, whatever you like to call them.
The barons, in turn, divided their lands into smaller plots, and assigned them to their vassals, who were often knights. Each knight swore fealty to his ‘suzerain’, i.e. the baron, in an act called ‘homage’. As a requirement of this ‘homage, the vassal had to collect taxes on the suzerain’s behalf and provide an agreed number of troops should they be required.
The barons then amassed the taxes, devolving a portion to the King. And just like their knights, the barons were expected to raise a certain number of troops, both skilled knights or part-time men-at-arms when the Kingdom was at war.
At the bottom of the ladder you had peasants, labourers and craftsmen, who just paid taxes to everybody, including the Church.
Through the feudal system, the monarch had thus access to a fairly reliable method to maintain law and order over his realm, to collect revenue, and to raise armies.
The ‘feudal contracts’, however, had to be respected by both parties. For example, when it came to military levies, the King could only ask for a certain number of troops, and for a set number of days in a given year.
A King could slam his fist on the table and angrily demand for more soldiers, sure. But barons could just as well refuse. What would the King do, send an army to impose his will? Not usually under this system as most of his army likely came from the barons themselves.
That said, he could hire mercenaries, right?!?! Well, it’s not so simple once again. No barons on the Crown’s side equaled no taxes, and no taxes meant empty coffers.
That is why European mediaeval monarchs were forced to cooperate with their aristocratic subjects. This cooperation had been a long-standing practice in England since the late 10th Century, since King Aethelstan had instituted the first ‘witan’ or ‘assembly of magnates’, which included bishops, archbishops and ‘thegns’, or landed gentry.
The practice was adopted also by William the Conqueror, who instituted an additional, smaller council of officials and barons which conducted the daily routine of government administration: the ‘curia regis’ or ‘Assembly of the King’.
William’s son, Henry I, recognised the importance of barons in his coronation charter, acknowledging that he had been crowned
‘By the common counsel of the barons of the whole kingdom of England’
He also relied heavily on the advice of the ‘curia regis’, summoning it a total of 27 times over a span of 35 years. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was more than his dad ever did.
By the late 12th Century, the ‘Council of Magnates’, i.e. the successor of the Anglo-Saxon ‘witan’, had grown in importance. So much so that chroniclers referred to it as ‘The Great Council’.
This was summoned whenever the King needed counsel on affairs of state, had to levy a new tax, or enact a new law.
And that’s an important point: lawmaking. As much as Mediaeval monarch wished to wield supreme legislative power, in practice they were limited by their counsellors. Early 13th century cleric and jurist Henry de Bracton wrote
‘Let him, that he be not unbridled, put on the bridle of temperance and the reins of moderation, lest being unbridled, he be drawn toward injustice … The King has a superior, namely, God. Also the law by which he is made King. Also his curia, namely, the earls and barons, because if he is without bridle, that is without law, they ought to put the bridle on him.’
Let’s now look at England’s great rival, France.
By the end of the 12th Century, the authority of the French Crown was arguably weaker than his English counterpart. The feudal system was much stronger, and local lords even had the right to issue their own laws, which completely superseded legislation emanating from Paris.
The French Crown exerted some direct authority only over a small region around the cities of Paris, Orleans and Compiègne, whilst being surrounded by the large holdings, ruled by de-facto independent Counts, or directly controlled by England.
Enter the ‘giga-chad’ of Western Europe, Philip II ‘Augustus’, crowned in 1180 and dying in 1223.
Throughout his reign, this warrior King directly led numerous campaigns against the English and his own vassals to reclaim direct control over France. And indirectly, he contributed to the Crown’s intervention in the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 to 1229. This was a conflict of genocidal proportions, sanctioned by Pope Innocent III against the Cathar heresy in the southern French region of Languedoc. A staunchly independent territory, the prosperous Languedoc was eventually brought under total royal control as a result of the Crusade.
In matters of administration, Philip II was able to put the French nobility in check by allying himself with the local powerful clergy, as well as the rising merchant classes. These budding middle-classes became the emerging powers, especially in larger towns and cities, and were happy to support the Crown financially and militarily.
As Philip gradually eroded the power of barons, he replaced them with a new class of appointed administrators, the bailis, the senechals, and the provosts. These officials were in charge of collecting taxes, recruiting troops and administering justice.
But, of course, power is always a negotiated commodity, and even Philip had to involve his aristocracy in the running of the country. Philip had inherited from his father Louis VII an institution akin to England’s ‘Council of Magnates’ or ‘Great Council’. This was the ‘Royal Council’, an assembly of aristocrats and bishops.
Philip made it permanent, and expanded it by including a Chancellor in charge of government administration, and even clerks of non-aristocratic origin. The Council provided, well, counsel, to the King in matters of internal policy, foreign relations and war. Moreover, this assembly participated in the drafting of legislation, which finally overruled the plethora of locally-issued laws.
Philip, nonetheless, always maintained a high degree of control over his Royal Council, as its size and composition were entirely subject to his discretion. After Philip’s death, his successors found it necessary to expand the size of the Council, hiring large numbers of clerics with legal knowledge. Eventually, in 1239, this group of experts became a separate body, becoming the first incarnation of the French Parliament.
Such levels of centralisation were unheard of in France’s neighbour, the Holy Roman Empire, where the feudal system was ramped up to 11. Centuries later, philosopher Voltaire would famously describe it as such:
‘The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire’
With its large population and land mass, roughly corresponding to today’s Germany and neighbouring territories, the Holy Roman Empire had the potential to easily outclass other European states of the early 13th Century.
But despite the best efforts of its nominal emperors, it never became a centralised nation, remaining a loose union of disparate states.
The Emperors maintained direct control only over a small fraction of their dominion, called the ‘Reichsgut’.
The remainder of the Empire was directly and independently administered by a collection of Dukes, Counts, Marquesses and high-ranking clergymen, collectively known as ‘Princes’. The emperors could call upon them for support in matters of war and foreign policy, but in exchange they had to progressively devolve more and more of their power.
We should also point out that the emperor himself was elected by the Princes, meaning that a prospective candidate had to dish out favours and promises if he wanted their vote.
In 1220, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was elected to the throne. He is widely regarded as one of the most intelligent, effective and progressive monarchs of his time, with the right vision to build a modern, centralised state. But Frederick was also the sovereign of the Kingdom of Sicily, in Southern Italy, and that’s where he focused most of his attention and reforms. To keep the Princes happy north of the Alps, Frederick had to extend and formalise the amount of their power, which he did so by signing the self-explanatory ‘Statute in favour of the Princes’.
In this document, the local rulers of the Holy Roman Empire were referred for the first time as
‘Owners of their own lands’
Which essentially relinquished almost all executive power into their hands.
Let’s take a breather to recap now.
European monarchs’ powers were limited to a higher or lesser degree by the oaths and contracts negotiated with their ruling classes. The extent of these limits depended on the sovereign’s own strategic vision, goals, ambitions, and access to resources. The balance of power between the centre and the periphery thus manifested via the councils of magnates and the feudal administrative system.
We should mention at this stage that the feudal system addressed the issue of delocalised administration, sure, but it may have borne out of external economic pressure, exerted by Islamic expansion.
This is according to Dr Basrowi, Lampung University, and Dr Ajat Sudrajat, University of Jakarta, Indonesia. In their paper Islam and European Feudalism in the Mid-Century, they argue that early Islamic expansion across the Middle East, North Africa, Spain and Southern Italy, cut off much of Europe from lucrative trade routes with said territories.
‘Since the Muslims dominated the Mediterranean Sea in the 8th century, European economy had a drastic deterioration … commerce was ruined or nearly dead. The fall of commerce in this field had pushed Europe to reuse land as a life source.’
In other words, the two scholars describe how feudalism was instituted as a viable way to maintain the productivity of agricultural land, thus ensuring the self-sufficiency of European kingdoms in the absence of foreign commerce. It is an interesting argument, which raises the question of whether feudalism was a system imposed for administrative reasons, or developed to address economic pressure from the Muslim world.
In the second case, we might go one step forward and posit that the Muslim expansion created the system which curtailed the absolute power of European rulers.
In the 11th century, the Italian Maritime Republics – Pisa, Amalfi, Genoa and Venice – resumed trade with the Islamic polities in the Mediterranean. According to the Indonesian scholars, the reawakening of commerce diversified the European economy, initiating the gradual and slow decline of the feudal system. Italian-driven trade also propelled the banking sector, of which Florence was one of the early major centres.
With a diversified economy, declining feudal system, and easy access to cash loans from banks, eventually European monarchs were less reliant on the consensus of barons, and were able to centralise their government apparatus – and their powers.
But we are venturing into the late- and post-Mediaeval eras, so we’ll stop there.
But at this point, we have mentioned the Islamic world, so we’ll take the cue to evaluate the amount of power wielded by rulers in those regions, focusing on the Abbasid Caliphate.
In the Muslim world, a Caliphate is roughly equivalent to an Empire in European terms. The first Islamic Caliphate was the Umayyad one, which propelled the early Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean from the year 661 to 750. After its collapse, the Umayyad empire was replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate. The latter, too, fractured in 861, but was consolidated again in 1118, centred around Baghdad. This Abbasid revival lasted until 1258, and its most successful ruler was Caliph Abū al-Abbās Aḥmad ibn al-Hasan al-Mustaḍi.
Also known as Al-Nasir, or ‘The One who Gives Victory’, this Caliph ruled from March 1180 to October 1225. So, slap bang in the time period we are focusing on!
So, let’s ask the same question once again: what kind of power did the Caliph have? Well, pretty much absolute, it appears. At least more extensive than the power wielded by his European counterparts.
According to Professors Aftab Hussain Gillani and Mohammad Tahir, Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan:
‘In theory the Caliph was still subject to the rule of the sharia, the holy law of Islam. But in practice, these checks on his authority were not effective since there was no machinery other than revolt for its enforcement. The Abbasid caliphate was thus a despotism based on military force claiming almost divine right to rule.’
The Abbasid Caliphs upheld their legitimacy by defining themselves as
‘The vicegerent of God (Khalifatuallah) and God’s shadow on the earth (Zillallahi ala’l -ard)’
Thus the Pakistani Professors define Caliph Al-Nasir as
‘An autocrat claiming a divine origin for his authority, resting it on a salaried bureaucracy.’
But this despot applied healthy principles of meritocracy:
‘Pedigree was no help to advancement, but only the favour of the sovereign, and an official hierarchy thus replaced the Arab aristocracy.’
The Abbasids rulers, and Caliph Al-Nasir in particular, took much inspiration from the ruling practices and the bureaucracy of the Sassanid Empire, modern-day Iran. Thus, Al-Nasir hired many Persian administrators, and welcomed talent from other non-Arab regions, including non-Muslims.
However absolute, the rule of the Caliph required the employment of regional and local governors. Unlike European barons, who inherited their title from their parents, local Abbasid governors had to be appointed directly by the Caliph, via a ‘deed of investiture’. This method favoured meritocracy, but it also ensured that the territories of the Caliphate would be administered by loyal officials, a direct projection of the sovereign’s power.
Local officials, once appointed, had pretty much free reign in how they administered their cities and regions, especially if distant from the capital Baghdad. The central government only interfered when trouble was brewing, or when the taxes went unpaid. .
Another difference from European kingdoms was the centralisation of military power:
‘The army, too, belonged to the court, the nucleus of it being concentrated in the Caliph’s residence.’
European kingdoms still relied on baron’s armies for funding and manpower, while the Abbasid Caliphate was already able to pay for and maintain a centralised military. How could they afford so much cash?
Well, first of all the Abbasid Caliphate controlled some of the most lucrative land trade routes in the world, as it was strategically placed along the legendary Silk Road.
Then, came the worldwide and well-established tradition of rapine war, i.e. raiding enemy territory to plunder their riches.
Next, good old boring taxation.
And when the Caliph was short on cash, he could apply the practice of Iqta, sometimes mistakenly described as equivalent to the feudal system. The Iqta was actually a land grant, awarded to army officers for limited periods of time. The lands granted as part of the Iqta were owned by non-Muslims, who paid the kharaj, a type of property tax.
The original owners of the land in question legally maintained their property, but paid the kharaj to the officer who had received the Iqta grant. The officer pocketed the kharaj, then paid a smaller tithe to the Caliph, keeping the balance as his salary.
Now, the Abbasid armies, however well funded, were largely composed of mercenary troops. Which might pose a risk in themselves to the absolute rule of the monarch. What if they asked for a pay raise? What if they become too powerful, an empire in their own right? Better keep them under control!
For this reason, the Abbasid Caliph devolved part of his military power to a newly instituted official, the ‘shahna’, translated as ‘commissary’ or ‘military governor’, who also had
‘The duty of keenly watching the moves of the game on the part of [the Caliph’s] rivals’
To be precise, Abbasid forces were not entirely in the palm of the Caliph or his ‘shahna’.
Large, peripheral regions could be entrusted to a specially appointed ruler, a Sultan. Sultans had almost total sovereignty over their territory, so much so that their title could be inherited. They could also raise and command armies on their own, and even wage war as they saw fit. A well-known example is the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, Saladin: while formally subordinate to Al-Nasir,, had the agency to initiate numerous wars against European Crusaders and rival Muslim dynasties.
Besides military authority, Al-Nasir and his predecessors also devolved part of their executive power to the ‘Wazir’ or Minister, often rendered in the west as ‘Vizier’.
(That’s Jafar, basically!)
‘The Wazir stood next to the caliph and acted as his alter ego … vested with absolute and
unfettered discretion in all matters concerning the state. With the help of their … wazirs, the Abbasids were able to streamline the existing administrative structure.’
In 1258, the Abbasid Caliphate collapsed under the attacks of a Mongol ruler called Hülegü, who happened to be the grandson of Temujin, better known as Genghis Khan, or ‘universal ruler’.
Temujin had founded the Mongol empire in 1206, becoming its first Khagan, or emperor. Between that date and his death in 1227, the Mongol dominion expanded into the largest contiguous land empire in history, extending from the Pacific Ocean to the Danube river.
That makes him the most powerful monarch we discussed so far, sure. But ruling over such vast and diverse lands is no easy task.
As much as he was swift and ruthless in battle, Temujin was not a full-on despot, who relied on meritocracy, a well-oiled administration, and a complex source of legitimacy, blending divine authority with pragmatic law-making.
Let’s first address local government. According to Professor Beverly May Carl, Dedman School of Law, Dallas, Genghis Khan had little interest in directly ruling over every single conquered land, as long as it provided revenue.
His empire’s provinces were managed via a military-feudal system, in which authority was entrusted to commanders who had proved themselves on the battlefield, or capable civilian officials. Very often, the latter were recruited amongst the conquered population, provided they had the right leadership skills. Local governorships were not inherited, and new local administrators had to earn their position.
Provincial governments enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy, as it respected the customs and religious practices of the subjects. Yet, they were still expected to enact a number of provisions mandated from Temujin’s court, relayed by an army of fast messengers on horseback. These messengers had access to supply stations placed at regular intervals along the many roads of the empire, and took less than one month to traverse the length of the Khaganate.
Temujin’s central court provided services similar to the European councils of magnates or the Caliphate’s officials. This body was organised over two main layers: an inner circle, composed of Temujin’s ‘urugh’, or ‘Golden Kin’. His family, in other words.
Before you scream: ‘hang on, what about meritocracy, then?’ – allow us to clarify. The second layer of central administration was entrusted to professional clerks and officials. At the start of Temujin’s rule, these were picked amongst hostages kidnapped from rival clans, but later the Khagan imported talent from China, Persia, and other subject territories.
While serving the vision of Temujin, these two layers also contributed to keeping him in check. The Khagan had to weigh in the contributions and goals of several disparate factions, and thus his government style was never autocratic.
Which brings us to the question of legitimacy. Temujin and his Golden Kin firmly believed that their right to rule had a divine origin, as the ‘Blue Eternal Heaven’ had bequeathed them the World, for them to conquer.
According to Prof Carl, however, Temujin did not consider himself to be anointed by God, let alone his ‘viceregent’ on Earth – unlike European or Muslim monarchs.
If Temujin was to be subjected to a higher authority, that would be his own Great Law, a legal body drawn from the customs and traditions of nomadic tribes, as well as the pre-existing laws of conquered nations.
The Great Law contained legislation which errs a tad on the draconian side, such as imposing the death penalty on cattle rustlers. But it also had some rather progressive concepts for its time. The most important of which was that nobody, not even the Khagan or his Golden Kin, were exempt from the Great Law.
This all brings us to a slightly different kind of monarch of a sort who on the surface had very little way of enforcing his will, but arguably was one of the most powerful individuals in the world during his reign. This individual directly controlled only a small territory in central Italy, had a very small military and lacked what we would call today ‘power projection’, at least in traditional terms. Moreover, he was an elected monarch, with no possibility to sire official heirs.
We are referring to the Pope of the Catholic Church.
In the period we have taken into consideration, this position was filled by two formidable individuals, Innocent III and Honorius III. Despite the limitations of their temporal power, these rulers were recognised by Catholic monarchs and barons as successors of Saint Peter, and heads of the Church.
As such, they could wield and project an enormous amount of influence over worldwide affairs. Some of the most notable tools at the Popes’ disposals included:
Excommunication. Described by Britannica as a
‘Form of ecclesiastical censure by which a person is excluded from the communion of believers, the rites or sacraments of a church, and the rights of church membership but not necessarily from membership in the church as such’
Considering that European monarchs often based their legitimacy on the Catholic faith, being excommunicated was quite a big deal. As mentioned earlier, King John begged Pope Innocent III for forgiveness in 1215, after a previous quarrel had led to his excommunication.
Which leads us to the second tool:
Vassalage!
As a prerequisite for revoking excommunication, Innocent effectively placed John under his vassalage, requiring the payment of an annual tax of 1,000 marks.
If a monarch brushed off excommunication, and refused to become a vassal of the Pope, the Pontiff could issue an act of
Deposition!
In other words: declaring that a monarch or baron no longer had the right to rule, and their lands were up for grabs! The principle of deposition was developed by the Papacy at the end of the 12th century, with Innocent and Honorius being the first to use it as a threat.
In particular, they used it to threaten rulers accused of being heretics, or simply of failing to persecute heresy. In a notable example, in 1217 Honorius III wrote to King James I of Aragon, scolding him for his support of Cathar heretics in French Languedoc. Should the King continue to do so, the Pope would declare Aragon open to invasion.
Which leads nicely to the most spectacular and visible of Papal ‘power tools’:
Calling for a Crusade!
Cathars and their local allies had been fighting against crusader forces since 1209, when Innocent III had issued a call for a Crusade against them. In very basic terms, it only took for a Pontiff to write a letter along the lines of
‘Whomsoever fights in a holy Crusade against the infidels and/or the heretics for a period of 40 days, shall be absolved of all sins’
And boom! Just like that, thousands of professional knights, men-at-arms and improvised soldiers with apparently guilty consciousness would rock up in Southern France or the Levant, ready to skewer, or be skewered by, the enemies of Catholicism.
Throughout their rule, the two Popes directly initiated three major conflicts: the 4th and 5th Crusades against Muslim states in the Levant, and the Albigensian Crusade. The 4th Crusade was a complete FUBAR, ending with the devastation of Byzantium. While the Albigensian Crusade resulted in an estimated one million deaths, and the almost total annihilation of Languedoc culture of Southern France.
So, yeah – pretty powerful guys. But how much of that was unbridled power?
Just like the other monarchs mentioned so far, the Popes, too, listened to the advice of an assembly, in this case their Curia, composed of Cardinals. Honorius III, in particular, placed great importance on the counsel of these prelates.
And, according to Dr Benedict Wiedemann, University College London, it was through the Curia that European rulers could exert their own influence over Papal affairs. Many of the Cardinals comprising the Curia also served, or had served, as nuncios, or Papal legates abroad. While working in the European capitals, some of these ambassadors had developed close relationships with monarchs, barons, even knights.
Thus, when the prelates were summoned to the Curia, their friends abroad could take the occasion to plead for their favour, steering Papal policies in a favourable direction. In other words, as much as the likes of Innocent and Honorius could exert control across Europe, their own decisions may have been influenced by other leaders.
But summing up all of this, the tyrannical, all-powerful, Mediaeval monarch is a bit of an exaggeration brought about by popular culture. Granted, especially in movies, it is easier and more entertaining to portray characters with absolute agency, rather than filming lengthy scenes of negotiations in which a King or a Kaghan has to moderate the opinions of dozens of barons or salaried clerks.
Now, up to a point they could have their way with the plebeians to an extent, at least until some evolution in law that occurred throughout all this, but a great way to piss off a baron would be to mess with his subjects too much, thereby potentially hurting his own labour force and ability to do his thing, let alone if extreme enough fermenting a peasant revolt, which is never good for business. From this, you might be unsurprised to learn that the Braveheart idea of Jus Primae Noctis, right of the ruler to sleep with any bride on her wedding night, does not have ever appeared to have been a real thing either. While subjects weren’t exactly generally treated well, there were limits to what even humans back then would tolerate from their rulers. The barons needed the people’s support to an extent. And the king needed the barons’ support, so none of them could get along very long pissing off their underlings too much.
That said, as we covered in depth in our video: Did Any Medieval Knights Ever Rescue a Damsel in Distress, let’s just say neighbouring barons attacking an enemy’s land were happy to slaughter and maim the lower classes on a whim, often precisely because it hurt their enemy’s standing amongst their own subjects and took away some of their labour forces. Afterall, one of the main points of even the barons was to keep the common man relatively safe from such things.
As an example of this sort of thing and how common it appears to have been, we have one 12th century chronicler Orderic Vitalis extolling the virtues of a knight for choosing NOT to slaughter a large group of peasants. As outlined in historian Catherine Hanley’s book War and Combat, 1150-1270: “he describes a raiding expedition undertaken by a young knight, during which his men destroy the homes of a group of peasants and kill their livestock. The peasants themselves flee to huddle around a cross; the knight spares their lives, and this charitable deed, according to [Vitalis] deserves to be remembered forever.”
Indeed, so brave; so noble.
In contrast, a 12th century knight and lord Waleran Count of Mellent was noted as simply cutting off one of the feet of any peasants he encountered while in his enemies’ lands. The idea being that lord now had not only just lost a useful worker, but also had an extra crippled and unhappy individual on his hands to manage, assuming the individual survived the de-feeting encounter with Count Waleran.
But going back to the kings and queens, mediaeval monarchs also had to contend with some very practical headaches when it came to administering their lands. They could not project their central authority everywhere at once, thus they needed to keep their vassals and administrators on their side, so that they could govern locally on their stead.
They also needed money, so, once again, they needed the cooperation of a delocalised structure to bring in those sweet tithes and taxes.
And they needed soldiers to wage wars! Thus, monarchs were careful not to rub their vassals the wrong way, lest they refused to fund and raise new levies.
The Abbasid Caliph and the Mongol Kaghan may have enjoyed more direct control and power over their Empires, thanks to larger, centrally funded, professional or semi-professional armies who could enforce their rule. Nonetheless, they still had to delegate part of their power to courts of skilled advisors, networks of decentralised governors, and military commanders. All of whom had to be kept happy lest they stage a rebellion!
Besides, as was the case of Temujin, they may have chosen not to place themselves above the Law.
The case of the Papacy in the early 13th Century is an interesting and rather unique one due to the skill of the individual Popes and their ability to combine a very effective set of tools. But their own power was subject to the influence of their cardinals, and external pressure from other rulers as well. In all cases a delicate dance between monarchs and their wealthy underlings, and the underlings with their subjects in the dust whose labours everything else was built on.
So, in conclusion: did mediaeval monarchs wield great amounts of power?
Sure, they were unelected Heads of State, Heads of Government, Heads of the Army and Chief Legislators after all. But their power was a result of a constant negotiation with those who advised them, funded them and fought for them, and thus subject to some level of checks and balances, even if by modern standards, rather insufficient in many respects.
BONUS FACT
We mentioned court jesters a couple of times, so it was interesting to discover how they were actually treated by their employers. Pretty well, it turns out.
According to chronicler Thomas Blount, writing in 1679, during the reign of either King Henry I or Henry II of England, a certain jester called Roland enjoyed particular favour at court. So much so, that for his services, he had been rewarded with a country manor in Hemingston, Suffolk, surrounded by 110 acres of land.
But there was a catch: Roland had to pay rent. Not in cash, mind you but by performing one job, once a year at Christmas:
‘Before our Sovereign Lord the King of England he should perform at the same time and only once, one jump, one whistle, and one fart’
It appears that this privilege was revoked, and either Roland and his successors had to pay an annual rent of 26 shillings and 8 pence. But for a good amount of time, Roland the Jester, aka Roland the Farter, was allowed to live in a sweet pad in Southern England at the cost of one fart per year!
Much more on the life of a court jester can be found in our video: What was it actually like to be a court jester in mediaeval times?
Expand for References
https://www.britannica.com/topic/monarchy/Premodern-monarchies#:~:text=Compared%20to%20their%20predecessors%2C%20the,on%20interstate%20war%20and%20conquest.
http://www.instoria.it/home/re_medioevo.htm.
https://sitelines.newcastle.gov.uk/sites/default/files/MEDIEVAL%20PERIOD.pdf
https://www.academia.edu/83867748/LUOMO_MEDIEVALE_A_CURA_DI_JACQUES_LE_GOFF_PDF_COMPLETO
https://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/historia/article/view/12134
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/medieval-times/social-institutions-in-the-islamic-world/a/medieval-muslim-societies
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/188156/1/pjcss195.pdf
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28484146
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239731366_An_Exploration_of_Monarchical_Power_in_Late_Medieval_England
https://www.academia.edu/83867748/LUOMO_MEDIEVALE_A_CURA_DI_JACQUES_LE_GOFF_PDF_COMPLETO
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/magna_carta#:~:text=The%20Magna%20Carta%20was%20a,ruled%20with%20relatively%20absolute%20power.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/magna-carta/
https://www.parliament.uk/magnacarta/#:~:text=Magna%20Carta%20was%20issued%20in,as%20a%20power%20in%20itself.
https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_MOND_122_0151–empire-fitting-systems-of-government.htm
https://osf.io/nmc98/download/?format=pdf
https://silapatharcollege.edu.in/online/attendence/classnotes/files/1623211617.docx
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Philip-II-king-of-France
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Innocent-III-pope#:~:text=Elected%20pope%20on%20January%208,of%20papal%20power%20within%20the
https://academic.oup.com/book/32805/chapter-abstract/274636469?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=true
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Honorius-III
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/khan1/hd_khan1.htm
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/mongols/mongol-government/4DEE13CA9B2862092D4D7F3C6D6AE809
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/mongols#:~:text=Genghis%20Khan%20helped%20allay%20this,military%2Dfeudal%20form%20of%20government.
https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1547&context=lbra
https://rowlandgenealogy.com/roland-the-farter-one-jump-one-whistle-and-one-fart/
The post What Kind of Power Did a Medieval Monarch Actually Have? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On the morning of August 16, 1956, an alert reached controllers at Oxnard Air Force Base, just north of Los Angeles: a rogue aircraft was headed towards the City of Angels. It was the call the pilots of the 437th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron had been waiting for their entire careers. Minutes later, a pair of fighter jets roared down the runway and streaked into the sky towards the steadily-approaching target. What followed was one of the most embarrassing and darkly hilarious incidents in the history of the United States Air Force, a comedy of errors that left a trail of destruction across southern California and revealed just how vulnerable America was in the early days of the Cold War. This is the story of the Battle of Palmdale.
The aircraft that appeared in the skies over southern California that day in 1956 was not a lumbering Soviet bomber looking to turn Los Angeles into a smoking radioactive wasteland, but something much smaller: an F6F-5K target drone. As covered in our previous video Tesla, Hollywood, and Inventing the Drone, what we now know as UAVs or “drones” started out as primitive cruise missiles before finding greater success as unmanned targets for fighter pilots and antiaircraft gunners. While some drones were purpose-built from the ground up, others were simply converted from readily-available surplus aircraft. Such was the case with the F6F-5K, an adaptation of the legendary WWII-era Grumman F6F Hellcat naval fighter. Fitted with radio control equipment and painted bright red for visibility, Hellcat drones were used by the U.S. Navy in a variety of roles, such as attacking bridges in Korea, collecting air samples after nuclear weapons tests, and as targets for prototype guided missiles like the Sperry AIM-7 Sparrow.
At 11:34 AM on August 16, an F6F-5K was launched from the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu, 30 kilometres northwest of Los Angeles, for a missile test over the Pacific Ocean. But instead of flying its intended course, the drone suddenly lost contact with its controllers and veered towards the southeast – heading straight for Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the Navy had no aircraft available that could intercept the drone; so, swallowing their pride, they called up the Air Force fighter squadron at Oxnard and informed them of the approaching threat. In response, Oxnard scrambled a pair of Northrop F-89 Scorpion aircraft to intercept. Introduced in 1950, the Scorpion was a state-of-the-art interceptor – the first post-war jet designed from the ground up to shoot down Soviet nuclear bombers. Capable of reaching speeds of 1,000 kilometres per hour and altitudes of 15,000 metres, it was equipped with a sophisticated Hughes E-6 fire control system and armed with 104 2.75-inch Mark 4 “Mighty Mouse” unguided rockets mounted in wingtip pods. Flying the first interceptor that day were First Lieutenant Hans Einstein and his radar observer, First Lieutenant Clennon Murray; while the second aircraft was manned by pilot First Lieutenant Richard Hurliman and radar observer First Lieutenant Walter Hale.
Flying at full afterburner, the interceptors caught up with the drone near Santa Paula, just northeast of Los Angeles. Cut off from radio control, the drone was flying erratically, forcing the pilots to wait until it veered over an unpopulated area before taking their shot. Slowly, the drone banked over the northern edge of the city and headed northeast over Fillmore, Frazier Park, and finally Antelope Valley. Seizing their chance, the pilots moved in for the kill. The F-89’s Hughes E-6 system allowed the rockets to be fired automatically when the target moved into the intercept radar beam, and could be set to two different modes: one for firing from behind, and one for firing from the side. As the drone was constantly turning, the pilots chose the second mode, lined up their shot, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Swinging around for another pass, they locked onto the target again, pulled the trigger and…still nothing. Thanks to a design flaw in the fire-control system, the rockets refused to launch, forcing the pilots to switch to manual firing. But, there was a problem: while the aircraft were delivered from the factory with optical gunsights, these were removed as unnecessary when the automatic fire-control system was installed. The pilots had no choice but to trust their instincts and line up their shots as best they could.
By this time, the drone had changed course back towards Los Angeles. Running out of time, one aircraft fired an initial volley of 42 rockets – all of which missed. Then the second aircraft fired. The 42 rockets passed just under the drone – some even bouncing off the bottom of its fuselage – but none exploded. As the drone approached a suburban town of Newhall, both aircraft fired another volley of 42 rockets, but once again every single one missed. Finally, as the drone veered once again in the direction of Palmdale, the pilots fired one last salvo of 30 rockets each…to no avail. Yes, over the course of the pursuit, the interceptors had fired a total of 208 rockets- over populated regions no less, and yet their target was still flying. In the end, the plucky little red drone was eliminated not by the might of the U.S. Air Force, but simple fuel starvation, spiralling earthward 11 kilometres east of Palmdale and taking out a power line before ploughing into the ground near Avenue P and disintegrating.
But the Battle of Palmdale was far from over, for the civilians on the ground now had to contend with the path of destruction wrought by the Air Force’s failed interception. Throughout the incident, Mk.4 rockets rained down on the Palmdale Area like hail, with all but 15 of the high-explosive warheads detonating on impact. The first salvo ignited a brush fire near the town of Castaic, while rockets from the second salvo set fire to oil sumps in Placerita Canyon and brush in Soledad Canyon and Santa Claritya. Over 500 firefighters were called in to tackle the blazes, which consumed over 4 square kilometres before being put out. One fire came within 100 metres of the Bermite Powder explosives factory, but was thankfully extinguished just in time.
Meanwhile, civilians throughout the Palmdale area experienced a number of harrowing close calls. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
“Edna Carlson, who lived in the home on Third Street East, said that a chunk of shrapnel from one Air Force rocket burst through the front window of her home, ricocheted off the ceiling, went through a wall and came to rest in a kitchen cupboard.”
Shrapnel from another rocket blasted through the garage of one J.R. Hingle, nearly striking a guest named Lilly Willinghann, while in Leona Valley a rocket detonated just in front of a station wagon being driven by 17-year-old Larry Kemptin and his mother Bernice. The explosion shredded the left front tire and peppered the radiator and windshield with holes, but neither occupant was injured. And in perhaps the closest call of them all, two men in Placerita Canyon had just left their truck to eat lunch under a tree when a rocket struck the vehicle and destroyed it. But the danger still wasn’t over, for 15 unexploded rockets still remained embedded in the ground, ready to go off at any moment. The Air Force circulated notices warning civilians not to approach the weapons, and with the help of the local Sheriff’s department safely detonated all 15 where they had fallen. Miraculously, despite the fires and the dozens of near-misses, no one was injured in the Battle of Palmdale.
The events of August 16, 1956 dramatically illustrated how vulnerable 1950s America was to aerial attack. Had the runaway drone instead been a fleet of Soviet bombers, the chances of the Air Force shooting down every aircraft and averting the destruction of Los Angeles would have been slim. This failure in turn revealed the glaring flaws in the E-6 fire control system and the Mk. 4 rocket, the latter of which was retired as an air-to-air weapon and successfully adapted to the ground-attack role. In its place, in 1957 the Air Force adopted a truly frightening weapon: the AIR-2 Genie, an unguided air-launched rocket armed with a 1.5 kiloton nuclear warhead that relied on its enormous blast and radiation radius to take out multiple Soviet bombers at once. While more sophisticated guided missiles like the Hughes AIM-4 Falcon and Sperry AIM-7 Sparrow soon became available, the Genie remained in service with the USAF and the Royal Canadian Air Force for decades, only being retired in 1985.
To avoid incidents like the Battle of Palmdale, today most military drones are fitted with failsafes that cause them to automatically enter a holding patten and return to base when they lose contact with their controllers. But accidents still occasionally happen. For example, on September 13, 2009, a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper attack drone on a mission over Afghanistan suffered a “lost link “ and went rogue, forcing U.S. Air Force fighter aircraft to shoot it down before it wandered out of Afghan airspace. Thankfully, such incidents are few and far in between and rarely result in injuries. It’s when rogue drones start turning around and firing back that we should really start to worry. And when that inevitably happens, I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
Expand for References
Baraniuk, Chris, The Runaway Drone That Caused a Cold War Air Battle, BBC Future, August 16, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160811-the-runaway-drone-that-caused-a-cold-war-air-battle
Battle of Palmdale, http://415vva.homestead.com/Mil_Hist___Battle_of_Palmdale.pdf
Rasmussen, Cicilia, ‘Battle of Palmdale’: Sound, Fury and 1 Lost Plane, Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2005, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-sep-11-me-then11-story.html
Hsu, Jeremy, Air Force Shoots Down Runaway Drone Over Afghanistan, Popular Science, September 14, 2009, https://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-09/when-drones-go-wild-air-force-shoots-them-down/
The post The Cold War’s Most Pathetically Hilarious Air Battle appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On March 21, 2003, in one of the first combat operations of the U.S.-led invasion or Iraq, a combined force of American, British, and Polish troops attacked and captured the Persian Gulf port of Umm Qasr. Throughout the invasion and the subsequent occupation, Umm Qasr would serve as a vital shipping terminal for humanitarian aid. But before any supplies could be landed, the port had to be cleared of mines and other explosives left behind by Iraqi forces. This proved a daunting task, with the thick mud at the harbour bottom reducing Explosive Ordnance Disposal or EOD teams to grope about in near-zero visibility. In response, the U.S. Navy dispatched its most elite diving team to Iraq. Trained for years by the Navy’s foremost experts, these divers could plunge more than 300 metres beneath the waves, hold their breath for up to 15 minutes, and do so all day long without suffering from the bends. Using their highly attuned senses, they could easily locate foreign objects in even the murkiest of waters, allowing them to clear over 100 mines and booby traps from Umm Qasr within weeks. And what’s more, they performed this heroic duty for no greater reward than a snack of fish. As you might have guessed, these superhuman sailors – named Makai and Tacoma – were not, in fact, human, but bottlenose dolphins. For over 60 years, the U.S. Navy has used trained dolphins and sea lions to carry out a variety of specialized missions, from espionage and mine clearance to defending naval bases from enemy divers, using their superior endurance and senses to perform tasks human divers cannot. But while the program has been highly successful, with the animals proving superior to even the most sophisticated drone technology, it has also attracted considerable controversy, with animal welfare activists accusing the Navy of abuse and questioning the ethics of using animals in warfare in the first place. This is fascinating story of the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program.
The remarkable intelligence of marine mammals has long been known, with nautical lore abounding with tales of shipwrecked sailors being rescued by dolphins, porpoises, and other creatures. However, it would not be until the mid-20th century that anyone attempted to exploit these abilities for use in warfare. Among the first was Swedish behavioural scientist Valdemar Fellenius, who in 1941 established a facility at Gålö near Stockholm to train a group of harbour seals to locate and mark mines, submarines, torpedoes, and other naval ordnance. While Fellenius’s efforts were successful, the Swedish Navy was less than impressed, and in 1943 the project was shut down without the seals ever having been used in the field.
In 1959, the U.S. Navy launched its own dolphin research program in an attempt to develop new hydrodynamic shapes and coatings for torpedoes. In the course of this research, Navy scientists noted the dolphins’ exceptional intelligence and trainability and wondered if these could be exploited to perform specialized underwater missions. Thus, in 1962, a special research program was established at Point Mugu near Oxnard, California. Over the next decade, the program carried out experiments with various small marine mammals including bottlenose dolphins, beluga whales, porpoises, pilot whales, orcas, seals, and California sea lions – as well as non-mammal species such as sharks and rays – before finally settling on dolphins and sea lions as the ideal candidates. Not only can dolphins dive down to depths of 300 metres, but their exceptional natural sonar abilities allow them to easily locate objects buried in the seafloor even in pitch darkness. Sea lions can only dive down to 200 metres, but compensate for this with exceptional eyesight, speed, and agility.
The first Navy-trained marine mammal to be deployed in the field was a bottlenose dolphin named Tuffy, who in 1965 participated in the SEALAB II project, an effort to determine whether humans could live and work under the sea for extended periods. Over the course of the project, Tuffy was trained to ferry messages and supplies between the surface and the pressurized Sealab habitat, 62 metres below the Pacific Ocean off La Jolla, California. Tuffy was also trained to find and guide lost or injured divers back to the habitat. That same year, the Navy deployed 5 dolphins to Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam to carry out underwater surveillance of North Vietnamese naval bases and defend U.S. vessels from attack by enemy divers. This unit would remain in Vietnam until the end of the war in 1975.
Based on these early successes, in 1967 the Navy Marine Mammal Program was officially classified and moved to a new facility at Point Loma near San Diego. A second facility was also established in Hawaii at the Marine Corps Air Station at Kāneʻohe Bay. By the 1980s, the NMMP had a budget of $8 million dollars and had trained over 100 dolphins, sea lions, and beluga whales – which can dive deeper and operate in colder waters than most other marine mammals. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Navy dolphins were deployed to the Persian Gulf to defend Bahraini ports, American warships, and Kuwaiti oil tankers against Iraqi forces, playing a small but key role in the success of Operation Desert Storm. With the end of the Cold War, however, the strategic importance of the Marine Mammal Program declined, and the unit was downsized and eventually declassified. Yet the Navy’s cetacean sailors continued to serve both at home and abroad; during the 1996 Republican Convention in San Diego, for instance, dolphins patrolled the harbour against infiltration by foreign agents or protestors.
Today, the Marine Mammal Program has a budget of $40 million and employs 77 dolphins and 47 sea lions – as well as 54 civilians, six Army veterinary surgeons, 220 contractors, and 22 graduate students. The program’s animals, which in Navy jargon are referred to as Advanced Biological Weapon Systems or ABWS, are divided into five teams, designated Mk.[“Mark”] 4, Mk.5, Mk.6, Mk.7, and Mk.8. Each of these teams specializes in a different mission. For example, Mk.4 and Mk.7 use dolphins to locate and mark underwater mines, with the Mk.4 dolphins specializing in floating tethered mines and the Mk.7 dolphins in seafloor mines. The dolphins are trained to search an area using their natural sonar then return to their handler, using a variety of body movements to communicate the type of object found. They are then given a special marker buoy, which they use to locate the object for inspection and disposal by Navy EOD teams. Mk.8 dolphins also specialize in locating mines, however, they are not trained to mark them, Rather, they are used to find corridors through minefields and other defences and guide landing craft and other vessels ashore during amphibious assaults.
The Mk.6 team is trained for force protection, using dolphins and sea lions as sentries to defend naval bases against infiltration by enemy combat swimmers. For this task, dolphins are provided with a special device which they are trained to attach to the air tanks of any diver they encounter. The device then deploys a marker buoy fitted with a small explosive charge, which alerts defending forces to the swimmer’s presence. Sea lions carry a similar device that attaches to a swimmer’s limbs using a handcuff mechanism. Over the years, rumours have circulated that NMMP animals have been trained to use special weapons like poison dart guns to neutralize enemy swimmers – and cue the jokes about “frickin’ sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their frickin’ heads”… Indeed, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, sensational headlines announced that flooding had released a number of armed dolphins from a Navy facility in Louisiana into the surrounding waters…in spite of the fact that no such facility exists. But while foreign marine mammal programs may employ such tactics, the U.S. Navy has vehemently denied that it has trained any of its marine mammals for attack, citing the simple fact that they would be unable to distinguish between friendly and enemy divers. Dolphins are also extremely empathetic and able to detect a dying diver’s distress, meaning that even if a dolphin could be enticed to kill, it would be unlikely to do it again. Nonetheless, the mere presence of trained dolphin sentries is often enough to deter even the hardiest of divers. As Kaj Larsen, a former Navy SEAL explains:
“The truth is, it’s really one of the most effective ways to prevent attacks by combat divers, because everything else doesn’t really work. We really have no way to defeat a dolphin. You’re in their element, and they find you every single time underwater…It’s scary when you’re in the dark, cold water and you know that there is a huge dolphin somewhere out there. It’s definitely a gut-check.”
Finally, the last NMMP team, Mk. 5, is trained to find and recover test equipment such as experimental torpedoes and missiles from the ocean floor. The animals do this either using marker buoys like the Mk. 4 and 7 dolphins, or using a special “grabber claw” mounted on a harness or mouthpiece that latches onto the object to be recovered. Once attached, the claw deploys either a recovery line or flotation bag to allow the object to be returned to the surface.
All five NMMP teams can be deployed anywhere in the world with 72 hours’ notice, the animals being transported on special hammocks suspended in water-filled pens which can be carried aboard ships, cargo aircraft, and even helicopters. While on duty, the animals are fitted with an Anti Foraging Device or AFD, a muzzle or strip of velcro that prevents them from opening their mouths and eating. According to the Navy, this is to prevent the dolphins from ingesting harmful objects. Another tool used by NMMP teams is a “recall pinger”, an ultrasonic noisemaker that dolphins are trained to home in on. This is typically used to find and recover lost animals who fail to return to base after a mission.
While the NMMP is the oldest and best-known Navy mammal program in the world, it is not the only one. Currently, three other nations are known or suspected to have similar programs: Russia, Israel, and North Korea. The Russian program, which began in the 1970s, is the largest and most diverse in the world, and is divided into two main projects: one based near Murmansk in the Arctic Ocean employing seals and beluga whales, and other based in Sevastopol on the Black Sea using dolphins. The Black Sea team is believed to have been deployed to defend the port of Tartus during the Syrian Civil War, while on April 23, 2019, a Russian-trained beluga whale appeared off the coast of Norway. Dubbed “Hvaldimir” by the locals, it wore a special harness thought to be for a camera or other sensors, indicating that Russian Navy belugas are mainly used for surveillance.
According to Dough Cartilage of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, who once visited the “Dolphin Division” base in Sevastopol, Russian Navy dolphins are trained to deploy from aircraft using specially-designed parachutes or even from helicopters hovering at 50 metres. Cartlidge was also shown a nasty little device designed to be attached to enemy combat swimmers and inject their bodies with carbon dioxide: “As the commander there said to me: “That would bring him to the surface.” It would, of course. But it would be with his guts spewing out both ends.”
Lovely…
Russian dolphins have also reportedly been armed with knives to attack enemy swimmers, but for the psychological reasons previously explained, this is unlikely to be effective. The CO2 injector, on the other hand, can be remotely activated long after the dolphin has attached it, getting around this problem. Israeli and North Korean navy dolphins have allegedly also been trained for attack missions, but relatively little is known about these programs.
While the NMMP has proven remarkably effective, from the very beginning it and similar programs have come under fire from animal welfare activists, who argue not only that the Navy’s treatment of its dolphins and sea lions is cruel, but the very practice of using animals in warfare is unethical. Much of this criticism is leveled at the small pens the animals are housed in when off-duty and the even smaller containers in which they are transported to deployment zones. This, activists argue, as well as transporting the animals to unfamiliar environments halfway across the world, induces extreme levels of stress that can severely impact the animals’ health and quality of life. Indeed, when in the 1980s the Navy considered using dolphins to guard the Trident missile submarine base at Bangor, Washington, they were sued by activists arguing that moving the dolphins from California to the colder waters of Washington would harm the animals. A judge ruled that a study had to be completed before the move could be carried out, but the Navy ultimately abandoned the project.
The use of Anti-Foraging Devices has also proven controversial. While the Navy maintains that these are meant to prevent animals from ingesting harmful objects, animal trainers argue that their real purpose is to maintain the handlers’ control over the animals, since their training is based entirely on positive reinforcement using food. As Ric O’Barry, a former animal trainer who worked on the 1960s television series Flipper explains:
“When [dolphins] are full, they do not respond. This is exactly why we had five dolphins for the “Flipper” TV series. When Flipper #1 had ten pounds of food and was full, I lost control, and I would bring out Flipper #2, and so on.”
In response, the Navy has pointed out that its practices are in full compliance with the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Animal Welfare Acts, that the NMMP is fully accredited by the Association for the Accreditation of Animal Laboratory Animal Care or AAALAC, and us a member of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums. However, while the AAALAC sets minimum standards for animal care, it does not restrict the uses to which said animals are put – and it is here that many activists argue the real problem lies. Regardless of how well they are treated while off-duty, while deployed, NMMP animals are exposed to high levels of danger, largely in the form of unexploded ordnance. Also, as it is often difficult to tell a trained navy animal from its wild cousins, the use of marine mammals in a military capacity may encourage enemy nations to kill all such animals around naval bases and other strategic sites as a security precaution.
More fundamentally, activists argue that since animals have no knowledge of human conflicts and cannot consciously volunteer, ethically they should not be pressed into military service. Of course, the Navy has pointed out that animals like horses and pigeons have long been used in warfare, and that armed forces around the world make extensive use of dogs as sentries, for rescue, and for sniffing out hidden explosives. But according to Andrew Fenton, a professor of ethics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, the comparison between dolphins and sniffer dogs is not an accurate one.
“We shaped these animals to live in close quarters with humans and we artificially selected dogs to be part of our social world, and so, we can be part of their social world. Maybe given enough time, we could create a cetacean breed that fits that criteria, yet that’s difficult to predict. But the more pressing question is, should humans domesticate dolphins? If we did, we would have to severely narrow their world…And this, in bioethics, we call harm.”
Yet another major controversy concerns the manner in which naval animals are retired at the end of their service lives. During the downsizing of the early 1990s, the NMMP reduced its ranks from 103 dolphins down to 70. In response, in the 1992 Defence Appropriations Act, Congress allotted the NMMP half a million dollars to:
“…develop training procedures which will allow mammals which are no longer required for this project to be released into their natural habitat.”
However, after holding two conferences on the matter, the Navy concluded that such a reintroduction program would not be cost-effective. The Navy next tried offering the retirees to marine parks, but said parks had already implemented a successful breeding program, and there were only four takers. The NMMP was thus left with no choice but to take care of the dolphins for the rest of their lives. In 1994, the Navy arranged to send three dolphins to Sugarloaf sanctuary in Key West, run by the aforementioned Ric O’Barry. O’Barry planned to reeducate the dolphins and release them once the appropriate federal permits were obtained, but ultimately chose to release them prematurely, arguing that the federal permits were merely a ploy to prevent the release of Navy assets, and that waiting any longer would jeopardize the dolphins’ chances of adapting the wild. Alas, Luther and Buck were recaptured within two weeks and returned to the Navy, where they remain to this day.
In response to such mounting criticisms and logistical difficulties, the Navy has tried to phase out its Marine Mammal Program in favour of autonomous drones and other high-tech equipment. But, there’s a problem: none of this gear can hold a candle to the extraordinary abilities of dolphins and sea lions. As Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at the Rand Corporation explains:
“[Marine mammals] offer so much at a relatively low cost that it seems absurd not to continue to use them, certainly in the near-term…We’re always five years away from supposedly having technology that will obviate the need from having to use the mammals. I question whether we’re at that point yet.
They have great precision in being able to differentiate objects that are similar to mines or mines themselves from the massive detritus that is on the sea floor in populated areas…Just as we use dogs to find drugs or explosives, there’s a lot of benefit for relying on the natural ability of dolphins. We don’t need to reinvent something we have a capability [for] already.”
Even Ric O’Barry, who has opposed NMMP for decades, agrees, stating:
“[Dolphins’] sonar makes our Navy’s best sonar system look like a toy.”
And so, the fine finned friends of the NMMP will continue to serve their country until technology finally catches up with their natural abilities – or until they inevitably depart our planet with a hearty salute of “so long, and thanks for all the fish.”
Expand for References
The Story of Navy Dolphins, PBS Frontline, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/whales/etc/navycron.html
Dispelling a Myth of Dangerous Navy Dolphins, NBC News, September 27, 2005, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9503310
The Dolphins of War, UK Diving, http://www.ukdiving.co.uk/conservation/articles/dolphin_war.htm
O’Barry, Rick, Use of Dolphins by the US Navy, The Dolphin Project, https://www.dolphinproject.com/campaigns/captivity-industry/use-of-dolphins-by-the-u-s-navy/
Gålö Seal Training Station, Atlas Obscura, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/galo-seal-training-station
H I Sutton, Killer Dolphins: World Survey of Navy Marine Mammal Programs, Covert shores, January 12, 2022, http://www.hisutton.com/Navy-Marine-Mammal-Programs.html
US Navy Wants to Retire Its Remaining Minehunting Dolphins, But Tech Hasn’t Caught Up Yet, SCMP, January 5, 2023, https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3205577/us-navy-wants-retire-its-minehunting-dolphins-tech-hasnt-caught-yet
Zeldovich, Lina, The Great Dolphin Dilemma, Hakai Magazine, February 5, 2019, https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-great-dolphin-dilemma/
Atlamazoglou, Stavros, Here’s What Happens When US Navy Special Operators Go Up Against Dolphins Trained to Keep Them Out of Sensitive Bases, Business Insider, February 1, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/us-navy-seals-train-against-marine-mammal-dolphins-sea-lions-2023-1
The post The U.S. Navy’s Remarkable Marine Mammal Program appeared first on Today I Found Out.
From the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world lived under the horrifying shadow of nuclear armageddon. Following the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, the Soviet Union, United States, and their allies stockpiled enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons to deter the other side from using theirs first, for doing so would guarantee the annihilation of all mankind. But maintaining this delicate balance of terror created a troubling paradox, encapsulated by the simple words “Always/Never.” Given their enormous destructive power, nuclear weapons cannot, of course, ever be allowed to go off accidentally. At the same time, however, they must always work perfectly when needed or else their effectiveness as a deterrent is lost. In order to square this circle, both sides developed vast, incredibly complex systems of protocols, failsafes, and mechanical and electronic safeguards. But the more complex a system gets, the more unstable and vulnerable it becomes, and on dozens of occasions the world came within a hair’s breadth of total annihilation due to trivial, sometimes comical errors – from the wrong tape being inserted into a defence computer to a bomber crewman accidentally pulling a bomb release handle to an early-warning missile mistaking the rising moon for a swarm of Soviet missiles. But perhaps the most absurd near-miss of the Cold War took place in September 1980 when a dropped socket wrench nearly turned central Arkansas into a radioactive wasteland. This is the forgotten story of the Damascus Titan Missile Incident.
In the early days of the Cold War, there was only one effective means of delivering an atomic bomb to enemy territory: by aircraft. The first decade following the end of the Second World War saw huge advances in aircraft technology, with lumbering propeller-driven bombers like the Boeing B-29 Superfortress giving way to sleek jets like the B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress that could fly higher and faster than anything which came before and cover vast, intercontinental distances without refuelling. But in warfare, the advantage always lies with the defender, and soon even these futuristic aircraft found themselves vulnerable to ever-improving Soviet interceptor and surface-to-air missile technology. In response, the U.S. Air Force developed even more advanced bombers like the Convair B-58 Hustler and North American XB-70 Valkyrie to fly higher and faster than any interceptor or missile. But once again advancing technology quickly closed the gap, and the Air Force was forced to develop even more advanced aircraft like the low-flying, terrain-hugging Rockwell B-1 Lancer and the stealthy, radar evading Northrop B-2 Spirit. Another solution was clearly needed.
That solution was the ballistic missile. In September 1944, the Germans unveiled the groundbreaking V-2 rocket, thousands of which were fired against targets in the UK and Belgium in the closing months of the war. Screaming down at its target from the edge of space at twice the speed of sound, the V-2 gave no warning of its arrival and – unlike manned bomber aircraft and the earlier V-1 flying bomb – was impossible to defend against. Indeed, it was only by misleading German intelligence as to where the bombs were falling and overrunning the launch sites in France and the Netherlands that the Allies were finally able to bring the V-weapons campaign to an end – and for more on this fascinating chapter of WWII history, please check out our previous videos A Wingtip and a Prayer: the Insane Way British Pilots Defeated Germany’s Secret Weapon, That Time Disney Helped Give the World a Weapon of Mass Destruction, and the Great V2 Rocket Heist.
But while the V-2 was a technological marvel, it was a failure as a weapon. Despite its fiendish complexity and exorbitant price tag, it was unreliable, only accurate enough to hit a city-sized target, and delivered only a 1-ton high-explosive warhead – enough to destroy a city block. Indeed, thanks to its relatively moderate destructive power and the Nazis’ extensive use of concentration camp labour in its construction, the V-2 remains the only weapon in history to kill more people in its production than in actual combat. Nonetheless, the sophisticated rocket was a glimpse into the future of warfare, and when paired with the other cutting-edge development of the war – the atomic bomb – promised become the ultimate weapon – utterly unstoppable and capable of obliterating entire cities from half a world away. Consequently, as soon as the Second World War ended and the world entered the decades-long stalemate of the Cold War, both sides began eagerly developing long-range ballistic missile technology, with the United States importing many of the German scientists and engineers who had developed the V-2 under Operation Paperclip. The earliest U.S. nuclear ballistic missiles like the PGM-11 Redstone, the PGM-17 Thor, and PGM-19 Jupiter, were intermediate-range weapons or IRBMs, capable of travelling between 600 and 3000 kilometres. To reach targets within the Soviet Union, they had to be stationed in neighbouring allied countries like Turkey, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Striking from farther away required significantly larger and more complex Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or ICBMs. The Soviet Union was the first to develop this technology, first testing the R-7 Semyorka missile in May 1957. On October 4 of that year, a modified version of the R-7 carried the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit, kicking off the Space Race – and for more on this heady – and often disastrous – early period of spaceflight, please check out our previous video ‘Kaputnik’: America’s Largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite.
The United States countered the threat of the R-7 with the Convair SM-65 Atlas, which first flew in June 1957 and officially entered service in August 1959. Featuring an innovative “stage-and-a-half” design and “balloon” tanks which drew their structural strength from the pressure of the propellants inside, the Atlas could carry a 3.75 megaton W-38 thermonuclear warhead over a range of 14,500 kilometres. Modified versions of the Atlas later carried the first American astronauts into orbit and were developed into a family of successful unmanned launch vehicles whose descendants are still in use today. That same year, the Atlas was joined by the Glenn L. Martin Company HGM-25A Titan I, a two-stage ICBM that could carry the same payload over a distance of 11,300 kilometres. However, like the R-7, both the Atlas and the Titan I suffered from a fundamental flaw: they were fuelled by a combination of RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen. Oxygen cannot be kept liquid at regular temperatures and pressures without eventually boiling off, meaning the Atlas and Titan I could not be kept fuelled and ready for launch. Instead, early Atlas D missiles were stored empty in horizontal earth-covered concrete vaults nicknamed “coffins.” Upon receiving an alert, the missiles were raised to the vertical position by hydraulic lifts and filled with propellants before launch. This process could take up to 15 minutes, leaving the missiles extremely vulnerable to a surprise Soviet first strike. Later versions of the Atlas – as well as the Titan I – were designed to be stored and launched vertically from underground concrete missile silos hardened against nuclear attack, greatly improving their survivability. However, fuelling and launch times were still agonizingly slow, making the missiles only marginally useful as quick-response weapons.
Thankfully, less than a year after the Titan I entered service, the Glenn L. Martin Company submitted a proposal for an improved Titan II missile, the contract for which was awarded in June 1960. The largest and most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile ever deployed by the United States, the Titan II measured 31 metres long and 3 metres in diameter, and weighed 155,000 kilograms. It could travel over 16,000 kilometres and deliver a single 9-megaton yield W-53 thermonuclear warhead – 600 times more powerful than the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the largest carried by any American missile. More importantly, unlike previous missiles the Titan II used storable propellants which could be kept in its tanks for long periods, allowing the missile to be kept on constant alert and deployed from its silo within minutes of receiving an attack order. But this quick-firing capability came at a cost: the propellants in question, Unsymmetrical Dimethylhydrazine or UDMH and dinitrogen tetroxide, are extremely toxic, forcing maintenance crews to wear special protective equipment. They are also hypergolic, meaning they ignite on contact with one another. While this made the missile’s LR-87 and LR-91 rocket engines extremely reliable, it also meant that a propellant leak could – and did – lead to a catastrophic explosion.
The Titan II officially entered service in January 1962, and by 1969 sixty-three missiles were deployed across four Strategic Missile Wings stretching across the southern United States: the 308th based out of Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas; the 381st based out of McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas; the 390th based out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona; and the 1st Strategic Aerospace Division at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which operated three Titan II silos for technical development and testing purposes. Each wing was further divided into two squadrons with nine missiles each, the silos being dispersed over a wide area surrounding the host Air Force Base to prevent a Soviet nuclear strike from destroying all the missiles at once.
For 20 years, Titan II missiles formed an important cornerstone of the American nuclear triad, along with submarine-launched ballistic missiles or SLBMs like the Polaris or Trident and gravity bombs and standoff missiles launched from strategic bombers like the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. Like the earlier Atlas, the Titan II was also modified into a civilian space launch vehicle, launching 12 NASA Gemini missions into orbit between 1965 and 1966 and countless other spacecraft including the Voyager 1 and 2 interplanetary probes until the platform was finally retired in 2003.
But, as always, technology marches on, and in 1962, the same year the Titan II entered service, the U.S. Air Force introduced the even more sophisticated Boeing LGM-30 Minuteman. The Minuteman was the first ICBM to use solid rocket propellant composed of synthetic polybutadeine rubber and ammonium perchlorate oxidizer – the same used in the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle and other space launch vehicles. This propellant allowed the Minuteman to be kept on standby for long periods and launched at a moment’s notice while being considerably safer and less maintenance-intensive than the Titan II’s toxic and explosive liquid propellants. Featuring one of the first digital, transistorized guidance computers, the Minuteman was also more accurate than the Titan II, allowing it to make pinpoint attacks on hardened military targets like Soviet missile silos. Finally, the Minuteman III, first deployed in 1970, featured multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles or MIRVs, which allowed a single missile to attack multiple targets and confuse and overwhelm enemy antiballistic missile or ABM systems. Yet despite its growing obsolescence, nothing could match the Titan II in terms of sheer throw weight and destructive power, so the ageing missiles were kept in service into the early 1980s – and it is here that the story of the 1980 Damascus incident begins.
The incident in question took place at Launch Complex 374-7 in Bradley Township, Van Buren County in central Arkansas, around 5 kilometres northeast of the town of Damascus. The was one of nine Titan II silos belonging to the 274th Strategic Missile Squadron of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing based out of Little Rock Air Force Base. Each launch complex comprised three hardened concrete structures buried just below ground level: a single missile silo, a launch control centre, and a junction structure connecting the two. This structure contained a staircase and elevator to provide access to the complex and a series of heavy blast doors to protect the launch control centre from the blast of a launching missile or an accidental explosion.
At around 6:30 PM on September 18, 1980, two Air Force Propellant Transfer System or PTS technicians, Airmen David F. Powell and Jeffrey L. Plumb, prepared to enter the Launch Complex 374-7 silo in order to perform routine maintenance. A warning light had gone off in the Launch Control Centre indicating low pressure in the missile’s second stage oxidizer tank, and Powell and Plumb were dispatched to check the pressure and top up the tank if necessary. The job of PTS technician has been described as among the most dangerous in the U.S. Air Force, and attracted a particularly foolhardy breed of airman. As author Eric Schlosser writes in his book Command and Control:
“The PTS guys were a different breed. Outside of work they had a reputation for being rowdy and wild. They had one of the most dangerous jobs in the Air Force – and at the end of the day they liked to blow off steam, drinking and partying harder than just about anyone else at the base. They were more likely to ride motorcycles, ignore speed limits, violate curfews, and toss a commanding officer into a shower fully clothed after consuming too much alcohol. They called the missiles “birds,” and they were attached to them and proud of them in the same way that good automobile mechanics care about cars. The danger of the oxidizer and the fuel wasn’t theoretical. It was part of the job. The daily risks often inspired a defiant, cavalier attitude among the PTS guys. Some of them had been known to fill a Ping-Pong ball with oxidizer and toss it into a bucket of fuel. The destruction of the steel bucket, accompanied by flames, was a good reminder of what they were working with. And if you were afraid of the propellants, as most people would be, you needed to find a different line of work.”
Nonetheless, PTS technicians followed strict protocols to ensure security and safety while working. On entering the junction structure, the airmen were locked into a caged area where they had to phone the launch control centre and read out a special access code. If the code checked out, the control centre would electronically open the door to grant them access to the complex. They then donned their Rocket Fuel Handler Clothing Outfits or RFCHOs: space-suit-like protective garments with built-in oxygen supplies that would protect them from corrosive and toxic propellant leaks. For safety reasons, PTS technicians always followed the “buddy system”, while two more RFCHO-suited technicians stood by in the junction structure to render assistance if needed.
Once suited up, Powell and Plumb walked through a set of heavy blast doors into an access tunnel that led to the Level 2 gantry inside the missile silo. Topping up the tank involved removing a large dust cap from the filler valve, a procedure which was supposed to be carried out using a large torque wrench. However, Powell and Plumb had forgotten the tool back in their truck topside. As retrieving it would have required removing their RFCHO suits and climbing back to the surface, Powell opted to use an alternative tool: a large socket wrench with a fist-sized, 3.6 kilogram socket. While this was strictly against protocol, Powell and Plumb were eager to get the job done as quickly as possible and turn in for the evening. The ageing Titan II missiles and their silos required constant maintenance, forcing PTS and other maintenance crews to work up to 18-hour shifts. So both technicians went along with the unauthorized procedure. This was to prove a fateful decision, for the wrench was more dangerous than Powell realized. While the wrench had a 1-inch drive head, the drive receptacle on the socket was three quarters of an inch, requiring the use of an adaptor to join the two. This, in turn, made the heavy socket more likely to slip off – and sure enough, as Powell prepared to remove the dust cap from the missile oxidizer tank, that’s exactly what it did. Normally, dropping a tool shouldn’t have been dangerous; the retractable platform Powell and Plumb were standing on had a rubber seal along its inner edge that was supposed to fit flush against the missile fuselage. But this seal had become deformed with age, leaving a gap between the platform and the missile – a gap just large enough to let the dropped socket through. Stunned, the two airmen watched helplessly as the heavy tool plunged 24 metres down the silo before bouncing off a thrust mount into the missile, punching a hole through the skin into the first-stage fuel tank. Immediately, a dense cloud of white UDMH fuel began streaming out of the breach, quickly filling the silo. After standing paralyzed for nearly a minute, wondering what to do, Powell and Plumb turned around and, faster than you can say whoopsie doodle, scrambled up a ladder to an escape hatch on the surface.
Alarmingly, this was not the first time a serious accident had occurred at a Titan II silo. On August 9,
1965, Launch Complex 373-4 of the 272 Strategic Missile Squadron, located 18 kilometres north of Searcy, Arkansas, was undergoing renovations when a massive uncontrolled fire ripped through the silo. The conflagration quickly burned up all the oxygen in the silo and filled the space with toxic fumes, killing 53 of the 55 civilian contractors working in the launch complex that day. Many of the dead were found piled around an escape ladder, suffocated as they tried to climb to the surface. It was the greatest single loss of life at a U.S. nuclear facility in history. The power in the silo also failed, knocking out the complex’s air conditioning system and pushing the temperature of the missile’s oxidizer tanks past nitrogen tetroxide’s boiling point of 20 degrees Celsius. Thankfully, the temperature was stabilized before the fuel could ignite. The cause of the accident was later traced to a welder working on level three of the silo, who accidentally hit a hydraulic line with his welding torch, rupturing the line and igniting the highly pressurized and flammable fluid inside. However, as the missile’s warhead was not installed at the time, there was no danger of nuclear contamination, and despite the intensity of the blaze the missile and silo were not seriously damaged and returned to service shortly thereafter. By grim coincidence, the missile in question – serial number 62-0006 – was the very same one involved in the 1980 Damascus incident.
A decade and a half later on August 24, 1978, another serious incident took place at Launch Complex 533-7 of the 533rd Strategic Missile Squadron near Rock, Kansas. At around 12 o’clock PM, While PTS technicians Airmen 1st Class Erby Hepstall and Carl Malinger were filling up the missile’s first-stage oxidizer tank, a teflon O-ring became lodged in the fuelling valve, jamming it open and causing nearly 50,000 litres of dinitrogen tetroxide to gush out into the silo. Though both Hepstall and Malinger were wearing RFHCO suits, the thick rust-red oxidizer vapours immediately dropped visibility inside the silo to zero, making it all but impossible to find their way out. Upon hearing Hepstall and Malinger’s cries of distress over the radio and seeing oxidizer fumes rising out of the silo vent, 1st Lieutenant Keith E. Matthews and Staff Sergeant Robert J. Thomas rushed down into the complex and suited up to rescue the PTS team and stop the oxidizer leak. At the same time, Hepstall staggered out of the silo, his helmet badly corroded from the fumes but otherwise alive. After changing his helmet, Hepstall followed Matthews and Thomas back into the silo, but while they managed to rescue Malinger, Hepstall and Thomas suffered leaks in his suit and were pronounced dead soon after. A cloud of dinitrogen tetroxide 1.6 kilometres long, 800 metres wide, and 300 metres tall drifted towards the nearby town of Rock, but the population of 200 was successfully evacuated by 1:45 PM and only one civilian had to be treated for fume inhalation.
Nor was the 1980 incident the first time Launch Complex 374-7 had suffered a serious accident. Just 8 months before the Rock incident on January 27, 1978, an oxidizer tank leak sent a cloud of highly toxic dinitrogen tetroxide 900 metres long, 90 metres wide, and 30 metres high drifting across U.S. Highway 65. While four civilians suffered mild ill effects from the toxic vapours, the rest were successfully evacuated from the path of the cloud and the leak quickly repaired. The next time, however, the Air Force would not be so lucky.
Within seconds of Airmen David Powell and Jeffrey Plumb puncturing the fuel tank of missile 62-0006, klaxons began blaring across Launch Complex 374-7 warning of a propellant leak. In the Launch Control Centre, Lieutenant Allan Childers, deputy commander of the Missile Combat Crew, struggled to find out what was going on. But other than the klaxons and reports that white smoke was rising from a vent shaft, he had little information to go on. Confusion reigned for nearly a half hour until Airmen Powell and Plumb showed up in the control centre. But rather than admit to his mistake, Powell – afraid of getting in trouble – simply played dumb, reporting seeing smoke in the silo but not mentioning the dropped socket. Jeff Plumb simply played along. This omission left Lieutenant Childers and the Combat Crew completely in the dark, scrambling fruitlessly to find out what had happened. It wasn’t until another member of the Combat Crew, Rodney Holder, questioned the PTS team that Powell finally broke down and admitted to his mistake. On hearing this news, Holder’s face turned white – as Childers later recalled.
Childers put Powell on the phone and made him explain the situation to the commander of the 374th Strategic Missile Wing. Then, as he waited for the information to make its way up the Air Force chain of command, Childers pondered his next move. Should he evacuate the missile complex, or keep everyone buttoned up inside the Launch Control Centre? After all, the structure was designed to withstand a direct hit by a Soviet nuclear warhead; surely it would protect its occupants if the Titan missile exploded. Hours passed before the order finally arrived from Colonel John Moser at Little Rock Air Force Base: evacuate the complex. Childers, disagreeing with the order, tried to argue with the Colonel:
“I didn’t think it’d blow up. And if it did blow up, I thought that the door and the complex would contain the explosion. It was underground. It had this cap on it…I had two blast doors protecting me that were the size of bank vault doors. And I was sitting in a facility that was designed to survive a detonation from a Russian nuclear weapon. So I thought we’re safer down here than if we go up above…I felt devastated. Yeah, I was devastated that I had to leave. Even to this day, it bothers me that I had to leave. Never in the history of an active missile complex had you left the missile with a warhead on it, walked away from the site with the site still running.”
In the end, however, Childers was forced to follow his orders, and the launch complex was evacuated. Meanwhile, Mike Hansen, chief of the PTS crews that night, asked for volunteers to descend into the silo to assess the situation and potentially try and fix the leak. But there was a problem: the complex had gone into lockdown, and all the massive steel blast doors were now sealed shut. Even worse, for unknown reasons orders from Little Rock forbade the PTS teams from entering through the escape hatch they had just climbed out of; instead, they were ordered to cut through the fence at the entry gate and force their way through the blast doors to get into the silo. Doubly frustrating was the fact that had the Combat Crew been allowed to remain in the Control Centre as Lieutenant Childers had requested, they could have easily opened those doors at the push of a button. But once again, the men obeyed their orders, and the first to suit up and enter the complex were Airmen Greg Devlin and Rex Hukle. After successfully cutting through the perimeter fence, the pair struggled to force open the blast doors using a crowbar, bolt cutters, and a handheld hydraulic pump, but no matter what they tried the locking bolts refused to retract. After around 35 minutes Sergeant Jeffrey Kennedy, concerned that the pair were running out of oxygen, recalled Devlin and Hukle and, along with Senior Airmen David Livingston, descended into the silo himself. By this time the hydrazine vapours in the silo were so thick that the two men could barely see their hands in front of their faces. When they finally reached the atmospheric monitoring readouts, they confirmed everyone’s worst fears: the vapours were at saturation levels, and could ignite at any second. Livingston and Kennedy were ordered to withdraw, but not before switching on a ventilation fan to help clear out the silo. Livingston volunteered, and descended back into the vapour-filled complex. It was 3:00 on the morning of September 19, around eight and a half hours after the missile fuel tank had been punctured. Just a few seconds later, sparks from the ventilation fan ignited the flammable vapours, and all hell broke loose. Airman Greg Devlin, standing just outside the complex, later described the scene:
“It was just a bang, the loud sound, and the concussion of wind. It was just– it was like bang. It was like … you just got hit by a Mack truck. And all of a sudden, rocks started falling. It was like rain falling. And it was all this gravel from the complex. And metal started falling out of the sky. And everybody started to run.
The chunks of concrete that were landing everywhere were as– I mean everywhere– were as big as coffee tables. The real big ones were as big as pickup trucks and school buses and stuff like that. Those were everywhere. You could hear them hitting the ground around me. Man, it was like boom, boom, boom.
“I slid 60 feet on my back with concrete flames and steel going past me. [When I finally come to a stop] I hear this blood curdling scream to the left of me going ‘Runnnnnn!’ I rolled because it scared me. I was like who is yelling at me. It’s pitch black. It’s 3 in the morning and no one is there and that scared me worse. I get off and take off running and I get five steps away and a chunk of concrete, the size of a school bus, fell right behind me.
The trees were on fire. The grass was on fire. The only light we had was fires. And you could see the shadows of just about everything because there was so much fire around there. It was like being in this forest fire without a forest being around you.
And then for just a second or two, it was this one point in time where there was no sound at all. It was like a total calm peace, kind of like the end of the world, for 10 seconds. And then you heard all the screaming and crying and guys yelling, oh my god, I’m hurt.”
The Titan II had exploded with the force of more than 70,000 metric tons of TNT, completely obliterating the silo and launching its 340 metric tonne steel and concrete door – designed to withstand a nearby nuclear blast – a distance of more than half a kilometre. The blast broke windows and houses for several kilometres around the complex, and was heard at Little Rock Air Force Base more than 100 kilometres away. But while eyewitnesses described the explosion as looking like a nuclear detonation, mercifully the 9-megaton W53 warhead had survived the blast and was found around 30 metres from the entrance gate, its various built-in safeguards having prevented it from going off. If it had, the surrounding area out to a radius of 32 kilometres would have been utterly devastated, while much of Arkansas and the southern United States would have been blanketed in lethal radioactive fallout. Thankfully, this was highly unlikely due to the microsecond ignition timing needed to achieve symmetric implosion of the bomb’s core. However, if the bomb’s conventional explosive lenses has gone off, this would have scattered highly-enriched uranium dust over a wide area, requiring extensive decontamination operations.
Meanwhile, Greg Devlin had suffered second and third degree burns to his face, neck, back, and both hands. Fuel and oxidizer had also gotten onto his skin, inflicting additional chemical burns, but quick action by a fellow PTS teammate who doused him in water limited the damage. But nothing could be done about the propellant fumes he had breathed in, which would cause him respiratory problems for the rest of his life. In addition, the blast had ruptured his right eardrum and shattered his left ankle. But he was alive – as were 21 other members of the missile crew who sustained various injuries. Senior Airman David Livingston, however, was not so lucky. Still inside the complex when the missile exploded, he died of his injuries. For his bravery during the crisis, Livingston was posthumously awarded the Airman’s Medal for Heroism, while the Titan II maintenance structure at Little Rock Air Force Base was renamed in his honour. Five other airmen were similarly decorated: Jeff Kennedy, Greg Devlin, Rex Hukle, Don Green, and Jimmy Roberts.
Cleanup of the shattered launch complex began in October 1980. With the cost of replacing the site estimated at over $225 million compared to $20 million to demolish it, the Air Force chose to fill in the silo with soil, gravel, and concrete debris. An official investigation into the disaster attributed the accident to human error, and concluded that the Titan II was fundamentally safe and reliable. However, the report also recommended a number of changes to official policies and procedures, such as the use of tethers on hand tools and better communication with local civilian authorities in the event of further accidents. But it was too little, too late, for in July 1982 the administration of president Ronald Reagan officially announced the retirement of the Titan II system after 20 years of service. The last operational Titan II, located at Launch Complex 373-8 near Judsonia, Arkansas, was decommissioned on May 5, 1987. Today, the entirety of the United States’ land-based nuclear deterrent comprises 450 Minuteman III missiles distributed between three air force bases in Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana.
While certainly traumatizing to those who lived through it, the 1980 Damascus Titan II explosion is particularly terrifying because it was merely one of dozens of similar incidents throughout the Cold War, all of which brought us terrifying close to total annihilation. Such mishaps serve as a sobering reminder of how unstable and unpredictable our complex technological systems can be and how the end of the world as we know it can be as little as a dropped socket wrench away.
Expand for References
Scott, Lynne, One of the Most Dangerous Jobs in the Air Force, Lynne Scott Author Site, November 10, 2013, https://lynnescottauthor.com/2013/11/10/one-of-the-most-dangerous-jobs-in-the-air-force/
Dillard, Tom, The Titan Missile Silo Disasters, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, May 19, 2019, https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/may/19/the-titan-missile-silo-disasters-201905/
Brooks, Sarafina, 37 Years After the Titan II Missile Explosion, KATV, September 28, 2017, https://katv.com/news/local/37-years-after-the-titan-ii-missile-explosion
Titan II Missile Explosion (1980), Encyclopedia of Arkansas, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/titan-ii-missile-explosion-2543/
Titan II Accident McConnell AFB, Kansas 1978, The Military Standard, http://www.themilitarystandard.com/missile/titan2/accident_533-7_1978.php
The Nuclear Warhead Explosion That Nearly Ended the World, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLS0ho8gWPE
634: Human Error in Volatile Situations, This American Life, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/634/transcript
The post When Dropping a Wrench Almost Caused Armageddon appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the opening of the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, everyone’s favourite super spy chases an assassin through the streets of Istanbul to recover a hard drive containing the identities of undercover British agents. For his trouble, he receives a shoulder full of shrapnel from the assassin’s pistol, is accidentally shot by a fellow agent, and falls off a bridge to his presumed death – whoopsie doodle. But this being a James Bond film, he inevitably returns to duty and, after digging the shrapnel out of his shoulder, discovers that the assassin’s bullets are made of depleted uranium. This handily allows him to identify and track down the assassin, kicking off the rest of the plot. But unless the assassin’s intention was to leave an easily-traceable calling card, he really needn’t have bothered with such fancy ammunition. For while depleted uranium projectiles are a real thing, the destructive properties of this very expensive material are wasted on something as small as a pistol bullet. So what is depleted uranium, anyway, and why is it used in military ammunition? Let’s lock and load and find out, shall we?
Depleted uranium, also known as DU or depletalloy, is uranium which contains less than the natural amount of the isotope U-235. Natural uranium consists mainly of the Isotope U-238, with only 0.72% being U-235. The only exception is uranium found at the Oklo mine in Gabon, Africa. Here, 2 billion years ago, Uranium deposits in the ground underwent a natural nuclear chain reaction, consuming most of the U-235. However, most depleted uranium is a byproduct of uranium enrichment, wherein the proportion of U-235 in Uranium metal is increased so the resulting fuel can be used nuclear reactors and weapons.
Depleted uranium typically contains 0.3% U-235 or less and has a density of 19.1 grams per cubic centimetre, making it the seventh densest metal after gold, tungsten, plutonium, neptunium, platinum, iridium, and osmium. This high density makes it ideal for use in high-velocity armour-piercing projectiles, as a DU penetrator can have a smaller cross-sectional area than a steel projectile of the same weight. This reduces aerodynamic drag, allowing for higher velocities; and concentrates the kinetic energy of the projectile onto a smaller area, improving penetration.
But DU also has two rather more unique properties. While most metal projectiles flatten on impact, increasing their cross-sectional area and decreasing their penetrating ability, DU projectiles fracture in a manner that makes them self-sharpening, allowing them to maintain their penetrating power all the way through the target. Uranium is also pyrophoric, meaning that it spontaneously ignites in air when ground into a fine enough powder. This, coupled with DU’s inherent brittleness, means that once a DU projectile has penetrated a tank’s armour, it disintegrates into a white-hot shower of fragments that can destroy equipment, ignite ammunition and fuel stores, and generally ensure that everyone inside the vehicle has a very bad day. And while DU is not nearly as hard as tungsten (the usual go-to metal for armour-piercing ammunition) it can be hardened by alloying it with titanium or molybdenum and carefully heat-treating it to produce one large metallic crystal.
But perhaps DU’s greatest advantage is its sheer availability. In the United States, uranium enrichment for use in reactors and weapons over the last half-century has generated nearly 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium, all of which has to be stored and monitored by the federal government. Making armour-piercing ammunition is one way of reducing this stockpile. DU’s density also makes it useful in a number of other applications, such as radiation shielding for nuclear reactors and medical imaging, balancing weights on fixed-wing aircraft and helicopter rotors, and armour plating on tanks such as the American M1A1 and M1A2 Abrams. It is also used in the casing of the B61-11 bunker-busting bomb to improve penetration into the earth.
DU penetrators are mainly used in cannon rounds of 30mm and up, for in smaller, lower-velocity weapons – like, say, a pistol – DU’s penetrating ability would be wasted. In US service, DU rounds are used in the Phalanx 25mm Close-In Weapons System or CIWS [“sea-whiz”] used to protect US Navy ships from incoming missiles; the 25mm M424 cannon used on the Bradley and LAV-25 armoured fighting vehicles; the 25mm GAU-12 Equalizer and 20mm M197 rotary cannons used on the AV-8B Harrier jump jet and AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter; and in 105 and 120mm projectiles fired by the M1 Abrams tank. Internationally, DU penetrators are also used in 120mm rounds fired by the British Challenger 1 and 2 tanks and the 125mm 3BM59 Svinets-1 and 3MB60 Svinets 2 rounds fired by Russian tanks like the T-80. Today, companies in 5 countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and Pakistan – are known to produce DU ammunition.
However, perhaps the most famous use of DU is in the 30mm PGU 14/B rounds for the GAU-8 Avenger rotary cannon carried by the Fairchild-Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II – AKA the “Warthog”. Weighing 395 grams, these rounds comprise a lightweight aluminium shell wrapped around a smaller DU penetrator and can achieve a muzzle energy of just over 200 kilojoules – enough to penetrate the thinner top armour of most modern tanks. Furthermore, the GAU-8 can deliver these projectiles at a blistering rate of 3,900 rounds per minute. At these speeds, it would take only 18 seconds of continuous firing to use up the A-10’s ammunition supply, though in practice pilots are limited to firing 2-second bursts to conserve ammunition and avoid overheating or wearing out the gun.
Depleted uranium ammunition made its combat debut during the Gulf War of 1990-1991, during which Coalition forces fired some 350 tons of DU against Iraqi targets over the course of six months. Some 10 tons of DU was also fired by NATO forces in Bosnia in 1994-95 and Kosovo in 1998-99; and 2,000 tons by US forces during the 2003 invasion or Iraq. Yet despite widespread claims by the US military, DU is not some magical tank-killing secret weapon; indeed, relatively few tanks were actually destroyed by depleted uranium rounds during these conflicts. During the Gulf War, for instance, of the 1,000 Iraqi tanks destroyed by A-10s, 900 were destroyed using the AGM-65 Maverick missile, not the GAU-8; while of the remaining 2,700 tanks destroyed by helicopters, tanks, and ground forces, only 45 were hit by DU rounds – a kill rate of less than one in seven. Some of this ineffectiveness has to do with the inherent inaccuracy of the GAU-8, exacerbated by the practice of flying at high altitudes to avoid anti-aircraft fire. However, even under ideal conditions, the A-10’s performance leaves much to be desired. On November 7, 1979, the US Air Force conducted a live-fire demonstration of the A-10 at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. For this test, ten M47 Patton tanks of 1950s vintage were arranged on the ground in a triangular formation to simulate a column of similarly-sized Soviet T-62 tanks on the move. The pilot then made 10 passes at the target – one for each tank – and fired a total of 174 rounds. Yet despite these near-ideal conditions – clear skies, a stationary target, and no antiaircraft fire – only 90 rounds hit their targets, with only 30 of these achieving penetration. 3 tanks were declared destroyed, 3 were immobilized by hits to the tracks and suspension systems, while 2 were completely unscathed. But this already marginal result was made worse by several factors. First, in a real combat situation, the presence of antiaircraft defence vehicles like the ZSU-23-4 Shilka would have limited the pilot to a single pass. The moving tank column would also have made aiming more difficult. Even worse, by the time the test was conducted the M47 was hopelessly outdated; had the targets been more modern M60 tanks, the report concluded, only one would likely have been destroyed. And had they been even more advanced Soviet T62s – the very tanks the targets were meant to represent – none would have been destroyed. Indeed, during the Gulf War, twenty Coalition vehicles were hit by DU rounds in friendly fire incidents, with 90% of their crews surviving. So while DU certainly has its advantages, it is far from the “magic bullet” its proponents claim it to be.
But the infamy of depleted uranium rounds lies less in their mythical tank-busting ability but rather their supposed long-term toxic effects. Indeed, DU contamination has been widely posited as at least one cause of so-called “Gulf War Syndrome”, a cluster of chronic symptoms including fatigue, muscle pain, insomnia, and impaired cognition afflicting nearly 250,000 US veterans of the 1990-1991 conflict. Following the Kosovo war in 1999, British biologist Roger Coghill claimed that DU contamination was likely to cause an 10,000 extra cancer deaths in Serbia, while more recently the use of DU munitions around the Iraqi city of Fallujah has been blamed for a steep rise in leukemia, liver and kidney disease, miscarriages, and serious birth defects among the local population. According to local physician Dr. Samira Alani:
“Between 2002 and 2005, the US armed forces expended six billion bullets [around Fallujah] – according to the figures of the US General Accounting Office…[these rounds create] fine metal-containing dust particles as well as DU-containing particles that persist in the environment. These particles can enter the food chain and enter the human body via contaminated food. Toxic particles can also become airborne with the wind and be inhaled by the public. Iraq is prone to frequent sand and dust storms. Continuous public inhalation of toxic materials can lead to cancer. Ingested or inhaled particles that emit alpha radiation can cause cancer.”
In 2010, Alani co-authored a study revealing that the rate of heart defects in Fallujah had risen to 13 times that in Europe, while between October 2009 and December 2011 she personally logged 699 cases of severe birth defects in the city – including cases of spina bifida, hydrocephalus, and even babies born with multiple limbs and heads. Meanwhile, official Iraqi statistics show that between 1991 and 2005, the cancer rate throughout Iraq rose 40 times from 40 to 1,600 out of every 100,000 people. This has led another Iraqi doctor, Huda Ammash, to compare DU contamination in Iraq to “100 Chernobyls.”
But is it true? Is depleted uranium actually responsible for all these illnesses? At first glance, the link appears plausible. Depleted uranium is only around 60% as radioactive as natural uranium and emits mostly alpha radiation, which cannot penetrate human skin and is largely harmless outside the body. However, if uranium dust enters the body via inhalation, ingestion, or wound contamination, the large amount of energy deposited by alpha particles directly into the tissue can cause severe genetic damage and cancer. Worse still, the main constituent of DU, uranium 238, has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. As a heavy metal, uranium is also toxic in and of itself, and like lead and cadmium can accumulate in the bones, liver, and kidneys, causing long-term damage to these organs and the central nervous system. And making the link between DU munitions and chronic health effects even more probable, the fine dust generated by the impact of DU projectiles is very easily absorbed into the body.
Yet, despite this, there is almost no evidence that DU contamination is directly responsible for any cases of cancer or long-term illness among combat veterans or residents of war zones. Following the Kosovo War, a study of 122 German soldiers deployed in the region revealed that none had incorporated any DU into their bodies, while similar studies on soldiers of other nationalities as well as residents of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bosnia returned similar results. And in the early 2000s, a team from the United Nations Environment program’s Post Conflict Assessment Unit and a committee of 50 nations set up by NATO both concluded that soldiers who were possibly exposed to DU dust suffered chronic illnesses at a rate no higher than those who were not exposed. Likewise, a 2021 study conducted by the University of Portsmouth in England concluded that DU contamination was not responsible for Gulf War Syndrome; while a 2013 study found that not only was DU not responsible for the rise in chronic illnesses in Fallujah, but that no traces of the material could be found anywhere in the city’s soil.
Much of this discrepancy stems from an overestimation of the contamination risk posed by depleted uranium. For despite the large quantities of DU ammunition expended during the Gulf War, Balkan Wars, and Iraq invasion, very little entered the environment in a form that could easily cause contamination. For instance, during the Gulf War, 86% of DU rounds were fired by aircraft, which when firing at ground targets typically achieve a hit rate of only 5-10% . Furthermore, only about 20% of each projectile is vaporized on impact. Thus, of the 350 tons of DU fired during the Gulf War, only around 7 tons would have been converted into dust – and most of that would have been concentrated inside the targeted vehicles, making it unlikely to be dispersed into the environment. Meanwhile, the projectiles that missed would largely have landed intact in the soft ground and thus pose little long-term contamination risk.
And even if soldiers and civilians had been exposed to large quantities of uranium dust, there is little evidence that this would have impacted their health either. Indeed, a US Centres for Disease Control review of 11 studies on uranium miners found no link between exposure to uranium dust and cancer, with all recorded instances of chronic illness being attributed to exposure to radon gas – a decay product of uranium – and other toxic substances in the mine. A 1999 literature renew by the RAND corporation similarly concluded that:
“No evidence is documented in the literature of cancer or any other negative health effect related to the radiation received from exposure to depleted or natural uranium, whether inhaled or ingested, even at very high doses.”
Thus, Huda Ammash’s comparison of DU contamination in Iraq to “100 Chernobyls” is a gross exaggeration, and the sharp spike in chronic health problems in Falljuah is likely caused by other factors, such as non-radioactive heavy metals and other toxic materials released by regular munitions.
Despite this, many groups have pushed for DU projectiles to be banned, with the Yugoslav government even arguing in June 1999 that the use of such weapons was an act of genocide due to the potential long-term effects of DU contamination on the Yugoslav people. Others have pointed to Article 35 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits any means or methods of warfare that cause superfluous injuries or unnecessary suffering. However, the US military has countered these claims by arguing that DU rounds are solely designed to defeat armoured vehicles via kinetic and incendiary effects – thus making them perfectly legal under international law. Nonetheless, several branches of the US Armed Forces as well as many foreign militaries have begun slowly abandoning DU ammunition. In 1989, the US Navy announced that it would phase out DU shells in its Phalanx CIWS systems in favour of more conventional tungsten ammunition, which meets performance requirements without any potential health and environmental risks. In 2002 and 2008, the British Army and the US Marine Corps also announced the replacement of DU rounds with tungsten on its armoured fighting vehicles, with the latter stating:
“We’re not considering depleted uranium anymore because of the environmental problems associated with it, be [they] real or perceived.”
But while depleted uranium weapons may not be a tank-killing “magic bullet” nor a radioactive disaster waiting to happen, you still wouldn’t want to find yourself on the receiving end of one. So if ever you see the menacing shape of an A-10 Warthog swooping down towards you, it’s probably best to take cover.
Expand for References
McDiarmid, Melissa, Depleted Uranium and Public Health, British Journal of Medicine, January 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119402/
UN Environment Programme Confirms Uranium 236 Found In Depleted Uranium Penetrators, UNEP, January 16, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20010717004828/https://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2001/unep81.doc.htm
Jamail, Dahr, Iraq: Wat’s Legacy of Cancer, Al Jazeera, March 15, 2013, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2013/3/15/iraq-wars-legacy-of-cancer
Hamilton, Douglas, NATO: 50 Countries See No Depleted Uranium Illness, Environmental Defence Fund, January 25, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20010220235753/http://www.cancerpage.com/cancernews/cancernews2268.htm
Peacock, H.B, Pyrophoricity of Uranium (U), Westinghouse Savannah River Company, March 1992, https://sti.srs.gov/fulltext/WSRC-TR-92-106.pdf
Fahey, Dan, Science or Science Fiction? Facts, Myths and Propaganda In the Debate Over Depleted Uranium Weapons, March 12, 2003, https://web.archive.org/web/20050601054749/http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/pdf/dumyths.pdf
Peck, Michael, Russia is Arming Its Tanks With a Controversial New “Bullet”, National interest, December 24, 2018, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-arming-its-tanks-controversial-new-bullet-39682
Hambling, David, Why Deadly Depleted Uranium is the Tank Buster’s Weapon of Choice, The Guardian, May 18, 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/may/18/armstrade.kosovo
Stolfi, R.H.S. & McEachin, R.R., Combat Design Assessment Team: A-10/GAU-8 Low Angle Firings Versus Simulated Soviet Tank Company, Department of the Navy Naval Post Graduate School, June 1980, https://web.archive.org/web/20160304062736/http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a522397.pdf
Franzen, Harald, The Science of the Silver Bullet, Scientific American, March 5, 2001, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-of-the-silver/
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At its peak, the British Empire was the largest Empire in history, encompassing nearly one quarter of the Earth’s surface and more than one quarter of its population. Throughout its history, this massive geopolitical entity was perceived by its proponents as a beacon of civilization, an engine for trade and building local infrastructure and prosperity, a source of military and national pride. Needless to say, however, populations under its rule may have had a VERY different opinion about things, and keen to point out a lot of things glossed over in popular history. In previous episodes of TodayIFoundOut, we covered how the national school curricula in Germany and Japan teach their pupils about the shadiest parts of their respective history- the periods before and during WWII. But what about good ol’ Blighty? How do schools in the UK teach about the British Empire? Do history teachers also cover its most negative aspects? Or do they gloss over them?
To beg with, the national curriculum’s approach to the British Empire is extremely complex and subject to change, and is currently undergoing a pretty major change, as we’ll get into later in this video. But first, let’s now take at a quick run through of the topic at hand, starting with a very brief overview of the British Empire itself.
The British Empire can be defined as a Global system of territories under the sovereignty of the Great British Crown and Government. These territories include colonies, protectorates and dominions. It is interesting to note that most of these early settlements were established by private enterprise, with no direct strategic oversight from the Crown or the Government.
For most of the history of the Empire, until the mid-19th Century, the Crown had some limited powers of supervision over the acquired territories, but the colonies themselves were largely self-managed and self-sufficient.
But let’s rewind a little. England first started its colonial path by invading Ireland in 1169, fully re-conquered by the Tudors in the 16th Century. And yet, the official start and end dates of the Empire have been set at 1601 and 1997. So what happened here? In the 17th Century, England established its first trans-Atlantic colonies in North America and the Caribbean, mainly driven by commercial ambition and a strategy to stem French influence over the area. Around the same time, the privately owned East India Company began establishing trading posts in India and South East Asia.
Continuing the trend, in the 1660s, England extended its reach into the African continent, by settling into modern-day Gambia. Over the following two centuries, England first, and Great Britain later, colonised much of Africa, establishing a chain of territories from Cairo to Cape Town.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Brits were on a roll. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 unlocked the door to what would become Canada and the East India Company continued its expansion, at the expense of their French counterpart and local Bengali rulers.
There was the occasional, yet major setback, of course, such as the loss of the 13 American colonies following the Revolutionary war of 1776. But even that came with some major advantages, as Britain very purposefully gave the new nation insanely favourable terms in the deal, as we’ve covered in one of personal favourite videos we’ve ever done: That Time Ben Franklin and John Adams Slept Together and the Hilarity That Ensued, which goes in depth into the start, middle, and end of the revolution and the rather fascinating and hilarious two contrasting individuals in those two men who played such critical roles, as well as covers in detail why Ben Franklin advocated so strongly that elderly women were the best to sleep with.
But going back to these colonists and the terrorist organisation that took control of them and subsequently mass murdered so many British soldiers just there trying to earn a living, France and the newly minted United States were bosom buddies at this point, which was a major problem for the British both at that time and very possibly could have turned into a catastrophic problem in the future if that was allowed to continue. Thus, in a bit of a double cross, which honestly what more can you expect from already traitors to king and country, the colonists decided to throw France, without whom they’d have definitely lost the war, completely under the bus at the last minute in exchange for those insanely favourable terms from Britain
As for the British side, then British Prime Minister Lord William Petty, Earl of Shelburne felt that in granting the United States such favorable terms, they also positioned the U.S. to prosper to a great degree, while simultaneously helping to open up very favorable trade with them which would benefit British merchants, as well as help supply the British Empire with much needed resources. This would also all hopefully foster a decent amount of goodwill towards Britain from the new nation, and potentially help ensure that the relationship between France and the U.S. didn’t continue to mature unchecked at the expense of Britain. And in retrospect, while the now dubbed “special relationship” between the British and Americans wasn’t always smooth in the aftermath, on the whole, such friendly relations with their former colonies has served the U.K. extremely well, and been a boon to the United States as well. So much so that the U.S. Department of States’ webpage on the relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. starts off,
“The United States has no closer Ally than the United Kingdom. Following the end of the American Revolution in 1783… in 1785 our two countries established diplomatic relations. Other than a brief break in relations during the War of 1812, the United States and the United Kingdom have remained durable partners and Allies. Our partnership is a foundation of our mutual prosperity and security.”
Not just teaming up in matters of war and security, the two nations are among each other’s biggest trade partners. They also share the world’s largest foreign investment partnership. And, as UK Foreign Secretary William Hague noted in 2013, “every day almost one million people go to work in America for British companies that are in the United States, just as more than one million people go to work here in Great Britain for American companies that are here.”
Most significantly of all in the history between these two nations, around 2014 an exceptionally awkward and nerdy American with a major beard envy complex and a silky toned and beautifully bearded balding British individual teamed up to start this channel.
But going back to matters of lesser importance in the nations’ respective histories, even in defeat on this one, the British Empire was advancing and the building of the Empire resumed in the following decades. Australia was settled in 1788 and Malacca in 1795. Then, the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars resulted in the acquisition of further former French territories. These were mainly island colonies such as Ceylon, Trinidad, Tobago, St Lucia and Malta, which made for great trading posts and bases for the Royal Navy.
New Zealand was colonised in 1840, followed by expansion in the Pacific. In 1857, as a consequence of the Mutiny of East India Company’s private troops, the Crown assumed control in the Subcontinent. And, as mentioned earlier, in the late 19th and early 20th century, Britain completed its expansion in Africa.
I am sure everyone will have great fun at pointing out in the comments which territories not mentioned and wars of conquest ironically glossed over. But the point we wanted to make is that the history of the British Empire is an extremely long and complex topic that quite literally spans the globe.
In all this, contrary to extreme points of view on the other side, there were undeniable positive effects at points, some intentional, others less so. And when it comes to controversy and ramifications, one should acknowledge what could be considered the positive aspects of imperialism, as well as its most sinister consequences.
On the former, British civil servants and private enterprises developed modern infrastructure in the colonised areas. They created a global trade network, allowing colonies, dominions and protectorates to access lucrative markets on the other side of the world. Colonial administration standardised education across the Globe, created job opportunities in the civil service and the military, and introduced modern legislature and administration practices.
The process of building the Empire is a remarkable achievement in itself, a testament to the skill, competence, courage and leadership of the British military, merchant sailors and explorers.
OF COURSE, in all this the British Empire was also responsible for some of the worst atrocities and violation of human rights in relatively modern history… Even if glossed over in their own history books, as we are going to get into shortly.
Which, to be fair, as we outlined in our unfortunately age restricted 2 hour long documentary: Swept Under the Rug: The Truth About the Japanese Holocaust, which is the best video we have ever produced, not just the Japanese, but the United States too committed mind boggling amounts of crimes against humanity during the Pacific Theater as something of a matter of course, yet virtually none of this is ever mentioned in either country’s academic history books, generally left to university lecturers and the likes of us to dig into. This is a theme with basically every single nation in history with how they cover their own history in schools, with the stark exception being Germany. Who some, perhaps rightly, have argued go too far the other way. Hammering their own atrocities home so much that the youth of today not only have learned the lessons from them as is very good, but also have unfortunately developed a bit of a collective major guilt complex about it even though neither they, nor their parents, nor even in many cases their grandparents, had anything to do with any of it.
Going back to the British Empire, the atrocities of their own have nonetheless been confirmed by the UK Government itself. For example, in 2011, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office confessed to keeping 20,000 classified files which included incriminating evidence of murder and torture by British colonial authorities.
So, before we cover how all this is taught specifically, we should probably also very briefly dive into those imperial atrocities so little discussed.
To begin with, British troops – and their colonial units – were enthusiastic proponents of using concentration camps to control hostile local populations. The tactic was first used against the Boers in South Africa in the early years of the 20th Century.
During the 1950 Malayan Emergency, camps known as ‘New Villages’ were built to keep Chinese civilians under tabs, lest they support the local independence movement. And then again in 1964, up to 1.5 million Kikuyu people were detained in camps in Kenya, as a means to quash the Mau Mau uprising.
When not forcibly locking up astounding numbers of people for no morally justifiable reason, Imperial troops distinguished themselves in massacring civilians to quell unrest, or slaughtering poorly armed local militias in the context of unprovoked invasions. An example of the former case can be illustrated by the massacre in Amritsar, Punjab, which took place on April 13th, 1919. That’s when the British Indian Army fired over an unarmed crowd, killing upwards of 1000 civilians. Yet another is the 1903 British invasion of Tibet. This was staged to pre-empt a potential Russian offensive. The operation resulted in a massacre via machine gunning 700 local militias armed with flintlock muskets.
When not causing death by bullets, the British Empire also had another common human weapon of mass destruction at their disposal: incompetence – often compounded by callousness. Through a combination of poor administration, carelessness, disdain towards populations perceived as inferior, or plain idiocy, British colonial authorities annihilated hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives through their actions, even if that wasn’t really the original intent of said actions.
The most blatant example is the partition of the Indian subcontinent into Pakistan and India. An operation so mishandled that it caused the mass migration of 10 million people, and the death of 1 million as a consequence of sectarian violence. Other examples include the introduction of smallpox to Australia, and the mismanagement of crop failures in India and Ireland, which led to terrifying famines of catastrophic proportions.
This carousel of colonial horrors would not be complete without a mention of the Transatlantic slave trade. Sure, other European powers took part in this practice. And undoubtedly African kingdoms took an active role by happily selling captured prisoners of war into slavery. But the role played by England first, and Britain later, is pivotal. The first English ship transporting slaves from Africa to America set sail in 1562, captained by John Hawkins. Hawkins sold his human cargo to Spanish colonists in America, raking in an enormous profit. Over the 17th Century, demand for unpaid labour skyrocketed also in the English possessions in the New World, propelled by the expanding demand for sugar cane crops.
By the late 18th Century, more than half of all the African slaves transported across the Atlantic were carried by British ships. Around the same period, in 1787, campaigners Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp founded the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which raised awareness about the inhumane conditions of African slaves, boycotted goods produced thorugh slavery and petitioned Parliament.
Petitions were led by MP William Wilberforce and after years of failed attempts, in 1807, the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire. But, up to that point, some 11 thousand ships had sailed from British ports with the purpose of transporting and selling people across the Atlantic, with countless thousands dying along the way, and the ones who made it left to a life of slavery, sometimes under extremely brutal conditions.
To their credit, following that date, the Royal Navy took an active role in patrolling the Atlantic waters, cracking down on those traders who defied the ban, as we discussed in our recent video The True Story of the Amistad. However, slavery itself was not abolished until 1838, after which the slave-owners – not the slaves – received compensation from the Government.
Again, you can have a field day by pointing out which atrocities we failed to include in this list. Because had we covered it all, or in any further detail even than we did, this video would likely have set the world record for longest YouTube video of all time. And been not only demonetized, but age restricted as well, as happened to our aforementioned phenomenal video Swept Under the Rug: The Truth About the Japanese Holocaust. But, please be our guest discussing as many such things as you can come up with in the comments.
All that out of the way, let’s now, finally, look at the British Empire in the UK Syllabus
To begin with, on this, Aneira Roose-McClew, former teacher and member of Facing History & Ourselves UK, a charity that uses the teaching of history to challenge bigotry and racism, states, “The history we learn in educational institutions and wider society concerning the British Empire is incomplete. The stories that dominate tend to amplify the voices of the colonisers, depicting the ‘Imperial period’ as a time of glory and greatness – while the plunder, oppression and destruction of indigenous peoples, and their societies and cultures, often occupies, at most, a footnote. We hear of how Britain’s Empire left behind sporting traditions, train networks, education and democracy (as if those subjected to colonialism wouldn’t have come to these themselves), but learn little of how much of Britain’s current wealth can be traced back to the suffering, exploitation and enslavement of millions of fellow human beings in overseas territories.”
In her article, Roose-McClew quotes a March 2020 survey, in which 33% of respondents believed that former British colonies were ‘better off overall’ for having been part of the Empire. She then goes on to comment that, “If the brutal realities of the colonial past of the British Government were taught in schools and discussed more within wider society, those survey results would no doubt be very different.”
Historian William Dalrymple chimes in on all this: “The British history curriculum moves suddenly from Florence Nightingale to the Nazis, so that Britain always seems to be on the side of liberation, freeing people. You learn about the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, all sorts of empires — just not the British Empire. The fact that we conquered half the globe was, bizarrely, left off the curriculum.”
He goes on, “Now, more than ever, we badly need to understand what is common knowledge elsewhere: that for much of history we were an aggressively racist and expansionist force responsible for violence, injustice and war crimes on every continent.”
As for more specifics, up until the period post-WWII, history lessons dedicated ample time to the Empire, with a nationalistic approach. In other words, teachers and teaching material covered the glorious exploits of British politicians, administrators, sailors and soldiers, emphasising military victories against rival colonial powers and invaded territories. As a consequence, the most unsavoury aspects of British colonial rule were mostly ignored.
In the 1950s and 1960s another school of thought took hold, called ‘New History’. This approach stressed the importance of understanding and analysing the experiences and point of view of the populations involved in historical events, rather than their leaders. Monarchs and Generals faded in the background, in favour of a ‘bottom up’ method founded on empathy for those who suffered from the tidal waves of history.
In this context, any patriotic or nationalist feelings were expunged from the classrooms. The history of the British Empire was mostly sidelined or downgraded, with the exception of Britain’s role in the slave trade. This was and still is an incredibly important subject to tackle. But the history syllabus was not standardised across the nation, and it was up to the discretion of the individual teacher whether to include slavery or not.
In 1991 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher introduced a ‘National Curriculum’ to introduce some standardisation across all subjects. In her memoirs, Thatcher claimed that it had been easier to fight the Argentinians in the Falkland Islands than to agree on a National History Curriculum with teachers and historians.
Her Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker, had some clear views on how to portray the Empire in the new curriculum: ‘Pupils should be taught about the spread of Britain’s influence for good throughout the empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries… These things are matters in which we should take great pride’
But the end result was a syllabus which covered the history of Great Britain in chronological order, yet leaving ample discretion to teachers on what topics to cover in detail. Once again, a holistic history of the Empire was largely left out, with the exception of slavery.
The National Curriculum for History was revised in February 2013, by David Cameron’s Conservative government. The proposal for renewal of the syllabus included topics such as English colonisation of the Americas and India, the occupation of Ireland and a large module called ‘Britain’s global impact’ in the nineteenth century ‘, which would span the scramble for Africa, expansion in central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent and the Boer Wars.
Despite it mentioning ‘the 19th Century’, the module would also include the post-WWII independence movements and the immigration into Britain of citizens from Commonwealth countries. The overall intention was to accord more importance and time to the Empire, with exhortations from the cabinet to present it in a largely positive light.
The end result was a syllabus which did include some imperial topics, but, once again, it was up to the individual teachers to decide what and how to teach their pupils – if anything at all!
All that said, in very recent years, the issue of Imperial instruction has taken centre stage in the British parliament. Following an online petition, the House of Commons held a debate on Monday 28 June 2021, to discuss how Britain’s colonial past was addressed in UK schools. Labour MP Chris Evans quoted Dr Deana Heath, who teaches Southern Asian and Imperial Colonial History at the University of Liverpool: “I face an uphill struggle at the start of each new academic year. Many of the undergraduates who greet me know virtually nothing about any of the subjects I teach.”
Other MPs, from both Labour and the Scottish National Party agreed that schools oversimplified Britain’s role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, as well largely omitting the contributions of non-white historical personalities. This omission extends also to the struggles of the lower classes, with Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy suggesting that this exclusion is both racially and class-driven.
The response from the Conservative majority was simply to point out that, as of 2021, the British Empire and Britain’s colonial past were a statutory theme for the Key Stage 3 history curriculum.
To clarify, Key Stage 3 corresponds to pupils aged 11 to 14. And a statutory theme indicates a theme which must be covered as part of history lessons. The selection of the specific topics within a statutory theme, however, is, once again, down to the choice of the individual teacher.
So, we took a peek into the current national syllabus for the UK, and as of June 2023, the Key Stage 3 curriculum includes two statutory themes related to the Empire. The first is “Ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain 1745-1901”. Topics contained within include the transatlantic slave trade, the Seven Years war, the American Revolution, the relationship with Ireland and ‘the development of the British Empire with a depth study’
The second theme is ‘Challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world, 1901 to the present day’. Which features topics such as the world wars, Indian independence, and the end of the Empire.
So, in theory, the Empire should be part of what pre-teens and early teens learn about in school. And in theory, there are plenty of chances to discuss all facets of imperialism, including Britain’s role in rather extreme crimes against humanity. But in practice this is not always the case.
In preparation for this video we asked a small sample of students, teachers and one retired headteacher about their individual experiences. In all cases, they replied that these themes and topics simply had not been touched. More than a concerted effort to sweep a shameful past under the carpet, it appears that history teachers do not have the time to fit these supposedly statutory themes into an already packed curriculum.
And yet, there is plenty of available resources for some teachers to develop lessons on our colonial past. For example, educational consultant Neil Thompson, through his company Key Stage History, provides a good sample of imperial topics which may have been taught by Key Stage 3 teachers as part of the statutory themes.
Examples include an in-depth module about the slave trade, and how it was propelled by the soar in demand for sugary products, which required a massive, unpaid workforce for the sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean. This module would then delve deep into the horrific conditions of the individual slaves, the status of African servants in rich households, and how they were portrayed in 17th and 18th century art. The lessons would then conclude with the abolitionist campaigns and Britain’s role in policing illegal slave trade.
Another wide-ranging topic, apparently largely ignored, is British rule in India. Thompson recommends a module spanning four centuries of history, from the birth of the East India Company, to Indian independence, without shying away from events such as the Amritsar massacre or the recurrent famines.
Finally, Thompson proposes for teachers to stimulate classrooms discussion on the British Empire as a whole, for example by asking, “How did Britain achieve to conquer such a large Empire; how did the Empire eventually dissolve; and to discuss the pros and cons of the Empire itself”
At this stage, we would really like to hear from you, our esteemed audience. If you hail from the UK, let us know if and what were you taught about any of these subjects when you were at school? More interestingly, if you hail from a country formerly part of the Empire, how were you taught about British colonisation?
Moving on from there, there is potentially good news on the horizon of relatively accurate history being taught in UK schools. Back in March 2022, the Department for Education announced the preparation of a new “model history curriculum”, which should be issued by 2024. This curriculum should, to quote, ‘Equip [teachers] with the skills to lead lessons that cover migration and cultural change …[and] To help pupils understand the intertwined nature of British and global history, and their own place within it.’
In other words, the future curriculum should provide a more comprehensive view of Britain’s colonial policies and their relationship with the rest of the world. By shedding light on this past, pupils today will be better placed to understand their present.
In the end, we think Professor Terry Haydn of East Anglia University summed all of this up best, stating in 2014:
‘Whether teaching about the British Empire, Empire more generally, or any topics where there are controversies of interpretation, history teachers, history didactics, and policymakers responsible for the formulation of history curricula should devote some attention to trying to cultivate in learners the dispositions of open-mindedness, respect for evidence and veracity.’
Expand for References
https://www.teachwire.net/news/teaching-the-british-empire-why-students-deserve-more-than-an-incomplete-history/
https://www.varsity.co.uk/interviews/24051
https://research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/publications/how-and-what-should-we-teach-about-the-british-empire-in-schools
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/06/readers-reply-what-if-the-british-empire-had-never-existed-would-the-world-be-a-better-or-worse-place
https://www.britishempire.co.uk/article/historyteaching.htm
https://www.britannica.com/place/British-Empire
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qbex4x/katie-engelhart-britains-secrets-mandy-banton-321
https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/crimes-against-humanity-the-british-empire/
https://historyindoors.co.uk/britains-dark-past-the-atrocities-of-the-british-empire-and-its-legacy-today/
https://historycollection.com/10-atrocities-committed-by-the-british-empire-that-they-would-like-to-erase-from-history-books/10/
https://www.keystagehistory.co.uk/in-the-news/inclusive-history-curriculum/
https://www.keystagehistory.co.uk/keystage-3/outstanding-lessons-keystage-3/the-empire/teaching-the-british-empire/
https://www.keystagehistory.co.uk/keystage-3/outstanding-lessons-keystage-3/black-peoples-of-america-slavery/reasons-for-the-abolition-of-the-slave-trade-poacher-turned-gamekeeper/
https://www.keystagehistory.co.uk/keystage-3/outstanding-lessons-keystage-3/the-empire/how-should-we-portray-dyers-motivation-in-the-amritsar-massacre/
https://www.keystagehistory.co.uk/keystage-2/outstanding-lessons-keystage-2/black-and-british/black-and-british-kq3-what-difference-did-the-slave-trade-make-to-the-experience-of-the-black-people/
https://www.keystagehistory.co.uk/keystage-3/outstanding-lessons-keystage-3/the-empire/
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/324092
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2021-06-28/debates/21062855000001/BlackHistoryAndCulturalDiversityInTheCurriculum
https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/2015-parliament-in-the-making/get-involved1/2015-banners-exhibition/maria-amidu/1807-abolition-of-the-slave-trade/#:~:text=It%20was%20only%20after%20many,the%20slaves%20themselves%2C%20received%20compensation.
The post How Do British Schools Teach About the British Empire? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Imagine you are a contestant on the classic game show Let’s make a Deal. The host, Monty Hall, presents you with three closed doors. Behind one is a brand-new sports car, while behind the other two is a goat.
You make your choice and prepare to discover whether you will leave the studio the proud owner of a set new ride or of a four-legged garbage disposal. But at the last moment, Monty offers to make your choice a little easier; he opens one of the doors, revealing a goat, and gives you the option to either change your guess or stick with your original choice. What do you do?
This is the Monty Hall Problem, first posed by American statistician Steve Selvin in a 1975 letter to the journal American Statistician. For 15 years after its introduction, the puzzle was discussed by a number of academic publications but failed to make much of an impact. But when in September 1990 reader Craig F. Whitaker submitted the question to Parade Magazine’s Ask Marylin column, it unexpectedly triggered one of the most heated, controversial, and downright toxic debates in the history of mathematics.
Ask Marylin, which has run in Parade since 1986, is written by Marylin sos Savant, who for many years was widely known as the “World’s Smartest Person.” Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1946, in 1956 at the age of 10 vos Savant took the standard 1937 Stanford-Binet Test, achieving an unprecedented IQ score of 228. Later in the 1980s she scored a 46/48 on the Hoeflin Mega Test, which revised her IQ down to a more reasonable but still impressive 186. Based on these two scores, vos Savant held the Guinness World Record for the highest recorded IQ from 1986 to 1989 when the category was finally retired.
At first glance the answer to the Monty Hall Problem appears obvious: your chances of picking the car, originally 1 in 3, have now been increased to 1 in 2. However, as you’ve been given no additional information as to which door the car sits behind, it makes no difference whether you stick with your original guess or switch; your odds of winning remain the same. However, in her reply to Craig Whittaker’s statement of the problem, vos Savant gave an altogether different answer, arguing that the best strategy was, in fact, to switch your first guess:
“Yes; you should switch. The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance. Here’s a good way to visualize what happened. Suppose there are a million doors, and you pick door #1. Then the host, who knows what’s behind the doors and will always avoid the one with the prize, opens them all except door #777,777. You’d switch to that door pretty fast, wouldn’t you?”
The reaction to this counter-intuitive solution was swift and surprisingly hostile, with vos Savant being bombarded with letters from hundreds of readers – several with PhDs in statistics and related fields – staunchly refuting her analysis. These ranged from the relatively polite but dismissive:
“Your answer to the question is in error. But if it is any consolation, many of my academic colleagues have also been stumped by this problem.”
-Barry Pasternack, Ph.D.
California Faculty Association
…to the arrogant and condescending:
“Since you seem to enjoy coming straight to the point, I’ll do the same. You blew it! Let me explain. If one door is shown to be a loser, that information changes the probability of either remaining choice, neither of which has any reason to be more likely, to 1/2. As a professional mathematician, I’m very concerned with the general public’s lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your error and in the future being more careful.”
-Robert Sachs, Ph.D.
George Mason University
“You blew it, and you blew it big! Since you seem to have difficulty grasping the basic principle at work here, I’ll explain. After the host reveals a goat, you now have a one-in-two chance of being correct. Whether you change your selection or not, the odds are the same. There is enough mathematical illiteracy in this country, and we don’t need the world’s highest IQ propagating more. Shame!”
-Scott Smith, Ph.D.
University of Florida
…to the downright misogynistic:
“Maybe women look at math problems differently than men.”
-Don Edwards
Sunriver, Oregon
In response to this deluge of criticism, vos Savant devoted her three next columns to patiently re-explaining the logic of her solution, but the majority of her respondents remained unconvinced, with one writing nearly a year later:
“I still think you’re wrong. There is such a thing as female logic.”
So, is it possible that the “world’s smartest person” actually got it wrong? Well, actually, no. Much of the confusion regarding the Monty Hall Problem stems from the ambiguous manner in which it was stated in Craig Whittaker’s original letter to Parade Magazine. Most of those who disagree with vos Savant’s answer assume that the host’s choice of which door to open is entirely random, and in this case the conclusion that the contestant’s chances become 50/50 would be correct. However, in Steve Selvin’s original formulation of the problem this is not the case. After all, if the host’s choice of door were random, there is a chance he would open the door with the prize behind it, ruining the game. Thus, the host must always open a door with a goat, and it is this detail which makes all the difference.
To understand why, imagine the three possible scenarios when playing the game: you can either guess the Prize, Goat 1, or Goat 2. If you guess the Prize, then your best strategy is to stay put, since switching will lose you the game. But if you choose Goat 1 or Goat 2, then the best strategy is to switch. As the optimal strategy in 2 out of 3 possible scenarios is to switch, your chances of winning are 2/3 if you switch compared to only 1/3 if you stick to your original guess. So your best bet is always to switch.
So how did a seemingly innocuous probability problem manage to ignite such fierce and passionate condemnation? The Monty Hall problem is what American Philosopher Willard Quine called a veridical paradox – a result that intuitively looks false but can nonetheless be logically proven to be true. Human intuition is particularly ill-suited to dealing with problems of probability, and when presented with a counter-intuitive solution a common reaction is simply to reject it outright. In the case of Marilyn vos Savant this knee-jerk incredulity – along with the egos of top athematicians and not a small amount of sexism – appear to have combined into the perfect storm of academic controversy.
Thankfully, however, history appears to have vindicated Marilyn vos Savant, with polls showing that by 1992 56% of readers and 71% of academics had accepted her solution, compared to only 8% and 35% two years before. And even Robert Sachs of George Mason University, once among vos Savant’s harshest critics, eventually wrote her to repent his former arrogance:
“After removing my foot from my mouth I’m now eating humble pie. I vowed as penance to answer all the people who wrote to castigate me. It’s been an intense professional embarrassment.”
Expand for References
Kaplan, Ellen and Michael, Chances Are…: Adventures in Probability, Penguin Books, 2007
Crockett, Zachary, The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman, Priceonomics, February 19, 2015 https://priceonomics.com/the-time-everyone-corrected-the-worlds-smartest/
Tierny, John, Behind Monty Hall’s Doors: Puzzle, Debate, and Answer? The New York Times, July 21, 1991 https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/21/us/behind-monty-hall-s-doors-puzzle-debate-and-answer.html
Vos Savant, Marylin, Game Show Problem, marylinvossavant.com https://web.archive.org/web/20130121183432/http://marilynvossavant.com/game-show-problem/
The post The Story Behind the Most Heated, Controversial, and Downright Toxic Debate in the History of Mathematics appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On September 8, 1943, the Second World War took a dramatic turn as Italian Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who had just replaced a deposed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister, announced an armistice between Fascist Italy and the Allied Powers. The following day, a large Italian naval fleet, on its way to counter the Allied amphibious landings at Salerno, was ordered to break off and sail to Malta to prevent its ships falling into the hands of Italy’s former German allies. Commanded by Admiral Carlo Bergamini, the fleet included three battleships – including the flagship Roma – six cruisers, and eight destroyers. Not knowing the details of the Armistice, Bergamini was reluctant to surrender in Malta, and instead set course for La Maddalena naval base on the island of Sardinia. On approaching the base, Bergamini discovered it had been overrun by the Germans, and instead ordered the fleet to Bône – today Annaba – in French Algeria. But as the fleet passed through the Strait of Bonifacio separating Sicily and Corsica, it was suddenly attacked by a flight of German Dornier Do 217 medium bombers of Kampfgeschwader 100. The bombers had actually been trailing the fleet for some time, but Bergamini had assumed they were the air cover promised him by the Allies. But by the time the Italian anti-aircraft batteries opened fire, it was already too late. At around 3:50 in the afternoon bombs slammed into Roma and the battleship Italia, causing extensive damage. Her boiler rooms flooded and her engines out of action, Roma became a sitting duck. At 4:02, another bomb slammed into her starboard side, penetrating her ammunition magazines and touching off an enormous explosion. The ship quickly capsized and sank, taking 1,253 of her 1,849 crew – including Admiral Bergamini – with her.
This engagement was a significant moment in the history of warfare, for the weapons that sank the Roma were not ordinary bombs but sophisticated radio-controlled missiles known as Fritz X. Though precision-guided weapons or “smart bombs” might seem like a recent innovation, this technology – like so many others – was actually pioneered during the Second World War. And while these weapons arrived too late to affect the outcome of the conflict, they forever changed the way modern warfare is waged. This is the fascinating story of the birth of the Smart Bomb.
German research into guided munitions began in 1938 in response to Luftwaffe experiences in the Spanish Civil War. During that conflict, pilots of the Condor Legion – a volunteer air force sent to assist Nationalist leader Fransisco Franco – encountered great difficulty hitting moving targets such as ships at sea. Much of this early research was headed by engineer Max Kramer of the German Centre for Aerospace Research or DVL, who began fitting regular aircraft bombs with radio-actuated control surfaces. The weapon that would eventually sink the Roma was based on the Ruhrstahl PC 1400, a 1400 kilogram unguided armour-piercing bomb intended for use against heavily-armoured targets like battleships and cruisers. The name “Fritz X” was derived from the PC 1400’s original nickname, but the weapon was also variously known as the Ruhrstahl SD 1400, the Kramer X-1, the PC 1400X, or the FX 1400.
Kramer fitted the PC 1400 with a set of four forward stabilization fins and a guidance system built into an annular “box fin” assembly at the tail of the bomb. This system contained gyroscopes to keep the bomb stable in flight as well as a set of spoilers that could be deployed into the airstream to control the bomb in roll, pitch, and yaw. These spoilers were controlled via a Strasbourg radio receiver whose receiver antennas were housed in aerodynamic plastic fairings mounted around the perimeter of the box fins. Aboard the attacking aircraft, the bombardier used a Kehl radio transmitter and joystick to guide the weapon visually to the target, a set of bright red flares in the bomb’s tail increasing its visibility. However, the primitive radio guidance system only allowed the spoilers to be set to “full up” or “full down”, requiring great skill on the part of the bombardier. The transmitter could be set to 18 different frequencies between 27 and 60 Megahertz, allowing multiple aircraft to drop bombs at once without their guidance signals interfering with each other.
The Fritz X became fully operational in the spring of 1943, with 750 being produced and deployed.
The weapon was only deployed by one squadron – Gruppe III of KG-100 Wiking – whose Dornier Do 217K-2 medium bombers were fitted with special bomb racks for the Fritz X and Kehl radio transmitter sets. Due to the glide angle of the bomb, attacks were typically made from an altitude of 5,500 metres and a minimum range of 5 kilometres, with the launching aircraft immediately decelerating after release so the bombardier could keep the bomb in his sights. From standard launch altitude and range, a skilled bombardier could theoretically make a maximum correction of 500 metres in the bomb’s range and 350 metres in its bearing and place 90% of bombs within a 30 metre radius of the aiming point. Those bombs that did hit were capable of penetrating 5 metres of armour – more than enough to sink a battleship.
The Fritz X made its combat debut on July 21, 1943 during a raid on Augusta harbour in Sicily. Several other attacks followed around the island, but no hits were recorded. The weapon’s first successful use was in August, when KG 100 sank a Royal Navy corvette and damaged another in the Bay of Biscay. On September 9, the unit carried out its historic attack against the defecting Italian fleet off Sicily, sinking the battleship Roma and badly damaging the Italia. Two days later, they attacked the Allied landing fleet off Salerno, barely missing the light cruiser USS Philadelphia but scoring a direct hit on her sister ship USS Savannah. The bomb penetrated the roof of C turret and detonated in the lower ammunition-handling room, severely damaging her hull, blowing out her boiler fire and killing 197 crewmen. Savannah languished, half sunken, for nearly six hours before her boilers were relit and the ship limped to Malta for repairs. On September 13th and 16th similar fates befell the Royal Navy light cruiser HMS Uganda and the battleship HMS Warspite when Fritz X bombs sliced through seven decks and exploded near the ships’ keels. Both ships were severely damaged and had to put into Malta for extensive repairs. Other ships damaged by Fritz X attacks off Salerno include the Dutch sloop HNLMS Flores, the British destroyer HMS Loyal, and the American merchantmen SS James W. Marshall and SS Bushrod Washington – though the latter two may actually have been hit by conventional bombs.
In early 1944, KG 100 was deployed against the Allied landing fleet off Anzio. By this time, however, the deficiencies of the Fritz X were starting to become apparent. The line-of-sight guidance system meant the launching aircraft had to maintain a straight, steady course over the target, making them highly vulnerable to fighter attack. The Fritz X also could not be deployed in anything but the lightest cloud cover, and was far less accurate in combat than in training; indeed, throughout the weapon’s deployment, only 30% of launches resulted in hits, while only one ship – the Roma – was ever sunk. Even worse, by the time of the Anzio landing, the Allies had figured out how to jam the Fritz X’s radio control system. At first, jamming had proved surprisingly difficult, since the Strasbourg receiver could be tuned to a variety of frequencies and was designed to ignore transmissions coming from ahead of – rather than behind – the bomb. However, British radio engineers soon discovered that by targeting the receiver’s intermediate frequency, the system could be effectively jammed no matter what frequency the Germans selected. The Type 650 jamming transmitter was first deployed aboard Allied ships at Anzio in early 1944 and succeeded in preventing the Germans from scoring any direct hits with the Fritz X. By the time of the Operation Overlord landings in Normandy in June 1944, radio jamming plus overwhelming Allied air superiority had rendered the Fritz X all but useless, and it was soon withdrawn from service.
However, the Fritz X was not the only guided air-to-ground weapon deployed by the Germans during the war. In 1939, the Gustav Schwartz Propeller Works designed a glide bomb to allow bombers to attack a target from beyond the range of anti-aircraft batteries. The bomb did not have an active guidance system, and instead was fitted with an autopilot to maintain a straight course to the target. In 1940, however, a team of engineers at aircraft manufacturer Henschel led by Dr. Herbert Wagner converted the Schwartz design into a powered, guided missile by fitting it with a rocket motor and the same Kehl-Strasbourg radio command system as the Fritz X. Known as the Henschel Hs 293, the weapon carried 550 kilograms of explosives but, unlike the Fritz X, had no armour-piercing capability and was designed for use against unarmored merchant and auxiliary vessels. To this end, the nose of the missile was fitted with a donut-shaped kopfring that, on impacting the water, ensured that the Hs 293 struck the target’s hull perpendicularly like a torpedo. The weapon was steered through the use of elevators and ailerons operated by electric solenoids and jackscrews; no rudder was fitted.
Thanks to its rocket propulsion, the Hs 293 could be used at greater ranges and lower altitudes than the Fritz X. Upon release, the Walter HWK 109-507 rocket engine slung beneath the fuselage ignited, delivering 5.9 kilonewtons of thrust for 10 seconds and accelerating the missile to a maximum speed of 960 kilometres per hour. This engine was powered by a highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide monopropellant decomposed into high-temperature steam by a sodium permanganate catalyst, and was originally developed as a Rocket Assisted Takeoff or RATO pod to help lift heavily-loaded transport aircraft into the air. Once the engine had burned out, the attack procedure was the same as with the Fritz X, the bombardier using red flares in the missile’s tail to guide it towards its target.
Development of the Hs 293 began in early1940 at the Luftwaffe research centre at Peenemünde on the Baltic – where many other advanced German weapons like the V1 flying bomb and V2 ballistic missile were also developed. The first unpowered drops took place between May and September, while the first powered flight was conducted on December 18. The weapon proved stunningly accurate, scoring a direct hit on the test target – a small barn – on only its second live firing. A derelict 5,000 ton ship just off the coast was used for testing, and was soon nearly obliterated by dozens of direct hits. Operators were first trained on a ground-based simulator, then allowed to make three live launches; most trainees scored direct hits on their third launch. The Hs 293 was first used in combat by KG 100 on August 25, 1943, successfully striking the British sloop HMS Bideford in the Bay of Biscay – though the warhead failed to detonate. Two days later, however, the squadron succeeded in sinking the sloop HMS Egret. Over the following year, Hs 293s damaged or sunk some 30 Allied ships, while in August 1944 they were used – unsuccessfully – to attack bridges over the Sée and Sélune rivers in Normandy – the first use of an air-launched standoff missile in military history. However, like the Fritz X before it, the Hs 293 was eventually rendered ineffective by Allied radio jamming and air superiority and was largely withdrawn from service in late 1944. The last recorded use of the Hs 293 was in April 1945, when a special unit of KG 200 attempted to destroy bridges across the Oder river to slow down the advancing Soviets. The attack was a failure, with no hits recorded.
Undeterred, the Germans investigated several ingenious methods for getting around the jamming problem, including converting the Hs 293 to wire guidance. The radio equipment was removed and a pair of streamlined pods added to the wingtips containing 18 kilometres of fine, 0.2mm piano wire. Similar spools aboard the launching aircraft carried a further 12 kilometres for a maximum range of 30 kilometres. Command signals from the bombardier travelled through the wires as they unspooled behind the missile, rendering it immune to radio jamming. Even more impressive was the Hs 293D, which featured television guidance. The Fernes Company, in collaboration with the German Post Office, succeeded in creating a miniature 224-line television camera and transmitter package called “Tonne A”, which measured 17x17x40 centimetres and weighed only 130 kilograms – making it ideal for mounting in the nose of a missile. While still vulnerable to radio jamming, this system allowed the attacking aircraft to take evasive action after launching the missile, as the bombardier no longer needed a clear view of both missile and target. However, the war ended before either weapon could see combat.
One final German “smart bomb” of note was the Blohm und Voss Bv-246 Hagelkorn or “Hailstone”, an unpowered glide bomb designed to attack the LORAN radio beacons used by Allied bombers for navigation. Designed to use as few strategic materials as possible, the Bv-246 had wings made of magnesite cement moulded around a steel spar and carried 435 kilograms of explosives. Carried aloft by a fighter aircraft like the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, the bomb was to be released up to 200 kilometres from the target, whereupon it would automatically home in on and destroy LORAN transmitters using a passive seeker device called Radieschen. Testing began in late 1944 at the Unterlüss Proving Ground in lower Saxony, but unfortunately the guidance system proved troublesome and only 20% of the test vehicles flew properly. However, when the V-1 flying bomb campaign against Britain proved more successful than anticipated, the Bv-246 was cancelled without ever seeing service. Nonetheless, it pointed the way toward modern anti-radiation missiles like the American AGM-45 Shrike and AGM-88 HARM.
But while the Germans were the first to deploy guided weapons in combat, the Allies were not far behind, and by the end of the war actually succeeded in surpassing German technology. In the now largely forgotten China-Burma-India theatre of operations, much effort was expended in disrupting Japanese supply lines by destroying bridges along the Burma Railway. However, these narrow wooden bridges proved challenging for airmen to hit, and much ordinance was wasted in unsuccessful attacks. In response, Major Henry Rand and Thomas O’Donnell invented the Vertical Bomb 1 or VB-1. This consisted of a conventional 1,000 pound general purpose AN-M65 “iron bomb” fitted with a special box-fin tail unit. This contained gyroscopes to stabilize the bomb in roll, a flare to increase its visibility, and a set of ailerons controlled by the bombardier using a BC-1156 transmitter and joystick in the launching aircraft. Unlike the Fritz X and other German guided weapons, the VB-1 had no pitch or range control and only be adjusted in azimuth – hence its eventual designation of AZimuth ONly or AZON. This meant that the bombardier still had to release the bomb accurately to ensure it did not fall short or long of the target, making it best-suited to attacking long, narrow targets like bridges.
The AZON was first deployed in November 1944 by Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers the 493rd Bomb Squadron based an Pandaveswar Airfield in India. Over the next nine months, the 493rd succeeded in destroying 41 bridges in Burma and Thailand – including the famous Bridge on the River Kwai – using 1,357 bombs, achieving a hit rate of around 12%. Perhaps the greatest testament to the AZON’s effectiveness came on December 28, 1944 when the 493rd used just 9 AZONs to demolish the rail bridge at Pyinmana, Burma, which had withstood bombardment by thousand of conventional munitions over the previous two months.
The AZON was also used in the European Theatre by the 458th Bombardment Group based at RAF Horsham St Faith in England. Between June 8 and September 13, 1944, the 458th carried out 9 AZON missions against railway bridges and oil refineries in France, the Netherlands, and Germany – though with considerably less success. Unlike in Burma, bombers over Europe had to contend with intense antiaircraft fire and fighter attacks, which often forced them to break off from their steady courses and interrupt the bombardier’s view of the target and weapon. A more advanced version of the AZON called VB-4 or RAZON – Range and AZimuth Only – which used a 2,000-pound bomb and allowed for pitch control – was in development since 1942, but entered service too late to see combat. After the war, an even more powerful 12,000-pound version called the VB-13 or ASM-A-1 Tarzon – effectively a British Tallboy “bunker buster” bomb fitted with a radio controlled tail unit – was developed and briefly used in the Korean War before being retired in 1951 – and for more on these enormous weapons, please check out our previous video That Time Disney Helped Give the World a Weapon of Mass Destruction. But while the AZON played a relatively minor role in the Second World War, it pioneered a technique still used today in weapons like the Joint Direct Attack Munition and Paveway, in which regular “dumb bombs” are converted into precision guidance munition by fitting them with a standardized tail unit or seeker head.
Another Allied guided weapon tested during the war was the Aeronca Glide Bomb or GB-1, which was originally intended to achieve not greater accuracy but rather greater range. Little more than a standard 1,000 or 2,000 pound bomb fitted with 12-foot wooden wings, a twin-boom tail unit, and a simple autopilot, the GB-1 was designed to be released up to 32 kilometres from the target, allowing the attacking aircraft to avoid anti-aircraft defences. The weapon had the further advantage of being more likely to hit the sides of buildings and other structures, rather than just exploding harmlessly in the open like conventional vertically-dropped bombs.
Too large to fit in an aircraft’s bomb bay, the GB-1 was instead carried in pairs under the wings of a Boeing B-17 bomber. After the completion of initial testing, the first weapons were sent to England in September 1943 for use by the 41st combat bomb wing of the 8th Air Force. However, local commanders saw fighter aircraft as a greater threat than anti-aircraft guns and deemed the GB-1 too inaccurate, so the weapon was shelved. By early 1944, however, the Luftwaffe’s strength had become so depleted that it was decided to finally give the GB-1 a try. On May 28, 1944, the 41st attacked the Eifeltor Marshalling Yard at Cologne, with 54 B-17s releasing 108 GB-1s. Yet despite ideal conditions with little wind and good visibility, most of the weapons drifted far off target and only a handful actually struck the marshalling yard. Thus, while the bombers successfully avoided anti-aircraft fire and all returned safely to England, the GB-1 was deemed a failure. Nonetheless, more than 1000 more would be dropped over Germany before the end of the war.
However, more advanced versions of the GB-1 were soon developed in order to remedy these shortcomings. The GB-4, like the Henschel Hs 293D, incorporated a small television camera in its nose that allowed it to be guided towards its target irrespective of the launching aircraft’s speed or course. The weapon was first deployed in July 1944, but combat trials revealed that the television image was too fuzzy to be usable on any but the clearest days. Though around 1,000 were produced, only a few were ever launched before the project was abandoned. The US Army Air Force also experimented with a powered variant called the JB-4 propelled by a pulse-jet engine similar to that used on the German V-1 flying bomb; however, this weapon was not yet ready by the end of the war and was cancelled soon afterward.
Even more sophisticated was the GB-5, which used a television-based light-contrast seeker to home in on targets – like ships at sea – that were considerably darker or lighter than their surroundings; the GB-6, which had an infrared homing system; and the GB-7, which could either home in on enemy radar transmissions or ride a radar guidance beam projected by the launching aircraft. However, none of these variants were ready either by war’s end.
One variant of the GB-8 that did see limited use was the GB-8, which, like the Henschel Hs 293, used a radio command link and coloured flares to allow the bombardier to guide the weapon towards the target. The GB-8 was first used in early 1945 against the German E-boat pens at Le Havre and La Pallice in France, and while the weapon was nominally more accurate than conventional bomb, it suffered from the same drawbacks as the Fritz X and Hs 293 – namely, that the launching aircraft had to fly a slow, steady course over the target, making them vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire and fighter attack.
The U.S. Navy also experimented with guided munitions. Inspired by the early successes of the German Fritz X and Henschel Hs 293, in late 1943 the Navy issued a requirement for an unpowered anti-ship glide bomb, the contract for which was awarded to McDonnell Aircraft in the summer if 1944. Dubbed the LBD-1 Gargoyle, McDonnell’s weapon resembled a small unpowered aircraft 2.5 metre wingspan, a v-tail, 3-metre fuselage containing a 1,000-lb armour-piercing bomb. The Gargoyle was designed for use by carrier-based aircraft and could be released up to 8 kilometres from the target, whereupon the bombardier would guide the weapon using radio command and flares in the tail. Just before impact, an Aerojet solid-rocket motor in the rail was ignited, providing 4.4 kilonewtons of thrust for 8 seconds and accelerating the weapon to 970 kilometres per hour. Despite the Gargoyle’s initial promise, however, the development program was plagued by technical difficulties, such that the first test flight did not take place until July 1946 – nearly a year after the end of the war. Trials dragged on for another four years until, in December 1950, the Gargoyle project was finally cancelled.
Far more successful than the Gargoyle was the Bat, which arguably holds the title of the most sophisticated guided missile ever deployed during the Second World War. The Bat originated in 1941 as an RCA project to build a television-guided anti-ship missile similar to the Hs 293D. In June 1942 the design was modified to use semi-active radar guidance, wherein the missile homed in on reflections from a radar beam projected by the attacking aircraft. Originally known as the Pelican, the weapon was designed by the National Bureau of Standards in collaboration with the Navy Bureau of Ordnance, MIT, Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Bendix Aviation. It was unpowered, had a length of 3.6 metres, a wingspan of 3 metres, weighed 270 kg, and was armed the same 1,000 pound general purpose bomb as the AZON. Power for the controls was provided by small wind-driven generator.
Drop tests of the Pelican began in December 1942 at Naval Air Station New York, but while the weapon proved moderately successful – hitting its target in about half of launches – the range of the radar guidance beam was found to be too short, putting the launching aircraft at risk of being spotted and fired upon. Thus, in 1944, the Pelican was cancelled in favour of a more sophisticated version using active radar guidance, which was designated the Special Weapons Ordnance Device or SWOD Mk.9 Bat. Unlike the other weapons covered in this video, the Bat was a truly autonomous “fire and forget” weapon, requiring no outside guidance commands after launch. Instead, it used an active radar system in a nose-mounted dome to home in on its target.
The Bat began developmental testing in the summer of 1944 at the Naval Ordnance Test Station at Chincoteague Island, Virginia, and was declared combat-ready in January 1945. Though many aircraft were modified to launch the Bat, including the Vought F4U Corsair fighter and Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, the weapon was mainly deployed aboard Consolidated PB4Y Privateer naval patrol aircraft. The Bat was first used in combat in April 1945 off Borneo, successfully damaging or sinking several Japanese ships including the coastal defence vessel Aguni. Like the AZON, the Bat was also used to attack bridges along the Burma Railway, though in this role it was considerably less successful as its relatively primitive radar guidance system was easily confused by ground clutter and other interference. Indeed, when used against ships close to shore, the Bat tended to veer off target and home in on other large objects like docks, hills, and mountains. Consequently, though 2,600 Bats were produced and deployed, relatively few were actually launched before war’s end. Nonetheless, it was the first fully-autonomous self-guided weapon to be deployed in combat, and set the template for guided weaponry for decades to come. Today, precision-guided bombs and missiles, steered by radio, radar, laser beams, or even GPS, can hit targets just a few metres across from altitudes of thousands of metres and ranges of hundreds of kilometres – a far cry from the indiscriminate area bombing tactics of the Second World War.
Before ending this video, it is worth mentioning one of the strangest chapters in the history of guided weapons: Project Pigeon. In 1942, behaviourist B.F. Skinner – most famous for developing the principle of operant conditioning – began studying the feasibility of guiding a missile using – you guessed it, pigeons. Skinner’s concept involved training pigeons to recognize and peck at images of enemy ships. They would then be placed in a special compartment in the nose of a missile with an electrically-conductive screen on which was projected images from a television camera. A guidance system would sense the pigeon’s pecks and use them to adjust the missile’ trajectory and keep the target image in the centre of the screen, guiding the missile all the way to impact. Incredibly, ground-based simulations proved that the system was workable, and Skinner tried to convince the Navy to try it out in a Pelican missile. However, Naval officials dismissed the whole concept as impractical and outlandish, and Project Pigeon was never deployed in combat.
Expand for ReferencesKing, J.B. & Batchelor, John, German Secret Weapons, BPC Publishing Ltd, 1974
Hogg, Ian & Batchelor, John, Allied Secret Weapons, BPC Publishing Ltd, 1975
Johnson, Brian, The Secret War, Arrow Books Ltd, London, 1978
Frantiska, Joseph, The Azimuth “Smart” Bombs of World War II, Warfare History Network, December 12, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20170505064546/http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/the-azimuth-smart-bombs-of-world-war-ii/
The GB 1 Glide Bomb, https://web.archive.org/web/20080213211708/http://www.1jma.dk/articles/1jmaglidebombs.htm
Guided German Air to Ground Weapons in WW2, https://web.archive.org/web/20080215223114/http://www.1jma.dk/articles/1jmaluftwaffegroundweapons.htm
Parsch, Andreas, GB Series, Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles, 2003, http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app1/gb.html
Gargoyle Missile, Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, https://web.archive.org/web/20190721100526/https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/missile-air-surface-gargoyle
Parsch, Andreas, McDonnell LBD/KSD/KUD/RTV-N-2 Gargoyle, Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles, 2003, http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app1/rtv-n-2.html
Parsch, Andreas, Bureau of Standards SWOD MK 9/ASM-N-2 Bat, Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles, 2003, http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app1/asm-n-2.html
Giving New Wings to an Old Bat, NIST, https://www.nist.gov/nist-time-capsule/any-object-any-need-call-nist/giving-new-wings-old-bat
Hitler’s Precision-Guided Bombs: Fritz X & Hs 293, National WWII Museum, September 21, 2023, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/hitlers-precision-guided-bombs-fritz-x-hs-293
How Radio-Controlled Bombs Were Jammed, Lone Sentry Blog, September 19, 2010, http://www.lonesentry.com/blog/how-radio-controlled-bombs-were-jammed.html
The post Creating the Smart Bomb appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Humphrey Bogart as world-weary bar owner Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseauin the Pink Panther films. Audrey Hepburn as socialite Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Keanu Reeves as kung-fu cyberpunk freedom fighter Neo in The Matrix. What do all these very different fictional characters have in common? You guessed it, they were all played by actors. Human ones no less, well, except for Reeves… But also, the characters all loved them some trench coat action.
Along with blue jeans, the plain white t-shirt, the leather jacket, Wayfarer sunglasses, and the Little Black Dress, the Trench Coat has become a timeless icon of 20th century fashion. Effortlessly conveying cool, sophistication, worldliness, and maybe even a hint of danger, it has remained relevant and stylish decade after decade, its classic design remaining largely unchanged for over a century. Yet as its name suggests, the trench coat started off not as an item of haute couture, but as a practical and utilitarian piece of military gear. And despite its association with the First World War, the origins of this iconic garment go back nearly a century earlier. This is the fascinating and stylish history of the trench coat.
The story of the trench coat begins in the 1820s with the invention of the first modern raincoat. Prior to this time, waterproof clothing was made either of leather or heavy fabric impregnated with linseed oil or wax known as oilcloth or oilskin. However, similar to your skin, these materials were heavy, hot, smelly, and tended to rot or lose their waterproofing over time. Enter Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh. Born in Glasgow in 1766, Macintosh started out as a store clerk, but quit at age 20 to study under the great chemist Joseph Black, and later opened his own commercial chemical dye works. In 1823, while studying potential applications for various organic compounds, Macintosh discovered that naphthalene – derived from the distillation of coal tar – could dissolve natural latex or India rubber to produce a sticky white liquid. Macintosh painted this liquid onto a piece of wool fabric and glued another layer on top, producing a lightweight, waterproof material perfect for making raincoats. The idea of rubberizing fabric was not a new one; indeed, many pre-Columbian peoples in Central and South America like the Aztecs painted natural latex rubber onto fabric to waterproof it without needing any fancy chemists degree to figure it out. Your parents must be soooo proud of your “invention” son of tosh.
While since the 1790s hydrogen balloon envelopes had been painted with a mixture of rubber and turpentine in order to gas-proof them, the naphthalene process produced a far smoother coating more suited to everyday wear. Macintosh quickly patented his manufacturing process, and on October 12, 1823 the first of these revolutionary raincoats went on sale. Known as Macintoshes – because Macintosh was apparently a narcissist, they quickly became an indispensable article of outerwear, being worn by people of all walks of life and officially issued to police officers, soldiers, railway workers, and the like. This ubiquity led to the term Mackintosh or simply Mack entering the English lexicon as a generic term for any raincoat.
Yet while they were significantly lighter than earlier waterproof garments, Mackintoshes were not without their flaws. While they certainly kept the rain out, they also kept heat and sweat in, making them uncomfortable to wear for long periods. Tailors making alterations to the coat also often punctured the waterproof layer, reducing its effectiveness, while natural oils like lanolin in the wool fabric quickly ate away at the rubber. Even worse, natural latex rubber tends to become sticky and smelly in hot weather and stiff in cold, similar to my college girlfriend.
By the 1840s, however, these problems had largely been solved by the discovery of vulcanization, a heat-treating process that stabilized rubber over a wide range of temperatures.
Nonetheless, other manufacturers began looking for superior alternatives to the Mackintosh raincoat, in the process creating the prototype for what would eventually become the modern trench coat. Today, two clothing brands lay claim to the invention of the trench coat. The first was founded by clothier John Emary, who opened a menswear shop on Regent Street in London in 1851. In 1853, Emary developed a method for producing water-repellent yarn, and began producing lighter and less odorous weather-resistant coats under the brand name Aquascutum – Latin for “needs to consult a marketer before coming up with a brand name”, or “water shield”, if you prefer.
Aquascutum “wrappers”, as they became known, became a must-have accessory for the discerning gentleman who wished to remain well-dressed while riding or hunting in inclement weather. During the Crimean War of 1853-1856, Aquascutum coats were widely purchased by British officers for protection against the damp climate of southern Russia, while at the end of the 19th Century Edward, Prince of Wales – later King Edward VII – became the company’s first royal client, resulting in Aquascutum being granted a Royal Warrant in 1897.
Meanwhile, in 1856 a young draper named Thomas Burberry founded the clothing company that still bears his name to this day. In 1879, inspired by the waterproof wool smocks worn by shepherds in his home county of Hampshire, Burberry developed a process for treating yarn or cotton thread with lanolin, then wove this this waterproofed thread into a durable, waterproof, yet breathable twill he dubbed Gabardine. Like Aquascutum wrappers, Burberry’s Gabardine coats also desperately needed a better name, but nonetheless soon became popular among the upper-class riding and hunting set, as well as explorers and other adventurers. Indeed, both Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1907 and Roald Amundsen’s 1910 Antarctic expeditions were officially outfitted with Burberry cold-weather gear. In 1901, Burberry submitted a design to the British War Office for a standard-issue military raincoat, which was soon adopted and widely worn by British officers during the 1899-1902 Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa.
These Burberry “weatherproofs” introduced an important feature that would become integral to the iconic look of the trench coat: its distinctive khaki colour. Throughout most of modern history, the British and Continental European armies dressed their soldiers in bright colours to increase visibility and help their men get shot. However, with the introduction of longer-ranged rifled muskets and artillery in the early 19th century, these brightly-coloured uniforms got the soldiers in them shot more. Who could have seen that coming?
By the time of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British began to understand it was better when their soldiers didn’t get shot. And, thus, began issuing uniforms made of a dull, mustard-brown material known as khaki – from the Urdu word for “dust coloured”, to help them blend into the countryside. Official khaki drill uniforms were first worn in combat by Indian Army troops during the 1868 Expedition to Abyssinia – modern day Ethiopia – and by the time of the Second Boer War had become standard across the entire British Army.
In 1912, Burberry introduced an improved version of its British Army “weatherproof” called the Tielocken, which incorporated nearly all the features of the modern trench coat. Made, of course, of weather-resistant Gabardine twill, the Tielocken was double-breasted with ten closing buttons and extended to just above the knee, providing maximum protection against rain while not interfering with the wearer’s mobility. Among its many weather-resistant features were an integrated waist belt, a large yoke or cape across the upper back to shed rain off the shoulders and help the individual look cooler with their cape, and buckled cuffs to prevent water from running down the sleeves while using binoculars. Distinctive “gun flaps” just below the shoulders served both as padding to absorb the recoil of a rifle and to deflect water off the shoulders, large vents allowed for ample ventilation, while a removable, checked wool lining provided additional insulation in cold weather.
Following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the Tielocken became very popular for British Army officers serving in Belgium and France. Traditionally, British soldiers fighting in temperate climates were issued with greatcoats made of heavy wool serge. However, as the mobile warfare of 1914 gave way to the bloody, muddy stalemate of trench warfare, these coats became something of a liability, quickly becoming saturated with water and mud and infested with lice. The Burberry Tielocken provided a lighter-weight, water-resistant alternative, and was sized large enough to fit over a traditional greatcoat in colder weather. As the war progressed, additional features were added to further adapt the Tielocken to military use including epaulets for attaching rank insignia, a tight, button-down collar for tucking in a sealing early gas masks, large pockets for storing maps and metal D-rings on the belt for hanging map cases, binoculars, and other equipment – though not, as is sometimes claimed, swords or hand-grenades.
Yet despite its practicality, the Tielocken was not a standard-issue item, and had to be privately purchased. Nor could it be worn by just any regular soldier, being strictly reserved for Warrant Officers Class I and above. Traditionally, British Army officers were drawn from the upper classes, and were expected to privately purchase all their own equipment. This could be quite an expensive undertaking; in the 1890s, a complete British officer’s dress could cost as much as £200 – equivalent to nearly £29,000 or $37,000 today. Starting in 1914 the War Office provided officers a £50 allowance to outfit themselves, but great emphasis was still placed on maintaining their image as proper gentlemen. The Tielocken proved an ideal garment for distinguishing the officer class from the regular rank-and-file, and was in widespread use across the British Army by 1916. Meanwhile, the image of the dashing Tielocken-clad officer featured extensively in Burberry’s advertisements, playing into the public’s often romanticized view of modern warfare.
The name “trench coat”, which would forever be associated with Burberry’s creation, first appeared in a tailoring trade journal in 1916 and soon became a universal term because all the previous names were, frankly, as noted, horrible.
But also, throughout the war, manufacturers slapped the word “trench” onto any product with even a remote connection to the armed forces in order to appeal to consumers’ patriotic zeal. As a result, ordinary citizens began buying Burberry trench coats by the thousands, turning them into fashionable symbols of patriotic solidarity with the troops overseas and technically making Burberry a wartime profiteer. As is that Simon Whistler… I mean, have you seen how many videos he’s done on WWII? For shame my friend…
As military historian Peter Doyle explains:
“If it’s labeled ‘trench’ you get the sense that they’re being bought patriotically. There’s a slight hint of exploitation by the [manufacturers], but then they’re supplying what the market wanted and I think the trench coat fit into all that. Certainly people were realizing that to make it worthwhile, you needed to have this magical word on it, ‘trench’.”
Meanwhile, back on the front lines, the British Army was discovering that its dashing and distinctive officers’ uniforms – including trench coats – had an unexpected and tragic drawback: they made the wearer extremely vulnerable to snipers. Indeed, throughout the war Junior Officers died at a rate 40% higher than the enlisted ranks, with many being picked off as soon as they went “over the top” to lead their men across no-man’s-land. This high attrition rate led to a shortage of officer candidates from the upper classes, forcing the Army to relax its standards and draw increasing numbers of officers from the plebians in the lower ranks and middle classes. These “temporary gentlemen” were rightly made painfully aware of their lack of pedigree and true social standing in the dust where they belonged, and thus often turned to expensive private-purchase kit in an attempt to at least look the part of someone who wasn’t poor. Gross… In the words of Peter Doyle:
“Quite a lot of men who had no money, no standing, no basis for working and living in that social arena were suddenly walking down the street with insignia on their shoulder. If they could cut a dash with all these affectations with their uniforms, the very thing that would have gotten them picked off the front line by snipers, that was very aspirational.”
These aspirations, along with the practical utility of the garment, led thousands of newly-minted “temporary gentlemen” to shell out £3-4 for a good-quality trench coat – an extraordinary amount given that the average British soldier made just one shilling – 1/20th of a pound – per day. Meanwhile, many other armies including those of France and Belgium recognized the utility of the trench coat, and began adopting the style for their own officer corps who also apparently wanted to get shot.
On the 11th hour of the eleventh day of the 11th month in 1918, an Armistice between the Entente and Central Powers was signed in the Forest of Compiegne, finally bringing four years of bloody conflict to an end. Over the following year, hundreds of thousands of troops were demobilized and slowly started returning home. But while among the civilian population the end of the war brought with it a mass desire to leave the slaughter behind and move on, it did little to dampen the appeal of the trench coat. Indeed, many newly-demobilized officers kept their coats and continued to wear them in everyday life – both due to its inherent practicality and as a reminder of the gentlemanly status the war had temporarily granted them before thrusting them back in the mud where they belong. As a result, the trench coat acquired a sort of mystique, becoming associated with a certain image of the world-weary veteran. As Dr. Jane Tynan, professor of design history at the University of the Arts London, explains:
“The war-worn look was most attractive, not the fresh faced recruit with his spanking new uniform, but the guy who comes back. He’s got his hat at a jaunty angle… the idea was that he had been transformed, he looked like the picture of experience. I think that would certainly have given [the trench coat] a cachet; an officer returning with that sort of war-worn look and the trench coat is certainly part of that image.”
But it was Hollywood which truly cemented the trench coat as an iconic fashion accessory, the style being prominently sported by the likes of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and The Big Sleep; and Marlene Dietrich in A Foreign Affair. Whether worn by the hardboiled gumshoe, the sinister villain, or the alluring femme fatale, the trench coat oozed mystery, danger, and sheer cool, and became a staple of the Film Noir genre.
Meanwhile, though the trench coat had originally been developed as a garment for Army officers, its military service was starting to come to an end. Officers in many armies continued to wear trench coats throughout the 1920s and 30s and into the Second World War, but by the end of the conflict they had largely been supplanted by shorter, less restrictive garments such as the American M1941 and M1943 Field Jacket; the British Denison parachutist’s smock; the Jacket, Field, Wool, Olive Drab or “Ike Jacket”popularized by Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower; and the leather B3 bomber jacket famously worn by American general George S. Patton. Thankfully for fashion designers, however, the style had already made the jump to the civilian sphere, where it now enjoyed a thriving second life far removed from its military roots.
And while Burberry had dominated the trench coat market during the Great War and the interwar period, by the 1950s competitor Aquascutum had come from behind, becoming the official supplier of stylish trench coats to the likes of Winston Churchill; Cary Grant; Charles, Prince of Wales; and Prince Rainier of Monaco. They also supplied the windproof Wyncol fabric used by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay during their historic 1953 ascent of Mount Everest. And as the decades passed, Hollywood was always at hand to inject new life into the venerable trench coat, with both Burberry and Aquascutum examples famously appearing in such classic films such as 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1979’s Kramer vs Kramer, and 1987’s Wall Street. Few other clothing items have achieved such broad and unisex appeal, or weathered the decades virtually unchanged.
Today, Burberry continues to manufacture its classic trench coat much as it has for over 100 years, with each coat comprising 80 different pieces and taking four hours and 120 different operations to stitch together. But while purists will gladly pay up to $6,000 for a Burberry original because the idea of impoverished children who don’t have food to eat for want of $1 makes them happy, the trench coat itself is no longer the exclusive preserve of the rich and famous, with dozens of manufacturers offering hundreds of different versions to suit any style or budget. And year after year, fashion designers come up with fresh new spins on the trench coat, reinterpreting the time-tested design in different fabrics, colours, and patterns, ensuring that this classic style – like the very concept of cool it exudes – will never go out of fashion.
Expand for References
McRobbie, Linda, The Classy Rise of the Trench Coat, Smithsonian Magazine, May 27, 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/trench-coat-made-its-mark-world-war-i-180955397/
Bass-Krueger, Maude, Vogue Encyclopedia: the History of the Trench Coat, April 8, 2019, https://www.vogue.fr/fashion/article/vogue-encyclopaedia-the-history-of-the-trench-coat
History of the Trench Coat: Military Necessity to Fashion Accessory, Contrado, December 20, 2017, https://www.contrado.co.uk/blog/history-of-the-trench-coat/
Collins, Jack, Trench Coat Guide: History, How to Wear, & Where to Buy, Gentleman’s Gazette, https://www.gentlemansgazette.com/trench-coat-guide/
Hughes, Natalie, History of the Hero: the Burberry Trench, Harper’s Bazaar, October 13, 2023, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/fashion/a41964443/burberry-trench-coat/
Muzquiz, Albert, The Trench Coat: Before, During, and After the Trenches, Heddels, October 10, 2018, https://www.heddels.com/2018/10/history-trench-coat/
Charles Macintosh, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Macintosh
Charles Macintosh and His Famous Coat, Google Arts & Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com/theme/charles-macintosh-and-his-famous-coat/SwLSEIbM4qLrIg?hl=en
The post What’s the Deal With Trench Coats? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On the morning September 2, 1945, delegates from the victorious Allied powers and the defeated Empire of Japan gathered aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, to sign Japan’s official instrument of surrender. By 9:23, the ceremony was over; after 6 brutal years and over 75 million deaths, the Second World War was finally over. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief, and millions of troops prepared to return home. But, there was a problem: where to house them all? Six years of war had resulted in the destruction of millions of homes, the diversion of nearly every available resource into weapons production, and a massive shortage of building materials. The world faced a housing crisis on an unprecedented scale. Into this looming crisis stepped an eccentric visionary with an invention that turned every convention of home architecture squarely on its head: a sleek, futuristic aluminium house that could be mass-produced like an airplane, shipped and assembled anywhere like IKEA furniture, and consume a minimum of water, electricity, and other utilities – and all for the price of a high-end automobile. This is the fascinating story of R. Buckminster Fuller and the Dymaxion House.
Born on July 12, 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts, Richard Buckminster Fuller came from a long line of non-conformists – most notably his great aunt Margaret Fuller, a feminist pioneer and social reformer who became the first female war correspondent and professional book reviewer, the first woman permitted to study at Harvard University’s library, and a founding member of the Transcendentalist movement. Following family tradition, Buckminster-Fuller – or “Bucky”, as his family called him – enrolled in engineering at Harvard in 1913, but was soon expelled for skipping his mid-term exams to party with a vaudeville troupe in New York and charging the resulting bill to his family’s account – as you do. Following his expulsion, he was sent to work at a cotton mill in Quebec, where he gained enough proficiency with machinery and engineering to be re-admitted to Harvard. But he was soon expelled a second time for showing insufficient interest in the curriculum and declaring himself a “non-conforming misfit” a bit too loudly and often.
Undaunted, Buckminster-Fuller worked a variety of odd jobs including as a labourer at a meat-packing and the commander of a crash rescue boat during the First World War. The practical experience gained in these occupations would lay the groundwork for one of the most uniquely eclectic and influential careers in modern American history. Though mainly remembered today as an architect and inventor, Buckminster-Fuller refused to be pigeonholed, and, styling himself as a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist” pursued dozens of different roles in the course of his eventful career including businessman, scholar, teacher, poet, and futurist. A holistic, forward-looking thinker, Buckminster-Fuller saw individual problems as part of larger, complex interconnected systems, and therefore approached such problems from multiple angles in order to achieve optimal results. For example. Buckminster-Fuller believed that global poverty and other development issues were caused not by a lack of natural resources but rather the unequal distribution and inefficient use thereof. He therefore advocated for a utopian world order he called the “Design Science Revolution” in which petty national rivalries would be abandoned and scientists, engineers, designers, and other experts around the world would cooperate to bring about the optimal use of the world’s resources and foster peace and prosperity for all:
“War is obsolete… What makes so difficult the task of informing humanity of its newborn option to realize success for all is the fact that all major religions and politics thrive only on the for-all-ages-held, ignorantly adopted premise of the existence of an eternal inadequacy of life support inherent in the design of our planet Earth. All books on economics have only one basic tenet the fundamental scarcity of life support. The supreme political and economic powers as yet assume that it has to be either you or me. Not enough for both. That is why those in financial advantage fortify themselves even further, reasoning that unselfishness is suicidal…
…[but] there is now plenty for all. This design science revolution would use the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world and redirect them from weaponry to livingry production; all humanity would thereby have the option of becoming enduringly successful.”
To encapsulate his philosophy, Buckminster-Fuller coined the metaphor of Spaceship Earth, likening the planet to a giant vehicles whose scattered systems and resources – chiefly energy and information – must be effectively interconnected in order to support the lives of its crew. Ever the wordsmith – he penned over 30 books over his lifetime – Buckminster-Fuller coined a number of colourful neologisms, including that corporate boardroom favourite, synergy; tensegrity, a property of load-bearing structures with both tensile and compressive elements;and ephemeralization, defined as the ability of technological advancement to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” This was, in a nutshell, Buckminster-Fuller’s core philosophy, making him one of the early pioneers of the now-ubiquitous sustainability mindset. Buckminster-Fuller applied the ephemeralization principle to everything from architecture to his own personal lifestyle. In the quest for maximum productivity, he adopted an unusually polyphasic sleep schedule, sleeping only for a half-hour every six hours. He also attempted to document every single day of his life from 1917 to his death in 1983, creating a gigantic personal archive totalling 140,000 pieces of paper, 64,000 feet of film, and 1,500 hours of audio and making Buckminster-Fuller’s life among the most thoroughly-documented of any person in history. Like we said, he was an eccentric fellow…
Buckminster Fuller’s first encounter with architecture – the profession that would make his name – came in 1917 shortly after his marriage to Anne Hewlett, daughter of architect and muralist James Monroe Hewlett. Hewlett had invented a modular construction system composed of hollow blocks of compressed wood fibre which could be quickly and cheaply stacked together and filled with concrete. Hewlett and Buckminster-Fuller went into business together and over the following decade erected hundreds of modular houses across the country. But not all was well in Buckminster-Fuller’s life. In 1922, his first daughter, Alexandra, died of spinal meningitis at the age of three – a death Buckminster-Fuller blamed on the damp environment of the family home. Worse still, in 1927 Hewlett’s company ran into financial difficulties and Buckminster-Fuller, a minority shareholder, was forced out. Suddenly unemployed and unable to provide for his wife and newborn daughter Allegra, Buckminster-Fuller fell into a deep depression. In the autumn of that year, he even contemplated drowning himself in Lake Michigan so his family could collect the insurance payout. Suddenly, however, he experienced a powerful revelation. He felt as though he was suspended in the air, enclosed in a sphere of white light, while a disembodied voice spoke to him:
“From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”
This profound experience prompted Buckminster-Fuller to re-examine his life, and in that moment he vowed to embark on:
“…an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity”.
His first goal in this grand experiment was to revolutionize housing, which in its traditional form he considered grossly inefficient, overpriced, and incapable of meeting humanity’s needs. Drawing on Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s notion that a house is a “machine for living”, Buckminster-Fuller determined that the ideal house should be designed more like a car or an aeroplane than a traditional building, being cheaply mass-producible in large numbers in a factory and capable of being transported and assembled almost anywhere with a minimum of labour. Furthermore, it should be able to stand up to all kinds of weather – even tornadoes – and be as self-sufficient as possible, consuming a minimum of water, electricity, and other utilities.
By 19328, Buckminster-Fuller unveiled his design for the inexpensive, self-sufficient home of the future, which he called the 4-Dimensional or 4D House. Inspired by the design of metal grain bins, the 4D House eschewed traditional building materials like wood, brick, and tile in favour of strong and lightweight aluminium sheets. Instead of sitting on a concrete foundation, the 15-metre wide, 12-metre tall hexagonal living space was suspended from a central 7-metre-tall steel-truss tower, the structure’s rigidity deriving from a network of tensioned steel struts and cables – rather like a giant metal umbrella. Altogether, the assembly weighed only 1,360 kilograms and could be disassembled and packed into a 1 x 5 metre metal tube for shipping. Once delivered, the house could be assembled in only a day. And, as this was the 1920s, Buckminster-Fuller also envisioned that fully-assembled units could be air-dropped into place by zeppelin.
The interior – accessed through a small elevator in the central mast – was lined with panels made of casein – a type of plastic made from milk – and divided into 5 wedge-shaped spaces: two bedrooms, each with its own en-suite bathroom; a kitchen, a living room, and a rooftop recreation deck. However, as all the utilities hardware was concentrated in the central mast, these spaces could easily be expanded or rearranged to suit the owners’ particular needs.
In order to minimize utility consumption, electricity was supplied by a diesel generator at the base of the central mast, a grey water system of gutters and channels in the roof and walls collected rainwater and condensation for use in washing, and a highly-efficient climate control system kept the interior temperature stable by raising and lowering the roof to control airflow. This, in turn, made it unnecessary to open the house’s plexiglas windows. Later plans called for the installation of windmills on the roof to provide even cheaper power. And if that weren’t enough, the 4D House came loaded with all the latest mod-cons – as well as a few not seen before. There was a central vacuum system, a kitchen incinerator, revolving clothes closets and dish racks, and “ovolving” shelves mounted on vertical conveyor belts that moved at the touch of a button.
Later, in 1936, Buckminster-Fuller would patent perhaps the cleverest and most celebrated aspect of the 4D design: its bathroom. Recognizing that traditional bathrooms with their tiled floors and porcelain fixtures were overly expensive and difficult to clean, he designed a futuristic, modular unit reminiscent of a modern airplane bathroom, composed of four stamped sheets of tin-plated copper integrating a molded-in bathtub, shower, toilet, sink, and two drains. A marvel of well thought-out design, no part of the bathroom had a radius less than 10 centimetres in order to simplify cleaning, the bathtub was placed at the perfect height to bathe children without stooping, and the ventilator fan was placed under the mirror to prevent it from fogging. Other unique features included a “fogger” shower that used compressed air to blast the user with tiny droplets and only consumed a cup of water per use, and a “packaging” toilet that used no water and sealed waste in plastic bags that could be used as garden compost – though the latter was quickly replaced with a conventional septic system as the technology could not be made to work properly.
The prototype house was due to be unveiled at the Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago, but the store management decided that it needed a catchier name than “4D”. So, working with Public Relations specialist Waldo Warren, Buckminster-Fuller combined three of his favourite words – Dynamic, Maximum, and Tension – to form Dymaxion, a word which would largely replace ephemeralization to encapsulate Buckminster-Fuller’s philosophy of accomplishing more with less and which he would apply to a variety of projects going forward. For example, his detailed personal archive was dubbed the Dymaxion Chronofile and his unique minimum-distortion projection of the earth’s surface the Dymaxion Map.
The Dymaxion House made its debut at Marshall Field’s in 1929 as part of an exhibition on modernist furniture. And while the futuristic home attracted plenty of press attention, it was roundly rejected by the American Institute of Architects and failed to attract any buyers. The public simply wasn’t ready for such a radical departure from traditional conceptions of home architecture.
Undeterred, Buckminster-Fuller next tried his hand at revolutionizing the world of transportation, teaming up with naval architect Starling Burgess to create an ultra-efficient 11-seat vehicle he dubbed – what else? – the Dymaxion Car. The sleek, futuristic-looking vehicle was built mainly of wood covered in aluminium panels, creating a strong but lightweight structure which, combined with a rear-mounted V8 engine, allowed it to reach speeds of up to 190 kilometres per hour. Driven by its two front wheels but steered by its third rear wheel, the car was impressively maneuverable, capable of driving itself in place in a tight circle. In keeping with Buckminster-Fuller’s holistic approach to all problems, the Dymaxion Car was not merely intended to be a ground vehicle, but rather the prototype “ground-taxiing phase” of a future “Omni-Medium Transport” that would also be able to fly.
The Dymaxion Car made its debut at the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago, and while the vehicle, like most of Buckminster-Fuller’s creations, was a media sensation, the design soon proved dangerously flawed. The rear-wheel steering system, combined with the unusual aerodynamics of the body, made the car highly unstable at all but the slowest speeds. Shortly after its public unveiling in October 1933, the prototype crashed during a demonstration, killing one of the three passengers aboard. Though Buckminster-Fuller conceded that the Dymaxion Car “was an invention that could not be made available to the general public without considerable improvements,” he nonetheless used his inheritance to form the Dymaxion Corporation and finance the construction of two more prototypes. Yet despite his best efforts, no automotive companies could be convinced to manufacture the vehicle, so Buckminster-Fuller sold off the prototypes and dissolved his company.
As his next venture, Buckminster-Fuller attempted to market the most well-received feature of his Dymaxion House design: the innovative unitized bathroom. Unlike the house, there was significant demand for the Dymaxion Bathroom, and Buckminster-Fuller signed a deal with the Phelps Dodge Corporation to mass produce the units both in the original copper and in plastic. Unfortunately, the Dymaxion Bathroom encountered stiff resistance from plumbers’ unions, who feared that the newfangled product would put their members out of work and refused to install them. As a result, the venture fizzled out after only a few years.
But while Buckminster-Fuller’s innovative home designs failed to attract any interest in the 1920s, the outbreak of the Second World War suddenly made his ideas very attractive. In 1942, Buckminster-Fuller was contracted by the British War Relief Organization to develop a small, lightweight, mass-producible shelter to house those rendered homeless by German bombing raids. The result was the Dymaxion Deployment Unit or DDU, a yurt-like structure made of corrugated steel measuring six metres in diameter. Unlike the earlier Dymaxion House, the structure was not suspended from a central mast but rather rested on a conventional concrete pad. It also sported a curved roof with a specially-designed cupola-like ventilator designed to create a natural heat-driven vortex and draw cool air down into the structure. Around 200 DDUs were produced by the Butler Manufacturing Company before wartime steel shortages forced manufacturing to end. Being insufficient to meet Britain’s wartime housing demands, the shelters were instead shipped to the Persian Gulf and used to house members of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
As the war drew to a close and the United States prepared to receive millions of demobilized troops, the nation faced a looming housing crisis. Nearly all available construction workers were tied up in wartime production, while said production had created shortages in lumber, brick, concrete, tile, and other common building materials. However, there was one material in abundant supply: aircraft-grade aluminium. Furthermore, the country was dotted with aircraft factories capable of working with this materials – factories that would be struggling to find work once the war ended. The time had come at last for the Dymaxion House.
In 1944, Buckminster-Fuller joined forces with the Beech Aircraft Corporation of Wichita, Kansas to form Dymaxion Dwelling Machines, Inc. – later Fuller Houses, Inc. – and manufacture an updated version of the 1929 Dymaxion House. Renamed the Fuller House – insert San Fransisco-set sitcom jokes here – or the new design was round instead of hexagonal and measured 11 metres in diameter, providing 94 square metres of living space. Building off his experience with the Dymaxion Deployment Units, Buckminster-Fuller also added a rotating rooftop ventilator that followed the prevailing wind and changed the entire volume of air inside the house every six minutes. This system was also cleverly designed to force dust down and through the baseboards where it was trapped by special filters, greatly reducing the amount of vacuuming the occupants had to perform. The diesel generator and rooftop wind turbines were eliminated, but many resource-conserving features like the rainwater collection system and fogging shower were retained. But Buckminster-Fuller was not able to integrate every innovation he would have liked. Though he originally intended to fill the house with custom-designed inflatable furniture, the Beech Aircraft management insisted on more conventional furnishings in to appeal to traditional middle-class sensibilities.
In 1945, Beech built two prototype Fuller Houses: one for indoor display called the “Barwise” and one for outdoor display called the “Danbury.” The houses went on public display in early 1946 and attracted considerable attention, with the April 1, 1946 issue of Aviation News magazine announcing that:
“Beech Aircraft Corp. expected to build 200 of these houses a day soon after the start of 1947, according to Herman Wolf, president of Fuller Homes, Inc., which will market the dwelling designed by R. Buckminster Fuller…The houses will be subcontracted to construction firms which will combine aircraft technology and auto mass production methods. Wolf and Fuller see the new dwellings, which will sell for $6,500 erected, as the answer to the veterans housing problem. City building codes are the big imponderable in forecasting the success of this dwelling.”
Meanwhile, Fortune magazine hailed the Fuller House as “a product that would have more significant social consequences than the introduction of the automobile” and which had a “better than even chance of upsetting the building industry.”
Yet despite such optimistic predictions and the receipt of more than 3,500 advance orders – including one from science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein – by 1948 the Fuller Houses Inc. venture was effectively dead, and no further houses were built. Several factors conspired to kill the Dymaxion House a second time. For one thing, despite Buckminster-Fuller’s extensive cost-saving measures, a Fuller House still cost $6,500 ($104,000 today) – around the price of a brand-new Cadillac and out of reach for many middle-class families. Also, as with the standalone Dymaxion Bathroom, the house drew the ire of builders’, electricians,’ and plumbers’ unions, who refused to install or connect houses built in factories by members of other unions.
Yet the greatest factor in the Fuller House’s demise was probably Buckminster-Fuller himself. An incorrigible perfectionist, Buckminster-Fuller was never satisfied with the design of the house, and refused to sign off on a production version until he had ironed out all the kinks. As is refinement process dragged on, investors grew impatient, and one by one they pulled out of the project. Beech Aircraft was unable to raise the capital to begin mass-production, and the whole venture eventually collapsed. No Dymaxion House fulfilling Buckminster-Fuller’s specifications was ever built or lived in, though in 1948 a Kansas-based investor named William Graham purchased the Danbury display prototype and installed on his lakefront property. Known as “Wichita House”, the structure had most of its autonomous features like the rooftop ventilator and rain-collection system disabled and was eventually turned into an annex for a much larger, conventionally-built house. Nonetheless, the Dymaxion House proved just as durable as Buckminster-Fuller had intended, emerging unscathed when a tornado passed just a few hundred metres away in 1964. The Grahams lived in Wichita House until the 1970s, the structure laying abandoned until 1990 when the family donated it to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan. Following a 10-year, $1 million restoration effort in which components of both the Danbury and Barwise were combined together into a single structure, the Dymaxion House re-opened to the public in 2001 – the only surviving example of this unusual architectural landmark anywhere in the world.
Though economic and political factors were largely responsible for the Dymaxion House’s demise, it is doubtful whether the design would have succeeded even if Beech Aircraft had managed to get its production line up and running. As demonstrated by the failure of later mass-produced, transportable “living machines” like Finnish architect Matti Suuronen’s UFO-shaped Futuro Pod, the average homebuyer is very conservative in their tastes, much preferring to live in a traditional house with a picket fence than something that looks like it just descended from the mothership – price and efficiency be damned. Furthermore, being self-contained, mass-produced structures, such houses did not blend well into older neighbourhoods and were difficult to expand or otherwise customize to the owner’s tastes. In other words, they were collectivist, one-size-fits-all products – a non-starter in the hyper-individualistic world of post-war America.
Yet despite these setbacks, Buckminster-Fuller continued to pursue efficient solutions to architectural problems, and in 1949 came up with the invention most closely associated with his name: the geodesic dome. First developed in the 1910s by German engineer Walther Bauersfeld but perfected and popularized by Buckminster-Fuller, geodesic domes are spherical thin-shell structures constructed from triangular lattice elements. Inherently stable, geodesic domes can be constructed to nearly any scale without losing structural integrity and, being spherical, enclose the largest volume for the least structural weight – properties which greatly appealed to Buckminster-Fuller’s sensibilities. Thanks to his tireless promotion of the concept, geodesic domes experienced a surge of popularity in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, notable examples including the American Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair – today the Montreal Biosphere – the dome at Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole, and Spaceship Earth at Disney’s EPCOT Centre. Buckminster-Fuller himself and his wife Anne even lived in a geodesic dome house in Carbondale, Illinois from 1960 to 1971 – a classic example of the inventor fulling integrating his life and work.
However, just like the Dymaxion House, geodesic domes had many unforeseen disadvantages which made them unpopular as personal dwellings. Being made of triangular sections, geodesic domes are largely incompatible with traditional square homebuilding hardware and require expensive custom-built windows, doors, and other components. Making such structures compatible with municipal building codes is also challenging, further adding to the cost. In terms of simple livability, the curved walls of a geodesic dome make internal partitioning and furniture placement inefficient compared to a rectangular floor plan and limit the total space the occupants can use due to the lack of headroom near the edges. Finally, moisture tends to accumulate inside the dome walls, accelerating the degradation of the structure, while the unusual acoustics cause voices to carry throughout the dome interior, making privacy difficult to maintain. Thus, like most of Buckminster-Fuller’s ideas, the geodesic dome was a brilliant technical innovation which sadly ran afoul of the messy and often contradictory realities of everyday life. Yet despite its real-world shortcomings, the geodesic dome and the utopian ideals it represents will forever be associated with the name of the man who perfected and popularized it. Indeed, in 1996, Harold Kroto, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of the C-60 molecule – a hollow, soccer ball-like shell composed of 60 carbon atoms. As this structure resembled a geodesic dome, the team named the C60 molecule Buckminsterfullerine – AKA the “buckyball.”
Expand for References
Marks, Robert, R. Buckminster Fuller, Encyclopedia Britannica, April 12, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/technology/geodesic-dome
Dymaxion House, https://web.archive.org/web/20120616063448/http://users.design.ucla.edu/~djvmc/24/bucky/house.html
Merin, Gili, Architecture Classics: The Dymaxion House / Buckminster Fuller, Arch Daily, https://www.archdaily.com/401528/ad-classics-the-dymaxion-house-buckminster-fuller
Dymaxion House (1946), www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx5VJ1yd3HQ
Dymaxion House, The Henry Ford, https://www.thehenryford.org/visit/henry-ford-museum/exhibits/dymaxion-house/
Curating & Preserving The Dymaxion House, The Henry Ford, https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/inside/dymaxion-house/
What is a Dymaxion House? R. Buckminster Fuller Collection, Stanford University, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bucky/feature/what-is-a-dymaxion-house
“A House is a Machine for Living In” – The Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, Buckminster Fuller and the Dymaxion House, University of Oregon, https://blogs.uoregon.edu/dymaxionhouse/a-house-is-a-machine-for-living-in/
Dymaxion House, Architectuul, https://architectuul.com/architecture/dymaxion-house
The 1920s Dymaxion House designed to be an innovative housing solution for American citizens by architect/inventor Richard Buckminster-Fuller, Double Stone Steel, https://www.doublestonesteel.com/blog/architecture/the-1920s-dymaxion-house-designed-to-be-an-innovative-housing-solution-for-american-citizens-by-architect-inventor-richard-buckminster-fuller/
Mugrabi, Colby, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, Minnie Muse, October 16, 2019, https://www.minniemuse.com/articles/musings/buckminster-fullers-dymaxion-house
Lobner, Peter, Beech Aircraft Corporation and R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, June 15, 2020, https://lynceans.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Beech-Aircraft-Buckminster-Fuller-Dymaxion-house-converted.pdf
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By the winter of 1944 and 1945, the German Third Reich was in dire straits. Adolf Hitler’s final offensive in the Ardennes had failed, the Soviet Red Army was driving ever closer to Germany’s borders, and day and night Allied bomber aircraft were pummelling German cities into smoking rubble. With the end in sight, the Nazi government hastily assembled a desperate, last-ditch force to fight the final battle for the Fatherland: the Volkssturm, a citizens’ militia composed of young boys and old men. Poorly trained and armed with a motley assortment of leftover weapons, Volkssturm units were derisively nicknamed “casseroles” by the regular Army, as they were full of “old meat and green vegetables”. Little more than cannon fodder against the better armed and trained Allied forces, the Volkssturm was emblematic of the suicidal fanaticism that typified the dying days of the Third Reich. But the madness went even further, for the youth of Germany were not only expected to face off against Russian tanks on the streets of Berlin, but shoot down waves of American bombers using crude wooden fighter jets. This is the story of the Heinkel He-162 Volksjäger, Nazi Germany’s last-ditch fighter designed to be flown by children.
As the Allied bombing offensive over Germany intensified throughout 1943 and 1945, Nazi planners turned to a series of increasingly sophisticated “wonder weapons” in a desperate attempt to stem the tide. These weapons included guided surface-to-air missiles like the Messerschmitt Enzian and Henschel Schmetterling; jet fighters like the Messerschmitt Me-262 Schwalbe, and rocket fighters like the Messerschmitt Me-163 Comet. However, not only were these weapons resource-intensive to produce in the large quantities needed, but most could only be flown by experienced pilots – something Germany had in short supply. So, on September 10, 1944, the Reich Air Ministry or RLM put out a call for the development of a lightweight “emergency fighter”. According to the RLM specifications, the aircraft had to be powered by a single BMW 003 turbojet engine, weigh under 2 metric tons, use a minimum of strategic materials like steel and aluminium, and be easy to mass-produce. Minimum performance was set at 750 kilometres per hour (or 466 mph) top speed with a takeoff roll of no more than 500 metres and a flight endurance of at least 30 minutes. Armament was to be two 20mm cannons with 100 rounds per gun or two 30mm cannons with 50 rounds per gun. Most crucially, however, the aircraft had to be easy to fly with minimal training, allowing members of the Hitler Youth to fly it into combat. Proposals were to be submitted no later than September the 20th, and the winning entry ready to enter production by New Year’s 1945. This ambitious and foolhardy program soon became known as the Volksjäger – the “people’s fighter.”
The Volksjäger program was vehemently opposed by leading figures in the German Luftwaffe including Generalleutnant Adolf Galland, who feared it would divert resources from more promising aircraft like the Me-262. This view was also shared by many in the German aviation industry, such as engineers Willi Messerschmitt and Kurt Tank. However, since the project had the support of Reichsmarschall Herman Göring and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer – both high-ranking figures in the Nazi government – these objections were ignored.
Nearly every aircraft manufacturer in Germany submitted a proposal for the Volksjäger program, but only two made RLM’s short list: Blohm and Voss and Heinkel. Blohm and Voss’s proposal, the P.211, was remarkably advanced for the time, with a fuselage-mounted engine reminiscent of post-war jet fighters like the American F-86 Sabre and Soviet MiG-21. The initial design even included swept-back wings for extra speed, though for ease of production these were soon changed to simpler straight wings.
Unfortunately for Blohm und Voss, however, Heinkel had already been working on a lightweight fighter for some time. In July 1944, Siegfried Günter, head of Heinkel’s project office, issued a report to his senior managers summarizing the state of the German air forces and the ideal design requirements for fighter aircraft going forward: “In addition to numerical ratios, the attainment air superiority also depends on flight performance. If enemy jet single-seaters are encountered, the superiority of the Me 262 cannot be relied upon due to its conventional design with unswept wings and the arrangement of the motor near the ground – which makes fuel consumption high and the range short. For this reason, it is necessary to limit yourself to a single-seater aircraft with the least possible equipment and the largest proportion of fuel in the total weight.”
This aircraft design became known as the P 1073 Strahljäger, and was calculated to have a maximum speed of 1,010 kilometres per hour and a maximum range of 1,000 km using Heinkel’s own He S-11 turbojet. But when the RLM issued its Volksjäger specifications on September the 10, Heinkel quickly adapted the P 1073 design to use the specified BMW 003 engine and submitted it to the competition the following day. Thanks to this head start – as well as a measure of political lobbying, Heinkel ultimately won the competition, and signed a contract with RLM to deliver 1,000 Volksjägers by April of 1945 and 2,000 by May. The design was officially designated the He-162 Spatz or “Sparrow”, though many sources incorrectly refer to the aircraft as the “Salamander” – actually a codename for its wing structure.
Designed by Siegfried Günter and Karl Schwärzler, the He-162 was a radical-looking aircraft. Its single jet engine was mounted in a streamlined pod above the fuselage, with the intake just above and behind the pilot’s head. This, along with the aircraft’s short tricycle landing gear, was intended to provide easy access to the engine for maintenance – a useful feature since the service life of early jet engines was measured in hours. While the fuselage was made of metal, to conserve strategic materials the short wings and twin tail – chosen to clear the engine exhaust – were built of laminated wood. Further, as bailing out conventionally was likely to result in the pilot being sucked into the engine intake, the He-162 was among the first combat aircraft to be fitted with an ejection seat, which launched the pilot clear of the cockpit using a small explosive cartridge.
Two versions of the aircraft were initially planned: the He-162 A-1 bomber destroyer armed with two 30mm MK-108 cannons, and the He-162 A-2 air superiority fighter armed with two 20mm MG-151’s. That said, the recoil of the MK-108s proved too powerful for the tiny airframe, so ultimately the MG-151s were used instead. Heinkel also came up with a number of follow-up models, including the He-162A-3 with a strengthened nose to take the recoil of the MK-108s, the He-163B-1 with a more powerful engine and greater endurance, the He-162S tandem-seat glider for training Hitler Youth pilots, and a number of variants powered by simpler and cheaper pulse-jet engines. However, due to lack of time and resources, only the basic A-1 model was ever mass-produced.
Incredibly, just 74 days passed between Heinkel accepting the RLM contract on September 23 and the He-162 prototype’s first test flight on December 6. This took place at Schwechat airfield near Vienna, with Heinkel test pilot Gotthold Peter at the controls. At first all went well, until, 20 minutes into the flight, a landing gear door fell off, forcing Peter to land immediately. The failure was soon traced to a faulty glue bond, a problem that would plague the aircraft throughout its short career. Nonetheless, the test was deemed a success, with the He-162 reaching an impressive top speed of 840 kilometres per hour (or 521 mph) at an altitude of 6,000 metres or about 20,000 ft. However, it quickly became apparent that the Nazi government’s plans to crew the Volksjäger with Hitler Youth was a fanatical pipe dream; while extremely fast and highly manoeuvrable, the He-162 proved tricky even for an experience pilot like Peter to handle, exhibiting significant lateral instability. And even bigger problems appeared four days later as Gotthold Peter took to the air to demonstrate the He-162 before Nazi Party officials. While making a high-speed pass over the airfield, the wing came partly unglued and shed an aileron, sending the aircraft crashing to the ground and killing Peter instantly.
Despite this setback, production of the He-162 carried on as planned. Indeed, such was the Nazis’ desperation to get the Volksjäger into combat as soon as possible that mass production began even before the first prototype had flown, with modifications derived from the flight testing program being applied directly on the assembly line. Among these were strengthening of the wing structure and the addition of turned-down wingtips to correct some of the aircraft’s lateral stability problems.
While the first 31 He-162s were produced at the Heinkel plant in Vienna, the ongoing Allied bombing campaign forced Heinkel to disperse production of components to small shops and factories all over Germany. Final assembly took place at the Heinkel plant in Merienhe, the Junkers plant at Bernberg, and the underground Mittelwerk factory at Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains. Here, the aircraft were assembled by forced labourers from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, under the brutal watch of the SS. Incidentally, Mittelwerk also assembled the infamous V-2 ballistic missile, 3,000 of which would rain down on England and Belgium between September 1944 and March 1945, killing over 9,000 people.
This brings us to February of 1945 when the Luftwaffe formed Erprobungskommado 162, an evaluation unit commanded by Oberstleutnant Heinz Bär, an experienced fighter pilot with 200 confirmed kills. Based at Rechlin Airfield in southern Germany, the unit received the first batch of 46 He-162s and spent the next two months familiarizing themselves with the aircraft’s handling characteristics. Meanwhile, the first operation unit He-162 unit, Jagdgeschwader I, was formed at Parchim, near the Heinkel factory at Marienhe. However, as preliminary flight testing had indicated, the He-162 proved tricky to fly – especially on takeoff and landing – leading to many accidents. As pilot Harald Bauer later recalled:
“When we started out in February and March it was a very tough, cold winter at the time, and they had ploughed runways with ice banks forming at the sides. During my short period [at the Heinkel Works] from December 44 to March 45, we started out with 65 people, and when I took off on my last test flight, we were 5 left of the original group. None of them died in combat; all of them [died] either [by] breaking out on landing or breaking out on takeoff (hitting the ice on either side of the runway). And then a sweeper truck came and swept the remains into a big hole.”
Things didn’t exactly improve when, on April 7, 1945, just as JG-I was approaching combat readiness, Parchim airfield was bombed by American B-17 Flying Fortress aircraft, forcing the unit to move to nearby Ludwigslust airfield. A week later they moved again to Leck in Schleswig-Holstein, near the Danish Border, where the He-162 finally saw combat for the first time. On April 19, the type scored its first victory when an He-162 of JG-I shot down a British Hawker Tempest fighter. However, the German pilot was soon shot down himself by another Tempest while returning to base. The following day, another He-162 pilot performed one of the first successful combat ejections in history. While his reason for bailing out is not recorded, given the He-162’s half-hour endurance it is likely he simply ran out of fuel. Indeed, while He-162 pilots managed to score a handful of victories before the end of the war, this came at the cost of 13 aircraft and 10 pilots – most being lost to landing or takeoff accidents and engine failures.
Fast-forward to early May, shortly after Adolf Hitler managed to take out Hitler in Berlin, Erprobungskommando 162 was formed into an operational unit under the command of Adolf Galland. But this was too little, too late, for a week later Germany surrendered and Galland’s men burned their aircraft to prevent them falling into enemy hands. Other units, however, gladly handed over their mounts, giving Allied pilots and engineers examples to evaluate the strange little jet. Thankfully, the Nazi Party’s mad scheme to send swarms of Hitler Youth pilots against the might of the Allied air forces never came to pass. If it had, it is likely that accidents and mechanical failures would have killed most of these boy warriors before they ever saw the enemy.
That said, Allied flight testing later revealed that overall, the He-162 was an exceptional combat aircraft, whose most glaring flaws were mostly just the result of rushed development, poor-quality materials, and the inexperience of its pilots. That the aircraft turned out as good as it did under such desperate conditions is a testament to the skill and ingenuity of Siegfried Günter and his design team at Heinkel. Today, seven He-162s survive in museums around the world, the strange little hunchbacked fighters serving as silent reminders of the fanaticism and desperation that overtook Germany in the final days of the Third Reich.
Expand for References
The High-Performance Aircraft Heinkel He-162 from 1945, Deutsches Technikmuseum, September 27, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20120529231119/http://www.sdtb.de/Medieninfo-Heinkel-He-162.1921.0.html
Heinkel He 162 A-2 Spatz (Sparrow), National Air and Space Museum, https://www.si.edu/object/heinkel-he-162-2-spatz-sparrow%3Anasm_A19600321000
Goebel, Greg, Heinkel He 162 Volksjaeger, Air Vectors, January 1, 2023, http://www.airvectors.net/avhe162.html
Heinkel He 162 Jet Fighter Test Pilot, PeninsulaSrsVideos, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmJqjx9VVKM
Heinkel He 162 “People’s Fighter”, http://balsi.de/Weltkrieg/Waffen/Flugzeuge/he162.htm
The post The Jet the Nazis Designed to Be Flown By Children appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Pop quiz: who was the first woman in space? Many of you probably just answered Dr. Sally Ride, who launched aboard the space shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983. But you would be wrong: Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, not the first overall. That honour belongs to a now scarcely remembered Russian woman who, all the way back in August 1963, became not only the first woman, but only the 12th person in history to rocket into the Final Frontier. This is the forgotten story of Valentina Tereshkova.
On April 9, 1959, the newly-formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA announced its selection for the first American astronauts. Known as the “Mercury Seven”, its members – Alan B. Shepard, Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, John H. Glenn, Malcom “Scott” Carpenter, Walter M. “Wally” Schirra, Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, and Leroy G. “Gordo” Cooper – were all drawn from the ranks of military test pilots. Less than a year later on February 25, 1960, the rival Soviet space program selected its own slate of 20 cosmonauts, all pilots in the Soviet Air Force: deep breath Ivan N. Anikeyev, Pavel I. Belyayev, Valentin V. Bondarenko, Valery F. Bykovsky, Valentin I. Filatyev, Yuri A. Gagarin,Viktor V. Gorbatko, Anatoli Y. Kartashov, Yevgeni V. Khrunov, Vladimir M. Komarov, Aleksei A. Leono, Grigori G. Nelyubov, Andriyan G. Nikolayev, Pavel R. Popovich, Mars Z. Rafikov, Georgi S. Shonin, Gherman S. Titov, Valentin Varlamov, Boris V. Volynov, and Dmitry A. Zaikin.
In sharp contrast to the very public and civilian-operated American space program, the Soviet program was run by the military and shrouded in official secrecy. Thus, unlike the Mercury Seven, who became instant celebrities fêted across the United States and the world, the names of the first cosmonauts were kept tightly under wraps, only to be revealed after they successfully reached orbit. Over the following year, the two programs raced neck and neck to place the first man in space, until, on April 12, 1961, 27-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, completing one orbit before safely returning to earth. This historic achievement was followed by a flurry of launches from both sides, with Gagarin being followed into space by Alan Shepard aboard Mercury-Redstone 3 on May 5, Gus Grissom aboard Mercury-Redstone 4 on July 21, and Gherman Titov aboard Vostok 2 on August 6. By late 1961, however, it became clear to both American and Soviet planners that new blood was needed – especially as both space programs geared up to launch more complex orbital missions and, eventually, land a man on the moon. The Soviets in particular had suffered significant losses in their cosmonaut corps, with Anatoli Kartashov and Valentin Varlamov suffering serious injuries in training and Valentin Bondarenko dying in a horrific fire in a hyperbaric chamber. By the end of 1963 four more cosmonauts would also be expelled from the program for disciplinary reasons.
The task of selecting replacements fell to General Nikolai Kamanin, director of cosmonaut training, who recommended that an unusual group of candidates be added to the next slate. In 1960 and 1961, a number of articles appeared in the American press about a group of women pilots who underwent the same medical evaluations as the Mercury Seven, with several of them scoring even higher than their male counterparts – and for more on this, please check out our video The Largely Forgotten “Mercury 13” over on our sister channel Highlight History. Though privately funded and unaffiliated with NASA, these experiments alarmed Kamanin, who declared:
“We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American. This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women.”
The idea of sending a woman into space delighted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to score yet another “first” over the United States. So, on December 31, 1962, the Central Committee of the Communist Party approved the recruitment of a new slate of cosmonauts – including five women. In order to beat the Americans into space, the women would be selected and trained far ahead of their male colleagues. The Freewill Society for Cooperation With the Army, Aviation, and Navy Support or DOSAAF, a paramilitary sport organization founded in 1927, was given the task of scouting out suitable candidates, who had to be under 30 years of age, no taller than 170 centimetres and no heavier than 70 kilograms in order to fit inside the spacecraft, and have experience in parachuting. Unlike the male cosmonauts, however, no university degree or even piloting experience was required. This was because unlike the American Mercury spacecraft, the Vostok capsule was designed to be controlled via radio command from the ground, the cosmonaut only taking manual control in the case of an emergency. Also, while Mercury capsules splashed down in the ocean, for reasons of convenience and secrecy Vostok capsules landed over the vast territory of the Soviet Union. But since the parachute could not land both the heavy capsule and the cosmonaut inside at a safe velocity, the cosmonaut instead ejected at an altitude of 7 kilometres and parachuted separately to the ground. Interestingly, this design feature was actually kept secret following Yuri Gagarin’s historic 1961 spaceflight because the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale or FAI’s official rules regarding spaceflight records specified that an astronaut must return with their spacecraft. In the end, however, the FAI amended its rules and Gagarin was officially recognized as the first human to make a spaceflight.
When the Soviet government announced it was looking for female cosmonaut candidates, some 800 patriotic women from across the nation eagerly submitted their applications. Of these, DOSAAF compiled a list of 400 names, eventually whittled down to just 58. On January 15, 1962, these 58 dossiers reached General Kamanin, who four days later stated:
“Yesterday I considered the files of fifty-eight female candidates. Generally disappointed and dissatisfied. Only twenty-three will be brought to Moscow for medical tests because DOSAAF did not examine their credentials correctly. I told them I needed girls who were young, brave, physically strong and with experience of aviation, who we can prepare for spaceflight in no more than six months. The central objective of this accelerated preparation is to ensure that the American do not beat us to place the first woman in space.”
A preliminary round of medical testing whittled the 58 candidates down to just 18: Valentina Daricheva,
Svetlana Ivleva, Galina Korchuganova, Galina Korolkova, Tatyana Kuznetsova, Vera Kvasova, Natalya Maslova, Tatiana Morozitcheva, Valentina Ponomareva, Marina Popovich, Marina Sokolova, Ludmila Solovyeva, Irina Solovyova, Valentina Tereshkova, Zhanna Yorkina, Rosalia Zanozina, and two women named Borzenkova and Yefremova whose first names were not recorded. These 18 women were divided into two groups of nine for further evaluations, of which seven – Valentina Daricheva, Svetlana Ivleva, Galina Korchuganova, Galina Korolkova, Tatiana Morozitcheva, and Rosalia Zanozina – were ultimately eliminated. Of the remaining 11, five finalists were selected, the results being finalized on April 3, 1962. These were:
-Tatyana Kuznetsova, aged 20: a secretary and champion parachutist with several world records to her name.
-Valentina Ponomareva, aged 28: a pilot and graduate of the Moscow Aviation Institute. Of the final 5, Ponomareva was the only married woman and the only one with children.
-Irina Solovyova, aged 24: an engineer and champion parachutist who had completed over 2,200 parachute jumps.
-Valentina Tereshkova, aged 24: a textile worker and hobby parachutist who had completed 100 jumps.
-Zhanna Yorkina, aged 22: a schoolteacher fluent in English and German and an avid skydiver.
As the Soviet space program was a military operation, all five candidates were temporarily inducted into the Soviet Air Force and given the honorary rank of Private. Training was set to begin in April 1962, with launches scheduled for August of the following year.
The five women arrived at the Cosmonaut Training Centre outside Moscow – colloquially known as “Star City” – in March 1962, around the same time General Kamanin announced the second slate of male cosmonauts. As Valentina Tereshkova later recalled the women were star-struck by the original cosmonauts assigned to be their guides and mentors:
“Let me tell you, when I entered the Star City of cosmonauts, my heart was about to stop. How will they meet me here? I didn’t do anything great in my life; in fact I didn’t see much of a real life and these were real pilots. And two of them, Gagarin and Titov, were heroes whose names were known all around the world!”
But the male astronauts were less enthused about their new female colleagues, with Valentina Ponomareva later reporting that:
“The men thought we were completely redundant, that there was no place for a woman on a spacecraft.”
Especially incensed was Gregory Nelyubov, who was nominally third in line to fly after Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov. However, the joint Vostok 3 and 4 missions were ultimately assigned to Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich who, being ethnically Chuvash and Ukrainian, respectively, were chosen to represent the diversity of the Soviet Republics. With the Vostok 6 slot now earmarked for a female cosmonaut, Nelyubov risked being pushed further down the flight rotation. In March 1963, Nelyubov, along with Ivan Anikeyev and Valentin Filatyev, was arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct and expelled from the cosmonaut corps, having never flown in space. He soon descended into depression and alcoholism, committing suicide on February 18, 1966.
Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was more ambivalent about the female cosmonauts. Though concerned about the selection of Valentina Ponomareva, stating:
“Cosmonautics is a known and unsafe world. Can we risk the life of a mother?”
…he ultimately came around and instructed his fellow cosmonauts:
“Some lady cosmonauts are on their way to join is. Let’s be considerate and helpful toward them. There must be no teasing or anything else offensive to them.”
Training for the five women cosmonauts began in April 1962, and included intensive sessions in centrifuges, thermal and decompression chambers, isolation chambers, and spacecraft simulators, as well as simulated zero-gravity training in a special aircraft flying parabolic arcs – what in American service is known as the “Vomit Comet.” They were also given basic cockpit instruction in MiG-15 UTI training aircraft by Colonel Vladimir Seryogin, who would later die in the same mysterious 1968 plane crash that took the life of Yuri Gagarin. But while the women were encouraged to take the controls and get a feel for the aircraft, they were not permitted to perform solo flights. By December 1962, all five had risen through the ranks, being commissioned as Junior Lieutenants.
But the strain of the training eventually took its toll, and two of the five began to fall behind. Zhanna Yorkina performed poorly during a simulated three-day space mission – reportedly even fainting – while and Tatyana Kuznetsova was ultimately forced to stand down due to illness. This left Valentina Ponomareva, Irina Solovyova, and Valentina Tereshkova in a neck-and-neck race for the Vostok 6 mission. Finally, on May 21, 1961, General Kamanin announced his decision:
“We must send Tereshkova into space first, and her backup will be Solovyova. She is Gagarin in a skirt.”
Valentina Pomonareva, the only one of the five with piloting experience, was shocked by the decision, and complained to Yevgeny Karpov, director of Star City:
“Trying to console me, Karpov said that political considerations prompted the sending of a person ‘with particular roots’, and I had the misfortune of being a clerk.”
Indeed, despite being arguably the least qualified of the final five, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was chosen largely because she most closely fit the proletarian ideal favoured by the Soviet regime. Born on on March 16, 1937 in the small village of Bolshoye Maslennikovo, 270 kilometres northeast of Moscow, Tereshkova was the eldest daughter of Vladimir Tereshkov, a tractor driver on a collective farm; and Elena Fyodorovna, a textile worker. In 1940, when Valentina was only 2, Vladimir, by then a sergeant in the Red Army, was killed while fighting in the Winter War against Finland. After graduating high school at age 16, Valentina worked first at a tire factory and then at a textile mill in order to support her family. Meanwhile, she became interested in skydiving and joined the local Aeroclub, making her first parachute jump at age 22 on May 21, 1959:
“I did night jumps, too, onto land and water – the Volga river. It’s a very different experience, but both are wonderful… I learned to wait as long as possible before pulling the cord, just to feel the air; 40 seconds, 50 seconds … It’s not really falling; you experience enormous pleasure from the sensation of your whole body. It’s marvellous.”
Tereshkova had also given more acceptable, patriotic answers to questions by the selection board. For example, when asked “What do you want from life?” Valentina Ponomaryova replied “I want to take everything it can offer,” while Tereshkova answered “I want to support irrevocably the Komsomol and Communist Party.” Other strikes against Ponomaryova included her habit of smoking in public and her reputation as a ‘loose woman.’
Strangely, space program Chief Designer Sergei Korolev recommended Tereshkova for Vostok 6 precisely because she was less qualified. At the time, Korolev was designing the next generation of Soviet spacecraft, the 3-man Voskhod, from which cosmonauts would be able to perform extravehicular activities or “space walks.” Such complex missions required the skills of cosmonauts like Ponomaryova and Solovyova, while Tereshkova was more than adequate for the fully-automated “spam in a can” Vostok 6 mission.
In other words, Valentina Tereshkova was everything Perier Khrushchev and the propagandists in the Kremlin needed her to be – no more, and no less.
Originally, it was planned that two women would fly into space together as in the joint Vostok 3 and 4 missions, which were successfully flown on August 11 and 12, 1962. Valentina Tereshkova would launch first aboard Vostok 5, followed the next day by Valentina Pomonareva in Vostok 6. However, at a meeting of the Presidium of of the Communist party on March 21, 1963, this plan was struck down by member Frol Kozlov and Minister of Defense Dmitry Ustinov, who argued that one woman cosmonaut was sufficient for propaganda purposes and that Vostok 5 would be flown by a male cosmonaut. This led to the flights being delayed by two months as cosmonauts Valery Bykovsky and Boris Volynov were hastily trained for their new mission. Ultimately, Bykovsky was chosen as prime crew largely on the basis of weight; a large amount of extra equipment had been added to the capsule to extend its endurance, and Bykovsky weighed 15 kilograms less than Volynov. Volynov, however, remained as Bukovsky’s backup pilot.
In June 1963, the cosmonauts made their way to Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to prepare for the historic dual mission. Bykovsky was the first to be launched, climbing the gantry and being strapped into his spacecraft on the morning of June 14. However, the countdown was fraught with difficulties, with faults in both Bukovsky’s ejection seat and the upper stage of the Vostok rocket causing the launch to be delayed by four hours. Volynov, waiting in the cosmonaut transfer van, was told to put on his spacesuit in case Bykovsky needed to be replaced. Thankfully, all the technical issues were worked out before the close of the launch window, and at 2:59 PM Moscow Time Bykovsky, given the callsign Yastreb or “Hawk”, blasted off the launch pad and rocketed into space. Within a half hour, Vostok 5 had settled into a stable orbit 200 kilometres – 3% lower than expected due to the malfunctioning upper stage. Otherwise, however, everything was normal. Watching from the launch control room, Tereshkova took the opportunity to send Bykovsky a greeting:
“Yastreb, Yastreb, so you recognize my voice? A warm greeting to you…I congratulate you on a good beginning.”
To which Bykovsky replied: “I am waiting.”
While he waited, Bykovsky carried out a light programme of scientific tasks, including photographing the earth and the sun’s corona, performing experiments on fruit flies and pea plants, and measuring his own body’s reactions to weightlessness.
Finally, on June 16, it was Valentina Tereshkova’s turn to make history. She and her backup Irina Solovyova donned their spacesuits and climbed into the transfer van that would carry them to the launch pad. It was then that an incident occurred which could have cost Tereshkova her date with destiny. While suiting up, the fabric near the neck seal of Solovyova’s spacesuit tore, forcing her to switch to Valentina Ponomareva’s suit. Had this happened to Tereshkova, there would have been no replacement suit, for Tereshkova was taller and stockier than her two backups. In that case, Ponomareva would have flown the mission.
In the event, however, Tereshkova’s suit held, and when she reached the launch pad she performed what is still a hallowed Baikonur good-luck ritual. Prior to his launch on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin had urinated on the back left tyre of the transfer van. Before climbing the stairs to the elevator, Tereshkova did the same, becoming the first woman to do so. Unlike with Bykovsky two days earlier, Tereshkova’s countdown proceeded without incident, and at 12:30 PM Moscow Time Vostok 6 blasted off the launchpad. Within minutes Tereshkova – given the callsign Chaika or “seagull” – became not only the first woman but also the first civilian to reach outer space. As she rose higher and higher into the sky, she jubilantly exclaimed:
“It is I, Seagull! Everything is fine. I see the horizon; it’s a sky blue with a dark strip. How beautiful the Earth is … everything is going well.”
And, as promised, Valery Bykovsky was waiting for her:
“When the spaceship Vostok 6 was to be put into orbit, I knew in advance at what time. I had my radio-receiving apparatus switched on at the time, and at the exact time anticipated I heard ground control speaking to Valentina before she was actually in orbit. By that time I was approaching the territory of the Soviet Union, and I was eagerly awaiting the moment when she would finish reporting to ground control that she was in a state of weightlessness and that all was well. I did not interrupt her conversation with the ground, but then, when I saw that she had finished speaking, I cut in. There, actually, our space rendezvous began. It began with congratulations – my congratulating her on her successful launching.”
As the Vostok capsule had no orbital maneuvering capability, the Bykovsky and Tereshkova were unable to perform an actual rendezvous, and though during Tereshkova’s first orbit the two spacecraft came within five kilometres of each other, neither cosmonaut reported visually sighting the other. They did, however, enjoy excellent radio communications, with Bykovsky reporting that Tereshkova was “Singing me songs.” But gradually the two drifted further and further apart, eventually drifting out of radio communications range.
On her third orbit, Tereshkova received a call from an ecstatic Premier Nikita Khrushchev. As Tereshkova later joked:
“Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev has become a real radio operator; we followed all the radio communication rules in our conversation. We used the call signals and ended by saying “over.””
In recognition of her historic achievement, Tereshkova was also promoted mid-flight to the rank of Captain.
But while Khrushchev could not have known it, not all was well aboard Vostok 6. As the mission progressed, Tereshkova developed an ever-worsening cramp in her right leg, an unscratchable itch beneath one of her biomedical sensors, and a persistent pain where her spacesuit helmet ring chafed against her shoulder. At one point she also became nauseous and vomited in the capsule – though she adamantly blamed this incident on bad food and not space sickness. But the most persistent problem Tereshkova faced during her flight was with communications. In his final report, General Kamanin accused Tereshkova of being out of her depth and berated her for failing to report key information to the flight controllers. Her responses regarding her health were often vague and evasive, and she often failed to answer at all. During one such period of radio silence, ground controllers suspected that her radio receiver might have failed and attempted to relay their messages through Bykovsky aboard Vostok 5. However Bykovsky reported that:
“I have tried myself to contact her without success, but I do not think there is any reason for concern.”
In desperation, the controllers switched on the onboard television camera, only to discover that an ill and exhausted Tereshkova had fallen into a deep sleep. Reluctantly, they awoke her by switching the cabin lights on and off, and reminded her of the upcoming maneuvering exercises. Though the Vostok capsule was designed to be fully-automated, Tereshkova was instructed to practice manual maneuvers in case the automatic systems failed and she was forced to manually align the capsule for reentry. But this, too, went poorly, with Tereshkova struggling to keep the capsule under control. This drew the ire of General Kamanin, who declared Tereshkova inept and out of her depth. Tereshkova, however, tells a very different story. While performing routine checks, she claims, she discovered that an engineer had mis-programmed the reentry sequence, causing the capsule to orient itself in the wrong direction. This meant that the retro-rockets, instead of slowing Vostok 6 down and initiating atmospheric reentry, would have boosted it into a higher orbit and left Tereshkova stranded in space. Despite the seriousness of the error, Tereshkova pleaded that the engineer responsible not be punished. Her request was accepted – but only on the condition that the incident remain top-secret. Over the night of June 18-19, cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov, and Andryan Nikolayev along with a team of engineers worked out a set of corrections to the guidance computer, which they relayed to Tereshkova the next morning. With the corrections correctly entered and a potentially fatal mishap averted, Tereshkova prepared to initiate reentry and return to earth.
Meanwhile, Bykovsky was also preparing to return home. Though it was originally intended for him to remain in orbit for eight days, his lower-than-expected orbit was not expected to remain stable for that long. Furthermore, high solar flare activity had caused the earth’s atmosphere to expand, further hastening the decay of his orbit. Thus, on June 17, the decision was made to bring Bykovsky home on the 19th – 5 days after his launch. Though less fraught than Tereshkova’s flight, Bukovsky’s mission had not been without incident. Like Tereshkova, he too had developed a pressure point under his spacesuit’s helmet ring, and found the helmet’s communications headset uncomfortable. He also encountered some minor digestive issues, leading to an unintentionally comedic exchange. On the fifth day of his mission, Bykovsky sent a Morse Code message to mission control reporting that. “At 09:05 had a cosmic stook.” Stook in Russian means “knock” or “bang”, and ground controllers feared that Vostok 5 had been struck by a meteor. Frantically, they compiled a list of urgent questions before contacting Bykovsky about the nature of the impact. Confused, Bykovsky stated he had no idea what they were talking about. When reminded of his message, Bykosvky burst out laughing, explaining that he had meant to type “stool”, not “stook.” After days of constipation, Bykovsky had finally managed to use the bathroom – another triumphant space “first” for the Soviet Union.
Though second to launch, Valentina Tereshkova was the first to head for home. At 9:39 AM Moscow Time on June 19, ground controllers initiated the reentry sequence, using solar sensors to orient the capsule and igniting the retrorocket. Once again, Tereshkova’s communications difficulties returned, and she failed to confirm over radio any of the key milestones in the reentry sequence. Such confirmations were deemed essential, for previous missions had encountered serious difficulties with the reentry sequence – particularly the separation of the main descent module from the instrument module. Tereshkova would later claim that he had indeed transmitted all the required signals via Morse Code, but that no-one had received them. It is now believed that she selected the wrong transmission frequency. Whatever the case, communication with Vostok 6 soon cut off completely as the capsule entered ionization blackout, the sheath of hot, ionized gas forming around the hull blocking out all radio waves as the spacecraft streaked like a meteorite through the atmosphere. Eventually, however, a tracking ship in the South Atlantic picked up Tereshkova’s signal, indicating all was well. Seven kilometres above the earth, the capsule’s parachute deployed and the hatch blew off, and a few seconds later Tereshkova’s ejection seat ignited and launched her clear of the spacecraft. As her own parachute deployed, Tereshkova opened her helmet faceplate to get a better look at the landing site. Though she had been warned not to look up, she did so anyway and was promptly struck by a piece of debris, which left a small cut and bruise on her nose. In a particularly hair-raising moment the wind threatened to push Tereshkova into a nearby lake, but at the last minute it shifted direction. At 11:20 AM Moscow Time, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, landed safely in a field on the Pavinskiy Collective Farm, 600 kilometres northeast of Karaganda in the Altai region of Kazakhstan. Over the course of 2 days, 22 hours, and 50 minutes – 70 minutes short of three full days – she had orbited the earth 48 times, exceeding the flight time of all American astronauts combined. Her flight also marked the end of the Vostok program and made her the last woman to fly into space alone.
Local farm workers soon arrived at the landing site bearing food, which Tereshkova gladly traded for the barely-touched food inside the capsule – much to the annoyance of flight surgeons who wanted to monitor her caloric intake during the mission. An hour later a rescue helicopter arrived and airlifted Tereshkova away.
Ninety minutes later, Vostok 5 initiated retrofire and reentered the atmosphere. As on earlier missions, the descent and instrument modules failed to fully separate and remained connected by a bundle of cables, causing the spacecraft to tumble wildly until the cables finally burned through. Though the extreme forces caused Bykovsky to strike his face against his helmet faceplate, he was not seriously injured. At 2:06 PM Moscow Time, Bykovsky safely parachuted to the ground some 800 kilometres from Tereshkova’s landing site. He had been in space for 4 days 23 hours, and 7 minutes – setting a solo spaceflight endurance record that stands to this day.
Overnight, Valentina Tereshkova became a celebrity, fêted across the Soviet Union and the world. She and Bykovsky were awarded the Order of Lenin and the title Hero of the Soviet Union and, on June 22 1963, appeared with Premier Khrushchev in Red Square before a crowd of millions. From then on, Tereshkova’s life became a gruelling whirlwind of parades, news interviews, factory visits, and other public appearances, with the “First Lady of Space” visiting an astonishing 42 countries over the next seven years. So tightly did the Soviet state control every aspect of Tereshkova’s life that she was even pressured by Khrushchev into marrying fellow cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev. The two had struck up a romance during Tereshkova’s training at Star City, and the Premier believed such a “cosmic marriage” would have enormous propaganda value. The wedding took place at a Moscow registry office on November 3, 1963 – the ceremony being officiated by Khrushchev himself – and was followed by a lavish reception at a former czarist palace in the Lenin Hills. Nine months later Tereshkova gave birth to a daughter, Elena – the first person born to parents who had both travelled into space.
Sadly, the “cosmic marriage” was not to last, and Tereshkova and Nikolayev gradually drifted apart, finally separating in 1977. And while Tereshkova’s achievement served as inspiration for millions of women around the world, it did not, as she had hoped, pave the way for other women to follow in her footsteps. Her selection and mission had been little more than a piece of propaganda, a means of claiming yet another spaceflight “first” over the Americans. The situation was no better across the Atlantic. Despite the exceptional performance of the women pilots known as the Mercury 13, NASA in the early 1960s had no intention of recruiting female astronauts. Though sexism certainly played a role in this policy, there was also a large practical component. Early on, NASA had decided that astronauts should be recruited from the ranks of military test pilots – an occupation not open to American women. Indeed, even if the Mercury 13 had been men, they would still not have qualified. Thus, thanks to these barriers and the accelerating pace of the Space Race, it would be another 20 years before another woman flew into space.
But it would not be for lack of trying. On July 17, 1962 members of the Mercury 13 persuaded Representative Victor Anfuso to convene public hearings before a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics on the subject of gender discrimination in the space program. Yet despite two days of testimony from members of the 13 as well as the Mercury 7 astronauts, the committee returned no recommendations and no action was taken. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, rumours were circulating that another woman would soon follow Valentina Tereshkova into space. The woman in question was Marina Popovich, wife of cosmonaut Pavel Popovich and one of the original 18 finalists for the first woman cosmonaut group. Despite being an accomplished pilot with an engineering degree, Popovich had been disqualified because at the time General Kamanin was only looking for parachutists. In 1964, Popovich enrolled at the air force test pilot school in Akhtubinsk and began training under Stefan Mikoyan, nephew of Artem Mikoyan of legendary aircraft design bureau Mikoya-Guerevich AKA MiG. By the time she graduated, Popvich had qualified on the MiG 16, 17, and 21 fighters, logged over 6,000 flying hours, and risen to the rank of Colonel in the Soviet Air Force. And on June 10, 1964, she broke the sound barrier in a MiG-21, becoming only the third woman to do so after American pilot Jacqueline Cochran and French pilot Jacqueline Auriol.
Upon completion of her training, Popovich applied again to become a cosmonaut candidate, and was subjected to a gruelling battery of tests over the course of 40 days. She passed every single one, only to be informed that she was ineligible because she had a child. Her husband Pavel was furious, demanding to know why his wife had been allowed to take the tests if she had already been disqualified. Yet despite this moment of loyal support, in reality Pavel Popovich was intensely jealous of his wife’s aviation career, and grew increasingly bitter as time went on. This simmering resentment came to a boil on April 11, 1966 when cosmonauts Popovich, Yuri Gagarin, Viktor Gorbatko, Andriyan Nikolayev and their wives were in Kiev entertaining delegates from the 23rd Communist Party Congress. At the reception, Marina spotted Pavel embracing Gorbatko’s wife Valentina and confronted him, whereupon Pavel lashed out angrily, striking Marina and berating her. This, in turn, prompted Marina’s brother, also in attendance, to punch Pavel in the face, giving him a black eye. Unsurprisingly, the couple divorced soon after. But Marina’s career only prospered, for in 1978 she accepted an invitation from Ukrainian aircraft designer Oleg Antonov to become the Soviet Union’s first female test pilot. Until her retirement in 1984, she flew more than 40 different types of aircraft and set nearly 100 flight records – many of which stand to this day.
Their propaganda mission accomplished, the first woman astronaut group was dissolved in 1969. It would be another 13 years before another woman flew into space, when another Russian, 34-year-old Svetlana Savitskaya, blasted into orbit aboard Soyuz T-7 on August 19, 1982. She was followed the next year by the first American female astronaut, Sally Ride, while on July 17, 1984 Savitskaya returned to orbit aboard Soyuz T-12, becoming the first woman to fly into space twice and the first to perform an extravehicular activity or “spacewalk.”
As for the First Lady of Space herself, Valentina Tereshkova, she hoped to fly again and graduated from the Zhokovsky Air Force Engineering Academy in an attempt to re-qualify for spaceflight. However, following the tragic death of Yuri Gagarin in a plane crash on March 27, 1968, the Soviet government made it clear that they could not risk the life of another national hero, and Tereshkova was permanently grounded. Upon the dissolution of the first woman cosmonaut group in 1969, Tereshkova remained in the Soviet space program and became a cosmonaut training instructor. That same year on January 22, she narrowly escaped death when one Viktor Ilyin, bitter over his recent conscription into the Soviet Army, attacked a motorcade celebrating the successful rendezvous and docking of the Soyuz 4 and 5 spacecraft. Hoping to assassinate Premier Leonid Brezhnev, Ilyin opened fire on a limousine which he believed held the Soviet leader, but which was actually carrying cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova, Andriyan Nikolayev, Aleksei Leonov, and Georgy Beregovoi. While Ilyin succeeded in killing the car’s driver and seriously wounding a motorcycle outrider, he missed the cosmonauts, who while superficially wounded by flying glass were otherwise unharmed.
In her appointed role as national hero and global ambassador, Tereshkova took on a variety of political roles over her career, serving as a member of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union from 1966 to 1975, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1969 to 1991.
She was also leader of the Committee for Soviet Women, a member of the World Peace Council and the International Woman’s Democratic Federation, and led Soviet delegations to the 1975 UN Conference for the International Women’s Year in Mexico City and the 1980 World Conference on Women in Copenhagen. By the time she retired from the Air Force in 1997 she had also attained the rank of Major General – the only woman in Russia’s history to do so.
In 1977, Tereshkova earned a doctorate in aeronautical engineering, and when in 1978 it was announced that the Soviet space program was once again accepting female cosmonaut candidates, she underwent medical evaluations to re-qualify for spaceflight. Unfortunately she failed the tests and never flew into space again, though during the evaluations she met and fell in love with physician Yuliy Shaposhnikov. The two married in 1982 after the granting of Tereshkova’s divorce from Andriyan Nikolayev, and remained together until Shaposhnikov’s death in 1999.
Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tereshkova remained active in politics, being elected to the regional Duma or parliament of Yaroslavl Oblast in 2008 and to the national State Duma in 2011, 2016, and 2021 as a member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russian Party. She currently serves as Deputy Chair for the Committee for International Affairs and Deputy Chair of the Committee on the Federal Structure and Local Government.[65]
Like many former and current astronauts, Tereshkova claimed that her experiences profoundly changed her perspective on life, the earth, and politics, stating that:
“[The earth is] a planet at once so beautiful and so fragile…When you are up there, you are homesick for Earth as your cradle. When you get back, you just want to get down and hug it. Americans, Asians, everyone who has seen it says the same thing, how unbelievably beautiful the Earth is and how very important it is to look after it. Our planet suffers from human activity, from fires, from war; we have to preserve it…People shouldn’t waste money on wars, but come together to discuss how to defend the world from threats like asteroids coming from outer space.”
Nonetheless, Tereshkova has remained an ardent supporter or President Vladimir Putin, voting in 2020 to lift presidential term limits and stating that:
“An awful lot depends on leaders. Putin took over a country that was on the brink of disintegration; he rebuilt it, and gave us hope again. You only have to see how he is received, how people respond to him. He’s a splendid person.”
And in 2022, Tereshkova voted in favour of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In response, both the European Union and the United States Department of the Treasury added her to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, freezing her foreign assets, preventing her from entering member states, and preventing American and EU citizens from doing business with her.
Yet in spite of her politics, Tereshkova remains a pioneer and an inspiration to millions, her historic 1963 mission opening the door for women around the world to pursue their dreams of outer space. Of the 500 people who have flown in space since 1961, around 11% have been women – though this number is steadily growing and includes such luminaries as American astronaut Peggy Whitson, who currently holds the American and world female record for most days in space at 665. Though originally chosen to be “Gagarin in a skirt” and a tool of Cold War propaganda, Valentina Tereshkova nonetheless proved that for women as well as men, the sky is not the limit.
Expand for References
Burgess, Colin & Hall, Rex, The First Soviet Cosmonaut Team, Praxis Publishing Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2009
Uri, John, 60 Years Ago: Soviets Select Their First Cosmonauts, NASA, February 25, 2020, https://www.nasa.gov/history/60-years-ago-soviets-select-their-first-cosmonauts/#:~:text=On May 30, 1960, Soviet,, Popovich, Titov and Varlamov.
Dejevsky, Mary, The First Woman in Space: ‘People Shouldn’t Waste Money on Wars’, The Guardian, March 29, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/mar/29/valentina-tereshkova-first-woman-in-space-people-waste-money-on-wars
First Woman in Space, Historic Wings, June 16, 2012, http://fly.historicwings.com/2012/06/first-woman-in-space/
Who Was the First Woman in Space? Royal Museums Greenwich, https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/who-was-first-woman-space
Kennedy, Maev, The First Woman in Space Recalls Mission’s Teething Troubles, The Guardian, September 17, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/17/first-woman-in-space-valentina-tereshkova
Tereshkova Orbits the Earth Aboard Vostok-6, Russian Space Web, https://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok6_flight.html
Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, Encyclopedia Astronautica, https://web.archive.org/web/20080325163329/http://www.astronautix.com/astros/terhkova.htm
The post The Forgotten First Woman in Space appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Oysters. Chocolate. Opium. Ginseng. Spanish Fly. Ambergris. Alcohol. MDMA. What do all of these have in common? Well, aside from the makings of a very wild party, they have all at one time or another been used as aphrodisiacs. Derived from the Greek aphrodisiakon or “pertaining to Aphrodite”, goddess of love, aphrodisiacs are substances believed to enhance the sexual experience either by boosting one’s energy or libido, increasing fertility, enhancing pleasure, or – in the case of philtres or “love potions” – making one more attractive to a potential partner. Sex, whether for pleasure, procreation, or ritual purposes, has lain at the heart of the human condition since the dawn of our species; little wonder, then, that over the centuries a vast amount of medical and pharmacological thought has been devoted to this most basic of biological acts. But do any of the thousands of purported lovemaking aids actually work? Can eating oysters, beetles, or chocolate really help you get it up and get it on? Well, turn off the lights, light up some candles… maybe not in that order, and turn on some Barry White, unless you are Barry White as that would just be weird, and let’s dive into the long, complicated, and fascinating history of aphrodisiacs.
Over the centuries and across every corner of the globe, so many wildly different foods, drugs, and other substances have been prescribed as aphrodisiacs that it is impossible to list them all. Instead, it is more useful to group them into three basic categories: substances with physiological effects, those with psychological effects; and those whose action is based on magic, ritual, or the good old-fashioned placebo effect. Of these three categories, the third is by far the most extensive, for until very recently, medicine, magic, and spirituality were inextricably intertwined. Among the earliest records of aphrodisiac rituals come from the Ancient Egyptians, who worshipped the god of the underworld Osiris and his wife Isis as sources of life and fertility. In one recorded springtime ritual, Egyptians would wash a statue of Osiris in wine and anoint it in oil. Anyone who licked the oil off the statue was thought to be protected from impotence and infertility. Similarly, cultures from around the world prescribed various amulets – often shaped like genitalia – as fertility aids, while an Ancient Greek wine cup dating from the 8th Century B.C.E bears the inscription “Whoever drinks from this wine cup, beautifully crowned Aphrodite’s desire will seize him immediately” – though whether this desire was supposed to derive from Aphrodite’s blessing or the effects of wine itself is unclear.
Other aphrodisiacs known to the Ancient Egyptians included the blue lily and a beetle related to the more famous ‘Spanish Fly.’ Unlike licking oil off of a statue, however, use of these aphrodisiacs had far more of a pharmacological justification, for blue lily is now known to contain compounds similar to sildenafil AKA Viagra. These compounds stimulate the release of nitric oxide into the bloodstream, relaxing smooth muscle tissue and allowing blood to flow into and engorge one’s happy bits. Meanwhile, Spanish Fly and its relatives contain a powerful irritant called Cantharidin which induced inflammation and increased blood flow throughout the body – but more on that later. A far stranger entry in the Egyptian sexual pharmacopeia was the dung of baboons – which, in addition to being the physical embodiment of the gods Thoth and Babi, were revered for their relentless sexual appetites. Indeed, the vast majority of ancient aphrodisiacs were selected not for any observable physiological effects but rather their symbolic associations because humans are stupid. This practice was later codified by first century CE Roman physician Claudius Galen as the Doctrine of Signatures, which held that God had deliberately created each plant to resemble the specific body part it was intended to treat. Thus, if a plant resembled, for example, the human liver, then it was prescribed to treat ailments of that organ because, sure, why not. This is the reason many common plants sport curiously anatomical names, such as liverwort, lungwort, spleenwort, toothwort, and eyebright.
The Doctrine of Signatures was widely applied to the field of aphrodisiacs. For example, Satyrion, a type of ragwort, was thought to resemble male genitalia and was named after satyrs, the mythical half-man, half-goat creatures known for their extreme lustfulness. Infusions of Satyrion were widely used as aphrodisiacs by the Ancient Greeks and Romans, with Roman grooms being given a cup to drink before retiring to the nuptial bed. Similarly, the root of the Mandrake, Mandragora officinarum, often resembles a pair of human legs, and was long thought to possess various magical powers. Among the many superstitions surrounding the Mandrake was that it grew only beneath the bodies of those hanging from the gallows, and that when pulled from the earth the root emitted a scream that would kill instantly. It was thus recommended that Mandrake be harvested by tying the plant to a hungry dog, who would uproot the plant and immediately die. Once the root stopped screaming, it could be handled safely. The use of Mandrake as an aphrodisiac appears throughout ancient history, even being mentioned in the Bible:
Now Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them to his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, “Please give me some of your son’s mandrakes.” But she said to her, “Is it a small matter that you have taken away my husband? Would you take away my son’s mandrakes also?” And Rachel said, “Therefore he will lie with you tonight for your son’s mandrakes.” When Jacob came out of the field in the evening, Leah went out to meet him and said, “You must come in to me, for I have surely hired you with my son’s mandrakes.” And he lay with her that night.
-Genesis 30:14-16
But Mandrake was also used as a sedative and hallucinogen, and today is known to contain high concentrations of tropane alkaloids like atropine, scopolamine, hyosciaminne, and mandragorine, which in high enough doses can be deadly. It is thus likely that the supposed aphrodisiac properties of Mandrake stem from either the stimulating effects of some alkaloids like atropine or the sedative effects of others like scopolamine, the latter serving to release the user’s inhibitions in a similar manner to alcohol.
In addition to Satyrion and Mandrake, many other foods including asparagus, bananas, cucumbers, strawberries, carrots, and especially oysters have been used as aphrodisiacs due to their resemblance to male or female genitalia. Oysters were a particular favourite of 18th Century Italian writer and libertine extraordinaire Giacomo Casanova, who was said to consume up to 40 in one sitting before lovemaking sessions, as well as feed them to his mistresses to get them in an amorous mood. Indeed, seafood in general has long been regarded as an aphrodisiac due to the Ancient Greek myth of Aphrodite being born from sea foam. And, as is often the case, some have speculated there also may be minor physiological component at play, for oysters, caviar, and other seafood contain high levels of zinc and the amino acids D-aspartic acid and N-methyl D-aspartic acid, which stimulate testosterone production in men. Similarly, honey – another common ingredient in ancient aphrodisiac potions – often contains boron, known to stimulate the release of sex hormones in both men and women.
But whereas some foods were used as aphrodisiacs due to their appearance and symbolic meaning, others were chosen for their sheer rarity and exoticism. As trade with the East exploded near the end of the Middle Ages, European markets were suddenly flooded with all manner of exotic spices, many of which – including saffron, ginger, black pepper, cumin, cloves, ginseng, and vanilla – soon made their way into various health tonics and love potions. Vanilla in particular was especially sought after thanks to the Doctrine of Signatures; when Spanish Conquistadores first encountered the plant in Central America in the 16th century, they noted the resemblance of its pod to female genitalia and named it vainilla, Latin for “little sheath” and the diminutive form of vagina.
Another exotic product of the spice trade highly sought-after as an aphrodisiac was ambergris, a rare waxy substance formed from the poop of sperm whales. Widely used in the perfume industry as a fixative and scent enhancer, it still commands high prices today. It was also a favourite of Casanova, who in his memoirs lists an impossibly decadent recipe for chocolate cream infused with ambergris and vanilla. Equally exclusive and highly-touted as an aphrodisiac were truffles, which 19th Century French gastronomist Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed could: “…on certain occasion, render women more tender and men more friendly.” However, as being able to afford luxuries like truffles, oysters, or caviar is an indication of wealth and status – attractive qualities in their own right – other, more psychological factors may be at play here.
Another ancient doctrine which guided the selection of ancient aphrodisiacs was the Four Humours theory of medicine, typically attributed to 4th Century B.C.E physician and “Father of Modern Medicine” Hippocrates of Kos. This theory held that the human body contained four fluids or humours – blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile – which controlled a person’s health and temperament. This is why, even today, one’s personality is still sometimes described as sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or bilious and the word “humour” is synonymous with “mood”. Disease, it was believed, was caused by an imbalance of the humours, and it was the job of the physician to restore this balance through various means including bloodletting and purging. Each of the four humours was also associated with a particular combination of temperature and moisture, which in turn were tied to the four seasons. Blood, tied to spring, was hot and wet; Yellow Bile, tried to summer, was hot and dry; Black Bile, tied to autumn, was cold and dry; and Phlegm, tied to Winter, was cold and wet. Thus, physicians could also correct humoral imbalances by prescribing foods of the opposite “quality” of whichever humour was in excess. In the context of sex, female infertility was blamed on the womb being “cold”, so “hot” foods like sugar like ginger were prescribed. Male infertility, by contrast, was linked to excessive heat. Physicians like Hippocrates thus recommended “cold” foods including the so called “windy meats” like beans, lentils, and peas. As these foods infamously induce flatulence or “wind”, the logic went, they could thus cool down the blood. So just remember, directly before spicy time with your partner, be sure and let one go. It’s science…
Finally, many ancient aphrodisiacs were rooted in the practice of opotherapy or organotherapy, the use of the glands or animals – or extracts thereof – to cure human diseases. Originally, this practice was based on similar principles to the Doctrine of Signatures, with Claudius Galen stating in On the Natural Faculties that:
“The maintenance and the proper functioning of an organ is affected by the like organ, because every body and each part of the body has its special faculty.”
Only much later was it discovered that animal glands secrete various hormones which produce similar effects in human bodies as they do in their original hosts. In an attempt to impart the sexual prowess of animals upon their patients, ancient physicians and apothecaries prescribed a variety of exotic concoctions prepared from their sexual organs. The 4th Century Indian sex manual Kama Sutra, for example, recommends boiling goat or ram’s testicles in sweet milk, while The Perfumed Garden, a similar 15th Century guide written by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nefzawi, includes a potion made from the penis or vulva of a jackal. The eggs and testicles of various birds (especially sparrows) were also widely prescribed – as were their brains, based on Galen’s belief that sperm was produced in the brain.
And opotherapy was not strictly limited to the use of animals, with many Ancient Roman aphrodisiacs and philtres containing the semen of young men or the menstrual blood of young women for a fun Saturday night. Today, a variant of this approach survives in the form of tonics and diet supplements containing testosterone. However, clinical studies on these products have shown little measurable effect on libido, while long-term consumption of oral synthetic testosterone is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
But to sum up this section, in the ancient world, aphrodisiacs were largely chosen according to various mystical or outdated medical doctrines or simply for their opulence and exoticism. And while, as we shall see, some of these ancient aphrodisiacs did have measurable physiological effects, the vast majority did not, and their reported potency was likely the result of the good old placebo effect. So our boy Casanova could easily have skipped the platter of oysters; the power, it seems, was inside him the whole time.
Of the traditional aphrodisiacs which do have measurable physical effects, perhaps the most famous is Spanish Fly or Lytta vesicatoria. Not a fly but rather a variety of blister beetle with brilliant metallic-green wing cases, Spanish Fly is found all across Eurasia and has been collected and sold in powdered form as an aphrodisiac for centuries. A related insect, Palembus dermestoides or “Korean Bug” has long been used in East Asia for the same purpose.
The active ingredient in Spanish Fly is the terpenoid Cantharidin, a powerful vesicant or blister agent which the beetle secretes onto its eggs to protect them from predators. Cantharidin is severely irritating to human tissue, producing inflammation and increased blood flow that is believed to enhance sexual desire in both men and women. But as you can probably imagine, such a toxic substance can also have other, less desirable effects, although one perhaps unexpected includes priapism – a prolonged, extremely painful erection. One such alleged case was reported by French surgeon Ambroise Paré in 1572:
“We went to see a poor Oregonian man in Provence, who was affected by the most horrible and frightening satyriasis one could ever see. The fact is this; he had quartan fever: to cure it he had consulted an old sorceress, who made him a potion composed of an ounce and a half of nettles and two frames of catharses, which made him so ardent in the venereal act that his wife swore to us by her God that he had been astride her, during two nights, eighty-seven times, without thinking it more than ten…and even while we were interviewing him, the poor man ejaculated thrice in our presence, embracing the foot of the bed and moving against it as if it were his wife.”
And that is all history will ever remember of this bed humping Oregonian man.
While that all may seem to be a good time, Spanish Fly can have many side effects including severe chemical burns, gastrointestinal bleeding, kidney failure, convulsions, coma, and even death. Indeed, over the centuries Cantharidin has been implicated in many accidental deaths – usually when fed to the victim without their knowledge. For example, in 1772 the infamous Marquis de Sade gave sweet aniseed balls laced with Spanish fly to prostitutes in order to “set them on fire,” as you do. Unfortunately, the unlucky ladies of the night proceeded to die slow, agonizing deaths. The Marquis and his valet quickly fled to Italy, eventually being sentenced to death in absentia. And in 1954, London office manager Arthur Kendrick Ford was convicted of the poisoning deaths of two female coworkers whom he had surreptitiously fed candies containing the toxic aphrodisiac.
So, if you’re having troubles in the bedroom, it’s probably best to leave the Spanish Fly alone and also don’t consult a sorceress unless you want to be remembered a few hundred years later as a bed humper.
Instead, why not try another old favourite: chocolate.? Yes: chocolate, which not only stimulates the release of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and other neurotransmitters commonly associated with sex and pleasure, but also contains theobromine, a caffeine-like stimulant which can help keep you alert and focused during the act itself. It also contains quertcetin, a substance with anti-inflammatory properties that can help improve blood flow. Indeed, Aztec ruler Montezuma was rumoured to consume more than 50 cups of liquid chocolate before visiting his harem; while, as we’ve seen, elaborate chocolate desserts were among Casanova’s preferred pre-coital concoctions. But while a 2013 study published in the British Journal of Nutrition confirms that cocoa can increase blood flow to different parts of the body, there is no evidence that it or any other stimulating or “warming” foods like coffee, tea, ginger, or hot peppers can actually increase one’s sexual desire. Indeed, a 2021 study published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science found just the opposite, determining that women who ate more chocolate had less interest in sex. It has been suggested from this that chocolate and other stimulating substances may act as a substitute for sex by providing a steady supply of pleasure-inducing hormones and neurotransmitters. So, when someone claims that chocolate is better than sex, they might actually be right… Or maybe just a sign someone’s needs aren’t being met and their partner seriously needs to up their game.
Potentially more effective is the bark of the Yohimbe tree or Pausinystalia johimbe, long used as an aphrodisiac by the peoples of central Africa. In 1896, at the height of German colonial expansion into Africa, a chemist named Leopold Spiegel obtained a sample of Yohimbe from Cameroon and managed to extract from it an alkaloid he dubbed yohimbine. Soon after, physiologist Adolf Löwy discovered that this compound was extremely effective at arousing sexual desire in animals including mice, cats, and dogs, hopefully not at the same time…
As a result, by the mid-1900s yohimbine was widely sold in pharmacies across Europe and North America as a potent aphrodisiac, being added to all sorts of tonics and potions. Among these was a product called Afrodex, which also contained methyl testosterone and, alarmingly, the poison strychnine – at that time commonly used as a recreational stimulant and performance-enhancing drug. Such tonics remained on the market for six decades until the 1960 amendment to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act forced many such products off the shelves. By this time, however, physiologists had long known that while yohimbine is effective on some animals, it is almost useless as a human aphrodisiac because it turns out humans are not mice, cats, or dogs no matter what the furries wish to be true.
And what little effect it does have is limited to the relaxation of smooth muscle tissue and the slight enhancement of blood flow to the chonky bits – a task at which synthetic erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra are many times more effective.
So, if traditional aphrodisiacs are just placebos, Spanish Fly is too dangerous, mild stimulants like chocolate, peppers, and yohimbine are much too weak, and Viagra just isn’t your style, what is a frustrated would-be Casanova to do? Well, maybe the problem is actually all in your head, and you simply need something to put you in an amorous frame of mind. Indeed, the third and final category of aphrodisiacs are those which produce mainly psychological effects. The most common of these are regular depressant drugs like opium, marijuana, and good old alcohol, which function mainly by removing the user’s inhibitions. Piper methusticum orKava-Kava, a plant commonly consumed in Polynesia as a sedative and hypnotic, is said to have similar disinhibiting effects. However, one can have too much of a good thing, for over-consumption of these substances often results in a decrease in erectile function, an age-old paradox eloquently expressed by MacDuff’s porter in MacBeth:
“Lechery, sir, [drink] provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.”
Alternative drugs often used as aphrodisiacs include MDMA – AKA Ecstasy or “E” -; Amyl Nitrite, a type of inhalant commonly known as a popper; and bufotenine, a hallucinogenic toxin extracted from toads and commonly used in traditional Chinese and West Indian medicine. MDMA in particular belongs to a class of psychoactive drugs known as empathogens or entactogens which can induce a powerful feeling of empathy, oneness, closeness, or emotional openness with others. This, combined with the drug’s stimulant and euphoric effects, theoretically make it ideal for stimulating sexual desire; however, as with alcohol and other sedatives, MDMA can also produce erectile disfunction along with other negative effects including hallucinations, paranoia, nausea, dehydration, insomnia, and severe bruxism or teeth grinding. Yet some doctors have suggested that in small, controlled doses, MDMA and similar drugs could be used as part of therapy.
Meanwhile, Amyl Nitrite works by rapidly relaxing smooth muscle tissues such as in the genitals and anal sphincter, while simultaneously producing a drop in blood pressure and an attendant rush of euphoria. However, just like MDMA, it can also produce temporary erectile dysfunction. But before you go reaching for the little blue pill to compensate, just know that using poppers and Viagra together can potentially cause a rapid fall in blood pressure, heart attack, and sudden death…. But what a way to go!
Now before we end this video, it is worth pointing out that there exists a Yang to the Aphrodisiac’s Ying: that is a class of substances which decrease rather than enhance libido. These are known, rather creatively as anaphrodisiacs. Like aphrodisiacs, anaphrodisiacs have been known about since antiquity, with Hippocrates claiming that peppermint lowered virility and should be avoided before sex. Strangely, Aristotle had previously claimed just the opposite, advising Alexander the Great to prevent his soldiers from drinking mint tea while on campaign as it was a powerful aphrodisiaceither way because, again, and we cannot stress this enough- people in the past did not know what they were talking about half the time.
Today, well-known anaphrodisiacs includecommon depressants such as alcohol and opiates – which, as you’ll recall, can also act as aphrodisiacs in smaller doses. This is the golden rule of pharmacology: the difference between poison and medicine is only a matter of dosage. Indeed, a recent reevaluation of infamous case of turn-of-the-century murderer Dr. Harvey Crippen holds that Crippen was secretly dosing his wife Cora with scopolamine as an anaphrodisiac in order to avoid having sex with her. However, he misjudged the dose, accidentally killing Cora and prompting him to dispose of her body and flee the scene. But who hasn’t been there at least once before.
Other common anaphrodisiacs include antiandrogens like estrogen, cyproterone, and leprolide, which interfere with the production or action of male sex hormones. Such drugs are sometimes given to convicted sex offenders to help prevent them from reoffending, among others, a process commonly referred to as “chemical castration.” And finally, decreased libido is a common side effect of several psychiatric drugs, including many common antidepressant, anti-anxiety, and antipsychotic medications.
So, where does this leave us? Well, bad news, while certainly some substances can play a role in such shenanigans, even if only in your head, of the thousands upon thousands of substances used as aphrodisiacs throughout history, not a single one actually measurably shifts the needle in the way people usually mean when they say aphrodisiac.
Yes, some may disinhibit you or the like, and some may marginally treat your erectile dysfunction; no amount of oysters, corrosive beetles, or ambergris chocolate cream will measurably and consistently make you more virile or fertile. And they definitely won’t make someone fall madly in love with you against their will. Indeed, aside from Viagra and similar drugs, the only substance that can charitably be said to fit the classic definition of an aphrodisiac is the antidepressant medication Wellbutrin, which can counteract the anaphrodisiac effect of other antidepressants. It cannot, however, boost libido from baseline levels.
Of course, exercise, maintaining healthy body weight and muscle mass, a good, balanced diet and proper sleep cycle routine can help in spades on this, and improve quality of life in about every possible way we have to measure that. But, you know, KFC is so good, our screens are amazing at screening, and there are literally other humans outside and at the gym. Gross. And don’t even get us started in having to talk to your prospective partner and, like, turn them on with your words and actions. Double gross. Bring on the sorceresses and spanish fly! These beds aren’t going to hump themselves.
Expand for References
Denninger, Henri, A History of Substances Known as Aphrodisiacs, Annals of Medical History, 1930, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7945783/pdf/annmedhist148549-0037.pdf
Malmed, Alexandra, Love Potions: a Brief History of Aphrodisiacs, Vogue World, February 11, 2017, https://www.vogue.com/article/what-foods-are-aphrodisiacs-history
Moore, Alison, A Long History of Aphrodisiacs, from Health Tonic to Sexual Aid, https://psyche.co/ideas/a-long-history-of-aphrodisiacs-from-health-tonic-to-sexual-aid
Moore, Alison & Pithavadian, Rashmi, Aphrodisiacs in the Global History of Medical Thought, Journal of Global History, Cambridge University Press, June 4, 2020, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-history/article/aphrodisiacs-in-the-global-history-of-medical-thought/83534F01F85157DB0C74F74986522BF9
McCooe, Anna: A Touch of Magic: the History and Science Behind Aphrodisiac Foods, Gourmet Traveller, March 14, 2024, https://www.gourmettraveller.com.au/explainers/history-of-aphrodisiac-food-20492/
He, Angela, The Humors and You! Medieval Health, Diet, and Humoral Theory, Bernard Becker Medical Library, August 31, 2023, https://becker.wustl.edu/news/humors-and-you/
West, Sheila et. al., Effects of Dark Chocolate and Cocoa Consumption on Endothelial Function and Arterial Stiffness in Overweight Adults, Cambridge University Press, November 25, 2013, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/effects-of-dark-chocolate-and-cocoa-consumption-on-endothelial-function-and-arterial-stiffness-in-overweight-adults/9E005E95AB9CC9EED9DD0BEC781B5085
Golomb, Beatrice & Berg, Britton, Chocolate Consumption and Sex-Interest, Cureus Journal of Medical Science, February 12, 2021, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7885734/
Marks, Tasha, Baked Beans to Ambergris: the Top 5 Weird and Wonderful Aphrodisiacs, British Museum, May 11, 2018, https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/baked-beans-ambergris-top-5-weird-and-wonderful-aphrodisiacs
Anthony, Andrew, Love as a Drug: Can Romance be Medically Prescribed? The Guardian, February 9, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/feb/09/love-as-a-drug-can-romance-be-medically-prescribed
Brown, Jessica, Do Aphrodisiacs Actually Work? BBC, February 13, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190211-do-aphrodisiacs-really-work
Schwarcz, Joe, Is “Spanish Fly” Really an Aphrodisiac? McGill University Office for Science and Society, December 3, 2021, https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-and-nutrition-you-asked/spanish-fly-really-aphrodisiac
The post Which Aphrodisiacs Actually Work? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
From October 1945 to October 1948, almost 1,700 Nazi officers and officials underwent the famous Nuremberg trials, charged with committing war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. The trials resulted in 200 death sentences, while 279 defendants were to serve life prison terms. Similar trials for similar charges were conducted in Tokyo, from April 1946 to November 1948, bringing to account 28 defendants among the militaristic leadership of Imperial Japan, though for various reasons of benefit to the United States, massive efforts were put in place to make sure the imperial family were not only absolved of any wrong doing, but a major propaganda campaign put in place to give the false impression to the rest of the world that the imperial family had been mere puppet leaders, instead of actively in charge and well aware of the the extreme atrocities as was actually the case. The U.S. also not only absolved the physicians and scientists in charge of the extreme atrocities committed in research facilities like Unit 731, but also paid money for some of their files because they wanted the research that the mass murderers had done on human subjects as it was much more scientifically conducted than the Nazi’s own data, and was thus deemed to be potentially useful in the upcoming potential conflict with the Soviets. See our unsurprisingly age restricted two hours documentary: Swept Under the Rug: The Truth About the Japanese Holocaust, in which we dive into all of that, as well as the shocking number of atrocities the Allies committed in the Pacific theater as well that is likewise generally swept under the rug today. As a little brief aside of that tale, you know when the card carrying Nazi comes out as arguably the greatest hero of the entire story in the Pacific Theater, something has gone very wrong on all sides.
But going back to the topic of today, Nazi leadership were partially held accountable. Some on the Japanese side were made to take the blame for the rest, and that’s the Axis powers sorted, right?
Well, at least the two Axis powers on which most historical accounts and fictional media tend to focus on.
… but what about the oft’ forgotten third wheel, Italy?
Despite the frequently depicted stereotype of ‘Italians as good folk’, Italian regular armed forces, security forces and Fascist militia also conducted atrocities on par with their more talked about axis allies, and the less talked about atrocities of their enemies.
But the victors hold the trials to make their enemies pay for what they did while generally simultaneously sweeping under the rug their own atrocities, and Fascist Italy was one of the losers… so why were they not brought to trial at an ‘Italian Nuremberg’?
Well, let’s dive into it shall we?
And we will kick off by briefly dispelling the myth of the Italian soldier as the ‘chill’ member of the Axis club of uniformed baddies.
Fascist Crimes
At its inception, Italian Fascism did not put forth policies to radically eliminate entire ethnic or religious groups, deemed ‘undesirable’. Nonetheless, after gaining power in October 1922, Benito Mussolini’s regime pursued aggressive nationalist and expansionist policies. First with anti-insurgency actions in Libya, an Italian colony since 1911. Then, with the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Next, with the occupation of Albania in April 1939. To say nothing of the ongoing occupation of Eritrea and Somalia, under the Italian flag since the late 19th century.
Then, after entering WWII in June 1940, Italian troops participated in the invasion and/or occupation of more territories in France, Greece, Yugoslavia, East and North Africa as well as the Soviet Union.
Across all these territories, and throughout this period, Fascist forces engaged in regular war crimes and crimes against humanity, targeting enemy combatants, partisan forces and civilian populations.
A regular protagonist of such occurrences was General, and later Field Marshal, Rodolfo Graziani.
Graziani had distinguished himself by conducting a brutal anti-insurgency campaign in Libya, culminating with the execution of the resistance leader Omar al-Mukhtar on September 16, 1931. According to historian Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, writing for The Cambridge World History of Genocide, al-Mukhtar was but one among an estimated 83,000 victims of Graziani’s colonial campaign.
Marshal Graziani went on to offer his services during the conquest of Ethiopia, overseeing the mass murder of prisoners, the use of banned weapons such as poison gas, and the bombing of Red Cross hospitals and ambulances.
After achieving victory, Graziani was appointed Viceroy in charge of the new colony. On February 19, 1937, the Viceroy was almost killed in an assassination attempt, which unleashed a wave of reprisals against local officials and civilians. This massacre, known as ‘Yekatit 12’ in the Amharic language, is cited as resulting in perhaps as many as 30,000 deaths.
Some weeks later, on May 20, 1937, Italian troops perpetrated another infamous atrocity, the massacre of up to 1,000 monks at the Debre Libanos monastery.
The case of Marshal Graziani was not an isolated one, with plenty of mass murdering officers to keep him company. One such gentleman was General Mario Roatta, known as ‘the Black Beast’ to his own soldiers. As the head of the Italian Second Army stationed in Yugoslavia from early 1942, he established a reign of terror in Croatia and Slovenia, responsible for the death of more than 13,000 individuals, variously killed by firing squad, beatings, arson, torture, as well as simple malnutrition and disease due to mistreatment in concentration camps.
Climbing down the ranks, we can also find cases of privates and non-commissioned officers who displayed levels of cold-blooded violence on par with the worst of serial killers. A particularly chilling example is that of sergeant Luciano Luberti, known as ‘the executioner of Albenga’.
After serving in an artillery regiment, Luberti enrolled in the Italian SS. This happened in the confusing aftermath of the Italian armistice of September 1943, a military-political mess which we shall cover in detail later. But at the time, Luberti was stationed in Albenga, not far from Genoa, and put in charge of interrogating captured anti-Fascist partisans.
In his new role, he was in charge of countless tortures, beatings, sexual abuses, executions and occasional straight-out murder, thus earning his nickname. After the war, his personal death toll was estimated at around 200, an accusation which he staunchly contested. You see, by his own estimate, he claims it was more like 300.
The extent of Italian atrocities was not lost on the Allied powers, who considered Fascist criminals to be on par with their German and Japanese colleagues. As such, as early as January 1942, the representatives of 18 Allied governments held an Inter-Allied Conference on the Punishment of War Crimes, during which they signed a declaration pledging to investigate, prosecute and judge, to quote, ‘Those guilty or responsible for the commission of acts of violence inflicted upon the civilian populations, whatever their nationality.’
Including Italians, of course!
Following this up, in October 1943, Allied leadership set up the United Nations War Crimes Commission, or UNWCC, as an independent body to investigate evidence of war crimes and identify potential perpetrators. And one month later, on November 1st, 1943, the leaders of the UK, US and USSR adopted the ‘Moscow Declaration’, in which they explicitly agreed that Italian war criminals had to be brought to justice.
In the period from 1943 to 1948, the UNWCC identified over 1,200 Italian nationals suspected of having committed extensive and systematic crimes in territories occupied by the Fascist regime.
And then there were the Fascist concentration camps. The extent of the atrocities here was little known at the time, but in recent years, the efforts of researchers such as Andrea Giuseppini and Roman Herzog have brought to life some rather poignant examples.
In a nutshell, from 1922 to 1943, while Benito Mussolini was the head of government of the Kingdom of Italy, Fascist authorities administered a total of 135 concentration camps, 85 forced labour camps, 651 prisons holding both common criminals and political prisoners, as well as 107 prisoner of war camps.
Going over all of this in any real detail would make this video both demonetized and likely age restricted, let alone be many hours long, so we shall focus on just two examples of the hundreds.
The first is the camp of Dhanaane, built in Somalia at the end of 1935 to detain PoWs from the Italo-Ethiopian war, as well as dissident élites loyal to Emperor Haile Selassie.
Between February and May 1937, the population of the camp sharply increased, following the already mentioned massacres of ‘Yekatit 12’ and Debre Libanos. In the ensuing months, more and more prisoners, including women and children, were concentrated at Dhanaane, and used as slave labour to build roads or fell trees.
Torture, interrogation and arbitrary beatings were frequently carried out in a specially dedicated area. But the more deadly aspect of these facilities was more that of neglect and the general inhumane conditions. Specifically, there were the frequent outbreaks of things like malaria and pneumonia and other health maladies brought about by the sanitary conditions of the camp, described as disastrous by the Italian medics themselves.
Survivor Imru Zelleke reported how the unfortunate who fell ill were taken to a tent outside the camp and simply left to themselves to die. He states, ‘Very few of them resisted more than two or three days before dying.’
Another survivor, civil servant Michel Tessema, denounced the actions of the medical director, Captain Antonino Niosi. In his official reports, Dr Niosi boasted how ‘The prisoners’ health is optimal, their diet is perfect, the healthcare provided is dutiful.’
Mr Tessema had a different perspective:
‘If the prisoners fell ill, the captain said it would have been better for them to die. And he killed them with an injection of strychnine and arsenic. Others, who came to him to be treated, were restrained and subjected to surgery against their will.’
And as for that ‘perfect diet’ much vaunted by the captain, this actually consisted of hardtack, maggot infested rice and polluted water from the camp’s only well, perhaps Dhanaane’s greatest killer. Overall mortality at this camp was estimated by Giuseppini and Herzog’s research at 3,175 deaths.
While that might seem like a small number, it should be noted that Dhanaane was a relatively small facility, which housed a total of 6,500 prisoners while in activity. This puts the death rate at a staggering 49%.
The second example was the brainchild of General Mario Roatta, ‘the Black Beast’. As the head of the Italian Second Army stationed in Yugoslavia, in May 1942 Roatta ordered the construction of a concentration camp on the island of Rab, Croatia. By October, Roatta had ordered some 8,260 prisoners, mostly Slovenian partisans and dissidents, to be housed in the camp, long before construction had been completed. As a result, the internees were crammed into improvised tents or dilapidated shacks, and all with the horrible sanitary conditions.
Italian guards ensured prisoners stayed in line via frequent beatings. But as with Dhanaane, the chief murderers were exposure and malnutrition, brought about by a daily menu of just 80 grams of bread, and a bowl of soup cooked inside fuel drums. Starvation was such a rampant issue that even Fascist Party official Emilio Grazioli filed a complaint with the Second Army in December 1942. General Gambara, from Roatta’s staff, replied that it was, to quote, ‘Right for a concentration camp not to become a ‘fattening camp’. A sick individual is a subdued individual.’
Almost 1500 of those subdued individuals eventually died at Rab, bringing its death rate to 18% – a higher mortality than that of the infamous Nazi camp at Buchenwald.
It should be mentioned that Roatta had also concentrated at Rab some 1,000 Jewish civilians, which he actually went to great lengths to protect from the Germans and the Ustasha, the Croatian fascist militia. Because of this, these Jewish prisoners allegedly enjoyed better living conditions than the other inmates.
Roatta was just one of several officers and civil servants, many of them card-carrying Fascists, who actively sought to shield Jewish civilians from falling victim to the industrialised slaughter carried out by the Nazis. In fact, much like Nazi Germany’s other ally in Japan who went to some effort to take in Jewish refugees, the Fascist Party did not espouse anti-semitic beliefs at least at its inception. Throughout the 1920s and most of the 1930s, many Italian Jews supported the regime, with 171 serving as officers in the armed forces, and 279 as officers in the Blackshirt militia.
That said, as Rome and Berlin got cosier, in September 1938 Mussolini decreed the first in a series of infamous Racial Laws, which severely curtailed the rights and personal liberty of Italian Jews. Of the approximately 46,700 Jews living in Italy as of 1938, 7,129 would be eventually arrested. The vast majority of them would be deported to concentration camps in Germany and Poland, And only 1,016 would survive the end of the war.
So … many crimes were committed. The Allies knew about many of them. So why didn’t the World witness the equivalent of Nuremberg and Tokyo, a large trial bringing to attention and documenting for posterity the scale of those atrocities?
As ever, nothing is black and white and the devil is in the details.
The Armistice
Let’s start with the Italian armistice of September 8, 1943. With this act, the Italian government surrendered to the Allies, and continued the war against the Axis as a ‘co-belligerent’ army alongside Britain, the US, and other allied forces.
As to what all went into this so-called switching of sides, this whole affair would deserve a video of its own. But in brief for now, following Operation Husky, the Allied landings in Sicily, on July 9, 1943, dissent against Mussolini grew exponentially within the armed forces, the Government and the Fascist Party itself. On July 25, during a session of the Fascist Grand Council, party official Dino Grandi launched a motion for Mussolini to be removed, and for full powers to be handed over to King Victor Emmanuel III of Savoy. The motion gained a majority within the Grand Council, prompting the King to seize the occasion and arrest the Duce.
In the aftermath, Victor Emmanuel appointed Field Marshal Badoglio as his new Prime Minister. Keep this in mind: Badoglio himself could be held accountable for his fair share of war crimes as Graziani’s former superior in the Italo-Ethiopian war. He could also be held accountable for crimes against peace, considering his role as Chief of Staff of the armed forces when Italy declared war on France and Britain.
However, after weeks of secret negotiations, on September 3rd, Badoglio’s man General Castellano signed a secret armistice with US general Walter Bedell Smith. On September 8, the agreement was made public, pulling Italy out of the Axis pact.
But then things became messy.
Mussolini was freed by German paratroopers on September 12, with the complicity of Fascist hardliners. Thus, the dictator was reinstated as head of a new state, the Italian Social Republic, in control of the Northern and Central sections of the Italian ‘boot’. The King and Badoglio, supported by the Allied expeditionary forces, retained control of the South.
Thus, Italy was now embroiled in a civil war, layered on top of the larger global conflict still raging. On one side: the Italian Social Republic and German forces deployed to Italy. On the other: the Allies, the ‘co-belligerent’ Italian troops who had disavowed fascism, plus an aggressive partisan movement, which targeted Nazi-Fascist forces deep inside their territory.
As it was the case elsewhere in Europe, partisan action was met with brutal reprisals against civilians, enacted both by local fascists and German nazis. This led to a paradoxical situation: in the setting of a war crimes tribunal, a prospective post-war Italian government could have played the part of both the defendant, and the victim.
As I said: a mess.
Which gets even worse.
Following the September 8 armistice, Badoglio and US General Eisenhower signed a second agreement on September 29, the ‘Instrument of Surrender’. According to its Article 29, the new Italian government was obliged to arrest and surrender into the hands of the United Nations, to quote, ‘Benito Mussolini, his Chief Fascist associates and all persons suspected of having committed war crimes or analogous offences whose names appear on lists to be communicated by the United Nations and who now or in the future are on territory controlled by the Allied Military Command or by the Italian Government.’
Which was all rather awkward, considering that the signatory himself, Marshal Badoglio, could have easily made it on that list! Nonetheless, shortly afterwards, the War Crimes Section of the British Foreign Office made a drastic decision: they would bar British authorities from apprehending any individual who had supported the Allied war effort after September 1943.
This decision would be later adopted by the Combined Chiefs of Staff. This meant that ALL Allied forces – not just the Brits! – were now expected NOT to arrest any suspected war criminal, provided they had joined the co-belligerent army or the resistance movement in Northern Italy.
This was essentially a get-out-of-jail free card for the likes of Badoglio!
But how about those staunch Fascists still active in the Italian Social Republic? Well, the desire to punish them was still alive and kicking, especially amongst Italians themselves! The CLN, the National Liberation Committee overseeing the resistance, had even endorsed a rather radical plan formulated in part by Winston Churchill in late 1943. According to the plan, the United Nations would draft a list of 50 to 100 Italian fascist criminals, who could then be executed on the spot without incurring any punishment on the individuals who killed them. A nationally sponsored hit list, essentially. No jurisprudence needed. Much simpler than involving the courts or allowing for basic human rights. It’s the good guys doing the killings, afterall.
The Executed and the Forgiven
However, the intricacies of the armistice and the civil war already show the signs of Allied ambivalence towards Italian authorities when it came to punishment for crimes. Nonetheless, the Allies were less ambiguous when it came to their war aims: their armies’ advance towards the north of the peninsula was slow, but relentless. By April 1945 the German occupation forces were retreating to Austria and the Fascist loyalist forces were crumbling.
By the 25th of the month, WWII officially ended in Italy, initiating a short, yet intense period of trials, executions, and retribution against Fascists no longer in power.
Benito Mussolini himself and 17 of his top officials were executed by resistance factions on April 28. More Fascist Party officials, police commissioners, military leaders and even regular foot soldiers would be tried and sentenced to death by improvised courts, also set up by the resistance. And although the Italian Civil War had ended, the killings did not: far-left factions within the resistance continued to mete out summary justice against former fascist militias, especially in the infamous ‘triangle of death’, in the Emilia region. The death toll of this lethal wave of revenge is unclear, ranging from 4,500 to 30,000 victims.
But it was ok in this case, because, again, the people doing it were the good guys.
On a more formal level, British occupation forces swiftly organised and conducted 40 trials against Italian war criminals.
On top of this, Italian, pro-Allied authorities, also set about to initiate a process of de-Fascistisation, similar in principle to the process of denazification which the Allies would pursue in Germany and Austria, see our video: How Did Germany Denazify So Quickly After WWII.
In this case, the de-Fascistisation would be carried out by the High Court of Justice for Sanctions Against Fascism and a High Commission. The latter reviewed more than 218,000 cases, attributed to almost 35,000 officials and officers. Not bad as a start for a purge! But by February 1946, the High Commission was dissolved, and its powers transferred directly to the Government.
On June 2, 1946, a referendum abolished the Italian monarchy. The new republican government, featuring a coalition of Christian Democrats and Communists, initiated a strategy of general pacification within Italian society. On June 22, Minister of Justice Palmiro Togliatti – who was also Communist Party Secretary – issued a general amnesty, offered to all those responsible for political and war crimes. There were exceptions of course: the amnesty would not apply to cases of pillage, torture, murder and massacre. High-ranking officials and military officers would also not benefit from this decree.
Togliatti was heavily criticised for this move, and in fact resigned one month later. But the amnesty remained in effect, and applied to far broader effect than its initial intentions. Eventually, out of those 218,000 cases identified by the High Commission, only 738 resulted in a sentence.
Therefore, most of those who had committed the worst atrocities on the ground, especially in Yugoslavia, Libya and Ethiopia still remained unpunished.
To try to counter this, Yugoslavia being the territory with the highest rate of Fascist war criminals, its government would file charges against 764 Italian nationals.
Unsurprisingly, General Roatta was at the very top of the list of criminals compiled by Yugoslavia. And in fact he had been under Allied custody since early 1945.
However, he ultimately got off very lightly thanks to an old entry in his CV … You see, back in the 1930s, Roatta had been the chief of the Italian Military Information Service. As such, he had access to information proving that former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had attempted to keep Mussolini out of the war by offering him some French colonies. Moreover, Roatta had later acquired intelligence about Marshal Badoglio’s conduct after the September 1943 armistice. Badoglio had failed to issue clear orders to his troops stationed in Rome, thus allowing for the capital to fall into German hands.
For both reasons, both British and Italian governments agreed that Roatta was likely to reveal embarrassing secrets should he be tried. Thus, as early as March 1945, Roatta was able to escape custody, with the collaboration of Italian police and British intelligence. The former general thus escaped to Francoist Spain, and after benefitting from the ‘Togliatti amnesty’ of 1946, he lived on as a free man, dying in Rome in 1968.
So, Roatta got away with it … what about the other 763 criminals in the list?
The matter was complicated by the fact that the Italians themselves had been victim to Yugoslav atrocities. In April 1946, new Italian Prime Minister, Christian Democrat Alcide De Gasperi, denounced these crimes to the Allies, especially the massacres perpetrated at the “Foibe” – natural sinkholes in the Karst region. In the last stages of the war, between 3,000 and 20,000 Italians, including civilians, were thrown alive in the “Foibe” by Yugoslav partisans.
Moreover, De Gasperi warned the Allies that extraditing any Italian national to Yugoslavia would impact the public opinion, and likely destabilize the young and fragile Italian democracy. The Prime Minister then reassured all that his government intended to investigate and prosecute war criminals.
Mr De Gasperi was referring to the Italian Commission of Inquiry, set up on May 6, 1946. This was a brain child of his Minister of War, Manlio Brosio, created with the explicit aim of preventing the risk of extraditing Italian nationals to foreign powers. By May 1947, the Commission had identified 39 high ranking individuals for investigation, appearing to proceed in the right direction.
But the initial momentum soon gave way to a slower pace, and resources were diverted into a ‘side-quest’: while investigating Fascist criminals, the Commission also gathered evidence on the Anti-Italian massacres in Yugoslavia.
The final report to the Italian judiciary was submitted only on June 30, 1951. By that time, any interest on the Allied side to stage war crimes trials had fizzled away. So, what was the real deal with the Commission of Inquiry?
According to a 2006 inquest of the Italian parliament, the Commission was never interested in bringing criminals to justice- shocking, I know- but only as a tool to buy time while the government reinforced its ties with the Western Allies. At the same time, the Commission would gather evidence about anti-Italian atrocities at the ‘Foibe’, which could be used as a case to prevent extraditions to Yugoslavia.
This all worked. From 1946 to 1947, Rome resisted any request from Belgrade to extradite, let alone bring to trial, former Fascists active in Yugoslavia. Over the same period, the Western Allies were happy not to get involved. So, Yugoslav leader Marshal Tito could count only on his Soviet counterpart, Josef Stalin, to exert pressure on the Italian government. But by 1948, the two leaders had dramatically broken off relations, which effectively dashed any hope to extradite the likes of the Black Beast to Yugoslavia.
Besides Yugoslavia, the Ethiopian government also was pressuring Rome for the trial of several high ranking officers, including Field Marshals Graziani and Badoglio. Due to the complexities deriving from the September 1943 armistice, described earlier, Badoglio would never be tried, a failure to act which had the UK’s blessing. As per Graziani, in July 1947 the Italian government informed Ethiopian authorities that he would indeed go to court … but nothing happened for several months.
In the interim, diplomatic relations between the two countries had been interrupted, hence Ethiopia could not demand Graziani’s extradition. In November 1948, the Ethiopian ambassador in London turned to British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin for help. Bevin replied only in January 1949, bouncing off the ‘hot potato’ back to Rome: the Ethiopian ambassador should sort the issue with his Italian counterpart, Mr Gallarati Scotti.
The two ambassadors corresponded in September 1949, but the Italian legate refused to escalate the issue to his Minister in Rome. Bevin failed again to intervene, fearing repercussions on the current friendly relations between Britain and Italy. After facing such a barrage of red tape and procedure, the Ethiopian government dropped the issue, hoping that at least Graziani would be tried in his home country.
This did not happen until 1948. His charges, however, did not include the perpetration of massacres in Ethiopia, nor his responsibility for the horrific camps in Somalia and other African colonies.
The officer was in fact charged only for collaborationism, on account of his role in the armed forces of the pro-Fascist, pro-nazi state, the Italian Social Republic. Graziani was found guilty and sentenced to 17 years in prison, but the butcher of Addis Ababa was freed after only two years, thanks to an amnesty. In 1952 he entered the political arena, joining the far-right party Italian Social Movement, or MSI, becoming its honorary president. His appointment lasted until his death, in 1955.
Intricacies of a Peace Treaty
So, to recap, Yugoslavia and Ethiopia failed to bring Italian criminals to justice, in part because of the Allies’ unwillingness to support them. Western powers simply had an interest in maintaining good relations with their former enemy, as exemplified by the negotiations surrounding the Peace Treaty with Italy.
This would be signed in Paris, on February 10, 1947, and it contained Article 45 according to which Italy ‘Shall take the necessary steps to ensure the apprehension and surrender for trial of persons accused of having committed, ordered, or abetted war crimes and crimes against peace or humanity.’
Pretty straightforward, right?
Not really.
The enforcement of such an article was watered down by an additional clause. It stated that, in case of a disagreement regarding Article 45, the issue could be referred to the Ambassadors in Rome of the Soviet Union, UK, US and France.
According to Luigi Prosperi, Assistant Professor in Criminal Law, Utrecht University :
‘This provision was the result of a political compromise between the “Big Three”: on the one hand, UK and US, that were every day less eager to be involved in tracing and arresting the alleged war criminals, fearing the repercussions in the Italian public opinion; on the other, the Soviet Union, the champion of the Yugoslav government’s cause.’
In essence, as of 1947, Moscow was very much willing to bring to justice those responsible for atrocities in Slovenia and Croatia. While the Western Allies were more inclined to secure Italy’s friendship, whatever the cost.
This was similar to what was happening in Germany in the same years. Nazis dealt with, the West decided that the next enemies in Human Wartime Bingo were the Soviets. And as both Germany and Italy bordered countries in Moscow’s sphere of influence and Italy was now home to one of the strongest, if not THE strongest Communist and Socialist Parties in Western Europe, the west needed to keep the current Italian government and public on their side, lest they fall into the Soviet’s lap.
Even with the inclusion of the ‘softening clause’, prof Prosperi states that ‘The Italian authorities received the draft with scorn. According to the Minister of Justice, Fausto Gullo (of the Italian Communist Party), the clause was at odds with Italian nationals’ right to liberty, since they would be exposed to every request of surrender, even the most arbitrary.’
During the Paris Peace Conference, the Italian delegation pushed back on the war crimes clauses. For example, they demanded that any alleged war criminal should not be handed over to the country in which the crimes were committed, and the accused should be offered guarantees of a fair trial. And, very importantly, they protested that the individuals most responsible for crimes against peace or humanity had already been tried, and often executed by the ‘Direct justice of the Italian people.’
Basically, the point made by the Italian delegation was: not all of us Italians were Fascists, many of us actively fought against them, and we exacted justice by ourselves. Are more trials really needed?
In such a complex and delicate situation, UK and US representatives at the Paris Conference decided to disengage from the prosecution of Italian war criminals. All they would do would be to put pressure on Rome to cooperate with any other country who may press charges against said criminals. Washington went a step further: on August 14, 1947, the US Department of State issued a declaration in which they formally renounced the application of Article 45. Throughout 1948, the UK, France, and finally Greece also all renounced, either formally or informally, to enforce Article 45.
So to sum up, in the end, Fascist Italy did not have its own ‘Nuremberg’ for a variety of complex and overlapping reasons. First of all, the nation had been split in two since 1943, fascists and anti-fascists. The Allied wished to cooperate with the latter faction, even if it included individuals who undoubtedly deserved to go to trial for various extreme atrocities.
Second, the post-war government was able to portray Italians both as perpetrators and victims of atrocities, thus ensuring Allied support or delaying efforts for extradition.
Third, similar to what happened in Germany and Japan, post-war tensions with the Soviet Bloc prompted the Western Allies to support the Italian government’s strategy of reconciliation and pacification. Considering the strength and size of the local Communist Party, the West simply needed the Christian Democrats to stay in power, even if it meant foregoing justice.
That said, as alluded to, not every Fascist war criminal got off scot-free. The Duce himself and his closest circle of acolytes were executed at the war’s end. And Italian authorities and partisan factions did carry out both trials and extrajudicial executions of other Fascist officials in the immediate post-war period. This fact actually allowed the government to prevent the Allies from organising a large-scale trial, claiming that direct justice had already been carried out by the Italian people.
Germany and Japan were not dissimilar, in the sense that a great deal of wanted criminals did go to court, but massively more got a slap on the wrist or not even that in some cases. Again, the most egregious of all being the Emperor of Japan himself who, contrary to popular belief since largely because of Allied propaganda in his favour, oversaw and ordered things that would make anyone but the likes of Hitler squeamish, let alone the Emperor’s uncle Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, who directly oversaw and was half in charge of one of the largest massacres in human history, occuring at Nanjing, seeing upwards of a quarter of a million civilians slaughtered in a matter of weeks, along with many thousands of other atrocities committed against the people of that city. Bizarrely it actually would have been massively worse if not for the intervention of a Nazi in the region by the name of John Rabe who is credited as saving many tens of thousands of lives during the event. Noteworthy the other individual besides Prince Asaka in charge of the whole thing, Iwane Matsui, was gone for much of this and upon return and learning the full extent of what had happened tried in vain to put a stop to it, but was quite literally not just ignored, but mocked and laughed at by his subcommanders for this, and more or less forcibly retired in disgrace, while Prince Asaka, who, again, was there the entire time and left in charge during Matsui’s absence, seemingly had zero issue with it all.
While Matsui was still hardly blameless in all of this, to his credit, after being removed from command, he would make a substantial personal donation to a French humanitarian who was working on trying to set up a safety zone for Chinese civilians in Shanghai. He also tried to get improvements made to certain Chinese refugee camps. On top of that, he commissioned a statue of the bodhisattva for mercy, Kannon, named Koa Kannon (Pan-Asian Kannon) in honor of all Chinese and Japanese soldiers dying during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He also subsequently prayed in front of the Koa Kannon in the morning and evening for pretty much the rest of his life, before ultimately being sentenced to death for his part in the massacre.
As for the Emperor’s uncle, Prince Asaka? Well, he would state no such massacre ever happened. He also claimed he did not receive any complaints during the occupation about any such behaviours by his army, nor did he have any knowledge of it…
Unlike Matsui who was sentenced to death, Prince Asaka would be not only protected by, but named by the United States blameless. He then spent the next three and a half decades or so apparently mostly playing golf and designing golf courses until his death in 1981.
Again, check out our two hour documentary Swept Under the Rug: The Truth About the Japanese Holocaust for more details. Many of you likely missed it owing to, by necessity of what we covered, it being both demonetized and age restricted and thus, not exactly promoted by the algorithm to many.
Expand for References
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304731071_Britain_and_the_Prosecution_of_Italian_War_Criminals
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4141408
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2887267
https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789047442820/Bej.9781571052674.i-1142_003.xml
https://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/the-missing-italian-nuremberg/
https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/25/artsandhumanities.highereducation
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233707219_The_question_of_Fascist_Italy’s_war_crimes_The_construction_of_a_self-acquitting_myth_1943-1948
https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law-mpeipro/e3315.013.3315/law-mpeipro-e3315
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https://journals.openedition.org/diacronie/9463#bodyftn5
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Take a flight 400 kilometres due south from the Peruvian capital of Lima, and you will find yourself over the Pampas de Jumana, an 80 kilometre stretch of coastal desert sandwiched between the Andes foothills and the Pacific Ocean. It is one of the driest regions on earth, receiving less than 4mm of rain a year – a rugged wasteland of cracked soil, sunbaked stone, and low stunted brush. But this parched landscape hides something truly magical. Look down out your aircraft window, and strange shapes will begin to emerge, carved across the hills and plains below: criss-crossing lines that run perfectly straight for kilometres; giant triangles, squares, spirals and other geometric shapes; and – most extraordinary of all – the figures of birds, whales, spiders, fish, and even humans stretching hundreds of metres across. These are the Nazca Lines, the largest geoglyphs in the world and the masterworks of an ancient civilization that flourished and died out hundreds of years before Europeans arrived in the New World. Since their discovery nearly 100 years ago, the Nazca Lines have fascinated and baffled archaeologists the world over. Who were the Nazca people? How did they create such massive yet intricate artworks – and why? Were they an ancient calendar? Symbols of fertility? Or were these figures – most only fully visible from the air – meant for a more… celestial audience? Let’s find out as we explore the mystery of one of South America’s greatest ancient wonders.
The Nazca Lines were first mentioned in writing in the mid-16th century by Spanish conquistadores Pedro Cieza de León and Luis Monzón. However, as they could not see the full extent of the lines from ground level, they mistook them for roads or irrigation channels. This remained the accepted wisdom until the 20th century, when the development of aviation finally allowed the lines to be seen in their full glory. Though the lines were first described in 1927 by Peruvian archaeologist Torbio Xesspe, who stumbled upon them while hiking through the Nazca foothills, the first person to study them in detail was Paul Kosok, an American historian from Long Island University. Like most scholars before him, Kosok initially believed that the lines were part of an ancient irrigation system. But while flying over the region in 1940, he discovered a group of lines forming the shape of an enormous bird. This discovery was followed by many more, with Kosok uncovering a previously unknown menagerie of giant plant and animal drawings etched across the landscape – from monkeys, spiders, and birds to whales, flowers, and humanoid figures. On one flight he even observed that a group of straight lines converged at the position of the sun during the winter solstice, suggesting they had some sort of astronomical purpose. Kosok immediately became obsessed with the Nazca Lines, and was soon joined in his his research by American archaeologist Richard Schaedel and German archaeologist and mathematician Maria Reiche. Together they set out to discover who created the lines, how exactly this impressive feat was accomplished, and – most importantly – what purpose these giant figures served.
The Nazca Lines are now known to have been created in two distinct phases: the Paracas phase, lasting from 400 to 200 B.C.E, and the Nazca phase, lasting from 200 B.C.E to 500 C.E. The Paracas and Nazca cultures were two closely related pre-Inca peoples who lived in the areas of the Ica and Rio Grande de Nazca valleys between 800 B.C.E. and 800 C.E. In addition to the famous geoglyphs, the Nazca were also constructed extensive networks of Puquios – underground which are still in use today. Yet despite these achievements in large-scale construction, the Nazca were not an urban people, their only large architectural endeavour being Cahuachi, a ceremonial complex of mounds and temples used only for religious purposes. Instead, the Nazca lived in smaller, scattered villages, living off staple south American crops such as corn, squash, beans, and peanuts as well as fish and other seafood from the Pacific Ocean.
The most common artefacts to survive from the Nazca and earlier Paracas are intricately patterned textiles and sophisticated multi-coloured pottery. However, archaeologically these cultures are perhaps best known for their distinctive burial practices. Like many Andean cultures, the Nazca and Paracas buried their dead sitting upright in “mummy bundles”, which were exposed to the dry air to naturally dry out and mummify. Unusually, however, many Nazca and Paracas graves feature “partial burials”, in which limbs, skulls, and other body parts from multiple people are bundled together. Many normally bundled bodies have also been discovered with their skulls replaced with “head jars” – ceramic pots painted with the likeness of a human face. Indeed, so-called “trophy heads” played a huge role in Nazca religious culture. These are severed heads with holes drilled through their foreheads, allowing them to be suspended with ropes. Hundreds of these skulls have been found in Nazca settlements, while depictions of decapitation abound in Nazca pottery and even appear in the Nazca Lines, with one of figures depicting a half-human, half-orca beast holding a trophy head with more heads inside its body. But while they were initially believed to be trophies cut from the bodies of enemies in battle, later research has suggested that the heads were in fact largely collected from within the Nazca community. However, some amount of ritual headhunting is still believed to have been practiced.
Over the course of nearly a millennium, the Paracas and Nazca carved more than 1,300 kilometres of lines across an area of over 50 square kilometres. Some of these lines were carved on hillsides, allowing them to be seen from the ground, while others were carved on flat plains or hilltops and can only be fully seen from the air. Archaeologists typically group the Nazca lines into three main categories. The first are the geometric lines, which comprise hundreds of straight, criss-crossing lines that can stretch across the landscape for several kilometres. There are also large geometric figures, including triangles, rectangles, wavy lines, and spirals. The second group are the representational figures, which take the form of animals and plants including monkeys; lizards; spiders; birds like condors, herons, and hummingbirds; dogs; cats; killer whales; flowers; and humanoid figures – the largest of which are up to 370 metres long. There are over 70 such figures known, with more being discovered every year. Finally, the last category of lines are the “tracks”, which are wider than usual and believed to be paths designed to convey large numbers of people to ritual sites.
Just like the who, the how of the Nazca Lines is also fairly straightforward. The figures were created by excavating the dark, iron-oxide coated stones and topsoil from the desert floor, exposing the paler, yellow-grey soil beneath. The width and depth of these excavations varies widely, ranging from 30 to 150 centimetres wide and 10-15 centimetres deep. Once excavation was completed, the little moisture that does blow into the region from the ocean caused the clay-rich subsoil to harden into a sort of mortar or cement, making the lines especially durable. The lack of rainfall and wind also greatly slowed soil erosion, allowing the lines to survive almost perfectly intact for more than 1500 years. The real question, however, is how the Nazca managed to draw such enormous figures with such accuracy without being able to see the entire design at once from ground level. Unfortunately, as is always the case with archaeological mysteries of this kind, the secret of the Nazca lines have attracted an old familiar explanation. Say it with me now: aliens. In his infamous 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?, Swedish writer Erich von Daniken argued that the ancient peoples of Peru could never have created the giant figures on their own, and that the Nazca lines were instead made as landing pads for alien beings whom the Paracas and Nazca worshipped as gods. Quite apart from being racist and colonialist like all “ancient aliens” theories, von Daniken’s claims regarding the Nazca’s abilities are also very easily debunked. In 1982, American skeptic and paranormal investigator Joe Nickell used simple tools and techniques readily available to the Nazca – specifically scale drawings, wooden stakes, and ropes – to draw a 130 metre long replica of the condor geoglyph in a field in Kentucky. As Nickell explains:
“That is, on the small drawing we would measure along the center line from one end (the bird’s beak) to a point on the line directly opposite the point to be plotted (say a wing tip). Then we would measure the distance from the center line to the desired point. A given number of units on the small drawing would require the same number of units—larger units—on the large drawing.”
Indeed, the remains of wooden stakes have been unearthed at many of the sites and carbon dated to the Nazca period, lending further credence to Nickell’s theories. Furthermore, the fact that many of the lines can only be seen from the air makes perfect sense if they were intended to be seen by the Nazca people’s pantheon of Gods. So, repeat after me: It. Is. Never. Aliens.
Finally, we come to the third and perhaps most important question about the Nazca Lines: why they were made. Unfortunately, this is the question for which we have the fewest answers, with the ultimate function of the Nazca Lines still a matter of archaeological debate. The first scholarly analysis of the lines’ function was conducted by the aforementioned Maria Reiche, who devoted over 40 years to studying the lines and became known to the locals as the “Angel of the Plains” and the “Lady of the Lines.” In her 1949 book The Secret of the Pampas, Reiche, like Paul Kosok before her, posited that the Nazca lines served as a giant astronomical calendar, with many of the figures representing constellations in the sky. Starting in the 1960s, however, these views began to be challenged by archaeologists like Johan Reinhard, who in his 1985 book The Nasca Lines: a New Perspective on their Origin and Meanings, argued that:
“It seems likely that most of the lines did not point at anything on the geographical or celestial horizon, but rather led to places where rituals were performed to obtain water and fertility of crops.”
This interpretation is supported by a 2019 study conducted by researchers from three Japanese research institutes, which reveals that few of the birds depicted in the Nazca Lines are native to Pampas de Jumana. Among the species identified by the team are hermit hummingbirds, pelicans, Guanay cormorants, pelicans, and parrots. As Masaki Eda of the Hokkaido University Museum explains:
“If exotic/non-local birds were not significant for the Nasca people, there [would be] no reason to draw their geoglyph. So, their existence should be closely related to the purpose of etching geoglyphs. But the reason is difficult to answer.”
According to Johan Reinhard’s theories, the fact that all these birds are native to wetter, more forested areas of Peru indicates that the Nazca used them as symbols of water and fertility. But if the Nazca did indeed use the lines to pray for water, they were to be bitterly disappointed, for in around 500 C.E. a massive drought swept across the Andean plateau, leading to the collapse of the Nazca civilization. Sadly, recent discoveries suggest that the Nazca themselves played a major role in their own demise. Archaeological excavations in the Pampas de Jumana. have uncovered the remains of Huarango trees, indicating that the area was once covered in lush forests. These forests, however, were systematically cut down by the Nazca to clear land for crops such as corn. This, in turn left the soil vulnerable to erosion, leading to a gradual process of desertification. As David Beresford-Jones of Cambridge University explains:
“[The Huarango tree] is the ecological ‘keystone’ species in this desert zone, enhancing soil fertility and moisture, ameliorating desert extremes in the microclimate beneath its canopy and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known… In time, gradual woodland clearance crossed an ecological threshold – sharply defined in such desert environments – exposing the landscape to the region’s extraordinary desert winds and the effects of El Niño floods.”
Thus, in one of history’s great ironies, the bare hills and plains that made the Nazca Lines visible to the gods were responsible for the very droughts and loss of crop productivity the gods were being called upon to reverse. A similar fate befell many other ancient civilizations – including the people of Rapa Nui or Easter Island, who cut down so many trees in order to move and erect their Moai stone heads that it triggered an ecological disaster.
Today, however, it is the Lines themselves which are under threat. Despite the geoglyphs being declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, encroaching human activity threatens to erase these extraordinary constructions which have withstood the elements for a millennium and a half. The Pan American Highway, which connects the Americas from Canada to Argentina, cuts through several of the geoglyphs, while in recent years large groups of squatters settling in the area have inflicted damage to the lines and Nazca period cemeteries through the construction of houses and pig corrals. Illegal miners have also destroyed several sites while excavating limestone. In 2013, illegal limestone miners destroyed a site in the department of Buenos Aires, while the following year the environmental activist group Greenpeace erected a large banner reading “Time For Change! The Future is Renewable” beside the Hummingbird figure to protest a UN climate summit in Lima. The stunt damaged the site and outraged the Peruvian government, who forced Greenpeace to issue a formal apology.
This rapid destruction is especially alarming given that more and more previously unknown Nazca figures are being discovered every year. In 2020 a new 37-metre-long geoglyph of a cat was discovered on a hillside, while the year before a team from Yamagata University in Japan used satellite imagery and IBM’s Watson supercomputer to locate 142 new geoglyphs that were too eroded to spot with the naked eye. Only time will tell how many more lie out there on the Pampas de Jumana, just waiting to be discovered – or whether careless human action will erase these ancient wonders before we even get the chance to find them.
Expand for References
Image Source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:L%C3%ADneas_de_Nazca,_Nazca,_Per%C3%BA,_2015-07-29,_DD_54.JPG
Nazca Lines, Go2Peru, https://web.archive.org/web/20181029152441/https://www.go2peru.com/peru_guide/nazca/nazca_lines.htm
Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa, UNESCO World Heritage Convention, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/700/
Jones, Sam, Huge Cat Found Etched into Desert Among Nazca Lines in Peru, The Guardian, October 18, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/18/huge-cat-found-etched-desert-nazca-lines-peru
Solly, Meilan, Scientists Identify Exotic Bird Depicted in Peru’s Mysterious Nazca Lines, Smithsonian Magazine, June 1, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-identify-exotic-birds-depicted-perus-mysterious-nazca-lines-180972469/
143 New Geoglyphs Discovered on the Nasca Pampa and Surrounding Area, Yamagata University, November 15, 2019, https://www.yamagata-u.ac.jp/en/information/info/20191115_01/
Collyns, Dan, Scratching the Surface: Drones Cast New Light on Mystery of Nazca Lines, The Guardian, May 24, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/may/24/nazca-lines-drones-new-discoveries-peru
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What is the Mystery Behind the Ancient Nazca Lines? TRT World, September 1, 2021, https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/what-is-the-mystery-behind-the-ancient-nazca-lines-50318
Taj, Mitra, Pigs and Squatters Threaten Peru’s Nazca Lines, Reuters, August 17, 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-peru-nazca-squatters-idUSBRE87E0R720120817
Vigo, Manuel, Peru: Heavy Machinery Destroys Nazca Lines, Peru This Week, March 14, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20130729023312/http://www.peruthisweek.com/news-3743-peru-heavy-machinery-destroys-nazca-lines
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The Nazca Lines, Discover Peru, http://www.discover-peru.org/the-nazca-lines/
The post What is Up with the Nazca Lines appeared first on Today I Found Out.
We all have to start somewhere and the Ancient Greeks didn’t arrive in Greece ready to write world changing epic poems, philosophy, and tragedies. They wandered into the Aegean after splitting from other Indo-Europeans, settled, founded a civilization, saw it collapse, and started again. As you do. The story of how the Greeks became the Greeks is a complex and surprising story. Far beyond the spread of their culture and language under the Romans, the Greeks saw a massive rise, rapid decline, and steady rise that eventually led them to be a massive influential cultural force for human history. But how specifically did the Greeks become Greeks?
First, let’s talk about some of the factors that make life in Greece special. There is very little arable land, and 75% of the land is covered with steep craggy mountains. Further, the Greeks and their predecessors lacked an important resource for the Bronze age, the bronze itself. Thus, whoever lived in the area had to import it from elsewhere, as well as other important building and staple materials. This meant that any peoples who developed a presence in the area had to rely on the sea for trade. This was not hard in the Aegean. The Aegean is dotted with Islands that are relatively close to each other. It also helped that there were plenty of older and established trading partners, such as the Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians, and other Indo-Europeans in Anatolia. In the Near East they traded with Western Semites such as the Phoenicians, and in the south with the Egyptians. All of which would see significant Hellenization under the empires of Alexander and Rome to the point they would eventually speak and write Greek.
In any event, it might surprise you to learn that the Greeks were not the first people living in Greece, and they were rather late arrivals. Greek sources acknowledged the presence of a people they named the Pelasgians. Herodotus records that they were barbarians with their own languages, but many decided to assimilate with the incoming Greeks. According to Homer in the Iliad Book 2, they were around during the Trojan war. Their fleet of ships is mentioned in the famous Catalogue of Ships, led by Achilles. Herodotus does write about them Hellenising in some areas like Attica, while maintaining their own cultures in others. Either way, we don’t know too much about the Pelasgians. They may have been one people, but more likely they were many peoples the Greeks lumped together as the indigenous population.
Another important pre-Greek people we need to look at when discussing the origins of the greeks are the Minoans. They were a civilization that developed on the island of Crete around 2000 BCE, and spread into the nearby Cyclades islands, meaning they were the first recognizable civilization in the Aegean. The Minoans did not call themselves that. Minoan is the name modern historians gave them based on the myth of the Cretan king Minos from the myth of the minotaur. For all we know that story has no relation to the Minoans because we don’t know much about them. They left a written language, in a script influenced by Egyptian Hieroglyphics we call Linear A, a similar pictographic script. The written language remained in use by the Minoans after they were incorporated into later Greek hegemony until 1300. As for culture, they worshipped different gods from the Greeks, with a central female deity. Like the Greeks after them, they relied on naval trade with their neighbors and seemed to have naval power in terms of warfare. Their political structure also seems to have been centralized around palaces in Crete, with the main palace in Knossos. With the construction of these palaces, a sophisticated form of political and economic organization centered on them developed with smaller palaces around Crete popping up as sub centers, with their influence spreading all the way to ancient Egypt. While we know little about their broader culture, the importance of the Minoans cannot be overstated, because the Greeks seem to have taken much that made the Minoans special and built on it.
In any event, depending on the theory, the Greeks arrived on the scene in around 2300 to 1600 BCE. We don’t know for sure because there are no real records until the Greeks started writing. What we do know is a series of natural disasters destroyed the Minoan cities and settlements. This was over a long time span, long enough to see them rebuild some cities, only for them to be destroyed again. One such disaster was the eruption on the island of modern day Santorini. The volcano preserved the Minoan settlement nearby in a similar manner to how the eruption of mount Vesuvius preserved Pompei. At around 1580 BCE, the Greeks overtook the Minoans and emulated their society. They formed similar centers across the Aegean and on the mainland of Greece.
We call this civilization Mycenaean Greece after the first discovered location in Mycenae. Based on archaeological evidence in Hittite and Egyptian records as well as the Homeric epics, they probably referred to themselves as Achaeans. Yes, these are the people described in the Homeric epics, even if Homer got most details wrong. We will get back to Homer. In fact, Homer is the only reason we are talking about the Minoans and the Myceneans, as Homer establishes one of the few connections between the ancient Greeks and the older Myceneans.
Were the Myceneans politically united as one entity like the Minoans may have been, or did they reflect the kingdoms in the Iliad as separate culturally connected kingdoms? The answer is in between. They adopted the central palace political and economic structure of the Minoans. The difference is that they copied this model across the Aegean into separate palaces surrounded by smaller subservient palaces. Other than the spread of this model, another significant difference is they heavily walled their cities, while the Minoans did not. Mycenaean palaces can be found in Knossos in Crete, Pylos in Messenia, Therapne in Laconia, Mycenae, Tiryns and Midea in Argolus, and Athens among others.
Like later Greeks, they spread out and founded settlements and trading outposts across the Mediterranean. We know they grew rich via trade by 1500 BCE and established themselves in the Aegean, spreading out across the Eastern Mediterranean and trading with the Hittites and Egyptians.
As previously alluded to, the Mycenaeans relied on trade to get Bronze as well, and they were masters at working the metal. They crafted fine weapons with them, funerary masks, and other luxury goods. They had an upper class and a lower class, and the wealth difference was high compared to the later dark age. The resources from trading went to the top and were spent on fineries like bronze works, and on building large defensive walls for the palaces. The chief or king was called a Wanax, and he ruled the main palaces while lesser chiefs ruled the sub palaces. The Wanax and the elites were also buried in vaulted tombs and with finery.
The Mycenaeans also adapted the Minoan Linear A script to produce what we call the Linear B script. The script’s Greek closely resembles the Arcado-Cypriot dialect of ancient Greek. It is a syllabic script, meaning it doesn’t record letters, but combinations of consonants with a vowel – think Chinese. Like Chinese, there are some pictographic symbols, but for the most part it is syllabic, with the syllables strung together to form words Greek speakers may be familiar with.
Don’t get excited just yet. If you thought that Linear B is a repository of Ancient Greek myths, poems, philosophy, or science, you and the scholars who cracked it would be very disappointed. Surprisingly, considering the Mycenean civilization was what Homer was trying to describe, Linear B tablets are almost all strictly business, mostly records; administrative and mercantile records of goods traded, catalogues, lists of animals and supplies, and very little else. They had numbers, units of measurement, and were very well organized, especially compared to Minoan Linear A.
On this note, even though we still have not deciphered Linear A, we know the two scripts were used for very different purposes. Linear A seems to have been used more often outside of record-keeping and has been used in religious and other functions. For all we know Linear A might contain poetry, or narratives. But unfortunately, if they did practice poetry, it wasn’t recorded in Linear B and remained oral like Balkan epic poetry today. In the end, Linear B is, for all intents and purposes, was a very clunky script made up of more than 200 symbols each representing a syllable. There is a reason it was forgotten once the Mycenean civilization collapsed.
But in any event, from what little we gleaned from Linear B that wasn’t strictly records, the Mycenaeans worshipped much of the same gods and goddesses as the later Greeks. They had the same or similar sounding names, and from what little details gleaned, functioned in much the same role. There were some differences, however. Some gods were an adaptation of the Minoan goddesses, especially the chief goddess whom we know very little about. Others came with the Greeks into the region and were forgotten by the time of Homer, or changed identities. Religious worship was also centralized in the palaces rather than shrines outside of them. We have statues from both civilizations as well.
So, where did this seemingly prosperous society all go wrong? The late Bronze Age collapse is to blame. In 1200 the Myceneans faced a rapid catastrophe. Another unspecified catastrophe affected the surviving Mycenean centers around 1150. Both catastrophes were a part of the larger scale bronze age collapse which included the invasions of the sea peoples. The sea peoples are still one of history’s biggest unsolved mysteries. They were probably more than one peoples who migrated somewhere from the North, North Eastern, and East Mediterranean. Some Greeks may have also been a part of the sea peoples according to Egyptian records. These peoples invaded or attempted to settle into places such as the Nile Delta, Hittite lands, and into the arable lands of the Myceneans. The destruction depopulated even small towns and caused migration waves away from vulnerable settlements to safer areas. Such was the case in the mainland with Achaea and Arcadia, or into the Western coasts of Asia Minor. Some unknown force destroyed the main palaces of the Myceneans. Some palaces and larger settlements were rebuilt only for another unknown force to destroy them again a few decades later. We don’t know if these forces were the sea peoples or some other nation, or if it was Mycenean infighting.
Whatever the case, this crisis affected the entire Mediterranean, meaning that Myceneans and their neighbors could not trade as their civilizations burned around them. The chaos of the bronze age collapse disrupted the Mycenean trade infrastructure and their trade partners. The supplies the Myceneans required for their civilization such as Bronze dried up. The valued structures, massive walls, expensive weapons, elaborate funerary culture, and bronze artifacts the Myceneans were known for became materially unfeasible. Settlements larger than 200 people would become unheard of for centuries. This was the dark age, and it saw a monumental shift in how the Greeks lived.
Without trade, the elite class disappeared. With the shrinking population and settlement sizes, Greece’s class system became simple. You had villages that normally didn’t exceed 200 people, usually a handful of families. Each family had an inherited plot of land that was to be passed down from father to son. There were also people who didn’t own land, and they usually worked for those that did, but that number was lower early in the dark age. The Wanax became a local chief. The collection of villages made up a region, or demos. This demos had a head chief, who earned the position by being the most powerful village chief. They met in a council and decided on policies of the demos. There was no distinction between chiefs and sub chiefs, all were given the same designation. In fact, as a sort of proto-democracy, if the sub chiefs decided on a policy or decided to ignore the chief’s orders in a battle, the chief had to go along with the majority. That said, chiefs, no matter their level in the demos, lived in a house that wasn’t all that different from the other villagers, albeit often slightly bigger, but not much. At this point, society wasn’t as divided by class.
It should also be noted that this was a violent society. Chiefs led raiding parties on other villages to steal livestock or take slaves. The combatants under the chiefs in these raiding parties were farmers. Any man who was able bodied would fight to preserve and enrich the demos. There was a heavy level of competition between quite literally everyone. Between farmers, between villagers to be chief, and between chiefs themselves.
During this time, the Greeks forgot Linear B. What is the point in using a script centered around records if there was nothing so significant to record? Instead, we’ll talk about something just as interesting as administrative records, pottery… Listen, it was called the dark age for a reason. The term comes from art history to describe the sudden downturn in quality of Greek crafts after the Mycenaean age. The craftspeople at first continued to create Mycenaean-like pottery and crafts, but of significantly lower quality. Pottery did play an important part in funerary services and everyday life, so it wasn’t going to disappear during this time though. Pottery’s presence was always felt and that is why art historians and archaeologists will spend significant time talking about Greek pottery. Eventually, Dark age pottery would be revived into the proto-geometrical and then geometrical styles of pottery when the technology, economy, and culture picked up. They were able to produce more intricate art as time went on because of an important development during the dark age: Greece’s unwilling entering of the Iron age.
Unlike copper ore, iron ore is native to Greece. Iron was already known during the Mycenean age, but the wealth of the Myceneans kept the bronze trade alive. It was only during the dark age, when importing bronze was no longer an option that small iron ore mines popped up around Greece. The adoption of iron was a slow process, and wouldn’t pick up steam for a while. Iron tools allowed for techniques that increased the quality of the pottery and the intricacies of the designs. Outside of pottery, iron obviously made better tools for farming and violence. As Iron began to proliferate around Greece, production by craftspeople and farmers became easier and the people started to grow in wealth and even begin trading again.
The booming economic prosperity would lead to a larger population and creeping wealth inequality. Not every son could inherit land. This may have been one of the factors of the foundation of so many Greek colonies across the Mediterranean. Chiefs leading expeditions assigned farmland to volunteers.
With this spread we have to talk about the Greek language itself. There are four main dialects in ancient Greek. Athenians spoke Attic Greek, as did the Ionians in Western Anatolia. Spartans spoke Doric, which was one of the West Greek dialects. Myceneans’ Linear B preserved a dialect that was part of the Arcadio-Cypriot dialect. There was no correct Greek, all these dialects are considered subsets of the Greek language. To the ancient Greeks, these accents were mutually intelligible. If you look at a map of where these dialects lie, you will see that Greek speaking areas around the Mediterranean are not uniform. Different dialects aren’t necessarily grouped together but are spread out like patchwork. Close neighbors spoke different accents while distant peoples sometimes spoke the same accent. This had a big part to play in Greek identity and politics and was partially the basis of alliances in later wars. For example, in the Greco-Persian wars Athens was interested in siding with the Ionians partially because of this. In the Peloponnesian wars, Dorics allied together under Sparta.
Archaeologically, the spread of dialects is little understood, but the Greeks proposed an explanation for it. Literary sources like Herodotus claim that it all started with the descendants of the hero Hercules, or Herakles in Greek. The Heraklids were originally from the Peloponnese but were exiled. They convinced the Dorics in the North to invade the Peloponnese with them. The joint Heraklid-Dorics invasion pushed the different dialect speakers away from their homes and caused them to shift around and found distant colonies to escape the chaos. Early Mycenaean scholars took this story so seriously, they tried to pin the blame for the bronze age collapse on this Doric invasion. Eventually these Dorics and Heraklids would become the Spartans. Did the Doric invasion happen? Maybe, but if it did, it would have happened during the dark ages, nor during the bronze age collapse.
What about Homer in all this? The society he tried to describe was the Mycenaean one, but as there were no written records, or any way for Homer to know how exactly the Mycenaeans lived, he turned to his present for reference. Scholars infer a lot about Dark age Greece from Homer’s poems rather than Mycenaean Greece. Archaeological records show that the way of life Homer describes falls more in line with the dark age, just a little exaggerated for effect. For example, the political organization of the chiefs (erroneously called kings in most translations) seems to be more accurate to how dark age chiefs lived and organized themselves. The packed dirt floors of Odysseus’ home is also more in line with excavated chiefly homes rather than the massive walled Mycenaean palaces. The palaces didn’t enter myth through Homer, but they did enter myth another way. The surviving ruins were interpreted by the ancient Greeks to have been built by the cyclopes.
The Dark age ends more or less with the adoption of an alphabet from the Phoenicians. Unlike Linear B, this alphabet was consonants and vowels, cutting the more than 200 signs down to around 24 depending on the dialect. The alphabet was adopted not for record keeping, but to preserve epic poetry like Homer’s and Hesiod’s. With this new script, Greece entered the Archaic age. Written works like Herodotus’ Histories started to develop a sustained Greek identity. As Herodotus wrote “the kinship of all Greeks is in blood, speech, the shrines of gods, the sacrifices that we have in common, and the likeness of our way of life.”
Expand for ReferencesDeger-Jalkotzy, Sigrid, Irene S. Lemos eds. Ancient Greece: From the Mycenaean Palaces to the Age of Homer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Egbert, J. Bakker eds. A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2010.
Hall, Jonathan M. Hellenicity Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Hīrūdūt, tr. Abd al-Ilāh Al-Malāḥ , Tārīkh Hīrūdūt. Abu Dhabi: al-Majmaʾ al-Thaqāfī, 2001.
Pomeroy, Sarah B., Stanley M. Burstein, et al. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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On June 7, 1195, an English Benedictine Monk named Gervase of Canterbury watched as a great thunderstorm descended on the city of London. What happened next, recorded in Gervase’s 600-page Chronicle, defied the monk’s imagination:
“On the 7th of the ides of June, around the sixth hour, a marvellous sign descended near London. For the densest and darkest cloud appeared in the air growing strongly with the sun shining brightly all around. In the middle of this, growing from an uncovered opening, like the opening of a mill, I know not what white colour ran out. That, growing into a spherical shape under the black cloud, remained suspended between the Thames and the lodgings of the bishop of Norwich. From there a sort of fiery globe threw itself down into the river; with a spinning motion it dropped time and again below the walls of the previously mentioned bishop’s household.”
Some 400 years later on October 21, 1638, another great storm descended upon the town of Widecombe-in-the Moor in Devon. Many of the townsfolk were attending a church service when the following extraordinary scene occurred:
“…and suddenly in a fearefull and lamentable manner, a mighty thundering was heard, the rattling thereof did answer much like unto the sound and report of many great Cannons and terrible strange lightening therewith… the extraordinarie lightning came into the Church so flaming, that the whole Church was presently filled with fire and smoke, the sell whereof was very loathsome, much like unto the scent of brimstone, she said they saw at first a great ball of fire come in at the window and pass through the Church, which so much affrighted the whole Congregation that the most part of them fell down into their seates…”
According to witnesses, the “great ball of fire” ricocheted around the sanctuary, demolishing stones and wooden beams and setting parishioners’ clothing alight. At one point the ball split in two, with one half smashing through a window and the other disappearing somewhere inside the church. When it was all over, four people lay dead and another 60 injured, and all that remained of the fireballs was a lingering pall of smoke and the acrid smell of sulphur.
These are two of the earliest recorded encounters with one of the strangest – and rarest – of all natural phenomena: ball lightning. Typically described as a floating orb of light or fire that moves around under its own power before suddenly vanishing, ball lightning has fascinated and baffled scholars for a thousand years. Yet while ball lightning has been witnessed by up to 5% of the world’s population, until recently this phenomenon had never been verifiably recorded, leading many scientists to conclude that it didn’t exist. Today, experts largely agree that ball lightning is a real phenomenon, but what exactly it is and what causes it remains a tantalizing mystery ripe for theoretical speculation. This is the fascinating story of the hunt for one of nature’s most elusive spectacles.
While the first written record of ball lightning only dates back to the 12th Century C.E., humans have likely been encountering this phenomenon since the dawn of civilization. For example, traditional Japanese folklore tells of Hitodama, glowing balls of lights – believed to be the souls of the departed – which follow people around at night. Similar apparitions include the ghostly Min Min Lights of the Australian Outback and the will-o’-the-wisp or ignis fatui of European folklore – a pale blue-green light seen flickering over the surface of bogs, swamps, and marshes. However, the latter two are separate phenomena, with the Min Min Lights likely being caused by car headlights and other light sources being refracted by layers of cold air; and the will-o’-the-wisp by swamp gases like phosphine, diphosphane, and methane spontaneously igniting on contact with air.
In addition to its rarity, another factor which has made ball lightning notoriously difficult to pin down is the wide range of characteristics it exhibits from sighting to sighting. Though typically associated with thunderstorms, ball lightning has been observed in fair weather, and – intriguingly – is often seen during earthquakes. Witnesses describe the orbs as measuring anywhere between a few centimetres and a few metres in diameter, with a colour ranging from pale blue to yellow, orange, red, and even pink and a shape varying from spherical to oblong, disk or rod-shaped, and multi-lobed. In many instances the orbs are completely silent and vanish without a sound, while in others they make a loud buzzing or crackling sound and make their exit with a violent bang. And while usually reported on land, ball lightning has also been encountered at sea, as crewman John Howell of the British sloop Catherine and Mary recounted in December 1726:
“As we were coming thro’ the Gulf of Florida on 29th of August, a large ball of fire fell from the Element and split our mast in Ten Thousand Pieces, if it were possible; split our Main Beam, also Three Planks of the Side, Under Water, and Three of the Deck; killed one man, another had his Hand carried off, and had it not been for the violent rains, our Sails would have been of a Blast of Fire.”
Two decades later in 1749, one Dr. Gregory of the Royal Navy frigate HMS Montague reported the following encounter:
“Admiral Chambers on board the Montague, 4 November 1749, was taking an observation just before noon…he observed a large ball of blue fire about three miles distant from them. They immediately lowered their topsails, but it came up so fast upon them, that, before they could raise the main tack, they observed the ball rise almost perpendicularly, and not above forty or fifty yards from the main chains when it went off with an explosion, as great as if a hundred cannons had been discharged at the same time, leaving behind it a strong sulphurous smell. By this explosion the main top-mast was shattered into pieces and the main mast went down to the keel. Five men were knocked down and one of them very bruised. Just before the explosion, the ball seemed to be the size of a large mill-stone.”
In more recent years, ball lightning has even been observed aboard aircraft, as famous British radio astronomer R.C. Jennison reported on March 19, 1963:
“I was seated near the front of the passenger cabin of an all-metal airliner (Eastern Airlines Flight EA 539) on a late night flight from New York to Washington. The aircraft encountered an electrical storm during which it was enveloped in a sudden bright and loud electrical discharge. Some seconds after this a glowing sphere a little more than 20 cm in diameter emerged from the pilot’s cabin and passed down the aisle of the aircraft approximately 50 cm from me, maintaining the same height and course for the whole distance over which it could be observed.”
Other prominent figures who happened to encounter ball lightning include British occultist Aleister Crowley and Russian Tsar Nicholas II, who as a young child witnessed the phenomenon while visiting his grandfather, Alexander II, in Peterhof:
“I was at the all-night vigil with my grandfather in the small church in Alexandria [when] during the service there was a powerful thunderstorm, streaks of lightning flashed one after the other, and it seemed as if the peals of thunder would shake even the church and the whole world to its foundations. Suddenly it became quite dark, a blast of wind from the open door blew out the flame of the candles which were lit in front of the iconostasis, there was a long clap of thunder, louder than before, and I suddenly saw a fiery ball flying from the window straight towards the head of the Emperor. The ball (it was of lightning) whirled around the floor, then passed the chandelier and flew out through the door into the park. My heart froze, I glanced at my grandfather – his face was completely calm. He crossed himself just as calmly as he had when the fiery ball had flown near us, and I felt that it was unseemly and not courageous to be frightened as I was. I felt that one had only to look at what was happening and believe in the mercy of God, as he, my grandfather, did. After the ball had passed through the whole church, and suddenly gone out through the door, I again looked at my grandfather. A faint smile was on his face, and he nodded his head at me. My panic disappeared, and from that time I had no more fear of storms.”
These various accounts clearly demonstrate another of ball lightning’s frustratingly inconsistent traits. While sometimes the orbs seem to have no effect on their surroundings, effortlessly passing through walls and other solid objects without leaving a mark, in others they are extraordinarily destructive, smashing windows, starting fires, and even killing people on contact. Stranger still, it seems to affect conductive objects far more than non-conductive ones; indeed in many reported cases of ball lightning, metal objects such as electrical meters and conduits have been violently ripped off of houses and flung into the street.
However, one detail which does remain largely consistent between accounts is the smell left behind by the orbs, typically described as resembling sulphur or ozone.
Strangely, despite being notoriously difficult to study, ball lightning may not actually be as rare as commonly assumed. In a study published in the Proceedings of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society in 1960, J.R. McNally analyzed some 10,000 eyewitness reports and concluded that up to 5% of the world’s population have seen ball lightning at some point in their lives. This suggests that the phenomenon is actually fairly common; the problem is that the earth is a very big place, and there are not always people – let alone trained and equipped scientists – around to witness it. But a few researchers have gotten very lucky. For example, in 1965, Soviet atmospheric chemist Mikhail Dmitriev was on an expedition near Archangelsk, northwestern Russia, when a bolt of lightning struck the ground near his camp. From the bolt sprang a ball of fire around 16 centimetres in diameter which hovered just off the ground for a few moments before flying across the camp, crackling loudly as it went. It then sailed off into the nearby woods and vanished, leaving behind a trail of dark bluish smoke and a sharp, acrid smell. Thinking quickly, Dmitriev used a set of evacuated sampling bulbs to take samples of the smoke. These samples were later revealed to contain levels of ozone and nitrogen dioxide 50-100 times higher than normal. These gases are commonly produced by high-voltage discharges, handily confirming the electrical nature of ball lightning. Indeed, ball lightning has often been conflated with another, more common phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s Fire, a bluish static electrical discharge often seen on ship’s masts or aircraft wings. However, they are almost certainly separate phenomena, for St. Elmo’s Fire requires a sharp point or edge to overcome the electrical breakdown potential of the surrounding air while ball lightning is fully detached and stable.
Given the great difficulty of observing ball lightning “in the wild”, the majority of research has involved trying to replicate the phenomenon in the laboratory. Among the first to succeed was patron saint of the internet and everyone’s favourite Serbian mad scientist, Nikola Tesla, who in the March 5, 1904 issue of the journal Electrical World and Engineer, claimed that in the course of experiments with high-voltage electrical transformers:
“I never saw fire balls, but as compensation for my disappointment I succeeded later in determining the mode of their formation and producing them artificially.”
Contemporary newspaper reports also claim that, for the amusement of guests, Tesla frequently produced and played with lightning balls a few centimetres in diameter. However, for Tesla, this phenomenon was merely an unexpected byproduct of his work on wireless energy transmission, and he wrote little more on the topic. We should also probably mention at this point that, as covered in our previous videos The Many Myths Surrounding Nikola Tesla and Most Everything You Know About Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison is Probably Wrong, much of what was reported about Tesla during his lifetime was highly sensationalized, so claims such as these should be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, Tesla’s tantalizing experiments would serve as inspiration for generations of ball lightning researchers to come.
The next major figure to investigate ball lightning in earnest was British physicist James L. Tuck. An expert in explosives, Tuck was a member of the British delegation to the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. After the war, Tuck remained at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was intimately involved in early research on fusion power. During this period, Tuck learned that many WWII submariners claimed to have accidentally produced ball lightning when closing the switches connecting the submarine’s batteries to its electric motors. These fireballs, the sailors claimed, hovered just above the deck for several moments and sometimes burned their legs. These stories intrigued Tuck, who believed that solving the elusive mystery of ball lightning might help crack another, more important scientific puzzle. At the time, most fusion research was based on the principle of the “pinch” – using a magnetic field to contain and compress a tube of plasma to high pressure and temperature, hopefully inducing the atoms within to fuse and release energy. Unlike in later fusion reactor designs like the donut-shaped Tokamak, no attempt was made to contain the plasma for long periods; instead, the approach was to induce fusion as quickly as possible and collect the energy before the plasma leaked out and dissipated. Unfortunately, all the earliest experimental fusion reactions like Lyman Spitzer’s Stellarator and James Tuck’s amusingly-named Perhapsatron failed time and time again due to instabilities within the plasma that prevented it from compressing evenly.
By this time, it was widely assumed that ball lightning was also some kind of plasma – a superheated soup of ionized, high-temperature gas. But unlike in the Stellarator and Perhapsatron, the plasma in ball lightning somehow remained fully contained and stable for minutes on end. Finding out why, Tuck believed, might just hold the key to perfecting fusion power. In an extraordinary stroke of luck, Tuck soon stumbled upon a complete submarine electrical system gathering dust in a Los Alamos storeroom. He convinced a group of colleagues to help him set up the equipment in an abandoned test bunker, and over the next two and a half years proceeded to charge and discharge the batteries thousands of times, recording the results on film. Some of these experiments involved discharging the batteries through a box filled with methane, as methane gas from decomposing matter in the submarine’s bilges was suspected to play some role in ball lightning formation. Most of these experiments yielded nothing but a shower of regular sparks, but while reviewing the footage from one test, Tuck spotted something in four frames: a glowing white orb, around 4 centimetres in diameter, travelling rapidly just above the floor. Unfortunately, the test bunker was condemned and bulldozed shortly thereafter, and Tuck was unable to continue his experiments. He retired from Los Alamos in 1973 and died in 1980 at the age of 70.
Among the many people Tuck shared his ball lightning photographs with was one Robert K. Golka, an independent experimenter from Brockton, Massachusetts. An acolyte of the work of Nikola Tesla, Golka was obsessed with realizing Tesla’s dream of transmitting electricity around the world wirelessly – as well as developing fusion power into the clean, limitless energy source of tomorrow. In 1974, Golka moved to Wendover, Utah, where he took up residence in a 600,000 square foot abandoned hangar on the nearby Wendover Air Force Base. Here, he proceeded to assemble the world’s largest Tesla Coil from army surplus parts and scrap from the local junkyard. Over the next several years he fired off the massive coil thousands of times, generating crackling showers 20 million volt lightning bolts several metres long. But only on a handful of occasions did this impressive light show produce anything resembling ball lightning. Then, in 1980, Golka’s experiments came to an abrupt end when the Air Force, who had been leasing him the hangar for a token $1 a year, transferred the property to the town of Wendover, which promptly raised the rent by 2400%. This precipitated a long and bitter legal battle between Golka and the town, whose residents and government saw Golka as little more than a freeloading crackpot.
In the end, Golka left Wendover and returned to Massachusetts, where he decided to replicate James Tuck’s submarine battery experiments. But as by this time WWII submarine batteries were rather hard to come by, Golka instead contacted the president of the Boston and Maine railroad and persuaded him to supply two locomotives, a few box cars, and a mile and a half of track – as one does. As Golka later wrote in the March 1985 issue of Radio Electronics:
“To perform my experiments, I grafted a submarine circuit breaker into the high-voltage circuit between the million watt, 1600-horsepower diesel generator and the 2000-horsepower motor trucks beneath the locomotive. By opening the circuit breaker (using a long broomstick handle), I was able to generate ball lightning.
The effects of opening the circuit breaker were quite astonishing. Temperatures in the cab of the locomotive would go instantly from 60°F to 110°F. As you might imagine, there was an overwhelming desire to leave the train cab for some fresh air. I, of course, could not do that since the train was still moving (at a speed of about 20 miles an hour), and the likely result would have been running the train off the end of the track and destroying the experimental setup…that was probably the first plasma physics experiment ever performed on a moving train!
What an absolute Mad Lad…
Based on these experiments, Golka came to some intriguing conclusions regarding the physics underpinning ball lightning:
“After redoing the experiment countless times, I was able to convince myself that the fireball effect was due to the elimination of turbulence. In fact, I found that when I closed the door and windows of the cab, the effect was most likely to occur…I now feel that it is more of a particle rotation flow than a high voltage electrostatic effect; that is, more like a giant plasma vortex donut with a tiny hole than an electrostatic sphere. Now, there are a whole host of phenomena in aeronautical engineering, particularly in the area of fluid dynamics, that are not yet fully understood. One of those is the physical properties of vorticies. One can blow smoke rings inside of smoke rings, and have the inner ring move back and forth. You can also blow smoke rings that stand perfectly still. In liquids, rings can form spheres and other shapes.”
Golka would continue to experiment on ball lightning, wireless energy transmission, fusion, and other projects – scraping together money and equipment however he could – until his death in 2018 at the age of 80. It is important to note here that as an unaffiliated independent researcher and member of “fringe science” community, Golka’s methods and conclusions should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Indeed, for many decades about the only people investigating ball lightning were fringe scientists like Golka, meaning the subject has unfortunately become confusingly entangled in pseudoscience. For example, one commonly-circulated account claims that one of James Tuck’s submarine battery experiments ended in an explosion that completely demolished the test bunker – an explosion far out of proportion to the tiny amount of methane gas used in the experiment. It is also widely claimed among conspiracy theorists that Tuck’s research – and ball lighting research in general – has been actively suppressed by the U.S. Military to protect its own research into directed-plasma weapons. Thankfully, in more recent years ball lightning has attracted the attention of more mainstream scientists, who are drawing ever closer to finally solving the enduring mystery of this elusive natural phenomenon.
One of the first comprehensive theoretical explanations of ball lightning formation was the Maser-Soliton Theory, first posited in 1955 by Soviet scientist Pyotr Kapitsa. In simple terms, Kapitsa proposed that under certain conditions, a lightning bolt can turn a large volume of air around it into a giant maser. Short for Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, a maser is the microwave equivalent of a laser – and for a more detailed explanation of the physics behind those fascinating and endlessly useful devices, please check out our previous video Who Invented Lasers and How Do They Actually Work? The powerful pulse of microwaves generated by this atmospheric maser causes the dielectric breakdown of the surrounding air, creating a ball of plasma. This maser effect can theoretically persist for some time following the lightning strike, the resulting microwave pulse feeding and sustaining the plasma ball.
Kapitsa’s theory neatly explains many of the more puzzling attributes of ball lightning. For example, ball lightning almost always forms in open countryside and never near mountain peaks, high-rise buildings, or other tall structures that typically attract lightning. This is because such objects concentrate electric fields, and cause lightning to strike at lower potentials and effect a smaller volume of surrounding air, precluding the formation of the atmospheric maser effect. Furthermore, ball lightning which forms inside closed, conductive structures like aircraft fuselages and submarine hulls tends to be low-energy and relatively harmless, while that which forms in more open areas tends to be more destructive. This, too, is explained by Maser-Soliton Theory, which predicts that the maximum energy of a maser in such enclosed environments is limited to 10 joules – as compared to 100-1,000 joules in a more open environment. Finally, Maser-Soliton theory explains the tendency of ball lightning to violently explode at the end of its life and to disproportionately affect conductive objects. According to Kapitsa, when the plasma ball runs out of energy and starts to decay, the photons inside the ball which drive the maser effect are suddenly released and begin to multiply via a phenomenon known as a photon avalanche. This in turn creates a large burst of heat and a powerful magnetic field that can tear apart composite objects made up of both conductive and non-conductive materials.
Incredibly, a version of Kapitsa’s microwave-generated ball lightning can easily be recreated in an ordinary microwave oven. Simply place a burning candle, match, or other source of carbon inside turn on the power, and within seconds glowing white balls of plasma will burst from the flame and skitter about along the roof of the oven, sustained for several seconds at a time by the concentrated microwave energy supplied by the oven’s magnetron. In 2009, Israeli physicists Eli Jerby and Vladimir Dikhtyar replicated this effect in a more controlled manner by converting a commercial 600-watt microwave oven magnetron into a “microwave drill” capable of projecting a concentrated microwave beam 2 millimetres in diameter. The team aimed this device at a variety of materials including glass, pure silicon, copper, carbon, water, and various salts and observed what happened. In many cases, the superheated material erupted into a glowing, jellyfish-like blob of plasma that floated and bounced around the inside of the metal containment vessel for around 10 milliseconds. Further investigation revealed that these plasma balls are composed of tiny vaporized particles with an average diameter of around 50 nanometers.
These findings seem to support a theory first proposed in 2000 by British chemical engineering professor John Abrahamson. Humorously known as the “dirt clod hypothesis”, the theory holds that ball lightning is caused by regular lightning striking soil containing the element silicon. The intense heat of the lightning strike vaporizes the silicon in the soil and blasts it into the air. If carbon – such as from organic matter – is also present, it will react preferentially with the oxygen in the air, leaving a ball of pure silicon vapour. Soon, however, oxygen re-combines with and rapidly oxidizes the silicon, the resulting exothermic reaction creating a white-hot ball of plasma that burns for several seconds. This theory is further supported by experiments conducted in 2007 by Antonio Pavão and Gerson Paiva of the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, in which they exposed wafers of pure silicon to powerful electric arcs, producing balls of plasma that persisted for several seconds.
Other experiments, however, suggest that other elements might be at play in the production of ball lightning. In 2006, a team at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute led by plasma physicist Gerd Fussman sparked high-voltage electric discharges at the bottom of a container of water, creating luminous balls they dubbed “plasmids” that rose out of the water and persisted for around 300 milliseconds – nearly 100 times the period a regular plasma of this type is expected to last. Furthermore, the plasmoids appeared to be relatively cool, not even singeing a piece of paper held in their path. These results are intriguing as ball lightning is often seen forming near bodies of water; indeed, Mikhail Dmitriev’s fortuitous 1965 encounter took place on the banks of the Onega River.
But if ball lightning really is a mass of superheated plasma, what keeps it contained within the orb? After all, in plasma physics experiments like fusion reactors plasma has to be contained using an externally-generated magnetic field. The answer may lay in a unique physical entity known as a magnetic skyrmion, a mass multiple magnetic vortices linked together to form a stable, self-contained, and self-reinforcing wave packet or soliton. Such an assembly of magnetic vortices could theoretically keep plasma contained within itself for several minutes on end without the need for an external power source. Though first theorized in the 1970s and proposed as an explanation for ball lightning in the 1990s, skyrmions were not observed in the lab until 2018, when at team of physicists from Amherst College and Aalto University succeeded in creating one out of Einstein-Bose condensate – a strange form of matter that forms when atoms are cooled to temperatures near Absolute Zero – and to learn more about just how bizarre things can get at these temperatures, please check out our previous video The Weirdest Substance Known to Science. While considerable research still needs to be conducted to confirm whether skyrmions are in fact the key to ball lightning’s longevity, this finding points the way forward in ball lightning research and suggests that Robert Golka’s speculation that ball lightning being a stable magnetic vortex was very close to the mark.
But while most current models of ball lightning are based on plasma, there are stranger theories. For example, Vladimir Torchigin of the Russian Academy of Sciences postulates that ball lightning actually consists of a mass of photons trapped inside a thin bubble of air – rather like a soap bubble – which refracts the trapped light in on itself and prevents it from escaping. Meanwhile, Ukrainian researcher Oleg Meshchyreyakov has proposed the nanobattery hypothesis, positing that the nanoparticles inside ball lightning act like an electrochemical battery, generating a continuous electrical discharge that can sustain the orb for long periods. As for ball lightning’s mysterious ability to pass through solid objects – even conductive ones like metal plates – theories range from the orbs creating and squeezing their way through microscopic holes to the plasma generating a shower of neutrinos – infamously inert particles that can pass through almost anything.
But perhaps the most far-out theory regarding the nature of ball lightning comes from J. Peer and A. Kendle of the Institute for Ionic and Applied Physics in Innsbruck, Austria, who in a 2010 paper made a bold proposal: ball lightning doesn’t actually exist. Instead, the pair posit that the orbs so often seen during thunderstorms are actually optical hallucinations induced by the electromagnetic pulses generated by nearby lightning strikes. To support this hypothesis, Peer and Kendle point to the technology of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation or TMS. Widely used in neurology research and in the experimental treatment of several illnesses including depression and epilepsy, TMS works by non-invasively stimulating different regions of the brain using highly-concentrated magnetic fields. Depending on which region of the brain is stimulated, TMS can induce all sorts of hallucinations, including moving points or “orbs” of light known as magnetophosphenes. Peer and Kendle have demonstrated that at distances under 100 metres, lightning strikes can produce electromagnetic fields powerful enough to stimulate the brain’s visual cortex just like TMS, meaning that “ball lightning” may in fact be a magnetically-induced hallucination. However, while intriguing, this theory does not account for the well-documented physical effects of ball lightning, such as the smoke, sulphur smell, and – in some cases – widespread death and destruction left in its wake. Still, magnetophosphenes may account for a small percentage of reported ball lightning sightings.
But until real-life ball lightning is finally captured and studied, all these theories remain pure speculation. Thankfully, in 2012, a team from the Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China, did just that. The team had set up spectrometers on the remote Qinghai Plateau in northwest China to record regular lightning strikes – which are very common in the region. During a thunderstorm in late July, a lightning strike around 900 metres from the instruments spawned ball lightning, allowing the team to capture both high-speed footage and spectral data of this elusive phenomenon. Spectral analysis revealed high concentrations of silicon, iron, and calcium – all elements found in abundance in the local soil. These findings provide compelling evidence for the so-called “dirt clod hypothesis”, which holds that ball lightning is composed of nanoparticles of soil vaporized and ionized by lightning strikes.
Nonetheless, much research remains to be done, and for now, at least, the enigmatic phenomenon of ball lightning continues to jealously guard many of its secrets. If and when these secrets are ever cracked, it will not only put to rest a millennia-old scientific mystery, but may also reveal the key to achieving clean and sustainable nuclear fusion power. Then physicists will really be having a ball…
Expand for References
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The post What on Earth is Ball Lightning? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Of all prominent American families, few are more popularly associated with tragedy than the Kennedys. Most infamous of these misfortunes are, of course, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that of his brother, Robert, in 1968. Also well-remembered is the death of John F. Kennedy Jr, his wife, and his sister-in-law in a plane crash in 1999. More obscure are the death of Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy in a 1948 plane crash; and the 1941 lobotomization of Rosemary Kennedy, which left her permanently incapacitated and institutionalized for the rest of her life. But nearly forgotten today is the 1944 death of Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, the eldest Kennedy brother and the family’s original hope for reaching the White House. A pilot in the U.S. Navy, Joe Kennedy was killed while taking part in a top-secret wartime project to destroy heavily-fortified targets using giant, radio-controlled drones packed with explosives. This is the story of Operation Aphrodite.
As we previously covered in our videos Tesla, Hollywood, and Inventing the Drone, Creating the Smart Bomb, and Well This Probably Won’t Explode, the Second World War saw great advances in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles and guided munitions – what today we would call drones and smart bombs. On the Allied side, the California-based Radioplane Company manufactured thousands of inexpensive target drones used to train anti-aircraft gunners; while on the Axis side, German engineers produced numerous radio-controlled air-launched bombs like the Fritz X, which in September 1943 became the first guided munition to sink a ship in combat. The Allies also produced a number of radio-guided gravity bombs like the Azon, which was used in limited numbers in Europe and Burma to take out bridges. But the largest and most ambitious Allied drone project was launched in 1944 in response to an unprecedented technological threat.
In August 1943,Allied reconnaissance aircraft began spotting a number of strange new structures being built across occupied France, the purpose of which was at first a mystery. These structures fell into three basic types. The first was a low bunker from which projected a long, shallow ramp supported on concrete pillars. Four of these installations were being built by the Germans at Siracourt, Desvres, Tamerville, and Couville. The second type was a giant concrete dome 71 metres in diameter being built into the side of a disused chalk quarry at Wizernes. A similarly-sized rectangular bunker was also under construction nearby at Éperlecques. The third and final installation was a complex of deep underground tunnels and angled shafts being built atMimoyecquesin the Pas-de-Calais, the closest point in France to the United Kingdom.
These strange installations, as the Allies would soon learn, were the launch sites for a new generation of high-tech weapons systems, which the Germans called vergelstungswaffe – or “vengeance weapons.”
The ramp sites were built to launch the Fieseler Fi-103 – better known as the V-1 or “buzz bomb” – an early cruise missile powered by a crude pulse-jet engine. The bunker was used to store and assemble the missiles while the ramp contained a steam-powered catapult used to accelerate the weapons towards their targets – in this case the Greater London area. Once launched, the V-1 would cruise across the English Channel at an altitude of 1000 metres until a wind-driven propeller in its nose reached a certain number of revolutions. The missile’s elevators would then spring downwards, sending the weapon and its 1-ton explosive warhead diving towards the ground.
The giant dome at Wizernes was designed to launch the more sophisticated A-4 or V-2, the world’s first operational ballistic missile. The V2 was fuelled by ethanol and liquid oxygen, the latter of which boiled off and had to be continuously manufactured. The Wizernes bunker thus incorporated a liquid oxygen plant and an underground workshop where missiles could be prepared and fuelled before being transported via narrow-gauge railway to open-air pads for launch. In this manner dozens of missiles could be launched against London every day. Unlike the V-1, whose distinctive high-pitched buzzing sound could be heard for miles around and which could be shot down by antiaircraft guns or sufficiently powerful fighter aircraft, the V-2 gave no warning of its approach and was essentially unstoppable, streaking down onto its target from the edge of space at twice the speed of sound.
Finally, the underground fortress at Mimoyecques was built to house the V-3 or “millipede”, a giant long-range cannon with a barrel 100 metres long. Staggered along the barrel were angled chambers loaded with propellant, which would ignite sequentially as the shell passed by. This would gradually accelerate the shell to a muzzle velocity of 1,500 metres per second, allowing it cross the English Channel and strike London. With a total of 25 gun barrels capable of firing 10 shots a minute, the Mimoyecques battery was designed to bombard its target with up to 600 shells every hour.
These massive installations were initially opposed by high-ranking German officers, who saw them as too vulnerable to aerial attack. Instead, they argued for mobile launch facilities which could be easily packed up and moved to a different location before Allied air forces could respond. However, they were overruled by Adolf Hitler, who had a megalomaniacal obsession with monumental structures. Eventually, a compromise was struck, with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe or air force, approving the construction of four fixed and 96 mobile launch sites for the V-1 flying bomb. Due to their distinctive J-shaped hangars, which resembled a ski from the air, these installations became known to the Allies as “ski sites.”
The V-1 campaign finally began on June 13, 1944, exactly one week after the Allied landings in Normandy. This was soon followed by the first V-2 launches in September. Within a few months, nearly 100 missiles were raining down on London every day. While the British quickly developed effective aerial defences against the V-1, the supersonic V-2 was impossible to intercept and shoot down; the only way to counter it was to destroy production facilities and launch sites. Indeed, such an undertaking, codenamed Operation Crossbow, had already been underway since before the V-weapons campaign had even begun. On the night of August 17, 1943, RAF Bomber Command launched Operation Hydra, a 600-aircraft raid against the Luftwaffe research centre at Peenemünde in northern Germany where the V-1 and V-2 had been developed. While the raid was largely successful, destroying considerable infrastructure and killing many scientists and engineers, it only disrupted V-weapons development for two months. The RAF, along with the American Eighth Air Force, thus turned their attention to destroying the launching sites in Northern France, the first raids being launched in December 1943. However, the heavily-fortified fixed sites proved all but impervious to conventional bombs. Something much more powerful would be needed to break through. Enter Operation Aphrodite.
It is not known who first proposed the idea for Aphrodite, but the project was officially approved on June 26, 1944 by Major General Jimmy Doolittle, then-commander-in-chief of the Eighth Air Force. The plan called for obsolete or war-weary Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bombers to be converted into giant remote-controlled drones by fitting them with radio control gear. The airframes would then be packed with high explosives, flown to the combat area by a radio operator in a trailing “mother ship”, and crashed into their targets. Development of the Aphrodite drones, officially designated BQ-7 and BQ-8 but commonly nicknamed “robots”, “babies”, or “Weary Willy”, was assigned to the 562nd Bomb Squadron based at RAF Honington in Suffolk, England. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy launched a parallel program called Operation Anvil using converted PB4Y-1s – the Navalized version of the B-24 Liberator.
At RAF Honington, the surplussed B-17s and B-24s were stripped of all turrets, guns, seats, armour, and other superfluous equipment, removing nearly 5,400 kilograms of weight. This allowed the aircraft to be loaded with 4,000 kilograms of high explosives – twice its usual combat load. The preferred explosive was Torpex, a mixture of TNT, RDX, and aluminium powder 50% more powerful by weight than plain TNT.
The stripped-down aircraft were next sent to the USAAF servicing station in Burtonwood in Cheshire for conversion to radio control. As no purpose-built radio-control gear was available, the aircraft were fitted with the control system from the Azon radio-controlled bomb. Short for AZimuth ONly, the equipment only allowed control along one axis of motion, so two sets were needed for each aircraft. To maintain the secrecy of the program, the control equipment was wrapped in explosive primacord linked to the main detonator to ensure its destruction.
To allow attacks to be carried out at long standoff distances, the drones were fitted with two television cameras: one in the nose to provide a forward view, and one aimed at the instrument panel. This was among the first uses of television technology in actual combat. As missions would be carried out at extremely low altitudes, a high-precision radio altimeter was also fitted, while a smoke canister mounted under the fuselage could be ignited to give the operators a better view of the drone. Said operators controlled the drone from a pair of modified B-17 or B-24 ‘motherships’ known as CQ-4s. Meanwhile, the Navy’s Operation Anvil used one B-17 and two Lockheed PV-1 Venturas as motherships. In addition to the drones and motherships, missions typically flew with an escort of fighters, one or two camera planes to record the mission, and a de Havilland Mosquito light bomber to fly ahead and scout the weather over the target.
It was originally intended for the drones to be remotely piloted throughout their missions, but testing revealed that the Azon equipment was not sophisticated enough for taxiing and takeoff. The drones thus needed to be piloted into the air by a two-man crew, who would then bail out once the onboard explosives were armed and the aircraft switched over to radio control. To make it easier for the crew to bail out, the escape hatches were removed and enlarged, and in some cases the entire cockpit roof removed. This also made it easier to load crates of explosives into the aircraft. Ground crews jokingly referred to these roofless aircraft as “roadsters.”
The initial Aphrodite force comprised ten drones and four motherships. Initially, it was decided to send the 562nd Bomb Squadron to RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, which had a long runway ideal for the heavily-loaded drones. However, Woodbridge was a major alternate airfield for damaged aircraft returning from bombing raids, and the fear that one of these aircraft diverted to Woodbridge might accidentally collide with an explosives-laden drone resulted in the squadron being sent to RAF Fersfield in Norfolk instead.
The first Aphrodite mission was launched on August 4, 1944 against the Mimoyecques V-3 cannon site, the Siracourt V-1 bunker, and the V-2 bunkers at Wizernes and Eperlecques. It was a complete failure. The crew of the first drone managed to bail out successfully, but the drone soon spun out of control and crashed into the ground before ever reaching the English Channel. The second drone kept entering an uncontrolled climb when it was switched over to radio control, forcing the pilot to re-take control. On the third attempt to hand over control to the radio operator, the aircraft pitched up sharply, stalled, and spiralled to the ground. The autopilot engineer managed to bail out, but the pilot was trapped onboard and died on impact. Similarly, the third drone lost control soon after the first crewman bailed out. The aircraft spiralled to the ground and the explosives detonated on impact, blasting a giant crater, destroying 8,000 square metres of countryside near Orford, Suffolk, and vaporizing the second crewman. Only the fourth drone made it across the English Channel and reached the target area. However, during final approach clouds obscured the operator’s view and the drone missed the target by nearly 500 metres.
On August 6, the 562nd tried again, launching a 4-drone attack against the V-2 bunker at Watten. The results were much the same as before, though mercifully all four drone crews managed to bail out safely. The first two drones immediately crashed into the sea, the third suffered flak damage and crashed near Gravelines, France, while the fourth lost control and began to circle uncontrolled over the English city of Ipswich. For many long, tense minutes, the motherhship crews heard their breath until, finally, the wayward drone crashed harmlessly in the English Channel.
On August 13, a raid was launched against the naval base at Le Havre. Both drones missed their targets, while one of the Mosquitoes photographing the raid flew too close to the explosion and was seriously damaged. The pilot managed to bail out and was captured by the Germans, but his observer was killed. Two more missions against Le Havre were flown on August 19 and 26, but these were also unsuccessful.
These failures revealed serious flaws with the Aphrodite system, so the operation was temporarily halted until all the kinks could be worked out. Meanwhile, the Navy was getting ready to launch its Operation Anvil missions from RAF Fersfield. The first mission, against the Mimoyecques V-3 cannon site, was to be crewed by autopilot engineer Lieutenant Wilford J. Willy and pilot Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, son of the U.S. Ambassador to Britain and scion of the powerful Kennedy political dynasty. After volunteering for the U.S. Navy and completing his flight training in 1942, Kennedy flew Martin Mariner flying boats from Puerto Rico before transferring to the PB4Y-1 Liberator and joining Squadron VB110 in Dunkeswell, Devon. After safely completing his regular combat tour of 25 missions, Kennedy, ever the patriot, volunteered to fly 10 more – somehow convincing his entire crew to stay with him. Then, just prior to what would have been his 40th and final mission, Kennedy learned of a top-secret assignment involving low-level flying and parachuting and immediately signed up.
Lieutenant Willy, meanwhile, had joined the Navy in 1933 as an able seaman and worked his way up through the ranks, eventually qualifying as a PB4Y-1 pilot and becoming an expert in radio control systems. Indeed, it was Willy who had designed much of the control equipment for the BQ-8 drone. Having spent the entire war working on various top-secret Navy projects, Willy was desperate to see action, and decided to pull rank in order to replace Joe Kennedy’s original engineer, Ensign James Simpson, on the first Operation Anvil mission.
At 6 PM on August 12, 1944, Kennedy and Willy took off from RAF Fersfield and headed east towards Halesworth to join up with the rest of the formation, comprising two Lockheed Ventura motherships, an escort of four North American P-51 Mustang fighters, two Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters, a Boeing B-17 camera plane, and two de Havilland Mosquito weather scouts from the 325th Photographic Reconnaissance Wing. In a strange coincidence, one of the Mosquitoes was piloted by one Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, son of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and member of another venerable American political dynasty. After forming up and departing Halesworth, Kennedy switched the drone over to radio control. The operators aboard the motherships then completed a number of test turns, whereupon Kennedy radioed the codewords “Spade Flush” to indicate that he and Willy were about to bail out. Willy then switched on the drone’s television cameras.
Then, at 6:20 PM, as the formation was flying over Blythborough, Suffolk, the BQ-8 drone suddenly exploded into a giant fireball. Nine-year-old Mick Muttitt of nearby Darsham, witnessed the entire incident, later recalling:
“All of a sudden, there was a tremendous explosion and the Liberator aircraft was blown apart, with pieces falling in all directions over New Delight Wood, at Blythburgh…I vividly remember seeing burning wreckage falling earthward while engines with propellers still turning, and leaving comet-like trails of smoke, continued along the direction of flight before plummeting down. A Ventura broke high to starboard and a Lightning spun away to port, eventually to regain control at tree-top height over Blythburgh Hospital.
While I watched spellbound, a terrific explosion reached Dresser’s Cottage in the form of a loud double thunderclap. Then all was quiet except for the drone of the circling Venturas’ engines, as they remained for a few more minutes in the vicinity. The fireball changed to an enormous black pall of smoke resembling a huge octopus, the tentacles below indicating the earthward paths of burning fragments.”
The blast felled hundreds of trees and scattered debris over an area of 50 square kilometres, damaging nearly 150 properties, injuring 50 people, and striking Colonel Roosevelt’s aircraft. Thankfully, no civilians were hurt and Roosevelt managed to land safely. However, no trace of either Kennedy or Willy’s bodies was ever found.
The loss of Joe Kennedy came as a bitter blow to his family, who had grand plans for him after the war. Indeed, it was hoped that he would become the first Irish Catholic in the White House – a feat that would only be achieved sixteen years later by his younger brother John. More tragic still, strategically Kennedy’s sacrifice had been for nothing. On July 6, Tallboy “earthquake” bombs dropped from RAF Lancaster bombers had severely damaged the Mimoyeques bunker – and for more on this extraordinary weapon, please check out our previous video That Time Disney Helped Give the World a Weapon of Mass Destruction. This, combined with the rapidly-advancing Allied ground forces, prompted the Germans to abandon the site by July 30. However, news of the abandonment had not reached the U.S. Navy. Nonetheless, Kennedy and Willy were both posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, Distinguished Flying Cross, and Air Medal, the citation for Kennedy’s Navy Cross reading:
“For extraordinary heroism and courage in aerial flight as pilot of a United States Liberator bomber on August 12, 1944. Well knowing the extreme dangers involved and totally unconcerned for his own safety, Kennedy unhesitatingly volunteered to conduct an exceptionally hazardous and special operational mission. Intrepid and daring in his tactics and with unwavering confidence in the vital importance of his task, he willingly risked his life in the supreme measure of service and, by his great personal valor and fortitude in carrying out a perilous undertaking, sustained and enhanced the finest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”
Due to most of the aircraft being vaporized, the cause of the explosion that killed Kennedy and Willy remains a mystery to this day. The leading theory is that a lack of adequate shielding on the television camera transmission cables resulted in stray electromagnetic fields accidentally closing an electrical relay in the detonator circuit, setting off the explosive payload. Indeed, this potential design flaw had been pointed out many times by Navy ground crews, but their warnings had fallen on deaf ears.
Despite this tragedy, on September 3, 1944 a second Anvil mission was launched – this time against the Nordsee U-boat pens on Heligoland Island in the North Sea. While this time the crew bailed out safely, once over the target the radio operator lost sight of the drone and attempted to carry out the attack using television images alone. Unfortunately, he became disoriented and instead flew the drone into a navy barracks on nearby Düne Island. This incident convinced the Navy that the entire concept was untenable, and Operation Anvil was soon cancelled.
Meanwhile, the Air Force continued to press forward with Operation Aphrodite. Once it was realized that the original ‘double Azon’ control system used by the Aphrodite drones was simply not up to the task, it was replaced by a more sophisticated control system codenamed Castor, which required just one receiver, transmitter, and operator. The drones were also fitted with a modified version of the Eureka/Rebecca radio navigation system commonly used to drop men and supplies to European resistance group. This allowed the drones to automatically home in on their motherships, preventing them from accidentally wandering out of radio command range. Finally, the attack profile was changed. Previously, the drones had flown at an altitude of 600 metres, making the very vulnerable to German anti-aircraft fire. Consequently, a radio-controlled throttle was added to allow the drone to be flown at 3,000 metres before dropping down for the attack run.
Aphrodite missions resumed in mid-September 1944. By this time, the U.S. Army Air Force had concluded that the drones were of marginal utility against hardened targets like V-weapons bunkers. Indeed, more conventional British Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs had proven far more effective, for the “earthquake” effect they were designed to inflict meant that even a near-miss could be extraordinarily destructive. Furthermore, by September 1944 Allied ground forces had overrun all the fixed V-weapon sites in France. All subsequent launches would be carried out by mobile units. Thus, the USAAF ordered that all further Aphrodite missions be directed against industrial targets inside Germany.
The first Castor-equipped Aphrodite mission was launched on September 11, 1944 against the Heligoland U-boat pens. Tragedy struck almost immediately when the drone pilot bailed out and his parachute failed to open. He was killed instantly. The drone, meanwhile, made it all the way to Heligoland, but was struck by flak and crashed 100 metres short of the target.
Two days later another mission launched against an oil refinery in Hemmingstedt. Three drones malfunctioned and crashed into the English Channel, while the fourth crashed short of the target due to the operator becoming disoriented. However, the enormous blast inflicted enough damage and casualties for the mission to be declared a minor success.
Two more missions were flown against Heligoland on October 15 and 30, but due to poor visibility, enemy flak, radio control issues, and other difficulties, neither achieved any success. Indeed, one operator grew so frustrated with his malfunctioning drone that he pointed it in the general direction of Berlin and let it go. Amazingly, it actually ended up coming down near its target, inflicting extensive damage and casualties. Meanwhile, another drone crash landed without exploding and was only lightly damaged, giving German intelligence an opportunity to inspect the radio control system.
The final two Aphrodite missions took place on December 5, 1944 and January 20, 1945, targeting the Herford marshalling yard and the Oldenburg power station, respectively. Cloud cover over Herford forced the crew to divert to Haldorf, but as so many times before, poor visibility through the television cameras caused the drones to fall short of their targets. Meanwhile, the two drones bound for Oldenburg were shot down by flak before they ever reached the target. Unimpressed by these failures, on January 27 General Carl Spaatz, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe, sent General Doolittle an urgent message:
“Aphrodite babies must not be launched against the enemy until further orders.”
Those “further orders” never came. Though American and British planners debated launching further drone strikes against Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr Valley, the imminent end of the war led to these plans being abandoned, and Operation Aphrodite was officially cancelled on April 27, 1945.
In the end, both Operation Aphrodite and Anvil proved dismal failures. Of the 25 converted bombers launched over 14 missions between August 1944 and January 1945, only one came anywhere close to striking its target. While outwardly simple in concept, the technology of the day was simply not up to the task. After the war, plans were made to convert more advanced B-17G models into similar explosive drones called MB-17Gs, but by this time technology had advanced sufficiently that the concept had become obsolete, and no MB-17Gs were ever built. Yet despite their failures, Aphrodite and Anvil were nonetheless important first steps in the development of guided munitions, weapons which have become the cornerstone of modern warfare. As they say: you have to start somewhere…
Expand for References
Television Goes to War, Secret Arsenal, https://web.archive.org/web/20080417214556/http://www.mugualumni.org/secretarsenal/page9.html
Baugher, Joe, BQ-7, http://joebaugher.com/usaf_bombers/b17_14.html
Parsch, Andreas, Consolidated BQ-8, Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles, 2003, http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app1/bq-8.html
Parsch, Andreas, Boeing BQ-7 Aphrodite, Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles, http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app1/bq-7.html
458th Bombardment Group (H), https://web.archive.org/web/20200106093918/http://www.458bg.com/azonproject.htm
Lt. Joe Kennedy, Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum, https://web.archive.org/web/20070514043255/http://www.aviationmuseum.net/Joe_Kennedy.htm
Giles, Rosemary, The Disastrous Operation Aphrodite Killed JFK’s Brother, War History Online, January 20, 2023, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/operation-aphrodite.html
Webb, Mason, Operation Aphrodite, Warfare History Network, Fall 2014, https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/operation-aphrodite/
Van Hare, Thomas, Operation Aphrodite, Historic Wings, August 12, 2012, http://fly.historicwings.com/2012/08/operation-aphrodite/
Boyne, Walter, The Remote Control Bombers, Air Force Magazine, November 2010, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Documents/2010/November 2010/1110bombers.pdf
The post The Secret Drone Program That Killed JFK’s Brother appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Valdivia, Chile. May 22, 1960. Magnitude 9.5. 1,655 killed. Prince William Sound, Alaska. March 26, 1964. Magnitude 9.2. 128 killed. Sumatra, Indonesia. December 26, 2004. Magnitude 9.1. 227,898 killed. Tohoku, Japan, March 11, 2011. Magnitude 9.1. 15,700 killed. These are the four most powerful earthquakes in recorded history. If you keep up with the news, then you have likely heard of Earthquakes being measured and compared by magnitude – particularly using something called the Richter scale. But how does this scale actually work? How do seismologists gauge the strength of one of the most complicated geological phenomena known? Well, grab your emergency kit and take shelter under the nearest doorway as we dive into the fascinating science and history of measuring earthquakes.
Before we begin, it is important to note that while the Richter scale has become synonymous with earthquake measurement, the scale proper is actually no longer used, having been replaced in 1979 by the more accurate and versatile Moment Magnitude Scale. However, for moderate earthquake intensities the two scales are roughly similar, and to understand the current system it is necessary to understand the history and development of its famous predecessor.
The remote detection and measurement of earthquakes is a surprisingly ancient practice, with the first modern seismometer being built in China in 132 C.E. by the great Han Dynasty mathematician and scientist Chang Heng. This instrument consisted of a two-metre tall, egg-shaped bronze vessel around which were mounted eight sculpted dragons with hinged jaws holding a small metal ball. Below these sat eight bronze frogs with open mouths. Inside the vessel hung a heavy metal pendulum, which was linked to each of the dragons’ jaws. When the seismic waves from a distant earthquake passed through the instrument, the vessel moved while the pendulum stayed still via inertia. This, in turn caused the dragon facing the direction of the earthquake’s epicentre to release its ball into the frog’s mouth. The instrument proved remarkably effective, as Chang Heng later wrote:
“On one occasion one of the dragons let fall a ball from its mouth though no perceptible shock could be felt. All the scholars at the capital [Chang’an] were astonished at this strange effect occurring without any evidence of an earthquake to cause it. But several days later a messenger arrived bringing news of an earthquake in Lung-Hsi (400 miles away). Upon this everyone admitted the mysterious power of the instrument.”
While modern seismometers are more sensitive and include systems for accurately measuring and recording seismic waves, they all fundamentally work on the same basic principle as Chang Heng’s pioneering design, using a pendulum or a weight suspended on springs as the detection element.
However, such instruments would not be developed until the 1920s, meaning early scales for classifying earthquakes were based on their physical effects – AKA its intensity. One of the earliest was the Rossi-Forel scale, developed by seismologists Michele Stefano Conte de Rossi and François-Alphonse Forel in 1873. Divided into ten categories, like the Beaufort scale for measuring wind speed, the Rossi-Forel scale was based on qualitative observations of common earthquake effects. For example, an intensity 1 and 2 earthquake was unnoticeable by most people, an intensity 5 earthquake could shift furniture and ring church bells, an intensity 7 earthquake could crack walls and bring down chimneys, while an intensity 10 earthquake was the most catastrophic of all, capable of levelling entire cities and tearing open the ground. This scale remained in use until 1902, when Italian volcanologist Giuseppe Mercalli developed his eponymous Mercalli scale, which used 12 points instead of 10 – though intensity 1 still represented an earthquake undetectable by humans and intensity 12 a catastrophic disaster. In 1931, Mercalli’s scale was refined by American seismologists Harry Wood and Frank Neumann to produce the Modified Mercalli Scale, which is still used today.
But such intensity scales were highly subjective, and as truly reliable seismometers became available in the 1920, it soon became clear that the observed intensity of earthquakes on the ground did not match up neatly with its measured magnitude – that is, the actual energy released at its hypocentre. Indeed, it was found that the intensity of an earthquake – its effects on the surface – depends as much on the depth of the hypocentre as the actual magnitude of the earthquake. In other words, a shallower, less powerful earthquake can inflict more surface damage than a deeper, more powerful one. And in case you are wondering, the epicentre of an earthquake is its origin point on the earth’s surface, while the hypocentre lies below the epicentre where the tectonic plates actually collide.
To correct this mismatch and standardize earthquake measurement, in 1935 American seismologist Charles Francis Richter introduced his famous eponymous scale, which he initially referred to simply as the local magnitude scale or simply the magnitude scale. The scale was based on the then-standard Wood-Anderson torsion seismograph, and expressed earthquake intensities as the logarithm of the maximum amplitude or height of the recorded seismic waves, expressed in microns or micrometers. This means that the Richter scale is not linear; instead, each whole-number magnitude represents an earthquake ten times more powerful than the previous number. For example, a magnitude 4 earthquake is 103 or 1,000 times more powerful than a magnitude 1. Meanwhile, the total energy released by an earthquake increases 31.7 times between whole number magnitude values.
Richter’s magnitudes were calibrated such that a magnitude 3 earthquake detected by a Wood-Anderson seismometer located 100 kilometres from the epicentre would produce a trace on the recording chart 1mm tall. As the measured intensity of seismic waves changes with distance, Richter also created a table of correction factors to account for the actual position of the seismograph and the effects of local geology. In practice, the magnitude of a particular earthquake was determined by averaging the readings of multiple seismographs, each corrected for their respective distance from the epicentre. While Richter’s name has become synonymous with this method, his was actually a refinement of a similar method developed by Japanese seismologist Kiyoo Wadati in 1931.
Richter originally developed his scale specifically for use in California, where earthquakes tend to be moderate in magnitude and seismometers are never more than 600 kilometres from the epicentre. Because of this – and the relatively low sensitivity of early seismometers – the weakest earthquakes registered as magnitude 1 and the strongest around magnitude 8. However, as more and more seismographs were installed around the world, seismologists discovered that the accuracy of the Richter scale fell apart at greater magnitudes and distances. At magnitudes above 6.5, values calculated using Richter’s method tend to cluster or “saturate” near one another, causing the total energy release to be underestimated. Furthermore, as seismometers became ever more sensitive, they became capable of detecting earthquakes at magnitudes lower than 1 – which, given the logarithmic nature of the Richter scale, translated into negative magnitude values.
To address these shortcomings, Richter and his colleague Beno Gutenberg developed the Body Wave Magnitude and Surface Wave Magnitude scales. The former measures the magnitude of the Primary or P waves and the Secondary or S seismic waves that travel through the earth’s interior; while the latter measures the so-called Love and Rayleigh waves that travel along the earth’s surface. As the Love and Rayleigh waves of earthquakes above magnitude 4.5 can travel all the way around the world, the Surface Wave Magnitude Scale has no distance restrictions and can be measured from anywhere on the earth’s surface. But while these scales were a marked improvement over Richter’s original local magnitude scale, magnitude values still tended to saturate at magnitudes above 8. And so, in 1979, Japanese seismologist Hiroo Kanamori and American seismologist Thomas C. Hanks introduced an entirely new measurement system: the Moment Magnitude Scale.
Instead of measuring the peak amplitude of seismic waves recorded on a seismometer, the Moment Magnitude Scale is instead based on an earthquake’s Seismic Moment – that is, the total displacement or slip of the tectonic fault across its entire surface during an earthquake multiplied by the force needed to move said fault. This method avoids the saturation problem, allowing earthquakes above magnitude 8 to be accurately measured. However, the scale still expresses magnitudes logarithmically, and at moderate values lines up almost exactly with the old Richter scale. Thus, even though all seismologists now use the Moment Magnitude Scale to report earthquake magnitude, using the term “Richter Scale” as news reporters sometimes do is still technically accurate in most cases.
But what do the numbers on the Moment Magnitude Scale actually mean? As the earth’s tectonic plates are constantly in motion, earthquakes are happening all the time somewhere in the world. The vast majority of these quakes, however, are minuscule and undetectable by humans. Millions of such micro-quakes occur every year, registering at magnitudes between 1.0 and 1.9. Going up the scale, magnitude 5.0-5.9 earthquakes are considered moderate, being readily felt by humans and capable of inflicting minor damage to buildings and other infrastructure. Around 1,000 to 1,500 of these earthquakes occur every year worldwide. Magnitude 7.0-7.9 earthquakes, on the other hand, are considered major, and can inflict major damage to buildings across a radius of 250 kilometres from the epicentre. Around 10-20 such quakes occur every year. And finally, at the other end of the scale, are extreme earthquakes of magnitude 9.0 or higher. Since regular seismic monitoring began in the early 20th century, only 5 earthquakes of this magnitude have ever been recorded.
Expand for References
Ghose, Tia, The 20 Largest Recorded Earthquakes in History, Live Science, January 27, 2023, https://www.livescience.com/largest-recorded-earthquakes-in-history
Ancient Seismometer, Chinese Historical & Cultural Project, https://www.chcp.org/ancient-seismometer/
Moment Magnitude, Richter Scale – What Are the Different Magnitude Scales, and Why Are There so Many? USGS, https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/moment-magnitude-richter-scale-what-are-different-magnitude-scales-and-why-are-there-so-many
What is the Difference Between Earthquake Magnitude and Earthquake Intensity? What is the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale? USGS, https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-difference-between-earthquake-magnitude-and-earthquake-intensity-what-modified-mercalli
Richter Scale, SMS Tsunami Warning, https://www.sms-tsunami-warning.com/pages/richter-scale
Rafferty, John, Richter scale, Encyclopedia Britannica, May 19, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/science/Richter-scale#:~:text=Richter%20scale%20(ML)%2C,a%20scale%20by%20a%20seismograph.
How Often do Earthquakes Occur? The IRIS Consortium, http://www.mgs.md.gov/seismic/education/no3.pdf
Jones, Richard, Investigating the Mercalli Intensity Scale Through Lived Experience, https://www2.hawaii.edu/~rmjones7/RMJ-Mercalli%20Scale%20Sci%20Scope%20Article.pdf
Boore, David, The Richter Scale: Its Development and Use For Determining Earthquake Source Parameters, US Geological Survey, January 11, 1988, http://w.daveboore.com/pubs_online/richter_scale_tectonophysics_1989.pdf
The post What is Up with the Bizarre Richter Scale? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If ever there was an ultimate weapon of war, it would have to be the nuclear submarine. For more than 60 years, ballistic missile-armed submarines have prowled the world’s oceans, ready to unleash nuclear armageddon at a moment’s notice. Meanwhile, fast attack boats track and stalk the missile-armed ‘boomers’, the two rivals locked in a shadowy game of cat-and-mouse deep beneath the waves. But while nuclear deterrence is the modern submarine’s most famous mission, it is far from the only one. Throughout the Cold War and into the present day, these vessels have served as the eyes and ears of the Navy, using stealth and guile to perform covert reconnaissance of enemy shores. And perhaps the most daring and successful such feat of naval espionage took place in the early 1970s, when a U.S. Navy submarine snuck into a Soviet naval base to tap an underwater communications cable. This is the extraordinary story of Operation Ivy Bells.
Our story begins in the late 1960s at the Petropavlovsk Naval Base on the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, home of the Soviet – and today Russian – Pacific nuclear submarine fleet. To connect the base to the Pacific naval headquarters at Vladivostok – and the rest of the Soviet military communications network – the Soviets laid a submarine cable more than 1500 kilometres across the sea of Okhotsk. From a security standpoint this was a wise decision, for unlike radio traffic, communications could not be intercepted without gaining physical access to the cable. And with the area heavily defended by acoustic sensors, mines, and regular naval patrols, this was highly unlikely.
Or so the Soviets thought, for on the other side of the Pacific, one man was planning to do just that: Captain James F. Bradley Jr., chief of the highly secret undersea warfare division of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence. If, Bradley reasoned, the sea of Okhotsk could be infiltrated and the Petropavlovsk-Vladivostok cable found and tapped, it would yield a bonanza of valuable intelligence on Soviet naval operations in the Pacific. But how to carry out such a daring mission? Thankfully, the U.S. Navy had the perfect tool at its disposal: the U.S.S. Halibut.
Laid down in 1957, the Halibut started out as a diesel-electric submarine but was converted to nuclear power halfway through construction. Shortly after her commissioning in 1960, she became the first submarine in history to launch a guided missile. However, unlike the later submarines Halibut was designed to launch the SSM-N-8 Regulus, a jet-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile. Five Regulus Is – or two of the later Regulus IIs – were stored in a special, 27-metre-long cylindrical hangar built into the Halibut’s forward hull, and were extracted and deployed onto her deck by automatic hydraulic equipment. Unfortunately, missiles could only be launched while the submarine was surfaced, making her highly vulnerable to detection and attack.
By 1965, Regulus-armed vessels had been rendered obsolete by the more advanced George Washington-class ballistic missile submarines, and Halibut was instead modified for use in “Underwater Engineering” – a euphemism for covert intelligence gathering. The now-empty Regulus missile hangar became the nerve centre of the vessel, housing a state-of-the-art Sperry UNIVAC 1224 and the Intelligence personnel who would operate it. This space became known as the “Bat Cave”. The computer was connected to an extensive suite of sensors, including remotely-operated vehicles or ROVs and a special sled or “fish” that could be towed behind the submarine and scan the seafloor with sonar and cameras. Halibut was fitted with skids called “sea keeping legs” or “skegs”, larger anchors, and position-keeping thrusters so she could rest on the seafloor or hover just above it while deploying the ROV or divers. Funds for these modifications were secretly drawn from the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle or DSRV project, and in 1971 a torpedo-shaped device officially designated a DSRV crew trainer was attached to Halibut’s aft deck. In reality, this structure was actually a pressurized habitat for the newly-developed technique of saturation diving.
When a diver remains underwater for long periods of time, nitrogen from the air they breathe becomes dissolved in their tissues. If they then surface too quickly, this nitrogen can bubble out of solution, leading to the dreaded decompression sickness or the bends – and for more on this, please check out our previous video Why is it Called The Bends When There is No Bending, and the Most Gruesome Accident. The standard solution to this problem for divers to surface slowly, allowing the nitrogen to be slowly and safely expelled from their bodies. However, when working at great depths, this process can take hours; and if a diver must make multiple dives over a given time period, the time spent decompressing becomes impractical, and multiple decompressions expose the diver to unnecessary risk of the bends. In the late 1950s, however, Captain George F. Bond, a U.S. Naval Physician, came up with a clever solution. After a certain amount of time spent working at depth, a diver’s body becomes saturated with nitrogen, such that no matter how much longer they remain underwater, their total decompression time remains the same. Thus, if the diver can be kept at this same pressure throughout their working shift, they only need to decompress once at the end, maximizing productivity and minimizing the risk of decompression sickness. In 1964, Bond tested his theories by building SEALAB I, a pressurized “habitat” sunk 59 metres below the surface off the coast of Bermuda. For 11 days, 4 divers lived aboard the habitat, venturing out to conduct scientific experiments and evaluate the function of the diving equipment. This was followed by SEALAB II in 1965 and SEALAB III in 1969, both of which demonstrated the practicality and utility of the saturation diving technique. Today, saturation diving is used extensively in the offshore oil and gas industry – and to find out just how dangerous this technique can be, please check out our previous video The Most Gruesome Death Imaginable: the Byford Dolphin Accident.
The refitted Halibut’s first clandestine mission was to find and photograph the wreck of the Soviet Golf II-class submarine K-129, which had sunk with all hands 2,890 kilometres northwest of Hawaii on March 8, 1968 This mission was part of the larger Project Azorian, wherein the CIA constructed a special ship called the Glomar Explorer to snatch K-129 off the ocean floor. The cover story for the mission was that Glomar Explorer was constructed by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes to mine manganese nodules off the ocean floor – a scheme crazy enough to be plausible. Incredibly, in July 1974, Glomar Explorer succeeded in recovering the forward section of K-129 from a depth of 4.9 km – but that is a story for a different video.
In October 1971, Halibut sailed from Hawaii on a covert mission to find and tap the submarine cable between Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok, code-named Operation Ivy Bells. While finding a single 12-centrimetre-wide cable in thousands of square kilometres of ocean should have been an insurmountable task, Captain Bradley, the architect of the mission, had come up with a laughably simple solution. Having grown up in St. Louis Missouri, Bradley remembered seeing signs along the Mississippi River reading CABLE CROSSING – DO NOT ANCHOR. There must, he reasoned, be similar signs around Petropavlovsk to prevent local shipping from snagging and damaging the cable. And indeed, shortly after arriving in the Sea of Okhotsk, the crew of the Halibut spotted such a sign on the shoreline and quickly located the cable in 120 metres of water. Operating from their pressurized habitat on Halibut’s aft deck, U.S. Navy saturation divers fitted the cable with a special signal-interception pod developed by the NSA and Bell Telephone Laboratories. 6 metres long, the pod did not penetrate the cable but gathered signals remotely through electromagnetic induction. The device could record up to eight weeks worth of signals and was designed to automatically drop off if the Soviets raised the cable for regular maintenance.
Halibut’s primary mission was so secret that few of her crew were aware of it. Instead, they believed they were sent to collect wreckage of Soviet SS-N-12 Sandbox anti-ship missiles test-fired over the Sea of Okhotsk. In fact, this cover mission was actually successfully carried out, with enough debris being collected for the missile to be fully reverse-engineered and evaluated for weaknesses.
With the tap successfully installed, Halibut slipped out of Soviet waters and returned to Hawaii. Every month thereafter, Halibut and other submarines including USS Seawolf, USS Parche, and USS Richard B. Russell returned to Petropavlovsk to recover and replace the recording tapes. To the Navy and the NSA’s delight, the first intercepts revealed that the Soviets were so confident in the security of the cable that nearly all communications sent over it were unencrypted – yielding a treasure trove of intelligence. Buoyed by this success, in 1973 the Navy installed a more sophisticated surveillance device, which was powered by a plutonium-fuelled Radioisotope Thermal Generator or RTG, could record 12 communications channels at once, and could record up to a year’s worth of data. And five years later, another tap was successfully placed on the cable connecting the Severdovinsk naval base to the Soviet Northern Fleet headquarters in Murmansk.
But this intelligence windfall came to an abrupt end in 1981 when a U.S. spy satellite spotted a small fleet of Russian ships gathered over the exact location of the recording device. Alarmed at this development, the Navy dispatched the U.S.S Parche to recover the next set of tapes. But when the submarine reached the site, they discovered that the tap had been removed. Operation Ivy Bells was over. But the project’s downfall was not the result of superior Soviet spy craft; rather, it had been betrayed from within. In January 1980, a 44-year-old former NSA analyst named Ronald W. Pelton walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C. and offered to sell the KGB everything he knew. At the time, Pelton was $65,000 in debt, had just filed for personal bankruptcy, and had only a few hundred dollars left in his bank account. In addition to Ivy Bells, Pelton disclosed the details of at least seven other NSA operations, relying on his excellent memory instead of physical documents. For his services, he received just $35,500 – not even enough to cover his debts. Then, in July 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB Colonel and Pelton’s initial contact, defected to the United States and provided information which eventually led to Pelton’s arrest. The following year, Pelton was convicted of espionage and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in prison – where he eventually died of natural causes on September 6, 2022. Thankfully, Pelton was not aware of the Severdovinsk-Murmansk cable tap, which remained in place until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Operation Ivy Bells remains one of the greatest and most ingenious intelligence coups of the Cold War – at least, that we know of. Given how many covert operations remain classified to this day, who knows what other daring exploits the “Silent Service” performed during the most dangerous period in human history?
Expand for References
Parrish, Thomas, The Submarine: a History, Viking Penguin, 2004
Sutton, H.I, Secret Sub – USS Halibut, Covert Shores, January 2, 2015, http://www.hisutton.com/Secret%20Sub%20-%20USS%20Halibut.html
Hunter, Thomas, Operation Ivy Bells – Sea of Okhotsk, Russia, 1970s-1981, Special Operations, https://web.archive.org/web/20101207163630/http://www.specialoperations.com/Operations/ivybells.html
Friendrich, Ed, Former Parche Sailors’ Best Stories Can’t Be Told, Kitsap Sun, July 22, 2016, https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/news/local/communities/bremerton/2016/07/22/former-parche-sailors-best-stories-cant-be-told/94324172/
Larson, Caleb, Intelligence Coup: How One U.S. Nuclear Submarine Tapped Russian Undersea Cables, National Interest, May 30, 2020, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/intelligence-coup-how-one-us-nuclear-submarine-tapped-russian-undersea-cables-159086
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If ever there was a poster child for human-caused extinction, it was the Dodo. This odd-looking flightless bird, native to the remote island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, was first encountered by Dutch sailors in 1598. Barely six decades later, the Dodo was all but extinct, wiped out by hungry sailors and invasive species like rats and pigs brought along. Indeed, so swift was the Dodo’s demise that for more than a hundred years many scientists refused to believe the bird had ever existed at all. But when it comes to modern extinctions, few can compare in sheer brutal swiftness to that of a large, docile marine mammal that once plied the cold northern waters of the Bering Strait. Discovered in 1741, the gentle giant was almost immediately hunted to oblivion. This is the tragic story of Steller’s Sea Cow.
The discovery of Steller’s Sea Cow is almost as dramatic as the creature’s ultimate demise. In 1741, Russian Tsar Peter the Great commissioned an expedition to explore and map Russia’s remote Pacific coast, declaring that “Everything shall be discovered that has not yet been discovered.” On June 4 of that year, two ships, the St. Peter and the St. Paul, set sail from the Kamchatka Peninsula, commanded by captains Vitus Bering and Aleksey Chirikov. Bering had already commanded a 1728 expedition which confirmed that Europe and North America were not connected by a land bridge. The strait separating the two continents still bears his name to this day. Also aboard the St. Peter was German professor of medicine and botany Georg Wilhelm Steller, substituted at the last moment when the ship’s original doctor suddenly fell ill.
A few days into the voyage, a violent storm separated the two ships. Captain Chirikov carried on independently, discovering several of the Aleutian Islands in the process. Meanwhile, Bering explored and mapped the coast of Alaska. But foul weather frequently blew the St. Peter off course, and by September 1741 the ship’s supply of fresh fruits and vegetables had been exhausted. With nearly half of his 77-man crew dead or dying of scurvy and other diseases, Bering set course for home. However, in early November a storm wrecked the St. Peter off what is now known as Bering’s island in the Commander Archipelago, leaving Bering and his crew marooned. Bering, himself feverishly ill, died a month later on December 8. This left Georg Steller, the only member of the expedition in good health, to tend to the rest of the crew. While exploring the island, Steller collected various birds, seals, and other animals and fed them to his comrades, who soon recovered their health.
While waiting for the weather to improve, the crew also began to explore the island, and before long they began returning to camp claiming to have spotted mermaids swimming in the shallows around the coast. At first Steller dismissed these reports, until on May 21, 1742, he caught his first glimpse of these so-called “mermaids.” Fever and long, lonely months at sea must really have played tricks on the crew’s imaginations, for the creature Steller described was about as far from the traditional image of a buxom mermaid as it is possible to get:
“It is 28 to 35 feet long, and 22 feet thick about the region of the navel, where they are the thickest. To the navel this animal resembles a seal species, from there on to the tail, a fish…in the mouth it has on each side in place of teeth two wide, longish, flat, loose bones, of which one is fastened above the palate, the other to the inside of the lower jaw….The lips are provided with many strong bristles….The eyes of the animal in spite of its size are not larger than sheeps’ eyes and are without eyelids….They are occupied with nothing else but their food.”
Steller recognized the creature as a sirenian, and described it as communal in nature, travelling in large family groups and subsisting mainly on seaweed. He also gave it the scientific name Hydrodamalis stelleri – Steller’s Sea Cow. Today, Steller’s Sea Cow, re-designated Hydrodamalis gigas, is widely regarded as the largest sirenian ever to have lived, growing three times larger than its closest sirenian relatives, the dugong and the manatee. This enormous size was likely an adaptation to the cold climate, reducing the loss of body heat by increasing the animal’s volume relative to its surface area.
Unfortunately, however, the crew of the St. Peter soon made a key discovery that would doom these newly-discovered creatures to oblivion: they were delicious. A single cow yielded more than 3,000 kilos of meat, tender and flavourful like prime beef. Furthermore, unlike most sirenians the Sea Cow had a layer of blubber up to 10 centimetres thick – an adaptation to the frigid waters of the Bering Strait. This the crew rendered the fat into oil and drank it like water, describing its taste as vaguely reminiscent of almonds. Just two Sea Cows were enough to sustain the crew until August 1742, when they finished building a new ship from the wrecked remains of the St. Peter and sailed to Kamchatka. Of the 78 men who set sail in June 1741, 46 returned home.
Yet despite these hardships, the expedition was considered a success. Not only had Bering mapped large sections of the Alaskan coast, but Georg Steller had discovered numerous animals previously unknown to science, including Steller’s Eider, Steller’s Jay, Steller’s Sea Eagle, Steller’s Sea Lion, and – of course – Steller’s Sea Cow. Steller published his discoveries in a 1751 book titled De Bestis Marinis – “On the Sea Beasts” – which established him as one of the foremost naturalists of his age. Unfortunately, this recognition came posthumously, as Steller had died six years earlier at the age of 37 – unaware that he was both the first and last scientist to study the Sea Cow and was indirectly responsible for its ultimate demise.
It should be noted here that it was not the Sea Cow which sent hunters in droves to the Commander Islands, but rather the abundance of sea otters and their valuable pelts – of which Russia was a major trader. The Sea Cow was an incidental victim of this trade, furnishing an abundant and easily obtainable source of meat for otter hunting parties. Tragically, the Sea Cow’s communal nature proved its undoing. When one animal was harpooned, instead of fleeing, the rest of the herd gathered protectively around it, exposing themselves to further slaughter. The animal’s thick, buoyant blubber also made diving difficult, making them even more vulnerable near the surface where they usually resided. Meanwhile, the mass slaughter of sea otters led to an explosion in the population of sea urchins, which in turn decimated the stands of kelp around the island – the Sea Cow’s main food source. By 1755, the population of Sea Cows had declined so dramatically that a Russian geologist, having witnessed the slaughter during a copper prospecting expedition, sent a petition to the Russian government calling for the animal to be protected before it disappeared entirely. But his pleas were ignored, and in little more than a decade Steller’s Sea Cow was extinct, with the last sighting taking place in 1768. And while a Russian whaling ship claimed to have spotted a pair off Bering’s Island in 1962, this has never been confirmed.
From discovery to extinction, Steller’s Sea Cow lasted a mere 26 years. So swift was their demise that Georg Steller’s writings remain the only scientific description of the Sea Cow in the wild. No pelts or other soft tissue of the animal survive, though several skeletons are preserved in museums. Based on fossils discovered in California, Russia, and Japan, palaeontologists believe that Steller’s Sea Cow and its relatives, the Cuesta and Takikawa Sea Cow, once ranged across the North Pacific before climatic changes around 400,000 years ago caused a severe population bottleneck and restricted the last remaining communities to the Commander Islands. Indeed, genetic analysis of Sea Cow bones indicates that this population was highly inbred and likely already headed towards extinction. But even these massive natural forces could not compete with human action, which wiped out the Sea Cow in the blink of a geological eye. This disappearance – both gradual and sudden – may have impacted the ecology of the Pacific Ocean in significant ways. According to a 2022 study led by Dr. Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences, the grazing of Sea Cows on the upper canopies of kelp forests likely allowed more sunlight to reach the ocean floor, allowing for a greater diversity of other seaweeds and algae. This, in turn, likely provided sea urchins and other animals with alternative sources of food, preventing the unsustainable consumption that plagues many kelp forests today. In other words, Steller’s Sea Cows may well have been a key part of the North Pacific ecosystem, whose disappearance had widespread impacts that we are only just beginning to understand. The tragic story of Steller’s Sea Cow thus stands as a poignant reminder of the fragility of the natural world and the often unpredictable dangers of its unchecked exploitation.
Bonus Facts:
Any video covering rapid extinction would be lacking without at least a brief mention of the insane tale of the passenger pigeon. The passenger pigeon once dominated the North American skies. It has been estimated that when Europeans first arrived to this continent late in the 15th century, there were three to five billion passenger pigeons already here. Legends abound about how these birds used to black out the sky when they moved en masse. John James Audubon, the famed naturalist and ornithologist, once said he saw a flock create a full “solar eclipse” for three days as it passed. While this is probably a bit of an exaggeration, accounts from towns across North America, like Columbus, Ohio and Fort Mississauga, Ontario, made it seem like a mass of passing passenger pigeons was something out of the Bible, even apocalyptic in nature. In fact, it’s estimated that the largest flocks of passenger pigeons were second only to the Rocky Mountain locusts in group size. For reference, the Rocky Mountain locusts could potentially swarm an area the size of California, with an estimated 12.5 trillion locusts in the largest such swarm ever recorded.
As for the passenger pigeon, when the birds nested, they formed colonies that were extraordinary in size. In 1871, a colony in central Wisconsin was recorded to have occupied 850 square miles, a little larger in size than the entire country of Georgia. In 1866, a passing flock of passenger pigeons was estimated to contain 3.5 billion of the birds, with the width of the flock about 1.5 miles and the length about 300 miles. Needless to say, if you were traveling under the flying column, an umbrella of some sort probably would have been a good idea.
So, what happened to these birds? How, in such a short time, could the passenger pigeon go from being more numerous than all other North American birds combined to extinct? Well, humans gonna human.
According to a hunting journal in 1913, the passenger pigeons were known to be “the gypsies of the birdom.” They traveled en masse to wherever they could find food and nesting habitats. They were known to travel up to eighty miles daily from their roost in search of food. And they ate… a lot. They had fondness for soft fruits like blueberries, strawberries, and figs. They also ate acorns and chestnuts. Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “It is a wonder how pigeons can swallow acorns whole, but they do.”
The plentiful chestnut, maple, oak, and pine forests of North America not only provided food to the passenger pigeon, but a home and a place to nest (or roost).
Those trees also provided ample firewood to humans. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the human population on the continent was exploding — from under four million in 1790 to seventy-six million by 1900. As human numbers grew, land was needed to accommodate. Unfortunately, this was the same land the passenger pigeons occupied.
But deforestation was only a contributing factor in the extinction of the passenger pigeon. The main reason they went from billions to zero in about a half century was because they were just so darn tasty, or at the very least, abundant and easy to kill.
When the first humans started showing up fifteen thousand years ago in the northern hemisphere, they immediately began including passenger pigeons in their diet. When Europeans began settling, they quickly figured out that passenger pigeons were a cheap source of food. By the mid 19th century, professional pigeon trapping was a major industry and massive punt guns were event invented to help the process, able to kill upwards of hundreds of birds in a single shot. By 1855, the number of passenger pigeons were noticeably declining, though the flocks were still massive as noted above, so very little was done about it.
In 1857, a bill was presented to the Ohio State legislature, but was quickly dismissed. A report was filed that read,
The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow.
A huge nesting area was found in Petoskey, Michigan in 1878. Trappers flocked there and, according to the Smithsonian, over a five month period 50,000 birds per day were killed. This turned out to be one of the last large nesting areas in North America. As this fact became apparent, a bill was finally passed making it illegal to trap pigeons within two miles of their nesting area.
By 1890, the wild passenger pigeon was nearly completely eradicated. In 1897, the Michigan state legislature passed a bill putting a ten year ban on the killing of passenger pigeons. But it was too late. Seventeen years later, the last known living passenger pigeon would die alone in her cage. This bird, Martha, had once been part of a pair, with her male counterpart George, but he had died several years before. So, for the final years of her life, Martha sat in her one-bird cage alone. The Cincinnati Zoo offered a thousand dollar reward (about $30,000 today) to anyone who could track down a mate for Martha. Unfortunately, all her kind were dead. On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Just like that, a bird that numbered in the many billions about a half century before, was gone.
Expand for ReferencesPanati, Charles, Panati’s Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody, Harper & Row, New York, 1989
Tikkanen, Amy, Vitus Bering, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vitus-Bering
Davis, Josh, Steller’s Sea Cow: The First Historical Extinction of a Marine Mammal at Human Hands, Natural History Museum, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/stellers-sea-cow-first-historical-extinction-of-marine-mammal-at-human-hands.html
Bidal, Devon, Steller’s Sea Cows’ Ecological Legacy, Hakai Magazine, October 8, 2021, https://hakaimagazine.com/news/stellers-sea-cows-ecological-legacy/
Bevington, Douglas, Never Forget the Steller’s Sea Cow, Rewilding Earth, December 15, 2022, https://rewilding.org/never-forget-the-stellers-sea-cow/
Sharko, Fedor et. al., Steller’s Sea Cow Genome Suggests This Species Began Going Extinct Before the Arrival of Palaeolithic Humans, Nature Communications, 2021, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22567-5
Knight, Skylar, Researchers Reveal How Extinct Steller’s Sea Cow Shaped Kelp Forests, Phys.org, November 28, 2022, https://phys.org/news/2022-11-reveal-extinct-steller-sea-cow.html
The post Mermaids and the Bizarre Tale of One of the Fastest Extinctions in Modern History appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Before we get started today, we’d just like to send a quick shoutout to one of our most prolific and best authors here, Gilles Messier, who if you liked his few hundred videos here the last few years, please do check out the link in the description below to his channel Our Own Devices, where you’ll find him covering in fascinating detail everything from radios to reactors to rocket launchers, breaking down the history and workings of the cleverest technology of yesteryear that humans have created. Now let’s get in to today’s video.
Ah, super glue. Along with duct tape and WD-40, it is an essential component of any toolkit, perfect for repairing everything from a chipped coffee mug to a cracked fingernail to that beloved toy the kids played a little too roughly with. Just dab on a little bit of the sticky stuff, wait a few seconds, and voila: the two parts are instantly bonded together…and to your hand…
Love it or hate it, super glue is one of the most successful adhesives in the world, accounting for more than $400 million in sales worldwide. And in addition to helping with minor home repairs, the substance has found applications in a wide variety of fields, including medicine and criminal forensic. But how did this powerful and versatile adhesive first come to be? Well, as with many inventions, superglue owes its existence to one person being in the right place at the right time. And that person was Dr. Harry Coover.
Harry Wesley Coover Jr. was born on March 6, 1919 in Newark, Delaware. His illustrious career as an inventor almost never happened, for at the age of 16 he was struck by a train while driving and fell into a coma for over a month. When he finally awoke, he remembered nothing of his life before the accident. However, Coover would go on to make a full recovery and study Chemistry at Hobart College and Cornell University, graduating with a Masters degree in 1942 and a PhD in 1944. His thesis was on a commercial synthesis process for Vitamin B6, which was adopted by the U.S. Army on the outbreak of the Second World War.
Shortly after graduation, Coover landed a job as a chemist at the Eastman Kodak company in Rochester, New York. At the time, Kodak was looking for a synthetic replacement for the optical glass used to make aircraft gunsights. Among the many materials being studied was a family of polymers known as cyanoacrylates. Normally a thick, transparent gel, when exposed to moisture cyanoacrylates spontaneously polymerize, the small molecular subunits or monomers assembling themselves into long, stronger and more flexible chains. However, as Coover later recalled, these compounds quickly proved less than up to the task:
“I was working with some acrylate monomers that showed promise. But everything they touched stuck to everything else. It was a severe pain.”
So the team moved on to more promising materials, and cyanoacrylates were quickly forgotten – for the time being, at least.
In 1951, Coover relocated to the Kodak facility in Kingsport, Tennessee, where he was assigned to a team of chemists researching heat-resistant polymers for jet aircraft canopies. While looking for an adhesive capable of bonding the various layers of a canopy together, Coover suddenly remembered the cyanoacrylates he’d experimented with seven years earlier. Unlike most adhesives, cyanoacrylates needed no additional heat or pressure to cure, greatly simplifying the manufacturing process. The team thus began experimenting with the compounds, synthesizing nearly 1000 different formulations. One day, Coover’s colleague Fred Joyner attempted to measure the optical properties of formulation 910 by spreading the compound between the prisms of a machine called a refractometer. To his horror, however, the compound immediately cured, permanently bonding the prisms together. As one of his colleagues later recalled:
“He ruined the machine. Back in the ’50s, they cost like $3,000, which was huge.”
For reference here, that would be about $40,000 today.
But thankfully, Joyner was not reprimanded for this mishap. Instead, he and Coover, immediately realizing the enormous potential of cyanoacrylate adhesives, filed for and were awarded U.S. Patent #2,768,109 for Alcohol-Catalyzed Cyanoacrylate Adhesive Compositions/Superglue and began refining the product for commercialization. The product first appeared on store shelves in 1958 under the name “Eastman 910,” though the company later coined the enduring name “super glue.” The formula was also licensed to the Loctite Corporation of Rocky Hill, Connecticut, who sold it under the name “Loctite Quick Set 404” and later “Super Bonder.” On January 15, 1959, Harry Coover appeared on the popular television show I’ve Got a Secret to promote his new invention. On live television, Coover used a single drop of super glue to bond a metal bar to a cable. Then, he and host Garry Moore grabbed hold of the bar and were hoisted off the stage, supported only by a thin layer of adhesive. Coover would later appear in several television advertisements endorsing various formulations of super glue.
From these humble beginnings, superglue spread quickly around the world, reaching all 7 continents by the 1970s. In addition to assisting ordinary people make minor household repairs and modelmakers stick their projects together, superglue has also found applications in other, sometimes unexpected fields. Rock climbers and guitar players use it to toughen their fingers or fix minor cuts and scrapes, veterinarians use it to mend broken turtle shells, while in forensic science cyanoacrylate vapour is used to reveal latent fingerprints, the oils, water, and other residues in the fingerprint causing the vapour to polymerize into an easily-photographed white crust. Superglue can even be used to light a fire in a survival situation. When dripped onto a cotton ball or other kind of fine natural fibre, super glue undergoes an exothermic reaction powerful enough to ignite the cotton.
But the application which Harry Coover was most proud of was in the field of medicine. One day in the early 1960s, Coover watched as his son tried to cut open a tube of superglue while building a model airplane. The knife slipped, cutting his son’s finger, only for a drop of glue to spill from the tube and immediately seal the wound. Immediately recognizing the tissue-bonding potential of superglue, Coover set about developing a formula that could be used to quickly staunch major bleeding in an emergency. This research soon caught the attention of the U.S. Army, then embroiled in the Vietnam War:
“During the Vietnam War, one of the generals came to us and said, ‘I want this for us out on the battlefield. When the medics go out on the battlefield, a guy’s got a big hole in his belly or someplace, bleeding. And he takes this and just sprays it, and that instantaneously stops the bleeding’…the biggest problem they had was stopping the bleeding so they could get the patient back to the hospital. And the consequence was—many of them bled to death. So the medics used the spray, stopped the bleeding, and were able to get the wounded back to the base hospital…This was very powerful. That’s something I’m very proud of – the number of lives that were saved.”
Despite this success, however, superglue as originally formulated was not ideally suited for medical use. Not only does the curing process produce large amounts of heat that can inflict serious burns, but it also releases formaldehyde, which can irritate the skin, eyes, and respiratory tract. For this reason, in 1988 a much less irritating derivative called 2-octyl-cyanoacrylate was developed and approved by the FDA, and is now sold under various brand names including Dermabond and Traumaseal. Indeed, in many clinics around the world, medical-grade superglue is now widely used in place of stitches for more minor wounds.
Given the astounding versatility and utility of his invention, it is safe to assume that Harry Coover became a very wealthy man…right? Alas, this is not the case, for while Kodak might have originated the product, they did not manage to capitalize on its success, and in 1980 the rights to super glue were sold to the National Starch Company. As a result, Harry Coover never received any royalties from his creation. But this did not prevent Coover from having a remarkable career. By the time of his death from congestive heart failure on March 26, 2011, Coover held 460 patents, including for graft polymerization, olefin polymerization, and organophosphorus chemistry. Over his nearly 60-year career authored over 60 papers and served as Vice President of Eastman Kodak, Director of Research and Development at Eastman Chemical Division, President of New Business Development at the Loctite Corporation, and board member at Reilly Industries. The many awards he received for his lifetime of work include the Industrial Research Institute Medal Achievement Award, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and an induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
And despite having invented many other products and processes, Coover was nonetheless proud of his most famous invention, his widow Muriel stating shortly after his death:
“I think he got a kick out of being Mr. Super Glue. Who doesn’t love Super Glue?”
Nonetheless, Coover acknowledged the key role of luck in his discovery, stating in an interview:
“The cyanoacrylate adhesive invention and discovery really involved one day of serendipity and about 10 years of hard work.”
But whatever the case, one thing is clear: superglue, like all good ideas, just sort of stuck.
Expand for ReferencesHarry Coover – Super Glue, Lemelson-MIT, https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/harry-coover
O’Brien, Caitlin, How World War II Led to the Invention of Super Glue, Military Times, July 30, 2021, https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2021/07/30/how-world-war-ii-led-to-the-invention-of-super-glue/
The Invention of Super Glue, https://www.cedesa.co.uk/who-invented-superglue/
Harris, Elizabeth, Harry Coover, Super Glue’s Inventor, Dies at 94, The New York Times, March 27, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/business/28coover.html
Creagar, Reid, Serendipity Shaped Life of Super Glue Inventor, Inventors Digest, January 4, 2017, https://www.inventorsdigest.com/articles/serendipity-shaped-life-super-glue-inventor/
Atherton, Kelsey, How a Shot at Making Better Gunsights Became Super Glue Instead, Popular Science, July 20, 2023, https://www.popsci.com/technology/super-glue-invention-mistake/
Harry Coover and the Invention of Super Glue, SciHi Blog, March 6, 2022, http://scihi.org/harry-coover-super-glue-cyanoacrylate/
The post Who Invented Super Glue? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The business of giving birth has long been a dangerous one. For most of human history, an estimated 4% of all women died in pregnancy or childbirth due to infections, haemorrhages, and other complications. Starting in the mid-19th century, improvements in sanitation and new medical techniques steadily began to improve these odds, such that today in the United States approximately 15 women die per 100,000 live births. But even as childbirth became increasingly safer, for many decades it remained just as painful as it had always been. Then, at the dawn of the 20th Century, a miraculous new method for giving birth emerged in Germany which promised to change everything. Known as twilight sleep, the technique promised to banish forever the the pain of childbirth which had plagued womankind seemingly since there have been womankind, and was enthusiastically championed by early feminists as a cornerstone of women’s liberation. But like so many ‘miracle cures,’ twilight sleep proved too good to be true, and its use – and abuse – would lead to one of the most horrifying periods in the history of obstetrics.
The widespread use of general anaesthesia in medicine originated in the mid-19th Century when pioneering doctors such as Horace Wells, William Morton, and James Simpson successfully demonstrated the use of substances like nitrous oxide, ether, and chloroform for pain management. But while anaesthesia rapidly took off for use in surgery, doctors were initially reluctant to use it to ease the pain of childbirth. Much of this resistance was religious in nature, as Christian doctrine saw the pain of childbirth as a divinely ordained punishment for the original sin of Eve. As Genesis 3:16 declared:
I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.
However, this taboo was shattered in 1853 when Queen Victoria gave birth to her eighth child, Prince Leopold, while under the influence of chloroform. Now bearing the royal seal of approval, the use of anaesthesia in childbirth soon caught on among the upper classes and eventually the rest of society. But while a definite improvement, the use of chloroform was far from a perfect solution, for women in labour could not be completely knocked out lest they become unable to actively push out the baby. Then, in 1902, an Austrian physician named Richard von Steinbüchel developed a unique solution. Von Steinbüchel experimented with a drug called scopolamine or hyoscine, derived from the deadly nightshade plant. Used in small doses to alleviate motion sickness, in higher doses scopolamine is a powerful hypnotic, inducing a dissociative state and amnesia such that a patient remembers little or nothing of what happens while under the influence of the drug. By administering a carefully balanced combination of scopolamine and morphine, von Steinbüchel sought to alleviate the pain of childbirth without the need to render a woman completely unconscious. Properly administered, this drug combination would cause a woman to wake up from childbirth with no memory whatsoever of the ordeal.
In 1906, Bernhardt Kronig and Karl Gauss, obstetricians working in Freiburg, Germany, refined von Steinbüchel’s methods into a technique they called Dämmerschlaf or “twilight sleep.” When a pregnant woman first began experiencing contractions, she was be given a dose of 1/150th of a grain of scopolamine and 1/2 a grain of morphine. 45 minutes later another dose of scopolamine was given, along with a memory test to determine the extent of the amnesiac effect. This procedure was repeated every half hour until the optimal dose of scopolamine was determined, with no further morphine being given for the remainder of the birthing process. As scopolamine had a tendency to induce violent delirium, the original “Freiburg Method” for twilight sleep placed great emphasis on sensory deprivation. Women gave birth in darkened rooms, often blindfolded and with oiled cotton pushed into their ears, while nurses wore uniforms designed to minimize noise – all to limit distractions and promote peaceful sleep.
Later that year, Konig and Gauss presented their technique at the National Obstetrics Conference in Berlin, where they revealed that the use of twilight sleep resulted in fewer post-delivery complications and faster recovery times. Despite initial hostility from the obstetric community, the pair continued to refine the technique. By 1907 Karl Gauss was using twilight sleep on all his pregnant patients, and within a few years the State University Women’s Clinic in Baden where he worked boasted the lowest rate of childbirth deaths and complications in the city. As the popularity of twilight sleep grew, patients from around the world began travelling to Germany to experience the miracle of painless childbirth. In 1912, an American woman named Cecil Stewart visited Freiburg to give birth to her second child. Stewart later described the experience as being like a fairy tale and enjoyed the clinic and its attentive staff so much that she stayed for a full month after giving birth.
But the popularity of twilight sleep truly exploded in May 1914 when American journalists Marguerite Tracy and Constance Leupp published an article titled Painless Childbirth in McClure’s Magazine, which praised the technique and the work of the Freiburg clinic. The article triggered a flood of letters from readers inquiring where they could find doctors willing to perform the procedure. Later that year, the National Twilight Sleep Association or NTSA was formed to promote the technique in the United States.
Lead by C. Temple Emmet, a member of the wealthy Astor family and the first American to give birth at the Freiburg clinic, the Association launched a massive campaign to inform the American public of the benefits of twilight sleep and pressure doctors and hospitals to adopt the technique. The NTSA produced pamphlets, books, lectures, and even a film – one of the first medical documentaries ever made. These materials were filled with glowing testimonials, including from one woman who declared:
“I was so happy. The night of my confinement will always be a night dropped out of my life.”
Before long the crusade for twilight birth had taken on an almost evangelical fervour, as first-wave feminists and suffragists began championing the technique as a new weapon in the fight for gender equality. According to these activists, twilight sleep freed women of the pain and danger traditionally forced upon them by the obligations of motherhood and allowed them to regain agency over their own bodies. NTSA member Mary Boyd, whose lectures on twilight sleep regularly drew crowds of over 300 women, framed the fight for twilight sleep as a battle against the patriarchal medical establishment, declaring:
“[Twilight sleep] is the dawning of a new era for woman and through her for the whole human race. [But] you women will have to fight for it, for the mass of doctors are opposed to it. For the first time… the whole body of patients have risen to dictate to the doctors.”
Meanwhile, many American obstetricians remained skeptical of twilight sleep, not only because of scopolamine’s unpredictable side effects but also the German origins of the technique. With the First World War raging overseas, many saw women who used twilight sleep as being disloyal to the United States. Yet many doctors caved to public pressure and travelled to Freiburg to learn the trendy new method. But unfortunately for an entire generation of women, the technique did not transplant well to America. Thanks to the efforts of the NTSA, the demand for twilight sleep far outstripped the supply of doctors and nurses capable of performing the procedure. Thus, while the original Freiburg method was a highly personalized and attentive affair, its practitioners taking years to learn and perfect the technique, few American hospitals were able to lavish such care and attention on any given patient. In America the technique was largely administered by overworked, poorly-trained nurses, and while German doctors took the time to customize the scopolamine dose for each patient, American patients all received the same standardized dose. The results were horrifying. Under the influence of the drug cocktail women often became delirious or even psychotic, forcing them to be confined in special padded delivery beds and tried down with leather straps or straitjackets to prevent them from thrashing about and injuring themselves. They would be left in this state for days until they gave birth, often wallowing in their own vomit and excrement. And while twilight sleep was billed as being painless, the small amount of morphine administered meant that most patients were still very much in pain, with one doctor explaining to The New York Times:
“There is as much [pain] as in the ordinary childbirth. The only difference is that the patient does not remember having the sensation of pain.”
There were other problems as well. While the mothers were technically conscious throughout the ordeal, the confusion and delirium induced by the scopolamine prevented them from assisting in the birth process, resulting in most twilight sleep babies being delivered mechanically through the use of forceps. This, in turn, increased the risk of injury and other complications for both mother and child. The morphine could also cross the placental barrier, resulting in babies born with depressed breathing as described in this 1915 account by one Dr. Stella Lehr:
“The baby was pinkish lavender in color and did not breathe for about ten minutes. During that time various means of resuscitation were used: the baby was suspended by the feet, and body vigorously slapped, then laid on a table, and chest rhythmically pounded; then body immersed alternately in hot and cold water, and finally intratracheal catheterization used. After witnessing this I naturally concluded that the twilight sleep was to be used very conservatively or better still not at all.”
But perhaps the most alarming side effect was the very amnesia the entire technique was billed on. As Dr. Henry Smith Williams wrote in 1914:
“She may seem to be conscious of the birth of her child, and may give evidence of apparent suffering, yet when a few moments later the child is brought in by the nurse from the neighboring room where it has been cared for, and placed in the mother’s arms, the patient does not recognize the child as her own, or realize that she has yet been delivered.”
This effect could be bewildering and even traumatizing for the mother, as one Mrs. Sargent described in 1915:
“The next thing I knew I was awake […] and then I thought to myself ‘I wonder how long before I shall begin to have the baby,’ and while I was still wondering a nurse came in with a pillow, and on the pillow was a baby, and they said I had had it—perhaps I had—but I certainly can never prove it in a courtroom.”
This sense of disconnection and alienation from the baby and the birthing process itself resulted in elevated rates of what is now termed postpartum depression amongst twilight sleep mothers. Yet despite these myriad disturbing side effects, the popularity of twilight sleep would persist until August 1915 when Frances Carmody, a prominent advocate for the technique, died while giving birth to her third child. While Carmody’s husband and doctor maintained that the death was due to a haemorrhage and unrelated to twilight sleep, this event was enough to turn a large part of the public and the medical establishment against the technique, and its popularity quickly faded.
Yet twilight sleep did not completely go away. Well into the 1960s, it was rare for a woman to give birth without being placed under some kind of sedation. It was not until the 1970s and 80s that movements emerged promoting more natural births, and new techniques like epidurals – injecting painkillers directly into the spine – allowed for more localized pain control without the need for general anaesthesia. But while twilight sleep is no longer used, its legacy is still with us. As late as the 1940s only one-third of births took place in hospitals, with the vast majority of women still giving birth at home in the traditional manner. Twilight sleep, however, could only be administered in a controlled clinical environment, and its brief popularity was instrumental in triggering the mass shift towards hospital births. This was the final step in a nearly century-long process wherein childbirth was increasingly pathologized, stripped from the hands of midwives and pregnant women themselves, and placed under the control of largely male obstetricians. But while much work remains before women can fully reclaim the birthing process, we can at least be thankful that the experience no longer involves the terrifying combination of hypnotic drugs, straitjackets, and memories wiped clean.
Expand for References
Pollesche, Jessica, Twilight Sleep, The Embryo Project Encyclopedia, May 16, 2018, https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/twilight-sleep
McCulloch, Sam, Twilight Sleep – the Brutal Way Some Women Gave Birth in the 1900s, Belly Belly, February 17, 2021, https://www.bellybelly.com.au/birth/twilight-sleep/
Schroeder, Zayaan, Twilight Sleep: the Weirdest Way of Giving Birth Ever? Patient 24, September 6, 2016, https://www.news24.com/parent/Pregnant/Birth/twilight-sleep-the-weirdest-way-of-giving-birth-ever-20160906
Twilight Sleep: the Forgotten 20th Century Method of Childbirth That Erased Memories, IFL Science, https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/twilight-sleep-the-forgotten-20th-century-method-of-childbirth-that-erased-memories/
McPherson, Katie, Twilight Births Sound Like an Absolute Nightmare, Romper, February 15, 2021, https://www.romper.com/pregnancy/what-is-twilight-sleep-during-birth-experts
Laskow, Sarah, In 1914, Feminists Fought for the Right to Forget Childbirth, Atlas Obscura, February 23, 2017, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/twilight-sleep-childbirth-1910s-feminists
Helmuth, Laura, The Disturbing, Shameful History of Childbirth Deaths, Slate, September 10, 2013, https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/death-in-childbirth-doctors-increased-maternal-mortality-in-the-20th-century-are-midwives-better.html
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The City of London – a one-square-mile enclave on the north bank of the River Thames, is the oldest borough in the UK capital – and one of the strangest. Though surrounded by and part of the sprawling metropolis known as Greater London, the City of London is in fact its own, semi-independent ceremonial county, with its own police force and governing body – the City of London Corporation. This city-within-a-city even has its own separate leader, the Lord Mayor of London, who holds traditional powers and privileges more than a thousand years old and is, unlike the regular Mayor of London, answerable only to the Sovereign. As the cultural and financial centre of London and the UK, the City is home to many of the capital’s most iconic buildings including St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Old Bailey courthouse as well as the headquarters of major financial institutions such as the Bank of England, the London Stock Exchange, and insurer Lloyd’s of London. In more recent years, however, the City has become famous – and sometimes infamous – for its collection of uniquely-designed skyscrapers, many of which have acquired suitably whimsical nicknames. These include 52 Lime Street – AKA “The Scalpel”; 122 Leadenhall Street – AKA “The Cheese Grater”; and 30 St. Mary Axe – AKA “The Gherkin.” While some have praised these structures for their architectural innovation, others have condemned them for spoiling the skyline of the ancient city. But whatever your opinion on the aesthetic merits of contemporary architecture, I think we can all agree that when a building starts inflicting property damage on the surrounding neighbourhood, something has gone horribly wrong. Such was the case with 20 Fenchurch Street AKA the “Walkie-Talkie”, which midway through its construction transformed, supervillain-lair-style into a giant car-melting death ray. This is the story of London’s most controversial skyscraper.
The site of 20 Fenchurch Street, about a kilometre northwest of Tower Bridge, was formerly home to a 91 metre tall, 25-storey tower built in 1968 and occupied by French banking firm SG Kleinwort Hambros. This building was demolished in late 2008, to make way for a new, radical structure developed by the Canary Wharf Construction and Land Securities. Designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly, the 37-storey, 160 metre-tall tower defied architectural convention by rapidly flaring out as it rose, creating a dramatically curved, top-heavy profile that quickly earned it the nickname of “walkie-talkie.” This inverted design meant that the higher – and thus more expensive – the floor, the larger it would be. According to Peter Rees, the City of London’s former chief planner who presided over the Walkie-Talkie’s construction, the intention was to create an open space with spectacular panoramic views of the city where the building’s tenants – largely insurance company employees – could hold face-to-face meetings or relax with a drink or meal after work:
“The building’s raison d’etre was to provide a new kind of Assembly Rooms…a place that City types could go in the evening to harrumph and hurroar, then stagger back to Liverpool Street station – and it’s worked enormously well for that purpose…The secret of the City’s success is having places to gossip. We are taking every opportunity to create the party city in the sky; it’s very important to our business offer that people can party as close to their desks as possible.”
More poetically, Rees described the building as:
“…the figurehead at the prow of our ship [complete with a] viewing platform where you can look back to the vibrancy of the City’s engine room behind you.”
The public’s reaction, however, was less enthusiastic. From its announcement in 2004, the building’s design has been derisively compared to everything from a misplaced pint glass to a sanitary napkin. The structure also came under criticism from the likes of UNESCO and English Heritage, the latter describing the Walkie-Talkie as an “oppressive and overwhelming form” and a “brutally dominant expression of commercial floor space” that would spoil the skyline and the view of heritage monuments like Tower Bridge. Meanwhile, the tower’s future neighbours contested the development on grounds of their right to light. Despite this, however, Peter Rees pushed the approval through, with piling and foundation work beginning in early 2009. According to Rees, the main reason for approving the project was Rafael Viñoly’s proposal to turn the top three floors of the tower into a “Sky Garden”, an urban green space open to the residents of London. As the architect explained:
“Every building is an occupation of the skyline, but most don’t give anything back. You have to ask what the public gets by accepting a further intrusion on the city. The possibility of offering an urban experience at a height is pretty remarkable.”
Yet right out the gate, the project was plagued by the first of many problems as the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis forced construction to halt in mid-2009. It would only resume in January 2011, the building’s concrete core being completed in March 2012 and its steel framework in December 2012. Then, in late August 2013, while the building’s windows were being installed, business owners along Eastcheap Street discovered to their horror that the Walkie-Talkie’s offensive capabilities went far beyond the purely aesthetic. For a few hours each morning, the building’s curved glass facade acted as a giant parabolic mirror, concentrating the sun’s light into what can only be described as a heat ray, producing temperatures as high as 117 degrees Celsius. At Rey Style Barbers, owned by Ali Akay, the concentrated beam of light set fire to the shop’s doormat:
“We were working and just saw the smoke coming out of the carpet. We tried to cut the fire down, there were customers in at the time and they were obviously not happy. Customers are not going to come in if there is a fire in the front of the door.”
Next door at the Viet Cafe, owner Diana Pham had a similarly scorching experience:
“Yesterday it was very hot so there was a concentration of light here. We thought something was burning in the restaurant but it wasn’t. we searched everywhere. Then a customer came in and showed us. A tile suddenly broke, the paint has bubbled too.”
But the event that made headlines around the world occurred on Thursday, August 30 when Martin Lindsay, director of a tiling company, parked his Jaguar XJ on Eastcheap street. He returned an hour later to find that the heat ray had melted and warped his car’s wing mirror, body mirror, and Jaguar badge. The day before, a similar fate befell a Vauxhall Vevaro van belonging to air conditioning engineer Eddie Cannon:
“The van looks a total mess – every bit of plastic on the left hand side and everything on the dashboard has melted, including a bottle of Lucozade that looks like it has been baked… When I got in the van it was a really strange light – like it was illuminated and they were filming. I want to know what effect it’s having on people walking down the road.”
The destructive phenomenon soon drew large crowds of curious onlookers, and earned 20 Fenchurch Street the new monikers “Walkie Scorchie” and “Fryscraper.” And in true cheeky London news fashion, City A.M. reporter Jim Waterson toasted a baguette and fried an egg using the reflective heat.
So what happened? Were Rafael Viñoly and the City of London secretly comic book supervillains, bent on world – or at least city – domination? Had the Walkie-Talkie suddenly become self-aware and begun lashing out at its own cursed existence? No: the root of the problem turned out to be – as it often is with such projects – cost-cutting measures. Viñoly had actually anticipated the parabolic mirror effect, with his original design incorporating louvred windows break up the reflections. But following the two-year construction halt caused by the financial crisis, these were deleted to reduce construction costs – with unfortunate results. Indeed, this was not the first time Viñoly had dealt with this problem; his Vdara hotel in Las Vegas, opened in 2009, generated a similar “heat ray”, which was eventually mitigated by coating the windows in non-reflective film. In the case of the Walkie-Talkie, Viñoly blamed the overlooked design change on the intricacies of London city planning, stating:
“One problem that happens in this town, is the super-abundance of consultancies and sub-consultancies that dilute the responsibility of the designer to the point that you just don’t know where you are any more.”
Bizarrely, Viñoly also partially blamed the heat ray effect on climate change, stating in an interview with The Guardian that:
“[I] didn’t realise it was going to be so hot. When I first came to London years ago, it wasn’t like this … Now you have all these sunny days.”
Thankfully for the residents of Eastcheap Street, by late September the sun’s position had shifted and the “Walkie-Scorchie” effect disappeared. Many of those effected – including Jaguar owner Martin Lindsay – received compensation from Canary Wharf Construction and Land Securities for inflicted damages, while the City of London erected a temporary scaffold with screening to break up the heat ray the following summer. Finally, in 2014, a permanent sunshade was installed on the building’s upper floors. In April of that year the building was completed at a total cost of £200 million, with the first tenants moving in in August. And in January 2015, the much-anticipated Sky Garden opened to the public.
But like much else regarding the Walkie-Talkie, the Sky Garden proved to be not quite as advertised. As The Guardian’s architecture critic Oliver Wainwright wrote shortly after the Garden’s opening:
“In theory, by lumbering into the middle of it all, the Walkie-Talkie provides the best aerial view of London. But the reality is that to appreciate this 360-degree vista, you actually have to look quite hard. For what stands out in the foreground is the great cage of steelwork that flexes in all directions, wrapping 15m above your head in a voluminous arc and plunging down in front of the glass facades. You are invited to behold less the skyline of London than the structural gymnastics of the architect….It feels a lot like being in an airport terminal, jacked up in the air.
In fact, wherever you are in the sky garden, the views feel frustratingly distant. The city is separated from your gaze by a buffer of external parapets to the north and a smokers’ terrace to the south; nowhere can you put your face to the glass and look right down. The whole of London spreads out below, but you’ll have to crane your neck to see it.
That must be how the remaining City planners are feeling now. They were promised a Babylonian hanging gardens, the pride of the square mile, accessible to all. True, the public may visit for free, by booking online three days in advance, for 1.5-hour time slots vetted by the City, but they will be shooed out by 6pm to make way for the paying clientele to enjoy the twinkling lights over cocktails. It is not the public park that was promised, but another private party space, available by appointment.
A source close to the planning department is candid: “It’s still very much a live issue here. Let’s say it isn’t necessarily quite what it was meant to be.”
And just as it had from the beginning, the completed Walkie-Talkie continued to draw public ire over its questionable aesthetics, with Christopher Costelloe stating that “…its bulbous shape makes it probably the ugliest building in London which distracts from other listed buildings”. And in 2015, the year the Sky Garden officially opened, Building Design Magazine awarded the Walkie Talkie the Carbuncle Cup for the worst building in the UK – the award’s name a cheeky reference to an infamous speech given by Prince – now King – Charles, a noted opponent of modern architecture. Yet the building’s designer brushed off criticism of his creation and is supposed despoliation of the London skyline, stating:
“Am I breaking the illusion that we’re living in the 13th century? The view from the Tower is already ruined – would it be logical to demolish all of the visible modern buildings?”
Peter Rees, the other major driving force behind the project agrees, arguing that:
“As Oscar Niemeyer used to say, ‘’You can like it or dislike it, but you’re not going to forget it.’”
Carbuncle or not, 20 Fenchurch Street is still prime real estate in the heart of London’s financial district, and in 2017 the controversial building became the object of the largest real estate deal in UK history, being sold to Hong Kong-based condiments and healthcare product manufacturer Lee Kum Kee Group for a whopping £1.3 billion. Time will tell whether Londoners will continue to deride the oddly-shaped tower or come to embrace it an eccentric part of the city’s fabric. Whatever the case, it is good to know that if heat ray-packing Martians ever attack War of the Worlds -style, Londoners will have some means of fighting back.
Expand for References
City of London, Encyclopedia Britannica, February 18, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/place/City-of-London
Dangerfield, Andy, Walkie Talkie Skyscraper’s Public Garden Opens Amid Criticism, BBC News, January 8, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-30709757
Wainwright, Oliver, London’s Sky Garden: the More You Pay, the Worse the View, The Guardian, January 6, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/jan/06/londons-sky-garden-walkie-talkie-the-more-you-pay-the-worse-the-view
Wainwright, Oliver, Walkie Talkie Architect ‘Didn’t Realize it Was Going to be So Hot’, The Guardian, September 6, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/06/walkie-talkie-architect-predicted-reflection-sun-rays
Walkie-Talkie Skyscraper to Have Screen Put up to Stop Rays, BBC News, September 3, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-23948811
London’s ‘Fryscraper’ Draws Crowd on Hottest Day, Mississauga News, September 6, 2013, https://www.mississauga.com/news-story/4067822-london-s-fryscaper-draws-crowd-on-hottest-day/
Porter, Tom, London Walkie-Scorchie Skyscraper Cost-Cutting Blames for Car-Melting, Egg-frying Reflected Sunbeams, International Business Times, September 6, 2013, https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/walkie-scorchie-talkie-building-sunlight-london-reflects-504342
Verity, Andrew, Who, What, Why: How Dies a Skyscraper Melt a Car? BBC News, September 3, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23944679
Lane, Thomas, London’s Walkie Talkie Judged UK’s Worst Building, BBC News, September 2, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34116610
Wainwright, Oliver, The Walkie-Talkie: Battle of the Bulge on Fenchurch Street, The Guardian, December 12, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2012/dec/12/walkie-talkie-fenchurch-street-architecture
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Study the history of science and technology long enough, and you will discover that – contrary to what popular culture would have you believe – few inventions are the product of a single brilliant mind. Instead, technological progress is the result of incremental discoveries and refinements made by multiple people. But once in a while, a person comes along whose sheer breadth of technical innovation is truly, well, breathtaking: Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, R. Buckminster Fuller, Charles Kettering, Tony Stark, and Leonardo da Vinci, to name a few. The list of great innovators extends well back into antiquity, but while perhaps the most famous ancient mechanical genius is Archimedes of Syracuse, there is another Greek innovator who was even more prolific: Heron of Alexandria. With a huge body of stunningly creative yet practical innovations ranging from water pumps and fountains to automatic doors, vending machines, automated puppet theatres and even a primitive steam engine, Heron was a mechanical powerhouse whose ideas influenced the development of ancient technology for centuries. This is the story of the forgotten Edison of Ancient Greece.
Surprisingly little is known about the life of Heron – also known as Hero. Even the years during which he lived are debated among historians. Traditionally, he was believed to have lived either around 150 B.C.E or 250 C.E. However, in the early 20th Century a reference was discovered in one of his works to a solar eclipse which took place on March 13, 62 C.E. Thus, today Heron is thought to have lived from approximately 10 to 70 C.E. His origins and background are also unclear, with historians debating whether he was ethnically Greek, a Hellenized Egyptian, or even a Babylonian. Indeed, as ‘Hero’ or ‘Heron’ was a very common name in Ancient Greece, it is difficult to tell whether contemporary records refer to the inventor and mathematician or another citizen of the same name. All that is known for sure is that Heron lived and worked in the Egyptian city of Alexandria and wrote many books on a variety of mathematical and scientific topics – around 15 of which survive to the present day. Given the sheer breadth of these works, it is almost certain that Heron taught at the Museum or “temple of the muses” – home of the legendary Library of Alexandria.
Heron’s known mathematical works include Definitiones, a glossary of geometric terms; Geometria, an introduction to geometry; Geodesia and Liber Geoponicus, two fragmentary works on land surveying; Metrica, a treatise on calculating the area and volume of various shapes; Stereometrica, a two-volume treatise on three-dimensional geometry; and Mensurae, a treatise on measurement tools. In these volumes, Heron collected and systematized various geometric rules and principles from earlier sources such as Archimedes and the Babylonians, including an equation for determining the area of a triangle from the length of its sides – today known as Heron’s Formula.
Heron’s known scientific works, meanwhile, include On the Dioptra, in which he describes a sophisticated surveying instrument very similar to a modern theodolite and methods for using it to determine overland distances; and Catoptrica, a treatise on optics whose principles of light propagation and reflection would only be improved upon 1,000 years by the Arab physicist Ibn Al-Haytham.
But Heron is by far best remembered for his mechanical innovations, as detailed in his remaining five books: Pneumatica, Automata, Mechanica, Cheirobalistra, and Belopoeica – the latter two dealing with catapults and other engines of war. Many of Heron’s inventions were created for use in Egyptian and Greek temples, producing seemingly miraculous special effects designed to enhance the perceived power and influence of the temple priests. One such device was a system for automatically opening and closing the temple doors when a fire was lit on a ceremonial altar. The mechanism consisted of a metal tank full of water hidden under the altar, connected to a siphon hose. This, in turn, drained into a bucket connected to a rope-and-pulley mechanism that operated the doors. When a fire was lit on the altar, the tank would heat up, forcing water out into the bucket, whose increased weight would slowly open the doors. And when, at the end of the ceremony, the fire was extinguished, the condensing and contracting steam inside the tank would create a suction that would draw water back out of the bucket, causing the doors to close. Heron also describes a pneumatic mechanism that automatically blew a trumpet whenever the doors opened. As outlandish as this mechanism may seem, it appears to actually have been implemented in many temples around the ancient world, for in Pneumatica, Heron states that:
“Some instead of water use quicksilver [Mercury] as it is heavier than water and easily disunited by fire.”
Though what exactly Heron meant by “disunited” is unknown, Mercury would indeed have allowed Heron’s door-opening mechanism to be made more compact and efficient, for it is denser and has a greater coefficient of thermal expansion than water. The element was long used in barometers and thermometers for the same reason. Unfortunately, no remains of Heron’s automatic door mechanism have ever been excavated, though given that later Christian and Muslim conquerers were known to have stripped ancient Egyptian and Greek temples of all available metal parts, this is hardly surprising.
Another of Heron’s inventions intended for temple use is a surprisingly modern one: the vending machine. Designed to dispense a small quantity of holy water for ritual ablution, this device consisted of a small water tank with a spout and flapper valve connected to a small balance beam. When a 5-drachma coin was dropped through a slot in the top, it fell onto the balance beam and opened the valve, dispensing the holy water. A moment later the coin slipped off the beam and the valve closed; the accumulated proceeds could then be collected by the priests. Heron appears to have based his design on a similar hygiene device invented by Philo of Byzantium, who lived and worked in Alexandria 300 years before. Philo’s device consisted of a water tank from which protruded a small metal hand holding a ball of pumice stone – commonly used for scrubbing. When a user removed the ball, the hand retracted into the device and water began flowing from the spout. A few moments later, the hand re-emerged holding a fresh stone.
Far more influential among Heron’s many inventions, however, was the Hydraulis, an early form of pipe organ. This consisted of a set of up to 19 vertical pipes derived from panpipes blown by a clever hydraulic mechanism. As the operator pumped a handle, air was forced through a one-way valve into an inverted bowl-shaped chamber submerged in a tank of water. Air from the chamber was drawn off to blow the organ pipes, the weight of the water in the tank maintaining this air at a constant pressure. In this manner, the Hydraulis was able to sustain more consistent notes than a regular bellows-powered organ. The Hydraulis proved extremely popular, seeing widespread use across the ancient Mediterranean world. Indeed, an inscription at Delphi dating from C.E. describes how a musician named Antipatros “covered himself in glory” by playing the Hydraulis for two days straight in a competition. It was reportedly Roman Emperor Nero’s favourite instrument, and was played at all sorts of public events in Rome, from gladiatorial games and theatrical performances to triumphal processions, wedding banquets, and swearing-in ceremonies for public officials. So widely used was the Hydraulica that, unlike most of Heron’s inventions, physical remains have been found – most notably in the ruins of a Roman Clothworker’s Guild hall in Budapest, Hungary, which burned down in the 3rd Century C.E. Intriguingly, Heron later developed a windmill-powered version of the Hydraulica, saving the operator – or his assistant – from having to pump the instrument by hand.
Another of Heron’s hydraulic innovations was what is now known as Heron’s Fountain, which operated without the use of pumps. This consisted of a shallow tray with a spout in the middle from which a stream of water issued. The tray, in turn, was connected by a series of vertical pipes to a pair of sealed chambers. Water flowing from the tray into the first chamber compressed the air inside, which flowed into the second chamber and forced the water inside out the spout in the tray. Despite appearances, this was not a perpetual motion machine, such devices being physically impossible, or so Big Energy would have us believe…. Instead, the water would continue to flow until the first chamber was completely filled, whereupon the whole fountain would stop. Still, the effect must have been mystifying to ancient observers.
Heron also invented a double-action water pump with a rocking handle remarkably similar to modern designs, which was widely used by the notoriously inept and corrupt Roman fire brigades, the Familia Publica. How corrupt, you might ask? Well, when the brigade’s creator, general and statesman Marcus Licinius Crassus, arrived at the site of a fire, he would not begin extinguishing it right away. Instead, he would offer to buy the burning property from the owner. If the owner refused, Crassus would hold his men back and let the building burn, continually lowering his bid until the owner finally relented.
Heron’s genius even extended to the field of theatre, for which he developed a variety of impressive special effects – including carts and set pieces that automatically moved about the stage seemingly of their own volition. These devices were powered by a falling weight system, whose speed was regulated by the flow of sand out of a reservoir – similar to an hourglass. But Heron didn’t stop there; using a sophisticated system of gears, knotted ropes, and other mechanisms, he was able to make these carts stop, start, reverse, and trace circles or figure-eights in a pre-determined sequence. These techniques were the distant ancestors of modern computer programming, which would not be experimented with again until the 18th Century. But even this remarkable achievement was dwarfed by what is perhaps Heron’s most impressive creation: a fully automatic miniature theatre that presented a complete, 10-minute theatrical performance using mechanical puppets. The show, titled Nauplius, told the story of a king whose son is falsely accused of treason by his comrade-in-arms Ajax and stoned to death. King Nauplius then sets about exacting his revenge on Ajax, aided by the goddess Athena. In the first scene, mechanical figures of nymphs were shown repairing Ajax’s ship, accompanied by the realistic sounds of saws and hammers. The doors of the theatre then closed and reopened to reveal the second scene, depicting the launching of the ship. The third scene depicted Ajax’s fleet sailing across the sea, accompanied by leaping dolphins. The sky then turned stormy, causing the ships to draw in their sails. In the fourth scene, King Nauplius was shown holding up a false beacon to draw Ajax’s ships onto the rocks, with Athena looking on approvingly. Finally, the last scene showed the fleet being shipwrecked on the rocks and Ajax struggling in the water. Like all of Heron’s automatons, the entire show was driven by an intricate system of pulleys, gears, and falling weights.
But the invention for which Heron is best remembered is the aeolopile or “wind ball”, a distant ancestor of the modern steam turbine. This comprised a closed metal vessel from which protruded two vertical pipes. Suspended between these pipes was a hollow metal ball with two L-shaped nozzles. When the vessel was filled with water and placed over a fire, the steam produced would flow up the pipes, into the ball, and out the nozzle, spinning the ball about its axis at high speed. Indeed, a replica constructed by classicist Dr. J.G. Landels of Reading University in England spun at an extraordinary 1,500 RMP – likely making it the fastest-rotating object in the world at the time of its construction. Yet while it is tantalizing to speculate that, had history played out differently, the Ancient Greeks could have started the Industrial Revolution nearly two millennia early, in reality Heron’s mechanism was little more than a toy, unsuited to any practical application. Indeed, when constructing his modern replica, Dr. Landels had difficulty finding the optimal tension between the ball and its tubular pivots. Too tight and the ball had difficulty spinning; too loose and excessive steam leaked out through the joint. And even when optimized, the aeolopile had an energy conversion efficiency of only 1%. It would not be until 1577 that Aran Taqu al-Din would find a somewhat practical application for Heron’s mechanism, adapting it to turn a roasting spit over a fire. Still, as far as basic mechanical principles go, the aeolopile was centuries ahead of its time.
Beyond all this, he came up with self-trimming oil lamps, self-filling wine bowls, and even a primitive form of odometer to record the distance travelled by a cart. The list goes on and on and on. In the end, while his name today is perhaps not as readily remembered as the likes of Archimedes or Doctor Emmet Brown, when it came to technology, few in history accomplished more given the tools and scientific understanding of his era than Heron of Alexandria.
Expand for ReferencesJames, Peter & Thorpe, Nick, Ancient Inventions, Random House Publishing Group, 2006
Heron of Alexandria, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Heron-of-Alexandria
Shuttleworth, Martyn, Heron’s Inventions, Explorable, https://explorable.com/heron-inventions
Shuttleworth, Martyn, Heron of Alexandria: a Beautiful Mind, Explorable, https://explorable.com/heron-of-alexandria
Heron of Alexandria, Ancient Greece Reloaded, https://www.ancientgreecereloaded.com/files/ancient_greece_reloaded_website/great_persons/heron_of_alexandria.php
Sack, Harald, Hero of Alexandria and his Amazing Experiments, SciHi Blog, June 30, 2021, http://scihi.org/hero-alexandria/
Lahanas, Michael, Heron of Alexandria, https://www.hellenicaworld.com/Greece/Technology/en/HeronAlexandria.html
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On January 23, 1943 at the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army captured a Luftwaffe Lieutenant, one Leo Raubal. That name did not ring any particular bell amongst the Soviet interrogators, just another POW. Except he wasn’t. Lieutenant Raubal himself revealed to his captors the identity of his infamous uncle: Adolf Hitler.
Now, Hitler could hardly be described as a family man and despite persistent rumours, there has never been hard evidence that he fathered any children. And yet, no person exists in a vacuum and Hitler had several siblings and other close family members. So, who were these individuals and what did they get up to during and then after WWII?
Let’s begin by introducing our main characters with a very brief rundown of Hitler’s family tree. As noted in our video, What was Hitler Like as a Child? Adolf’s father, Alois, married three times and had countless affairs and mistresses along the way, siring a number of known children with several women, and probably had some unknown children on top of that. In the end, Alois seems to have taken the credo of every good store shelf stocker “see a hole, fill a hole” very seriously in his personal life.
As for the more well documented offspring, in 1873, at the age of 36, Alois married his first wife, 50-year-old Anna Glasl. The union was for career advancement reasons and ultimately childless and unhappy, in part owing to Alois’ unabashed philandering. The two separated, but didn’t divorce, in 1880, and Anna died on April 6, 1883. Now free of his mariage, the following month, Alois married his long time mistress, 21-year-old Franziska Matzelsberger.
Alois and Franziska had already had a child out of wedlock, Alois Jr, born on January 13, 1882. And when they married, Franziska was already pregnant with a second child, Angela, born on July 28, 1883.
As a little interesting aside here: the very following day, July 29th, a blacksmith and a teacher in Northern Italy welcomed their first child, whom they named Benito Mussolini.
In any event, Franziska, despite her young age, became ill with a lung disorder, and died on August 10, 1884. Alois was now free to marry his latest pregnant mistress who had already taken over care of his children when his wife got sick, Klara Polzl.
Well, not so fast.
You see, Klara was either Alois’ niece or first cousin once removed. Importantly, as far as the Catholic Church was concerned, it was the latter thanks to a birth certificate change that Alois had done when he was 39, with some family members corroborating who he claimed his real father was, as his mother had not owned up to it when she gave birth to him. Either way, such a marriage in Catholic Austria-Hungary required a dispensation from the Pope, which was granted at the end of 1884, allowing for the two to exchange vows in January of 1885.
Alois and Klara ultimately had five children: three of them died in infancy between 1885 and 1887; then came Adolf, born April 20, 1889, Edmund, in March 1894 and Paula, in January 1896. Edmund died of measles in June 1900, because the past was the worst, leaving the Hitler household with four children: Alois Jr, Angela, Adolf and Paula.
The future dictator and Paula both died without offspring – although, again, much speculation has been made about Adolf’s alleged illegitimate children. For example, according to one story, he may have sired a child with British socialite Unity Mitford, sister to celebrated novelist Nancy Mitford. We’ll save Hitler’s alleged children for a topic for another day, however.
In any event, Alois Jr, a rather colourful character as we’ll discuss shortly, married twice. His first marriage was with an Irish woman, Bridget Dowling, in June 1910. They had one son, William Patrick, born on March 12, 1911, who arguably has the most interesting story of all the close relations. Alois Jr later re-married, this time to a woman named Hedwig Heidemann in 1916, welcoming another boy, Heinrich, or ‘Heinz’, born on March 14, 1920.
Angela Hitler, sister to Alois Jr, and half-sister to Adolf, perpetuated what appeared to be a family tradition, and also married multiple times. In September 1903 she tied the knot with Leo Raubal, and the couple welcomed three children: Leo Jr, in October 1906; Angela Maria, known as ‘Geli’, in June 1908; and Elfriede, in January 1910. In August of that year, Leo Sr died unexpectedly, and Angela waited 26 years before remarrying with Martin Hammitzsch, but the two would not have any more children.
Thus, to recap, when WWII started, Adolf Hitler had seven living extremely close relatives: Sister Paula; Half-siblings Alois Jr and Angela; Half-nephews William Patrick, Leo and Heinz; And half-niece Elfriede. Noteworthy, Elfriede’s sister, Geli, who Hitler was allegedly in love with, had committed suicide under mysterious circumstances in 1931 during her quasi-imprisonment in Hitler’s home. We will get to all that later. For the moment, let’s take a look at those relatives who took an active role in WWII.
Following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in September of 1939, and the outbreak of WWII, Hitler’s half-nephews were all of the right age to serve in the military – and serve they did, albeit not all on the same side …
HEINZ HITLER
Let’s start with our younger character, Heinrich ‘Heinz’ Hitler.
Heinz was unquestionably a strong supporter of Nazi ideology. His uncle Adolf kept most of his family at arm’s length during his years in power and during the war, not willing to dish out favours out of nepotism. The dictator, however, had a soft spot for Heinz, and helped him enrol in the National Political Institute of Education, an elite school for future leaders of the Party and the SS.
Afterwards, however, Heinz was left to his own devices. The ambitious youngster entered the Heer, or land army, as a junior signals officer in the 23rd Potsdam Artillery Regiment. In June of 1941, Heinz joined Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, and distinguished himself in action, earning an Iron Cross 2nd Class.
By January 10, 1942, the Soviet Red Army had launched a counteroffensive around Moscow, rolling back the Axis invaders. Heinz was ordered to collect some radio equipment from an army post, before it was overrun by the Soviets, but the young officer arrived too late. Captured by the enemy, Heinz was transferred to the Butyrka military prison in Moscow.
Surely, the Red Army could not believe their luck when they had seized such a prized prisoner! And yet, Soviet captors could not extract much leverage, as the unlucky Heinz died on February 21 of unclear causes, possibly as a consequence of mistreatment or even torture.
LEO RAUBAL JR
It appears that the younger generation of the Hitler clan had little luck when it came to fighting the Soviets, as a similar fate befell Heinz’s cousin, Leo Raubal Jr.
After graduating from university, Leo Jr made a living teaching chemistry in Salzburg, Austria. During this period, he made sporadic visits to his mum Angela, who was running uncle Adolf’s household in the Berchtesgaden residence. Again, it appears that Adolf quite liked this half-nephew, but did not seek to favour him in any way.
Shortly before the war, Leo had become a manager at the steelworks in Linz, also in Austria. But in October 1939, he was drafted into the Luftwaffe, as a Lieutenant in the engineering corps.
In 1941, he too joined Barbarossa, and was detailed to Friedrich Paulus’ doomed 6th Army. This was the force that fruitlessly tried to capture Stalingrad, suffering enormous losses. Leo was not immune to the carnage, and suffered an injury in January of 1943. Paulus suggested that Lieutenant Raubal be airlifted back home to safety, but Hitler refused, stating that an officer should stay with his men until the end.
That end came on January 23, 1943, when the Red Army captured Raubal and took him to Moscow for interrogation. The relation with the Fuehrer was not evident at first, and it was Leo who actually revealed it to his captors, proceeding to disclose useful intelligence about Hitler’s relatives and especially about his inner circle – information which would prove very valuable after the war, when the Soviets seized some of the top Nazi leaders.
For the time being, Raubal had a glimmer of hope to return home, when uncle Adolf proposed a prisoner exchange. If the Red Army released Leo, the Nazis would release Yakov Dzhugasvili, Stalin’s own son, taken as a POW back in July 1941.
But the Soviet dictator refused categorically, stating that ‘war is war’. Ultimately the refusal to make a swap cost Yakov his life, dying in the camp on April 14, 1943 at the age of 36, though how exactly isn’t clear.
As for Leo Jr, he remained in captivity until 1949, when he was subjected to trial for war crimes. He was found guilty of supporting the Nazi war of aggression and being involved in the crimes of the 6th Army, and was sentenced to spend 25 years in a Gulag labour camp.
Luckily for him, in 1955 West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer petitioned for the release of German POWs. The new Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed, and thousands of servicemen returned home in September – including Raubal.
Leo Jr resettled in Linz, where he resumed his work as a teacher. He died of tuberculosis in the summer of 1977. He was survived by a son, born back in 1931.
Now, Leo’s son is part of the last generation of Hitler relatives who are alive to this day. Their names and general whereabouts are publicly available if you search for them, but we’d rather not disclose them here. As you can imagine, these individuals have attracted plenty of attention as representatives of the Hitler bloodline. However, they have always stated that they have no sympathy for their great-uncle’s ideology, no interest in politics and simply want to get on with their lives. We shall respect their wishes.
WILLIAM PATRICK HITLER
Moving on from there, we have the rather interesting case of William Patrick Hitler, who served in the U.S. Navy during WWII. What the what? You say? Well let’s dive into his story.
It was the winter of 1910. At a horse show in Dublin, Ireland, Bridget Elizabeth Dowling met a young, strapping Austrian waiter named Alois Hitler, Jr. The two entered into a passionate courtship, despite the disapproval of Bridget’s father, William. The lovebirds eloped to London, where they married on June 3, 1910, infuriating Mr Dowling. The father of the bride even tried to have Alois Jr arrested for kidnapping, but somehow he came to accept his son-in-law by 1911.
On March 12 of that year, Bridget gave birth to a boy, William Patrick Hitler. Two years later, however, the toddler found himself fatherless, as Alois Jr dumped Bridget and relocated to Germany. As mentioned earlier, he would remarry in 1916, siring Heinz. This second marriage made him a bigamist, by the way, as he had never legally separated from Bridget.
As per Bridget and William Patrick, they went through a rather long, rough patch, as mum took on several odd jobs in Liverpool, trying to make ends meet.
The boy was educated as an accountant, first in Liverpool, then in Middlesex, and by 1927 he was hired by catering equipment company Benhan & Son in London. In 1928 William Patrick resumed contact with his father, and in 1929 visited him in Germany. On this occasion, Alois Jr took William to Nuremberg, where the two attended a congress of the Nazi Party – not yet in power, but very much on the rise.
This is when William first saw his half-uncle Adolf, but the two met in person only in 1930. The relationship between the two was cordial at first, and William returned to London with an autographed photo of the future Fuehrer.
In 1931 William visited Germany again, on the occasion of his cousin Geli Raubal’s alleged suicide using Adolf Hitler’s gun and in his home, which we’ll get to shortly. After that visit, William sought to capitalise on his family name, releasing a series of articles in England covering Hitler, the Nazis and Germany in an unflattering light. This enraged uncle Adolf, who summoned William back to Berlin and gave him a piece of his mind, demanding for the articles to be retracted.
William could not catch a break: he was persona non grata with his powerful uncle, sure, but soon found himself also blacklisted back in England, in March of 1932 losing his job due to his relation to his uncle.
Strapped for cash, William appealed to his dad to try to sweet talk uncle Adolf into securing him a job in Germany. Towards this end, he travelled once more to Berlin, hoping to reconcile with Hitler. However, all he got from the dear uncle was a letter disavowing any familial connection and refusing any future monetary assistance. Alois Jr doubled down, making it clear that his loyalties were with his half-brother, rather than his son.
Thus William made his way back to London for a time before making another trip to Berlin in October of 1933. By then, uncle Adolf had become the Chancellor and undisputed Fuehrer of the III German Reich. William first approached Ernst Rohm, leader of the brown-shirted SA, who then interceded with Hitler himself.
Surprisingly, the dictator had a change of heart. He gifted his half-nephew with 500 Reichsmarks and even asked his Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess to help William find employment!
William was first hired by a Berlin bank, and then became a car salesman with Opel Automotive. By 1936, however, he had again fallen out of favour, owing to allegedly name dropping his uncle to help secure car sales! As is a theme, Hitler never appreciated any of his family trying to ride his coat tails and this all resulted in the Fuehrer in a fury, leading to William’s work permit being revoked.
Now, if your future job depended on the mood of a murderous dictator, who also had allegedly killed his niece he was apparently in love with, what would you do? Probably not what William did: resorting to blackmail! After the war, during the Nuremberg trials, Nazi official Hans Frank revealed how William had written to Hitler, threatening to expose his complicated and unusual family history. In other words: confirming the rumours that Hitler’s biological grandfather was a Jewish merchant named Leopold Frankenberger. We’ll get to whether there could be any truth to this in the Bonus Facts later.
But for now, both Adolf and Alois Jr went ballistic, and William wisely fled Germany, returning to England and breaking for good with that side of his family. Back in London, he tried his hand at journalism, most notably publishing the article ‘Why I Hate My Uncle’, and later tried to enlist in the British armed forces.
This attempt was unsuccessful. After this latest debacle, both him and mum Bridget boarded the SS Normandie in February 1939 and relocated to the US as the young Hitler had received an invitation from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to perform a series of lectures in America about the Nazi Party and life in Germany.
Fast-forward to March of 1942 when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was forwarded a letter for his analysis of William by none other than President Roosevelt. The letter, written by William, read in part:
“I am the nephew and only descendant of the ill-famed Chancellor and Leader of Germany who today so despotically seeks to enslave the free and Christian peoples of the globe.
…Everybody in the world today must answer to himself which cause they will serve. To free people of deep religious feeling there can be but one answer and one choice, that will sustain them always and to the bitter end.
I am one of many, but I can render service to this great cause and I have a life to give that it may, with the help of all, triumph in the end.
All my relatives and friends soon will be marching for freedom and decency under the Stars and Stripes. For this reason, Mr. President, I am respectfully submitting this petition to you to enquire as to whether I may be allowed to join them in their struggle against tyranny and oppression?
…I have attempted to join the British forces, but… The British are an insular people and while they are kind and courteous, it is my impression, rightly or wrongly, that they could not in the long run feel overly cordial or sympathetic towards an individual bearing the name I do….
More than anything else I would like to see active combat as soon as possible and thereby be accepted by my friends and comrades as one of them in this great struggle for liberty.”
That’s right. Hitler’s half-nephew was asking directly for Roosevelt’s permission to join the fight against the Axis! Ultimately Hoover looked into William’s background and cleared him for service.
Thus, on March 6, 1944, William was sworn into the US Navy as a hospital corpsman, and was dispatched to the Pacific theatre. Not much is known about his service record, except that he received a shrapnel wound in his leg and he was ultimately discharged after being awarded a Purple Heart.
By then, the full extent of the genocidal atrocities perpetrated by his infamous uncle had been proven definitively and let’s just say regardless of the fact that he’d fought for the U.S. during the war, having the last name Hitler wasn’t exactly ideal. Thus, William finally decided to change his surname to Stuart-Houston. In 1947 he married his German-born fiancée, Phyllis Jean-Jacques, and the two settled in the State of New York.
From then on, the Stuart-Houstons would lead a quiet and uneventful life. They established a medical analysis lab, Brookhaven Laboratories, which they apparently ran out of their home. Beyond this, the couple also had four children, three of whom are seemingly still alive to this day, but none whom have had children of their own.
This is often stated to have been as part of pact to terminate the direct Hitler bloodline. However, there is no corroboration of said pact and all evidence is it is probably just an urban legend. Including at least one these sons explicitly stating this is false.
For example noting one of them was engaged and planned to have children before his untimely death at the age of 32 in a car accident. At the time, his member of the Hitler bloodline was working for the IRS, and we’re pretty sure there will be no jokes anyone comes up with about that…. Further, another of the brothers was apparently briefly engaged before he and his fiance had a falling out over his heritage.
ALOIS JR
So, that covers the dictator’s nephews who took an active role in the war, but that doesn’t conclude our trip up and down the Hitler family tree. I mentioned earlier how Adolf’s half-brother Alois Jr had quite the backstory …
As children and teens, Alois Jr and Adolf never really got along. Adolf was always his mum Klara’s favourite, who, at least at first, helped shield him from the ire and extreme abuse of dad Alois. As a consequence, at least at this stage, Alois jr often bore the brunt of their father’s many beatings without any such protection. This would, as we’ve noted in our What was Hitler Like as a Child? video, change once Alois left and Adolf became the eldest male child and most primed for the constant abuse regardless of his mother’s efforts to protect him.
But in any event, the young Alois was never given a high-level education, and was sent to learn a trade as an apprentice instead. But it appears that the boy had a rebellious streak, and rather than pursuing an honest career, he took to stealing, and was sentenced for theft on two occasions, in 1900 and 1902. Finally, in 1905, he decided to emigrate to England, where he would later marry Bridget Dowling.
Earlier, I mentioned how their son William Patrick was born in 1911, and how Alois Jr left England in 1913. What I did not mention was that in between those two dates, much like his father before him, Alois Jr often took to the bottle, subjecting both his wife and son to frequent beatings.
They must have been relieved when he moved to Germany, where he would remain stuck after the start of WWI. As mentioned, he remarried with Hedwig and fathered Heinz. But on account of the whole already being married thing, he had to stand charges of bigamy in 1924. This charge carried a sentence of six months in prison, but it appears that it was revoked or suspended.
At the end of 1927 Alois Jr joined the NSDAP, and seemingly maintained some contact with his half-brother Adolf, and definitely throughout the 1930s during William Patrick’s visits to Germany.
Alois did not hold any government nor party office after his ambitious relative rose to power, but he did enjoy some perks. In 1933, he opened a small restaurant in Berlin called Cafe Alois, which, thanks to his familial connection, was always replete with high-ranking patrons, including Nazi officials and ministers, often given access to private rooms to conduct delicate business.
Moreover, Alois took advantage of racial laws to evict his Jewish neighbours and take over their properties, thus expanding his premises at very little cost.
Ultimately, in 1937, Alois was able to buy a much larger restaurant in a prestigious location within the German capital. Business was thriving, and in no small measure thanks to his blood ties to the Fuehrer! And it appears that during the war, Alois continued to run his restaurant without incidents of note. However, as the Red Army approached Berlin in April of 1945, the restaurateur decided it was closing time and promptly relocated to Hamburg.
His paper trail has him re-emerging in October of 1945, after the war had ended, when a resident named Alois Hitler sent a letter to the Drehbahn Police Department, asking for his surname to be changed to ‘Hiller’. In his letter, Alois admitted to being the half-brother of the former Fuehrer, but claimed to have no affiliation to the Nazi Party whatsoever. The Hamburg Police believed him, and allowed for the name change.
However, in 1947, just like any other German, Herr ‘Hiller’ was subjected to a ‘denazification’ procedure, initiated by the Allied occupation authorities to purge the country of the vestiges of the old regime. It was at this time that the local police received a testimony from one Walter Herzog, who had known ‘Hiller’ since the late 1930s. Thanks to Herzog, authorities found that Alois had indeed been a member of the Party, had favoured meetings of Nazi officials and had unjustly profited from racial laws. The ensuing investigation even dug up letters sent by Alois to Reich authorities, which had caused the deportation of three individuals to a concentration camp!
Occupation authorities therefore filed Alois Hiller as a ‘Category III’ former Nazi. This category indicated lesser offenders, to be placed on probation for 2 or 3 years, but not to be interned. By the end of 1949, Alois was exonerated from all charges. This coincided with a general period of leniency towards most ‘lesser offenders’, as German society wanted to move on.
Thus, Alois Jr Hitler, now officially known as Herr Alois Hiller, lived peacefully his last years, dying on May 20, 1954, in Hamburg.
PAULA
Even though Alois was subjected to the denazification process, he escaped the scrutiny of the Allied occupation forces. The same cannot be said for Adolf’s sister Paula, who was interviewed by the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps, CIC, in July 1945.
During her interrogation, Paula recounted how the two were never particularly close during childhood, as she was six years younger than Adolf, stating, ‘He never considered me a playmate.’
After their mother Klara’s death, in 1907, Adolf left home, and Paula knew nothing of his whereabouts and activities until 1921. In that year, Adolf resurfaced in Vienna where Paula was living at the time, and she barely recognised him! The older brother, however, apparently was very charming and affectionate with Paula, and she states, ‘What made the biggest impression on me was the fact he went shopping with me. Every woman loves to shop.’
In the following years, the two had little contact, interacting mainly by correspondence. For example, in one instance Paula would write a letter to Adolf on his birthday, and he would reply with a care package of Spanish ham, flour and sugar. In the late 1920s, Paula found employment in a Viennese insurance company, but her brother’s notoriety attracted the attention of her employers, and in 1930 she was fired. From then on, Paula would receive a monthly allowance of 250 marks from Adolf.
The siblings did meet in person once a year, from 1929 to 1941. On one such occasion, in the summer of 1936, the now Fuehrer instructed Paula to change her surname to ‘Wolff’. As Paula stated to the CIC, this was to ‘maintain the strictest incognito. That was sufficient for me. From then on I kept this name. I added the “Mrs.” as I thought that less conspicuous.’
During WWII, the now renamed ‘Mrs Wolff’ maintained a low profile, working as a typist in a hospital, with Hitler’s blessing.
But during this time, Paula met and fell in love with a medical officer with the SS, Erwin Jekelius, involved in the infamous Aktion T4- the Nazi euthanasia program. Paula informed Adolf of their intention to marry, and this time he did not give his blessing. The Fuehrer feared that this prospective brother-in-law may lay a claim on a future succession, and thus botched the wedding by transferring Jekelius to the Eastern front. Eventually, he was captured by the Red Army and died in a Gulag in 1952.
As noted, at the end of the war, Paula was interrogated and later released by the CIC. In her statements, she denied knowledge of the atrocities perpetrated by her brother’s regime, and even felt that Hitler himself hadn’t known of them, as well as expressing admiration for her brother, and sorrow for his eventual downfall, despite their at times fractured relationship. In her own words: ‘The personal fate of my brother affected me very much. He was still my brother, no matter what happened. His end brought unspeakable sorrow to me, as his sister.’
After being released from US custody, Paula moved back to Vienna, and then to Berchtesgaden in 1952, where she would be closely taken care of by former SS officers.
In 1959, she agreed to be interviewed by Peter Morlery, a British reporter working for ITV. In her interaction with Morley, Paula reiterated her admiration for her older brother, and once again stated that she did not believe he could have done anything horrible as so many said.
This would be Paula’s first and last public interview. The following year, on June 1, she died at the age of 64.
ANGELA, GELI AND ELFRIEDE
During her interrogation at the hands of US intelligence services, Paula also had some kind words for her half-sister Angela: ‘I especially remember (…) Angela as a beautiful girl.’ It seems like young Angela was surrounded by wooers, all of whom were thoroughly vetted by her father Alois: ‘He was examining every wooer with the strict demand that only a civil servant was allowed to marry her.’
Dad must have been happy, then, when Angela married revenue officer Leo Raubal in 1903. As mentioned earlier, the union was short-lived as Leo died in 1910. Following his death, Angela and her three children moved to Vienna, where she would work as a cook for the Mensa Academica Judaica Association of Jewish Students.
Interestingly on this one, according to the famed 1943 OSS report A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend, written by psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, while working at the boarding house, “Some of our informants knew her during this time and report that in the student riots Angela defended the Jewish students from attack and on several occasions beat the Aryan students away from the steps of the dining hall with a club.”
Much like in the case of Paula, Adolf and Angela Hitler had little contact during the years of WWI and in the early 1920s. Then, in 1925, Adolf hired Angela to run his household in Munich. She accepted the offer and relocated to the Bavarian city, bringing along her 17-year-old daughter, Geli.
From their very first meeting, the future dictator was immediately obsessed by the younger girl, becoming possessive and controlling.
Some of Hitler’s then political opponents described the relationship as scandalous and sexual in nature, although whether there is any truth to this isn’t totally clear. It appears, however, that Uncle Adolf was infatuated with Geli, and the girl partially reciprocated this affection.
In 1927, Hitler asked Angela to relocate to Berchtesgaden, on the Bavarian Alps, to manage his larger, private residence, the Berghof villa. But Geli was to remain with him in his Munich apartment. It is not clear if Geli accepted of her own volition, or was forced to accept by the domineering Adolf. What is known is that for the ensuing four years, uncle and half-niece would live together in Munich.
In December of 1927, Hitler’s chauffeur, Emil Maurice, confessed to his boss that he was having a relationship with Geli. The furious future Fuehrer forced an end to the love story and removed Maurice from his post. From then on, Hitler would strictly regulate Geli’s activities, dictating whom she could and could not associate with, and preventing her from applying to a music school in Vienna, as well as any time she wished to go anywhere and he decided to let her, having her chaperoned by one of his men.
Despite the extreme restrictions, according to her mother Angela, by 1931 Geli had somehow initiated another relationship, this time with a man from Linz. But Hitler also put an abrupt end to this romance.
This all leads us to September 18, 1931, when Hitler and Geli had a furious argument, during which Adolf forbade her once again from going to Vienna. Hitler then left town, heading to Nuremberg for a party meeting. But the next day, he was hastily recalled to Munich. Geli had been found dead in their apartment, lying in her bedroom in a pool of blood. The cause of death: a gunshot wound to the chest, apparently fired from Hitler’s own pistol, lying next to Geli.
So, was the wound self-inflicted?
That mystery has never been solved, as no inquest, let alone an autopsy, was ever performed. Rumours began circulating that Geli had suffered a broken nose, in addition to the gunshot to the chest. And that she may have been pregnant! But, again, with no post-mortem, these remained just uncorroborated rumours and noteworthy most of them seem to have been started by Hitler’s political enemies.
That said, for whatever it’s worth, William Stuart-Houston, stated, “When I visited Berlin in 1931, the family was in trouble. … Everyone knew that Hitler and she had long been intimate and that she had been expecting a child – a fact that enraged Hitler.”
Thus, it’s been suggested that in a rage, Hitler killed her.
Whatever the case there, what has been confirmed by members of Hitler’s inner circle, such as Rudolph Hess and Hermann Goering, is that Geli’s death sent Adolf into a deep depression and afterwards he was allegedly more extreme in his ideology. The dictator’s official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, went as far as commenting that the moment of Geli’s death ‘was when the seeds of inhumanity began to grow inside Hitler.’
Geli’s death must have impacted Angela as well. Nonetheless, she continued working for Adolf at the Berghof residence until September 1935, when she moved to Dresden. Then, in February 1936, she married for a second time with architect Martin Hammitszch. The two continued living in Dresden throughout the war, until the spring of 1945. As the Red Army encroached, Hitler had Angela relocated to Berchtesgaden, while her husband remained behind and eventually committed suicide in May.
Noteworthy, in his will, Hitler left Angela 1,000 Reichsmark per month pension, though it’s not clear if she ever got this. Shortly before his death, however, he did give her and Paula around 100,000 Reichsmarks, presumably knowing his own demise was nearing and wanting to ensure they were somewhat taken care of.
In the summer of 1945, just like Paula Hitler, Angela was interviewed by the US CIC. The report compiled by her interrogators was titled: ‘The very uninteresting life of Hitler’s half-sister’
Allied intelligence services had indeed very little interest in Angela, who was quickly released. Hitler’s half-sister, former housekeeper, and alleged mother of his lover, died of a stroke on October 20, 1949.
This all brings us to the last member of Hitler’s immediate family: Elfriede Maria, daughter to Angela and sister to Geli. And to be honest, there is not much known about her life. We know that she was born on January 10, 1910 in Linz, Austria, and that she married one Ernst Hochegger in June of 1936, in Düsseldorf. Elfriede apparently lived a quiet and uneventful life until she passed away on September 24, 1993. Her son, born in 1945, is alive at the time of writing though likewise little is known of him. And, similar to the other remaining still living descendents, we aren’t inclined to try to dig too deep here on him.
Bonus Fact:
As previously alluded to, one popular hypothesis on the interwebs is that Hitler’s grandfather was a Jewish man by the name of Leopold Frankenberger. However, most historians dismiss this as there is quite literally not once shred of evidence to support the notion outside of the claim of one Hans Frank, who for a time was the Governor-General of occupied Poland where he was overseeing the mass murder of over 4 million people during his time in office there. Shortly before his execution for these crimes, Frank would claim Hitler had asked him to quietly investigate Hitler’s lineage to try to track down who his biological grandfather was. Frank says he did so and claims Hitler’s grandmother was working for a Jewish man named Leopold Frankenberger at the time she got pregnant with his father. And, curiously, that she had received money from him for some 14 years after Alois was born, with it conjectured that he paid her during this time lest she reveal he’d knocked her up. Thus, if this were true, it would make Hitler’s grandfather a Jew.
Naturally, unlike internet commenters, historians since have dug deep on this one, and haven’t been able to find record of anything of the sort, not even of any Frankenberger living anywhere near there during that period, let alone evidence of such a mythical man being Jewish. Not only that, Jews had been expelled from the region for a few centuries up to that point, only permitted to return a few decades after Alois was born, making it even more unlikely that, regardless of name, she was impregnated by a Jewish man. On top of that, several parts of his story have been proven to be incorrect.
But, I mean, if you can’t trust the word of a mass murdering Nazi about to be executed for war crimes few others in history have managed to match, and probably pretty pissed at his former boss for him being in that position at the time, who can you trust?
Expand for Referenceshttps://it.everand.com/read/363350568/Hitler
https://it.everand.com/read/595093274/Hitler-s-Father-Hidden-Letters-Why-the-Son-Became-a-Dictator
https://it.everand.com/article/603670721/The-Hitler-Who-Fought-For-The-Allies
https://it.everand.com/article/449323302/The-Other-Hitler
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-black-sheep-of-the-family-the-rise-and-fall-of-hitler-s-scouse-nephew-5339313.html
http://www.americainwwii.com/articles/corpsman-hitler-us-navy/
https://allthatsinteresting.com/william-stuart-houston
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Arlene, Cindy, Emily, Farrah, Katia. These are not, as you might expect, the names of women who were considered for Mambo No. 5, but rather the names of hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, and other tropical storms. The practice of giving storms human names is now an accepted part of life, with the names of particularly destructive and deadly storms like Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, and Andrew burned into the memories of those who witnessed their wrath. But how did this practice get started? And who actually chooses the names – and how? Well, board up your windows and hunker in your storm cellar as we dive into the curious history and process of naming storms.
Now, before we get started, let’s answer a common question: what is the difference between a tropical storm, hurricane, cyclone, and typhoon? The answer, surprisingly, is almost nothing – they are all the same kind of rotating weather system, generically known as a tropical cyclone. The only difference between them is in strength and location. A weather system only becomes a tropical storm when it reaches sustained wind speeds of at least 39 miles per hour or 62 kilometres per hour. It then only becomes a hurricane, typhoon, or cyclone if winds reach 74 miles per hour or 118 kilometres per hour. And while the term cyclone is retained for storms in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, Atlantic and Northeast Pacific cyclones are known as hurricanes and northwest Pacific cyclones as typhoons. And now you know.
Tropical storms have been given names since at least the 18th century, though the practice was largely arbitrary and haphazard. For example, “Antje’s Hurricane” of 1842 was named after the ship HMS Antje, whose mast was ripped off by the storm. Other storms were named for where they made landfall – for example, the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 – while in the Caribbean they were named after the particular saint’s day on which they occurred – for example, Hurricane Santa Ana, which struck Puerto Rico on July 26, 1825. If two or more hurricanes occurred on the same day of the year, a number was added to the name, with Hurricane San Felipe the First and Second striking Puerto Rico on September 13 of 1876 and 1928, respectively.
The first person to systematically name tropical storms was Clement Wragge, a meteorologist working for the government of Queensland, Australia in the late 19th century. At first Wragge used letters of the Greek alphabet, but soon moved on to figures from Polynesian mythology, ancient historical figures like Xerxes and Hannibal, and – most amusingly – unpopular Australian politicians like James Drake, Edmund Barton, and Alfred Deakin, whom Wragge characterized as erratic and destructive like cyclones. Unfortunately for Wragge, this cheeky naming scheme backfired when, in 1902, a cyclone he named after politician Alfred Conroy caused considerable damage in his home state of Queensland. Wragge soon found his funding slashed, and finally retired from his post in 1907 – and with him, so too did the practice of naming storms.
For the next 40 years, tropical storms were simply designated by their strength and current position – for example, Category 3 at 30.4 degrees North and 71.8 degrees West. But this system was cumbersome and often led to confusion, so during the Second World War meteorologists began naming storms after wives, girlfriends, or female celebrities. This, in turn, was inspired by the popular 1941 novel Storm by George R. Stewart, in which the titular weather system is named “Maria.” Otherwise, however, naming storms remained a largely informal practice. For example, when in 1949 a Category 2 Hurricane struck Florida during a visit by President Harry S. Truman, it was dubbed “Hurricane Harry.”
In 1951, the U.S. Weather Bureau – now the U.S. National Weather Service – tried to formalize the naming process by naming storms sequentially after letters of the military phonetic alphabet, starting with Able for the first storm of the year and proceeding through Baker, Charlie, Dog, and so on. Just two years later, however, this alphabet was supplanted by the now-standard NATO phonetic alphabet of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and the Weather Bureau abandoned this scheme in favour of giving hurricanes female names in alphabetical order. This remained the accepted convention until the later 1970s, when the practice came under fire from feminist groups for being sexist. As one letter to the National Weather Service from the National Organization for Women read:
“Women are human beings and deeply resent being arbitrarily associated with disaster.”
As a result, in 1979 meteorologists began alternating between men’s and women’s names. Progress!
Today, the naming of tropical storms is the responsibility of the World Meteorological Organization or WMO, which maintains separate, standardized lists of names for different regions such as the South Atlantic, North Pacific, and Indian Ocean. There are six separate lists for the Atlantic region, which are cycled through every six years. Thus, the list used in 2023, which starts with Arlene and ends with Whitney, will be used again in 2029. The names on these lists have no particular meaning, and are chosen to be easy to pronounce and remember. They are also tailored to the culture of each particular region – for example, Jal and Bulbul in the Indian Ocean, Saomai and Bebinca in the South China Sea, and Moke and Walaka in the Central Pacific.
Finally, names starting with W, U, X, Y, and Z are not used, meaning each list has only 21 names. But what happens if there are more than 21 major storms in a season? This is a highly unlikely occurrence. As previously covered, tropical weather systems only become tropical storms – and receive names – when they reach sustained wind speeds of at least 39 miles per hour or 62 kilometres per hour. As this happens relatively infrequently, the regular 21-name lists are usually more than adequate. But for the rare cases where there is spillover, the WMO maintains alternative naming lists. Originally, this was simply the Greek Alphabet – the system pioneered by Clement Wragge in the 1890s. But the large number of similar-sounding letters such as Eta, Zeta, and Theta often led to confusion, so in 2021 this was replaced by a backup list of regular names – with the Atlantic list starting with Adria and ending with Will and the Northeast Pacific list starting with Aidan and ending with Zoe. But the primary list has only been exceeded twice in the past 15 years – once in 2015 and again in 2020.
But while the naming lists are standardized, they are not set in stone, and names can be – and often are – retired for a variety of reasons. For example, names of particularly destructive and deadly storms are retired out of respect for the victims. Therefore, there will never be another hurricane Harvey, Ian, Ida, Irma, Fiona, Floyd, Katrina, Maria, Nate, or Sandy, these names having been replaced with Harold, Idris, Imani, Idalia, Farrah, Franklin, Katia, Margot, Nigel, and Sara. However, there are no hard and fast rules for retiring a name, the decision being made by a vote at the annual meeting of the WMO’s Regional Association IV Hurricane Committee. Names can also be retired for other reasons; for example, in 2015 the name “Isis” – previously associated with the Ancient Egyptian goddess – was retired due to its association with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – now the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or simply the “Islamic State”. And in 1966, the name “Freida” was replaced with “Fern” with no explanation given. In total, 94 names have been retired by the WMO since 1953.
While the names of hurricanes and other cyclones are intended to be neutral and non-descriptive, there is evidence they may actually have a very real impact on the deadliness of these storms. In 2014, a study led by Kiju Jung, a doctoral student in marketing at the University of Illinois College of Business, found that, statistically speaking, hurricanes with female names are deadlier than those with male names. As to why, Jung posits that this effect results from people taking female-named hurricanes less seriously and thus taking fewer precautions. This, in turn, by this hypothesis results in higher casualties. But while presenting a plausible hypothesis, this study has been the subject of considerable criticism. For while the study examines all hurricanes which made landfall in the United States between 1950 and 2012, as we’ve previously covered, all hurricanes were given female names prior to 1979, potentially skewing the statistical analysis. Whatever the case, the lesson is clear: if a hurricane is headed your way, always take the proper precaution. Even if its name is Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary, or Jessica here I am. A little bit of you… destroys coastal cities apparently.
Expand for References
O’Kane, Caitlin, How do Hurricanes Get Their Names? A Look at the Naming Process and 2023’s Full List of Storms, CBS News, August 28, 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-do-hurricanes-get-their-names-who-chooses-and-why-list/
Tropical Cyclone Naming History and Retired Names, National Hurricane Center and Central Pacific Hurricane Center, NOAA, https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_history.shtml
Holmes, Stephanie, A Hurricane by Any Other Name? BBC News, September 21, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4268588.stm
Hurricane Names – How Are Hurricanes Named? Geology, https://geology.com/hurricanes/hurricane-names.shtml
Galchen, Rivka, How Hurricanes Get Their Names, The New Yorker, August 8, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-hurricanes-get-their-names
Hopper, Tristin, Why Hurricanes Have Human Names – and Who Picks Them, National Post, September 12, 2018, https://nationalpost.com/news/world/why-hurricanes-have-human-names-and-who-picks-them
Ciciora, Phil, Study: Hurricanes With Female Names More Deadly Than Male-Named Storms, University of Illinois New Bureau, June 2, 2014, https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/204580
Tropical Cyclone Naming, World Meteorological Organization, https://community.wmo.int/en/tropical-cyclone-naming
The post How and Why Do They Name Hurricanes and Who Picks the Name? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Of all belligerent nations in the Second World War, few were as creative and prolific in their pursuit of exotic weapons technology as the Third Reich. From jet aircraft to ballistic missiles, air-independent submarines, and infrared detection, German scientists and engineers pioneered many of the key technologies that would shape the course of late 20th-century warfare. Yet despite their cleverness, none of these so-called wunderwaffe – many of which we have already covered on this channel – did much to improve Germany’s fortunes during the war. In many cases, this failure was due to political and economic factors rather than the skill of German designers. Chronically short of raw materials and manpower and with its cities and factories being bombed round-the-clock by Allied air forces, Nazi Germany simply lacked the industrial capacity to produce even conventional weapons in sufficient quantities. Certain designs were also hamstrung by the limitations of existing technology. For example, despite being a marvel of engineering that would later pave the way for manned space travel, the A-4 ballistic missile – better known as the V-2 – was too complex, expensive, unreliable, and inaccurate, and carried too small a warhead to be an effective weapon. It was also produced using slave labour under horrific conditions, making it the only weapon in history to kill more people in its manufacture than in actual combat.
All this was further exacerbated by the dysfunctional, divide-and-conquer structure of the Nazi state, which pitted the various branches of the government and armed forces against each other in a bid to win the Führer’s favour. This led to multiple groups simultaneously pursuing largely-identical projects, resulting in massive duplication of effort and the further squandering of already-scarce resources. And then there was the Führer himself, Adolf Hitler, whose wrongheaded and often delusional micromanaging crippled many a promising weapons project. For example, as previously covered in our video What Actually Defines an Assault Rifle, and Who Invented Them? Hitler’s interference significantly delayed the introduction of the Stg.44 Sturmgewehr, the world’s first modern assault rifle. He also greatly reduced the effectiveness of the Messerschmitt Me-262 Schwalbe, the world’s first operational jet fighter, by insisting it be used as a bomber instead of an interceptor.
…on the other hand, many German wunderwaffe failed because they were just really bad ideas. As we’ve previously covered in our videos The German Rocket Fighter That Dissolved its Pilots Alive and The Bizarre Tale of the Spontaneously Exploding Submarines, some designs were so horrifically hazardous to their operators that it’s a wonder they ever got off the drawing board. Still others were based on laughably outdated or ill-conceived ideas, with few weapons epitomizing this latter category like the Messerschmitt Me-323 Gigant. Begun as a far-sighted attempt to bring heavy-lift cargo capacity to the modern battlefield, the Me-232 project ended up producing one of the very worst aircraft of the Second World War. This is the story of Nazi Germany’s aerial white elephant.
In the spring of 1940, Germany stunned the world by launching some of history’s first large-scale assaults by airborne troops. German paratroopers, known as Fallschirmjäger, were deployed during the invasions of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands to capture bridges, crossroads, and other key objectives ahead of advancing ground troops. Yet despite their pioneering nature, the Fallschirmjäger suffered from a number of tactical and equipment shortcomings which significantly hampered their effectiveness. For example, their standard parachute, the RZ 20, suspended its wearer from the small of their back instead of their shoulders, causing them to descend face-down and land on their hands and knees. Not only did this result in parachutists being scattered widely over the drop zone, but it forced them to wear thick knee and elbow pads to avoid injury and limited the equipment they could carry. Indeed, most Fallschirmjäger jumped into combat carrying little more than a pistol and a small gravity knife used to cut away tangled parachute shrouds on landing. Rifles, machine guns, and other heavy equipment were dropped separately in special containers, forcing newly-landed troops to spend the first few minutes of an assault scrambling around the battlefield looking for weapons and squander the precious element of surprise.
A far more effective tactic was to use assault gliders, which were towed into the air by transport aircraft and released near the target area. The standard German assault glider, the DFS 230, allowed 9 paratroopers along with all their weapons and equipment to be landed in a very small area, greatly increasing their combat effectiveness. Indeed, on May 10, 1940, the use of gliders allowed just 78 Fallschirmjäger to capture the seemingly impenetrable Belgian Fortress of Eben Emael in only 20 minutes.
In the summer of 1940, the German armed forces turned their attention to Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of the British Isles. As the Allies would later learn the hard way, amphibious assaults are incredibly difficult to pull off, requiring truly herculean feats of logistics. Operation Sea Lion, however, would be a particular challenge. Having largely geared their war machine towards ground combat, the Germans had a relatively weak surface navy, and lacked the ships necessary to carry their invasion force across the English Channel. Worse still, this fleet would have to contend with the might of the Royal Navy – at that time the most powerful in the world. As a result, the Germans planned to transport the majority of their troops to Britain by air. But this plan soon ran into two major roadblocks. First, the Luftwaffe lacked sufficient transport aircraft and assault gliders to carry all the invasion troops. Second, such an airborne invasion required the attainment of total air superiority, otherwise the Royal Air Force would cut the slow-moving transports and gliders to pieces. Unfortunately, the Luftwaffe’s air campaign to destroy the RAF on the ground – what has since become known as the Battle of Britain – ended in a British victory, and in September 1940 the High Command postponed Operation Sea Lion until the following spring. Not only did this postponement free up troops and other resources for Operation Barbarossa, the upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union, but it was hoped it would allow for the development of specialized equipment to increase Sea Lion’s chance of success.
To this end, on October 18, 1940, the German Air Ministry or RLM issued a tender for the development of a Grossraumlastensegler or high-capacity assault glider. The specifications called for a truly enormous aircraft capable of carrying an unheard-of 20 tons of cargo – the equivalent of 100 fully-equipped troops, a Panzer IV tank, or a towed 88mm anti-tank gun with its crew. Emphasizing the urgency of the project, prospective manufacturers were given only 14 days to submit their proposals. In the end, only two companies – Junkers and Messerschmitt – submitted their bids on time. The project was given the codename“Project Warsaw”, with the Junkers’s design being dubbed “Warsaw East” and Messerschmitt’s “Warsaw West.”
First out the gate was Junkers with their Ju-322 Mammut or “Mammoth.” Measuring a whopping 62 metres wide and 30 feet long, the Mammut was a strange-looking beast, effectively a giant flying wing, its tail unit appearing comically small in comparison. The 11×14 metre cargo bay in the centre of the span featured a drop-down ramp to allow troops, vehicles, and cargo to be easily unloaded, while the pilot’s cockpit was offset to the port to clear the cargo bay and maximize capacity. While being towed into the air, the Mammut rolled on an 8,000-kilogram wheeled trolley which was jettisoned immediately after takeoff. Upon reaching the target, the glider landed on a set of sprung skids. Finally, for self-defence, the Mammut was armed with three MG-15 machine guns mounted in turrets on either side of the cargo bay and at the front of the tail unit.
Yet despite these impressive specifications, right from the start the Ju-322 project was plagued with difficulties. Most of these problems stemmed from the RLM’s insistence that the Ju-322 be built as much as possible from non-strategic materials – namely wood. Junkers, which had pioneered the construction of all-metal aircraft, had very little experience working with wood. Worse still, when the lumber for the first 100 Ju-322 was delivered, much of it turned out to be rotten or otherwise defective. Indeed, while the main spar was designed with a safety factor of 1.8, when the first prototype was load-tested it failed at only 90% of the design value! Later, during cargo loading tests, a Panzer VI tank pitched forward off the loading ramp and crashed right through the floor of the cargo bay. Reinforcing the floor, along with other modifications, resulted in the cargo capacity being reduced time and time again; by the time the first prototype rolled out of Junkers’s factory at Merseburg, it could only carry around 12 tons – a little over half of the RLM’s original specifications. And all the while, the supposedly top-secret project was being closely followed by Allied Intelligence, who learned so much about it that in March 1941 the BBC broadcast a news report on the so-called “Merseburg Giant.”
And then there was the unusual design of the aircraft, which many feared was aerodynamically unsound. Indeed, upon first laying eyes on the Mammut, Generaloberst Ernst Udet, head of research and development for the Luftwaffe, declared:
“This aircraft will never fly. The proportions of the empennage are wrong. The machine will never be stable!”
Udet’s suspicions were soon confirmed when, on March 12, 1941 the first Ju-322 prototype prepared to make its maiden flight. Despite the Mammut being unloaded, the four-engine Junkers Ju-90 towplane – one of the largest transports in the Luftwaffe’s arsenal – struggled to gain sufficient airspeed, using up the entire runway in the process. Finally the giant glider lifted from the runway…only to rise above the towplane, lifting up its tail and threatening to crash it. Thinking quickly, test pilot Hans Hasselbach released the tow cable, allowing the towplane to land safely. As for the Mammut, it was so unstable and its massive control surfaces so heavy that Hasselbach struggled to control it, only barely managing to set it down in a nearby field. Due to the glider’s enormous size, it took two weeks to tow it back to the airfield using tanks. Subsequent flight tests with a second prototype revealed further major problems, such as the wheeled dolly bouncing so high it threatened to destroy the glider. Finally, in May 1941, the RLM deemed the design unworkable and cancelled the project. The lumber for the remaining 98 airframes was cut up and used as fuel for wood-powered vehicles. All told, the disastrous Ju-322 project had cost 45 million Reichsmarks – or around $380 million today.
With Junkers out of the race, the contract for the Grossraumlastensegler passed to Messerschmitt and their Me-321 Gigant or “Giant.” Smaller and more conventional than the Junkers Mammut, the Gigant
was built of steel tubing and wood covered in fabric, weighed 35 tons fully loaded, and measured 28 metres long with a wingspan of 55 metres. However, it could carry a full 23 tons of cargo – 3 more than the RLM specification – in its cavernous 11x3x3.4-metre cargo hold. This space was designed to match the dimensions of a standard German railway flatcar – meaning anything that could travel by rail could travel by Me-321 – and was accessed via a pair of large clamshell doors in the hose – an innovation that would see widespread use in many postwar transport aircraft. Like the Mammut, the Gigant took off on a wheeled dolly that was jettisoned shortly after liftoff, with the glider landing on a set of extendible skids. Self-defense was provided by 2-4 machine gun mounted in positions atop the wing.
The prototype Me-321 made its maiden flight at Leipheim on February 25, 1941 with test pilot Karl Bauer at the controls. Though the aircraft was loaded with only 3 tons of ballast, the Junker Ju-90 towplane struggled to lift it into the air. Once airborne, Bauer found the controls heavy and sluggish, but managed to make a safe, controlled landing. Based on this experience, the cockpit was enlarged to fit a copilot and radio operator and electric servo motors were fitted to the control surfaces. A braking parachute was also added to reduce the glider’s landing distance. As the Ju-90 had proved inadequate Messerschmitt decided to tow the Gigant using three Bf-110 heavy fighters connected to the same tow cable. For additional thrust, the glider was also fitted with a number of Walter HWK 109-500 Starthilfe rocket-assisted takeoff or RATO pods mounted under the wings. Known as troika-schlepp, this scheme proved exactly as dangerous as it sounds, requiring near-superhuman concentration and flying skills on the part of the towplane pilots. On May 28, 1941, a test flight carrying a full load of 100 soldiers ended in disaster when some of the rocket pods failed to ignite, causing the Gigant to slew to one side and the towplanes to collide with each other. The resulting crash resulted in 129 deaths – the deadliest aviation accident in history until the New York mid-air collision of December 16, 1960. In the wake of this crash, Messerschmitt began looking for an an alternative to the troika system. The solution came in the form of the bizarre Heinkel He-111Z Zwilling or “twin” – effectively two Heinkel He-111 light bombers joined together at the wing with a fifth engine added.
By the summer of 1941 Operation Sealion – the mission for which the Me-321 was designed – had been postponed indefinitely, so the giant gliders were formed into three Luftwaffe transport squadrons and sent to Russia in support of Operation Barbarossa. As few airborne assaults were carried out on the Eastern Front, the Gigants were mainly used to carry heavy cargo to forward airfields. They proved less effective than hoped, for the primitive conditions at these airfields made the giant gliders difficult to land and maneuver on the ground. In early 1942, the Gigants were withdrawn from the Eastern Front and sent to the Mediterranean in anticipation of Operation Hercules, the planned airborne invasion of island of Malta. However, in May of that year, the Germans launched Operation Mercury, the airborne invasion of Crete. The largest invasion ever conducted entirely for the air, Mercury proved a pyrrhic victory, with the lightly-armed Fallschirmjäger suffering horrific casualties at the hands of the Cretan defenders. This near-disaster convinced the German high command that Hercules would meet a similar fate, and the operation was cancelled. But even if the invasion had gone ahead, a chronic shortage of towplanes would likely have prevented the Gigants from participating. Instead, the gliders were sent back to Russia in an attempt to resupply the encircled German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. But by the time they arrived there were no longer any German-held airfields in range of Stalingrad, so the plan was abandoned and the remaining Gigants sent back to Germany.
By this time it had become apparent that the giant assault glider was an outdated concept no longer suited to Germany’s current strategic situation. Consequently, Messerschmitt set about converting the Me-321 into a self-propelled cargo transport. As nearly all German-made engines were earmarked for other projects, Messerschmitt selected the French Gnome-Rhone 14N 1,140-horsepower radial, hundreds of which had been captured during the 1940 invasion of France. The first prototype, designated the Me-321C, was fitted with four engines, but this was soon increased to six. The final version, re-designated the Me-323, could carry two more tons of cargo than the Me-321. However, the six engines increased the aircraft’s gross weight by more than 25% and gave it a lumbering top speed of only 283 kilometres per hour – less than half the speed of most Allied fighters. It was also just as exhausting and sluggish to control as its unpowered predecessor.
Nonetheless, 201 Me-323s were produced between 1942 and 1944, with some being converted from Me-321 gliders and others being built from scratch. Several different versions were produced, including the E-1, which added two turrets armed with 20-millimetre cannons for added defence; the E2, which featured more streamlined turrets and more powerful Junkers Jumo 211R engines; and the E-2WT, which added yet another defensive turret in the aircraft’s nose. In the spring of 1943, two squadrons of 16 Gigants each were sent to the Mediterranean to support Germany’s faltering North African campaign. The German Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel – AKA “The Desert Fox” – had been in retreat since their defeat at the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942. Trapped in Tunisia by the Allied forces, they were quickly running out of ammunition, food, medicine, and other supplies. The German Kriegsmarine had attempted to resupply Rommel by sea, but most of its transport ships had been sent to the bottom by Allied aircraft based in Malta. The German High Command hoped that the Gigants with their enormous cargo capacity could break the blockade by creating an air bridge between Italy and Tunisia.
But the Mediterranean was not the Eastern Front, where the Germans had enjoyed air superiority; and the lumbering, heavily-laden Gigants proved to be sitting ducks against the marauding fighters of the Royal Air Force. On April 22, 1943, 16 Me-323s of Transportgeschwader 5 were approaching Cape Bon in Tunisia when they were jumped by seven squadrons of RAF Supermarine Spitfires and South African Air Force Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawks. Within minutes, all but two of the Gigants were shot out of the sky, sending 120 German airmen to their deaths. In the wake of this disaster, the Gigants were withdrawn from the Mediterranean and sent once more to the Eastern Front, where they finally proved their worth resupplying the Kuban Bridgehead on the Taman Peninsula. Operating from airfields at Bagerowo, Krasnodar, and Timashevskaya, Slavyanskaya, the Me-323s and their He-111Z towplanes flew badly-needed supplies to forward troop positions, carrying wounded troops to rear-line hospitals on the return flights. The last of these supply missions were flown in April 1944, whereupon the remaining Me-323s were withdrawn from service and scrapped. No complete examples survive today, though a complete wreck was discovered in 2012 off the coast of Sardinia, lying in 60 metres of water.
Thus ended the tragicomic saga of the Gigant, an aircraft that was obsolete before it even flew and, despite the best efforts of its designers, never managed to become much more than a lumbering death trap. Yet for all its failings, near the end of its rocky career the Gigant briefly succeeded in demonstrating the value of heavy air-lift capability on the modern battlefield. Today, such capability is vital to global military operations, and is capably provided by such legendary aircraft as the Antonov An-124 Ruslan, Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, and Lockheed C-5 Galaxy.
Expand for References
Junkers Ju 322 Mammut, Aircraft of the World,International Masters Publishers AB, 1998
Yenne, Bill, The World’s Worst Aircraft, World Publications Group, Inc, North Dighton, MA, 2001
Nowarra, Heiz, German Gliders in World War II, Schiffer Military History, West Chester, Pennsylvania, 1991
Messerschmitt Me 323 Gigant (Giant), Military Factory, January 21, 2019, https://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.php?aircraft_id=729
Kalu, Michael, Flying Whale – The Messerschmitt 323 Gigant in 26 Photos, War History Online, August 13, 2018, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/messerschmitt-323.html
Chen, Peter, Me 323 Gigant, World War II Database, https://ww2db.com/aircraft_spec.php?aircraft_model_id=212
The post The Worst Aircraft of WWII appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In all but four of the 25 James Bond films so far, the titular super spy starts his adventure with a visit to Q, MI6’s brilliant but grumpy creator of spy gadgets. From a briefcase full of weapons to a safe-cracking cigarette case to a watch with a built-in laser, Q always has exactly what 007 needs to complete his world-saving missions. Given that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, worked for British Intelligence during the Second World War, it is perhaps unsurprising that both the character of Q and many of his creations are based on people and equipment Fleming worked with in real life. But during the Cold War, real-life spy gadgets weren’t confined to the West; as we covered in our previous video “The Thing” – the Revolutionary Spy Gadget That Baffled the West, the intelligence services of the Eastern Bloc had their fair share of fiendishly clever contraptions. And in 1978, perhaps the most fiendish of all spy gadgets would make international headlines when it was used to carry out a bold and bizarre murder in broad daylight.
Our story begins in 1969 with 40-year-old Bulgarian journalist Georgi Ivanov Markov. Born on March 1, 1929 in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, Markov initially pursued a career as a chemical engineer and a schoolteacher before becoming a writer. Starting with his first novel, The Night of Caesium, in 1957, over the following decade Markov published dozens of novels, short stories, and plays, becoming one of Bulgaria’s most successful and influential writers. However, his writing was increasingly seen as critical of the Bulgarian Communist Party and its leader, Todor Zhivkov, leading to several of his works being censored or banned. Though Markov was a close personal friend of Zhivkov, this relationship could only keep him out of trouble for so long, and in 1969, under intense pressure to conform to the Communist party line, he left Bulgaria and settled in Bologna, Italy, with his brother. Though Markov hoped to return to Bulgaria once the heat had died down, in 1971 the Bulgarian government refused to extend his passport and he decided to stay in the West. In 1972, Markov moved to London, learned English, and began working for the Bulgarian section of the BBC World Service as a writer and broadcaster. Meanwhile, back in Bulgaria, Markov’s works were removed from libraries and bookstores and Markov himself expelled from the Union of Bulgarian Writers and sentenced in absentia to six years and six months in prison for defecting to the West.
Markov thrived in London, writing and staging a number of plays including Archangel Michael, which won first place in an Edinburgh festival. In 1975 he married English-born Annabel Rilke, a fellow broadcaster at the BBC, and a year later the couple had a daughter, Alexandra-Raina. In 1975, Markov began writing freelance scripts for Radio Free Europe and the West German radio station Deutsche Welle, which broadcast pro-western propaganda into Eastern Europe. These scripts included the series In Absentia Reports, broadcast weekly on Radio Free Europe, which exposed and criticized life under the Bulgarian Communist regime. These broadcasts formed the basis for Markov’s memoir, the Truth That Killed, posthumously published in 1984.
In addition to criticizing the policies and practices of the regime, Markov also called out its hypocrisy and corruption, revealing – among other things – the mistresses and other indiscretions of top party leaders. His broadcasts grew even more vitriolic in 1977 when his father became terminally ill and the Bulgarian government denied Markov and his brothers permission to visit him in his final days. Infuriated by Markov’s unceasing attacks, President Zhivkov decided to rid himself of the troublesome dissident. The assassination was directed by Minister of the Interior Dimiter Stoyanov and carried out by the Bulgarian Secret Service, the Darzhhavna Sigurnost,. At Stoyanov’s request, the Soviet KGB agreed to provide technical assistance – on the condition that no trace of Soviet involvement would be left.
It is now known that three separate attempts were made on Markov’s life. The first took place during a dinner party with colleagues from Radio Free Europe, while the second took place in Sardinia where Markov was vacationing. But the third – and ultimately successful – attempt took place on September 7, 1978 in the heart of downtown London.
That day, Markov was working a double shift at the BBC. After working the early morning shift, he went home to rest for a few hours. On his return for the afternoon shift, he parked his car south of Waterloo Bridge and headed to a nearby bus stop to catch the bus to BBC headquarters at Bush House in The Strand. As he approached the bus stop, Markov felt a sharp pain in his right thigh, and turned to see a man behind him bend down to pick up an umbrella. The man apologized in a thick foreign accent, then climbed into a nearby taxi and sped away.
On arriving at work, Markov inspected his leg and discovered a small, pimple-like swelling on his thigh and a matching spot of blood on his jeans. Otherwise, however, he was unhurt. But when he returned home at the end of the day, he suddenly began to feel extremely ill, spiking a high fever. The following morning, his condition had deteriorated so much that his wife had him admitted to St. James’s hospital. Delirious, Markov insisted he had been poisoned by the Bulgarian government, but few of his doctors believed him. Instead, the attending physician, Dr. Bernard Riley, tested Markov for a host of potential ailments – even a venomous snakebite. He did, however, order an X-ray of the swelling on Markov’s leg, but this revealed nothing. On account of his high white cell count, Markov was diagnosed with septicemia or blood poisoning and placed in intensive care. Yet despite the doctors’ best efforts, Markov died four days later on September 11, aged 49.
While the doctors at St. James did not take Markov’s claims of poisoning seriously, the Metropolitan Police did, and ordered a thorough autopsy of his body. The autopsy was conducted by Rufus Crompton, who rediscovered the tiny puncture wound and swelling on Markov’s right thigh and extracted tissue samples from the area for further analysis. These samples were sent to Porton Down, the British Ministry of Defense’s chemical and biological weapons laboratory. Here they were analyzed by Research Medical Officer David Gall, who soon made an unusual discovery: embedded in one tissue sample was a tiny metal pellet, 1.5 millimeters in diameter – smaller than the head of a pin. Further examination revealed that the pellet was made of a platinum-iridium alloy and cross-drilled with two 0.35mm holes, forming an x-shaped cavity only 0.28 cubic millimeters in volume. Though no traces of poison were ever detected, Markov’s symptoms and the miniscule dose used ruled out all but one culprit: ricin.
Ricin is a lectin or carbohydrate-binding protein found in the seeds of the castor oil plant, Ricinus communis. These seeds are processed worldwide to produce castor oil, used in a wide variety of products including soaps, waxes, polishes, lubricants, and laxatives. While the process of making castor oil destroys all traces of ricin, making it safe for human consumption, the leftover bean waste contains high levels of the toxin, which can be readily extracted. Once inside the body, ricin inhibits the action of ribosomes, structures inside cells which assemble amino acids into proteins. The body’s cells are thus unable to produce the proteins they require to maintain proper functioning, leading to multiple organ failure and eventually death. When injected, the median lethal dose for ricin is only around 22 micrograms – exactly the amount contained in the pellet found in Georgi Markov’s leg.
Based on their analysis and Markov’s testimony prior to his death, scientists at Porton Down hypothesized that the pellet had been fired into Markov’s leg using an air rifle disguised as an umbrella – the same umbrella Markov had seen being picked up by the fleeing foreign stranger. The pellet had also likely been coated in a sugar-like substance designed to melt at human body temperature, causing it to release its toxic payload immediately after injection.
This theory was bolstered by the fact that just three weeks earlier, another Bulgarian exile and dissident, Vladimir Kostov, had suffered a nearly identical attack. On August 27, Kostov, the former head of the Paris Bureau of the Bulgarian State Radio and TV Network, was leaving the Arc de Triomphe metro station when he heard a sharp crack and felt a stinging pain in the right side of his back. A platinum-iridium pellet identical to the one found in Georgi Markov was later extracted from the wound, though mercifully it failed to release its poison and Kostov made a complete recovery.
Just days after Markov’s death, a joint investigation was launched by Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Squad, Special Branch, and the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police. Their first order of business was to track down the taxi which had driven the alleged assassin from the scene, in the hopes of obtaining a more detailed description. Yet despite questioning hundreds of taxi drivers, the investigators came up empty. Soon, every other lead dried up, and the case went cold. Georgi Markov was buried at the Church of St. Candida and Holy Cross in Dorset, the identity of his assassin still a mystery.
It was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that further details of the Markov Affair began to come to light. Two former KGB officers, Oleg Kalugin and Oleg Gordievsky, publicly confirmed that the KGB had indeed developed ricin-firing umbrellas, and that several such devices were provided to the Bulgarian Secret Service. Indeed, following the collapse of the Bulgarian communist regime in 1989, a stockpile of assassin umbrellas was discovered in the Ministry of the Interior in Sofia. Kalugin and Gordievsky further identified the perpetrator in both the Kostov and Markov assassinations as Fransesco Gullino, a Danish hitman of Italian extraction. In 1970, Gullino was arrested for smuggling drugs and currency into Bulgaria, and recruited into the Bulgarian Secret Service. Given the codename “Agent Picadilly”, he worked out of Denmark as an antiques salesman – a cover which allowed him to travel freely throughout Europe without raising suspicion. Bulgarian records indicate Gullino flew to London three times in 1977 and 1978, leaving the day after Georgi Markov was attacked. In spite of these revelations, however, UK investigators were unable to track down and apprehend Gullino, who remains officially at large.
With the collapse of communism in Bulgaria, Georgi Markov’s image and reputation were gradually rehabilitated, and in 2000 the author was posthumously awarded the Order of Stara Planina, Bulgaria’s highest civilian honor. The citation for the award praised Markov’s:
“…significant contribution to the Bulgarian literature, drama and non-fiction and for his exceptional civic position and confrontation to the Communist regime.”
While assassination by poisoned umbrella may seem like the sort of absurd incident that could only have taken place during the Cold War, astonishingly a similar crime was committed in Hanover, Germany as recently as 2011. On July 15 of that year, 40-year-old software engineer Christoph Bulwin was walking home from work when he noticed a strange man waiting on the sidewalk ahead of him, holding an umbrella. Instinctively, Bulwin crossed the street, but the man followed him and stabbed him in the left buttock with the umbrella, to the end of which he had fixed a syringe. Bulwin fought back and chased his assailant, but he managed to escape.
Believing he had been maliciously infected with HIV or some other bloodborne pathogen, Bulwin immediately had himself examined by a doctor, but every test turned up negative. However, a week later he began to feel ill, his condition rapidly deteriorating until, at the end of August, he slipped into a coma. Blood work revealed levels of mercury 2,000 times higher than normal, indicating that Bulwin had been injected with methylmercury, an extremely neurotoxic compound. Though at first his condition seemed to improve, Bulwin remained in a coma for ten months before dying from a seizure in May 2012. Though police managed to find witnesses who claimed to have seen the assailant and compile a detailed description, they were ultimately unable to track him down. The killer’s identity – and his motives for killing Christoph Bulwin – remain a mystery to this day.
So if there is a moral to this whole macabre saga, it might be: beware of strange people with umbrellas. Or, if you happen to be a suave international super spy, be sure to return all your equipment intact. There is no telling what nasty surprises your long-suffering quartermaster might cook up for you…
Expand for References
From the Archive, 14 September 1978: Bulgarian Dissident Killed by Poisoned Umbrella at London Bus Stop, The Guardian, September 13, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/sep/14/bulgaria-umbrella-murder-archive-1978
Nelsson, Richard, The Poison-Tipped Umbrella: the Death of Georgi Markov in 1978 – Archive, The Guardian, September 9, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/from-the-archive-blog/2020/sep/09/georgi-markov-killed-poisoned-umbrella-london-1978
Facts About Ricin, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/ricin/facts.asp#:~:text=Ricin%20is%20a%20poison%20found,in%20water%20or%20weak%20acid.
Georgi Markov – The Umbrella Assassination, https://web.archive.org/web/20061013001331/http://www.portfolio.mvm.ed.ac.uk/studentwebs/session2/group12/georgie.htm
Walsh, Nick, Markov’s Umbrella Assassin Revealed, The Guardian, June 6, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/06/nickpatonwalsh
Albers, Anne et al, Another Umbrella Murder? – a Rare Case of Minamata Disease, Springer Link, April 22, 2020, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12024-020-00247-y
Gardner, Tom, German Man Stabbed With Poison Umbrella Dies a Year After Attack Which Has Chilling Echoes of Infamous Markov Assassination, The Daily Mail, May 12, 2012, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2143522/German-man-stabbed-poison-umbrella-dies-year-attack-chilling-echoes-infamous-Markov-assassination.html
Brown, Jonathan, Poison Umbrella Murder Case is Reopened, The Independent, June 20, 2008, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/poison-umbrella-murder-case-is-reopened-851022.html
The post The Most Fiendish of All Spy Gadgets appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Most of our nightly dreams are either traumatic conga lines of unresolved anxiety, or a hodgepodge of random, incoherent nonsense that makes perfect sense while we’re asleep but quickly fades into irrelevance once we awake. But for some people, dreams can be far more useful; indeed, they can change the world. Such was the case for German chemist August Kekulé, who in 1861dozed off in front of his fireplace and awoke with the solution to a difficult theoretical problem. This is the story of how a dream changed chemistry forever.
Friedrich August Kekulé was born on September 7, 1829 in Darmstadt, Hesse, the son of civil servant Ludwig Kekulé.As a child he excelled at languages, drawing, and science, and was originally intended by his family to become an architect. However, while studying at the University of Geissen in 1848, he was – in his words – “seduced” by a lecture from the great chemist Justus von Liebig and decided to change careers. In 1850 he began working in von Liebig’s laboratory – where he studied the composition of gluten and wheat bran – before graduating with a doctorate in Chemistry in 1852. But as no teaching positions were then available, he continued his post-doctoral work in Paris, London, and Chur in Switzerland.
It was while working in London under chemist John Stenhouse that Kekulé first encountered the emerging field in which he would eventually make his name: organic chemistry. For centuries, scientists believed that “organic” substances produced by living organisms were fundamentally different from regular “inorganic” substances, being imbued with some kind of intangible “life force.” This doctrine was known as vitalism. In the early 19th Century, however, this view began to crumble as chemists demonstrated that supposedly “organic” molecules could be synthesized from inorganic ones in the laboratory. For example, in 1828, German chemist Friedrich Wöhler heated ammonium cyanate – a supposedly “inorganic” molecule – to produce urea. In a letter to fellow chemist Jacob Berzelius, Wöhler boasted that:
“In a manner of speaking, I can no longer hold my chemical water. I must tell you that I can make urea without the use of kidneys of any animal, be it man or dog.”
Chemists eventually realized that organic substances obeyed the same chemical rules as inorganic ones, but all had one thing in common: they were based on carbon, the fundamental building block of life on earth. Soon after this discovery, the newly-established field of organic chemistry began taking the world by storm. The emerging illuminating gas industry produced as a byproduct large quantities of a dark, sticky substance called coal tar, which chemists began probing in search of useful organic compounds. They were not to be disappointed. In 1856, British chemist William Perkin used coal tar to create the world’s first synthetic dye, mauvine, which not only revolutionized fashion but also laid the groundwork for the modern global chemical industry. Research into coal tar and other hydrocarbons soon yielded a veritable cornucopia of revolutionary products, from medicines to cosmetics, paints, and lubricants.
However, most of these early discoveries were made by blind trial and error, for chemists still did not fully understand how atoms came together to form molecules. In the early 19th century, chemists like Sir Humphry Davy had used electricity to split chemical compounds into their constituent elements, allowing their chemical formulae – that is, the number of each element within a given molecule – to be determined. Based on these experiments, Davy concluded that chemical compounds were composed of atoms of opposite charges, held together by electrostatic attraction. However, while this explanation worked well for simple compounds like sodium chloride – AKA table salt – it did not explain the vast number of substances composed of atoms with the same electric charge. Indeed, in many compounds an electrostatically positive atom like hydrogen could be replaced by an electrostatically negative one like chlorine with little change to the compound’s physical or chemical properties. Another mystery was how two or more compounds could have such different properties while being composed of the same elements. For instance, the compounds Propadiene, Propyne, and Cyclopropene all have the same chemical formula: C3H4.
In 1856, Kekulé was hired as an unsalaried lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, where he quickly distinguished himself as an energetic and highly original thinker and a much-respected teacher. In 1858 he moved to the University of Ghent in Belgium, and again in 1867 to the University of Bonn in Germany, where he would remain for the rest of his career. It was while at the University of Ghent that Kekulé made most of his major contributions to chemistry. Building on the observations of other chemists, Kekulé recognized that different atoms had different capacities to combine with other atoms – what Berzelius called atomicity but Kekulé dubbed valenz or “valency” – the term still used to this day. For example, hydrogen can only bond with one other atom and thus has a valence of one; sulfur has a valence of 2, Nitrogen 3, Carbon 4 and so on. Today, we know that valency results from the number of electrons in an atom’s outer electron shell, which can be shared with other atoms to form covalent bonds. Meanwhile, bonds formed by electrostatic attraction between oppositely-charged atoms are known as ionic bonds. Of course, in Kekulé’s day, the existence of atoms was purely theoretical and nothing was known of their structure. Nonetheless, the theory of valency proved extremely useful, with Kekulé theorizing that all organic compounds were built on a chain or “backbone” of carbon atoms linked together with single, double, or triple bonds. As carbon had a valency of 4, this allowed 1, 2 or 3 other atoms like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, or chlorine to bond with each carbon atom.
Another idea that Kekulé incorporated into his theories was the concept of isomers, first proposed by Jacob Berzelius. Berzelius posited that the reason compounds with different properties could have the same chemical formula was that the atoms in each compound were arranged in a different geometric configuration. For example, Propadiene consists of a chain of three carbon atoms linked together with double bonds with two hydrogen atoms bonded to each end; while in Propyne the central carbon is single-bonded to one carbon and triple-bonded to the other, with one hydrogen atom bonded to one end of the molecule and three to the other. Finally, in Cyclopropene the three carbon atoms are linked not in a straight line but in a ring with one double and two single bonds, with two hydrogen atoms bonded to one carbon and one hydrogen to each of the other two. By combining the theory of valency with the theory of isomers, Kekulé posited that chemists should be able to work out the structure of every possible organic compound. It was simply a matter of swapping out different atoms in different locations on a molecule and noting the result. These ideas laid the groundwork for the field of structural chemistry, though Kekulé was not alone in this endeavour, with Scottish chemist Archibald Scott Couper and Russian chemist Aleksandr Butlerov developing similar theories at around the same time.
Kekulé published his ideas on structural chemistry in two groundbreaking articles published in 1858 as well as his popular textbook Lehrbuch der Organischen Chemie, first published in 1859.But while these works brought Kekulé much acclaim, not all his ideas were warmly received. For example, Kekulé developed a system for visually depicting valency and bonds between atoms in which monovalent atoms like hydrogen and chlorine were depicted as simple circles and polyvalent atoms like carbon and nitrogen as elongated ovals with multiple lobes. Chemists ridiculed these figures as “sausage formulae” and instead adopted the simpler “ball and stick” model developed by Scottish chemist Alexander Brown.
Kekulé’s theories allowed chemists to work out the structures of many common organic compounds, but the nature of one substance remained stubbornly elusive: Benzene.
Benzene has been known since the Sixteenth Century in the form of Benzoic Acid, produced by distilling the resin of the Styrax tree and used in perfumes and topical ointments. However, it was not until 1825 that British scientist Michael Faraday first isolated pure Benzene via the distillation of coal tar. By the time Kekulé began his research, Benzene was known to have the chemical formula C6H6. However, unlike other organic compounds chemists had studied thus far, Benzene did not follow the rules dictated by Kekulé’s valency and carbon backbone model. According to the former, carbon was tetravalent, meaning it could form bonds with four other atoms. Yet compared to other known organic compounds such as Methane – formula CH4 – the Benzene molecule was strangely stable and unsaturated, containing far fewer hydrogen atoms than expected. This meant that many of the carbon atoms in the molecule had to be linked via double bonds. However, if Benzene was built around a chain of 6 carbon atoms, at least one bond had to be single, otherwise there would not be enough valencies left for the last two hydrogen atoms. This single bond, in turn, could exist in three different positions in the chain – centre, left, or right – meaning that Benzene should have two different structural isomers, each with the last two hydrogen atoms bonded at different positions in the carbon chain. Yet chemists could only ever find one isomer of Benzene. Furthermore, replacing one of the hydrogen atoms with another atom – for example, chlorine – should have produced two possible mono-substitution isomers: one with an end hydrogen substituted and one with a central hydrogen substituted. But again, only one such isomer could be found. It was a puzzle which threatened to undermine the entire foundation of organic chemistry.
It was then that Kekulé had one of the most famous revelations in the history of science – arguably on par with Archimedes’ alleged “Eureka!” moment or Newton’s fabled apple. As he later recounted in an 1890 lecture, the event occurred in Ghent during the winter of 1861, while Kekulé was working on his organic chemistry textbook:
“I was sitting writing at my textbook; but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair towards the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time I also spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.”
This was not the first time dreams had come to Kekulé’s aid. Allegedly, his ideas about the tetravalency of carbon were inspired by a daydream about “dancing molecules” he had aboard a London omnibus in 1855. Based on his second, more famous dream, Kekulé formed a bold new hypothesis: the Benzene molecule wasn’t linear, but ring-shaped, with an inner, hexagonal ring of six carbon atoms linked by alternating single and double bonds and six hydrogen atoms bonded to the outside. This theory solved nearly all the problems with the old linear model, explaining at a stroke why Benzene could be so unsaturated while remaining stable and why the molecule had only one structural and one mono-substitution isomer: as the molecule is rotationally symmetrical, all the hydrogen atoms are structurally equivalent to one another, meaning that substituting one is the same as substituting another.
But despite their elegance and power, Kekulé did not immediately publish his ideas. This delay was likely due to problems in Kekulé’s personal life. The year after his famous dream, Kekulé married Stephanie Drory, daughter of an English official in the Belgian illuminating gas industry. Tragically, Stephanie died only a year later while giving birth to the couple’s only son, sending Kekulé into a years-long depression during which he only carried out routine teaching work. It was not until 1865 that Kekulé finally resumed his research, and on May 11 of that year he presented his theory of the cyclical structure of Benzene in a historic paper titled Some Notes on Several Substitution Products of Benzene. In the paper, he predicted that if his theory were correct, Benzene should have three di-substituted isomers – that is, in which two of the hydrogen atoms are replaced: orthobenzene, in which two adjacent hydrogens are replaced; metabenzene, in which alternate hydrogens are replaced; and parabenzene, in which opposite hydrogens are replaced. Over the next few years, Kekulé and his colleagues soon succeeded in isolating all three isomers, further strengthening his theory.
Kekulé’s breakthrough revolutionized the field of organic chemistry, as the vast majority of organic compounds were found to contain one or more Benzene rings. Today, these are known as aromatic compounds. So influential was Kekulé’s discovery, that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate celebration to mark the 25th anniversary of his landmark 1865 paper. It was during this event that Kekulé first publicly recounted the story of his now-famous 1861 dream about snakes biting their tails. Whether this event actually happened or was merely a whimsical invention made after the fact has been debated, but as a dream cannot exactly be witnessed by others, we will never know. As a further honour, in 1895 Kekulé was ennobled by Kaiser Wilhelm II as August Kekule von Stradonitz. Interestingly, this title dropped the accent from the end of Kekulé’s, name, which had been added in 1806 so celebrate the annexation of the Grand Duchy of Hesse by Napoleon.
Yet despite their outsized influence, Kekulé’s theories were not without their detractors. For example, in 1872 one of Kekulé’s students, Albert Ladenburg, pointed out that Benzene should have two different ortho isomers depending on whether the two substituted hydrogen atoms were separated by a single or double carbon bond. In response, Kekulé proposed a dynamic model wherein the double and single bonds in the benzene ring continually swapped places, making every position in the ring structurally equivalent. But Kekulé was unable to put forward any plausible mechanism to explain this behaviour, leading Ladenberg and others to develop alternative molecular structures for Benzene. For example, Ladenberg’s proposed structure, prismane, took the form of two rings of three carbon atoms linked together to form a triangular prism, while British chemist James Dewar’s structure comprised two square rings of four carbon atoms linked together. However, both isomers were later synthesized and found to exhibit no Benzene-like properties. Then, in 1928, American chemist Linus Pauling proposed that the Benzene molecule resonated between two quantum-mechanical structures, producing the same effect as Kekulé’s dynamic model. Kekulé, it turned out, had been right all along.
Sadly, Kekulé’ professional success was not matched by his personal life. In 1867 he became a professor at the University of Bonn, where he would remain for the rest of his career. Nine years later, he married his housekeeper, Louise Hôgel, with which he had three more children. Unfortunately, the marriage proved an unhappy one, and Kekulé’s health soon began to fail. He died of influenza on July 13, 1896, aged 66. But Kekulé’s legacy lives on, for the aromatic compounds he helped discover form the basis of countless products which make our modern world possible, from plastics to medicines to fuels. And it all started with a dream.
Expand for References
Rocke, Alan, August Kekule von Stradonitz, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/August-Kekule-von-Stradonitz
Sutton, Mike, Snakes, Sausages, and Structural Formulae, Chemistry World, October 8, 2015, https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/snakes-sausages-and-structural-formulae/9038.article
Robinson, Andrew, Chemistry’s Visual Origins, Nature, May 5, 2010, https://www.nature.com/articles/465036a
August Kekule and Archibald Scott Couper, Science History Institute Museum & Library, https://www.sciencehistory.org/education/scientific-biographies/august-kekule-and-archibald-scott-couper/
Scientist of the Day: August Kekule, Linda Hall Library, September 7, 2017, https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/august-kekule/
Rocke, Alan, Friedrich Wöhler, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Friedrich-Wohler
Aromaticity of the Benzene Ring, 22nd European Symposium on Organic Chemistry, July 9-13, 2023, https://www.esoc2023.org/kekule
Kekule Von Stradonitz, (Friedrich) August, Encyclopedia.com, June 8, 2018, https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/chemistry-biographies/august-kekule-von-stradonitz
The post How a Breakthrough in a Dream Changed Chemistry Forever appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In one of the more memorable scenes of the 1966 camp masterpiece Batman: the Movie, the Caped Crusader ascends a rope ladder to the Batcopter when a large – and very rubbery – shark clamps its jaws around his leg. Unable to dislodge the fiendish fish, Batman calls up to Robin in the Batcopter and tells him to bring down the Shark Repellent Bat Spray. Wasting no time, Boy Wonder nimbly descends the ladder, Batman sprays the shark in the face, and the sinister squalus lets go and falls back into the water – only to promptly explode. Holy cinema, Batman! But while Batman’s spray is obviously meant as a joke, does real shark repellent actually exist – and if so, does it actually work? This is the surprisingly fascinating history of shark repellent, which includes work done by famed chef extraordinaire, Julia Child, among countless others, all to try to keep your limbs attached while foolishly deciding to dip your toes into the big blue.
The quest to develop the first shark repellent was launched in the early 1940s by Henry Field, anthropologist to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Up until this point, the U.S. Navy had seen little use for such a substance, as shark attacks were exceedingly rare and considered an insignificant threat to naval personnel. In 1941, however, Field learned of an incident in which a navy aircraft crashed in the Pacific Ocean after running out of fuel. The pilot swam for hours to reach the nearest land, dragging the body of his dead copilot behind him. Throughout the journey, he was followed by hungry sharks, who slowly tore his comrade’s body to pieces. While objectively a freak occurrence, the story nonetheless spread like wildfire through the Navy’s ranks. Fearing a serious drop in morale, Field urged Roosevelt to approve research into shark repellent.
Roosevelt agreed, and in 1942, the task of developing an effective shark repellent was given to the newly-formed Office of Strategic Services or OSS – the precursor to the CIA. Initial research was conducted at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts under the leadership of Stewart Springer, an ichthyologist and commercial fisherman and a leading expert on sharks. As large, potentially man-eating sharks are rather difficult to work with, Springer conducted his experiments on metre-long dogfish sharks. The sharks were kept in large tanks and conditioned to eat fresh bait from small wire cages. By withholding food for certain periods of time, Springer was able to adjust the sharks’ hunger level and thus gauge the effectiveness of whatever repellent substance was being tested.
Unfortunately, at the time relatively little was known about the physiology and behaviour of sharks, leaving Springer with little to go on except bits of often dubious “shark lore” accumulated by generations of fishermen. So Springer simply decided to test any substance that might have a repellent effect. He first tried rotenone, a powerful toxin known to kill fish at low concentrations. Like cyanide, rotenone works by interrupting cellular respiration, preventing fish from absorbing and using oxygen and causing them to suffocate. Alas, as Springer quickly discovered, the concentrations required to kill even small sharks would also kill a human. So Springer tried other well-known poisons, such as sodium cyanide and the sedative quinacrine, but these did little to deter the sharks; they simply ate the poisoned bait and died later. Dozens of other substances produced similarly mixed results.
Running out of ideas, Springer turned to some traditional shark lore. Knowing that fishermen along the Florida coast hung shark carcasses from their boats to keep sharks away from their catches, Springer analyzed the fluid extracted from decomposing sharks in order to pinpoint the active ingredients. He discovered that the two most potent compounds were ammonium acetate and acetic acid – both common and inexpensive chemicals. Knowing also that copper sulphate was widely used by sailors and fishermen to deter marine growth like barnacles, Springer combined this with acetic acid to form the compound copper acetate.
Among the dozens of personnel involved in the development of this shark repellent was 30-year-old Julia McWilliams of Pasadena, California. Rejected by both the Army and Navy’s women’s divisions due to her height – she stood 6’ 2” – McWilliams was readily accepted by the OSS and deployed to Ceylon – today Sri Lanka – and then China. Her first assignment was typing up thousands of file cards of government officials, but she soon grew bored of this and directly lobbied OSS founder and director William ‘Wild Bill” Donovan for more challenging work – including standardizing Springer’s shark repellent formula. As it happened, this would not be her last recipe, for after the war she would marry fellow OSS officer Paul Cushing Child, discover a love for French cooking, and forever change the American culinary and television landscape as the one and only Julia Child.
But while copper acetate performed well in laboratory testing, there was no substitute for actual field trials. So Springer’s team relocated to St. Augustine, Florida, a busy fishing port known to be frequented by several varieties of sharks. Here, tests were conducted by hanging two bags of bait off the stern of a slow-moving boat: one untreated to act as a control, and the other fitted with a slowly-dissolving packet of copper acetate. Initial results were remarkable; while 50 sharks of different types were caught on the unprotected bait, the bait protected with copper acetate was only attacked twice.
But, there was a catch: while copper acetate worked well against individual sharks, it was far less effective against large groups engaged in a “feeding frenzy.” As most shark attack scenarios were likely to involve large groups of personnel entering the water at once, this was something of a problem. Serendipitously, however, around this time Springer’s team was joined by chemists from the Naval Research Laboratory, who were experimenting with soluble fluorescent dye packs to help rescue aircraft spot servicemen lost at sea. Inspired by this research, Springer wondered whether adding an opaque dye to the shark repellent might increase its effectiveness, obscuring the user’s body like the ink secreted by octopuses and squid. A suitably dense black dye was soon found in the form of Nigrosine, produced by the Calco Chemical Division of the American Cyanamid Company. Incredibly, in double bait-line testing, this dye proved nearly as effective as the copper acetate – even at night when the dye was not even visible to sharks. Further tests conducted in the Gulf of Guayaquil in Ecuador and Biloxi, Mississippi in December 1942 produced similar results; the team finally had a winner. Springer mixed the Nigrosine with the copper acetate, pressed it into a 3-inch disk-shaped cake, and packed it in a waterproof pouch that could be attached to a sailor or airman’s life preserver. The resulting repellent was dubbed “Shark Chaser.”
However, the Navy remained skeptical, with one lead scientist pointing out in May 1943 that:
“…none of us expected that the chemical would really function when the animals were stirred up in a mob behavior pattern.”
And while Shark Chaser was mainly intended as a morale booster, some worried that issuing it to servicemen would have the opposite effect, amplifying already overblown fears of man-eating sharks. In the end, however, it was decided that some protection was better than none, and Shark Chaser was issued to sailors and airmen along with an illustrated pamphlet titled Shark Sense dispelling some of the more common myths regarding shark attacks.
Distribution of Shark Chaser remained modest until July 30, 1945, when the U.S. Navy suffered the worst shark attack incident in its history. On that day, the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis, fresh from delivering parts of the Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima to Tinian island, was torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese submarine I-58. Some 900 sailors found themselves adrift at sea for four days; so secret was the Indianapolis’s mission that her sinking was not immediately reported. In addition to dehydration and hypothermia, the survivors were soon set upon by dozens of oceanic whitetip and tiger sharks, which are thought to have killed up to 150 men – and if this sounds strangely familiar, yes: this is the same disaster Robert Shaw’s character Quint recounts in the infamous monologue scene in Jaws.
In the wake of the Indianapolis disaster, the Navy began handing Shark Chaser like candy. This practice continued for decades, with packets even being issued to the first Mercury and Gemini astronauts in case they had to leave their capsules after splashdown. But while the Navy claimed that Shark Chaser was 70% effective, experiments conducted by the aptly-named biologist Albert Tester at Enewetak Atoll in 1959 confirmed that many had already suspected for years: Shark Chaser was effectively a placebo with negligible repellent effect. By the 1970s, Shark Chaser was no longer being issued.
At around the same time as Shark Chaser was being phased out, researchers discovered that pardaxin, a toxin secreted by a fish called the Red Sea Moses Sole, is highly effective at repelling sharks. However, while extensive efforts have been made to turn pardaxin into an effective shark repellent, these have proven unsuccessful. Not only is the chemical highly perishable and difficult to store, it is only effective at high concentrations, meaning it would have to be injected directly into a shark’s mouth. Another line of research has focused on soap-like surfactant compounds like sodium lauryl sulfate, which can repel sharks at concentrations of 100 parts per million. However, most soluble substances released into open seawater drop below such concentrations within minutes, making this yet another dead end.
A more exotic approach to repelling sharks has been investigated by the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, Florida. In 2017, researchers at the center announced that they had successfully created a synthetic version of hagfish slime. A primitive, eel-like creature with no scales, bones, or jaws, when attacked, hagfish secrete a special mixture of proteins that, on contact with water, extend to over 30 centimeters in length, forming a tough, viscous gel that can ensnare and suffocate the attacker. To produce the slime in large quantities without having to harvest hagfish, the NSWC genetically modified E.Coli bacteria to manufacture the required proteins – similarly to how insulin is produced commercially. In addition to repelling sharks, the Navy foresees using the synthetic slime for protecting ships against torpedoes, mines, and other explosive weapons.
Another effective means of repelling sharks is to use electricity. Shark’s noses are dotted with hundreds of small organs called Ampulae of Lorenzini, which detect the electric impulses generated by their prey. Sharks are thus highly sensitive to electromagnetism, and can be deterred by a powerful enough field. Indeed, several companies including Sharkbanz and SharkDefense Technologies LLC of West Milford, New Jersey, already produce small electromagnetic devices that can be strapped to a diver’s wrist or attached to their equipment to help ward off sharks. SharkDefense is also experimenting with the use of synthetic semiochemicals – i.e. shark pheromones – as a potential chemical repellent – a technology that has shown much promise. And in 2014, the KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board of South Africa announced that it would be installing a system of submerged electrified cables under popular beaches to help keep sharks at bay.
Interestingly, the approach that inspired the development of Shark Chaser – mimicking the odour of dead shark – might just make a comeback. In 2004, researchers Samuel Gruber and Eric Stroud, working at the Shark Lab on the island of Bimini, announced that they had developed a highly effective repellent called A2, derived from extracts of decomposing sharks. Unlike paradaxin, A2 is non-perishable and effective at very small concentrations, with only a few milliliters per minute needed to repel sharks indefinitely from a piece of submerged bait.
Yet despite these advancements, the greatest defense against shark attack is sheer probability. Every year there are an average of 100 shark attacks worldwide, only around 5 of which are fatal. This gives the average person a less than 0.00000001% chance of being attacked by a shark – far less than being struck by lightning or being killed by a falling vending machine. By contrast, some 50 million sharks are accidentally caught each year by commercial fishing boats, while countless more are actively hunted for sport, food, or to protect those very same fisheries. For this reason, many newer shark repellent technologies are being developed not to protect people from sharks, but the other way around.
Expand for References
Tuve, Richard, The Technology of the U.S. Navy “Shark Chaser”, U.S. Naval Institute, May 1947, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1947/may/technology-u-s-navy-shark-chaser
The US Government Issued Sailors and Soldiers Shark Repellent That Didn’t Work – Here’s Why, SciTechDaily, January 13, 2020, https://scitechdaily.com/us-government-issued-sailors-and-soldiers-shark-repellent-that-didnt-work-heres-why-video/
Kofman, Jeffrey, Scientists Create a Stinky Shark Repellent, ABC News, December 22, 2004, https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=350597&page=1
Thompson, Helen, Do Shark Repellents Really Work? Smithsonian Magazine, July 8, 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/do-shark-repellents-really-work-180955843/
Iozzio, Corinne, An Electric Fence Wards Off Sharks, Smithsonian Magazine, November 25, 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/electric-fence-wards-sharks-180953380/
Frost, Natasha, Julia Child’s Spy Days Included Work on a Shark Repellent, History, March 29, 2023, https://www.history.com/news/julia-child-oss-spy-wwii-shark-repellent
Cindy, Dave, When Julia Child Worked for a Spy Agency Fighting Sharks, The Washington Post, May 2, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/02/julia-child-hbo-oss-sharks/
Julia Child and the OSS Recipe for Shark Repellent, CIA, June 14, 2017, https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/julia-child-and-the-oss-recipe-for-shark-repellent/
Researchers Tout Shark Repellent, NBC News, July 30, 2004, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna5560773
The US Navy is Synthesizing Hagfish Slime to Defend Against Torpedoes and Sharks, Interesting Engineering, July 10, 2017, https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/us-navy-sythesizing-hagfish-slime-defend-against-torpedoes-and-sharks
The post Is Shark Repellent a Real Thing? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
It is one of the most widespread and recognizable religious symbols in the world: the anguished figure of a man, naked but for a loincloth and crown of thorns, hands and feet brutally nailed to a wooden cross. The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth in 33 C.E. is perhaps the single most famous and consequential act of capital punishment, spawning the world’s largest religion and forever changing the course of human history. Yet, despite its sheer ubiquity in Christian iconography, there is something rather abstract about the practice of crucifixion, for unlike in other forms of execution such as hanging or beheading, the cause of death is not immediately obvious. Does the victim simply die of thirst and exposure, or is some other mechanism at play? And who first came up with this cruel and agonizing form of punishment? Let’s find out as we dive into the strange and barbaric history of crucifixion.
Though the exact person to think up crucifixion is unknown, it is thought to have originated with the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, who likely developed it from the even older pleasant practice of impalement. Among the earliest written descriptions of crucifixion comes from Greek historian Herodotus, who recounted an incident from the reign of Persian emperor Darius I. In 519 B.C.E., a neighbouring monarch named Arakha declared himself emperor Nebuchadnezzar IV and captured the key city of Babylon – just outside modern-day Baghdad in Iraq. In response, Darius sent his top general, Intaphrenes, to recapture the city. When Babylon fell with little resistance, Darius had Arakha and 3,000 of his followers crucified for their defiance.
From Mesopotamia and Persia, the practice spread across the Mediterranean, likely carried by Alexander the Great during his wars of conquest. To varying extents, crucifixion was practiced by the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Phoenicians, though the most prolific early practitioners were the Carthaginians – Phoenicians who settled in what is now Tunisia in North Africa. The Carthaginians used crucifixion not only as punishment but also a form of ritual sacrifice. For example, 6th Century B.C.E. general Malchus crucified his own son, Cartalo, to the god Baal in return for military victory. And during the Second Punic War of 218-201 B.C.E, Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca crucified 500 Roman soldiers captured in battle. This act likely inspired the Romans to adopt crucifixion for themselves because, sure, why not?
Indeed, while the Romans may not have invented crucifixion, they arguably perfected it, turning it into a truly horrific and degrading form of punishment reserved for only the lowest of the low in Roman society, such as slaves, foreigners, Christians, and political agitators – so degrading, in fact, that anyone who could prove Roman citizenship could opt for a different form of capital punishment, such as beheading. And according to writer and philosopher Cicero, it was even considered unacceptable to present a Roman citizen with the mere image of a cross. Aside from the execution of Jesus, and note after this video see our video: Is There Any Actual Hard Evidence Jesus Existed?, perhaps the most famous act of crucifixion took place in 71 BCE in the wake of the Third Servile War, when 100,000 slaves led by the gladiator Spartacus rebelled against the Roman government. Following the uprising’s defeat at the hands of Marcus Licinius Crassus and his legions, some 6,000 rebels were crucified along the Appian Way as a dire warning to any future would-be insurrectionists. However, crucifixion was seldom used in Rome itself, the practice being far more widespread in the outer fringes of the Empire. For example, thousands of Jews – including Jesus – were crucified in Roman Judea between 6 and 132 C.E., while hundreds of participants in British Queen Boudica’s failed uprising in 60 C.E. were executed in this manner. Rome’s enemies also often adopted the practice, with Germanic tribesmen crucifying dozens of Roman tax collectors in AD 28 as an act of defiance.
In the early days of Roman crucifixion, the condemned was simply hung from a tree or plain vertical pole called a crux simplex and left to die of exposure and dehydration. Over time, however, the Romans developed an elaborate ritual designed to inflict upon the victim the maximum amount of pain, suffering, and humiliation – indeed, the modern word excruciating comes from the Latin ex crucio – “from the cross.” First, the victim was stripped naked save for a loincloth and scourged across the back, buttocks, and upper legs with a whip known as a flagellum or flagrum, whose leather thongs were fitted with metal balls and bone tips to inflict even greater damage. Only a few classes of citizens were spared this initial punishment, including women, senators, and soldiers – though not, in the latter case, for the crime of desertion. On some occasions the victim would be subjected to further mutilation, such as having their tongue or eyes cut out.
The victim would then be forced to carry the implement of their demise to the site of execution, their path lined with jeering onlookers for maximum humiliation. Unlike what is usually depicted in the christian art, however, the victim would not carry the entire cross but rather just the crossbar or patibulum, the vertical post or stipes being permanently fixed in the ground and reused for multiple crucifixions. Nonetheless, this would have weighed up to 60 kilograms – quite the burden for the already-weakened victim. Ever creative, the Romans actually developed several different styles of crosses, with the familiar T-shaped Tau or Latin cross being known as the crux immissa. There was also the crux commissa, which was Y-shaped, and the crux decussata, which was X-shaped. There were also standard heights of crosses, the shorter model known as the crux sublimes and the shorter the crux humilis.
Arriving at the site of execution, the victim would then be tied – and often nailed – to the patibulum before being hoisted onto the stipes. Here again the traditional Christian depictions of crucifixion are slightly inaccurate, for nails driven through the palm would too easily be torn out by the victim’s weight. Instead, the nails were driven through the much stronger tissue and bones of the wrists. Once suspended from the cross, the victim’s buttocks would often be supported by a simple wooden seat known as a sedile or sedicula, and – less frequently – their feet by a block known as a suppedanum. If the feet were nailed to the cross, this would be done through the bones of the heel, which would not only prevent the nails from tearing free, but also inflict even more agony. Finally, a wooden panel called a titulus would be affixed to the cross, inscribed with the victim’s name and the nature of their crime. In the case of Jesus, the titulus famously bore the words Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum – “Jesus the Nazarene King of the Jews.” And, as in the case of Jesus, crucifixions were seldom carried out alone, with the Romans typically grouping several victims together as a form of spectacle. A contingent of soldiers was also posted at the execution site, forbidden to leave their posts until the condemned had breathed their last.
Death by crucifixion usually took between 2-3 days, though this was often hastened by the attending soldiers for obvious reasons. Common methods of accelerating death included breaking the victim’s legs – a practice known as crurifragium – stabbing them in the chest with a spear, striking a hard blow to the chest, or lighting a smoky fire beneath the cross to asphyxiate them. But absent such interventions, how do victims of crucifixion actually die?
The answer is complicated, as there are many potential mechanisms at work. Firstly, the scourging inflicted prior to crucifixion – in addition to the nails driven through the hands and feet – would have resulted in significant blood loss and hypovolaemic shock. This, combined with severe dehydration from being exposed to the elements without water, would be enough to kill the victim within a day or two. However, there was another, more insidious process at work. Suspension in this way would cause the victim’s body weight to push down on the diaphragm, making it very difficult for them to breathe out. With their shoulders likely dislocated, the only way for the victim to gain any reprieve would be to push up against their feet to relieve the pressure on their chest. But as the hours wore on, the victim would become ever more exhausted, until they finally became too weak to support themselves. And even this small reprieve was only possible if the victim’s feet were nailed to the cross or supported by a suppedanum; if their legs were unsupported or broken via crurifragium, there was no way to delay what happened next. Unable to exhale, the victim’s lungs – and consequently their bloodstream – would quickly become saturated with carbon dioxide, triggering an excruciating urge to breathe and causing the heart to beat faster to circulate the remaining oxygen around the body. Meanwhile, rising carbonic acid in the blood would begin to damage the capillaries, causing them to leak plasma and leading to a buildup of fluid around the heart and lungs – AKA pericardial and pleural effusion. Indeed, the gospels claim that when the Roman soldier Longinus pierced Jesus’s side with a spear to ensure he was dead, the wound oozed both blood and water – a phenomenon consistent with such a fluid buildup. Eventually, the combination of respiratory collapse and hypovolaemic shock would cause the heart to fail, leading to death by cardiac arrest.
The speed at which these effects set in is attested to by experiments performed by German radiologist Hermann Mödder, who in the 1940s hung volunteer medical students from crosses – mercifully with leather straps instead of nails – and monitored their vital signs. Within only six minutes, the students’ tidal volume – that is, the volume of air moved in and out of their lungs – decreased by 70%, while their blood pressure halved and heart rate doubled. And within 12 minutes they began to pass out. If, on the other hand, the students were allowed to support their weight for 20 seconds at a time, their condition improved significantly – and you thought your university program was torture!
Though the experiments only lasted 30-40 minutes due to wrist pain, Mödder concluded that the average crucifixion victim would last only 3-6 hours before suffering complete cardiopulmonary collapse. This suggests that supports like the sedile and suppedanum were deliberately added to prolong the victim’s suffering, and explains why the breaking of the legs via crurifragium so swiftly led to death. Alternatively, the breaking of large bones like the femur could have induced massive internal bleeding or fat embolization – that is, the release of fat globules from the bone marrow into the blood, which could block blood vessels and lead to cardiac arrest.
Yet this would likely have been little comfort for the average crucifixion victim, for the agonizing combination of dislocated shoulders, nails driven through the wrist and ankles, deep wounds from flagellation, and severe dehydration would have made even six hours seem like weeks. Occasionally, the Romans would crucify victims upside-down, as in the case of Jesus’ disciple St. Peter. While this was considered by far the most degrading form of crucifixion, mercifully the flow of blood to the victim’s head would quickly lead to unconsciousness, making the whole ordeal less physically – if not socially – excruciating.
After more than 500 years of refinement and use, crucifixion was finally abolished in Rome in 315 C.E. by Constantine, the first Christian emperor. However, crucifixion continued to be practiced intermittently over the next two millennia, with France in the Middle Ages often reserving the punishment for Jews and Heretics. Crucifixion was also used in feudal Japan into the early 19th Century, though with a twist: once the victim was fixed to the cross, the executioner would strategically shoot arrows at them to inflict a slow, agonizing death. Such is the brutality and humiliation associated with crucifixion that cases of the practice in modern times seldom fail to shock and enrage. For instance, in April 1915, it was reported that a Canadian soldier had been found near the Belgian town of Ypres, crucified to a barn door with German bayonets. The incident caused outrage in Canada and the other Entente powers, and was seized upon by propagandists as evidence of German barbarism and depravity. Despite this however, no concrete evidence of this incident has ever been found, meaning it was likely just a battlefield rumour or a deliberately crafted piece of black propaganda. In more recent years, crucifixion has been carried out by islamic militant groups like Al Qaeda and ISIL in Sudan and Iraq, and by the Saudi Arabian government – though in the latter case it is used as a form of gibbeting, in which the victim first being executed by beheading before having their body displayed on a cross as a warning to others.
Yet despite its apparent ubiquity, surprisingly little physical evidence remains of crucifixion in biblical times. This is likely due to the fact that crucifixion victims were usually cremated after execution, leaving few remains. However, in June 1968, construction workers in Jerusalem accidentally unearthed a number of tombs dating from the first Century C.E. Of the skeletons discovered in the tomb, one – identified as Yehohanan son of Chaggol – had a large nail driven through its heel bones – the first concrete evidence of Roman crucifixion ever discovered. What’s more, the skeleton revealed hitherto unknown details of Roman crucifixion methods. For example, no evidence was found of nails being driven through the wrists, indicating that Yehohanan was simply tied to the cross with ropes or leather thongs. Also, both heels showed evidence of penetration, leading archaeologists to speculate that Yehohanan’s feet had been nailed together to the cross in an awkward – and likely very painful – bent-leg posture. However, it was later realized that the nail discovered with the skeleton was too short to have penetrated both feet and the cross, meaning Yeohanan’s feet were instead nailed to either side of the stipes or upright. Still, much remains unknown about this ancient practice, for since 1968 only three other skeletons have been unearthed showing possible signs of crucifixion: one in Mendes, Egypt, one in La Larda, Italy, and one in Cambridgeshire, England.
And that is a brief and brutal history of the ancient and infamous practice of crucifixion. Let us know in the comments what you thought of our summary. Hopefully we nailed it.
Expand for References
Panati, Charles, Panati’s Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody, Harper & Row, New York, 1989
Retief, FP & Cillers, L, The History and Pathology of Crucifixion, South African Medical Journal, December 2003, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14750495/
Crucifixion, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/crucifixion-capital-punishment
Roman Crucifixion Methods Reveal the History of Crucifixion, Biblical Archaeology Society, January 13, 2024, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/crucifixion/roman-crucifixion-methods-reveal-the-history-of-crucifixion/
Seaver, Carl, The Strange and Brutal History of Crucifixion, History Defined, March 8, 2023, https://www.historydefined.net/history-of-crucifixion/
Mundir, Fathul, The Cross and the Crucified: a History and Culture of Crucifixion, Medium, October 19, 2023, https://medium.com/flamma-saga/the-cross-and-the-crucified-a-history-and-culture-of-crucifixion-c6b1406ca105
Chrier, Cahleen, The Science of Crucifixion, Azusa Pacific University, https://www.apu.edu/articles/the-science-of-the-crucifixion/
Tapalaga, Andrei, The Shocking History of Crucifixion, History of Yesterday, January 31, 2023, https://historyofyesterday.com/the-shocking-history-of-crucifixion/
Gershon, Livia, Rare Physical Evidence of Roman Crucifixion Found in Britain, Smithsonian Magazine, December 10, 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-physical-evidence-of-roman-crucifixion-found-in-britain-180979190/
The post Crucifying Your Own Son- Who Invented Crucifixion and How Does it Actually Kill You? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Has there ever been a piece of home decor that more perfectly encapsulates an era than the Lava Lamp? An icon of the psychedelic and hippie movements of the 1960s and 70s, this mesmerizing tube of undulating, brightly-coloured blobs is the perfect mood-setting accessory for when you just want to lay back in your bean bag chair, consume an illegal substance – or two – strum a few lines of your new protest song, and just groove, man. Given the lamp’s indelible association with the counterculture, it is perhaps unsurprising that its inventor was something of a cultural rebel himself – though not in the way you might think. And while the lava lamp might seem like a purely aesthetic object with no practical applications, today this psychedelic device performs a vital service that helps keep the internet safe and secure. So turn on, tune in, and drop out as we dive into the groovy history of the Lava Lamp.
Our story begins shortly after the Second World War with English businessman Edward Craven Walker. While outwardly the very model of the establishment “square” that the lava-lamp loving hippies would later despise, Walker was a more colourful figure than he at first appeared. Born in Singapore on July 4, 1918, Walker worked for the British-American Tobacco Company before enlisting in the Royal Air Force and flying de Havilland Mosquito aircraft on reconnaissance missions during the Second World War. After the war, he and his first wife Marjorie – whom he’d met and married during the war – returned to England, where Walker founded his own home-exchange travel business. Among his many interests, Walker was a devoted follower of the naturalist or nudist movement, a lifestyle he adopted after visiting a nudist colony on France’s Isle du Levant. Walker would later go on to found one of the UK’s most popular nudist colonies, the Bournemouth and District Outdoor Club, and in 1960 produced and exhibited the underwater nudist art film Travelling Light – the first such film to be publicly released in the UK. This was followed by Sunswept in 1961 and Eves on Skis in 1963.
In 1948, Walker was killing time in a Dorset pub when he noticed a strange device bubbling on the stove in the kitchen. Invented and later patented by one Donald Dunnet, the device was a novel type of egg timer constructed from a glass cocktail shaker filled with two immiscible liquids – mainly paraffin wax and water. As the pub’s owner explained, the device was placed in a pot of boiling water along with the eggs; when the blob of wax at the bottom melted and floated to the top, that meant the eggs were ready. Walker immediately saw a business opportunity, and he and his third wife Christine spent the next 15 years perfecting the design for a decorative lamp based on the same principles. The initial prototype was constructed from a lightbulb, a bottle of Tree Top Orange Squash drink syrup, and a mixture of liquids including paraffin wax and the solvent carbon tetrachloride. However, the exact formula remains a trade secret to this day, with the 1964 patent, filed by Walker’s associate George Smith, only revealing that:
“The liquid in which the globule is suspended is usually dyed water, but not necessarily so. The other liquid is chosen with very many considerations in mind, including the relative densities of the liquids at the desired operating temperature of the device…the fact that the liquids must be immiscible; the fact that the surface tension must be such that the globule does not adhere to the walls of the container; the material of the container; the relative coefficients of thermal expansion of the liquids; and the shapes that are to be obtained during operation. A suitable liquid for the globule has been found to comprise mineral oil, paraffin and a dye when it is intended to suspend it in water, for example, Ondina 17 with a light paraffin, carbon tetrachloride and a dye or dyes. However, undue shaking or sharp impacts, especially during transport of the display device, can cause total or partial emulsification of the globule.
According to the invention, one of the liquids has a melting point above room temperature or so viscous at room temperature that emulsification cannot take place at room temperature. Preferably, the said one liquid is such that the display properties of the device are attained at about 45-50. C.
In one form of the invention, the one liquid includes an additive in the form of a thickening or gelling agent which is soluble in said one liquid and causes it to have an increased viscosity or to gel at room temperature, i.e. when the heat source is turned off. At the operating temperature when the heat source is on, say 45º-50º C., the liquid becomes fluent so that the device may then carry out its proper function. An example of a gelling agent for globules of the aforementioned mineral oil composition is a wax, such as paraffin wax, or petroleum jelly.”
In 1963, Edward and Christine set up a small company called Crestworth, Ltd. in Poole, Dorset to sell their finalized design, which they dubbed the “Astro Lamp.” The original Astro featured a sleek, rocket-shaped body, a gold base drilled covered in tiny holes to simulate starlight, and a 1.5 litre glass globe containing either red or white lava and yellow or blue liquid. Yet despite its later countercultural associations, the Astro Lamp was originally marketed as a sophisticated conversation piece for middle and upper-class professionals, with Crestworth even producing an “Executive Model” in 1968 mounted on a walnut base with an integrated pen holder. However, the lamp soon caught the attention of the emerging psychedelic set, and after examples were purchased by popular musicians like David Bowie, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, sales went through the roof. In 1965, Walker exhibited the Astro Lamp at a novelty convention in Hamburg, Germany, where it was spotted by two American executives named Adolph Wertheimer and Hy Spector. The pair immediately purchased the American rights to the lamp and set up their own company in Chicago called Lava Brand Motion Lamps – AKA LavaLite – to manufacture and distribute them. Advertised as “Head Trips That Offered a Motion for Every Emotion”, the American lava lamps sold even better than the original British ones, and within a few years more than seven million were being sold worldwide every year. By the end of the decade the Lava Lamp had become a cultural icon, making appearances in popular television shows such as Dr Who, The Prisoner, Are You Being Served, and Carry on Laughing.
By the 1970s, however, the counterculture movement began to peter out, and the appeal of the Lava Lamp waned. By 1976, global sales had dropped to little over 10,000 a year. The lamp saw a brief resurgence in popularity in the late 1980s as the world went through its first cycle of 1960s nostalgia, but eventually the Craven-Walkers decided to get out of the business and in 1989 sold Crestworth to entrepreneur Cressida Granger, who re-launched the company under the name Mathmos – a reference to the sentient pool of lava in the hit 1968 sci-fi film Barbarella. The timing could not have been better, for the release of the 1997 film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery triggered another wave of 60s nostalgia, and lava lamps became all the rage once more. By the following year, Mathmos was selling nearly a million units per year. This revival came as little surprise to Edward Craven-Walker, who, waxing poetic on the immortal appeal of his invention, opined:
“I think it will always be popular. It’s like the cycle of life. It grows, breaks up, falls down and then starts all over again.”
Walker died in Ringwood, Hampshire on August 15, 2000, aged 82 and still enthusiastically embracing the nudist lifestyle he helped popularize.
While the lava lamp remains a pop-cultural icon – indeed, an example is on permanent display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC – it is, in the end, little more than a decorative novelty with no practical use – right? Nope! Walk into the San Fransisco headquarters of IT Service provider Cloudflare Inc, and in the lobby you will be confronted with a truly surreal sight: an entire wall covered in 100 swirling, bubbling lava lamps. But this groovy installation is not merely for decoration. Mounted on the ceiling above the wall is a video camera, which records the movements of the lamps and converts them into a string of random numbers. These numbers are then fed into a piece of software called a cryptographically-secure pseudorandom number generators or CSPRNG, which uses them to carry out the sophisticated encryption that keeps our online data secure.
While this might seem like a rather Rube Goldberg-esque method for generating random numbers, the plain truth is that not all randomness is created equal. For example, statistically speaking the digits of Pi are considered “random” because no number in the sequence appears more frequently than another. However, for data encryption to be secure, encryption keys – and the numbers used to generate them – must not only be random, they must be unpredictable – something the digits of Pi and other algorithmically-generated pseudorandom strings are most definitely not. This is where the lava lamps come in. Driven by an inherently chaotic form of thermodynamic turbulence known as Rayleigh-Taylor Instability, the movements of the lamps generate truly random, unpredictable number strings ideal for digital encryption. And as an added bonus, the fact the system is displayed in a public area adds to their effectiveness, for the images of people passing through the lobby or stopping to gawk at the lamps just adds further random noise to the output. But lava lamps are not the only means of achieving such randomness; for example, Cloudflare’s London office uses a camera trained on a double-pendulum desk toy, while its Singapore office measures the radioactive decay of a pellet of Uranium. Other companies use systems based on hot, turbulent air rising from data servers and other naturally random physical processes. But as effective as they might be, I think we can all agree that none of these methods are anywhere as groovy as a giant wall of lava lamps. Peace, man.
Expand for References
Mathmos Lava Lamps in the 1960s & 70s, Mathmos, https://mathmos.com/lava-lamps-in-the-1960s-70s/#:~:text=Edward%20Craven%2DWalker%20was%20the,to%20instant%20and%20enduring%20popularity.
Tucker, Abigail, The History of the Lava Lamp, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-history-of-the-lava-lamp-21201966/
Bennett, Jessica, Learn How the Lava Lamp Became a Groovy Icon of 1960s Style, Better Homes & Gardens, March 21, 2022, https://www.bhg.com/decorating/home-accessories/lava-lamp-history/
History of the Lava Lamp, The Glow Company, https://www.glow.co.uk/history-of-lava-lamps.html
Edward Walker, Lemelson-MIT, https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/edward-walker
Bellis, Mary, Edward Craven Walker: Inventor of the Lava Lamp, ThoughtCo, February 2, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-lava-lamps-1992086
Dunnet, Donald, GB703924 (A) – 1954-02-10- A Display Device Using Liquid Bubbles in Another Liquid, Espacenet Patent Search, https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=GB&NR=703924&KC=&FT=E&locale=en_EP
Smith, George, US3387396A – Display Devices, Google Patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/US3387396
How do Lava Lamps Help With Internet Encryption? Cloudflare, https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/
Liebow-Feeser, Joshua, Randomness 101: LavaRand in Production, Cloudflare, May 11, 2017, https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-production/?_gl=16x6v5i_gaMTk2MzEyODM1Mi4xNzExODM3MjYy_ga_SQCRB0TXZW*MTcxMTgzNzI2Mi4xLjEuMTcxMTgzODgyNi4wLjAuMA..
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As far as successful film franchises go, few are as balls-to-the-wall insane as The Fast and the Furious. Best described as Mission: Impossible soaked in Axe Body Spray, the series is set in an alternate universe where few problems can’t be solved by driving muscle cars at it. Over its ten installments, the franchise has seen its band – sorry, family – of street racers-turned-international-crime-fighters drag bank vaults through the streets of Rio, race a Russian submarine across polar ice, and even fly a rocket-powered Pontiac Fiero into outer space, because sure, why not?Strange to think, then, that the whole saga began all the way back in 2001 with a low-budget Point Break ripoff about illegal street racers robbing DVD players off the back of trucks. But humble as it was compared to what came later, the first film established the cinematic language of drag racing that would become a staple for the series: the steely gazes of the two opponents as they pull up to the line. The scantily-clad woman dropping her arms to kick off the race. Tight, rapidly-edited shots of gear shifting. Close-ups of the NOS button being pressed and the exhaust pipe belching blue flame as the cars accelerate to seemingly supersonic speeds. If these films are your only reference point for auto racing, you have probably wondered: what is NOS – AKA Nitrous Oxide – anyway? How does it boost a car’s performance, and is it really the automotive warp drive that Vin Diesel and family would have you believe? Well, throw on your tank top and silver crucifix necklace as we dive into the high-octane science and history of nitrous oxide.
The discovery of Nitrous Oxide – chemical formula N2O – is typically credited to English theologian and chemist Joseph Priestley. In 1767, Priestley moved to Leeds, where he lived next door to the local brewery. He soon became fascinated with the gases or “airs” produced by the fermentation vats, and embarked on a series of detailed experiments to study these mysterious substances. In the course of these investigations, Priestley discovered that the gas given off by the vats was “fixed air” – AKA carbon dioxide – and figured out how to dissolve this substance in water. This discovery, published in 1772, led directly to the establishment of the highly-lucrative carbonated water and later soft drink industry. In another experiment, Priestley heated iron filings soaked in nitric acid to produce a new gas that made flames burn brighter but was unbreathable by mice and other animals. He called this substance “dephlogisticated nitrous air”, in reference to the now-defunct phlogiston theory first proposed by German alchemist Johan Becher in 1667. This theory held that combustible materials contained a fire-like element called phlogiston that was released by burning and absorbed by the surrounding air. Once all the phlogiston was released and the air saturated, combustion stopped and could not be supported until the air was dephlogisticated. Today, of course, we know that dephlogisticated air is in fact the element oxygen, which is absorbed by burning substances and converted into carbon dioxide and other combustion products. This continues until the oxygen in the atmosphere is depleted and combustion stops, with the resulting “phlogisticated air” actually being a mixture of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other combustion products as well as nitrogen and other inert gases from the air.
But while Priestley is traditionally credited with discovering nitrous oxide, it is now believed that he was beaten by over a decade by Scottish chemist Joseph Black, who in 1766 produced the gas by heating ammonium nitrate – the same process used today. Similarly, Priestley’s claim to have discovered oxygen is now typically credited to Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele – though Priestley published his findings first.
Whatever the case, for nearly three decades Nitrous Oxide remained little more than a scientific footnote, until the great English chemist Sir Humphrey Davy – then working as a surgeon’s apprentice – began investigating the substance in the 1890s. To his astonishment and delight, Davy discovered that nitrous oxide, when inhaled, induced a powerful sense of euphoria and uncontrollable giggling. He had discovered laughing gas. Ever the consummate scientist, Davy had his close friends and had them record their experiences. J.W. Tobin reported that:
“When the [bladders of nitrous oxide] were exhausted and taken from me, I continued breathing with the same violence, then suddenly starting from the chair, and vociferating with pleasure, I made towards those that were present, as I wished they should participate in my feeling. I struck gently at Mr. Davy and a stranger entering the room at the moment, I made towards him, and gave him several blows, but more in the spirit of good humor than of anger. I then ran through different rooms of the house, and at last returned to the laboratory somewhat more composed; my spirits continued much elevated for some hours after the experiment…”
While poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, wrote:
“Then I first inspired the nitrous oxide, I felt a highly pleasurable sensation of warmth over my whole frame, resembling that which I remember once to have experienced after returning from a walk in the snow into a warm room. The only motion which I felt inclined to make, was that of laughing at those who were looking at me.”
Davy published his results in an 1800 with the unwieldy title of Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration. Soon after, laughing gas parties became all the rage among the upper classes, with revellers inhaling the gas from pigs’ bladders and stumbling about for their own – and each others’ – amusement. One of these parties, held in Hartford, Connecticut in 1844, became the site of a discovery that forever changes the history of medicine. One of the attendees, dentist Horace Wells, witnessed one reveller gash open his leg yet carry on partying as if he had felt nothing. Indeed, Humphry Davy had noted the painkilling effects of nitrous oxide forty years earlier, even using it during a wisdom tooth extraction, but did not pursue this discovery. The day after the party, Wells experimented on himself by inhaling nitrous oxide and having fellow dentist John Riggs extract one of his teeth. The experiment was a success, with Wells excitedly declaring:
“It is the greatest discovery ever made! I didn’t feel as much as the prick of a pin!”
Wells proceeded to test the procedure on 12 patients, with equally positive results. As Hartford did not have a hospital, Wells arranged to give a public demonstration at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, which took place on January 20, 1845. Surrounded by an audience of doctors, Wells administered nitrous oxide to his patient and proceeded to extract a tooth – only for the patient to cry out in pain. The audience immediately broke out into boos and cries of “humbug!” forcing Wells to slink out in disgrace. It was later determined that the gas had been improperly administered, and that the patient’s obesity and alcoholism had made his body insensitive to the anaesthetic. Furthermore, despite having cried out, the patient did not recall feeling any pain. Sadly, however, the botched demonstration effectively ended Wells’s career. He soon fell ill, closed his dental practice, became addicted to ether and chloroform, and was imprisoned on January 21, 1848 for throwing sulphuric acid on two prostitutes in a drug-fuelled rage. Three days later, aghast at what he had done, he committed suicide in his cell.
But this was not the end of the story, for present at Wells’s 1845 demonstration was fellow dentist and former colleague William Morton. Convinced that nitrous oxide was an unreliable surgical anaesthetic, on October 16, 1846 Morton made medical history by removing a tumour from the neck of printer Edward Gilbert after knocking him out using diethyl ether. The landmark surgery took place in the same theatre as Wells’s ill-fated demonstration, which today is commonly known as the “Ether Dome.” Ether, along with chloroform, quickly became the surgical anaesthetic of choice, allowing ever longer and more complex surgeries to be performed without the patient thrashing about in agony. But while these were eventually replaced by safer and more effective general anaesthetics like desflurane and sevoflurane, nitrous oxide continues to be used to this day, primarily in dentistry and obstetrics. In these applications the gas is usually diluted to 30-40% with oxygen, as nitrous oxide cannot be breathed in pure form without asphyxiating the patient. Ironically, the use of nitrous oxide was popularized after Horace Wells’s death by Gardner Colton, host of the laughing gas party where Wells made his fateful observation.
For nearly a century and a half after its discovery, nitrous oxide had few applications outside of medicine and as a recreational drug. In 1949, however, Austrian engineer Eduard Haas discovered how to use laughing gas to produce another joy-inducing substance: whipped cream. When stored in a pressurized container, nitrous oxide, which is lipophilic or fat-binding, dissolves in cream; it also inhibits bacterial growth, extending the life of the mixture. When the pressure is released, however, the gas comes out of solution and froths the cream, creating that oh-so-delicious confection we all love to squirt directly into our mouths – er, I mean, spray onto desserts in reasonable amounts. While consumer whipped cream cans come pre-charged and are single-use, commercial refillable whipped cream dispensers use pre-charged nitrous oxide cartridges commonly known as chargers or ‘whippits.’ Unfortunately, however, the ready availability and legality of whippits makes them a popular source of nitrous oxide for recreational users, who consume the gas by breaking the seal on the charger with a special tool called a cracker and dispensing it into a balloon. Inhaling directly from the charger is dangerous, as the expanding gas is extremely cold and can inflict severe frostbite to the user’s mouth and respiratory tract. While nitrous oxide’s mechanism of action is not fully understood, it is believed that, like benzodiazepine drugs and opiates like morphine, the molecule binds to Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid or GABA and endogenous opioid receptors in the brain. This is evidenced by the fact that addicts who develop a tolerance to these drugs also develop a tolerance to nitrous oxide – and vice versa. Long-term nitrous oxide abuse can also lead to addiction, as well as severe vitamin B12 deficiency and associated neurological damage. This means that Devo was wrong: if a problem comes along, you must not whip it.
And finally, we get to the most dramatic use of nitrous oxide: making things go vroom. The first nitrous oxide injection system for internal combustion engines was developed by the Germans during the Second World War. Known as Göring Mischung Eins or “Göring Mixture 1” after head of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring – but nicknamed the Ha-Ha-Gerät or “Ha Ha Device” – the system was invented in 1940 by engineer Otto Lutz to solve a serious problem plaguing high-altitude German bombers and fighters. As aircraft flew higher, the air grew progressively thinner, making it harder to supply the engine with oxygen and causing performance to drop rapidly. The traditional solution to this problem was to fit the engine with a supercharger or turbocharger, high-speed pumps which can compress and feed more air into the engine than natural induction alone. However, Germany lacked the metallurgical experience and production capacity to build these devices in sufficient numbers. GM-1 was a practical workaround that allowed engine performance to be boosted at high altitudes – at least for brief periods. The system worked in two ways. First, when nitrous oxide is heated above 300ºC, it decomposes into nitrogen and oxygen. This mixture contains 37% oxygen by mass compared to only 21% for regular air, meaning more fuel could be fed into the engine and more power obtained. Injecting nitrous oxide into the intake manifold also cooled the air, increasing its density and allowing even more oxygen to be fed into the cylinders. Finally the decomposition of nitrous oxide is exothermic, increasing the temperature inside the cylinders and improving the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine.
GM-1 was often used in tandem with another system called MW 50, which injected a 50:50 mixture of water and methanol into the intake manifold. As well as increasing the density of the inducted air, this mixture cooled the cylinders and helped prevent pre-detonation or knocking – the premature ignition of the fuel-air mixture caused by compression from the pistons. This, in turn, allowed the engine to achieve higher compression ratios and produce more power – and to learn more about engine knocking and how it affects what kind of fuel you put in your car, please check out our previous video What Does the “Octane Rating” of Fuel Really Mean? And in case you are wondering, the methanol in the mixture was to prevent the water from freezing at high altitudes.
Together, GM-1 and MW 50 could boost an engine’s performance by up to 500 horsepower and allow aircraft to operate at altitudes up to 20,000 feet – especially if used in tandem with a supercharger. Indeed, one of the few aircraft to have both systems fitted, the Focke-Wulf Ta 152 interceptor, was capable of reaching speeds of up to 756 kilometres per hour. But this blistering performance came at a price. For one thing, these systems were very heavy and bulky, reducing the aircraft’s performance and taking up weight and space that could otherwise be used for extra fuel and ordnance. They were also very thirsty, with the average aircraft only carrying enough water and nitrous oxide for around 10 minutes of continuous operation at full power. Pilots thus only used engine boost for brief periods such as the final climb before interception or when taking evasive action. However, by the time these systems were introduced in large numbers, Germany had already lost air superiority over Europe and high-altitude missions had become less relevant, meaning they were seldom used before the war ended. Meanwhile, the Allies also made limited use of nitrous oxide and water injection systems, especially in high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft.
With the rise of jet-powered aircraft after the Second World War, nitrous oxide injection became obsolete and passed into the annals of military aviation. It would be nearly two decades before the technology was rediscovered by a pioneer of the fledgling sport of high performance drag racing. In 1958, drag racer Richard Flynn of Spokane, Washington was combing his local library for potential high-energy fuels to feed into his next vehicle. Flynn had previously tried injecting pure oxygen into his engine, but this made the fuel-air-mixture dangerously unstable – a fact he discovered when his dragster proceeded to undergo a rapid unscheduled disassembly. In the course of his research, Flynn stumbled upon the wartime technique of nitrous oxide injection, which he realized could produce the desired performance boost without the risk of catastrophic explosions. It was also much more convenient to handle. At room temperature, gaseous oxygen can only be practically compressed up to a density of 279 kilograms per cubic metre at a pressure of 20 megapascals; to achieve greater density, it must be liquefied at temperatures below -196ºC, requiring impractically cumbersome cryogenic equipment. Nitrous oxide, by contrast, liquefies to a density of 800 kilograms per cubic metre above 4 megapascals at room temperature, meaning larger amounts can be carried using much simpler equipment. Flynn brought the idea to fellow drag racer Gary Hams, who proceeded to cobble together the world’s first automotive nitrous oxide system from a spare oxygen tank and regulator mounted in his car’s tool tray, a shop air hose and blowgun valve held in the driver’s lap, and a nozzle fixed to the base of the carburetor. On September 7, 1958, Hams entered his modified dragster in the B/Gas competition at Deer Park speedway, Minnesota, and handily won the race. This was, as far as it is known, the first-ever use of nitrous oxide in auto racing. Such boosted vehicles soon came to be known as “funny cars” after the famous psychotropic effects of nitrous oxide – though you shouldn’t try to breathe automotive nitrous as it is usually mixed with sulphur dioxide, corrosion inhibitors, and other highly-toxic substances. Don’t say we didn’t warn you…
From these humble beginnings, nitrous oxide boosting steadily grew in popularity among the racing community, and enterprising hobbyists began producing and selling ready-made kits for their fellow gear heads. Among the first such enterprises to find widespread success was 10,000 RPM Speed Equipment, founded in 1964 by Ron Hammel. In 1978, another racing enthusiast, Mike Thermos, was inspired by Hammel’s products to create his own line of nitrous oxide kits. Together with Dale Vaznaian, Thermos not only ironed out the various technical problems plaguing earlier systems, but also placed greater emphasis on aesthetics to better appeal to professional racers:
“We’d skin pack the kit. A lot of the guys were starting to do this stuff out of the back of their garage. But we painted ours, had our bottles painted really nice, put chrome valves on them — really gingerbread everything up.”
But what to call their new company? As Thermos later recalled:
“We had a buddy that painted the race cars. I asked if he can make us a logo? And he drew N-O-E for Nitrous Oxide Engineering. I said, well, we’re not engineers so do something else. So he drew N-O-S like that. I said, yeah, that kind of looks like the symbol for nitrous oxide. We became Nitrous Oxide Systems.”
Nitrous Oxide Systems or NOS would go on to become legendary within the racing community – so much so that “NOS” has become a common slang term for nitrous oxide. By the time the company was sold to Holley Performance Products in 2001, it was valued at more than $5 million.
But as with all such technologies, it wasn’t long before racers began abusing nitrous oxide systems – even in NASCAR, where such performance-boosting methods are outlawed. This problem came to a head in February 1976 at the qualifying stage for the Daytona 500, when the No. 28 Hoss Ellington Chevrolet driven by A.J. Foyt and the No.88 DiGard Racing Chevy driven by Darrel Waltrip mysteriously clocked times one second faster than during practice laps. Suspecting foul play, NASCAR officials ordered Waltrip’s car to the inspection area, where they informed Waltrip and his crew chief Mario Rossi that they would cut the vehicle into little pieces until they found the nitrous oxide they were obviously using. Rossi caved and revealed the system hidden inside a chassis tube. Caught red-handed, Waltrip uttered an iconic line which underscored how ludicrously high the stakes had become in professional motorsports:
“If you don’t cheat, you look like an idiot. If you cheat and don’t get caught, you look like a hero. If you cheat and get caught, you look like a dope. Put me where I belong.”
Today, nitrous oxide systems are produced by dozens of companies in dozens of configurations tailored to particular vehicles or racing styles. However, broadly speaking there are only two main types of systems: dry and wet. Dry systems are the simplest, comprising one or more nozzles or jets mounted in the engine intake plenum. The liquid nitrous oxide fully vaporizes before entering the cylinders, hence the name. Operating such systems requires increasing the fuel flow to the engine to avoid an overly-lean condition, which can generate dangerously high temperatures and potentially damage the pistons and cylinders. This is accomplished by increasing the fuel pressure using a secondary pump or adjusting the electronic control module or ECU to keep the fuel injectors open for longer.
In wet systems, by contrast, liquid nitrous oxide and fuel are mixed together and delivered simultaneously into the carburetor or fuel injectors. While such systems do make it easier to control the fuel/air ratio, they can also suffer from uneven fuel distribution, fuel pooling, and lean conditions, potentially leading to detonations and other catastrophic damage. Meanwhile, dry systems can be used with one of four standard delivery methods: single nozzle, in which one jet is placed at the opening of the intake plenum; direct port, in which multiple jets are mounted close to the engine intake ports above the cylinders, plate, in which a flat spacer drilled with holes is mounted in the intake plenum to vaporize and distribute the nitrous, and bar, which is similar to a plate system but uses a hollow tube drilled with holes to distribute the nitrous. And while most nitrous oxide kits are based on a single delivery stage, multiple kits can be chained together to form multi-stage systems that deliver nitrous more progressively to ensure smoother acceleration. Different jet sizes can also be installed to tweak the oxidizer-fuel ratio.
But while nitrous oxide is most famous for boosting race cars, perhaps its most dramatic application is boosting payloads into space. On October 4, 2004, pilot Brian Binnie flew the experimental Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne to an altitude of 112 kilometres above the Mojave Desert – crossing the 100km Karman Line that marks the boundary of outer space. This flight, the second conducted in a week, won Scaled Composites the $10 Million Ansari X-Prize and officially made SpaceShipOne the first private craft to reach outer space – and for more on this, please check out our previous video The Surprisingly Interesting Debate of Where Outer Space Actually Begins.
Propelling SpaceShipOne on its record-breaking flights was an unusual type of power plant known as a hybrid rocket engine – which, as the name suggests, lies halfway in design between a traditional liquid rocket engine and solid rocket booster. The fuel in a hybrid rocket engine takes the form of a long cylinder or grain of hydrocarbon material – in the case of SpaceShipOne, a synthetic rubber called HTPB – with a hollow channel or port running down the middle. This is contained in a cylindrical combustion chamber with a rocket nozzle at one end and a tank of liquid or gaseous oxidizer at the other – in this case, our good old friend nitrous oxide. To start the engine, the pilot opens a valve to release the oxidizer into the fuel grain port and sets off a pyrotechnic charge to ignite the fuel. The fuel and oxidizer mix and burn in a narrow boundary layer along the inner surface of the fuel port, with the fuel grain being consumed from the inside out.
Hybrid rocket engines have numerous advantages over traditional liquid-fuelled engines and solid motors, particularly in the areas of safety and simplicity. Solid rocket motors combine fuel and oxidizer in same propellant grain, meaning that once they are ignited, they cannot be put out. Liquid-fuelled engines, meanwhile, often use toxic, volatile, and difficult to handle propellants like liquid oxygen or hydrazine, and are prone to exploding violently when they fail. They also require complex and difficult to manufacture hardware like propellant turbo pumps, making them very expensive. By contrast, the fuel and oxidizer used in hybrid engines are, on their own, largely inert and can be safely handled without special equipment. They are also considerably cheaper than traditional rocket fuels. Furthermore, hybrid rocket engines can easily and safely be shut off by simply cutting off the flow of oxidizer to the combustion chamber. On the other hand, hybrid rockets generally exhibit poorer performance and efficiency compared to liquid-fuelled rockets and suffer from a constantly-changing oxidizer-fuel ratio as the solid fuel grain is consumed. Their use thus involves tradeoffs between performance, cost, and safety.
Nor are hybrid rocket engines 100% safe. Though largely inert and safe to handle, nitrous oxide can still violently decompose if heated or exposed to the right catalyst. This lurking danger was tragically revealed on July 26, 2007 during a test of the engine for SpaceShipTwo, the rocket plane developed for space tourism firm Virgin Galactic. This was what is known as a cold flow test, and simply involved running nitrous oxide through the engine without igniting it to ensure that the blooming worked. Nonetheless, the nitrous oxide spontaneously decomposed, resulting in a massive explosion that killed three Scaled Composites engineers. While the cause of the explosion remains a mystery, it is known that turbulence can cause nitrous oxide to decompose at high flow rates. Hopefully the cause will be determined and the danger mitigated before Virgin Galactic begins commercial space tourism operations…
And that, dear viewers, is the surprisingly fascinating history of nitrous oxide, the unassuming molecule responsible for gifting humanity such indispensable scientific wonders as medical anaesthesia, billionaires in space, whipped cream, and hour-long YouTube supercuts of Vin Diesel saying “family”.
Expand for References
Nitrous Oxide, Encyclopedia Britannica, December 29, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/science/nitrous-oxide
Coleman, Frank, The History of Nitrous Oxide Anaesthesia, Medicine Illustrated, July 1, 1954, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1742-1241.1954.tb01704.x
Eveleth, Rose, Here’s What It Was Like to Discover Laughing Gas, Smithsonian Magazine, March 27, 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/heres-what-it-was-discover-laughing-gas-180950289/
The Wacky History of Nitrous Oxide: It’s No Laughing Matter, DOCS Education, July 20, 2015, https://www.docseducation.com/blog/wacky-history-nitrous-oxide-its-no-laughing-matter
Smith, W.D.A., A History of Nitrous Oxide and Oxygen Anaesthesia Part IA: The Discovery of Nitrous Oxide and of Oxygen, British Journal of Anaesthesia, 1972, https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/318044/1-s2.0-S0007091217X65495/1
How Does Nitrous Oxide Help an Engine Perform Better? HowStuffWorks, April 19, 2021, https://auto.howstuffworks.com/question259.htm
Buslov, Alexander & Carroll, Matthew, Frozen in Time: A History of the Synthesis of Nitrous Oxide and How the Process Remained Unchanged for Over 2 Centuries, Anaesthesia & Analgesia, July 2018, https://journals.lww.com/anesthesia-analgesia/fulltext/2018/07000/frozen_in_time__a_history_of_the_synthesis_of.16.aspx
The First Drag Racers to Ever Use Nitrous Oxide, MotorTrend, March 4, 2016, https://www.motortrend.com/news/the-first-drag-racers-to-ever-use-nitrous-oxide/
Strohl, Daniel, Four-Link – World Matsuri Week, Hot Wheels Collectors, Slant Six Performance, the NASCAR Nitrous Scandal, Hemmings, August, 15, 2020, https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2020/08/15/four-links-world-matsuri-week-hot-wheels-collectors-slant-six-performance-the-nascar-nitrous-scandal
Muhammad, Jody, Unmasking Nitrous Oxide: History, Mechanics, and Controversies, Kompasiana, January 10, 2024, https://www.kompasiana.com/jodyfathir4422/659d9993c57afb2b0a7c08e4/unmasking-nitrous-oxide-history-mechanics-and-controversies?page=all&page_images=2
Hecht, Jeff, Report Leaves Scaled Composites Blast a Mystery, New Scientist, February 7, 2008, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13292-report-leaves-scaled-composites-blast-a-mystery/
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Ah, pirates! As fellow YouTuber The History Guy so famously stated: don’t all good stories involve pirates? For hundreds of years, these raiders of the waves have struck fear into the hearts of sailors and captured the popular imagination with a romantic image of freewheeling, swashbuckling adventure. But while the world of fiction abounds with tales of pirates commandeering all manner of vehicles – from airships to spaceships – real-life piracy has largely been confined to the high seas or the seedier corners of the internet. But in April 1917, at the height of the First World War, a German naval zeppelin did something rather unique in the history of aviation. This is the badass story of history’s only true sky pirates.
When the First World War broke out in August 1914, the state of the art in aviation technology was the zeppelin. Named after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who began perfecting the technology in 1900, zeppelins were rigid airships with aluminium frames held aloft by cells filled with buoyant hydrogen gas. Though often dangerous to operate in heavy winds and prone to bursting into flames, zeppelins could fly higher, farther, and carry much heavier loads than the relatively primitive heavier-than-air craft of the time, making them nigh-unstoppable weapons of war – at least at first. Strangely, it was the German Imperial Navy and not the Army who operated the largest and most effective zeppelin fleet of the war. This was largely due to the relentless leadership of Kapitän zur See Peter Strasser, Germany’s main architect of zeppelin warfare. Another factor was the blockading of the German High Seas Fleet by the British Royal Navy, leaving zeppelins as the Imperial Navy’s only means of striking back at the enemy.
At first, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s blood ties to the British Royal Family made him hesitant to launch air raids against the United Kingdom. But in January 1915 he changed his mind and authorized a massive strategic bombing campaign against southern England to destroy vital war industry and demoralize the British populace. The first of these raids took place on January 19, 1915, when two zeppelins – the L.3 and the L.4, dropped high-explosive and incendiary bombs on Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, destroying a handful of buildings and killing four people. While the damage inflicted was minor, the raid had a profound psychological impact on the British people, who had until that point considered their island nation immune from enemy attack. British propaganda dubbed zeppelins “Baby Killers” and decried them as symbols of Teutonic barbarism. But worse was yet to come. On May 31, 1915, German zeppelins attacked London for the first time, setting 41 fires across the city, killing 7 civilians and injuring 35. This was later followed by a September 8 raid which killed 71 and injured 128.
However, the “Baby Killers’” reign of terror was short-lived. Right from the start, long-range zeppelin raids against the British Isles were precarious affairs. For one thing, missions could only be flown during two narrow windows in the early spring or late fall; summer nights were too short for missions to be completed under the cover of darkness, while winter weather made flying unacceptably dangerous. Mechanical breakdowns often forced many raiders to turn back, while fog and clouds made navigation difficult, causing zeppelins to miss their targets by miles. And while initially their altitude made zeppelins largely untouchable, Entente defensive technology quickly caught up, and following the introduction of higher-performance fighter aircraft and machine guns firing incendiary ammunition, from late 1916 onwards increasing numbers of German raiders began going down in flames. In response, the Germans developed more advanced “height climber” zeppelins capable of flying above the 13,000 foot ceiling of Entente fighters, but this tactic came with its own problems, including bitter cold and oxygen deprivation that could completely incapacitate a crew. Worse, extreme altitudes made navigation and bomb aiming even more difficult, rendering the height climbers largely ineffective. For this reason, in 1917 the German Army abandoned zeppelins in favour of bomber aircraft like the Gotha G.IV, which were faster and harder to shoot down than their lumbering lighter-than-air brethren. Meanwhile, naval zeppelins were largely relegated to flying reconnaissance patrols over the North Sea.
So it was that in the early hours of April 23, 1917, the German zeppelin L.23 took off from the Imperial German Navy airship base at Tønder, Denmark, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Ludwig Bockholt. Heading southwest at an altitude of 1,000 feet, the L.23 soon reached the Dogger Bank off the Dutch coast, where it encountered a large fleet of foreign ships. Bockholt ordered the crew to prepare for action, but the ships were soon identified as neutral fishing boats, all flying the appropriate identification flags. But among the various steamers, lookouts spotted an anomaly: a large schooner sailing west. As a crew member identified only as “Petty Officer K” later recalled in 1934:
“The telegraph apparatus passed the word round: ‘Full speed ahead with full throttle!’ We wanted to overhaul that schooner because such a craft in such latitudes was bound to be an object of suspicion. Our propellers hummed as we approached our quarry. Through our binoculars we saw that her crew were getting her boats out and making ready to abandon ship. What did it all mean? Then we noticed that the men down below appeared in a mighty hurry to get their boats out. Very curious, it seemed. One of the boats was ready in the water. The remainder of the crew were apparently in too much of a hurry to let the next boat down in orderly fashion; they simply bumped it into the water, scuttled into it head over heels and began pulling away from the schooner as if Old Nick [the Devil] himself was after them.”
Suspecting that the schooner was carrying contraband cargo to Britain, Bockholt ordered the L.23 to circle the ship and dropped a bomb in the water as a warning. Then, as Petty Officer K recalled:
“…the adventurous idea took shape in our heads. What an opportunity, we thought, to make a prize. That would be something to sign a song about afterwards. But obviously the business was not without its risks. It was extremely risky…it meant landing in the water with a wind velocity of 3 to 4 metres per second. That was a feat no naval airship had ever performed of its own accord under war conditions. But the…idea had run like wildfire round the ship. Several members of the crew volunteered to board the chopper. The skipper nodded his consent. ‘So, come on, boys! Get a machine gun ready to take with us!’And then we heard an order issued that was never before and never afterwards given on an airship. ‘Helmsman, prepare to board our prize!’
As the helmsman spiralled the L.23 down towards the schooner, nearly the entire crew volunteered to join the boarding party. However, only three men could be spared, and lots had to be drawn, with the final boarding party consisting of Bernhard Wiesemann, chief mate Ernst Fegert and chief mate Friedrich Engelke. The party was armed with a single machine gun, while the leader, Fegert, carried a flare pistol. Meanwhile, the helmsman succeeded in bringing the L.23 down over one of the lifeboats, from which a member of the schooner’s crew identified the ship as the Norwegian vessel Royal, carrying mining timbers to West Hartlepool. Satisfied that the ship constituted a valid war prize, Bockholt ordered a rope ladder lowered and the boarding party to descend into the lifeboat.
“From the control-car we shouted to the men in the boat – the captain and helmsman were in the second boat, which was pulling away for dear life – to tell us their nationality and destination again. Then we began to climb down from the cabin into their boat, and all the tome they stared at us as if we were ghosts from another world. [Then] something happened which in our hustle and bustle we had forgotten to allow for. The loss of three men’s weight had made the L.23 so much lighter that she suddenly rose into the air and sailed off…luckily our helmsman had the light-pistol hanging round his neck. It was a fearsome-looking monster, but it was the only weapon we had, and the prisoners in the boat were not exactly well-disposed towards us.”
Meanwhile, the crew of the L.23 flew over to the second lifeboat and ordered its occupants by megaphone to row back to the schooner.
“Apparently they did not at once make up their minds to obey, because we suddenly heard the warning ‘tack-tack-tack’ of a machine gun from the airship. Then the second boat’s crew thought they had better do what the L.23 told them.
A couple of minutes later they were all on board again. We locked the captain and helmsman in their cabins, set the sails that had been braced back, and steered a course for German waters… Our helmsman ordered the crew aft, where he told them that their schooner was the lawful prize of a German man-o’-war, and that they were now under martial law. To emphasize the effect of his words he loaded the harmless light pistol before their eyes and said: ‘At the first sign of mutiny I’ll blow the boat sky high and send you all to heaven. Got that into your heads?’ I never yet heard of a ship being sunk by a light-pistol, but the look of the think fairly put the wind up those Norwegians. They told us through a spokesman that they were ready to obey our helmsman’s orders. We had to take the precaution of battening them all below hatches except their helmsman and look-out man because of our lack of arms.”
However, the small prize crew struggled to control the ship, and were forced to release the crew. During the voyage back to Germany, a member of the boarding party attempted to cut away the lifeboats, which were being towed behind the Royal. He was only stopped by the Norwegian helmsman, who rather reasonably asked what would happen if the ship struck a mine – of which there were thousands planted around the North Sea.
On the evening of the 24th, the Royal encountered a small flotilla of German destroyers, who approached to investigate the strange intruder. Upon being told how exactly the schooner fell into German hands, the destroyer crews were incredulous, with Petty Officer K recalling:
“I believe those sailormen took us for the Flying Dutchman himself.”
Then, after 43 hours of sailing, the Royal reached the lightships at the mouth of the Elbe estuary:
“… regular prize-crew came on board, all armed to the teeth. But we were seamen enough not to want to turn our prize over to them without a ‘by your leave’; that would not have suited us at all, and the end of the business was that we sailed her ourselves right into Cuxhaven.
And there were were met by no less a person than the chief of the airship service in person, who took us back to Nordholz in his own car. When we got back, we celebrated our success by putting inside us enough liquor to float our prize.”
The Navy impounded and later old the Royal, which would serve with various shipping companies until 1924 when it was sold for scrap. The L.23’s capture of the Royal quickly became the stuff of legend, and did much to bolster the flagging morale of the airship service. However, the German High Command saw the exploit as unnecessarily risky, and admonished zeppelin crews not to repeat it. The crew of the L.23 remain the only men to have captured another craft entirely from the air, and are thus history’s first – and thus far only – bona fide sky pirates.
But the story doesn’t quite end there, for both the L.23 and her captain would go on to play further pioneering roles in aviation history. In late 1917, the German Army launched Operation China Show, an ambitious attempt to resupply German troops fighting in Southeast Africa by zeppelin. From the first dat of the war to the very last, Generalmajor Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, commanding a small force of imperial Schutztruppe and native African Askaris, waged a brilliant guerrilla campaign in what is now Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania, using ambush and hit-and-run tactics to outfox the some 300,000 British, Belgian, and Portuguese sent to destroy him. These legendary exploits earned von Lettow-Vorbeck the nickname The Lion of Africa. However, by late 1917 his forces were running dangerously low on ammunition and other supplies, and the German High Command cast around for a means to keep him fighting. The Royal Navy’s command of the sea made resupply by ship impossible, while Southeast Africa – 6,400 kilometres from friendly German territory – was far beyond the range of any contemporary heavier-than-air craft. But a zeppelin just might make it.
The craft chosen for the flight was the brand-new L 59, which was loaded with 15 metric tonnes of supplies for von Lettow-Vorbeck’s army. As the zeppelin could not be supplied with hydrogen for a return journey, upon reaching its destination the craft would be dismantled and every last part recycled, with the outer covering being used for tents, the aluminium frame for radio towers, and so on.
Between the 3rd and 4th of November, 1917, the L 59 was flown by chief pilot Hugo Eckner from the Zeppelin factory in Friedrichshafen to Yambol, Bulgaria, the southernmost air base in the Central Powers’ sphere of influence. Command of the craft then passed to Ludwig Bockholt, who, after a number of failed attempts due to poor weather finally succeeded in getting airborne on November 21. From Yambol, the L 59 flew southeast over what is now Turkey, crossing the African coast near Mersa Matruh, Egypt, the following day. Despite numerous difficulties including engine trouble and turbulence that nearly caused a crash, the zeppelin carried on south, reaching the Sudan by the 23rd. However, some 201 kilometres west of Khartoum, the L 59 received a message from Germany announcing that von Lettow-Vorbeck had surrendered and ordering Bockholt to turn around and return to base. L 59 arrived back at Yambol on the morning of November 25, 1917, having travelled 6,800 kilometres over 95 hours.
British Intelligence would later claim that the recall signal was faked by Entente forces. In reality, the message was genuine, but had been garbled in translation on the way from Southern Africa to Germany. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces had not, in fact surrendered, but rather had retreated from the Mahaenge flatlands in Tanzania to more mountainous terrain where the L 59 could not have safely landed. Indeed, von Lettow-Vorbeck was the last German commander to surrender at the end of the war, having never been defeated or captured in battle. And while the epic flight of the L 59 was ultimately unsuccessful, it nonetheless set an endurance and distance record for military airships that still stand to this day. As for her captain, Ludwig Bockholt, his career – and life – would come to an end on April 7th, 1918 when the airship LZ 104 crashed into the Strait of Otranto during an attack on Malta.
Upon Bockholt’s departure to command the L 59, command of the L.23 – history’s only aerial pirate ship – passed to Oberleutnant zer See Bernhard Dinter. Unfortunately, his tenure would be short-lived, for on August 21, 1917, the L.23 was shadowing the Royal Navy’s First Light Cruiser Squadron off the Danish coast when they were suddenly attacked by a short-range Sopwith Pup fighter. Dinter was baffled, for there were no Entente airbases anywhere within range. Unbeknownst to him, the aircraft, flown by Lieutenant Arthur Smart, had actually taken off from platform atop a gun turret on the cruiser HMS Yarmouth – the first time in history an aerial strike had been launched at sea. Catching the L.23 completely by surprise, Lieutenant Smart maneuvered into position 3,000 feet above and behind the zeppelin and moved in for the kill:
“I now realised the time had come. I pushed forward the control stick and dived. The speed indicator went with a rush up to 150 m.p.h….The roar of the engine had increased to a shrill scream while the wires were whistling and screeching in an awful manner….At 250 yards and at the same height as the Zeppelin, I flattened out slightly and pulled the lever which works the fixed machine-guns….I had just time to see about half a dozen [incendiary bullets] enter the blunt end of the Zeppelin, and a spurt of flame, before my very soul froze with the thought that in my eagerness to aim the gun, I had waited too long and couldn’t avoid a collision. Spasmodically I jammed the joystick hard forward and my heart seemed to come into my mouth in the absolute vertical nose dive which followed.”
The L.23 went down with all hands, with the top gunner initially managing to parachute away but drowning in the sea soon after . As for Lieutenant Smart, the most harrowing part of his mission was yet to come, for there was no way for him to land back aboard HMS Yarmouth. Instead, he would have to ditch in the sea:
“This was my first attempt at coming down in the sea in a land machine, but instinct told me that at all costs I must hit with practically no forward way on whatever to avoid turning head over heels…The machine lost all flying speed and dropped like a stone, hitting the water with a nasty jerk which would probably have meant broken bones had it been on mother earth. The destroyer was alongside in a short time but not before the nose of the machine had sunk and left me just hanging on to the tail.”
Smart’s exploits won him the Distinguished Service Order and the French Croix de Guerre, and dramatically demonstrated the potential of naval aviation. Less than a year later on July 19, 1918, Smart would participate in a similar raid on the zeppelin base at Tønder, which destroyed the LZ 99 & LZ 108.
For all the massive resources the Germans poured into the zeppelin program, the results were less than impressive. Between early 1915 and late 1917, the zeppelin service conducted 51 raids over the British Isles, dropping 196 tonnes of bombs and losing 77 of their 115 machines while killing 557 British civilians, injuring 1,358, and inflicting £1.5 million in damage. But while the bombing campaign had little effect on the course of the war, it marked a major turning point in the history of warfare. No longer were the British Isles – or civilians anywhere – safe from the ravages of modern warfare. The scourge of the “Baby Killers” would still be fresh in Britons’ minds when, only 20 years later, the skies over southern England filled once again with the foreboding drone of German bomber aircraft.
Expand for References
Botting, Douglas, The Giant Airships, The Epic of Flight, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1981
Marben, Rolf, Zeppelin Adventures, John Hamilton Ltd, 1934, https://www.greatwarforum.org/topic/93976-zeppelin-l-23-capture-of-norwegian-ship-royal/
Zeppelin LZ66 L 23, http://www.aircraftinvestigation.info/airplanes/Zeppelin_LZ66_L23.html
Holloway, Don, The Tondern Raid, Aviation History, July 2016, https://donhollway.com/tondernraid/index.html
Operation “China Show” – The Top Secret Mission of Germany’s Zeppelin L 59, Military History Now, April 12, 2017, https://militaryhistorynow.com/2017/04/12/operation-china-show-the-top-secret-marathon-flight-of-zeppelin-l-59/
The post The Incredible Tale of History’s Only Real Sky Pirates appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Somewhere in Siberia around 23,000 years ago, a particularly brave wolf or wolves wandered into a human campsite in search of food and the humans and said animal were apparently like “Did we just become best friends?!?!?!?” 23 millennia of selective breeding later, and we have succeeded in turning a once wild and fearsome beast into chihuahuas… And also such a good boy! Yes you are, yes you are!
…and then there’s cats, who probably took one look at what happened to dogs like the chihuahua, said “fk that noise”, and decided to domesticate us instead. Now, we do absolutely everything for our feline friends – keep them in a nice warm house, feed them delicious wet food, and scoop their litter box – while expecting very little in return aside from the occasional round of pest control or a grudgingly-given cuddle so long as we hold completely still and don’t move a freaking muscle. We even buy them recreational drugs. Known as “the nip” on the streets, this illicit substance is so ubiquitous used by our feline friends that its full street name also includes theirs- catnip– that magical herb that sends sweet Mittens rolling, flipping, and occasionally drooling on the floor in a haze of pure bliss. But what even is* catnip anyway, and does it actually get cats high? Well, grab your favourite furry middle manager as we dive into the fascinating science of catnip.
Napeta cataria, also known as catmint, catwort, and of course catnip, is a small perennial shrub with elliptical saw-edged leaves and white-purple orchid-shaped flowers. Originally native to large areas of Europe, Asia, and Africa, catnip was introduced to North America by European settlers and is now widespread across the continent, often found growing in roadside ditches. Catnip belongs to the family Lamiaceae, which also includes most of the common culinary herbs like basil, peppermint, rosemary, sage, and oregano. Like those herbs, catnip produces aromatic essential oils, which are stored on the surface of the leaves, stems, and seedpods in microscopic bulbs called trichomes, which naturally burst and release the oil when they mature. However, they can also be ruptured by insects feeding or larger animals – like cats – rubbing up against the plant.
Catnip oil contains a variety of aromatic compounds including nepetalactone, which is believed to be what makes our furry friends trip out like they’re rocking out at feline Woodstock. Unfortunately, much of what we currently know about the effect of catnip on cats’ brains is heavily based on theory; after all, getting a bunch of cats hopped up on the nip to sit still in an MRI is not exactly a practical proposition. Nonetheless, there are many compelling clues as to what might be going on inside Felix’s little noggin. For one thing, the most common behaviours induced by catnip – sniffing, licking, chewing, body and head rubbing, shaking, loudly vocalizing – and flipping or rolling around on the floor – are very similar to those exhibited by female cats in heat. Furthermore kittens don’t become susceptible to catnip until approximately six months of age – around the time they start reaching sexual maturity. This suggests that nepetalactone mimics the action of one or more feline sex pheromones. Originally, scientists believed that nepetalactone directly stimulated the vomeronasal or Jacobson’s organ – an olfactory or smell organ found in many animals but not humans which is involved in the detection of sex pheromones. However, a 1985 study published in the Journal of Behavioural and Neural Biology determined that removing the vomeronasal organ has no effect on cats’ sensitivity and reaction to catnip. Nepetalactone, the study concluded, must thus be detected by the regular olfactory receptors, stimulating various regions of the brain including the olfactory bulb, amygdala, hypothalamus, and pituitary gland to produce a sexual – and euphoric – response. In most cats, this response lasts for about ten minutes before suddenly ceasing, whereupon the cat enters a state of passive relaxation or stupor. At this point it can take up to 30 minutes for the cat’s system to reset and become re-sensitized to the catnip.
But while cats on catnip might look like they’re seconds away from driving to White Castle with a major case of the munchies, there was originally no evidence that catnip effects feline brains like marijuana, opium, cocaine and other drugs affect human brains – that is, by triggering the release of dopamine or stimulating natural opioid receptors. Indeed, cats appear to be fully aware while supposedly “tripping” on catnip, and if disturbed will resume their normal behaviours with no impairment of cognition or motor function. Furthermore, the reaction is exactly the same every time, with no evidence that cats can overdose on – or develop a tolerance to – catnip, though ingesting too much can irritate the digestive tract, leading to dizziness, vomiting and diarrhea. And the editor of this piece once had a cat get into a bulk giant bag of catnip and tear it open, only to be discovered later that day laying on his back covered in catnip with drool all over his face and otherwise relatively catatonic (the cat, not the editor) on his makeshift catnip bed for a little while after, only fully back to normal a few hours later. In any event, on this note, a 2021 study led by Professor Masao Miyazaki of Iwate University in Japan revealed that naloxone – an antagonist drug used to reverse the effects of opiate overdose – can completely eliminate cats’ reaction to catnip. Miyazaki and his colleagues also measured elevated levels of beta-endorphins – the body’s natural painkilling chemicals – in the cats’ bloodstream immediately following exposure to catnip, suggesting that the opioid system may in fact play some role in the herb’s physiological effects.
While inhaled catnip usually produces an energetic response, when ingested the herb has the opposite effect, making cats relaxed and mellow. This is unsurprising, since the herb has been used by humans for centuries as a mild sedative, with catnip infusion having similar calming properties to chamomile tea. It was also traditionally used to treat all manner of ailments including infant colic, migraines, cramps, gas, indigestion, and arthritis. Indeed, the medicinal properties of catnip are the reason it was imported to North America in the first place. In the 1960s, catnip was even touted as a cheaper and legal alternative to marijuana. However, its purported psychoactive properties were almost certainly a case of wishful thinking, for later scientific studies revealed that it has no such effects on the human brain.
Interestingly, not all cats appear susceptible to catnip, with sensitivity being strongly hereditary; that is, a kitten with one catnip-sensitive parent will have a 50% chance of being sensitive, while one with two sensitive parents will have a 75% chance. Breed, colour, and sex appears to have no effect on catnip sensitivity, while many wild cats including jaguar, lynx, leopards and cheetahs are just as sensitive to the herb as their domestic cousins; indeed, North American hunters traditionally used catnip to lure mountain lions. Strangely, however, tigers appear to be immune… perhaps they simply prefer frosted flakes. Originally, it was thought that around 70-80% of cats were sensitive to catnip, but a recent study by Dr. Bruce Kornreich of the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine suggests that many cats previously thought to be insensitive to catnip in fact simply exhibit a less active response:
“They assume what’s called a kind of sphinx position, and they vocalize less. The results of this study suggest that a much higher percentage of cats — if not all cats — are somehow affected by catnip.”
But whatever the actual percentage, the fact that not all cats respond to catnip suggests that the genes for catnip sensitivity were acquired relatively recently in feline evolution. And the rapid spread of these genes further suggests that catnip sensitivity confers some manner of evolutionary advantage. But what possible advantage can cats possibly get from a plant that induces euphoria?
One answer suggested by Professor Masao Miyazaki – who also discovered the effects of catnip on cats’ opioid receptor systems – is that catnip exposure protects cats from insect bites. In the 1960s, Cornell University naturalist Thomas Eisner discovered that catnip oil was 10 times more effective than N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide – AKA DEET – the synthetic active ingredient in most insect repellents. Indeed, catnip-based sprays are still available today as a natural alternative to DEET-based repellents, though they break down more quickly than DEET and must be reapplied more regularly. But we’re also assuming have the side effect of making it so your cats pretend to like you for a little bit outside of feeding time.
To test the natural repellent properties of catnip and silver vine – an unrelated plant native to China and Japan that produces similar compounds – Miyazaki and his colleagues placed the heads of sedated cats into chambers full of mosquitos and counted how many insects landed on them. Some of the cats were treated with catnip and silver vine extract, while others were treated with a neutral substance. The experiment, published in the January 2021 issue of the journal Science Advances, revealed that only around half the number of mosquitoes landed on the treated versus the non-treated heads. The evolutionary advantage, Miyazaki argues, is obvious:
“Anyone who has ever sat in the field to observe animals ambushing prey knows just how difficult it is for them to keep still when there are many biting mosquitoes around. “It does not seem unreasonable, therefore, to argue that there is a strong selection pressure [to keep these insects at bay].”
Whatever the case there, the psychoactive effects of catnip are thus likely a happy side-effect – one that helped reinforce the even more beneficial insect-repellent properties of the plant.
Today, of course, the pampered indoor lives of our feline friends makes the practical advantages of catnip irrelevant, turning the herb into a purely recreational substance we gladly supply our feline masters.
Expand for References
Turner, Ramona, How Does Catnip Work its Magic on Cats? Scientific American, May 29, 2007, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-how-does-catnip-work-on-cats/
Stromberg, Joseph, How Catnip Gets Your Cat High, Vox, December 20, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/9/12/6136451/catnip-cats-science
Barry, David, Catnip, Chemical & Engineering News, August 1, 2005, https://pubsapp.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/83/print/8331catnip.html?
Weisberger, Mindy, Does Catnip Really Make Cats ‘High’? Live Science, September 7, 2022, https://www.livescience.com/does-catnip-get-cats-high.html
How Does Catnip Make Cats High? New Study Offers Answers, NPR, January 22, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/01/22/959700116/how-does-catnip-make-cats-high-new-study-offers-answers
Miller, Matthew, Does Catnip Make Cats High? PetMD, January 3, 2022, https://www.petmd.com/cat/general-health/does-catnip-make-cats-high
Moutinho, Sofia, Why Cats Are Crazy for Catnip, Science, January 20, 2021, https://www.science.org/content/article/why-cats-are-crazy-catnip
Miyazaki, Tamako et. al., The Characteristic Response of Domestic Cats to Plant Iridoids Allows Them to Gain Chemical Defense Against Mosquitoes, Science Advances, January 20, 2021, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd9135
Diep, Francie, FYI: Can Humans Get High on Catnip? Popular Science, April 18, 2013, https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/catnip-effects-humans/
Hart, Benjamin & Leedy, Mitzi, Analysis of the Catnip Reaction: Mediation by Olfactory System, not Vomeronasal Organ, Behavioral and Neural Biology, July 1985, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0163104785911513
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Gladiatorial combat may seem outdated and barbaric, but it is, at its heart, a combat sport like mixed martial arts, boxing, and even professional wrestling, with very similar appeal. There were clearly defined rules, a sense of dramatic flair with costumes, and even character archetypes. It was indeed bloody, but not as nearly as fatal as many think today. Not every gladiator died in the arena, and those who made it past their first handful of matches even less so beyond. That isn’t to say that gladiator fights didn’t also come with many deaths. For example, gladiator combat was usually accompanied by other events such as parades, animal hunts, glorified prisoner executions dressed up as combat practice for gladiators, and even occasional audience fatalities. But how did the games get started, what was life actually like for a typical gladiator, and how did these ubiquitous games rather suddenly cease to be a thing after so many centuries of widespread extreme popularity?
To begin with, the first known gladiator game was held in 264 BCE in honor of a deceased Roman aristocrat, put on by the aristocrat’s sons. The gladiators in this one were slaves that seemed to be captured from outside of Rome. As to the outcome, well, unfortunately, we don’t know if the first gladiators in this event lived or died, simply that it was a three-way match between three gladiators.
While gladiator games would be held throughout Roman history for various reasons, this particular occasion of honoring someone who’d just died persisted. In fact, upon the death of a Roman aristocrat in a given region, the masses even began expecting games, and would sometimes revolt if they weren’t held after such a death. For example, Suetonius noted upon the death of one aristocrat, the people of his city refused to let the body be buried unless his family held gladiatorial games. This eventually led to a revolt that had to be put down by emperor Tiberius.
That said, it should be noted that funerary gladiator games were not held for everyone. Equestrians and plebeians, even very rich ones, did not get funerary gladiator games held in their honor, just the patricians like the senatorial class. They also did not happen frequently, and you were lucky if you had two a year in a given town. Even a city as big as Rome did not usually see that many per year.
In any event, the gladiator games’ form would start to cement as Romans spread out into the world and took the games with them. Slaves captured in wars were sometimes sold to a gladiator school, or a ludus. As Rome expanded, there was a growing pool of slaves, and new territories in which gladiatorial combat became popular as a part of the spreading Roman culture. It was a machine that fed itself and could only grow as Rome was growing. Gladiatorial schools owned a familia gladiatoria or a gladiator troupe of slaves and free men and women. On this note, there were also free volunteers, usually thrill seekers or people down on their luck. These individuals typically paid to join the school, negotiated terms with the school owner, and were treated better than their slave colleagues. They could also leave whenever they wanted if they bought out their contract. Each troupe was run by a manager or owner, called a lanista, usually a freed gladiator himself.
Training as a gladiator was harsh. So harsh that there were protocols to ensure the gladiators-in-training did not try to end their own lives. They were chained and lived in rooms devoid of anything they could hang or stab themselves with. As they fought and gained a reputation, they moved up in the hierarchy of gladiators and gained better accommodations. If you have something to gain by living, you don’t necessarily resort to ending your own life to escape a bad situation. Lower gladiators, however, were kept under lock-and-key and their movements were limited.
We do have some examples of gladiators sharing a room with their so-called “wives” such as Spartacus, keeping in mind that legally, slaves could not marry. Gladiators could have children with these women and live as a family, sometimes in private houses if the gladiator was successful enough. Groupies and prostitutes were also allowed into the gladiators’ private quarters depending on their level in the hierarchy. Gladiators could have some sort of domestic life, and often when freed, their families also became freed and paid tribute to their father in posthumous memorials.
The schools also employed experts– also freed gladiators – to train in one or more combat styles, which we’ll get into shortly. They ran drills with the recruits and showed them how to fight according to their style. The experts and trainees practiced with wooden swords approximately twice as heavy as the swords they would ultimately fight with, same for wooden shields, and on wooden posts as tall as a person. They also practiced various offensive and defensive drills known as dictata. These were seen as the basics of their style of combat, and audience members were known to call out the dictata they wanted to see, essentially exhorting the gladiators to fight in a way they found to be exciting. These drills were important to the training of a gladiator, and experienced gladiators could build off of them to have more interesting or efficient fights. The hierarchy within the gladiator class or style was based on the victory record of the fighter. Trainees who had not had their first fights were usually considered the lowest. Noteworthy on this one, many did not survive their first fight. After these beginners came four levels of hierarchy with the first two considered the lowest. The top levels were where being a gladiator got really interesting. This is when you started to be a known commodity and started building a bonafide fanbase. The hierarchy was maintained by those with the same fighting style, with the top level of each style being considered the troupe’s main draws.
As for health, their diet and conditions were regulated to ensure they were healthy as possible. For example, many cities famed for gladiator schools were coastal cities, with the fresh air supposedly healthier for the gladiators. Gladiator diet was very barley-heavy, to the point of “barley-men” becoming a nickname for these fighters. As to why such a diet, it was said that barley fattened the arteries and made it harder for the gladiators to bleed to death. However, in reality, barley was probably used because it was cheap. This was important as Gladiators ate a lot, even more than the average soldier, to the point that they could put a stress on regions undergoing famine.
To help regulate their diet and ensure the gladiators were in good health, the schools hired physicians and cooks. On the former, no greater a physician than Galen, considered by many the greatest medical researcher of his era, worked for a gladiator school for a time. Notably, Galen doubted the barley diet was optimal here, and worked to change the diet of his gladiators. In the process of his work here, he gained invaluable experience, which helped him develop his medical theories beyond.
Another facet of maintaining good health was massage, with masseuses employed by the schools to help ensure the gladiators were fighting in top form.
Going back to the schools themselves, as gladiator combat became more popular, and politicians saw its potential as a political tool, upper classes, and even the empire itself, bought schools from their original lanistae. In fact, Julius Caesar himself owned a school of about a thousand gladiators. It was such a part of his political career that other senators attempted to limit his promotions indirectly by legally limiting how many gladiators could be in combat at any given time.
Octavian inherited Caesar’s school, and it was passed on throughout the Julio-Claudian dynasty of emperors. Some emperors like Nero opened separate schools than the imperial one, while others integrated them more into their administration by placing high ranking members of the court into the school’s administration. Imperial schools could be found all over Rome in the Eastern and Western empires. They were considered a cut above the regular schools and could even be rented out just like the others for a heftier price. Roman politicians followed suit and bought their own schools. Economically, it made sense for an aristocrat to buy a school. Since politicians were usually the editor, they incurred the cost of the dead gladiators and the cost of setting up a venue. Why not own the school?
This all brings us to the types of fighters used here. As alluded to, Rome had many types of gladiators that fell in and out of style depending on era or region. However, there are some primary types of gladiators found almost in any era and place: the horsemen, who fought on white horses with golden helmets, a tunic, round shields, with lances as weapons. They also wore a single shoulder armor called a manica, which most other gladiators wore as well. Noteworthy here is that despite the name, horsemen could fight on the ground as well as on horseback.
There were also the Retiarius, usually a good looking man or woman who fought without a helmet, but with a net, trident, and small blade.
Next up different types of sword and shield wielders existed like the Myrmillo, Thracian, and Secutor. They all had helmets, swords, and shields with a distinct design for each style of fighting. A gladiator could specialize in one to three of these styles. The eclecticism was probably to remain interesting in the arena, but also to ensure a career as a trainer in several styles as one’s fighting career began to wrap up. Originally these styles, like the Thracian, were based on peoples Rome were at war with. As the Empire grew and these locals became assimilated the names changed and new styles were added to represent further foes. For example, the Myrmillo used to refer to a peoples in what is now modern France, but the name was changed to fish person to more suit the look of the armor.
We should probably also explicitly mention there were female gladiators. Female gladiators were not tied down to a singular female-only style and could also specialize in more than one style of fighting.
As for what gladiators got up to in the matches, this could be all over the map. As noted in the first game in 264 BCE, it was a three-way match between the three slave-gladiators. As the sport became more refined, however, one-on-one matches became common. That didn’t mean there weren’t, say, 74-man matches in later Roman history, because there were- massive battle royales between trained gladiators happened. However, most of the large-scale matches were between criminals whose lives were less valuable, or not at all really, rather than trained gladiators. This would eventually be a part of the experience of going to the gladiator games. Sometimes these prisoners would recreate sea battles complete with battleships, sacking of villages, and other key Roman victories. The idea was the prisoners got a chance to die like brave Roman soldiers while the masses were thoroughly entertained by their deaths. In fact, many were expected to die in these battles to the point that once during a recreation of a sea battle, emperor Claudius was misheard to be offering the prisoners a pardon; this misunderstanding caused the prisoners to revolt.
In any event, while trained gladiators did die during their less frequent multi-man battles, these were spectacles rather than the norm, at least compared to one-on-one matches.
Moving on to people who fought animals in the arena, these were not considered gladiators, though they were eventually sourced from the same pool of slaves and trained in similar schools. However, they were called venatores and they were seen as slightly more respectable than their gladiator colleagues- hunters who fought against all sorts of animals, but mostly predators.
To fit the bill, they fought wearing the clothes and equipment of a hunter: a tunic, a spear for thrusting, and a spear for throwing. Venatores could come from all over the empire, and typically were well versed in how to handle animals exotic to wherever they were fighting.
Another class of beast fighter, named – well – beast fighter, is more linked in the mind of the spectators to the gladiator. In all likelihood, these were gladiators that started to fight in events meant for venatores, sort of a crossover spectacle. That said, there is a lot of disagreement between scholars as to what the beast men were. Some scholars say they fought with heavy armor for a time, others say light armor. Some say the term is used to refer to people thrown to animals as an execution, while others say the beast men were assistants to the venatores and trained the animals.
Yet another class of beast fighter consists of the animals themselves. Some events pitted exotic animals against each other. Animals found in the arena included leopards, lions, rhinos, bulls, bears, and others. Venatores, beast men, and animals were also susceptible to the crowd’s bloodthirst, and they could be condemned or spared in the arena. Events involving animals were well regarded, and the crowds both high and low appreciated seeing animals from far off lands. In fact, so popular were these animal spectacles that hunting animals for the arena led to the extinction of some animals such as the Nile Hippopotamus.
This all brings us to what a day at the games was actually like more specifically. For starters, these were usually free events, as most expenses were paid by the person putting on the show – the editor – or by the editor splitting the bill with the city.
It was also an all-day affair beginning in the morning. A procession opened the games in which the editor and gladiators were paraded to the audience. This was usually considered the most boring part of the card and was not advertised. That said, the procession was still an important part of the games, as it was where the editor showed off for the audience, attempting to curry favor for the event they were, in essence, sponsoring. Afterwards there was typically a beast-hunt. The beast-hunts were welcomed and while they weren’t the main event, as mentioned, they were enjoyed by the high and low classes alike.
In the afternoon were the noonday spectacles, usually execution events. The editor purchased prisoners from the local prisons to be executed in various ways. Noonday spectacles could be recreations of Roman victories for larger arenas, and smaller scale combat between condemned men for smaller arenas. Usually these men were forced to fight animals, gladiators, or each other. Other times they were executed in basic ways like hanging and burning, or in more vicious and elaborate ways such as having a stake shoved through the back of the head, or quartering. The memory of the noonday spectacle lives largely in Christian lore as many early Christians were executed rather brutally during this portion of the event. Aristocrats and intellectuals usually disliked the levels of bloodshed of this part of the games and went home for lunch to return later when the gladiators came out.
In the meantime, you could buy souvenirs of your visit, and even potentially luck out in receiving giveaways from particularly wealthy editors that could span anything from free food to whole apartment buildings and farms if you were really lucky. On the not so fun side, the sweet aroma of animal feces, blood, sweat, and opened and rotting flesh was a thing. To combat these odors, perfume and water mixed with saffron were usually sprayed on the audience.
Going back to the main event, there was typically a little warm-up show where the gladiators showed off practicing and performing monologues against their opponents. From here, the first gladiators to fight were the horsemen, usually fighting other horsemen.
And just in general once the combat portion of the games started, it was pretty comparable to a modern combat sports supercard or pay per view, with the gladiator matches lasting around ten to fifteen minutes with around twelve matches to a card running around three hours, although sometimes games could be stretched into several days in this way. Between matches, decisions would be called to either break ties or decide the fate of the combatants by the editor. Viscera and blood were also cleaned off the arena as best as possible by sand or water. On this one, our term for “arena” comes from the Latin word for sand, Harena.
Matches were refereed, much like modern combat sports. This was to ensure that the fights were being fought fairly, and to make sure they didn’t get too boring. If action died down too much, gladiators could be whipped to encourage them to fight more dramatically. As alluded to, at the end of a fight, if a gladiator did not get killed, the audience voiced their decision, while the editor made the final decision on who lived and died.
As to voicing their thoughts, the fate of a gladiator, in terms of whether the audience was voting for a kill, was decided with what is known as “pollice verso”, a Latin term which roughly translates to “turned thumb”. More precisely what this means isn’t known and there are no accounts that have survived to this day that describe it in any real detail. As such, we’re unable to say for sure which way the thumb was supposed to be pointed if the audience wanted a given gladiator to be killed or if they could just wave their thumbs around at random, which it seems may well have been the case.
So that’s voting for death, what about life? The gesture to spare a given gladiator’s life seems to have been neither a thumbs up nor a thumbs down. Instead, you had to hide your thumb inside your fist, forming a gesture known as pollice compresso, “compressed thumb”.
The reasons for this has been speculated to be twofold: one, it made the decision of the crowd easier to discern, since it’s easier to tell the difference between a thumbs turned and a closed fist than a thumbs up and a thumbs down from a long ways away. And two, the gestures themselves are thought to be largely symbolic of what they represented- a pointed thumb represented the audience’s desire for the victorious gladiator to deliver his coup de grâce (stab the fallen foe), while a hidden thumb symbolised that they wished for the gladiator to stay his blade, sheathing it much in the way they’d hidden their thumbs. Hence why it’s thought “turned thumb” may well have been simply waving your thumb around in the air, perhaps in a stabbing motion.
In any event, the crowd seems to have done these gestures rather than the editor. But once their opinions were seen, the editor could decide several things: mercy for both gladiators, mercy for the defeated, ordering the winner to kill the defeated gladiator, complete manumission of one or both combatants, or giving the winner the choice to end his opponent’s life. Noteworthy here is that the editor footed the bill on any slain or freed gladiator, perhaps slightly incentivizing to keep them alive, especially if they were an accomplished fighter.
As for broad death rates, just like modern combat sports, the crowd could be more or less blood thirsty depending on the era and region, and their reactions to sparing a gladiator could vary. But it is known that gladiators tended to live after a fight much more so than media would make it seem. And these individuals often had fight records comparable to modern boxers or mixed martial arts fighters today.
That said, despite the extreme fame some of these individuals reached, gladiators never really enjoyed the respectability of their Greek athletic predecessors, or their modern combat sports antecedents, and gladiators were considered a lowly class in Roman society. And when we say low, we mean very low. For example, a common way to soothe a mother of a dead child was to assure her that at least he didn’t grow up to be a gladiator.
That said, that didn’t stop emperor Commodus from getting in the arena more than 700 times in essentially fixed matches. And gladiators did have their adoring fans, some of whom went out of their way to meet them, have spicey time with them, and even memorialize them if they died in the arena. Probably the most famous gladiator of all, Spartacus, even led a revolt against the Roman Republic in 73 BCE; the largest slave revolt in Rome.
This all may now have you wondering how exactly these incredibly popular games finally, and rather abruptly, went the way of the Dodo?
Well, remember how we mentioned Christians were rather brutally executed during gladiatorial games for the amusement of the masses? Well, a LOT of early Christians were killed this way. As you might imagine from this, Christian writers were rather hostile towards the games, either because their fellow Christians were killed in them, or because of the bloodlust the games inspired in their audience which kind of went against the whole “love your neighbor” thing and other such precepts.
As such, as Rome Christianized, church leaders put up more and more resistance to the games. In the late fourth century the church even made baptism impossible for gladiators and their trainers. Schools closed up and the games became an ever more rare part of Roman life.
Things finally ceased completely when, in 404 CE, a monk named Telemachus was stoned when he ran into one of the last active arenas to beg the crowd to disperse. His death led emperor Honorius to close the arenas for good, with the last game happening probably in 410.
This end to the gladiator games while Rome was still an entity is most likely why the games didn’t persist among the European, Byzantine, or Muslim inheritors of Rome, despite many of the old arenas and coliseums surviving in those locales, and that the human thirst for watching extreme combat existed before Rome and continues to this day… just now with less slavery, mass executions, and while crowds might scream for one opponent to destroy the other, the runners of the event aren’t deciding if the athletes live or die after a match. But otherwise, the general idea behind the thing and entertainment value is approximately the same.
Expand for ReferencesWiedmann, Thomas. Emperors and Gladiators. Routledge: London, 1992.
Wisdom, Stephen and Angus McBride. Gladiators: 250 BC- AD 100. Osprey Publishing: Oxford, 2001.
The post What was It Like to Be a Gladiator in Ancient Rome? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
“God…France…My son…Josephine.” These were the final words of Napoleon Bonaparte, spoken on May 5, 1821. The Corsican-born leader, who in less than two decades rose from humble artillery commander to Emperor of the French and conquered much of mainland Europe, died far from his beloved France – exiled to the remote, windswept island of Saint Helena. Napoleon’s cause of death was officially ruled as stomach cancer, which ran in his family and had killed his father and two sisters. But the former Emperor was not so sure, writing shortly before his death that:
“I will die before my time, killed by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.”
While no evidence of foul play was found at the time, nearly two centuries later, analysis of Napoleon’s hair has revealed dangerously high levels of arsenic, resurrecting old conspiracy theories that the former Emperor was poisoned by his British captors. But is this actually the case? Did Napoleon die of cancer as his doctors claimed, or was he secretly murdered? Or, as one surprising theory suggests, was he done in by a seemingly innocuous piece of home decor? Let’s find out as we examine the curious case of Napoleon’s death.
On July 15, 1815, a month after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon boarded the Royal Navy warship HMS Bellerophon in Rochefort Harbour and formally surrendered to the British, bringing 12 years of Napoleonic Wars to an end. From Rochefort, Bellerophon sailed to Plymouth, where she remained for two weeks while the British government decided what to do with the deposed Emperor. Napoleon, who had expected to settle peacefully in Britain or even the United States, was bitterly disappointed when, on July 31, he learned that he was to be exiled indefinitely to Saint Helena, along with a retinue of three officers, a surgeon, and twelve servants. On August 7, Napoleon and his entourage were transferred to HMS Northumberland for transport to the St. Helena, arriving on October 15, 1815.
For his first two months on St. Helena, Napoleon lived at Briars Pavilion, a small house on the estate of English merchant William Balcome. He was then moved to Longwood House, a 40-room wooden bungalow. Security around Napoleon was tight, the island being garrisoned by 2,100 British troops and continually patrolled by 10 Royal Navy warships. This was not as excessive as it might seem; after all, Napoleon had escaped British custody before. On March 20, 1815, the Emperor fled his first exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba and returned to France, taking command of the French Armies, overthrowing King Louis XVIII, and launching a final military campaign known as the Hundred Days, which culminated in his final defeat at Waterloo. However, while there were many rumours of plots to spring Napoleon from St. Helena, none ever materialized.
Napoleon soon settled into a life of dull routine. He awoke every morning at 9, breakfasted at 10, then spent most of the day dictating his memoirs to his secretary, Emmanuel, Comte de Las Cases. He ate dinner at 7 and read classics aloud until 11 before retiring to bed. It was a lonely and monotonous existence for one of the most dynamic figures in human history – made all the worse by the rapid decline in the former Emperor’s health. Napoleon was no stranger to ill health. Stomach cancer ran in his family, and he had long been troubled by ulcers and other stomach upsets as well as diarrhea and haemorrhoids, which may have affected his performance at Waterloo. None of this was helped by his accommodations on Saint Helena. The weather on the island was often cold, damp, and windy, while Longwood House – hastily converted from two cow sheds – was drafty and rat-infested – something Napoleon and his servants frequently complained about. As a result, throughout his exile Napoleon was beset by all manner of symptoms, including various bodily aches and pains, fever, insomnia, rashes, chills, nausea and vomiting, coughing fits, fainting spells, and oedema or swelling of the legs that frequently rendered him barely able to walk. As time went on, the Emperor spent more and more time soaking in the bath to relieve his various ailments.
Napoleon’s first doctor on Saint Helena was Dr. Barry O’Meara, the ship’s surgeon aboard HMS Northumberland, who was assigned to him by the Royal Navy upon his arrival on the island. Napoleon took a liking to O’Meara, the two maintaining a friendly relationship for the first two years of the Emperor’s exile. All this changed, however, in 1817, when British Army officer Sir Hudson Lowe became governor of the island. A staunch opponent of Bonapartism, Lowe had little sympathy for Napoleon and sought to make his exile as miserable as possible. Over the next four years, Lowe would confine Napoleon to the grounds of Longwood House, force him to pay for his imprisonment with Imperial silver, limit his supply of firewood, and expel several members of his entourage from the island on suspicion of conspiracy.
Lowe distrusted Dr. O’Meara, not only because of his close relationship with Napoleon and allegiance to the Royal Navy – the Army’s perpetual rival – but because he had diagnosed the Emperor with hepatitis and publicly decried his accommodations at Longwood as unhealthy. Lowe, convinced that Napoleon was malingering in order to engineer an escape, had O’Meara court-martialled on trumped-up charges of conspiring against the governorship and sent back to Britain in disgrace. In his place Lowe appointed Dr. John Vierling, an Army Surgeon, but Napoleon refused to be treated by him. Vierling was thus replaced by naval surgeon Dr. John Stokoe, who, to Lowe’s chagrin, confirmed O’Meara’s diagnosis of hepatitis. Medicine at the time was still dominated by the ancient theory of the four humours, which held that the body was governed by four fluids or humours – blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile – and that all diseases were caused by an imbalance of these fluids. Vierling thus prescribed a series of bloodlettings and purgings to re-balance Napoleon’s humours. But Napoleon, believing all British doctors to be agents of Governor Lowe, refused medical attention until September 1819, when his relatives in Corsica sent Dr. Antonio Antonmarchi to be his personal physician.
But Napoleon’s health soon took another turn for the worse. In early 1820 he began vomiting what looked like coffee grounds – clotted blood from a gastric haemorrhage – while by early 1821 he had become increasingly thin and frail, abandoning his habit of dictation and spending much of his time lying in bed or on the sofa. As one Captain Nichols, a British orderly at Longwood House, wrote in his memoirs:
“At his dressing room window with a red handkerchief round his head, he continued there a considerable time talking to Madame Montholon and the children. . .his countenance appeared cadaverous.”
By March of that year Napoleon was confined to bed, whereupon he finally consented to be treated by Dr. Archibald Arnott, a surgeon in the British 20th Regiment of Foot. Though Napoleon was now also suffering from amoebic dysentery and severely hydrated, Arnott subjected him to a punishing regimen of the purgative antimony potassium tartrate – known at the time as tartar emetic – dissolved in lemonade – a treatment which left Napoleon writhing on the floor in agony. Realizing the end was near, a frail and bedridden Napoleon dictated his last will and testament, bequeathing some six million Francs to various beneficiaries and requesting that:
“… my ashes [rest] on the banks of the seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have loved so well.”
On May 5, 1821, Dr. Arnott administered ten grains or 640 milligrams of the laxative calomel – AKA mercuric chloride – whereupon Napoleon slipped into unconsciousness. He never awoke, murmuring a few delirious words before finally expiring at 5:49 P.M. Napoleon Bonaparte, the “little corporal” who had set Europe ablaze, was dead at the age of 51.
As per his request, Napoleon’s head was shaved and locks of his hair distributed to members of his retinue as keepsakes. His body was then autopsied, the procedure being performed by Dr. Antommarchi and witnessed by Dr. Arnott and four other British doctors: Thomas Shortt, Charles Mitchell, Francis Burton, and Matthew Livingstone. The six doctors concluded that Napoleon had died of a gastric ulcer or tumour which had spread to his liver – just as the Emperor had always feared.
Yet despite his final wishes, Napoleon neither cremated nor sent home to France. Instead, his body was dressed in his green military uniform, placed in a triple-lined tinplate coffin, and, on May 7, 1821, buried in St. Helena’s Valley of Geraniums with full military honours. It was not until 1840 that the British Government gave King Louis-Philippe I permission to repatriate Napoleon’s remains. His coffin was exhumed and returned to Paris where, on December 15, 1840, he was given a state funeral attended by some 1 million mourners. The coffin sat in St. Jérôme’s Chapel until 1861, when Napoleon’s remains were finally interred in a red quartzite sarcophagus beneath the gilded dome of l’Hotel des Invalides. They remain there to this day, an imposing monument to one of the most consequential figures in modern history.
While rumours circulated for decades that Napoleon’s death had secretly been expedited by his British captors, it was not until the 20th century that any evidence of this emerged. In 1961, a Swedish dentist named Sten Forshufvud, Scottish doctor Hamilton Smith, and Swedish doctor Anders Wassen, subjected a lock of Napoleon’s hair collected just after his death to neutron activation analysis. The analysis revealed levels of arsenic 100x higher than normal, all of which had been absorbed within the last four months of Napoleon’s life. While it was impossible to tell if the arsenic had been absorbed continuously or all at once, the team concluded that it was contained within the hair follicles themselves and was not applied externally afterwards as a preservative or insecticide. These findings were independently verified by other teams analyzing other locks of hair, raising the tantalizing possibility that Napoleon had been poisoned.
Indeed, evidence that Napoleon had actually succumbed to arsenic poisoning had been uncovered all the way back in 1840. When his grave on Saint Helena was opened, his body was found to be remarkably well preserved, with few signs of decomposition after 20 years underground. As arsenic slows decomposition and was widely used in early embalming fluids, this is consistent with Napoleon having slowly been poisoned – as are many of Napoleon’s recorded symptoms prior to his death, including oedema in the legs and chronic diarrhea. Furthermore, until the development of the Marsh Test in 1836, arsenic was almost impossible to detect in a body after death, making it a popular instrument of murder; indeed, it was commonly known as “inheritance powder.”
But who, then, was Napoleon’s poisoner? While the British Government and especially Governor Lowe would seem to have motive to get rid of Napoleon, in fact the opposite is true. Despite his animosity, the one thing Lowe could not afford was to let Napoleon die on his watch, for this could potentially stir up Republican sentiment in France and endanger the recently restored French monarchy. If the French even suspected that Napoleon had been deliberately murdered, the political consequences would have been many times worse.
Another theory is that Napoleon was poisoned by his close friend and confidant Charles Tristan, Marquis de Montholon. His wife, Albine de Montholon, was rumoured to have been Napoleon’s mistress, while the Comte’s letters to his wife reveal that he was desperate to leave his post on Saint Helena and return to France. Furthermore, Napoleon bequeathed the Comte some 2 million francs in his will. Yet despite these plausible motives, there is little solid evidence to support any allegations against the Comte de Montholon – or any other member of Napoleon’s entourage. However, there is absolutely no evidence of this allegation. If Napoleon was deliberately poisoned, no-one seems to have had the motive or opportunity to do so – at least, not that we know of.
But how to explain the arsenic found in Napoleon’s hair? Surprisingly, this could have come from a whole host of sources, so widespread were arsenic and other toxins in the 19th century. Napoleon could have absorbed arsenic from the rat poison set out around Longwood House, or from eating fish caught around Saint Helena. Arsenic, along with strychnine, was also a popular recreational drug in the early 19th century, being taken in small doses to induce a brief sense of strength and vitality. Though it is not known if Napoleon engaged in his practice, it is certainly a possibility. Similarly, Napoleon was known to have been partial to a sweet apricot drink containing high levels of hydrocyanic acid, and would have absorbed high levels of heavy metals like antimony and mercury from the various purgatives prescribed by his doctors. In other words, Napoleon’s body, like those of many of his contemporaries, was already a wasteland of toxic substances – no foul play required.
But perhaps the strangest theory regarding Napoleon’s death is that he was poisoned….by his wallpaper. In the 1980s, a scrap of green-and-gold wallpaper from Longwood House, collected by a visitor in the 1820s, was discovered in a family scrapbook in Norfolk, England. The owner of the scrapbook, Shirley Bradley, contacted chemist Dr. David Jones, who analyzed the wallpaper using x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. This revealed the green dye to be copper arsenite, also known as Scheele’s Green or Schloss Green. Invented in 1775 by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele – most famous for discovering the element oxygen – Scheele’s Green soon became the most popular green dye of the 19th Century, being used in hundreds of different products from soap and candles to clothing, candy, and – yes – wallpaper. And given this widespread and unregulated use, it did not take long for Scheele’s Green to start poisoning people, with fashionable ladies and especially seamstresses suffering painful skin lesions and chronic health issues collectively known as Gosio’s Disease from constant exposure to arsenic-dyed cloth. Shirley Bradley’s wallpaper scrap from Longwood House was found to contain 0.12 grams of arsenic per square metre – nearly twenty times the concentration considered hazardous today. But if this was the source of the arsenic in Napoleon’s body, how did it get there? Was the Emperor so restless that he took up licking walls out of sheer boredom? Well, not quite; according to Dr. David Jones, the damp conditions at Longwood House would have been ideal for the growth of various moulds which, in process of digesting the wallpaper and the paste beneath, would have metabolized excreted the arsenic in the dye and excreted it in the form of arsine gas. Napoleon and his retinue may thus have been breathing arsenic vapours day in, day out for nearly 6 years. This would explain the fluctuating levels of arsenic found in Napoleon’s hair: the yearly cycle of wet and dry seasons on Saint Helena would have caused variations in the growth of mould and thus the concentration of arsenic in the air. Furthermore, wallpaper dyed with Scheele’s Green was also found in the bathroom where Napoleon spent many of his final days soaking in the bathtub – likely exposing him to even higher concentrations of arsenic.
That Napoleon absorbed the arsenic over time rather than in one lethal dose is further supported by a 2008 study conducted at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics, which analyzed strands of hair from four different periods of Napoleon’s life – childhood, early exile, the day of his death, and the day after – as well as from his son, Napoleon II; and his one time wife Empress Josephine. All showed similarly elevated levels of arsenic, indicating that the entire Bonaparte family were chronically exposed to this toxin throughout their lives.
So what, then, killed Napoleon? The simple answer is what Dr. Antommarchi concluded in 1821: ulcerating cancer of the stomach and liver. However, this and the other conditions plaguing Napoleon during his exile may have been aggravated by chronic exposure to arsenic and other environmental toxins – whether from rat poison, fish, wallpaper, or other sources. But while these conditions would inevitably have resulted in Napoleon’s death, the question “What killed Napoleon?” does have another, more shocking answer: his doctor. The ten grains of calomel administered by Dr. Arnott just prior Napoleon’s death was five times higher than the maximum recommended dose. According to a 2004 study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the extreme dehydration caused by amoebic dysentery and endless rounds of purgatives would have left Napoleon with a dangerous electrolyte imbalance. A high dose of calomel would have been more than enough to finish him off, inducing death by cardiac arrest. So in the end Napoleon probably was poisoned by his captors – just not intentionally. And while the toxic decor of Longwood House was probably not the primary cause of Napoleon’s untimely death, it does give new meaning to Oscar Wilde’s infamous last words, spoken 80 years later:
“This wallpaper and I are fighting duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”
Expand for References
Panati, Charles, Panati’s Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody, Harper & Row, New York, 1989
Death by Wallpaper, Napoleon on St Helena, https://www.napoleon-on-st-helena.co.uk/death-by-wallpaper/
Was Napoleon Poisoned? American Museum of Natural History, January 21, 2014, https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/on-exhibit-posts/was-napoleon-poisoned
The Color That May Have Killed Napoleon: Scheele’s Green, Open Culture, February 15, 2021, https://www.openculture.com/2021/02/discover-scheeles-green-the-arsenic-laden-color-that-may-have-contributed-to-napoleons-death.html
Dimri, Bipin, Was Napoleon Poisoned by his Wallpaper? Historic Mysteries, August 27, 2022, https://www.historicmysteries.com/history/napoleon-poison-wallpaper/26528/
Markel, Howard, How Napoleon’s Death in Exile Became a Controversial Mystery, PBS News Hour, August 15, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-napoleons-death-in-exile-became-a-controversial-mystery
Ball, Hendrik, Arsenic Poisoning and Napoleon’s Death, https://victorianweb.org/history/arsenic.html
Blair, Victor, Who Murdered Napoleon? Probably Nobody! The Napoleon Series, https://www.napoleon-series.org/research/napoleon/c_arsenic.html
Forshufvud, Sten et al, Arsenic Content of Napoleon I’s Hair Probably Taken Immediately After His Death, Nature, October 14, 1961, https://www.nature.com/articles/192103a0.pdf
Marim Fransesco et al, Channelling the Emperor: What Really Killed Napoleon? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, August 2004, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079564/
Broad, William, Hair Analysis Deflates Napoleon Poisoning Theories, The New York Times, June 10, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/science/10napo.html
The post What Killed Napoleon? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The Battle of Thermopylae as seen in the movie 300 was just one of many battles in the Graeco-Persian Wars. It wasn’t one the Greeks won, but we think of it as a kind of victory. Leading the Greeks through the push back against the Persians were the Spartans, a warrior society built on the backs of some rather brutally treated slaves, to the point that the Spartans feared other Greeks stepping in in defense of their mistreated underlings who occasionally revolted. Nevertheless, this societal structure allowed the aristocracy to enjoy a life training for battles like Thermopylae. But what led up to this battle, and was it actually anything like depicted in the 2006 film 300?
To begin with, as you are no doubt aware, Ancient Greece wasn’t one country, but several independent city-states, with the most famous today being Athens and Sparta, though Ancient Greek city-states could be found all the way into modern day Western Turkey, and in colonies around Italy and Sicily. All of these locals spoke Greek and were considered to be part of a greater Greek culture, even if they weren’t unified into one federal state.
On the other end of things, off in Central Asia there was a state unifying several related and unrelated peoples into a Persian empire: the Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BCE, which at its height, contained two fifths of all humans within its borders. Its eastern territory stretched to modern day Pakistan and the Aral Sea, while its western territory stretched to Egypt, Thrace, and Macedon. This empire also conquered the kingdom of Lydia, which previously conquered the Ionian Greek city-states in 547 BCE.
As to how they managed this vast empire, the Achaemenids were masters of infrastructure, logistics, and long-range communication. This enabled them, among other things, to successfully consolidate their rule over the Ionian Greeks and helped keep the Greeks divided.
To further help manage things, Cyrus and his predecessors installed tyrants to rule over the Ionian city states. Important to note here is that “tyrants” meant something very different for the ancient Greeks than it does for us today. It didn’t have that ring of authoritarian and unpopular rule. In fact, usually tyrants returned power to ordinary residents of the city-state, and away from the aristocrats of the region. Sometimes they even advocated for democratic reform to broaden enfranchisement.
In any event, the tyrant of the Ionian city-state of Miletus was a man named Aristagoras, who embarked on a failed invasion of the Greek island of Naxos with Persian support. On the way, he got into a fight with his Persian handler, as you do. Ultimately Aristagoras managed to alienate himself from Persian support and the powerbase in Miletus. To save face, he tried to incite support amongst the other Ionian city states to revolt, and embarked to Sparta and then Athens to convince them to support the revolution. Sparta refused, but Athens agreed to send twenty ships to help out. Ultimately the revolt was not successful, but this all turned Cyrus’ later successor, Darius’, eye towards the other Greek city-states, especially Athens.
On this one, Darius demanded symbolic gifts of water and soil from the Greek city-states as a sign of submission. As you probably guessed from the fact that we’re about to talk about a major war between these peoples, Sparta and Athens refused to do this, with the Athenians kicking the Persian messengers down a ravine used for executing prisoners. The Spartans did something similar, although would later apologize for this act against the messengers. To try to make up for it, the Spartans even sent two individuals to be executed as a token offering. Though their lives were ultimately spared, with the offering deemed insufficient for the slight.
In any event, ultimately Darius responded to the Athenian and Spartan refusals to submit by sending a conquering fleet to siege the islands leading to Athens. With the help of an exiled Athenian politician, he learned that he must establish a beachhead in the bay of Marathon, which they did in 490 BCE. The Persians camped for a few days here before Athenian and neighboring Plataean troops attacked them.
So where were the Spartans in all this? Well, they were supposed to be there, but were busy with a religious festival that couldn’t end until after the full moon. Nevertheless, the Athenians and the Palataeans fought the larger Persian forces off the bay, and then the Athenians swung back to Athens fast enough to head off an attempted invasion by sea. When the Spartans eventually arrived, the battle was over by a day.
While this was a significant victory for the Greeks, in the process of preparing for a beachhead, the Persians had conquered several islands in the Aegean, giving them control over the sea in the region.
Fortunately for the Greeks, however, Darius’ empire was very large, and as much as the Greeks may seem important to us today, they were not the main concern for Darius once the Egyptians began revolting, with Darius ultimately dying while planning to put down the revolt. His son, Xerxes, succeeded him in 484. Another revolt, this time in Babylon, kept Xerxes busy until 481, but this was only a calm in the storm for the Greeks and Xerxes had not forgotten about their disrespect and the shameful loss at Marathon.
And so it was that when he was able to finally focus on the Greeks, Xerxes REALLY focused on the Greeks, this time intent on crushing them completely. He assembled a massive army comprised of peoples and animals from all over his empire. He also intended to lead them himself into Greece. In the process, he ordered the building of two pontoon bridges using interconnected ships to cross between Abydos in Asia Minor and Sestos in Thrace. The pontoon bridges were famously destroyed in a storm, with Herodotus reporting that Xerxes had the sea shackled, whipped, and branded in punishment, although it isn’t actually clear whether that really happened or not.
Whatever the case, Xerxes had the bridges rebuilt and this time was able to move his forces into Thrace, estimated to be around 100,000-200,000 strong, a staggeringly large army for the era. Noteworthy here, though is that Herodotus famously puts Xerxes’ army into the millions, but historians generally discount this number as an exaggeration. Whatever the case there, in 480 Xerxes marched with his people into Thrace. The Persian genius for logistics and planning worked out and Xerxes had little trouble feeding and watering his forces and their animals all the way into central Greece with the help of his Macedonian and Thracian allies.
This brings us back to the Spartans, who were ruled by a mix of democracy, theocracy, and dual monarchy. The rule of the two kings was supported by two democratic bodies, ensuring a balance of power between the Spartans and their kings. One of these ruling groups was the Ephors, which the movie 300 was not very kind towards. In truth, the Ephors were not mutant and debauched priests, but a group of five elected officials cycled amongst the citizenry. On the other end, the famous Leonidas was one of the dual kings.
We’ve already discussed in great detail how the Spartan society functioned in our video How Did One Actually Become a Spartan Warrior?, but what is important to note in this one is that Spartans were a very hierarchical society based on the social organization of the mythical king, Lycurgus. The only true citizens were the Spartiates; these were the ruling class and the leaders of Sparta’s military. They were isolated to the city of Sparta, whereas the region itself was actually called Laconia. As for this ruling class, as alluded to, they lived a life of leisure geared towards athletics and combat training, so they were always ready for battle. Below them were the majority of Laconians, the free Dwellers-Around, and the slave Helots. Both of these groups also saw combat alongside the Spartiates, though little spoken of today in popular media. As also previously alluded to, it is noteworthy that the Helots were treated much more harshly by the Spartiates than most other Greeks tended to treat their slaves, possibly even having a festival where young Spartiates would sneak off into the night to murder Helots.
Unsurprisingly from this, the Helots occasionally revolted against the Spartiates, which presumably didn’t exactly improve their treatment, and notably also kept the Spartiates suspicious of them. On top of this, most other Greeks found the Spartans’ mistreatment of the Helots extremely troubling, and the Spartans feared outside intervention into their affairs by other Greeks on behalf of the mistreated Helots.
However, given the Spartans were the good guys in the movie 300, it is perhaps unsurprising that one major difference between the movie 300 and real life is that the movie does not portray the Helots and Dwellers-Around. Who, by the way, not only also bled and died at Thermopylae, but vastly outnumbered the 300 Spartans in the battle of Thermopylae. Naturally, their inclusion would have made the movie’s portrayal of Sparta much more complicated, especially having to explain why these groups do not enjoy the freedom and liberty of the Spartiates despite the fact that they were forced to die for it.
Speaking of maybe not so much being the good guys by our modern perspectives, it’s also noteworthy that during this era of Greek history, the Spartans kept up good relations with democratically organized aristocratic regimes across the city-states. Despite our modern understanding of democracy standing for liberty and freedom, Greek democracy was almost always controlled and meant for the aristocratic families. These families jealously guarded democratic participation from even wealthy common citizens. That said, as alluded to, these regimes were occasionally challenged by Tyrants, who sometimes overthrew them and took power. Tyrants, again as mentioned, often returned power to ordinary residents of the city-state away from the aristocrats, sometimes even advocating for democratic reform to broaden enfranchisement.
Given the power structure among the Spartans, it should come as no surprise that it was Spartan foreign policy to depose these tyrants and democratic reformers in order to return power to the aristocracy of foreign city-states. This happened in Athens in 507 when Sparta attempted to remove the reformer Cleisthenes. On this one, however, the people successfully forced the Spartans away.
Nevertheless, for the purpose of Xerxes’ invasion, Spartan foreign policy in these matters around this time in support of other aristocratic leaders meant that it was relatively easy to organize a force against the Persians under Spartan leadership, although the Spartans’ track record did isolate some rivals and neighbors such as the Argives. Other city-states were either allied with the Persians or were busy with other conflicts around Italy and Carthage.
The allies that ultimately did band together formed a league of sorts historians call the Hellenic League, but it was by no means a unified Greece, and even amongst themselves they had a bit of trouble getting on the same page about where to allocate their resources and where to stand their ground, owing to the league city-states being spread across very different parts of Greece. In short, not all points could be easily defended and so nobody wanted to send the bulks of their armies too far from their respective homes.
Further, leading up to Thermopylae, under Sparta, the league already lost a fight when Xerxes’ army entered Thessaly in 480. So everybody was being a bit cautious.
So why was Thermopylae, specifically the middle gate, chosen to make stand? Thermopylae was a narrow path with the mountains on one side and the sea on another. The middle gate was wider than the path in front of it and behind it, but the slopes of the mountain were easier to climb next to the middle gate than at either point. There was another path that led behind the contingent, but Leonidas blocked it with warriors native to the region to keep the Persians from flanking him. The Greeks also camped for a time and rebuilt an ancient wall to support themselves further.
This all set the stage for two battles that happened simultaneously to the point of being called twin battles- the more famous Thermopylae on land, and the lesser talked about Artemision in the water. The purpose of the fleet in Artemision was to keep the Persian fleet from landing behind Thermopylae and attacking the Greeks. King Leonidas led the stand at Thermopylae while a man by the name of Eurybiades led the fleet, with the assistance of a much more experienced naval commander Themistocles. As to why Themistocles wasn’t leading this one officially, this was simply because the rest of the banded city-states didn’t want an Athenian leading them.
For his battle, Leonidas chose three hundred soldiers who had sons who could replace them if they were killed, and after a religious festival, set out for Thermopylae. But this, contrary to what is depicted, was not all he brought. Leonidas’ actual number of soldiers was in the ballpark of 8000 warriors. Again, the Dwellers-Around and Helots and the like vastly outnumbered the Spartans, despite in popular history the Spartan warriors getting all the credit. As for Eurybiades, for his supporting fight, he was at the head of 271 ships.
Now, while bringing a massively larger number than just 300 soldiers, the 8000 or so were still a miniscule amount compared to the army attacking. As to why so few here, at the time many Greeks were observing different religious festivals, like the festival of Carneia for the Spartans, and the Olympic festival for the other Greeks. The movie, 300, takes a strange stance against Greek religion, but Leonidas and much of Sparta were well regarded for being more pious than other Greeks. Leonidas himself respected oracles to the point that he accepted his later death due to an oracle predicting he would either die, or Sparta would be captured. That said, some historians think these “festivals” excuses were actually just a cover for the Greeks’ own uncertainty about the league, and that the city-states wanted to hedge their bets and keep the majority of their forces closer to their respective homes.
Whatever the case, when the two forces initially faced one another, no action happened for the first five days. Ultimately Persian spies observed that the Greeks, specifically the Spartans, were just lounging about during this time combing their long and luxurious hair. On this one, traditionally, Spartans wore their hair long as a sort of flex against their enemies and took exceptionally good care of it. It was at this point that Xerxes sent men from two different nations against the Greeks, which they were able to fight off with few casualties.
Next, Xerxes sent the Immortals to fight, with the name supposedly referencing that when one man would fall, another would be assigned immediately to take his place in the force, such that it never diminished in number. Whatever the case there, these were the Persian kings’ crack bodyguards, which numbered between 10,000 to 15,000 men and were drawn from Persian nobility and from the nobility of nations culturally close to the Persians. Unfortunately for these troops, this wave of Immortals was at a disadvantage because their spears were shorter than the Greeks’. Noteworthy here on this is that the Greeks did indeed push some of them into the waters off the cliff of Thermopylae as depicted in the film.
Another relatively accurate thing was that although probably not a deformed person like in the movie, the traitor Ephialtes did exist and he informed the Persians of the pass that led behind the Greeks. The Persians were thus able to push through the natives who guarded it and successfully flanked the Greek forces.
Before they were flanked, however, Leonidas held a council where many of the Greeks wanted to disband and return to their homes. It is debated who left and who stayed at this point, but Leonidas seems to have disbanded most of the Greeks except for his own people who were comprised of the surviving among the original 300 Spartans, along with untold numbers of Dwellers-Around and Helots, 700 Thespians, and Theban hostages who were there against their will.
As for the Spartans’ decision not to retreat in the face of sure defeat, they had a very strict ethos about cowardice. If a Spartiate was branded a coward, he was essentially demoted to a type of pariah called a Trembler. So great was the fear of being branded a coward, that there are references to mothers beating their adult Spartiate sons to death for turning their backs on their comrades. Thus, Leonidas was probably holding to this ethos in his decision to send back the other Greeks but make his last stand with his fellow Spartans and support force who weren’t given a choice.
Ultimately, so vastly outnumbered, Leoniadas did indeed die during this battle, and the Greeks and Persians fought over his corpse several times before the battle was over. However, in the end, all the Laconians and Thespians died in the battle, while the Thebians begged Xerxes to recognize they were held as captives and their loyalty belonged to him, an act he also treated as a sham.
A famous epitaph was later written that commemorated all the Greeks that fought there with a section for the Spartans with the famous line “Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we died here obedient to our laws.”
On the other end of things, the Battle of Artemisium didn’t fare much better for the Greeks. Before the battle began, a storm did destroy some of the Persian ships, but the Greeks lost anyway.
After Thermopylae, Xerxes captured Athens and destroyed it. At which point it looked like all of Greece was about to be conquered by Xerxes. That is, until the battle of Salamis. Noteworthy on this one, unlike Leonidas, Eurybiades survived the previous battle he led, and ultimately commanded the battle at the straits of Salamis against Xerxes’ fleet. In this one, the Greeks won and it was a major turning point in the war. These two battles are the subject of 300’s sequel, 300: Rise of an Empire.
The movie is framed as a story told by a survivor of Thermopolaye to the Greeks before the battle of Plataea. He is based on a real survivor of the battle, Aristodemus. Aristodemus had an eye disease that kept him from participating, and Leonidas did order him back, but he was not well received in Sparta when he arrived, being treated with disgust for being deemed a coward for leaving. That said, Aristodemus ultimately died in the battle of Plataea heroically enough to redeem his name in Sparta. This battle took place in 479 and was another victory for the Greeks. From there, they recaptured Athens, battled the rest of the Persian navy at Mycale, and were able to repel them back to Asia Minor.
Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale are considered the five major battles of the second Greco-Persian wars for most historians. After this, the Spartans withdrew from the rest of the war, and Athens led a newly constituted Delian League in revenge against the Persians, attacking Persian targets in the Mediterranean. The final battle of this war was in Salamis in Cyprus.
Noteworthy here is that the Delian league consolidated Athens’ power, which all set the stage for the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta. That story, however, we’ll save for another day.
Expand for ReferencesBradford, Alfred S. Leonidas and the Kings of Sparta, Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011.
De Souza, Philip. Essential Histories: The Greek and Persian Wars 499-386 BC. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003.
Waters, Matt. Ancient Persia: A Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire 550-330 BCE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Rahe, Paul A. The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
Hīrūdūt, tr. Abd al-Ilāh Al-Malāḥ , Tārīkh Hīrūdūt. Abu Dhabi: al-Majmaʾ al-Thaqāfī, 2001.
The post What was the Real Story Behind the Spartan 300? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On February 20, 1947, a captured German V-2 rocket roared off the launch pad at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico and streaked off into the sky. Within three minutes, it reached an apogee of 109.4 kilometres – just above the 100 kilometre Karman Line that defines the boundary of outer space. Though completely forgotten today, this launch was a historic one, for the rocket carried passengers: a group of ordinary fruit flies who became the first complex organisms to travel into space and be successfully recovered. Over the next two decades, they would be followed by hundreds of other animals from mice and rats and guinea pigs to turtles, frogs, and beetles, who bravely paved the way for the first human astronauts. The American space program preferred to use primates like rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees, while the Soviets preferred dogs – all of which were considered even-tempered, cooperative and easy to train. Seemingly missing from this menagerie of early spacefarers are cats, which are notoriously none of these things. Yet in 1963 the French space program, apparently unaware of the expression “like herding cats”, launched a cat named Félicette into the wild blue yonder. This is the forgotten story of history’s first – and thus far only – cat-stronaut.
Just like its British, American, and Soviet counterparts, the early French space program benefited greatly from German rocket engineers and research captured at the end of the Second World War. In 1946, thirty German engineers employed by the French Centre d’Etudes de Projectiles Autopropulsés or Centre for the Study of Self-Propelled Missiles began development of a “Super V-2” ballistic missile based on wartime designs, which would be capable of lofting a 1,000 kilogram payload over a range of 3,600 kilometres. However, the design was plagued with technical difficulties and French government was reluctant to fund the project, so in 1949 CEPA cancelled the Super V-2 and pivoted to the development of a simpler and cheaper sounding rocket one-tenth the size for use in scientific research. Dubbed Véronique, a portmanteau of the Vernon – the town were the rocket was developed – and electronique, the rocket measured six metres tall, weighed 1,000 kilograms, and was fuelled by a combination of kerosene and nitric acid. Uniquely among sounding rockets, Véronique was wire-guided for the first 55 metres of its flight, using thin guidance wires trailing out from fold-out fins. This eliminated the need for the tall launch towers used by most other sounding rockets, keeping the rocket stable until it had reached a high enough airspeed for its fixed guidance fins to take over.
The first Véronique flight took place on August 2, 1950 from Suippes in northeastern France. Test flights would continue at various sites in mainland France until May 1952, when the Centre Intrerarmées d’essays d’Engins Spéciaux or Inter-Army Special Vehicles Test Centre opened in the Sahara Desert near Hammaguir in French Algeria. These early tests were disappointing, the unexpectedly low thrust of the rocket giving it a scientifically useless apogee of 65 kilometres. However, in 1957 a lighter version with an apogee of 135 kilometres was developed dubbed the Véronique AGI – short for Année Géophysique Internationale orInternational Geophysical Year. The IGY was an international project lasting from 1957 to 1958 in which teams from around the world cooperated conduct research on the earth and its environment. It was this project which prompted the Soviet Union to launch Sputnik 1 – the world’s first artificial satellite – on October 4, 1957, kicking off the Space Race – and for more on this wild and wacky period in spaceflight history, please check out our previous video ‘Kaputnik’: America’s Largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite.
By the early 1960s, the United States and Soviet Union were firmly locked in a race to launch the first man into space, and other nations – while lacking the resources and expertise to do the same – were eager to contribute to the burgeoning Space Age. One of the major unanswered questions during this early period was what effects the alien and hostile environment of outer space would have on the human body, with many physiologists fearing that microgravity would prevent astronauts from swallowing or properly digesting food and drink, or so thoroughly scramble their inner ears that they would be completely incapacitated by vertigo and nausea. Such fears had to be thoroughly addressed before the first human astronaut set foot in a spacecraft.
In 1961, French President Charles de Gaulle signed into existence the Centre National d’Etudes Spaciales or CNES, officially launching the French space program. That same year, the Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherches de Médecine Aéronautique, in cooperation with the CNES, launched a program to study the physiological effects of spaceflight on living organisms. For this research, CERMA scientists chose animals whose physiology and neurology were already well-known, starting with rats. A batch of six laboratory-bred rats was selected for testing, the animals having electrodes implanted in three regions of their brains in order to monitor their neurological response. Over a period of 30 weeks, the six rat-stronauts were run through a battery of rigorous stress tests including spells in isolation chambers and centrifuges. One by one, the subjects were eliminated until only one remained: a one-year-old white male rat dubbed Hector. On February 22, 1961, Hector was launched from the Hammaguir facility aboard a Véronique AGI rocket, reaching an apogee of 110 kilometres before safely reentering the atmosphere and parachuting to earth. Throughout the flight, he remained alert and calm, a result which boded well for future human spacefarers. This feat made France the third nation to successfully launch an animal into space and recover it alive.
Following two more successful rat flights on October 15 and 18, 1961, CERMA moved on to a larger animal for which they also had extensive neurological data: the common house cat. In 1963, the scientists purchased a batch of 14 cats from a Paris pet dealer – all female as these were believed to have a calmer demeanour. All were given numbers instead of names to prevent the scientists from becoming emotionally attached. Like the rats before them, these prospective cat-stronauts had monitoring electrodes implanted in their skulls and, over the course of two weeks, were steadily acclimatized to all the stresses they would encounter during their brief suborbital flights, including being strapped into a tiny, claustrophobic cat carrier, being bombarded with recordings of rocket engine noises, and being spun in a centrifuge at accelerations up to 7Gs – and to learn about another truly bizarre experiment conducted on our feline friends, please check out our previous video The Curious Case of the Cat That Was Turned Into a Living Telephone FOR SCIENCE!!!!!!
On October 8, 1963, six cats were selected from the initial batch of 14 and transported to the launch site in Algeria. Then, on October 17, cat C341, the calmest of the bunch, was selected for launch. A tuxedo cat weighing 2.5 kilograms, C341 had been a stray on the streets of Paris just weeks before being picked up and sold to CERMA. In addition to her brain electrodes, C341 was fitted with electrocardiogram or EKG electrodes on her hind legs to monitor her heart rate, a microphone on her chest to monitor her breathing, and two more electrodes on her forelegs that would deliver mild electric shocks. This allowed scientists to monitor her brain’s reaction to said shocks and determine if her neurological responses were within normal bounds.
Finally, on October 18, 1963, C341 was loaded into the nosecone of Véronique rocket number 47 and, at 8:09 AM local time, blasted off from the Algerian desert. The suborbital flight reached an apogee of 152 kilometres and lasted a total of 13 minutes, during which C341 experienced a peak acceleration of 9.6 Gs and 5 minutes of weightlessness. Nonetheless, telemetry from her various bio-monitors indicated that she remained perfectly calm throughout, exhibiting only minor changes to her hear and breathing rate. At apogee, the nosecone containing the world’s first astro-cat detached, reentered the atmosphere, and parachuted back to the desert floor, where it and its feline passenger were soon recovered by helicopter.
Upon the French Government’s announcement of the successful flight, the public immediately dubbed the hitherto nameless C341 “Félix” after the popular cartoon character. However, when it was revealed that C341 was actually female, this was changed to the female form Félicette and officially adopted by CERMA. Six days later on October 24, the French attempted to launch another cat into space, but a malfunction caused the rocket to careen off course and crash into the desert floor, taking its unnamed feline payload with it.
And if all you animal lovers out there have found this story upsetting so far, then you might want to turn off the video now, because it does not have a happy ending. For despite putting her life on the line for science and completing her mission with flying colours, two months after her pioneering flight, Félicette was euthanized so that scientists could dissect her brain. Tragically, they discovered nothing of scientific value. All but one of Félicette’s training cohort also met this fate. The health of the remaining cat began to deteriorate shortly after receiving her brain electrodes, so the electrodes were removed and the cat adopted as the CERMA scientists’ mascot. They named her Scoubidou, after the scoubido braided collar she wore around her neck. It is worth noting that by the time of Félicette’s flight, nine humans had already successfully flown into space, making the scientific value of the mission somewhat dubious.
From this early start, the French space program grew by leaps and bounds. On November 26, 1965, CNES performed the first successful launch of the Diamant rocket, the first expendable launch system to be designed and built entirely within France – and, indeed, Western Europe. The rocket carried Astérix, the first French satellite, into orbit, making France the sixth nation after the Soviet Union, United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy – and only the third to do so using its own indigenously-developed rocket. France later spearheaded the founding of the European Space Agency and developed the Ariane series of rockets, which have successfully launched over 250 payloads since 1979.
However, amid these successes, Félicette has been largely forgotten, overshadowed by more famous astro-animals such as Laika the dog and Ham the chimpanzee. And while several countries like former French colonies Chad and Niger issued commemorative stamps in her honour, few of these depictions resembled the actual cat, with many even misnaming her “Felix”.
This began to change in 2017, when Matthew Serge Guy, a creative director at the Anomaly London advertising agency, accidentally stumbled upon Félicette’s story:
“Around 6 months ago whilst at work, I came across a tea towel in the staff kitchen commemorating the 50th anniversary of the cat who went to space There was no name for the cat on the towel, nor did it resemble Félicette. After Googling it, I became fascinated with Félicette’s story, how it had been forgotten over the years, and misattributed. It felt like something big should be done to right these wrongs.”
That same year, Guy launched a kickstarter campaign to fund a bronze statue to commemorate Félicette. By April 2018, the campaign met its £40,000 funding target, and sculptor Gill Parker was commissioned to create the statue. On December 18, 2019, the finished piece, depicting Félicette standing atop a globe and staring up at the stars, was unveiled on the grounds of the International Space University near Strasbourg in eastern France. Of the memorial, Matthew Guy later wrote:
“It’s [important] to note that Félicette, alongside many other animals that have braved space travel in the name of science, was ultimately an unwilling participant in this experiment. For this mission alone she, alongside 13 other cats, experienced arduous training prior to the mission and eventually gave her life.”
And while since 1963 dozens of different animals have flown into space, including fish, newts, shrimp, worms, jellyfish, and even spiders, Félicette remains the one and only cat to travel to the Final Frontier, perhaps proving the adage that the French copy no-one, and no-one copies the French.
Expand for References
Space Cat Back Alive, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 20, 1963, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19631020&id=yYNWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=wuUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3200,5973576
Une Statue en Bronze Pour Félicette, Votre Avis M. Viso? Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, December 14. 2017, https://spacegate.cnes.fr/fr/une-statuette-de-bronze-en-memoire-de-felicette-votre-avis-m-viso
Jean-Laurent Cassel, La France a Envoyé le Premier Chat Dans l’Espace, et Tout le Monde l’a Oublié, Slate, January 27, 2017, https://www.slate.fr/story/135719/france-envoye-premier-chat-espace
[Archival Footage] France Launching the First Cat in Space, Felicette, Energiya, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-tpmvGRoyw
Moye, David, The First Cat in Space May Finally Get the Recognition She Deserves, HuffPost, October 20, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cat-in-space-memorial-statue-felicette_n_59ea1b41e4b05b4f1c3af7c2
Wu, Katherine, Félicette, the First Cat in Space, Finally Gets a Memorial, Smithsonian Magazine, January 28, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/felicette-first-cat-space-finally-gets-memorial-180974062/
Martinez, Alonso, Felicette: How France Launched the First Cat Into Space 60 Years Ago, El País, October 18, 2023, https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-10-18/felicette-how-france-launched-the-first-cat-into-space-60-years-ago.html
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It is a classic action movie scenario. Our hero, burdened with disarming the doomsday weapon, killing the bad guy, saving the love interest – or all three at once – must assault a building packed to the brim with armed goons. Thankfully, being the protagonist, our hero is also blessed with bottomless magazines and unfailing aim, and proceeds to simply charge into the building guns blazing. Without fail, every bullet finds its mark, sending legions of goons crumpling to the ground dead or – if it’s that kind of movie – flying across the room like rag dolls, their lifeless bodies smashing through walls and plate-glass windows for maximum cinematic mayhem. While most of us are aware that this is not how a real-life gunfight would go down, just how removed from reality is this scene? Well, while it can easily be proven that no regular man-portable firearm can send a body flying across the room, in most cases people will indeed crumple to the ground when shot. The reason for this might seem rather obvious, except for one puzzling fact: regardless of where the bullets hit or whether said hits are immediately fatal, most people will still drop. Stranger still, scientists still aren’t quite sure why. Welcome to one of the more surprising scientific mysteries of our modern age: why to people drop when shot?
First off, let’s tackle the myth that a gunshot will send you flying across the room as if you’ve just been hit by a speeding freight train. The main reason this is impossible has to do with energy transfer. Most bullets are relatively small in diameter – usually less than one centimetre – and travel at extremely high speeds – for example, 352 metres per second for a 9mm Parabellum handgun bullet and 954 metres per second for a 5.56mm NATO rifle bullet. This means that on impact, a tremendous amount of force is concentrated over a tiny cross-sectional area, allowing most bullets to easily slice through human flesh without transferring much of their energy to the victim’s body. But even in cases where the bullet stops dead – such as when it impacts a particularly dense bone or a bulletproof vest – being so light, most bullets don’t have nearly enough momentum to send a person flying across the room. To use an extreme example, let’s imagine firing the massive .50 BMG round used in the M2 heavy machine gun and Barrett M82 anti-materiel rifle at a person holding an armour plate, such that the bullet is stopped dead by the plate and transfers all its energy to our hapless target. In such an inelastic collision, momentum – defined as mass times velocity – is conserved, meaning that after the collision, the combination of projectile and target will have the same momentum as they did before the collision. The .50 BMG bullet has a mass of 42 grams and a muzzle velocity of 928 metres per second, meaning it has a momentum of 38.9 kilogram-metres per second. Dividing this momentum by the mass of the target – 98.9 kilograms for the average American male – yields a rearward velocity of 0.39 metres per second, meaning that in a frictionless environment – say, wearing ice skates on a rink – the impact would propel our unfortunate cannon fodder rearward at a leisurely 1.4 kilometres per hour. Standing on solid ground, such an impact could certainly knock a person to the ground, but would be nowhere near powerful enough to fling them across the room. Indeed, this film trope is easily debunked by the fact that firearms are usable at all. According to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, meaning that if a bullet really could send its victim flying across the room, the shooter would also be blown rearward with equal force by the recoil of the firearm. And if somehow all this theory still isn’t enough to convince you that people getting blown across rooms is pure Hollywood ballyhoo, in a February 6, 2005 episode of the television series Mythbusters, this myth was physically tested by shooting various firearms at a dummy made of ballistics gel. In all cases, it was found that no practical handheld firearm produced enough muzzle energy to knock the dummy back more than a few inches. Achieving the classic Hollywood effect would require something on the order of a small artillery piece, at which point you will no longer be blowing someone across the room so much as using their insides to redecorate the walls…
But anyway, back to the mystery at hand. While the obvious answer to the question “Why do people drop when shot?” is “Duh, Simon: because they’ve been shot!” in reality, the physiology of gunshot wounds is far more complicated than it might at first appear. There are relatively few parts of the human body where a bullet impact will produce instantaneous death, these being certain parts of the brain, spinal cord, and heart. But a great many people have survived hits to both organs – for a time, at least – with the cause of death in the vast majority of gunshot cases being exsanguination – AKA blood loss. Yet time and time again in military conflicts or criminal, police, and accidental shootings, people will crumple to the ground when shot in places which are not immediately lethal. Of course, in some cases the person was shot in the legs and simply collapsed due to extreme pain or because their bones were broken and could no longer support their weight, but the same phenomenon is observed in people shot in the chest, abdomen, and arms. Theoretically, such people should be able to carry on walking for some time before passing out from blood loss – especially if their system is full of adrenaline. So, what exactly causes them to drop?
Interestingly, the leading theory as to why people drop when shot holds that the phenomenon is purely psychological, rooted in popular depictions of gun violence. Because people in movies and TV shows drop instantly when shot, when people are shot in real life they, too drop to the ground because that is what is supposed to happen. This theory, posited by American ballistics expert Duncan MacPherson, is supported by the fact that animals, which have no conception of how firearms or gunshot wounds work, react very differently from humans to being shot. As any hunter can attest, a deer shot through the heart can run up to fifty metres before blood loss takes it down. The same holds for humans who have had little exposure to firearms. For example, from 1899 to 1913, the United States Military fought a protracted counterinsurgency in the Philippines against a group of fiercely independent muslim tribesmen known as the Moros. During early battles, American troops were shocked to discover that their .30 calibre Krag-Jørgenson and M1903 Springfield rifles and .38 calibre M1892 revolvers did little to stop the hordes of charging Moros, with multiple shots being needed to take down a single man. As Colonel Louis A. LaGarde of the Army Medical Corps reported in 1905:
“Antonio Caspi, a prisoner on the island of Samar, P.I. attempted escape on Oct. 26, 1905. He was shot four times at close range in a hand-to-hand encounter by a .38 Colt’s revolver loaded with U.S. Army regulation ammunition. He was finally stunned by a blow on the forehead from the butt end of a Springfield carbine.”
On many occasions Moro berserkers, known as juramentados, were able to charge through a hail of bullets and cut down a handful of Americans before finally dying of their wounds. The same phenomenon was encountered by American troops deployed to China in 1900, where they faced equally fanatical – and seemingly bulletproof – anti-colonial rebels known as the Boxers. It is now believed that naïveté regarding the effects of firearms, coupled with adrenaline and religious or nationalistic fervour allowed the Moros and the Boxers to ignore their wounds and keep fighting until physiology took its inevitable toll. The experience of fighting in the Philippines and China convinced the U.S. Military that it needed a harder-hitting pistol cartridge capable of knocking a man down with one shot. Thus, in 1904, Colonel John Thompson, head of the Army Ordnance Department and later inventor of the famous Thompson Submachine gun or “Tommy” gun, conducted a series of tests with Major LaGarde to evaluate the stopping power of various handgun cartridges – and for more on Colonel Thompson and his most famous creation, please check out our previous video The “Chicago Typewriter”: the Story of the Legendary “Tommy Gun”. These tests, conducted at the Union Stockyards in Chicago, involved firing various cartridges at live cattle and horses as well as human cadavers and noting how long the animals took to die or how far back the cadavers were pushed by the bullet impact. The results revealed that hollow-point or “dum-dum” bullets which expand on impact were most effective, but as such projectiles were prohibited in warfare by the 1899 Hague Convention, Thompson and LaGarde recommended that the Army adopt a cartridge no smaller than .45 calibre. This recommendation eventually led to the adoption of the .45 ACP cartridge and the legendary Colt M1911 automatic pistol.
While the “naïveté” theory for why most people drop when shot is by far the most popular, other experts argue that dropping is simply a logical reaction to trauma and danger. Simply put, dropping to the ground allows the victim to guard and tend to their wounds and avoid getting shot at again. Still others, however, reject psychological explanations altogether and instead posit a purely physiological reason for why people drop when shot. For example, Dr. Dennis Tobin, a neurologist at the Citizens Medical Center in Victoria, Texas, theorizes that the common reaction to being shot is due to a structure in the brain known as the Reticular Activating System or RAS. Located in the brainstem, the RAS filters out irrelevant information pouring in from our senses, preventing our brains from becoming overloaded. So if you are able to listen in on a single conversation in a crowd or sleep next to a busy highway, thank your RAS. A gunshot wound typically produces a large amount of pain and other trauma, unleashing a barrage of nerve impulses which can quickly overwhelm the brain. Certain projectiles can even unleash powerful pressure waves which can travel through the body and potentially damage delicate brain structures. This is especially true of small, high-velocity rounds like 5.56mm NATO, which can momentarily create large cavities as they pass through tissue, inflicting significant damage. According to Dr. Tobin, in order to protect the brain from this onslaught, the RAS immediately shuts down all non-essential bodily functions – including maintaining muscle tone. This causes the leg muscles to suddenly weaken and the shooting victim to collapse. This theory is supported by research done in 1988 by A.M. Göransson and in 2004 by a team from the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, China – and any animal lovers in the audience might want to turn off the video right now…
[Long Pause]
… because both studies involved shooting live pigs and dogs in the legs with real bullets and measuring the effects on their brains.
Whether psychological, physiological, or a bit of both, the real reason most people drop when shot remains as elusive as ever, largely because most of the data we have on the subject comes from anecdotal military reports or experiments conducted on animals. For rather understandable reasons, people aren’t exactly lining up around the corner to be shot for science – and even if they were, no ethics review board on the planet would approve such an experiment. But whatever the real answer is, I think we can all agree on one thing: it’s probably a good idea to just not get shot.
Expand for References
Pomeroy, Ross, Why Do People Fall Down When Shot? RealClear Science, July 17, 2013, https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/07/why-do-people-fall-down-when-shot.html
Ortiz, Miguel, How the US Military Adopted the Legendary .45 ACP Cartridge, We are the Mighty, July 30, 2022, https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/how-the-us-military-adopted-the-legendary-45-acp-cartridge/
Sjursen, Danny, America’s First ‘Endless War’ Was Fought in the Philippines, The Nation, December 18, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/moro-war-tomdispatch/
Narciso, Connor, What Really Happens When You Get Shot, WIRED, December 8, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/12/what-really-happens-when-you-get-shot/
Schneider, Tobias van, If You Want it, You Might Get It: The Reticular Activating System Explained, Medium, June 22, 2017, https://medium.com/desk-of-van-schneider/if-you-want-it-you-might-get-it-the-reticular-activating-system-explained-761b6ac14e53
Göransson et al, Remote Cerebral Effects on EEG in High-Energy Missile Trauma, Journal of Trauma, January 1988, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3339687/
Qingsong, Wang et al, Alterations of Myelin basic Protein and Ultrastructure in the Limbic System at the Early Stage of Trauma-Related Stress Disorder in Dogs, Journal of Trauma, March 2004, https://journals.lww.com/jtrauma/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=2004&issue=03000&article=00019&type=abstract
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You can find it almost everywhere: in every gift shop, on every online merchandise store, on every souvenir stand – and on every object imaginable, from posters and postcards to coffee mugs, water bottles, t-shirts, and phone cases: the brick-red background, the stylized white crown, and in big, bold letters, those five iconic words: Keep Calm and Carry On.
…or, just as likely, you will encounter one the slogan’s endless, obnoxious parodies and remixes, from Keep Calm and Party On to Panic and Freak Out to the Yoda-speak favourite Calm You Must Keep and Carry on You Must. Whatever form it takes, this poster has become an icon of the Second World War, as emblematic of wartime British “stiff-upper-lip” stoicism as the equally iconic “Rosie the Riveter” poster is of American resolve and industriousness. Yet despite its ubiquity, just like its American cousin, the Keep Calm and Carry on Poster was actually rarely if ever seen by the wartime public, and remained virtually unknown until very recently. So how, then, did this simple but powerful piece of typography go from obscure wartime propaganda to global cultural icon? Well, let’s find out, shall we?
In the late 1930s, as war clouds gathered over Europe, the British government faced the terrifying prospect of German bombs raining down on civilian centres. During the Great War, London and other cities had been bombed by German Zeppelins and Gotha bombers, but these attacks had caused relatively little damage. However, the huge advancements in aviation technology in the intervening twenty years promised death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. Eager to avoid mass panic and social collapse, in 1937 the British Ministry of Information began work on various ‘Home Publicity’ campaigns to steel the British people against the coming onslaught.
At first, the Ministry believed that such campaigns would only be required once the bombings had already begun, and thus devoted most of its efforts to censorship and the official news broadcasts. However, in March of 1939, the Royal Institute of International Affairs produced a secret report on propaganda policy in foreign countries, which revealed that for a propaganda message to be truly effective, it had to be drilled into the public’s minds well ahead of the outbreak of hostilities, thereby helping to control and contain the initial reaction. And so, on April 6, the Ministry of Information began working in earnest on its preemptive “reassurance campaign.”
A prototype of sorts for the now-iconic Keep Calm and Carry On Poster had already appeared during the 1938 Munich Crisis, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and German dictator Adolf Hitler negotiated Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region. With war seemingly just around the corner, posters printed in newspapers urged citizens to Keep Calm and Dig – in this case, referring to air-raid dugouts and slit trenches. However, the Ministry’s new campaign was to be carried out on an altogether larger scale, with millions of posters plastered over train stations, bus stops, bulletin boards, and other public spaces all over the British Isles. The men tasked with creating this campaign were an ad-hoc committee of civil servants and volunteer academics, publicists, publishers, and artists, who met over lunch on a weekly basis. These included A.P. Waterfield, head of planning for the Ministry of Information; William Surrey Dane, the managing director of Odhams press; Gervais Huxley, the former head of publicity for the Empire Marketing Board; advertising agent W.G.V. Vaughan; John Hilton, Professor of Industrial Relations at Cambridge University; William Codling, controller of His Majesty’s Stationery Office; Member of Parliament Harold Nicholson; and graphic artist Ernest Wallcousins. The committee decided that the campaign posters should stand out against regular commercial advertisements and be clearly identifiable as part of a single, coherent campaign. They also agreed that the posters should reassure the public of ultimate victory and emphasize that every defensive precaution was being taken and that the whole country was united and committed to the war effort.
Exactly how the posters were supposed to convey these sentiments, however, was a different matter, and many different concepts were put forward. One early proposal featured a medieval English bowman and a modern British citizen side-by-side, drawing on the romantic image of the nation’s military past. The committee soon decided, however, that such artwork was too complex, and that the posters should feature only motivational slogans printed in bright colours and bold, straightforward fonts. The first such designs took the form of personal messages from King George VI to his subjects, to be printed as letters and mailed out to British citizens. In keeping with the emphasis on graphic simplicity, instead of a portrait of the king, the message was headed by the stylized image of a crown. But this concept was also eventually abandoned, as the committee feared that it would draw too much attention to the social gulf between the aristocracy and ordinary people. Instead, it was decided that the slogans should, as A.P. Waterfield put it:
“…be a rallying war-cry that will bring out the best in every one of us and put us in an offensive mood at once.”
To this end, excerpts of speeches by Prime Minister Winston Churchill were also briefly considered, but these, too, were ultimately deemed too elitist. Indeed, so adamant was the desire to democratize the slogans that the seemingly innocuous “England is Prepared” was rejected in favour of the more populist “We’re going to see it through.”
By July 6, 1939, twenty slogans had been submitted to the committee, which, over the course of four additional meetings, were whittled down to a short list of five. On August 4, these were presented to Home Secretary Samuel Hoare, who selected the three finalists. These were: Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution; Will Bring Us Victory; Freedom is in Peril;Defend it With All Your Might printed in white on green; and, finally, Keep Calm and Carry On. These slogans were printed in bold letters on a red or blue background with a stylized crown borrowed from the earlier “Message from the King” concept.The H.M. Stationery Office was placed in charge of printing while advertising agency S.H. Benson Ltd. was hired to handle distribution. The total cost of the campaign was estimated at £112,000 – more than £8.6 million in today’s money.
Yet many still had doubts about the campaign, including Waterfield himself, who deemed the slogans “too commonplace to be inspiring,” and feared that:
“…the population might well resent having this poster crammed down their throats at every turn…it may even annoy people that we should seem to doubt the steadiness of their nerves.”
In the end, world events forced the committee’s hand. On August 23, Hitler signed the Molotov-Rippentrop non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, making war all but inevitable and spurring the Ministry of Information to rush the posters to print. By the time Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 4 million posters were produced – 12% Freedom is in Peril, 23% Your Courage, and 65% Keep Calm and Carry On. The posters were produced in 11 different sizes, from 15×10 inches to 10×20 foot billboards, with Freedom is in Peril and Your Courage being distributed first and Keep Calm and Carry On held in reserve.
Unfortunately, the public’s reaction to the posters was not at all what the committee had expected. For one thing, the British Government had assumed that German air raids would commence shortly after the declaration of war. In reality, however, the 8 months between the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 and their invasion of France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940 saw almost no activity on the Western Front – a period which came to be known as the “Phoney War.” Thus, with the public mood marked by boredom rather than terror, the posters’ reassuring message fell upon deaf ears. As Brigadier V.M.C. Napier complained to the Times:
“Is it wise, to say the least, to placard the countryside with posters calling on the courage and resolution of the individual when no appreciable demands have yet been made on these qualities?”
Public surveys conducted by Mass Observation, the UK Government’s social research group, also revealed that many people were annoyed by the sheer volume of posters covering every available surface. Worse still, despite their populist intentions, the Ministry of Information committee had severely misjudged the public’s mood and the implications of the chosen slogans. Your Courage was particularly despised, as its exhortation that “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory” seemed to imply that the common people would suffer for the benefit of the upper classes. The slogan was also judged to be too wordy and confusing to be truly effective, with one journalist from the Daily Mail reporting that while he passed the poster six times every day, he was unable to precisely remember the entire slogan. Indeed, the campaign was widely disparaged in the press, with the Daily Express dismissing the effort as so much government “waste and paste.”
As a result, the existing stocks of Keep Calm and Carry On remained in reserve, with funds instead diverted into printing 750,000 additional copies of Your Courage and Freedom is in Peril. These stocks were retained until April 1940 when, due to a severe paper shortage, nearly every single copy was pulped. Aside from a handful of examples displayed in shops and pubs, the poster was almost never seen by the wartime British public.
And so the poster fell into obscurity, only to suddenly resurface six decades later. In the year 2000, Stuart Manley, owner of Barter Books Ltd. in Alnwick [“Ann-ick”], Northumberland, was sorting through a box of second-hand books purchased at auction when he uncovered a surviving copy of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. As Manley explained in a later interview:
“I didn’t know anything about it but I showed it to my wife. We both liked it so we decided to frame it and put it in the shop. Lots of people saw it and wanted to buy it. We refused all offers but eventually we decided we should get copies made for sale.”
This proved surprisingly difficult, as the lettering did not conform to any existing typeface, having likely been hand-drawn by artist Ernest Wallcousins. The finalized reproductions sold modestly until 2005, when Susie Steiner, a journalist from The Guardian, featured the poster on a list of Christmas gift suggestions. Suddenly, said Manley:
“All hell broke loose…Our website broke down under the strain, the phone never stopped ringing and virtually every member of staff had to be diverted into packing posters.”
The store soon diversified into selling fridge magnets, coffee mugs, cufflinks, and other merchandise bearing the slogan, and now receives more than 1,000 orders every month from around the world. However, as the Manleys did not copyright their reproductions, it wasn’t long before others started jumping on the bandwagon. In August 2011, former British TV producer and entrepreneur Mark Coop incorporated the company Keep Calm and Carry on Ltd. and registered the slogan as a community trademark in the European Union. Coop then issued take-down notices to all other companies selling merchandise featuring the slogan.
Unsurprisingly, this move did not sit well with smaller vendors like the Manleys, who accused Coop of trying to monopolize a piece of history. They subsequently filed an application with the British trademarking service Trade Mark Direct to have the registration cancelled, arguing that the words were too widely used for any one person to own the exclusive rights. Unfortunately, the application was rejected, and the slogan remains protected in all 27 EU countries.
Soon after, Coop appeared on the BBC to respond to the backlash, stating:
“I have to protect my own interests…had I not built this up, they probably would never have even heard of it, you know, they would never have even have seen it, so I think they’re jumping on the back of essentially what I came up with…The trouble and everything it’s caused has not been worth it. I didn’t expect that people would react in such a venomous, vicious way.”
Yet despite his rather dubious claim of having single-handedly created the Keep Calm and Carry On phenomenon, Coop has refused to take legal action against the Manleys and Barter Books, explaining that:
“I wouldn’t dream of stopping them from selling copies of the poster that they found. If it wasn’t them who found it and brought it to life, nobody would be aware of the poster.”
But regardless of who is responsible, the brand has become ubiquitous, with Amazon.com listing nearly 100,000 products featuring the Keep Calm and Carry On slogan or variations thereof. For the Manleys, this explosion in popularity elicits mixed feelings, with Mary Manley lamenting:
“I didn’t want it trivialised; but of course now it’s been trivialised beyond belief.”
But there is no denying the poster’s universal appeal. Indeed, Stuart Manley believes that the Ministry of Information’s decision to release the awkwardly-worded Your Courage and Freedom is in Peril posters first was an error in judgement, and that:
“If they had started with [Keep Calm and Carry On], I think it would have been just as popular then as it is now.”
But why, among the millions of pieces of propaganda produced during the Second World War, did this particular poster become so popular? What is it about those five simple words that speaks to so many people worldwide? According to design historian Susannah Walker, the poster succinctly encapsulates a romanticized view of British wartime resolve and stoicism and builds a bridge between that past and the present:
“[It is] not only as a distillation of a crucial moment in Britishness, but also [an] inspiring message from the past to the present in a time of crisis.”
Professor Jim Aulich, a propaganda expert at Manchester Metropolitan University, argues that the poster’s power lays in its simple, non-partisan message:
“It speaks to peoples’ personal neuroses. It’s not ideological, it’s not urging people to fight for freedom like some propaganda posters did.”
Mary Manley, on the other hand, is rather less philosophical, stating:
“No other country could have that phrase and have it so redolent of a people. In America, it would be ‘Keep calm and go on Oprah Winfrey and blab’. There’s something about British dignity.”
Expand for References
Lewis, Rebecca, 1939: the Three Posters, Keep Calm and Carry on and Other Second World War Posters, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20150402071239/http://ww2poster.co.uk/2009/04/1939-3-posters/
Hughes, Stuart, The Greatest Motivational Poster Ever? BBC News, February 4, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7869458.stm
Irving, Henry, Keep Calm and Carry On – The Compromise Behind the Slogan, UK Government, June 27, 2014, https://history.blog.gov.uk/2014/06/27/keep-calm-and-carry-on-the-compromise-behind-the-slogan/
Chu, Henry, Keep Calm and Carry On…Into a Feud, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 3, 2013, https://www.smh.com.au/world/keep-calm-and-carry-on–into-a-feud-20130503-2ix55.html
Bustillos, Maria, The Vicious Trademark Battle Over ‘Keep Calm and Carry On,’ The Awl, October 5, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20160301012125/http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/keep-calm-and-carry-on-trademark-fight
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Timeless beauty encased in a frame, day after day stares back at thousands of admiring viewers, engaging with them through an intriguing, smiling expression and a profound gaze, an embodiment of perfection and artistic expression.
But enough about me.
The Portrait of Mona Lisa by Italian painter, engineer, polymath and all-encompassing genius Leonardo Da Vinci is exhibited at the Salle des Etats in the Louvre Museum, in Paris, France. Painted in oil on a poplar panel, the masterpiece is relatively small, measuring 77 by 53 cm. Despite the unimpressive size, an estimated 30,000 visitors crowd around the painting every single day – except Tuesday anyway, when the Louvre is closed.
Considering that a ticket to the Louvre costs €22, the Mona Lisa, the jewel of the Louvre, helps generate some €206 million in revenue to the museum every year – that’s $223 million, roughly one quarter of the painting’s estimated value.
And yet, for all its cultural importance and fame, the Mona Lisa wasn’t really famous at all up until about a century ago thanks to one of the most famous art capers in history, which also just so happened to see none other than a young burgeoning artist by the name of Pablo Picasso arrested for stealing it.
So, what is the secret of Mona Lisa’s success? Who was the woman in the painting, why is it called the Mona Lisa, how did it rise to prominence, what mysteries and controversies lurk behind those brush strokes, and what’s the Picasso connection in the caper that made it rise to arguably the most famous painting in the world?
Let’s start with the origin of the painting itself and who the Mona Lisa was.
It was in Florence, Italy that Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, between 1503 and 1506. The most agreed upon origin story for this work is that it was commissioned to the artist by the wealthy husband of the portrayed lady – more on this shortly.
Da Vinci was famously a perfectionist and procrastinator, and as such he continued to retouch his painting until 1513. As to why da Vinci never delivered it to the person who commissioned the painting, it has been speculated that he received a much more lucrative commission shortly thereafter and thus abandoned the painting at the time. Another hypothesis is that he perhaps made two versions of the painting, keeping one and delivering the other. More on this two Mona Lisa paintings thing later.
Whatever the case, it was still in Leonardo’s hands in 1517 when King Francis I of France invited him to live at the castle of Cloux, near Amboise, central France. This is where the Italian artist died of a stroke on May 2, 1519. Historical records of the time offer two versions, equally reliable, of what happened to his beloved masterpiece afterwards.
According to one version, Leonardo sold the Mona Lisa to King Francis, to the tune of 4,000 golden écus and it went on display at the castle of Cloux. Indeed, one Antonio de Beatis, secretary to a cardinal, reported seeing the Mona Lisa at Cloux on October 10, 1517. However, a 1525 notarial document mentions that the painting had been inherited by Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as Salaí, Leonardo’s favourite apprentice, assistant and alleged lover.
This discrepancy in accounts points to the possible existence of potentially two contemporary versions of the Mona Lisa once again. Again, we’ll explore this conundrum later.
In any case, by the 17th Century the Mona Lisa we know and love today was in the hands of the French Crown. In 1630, King Louis XIII considered selling it to King Charles I of England, but Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens convinced him to sell another painting instead. In 1665 the Mona Lisa was first hung at the Louvre, back then the Royal Palace in Paris, but was soon moved to Versailles, for Louis XIV to admire it in his private gallery.
In the late 18th century, King Louis XV unceremoniously had the painting removed from its place of prominence at Versailles and placed out of the way in the keeper of the royal buildings’ office.
After the French revolution, the Louvre was converted into a museum, and in 1797 the Mona Lisa returned to its halls, widely ignored by the general public. In 1800, another kind of general, General Napoleon Bonaparte, took a fancy to the Tuscan lady, and had her relocated to the chambers of his wife Josephine. But not for long, as in 1805 the Mona Lisa was once again moved to the Louvre’s Salon Carré where it remained until August 21, 1911.
That said, it was during the 19th century that while the masses still weren’t overtly aware of the painting, art critics were starting to appreciate it, with particularly French art critics beginning to hold it up as a model of Renaissance painting techniques. This helped it attain a level of significant fame among art enthusiasts of the world, but to the wider general public, it was still little known. This would only change thanks to the Picasso caper we’ll get into shortly.
We will pick up the painting’s history in a later section. For the moment, let’s go back to why art enthusiasts first began appreciating the painting to the level they did in the late 19th century. In a word- technique.
In the painting, Da Vinci experimented with a method known by the Italian word sfumato, which can be translated as ‘nuanced’ or ‘shaded’. Rather than painting well-defined outlines to his subject, the artist applied several layers of different colours, tones and shades, waiting for each one to dry before laying on the next.
The sfumato technique allowed Leonardo to merge the human figure with the landscape behind her, which was a dramatic and varied landscape, rather unusual for portrait art at the time. It depicts rocks, roads, hills and a river, fading from earthly tones into a dreamy distance, rendered in ethereal shades of blue. However dream-like, this backdrop was likely inspired by the countryside of the Republic of Florence, Leonardo’s main place of work in the early 1500s.
Going back to the technique, this device is at the basis of the enigmatic gaze and fascinating smile of the Mona Lisa. On the eyes and their apparent ability to follow you around the room, it turns out this technique lends itself to this.
So how does this work? It turns out for even a moderately skilled artist, this “ubiquitous gaze” effect isn’t a difficult thing to achieve. In a nutshell, all you need is a little illusion of depth, so the person depicted appearing at least somewhat 3D despite being on a 2D canvas, and to direct the gaze of the eyes such that they would be looking at someone standing right in front of the picture.
So what exactly is going on here in our brains that then makes it seem like the eyes follow you even if you move away from being front and center? As demonstrated in 2004 by a team of researchers from Ohio State University, as you move to the side, the “near” and “far” points of the 2D image don’t really change. These near and far points are defined as visible points that, if the image was 3-dimensional, would appear nearest and furthest away from the viewer at a given angle. Summarising their findings, co-author of the paper James Todd had the following to say:
“The idea is simple – no matter what angle you look at a painting from, the painting itself doesn’t change. You’re looking at a flat surface…. The key is that the near points and far points of the picture remained the same no matter the angle the picture was viewed from. When observing real surfaces in the natural environment the visual information that specifies near and far points varies when we change viewing direction. When we observe a picture on the wall, on the other hand, the visual information that defines near and far points is unaffected by viewing direction. Still, we interpret this perceptually as if it were a real object…”
Thus, because the perspective, shadows, and light on the painting don’t change as you move around, if the eyes in the painting would be staring directly at the observer if said individual is standing in front of the painting, it creates something of a mild optical illusion in your brain such that the eyes will continue to seem to stare at you as you move to the side.
In contrast to the eyes following you trick, if the artist tweaks the painting a bit such that the eyes are looking off somewhere else instead of directly out at a potential observer, no matter where you stand, the eyes will never seem to be looking at you no matter where you are.
The technique first began popularly showing up in art around the 14th century when the artist and architect Fillipo Brunelleshi introduced the art world to the idea of “linear perspective”, linear perspective being painting with the idea of everything in the picture converging on a specific point on the horizon, creating the illusion of depth. This, combined with skilled use of light and shadow, allowed artists to create masterfully realistic paintings, including sometimes of people that stare at you creepily no matter where you stand, and totally aren’t Scooby Doo villains stalking you with the intent to murder you in your sleep.
Going back to the mouth of the Mona Lisa, moving past her eyes that gaze into your soul no matter where you are standing, the same ambiguity applies to the corners of her oral orifice, raising many questions about her smile, variously described as ‘vague’ and ‘enigmatic’. Curiously, every admirer appears to have a different opinion on the nature of the lady’s subtle grin, ranging from an expression of melancholy to serene mirth. Is there a deeper meaning behind that smile?
A 2017 study by the University of Freiburg, Germany, argued that no, we should not look for a hidden message. The researchers developed eight slight variations of the original picture, altering the corners of Lisa’s mouth. In four of the images, her smile was more open. In the other four, her expression indicated sadness. They then showed the eight variations, plus the original, to hundreds of volunteers, asking them to describe if the person in the pictures was happy or sad. When confronted with the original, unmodified Lisa, 97% of responders stated that she simply looked happy.
Back in the 16th Century, artist, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari. In his work Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, first published in 1550, had no doubts about it: the woman in the painting was indeed merry, as Leonardo himself went to great lengths to keep her so! Although many discount Vasari’s account here, where he states:
“He [Leonardo] continually employed musicians or singers and jesters who made her merry, in
order to chase away the melancholy that painting often seems to give to portraits. And in this [portrait] of Leonardo’s there was a smile so pleasing that, to one who sees it, it was a thing more divine than human, and it was considered a marvellous thing for being no different than life.”
Unfortunately for Vasari’s account, imaging of the painting shows that the sitter did not originally smile after the first brush strokes. Da Vinci later corrected his earlier work, applying more than forty layers of pigment and lacquer, a distinctive feature of his sfumato technique. It is not possible to discern if the artist had a change of heart, or gradually developed his anatomical studies before reaching the desired perfection for his subject’s smile.
As a brief aside, contemporary commentators, however, question whether Mona Lisa’s expression was at all voluntary with the subject of the painting perhaps suffering from hypothyroidism. In a September of 2018 report by the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, authored by Prof Mandeep R. Mehra, at Harvard Medical School, Prof Mehra and his colleague Hilary Campbell, University of California, Santa Barbara, performed a diagnosis based on signs such as Mona Lisa’s yellowish skin, her thinning hairline and eyebrows, and a slight goitre under the chin. Mehra and Campbell concluded that Lisa may have suffered from peripartum hypothyroidism, a common condition made worse by the Florentine diet of the time, poor in iodine.
Consequences of this condition include a psychomotor deficit and weakness in facial muscles, which may explain Mona Lisa’s barely perceivable smile. This medical diagnosis makes for an intriguing hypothesis, which prompted us to compare Mona Lisa’s expression with those of the other three women portrayed by Leonardo in his career. Of these, La Belle Ferronière and Ginevra Benci display a rather unfazed expression, bordering on stern. Only the Lady with the Hermine displays a hint of a smile. From this, it may simply be that Leonardo preferred his portrait subjects not to display too open emotions, as subtlety and ambiguity made for more interesting subjects.
Whatever the case there, all in all, Leonardo’s sfumato contributed unprecedented psychological depth to what could have been just another portrait of another wealthy patron.
Speaking of which … who was she?
The first indication as to her identity comes from the aforementioned artist, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari. Vasari identifies the subject of the painting as one Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a wealthy nobleman and merchant who commissioned the painting. That explains the title of the portrait, with ‘Monna’ – rendered as ‘Mona’ outside of Italy – being short for ‘Madonna’, or ‘My Lady’.
The ‘Lady Lisa’ is also known outside the English-speaking world by another title, ‘La Gioconda’, the feminine declination of Francesco’s surname.
Vasari’s account was compiled three decades after Leonardo’s death, and Lisa may have still been alive, although the date of her death is disputed. Therefore, most assume this claim to be accurate, though the lack of direct evidence has spurred a number of alternative hypotheses as to the identity of the portrait’s subject.
For example, she has been identified as the noblewoman Caterina Sforza, as the Duchess of Milan Isabel of Aragon, or as a lover of Giuliano de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’.
We find particularly amusing the theory put forward by Sigmund Freud. The father of psychoanalysis believed ‘Lisa’ to actually be Caterina, the mother of Leonardo da Vinci, who died when he was only five years old. According to Freud, Leonardo wanted to capture the faint memory of Caterina with the portrait of an idealised woman, whose enigmatic yet sweet smile expresses motherly affection. Although, given Freud’s propensity to attribute everything to one’s mothers and complete lack of evidence, let’s just say art historians aren’t exactly jumping on this hypothesis like they apparently want to jump on their mothers according to Freud.
But was she an idealised woman? Or perhaps a very material man? According to French researcher Sophie Herfort the portrait sitter was the artist known as Salaí, Leonardo’s favourite pupil and alleged lover. Herfort states the master had wished to depict his assistant in women’s clothing, but had later made his face more feminine to evade censorship. This may explain why Leonardo carried the painting with him to France, rather than handing it over to the Giocondos.
Needless to say, these alternative hypotheses carry little to no evidence.
That said, neither does the original claim by Vasari according to an argument made in the paper ‘Leonardo, Mona Lisa and La Gioconda. Reviewing the Evidence’ written in 2004 by Jack M. Greenstein, Professor and Chair of the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. In it, Greenstein notes that ‘Nothing in the archives nor in Leonardo’s voluminous writings conclusively connects Leonardo with the Giocondo family.’
He also points out that all critics who commented on the painting in the 16th and 17th centuries ‘Did not think that the title ‘La Gioconda’ referred to the surname of the sitter.’
We should point out that the word ‘Gioconda’ in Italian may be translated as ‘playful’. Hence, Greenstein argues that the title of the portrait is not the sitter’s name, rather a descriptor of her merry demeanour. The author of the paper then posits that Vasari may have actually never met the Giocondos, nor even seen the portrait itself. Greenstein mentions an incident, recorded by Vasari himself, in which the Italian writer admired two copies of Leonardo’s works exhibited in 1566. He described them as ‘A young St. John the Baptist, very well imitated’ And a portrait ‘In which is a woman who smiles.’
This unnamed painting is hypothesised to have been a copy of the Mona Lisa. You see, Leonardo only ever painted four confirmed female portraits. Of the four ladies he immortalised, only two are smiling: our friend Lisa, and the ‘Lady with an Ermine’. But the latter’s smile is barely perceptible. Besides, Vasari would have described it as a portrait ‘In which is a woman who holds some sort of slender white rat.’
So, if Vasari did not name the painting, Greenfield argues that he ‘Did not recognize La Gioconda by sight – a failure that would all but disqualify Lisa del Giocondo as the sitter, had Vasari ever met her.’
Looking into it further, Greenfield then reviews Leonardo’s finances. The Mona Lisa was painted some time between 1503 and 1506. Da Vinci’s bank statement for the period shows regular withdrawals of 50 gold florins, once every three months. But no deposits!
According to art historian Frank Zoellner, University of Leipzig, this lack of income proved that Leonardo was not busy in the spring of 1503, and therefore willing to accept a private commission from a wealthy but unremarkable family such as the Giocondos.
But Greenfield counters that the Tuscan polymath was far from idle, as he was involved in military engineering plans. At the time, the Republic of Florence was at war with Pisa, and Leonardo had been commissioned by none other than Niccoló Machiavelli to divert the course of the river Arno, thus ravaging the enemy’s economy. Moreover, in December of 1503, the Republic’s government awarded a regular stipend to the artist, as payment for a large mural, the Battle of Anghiari.
And if that wasn’t enough, Leonardo had plenty of wealthy patrons banging on his door – one of them being the King of France! Why would he have accepted a commission from a ‘relative nobody’ such as good old Francesco del Giocondo?
Greenstein concludes his paper by describing two alternative scenarios to Vasari’s version. The lady in the portrait may have been Lisa del Giocondo, née Gherardi. But she did not sit for a commissioned portrait, rather Leonardo painted her from memory as an idealised beauty.
But Greenstein’s preferred option is that the lady in the frame is not based on a real person: ‘La Gioconda was painted by Leonardo on his own initiative to show what art can do … Painted for display, not for a patron, La Gioconda is a showpiece of art. It represents a fictive smiling woman, who is so natural that she seems to have been taken from life.’
This would, of course, explain why Leonardo never delivered the painting to anyone.
Whatever the case there, we cannot but agree with his concluding statements: ‘Whether Leonardo employed a model or fashioned her from memory or imagination does not matter, since no knowledge of the model is needed to appreciate the painting.’
It is interesting to note that all this scholarly disquisition and any clicks to watch this video from our abnormally attractive and scholarly audience would be limited, if it weren’t for the event which arguably most contributed to Mona Lisa’s stellar fame amongst the general public: its headline-making theft in 1911. What is also most surprising in all of this and once again shows the universe is quirky is that Leonardo’s smiling lady only became a piece of loot by total chance according to the person who stole it.
The story of this theft begins on Tuesday, August 22, 1911. That morning, French artist Louis Béroud arrived at the Louvre with the intention of painting a copy of the Mona Lisa. The Louvre was happy to entertain artists in this way, so long as the copies of any work are not made the same size as the original.
Unfortunately for Béroud, when he entered the Salon Carré, there was an empty space where the Mona Lisa should have hung. Béroud queried a nearby security guard asking to know where the painting was. The guard assumed it must have been removed by the photography department, as they frequently did this without telling anyone.
Not satisfied with that explanation, Béroud demanded the guard find out where the painting was and when it would be put back. However, after extensive searching, the guard was unable to locate anyone who knew anything about what had happened to the painting. Soon after, the Louvre was closed while staff and French police combed over 1,000 rooms in the sprawling museum. But to no avail- the Mona Lisa was gone.
In the aftermath, law enforcement all over France scrambled to secure the borders in case the thief tried to leave the country with the painting, searching every piece of luggage heading out of the country. Ships that had sailed after the theft, but before search efforts were started, were subsequently searched when they reached their destination.
The authorities also interviewed and investigated every single employee at the Louvre. After all, the painting had been there on Sunday, but was not on Tuesday. The only people who should have had access to the building on Monday were employees working that day. And even if it wasn’t an employee, surely with so many people in the building, someone must have seen something. But this avenue of investigation also went nowhere.
The press had a field day. French newspapers began a bidding war to see who could offer the largest reward for information leading to the painting’s safe return, such as the Paris-Journal which offered 50,000 francs (about €198,000 Euros or $220,000 today).
When the museum finally reopened in early September, visitors surged in just to see the place where the Mona Lisa had hung. Budding author Franz Kafka himself would go visit the Louvre to look at the empty section of the wall, noting in his journal, “the excitement and the knots of people, as if the Mona Lisa had just been stolen.”
Yet, despite everything, there were no solid leads and the trail was completely cold.
That is, until police were tipped off on the whereabouts of some other items that had been stolen from the Louvre.
This brings us to Pablo Picasso.
When Picasso made his way to Paris in 1900, among many other artistically minded friends he made was poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire, in turn, had a secretary by the name of Géry Pieret. Knowing Picasso’s love of the 3rd and 4th century Iberian sculptures then on display at the Louvre, Pieret decided to simply go to the Louvre and take a couple of them. As it turns out, given the low density of security guards at the facility relative to its immense size, the theft apparently wasn’t difficult.
When Pieret presented the statues to Picasso, he loved them, with Apollinaire and Picasso ultimately paying Pieret 100 francs (about $440 today) for the stolen items. Picasso would actually go on to use the face of one of the statues in his famed 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Moving on to 1911, Pieret found himself broke and decided to go steal more things from the Louvre to, in turn, sell. When Apollinaire found out, he kicked him out of his apartment, funny enough, on the day the Mona Lisa was stolen.
With items stolen from the Louvre now being front page news, Apollinaire and Picasso had a bit of an issue that they’d not exactly kept their possession of the stolen statues a secret, with Apollinaire actually displaying one on his mantelpiece for some time, observed by countless guests, including some journalists. It was only a matter of time before the authorities came calling.
Things got worse when, perhaps just to get revenge or to earn money from the paper if he revealed the information, Pieret informed the Paris-Journal that he knew where a couple other stolen items from the Louvre rested.
Needless to say, at this point Apollinaire and Picasso were in a bit of a panic. As Picasso’s long time mistress Fernande Olivier notes,
“I can see them both: contrite children, stunned by fear and making plans to flee the country. They decided to get rid of the compromising objects immediately. Finally, they had made up their minds to go out that night and throw the suitcase containing the sculptures into the Seine—they left on foot about midnight, carrying the suitcases. They returned at two in the morning, absolutely dog-tired. They still had the suitcases, and its contents. They had wandered up and down, unable to deliver themselves of their parcel. They thought they were being followed. Their imaginations dreamed up a thousand possible occurrences, each more fantastic than the last.”
Unable to bring themselves to dispose of these particular pieces of history, instead Apollinaire decided to give them to the editor of the Paris-Journal, Andre Salmon. Despite a condition of giving them back being that editor was to keep a secret his knowledge of who had possessed them, when the police grilled Salmon, he spilled the beans.
Apollinaire was promptly arrested and became prime suspect #1 for the theft of the Mona Lisa. Not long after this, Picasso was implicated by Apollinaire and in turn brought in by the police, with his apartment thoroughly searched for the missing painting. As the two were being held, newspapers had a field day about the supposed gang of radical artists led by Picasso and Apollinaire who were running an international group of art thieves on the side.
On September 8th, the two men appeared before Judge Henri Drioux. Both would devolve into hysterics, telling the judge stories that conflicted with things they’d said even moments before. At one point Picasso became so desperate he pulled a Peter, randomly proclaiming to the judge that he didn’t even know Apollinaire, despite that it was well known they were close friends.
Of this statement, decades later Picasso would state in an interview, “When the judge asked me: ‘Do you know this gentleman?’…I answered: ‘I have never seen this man.’…I saw Guillaume’s expression change. The blood ebbed from his face. I am still ashamed.”
Both men at various points broke down and wept, begging the court’s forgiveness. Ultimately the judge had seen enough, and correctly surmised that the pair had had nothing to do with the theft of the Mona Lisa and knew nothing about who had stolen it. While they had technically knowingly purchased and kept stolen goods, he let them off and they were released 4 days later, on September 12th.
Over the following two years, Louvre officials gave up hope of the Mona Lisa’s return and after briefly hanging a replica of the painting, replaced it with Baldassare Castiglione by Raphael.
During this span, reports still occasionally filtered in that the painting had been sighted or was being offered for sale, but none of them panned out. It wasn’t until November of 1913 that the story picks up. It was then that art dealer Alfredo Geri of Florence, Italy received a letter from a man identifying himself as “Leonard”.
Leonard claimed to have the Mona Lisa in his possession and wanted to meet to hand it over. After an exchange of letters, Geri involved Giovanni Poggi of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. As to why, Poggi had detailed photographs of the real Mona Lisa which, most importantly, showed the crack lines from the paint drying over the centuries, as well as markings on the back that few knew about. With these photographs, they’d be able to easily tell if the painting Leonard had was the real thing, or simply yet another forgery among many that had popped up since the painting was stolen.
After a series of delays, Leonard agreed to meet the two men. However, before the scheduled meeting, he showed up at Geri’s gallery unexpectedly. While there, he reaffirmed he had the Mona Lisa and that he knew for a fact it was the real one. When asked how he could be so sure, he brashly revealed he’d taken it from the Louvre himself. When Geri then asked him if he’d done it alone, he states Leonard, to quote, “was not too clear on that point. He seemed to say yes, but didn’t quite do so,” and that his answer was “more ‘yes’ than ‘no.’”
They then negotiated a fee for Leonard to sell the painting for 500,000 lire (about €1.8 million or $2 million) to the Italian government- a bargain given newspapers at the time estimated the Mona Lisa to be worth approximately ten times that amount at this point.
Later, Geri and Poggi met Leonard at his hotel where he pulled out a white trunk. When he opened it, no Mona Lisa could be seen, which confirmed Geri’s suspicions that the whole thing was a hoax, as all the trunk appeared to contain was “wretched objects: broken shoes, a mangled hat, a pair of pliers, plastering tools, a smock, some paint brushes, and even a mandolin.”
But under a false bottom to the trunk, Leonard removed an object wrapped in red silk. Said Geri, “To our astonished eyes, the divine Mona Lisa appeared, intact and marvellously preserved.”
The men then convinced Leonard to come with them to the Uffizi Gallery so they could compare the painting to the photographs to confirm that it indeed was the missing masterpiece. When they did so, they found everything matched perfectly. They had the Mona Lisa.
The two experts then requested Leonard leave the painting at the gallery and return to his hotel while they worked on collecting his payment. Naturally, they instead notified the police, who arrested Leonard at his hotel almost immediately after he arrived back at his room. As for Geri, he received a tidy sum of 25,000 francs (about $110,000 today) as a reward from the Les Amis du Louvre and was given the Legion of Honor from the French government… Of course, he followed this up by suing the French government for 10% of the value of the painting, but the French courts ruled against him on that one.
So who was Leonard really and how did he manage to get a hold of the Mona Lisa?
Leonard turned out to be one Vincenzo Perugia. Italian by birth, in his 20s he decided to move to Paris with his brothers. When he wasn’t occasionally getting in trouble with the law, including at one point attempting to rob a prostitute which landed him in the slammer, he took odd jobs, including working construction.
He supposedly even helped construct the protective case around the Mona Lisa. This was done in 1910 after museum officials received a letter threatening the safety of the Mona Lisa. They then contracted with a firm called Cobier to come construct glass faced protective cases for certain of the more valuable paintings. Perugia, at the time, just so happened to work for Cobier, and as a result ended up working at the Louvre from October of 1910 to January of 1911, helping him become extremely familiar with its layout.
As for how he stole the painting, many of the details are still up in the air as Perugia’s account varied considerably on several points throughout the interrogation process and trial, and some parts of his story don’t make any sense at all. This was all considered curious because he’d already confessed to the crime both to Geri and the authorities after, so there was little point in lying about how he did it, unless he was perhaps protecting others who may have been involved.
Whatever the case, the generally accepted story is that Perugia slipped into a nearby storage closet on Sunday and spent the night there. After emerging from the closet on Monday dressed in a white smock to blend in with other workers, Perugia states he targeted the Mona Lisa because it “was the smallest painting and the easiest to transport.”
The 5 ft 3 inch (1.6 meter) Perugia then supposedly managed to lift the nearly 200 pound (91 kg) frame and painting off the wall, despite that it weighed significantly more than he did- one of many factors that have led some to speculate that he probably wasn’t actually working alone.
And if you’re now wondering why the painting wasn’t secured to the wall in any way, ease of removal was considered a good thing by museum officials in case of a fire.
In any event, once out in a nearby stairwell, Perugia claims he removed the painting from its casing, wrapped a white cloth around it and supposedly somehow slipped the 21×30 inch (53×76 cm) painting under his smock despite that this is about half his height and significantly wider than the man himself… Color us sceptical on that one.
If you’re wondering why he didn’t try rolling it up, this wasn’t possible as the Mona Lisa is not painted on a canvas, but on slabs of wood.
Walking down the stairs to the first floor, Perugia ran into a big problem- the door at the bottom was locked and the key he had somehow acquired for it didn’t work. Using the screwdriver he had on hand, he managed to get the door knob off, at which point he was discovered by a plumber by the name of Sauvet. Apparently not seeing anything suspicious about a missing door knob, nor the giant square bulge that was supposedly under Perugia’s smock at the time, if Perugia is to be believed, helpfully, Sauvet had some pliers on him that made the task of finishing the job of opening the door easier.
Perugia was then able to leave the museum altogether when the guard at the main entrance briefly left his post to get a bucket of water to use to clean the lobby. Once outside, Perugia tossed aside the doorknob, which was later found by police, and went home.
Smart enough not to leave Paris with the painting while the heat was on, Perugia waited 28 months to bring it back to Italy, ultimately making that trip with the painting stored in the hidden compartment in his trunk.
Despite strong suspicions that he must have had help, Perugia maintained that he worked alone and only wanted to return the Mona Lisa to her rightful home in Italy.
He seemed to be under the mistaken impression that the painting had been stolen and taken to France by Napoleon. In fact, as previously noted, da Vinci himself brought it with him to the French court a couple hundred years before Napoleon, with his assistant seemingly eventually selling it to King Francis I. After the revolution, the painting became the property of the new government.
While the general public in Italy seemed to eat up the patriotic angle to the story, with some proclaiming Perugia a hero, the presiding judge wasn’t buying it. For example, consider this exchange:
Judge: Is it true. that you tried to sell the Mona Lisa in England?
Perugia: Me? I offered to sell the Mona Lisa to the English? Who says so? It’s false!
Judge: It is you yourself who said so, during one of your examinations which I have right here in front of me.
Perugia: Duveen didn’t take me seriously. I protest against this lie that I would have wanted to sell the painting to London. I wanted to take it back to Italy, and to return it to Italy, and that is what I did.
Judge: Nevertheless, your unselfishness wasn’t total—you did expect some benefit from restoration.
Perugia: Ah benefit, benefit, certainly something better than what happened to me here…
In the end, Perugia was convicted, but given a relatively light sentence of just a year and fifteen days in prison. Upon appeal, his lawyers managed to get the sentence reduced to seven months.
Because he had already served more than that time since being arrested, he was immediately released and eventually returned to France where he would live out the rest of his life working, among other things, as a house painter until his death in 1925 at the age of 44.
As for the Mona Lisa, initially there was some debate among members of the Italian government as to whether they should return the painting to France or keep it, but they ultimately decided, to quote a statement issued:
“The Mona Lisa will be delivered to the French Ambassador with a solemnity worthy of Leonardo da Vinci and a spirit of happiness worthy of Mona Lisa’s smile. Although the masterpiece is dear to all Italians as one of the best productions of the genius of their race, we will willingly return it to its foster country … as a pledge of friendship and brotherhood between the two great Latin nations.”
In thanks, the French government allowed the Mona Lisa to be displayed at certain museums in Italy before taking it back.
In the aftermath, with the painting gracing the front pages of newspapers the world over in the hoopla after the initial theft, and then again when it was found, and yet again during the well publicized return to France, it had now come to be considered the world’s best known, and most valuable painting. The Louvre saw a reported 100,000 people come view the painting in the first two days after its return alone, and, as noted at the start of this piece, it’s been one of the biggest draws at the massive facility ever since. As art critic Robert Hughes would lament, “People came not to look at the painting, but to say that they’d seen it… The painting made the leap from artwork to icon of mass consumption.”
Of course, after the case was solved and the Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre, by now a global superstar, some didn’t want to admire her ambiguous smile and sfumato brushwork, but rather, destroy it. Yes, unfortunately, it is a common occurrence for pieces of famous art to become a target for vandals and demonstrators of all persuasions – and the Mona Lisa is no exception.
The first acts of vandalism took place in 1956, when our favourite Tuscan lady was attacked not once, but twice! While the painting was being exhibited in Montauban, southern France, a vandal tried to deface it with acid for unclear reasons. Miraculously, the Mona Lisa was unharmed and was returned to the Louvre.
On December 30 of the same year, a homeless Bolivian man hurled a rock at the masterpiece, damaging a small speck of paint on Lisa’s elbow. The perpetrator had no particular beef against Tuscan middle-class women, he allegedly simply wanted to be arrested so he could spend some nights in a warm bed in prison. Or, so it is claimed. Given there are easier ways to accomplish that than trying to destroy one of the world’s most famous paintings intentionally, which certainly could see you get a lot more than just a few days in prison, let’s just say color us sceptical that was the real motivation. As per the minor damage, it was easily restored, and from then on the painting would be protected by a bullet proof glass pane.
This see-through shield proved very handy in April 1974, when Mona Lisa was on tour in Japan, at the Tokyo National Museum. A paraplegic woman, incensed at the lack of accessible facilities for wheelchair users, spray-painted the masterpiece in protest. Of course, none of the bright red tint made it through the glass pane, and the painting was not damaged.
After three decades of calm, on August 2, 2009, another protester decided to target the work.
The culprit was a Russian woman, disgruntled with authorities who had refused to grant her French citizenship. The woman entered the Louvre carrying her concealed weapon: a ceramic mug. Shocking museum patrons, she angrily hurled it against the Mona Lisa. Predictably, the mug shattered against the bullet proof glass, causing only a minor annoyance to the cleaning crew as they swept the ceramic shards.
On May 29, 2022, the Mona Lisa suffered a potentially more dangerous attack. Museum visitors stepped aside from the painting, allowing for an elderly woman on a wheelchair to admire it from up close. Suddenly, the lady leapt to her feet, produced a cake frosted in white cream and smashed it against Lisa’s face. The lady then proceeded to pummel the frame and glass pane with her fists, before being seized by security. As she was led away, she screamed at the tourists, urging them to ‘Think of the Earth!’
Always good advice…
The ‘lady’ turned out to be a 36-year-old man in a wig and lipstick, and was later detained in a police psychiatric unit.
This takes us to January 27, 2024, the last act of vandalism at the time of writing this episode.
At around 10am, local time, two protesters entered the Salle des Etats, where the Mona Lisa is routinely exhibited, and then proceeded to cover the painting in pumpkin soup, before delivering their message: ‘What is more important? Art or the right to healthy and sustainable food? Your agricultural system is sick. Our farmers are dying at work!’
The two protesters were swiftly led away by security staff, and the Salle des Etats evacuated as the soup was being cleaned. Again, Mona Lisa suffered no damages.
The action was later claimed by a group called ‘Riposte Alimentaire’, or ‘Food Counterattack’
In a later statement posted on X, the group stated that their protest was intended to integrate ‘Food into the general social security system.’ And called for each citizen to receive a €150 food card each month.
It is yet to be seen if the pumpkin soup stunt will further the group’s goals. After the event, the response by French authorities was firm. Rachida Dati, France’s Minister for Culture, stated that no cause, however important, ‘Could justify the Mona Lisa being targeted.’ Adding that the Louvre would lodge a complaint against Food Counterattack.
These acts of vandalism only contributed to perpetuate Mona Lisa’s fame. But our favourite portrait made it to headlines also thanks to less violent controversies.
Back in 2012, a Swiss-based organisation called the ‘Mona Lisa Foundation’ proudly and loudly revealed to the world the existence of a second, yet unknown, version of the portrait, also by Leonardo. The Foundation claimed to be in possession of evidence confirming the authenticity, but curiously did not own the painting itself. According to the organisation’s general secretary, Joel Feldman, the picture was owned by an unnamed international consortium, but refused to reveal any more details.
In October 2019, the BBC interviewed archaeology Professor Jean-Pierre Isbouts, at Fielding Graduate University, California. The ‘Foundation’ had invited Isbouts to Switzerland to inspect their ‘Second Mona Lisa’ – and the professor was convinced: ‘I spent about two hours with that painting. But after five minutes I recognised that this had to be a Leonardo.’
The portrait in the Louvre and the one displayed by the Foundation do bear a striking resemblance, in fact. The composition and the subject of both works are very similar, and one could argue that the lady portrayed in the newly revealed painting is the same as the one hanging about in the Louvre – although the one residing in Switzerland appears to be somewhat younger.
Isbouts claimed that 16th century records suggest that Leonardo may have in fact painted two variations of the portrait, with the ‘Second Mona Lisa’ being an incomplete version. The existence of two Mona Lisas would explain the discrepancy we mentioned earlier, i.e. the differing accounts on who actually owned the portrait after Da Vinci’s death.
Furthermore, the professor explained how a scientific analysis proved that Leonardo’s hand had been at work on both pictures: ‘The histograms [digital graphs of the colours used] show that in terms of the ‘handwriting’ of the painting, how he applies the paint, [it] is exactly identical.’
The BBC counterbalanced Isbouts’ views by speaking to Martin Kemp, professor of art history at the University of Oxford, and one of the top experts of Leonardo worldwide.
Professor Kemp quoted the results of infrared examination carried out on both works of art. The analysis performed on the Louvre Mona Lisa tells a story of hesitation, corrections, and evolution. In other words: Leonardo gradually adjusted his work as he painted, layer after layer, painting over certain details until he reached the final, perfected result. On the other hand, the infrared scan of the Second Mona Lisa ‘is just tediously exact and is clearly the kind of drawing that’s made when you’re copying something rather than generating it.’
But who could have been the author of such a copy? That is not clear, as its origins are rather murky.
Apparently, the Second lady emerged in 1911, when British artist Hugh Blaker bought it from the Phelips’ family estate in Montacute House, Somerset, southern England. According to press agency Reuters, this Mona Lisa doppelganger had been brought to England by a young nobleman called James Marwood in the 1780s. After changing hands several times, it was bought by the Phelips family, who then sold it to Blaker after falling on hard times.
Upon Blaker’s death in 1936, the painting was acquired by art dealer Henry Franz Pulitzer, who kept it in his house in Isleworth, outer London. That’s why the picture in question is often referred to as ‘The Isleworth Mona Lisa’.
In 1964, Pulitzer was short on cash and allegedly sold a 25% share of the painting to the Gilbert family. Then, in 1974, the dealer stored the Isleworth Mona Lisa in a Swiss bank vault, where it remained even after his death in 1979. Eventually, in 2008, the lady in the vault was acquired by the consortium we mentioned earlier.
This consortium, by the way, remained unnamed only until late 2019. That’s when the Gilbert family sued the Mona Lisa Foundation, in a bid to claim back their 25% share of the Isleworth Mona Lisa. It was during the court proceedings that the Foundation was forced to reveal that the consortium was in fact a company called ‘Mona Lisa Inc.’, based in the Caribbean tax haven of Anguilla.
As of today, the ‘Lady of Isleworth’ is touring museums and exhibitions worldwide, while the Mona Lisa Foundation is still actively claiming it is an authentic Da Vinci. Thus far, there is no scholarly consensus amongst art historians, with the most realistic hypothesis being that the painting in the Louvre is the original by the master himself, while the Isleworth version is a copy produced by apprentices in his studio.
The case, however, is not definitively closed yet, and our dear smiling lady may surprise us again in the future.
Bonus Fact:
In 1964, a new avant-garde artist was introduced to the art scene in the Swedish city of Gōteborg. The fresh new artist was Pierre Brassau and his work received rave reviews from critics and art fans alike. One critic in particular, Rolf Anderberg, was so overwhelmed by Pierre’s talent that he wrote the following review about his work, which appeared in print the morning after the exhibition: “Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.” The reviews were almost universally glowing. All but one, that is. One critic’s commentary on the new artist was short and to the point: “Only an ape could have done this.”The opinion was unpopular, despite that the pieces of art looked strikingly similar to “art” you commonly see stuck to refrigerators, produced by 2 year olds the world over.
It turns out, though, that the “ape” review more or less hit the nail on the head. Pierre Brassau was actually none other than a young West African chimpanzee named Peter who lived in the Borås djurpark zoo in Sweden. The mastermind behind the hoax was journalist Åke “Dacke” Axelsson. Axelsson worked for the Swedish tabloid Gotebors-Tidningen and came up with the idea of featuring the primate paintings in an exhibition in order to put the critics to the test- could they distinguish between the work of true, highly skilled avant-garde modern artists when compared to the work of a random chimpanzee? It turns out the answer is mostly no. Although it should be noted that we’re guessing the chimp couldn’t have painted a perfect black square. So that’s something I guess.
And if you’re wondering, once the hoax was revealed, the critic who had previously compared Pierre Brassau with a ballet dancer, Rolf Anderberg, doggedly stuck by his assessment and stated that Pierre’s work “was still the best painting in the exhibition”.
Expand for Referenceshttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68121654
https://time.com/6589430/activists-mona-lisa-throw-soup-french-farmers-protests/
https://www.theartist.me/artwork/mona-lisa/
https://www.theartist.me/art/why-mona-lisa-painting-famous/
https://archiviodistatofirenze.cultura.gov.it/asfi/mostre/io-sono-e-mi-chiamo-peruggia-vincenzo/la-gioconda-o-monna-lisa
https://www.analisidellopera.it/leonardo-da-vinci-la-gioconda/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/stolen-how-the-mona-lisa-became-the-worlds-most-famous-painting-16406234/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leonardo-da-Vinci/Second-Florentine-period-1500-08
https://amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/jan/29/killers-muse-goddess-man-10-things-mona-lisa-leonardo-da-vinci
https://www.academia.edu/27966082/Leonardo_Mona_Lisa_and_La_Gioconda_Reviewing_the_Evidence
https://www.academia.edu/39202103/Who_the_Mona_Lisa_Is_2015_
https://www.academia.edu/39249166/Who_the_Mona_Lisa_Is
https://www.repubblica.it/scienze/2018/09/05/news/_la_monna_lisa_di_leonardo_soffriva_di_ipotiroidismo_-205668209/
https://www.repubblica.it/scienze/2017/03/13/news/risolto_il_mistero_della_monna_lisa_secondo_la_scienza_e_felice-160454895/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50046133
https://www.firenzetoday.it/cronaca/gioconda-leonardo-da-vinci-travestito.html#:~:text=E%2C%20due%2C%20perch%C3%A9%20il%20Da,Salai%2C%20alias%20Gian%20Giacomo%20Caprotti.
https://www.arte.it/leonardo/enigmi-al-femminile-le-misteriose-dame-di-leonardo-17391
https://monalisa.org/the-earlier-version/
The post The Secrets of the Mona Lisa appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the latest entry in the iconic adventure film series, everyone’s favourite swashbuckling archaeologist/grave robber hunts after the titular dial, a mechanism invented by Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes to predict the appearance of fissures in time, allowing the user to travel between the present and the past…because, sure, why not? But while this fantastical plot element might sound like the product of a particularly drunken session of antiquities-themed Mad Libs, amazingly, it is actually based on a real-life artifact called the Antikythera Mechanism, funny enough. Dating from the 1st century B.C.E, this incredibly sophisticated assembly of bronze gears has baffled archaeologists for over a century, predating the earliest known mechanisms of its kind by more than a millennium. Only in recent years has its true function been determined, revealed to be an ancient form of analogue computer – the oldest on record. This is the story of the most incredible example of ancient mechanical and mathematical genius ever discovered. So let’s dive into it, shall we?
Speaking of diving, in the spring of 1900, a team of Greek sponge divers from the island of Symi were returning home from a fishing expedition off the North African coast when a violent storm struck. Blown off course, they were forced to take shelter in a cove on the small island of Antikythera, northwest of Crete. The following morning, the leader of the expedition, Captain Dimitrios Kontos, decided to try his luck in the waters off the island, and sent diver Elia Stadiatos down to search for sponges. Minutes later, a visibly shaken Stadiatos suddenly resurfaced, frantically exclaiming that the seafloor was strewn with dead, naked bodies. When his fellow divers investigated, they discovered that the “bodies” were in fact large bronze and marble statues, the cargo of an ancient shipwreck lying 45 metres below the surface. Upon reaching their home port, the crew reported their discovery to the Greek Archaeological Service, who in 1901 launched an expedition to Antikythera. Over the course of eight months, the team recovered thousands of artifacts, including the magnificent statues, pottery, jewelry, and glassware. From these finds, the wreck was determined to be a Roman ship from the 2nd Century B.C.E, its cargo of fine and expensive art objects likely destined for a wealthy buyer in Rome.
Then, on May 17, 1902, archaeologist Valerios Stais was cleaning some of the many corroded lumps of metal from the wreck when he discovered something completely unexpected: a fused mass of complex, intermeshing bronze gears and wheels, like a large mechanical clock. While the Ancient Greeks were known to have used simple peg-toothed gears for machines like water wheels and windmills, the precision of these gears was unlike anything yet discovered from the period, sparking furious debate among archaeologists. Many refused to believe that the Ancient Greeks could have created such a sophisticated device, declaring the mechanism to be a forgery or a later device that conveniently sank in the same area as the wreck. Others argued it was the remains of a particularly complex astrolabe – a common ancient device for making astronomical measurements and calculations – while still others believed it to be a planetarium or orrery – a mechanical model showing the motion of the planets.
Meanwhile, in 1905 a German philologist named Arthur Rehm conducted the first in-depth analysis of the mysterious device. Observing that many of the gears and the remains of the wooden box that held them were covered in Greek writing, Rehm attempted to translate as much of this text as possible. What he discovered was part of an ancient almanac known as a parapegma, which predicted various astronomical phenomena such as equinoxes, solstices, and the rising and setting of various constellations. He also discovered the names of the five planets known to the Ancient Greeks – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – and that certain key numbers – particularly 19, 76, and 223 – appeared several times throughout the mechanism. But perhaps Rehm’s greatest observation was that not all the gears in the mechanism were simply fixed to the wooden base; instead, some rotated on or within other gears, forming epicyclic gearsets. This was a startling discovery, for epicyclic gears would not appear again in the West for another 1,500 years. All this led Rehm to speculate that the Antikythera mechanism was indeed a planetarium or other kind of calculator for predicting astronomical events.However, unable to penetrate the thick corrosion encasing the mechanism and more closely examine its components, he made no further progress, and the Antikythera mechanism soon faded into obscurity.
Things changed in 1951 when the mechanism was rediscovered by Professor Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist and historian of technology working at Yale University. Price immediately became obsessed with this ancient enigma, and devoted much of the next 20 years to cracking its many mysteries. He was aided in his quest by two key developments. Though the Antikythera mechanism had been recovered in 1901 as one solid, corroded lump, over the intervening half century it had been broken into around 20 smaller fragments, revealing more of its inner workings. Advancements in x-ray technology also made it possible to look inside the larger concretions without damaging them further. de Solla Price therefore teamed up with Greek radiologist Charalambos Karakalos to take the first detailed 2-D x-rays of the mechanism. These not only revealed ten previously unknown gears, but also hundreds more Greek characters, providing vital clues to deciphering the mechanism.
For example, on the surviving fragments of the front outer dial, de Solla Price discovered the words Pachon, Payni, and Epiphi – the 9th, 10th, and 11th months of the Ancient Egyptian lunar calendar. Meanwhile, the inner front dial was divided into 360 degrees as well as 12 segments marked with the signs of the zodiac. The dial also featured 20 individual letters, which de Solla Price realized corresponded to Arthur Rehm’s parapegma almanac. From these clues, de Solla Price determined that the front dial of the mechanism tracked the sidereal motion of the sun and the moon – that is, their motion relative to the so-called “fixed stars.” The two pointers that once travelled across the dial, however, had long ago corroded away. Also lost to history was a hand crank on the side of the case, which de Solla Price determined through context must have driven the entire mechanism. Another key feature of the front dial was the rotating outer ring, which allowed the operator to account for the effects of leap years and the intercalary month – the 4-5 days added to the end of the synodic year to synchronize it with the tropical year.
Examining the x-rays, de Solla Price and Karakalos next set about counting the teeth on each of the gears, which was vital for determining exactly which astronomical cycles the mechanism was intended to model. This proved more challenging than expected, as many of the gears were only partially preserved. And since a difference of just one tooth could entirely throw off the analysis of the mechanism, the analysis ran into many frustrating dead ends. For example, Karakalos believed that one particular gear had 128 teeth while de Solla Price believed it had 127. de Solla Price turned out to be correct, for 127 is half of 254 – the number of tropical or solar months in the Metonic Cycle.
First discovered by the Ancient Babylonians but named after 5th Century B.C.E. Greek astronomer Meton of Athens, the Metonic Cycle is a period of 19 solar years or 235 synodic or lunar months after which the phases of the moon occur at the same time of year – the same number 19 that Arthur Rehm had discovered repeated throughout the mechanism. The Metonic cycle is still used today by many religions to determine the dates of certain holidays – including Easter, Rosh Hashanah, and Ramadan. This particular 254-tooth gear drove a pointer on the rear upper face of the mechanism, which indicated all the lunar months in a single 235-month Metonic Cycle. Finally, building from Arthur Rehm’s insights about epicyclic gearsets, de Solla Price concluded that these mechanisms were used to calculate the phases of the moon. In 1974, he published his 20 years of findings in a landmark paper titled Gears From the Greeks.
de Solla Price’s paper shook the world of archaeology, causing many to rethink their assumptions about the mathematical and engineering abilities of the Ancient Greeks. It also inspired many researchers to tackle the puzzle of the Antikythera mechanism. Among these was Michael Wright, a curator at the Science Museum in London. One of Wright’s key insights was that the Science Museum had in its collection a similar artifact to the Antikythera mechanism: a 6th-Century C.E. device known as the Byzantine Sundial Calendar. When the mechanism is spun, the name of the month appears in one window while a graphical representation of the moon’s phases appears in another. While the mechanism is relatively simple – containing only 8 gears compared to the Antikythera Mechanism’s 30 – the similarities between the two designs suggests that the Byzantine Sundial Calendar was part of a long engineering tradition stretching back to the Antikythera mechanism and even beyond. This, along with the discovery of a new mechanism on the front dial, led Wright to hypothesize that the moon pointer on this dial included a rolling spherical indicator to display the phases of the moon. Incredibly, this mechanism made use of a differential gear train, a technology not previously thought to have been invented until the 16th century.
In the early 1990s, Wright, along with Australian historian of technology Allan George Bromley, performed linear x-ray tomography of the Antikythera mechanism, obtaining even more detailed, easier-to-interpret 3D scans. From these scans, the pair were able to determine that much of de Solla Price’s analysis of the mechanism was fundamentally flawed, with 17 out of his 20 gear tooth counts proving to be incorrect. Based on his more accurate counts as well as inscriptions found by Arthur Rehm, Wright hypothesized that the front dial also featured pointers – now lost – representing the orbits of the five known planets – the motion of which was informed by the theories of ancient Greek astronomers Apollonius of Perga and Hipparchus of Rhodes. The Ancient Greeks knew that the planets sped up or slowed down and sometimes even reversed direction as they orbited – a phenomenon known as retrograde motion caused by the earth overtaking the planets as it orbits around the sun. Indeed, the word “planet”, from the Greek planetes or “wanderer”, is derived from this behaviour. However, the Ancient Greeks believed in a geocentric model of the solar system wherein the sun, moon, and planets orbited the earth. To account for retrograde motion, Apollonius and Hipparchus theorized that the planets not only travelled in circular orbits around the earth, but also in smaller “epicycles” attached to said orbits. While not an accurate literal representation of the solar system, this model was mathematically accurate enough to perform practical astronomical calculations – and to be mechanically modelled by epicyclic gearsets like in the Antikythera mechanism. The epicyclic system would remain the dominant model of the solar system for more than a millennium and a half until it was finally overturned by Copernicus, Galileo, and others in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Wright and Bromley’s 3D scans led to a number of other key discoveries, such as the fact that the two dials on the rear of the mechanism were not concentric circles as had previously been assumed but rather spirals. Furthermore, the pointers on these dials were telescopic and featured a peg that rode in a groove on the spiral dial, allowing them to expand and contract as they travelled around the dials. This clever arrangement allowed much longer and accurate measurement scales to be compressed into a more compact space. Wright and Bromley also discovered a smaller dial within the lunar dial, which appeared to measure the 76-year Callipic cycle. Named after Greek astronomer Callippus, this cycle represents the common multiple of the tropical or solar year and the synodic or lunar month, and is a more accurate improvement on the Babylonian 19-year Metonic cycle. It also corresponded with the number 76 which Arthur Rehm found repeated throughout the mechanism. Based on all these discoveries, in 1997 Wright constructed the first practical working model of the Antikythera mechanism.
Another researcher who was skeptical of de Solla Price’s initial findings was Dr. Tony Freeth, a British mathematician and documentary filmmaker. Upon reading de Solla Price’s 1974 paper, Freeth, citing Occam’s Razor, found the notion of using epicyclic and differential gears to determine the phases of the moon too unnecessarily complex to be true. After all, there were much simpler and efficient mechanical means of obtaining these values, which any competent Greek mathematician would have known.
In any event, in 2000, Freeth and a team of British and Greek researchers formed the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project and launched a fresh assault on the enigmatic mechanism’s secrets. This effort involved the use of a state-of-the-art digital 3D imaging system developed by Hewlett-Packard and an 8-ton x-ray tomography machine built by UK Firm X-Tek Systems – both of which had to be transported to the National Archeological Museum in Athens since the Antikythera Mechanism is too fragile to travel. But the team obtained much more than high-resolution photos and x-rays; while working at the Museum, they were approached by a curator who had discovered a box labelled “Antikythera” in a storage room. The box turned out to contain 72 extra fragments of the mechanism, increasing the total to 82. The largest 7 of these fragments are now designated by the letters A-G; the remaining pieces by the numbers 1-75.
The team’s high-resolution scans revealed more than 2,000 new text characters in the mechanism, providing new clues to its function. For example, a second smaller dial inside the rear lunar dial is divided into four quadrants marked with names Nemea, Naa, Isthmia, and Olympia – all sites of Ancient Greek athletic games. This dial thus likely used the lunar calendar to determine the appropriate opening day of these games, which took place every 2-4 years.
But the function of one particular component remained frustratingly elusive: a large 223-tooth gear behind the lower rear dial. This is connected to an epicyclic set of 4 smaller gears, which de Solla Price had theorized calculated the phases of the moon. However, not only does this not make sense from a complexity standpoint, but Tony Freeth discovered all four gears in the set have the same number of teeth. This would make the output the same as the input – rendering the whole mechanism pointless. However, Freeth then discovered an observation made by Michael Wright that one of the epicyclic gears features a pin that engages in a slot in another. Its rotation axis is also mounted at a slightly different angle, meaning that the rotation transferred by one gear to another will periodically slow down or speed up. Upon reading this, Freeth had a Eureka moment, for this mechanism perfectly modelled the orbit of the moon. We now know that the moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular but rather elliptical, causing its motion across the sky to periodically speed up and slow down – a phenomenon known as the anomalistic cycle. Not knowing about elliptical orbits, however, Ancient Greek astronomers like Hipparchus modelled this behaviour via epicycles.
But while this ancient theory neatly explained the function of the offset epicyclic gears, there was a further wrinkle: the moon’s orbit is constantly shifting, tracing a flower-petal-like path around the earth like a giant spirograph. The time it takes for the moon to return to perigee – its farthest distance from the earth – is slightly longer than the time it takes to return to the same point in the sky – a difference of just 0.112579655 turns per year. Based on this, Freeth found that if the input gear had 27 teeth, the rotation of the output gear was slightly too fast; if, by contrast, it had 26 teeth, the rotation was slightly too slow. But if the input gear had 26 and a half teeth, the output ratio was exactly 0.112579655 – accurate to 9 decimal places. Though a gear can’t physically have 26 and a half teeth, Freeth quickly realized that 26 and a half times two is 53 – the exact number of teeth on the remaining gear in the set. By using precise gear ratios and slightly offset gear axes, the designer of the Antikythera mechanism had succeeded in mechanically modelling the elliptical orbit of the moon to a high degree of precision – a staggering intellectual achievement in any era, let alone the first century B.C.E.
But there was more to come, for Freeth soon realized that the number 223 Arthur Frehm had found repeated all over the mechanism corresponded to the 223 lunar month Saros Cycle that governs solar and lunar eclipses. Furthermore, the lower back dial of the mechanism was covered in short letter groups, nearly all of which featured the letters Sigma and Eta. Realizing that these stood for Selene and Helios, the Ancient Greek gods of the Moon and Sun, Freeth determined that the lower dial was, in fact, a sophisticated eclipse predictor. With this final breakthrough, the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project was able to build a new working model of the mechanism with all components accounted for save one – a small 63-tooth gear called R1 whose function remains a mystery to this day. Some believe it to be the last remaining component of Michael Wright’s hypothetical planet-tracking mechanism, the rest of which either corroded away long ago or remains hidden somewhere beneath the Aegean Sea, waiting to be discovered. Others, however, doubt the existence of such a mechanism, arguing that Wright’s hypothetical reconstruction is overly complicated and lacks the ingenious elegance of the rest of the mechanism. Time will tell whether the truth will ever be discovered.
But the most tantalizing mystery of all still remains: who actually built this mechanical marvel – and when? Unfortunately, hard evidence is rather thin on the ground, though there are some tantalizing clues. Though the 1901 expedition that first excavated the wreck dated it to the 2nd century B.C.E, excavations conducted by explorer Jacques Cousteau in the 1950s and 70s uncovered coins minted in the Greek city of Pergamon dated to 86 BC, reducing the age of the wreck by a full century. And while nothing resembling the Antikythera Mechanism has yet been discovered from this period, there is evidence that devices of this type were widely known in the ancient mediterranean. For example, just a few years after the Antikythera ship went down, the Roman statesman and writer Cicero wrote that his colleague, the philosopher Poseidonius of Rhodes:
“…recently made a glove which in its revolutions shows the movements of the sun and stars and planets, by day and night, just as they appear in the sky.”
Indeed, the Antikythera ship was built in the Rhodian style, while the parapegma almanac has been shown to be most accurate at latitudes similar to Rhodes. Furthermore, Rhodes was also home to Hipparchus, on whose astronomical theories much of the mechanism is based. Others, however, point to an origin in Pergamon, which minted the coins found aboard the shipwreck and whose Library was second only to the great Library of Alexandria in terms of preserved ancient knowledge.
But perhaps the most tantalizing theory credits the mechanism’s creation to an even more legendary intellect. Among the many findings of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project was that the names of certain months on the calendar dial were not universal across the Hellenistic world but were instead specific to the city-state of Corinth and its colonies. And one of the major colonies of Corinth was Syracuse on what is now the island of Sicily – home to none other than mathematical and mechanical genius Archimedes. Indeed, in his account of the 212 B.C.E. siege in which Archimedes was killed by the Romans, Cicero claims that the general in charge, Marcus Marcellus, made off with a sophisticated astronomical instrument designed by the great genius himself.
But while compelling enough to inspire the writers of Indiana Jones, unfortunatelythis origin story is almost certainly false. For one thing, Archimedes died more than 100 years before the Antikythera ship sank, while in 2017 it was determined that though the calendar style used by the mechanism was indeed specific to Corinth, it could not have come from Syracuse. Then again, a 2014 study conducted by Christian Carman and James Evans at the University of Puget Sound found that the start date on the Saros cycle eclipse predictor corresponded to around 205 B.C.E. – only 7 years after Archimedes’ death – meaning that while Archimedes may not have physically built the Antikythera Mechanism itself, he may well have invented many of its operating principles, inspiring a centuries-long tradition of mechanical computer construction. Without further evidence, we may never know for certain. But regardless of who exactly designed it, the Antikythera mechanism stands as an astonishing monument to the genius of the Ancients – an object the likes of which would not appear again until the 14th Century. It also serves as a sobering reminder of just how much ancient knowledge has been tragically lost to history. As Derek de Solla Price once wrote:
“[The Antikythera Mechanism] requires us to completely rethink our attitudes toward ancient Greek technology. Men who could build this could have built almost anything they wanted to. The technology was there, and it has just not survived like the great marble buildings, statuary, and the constantly recopied literary works of high culture.”
Expand for References
James, Peter & Thorpe, Nick, Ancient Inventions, Random House Publishing Group, 2006
The World’s Oldest Computer, National Geographic, June 29, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt4WxxduSGY
Freeth, Tony, Decoding an Ancient Computer, Scientific American, December 2009, https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Decoding_an_Ancient_Computer.pdf
The Antikythera Mechanism Explained With Dr. Tony Freeth, Event Horizon, June 1, 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y-Qxw4DLOY
Sample, Ian, Mysteries of Computer From 65 BC Are Solved, The Guardian, November 30, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/nov/30/uknews
Kaplan, Sarah, The World’s Oldest Computer is Still Revealing Its Secrets, The Washington Post, Hune 14, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/06/14/the-worlds-oldest-computer-is-still-revealing-its-secrets/
Casselman, Bill, The Antikythera Mechanism II, https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fcarc-diff4
The post What Did the Real Antikythera Mechanism Do And Who Actually Made It? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On February 7, 1984, 370 kilometres above the earth, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II floated into the payload bay of the Space Shuttle Challenger and prepared to make history. Strapped to his back was a bulky device resembling a futuristic chair, known as the Manned Maneuvering Unit or MMU. As he gently touched the joysticks on the twin armrests, jets of nitrogen gas propelled him out of the payload bay and out into the void. In that moment, McCandless achieved the ultimate dream of every astronaut, becoming the first human in history to fly freely and untethered outside the safety of a spacecraft. Rocket packs are a staple of science fiction, allowing heroes and villains alike to zip around freely both in space and on the ground – indeed, where would the Mandalorians in Star Wars be without them? Today, however, Extravehicular Activities or EVAs – AKA “spacewalks” – are always performed with the astronauts safely tethered to their spacecraft. But wouldn’t a space jetpack give them greater mobility? Why aren’t devices like the MMU used anymore? Well, strap into your chair and let’s dive into it all shall we? This is the long and fascinating history of the space jet pack.
Even before the space age began, engineers knew that future astronauts would need some way of maneuvering outside their spacecraft to carry out construction work, repairs, and other tasks. On March 9, 1955, the television series Disneyland aired an episode titled Man in Space, featuring former German rocket scientists – and possible war criminals – Wernher von Braun and Heinz Haber presenting their predictions about the future of astronautics. Among the hypothetical hardware presented was the so-called “bottle suit”, a rigid, one-man spacecraft with maneuvering thrusters and robotic arms that could be manipulated from the inside. Such devices, however, proved too heavy and complicated for early space missions, and the first astronauts headed into the void far less well-equipped. Indeed, when Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to perform an extravehicular activity or “spacewalk” on March 18, 1965, he had no thrusters of any kind and had to tug on his umbilical hose or use handholds on the outside of the Voskhod II spacecraft to move around. While Leonov initially had few difficulties maneuvering himself, his Berkut space suit ballooned in the vacuum of space, making it impossible for him to fit back in the airlock. Whoopsadoodle… More on his harrowing tale in the Bonus Facts in a bit.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, American companies were coming up with a host of weird and wonderful devices to improve the mobility of spacewalking astronauts. Among the strangest was the “space sled” proposed by the Marquardt Corporation of Van Nuys, California. Resembling nothing so much as a space motorcycle, the contraption featured a seat, headrest, handlebars, and an array of nitrogen gas thrusters to allow an astronaut to maneuver untethered outside his spacecraft. However, for the first American spacewalk on June 3, 1965, Gemini 4 astronaut Ed White used the far smaller Hand-held Maneuvering Unit or HHMU. Nicknamed the “zip gun”, the device comprised two small cylinders of compressed nitrogen connected to a crossbar with three nozzles: two on the ends of the boom, angled backwards to propel the astronaut forward; and one in the centre facing forward to provide a braking force. It also included a handgrip with a large trigger, a mount for a camera, and a wrist strap and tether to prevent the unit from drifting away. White found the HHMU easy and enjoyable to use, though he soon ran out of propellant and had to resort to tugging on his umbilical as Leonov had. White’s crewmate James McDivitt, however, remembered the HHMU being “hopeless”, since it needed to be held very close to the astronaut’s centre of gravity or else it would send him tumbling head over heels.
Nonetheless, NASA continued to tinker with the HHMU, changing the propellant to Freon 14 fed from a larger tank on the astronaut’s back. This version was to be used by astronaut David Scott during the Gemini 8 mission in March 1966, but his EVA had to be abandoned when the spacecraft suddenly snapped into a nearly-lethal roll, forcing fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong to perform one of the most legendary feats of piloting in spaceflight history.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force, still trying to maintain a presence in the increasingly civilian-dominated realm of manned spaceflight, was planning to launch its own space station, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory or MOL. As part of this project, the Air Force developed the first true “space jetpack”, known as the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit or AMU. Worn on the astronaut’s back and controlled using two joysticks mounted on fold-down armrests, the AMU was powered by concentrated hydrogen peroxide, which was passed over a catalyst to decompose it into high-temperature oxygen and steam. This allowed the AMU to reach a maximum speed of up to 76 metres per second. Because the exhaust coming out of the nozzles was extremely hot, the astronaut had to wear special trousers made of woven chromium alloy cloth to protect the spacesuit beneath. The AMU was scheduled to be tested during the Gemini 9A mission, launched on June 3, 1966. Astronaut Eugene Cernan – later the last man to walk on the moon – was to exit the spacecraft, make his way to the rear compartment where the AMU was stored, strap on the backpack, and use it to fly around the capsule. But almost immediately, the EVA started going very, very wrong. With no hand or footholds installed on the spacecraft exterior, Cernan found it extremely difficult to reach the rear of the spacecraft and strap on the AMU. This, combined with a spacesuit he later described as having “all the flexibility of a rusty suit of armour,” caused Cernan’s heart rate and body temperature to shoot up. This, in turn, overwhelmed his spacesuit’s air cooling system, causing his visor to completely fog up – which, given that he was hurtling around the earth outside the safety of his spacecraft, was a little bit of a problem. Though Cernan managed to gain some visibility by rubbing away the condensation with the tip of his nose, he was too exhausted to carry on and Mission Control decided to scrub the rest of the EVA. But Cernan’s troubles were not over yet, for his suit, like Alexei Leonov’s, had ballooned significantly, and bending down to allow the spacecraft hatch to seal was an excruciating experience.
As a result of Cernan’s harrowing experience, subsequent Gemini capsules were fitted with numerous hand and footholds, while the A7L space suits used on the Apollo missions used more effective liquid cooling systems. As for the AMU, another trial was planned for the Gemini 12 mission, but this was scrapped at the last minute. The Manned Orbiting Laboratory was cancelled in 1969 before a manned mission could be flown, and with it went the original version of the AMU. Instead, during the Gemini 10 mission in July 1966, astronaut Michael Collins used an upgraded version of the HHMU “zip gun” whose nitrogen propellant was supplied through the astronaut’s umbilical. The device was also carried aboard Gemini 11 in September 1966, but astronaut Richard Gordon cut his EVA short due to fatigue before he could use it.
As the Apollo missions had no need for such equipment, it would not be until the Skylab space station program in the mid-1970s that work on astronaut maneuvering units resumed, the work being spearheaded by NASA engineer Charles Whitsett. One of Whitsett;s designs, the nitrogen-fuelled Experiment M-509, was launched aboard Skylab on May 14, 1973, but a failure during launch caused part of the station’s micrometeorite and sun shield and one of its solar panels to be torn off. While the Skylab 2 crew, launched on May 25, managed to repair the station and keep it operational, NASA forbade the astronauts from using M-509 as it feared the wildly fluctuating temperatures aboard the crippled station could have damaged the backpack’s nickel-cadmium batteries. The Skylab 3 and 4 crews, however, would perform extensive tests of upgraded versions known as the Automatically Stabilized Maneuvering Unit or ASMU and the Foot Controlled Maneuvering Unit or FCMU. But while the astronauts collectively accumulated 14 hours flying time on both models, they were only tested inside the spacious interior of the Skylab station; actual EVAs were performed using umbilicals for fear of damaging the station’s delicate solar panel arrays and astronomical instruments.
It was not until the Space Shuttle Program got underway in the 1980s that an astronaut “jet pack” would finally be flown in open space. This was the Manned Maneuvering Unit or MMU, a direct descendant of the Skylab-era ASMU. Developed by Martin Marietta of Denver, Colorado, the MMU measured 127cm high, 83 cm wide, and 69 centimetres deep and weighed 148 kilograms. Designed to fit over the
Primary Life Support System or PLSS backpack of the Extravehicular Mobility Unit – the standard shuttle EVA suit – the unit held 12 kilograms of compressed nitrogen in two tanks – enough to last up to 6 hours and propel the astronaut to a maximum velocity of 25 metres per second. The propellant gas was vented through an array of 24 nozzles which allowed the astronaut to translate and roll themselves in any direction. These in turn were controlled by a pair of joysticks mounted on hold-down armrests, which automatically deployed when the astronaut backed themselves into the MMU frame. The unit also featured an automatic station-keeping system to free the astronaut’s hands while performing work. Many roles were envisioned for the MMU, including capturing and repairing satellites, building and maintaining space stations, and inspecting the tiles of the space shuttle’s Thermal Protection System for damage.
The person most associated with the development and testing of the MMU is astronaut Bruce McCandless II. Originally a flight instructor in the U.S. Navy, McCandless was recruited into NASA in 1966 as part of Astronaut Group 5. Like many of his fellow recruits, McCandless’s lack of test pilot experience placed him at the rear of the prime flight rotation; he thus spent the first 18 years of his NASA career on the ground, serving as a Capsule Communicator or CAPCOM for Apollo 11 and 14 and Skylab 3 and 4, and backup pilot for Skylab 2. It was during the latter mission that he became interested in astronaut maneuvering units, and as the Skylab program gave way to the Space Shuttle, he chose to become mission specialist for the then in-development MMU – a position that would guarantee him a spaceflight.
The $26.7 million contract for the MMU was awarded to Martin Marietta in February 1980, with the first two flight test units arriving at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, in September 1983. The year before, NASA announced that the MMU would be used to repair the Solar Max scientific satellite, which had been launched in February 1980 but suffered a failure in its attitude control system requiring it to be placed in standby mode. But before this mission could take place, the MMU had to be thoroughly tested in orbit. These tests would be performed by astronauts Bruce McCandless and and Bob Stewart aboard STS-41B, scheduled for launch in February 1984. According to the official press kit for the mission, the mission would be a conservative one, with the astronauts piloting their MMUs out to 50 then 100 metres from the shuttle before returning. As mission commander Vance Brand joked:
“We didn’t want to come back and face their wives if we lost either one of them up there!”
In preparation for the mission, McCandless and Stewart trained on Martin Marietta’s Space Operations Simulator, a giant rotating gimbal mounted on a rolling base that allowed astronauts to “fly” a mockup MMU around a large warehouse. As McCandless later recalled:
“It was quite effective, and could accommodate a fully-suited astronaut and reasonable sized mockups of “target” objects, such as the underside of the orbiter for TPS repairs. It also had the capability for introducing malfunctions for training purposes.”
Finally, on February 3, 1984, the Space Shuttle Challenger blasted off from Kennedy Space Centre and climbed into orbit. Crewed by Commander Vance Brand, Pilot Robert Gibson, and mission specialists Bruce McCandless, Bob Steward, and Ronald McNair, the shuttle carried in its payload bay two communications satellites, the American Westar 6 and Indonesian Palapa B2, as well as the two MMU prototypes, playfully nicknamed “Buck” and “Flash” after 1930s pulp space adventure heroes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Westar 6 was deployed eight hours after reaching orbit, and Palapa B2 four days later. However, failures in their rocket boosters placed both satellites into lower, operationally useless orbits, necessitating another mission to retrieve and re-launch them.
Then, on February 7, the time came for Bruce McCandless and Bob Stewart to make spaceflight history. After lowering the cabin pressure and pre-breathing oxygen to flush nitrogen from their bodies and avoid “the bends”, the astronauts donned their EMUs and made their way through the airlock to the cargo bay. While McCandless inspected his MMU, Stewart hooked his feet into the Manipulator Foot Restraint or MFR on the end of the Shuttle’s robotic Remote Manipulator System or RMS – AKA the Canadarm. Once satisfied with his equipment, McCandless backed himself into the MMU frame and detached himself from the payload bay bulkhead. In that moment, he became the first astronaut to fly untethered outside a spacecraft. Reflecting on this momentous occasion, McCandless – who, you’ll recall, was CAPCOM during Apollo 11, quipped:
“That may have been one small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me.”
Working slowly and methodically, McCandless translated and rotated the MMU through all six degrees of freedom before flying down the length of the payload bay. Finding the MMU highly responsive and intuitive to use, McCandless was at last ready to head out into the unknown. Though momentarily hesitant – who wouldn’t be? – McCandless immediately reminded himself:
“I knew the laws of physics hadn’t been repealed recently.”
After tentatively flying out to 45 metres and immediately returning, he flew out to 100 metres from the shuttle – a free flight EVA record that still stands to this day. The mission also contributed massively to the iconography of NASA and manned spaceflight in general: one photo taken of McCandless during his historic EVA, nicknamed “Backpacking”, is one of NASA’s most-requested images, and perhaps the second most famous depiction of an astronaut after the iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11 mission.
Yet, as is often the case with such missions, McCandless remembered the event as rather less profound than expected:
“I was grossly over-trained. I was just anxious to get out there and fly. I felt very comfortable … It got so cold my teeth were chattering and I was shivering, but that was a very minor thing. … I’d been told of the quiet vacuum you experience in space, but with three radio links saying, ‘How’s your oxygen holding out?’, ‘Stay away from the engines!’ and ‘When’s my turn?’, it wasn’t that peaceful … It was a wonderful feeling, a mix of personal elation and professional pride: it had taken many years to get to that point.”
Returning to the shuttle, McCandless flew past the flight deck, where he asked Commander Brand if he needed his windows cleaned. Brand declined the offer. McCandless then returned to the cargo bay, stored his MMU, and switched places with Stewart on the Canadarm. While Stewart performed his own tests of the MMU, flying out to 91 metres from the shuttle, mission specialist Ronald McNair maneuvered McCandless on the end of the Canadarm to a piece of equipment known as the Shuttle Pallet Satellite or SPAS-01A, where he practiced various procedures that would be necessary for the upcoming Solar Max repair mission. Stewart’s evaluation of the MMU was just as enthusiastic as McCandless’s, with the astronaut later declaring:
“I decided that this was the easiest thing I had ever flown. The only way you could make it easier would be to wire it directly to your brain.”
Upon completing his test flight, Stewart returned to the cargo bay, clipped a docking module called the Trunnion Pin Attachment Device or TPAD to the front of his MMU, and used it to practice docking with the SPAS. The astronauts then ended their EVA after 5 hours and 55 minutes.
Two days later, McCandless and Steward headed once more into the void on a 6-hour, 17 minute spacewalk during which they practiced docking with the SPAS, tested the MMU’s automatic attitude-keeping system, and simulated the transfer of hydrazine fuel from the shuttle’s reaction control system or RCS. During the EVA, the astronauts received a phone call from President Ronald Reagan, who congratulated them on their historic mission two days before. Another highlight of the mission took place the following day when McNair, an accomplished saxophonist, became the first astronaut to play the instrument in orbit. This proved more challenging than expected, as microgravity caused spit to float inside the instrument, producing a bubbling sound, while the dry air and low atmospheric pressure in the shuttle cabin wreaked havoc on the valves and reeds. Nonetheless, it was a giant leap for Jazz-kind. That same day, the Soviet Union launched three cosmonauts to the Salyut-7 space station, raising the number of people in space to a record-setting eight and prompting one astronaut to quip: “It’s really getting to be populated up here.”
Their mission objectives complete, the crew of STS-41B returned to earth on February 11, 1984, becoming the first shuttle mission to land on the recently-completed runway at Kennedy Space Centre – previous missions had landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The next use of the MMU came in April 1984 during STS-41C, whose primary mission was to repair the malfunctioning Solar Max satellite. On April 9, after Commander Robert Crippen maneuvered the Space Shuttle Challenger to within 60 metres of the satellite, astronauts James van Hoften and George Nelson donned their MMUs and flew out to try and capture it. Unfortunately, all attempts to clamp onto it with the TPAD failed – a problem eventually traced to a badly-machined component on the device’s docking probe. Then, Nelson attempted to grab one of the solar arrays by hand, causing the satellite to start tumbling wildly and forcing the EVA to be abandoned. The next day, controllers on the ground managed to get Solar Max back under control, whereupon Mission Specialist Terry Hart succeeded in using the Canadarm to capture the satellite and bring it into the Payload Bay, where Nelson and van Hoften succeeded in repairing it over the course of two EVAs. Solar Max was released back into orbit the following day and remained in orbit for another 5 years, reentering the atmosphere and burning up over the Indian Ocean on December 2, 1989. STS-41C safely returned to earth on April 13, 1984.
The third shuttle mission to deploy the MMU was STS-51-A, flown by the Space Shuttle Discovery. Launched on November 8, 1984, the mission’s primary objective was to recover the Westar 6 and Palapa B2 communications satellites unsuccessfully launched by tSTS-41B. The mission also deployed two more communications satellites: the Canadian Anik D2 and the American Syncom IV-1.
The first satellite to be recovered was Palapa B2, which the shuttle rendezvoused with on November 13. Flying the MMU, Mission Specialist Joseph Allen inserted a unit called the Apogee Capture Device or “Stinger” into the satellite’s apogee motor nozzle, which fellow specialist Dale Gardner hooked onto using the Canadarm. Unfortunately, this procedure proved more difficult than anticipated, and it took two hours of Allen manually maneuvering the Stinger into the Canadarm docking adapter before the capture was at last achieved. The capture of Westar 6, which took place the following day, proved far less difficult. Both satellites were returned to earth intact, with the refurbished Palapa B2P being re-launched in March 1987 and Westar 6 – sold to Hong Kong and renamed AsiaSat 1 – on April 1990.
As it turned out, STS-51A would be the MMU’s final mission. Following the Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, a review of NASA’s safety policies concluded that free-flight EVAs using the MMU were unnecessarily risky. Furthermore, in the wake of the disaster, NASA discontinued its policy of using the space shuttle to carry out military and private satellite launches and repairs – one of the primary tasks for which the MMU was designed. Finally, the three MMU missions had revealed that the majority of these tasks could be just as capably performed using the much safer and more versatile Canadarm. As a result, the MMU was retired from service, and three space-flown examples are now on public display at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Centre in Chantilly, Virginia, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Despite its short service life, the MMU remains a significant milestone in aerospace engineering, winning manufacturer Martin Marietta the National Aeronautic Association’s prestigious Collier Trophy in 1984.
The Soviet Union also developed its own astronaut maneuvering unit known as the SPK for use aboard the space station Mir. Though roughly similar to the MMU, the SPK used oxygen as its propellant and was always flown tethered to the station. Like NASA, the Soviets quickly realized that the SPK’s role could be more easily carried out using the Strela crane – the Russian equivalent of the Canadarm; consequently, the SPK was only tested during two EVAs in 1990 before being retired.
Today, the spirit of the MMU lives on in the Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue or SAFER, designed to allow astronauts to fly back to the International Space Station should they become detached from the Canadarm or their safety tethers. Developed by former astronauts Joseph Kerwin, Paul Cottingham, and Ted Christian working with Lockheed Martin, SAFER was first tested in orbit by astronauts Marc Lee and Carl Meader during the 1994 STS-64 mission. Effectively a miniaturized version of the MMU, SAFER attaches to the bottom of a regular EMU’s PLSS backpack and contains 1.4kg of compressed nitrogen – just enough to reach a maximum velocity of 3 metres per second and return the astronaut to safety. Today, SAFER is standard equipment aboard the ISS, where EVAs are always performed with the astronauts safely tethered to the station. While it may not be as glamorous as Buck Rogers or Star Wars, as any astronaut can tell you, it’s a heck of a lot better than being lost in space.
Bonus Fact:
Going back to Alexei Leonov being the first man to space walk and getting stuck out there, for a brief background, Leonov was one of the twenty Soviet Air Force Pilots to be chosen for the first cosmonaut group. Originally, his historic walk was supposed to have happened on the Vostok 11 mission, but as that was cancelled; it was later performed on the Voskhod 2 instead. After eighteen long months of training for the event, Leonov was ready to become the first person to walk in space.
The Voskhod 2 launched on March 18, 1965. In addition to Leonov, Pavel Belyayev was on board to man the ship while Leonov was giving the universe the finger by daring to exist in its void. It was the first trip into space for both of the crew members.
And so it was that once in orbit, Leonov strapped on an EVA backpack to his spacesuit that provided him with 45 minutes of oxygen and would help cool him a bit while heat, moisture, and carbon dioxide would be vented into space via a relief valve.
Belyayev then pressurized the inflatable airlock, which was a process that took seven minutes. Everything went smoothly at first and Leonov spent a total of 12 minutes and 9 seconds out on his space walk. He described the experience by saying he felt “like a seagull with its wings outstretched, soaring high above the Earth.”
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and he needed to get back inside the spacecraft before he ran out of air. But, as alluded to earlier, getting back inside proved to be a problem. He maneuvered himself back to the airlock, but then realized that his suit had bloated to a significant degree making it, at least in his current state, impossible to get back in.
Leonov thought about contacting mission control about his predicament, but decided not to. He had an idea of what to do, albeit extremely risky, and he was the only one who could do anything about the situation anyway, and didn’t want to worry the people on the ground.
As to what he decided to try, it was wriggling in head-first while slowly bleeding off the oxygen in his suit. He states of this,
I knew I might be risking oxygen starvation, but I had no choice. If I did not reenter the craft, within the next 40 minutes my life support would be spent anyway.
Unfortunately, as he released oxygen and exerted himself, his suit began to heat up dangerously with his core body temperature rising 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.8 degrees Celsius), as he slowly clambered into the airlock inch by inch.
Matters were not markedly improved once inside, however because he needed to curl his body around to close the hatch. The only way to do that he found was let yet more oxygen out of his suit and lower the pressure further… which he eventually accomplished and got the hatch closed.
At last with the hatch sealed, Belyayev was able to pressurize the airlock again and Leonov made it back inside the spacecraft.
On the ground, people had watched the very first spacewalk, though Leonov’s struggle to get back inside the spacecraft wasn’t televised. At the first sign of trouble, the transmissions shown on televisions on Earth “randomly” stopped with no explanation, with most assuming technical difficulties with the broadcast feed.
Leonov was thankful they didn’t show his re-enty, stating, “My family was therefore spared the anxiety they would have had to endure had they known how close I came to being stranded in space.”
Unfortunately, this was only the start of the problems. Just five minutes before they were scheduled to begin re-entry, the crewmen discovered that the automatic guidance system wasn’t functioning. They would have to land the spacecraft manually and were also dangerously low on fuel to maneuver to boot.
To do the necessary maneuvers, Leonov stated:
Pasha began orienting the craft for reentry. This was no easy task—in order to use the optical device necessary for orientation, he had to lean horizontally across both seats in the spacecraft, while I held him steady in front of the orientation porthole. We then had to maneuver ourselves back into the correct positions in our seats very rapidly so that the spacecraft’s center of gravity was correct during the reentry burn.
The difficulty of the landing was compounded by politics. They had to land on Soviet soil; if they overshot and landed in China, which had very poor relations with Soviet Russia at the time, a potential international incident could have ensued. They also had to choose somewhere without many people. Thus, Leonov chose Perm, a sparsely populated area far from China. It seemed like a safe bet.
However, additional problems started as they entered the Earth’s atmosphere. The craft began spinning uncontrollably, we can only assume because the universe was saying F- you, that’s why Alexei. But also because the orbital module was still attached to the landing module. The modules hadn’t fully detached when they were supposed to, due to a thick communication cable connecting the two.
Not only did it throw the landing location off significantly, but the two craft spun around one another, subjecting the cosmonauts to as high as 10 G’s of force. So much, that Lenov said that the “small blood vessels in our eyes burst”.
At around 62 miles high (100 km), the cable burned up and they were able to stabilize and land successfully… in two meters of snow in Solikamsk on the outskirts of frigid Siberia.
Upon attempting to open the hatch, they further had difficulty after the explosive bolts blew. Rather than the hatch opening, it was stuck shut. He states,
Looking out of the window, we could see the hatch was jammed against a big birch tree. We had no alternative but to start rocking the hatch violently back and forth, trying to shift it clear of the tree. Then, using all his strength, Pasha managed to push the hatch away from the remains of the bolts, and it slid back and disappeared into the snow.
At this point, Leonov and Belyayev’s families were told that the two had landed safely and were resting before returning to Moscow. However, Soviet officials hadn’t picked up on the rescue signal, and had little idea where they’d landed or even if they were still alive.
Lucky for the cosmonauts, a cargo plane did pick up on the signal and the word of their location spread around. Initial attempts at rescue were made by civilian aircraft, with helicopter pilots and others throwing the two down supplies, including wolf skin boots and cognac. (Note: contrary to popular belief, drinking alcohol in such a situation would make hypothermia significantly more likely, rather than it heating your body. In a nutshell for various physiological reasons you will feel warmer, but core body temperature dropping much faster because of it.)
In the end, they ultimately had to spend the night in a place packed with wolves and bears during mating season- when they’re most aggressive- and where the temperature dropped to -22 degrees Fahrenheit (-30 C) according to Leonov. They also had no way to re-seal the landing module, so simply had to hunker down and endure the night.
The temperature problem was compounded by the fact that their suits had sweat sloshing around up to their ankles, along with being soaked through the inner layers. As to what they did about this, he states,
“We had to strip naked, take off our underwear, and wring the moisture out of it. We then had to pour out what liquid had accumulated in our spacesuits. We went on to separate the rigid part of the suit from its softer lining—nine layers of aluminum foil and a synthetic material called dederone—and then put the softer part of the suits back on over our underwear and pull our boots and gloves back on.”
The next day, a rescue crew arrived traveling via skis, while another came a day later and chopped down trees, making a log cabin and a huge fire to keep the team and cosmonauts warm. They then all traveled nine kilometers by ski to a clearing where a helicopter was waiting for them.
Upon arriving in the town of Leninsk, they had one last duty: to report on their mission. Leonov said simply,
“Provided with a special suit, man can survive and work in open space. Thank you for your attention.”
He didn’t go into detail about his brush with death. It’s possible that he was told not to; details of the harrowing mission weren’t released until much later.
Expand for ReferencesSuited for Spacewalking: a Teacher’s Guide With Activities for Technology Education, Mathematics, and Science, NASA, https://books.google.ca/books?id=nv4w6IuEbNMC&pg=PA34&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Uri, John, 40 years Ago: STS-41B, the First Flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit, NASA, February 6, 2024, https://www.nasa.gov/history/40-years-ago-sts-41b-the-first-flight-of-the-manned-maneuvering-unit/
Evans, Ben, “Buck and Flash”: Remembering the First Flights of the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), Forty Years On, AmericaSpace, https://www.americaspace.com/2024/02/03/buck-and-flash-remembering-the-first-flights-of-the-manned-maneuvering-unit-mmu-forty-years-on/
Norman, Scott, Untethered in Space: Bruce McCandless and the Manned Maneuvering Unit, Coca Cola Space Science Centre, June 9, 2020, https://www.ccssc.org/mmu/
SPK, Encyclopedia Astronautica, http://www.astronautix.com/s/spk.html
Unusual Marquardt “Space Sled”, Aerospace Projects Review Blog, https://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/?p=2983
1954 – “Bottle Suit” – Wernher von Braun / Disney (American), Cybernetic Zoo, August 31, 2014, https://cyberneticzoo.com/teleoperators/1954-bottle-suit-wernher-von-braun-walt-disney-american/
Chaikin, Andrew, The Story of NASA’s Jet-Propulsion Backpack, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/story-nasas-jet-propulsion-backpack-180950190/
Gemini 9, Encyclopedia Astronautica, http://www.astronautix.com/g/gemini9.html
The post Touching the Void- The Story of the Space Jetpack appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the 2008 film Wanted, mild-mannered office worker Wesley Gibson, played by James McAvoy, is inducted into a secret group of elite assassins known as The Fraternity, who keep the world in balance by eliminating those who threaten its safety. Among the superhuman skills Wesley learns is the ability to “curve” bullets by swinging his pistol as he fires, allowing him to hit targets hidden behind obstacles. While this makes for an awesome cinematic visual, is it actually possible to do this? Can you actually curve a bullet like a pitcher curves a baseball?
The short answer is no – at least, not in the way shown in Wanted, but there is a caveat we’ll get to in a bit. But for now, the reason has to do withplain old inertia. When an object is set in motion, it will travel in a straight line unless some force acts upon it. Thus, no matter how fast you swing your gun while firing, the bullet will fly in the same direction it was travelling the moment it left the barrel. Once in free flight, there are only two major forces that can affect a bullet’s trajectory: gravity and air resistance. Gravity, of course, pulls the bullet towards the centre of the earth, causing it to travel in a downward-arcing trajectory. Wind resistance, however – specifically from a crosswind – can cause a bullet’s trajectory to curve sideways. This is called windage, and the sights of nearly all rifles are designed to be adjustable to compensate for this effect. However, due to the high density, small surface area, and high velocity of most bullets, windage is only significant over long distances and would be useless for curving a bullet around, say, Angelina Jolie. Similarly, another force that can affect bullets – at least, modern, spin-stabilized ones – is the Magnus Effect, the same aerodynamic phenomenoncauses golf balls to “slice”, baseballs to curve, and soccer balls (football to our non-American viewers) to “bend” into the net. However, for a cylindrical bullet spinning around its longitudinal axis, the Magnus Effect acts either upwards or downwards – not sideways. To achieve a sideways curve, a gun would need to fire a spherical projectile spinning around its vertical axis – but again, so high are the inertial forces compared to the aerodynamic forces acting on a bullet that this curve would be very gradual and only become apparent over long ranges. To make the curve more pronounced at short range, you must make the projectile much larger and far less dense – creating, essentially, a nerf gun.
Of course, there is a third way to make a bullet curve in flight: the Coriolis effect. Known to most people as the phenomenon that apparently makes toilets flush a different direction in the southern hemisphere (spoiler alert: no it doesn’t) in this case the Coriolis effect is the result of the earth rotating beneath a projectile as it flies, making it seem as though it is travelling along a curved trajectory. But once again, this effect only occurs over very long distances and is useless in a Wanted-type gunfight. So, in conclusion, there is no practical way to bend a regular bullet over the short distances depicted in Wanted. Sorry, all you would-be super assassins: you’ll just have to take out your targets the old-fashioned way.
“But wait”, I hear you saying, “If you can’t curve a bullet by swinging a gun around, what about bending the barrel to shoot around corners?” Well, as goofy as it may sound, this actually is possible, and has been tried several times throughout history. During the First World War, armies on both sides extensively experimented with so-called periscope rifles to allow soldiers to shoot over the rim of a trench without exposing themselves to enemy fire. These typically consisted of a wooden or metal frame holding a regular service rifle and fitted with a periscopic sight and various levers connected to the bolt and trigger to allow said rifle to be safely operated from below. But while this fits the technical definition of “shooting around corners”, none of these devices made use of a curved barrel to bend the bullet’s trajectory, though did result in some rather interesting guns. The first patent for a curved-barrel firearm would not appear until 1919, filed by inventor Alexander T. Fischer of Detroit, Michigan. Dubbed A Device for Oblique Firing, Fischer’s design included a periscopic sight so that firearms fitted with the system could be fired:
“…at an angle from that of the line of sight as is now practised. This improvement is especially desirable in airplane usage in war, as it enables the observer to shoot over the side of the airplane and direct his bullet to an object beneath him without being obliged to hold the fire arm in a vertical or nearly vertical position and without being exposed to fire from his adversary. Soldiers also by its use may fire over parapets without exposure to adverse fire.”
This description suggests that Fischer was naively ignorant with the realities of aerial combat, for by 1919 the days of aircraft observers firing at ground targets with regular rifles was long past. And unless the observer’s compartment was armoured – which few 1910s aircraft were – hiding behind its edge would make little difference to the gunner’s safety. And while Fischer’s invention was theoretically better suited to infantry use, there is no evidence a working example was ever built. It would not be until the 1940s that a working curved-barrel firearm was actually fielded by – who else – the Nazis.
Known as the krummlauf – literally “curved barrel” – this device was the brainchild of Hans Schaede of Düsseldorf weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall-Borsig, with development beginning in 1943. As it was believed that bending a regular barrel would impart too much stress on it and the bullet, the first prototypes used a curved piece of 20mm barrel as a “trough” to help guide the 8mm bullet around a corner. However, this did not work nearly as well as planned, and it was soon discovered that simply using a curved 8mm barrel actually worked much better. The curve still placed tremendous stress on the barrel extension, so relief holes were drilled to release some of the pressure. As the krummlauf was only intended for short-range use, the resulting loss of velocity and accuracy was not considered a major problem.
Several different versions of the krummlauf were developed, broadly divided into ‘I’ variants for infantry use and ‘P’ or panzer variants for use aboard armoured vehicles. 30º, 45º, 60º and 90º versions were designed, as well as special mountings for the MG-42 machine gun and the StG-44 assault rifle. (More on the fascinating history of assault rifles in the Bonus Facts in a bit.) The 90º ‘P’ krummlaufs were specifically designed for use in tank destroyers like the Porsche Elefant, which was not fitted with defensive machine guns. Mounted in a special swivelling cupola fitted with a periscope, an StG-44 fitted with a krummlauf allowed the vehicle crew to defend themselves against attacking infantry while keeping the weapon vertical, minimizing the space it occupied inside the hull. In the end, however, only the 30º ‘I’ variant for the StG-44 was produced in any significant numbers – and even then, of the 20,000 initially ordered, only around 500 ever made it into the field.
Intended for use in urban warfare, the ‘I’ krummlauf featured a 35 centimetre barrel, comprising a 10 cm straight section, a 14 cm curved section, and another 11 cm straight section. This clamped over the front sight and muzzle of the StG-44 using the same mount as the German Army’s standard schiessbecher grenade launching cup. While early on efforts were made to line up the rifling of the weapon and the krummlauf, this was eventually found to be unnecessary and production versions actually featured a short bored-out section between the muzzle of the weapon and the start of the curved barrel to allow the bullet to re-center itself. And to allow the infantryman to see what he was shooting at, the krummlauf was fitted with a periscopic mirror in a sheet-metal housing. This in turn featured a triangular shield to prevent gases from the barrel from clouding the optics.
Like many German “wunderwaffe,” the krummlauf arrived too late and in too few numbers to have any impact on the end of the war. However, the Allies took a keen interest in the odd-looking design, with both the Americans and Russians conducting extensive tests on captured examples. The results were something of a mixed bag. While comfortable to shoot and capable of achieving 35×35 centimetre grouping at a range of 100 metres when fired in semi-automatic mode, the 30º ‘I’ krummlauf became uncontrollable in fully-automatic fire, the sideways recoil spinning the shooter dangerously to the side. The powerful forces in the curved barrel also tended to tear the bullets into fragments, though this unintended shotgun effect was theoretically useful in close-quarters urban combat. However, these same forces also caused the barrel to very quickly wear out. Though originally designed to last 6,000 shots, in practice most krummlaufs failed after just a few hundred.
In his final report, Colonel H.A. Quinn of Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland concluded that:
“Despite the fact that the bent-barrel theory is in violation of accepted ideas on bullet delivery, it is believed to be worthy of extensive research and development. With the short length, large diameter, and short bearing of the 230-grain U.S. Caliber .45 bullet, various degrees of bent barrels might prove to be successful, and with reasonable control. With the 7.9mm Kurzpatronen bullet, it is believed that the 30-degree bend is practical. The 90-degree bend is apparently impractical.”
The Soviets came to similar conclusions, and produced experimental versions of the Mosin-Nagant 91/30 and AVS-36 rifles and the PPsH-41 submachine gun with 30º curved barrels. However, neither the U.S. nor the Red Army chose to pursue the idea any further.
But if curving a firearm’s barrel around a corner is impractical, why not just bend the whole firearm? This was the thinking Israeli Defense Forces Lieutenant Colonel and counter-terrorist expert Amos Golan when he created one of the most unique weapons currently in service: the CornerShot. Introduced in the year 2000, the CornerShot is not a weapon per se but rather a rifle-like chassis with a forward section designed to hold a standard service pistol like a Glock 17 or Beretta 92F. This section is hinged to allow the attached firearm to fire around corners, and incorporates a high-definition television camera connected to a screen on the rear of the device to allow the operator to see what they are shooting at. And if that weren’t bizarre enough, among the many accessories created for the CornerShot is the Kitty Corner Shot, a stuffed animal resembling a cat designed to be slipped over the muzzle of the pistol. The idea is that when the Kitty Corner Shot is pushed around a corner, it will distract the target just long enough for the CornerShot gunner to get them in their sights. And if you ask us, when someone starts coming up with ideas that unhinged, it is they, and not the bullets, that are truly going around the bend…
Bonus Fact:
Speaking of innovative weapons, what we now call assault rifles can trace their origins back to the Second World War. While that conflict is remembered for introducing advanced technologies like radar, jet aircraft, and nuclear weapons, the average infantryman went into WWII armed essentially the same weapon his parents had used in the last war: a bolt-action, manually-repeating rifle firing a full-power cartridge. The only major exception was the United States, which in 1936 became the first nation to issue a semi-automatic rifle – the M1 Garand – as its standard infantry weapon. But while such weapons were well-suited to shooting across no-man’s-land during the Great War or the South African Veldt during the Boer War, in the increasingly urban, close-quarters combat troops increasingly found themselves engaged in, bolt-action rifles quickly became something of a liability. Not only were they slow and awkward to operate – severely limiting the volume of fire that could be laid down – but the full-power cartridges they fired, great for precision shots over long distances, were grossly overpowered, with Army reports indicating that few combat engagements occurred at ranges over 300 metres. Such cartridges also made fully-automatic weapons all but uncontrollable when fired from the shoulder.
Thankfully, most armies had another class of weapon at their arsenal: the submachine gun. Developed at the end of the Great War for raiding and clearing trenches, submachine guns fired lower-recoil pistol-calibre ammunition and could deliver a murderous volume of fire at close quarters, making them ideal for urban combat. This advantage was exploited to great effect by the Soviet Red Army, who equipped entire infantry companies with PPsH-41 and 43 submachine guns for house-to-house fighting in cities like Stalingrad. But submachine guns were not a perfect solution, being inaccurate at ranges beyond a few dozen metres. Both the Soviets and the Germans quickly realized that this new kind of combat required a new kind of weapon, one which combined the volume of fire and full-auto controllability of a submachine gun with the accuracy of a rifle – at least over moderate ranges.
Interestingly, both nations approached the same problem from opposite ends. Unlike most armies, the tactical structure of the German Wehrmacht was organized not around the rifleman, but rather the machine gun squad, with rifle-carrying infantry playing a supporting role. This is a major reason army planners chose to retain the Great War-era Mauser 1898-pattern bolt-action rifle rather than adopt a more modern semi-automatic infantry weapon. But while this arrangement worked well during the Blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939, 1940, and 1941, it proved less effective in 1943 as the Wehrmacht found itself in full-on retreat following the disaster at Stalingrad. Though the German MG 34 and MG 42 machine guns could lay down an impressive volume of fire, they required extensive setup before they could be brought to bear – something that was difficult to do while retreating. German industry thus set about designing a more compact, man-portable machine gun that could be more easily used on the retreat.
Fortuitously, the basic elements for such a weapon were already in development. In 1938, the Polte Ammunition Works in Magdeburg designed a new kind of ammunition, designated the 7.92x33mm Kurz or “short.” This was essentially a cut-down version of the standard full-power 7.92x 57mm Mauser cartridge used in German bolt-action rifles and machine guns, with a shorter case and lighter bullet. This provided a balance between recoil and accuracy, allowing an infantryman to lay down controllable automatic fire from the shoulder while still being able to accurately hit targets out to 300 metres. In 1940 the German government issued contracts to firms Haenel and Walther to produce prototypes of a rifle to fire the new Kurz cartridge, to be designated the Maschinenkarabiner or “Machine Carbine” 42. Both companies produced similar weapons, which looked unlike anything that had come before. Both were gas-operated, built of lightweight and inexpensive welded steel stampings, and featured an inline shoulder stock, low-slung barrel to reduce muzzle climb, and a long, curved 30-round detachable box magazine. Both companies’ prototypes were extensively tested at the Kummersdorf proving grounds in December 1940, and the results were…less than impressive, with the weapons suffering a large number of jams, burst barrels and other failures. Undaunted, Walther and Haenel continued to refine their designs, and in April 1942 the Haenel weapon was judged reliable enough for combat trials, first seeing service on the Eastern Front, south of Leningrad.
The reaction of the first troops to use the new weapon was overwhelmingly positive, and they requested that more MKb 42s be sent to the front immediately. Unfortunately, the entire program suddenly fell victim to that greatest of enemies to the German war effort: Adolf Hitler, who ordered all new rifle development programs suspended. The reason for this decision is hotly debated among historians, with some arguing that Hitler, having been a soldier in the Great War himself, was suspicious of new technology and believed that the standard KAR98K bolt-action rifle was perfectly adequate for the German infantryman’s needs. Others, however, claim that his decision was a far more pragmatic one. German forces had lost vast quantities of rifles and other weapons during the retreat from Stalingrad, greatly straining the capacity of German industry to replace them. Introducing a new pattern of rifle, which required brand-new tooling and manufacturing facilities, would only make the situation worse and result in too few new rifles being produced to have any significant impact on the war effort. Hitler thus limited research and development efforts to upgraded models of submachine guns.
Believing they had a winning weapon on their hands, Haenel made the bold decision to go behind the Führer’s back and continue development of the Mkb 42 under the designation Maschinenpistole or “Machine Pistol” 43. In order to address the issue of manufacturing capacity, Haenel attempted to develop the MP 43 into a complete replacement for the KAR98K, fitting it with a grenade launching attachment, mounts for telescopic sights, and a bayonet lug. Unfortunately, the rifle proved fundamentally unsuited to sniping, bayonet fighting, or grenade launching, and it was reluctantly decided that the MP43 could only ever supplement the KAR98K, not replace it. In March 1943, Hitler discovered Haenel’s deception and ordered the project shut down once again. However, he was eventually persuaded to allow development to continue on an evaluation basis only. But the results of early trials proved so promising that Hitler approved the weapon for mass-production, the first examples entering combat in October 1943. Once again the reaction from front-line soldiers was overwhelmingly positive- so much so that when Hitler asked his Eastern Front generals in July 1944 what they most needed, one general immediately exclaimed “more of those new rifles!” Hitler soon warmed to the MP 43 concept, and recognizing the propaganda value of this new weapon, requested that it be given a new name: Sturmgewehr, or “Assault Rifle.” Nearly 426,000 StG 44 rifles were produced by the end of the war, and while they proved extremely effective in combat, by the time they entered service the war for Germany was already lost, and the new weapon had little to no impact on the final outcome of the conflict. However, the basic concept of a select-fire rifle firing an intermediate cartridge – as well as the name “assault rifle” – was to have a major impact on the future of firearms design.
Meanwhile, a similar development was taking place in the Soviet Union. Recognizing, as the Germans had, the need for a cartridge halfway between a pistol and rifle in power, in 1943 the Soviet OKB-44 design bureau developed the intermediate 7.62x39mm cartridge for use in a planned family of new infantry weapons, including a semi-automatic rifle, an automatic rifle, and a light machine gun. The cartridge, along with the semi-automatic SKS rifle designed by Sergei Simonov, first entered combat in limited numbers in 1945 during the final battles against Nazi Germany. The round performed well, and in 1949 the SKS was officially adopted as the Red Army’s standard rifle, alongside the RPD light machine gun firing the same round. However, the SKS would prove extremely short-lived in front-line service, thanks to the development of a weapon that would go on to become legendary.
In October 1941, tank commander Mikhail Kalashnikov was recovering in hospital from shoulder wounds received during the Battle of Bryansk. With plenty of time on his hands, Kalashnikov decided to solve what he saw as a major deficiency in Soviet armaments and designed a new type of submachine gun for the Red Army:
“I was in the hospital, and a soldier in the bed beside me asked: ‘Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men, when the Germans have automatics?’ So I designed one. I was a soldier, and I created a machine gun for a soldier.”
While Kalashnikov’s submachine gun was not accepted into service, his talent as a designer was recognized and he was reassigned to the Red Army’s Central Scientific Development Firing Range for Rifle Firearms of the Chief Artillery Directorate. In 1944 Kalashnikov became aware of the 7.62x39mm intermediate cartridge and redesigned his submachine gun to accommodate it. The resulting weapon looked very similar to the German StG 44, with an inline stock, low-slung barrel, and curved 30-round magazine. Whether Kalashnikov was directly influenced by the German weapon is debatable, with most historians attributing the similarities to a case of convergent design – that is, of two designers coming up with similar solutions to the same problem. Indeed, the operating mechanism of the two rifles is quite different, the StG 44 using a tipping bolt and the Kalashnikov a rotating bolt. However, it is worth noting while the Germans were trying to create a machine gun that could be used at shorter ranges, Kalashnikov was trying to create a submachine gun that could be used at longer ranges.
In 1946 Kalashnikov entered his design into a competition for a new infantry automatic rifle, which it eventually won. In 1947, the weapon was approved for service under the designation Avtomat Kalashnikova – or “Kalashnikov’s Automatic Rifle” – 1947, better known as the AK-47. Trials of the new rifle began in 1948, and in 1949 the AK-47 was adopted as the Red Army’s standard rifle, replacing the SKS after barely a year in service. The AK family of rifles would go on to become the most successful and widely-produced firearms in history, renowned for their ruggedness, reliability, and ease of use. Millions were exported around the world by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist states, and can be found in war zones worldwide to this day. It is important to note here that while the weapon is popularly referred to as the “AK-47,” this designation technically applies to the first three patterns of the rifle. While the first AK-47 featured stamped steel construction like the StG 44, this proved unreliable and was quickly replaced by machined steel construction for the Type 2 in 1951 and Type 3 in 1954. Then, in 1959, Soviet manufacturers finally perfected the stamped-steel technology and introduced the Modernized AK or AKM. This is the AK most commonly encountered around the world, the original “AK-47” patterns being extremely rare.
Yet despite the success of the StG 44 and the AK, it took several decades for the assault rifle concept to catch on in the West. American infantry doctrine had long emphasized individual marksmanship and firing accurate aimed shots over long distances over suppressing fire, and despite the lessons of urban close-combat combat during WWII, the United States was reluctant to adopt an intermediate cartridge. In 1954 the U.S. pressured the newly-formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO into adopting the full-power 7.62×51 or .308 calibre cartridge as its infantry standard. This decision forced many NATO countries to abandon advanced assault rifle projects and adopt so-called “battle rifles” firing full-power cartridges, such as the Belgian FN-FAL, German G3, and American M14, which was essentially an M1 Garand with a detachable box magazine and select-fire capability. Unfortunately, these rifles proved less than ideal, the full-power .308 cartridge making them nigh-uncontrollable in full-automatic fire. This led many countries like the UK to delete the full-automatic capability from their battle rifles altogether.
The deficiencies of the battle rifle concept became glaringly obvious as the United States entered the Vietnam War, where the bulky, wood-stocked M14 proved prone to snagging in heavy brush and warping in the tropical humidity. By contrast, the Chinese-supplied SKSs and AKs used by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army proved ideally suited to jungle warfare, being light, compact, reliable, and capable of controlled automatic fire. It quickly became clear to U.S. Commanders that an American answer to the AK was desperately needed. Thankfully, just such a weapon was already in development.
In 1954, Richard Boutelle, president of the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, created the ArmaLite division to explore the use of aluminium and other aerospace materials in firearms design. The division’s first success came that same year when it designed the lightweight folding AR-5 and AR-7 survival rifles for use by U.S. aircrew shot down behind enemy lines. In 1957, ArmaLite was invited to enter the competition for a new U.S. Forces rifle to replace the WWII-era M1 Garand, and to this end designer Eugene Stoner produced the AR-10, a lightweight aluminium-bodied rifle firing the 7.62x51mm NATO round. While the AR-10 would ultimately lose out to the M14, that same year General Willard G. Wyman, commander of the U.S. Army Continental Command, put out a request for a lightweight automatic rifle to fire the newly-developed 5.56x45mm or .223 calibre intermediate cartridge. Stoner scaled down the AR-10 design to create a new rifle called the AR-15, which after extensive trials and conversion to fully-automatic capability was adopted into U.S. service in 1964 as the M16. While the lightweight, space-age weapon was initially disparaged by troops as the “Mattel Rifle”, the M16 quickly proved its worth in the jungles of Vietnam, and Eugene Stoner’s AR system has formed the basis for all standard U.S. military service rifles to the present day. The rifle also set the trend for modern assault rifles, the 5.56x45mm cartridge being flatter-shooting and more lightweight than the Russian 7.62×54, the latter feature allowing an infantryman to carry more ammunition. As a result, in 1974 the Soviet Union replaced the AKM with the AK74 firing the broadly similar 5.45x39mm cartridge. And in 1980 NATO adopted 5.56x45mm as its infantry standard, replacing the full-power 7.62×51.
And if you’re now wondering what actually makes something an assault rifle according to the U.S. Army definition, to be classified as an assault rifle a firearm must have three basic characteristics embodied in the original StG 44 and AK-47: 1) it must fire an intermediate cartridge with an effective range of at least 300 metres; 2) it must have select-fire capability – that is, the ability to fire in fully-automatic mode; and 3) it must have a high-capacity detachable box magazine. By this definition, most civilian versions of the widely demonized AR-15 are not, in fact assault rifles, for while these rifles are designed to fire an intermediate cartridge and can be fitted with large capacity magazines, the AR-15 is, by definition, a semi-automatic firearm. Furthermore, “AR” does not stand for “Assault Rifle,” as is widely believed, but rather “Armalite Rifle.” Similarly, any firearm lacking one or more of the above characteristics cannot be classified as an assault rifle. For example, the original M14 has a detachable high capacity magazine and select-fire capability, but fires a full-power rifle cartridge; while the SKS, despite firing an intermediate cartridge, has only a 10-round fixed magazine and no select-fire capability.
Nor should “Assault Rifles” be confused with “Assault Weapons,” the latter being neither a technical or military term but rather a political one.
Expand for ReferencesErenfeicht, Leszek, Sturmgewehr: Hitler’s Only True Wunderwaffe, Small Arms Defense Journal, September 30, 2013, http://www.sadefensejournal.com/wp/sturmgewehr-hitlers-only-true-wunderwaffe/
Williams, Anthony, Assault Rifles and Their Ammunition: History and Prospects, June 22, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20080714163011/http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk:80/Assault.htm
Bocetta, Sam, The Complete History of the AR-15 Rifle, Small Wars Journal, December 7, 2017, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-complete-history-of-the-ar-15-rifle
Hogg, Ian, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Ammunition, Chartwell Books, NJ, 1985
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-103hr3355enr/pdf/BILLS-103hr3355enr.pdf
McCollum, Ian, Kalashnikov vs Sturmgewehr, Forgotten Weapons, September 17, 2016, https://youtube.com/watch?v=sPWJOJZQCs8
McCollum, Ian, Krummlauf Curved Barrel on an StG-44, Forgotten Weapons, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSsFiS2Voxg
Experimental PPSh With Curved Barrel, Model 1945, http://www.ppsh41.com/serge3.htm
McCollum, Ian, Forgotten Weapons: The Nazis’ Desperate Attempts to Curve a Bullet, Popular Mechanics, July 13, 2016, https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21800/forgotten-weapons-wwii-curve-a-bullet/
Lamlein, Tom, Nazi Secret Weapon: the Krummlauf StG-44, The Armory Life, November 10, 2020, https://www.thearmorylife.com/nazi-secret-weapon-the-krummlauf-stg44/
A.T. Fischer’s Proto-Krummlauf, Historical Firearms, https://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/181880200544/at-fischers-proto-krummlauf-many-of-us-have
1945 Soviet Trials of a 90 Degree “Krummlauf”, https://www.patreon.com/posts/1945-soviet-of-36458898?l=de
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On the evening of August 21, 1986, Ephraim Che, a farmer from the highlands of northwest Cameroon, heard a great rumbling in the distance like rolling thunder. Emerging from his hut, he peered down the mountain to the moonlit waters of Lake Nyos, a small but deep body of water nestled in the crater of an extinct volcano. Though a strange white mist now hung over the lake, otherwise everything looked normal. Suddenly overcome by a feeling of illness, Ephraim returned to his hut and went to bed. The following morning, Ephraim rose and began making his way down the mountain. It was not long before he realized something was amiss. The waterfall that cascaded out one end of the lake had suddenly gone dry, while the waters of the lake itself, normally crystal blue, had turned an ugly rust-brown. Then, he noticed the eerie silence: not a single bird was singing, or insect buzzing. Spooked, Ephraim began running down the valley. He soon came upon Halima Suley, a cowherd, shrieking in grief and horror. Scattered around her were the bodies of more than 30 family members and 400 head of cattle. Around 9 PM the previous evening – the same time Ephriam had heard the distant rumble – a great wind had roared down the valley through Suley’s house, causing all the people and animals around her to suddenly lose consciousness. They never woke up. But worse was yet to come. In the nearby village of Nyos, all but two of the 1,000 inhabitants perished in the night, felled where they stood, sat, or lay. Hundreds more were killed in villages up to 25 kilometres away. Those who survived remained unconscious for up to 36 hours before coming to. Many, upon seeing the bodies of their dead loved ones strewn about them, chose to commit suicide. In all, 1,746 people died that night, along with 3,500 head of cattle and countless birds, insects, fish, and other wild animals. It was only days later that wildlife finally returned to the area, when vultures and other scavengers arrived to feast on the corpses.
But what had caused this horrifying catastrophe? Almost immediately, rumours and speculation ran rampant. Some pointed to secret government weapons experiments, toxic waste dumped by corporations, or even ancient legends of evil spirits said to haunt the area. Others suspected toxic gases from a volcanic eruption. But as experts from around the world descended on Cameroon, a more surprising picture began to take shape. The invisible killer, it turned out, was Lake Nyos itself.
Lake Nyos lies in the Oku Volcanic Plain, part of the Cameroon Line of volcanoes stretching 1,600 kilometres northeast from the Gulf of Guinea to Lake Chad. As with all the volcanoes in the Cameroon Line except for Mount Cameroon, the volcanoes of the Oku Massif are now extinct, with two of the craters having filled with water to form Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun. Such crater lakes are typically small in area but extremely deep, with Lake Nyos measuring only 1.9 kilometres long and 1.2 kilometres wide but bottoming out at 200 metres. Below this lies a tall volcanic pipe of porous debris from the last volcanic eruption, as well as a magma chamber 80 kilometres below the surface. While the crater is no longer connected to the magma chamber, gases from the magma can still percolate up through fissures in the rock into the bottom of the lake. And chief among these gases is carbon dioxide. Due to the lake’s great depth, the bottom is extremely cold, dark, and under high pressure – the perfect environment for storing large amounts of gas. Bubbles of carbon dioxide emerging from the rock below grow smaller and smaller as they rise through the water column, never reaching the surface as they are absorbed into the cold, high-pressure water. In most crater lakes this buildup is not an issue, as seasonal temperature fluctuations create convection currents that carry water from the bottom of the lake to the top, safely releasing the trapped gas into the atmosphere. In equatorial regions like Cameroon, however, the temperature is fairly stable year-round, and no such turnover occurs. Instead, carbon dioxide continues to build up for years or even centuries, forming a large supersaturated layer at the bottom of a lake. This gradual buildup creates a ticking time bomb – a bomb which went off on the evening of August 21, 1986.
No-one knows exactly what set off that bomb, with the leading theories being an underwater volcanic eruption, a landslide, or a small earthquake. Whatever the case, that disturbance triggered an upwelling of water from the lake bottom. As this plume rose, the change in pressure and temperature caused the carbon dioxide to bubble out of solution. These bubbles, in turn, entrained more water behind them, creating a positive feedback loop that caused all the carbon dioxide trapped in the lake to bubble out at once – a phenomenon known as a limnic eruption. This eruption unleashed nearly a billion cubic metres of carbon dioxide, creating a tsunami that flattened vegetation around the lakeshore and caused the lake’s water level to drop by a full metre. It also disturbed iron-rich sediments on the lake floor which oxidized as it reached the more oxygen-rich upper layers, producing the dramatic colour change observed by Ephraim Che.
Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide cloud grew to 100 metres high, spilled over the crater rim, and – being heavier than air – flowed down the mountainside and into the twin valleys below at 72 kilometres per hour, smothering everything in its path. The silent, invisible killer engulfed the villages of Nyos, Cha, Fang, Subum, and finally Mashi, travelling 25 kilometres before finally dissipating. Carbon dioxide is odourless and tasteless and produces unconsciousness at concentrations as low as 20%, so most victims died instantly and without warning – though some survivors reported smelling rotten eggs, indicating the presence of sulphur dioxide gas. Of the some 5,000 survivors, most were either standing on higher ground or in poorly-ventilated buildings, and thus inhaled only a sub-lethal concentration of gas. Nonetheless, many remained in comas for days, with 548 being admitted to hospital. Strangely, many of the victims’ bodies were found to be covered in rashes and blisters, which were initially believed to be caused by acidic volcanic gases. Later, it was theorized that the marks were instead bedsores from the victims laying comatose for long periods before finally dying or regaining consciousness. However, these symptoms largely remain a mystery to this day.
While the Lake Nyos disaster may seem like a freak occurrence, such incidents were not new to the region. Just a year before on August 15, 1985, a limnic eruption from the smaller Lake Monoun, 100 kilometres southeast of Nyos, resulted in the deaths of 37 people. Indeed, anthropologists believe that local legends of evil spirits haunting crater lakes, as well as the tradition of certain ethnic groups like the Bafmen of always building houses on high ground, derive from memories of past eruption events. Palaeontologists even theorize that limnic eruptions – albeit on a much, much larger scale – may have been responsible for several mass extinction events, such as the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago which saw the disappearance of nearly 80% of all life on earth.
But if such eruptions have happened in the past, then they will inevitably happen again in the future – unless preventative measures are taken. Shortly after the 1986 disaster, an international team of geologists and other experts began examining means of safely releasing the carbon dioxide trapped in Lake Nyos to prevent another tragedy. One proposal involved dropping explosives into the lake to shock the gas out of solution, but this was quickly rejected as it could damage the lake’s thin walls, unleashing a deadly flood on the valleys below. Other proposed solutions included dumping vast quantities of calcium hydroxide or lime into the lake to neutralize the dissolved carbon dioxide, or digging tunnels into the bottom of the lake to drain out the gas-saturated water. However, all were rejected for being too expensive or logistically challenging. Instead, it was decided to sink a pipe to the bottom of the lake to allow the gas to escape gradually.
But while several experimental setups were tested in the 1990s, a permanent solution was slow to materialize, largely due to lack of support from the Cameroonian government and international disaster relief agencies. It wasn’t until 1999 that the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) came up with $433,000 to fund the project. In 2001- fifteen years after the disaster – a French engineering team rowed out to the middle of the lake in rafts and sank a 15 centimetre-diameter pipe 200 metres down to the gas-bearing layer. Immediately, a geyser of carbonated water shot out of the pipe at nearly 200 kilometres per hour and rose 50 metres into the air. Nearby Lake Monoun has three such pipes, one installed in 2003 and two in 2006, while solar-powered CO2 detectors installed around both lakes stand ready to warn the locals of any future gas releases. Yet despite these measures, experts remain wary. Some 5,500 tons of carbon dioxide seep into the lake every year, an influx the single vent pipe is just barely able to keep up with. However, no funding is forthcoming to install more pipes. As a result, there is still enough gas at trapped a the bottom of Lake Nyos to cause another major disaster, endangering the lives of more than 10,000 living around the volcano. There is also the flood risk posed by the lake’s fragile walls, while experts have speculated that the venting pipe might actually trigger a future eruption by inducing turbulence in the lake bottom. As of this recording, however, no eruptions have been reported since 1986.
But Lake Nyos and Monoun are not the only crater lakes susceptible to limnic eruption. There are 44 similar lakes in Cameroon’s northwest province alone, and many more around the world, including lake Quilotoa in Ecuador, Lake Ngozi in Tanzania, and Lake Monticchio in Italy. But most worrying of all is Lake Kivu, located on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in central Africa. Measuring 2,700 square metres in area and 480 metres deep, Lake Kivu is more than a thousand times larger and twice as deep as lake Nyos, and is thought to contain nearly 256 cubic kilometres of carbon dioxide and 65 cubic kilometres of methane – which, unlike carbon dioxide, is every flammable. Given that nearly 2 million people live near Lake Kivu, a Nyos-style eruption could trigger a natural disaster on a hitherto unheard-of scale. Even more frightening, studies of sediment layers suggest that the lake has already erupted between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago, meaning it might be due for another any day now. As a result, experts are closely monitoring the lake and developing strategies for safely bleeding off the gas – which, as a bonus, could be used to fuel a natural gas power plant. For now, however, the shadow of August 21, 1986 looms over Lake Nyos and other crater lakes across Africa, a constant reminder of how unpredictable – and deadly – nature can be.
Expand for References
Backhouse, Fid, Lake Nyos Disaster, Encyclopedia Britannica, February 13, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Lake-Nyos-disaster
Saylor, John, The Invisible Threat Beneath Cameroon’s Deadly Lake Nyos, Atlas Obscura, June 9, 2022, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lake-nyos-1986
Nasr, Susan, How did Lake Nyos Suddenly Kill 1,700 People? HowStuffWorks, March 7, 2024, https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/lake-nyos.htm
Krajick, Kevin, Defusing Africa’s Killer Lakes, Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/defusing-africas-killer-lakes-88765263/
Bressan, David, The Deadly Cloud at Lake Nyos, Forbes, August 21, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2019/08/21/the-deadly-cloud-at-lake-nyos/?sh=2bebd9125dbf
Baxterm Peter et. al., Lake Nyos Disaster, Cameroon, 1986: The Medical Effects of Large Scale Emissions of Carbon Dioxide? British Medical Journal, May 27, 1989, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1836556/pdf/bmj00233-0037.pdf
The post Ticking Time Bombs- The World’s Deadliest Lakes appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If you visit Pier 13 at the Canton Marine Terminal in Baltimore, Maryland, you will find two very different historic cargo ships. One is the SS John W. Brown, one of nearly 3,000 cheap, quick-to-produce “Liberty Ships” built to haul cargo during the Second World War. The other, by contrast, is one of a kind. With a gleaming white hull and sleek, futuristic lines, she looks more like a luxury yacht than a cargo ship. But she was – and so much more. For sixty years ago, this glittering monument to mid-century modernism made history by becoming the first civilian ship to sail under nuclear power. For over a decade this cutting-edge ship sailed the world’s oceans, serving as a glittering symbol and global ambassador of the post-war dream of peace and prosperity through technology. She would, it was hoped, be the first of many, ushering in a bright new future. But it was not to be. Though she performed her mission well, shifting politics and public sentiment condemned her to be both the first and last of her kind, and today she survives as a lonely relic of this hopeful and optimistic period of human history. This is the story of the Nuclear Ship Savannah, the Atomic Age’s ship of dreams.
The story of the N.S. Savannah begins on December 8, 1953. On that day, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a speech before the United Nations General Assembly in which he warned of the growing threat of nuclear proliferation. By this time two other nations, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, had succeeded in developing their own nuclear weapons, shattering the American atomic monopoly. A global arms race had begun, threatening to push mankind to the brink of nuclear war:
“Should such an atomic attack be launched against the United States, our reactions would be swift and resolute. But for me to say that the defense capabilities of the United States…[would be] so great that an aggressor’s land would be laid waste… is not the true expression of the purpose and the hope of the United States.
…To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed-the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us generation from generation–and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery toward decency, and right, and justice.
Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation. Could anyone wish his name to be coupled by history with such human degradation and destruction.
Occasional pages of history do record the faces of the “Great Destroyers” but the whole book of history reveals mankind’s never-ending quest for peace, and mankind’s God-given capacity to build.
It is with the book of history, and not with isolated pages, that the United States will ever wish to be identified. My country wants to be constructive, not destructive. It wants agreements, not wars, among nations. It wants itself to live in freedom, and in the confidence that the people of every other nation enjoy equally the right of choosing their own way of life.”
To this end, Eisenhower proposed a bold new vision of global nuclear policy, which became known as “Atoms for Peace”:
“It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace
…The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. That capability, already proved, is here-now-today. Who can doubt, if the entire body of the world’s scientists and engineers had adequate amounts of fissionable material with which to test and develop their ideas, [they would] devise methods whereby this fissionable material would be allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind. Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine, and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world. Thus the contributing powers would be dedicating some of their strength to serve the needs rather than the fears of mankind.
…Against the dark background of the atomic bomb, the United States does not wish merely to present strength, but also the desire and the hope for peace.”
A keystone of this initiative would be the development of an International Atomic Development Agency, which would manage the world’s stockpile of fissile material and distribute it to nations on the condition that they only use it for peaceful purposes. This, in turn, would help build international trust and – hopefully – draw the Soviet Union into productive talks about global nuclear arms control.
But while presented as a radical departure from Cold War nuclear brinkmanship, in reality “Atoms for Peace” was anything but. Far from rejecting nuclear weapons, Eisenhower wholly embraced them, believing a large stockpile of nuclear weapons to be a more cost-effective deterrent to Soviet aggression than conventional military forces and a cure for ballooning defence budgets. This stripped-down, nuclear-centred policy became known as the “New Look”. But there was a problem: this new emphasis on building a massive nuclear stockpile risked frightening the American people. Atoms for Peace was thus conceived as the propaganda wing of the New Look, reassuring the public and allowing the U.S. military nuclear program to carry on under the cover of peaceful intentions. The policy also allowed the United States to project and maintain its global influence through the sharing of nuclear materials and technology. Prior to 1949, the United States had kept its nuclear capabilities a closely-guarded military secret. However, once the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, it was feared that they would share their atomic secrets with aligned nations and thereby increase their political influence. Eisenhower thus sought to head off the Soviets by sharing American nuclear technology first. Over the course of the Atoms for Peace Initiative, the United States exported over 25 tons of highly-enriched uranium to 30 countries, with many countries – including Israel and Pakistan – receiving their first research reactors and nuclear medicine installations through the program. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union ran a similar program which exported 11 tons of enriched uranium. As we shall see, this policy would have unexpected consequences which are still being felt to this day.
In addition to supplying nations with fissile materials, medical isotopes, and research reactors, Atoms for Peace also manifested in the training of foreign scientists and technicians in nuclear technology, the development of nuclear reactors for civilian electricity generation, as well as the absolutely batshit-crazy Project Ploughshares, which sought to find ways of using nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes like digging canals and stimulating petroleum production – and to learn more about this, please check out our previous video That Time the Soviets Tried to Extinguish a Fire with a Nuke for…Reasons. Another, decidedly less insane idea was Eisenhower’s 1955 proposal to build a nuclear-powered cargo ship. The nuclear submarine USS Nautilus, launched in 1954, proved that nuclear marine propulsion was safe and reliable, and it was hoped that this technology would make global commerce more efficient, cost-effective, and profitable. As with land-based reactor development, Eisenhower also hoped that an effective demonstration of peaceful nuclear marine propulsion would convince the private sector to invest in the technology, further reducing the government’s monopoly on nuclear technology.
The project was approved by Congress in July 1956 and placed under the joint administration of the Atomic Energy Commission or AEC; the United States Maritime Administration or MARAD; and the United States Department of Commerce. Design of the vessel was assigned to naval architects George G. Sharp Incorporated of New York City; and development of her reactor to Babcock & Wilcox of Lynchburg, Virginia, who had already designed marine reactors for the U.S. Navy. The vessel was dubbed the Nuclear Ship Savannah in homage to the SS Savannah, the first steam-powered ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean in 1819.
As originally envisioned, the N.S. Savannah project had five main goals. First, it would demonstrate to the world the United States Government’s commitment to the peaceful use of nuclear power; second, it would help convince the public that nuclear-powered shipping was safe and reliable; third; it would allow any practical issues with operating nuclear technology in a civilian and commercial environment to be worked out; fourth, it would experimentally introduce nuclear power into the maritime shipping industry; and fifth, it would stimulate the creation of new laws and procedures for accommodating nuclear-powered vessels into said industry. As President Lyndon B. Johnson would later state:
“The Nuclear Ship Savannah is more than a demonstration of American technology and engineering skill; she is also an expression of our belief that through the expansion of world trade and the exchange of ideas and materials, a better world can be created for the benefit of all mankind. She is a prophet of a brighter future, a symbol of hope for tomorrow. As her brave and tiny namesake was almost 150 years ago, the Savannah is a true pioneer, carrying swiftly across the seven seas proof that the mighty power which propels her, the atom, can help all men to enter a new era of peace, prosperity, and progress.”
However, Savannah’s unusual status as both technology demonstrator and global ambassador for peaceful nuclear power posed unique challenges for its designers. By the time the project was approved, the ship’s mandate had changed from simple bulk cargo carrier to combination freighter and ocean liner capable of carrying VIP passengers in style and luxury. This placed a much greater emphasis on safety and comfort. For balance and protection against collisions, the reactor had to be placed in the very centre of the ship; however, it also had to be easily accessible from the top to allow the core to be refuelled. Engineers at George G. Sharp Incorporated thus moved the superstructure farther back on the deck, giving the ship a distinctive profile. Indeed, the entire ship was designed for maximum visual impact, with clean, futuristic lines dripping in mid-century modern style. As we will see, however, this emphasis on style would severely impact Savannah’s effectiveness as a commercial vessel.
Construction of Savannah began in 1958 at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation shipyard in Camden, New Jersey. On May 22 – National Maritime Day – Savannah’s keel was laid down in an unusual ceremony presided over by Patricia Nixon, wife of then Vice-President Richard Nixon. As a large crowd looked on, Mrs. Nixon waved a special “atomic wand” containing a small amount of radioactive material, triggering a geiger counter. This, in turn, signalled a crane operator to swing the first keel section into position. The same “atomic wand” had been used by President Eisenhower on September 6, 1954 to initiate the groundbreaking of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Beaver County, Pennsylvania – another Atoms for Peace project and the world’s first full-scale nuclear power plant devoted entirely to peacetime uses. Construction of the hull was completed in a little over a year, Savannah being launched and christened by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower on July 21, 1959. Fitting-out, including reactor installation, fuelling, and initial sea trials, took another two and a half years.
The completed ship was a marvel of mid-century engineering and design. Measuring 182 metres long with a beam of 24 metres and a loaded displacement of 19,800 tonnes, Savannah was powered by a Babcock & Wilcox pressurized-water reactor driving twin de Laval steam turbines with a maximum power output of 20,000 shaft horsepower or 14.9 megawatts. This, along with her streamlined hull, allowed her to reach a maximum speed of 23 knots or 43 kilometres per hour. To provide a smoother ride at high speeds and in rough seas, Savannah was fitted with fold-out stabilizer planes – only the sixth such use of this technology in maritime history. The ship also featured a 750 horsepower or 560 kilowatt electric motor geared to the high-pressure steam turbine. Powered by a pair of emergency diesel generators, this provided the ship with rudimentary propulsion in case of a reactor shutdown.
Though it was originally intended to simply copy the reactor used aboard USS Nautilus, Babcock & Wilcox ultimately chose to design a brand-new reactor to civilian specifications. The finalized reactor was fuelled by 312 kilograms of low-enriched uranium oxide – enough power the ship for up to 3.5 years or 480,000 kilometres – that’s 14 times the circumference of the earth – without refuelling. 21 neutron-absorbing control rods arranged between the fuel elements could be raised and lowered to control the rate of the nuclear chain reaction. In an emergency, these rods could be lowered in 1.6 seconds to shut down or scram the reactor. A separate system allowed neutron-absorbing boron to be dumped into the core, but this option was reserved for dire emergencies only as the core would have to be completely dismantled and cleaned out to get the reactor working again. To protect against collisions and prevent radiation leakage, the reactor was surrounded by an elaborate containment vessel measuring 10 metres in diameter and 15 metres tall and composed of nearly two metres of steel, polyethylene, lead, concrete, and redwood planks. Radioactive wastewater was collected in a 38,000 litre storage tank, which, when full, could be pumped out by a special unpowered tender barge called the Nuclear Servicing Vessel or NSV Atomic Servant. Also featuring a lead-lined storage pit for reactor refuelling operations, the Atomic Servant could be made available anywhere in the world.
Befitting Savannah’s mission as a peaceful nuclear ambassador, the turbine compartment and reactor control room were fitted with large windows and an observation gallery so passengers and the visiting public could observe the miracle of nuclear power first-hand. This ran contrary to the United State’s typical policy regarding nuclear technology, prompting President Eisenhower to state:
“The ship’s design will not be secret. It will be possible for engineers not only of our own country, but of other nations, to view the nuclear power plant and see first-hand this demonstration of the great promise of atomic energy for human betterment.”
But what impressed passengers and visitors most about Savannah was her luxurious accommodations and futuristic style. The ship could accommodate up to 60 passengers in 30 air conditioned staterooms – each with its own private bathroom – and seat up to 100 in its lavishly-appointed dining room. This, in turn, was served by a large galley packed with all the latest gadgets – including a Raytheon Radar Range, the world’s first commercially-available microwave oven. This allowed the Savannah to host large banquets and other events while in port. Other amenities included a large windowed veranda with a bar; a swimming pool; a library, a barber shop; a well-stocked infirmary with a full surgical suite; and a lounge which doubled as a movie theatre, which showcased paintings by contemporary American artists and featured coffee tables cut from petrified wood and a television screen showing a live feed of the reactor compartment. All this was in turn decorated in a distinctive atomic-age style designed by Jack Heaney and Associates of Wilton, Connecticut, which left no doubt as to the ship’s revolutionary form of propulsion. Everything from light fixtures to dinnerware to the giant logo splashed across the ship’s superstructure bore an instantly-recognizable atomic motif; the wine rack behind the bar was modelled after a chart of nuclear decay chains; and one wall of the dining room was dominated by a curved wall sculpture titled Fission by artist Pierre Bourdelle. And at the other end of the room stood a golden model of the ship’s namesake, the pioneering steamship SS Savannah. Uniquely among passenger liners, Savannah could boast that her gleaming white paint job would never be smudged by soot, for her clean atomic power plant produced no smoke.
While largely advertised as a luxury liner, Savannah was also designed as a freighter and could carry up to 7,700 tonnes of cargo in 7 holds totalling 18,500 square metres: 4 forward of the superstructure and reactor compartment and three aft, with Hold #5 located beneath the swimming pool. Like every other aspect of the ship, the three cargo-handling cranes were specially designed to complement the Savannah’s sleek, futuristic appearance.
Following initial fitting-out, Savannah’s reactor first achieved criticality on December 21, 1961. Then, on January 31, 1962, Captain Gaston DeGroote took command of the ship and sailed her under temporary oil-fired power to Yorktown, Virginia for sea trials. These trials, attended by representatives of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Maritime Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the ship’s builders, culminated in the first full-power run on April 14, 1962, during which Savannah reached a maximum speed of 22 knots. Meanwhile, a corps of engineers were being specially trained to operate and maintain Savannah’s nuclear power plant. Drawn mainly from the United States Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point, New York, these men were put through an intensive 15-month course at Babcock & Wilcox’s headquarters in Lynchburg, Virginia, using full-scale mockups of Savannah’s reactor, turbine machinery, and control room. Once operational, Savannah sailed with a complement of 124: 35 engineers, 27 deck officers, 49 stewards, and 13 support staff, including one senior nuclear advisor and three health physics monitors.
At last, on May 1, 1962, Savannah was accepted by the Maritime Authority and handed over to her chosen operator, States Marine Lines Incorporated. On August 20th, she set sail for her home port of Savannah, Georgia, where she received a triumphant welcome complete with cannon salutes and fireboats spraying giant fountains of water. From here, she transited the Panama Canal and sailed up the Pacific coast to Seattle, where she spent three weeks as a popular attraction at the 1962 Century 21 Exposition – the same World’s Fair which introduced the city’s iconic Space Needle. She then sailed on to San Fransisco, Long Beach, and Los Angeles before crossing the Pacific to Honolulu, Hawaii. This was followed by stops in Portland and San Diego before Savannah once again transited the Panama Canal, docking in Galveston, Texas in early 1963 for much-needed maintenance.
But then, barely six months into her maiden voyage, Savannah’s career came to a screeching halt when her 35 engineers walked off the job. The strike had been triggered in November 1962 while Savannah was docked in Los Angeles, when a Government-appointed labour arbitrator awarded the ship’s deck officers pay raises which automatically set their salaries higher than those of the engineers. As a result, the engineers would be unable to negotiate higher salaries without also increasing the salaries of the deck officers. Disgusted and prepared to walk off the job immediately, the engineers were persuaded to remain aboard until Savannah reached Galveston.
The strike divided political opinion and placed the entire Savannah and Atoms for Peace project under increased scrutiny. Congressman Herbert C. Bonner of North Carolina called the affair “A national disgrace”, while Congressman Herbert Secretary of Commerce Luther H. Hodges painted the engineers as entitled prima donnas, pointing to their enviable salaries of $14,000-22,000 – equivalent to $140,000-22,000 today:
“The affair has] a strange Alice-in-Wonderland character that the average American would find hard to believe…[these youngsters] have put their petty pride and their concern for wage status…ahead of any concern for the public interest.”
Meanwhile, Jesse M. Calhoun, president of Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, defended the engineers, seeing the strike as symptomatic of deeper problems with the Savannah project:
“This whole affair is a disgrace all right, just as Congressman Bonner says – but not for the reasons he thinks. The real disgrace is that the Savannah, nearly four years after its launching, has made only one trip – from the East Coast to the West Coast and back to Galveston. The real disgrace is that Savannah, far from being a suburb example of advanced maritime technology is not even a first-rate modern ship.”
As for the engineers themselves they maintained that the strike had far less to do with money than with the overall state of affairs and work culture aboard Savannah. As one senior engineer revealed:
“We all felt very proud and lucky to be in on the ground floor of the new era of nuclear shipping….many of us had been chief engineers on other ships – a few had even done nuclear engineering – before we joined the Savannah program. We were appalled at the limited knowledge of the instructors who were supposed to be qualifying us for jobs we already knew more about than they did….More important was the way we felt about the ship itself. We made suggestions for improving the reactor – and especially the standard ship equipment. All we got for our pains was resentment, Even when the shipyard agreed with a suggestion it would soon disappear in a snarl of red tape and that would be the last we’d hear of it. We lost some of our brightest recruits in those early days. They simply quit in disgust.”
According to the engineers, the Maritime Authority had initially intended for the Savannah to be designed first and the reactor designed to fit the ship. However, the Atomic Energy Commission forced a reversal of this plan, turning the ship into a mere appendage of the reactor. As a result, while funds were lavished on reactor development, comparatively little of the budget was allocated to the design of the ship. This was further compounded by the 1956 Suez Crisis, which increased global demand for cargo vessels and caused shipbuilding costs to skyrocket. Furthermore, the Soviet Union’s announcement that they were building their own nuclear-powered civilian ship – the Icebreaker Lenin – placed increased pressure on George G. Sharp Incorporated to finish Savannah first.
All this resulted in a ship that, while outwardly impressive, was riddled with serious flaws. As another senior engineer put it:
“The Savannah is like a man who has a bright smile and a great coat of suntan. He looks healthy and vigorous. Then you talk to his doctor and find out he has diabetes, high blood pressure, and a stomach ulcer. That’s the way it is with the ship. She looks beautiful on the outside. But inside she’s full of substandard and obsolete equipment that keeps breaking down.”
The strike brought to light a whole laundry list of flaws plaguing the Savannah, running the gamut from merely annoying to potentially dangerous. For example, the original telephone system was so defective it had to be replaced at an additional cost of $50,000. The air conditioning system often failed and sometimes leaked, ruining the expensive carpets in the passenger staterooms. The bridge deck lacked adequate drainage and often filled with water during rainstorms, while the ship’s machine shop was full of outdated equipment. More serious problems included a faulty gyro stabilizer, which during one test cruise failed and caused the ship to roll violently, knocking passengers to the deck and nearly emptying the swimming pool.
Even the reactor was not free of faults, in spite of the care and funds lavished on its development. For instance, wastewater production greatly exceeded the ship’s storage capacity, forcing Savannah to dump over 440,000 litres of radioactive water into the sea during its first year of operation. This, in turn, rendered the support barge
The steam generator feed pumps constantly broke down and had to be rebuilt three times, while the AEC insisted upon the installation of two auxiliary boilers as a safety feature. However, these boilers proved inadequate for the task, with one of them even exploding while the ship was underway. Thankfully, nobody was hurt. But the most serious flaw of all was with the hydraulic system for raising and lowering the control rods, which could leak and catch fire while the reactor was powered up. This forced the builders to install a complicated and expensive system to keep the containment vessel flooded with 3500 cubic metres of nitrogen and prevent fires from breaking out. This further complicated operations, as all that nitrogen had to be pumped out before anyone could enter the containment vessel to perform maintenance.
Several of these problems made themselves apparent during Savannah’s maiden voyage. While sailing from Yorktown, Virginia to Savannah, Georgia, a sensor error caused the reactor to automatically scram. This, in turn, caused the air conditioning system to fail and the temperature in the staterooms to soar. With only a small electric motor for emergency propulsion, the crew raised a pair of black balls on the ship’s mast – the universal maritime signal for “We are out of command, we have no power, keep clear of us.” After two frantic hours the reactor was finally restarted, and Savannah belatedly steamed into its home port. Ironically, in spite of all these cut corners, Savannah did not even succeed in beating its Soviet counterpart to sea. Lenin was launched in 1957 and entered service in 1959 – a full three years ahead of Savannah.
In response to the strike, States Marine Lines took its case to court, but its appeal was denied. Eventually a settlement was worked out, but the Department of Commerce chose instead to end its contract with States Marine Lines and turn operation of Savannah over to American Export-Isbrandtsen Lines. This allowed the hiring and training of a new, non-union crew – igniting a lingering debate over the future operation of nuclear-powered commercial ships.
By 1964 Savannah was operational once more, and embarked on a global tour that took her all along the U.S. Gulf and East Coasts and across the Atlantic to Bremerhaven, Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Southampton. During this tour, more than 150,000 people toured the ship. The following year, however, American Export-Isbrandtsen Lines discontinued passenger operations to reduce operating costs and converted Savannah to all-cargo use, closing off the passenger areas and removing 1,800 tons of ballast. However, the many compromises which had been incorporated into Savannah’s design greatly hampered her effectiveness as a freight carrier. Her sleek, streamlined hull limited her cargo capacity to 7,700 tonnes of cargo – significantly less than conventional cargo ships of equivalent size. Her cargo holds were also awkwardly shaped and laborious to load and unload – especially Cargo Bay #5, which was covered by the swimming pool and could only be accessed through narrow side ports. Worse still, Savannah’s cargo handling booms, designed more for aesthetics than functionality, proved inefficient and awkward to operate. These were all serious handicaps, especially in an industry increasingly dominated by automated, containerized shipping systems.
Nonetheless, Savannah continued to operate as a commercial freighter and nuclear ambassador for another six years, with a brief pause in 1968 for refuelling in Galveston. In 1969, she became the first nuclear vessel to dock in New York Harbour and served as the centrepiece of a special event called Nuclear Week in New York, which featured various events including a presentation by Dr. Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of Plutonium and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; and two special segments on The Tonight Show. By 1970, however, Savannah’s dubious economics had finally caught up with her. Not only could she carry less cargo less efficiently than other ships her size, but she needed a crew a third larger who required special training and cost $2 million more per year to operate than a conventional oil-fuelled freighter. With costs piling up, the Maritime Administration decided to retire Savannah at the end of 1971. Ironically, had MARAD waited just a few years, Savannah might actually have made something of a comeback. While fuel oil cost only $20 a ton in 1971, the 1973 oil crisis caused this price to quadruple, meaning Savannah would have been no more expensive to operate than a conventional oil-fired ship. But it was not to be, and in 1975 Savannah’s reactor was decommissioned and de-fuelled, bringing her unique career to an end.
Over her brief service life, N.S. Savannah travelled 830,000 kilometres – equivalent to 20 times the circumference of the earth – carried 848 passengers, visited 45 domestic and 32 foreign ports, and was visited by 1.4 million people worldwide – all without a single major safety incident. At the same time, however, she cost $47 million to build – nearly $500 million in today’s money – was constantly beset by technical problems and labour disputes, and never turned a profit for its operators. Nor did she usher in a new age of nuclear merchant shipping, with only three more nuclear-powered civilian vessels ever being constructed: the experimental West German freighter Otto Hahn, launched in 1968 but converted to diesel power in 1979; the Japanese oceanographic research vessel Mutsu, launched in 1970 but converted to the conventionally-propelled RV Mirai in 1996; and the Soviet lighter aboard ship carrier Sevmorput, launched in 1988 and still in service today. The Soviet Union and later Russia have also launched 12 nuclear-powered icebreakers including the Lenin, but these are largely operated by the government and are not considered commercial vessels.
Yet despite all this, N.S. Savannah cannot really be deemed a failure. After all, her designers never intended for her to be commercially competitive. From the outset, her mission was to demonstrate the feasibility and safety of commercial marine nuclear propulsion and serve as a global ambassador for the Atoms for Peace initiative – roles she performed with admirable success. In this sense she was very much like her namesake, the SS Savannah, which despite the technological advancement she represented never succeeded in turning a profit; her primitive steam engine consumed so much wood that there was barely any space left aboard for cargo. That N.S. Savannah failed to turn a profit or launch a new industry has more to do with external economic factors and administrative errors than any flaw in the Savannah’s technical design. As former MARAD inspection officer Robert J. Bosnak stated:
“The Savannah performed well from an operational point of view, but in my opinion her designers condemned her to a short life by her hybrid design as a passenger-cargo vessel. Neither function of the ship proved to be economically viable, and MARAD (Maritime Administration) chose not to spend additional monies to convert her to an all cargo, or an all passenger vessel, but instead removed her from service. I regret that this happened.”
Indeed, Savannah was arguably among the most successful aspects of the entire Atoms for Peace program, whose overall results were largely mixed. For while the program succeeded in creating a commercial nuclear industry, failure to invest long-term in reactor design, improvement, and maintenance led to industry stagnation and public disillusionment with nuclear power, especially following high-profile accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. And while dozens of countries benefited greatly from American assistance with research reactors and nuclear medicine, in a few cases the program encouraged the very nuclear proliferation it was designed to curtail. For example, the nuclear weapons programs of India and Pakistan, which achieved their first successful detonations in 1974 and 1998, respectively, were greatly accelerated by technical and material assistance provided through Atoms for Peace.
Following her decommissioning, Savannah was acquired by her namesake city and home port with plans to convert her into a floating hotel, though investors never materialized. After briefly being stored in Galveston, in 1981 the ship was acquired by the Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, who opened her up for public tours. She was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, declared a Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 1983, and named both a Nuclear Engineering Landmark and a National Historic Landmark in 1991, with the customary 50-year age requirement for the latter designation being specially waived due to her historic significance.
Sadly, Savannah proved far less of a draw than Patriot Point’s other ships – especially the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown – and in 1994 the museum chose to terminate the ship’s charter. Over the following decade Savannah was shuttled between Baltimore, Maryland; Newport News, Virginia; and Norfolk Virginia for various repair and preservation work. Finally, on May 8, 2008, she was towed to Baltimore and docked at the Canton Marine Terminal’s Pier 13 beside the WWII Liberty Ship SS John W. Brown, where she remains to this day.
Since its retirement and defuelling in the 1970s, Savannah has been licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission – the successor to the AEC – who regularly monitor radiation levels and fund the ship’s maintenance to the tune of $3 million per year. However, in 2008, following Savannah’s arrival in Baltimore, the NRC announced its intention to fully decommission the ship’s nuclear power systems and terminate its license, allowing the ship to be preserved, scrapped, or otherwise disposed of. Pre-decommissioning work took place at the Philadelphia Naval Yard between September 2019 and February 2020, while in November 2022 the main reactor vessel was removed and shipped to a nuclear repository in Utah for disposal. Remaining areas of radioactive contamination are gradually being cleaned up, with full decommissioning to be completed no later than 2031. Once that happens, the ship’s ultimate fate will be up in the air. While the hope is to convert the ship into a museum or other public attraction, no investors have yet materialized. If no funds can be secured, there is a real possibility that N.S. Savannah may wind up in the shipbreaker’s yard. In the meantime, the ship remains in a state of limbo, diligently maintained by a dedicated group of volunteers and occasionally opened up for tour groups and special events. Time will tell what fate awaits this retro-futuristic gem – a gleaming relic of a more wide-eyed, optimistic age.
Expand for References
The Nuclear Ship Savannah, Sam Orleans Film Productions, 1964, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8W2Xpz2hA
NS Savannah – Under Way, Sam Orleans Film Productions, 1959, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpmjK9EpPWA
Rosenfeld, Albert, Atom-Powered Ship is National Disgrace, LIFE Magazine, June 14, 1963, https://books.google.ca/books?id=30sEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA40&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
N.S. Savannah Association, Inc., https://web.archive.org/web/20121013001056/http://ns-savannah.org/index.html
Tour of NS Savannah, Historic Naval Ships Association, https://web.archive.org/web/20121013215502/http://hnsa.org/savannah/
Nuclear Ship Savannah, U.S. Department of Transportation Maritime Administration, https://web.archive.org/web/20120829193504/http://www.marad.dot.gov/ships_shipping_landing_page/ns_savannah_home/ns_savannah_home.htm
Address Before the General Assembly of the United Nations on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, New York City, December 8, 1953, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-the-general-assembly-the-united-nations-peaceful-uses-atomic-energy-new
Lavoy, Peter, The Enduring Effects of Atoms for Peace, Arms Control Association, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2003-12/features/enduring-effects-atoms-peace
Atoms for Peace, N.S. Savannah, https://www.nssavannah.net/ID_21/
Adams, Rod, Why Did the NS Savannah Fail? Can She Really be Called a Failure? Atomic Insights, April 2, 2011, https://atomicinsights.com/cover-story-why-did-savannah-fail/
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There have been no small number of rather bizarre accidents from humans humaning, everything from that time the City of Boston almost literally drowned in molasses to how humans drilling a 14 inch hole accidentally created a 1,300-foot deep saltwater lake out of a formerly 10-Foot deep freshwater one (more on this hilarious event in the Bonus Facts later.) But yet another curious such event was that time a rather large portion of the Reforma district of Guadalajara, Mexico just up and exploded one day for reasons… This is the story of one of the greatest urban disasters you’ve never heard of.
Guadalajara, located 300 kilometres northwest of Mexico City, is the capital of Jalisco state and, with a population of 3 million, the second-largest city in Mexico after the capital. The morning of April 22, 1992 was just like any other in Guadalajara, the largely Catholic population having just celebrated Easter. All was normal – all, that is, except for the smell. Four days before, residents of the Reforma district had noticed a strong gasoline-like odour- mainly those along Gante Street. At first, people ignored the smell, attributing it to annual cleaning at the nearby Nogalera gasoline storage facility. One of nearly 40 factories and storage facilities in the industrial, working-class neighbourhood Nogalera was owned by Petróleos Mexicanos or Pemex, Mexico’s national petroleum monopoly. Yet as days passed, the smell got progressively worse, causing eye and lung irritation and severe nausea. Residents even reported gasoline fumes streaming out of faucets.
In response to complaints, on Tuesday, April 21, Jalisco State Governor Guillermo Vidaurri cordoned off large sections of Reforma while dozens of members of the Guadalajara Fire Department, the State Civil Defense Unit, the local police, and the Intermunicipal Water and Sewer System or SIAPA descended on the district to investigate. Sampling of the water and air throughout the district soon revealed the source of the smell to be the industrial solvent Hexane. More alarmingly, vapour concentrations in many of the sewer lines had reached 100% explosivity – meaning that the slightest spark could potentially set off a massive explosion. Suspicion immediately turned to a nearby plant operated by the company La Central S.A., which used Hexane to extract cooking oil from seeds. Though an inspection of the plant revealed no solvent leaks, Jesus Doria, a member of La Central’s board, immediately ordered the facility shut down as a precaution. Meanwhile, the fire department opened manhole covers and flushed drains across the district in order to let the Hexane vapours dissipate. By 3:30 AM on April 22, explosivity levels had dropped from 100 to only 15%. Believing the problem had been solved, the firefighters and other government workers returned home.
By 9 o’clock, however, explosivity levels had risen back to 100%, and members of SIAPA met with Governor Vidaurri and Guadalajara Mayor Enrique Dau Flores to discuss evacuating residents from the Reforma district. These officials, however, chose to ignore their warnings, and throughout the morning firefighters and SIAPA workers continued to assure Reforma residents that there was nothing to worry about.
Then, just past 10 o’clock in the morning, all hell broke loose.
28-year old Alberto Pulido was driving to work down Violeta Street when the first explosion occurred. He watched in horror as, like in a scene from a supernatural horror film, the ground suddenly opened up beneath him:
“I thought a car had hit me from behind, and then I saw the earth was opening up and my car was sinking. I prayed to God. I thought I was going to die.”
Miraculously, despite having a semitrailer roll over onto his car, Pulido escaped unscathed.
Meanwhile, Gonzalez Cervantes was at home watching television when the ground began to shake beneath him:
“There was a huge boom. I came outside, and there were cars on roofs and clouds of dust everywhere. People were crying. They were hysterical. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The first explosion took place around 10:06 near the intersection of Gante and 20 de Noviembre. This was followed barely 5 minutes later by another explosion near Violeta. Surging south along the sewer main that ran beneath Gante street, three more major explosions followed, the last occurring around 2:20 PM near the intersection of Rio Alamo and Rio La Barco-Gonzalez Gallo. According to disaster sociologist Benigno Aguirre, residents had almost no warning of the surreal wave of destruction speeding towards them:
“The only indication of warning [was]…people looking down the streets and seeing a rapidly disintegrating landscape advance towards them. Those who survived turned away from the center of the street where the drainage pipe that blew up was located.”
The five explosions demolished or damaged more than 1,500 homes and businesses and reduced eight kilometres of city streets to gaping ravines 5 metres deep and choked with 230,000 tons of rubble. Hundreds of cars, buses, and other vehicles were swallowed up by the ground, while several were struck by flying manholes and launched into the air, sometimes landing upside down atop buildings. Inside at least one flying car was a newborn infant, who miraculously survived. When the smoke finally cleared over 200 people lay dead, 1,800 injured, and 500 trapped beneath the rubble. A large proportion of the victims were children, home from school for the Easter break. Wednesday was also market day in La Reforma, and thousands had been out on the streets when they collapsed beneath them. A further 25,000 people had to be evacuated from the area, while the disaster inflicted an estimated $3 billion in physical damage.
As first responders, Red Cross personnel, and civilian volunteers raced to rescue survivors from the rubble, firefighters re-opened manhole covers and pumped soapy water into the sewers to neutralize any remaining fumes. Later, trenches and pumping wells were dug to drain off liquid gasoline and prevent it from contaminating the aquifer beneath the city. Despite these precautions, however, a further two explosions rocked the neighbourhood early the following morning. The sheer number of victims soon overwhelmed local hospitals and clinics, so temporary accommodations for the injured and homeless were set up in two local sports stadiums, while makeshift morgues were established in gymnasiums and other public buildings.
Meanwhile, an investigation as to the causes of the explosions began – as did the inevitable finger-pointing. Pemex pushed the initial theory that the solvent leak had come from the La Central oilseed facility. However, the plant had been shut down for the Easter weekend and had not suffered any leaks in its Hexane storage tanks. Furthermore, the capacity of said tanks was far below that needed to fuel an explosion the size of the Guadalajara disaster. Finally, investigators determined that the explosions had been caused not by pure Hexane but rather ordinary gasoline – of which Hexane is only one component. Suspicion thus shifted to Pemex’s Nogalera gasoline storage facility. The investigation soon revealed that 8 days before the disaster, Nogalera had registered a pressure drop in a pipeline carrying gasoline from a refinery in Salamanca to the Guadalajara depot, indicating a rupture in the pipe. This rupture was quickly traced to a spot less than 1 kilometres from the depot. Here, a section of zinc-plated copper pipe from the municipal water distribution system had been laid close to the steel gasoline pipe in violation of local building standards. The two dissimilar metals in close proximity created an electrolytic reaction, causing the gasoline pipe to corrode through and leak into the ground, with the fuel eventually finding its way into the municipal drainage system. The poor design of the sewer system itself also contributed to the disaster. A new line of the subway system had recently been installed, requiring the main sewer to be diverted around it. City engineers accomplished this by building a U-shaped inverted siphon – rather like the S-bend in a toilet – under the subway line. However, siphons like this only work with fluids of uniform consistency. With a mixture of different fluids – like water and gasoline – only the densest fluid passes through the siphon, leaving the lighter fluids trapped upstream. This caused gasoline fumes to gradually accumulate in the sewer line, creating the perfect conditions for an explosion. What exactly set off the vapours is unknown, though given the high explosivity measured in the sewers just before the disaster, it could have been almost anything, from two pieces of metal striking each other and creating a spark to someone carelessly tossing a cigarette butt down a manhole.
In light of these revelations, several Pemex executives were arrested and interrogated in an attempt to determine who bore responsibility for the disaster. Disturbingly, this was not the first time fuel had leaked from the Nogalera facility and ignited, a similar incident having occurred less than a year before in October 1991. Thankfully, only a few manhole covers were blown off and nobody was hurt. Nor was this the first time negligence on Pemex’s part had resulted in mass casualties. In the early morning hours of November 19, 1984, a ruptured pipe at the company’s San Juan Ixhuatepec storage facility caused over 10,000 cubic metres of liquefied petroleum gas to go up in flames, triggering a series of massive explosions that destroyed 150 homes, killed 450 people and severely injured 5,000 more. It was one of the largest industrial disasters in history and one of the most powerful manmade explosions ever recorded, the shockwave from the blast registering 0.5 on the Richter scale.
But the irresponsible behaviour doesn’t stop there. In June 3, 1979, Ixtoc I, an exploratory well drilled by the Pemex in the Gulf of Mexico, blew out and released 3 million barrels of crude oil into the ocean – the largest oil spill up to that point and the second largest in history after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. And if that weren’t bad enough, recent investigations have determined that over 95% of the industrial wastes produced by Pemex facilities in Mexico City are dumped directly into the municipal wastewater system.
Yet despite this long and sordid history, Pemex has almost never faced justice for its negligence. The 1992 Guadalajara explosions were no exception, with all of the arrested executives being cleared of all charges. Why? Allegedly because Pemex is, quite simply, too large and powerful to touch. With assets valued at over $100 billion, Pemex is the single wealthiest entity in Mexico and its largest source of public funds, contributing a whopping 40% of the Federal Government’s annual revenue. Unsurprisingly, such vast fiscal power allegedly breeds rampant corruption, allowing Pemex to operate as an independent state-within-a-state. Indeed, about the only person indicted for their part in the disaster was Guadalajara Mayor Enrique Dau Flores, who subsequently resigned from office. Meanwhile Pemex quietly funded the reconstruction of the shattered neighbourhoods and established a $40 million fund to help the victims of the disaster. However, the company has vehemently insisted that this is a donation and in no way implies responsibility for the incident.
But given the sheer extent of the devastation, even $40 million doesn’t go very far, and in the wake of the tragedy survivors formed a group called La Asociación 22 de Abril en Guadalajara to fight for fair compensation for the injuries inflicted and the lives, homes, and livelihoods destroyed by the 1992 explosions. 30 years on from the disaster, the streets, buildings and sewers of Guadalajara may have been rebuilt, but the scars of the horrific day still run deep.
Bonus Fact:
Going back to the story of how drilling a relatively small hole set off a sequence of events creating a giant salt water lake out of a small freshwater one- Lake Peigneur is located in Louisiana near the Gulf of Mexico. Before 1980, it was an approximately 10-foot deep fresh water lake with an island in the middle. Next to it, and partially under it, Diamond Crystal Salt Company maintained a salt mine, with salt being mined near the lake since 1919.
Around large underground salt domes, you can often find oil. As explained by one Dr. Whitney J. Autin, “…salt moves upwards and it pierces through surrounding strata… and this piercing produces faults and folds within the surrounding sediments producing an ideal mechanism to trap oil.”
As such, Texaco was doing some drilling in the lake. On November 20, 1980, crews on the oil rig in the lake ran into a problem. At just over 1,200 feet, their drill seized up. Not a major problem normally, they worked to get it loose. In the process, they heard several loud pops then the oil rig tilted like it was going to collapse. The men got off the rig and to shore as quickly as possible. Not a moment too soon. Just 19 minutes after their drill had seized up, they watched from the shore as the huge platform (150 feet tall) overturn and sank into the 10 foot deep lake…
Next, the astounded drillers watched as a whirlpool slowly formed, soon reaching a quarter mile wide and centered over the site of the oil drilling.
Whoopsadoodle.
At the same time the oil workers were watching their $5 million drilling rig disappear into the lake, workers in the salt mines below the lake noticed something was wrong as well; a stream of water was found flowing along the floor of the mine shaft at about the 1,300 foot level of the mine, which went down to about 1,500 feet at its deepest. As water wasn’t supposed to be in the mine, the evacuation alarm was raised. Foreman Randy LaSalle then drove a cart around to the regions of the mine where the alarm signal could not be seen, making sure everyone knew about the evacuation. By the time those from the deepest areas of the mine made it to the elevator, they encountered knee-deep water. Despite the fact that the mine was rapidly filling with water and the exit elevator could only take up to eight people at a time, all 55 miners were evacuated successfully.
It wasn’t clear to the miners what had happened at the time, but from the evidence at hand, the theory is that the drilling crew miscalculated their location and instead of being several hundred feet from the salt mine, they had instead been directly over a portion of it and penetrated the salt dome. The initial hole resulting from this mistake was only 14 inches wide, but water spraying in at extremely high pressure quickly widened the hole. The water also dissolved the salt pillars that supported the ceiling of the mine, causing the shafts to collapse.
The widening of the hole and the collapse of the mine gave strength to the whirlpool on the surface of the lake, which caused major damage. Docks, another drilling platform, a 70 acre island in the middle of the lake, eleven barges, vehicles, trees and a parking lot near the lake were all sucked into the mine below. The pull of the whirlpool was so strong that it reversed the flow of the 12-mile-long Delcambre Canal that drained the lake into the Gulf of Mexico.
Three hours after the first signs of trouble, the three to four billion gallons of water that had made up the lake were almost all gone, having dropped into the mine below, leaving a gaping crater. The backward-flowing canal formed a 160 foot waterfall that gradually refilled the lake, this time with salt water from the Gulf.
The 10-foot deep freshwater lake was now a saltwater one, approximately 1,300 foot-deep in a good sized portion of it.
Amazingly, there were no deaths or serious human injuries as a result of the disaster, though the ecosystem of the lake was forever changed. Further, three dogs died in the event. Many lawsuits were filed, all settled out-of-court, costing Texaco about $45 million in damages, with about $32 million of that going to Diamond Crystal.
Expand for ReferencesExplosion of Hydrocarbons in an Urban Sewerage Network, April 22nd, 1992, Guadalajara Mexico, Ministry in Charge of the Environment, https://web.archive.org/web/20161027054836/http://www.aria.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/wp-content/files_mf/FD_3543_guadalajara_1992_ang.pdf
Eisner, Peter, Mexico Reels From Explosion, The Tech, April 24, 1992, https://web.archive.org/web/20111005045048/http://tech.mit.edu/V112/N22/mexico.22w.html
This Day In History: April 22, 1992 – Sewers Explode in Guadalajara, Killing Hundreds, History, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sewers-explode-in-guadalajara
The Guadalajara 1992 Sewer Gas Explosion Disaster, Suburban Emergency Management Project, May 3 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20090210235229/http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=356
Miller, Marjorie, Guadalajara Gas Blasts Kill 162 : Mexico: A Daylong Series of Explosions Thunders Under the City, Leveling Houses and Ripping Open Streets. More Than 800 are Injured. The Cause is Disputed, The Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1992, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-04-23-mn-1280-story.html
30 years after the explosion in the Reforma Sector of Guadalajara: “You looked as if they had bombed”, Newsroom infobae, April 22, 2022, https://www.infobae.com/en/2022/04/23/30-years-after-the-explosion-in-the-reforma-sector-of-guadalajara-you-looked-as-if-they-had-bombed/
The post That Time a City Randomly Blew Up appeared first on Today I Found Out.
While often overlooked, unless you drive an electric car, there is likely a seemingly humble metal can attached to your exhaust pipe that is an absolutely incredible piece of chemical engineering, a product of a herculean but now largely-forgotten feat of politics and industrial research and development that some scholars have compared to the Apollo Program. This is the fascinating story of the catalytic converter, perhaps the most underrated automotive component of all time.
Catalytic converters are designed to reduce an engine’s emissions by converting harmful exhaust products like unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides into more benign compounds like carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapour. As the name suggests, this is accomplished through the use of a catalyst, a substance which speeds up the rate of a chemical reaction but takes no part in the reaction itself. Catalysts work by allowing reaction pathways with lower activation energies, reducing the energy barrier required for a reaction to take place. For example, a catalyst may adsorb the reactants onto its surface, making it easier for them to bond, or may form intermediate compounds with the reactants that can more easily react with one another. In either case, at the end of the reaction the catalyst is left unaltered, allowing it to be reused almost indefinitely.
Older catalytic converters are known as two-way models, as they only catalyze two oxidation reactions. First, they break down unburned hydrocarbons into hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, then recombine these elements into carbon dioxide and water; and second, they convert carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide. The year 1981, however, saw the introduction of three-way converters, which can also catalyze reduction reactions converting nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide – precursors to photochemical smog and acid rain – into harmless nitrogen gas.
While catalytic converters did not begin appearing on cars until the mid-1970s, the technology is significantly older. As early as 1909 – just a year after the introduction of the Ford Model T – French chemist Michel Frankel gave a speech at the 7th International Congress on Applied Chemistry in London in which he proposed “…supplementary combustion in the exhaust box, with the aid of a catalytic agent” to help reduce future emissions from these newfangled automobiles. While this proposal was certainly prophetic, at the time air pollution was nothing new. Indeed, London’s infamous “pea soup fog” was not actually fog but rather a noxious smog resulting from the burning of coal which could – and often did – prove lethal when inhaled. Coal smog became such an issue in the UK that in 1845 Parliament passed the Railway Clauses Consolidation Act, one of the first pieces of legislation in history to regulate transport emissions.
However, the true father of the modern catalytic converter was another Frenchman: a mechanical and chemical engineer named Eugéne Jules Houdry. Houdry was born in 1892 in Domont, France, scion of a French steel-making family. He studied engineering at Paris’s École des Arts et Métiers, graduating top of his class and receiving a gold medal from the government before joining his family’s steel firm in 1911. With the outbreak of the First World War, Houdry joined the French Army, serving first in the artillery and later France’s first tank company. During the Second Battle of the Aisne in 1917, Houdry was seriously wounded while trying to repair his tank under heavy fire – an action for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour.
After the war, Houdry returned to the family firm and took up auto racing as a hobby, driving a Bugatti race car in his spare time. His obsession with increasing engine performance eventually led him to develop the catalytic cracking process for refining crude oil and coal into high-performance automotive fuel. This process was far more efficient than the older thermal cracking process and promised to meet the increasing demands of the ever-expanding automotive industry. In 1927, with the support of the French Government, Houdry built a pilot catalytic refinery in St. Julien de Peyrolas. Unfortunately, the plant’s output was far lower than expected and, unable to secure further support from the Government or Industry, Houdry moved to the United States, settling in Paulsboro, New Jersey in 1930. Here, he worked with Socony Vacuum and Sun Oil to develop improved versions of his catalytic process, with the first full-scale refinery opening in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, in 1937. By 1942, fourteen “Houdry Units” were operating across the United States, producing large quantities of high-octane aviation fuel which proved decisive in the final Allied victory in the Second World War.
After the war, Houdry turned his attention to another problem: air pollution, which even in the 1940s was becoming a serious problem in commuter-heavy cities like Detroit and Los Angeles. Though the link was as yet unproven, Houdry suspected that automobile emissions were responsible for a recent spike in lung cancer rates, and he set out to invent a device to clean up exhaust gases. In 1948, he formed a company called Oxy-Catalyst Inc. in Wayne, Pennsylvania, establishing a laboratory and office in a converted ballroom and horse stable. Within two years, Houdry developed a catalytic converter for use on factory smokestacks. This consisted of a metal box containing a bundle of porcelain rods over which exhaust gases would flow. These rods, in turn, were coated in aluminium oxide and platinum, the latter of which acted as the catalyst to convert unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide into water and carbon dioxide. He later developed a smaller version – the “catalytic muffler” for use in automobile exhaust systems, for which he was awarded the Society of Chemical Industry’s prestigious Perkin Medal. An amazingly-written 1955 article in Popular Mechanics breathlessly explained to readers just how this clever new device worked:
“A catalyst is like a heckler who prods two other guys to fight. A cat never does much fighting himself – he’s needed to keep things stirred up.
“In your car’s exhaust pipe the trouble is that nobody wants to fight. The waste hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide coming down from your engine aren’t hot enough to mix it up with oxygen – in other words, burn. Like snakes on a cold day they are too lazy to fight.
“So Houdry throws in a cat, and – wham! – a fight starts. Oxygen from the air leaps with a snarl at the smelly stuff. While the cats glow with the heat of the fight, oxygen rips the hydrocarbons apart. The hydrogen joins some of the oxygen to form water (H2O). And the widowed carbon is swallowed by other oxygen, burning into harmless carbon dioxide (CO2). Deadly carbon monoxide (CO) gets the business, too. Attacked by oxygen, it also burns to (CO2).”
Who said science writing had to be dull?
Houdry was particularly proud of his creation, boasting:
“Put them on all cars and watch the lung cancer curve dip.”
Unfortunately, this was not to be – at least, not in Houdry’s lifetime. For one thing, public concern over air pollution was nowhere near intense enough to convince automotive companies to adopt such a new, potentially expensive device. But there was an even bigger, more practical problem. At the time, gasoline contained tetraethyl lead to boost its octane rating and prevent engine knocking, and lead residue in the exhaust tended to coat or “poison” the catalyst, rendering the catalytic converter useless after only a year or two of regular driving. Consequently, Houdry turned away from regular automobiles and instead began developing catalytic converters for forklifts and mining machinery used in confined spaces, where carbon monoxide levels could quickly build up to lethal levels. Such machinery typically ran on low-grade, unleaded fuel, eliminating the catalyst poisoning problem. Eugène Houdry died in 1962 at the age of 70, his dream of curbing automobile emissions unrealized.
However, that same year saw the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s classic exposé of the dangers of synthetic pesticides like DDT. This book helped launch the modern environmental movement, which by the late 1960s had grown so large and influential that politicians and industry were forced to take notice. By 1969, smog over Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities had gotten so bad that residents sometimes couldn’t see the sun at noon, parents were wary of letting their children play outside, and buildings had to be repainted every few years. This crisis spurred the government of then-California governor Ronald Reagan to pass sweeping state emissions regulations. The Federal Government quickly followed suit, and on January 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act. Less than a year later, he established the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA, whose first Administrator, Assistant Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus, immediately ordered the mayors of the heavily-polluted cities of Cleveland, Atlanta, and Detroit to clean up their waterways within six months or face legal action. And before the year was out, President Nixon signed a massive expansion to the 1963 Clean Air Act, which set national standards for automobile emissions. Specifically, it called for automobile manufacturers and oil companies to reduce exhaust emissions – particularly smog-causing nitrogen oxides – by 90% and to eliminate leaded gasoline from all major service stations by 1975.
As you might imagine, this did not go down well with automakers. The Government had just thrown down what science writer Tim Palucka once called:
“…a gauntlet similar in spirit to President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Both were bold strokes that placed a burden squarely on the shoulders of the nation’s scientists and engineers. And both looked impossible.”
Indeed, in order to get cleaner cars rolling off the assembly line by the 1975 model year, manufacturers would have to complete the necessary research and development work within only 2-3 years – an absurdly short turnaround for technology nobody knew was even possible. Ernest Starkman, vice president in charge of the environmental-activities staff of General Motors, balked that:
“The cleaner the car is from a pollution standpoint, the harder it is to make it run well.”
While then Ford president Lee Iacocca claimed that to comply with the regulations, the auto industry would have to flat-out stop producing cars for several years:
“No matter how much we spend and how many people we assign to the task, we do not think we can do it by Jan. 1, 1975. Under this bill we would be directed to reduce all emissions by 90 percent even if nobody knows how to reduce emissions by 90 percent.”
But the EPA refused to back down, forcing Big Four in Detroit to attempt the impossible. Even EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus later admitted that the Clean Air Act was overly ambitious, stating in 1985 that:
“We thought we had technologies that could control pollutants, keeping them below threshold levels at a reasonable cost, and that the only things missing in the equation were national standards and a strong enforcement effort…All of the nation’s early environmental laws reflected these assumptions, and every one of these assumptions is wrong.”
With the clock ticking, the automakers decided to tackle the problem of emissions on two fronts: at the source using improved carburetors, pre-combustion chambers, and dual spark plugs to promote more complete combustion of the fuel; and at the exhaust end using catalytic converters to clean up any remaining emissions. At first, most research focused on pre-combustion emission reduction, as Rodney Bagley, an engineer at Corning Glass Works later recalled:
“Hanging a chemical reactor under a car was not something the auto companies wanted to do. They thought that it would be a short-term stopgap until they could design an engine that would reduce emissions using a precombustion chamber or some other gizmo.”
In the decade since Eugène Houdry’s death, catalytic converter technology had advanced significantly, with companies like Corning in New York, 3M in Minnesota, and Englehard Industries in New Jersey all developing more sophisticated alternatives to Houdry’s porcelain-rod design. However, all were stymied by the same lead-poisoning issue, which would have forced motorists to change their converters – or at the very least the catalyst within – every year. However, the 1970 Clean Air Act’s requirement that leaded gasoline be eliminated by 1975 suddenly made these designs feasible.
The first company to develop a production catalytic converter was GM, which at the time was not only the world’s largest automaker but also its single largest employer. After assigning over 5,000 workers to the task, including former DuPont chemist Richard Klimisch, GM came up with a pelletized catalytic converter containing hundreds of aluminium-oxide beads coated in platinum and palladium catalysts. While GM had tested dozens of cheaper metals like copper and iron, these were unable to withstand high exhaust temperatures. According to GM promotional material, each converter used less than 1/10 of a troy ounce – around 3 grams – of catalyst, yet was able to reduce tailpipe hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions by over 90%. Furthermore, thanks to modifications made on the combustion end, the new converter-equipped GM models achieved 15% more miles per gallon than their predecessors – proving that Ernest Starkman’s concerns about cleaner cars being less efficient were entirely unfounded. To ensure that drivers didn’t destroy their catalytic converters, 1975 GM models featured a smaller gas-filling port that wouldn’t fit older leaded-gas nozzles.
But while several other companies like AMC and Toyota opted to license GM’s pelletized catalytic converter, the design was soon found to be fundamentally flawed. For one thing, vibration caused the pellets to grind against each other and gradually wear off their catalyst coating, eventually rendering the converter useless. Worse still, carbureted engines tended to swing wildly between lean and rich combustion, resulting in high exhaust temperatures that could melt the catalytic converter. And while GM marketing had boasted that with their design, drivers need only replace the pellets and not the whole converter, in reality drivers were unwilling to pay for this kind of regular maintenance, and GM was forced to look for alternative designs.
Meanwhile, Ford and Chrysler opted for more sophisticated designs developed by 3M, Englehard Industries, and Corning Glass Works. 3M and Englehard had developed a ceramic material made of zirconia and mullite which could be extruded into corrugated sheets and rolled into a cylinder, creating a monolithic honeycomb structure with a huge internal surface area that would not wear down over time like GM’s pelletized converter. Corning’s design, however, was even more sophisticated. Corning had experimented with dozens of methods for producing a strong, stable honeycomb substrate, such as rolling up sheets with glass nibs or ridges to separate them, stacking together circular or triangular tubes, or extruding thin alumina “noodles” into something resembling a bird’s nest. However, all these structures turned out to be too expensive to manufacture or too fragile to stand up to regular road use. It was then that engineer Rodney Bagley hit upon an elegant solution: why not extrude the substrate through a die, creating a tough, monolithic honeycomb with thousands of tiny channels running front-to-back? While simple in concept, implementing this process proved to be a major engineering challenge. If the die wasn’t designed exactly right or the ceramic formulated just so, the tiny channels would immediately collapse after extrusion like, as Bagley put it, “a wet newspaper.” The wrong ceramic would also expand and warp when exposed to the heat of an automobile’s exhaust, causing it to clog up and disintegrate. However, after months of feverish work and 100-hour weeks, Bagley and his colleagues developed a practical extrusion process and a substrate material composed of methylcellulose and synthetic cordierite – a mixture of talc, aluminium silicate, and aluminium oxide. This yielded a stable, solid honeycomb structure with walls as thin as two thousandths of an inch or 0.05 millimetres. On November 9, 1971, the Corning team filed a patent for their design, which was finally granted in February 1974.
But Corning wasn’t out of the woods yet. With the 1975 deadline fast approaching, they would have to build a catalytic converter factory before their converter design was even finalized. It was a huge gamble, but a necessary one. Not only did Corning stand to reap a $100 million windfall in catalytic converter sales if their design reached the market first, but the fate of the American automotive industry now rested in their hands. If they failed, Ford, Chrysler, and other companies would effectively be forced to shut down until an effective catalytic converter could be developed. In the end, the race to the 1975 deadline proved to be a close-run thing. In June 1975, a massive flood severely delayed construction at the factory site in Erwin, New York, while in 1973 the Corning was hit by a triple-whammy of technical issues. Prototype converters kept shaking loose on the test track, problems with the crystal structure of the cordierite substrate caused the honeycombs to warp, and – most worrying of all – the EPA made a disturbing discovery: catalytic converters would combine sulphur contaminants from gasoline with hydrogen and oxygen to form sulphuric acid. As one Corning engineer recalled:
“I had two elements of the agency pitted against each other. The Mobile Source people were basically engineers, and the other side of the coin was represented by the health scientists. The latter group argued that catalytic converters would emit a fine aerosol of sulfuric acid, so that anyone standing alongside a Los Angeles freeway would essentially be inhaling a sulfuric acid mist, which was extremely damaging to health. This was a very tough decision to make. I came down on the side of the catalytic converter, which, in hindsight, seems to have been the right decision.”
Indeed, testing revealed that sulphuric acid emissions were not a major hazard, and the project was pulled back from the brink of failure. The other issues were also eventually worked out, and by the time the 1975 model year rolled around, the Big Four automakers had done the impossible: meeting the EPA’s stringent guidelines in less than five years. It was a spectacular achievement, and one of the greatest feats of industrial research and development in history. As Rodney Bagley later recalled:
“Having a major breakthrough is very rare in any company. In the catalytic converter we had two major breakthroughs: a new process and new materials that didn’t exist before.”
For his historic role in reducing global emissions, in 2002 Bagley, along with his colleagues Irwin Lachlan and Ronald Lewis, were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Yet, despite this triumph, automakers resented the Government meddling in their business and expended considerable effort trying to paint catalytic converters as a useless passing fad. Indeed, Alan Loofbourrow, Vice President of Engineering at Chrysler, called the catalytic converter “the dumbest thing to ever happen to the automobile”, while today it is suspected that the reason GM held on to its problematic pelletized design for so long was to give catalytic converters as a whole a bad name. Other companies found ways of getting around the regulations altogether. For example, since the Clean Air Act mandated catalytic converters for all vehicles under 6,000 pounds, in 1975 Ford introduced a new model to its F-series of pickup trucks that was just slightly heavier than the cutoff. Known as the F-150, it remains the best-selling pickup truck in the United States.
Yet despite this grumbling, the EPA held firm, and by the end of the 1970s catalytic converters became standard equipment on nearly all consumer vehicles. But there was still plenty of work to be done. The first generation of catalytic converters were so-called two-way models, which did nothing to reduce the nitrogen oxides responsible for photochemical smog. The EPA had removed NOx standards from its 1975 requirements to allow manufacturers to focus on reducing carbon dioxide and hydrocarbon emissions, but was due to reintroduce them for the 1976 model year. However, the 1973-74 oil prompted the EPA to extend the deadline to 1978; while in 1977 it extended it again to 1981. This time, it was Englehard Industries of New Jersey who provided the necessary breakthrough. Converting nitrogen oxides to plain nitrogen requires a reduction rather than an oxidation reaction, and Englehard discovered that rhodium, another member of the platinum group of metals, efficiently catalyzed this reaction. Englehard’s first design was a two-stage system, with one converter oxidizing carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons and another reducing nitrogen oxides. This system, however, was bulky, heavy, and expensive, and certain to prove unpopular with auto manufacturers. It was then that Englehard chemists John Mooney and Carl Keith came up with an ingenious solution: adding cerium oxide, which would either release or store oxygen by switching between its CeO2 and Ce2O3 forms. This breakthrough allowed both oxidation and reduction to take place within the same catalytic converter. Introduced in 1973, such three-way converters soon became standard across the automotive industry, and remain in use to this day. In 2001, Keith and Mooney were awarded the prestigious Walter Ahlstrom Engineering Prize for their invention.
Modern three-way converters can remove up to 98% of toxic pollutants from a vehicle’s exhaust and are estimated to have kept some 800 million tons of pollutants out of the atmosphere since the 1970s. While the basic design of catalytic converters has changed relatively little over the last 50 years, they have benefited greatly from other advances in vehicle design such as oxygen sensors and fuel injection systems, which allow engines to run at an optimum stoichiometric ratio – that is, neither too rich or too lean – reducing emissions at the source and allowing catalytic converters to operate at peak efficiency.
Yet despite 50 years of development, problems still remain. For example, catalytic converters must reach a certain temperature to operate efficiently, meaning vehicles tend to emit larger amounts of pollutants in the first few minutes after startup – especially in cold climates. Manufacturers have come up with several solutions to this problem, including placing the converter close to the engine exhaust manifold, adding electrical heaters, or installing a smaller “pre-cat” ahead of the main converter – all of which significantly reduce the converter’s warm-up time and overall emissions. And while lead has been eliminated from gasoline, catalytic converters can still be poisoned by sulphur, phosphorus, and manganese found in gasoline and fuel additives. However, the reduction or elimination of sulphur and phosphorus from most gasoline blends has largely eliminated this problem.
But the biggest problem with catalytic converters is the very materials which make their alchemy possible: the precious metals platinum, palladium, and rhodium. Indeed, these metals were the focus of great controversy surrounding the initial adoption of catalytic converters, for in the 1970s most of the world’s reserves came from the Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa. Today, catalytic converters account for 40% of the world’s demand for platinum, 70% of the demand for palladium, and 80% of the demand for rhodium, with the global automotive industry spending more than $40 billion every year on these metals alone. In recent years, growing demands for emissions control – especially in China – has caused the prices of these metals to skyrocket has caused the price of platinum to skyrocket from $800 an ounce in 1986 to nearly $1,400 today. Similarly, the price of palladium has quintupled to $2,875 an ounce and rhodium to an eye-watering $21,900 an ounce – around 12 times the price of gold. This, in turn, has made catalytic converters a tempting target for petty thieves, with unscrupulous scrap metal dealers paying anywhere from $150 up to $500 for a single unit. In 2022, more than 64,000 catalytic converters were stolen in the United States alone, sticking the vehicles’ owners with repair bills often in excess of $2,000. The most commonly targeted vehicles are those with high wheelbases like pickup trucks and SUVs since they are the easiest for thieves to slip under, though hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius are also popular targets. This is because their engines run less often than regular vehicles, meaning their converters are often in better condition.
As electric vehicles become increasingly popular, demand for catalytic converters – and their theft – may eventually taper off. Until then, however, these ingenious devices will continue to play a vital – if often overlooked – role in keeping our air clear and breathable. So for now, just be careful where you park your car.
Expand for References
General Motors Believes it Has an Answer to the Automotive Air Pollution Problem, Toledo Blade, September 11, 1974, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=9tBOAAAAIBAJ&dq=catalytic-converter&pg=6404,6576523
Palucka, Tim, Doing the Impossible, American Heritage, Winter 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20081203124718/http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2004/3/2004_3_22.shtml
Eugene Houdry, Science History Institute Museum & Library, https://www.sciencehistory.org/education/scientific-biographies/eugene-houdry/
Tabuchi, Hiroko, Thieves Nationwide are Slithering Under Cars, Swiping Catalytic Converters, The New York Times, February 9, 2021, https://ghostarchive.org/archive/hZO5F
Catalytic Converters, Let’s Talk Science, December 14, 2022, https://letstalkscience.ca/educational-resources/stem-explained/catalytic-converters#:~:text=Eugène Houdry invented the catalytic,catalytic converter to clean exhaust.
History of the Catalytic Converter, https://www.catalyticconverters.com/history/
York, Andrew, The Evolution of Catalytic Converters, Royal Society of Chemistry, May 31, 2011, https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-evolution-of-catalytic-converters/2020252.article
Roberts, Jacob, Clean Machine, Science History Institute Museum & Library, January 13, 2015, https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/clean-machine/
Procidia, Lee, Catalytic Converters are the Coolest Car Parts That Get No Respect, Shop Press, May 25, 2023, https://shoppress.dormanproducts.com/history-of-how-catalytic-converters-work-theft/
Stern, Daniel, Automotive History: The Dawn of the Catalytic Converter – Who Put the Cat Out? Curbside Classic, February 3, 2020, https://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-histories/curbside-tech-who-put-the-cat-out-the-dawn-of-the-catalytic-converter/
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Despite all the veneration we often throw Ancient Rome’s way, the truth is the Ancient Romans built their empire on the backs of slaves, with an estimated 35% of the total population of that society in the 1st century BCE comprised of slaves. So how did slavery start in this civilization and what was it actually like to be a slave in Ancient Rome?
As to the former question, it may or may not come as a surprise to you, but slavery in this region had been around as long as we have documented evidence of anything that happened there. Thus, by the time Rome became a thing it was already firmly established as a societal norm. For example, the 5th century BCE legal code, The Twelve Tables, had laws relating to slaves and freed slaves. What was a little different in these earliest references, such as in The Twelve Tables is that there was a taboo against slaves taking part in religious rituals such as anointing corpses. This is odd considering that in later years slaves commonly helped high ranking priests with rituals important to the running of the state concerning augury and the Sibylline Books. What was not odd and seemingly pretty much par for the course in slavery the world over is that in The Twelve Tables, slaves often faced a harsher punishment for crimes than free people. For example, if a free person was caught stealing, part of his corporal punishment was flogging, while a slave well… let’s just say they would swiftly after being caught cease to continue breathing.
As for where the Romans got their slaves, these most commonly came from any peoples the Romans were at war with. Unsurprisingly from this, slave numbers ramped up significantly once Rome began their conquering ways. As Rome expanded its empire into Italy, and then out into the Mediterranean and beyond, captured peoples became slaves and were brought to Rome and other provincial cities. Sometimes these prisoners were sold to dealers during the campaign or taken by the soldiers themselves for use in their respective households. As an average Roman who wanted to buy slaves, you went to specific slave dealers depending on your needs. As to this, slave dealers sold slaves in different markets depending on what type of slave you wanted, with hardier ones sold in one area of the city, while domestic individuals sold in others.
All this said, the sale of war prisoners was not the only source of slaves in Rome. There was also a robust slave trade between the Romans and other cultures. This was commonly used to bring in slaves while bypassing certain restrictions. For example, it was illegal in the later empire to castrate slaves. One way around this was to import already castrated slaves from Eastern reaches such as Persian held Armenia. Piracy was also another source of slave stock as pirates commonly kidnapped and sold people, Roman or otherwise, into slavery. It is even known that pirates operated private slave prisons on the Italian peninsula where freeborn kidnapped citizens were held before being sold into slavery.
People could also be born slaves. Regardless of the father’s status, if a slave woman were to bear a child, even by her master, that child by default became her master’s slave. As such, pairing and breeding was encouraged by masters as a natural means to supply their estate with more slaves. It was also known for Romans themselves to enter slavery either within Rome, often after a civil war or the like, or as captives in the hands of an enemy. Abandoned children were also at risk of becoming slaves in the Roman Empire.
As for the legality of it all, legally, slavery was related to death in Roman codes. As far as the law was concerned, you existed in a state like death, and your owner owned you in body and soul, with almost no restrictions, save something like the aforementioned eventual ban on castration. You otherwise had no rights. You could own no property; you could not legally start a family and, again, any children you had belonged to your master. Slaves did sometimes have a limited pool of money to spend from called a peculium, but even though they may have accumulated those funds or possessions themselves in some way, that still technically belonged to their masters. Slaves with high status could even have underslaves who waited on and worked for them and were otherwise at their bidding, but the underslaves were still in effect owned by their master, not the higher-ranking slave.
Beyond this, physically abusing a slave in pretty much any way you please was very common and was usually the go-to response of an agitated master. Sexual gratification with a slave was also an accepted action for slaveowning men, and at times for women, although it was generally frowned upon for a woman to have sexual relations with her slave. In the end, as property, Roman slaves arguably had fewer rights than modern-day pets in many societies, since our pets are protected by some level of law, though of course pets can be castrated… So that’s one win for the Roman slave.,, Yet despite the ethical ramifications from a modern day lens, Romans saw slavery as a normal and regular facet of life. Even lower class individuals potentially owned a slave or two.
This all brings us to what slaves got up to when they weren’t polishing their master’s trophy. It turns out, saying concisely what a typical slaves’ day to day life was like in Ancient Rome is an effort in futility as this could be as diverse as the lives of their masters, save sans any rights to do as they pleased except where their master willed. In the general case, slaves simply helped in production and tasks both in rural and urban areas, but with the majority of slaves being in the countryside.
As for slaves belonging to lower class owners, they were often in charge of extremely diverse tasks from cooking, cleaning, stabling horses, going on deliveries, helping out in their masters’ business, etc., perhaps all on the same day. Even if one of these lower class owner slaves had specialized jobs such as weavers, they usually did more general tasks around the house such as cooking and cleaning. Basically they did whatever their master needed them to in a given moment.
Slaves in more well to-do households, however, tended to be much more specialized. For example, children of the elite generally had Attendant slaves, the title given to a slave whose job it was to do basically anything needed to care for the child, as well as do anything the child asked of them. They opened doors and windows for them, dressed them, fed them, washed them, walked them to school, and were otherwise addressed by their little charges by such fun terms as “boy”.
Beyond this, slaves of the elite could be dedicated maidservants, smiths, masons for repairing structures, ploughmen, shepherds, oil press workers, bakers, barbers, bailiffs, and much more depending on the size and wealth of the estate. There were also occupations that required more advanced training and learning such as treasurers, clerks, secretaries, and doctors. There were even artisanal slaves who worked as gold and silversmiths and pearl setters. A given slave might also be trained as a comic actor… pet child and… even a dwarf. No, really, those last three are found in records. In the end, basically any job a free person could hold, you could also find a slave trained and doing that profession for their master. Just about the only thing that slaves could not do was serve in the military.
There was even “job mobility” if you could call it that. Some slave jobs were meant to be grown out of such as hen keeping and gathering fodder, although older slaves could be assigned those roles later in life. You could also progress from one job to another, such as going from litter-bearer to cook. Some slaves were lucky and were allowed to pursue intellectual tasks, such as Timagenes of Alexandria who eventually became a historian.
It should also be noted that there were hierarchies of slaves, so not all slaves or their jobs were equal. As mentioned before, underslaves existed and served higher ranking slaves, although all involved belonged to one master. On this note, in general, urban slaves had a higher ranking than rural ones. The standing of one’s owner also counted in some ways; slaves belonging to a wealthier or more powerful owner were socially higher than those who belonged to poorer owners. Slaves with higher levels of responsibilities were also typically given more luxurious or spacious accommodations compared to lower ranking ones. Further, as alluded to, slaves could sometimes hold jobs that required great learning, and it is possible, although not thoroughly documented, that there is a career progression in those jobs. There were many such learned positions such as record keepers, tax-stewards, and assistants to priests. This all meant that there was no single class of slaves, there were several.
As you might imagine from this, slave rebellions didn’t tend to include all levels of slaves, as these different levels of slaves often competed and didn’t see themselves as one class of people. Further, some classes were more comfortable in their station than others. Combined with the fact that slave rebellions tended to be put down brutally, they weren’t common. For example, the events of a film you may have watched, Spartacus, started in 73 BCE, was the last major slave revolt for the rest of Rome’s existence. However, there were other ways to resist oppression, and a large-scale slave rebellion was just one form. Running away from your life as a slave was an occasional thing despite being punishable by death. However, some slaves lived such a poor quality of life that the possibility of death was preferable to continued mistreatment. Murder and conspiracy to murder were also not out of the question, and cases were recorded of slaves going postal and killing their masters and their master’s family. Some took, well… more imaginative approaches to resistance. In one case we know of, a slave took revenge on his mistress after she flogged his wife, via said slave then reporting his mistress’ cheating affair to his master. Much like in your soul crushing job, passive resistance was also a common thing, via slaves working as poorly as possible so as to just barely stay within acceptable means. This could mean doing your job slowly or incompetently, lying, and even sabotage; whatever negatively impacted the owner but didn’t result in much pain or consequence for yourself.
As to mistreatment, coercion was a large part of slave life. All were coerced to work for their masters, but some like bailiffs and overseers had the specific role of enforcing that coercion on fellow slaves in place of their masters. Failure to perform could mean demotion at best, physical or emotional harm such as beatings or separation from your “family”, and, in the end, death at worst.
On the flipside, there was a degree of independence depending on your job and position. Urban slaves could even end up working as managers in their owners’ businesses. They could run a bank or shop for their owners. A slave agent was even authorized to buy anything the owner required for their business such as cattle, tools, equipment, real estate, or other slaves. They could run inns, shops, and carry out money lending operations. This sort of agent was very common, and while it wasn’t necessarily just slaves that could be agents, it was common for slaves to be tasked with such. Freed slaves would even sometimes continue this agent work for their former masters after they were freed.
On this note of freed slaves, what happened after slavery? Well, usually death was the only release for the vast majority of slaves. But for some, manumission was possible, with slaves and their former masters then often having a client-patron relationship. In fact, inheritance laws made it so that former masters inherited their freedmen’s possessions if the former slave died without heirs.
Going back to life though, depending on the high status of your patron, you could get a boost in prestige and standing as a freed person from their household. Thus, a freed slave of a poor household held a lot less prestige than a freed slave of, say, the emperor. Depending on your patron, you could leverage that prestige to marry wealthy freed or free women and cement generational wealth for your free born children. Manumission did not always mean freedom from your old job, however. After all, you were trained in that job and may have done it all your life. Thus, as alluded to, many ex-slaves returned to their old jobs, simply now as free people, whether that was as secretaries, or as domestic servants. The difference being, of course, they could now accumulate their own wealth from their efforts, in some cases substantial if their trained trade was a lucrative one. These ultimately wealthy freed individuals sometimes had the airs of the nouveau riche, attempting to live like their masters, including with their own retinue of slaves. It was also possible for slaves to attain Roman citizenship, and even have descendants that achieved equestrian status. This social mobility away from slavery goes to highlight how diverse the slave experience was in Rome.
That said, as slaves made up upwards of 1 in 3 people comprising Rome’s population at any given time, there were rules about freeing one’s slaves. A rush of freed slaves, especially from larger estates which could have many hundreds of slaves could pose a risk to public order after all. As such, laws restricted how many slaves an owner could free upon his death depending on how big his retinue was.
But as for some of these freedmen, one of the elite remembered among them today is the aforementioned Timagenes of Alexandria, a historian and jurist. Originally a slave who was a cook, he was allowed to advance to a position where he could learn to read and write, ultimately becoming a noted historian. Unfortunately, his works did not survive primarily as he got on the wrong side of Augustus during his campaigns in Egypt, as Timagenes was thought to have helped Anthony and Cleopatra in the spat. In the end, he is thought to have been poisoned by Augustus in his home in modern day Albania.
A much more famous former slave was the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, born in 50 CE. Epictetus was a slave to Emperor Nero’s secretary Epaphroditus, himself also a freedman. While still a slave, Epictetus was allowed to study Stoic philosophy with Musonius Rufus, a prominent Stoic. We actually don’t have proof of Epictetus’ manumission, so for all we know he might have also died a slave. Nevertheless, he rose to prominence, teaching things like “Some things are up to us and some are not up to us… The things that are up to us are by nature free, unhindered, and unimpeded; the things that are not up to us are weak, enslaved, hindered, not our own… if you think that only what is yours is yours, and that what is not your own is not your own, then no one will ever coerce you… and no one will harm you, because you will not be harmed at all.”
It is easy to see this as the philosophy of a former slave, but this is in line with Stoic thought before Epictetus. Epictetus knew hardship under slavery, for example it’s thought he had some sort of physical disability from Epaphroditus, fascinatingly given he himself was a former slave, purposely breaking Epictetus’ leg, among other apparently brutal beatings.
Naturally, freedom was a theme in Epictetus’ work, but if you are expecting our modern sense of individual, political, or economic freedom, you would be mistaken. Epictetus taught of a spiritual freedom, the kind anyone can attain regardless of their condition. He is an important figure in the survival of Stoic philosophy because his works are some of the only complete texts to come down to us from this era.
In the end, the life of an individual slave in Ancient Rome could vary almost as much as the life of any free individual, with the exception of that the slave’s life was not their own in any way their master did not will. Thus, the world of a slave in Rome, as is the world of a slave in any society, was more often than not, a sad state of affairs. Considered quasi dead by the law, and with practically no protections, slaves were at the mercy of their masters. Sometimes those masters were benevolent and helped their slaves achieve success by affording them opportunities or even ultimately granting them their freedom. But often this was not the case. And, much like my basement dwelling writer monkeys, their day to day lives, and very life itself, was always at the whim of their master, with little hope of any way out, save the sweet release of death.
Expand for ReferencesBeard, Mary, John North, and SRF Price. Religions of Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Bradley, Keith. Slavery and Society in Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994
Lawson, Jennifer. Greek and Roman Sexualities: A Sourcebook. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012.
Tougher, Shaun. The Roman Castrati: Eunuchs in the Roman Empire. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.
Wiedemann, Thomas Greek and Roman Slavery. London: Routledge, 1981
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On January 1, 1959, troops of the revolutionary 26th of July Movement marched into the Cuban capital of Havana, toppling the American-backed government of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Two weeks later, the leader of the revolution, former lawyer Fidel Castro, was sworn in as Prime Minister. Almost immediately, Castro began implementing a program of sweeping socialist reforms, nationalizing Cuba’s sugar and oil refining industries, confiscating land from private owners and redistributing it among the peasantry, and seeking closer diplomatic and economic ties with the Soviet Union. These actions incensed and frightened the United States, who saw the Caribbean island as a dangerous communist outpost in the Western Hemisphere. Over the next six decades, Cuba’s beard-sporting, fatigues-wearing, cigar-chomping leader would remain a veritable obsession of the American CIA, attracting dozens of coup and assassination attempts. But while some of these plots were well-organized and came lose to succeeding, others were so improbably absurd they sound like something Wile E. Coyote would dream up after browsing the Acme Products catalogue – involving such exotic killing methods as exploding seashells, poisoned diving suits, and LSD-laced cigars. This is the story of the of the many hilarious ways the CIA tried – and failed – to kill Fidel Castro.
The first recorded attempt to undermine the Cuban revolution took place in early 1960, a year after the fall of the Batista government. According to former U.S. Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who revealed the plot in 1975, the U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Special Operations chartered a small Air Force liaison aircraft to fly two CIA-trained Cuban exiles from Elgin Air Force Base in Florida to a road just outside Havana. The exiles planned to infiltrate a building in Havana overlooking Castro’s daily commute and assassinate the leader with a sniper rifle. But while the plane returned safely to Florida, the two operatives were never heard from again, having likely been captured by Cuban forces en route to Havana.
Finding it increasingly difficult to infiltrate outside agents into Cuba, the CIA enlisted the help of a person with very close ties to Fidel Castro: his former mistress Marita Lorenz. The German-born daughter of an ocean liner captain, Lorenz arrived in Havana in February 1959 and soon met and began an affair with the new Cuban leader – who immediately proceeded to knock her up. Seven months later, Lorenz was given a glass of drugged milk, passed out, and awoke in a local clinic with her baby nowhere to be found. Shortly thereafter, she was recruited by CIA agent Frank Sturgis, who gave her a package of poison capsules and convinced her to return to Cuba and kill her former lover. Unfortunately, the plan immediately went awry. Paranoid that the pills would be discovered by Cuban customs, Lorenz hid them in a pot of cold cream. Later, when she tried to recover them:
“…they were all gunked up. I fished them out and flushed them down the bidet.”
Things only got worse when Castro finally appeared, as Lorenz later recalled:
“‘Why did you leave so suddenly?’ he asked. “Are you running around with those counterrevolutionaries in Miami?’ I said yes. I tried to play it cool. The most nervous I have ever been was in that room, because I had agents on standby and I had to watch my timing. I had enough hours to stay with him, order a meal, kill him, and prevent him from making a speech that night, which was already pre-announced.
He was very tired and wanted to sleep. … He was chewing a cigar, and he laid down on the bed and said, ‘Did you come here to kill me?’ Just like that. I was standing at the edge of the bed. I said, ‘Yes. I wanted to see you.’ And he said, ‘That’s good. That’s good.’ He asked if I was working for the CIA. I said, ‘Not really. I work for myself.’ Then he leaned over, pulled out his .45, and handed it to me. I flipped the chamber out and hit it back. He didn’t even flinch. And he said, ‘You can’t kill me. Nobody can kill me.’ And he kind of smiled and chewed on his cigar. … I felt deflated. He was so sure of me. He just grabbed me. We made love. I contemplated staying—to try talking to him later, after his speech, but it would be too late, because he rambles on for 8, 10, 12 hours. That was the hardest part. I wanted him to beg me to stay, but he got dressed and left. I just sat there by myself awhile. I left him a note. I told him that I would be back.”
Shortly after this encounter, Lorenz left Cuba, only returning once to visit Castro in 1981.
The CIA’s next major assassination attempt targeted not Fidel Castro but his younger brother Raúl, then leader of the Cuban Armed Forces. In July 1960, José Raúl Martínez, a pilot for national airline Cubana and secret CIA operative, revealed that he had been chosen to fly Raúl Castro to a meeting in Prague, in the then-communist republic of Czechoslovakia. Seizing a rare opportunity to eliminate a key figure in the Cuban government, the CIA wired $10,000 to William Murray, its operative in Havana, and instructed him to arrange for Castro to have an “accident.” The plot was a rush job in the extreme; indeed, Murray’s only chance to discuss the mission with Martínez was while the pilot was driving to the airport. And while Martínez was eager to eliminate Castro, he was unsure of how to do so without also killing everyone on the plane. In the end, he asked Murray:
“If I die, will you make sure that my two sons have their college education paid for?”
The CIA agreed, and Martínez set off on his mission. Minutes later, however, Murray received new orders: Do not pursue. Would like to drop matter. But it was already too late; the plane had already taken off, and Murray had no means of contacting Martínez. In the end, however, Martínez found no opportunity to arrange the CIA’s desired “accident”, and returned Raúl Castro to Cuba, safe and sound. A few months later, Martínez defected to the United States.
Just one month after this hastily-organized assassination attempt, the CIA concocted a more sophisticated scheme to poison Fidel Castro by contaminating his favourite cigars with botulinum toxin – one of the most powerful poisons known to science. According to official reports from the CIA’s Technical Services Division, the poisoned cigars were ready by October 7, 1960 and delivered to an unidentified operative in Cuba on February 13, 1961. For unknown reasons, however, the cigars never made it into Castro’s hands. At around the same time, the CIA also toyed with the idea of overthrowing Castro not by assassinating him, but by undermining his credibility. One such scheme involved clandestinely dosing Castro with LSD or a similar hallucinogen prior to his delivering a television or radio broadcast to make him behave erratically. Another plot, timed to coincide with a planned address before the United Nations in New York, involved poisoning Castro with Thallium salts. The salts, which would be slipped into Castro’s shoes when he set them outside his hotel room to be polished, would, it was hoped, cause Castro’s iconic beard to fall out, making him look weak on the world stage.. In the end, however, neither plan was carried out.
The next offensive against Cuba would be a much more substantial affair. In March of 1960, U.S. President Dwight D Eisenhower authorized the CIA to arm and train a force of exiled counter-revolutionaries to land in Cuba and lead a coup against the Castro government. Though Eisenhower left office later that year, his successor, John F. Kennedy, gave the operation the go-ahead. On April 17, 1961, a force of 1,400 Cuban exiles known as Brigade 2506, sailing from bases in Guatemala and Nicaragua, landed in the Bay of Pigs in southwest Cuba. The operation was a complete disaster. Due to confusion over time zones, the expected American air support came an hour late, and Brigade 2506 found itself pinned down on the beach by Cuban revolutionary forces. And when the world learned of the illegal invasion, President Kennedy cancelled further airstrikes. Within two days 100 exiles were killed and the rest captured. The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a major embarrassment for the Kennedy Administration, further souring relations between the United States and Cuba. In late 1961, Fidel Castro officially declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and publicly sought closer cooperation with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
In the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster, the CIA and Department of Defense launched Operation Mongoose, a multi-phase, coordinated program of military and intelligence operations designed to undermine and topple the Cuban government. The plan, authorized by President Kennedy on November 30, 1961, included the dissemination of anti-Castro propaganda, the training and infiltration of counter-revolutionary guerrilla units into the country, the assassination of key government figures, and:
“…all other political, economic and covert actions, short of inspiring a revolt in Cuba or developing the need for US armed intervention… in order to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime…while [remaining] consistent with US overt policy, and [remaining] in position to disengage with minimum of loss in assets and US prestige.”
Operation Mongoose was placed under the directorship of CIA operative Edward Lonsdale, and given an initial budget of $100 million. Over the next two decades, the project would consume $50 million per year and involve some 2,500 Cuban and American personnel.
In June 1962, American lawyer James B. Donovan – most famous for arranging the exchange of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers – was sent to Cuba to negotiate the release of the 1,113 Cuban exiles taken prisoner during the Bay of Pigs invasion. In the lead-up to the mission, the CIA prepared a special scuba diving outfit which Donovan was to present to Castro as a gift. The wetsuit had been treated with spores of the fungus Eumycetoma, which causes the disfiguring skin disease Madura Foot, while the breathing apparatus was infected with tuberculosis bacteria. But in another stroke of bad luck, Donovan revealed that he had already gifted Castro with a diving suit, and the infected suit never left the United States. In the end, Donovan managed to secure the prisoners’ release in exchange for $52 million in medical supplies and baby food.
With their assets in Cuba swiftly dwindling, the CIA next turned to another group with a major grudge against Castro: the American Mafia. Prior to the revolution, the Mafia had enjoyed a lucrative presence in Cuba, running a chain of successful hotels, nightclubs, brothels, and casinos catering mostly to American tourists. When Castro came to power, however, he seized the Mafia’s assets and expelled them from the country. The CIA’s collaboration with the Mafia had begun back in 1960, when the agency sent former FBI agent and private intelligence contractor Bob Maheu to make contact with Chicago mob bosses Johnny Rosselli, Salvatore Giancana, and Santos Trafficant. The mobsters eagerly agreed to cooperate, even waiving their regular fee to carry out the assassination. Despite this, Maheu soon dropped out of the plot, later stating:
“I was not very happy about the project in the first place. I felt that I was building up my business, I had a good business going, the demands on behalf of the [Howard] Hughes interests were increasing progressively. On the other hand, I felt that I had an obligation to my country, and I recognized the fact that the Agency had been good to me in the early stages of my business. . . . I was anxious to get back to work. My recollection is that I phased out of the project as soon as it could be accomplished after the Bay of Pigs, or after the invasion was not successful.”
Rosselli, Giancana, and Trafficant, however, carried on plotting, and in 1963 they managed to smuggle a batch of botulinum toxin pills into Cuba, disguised in a bottle of aspirin. The perfect opportunity to deploy them soon arrived when Castro visited the Havana Libre Hotel, which served his favourite chocolate milkshakes. Interestingly, Castro was such an ice cream aficionado that in 1966 he spearheaded the construction of Havana’s famous Coppelia, a massive ice cream parlour which seated 1,000 guests and served a then impressive 26 different flavours. Yet despite the mob having found the perfect delivery mechanism for Castro’s poison, once again the plot quickly unraveled. When the would-be assassin went to retrieve the poison capsule from the freezer where he had hidden it, he found it frozen to the wall. His attempts to free the capsule caused it to rupture, scuppering the assassination attempt. It was the closest they came to actually killing Fidel Castro.
But this failure was not for lack of trying, for over the next decade the agency would hatch a dizzying array of harebrained assassination schemes, each more outlandish than the next. One such plot involved planting a conch shell packed with explosives near a reef where Castro liked to scuba dive. The shell was even painted in bright colours to make it especially attractive. Other schemes involved blowing Castro’s head off with exploding cigars, pushing him into a vat of molten metal while he toured a steel mill, injecting him with a poison-tipped needle disguised in a pen, shooting him with a gun hidden in a television camera, or killing him with a grenade disguised as a baseball – another of Castro’s favourite pastimes.
Of course, none of these attempts proved successful, and in 1976 the findings of the Church Committee – a U.S. Senate group established to investigate abuses by the CIA, FBI, NSA, and IRS – prompted President Gerald Ford to pass a series of Intelligence Services reforms which, among other things, banned the assassination of foreign leaders. This effectively brought Operation Mongoose to an end. Like the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Mongoose had turned into an embarrassing failure for the U.S. Government, swallowing countless millions of dollars while accomplishing little of substance. Meanwhile, the U.S. government had found more effective ways of containing Cuban influence. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the United States imposed a complete trade embargo against Cuba.
But while the CIA was no longer allowed to assassinate Castro directly, they continued to work with Cuban exiles and other anti-Castro forces. As recently as 2000, former CIA operative Luis Posada was arrested in Panama for planting explosives in a podium where Castro was scheduled to speak. Castro’s security detail found and removed the explosives, and Castro’s speech proceeded as planned. In 2004, Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned and released Posada, who subsequently fled to the United States.
According to former Cuban Intelligence officer Fabian Escalante, over his lifetime Fidel Castro survived a whopping 638 assassination attempts. This number, however, is highly debated, with declassified CIA records confirming only 8 officially-sanctioned plots. Nonetheless, Castro’s apparent invulnerability became a part of his public image, with the leader once claiming that:
“If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.”
On another occasion, Castro was offered a Galápagos tortoise as a gift. But upon learning it would live for 100 years or more, he declined the offer, quipping:
“That’s the problem with pets. You get attached to them and then they die on you.”
Indeed, for a man forever in the world’s crosshairs, Castro lived an astonishingly long life, with the leader stating on his 90th birthday that:
“Never would such an idea have occurred to me. It was not the fruit of any effort, it was the whim of fate. Soon I will be like all the rest.”
These words would prove prophetic, for three months later on November 25, 2016, Fidel Castro finally died – not from an exploding cigar or poison milkshake, but the killer that gets us all in the end: time.
Expand for ReferencesThe Bay of Pigs Invasion and its Aftermath, April 1961-October 1962, U.S. State Department Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/bay-of-pigs#:~:text=Operation%20Mongoose%20was%20designed%20to,wide%2Dranging%20purpose%20and%20scope.
CIA Plot to Kill Castro Described, The New York Times, April 30, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/30/archives/cia-plot-to-kill-castro-described-agency-flew-2-assassins-to-cuba.html
Myre, Greg, In the CIA’s 1st Plot Against the Castros, Fidel Wasn’t the Target, NPR, May 4, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/04/992951030/in-the-cias-1st-plot-against-the-castros-fidel-wasnt-the-target
Fidel Castro, History.com, March 4, 2020, https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/fidel-castro
Parry, Hannah, From Poisoned Cigars to Exploding Seashells: How Fidel Castro Survived ‘More Than 600’ CIA Assassination Attempts Before Passing Away at 90, The Daily Mail, November 26, 2016, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3973264/From-poisoned-cigars-exploding-seashells-Fidel-Castro-survived-half-century-crackpot-CIA-assassination-attempts-passing-away-90.html
Mob Involved in Attempts to Assassinate Castro, The Mob Museum, November 29, 2016, https://themobmuseum.org/blog/mob-attempts-assassinate-castro/
CIA Assassination Plot Targeted Cuba’s Raul Castro, National Security Archive, April 16, 2021, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuba/2021-04-16/documents-cia-assassination-plot-targeted-raul-castro
634 Ways to Kill Fidel, Seven Stories Press, https://www.sevenstories.com/blogs/258-634-ways-to-kill-fidel
Hughes, Trevor, Assassins Repeatedly Tried and Failed to Kill Castro Over the Decades, USA Today, November 26, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/11/26/assassins-repeatedly-tried-and-failed-kill-castro-over-decades/94478628/
How Castro Survived 638 Very Cunning Assassination Attempts, ABC, November 28, 2016, https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/how-castro-survived-638-assassination-attempts/8064788
Matthews, Dylan, 7 Bizarre Ways the US Tried to Kill or Topple Fidel Castro, Vox, November 26, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/26/13752514/us-fidel-castro-assassination
Campbell, Duncan, Close But No Cigar: How America Failed to Kill Fidel Castro, November 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/26/fidel-castro-cia-cigar-assasination-attempts
The post The Many Hilarious Ways the CIA Tried to Assassinate Fidel Castro appeared first on Today I Found Out.
From the dawn of history we humans have been obsessed with measurement, striving to gauge, rank, and quantify every part of our world from the tallest mountain to the tiniest grain of sand. It is an obsession which led to the development of the precise mathematics and science which underpin our modern world. But one unfortunate result of this millennia-long quest has been to saddle us with a bewildering array of disparate weights and measures, many of which to modern eyes appear completely arbitrary and illogical. Much of this apparent arbitrariness stems from these systems of measurement having been created in an era before precise measuring instruments, when people had to rely on everyday objects and observations to make sense of their world. For example, the mile, now defined as 5,280 feet or 1,609.344 metres, derives its name from the Latin word for “one thousand,” and once corresponded to a thousand standard paces of a marching Roman soldier. Similarly, the acre, now defined as 43,560 square feet or 4,047 square metres, was traditionally the average area of land which could be ploughed by a team of oxen in one day. Slightly more modern but equally based in everyday agrarian life is horsepower, developed by engineer James Watt in the late 18th Century to measure the output of steam engines. Defined today as 745.7 watts, one horsepower originally referred to the mechanical power needed by a draft horse to lift a 550 pound weight a distance of one foot over one second. Essentially Watt wanted a way to show people how economical it would be to replace their draft horses with his engines.
It isn’t known exactly how he came up with the numbers he did, as there are conflicting accounts of the experiments he ran. And, in truth, that’s a very generous estimate as very few horses could maintain that kind of power for a full workday, but getting a perfect figure wasn’t that important to what Watt was trying to do. Further, by overestimating what a horse could do, whether intentionally or not, he made sure that his product would always over deliver what he said when trying to get people to buy it, which is a great word-of-mouth marketing trick.
Moving on from there, other common systems of measurement are baffling on an entirely different level, and one of the most widespread and confusing is the concept of “gauge.” While the term originates from the use of a standardized measuring tool or gauge for inspection, the various measurement systems known as “gauge” are as different as the objects they measure.
The most common use of “gauge” is to measure the thickness of sheet metal and the diameter of metal wire. The gauge scale works opposite to what one might expect, with 1-gauge sheet measuring 0.28 inches thick but 10 gauge sheet only 0.14 inches. Similarly 1-gauge wire measures 0.3 inches in diameter and 10-gauge wire 0.128. This system, however, starts to make a lot more sense once you consider how these materials are actually manufactured. Sheet metal is produced by passing thick sheet steel through heavy rollers, while wire is manufactured by pulling metal rods through a draw plate – a hardened metal die with a series of precise holes drilled in it. The gauge number refers to the number of times a sheet is passed through the rollers or a wire through the draw plate, with the metal getting progressively thinner with each pass. Thus, the higher the gauge, the thinner the metal. Originally, the exact thickness of each gauge number was based on the standard thickness of the original – or 0-gauge – starting material: 0.2813 inches for sheet metal and 0.324 inches for wire. Later, smaller gauge numbers, written as 2/0, 3/0, 4/0 and so on were added to accommodate thicker materials. Nowadays, however, sheet metal and wire are typically measured by simple thickness or diameter in millimetres or fractions of an inch, while the gauge systems still in use have been rationalized to make them more consistent. For example, in the British Standard Wire Gauge or SWG system, introduced in 1883, wire sizes are fitted to a pre-calculated exponential curve wherein the weight per unit length changes by 20% per step. This, in turn means that wire diameter decreases by approximately 10.6% between gauge numbers.
Gauge is also used to measure hollow tubes, though in this case gauge refers not to the diameter of the tube but rather its wall thickness. As in other gauge systems, the higher the gauge number, the thinner the tube walls. This again derives from the manufacturing process, with the walls getting thinner each time a tube is drawn through a tool called a swage. In industry, tube dimensions are typically given as a combination of outer diameter and gauge. However, this applies only to larger structural tube sizes; in the Birmingham Gauge System, commonly used for hypodermic needles, gauge numbers refer not to wall thickness alone but rather to a standardized combination of outer diameter and wall thickness. Wall thickness also does not consistently decrease with diameter, with some higher gauges actually having thicker walls than lower gauges. The Birmingham scale ranges from 00000 gauge, with a diameter of half an inch, down to 36-gauge, with a diameter of 0.003 inches, with 19-26 gauge being the most common diameters for hypodermic needles. Further adding to the confusion, intravenous catheters, though inserted using hypodermic needles, are measured using an entirely different system called French Gauge. Unlike in Birmingham Gauge, a higher French Gauge number indicates a thicker catheter, with the numbers corresponding to three times the diameter of the catheter tube in millimetres. Thus a 3 French Gauge tube has an outer diameter of 1mm.
And if all this wasn’t enough, Gauge only applies to seamless drawn tubing; for welded pipes like those used to carry water and sewage, yet another system known as Pipe Schedule is used. Each standard pipe size is available in up to 11 standard pipe schedules, ranging from 5 to 160, each defined by a particular ratio between the internal pressure of the pipe and maximum allowable stress in the pipe wall. Thus, as schedule increases, so does the thickness of the pipe wall compared to its outer diameter, meaning that the higher the schedule, the more internal pressure a pipe can carry. But as pipe schedule is based on calculations of mechanical stress, the ratio between pipe thickness and pipe diameter is not constant across each schedule. For example, for a 1-inch schedule 30 pipe the ratio is 13.5% while for a 3-inch schedule 30 pipe it is only 5%. Thus, in most practical applications it is easier look up the dimensions of a particular pipe size on a standard chart rather than calculate it.
Yet another way in which gauge is commonly used is to measure the barrel diameter or “bore” of firearms, particularly shotguns. As in other gauge systems, the higher the gauge, the smaller the diameter, with a 16-gauge barrel, for instance, being smaller than a 12-gauge barrel. However, unlike with sheet metal, wire, or tubing, this system is based not on the manufacturing process of the barrel, but a totally different and archaic system involving lead, the metal traditionally used to make shotgun projectiles. If you were to take a pound of lead, divide it into 12 equal pieces, and form those pieces into perfect spheres, each of those spheres will have a diameter of 0.729 inches or 18.53mm – the exact inner diameter of a 12-gauge shotgun barrel. Thus, shotgun gauge refers to the number of pieces into which that pound of lead is divided; the higher the number, the smaller the resulting spheres, and the smaller the barrel diameter. The only common exception to this is .410 gauge, commonly used for hunting small game like rabbits or grouse. In this case .410 is not actually a gauge but simply the calibre or internal diameter of the barrel in inches.
But while gauge is used to measure the diameter of the barrel, the actual pellets or “shot” fired by a shotgun are measured using an entirely different system. As with gauge, a higher number corresponds to a smaller pellet diameter, but as there are multiple different classification systems still in use, things get very confusing very quickly. In the British system shot is classified according to the number of pellets per ounce, with, for example, AAA shot corresponding to 35 pellets per ounce, A shot 50 pellets per ounce, BB shot 72 pellets per ounce, and No.2 shot 87 pellets per ounce. The American and European systems are similar but differ in the actual diameter of each shot type, the American system being based on hundredths of an inch and the European system on millimetres, with each number corresponding to a 0.25mm decrease in diameter. This system, incidentally, is the origin of the “BBs” traditionally used in children’s BB guns. “BB” in this case does not stand for “Ball Bearing” as is sometimes claimed but rather BB-size shot, once defined as .180 inches but now standardized at .177 inches or 4.5mm. Buckshot, used against larger game, is measured using a similar – but once again slightly different – system. As with birdshot, the British system is based on shot weight, with SG or “small game” shot corresponding to 8 pellets per ounce. Each subsequent size, designated as SSG, SSSG and so on, is half the weight of the last. The American system is centred around #0 buck, with larger pellets designated by additional zeroes – as in the ubiquitous “double-aught-buck” – and smaller pellets by larger numbers like #1 buck, #2 buck, and so on. These sizes in turn correspond to an increase of approximately 2-3 pellets per ounce. However, given the long and complex history of these measures and the inexact methods used to create them, most of these sizes are more a matter of tradition than any rational system.
And finally, we come to the last common use of gauge: as a measure of the width of railroad tracks. Unlike other gauge-based systems, railroad gauge is not based on any overarching system of measurement but rather evolved over time to meet the ever-changing needs of railway rolling stock. The earliest common track gauge of around 4 feet 4 inches was based on the width of the wagons and horse teams used to haul coal and other minerals out of mines. But as steam locomotives continued to grow, so too did track gauge. What is now known as a standard gauge of4 feet, 8-1/2 inches was first used on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, while the broad gauge of7 feet, 1/4 inch was first used on the Great Western Railway in 1833 to give trains greater lateral stability. However, the use of different gauges on competing rail lines lead massive compatibility problems within the British rail system, and in 1846 the Regulating Gauge of Railways Act mandated that all lines be converted to standard gauge. Today, Standard Gauge is the most commonly-used railway gauge in the world, though Broad Gauge – defined as any gauge significantly wider than 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches – is widely used in India and Russia, while Narrow Gauge is used in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and in industrial settings like mines and factory complexes.
And so we reach the end of our journey through the arcane and confusing world of gauge. After all that, all I can say is: I, for one, welcome our Metric overlords.
Expand for ReferencesRinella, Steven, Shotgun Shells and Shot Size: Everything You Need to Know, Meat Eater, March 13, 2018, https://www.themeateater.com/hunt/general/understanding-shotgun-shells
Milbury, Matt, Pipe Schedule, Piping Designer, January 18, 2016, https://www.piping-designer.com/index.php/disciplines/mechanical/stationary-equipment/pipe/494-pipe-schedule
Where Did the Hypodermic Needle Gauge System Come From? The Trauma Pro, March 28, 2018, https://thetraumapro.com/2018/03/28/where-did-the-hypodermic-needle-gauge-system-come-from/
Pipe or Tube: What’s the Difference? Sharpe Products, https://www.sharpeproducts.com/pipe-or-tube-what-is-the-difference-1
Cushman, David, Wire Gauge Conversion Chart, http://www.dave-cushman.net/elect/wiregauge.html
Pöll, J.S, The Story of the Gauge, Association of Anaesthetists, April 6, 2002, https://associationofanaesthetists-publications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2044.1999.00895.x
The post What’s Up With Measuring So Many Things in “Gauge”? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In a fenced-off field near Langdon, North Dakota stands a strange and enigmatic object: a 24-metre high truncated concrete pyramid, looming over the prairie. Scattered around its base are other strange forms cast in concrete and steel, and a cluster of low, prefabricated buildings, now empty and slowly rusting away. These are the remains of the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, a massive effort by the United States Military to defend its nuclear arsenal from missile attack. The culmination of 20 years of cutting-edge research, the complex took 6 years and $6 billion (about $60 billion today) to build. Yet only one day after the system came online, the United States Congress pulled the plug on the entire project. Within four months, the sprawling, high-tech complex was shuttered, decommissioned, and abandoned, becoming a crumbling monument to Cold War paranoia. This is the story of Project SAFEGUARD, the missile defence system that never was.
The roots of SAFEGUARD go back to the development of the Nike-Ajax and Nike-Hercules missiles in the early 1950s. These weapons were designed to shoot down Soviet Tu-95 and M-4 manned strategic bombers, which at the time were the only means of delivering nuclear weapons. But a new generation of nuclear weapons in the form of intermediate-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles were just around the corner. Missile-launched warheads were far smaller and faster than bombers, plunging down on their targets from outer space at speeds of 6 kilometres per second. It thus became clear that a new type of defense system would be needed to counter this coming threat: an anti-ballistic-missile or ABM. So, in 1955, the U.S. Army commissioned a research group composed of Western Electric, Bell Labs, and Douglas Aircraft to develop an anti-ballistic missile system known as Nike-Zeus.
Nike-Zeus consisted of six basic components. The first was the missile itself, developed from the older Nike-Hercules, which could travel at 4 times the speed of sound and reach a maximum altitude of 280 kilometres, allowing it to intercept enemy reentry vehicles above the atmosphere. Steering was via a set of moveable fins while inside the atmosphere, while exhaust gasses vented through the fins allowed for maneuvering in the vacuum of space. The missile was armed with 400-kiloton W50 enhanced-radiation nuclear warhead, which destroyed the target through a combination of blast and radiation effects.
But the most challenging aspect of Nike-Zeus development was the radar system, which detected and tracked incoming warheads and guided the anti-ballistic missiles to interception. This system comprised five basic components: the Acquisition Radar, which detected incoming warheads at long ranges and alerted the rest of the system; the Target Track Radar, which determined the warheads’ position and trajectory with greater accuracy; the Discrimination Radar, which separated out the warheads from the remains of the rocket booster and other clutter; the Missile Track Radar, which guided the Nike-Zeus missiles to interception; and the Data Processing Centre which tied the whole system together. These systems were marvels of 1950s electronics engineering, incorporating some of the first large-scale applications of the then-new technologies of transistors and modular architecture. The target-track radar was able to scan some 4 million cubic kilometres of space while keeping track of multiple different targets and interceptor missiles.
In 1958, testing of the Nike-Zeus system began at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Proving Grounds. While initially the missiles suffered from a variety of issues, including excessive frictional heating of the guidance fins, these were eventually ironed out, and by 1963 the system had successfully performed 9 consecutive intercepts, both of Nike-Hercules missiles launched from Kwajalein and Atlas ICMBs launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Meanwhile, a prototype of the Target Track Radar tracked the Echo 1 communications satellite at an altitude of 3,600 kilometres and successfully received a signal bounced off the moon.
But just as the Nike-Zeus system was poised to enter service, it was abruptly cancelled by the Department of Defense. There were many reasons for this decision. Firstly, Nike-Zeus was developed under the assumption that Soviet ballistic missile deployment would remain relatively low. However, as the USSR continued to field ever greater numbers of increasingly advanced missiles, it became clear that an all-out attack would quickly overwhelm the Nike-Zeus system. Worse still, advancements in nuclear warhead miniaturization allowed missiles to carry multiple inflatable radar-reflector decoys, which would further clutter the radar image and overwhelm the system. Indeed, Army calculations predicted that at least 20 Nike-Zeus missiles would be needed to ensure the destruction of a single enemy warhead. Finally, experiments like Operation Fishbowl in 1962 had revealed that nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere created large radio blackout zones, meaning the first few missile intercepts would effectively blind the whole system – and for more on this phenomenon, please check out our previous video Do Real EMP Weapons Actually Exist, or Are They Only a Thing in Movies?
There was also considerable skepticism as to the practicality of ABM systems in general, with Herbert York, head of the Advanced Research Projects Administration or ARPA, stating:
“The problem here is the usual problem between defense and offenses, measures, countermeasures, counter-counter measures, et cetera, in which it has been my judgment and still is that the battle is so heavily weighted in favor of the offense that it is hopeless against a determined offense and that incidentally applies to our position with regard to an anti-missile that they might build. I am convinced that we can continue to have a missile system that can penetrate any Soviet defense.”
Nonetheless, the Department of Defense directed the Nike-Zeus’ team to develop an even more advanced anti-ballistic-missile system, which became known as Nike X. The Nike X system incorporated a number of advances over Nike-Zeus. Firstly, instead of traditional rotating-antenna radars, the system incorporated the new technology of phased arrays, which allowed the radar beam to be steered electronically instead of mechanically, vastly increasing speed and accuracy. And instead of four radars, the system only used two: a Perimeter Acquisition Radar or PAR to detect incoming warheads at long ranges, and a Missile Site Radar or MSR to track the targets and guide the interceptor missiles. The system could track up to 40 objects simultaneously and detect objects as small as a baseball. Even more important to future technological development, the data processing system for these radars made extensive use of another major advancement in electronics: the integrated circuit.
Secondly, the Nike-X system used not one but two different interceptor missiles. The first of these was the Spartan, an upgraded version of the Nike-Zeus designed for greater speed and altitude and armed with a 5-megaton W71 warhead. This was designed to intercept warheads shortly after they were detected by the PAR, while they were still above the atmosphere. However, thanks to the deployment of radar-reflective decoys and other countermeasures, at least a few warheads were expected to get through this initial defence. Thankfully, these countermeasures would be quickly slowed down by atmospheric friction, causing the real warheads to become decluttered – that is, separated from their decoys and easier to detect. Unfortunately, due to their tremendous speed, the time between the warheads entering the atmosphere and reaching the ground was measured in seconds, creating a very narrow interception window. This secondary, low-altitude interception was performed by a second type of missile, the Martin-Marietta Sprint. Measuring 8 metres long and weighing 3,500 kilograms, the cone-shaped Sprint was one of the most impressive weapons ever developed. Gas-launched from an underground silo, the two-stage missile accelerated at a whopping 100 Gs, going from 0 to Mach 10 in less than 5 seconds. So fast was the Sprint that within seconds of launch, atmospheric friction made its casing glow white-hot. This blistering performance allowed the missile to intercept incoming warheads at altitudes of up to 30 kilometres within 15 seconds.
As with Nike-Zeus, the components of Nike-X were tested at White Sands and Kwajalein, where they performed practice intercepts on Polaris intermediate-range missiles launched from Navy ships and Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from Vandenberg. Between 1963 and 1975, 150 test intercepts were conducted from Kwajalein with a 90% success rate, the last 21 intercepts being complete successes. As the system was expected to be able to survive a nuclear strike, all the major components – especially the above-ground radar antennas – had to be hardened against the effects of blast and radiation. Much of this research was carried out at Canadian Forces Base Suffield in Alberta, Canada, where in 1964 large piles of conventional explosives were used to simulate the blast wave from a nuclear weapon. Components were also exposed to underground nuclear detonations to test their radiation resistance.
While Nike-X was being developed, world events were making the system’s deployment increasingly urgent. On October 16, 1964, the People’s Republic of China successfully detonated its first atomic bomb, while on June 17, 1967 it tested its first thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb. Suddenly, the bi-polar nuclear contest between the United States and Soviet Union had become a tri-polar one. In response to this new threat, on September 18, 1967, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced the creation of Project SENTINEL, a system of 17 Nike-X sites scattered around the United States to defend the country against the small anticipated Chinese ICBM fleet or a limited strike by the Soviets. To ensure an adequate workforce for construction and easy access to utilities and other resources, the sites would be built just outside major metropolitan areas, with the whole system coordinated from NORAD headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado via a system of hardened microwave-tower links.
Construction soon began on the first Perimeter Acquisition Radar site at Sharpner’s Pond, just outside of Boston. But almost immediately, the entire project became mired in controversy, receiving fierce opposition from multiple sectors. Predictably, residents of communities where Sentinel sites were planned feared that the installations would turn their homes into targets, and mass protests were held in several cities to oppose their construction. Meanwhile, government scientists continued to question the wisdom of ABS systems – not only because they might be ineffective, but because they might paradoxically increase the risk of nuclear war. This argument was based on the prevailing nuclear doctrine at the time: Mutually-Assured Destruction or MAD, which depended on the ability of both superpowers to annihilate the other to deter either from launching a first strike. An effective ABM system would dramatically shift this delicate balance of power, allowing one power to destroy the other while remaining impervious to counter-attack. This in turn, the scientists argued, might provoke the other power – in this case, the Soviet Union – into launching a first strike before the ABM system became operational. Many politicians also opposed Sentinel on the basis of cost, including Pennsylvania Democratic representative Daniel Flood, who argued that fallout shelters would be more effective than ABMs at saving American lives:
“It is estimated that a shelter system at a cost of $2 billion would save 48.5 million lives. The cost per life saved would be about $40.00. An active ballistic missile defense system would cost about $18 billion and would save an estimated 27.8 million lives. The cost per life saved in this case would be about $700….I personally will never recommend an anti-ICBM program unless a fallout program does accompany it. I believe that even if we do not have an anti-ICBM program, we nonetheless should proceed with the fallout shelter program.”
The debate over Sentinel reached its peak in 1969 with the election of President Richard Nixon, who agreed to hold a thorough review of the system. This culminated in the Senate authorizing the construction of Sentinel on August 7, 1969, the resolution passing by only a single voice. However, the scope of the system was considerably narrowed, with the number of missile sites being reduced from 17 to 12 and the system’s mission shifted from protecting the U.S. population to defending the nation’s offensive weapons installations. In this new guise, Sentinel was re-named SAFEGUARD. Construction of the Sharpner’s Pond PAR site was halted, and development efforts refocused on a pair of sites in North Dakota and Montana to defend the area’s 1,000 Minuteman ICBM sites – a strategy known as counterforce defense. According to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, this strategy minimized many of the system’s potential shortcomings:
“When you are looking toward city defense, it needs to be a perfect or near perfect system because, as I examined the possibility of even a thick defense of cities, I have found that even the most optimistic projections, considering the highest development of the art, would mean that we would still lose 30 million to 40 million lives…[but] when you are talking about protecting your deterrent, it need not be perfect. It is necessary only to protect enough of the deterrent that the retaliatory second strike will be of such magnitude that the enemy would think twice about launching a first strike.”
But just as construction was getting underway, world events once again intervened to change the fortunes of SAFEGUARD. On May 26, 1972, President Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty or SALT, which reduced the number of nuclear weapons systems both nations were allowed to field. Under the terms of the treaty, the US and USSR could deploy two ABM systems each with a total of 100 interceptor missiles to defend ballistic missile sites and strategic command headquarters. Consequently, construction was halted on the Montana SAFEGUARD site and the completed infrastructure demolished. For budgetary reasons it was also decided to abandon the site defending Washington, DC. This left a single ABM site in North Dakota, which was named after Lt. General Stanley R. Mickelsen, the first commander of Army Air Defence Command. The entire complex consisted of six separate sites spread out over an area of some 400 square miles. The Perimeter Acquisition Radar, housed in a large concrete cube, was located outside the town of Cavalier, its single radar antenna facing north to detect missiles coming over the North Pole. The pyramid-like Missile Site Radar, with a radar antenna in each of its four faces for 360-degree coverage, was located near the town of Langdon. This site also housed silos for 30 Spartan long-range missiles and 16 Sprint short-range missiles. Finally, scattered around the surrounding countryside were four Remote Sprint Launch or RSL sites with 16 Sprint missiles each. The site finally became operational on October 1, 1975 – just 3 days ahead of the projected deadline. At its peak, the facility employed 500 military and 1,200 civilian personnel, with the Army carrying out major improvements to housing, utilities, and other services in neighbouring towns to accommodate the large influx of people.
But this hyper-advanced shield against a counter-force strike was not to be, for only one day after the SAFEGUARD system became operational, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to shut it down. The reasons given for the cancellation were familiar ones: advances in countermeasures technology and the use of Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles or MIRVs would overwhelm SAFEGUARD; the system was too expensive; ABMs destabilized the global balance of power. Furthermore, the Chinese ballistic missile force the system was intended to defend against never materialized. The general consensus was that SAFEGUARD was a “system in search of a mission”, while Texas Democratic representative George Mahon stated:
“We have spent $5.7 billion preparing to defend ourselves against the intercontinental ballistic missile. The Safeguard system has not been effective, except perhaps from a cosmetic standpoint. If we had done nothing, it would have been the same.”
Yet contrary to a popular myth, SAFEGUARD did not shut down immediately. It remained active until November, while decommissioning officially began on February 10, 1976. The only part of the system to remain active was the PAR, which is operated by what is now Cavalier Space Force Station. Upgraded and re-designated the Enhanced Perimeter Acquisition Attack Characterization System or PARCS, it is used to track satellites and other objects in earth orbit. The other system sites were stripped of their missiles and electronic equipment and sold to private owners. The MSR site is now owned by the Cavalier County Job Development Authority, which plans to renovate the property and develop an interpretive centre; while the concrete pyramid itself was acquired in 2022 by Bitzero Blockchain Inc, who plan to convert it into a data centre. Finally, one of the three Remote Sprint Launch sites, RSL #3 near Cavalier, is open for private tours.
The SAFEGUARD system was the product of 20 years and $20 billion in research and development – 6 years and $6 billion of which was spent on constructing the Mickelsen complex itself. While the system’s abrupt cancellation after only a day of operation may seem like a colossal waste of money and effort, the project was not without its benefits. Many of the advancements in radar in computer technology developed for SAFEGUARD are still in use today, while the project was a major boost to the local economies and public infrastructure of North Dakota counties surrounding the radar and missile sites. But most importantly, ABM projects like SAFEGUARD served as key bargaining chips in Cold War diplomacy, convincing the Soviets to sign arms limitations treaties like SALT and START. These treaties have arguably done more to secure world peace in a nuclear world than defence systems like SAFEGUARD ever could.
Expand for References
AT&T Archives: A 20-Year History of Antiballistic Missile Systems, AT&T Tech Channel, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARx2-wRn9-Y
Liles, Jordan, Did the Mickelsen Safeguard Complex Close After One Day? Snopes, march 15, 2021, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mickelsen-safeguard-complex-close/
Finney, John, Safeguard ABM System to Shut Down; $5 Billion Spent in 6 Years Since Debate, The New York Times, November 25, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/11/25/archives/safeguard-abm-system-to-shut-down-5-billion-spent-in-6-years-since.html
Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, https://srmsc.org
Garwin, Richard & Bethe, Hans, Anti-Ballistic-Missile Systems, Scientific American, March 1968, https://rlg.fas.org/03%2000%201968%20Bethe-Garwin%20ABM%20Systems.pdf
Selk, Merry, Sentinel in the Backyard: The Transitional Reaction, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1969, https://books.google.ca/books?id=WgcAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA7&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
The post That Time the U.S. Military Spent $60 Billion On Something and 1 Day After Completing It, Threw It Away appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On December 26, 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s second-largest superpower and flagship for state communism for 74 years, suddenly ceased to exist. The Cold War, the four-decade- long ideological struggle between East and West, was finally over. But while December 26 marked the official birth of the newly-democratic Russian Federation, the dissolution of the Soviet Union had been a chaotic, drawn-out affair, fuelled by decades of economic stagnation, the attempted reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, independence movements in the Soviet republics, and countless other factors. In the process, 18 former Soviet republics and satellite states found themselves newly independent: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. For Ukraine, the transition to independence was particularly dramatic, as it left the nation in possession of thousands of formerly Soviet nuclear weapons. Yet within five years Ukraine had rid itself of all these weapons and signed the international nuclear non-proliferation treaty. But what led Ukraine to give up such an overwhelming strategic advantage, and what does this decision mean for a nation once again facing invasion and occupation by Russia?
Ukraine has long been a key strategic asset in Russian and later Soviet global affairs, being both the breadbasket of Eastern Europe and home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sebastopol. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union also stationed large numbers of nuclear weapons in the region for use against targets both in Europe and North America. At the time of Ukraine’s independence on July 16, 1990, these numbered some 1,700 warheads divided among various delivery systems, including 33strategic bombers and 130 UR-100N Stiletto and 46 RT-23 Molodets intercontinental ballistic missiles. This effectively made Ukraine the third-largest nuclear power on earth after the United States and Russia.
Nonetheless, for a while these weapons still remained under the control of the Soviet military. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, the political status of Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal suddenly became uncertain. In January 1992, Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk ordered military commanders in charge of nuclear forces to pledge loyalty to the newly-independent Ukraine, which would give Kyiv administrative control over the weapons. However, many commanders refused, plunging Ukraine into a period of tense confusion and political debate regarding the nation’s future as a nuclear-armed nation. On May 23, 1992, Ukraine, along with former Soviet republics Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, signed the Lisbon Protocol, which under the terms of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty or START restricted signatories from deploying more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and 1,600 bombers or intercontinental ballistic missiles. Internally, however, Ukraine had little intention of complying with theProtocol, with many in the government pushing for the country to retain nuclear capability as a safeguard against future invasion and occupation. Despite the United States Government pledging $175 million towards disarmament efforts, in early 1993 Kyiv claimed national ownership of its former Soviet weapons and began implementing administrative control over the arsenal.
Ultimately, however, Ukraine concluded that the costs of maintaining nuclear status far outweighed any potential benefits. While Ukraine maintained extensive facilities for designing, building, and maintaining aircraft and ballistic missiles, it had no nuclear production capabilities of its own and would have had great difficulty maintaining and replacing its warhead stockpile. The command and control infrastructure for launching its nuclear weapons was also based entirely in Russia. It would thus have taken Ukraine years and millions of dollarsto bring its inherited arsenal under full operational control – an expense the nation’s shaky post-independence economy could scarcely afford. Furthermore, the arsenal itself was of limited use as a deterrent against Russia, for the UR-100N and RT-23 missiles had a minimum range of 5,000 to 10,000 kilometres and could only be targeted against Russia’s far eastern regions. Most importantly, however, a nuclear-armed Ukraine would likely have faced sanctions or withdrawal of diplomatic recognition from the United States and other NATO countries, or provoked retaliation by Russia – the very thing the arsenal was meant to prevent.
Thus, in April 1993, a group of 162 Ukrainian politicians submitted 13 preconditions for ratifying the START treaty, including assurance of national sovereignty and security from Russia and the United States, international assistance for weapons dismantlement, and financial compensation for all weapons-grade Uranium and Plutonium surrendered. Furthermore, Kyiv stated that it would dismantle only 42% of its warheads and 36% of its missiles, with the rest remaining under Ukrainian control. Russia and the United States balked at these demands, but Ukraine held firm, leading to a temporary breakdown in negotiations. Eventually, however, an American offer of additional financial assistance for dismantlement changed Kyiv’s mind, and on January 14, 1994, Ukraine signed the Trilateral Statement agreeing to full nuclear disarmament. This was followed on February 3 by Ukraine’s ratification of the START treaty, and on December 5 by the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, which read in part:
“The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,
Welcoming the accession of Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as non-nuclear-weapon State,
Taking into account the commitment of Ukraine to eliminate all nuclear weapons from its territory within a specified period of time…
Confirm the following:
1. …their commitment… to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.
2. … their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
3. … their commitment… to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
4. … their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.
5. …their commitment not to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapon State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a State in association or alliance with a nuclear-weapon State.”
The Budapest Memorandum gave Ukraine 7 years to completely disarm, and by 2001 – one year ahead of schedule – all warheads and missiles had been dismantled and returned to Russia and all missile silos decommissioned. This made Ukraine the first – and thus far only – nation to give up a functioning nuclear arsenal. The only exception to Ukraine’s status as a nuclear-free nation were a handful of nuclear-armed ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, based at Sebastopol under a strategic agreement between the two nations.
But while total disarmament may have seemed the most economically and politically prudent move in 1994, recent acts of Russian aggression have led many to reconsider this fateful decision. Among those who have expressed betrayal at the hands of Russia and the other Budapest Memorandum signatories is former Ukrainian defence minister Andriy Zahorodniuk, who stated:
“We gave away the capability for nothing. Now, every time somebody offers us to sign a strip of paper, the response is, ‘Thank you very much. We already had one of those some time ago.’”
These sentiments echo those of former missile base commander Volodymyr Tolubko, who upon his election to the Ukrainian parliament in 1992, told the assembly that total disarmament was “romantic and premature” and that Ukraine should maintain at least a residual missile force to “deter any aggressor.” The following year, John Mearsheimer, an international relations theorist at the University of Chicago, concurred that Ukraine maintaining a nuclear arsenal was “imperative” to ensure that:
“…[the Russians], who have a history of bad relations with Ukraine, do not move to reconquer it.”
Following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the cause of nuclear rearmament began to be taken up by more and more mainstream politicians, including former foreign minister Volodymyr Ohryzko, who in March 2014 stated that Ukraine had the moral and legal right to reestablish its nuclear status. That July, an ultranationalist parliamentary bloc introduced a bill for nuclear rearmament, while a poll conducted later that year found that nearly 50% of the Ukrainian population supported the reestablishment of a nuclear arsenal. More recently in 2021, Andriy Melnyk , Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, stated that Kyiv would consider nuclear rearmament if its bid to join NATO was rejected – though the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry later denied Melnyk’s claims.
Skeptics of Ukraine’s disarmament point to numerous examples of nations who gave up weapons of mass destruction only to be subsequently betrayed and invaded. For instance, in 2003 Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi agreed to abandon his nuclear and chemical weapons programs in exchange for improved diplomatic and economic relations with the West, even going so far as to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors into the country. Yet despite this show of good faith, following the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, Western nations provided air support and other military aid to anti-government forces, ultimately leading to Gaddafi’s death and the collapse of his government. Similarly, in 2015 the Islamic Republic of Iran signed a deal with the Obama administration agreeing to extensive international oversight of its civilian nuclear program. Barely one year later, however, the administration of newly-elected president Donald Trump reneged on this agreement, hitting Iran with crushing economic sanctions and launching a campaign of targeted assassinations against its military leaders.
Standing in stark contrast to these examples is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which by stubbornly clinging to its nuclear arsenal, rearmament proponents argue, has succeeded in rising from pariah state to a valued security partner of the United States.
Many experts, however, are skeptical of this view, arguing that the instability of Libya and Iran and the ongoing security of Pakistan and North Korea are due to multiple complex factors unrelated to nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the notion that nuclear weapons guarantee security continues to gain traction in Ukraine, as Mariana Budjeryn, an expert on Ukraine at Harvard University, explained in 2022:
“The gist is, ‘We had the weapons, gave them up and now look what’s happening.’ On a policy level, I see no movement toward any kind of reconsideration. But on a popular level, that’s the narrative.”
Indeed, not only would nuclear rearmament be financially costly for a nation already fighting for its survival, but it would also likely cost Ukraine dearly on the world diplomatic stage, as former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer argues:
“A lot of countries are supportive of Ukraine, [but if it went nuclear], that support would dry up quickly.”
But even if Kyiv is not seriously considering rearmament, experts worry that the rising popularity of the pro-nuclear argument combined with international inaction against the Russian invasion might send the wrong message to nations considering the acquisition of nuclear arsenals. As Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, stated in 2022:
“If a diplomatic solution is not achieved, it will reinforce the impression that nuclear-armed states can bully nonnuclear states.”
Mariana Budjeryn agrees, arguing that:
“[It] really doesn’t look good for the international non-proliferation regime. Because if you have a country that disarms and then becomes a target of such a threat and a victim of such a threat at the hands of a nuclear-armed country, it just sends a really wrong signal to other countries that might want to pursue nuclear weapons.”
However, she remains confident that Ukraine made the right decision in 1994:
“I would say, after having researched this topic for nearly a decade, Ukraine did the right thing at the time. It did the right thing by itself, and also by the international community. It reduced the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world and that makes everyone safer. Now, looking at this history, however, the guarantors — the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum especially but also the international community more broadly — needs to react in the way as to not make Ukraine doubt in the rightness of that decision.”
For now, only time will tell whether the other signatories of the Budapest Memorandum will make good on their promise to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty and security, or whether Ukraine will find itself forever regretting its decision to become a non-nuclear nation. Sláva Ukrayíni.
Expand for References
Kelly, Mary Luise, Why Ukraine Gave Up Its Nuclear Weapons – and What That Means in an Invasion by Russia, NPR, February 21, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1082124528/ukraine-russia-putin-invasion
Broad, William, Ukraine Gave Up a Giant Nuclear Arsenal 30 Years Ago. Today There Are Regrets. The New York Times, February 5, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/science/ukraine-nuclear-weapons.html
Hussain, Murtaza, Lessons From Ukraine: Breaking Promises to Small Countries Means They’ll Never Give Up Nukes, The Intercept, February 27, 2022, https://theintercept.com/2022/02/27/ukraine-nuclear-weapons-russia-invasion/
Kimball, Daryl, Ukraine, Nuclear Weapons, and Security Assurances at a Glance, Arms Control Association, February 2022, https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Ukraine-Nuclear-Weapons
What Prompted Ukraine to Give Up Its Nuclear Arsenal? Times of India, February 26, 2022, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/what-prompted-ukraine-to-give-up-its-nuclear-arsenal/articleshow/89855562.cms
The post Why Did Ukraine Give Up Its Nuclear Weapons? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The world of aviation abounds with thousands of unique aircraft designs, from tiny ultralights to giant military transports. Yet no matter how advanced or outlandish these designs get, nearly all fall into one of only two basic categories: fixed wing or rotary wing. But the history of aviation, like that of all technologies, is riddled with false starts and dead ends, and once upon a time the landscape of aircraft design was considerably more diverse. For example, well into the 20th Century many inventors believed that flapping-wing ornithopters were a viable means of human flight, while in the 1920s it seemed like giant gas-filled airships were the future of commercial aviation, offering a more comfortable and luxurious experience than airliners of the time. By the end of the 1930s, a series of high-profile disasters including the crash of the British R101 and German Hindenburg (which by the way despite the plummeting firey ball, over half the passengers actually survived that one), this allbrought the age of the giant airship to an abrupt close, ceding the future of flight to the airplane and eventually the helicopter. But largely forgotten among aviation’s many false starts is a bizarre effort to achieve manned flight using giant powered kites. And the unlikely figure behind this eccentric quest was none other than legendary inventor Alexander Graham Bell.
Born in Scotland in 1847, Bell is perhaps best remembered for his work on the telephone, which he patented in the United States in 1876. However, Bell’s creative genius knew few bounds, spanning fields as diverse as architecture, medicine, genetics, and – his lifelong passion – teaching the deaf to speak. Among his numerous inventions were the first metal detector, a precursor to the iron lung, an improved version of Thomas Edison’s phonograph called the Graphophone, and a hydrofoil boat that in 1919 set a world speed record of 113 kilometres an hour. In 1893, flush with cash from the telephone, Bell and his wife Mabel built a palatial estate at Baddeck on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, which they dubbed Beinn Bhreagh [“Ben Vree-ah”] – Gaelic for “Beautiful Mountain.” In addition to the large mansion, the grounds included a variety of facilities dedicated to Bell’s wide range of scientific interests, such as an observatory, a sheep farm for studying genetics, and a boat house where Bell developed hydrofoils. That same year, Bell would develop a new obsession: human flight, research on which was beginning to pick up steam all around the world. His entry into this exciting new field was celebrated by his fellow scientists and inventors, including meteorologist Henry Clayton, who wrote in 1903:
“It is fortunate for those interested in aeronautics and the exploration of the air that Professor Alexander Graham Bell has joined the band of experimenters and is lending his inventive genius to the cause.”
Bell began his experiments by building a helicopter-like device with rotating wings, powered by a miniature steam boiler. Though the contraption successfully flew across a room, it was impossible to control and like all steam-powered machines could not be scaled up to a level needed for manned flight, steam engines simply having too low a power-to-weight ratio. Nonetheless, Bell was optimistic, writing to his wife:
“I have the feeling that this machine may possibly be the father of a long line of vigorous descendants that will plough through the air from Beinn Bhreagh to Washington. And perhaps revolutionize the world! Who can tell? Think of the telephone!”
But the course of Bell’s research would soon be diverted by the work of two men. The first was German inventor Otto Lilienthal, who between 1891 and 1896 performed hundreds of successful, controlled flights in homemade, bird-like hang gliders. The second was Australian Lawrence Hargrave, who in 1893 invented the box kite, a design so efficient Hargrave was able to use three kites to lift himself 16 feet off the ground. Inspired by Hargrave, in 1894 Bell built a giant box kite 14 feet long and 10 feet wide, which he referred to as “a monster, a jumbo, a full-fledged white elephant.” Indeed, it was so large an entire wall of the kite house at Beinn Bhreagh had to be dismantled to get the kite outside. And true to Bell’s description, it proved too heavy to fly in even the strongest winds.
Then, on August 10, 1896, Bell received shocking news: Otto Lilienthal had been killed when a stray gust of wind caused his glider to stall and crash, breaking the inventor’s spine. This event profoundly impacted Bell’s outlook on manned flight, as he wrote in his diary:
“A dead man tells to tales; he advances no further. How can ideas be tested without actually going into
the air and risking one’s life on what may be an erroneous judgement?”
This further pushed Bell to think that kites were the answer. In Bell’s conception, a powered kite did not need to land; instead it could be brought into the wind and moored to the ground by a cable, allowing the pilot to climb down via a rope ladder. And in an emergency, a kite would not violently crash but rather float gently to the ground. At least, so he thought. It was, Bell concluded, the only way for humans to achieve flight safely, and with this in mind he threw himself into research on manned kites.
The main technical hurdle facing Bell was that of scale. When a kite is scaled up, its surface area increases by the square of its length while its volume – and thus its weight – increases by the cube, meaning the kite quickly becomes too heavy to lift itself off the ground. After much experimentation, Bell came up with an elegant solution: the tetrahedral cell, a 3D construction of four triangular faces which could be combined into much larger, modular structures. As multiple cells could share the same structural member, the weight of the kite grew at a much slower rate than conventional designs when scaled up. It was also immensely strong. As Bell explained:
“It is not simply braced in two directions in space like a triangle, but in three directions like a solid.”
Bell’s finalized cell design, built first of black spruce and later aluminium tubing, was 10 inches to a side and covered on two sides with red silk, chosen because it was lightweight, airtight, and photographed well in black-and-white.
Over the next ten years Bell and his assistants test-flew dozens of different sizes and shapes of tetrahedral kites, including rings, prisms, and hexagons. This research reached its peak in 1905 with the construction of the largest kite the world had ever seen: the Frost King. So-named because Bell’s daughter Susie had recently married a man named Jack Frost, the kite measured 30 feet long, contained 1300 cells and had 400 square feet of lifting surface, yet weighed only 165lb. Nonetheless, Bell was forced to wait months for winds strong enough to lift it.
That wind finally came in November 1905 when a powerful gale blew through Baddeck. Bell excitedly rushed out to fly the Frost King, only to discover that his assistants, unwilling to row across the choppy lake, had decided to remain home. Bell, already depressed by the death of his Father two months before, was devastated by the apparent missed opportunity. After writing a note disbanding the kite-flying team, he retreated to his study to sulk. However, his devoted wife Mabel was having none of it. Realizing that her husband was squandering ideal flying conditions, she rounded up the rest of the domestic staff – including Bell’s manservant Charles Thompson, secretary Arthur McCurdy, and coachman Neil McDermid – and together this makeshift team carried the Frost King out onto the testing field. The flight was a resounding success, the kite producing so much lift it accidentally hoisted McDermid nearly 30 feet off the ground. Of the event, Mabel would later write:
“The experiment was so satisfactory, that it demonstrates that this form of kite could sustain a much greater load than he had dared hope.”
However, by this time Bell’s obsession with kites had begun to worry his family and colleagues, many of whom saw the experiments as a technological dead end. For example, a few years earlier, after visiting Beinn Bhreagh in 1901, Bell’s former student Helen Keller opined:
“Mr. Bell has nothing but kites and flying machines on his tongue’s end. Poor dear man, how I wish he would stop wearing himself out in this unprofitable way.”
Bell, however, dismissed his critics as having missed his point, writing:
“The word ‘kite’, unfortunately, is suggestive to most minds of a toy just as the telephone at first was thought to be a toy.”
Ironically, Bell would later suggest developing the tetrahedral kite into a toy, the sales of which he believed could finance the construction of larger machines. In a letter to Mabel, he claimed that if only 1/4 of all American children bought this toy, he could raise over $100,000 (about $3.1 million today). Apparently finding her husband’s logic rather dubious, Mabel instead encouraged him to patent the tetrahedral method of construction and find other applications for it. Towards this end, in August 1907 Bell erected an observation tower on the highest point of Beinn Bhreagh. Composed of three tetrahedral trusses arranged to form one large tetrahedron, the tower was highly efficient structurally and could be easily erected from the ground without the need for cranes or scaffolding. Today, this method of construction is known as an octet frame, and is widely used in applications as diverse as sports stadiums and the International Space Station.
Nonetheless, aeronautical science was rapidly passing Bell by. Among Bell’s many scientific colleagues was Samuel Langley, President of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and main rival to the Wright Brothers in the race to achieve controlled, powered, manned flight. On May 9, 1896, Bell was present when Aerodrome #6, a scale model of Langley’s manned aircraft design, was launched from a houseboat on the Potomac near Quantico, Virginia, and flew for an extraordinary 1 minute, 20 seconds, covering a distance of over 3,000 feet. This demonstration made it clear to Bell that manned flight was just around the corner, and that it would be achieved not by kites, but by winged aircraft.
Thus, at Mabel’s suggestion, on October 1, 1907, Bell formed the Aerial Experiment Association, a group dedicated to advancing aviation technology. Backed by a $20,000 grant from the sale of some of Mabel’s family property, the AEA’s members comprised Bell, engineers J.A.D. McCurdy and Frederick Casey Baldwin, U.S. Army Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, and engine designer Glenn Curtiss. Despite being nearly four years since the Wright Brothers’ historic first flight on December 17, 1903, Bell insisted on carrying on with his kite research. This resulted in the construction of the Cygnet, a man-carrying kite composed of 3400 tetrahedral cells and fitted with a short stabilizer tail and a pair of pontoons. On December 6, 1907, with Lt. Selfridge at the controls, the Cygnet was towed out onto Bras D’Or lake by the steamer Blue Hill. As the steamer accelerated, the kite lifted gracefully into the air, reaching a maximum height of 168 feet. She remained aloft and stable for a full 7 minutes until, suddenly, disaster struck. Selfridge was supposed to cast off the towline as soon as the aircraft touched down on the water, but nestled in among the kite cells, his visibility was limited and by the time he realized he had landed the Cygnet was dragged through the water and torn to pieces. Though Selfridge managed to disentangle himself from the wreckage and swim to the surface, the incident was an eerie portent of things to come. On September 17, 1908 Thomas Selfridge would be killed during a demonstration flight with Orville Wright over Fort Meyer, Virginia, becoming the first person in history to die in a plane crash.
Despite this setback, Bell proceeded with the construction of the improved Cygnet II, which featured a wheeled undercarriage and Curtiss V-8 engine. It proved a dismal failure, as did the even larger Cygnet III, which, despite using a more powerful engine, only managed to lift itself two feet off the ground. During a test flight on March 19, 1912, the tetrahedral structure failed and the aircraft was destroyed beyond repair. This failure finally convinced Bell that this approach to manned flight was a dead end, and he abandoned his kite experiments. However, kites would continue to hold a special place in the inventor’s heart. When Bell died in 1922, he was buried in a coffin lined with red kite silk.
But the AEA’s efforts had not been in vain. While Bell remained in Baddeck, the rest of the team moved their operations to Glenn Curtiss’ headquarters in Hammondsport, New York, where they constructed a series of increasingly sophisticated aircraft. On March 12, 1908, their first design, Red Wing, flew 319 feet over Lake Keuka. Red Wing was soon followed by White Wing, which introduced an important new innovation: hinged ailerons on the wingtips for roll control. Previous aircraft, including the Wright Brothers’ 1903 Flyer, had induced roll by physically distorting the wing tips, a system known as wing warping. Today, ailerons are standard equipment on nearly all aircraft. The AEA’s next aircraft, June Bug, was even more sophisticated, introducing special paint called dope to seal the wing fabric and steerable tricycle undercarriage. On July 4, 1908, June Bug achieved another first when it flew a distance of 5,090 feet, winning the Scientific American Trophy for the first flight over 1 kilometre.
The AEA’s last and most famous creation was the Silver Dart, which incorporated all the lessons learned from the group’s previous aircraft. Built largely of bamboo and wood and powered by a 50 horsepower Curtiss V8 engine, the aircraft was named after the metallic balloon dope used to seal its wing fabric.
On February 23, 1909, with J.A.D. McCurdy at the controls, the Silver Dart made history when it lifted off the ice of Bras D’Or Lake, becoming the first manned aircraft in the British Empire to make a controlled, heavier-than-air powered flight. The aircraft would be flown another 30 times over the next month, making its longest flight of 11 minutes on March 9. This flight brought an end to the AEA’s activities, the association being officially disbanded on March 31, 1909. In less than a year and a half, this small band of pioneering inventors and dreamers had succeeded in turning the aeroplane from a rickety, precarious contraption into a viable transport technology.
While Alexander Graham Bell’s quixotic obsession with giant kites might seem quaint and foolish to us today, it is important to remember that at the time, nobody could have predicted what path the brand-new technology of flight would take. It was an exciting era of endless possibilities, when anything seemed possible and the sky really was the limit.
Expand for References
Gray, Charlotte, Reluctant Genius: the Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell, Phyllis Bruce Books Perennial, 2007
In Pictures: Tetrahedral Kites by Alexander Graham Bell, Lomography, September 25, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20180503180547/https://www.lomography.com/magazine/333099-in-pictures-tetrahedral-kites-by-alexander-graham-bell
Alexander Graham Bell’s Tetrahedral Kites (1903-09), The Public Domain Review, https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/alexander-graham-bell-s-tetrahedral-kites-1903-9
Nemo, Leslie, Alexander Graham Bell Goes and Flies a Kite – For Science, Scientific American, January 21, 2021, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alexander-graham-bell-goes-and-flies-a-kite-for-science/
Lucarelli, Fosco, Structures to Let Man Fly: Bell’s Tetrahedral Kites, Socks, February 4, 2014, https://socks-studio.com/2014/02/04/structures-to-let-man-fly-bells-tetrahedral-kites/
After the Telephone – Tetrahedral Kites, Airplanes, and Hydrofoils, Best Breezes, http://best-breezes.squarespace.com/alexander-graham-bell-tetrah/
The post Dustbin of History: That Time the Inventor of the Telephone Dedicated His Life to the Creation of Manned Giant Kites appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Your Majesty, Caesar, King, Emperor, Lord Protector, Excellency, Duke, these are only a handful of monikers given to leaders of nations throughout history. Picking from such official titles and honorifics to apply to one’s own leader when forming a new nation would seem rather straightforward… However, in a budding nation that vehemently rejected just about anything that was associated with the old world and its forms of government, deciding what to call their leader was anything but straightforward, and at one point brought the U.S. Senate to a screeching halt right from their earliest sessions. This is the fascinating, and mildly humorous, story of how the U.S. President got his then rather unique and extremely humble moniker amongst leaders of nations.
Our story today begins on April 14, 1789. On that day, George Washington was sitting in his home at Mount Vernon in Virginia when the Secretary of the Continental Congress, Charles Thomson, arrived bearing a letter from the U.S. Senate that stated that Washington had won the recent election and was now leader of the nation under its new Constitution.
This was lucky for the asset rich but cash strapped former General, as he would later write his nephew, George, when giving advice on running a plantation and life in general. In this letter, he particularly advised him to remain frugal in all things, and stated of his election “Indeed, necessity, if this had not happened, would have forced me into the measure [of frugality], as my means are not adequate to the expense at which I have lived since my retirement to what is called private life.” That said, he also noted in the letter, that becoming the nation’s first president under the new constitution was something “I dreaded would take place…”
If you’re curious here, the initial salary for the President was set at $25,000 per year (a little over half a million dollars today), and the Vice President was set to earn $5,000 per year. For reference, today the President has a salary of $400K per year, so slightly less than Washington. Whereas the Vice President earns $235,100, so over double the nation’s first Vice President in John Adams.
In any event, two days after receiving news of his victory, Washington set out for Federal Hall in New York City where he was inaugurated on Thursday, April 30, 9 days after the runner up in the election, Adams, was inaugurated as Vice President.
Right from the start issues of protocol bogged the Senate down. With, directly before Washington’s inauguration, Adams rising and stating, “Gentlemen, I wish for the direction of the Senate. The President will, I suppose, address the Congress. How shall I behave? How shall we receive it? Shall it be standing or sitting?” This apparently kicked off a heated discussion on how any of them should receive the President and whether they ought to mirror how Parliament in Britain receives their King, or be much less formal.
According to Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, little headway was being made when suddenly a clerk arrived from the House, triggering yet another furious debate on how to receive him. Maclay states,
“A silly kind of resolution of the committee on that business had been laid on the table some days ago. The amount of it was that each House should communicate to the other what and how they chose; it concluded, however, something in this way: That everything should be done with all the propriety that was proper. The question [now] was, Shall this be adopted, that we may know how to receive the Clerk? …Mr. Lee brought the House of Commons before us again. He reprobated the rule; declared that the Clerk should not come within … that the proper mode was for the Sergeant-at-Arms, with the mace on his shoulder, to meet the Clerk at the door and receive his communication; we are not, however, provided for this ceremonious way of doing business, having neither mace nor sergeant.”
Continuing to debate the matter at length with the Clerk left waiting, things came to a head when yet more officials arrived and yet more debate was had on how the Senate should receive them. Ultimately the President himself arrived with seemingly little headway made on any of it.
While this may all seem quite ridiculous, all involved were extremely well aware every little thing they did was setting a precedent that could have major implications not just down the road, but potentially immediately, as with the President’s title, which we’ll get to shortly. But in brief for now, many in the nation already saw such a position as tantamount to just a King with another name, and countless news reports at the time even rumored some were considering that another revolution was needed to get rid of any such monarch and overly powerful central government. Even outside the nation, foreign powers were also derisive and making such a connection. As William V, Prince of Orange, for example, would write to John Adams, “Sir, you have given yourselves a king under the title of president.”
Washington himself would write to James Madison of his own conduct and concerns with all this, “As the first of everything in our situation will serve to establish a precedent, it is devoutly wished on my part that these precedents be fixed on true principles.”
Speaking of Madison, he would write to Thomas Jefferson on June 30, 1789 concerning trying to figure all this out, “We are in a wilderness, without a single footstep to guide us.” Not just with matters of how to receive officials and titles, but of setting up everything from the judiciary system to the banks, from immigration laws to militia acts, right down to whether the nation should have a standing army or not. Let alone the entire etiquette and protocol of everything involved. They were largely starting from scratch on much of it, using the minimalist and rather revolutionary Constitution as their guiding document, and generally vehemently rejecting the way things were done before by other governments, in many cases simply because the other governments were doing it that way and they didn’t want to be associated with such.
As for the President’s subsequent inaugural address in the Senate chamber after taking his oath of office, while today the general perception of Washington is of regal bearing and the picture of a powerful, confident, dignified leader, Maclay claims Washington was anything but during his inauguration speech, noting, “this great man was agitated and embarrassed more than ever he was by the leveled cannon or pointed musket. He trembled, and several times could scarce make out to read, though it must be supposed he had often read it before…. When he came to the words ‘all the world’, he made a flourish with his right hand, which left rather an ungainly impression.”
Afterwards, Adams chose to officially refer to this inaugural address as the President’s “Most Gracious Speech,” referencing the British way to refer to certain speeches of the King, such as King George III’s address to parliament back in 1775 discussing the rebellious colonists. In this one, King George, among other things, noted, “When the unhappy and deluded multitude… shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy! … as if such Province or Colony had never revolted.”
Washington himself in a letter to one Colonel Joseph Reed a few months later would use the “most gracious speech” moniker for this Kingly address, writing, “We are at length favourd with a sight of his Majesty’s most gracious Speech, breathing sentiments of tenderness & compassion for his deluded American Subjects…”
Adams simply wanted to apply the same such pomp and sense of grandeur to Washington’s own address, even if it was apparently awkwardly delivered with some amount of anxiety.
McClay’s response to this “Most Gracious Speech” suggestion, however, was not just to reject it, but he states, “I looked all around the Senate. Every countenance seemed to wear a blank. The Secretary was going on: I must speak or nobody would. “Mr. President [Adams], we have lately had a hard struggle for our liberty against kingly authority. The minds of men are still heated: everything related to that species of government is odious to the people. The words prefixed to the President’s speech are the same that are usually placed before the speech of his Britannic Majesty. I know they will give offense. I consider them as improper. I therefore move that they be struck out, and that it stand simply address or speech, as may be judged most suitable.” And that, “The enemies of the Constitution had objected to it the facility there would be of transition from it to kingly government and all the trappings and splendor of royalty… if such a thing as this appeared on our minutes, they would not fail to represent it as the first step of the ladder in the ascent to royalty.”
Adams, in turn, responded, according to Maclay (who noteworthy here loathed Adams as we’ll get into shortly), “he was for a dignified and respectable government, and as far as he knew the sentiments of the people they thought as he did.”
After some debate, it was decided to get rid of any grandiose name for such Presidential speeches.
This all brings us, finally, to the title of President itself.
After Washington took his oath of office, in which he vowed to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God”, the Chancellor of New York, Robert Livingston, shouted to the gathered crowd, “Long live George Washington, President of the United States!”
While perhaps lost on people today, at the time, this was a rather humble title, with “president” more akin to “chairman” or “foreman” and otherwise generally up to this point used commonly for much lesser positions in all walks of life.
On this note, the word “president” ultimately comes from the Latin praesidere, meaning “to sit before” or “to preside over”- hence a presiding officer sitting over some group. This gave rise to the Old French “President”, meaning “presiding over” or “leader”, and, in turn, borrowed in Middle English for the title for heads of institutions from almshouses to hospitals to religious houses to universities to banks to various trade groups. With, for example, one of the earliest examples in English being at Cambridge in 1464 where the head of Magdalene College at Cambridge was given the title of Master, and his second the title of President. Noteworthy here, Henry Dunster, the first titled president of Harvard, was a student at Magdalene. And it’s been hypothesized that he chose the term President at Harvard, rather than “master” as his predecessor had held, from this, and to illustrate a level of humility in the position by choosing the lesser title.
Whatever the case there, it would be in America that the title would begin to be elevated in this way to a role far higher in the power food chain than it typically was in the old world. This rise began with “president” being used as the title for the heads of certain colonies, such as Virginia, and later during the revolution the title for the head of states such as Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Hampshire before “governor” became the de facto for all states. From here, President was elevated further to the title for the chairman of congress under the Articles of Confederation. Important to note here, this position was not anywhere close to that given to George Washington and those after him under the new Constitution, in particular because Congress itself oversaw all the functions that individual executed. The President, at this time was, as alluded to in his full title, just the chairman of a sort of that committee- hence the name “President” was rather fitting given its then normal usage.
Borrowing from the previous Articles, the new Constitution in Article II likewise gave the simple title of “President” to the nation’s new leader when referenced throughout, and his runner up “Vice President”- in both cases, again, a rather lowly term, and seemingly chosen exactly for this reason- to be simple and unassuming, as the group of traitors to King and Country weren’t exactly keen on elevating any one individual too much over them. While the new President would have significantly more power than the old, names have implications, and anything too grandiose would not be seen in a positive light by many in the nation. And, indeed, as alluded to, given the power the President was being granted, many were already claiming the new supposed Republic was really just a monarchy given new clothes.
There was a potential problem with this mindset, however, when it came to a simple title. And that is how other nations of the world would perceive the new leader of the executive branch, especially with such a humble title compared to their own. America’s little experiment in their revolutionary form of government was already generally seen with extreme skepticism and derision in many countries of the old world. Thus, some, most notably Vice President John Adams, felt titles on the same level as those given to leaders of the Old World would help garner more respect in their eyes.
He stated of this, “There are presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs…” And even something like “Excellency” wouldn’t do, as then the person in the office “would be leveled with colonial governors or with functionaries from German princedoms.” This perception, in turn, could lead to a weakening of the office at a time when the role was first being defined. Something greater was needed, at least according to Adams and his supporters.
A couple key points to understand in this is, first, how important titles were back then, and even to Washington himself. In fact, a little over a decade before in 1776, General Washington, at a critical time in the early going of the revolution directly after the British landed with a massive force fully capable of crushing his army, refused to accept a letter from the commander of the British forces attempting a peaceful resolution before any blood shed merely because said commander, Admiral Richard Howe, had addressed the letter “George Washingto, Esq,” not acknowledging Wasington’s relatively new rank and position. After consulting with his officers over the slight, Washington refused to receive the letter. Instead, one Joseph Reed simply replied to British Lieutenant Philip Brown who was delivering the letter that there was no one in the Continental Army that answered to that address.
Rather than commence battle, Howe tried at a compromise, but still couldn’t give in for reasons we’ll get to shortly in an exchange between Howe and Ben Franklin and John Adams. But for now, Howe sent the letter again, this time to “George Washington, Esq., etc., etc.”. But this, too, was refused.
Not getting anywhere with letters owing to the issue of title on the letter, Howe attempted a different tack- asking via one Captain Nisbet Balfour if Washington would instead be willing to meet with one of his representatives, Colonel James Patterson, in person to discuss things that way.
Washington agreed and a meeting was set. However, upon learning from Colonel Patterson at the meeting that Howe had only been granted the power to offer pardons in negotiations for peace, Washington famously replied, “Those who have committed no fault want no pardon.” And it was on.
Going back to Washington’s Presidency, it was also noted by some that the title of President here was actually a major downgrade for Washington given his former title of “General” and often referred to as “Your Excellency” while he was commander of the American forces during the Revolution.
In another such instance of the importance of titles, not long after Howe’s exchange with Washington, the British sued for peace and John Adams, Ben Franklin, and their third wheel Edward Rutledge went to meet with Howe. Among the first things they discussed right off the bat after dinner when formal talks would commence was their titles, without a resolution of such, no talks could commence. Howe stated of all this he had no power to consider the colonies independent as they had declared themselves when he was en route. And, thus, he could not even acknowledge them as such or their formal titles and positions. And if they objected on this point and insisted he use their titles, there was no point in proceeding any further with peace talks. He instead proposed he could otherwise consider them “Gentlemen of great Ability, and Influence in the Country”, and that for his part he also considered them British subjects.
The extremely laid back Franklin had no problem with this, noting, “His Lordship might consider the Gentlemen present in any view he thought proper, that they were also at liberty to consider themselves in their real Character, that there was no necessity on this occasion to distinguish between the Congress and Individuals, and that the Conversation might be held as amongst friends.”
On the other side, Adams would more abrasively state, “Your lordship may consider me in what light you please,… except that of a British subject.”
Going back to Washington and his title, after his inauguration, The Gazette and Daily Advertiser would both refer to the President as “His Excellency” and “President”.
But the Senate needed to figure out more officially if any title beyond President was warranted.
On the two sides of the argument were James Madison and the House as a whole, and within the Senate, William Maclay and supporters, advocating for no additional titles for the President. And on the other side, as noted, Vice President John Adams and his supporters who felt it critical the President needed a better title.
As for Madison, as a brief aside, it’s noteworthy that he is actually thought to have been the principal author of Washington’s inaugural address, which comprised a rather short 1,419 words. In contrast, his original draft was over 70 rather meandering and rambling pages, which Madison stated he found a rather “strange production” when he read it. In the end, Madison is thought to have rewritten the thing, keeping the essence, but significantly more concise and well organized.
In any event, on the matter of titles, Madison at one point had also thought the President needed a better honorific, initially suggesting “His Elective Majesty”- keeping some of the pomp, but noting this person was elected, not given the position by some birthright. However, he would later recant this stance and led the charge with the House on convincing them no additional monikers were needed, which was critical to the whole thing being shot down. Madison would state of this,
“I am not afraid of titles because I fear the danger of any power they could confer, but I am against them because they are not very reconcilable with the nature of our government, or the genius of the people; even if they were proper in themselves, they are not so at this juncture of time. But my strongest objection is founded in principle; instead of encreasing they diminish the true dignity and importance of a republic, and would in particular, on this occasion, diminish the true dignity of the first magistrate himself. If we give titles, we must either borrow or invent them—if we have recourse to the fertile fields of luxuriant fancy, and deck out an airy being of our own creation, it is a great chance but its fantastic properties renders the empty fantom ridiculous and absurd. If we borrow, the servile imitation will be odious, not to say ridiculous also—we must copy from the pompous sovereigns of the east, or follow the inferior potentates of Europe; in either case, the splendid tinsel or gorgeous robe would disgrace the manly shoulders of our Chief. The more truly honorable shall we be, by shewing a total neglect and disregard to things of this nature; the more simple, the more republican we are in our manners, the more rational dignity we acquire.”
Nevertheless, despite the House’s objection, the Senate, perhaps not coincidentally meant to be representative of the more aristocratic class, soldiered on in search of a more esteemed title. Various honorifics within the Senate were proposed such as “His Mightiness”, “His Most Benign Highness”, “His Most Serene Highness, “His High Mightiness” before ultimately, according to Maclay, the Senate settled on “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same”. Noteworthy here, Adams preferred a slight tweak of this, “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of Their Liberties.”
Before we go further into the upcoming mildly humorous, and heated, debate, it’s important to understand a few key things about the leaders of the two sides of the argument in the Senate. On the one hand, Vice President John Adams, being John Adams, was constitutionally incapable of keeping his mouth shut when he had an opinion, especially given that at that time so much was so critical to the young nation perhaps even surviving at all… I mean, you might as well ask Adams to stop breathing as to stop giving his unabashed opinion, no matter what anyone else thought. And, given the enormous brain that resided in his skull, he was remarkably adept at getting people to listen. As Founding Father Benjamin Rush would state of Adams, “He saw the whole of a subject at a single glance, and by a happy union of the powers of reasoning and persuasion often succeeded in carrying measures which were at first sight of an unpopular nature.”
Yet Adams really shouldn’t have had any say here. You see, the Vice President had no real defined role outside of tie breaker in the Senate, as well as to simply exist in case anything happened to the President. Another blow to the man on this front was that Washington, especially in the first term, seemed to have little interest in including Adams in anything he was doing, or really get his thoughts on much, though this did slightly change later, such as in 1795, a year before Adams himself would become President, with Adams helping to convince Washington to support the rather controversial Jay Treaty between Britain and the United States.
Adams would write his wife, Abigail, of his position as Vice President, “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
However, as everything was brand new for the country and the Constitution had very purposefully been a minimal document, not trying to handle everything, but just put forth a general set of guidelines and principles for the nation, Adams decided from the start to try to expand his constitutional role in the Senate via inserting himself in their debates, and even trying to lead them.
This was something that rubbed a lot of Senators the wrong way, owing to a member of the executive branch essentially trying to lead and directly influence a body of the legislative branch.
Going back to titles and the importance of them, Adams’ eventual choice to sign legislative documents as “John Adams, Vice President of the United States” was also seen as a major faux pas by some for this reason, owing to it only noting his role in the executive branch. In response to this, Adams would take to signing such documents more or less giving himself separate titles for both- “John Adams, Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate.”
Ultimately the Senate finally made peace with Adams in the form of making it so the Senate deliberations would not include the Vice President anymore… A rather major blow for a man of his stature and intellect. But, at least, Adams did get to cast more tie breaking votes within the Senate at 31 than any other Vice President since. This was largely owing to the Senate at the time being evenly split between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists.
But before they managed to muzzle the unmuzzleable, there was the matter of how to address the President in the Senate’s response letter to the President.
This brings us to the lead of the other side of the argument within the Senate. Much of what we know of this discussion and, indeed, the detailed internal discussions of the Senate for the next couple years comes from the aforementioned Senator William Maclay’s daily journal, which more or less violated the “inviolable secrecy” the Senate at the time was partially operating under until 1795 when Senate sessions were no longer closed to the public.
An important thing to point out here was that Maclay was, shall we say, seemingly a bit biased, to put it mildly, and this may have affected the way he colored discussions at times. In particular when reading through his accounts, not just on this, but other such debates, Maclay seems to have a tendency to write his own thoughts and arguments extremely eloquently, but paint his opponent’s as more than a little absurd and their arguments often poorly worded. This is perhaps no better illustrated than when it came to the likes of John Adams who Maclay, as noted, loathed. With Maclay’s accounts very frequently, and sometimes explicitly, painting Adams and his arguments as seemingly coming from a bumbling buffoon, which was in stark contrast to how most of the rest of his contemporaries described the man. Yes, a man with little social grace, extremely abrasive, occasionally with seemingly no ability or caring to read the room- if Adams thought something was right, and the entire world thought he was wrong. He’d stubbornly stick to his principles and then do his best to change everyone’s mind. The epitome of Captain America’s little speech in Amazing Spider-Man #537. If Adams felt something was right, to quote the Captain, it “Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like at tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world-‘No, you move.’”
This element of Adams’ character was perhaps no better illustrated than in his choice to defend the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre despite even his own extreme opposition to the British, ultimately being one of the leading patriots of the revolution. In the end, he just felt everyone deserved a fair and just trial no matter what. And he wanted to make sure the soldiers involved got that in a proper defense, even if it costs him his career and reputation. As Adams would later write to his wife on this: “I…have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children…[but] the law…will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations, and wanton tempers of men.”
Thus, while yes sometimes as abrasive as it’s possible to be (and note, we’ll get into this more in the Bonus Facts with a sample of Adams’ rather legendary scathing insults to his contemporaries) and could at times seem a little ridiculous to his peers, he was nonetheless insanely well respected and his intellect and skill in debate were considered among the best in the nation at the time. Yet that’s not even close to how Maclay portrays Adams or his arguments pretty much anywhere in his journal.
Maclay was also, much like Adams himself, certainly not shy of giving his very frank opinion of most of his fellow senators and on anything at all, noting most of them were “a set of vipers” who “cared for nothing else but… the creation of a new monarchy in America.” He also felt the U.S. Constitution would “turn out [to be] the vilest of all traps that was ever set to ensare the freedom of an unsuspecting people.”
As for Adams specifically, Maclay became one of his most bitter political detractors for a number of reasons ranging from Adams’ choice to not support moving the capital to Philadelphia, and rather, what would become Washington D.C., to Adams push to expand the powers of the federal government, to Adams’ seeming overstepping trying to lead the Senate in the first place… This list goes on and on with regards to the countless clashes between the two. This all resulted in Maclay writing many rather scathing accounts of Adams.
For some samples, Maclay wrote on May 2, 1789,
“[Adams] not well furnished with small talk more than myself and has a very silly kind of laugh. I have often looked with the utmost attention at him to see if his aspect, air, etc. could inspire me with an opinion of his being a man of genius; but … no; the thing seems impossible.”
In a dinner with Adams and others on March 4, he stated, “I looked often around the company to find the happiest faces. … The President seemed to bear in his countenance a settled aspect of melancholy. No cheering ray of convivial sunshine broke through the cloudy gloom of settled seriousness. At every interval of eating or drinking he played on the table with a fork or knife, like a drumstick. Next to him, on his right, sat Bonny Johnny Adams, ever and anon mantling his visage with the most unmeaning simper that ever dimpled the face of folly.”
Later on May 11 he writes, Adams “takes on him to school the members from the chair. … Instead of that sedate, easy air which I would have him possess, he will look on one side, then on the other, then down on the knees of his breeches, then dimple his visage with the most silly kind of half smile which I can not well express in English. The ScotchIrish have a word that hits it exactly— smudging . God forgive me for the vile thought, but I can not help thinking of a monkey just put into breeches when I saw him betray such evident marks of self-conceit.”
Not holding back, on June 22 he writes, “His pride, obstinacy, and folly are equal to his vanity, and, although it is a common observation that fools are the tools of knaves … yet John Adams has served to illustrate two points at least with me… that a fool is the most unmanageable of all brutes, and that flattery is the most irksome of all service.”
In yet another account on September 18, he writes, “Ye gods, with what indignation do I review the late attempt of some creatures among us to revive the vile machinery [of royalty and nobility]. O Adams, Adams, what a wretch art thou!”
On March 2, 1790 he goes on, “Our Vice President goes every day [to the House of Representatives], and the members spend their time in lampooning him before his face.”
In yet another instance on June 8, he states, “John Adams has neither judgment, firmness of mind, nor respectability of deportment to fill the chair of such an assembly.”
This all finally brings us to the specific debate over the President’s title. McClay writes, on May 8, 1789,
“Ellsworth was enumerating how common the appellation of President was. The president [Adams] put him in mind that there were presidents of fire companies and of a cricket club. Mr. Lee, at another time, was saying he believed that some of the States authorized titles by their constitution. The President [Adams], from the chair, told him that Connecticut did. At sundry other times, he interfered in a like manner.
Excellency was moved for as a title by Mr. Izard. It was withdrawn by Mr. Izard, and highness, with some prefatory word, proposed by Mr. Lee. Now long harangues were made in favor of this title…. It was insisted that such a dignified title would add greatly to the weight and authority of the Government, both at home and abroad. I declare myself totally of a different opinion. That at present it was impossible to add to the respect entertained for General Washington. If you gave him the title of any foreign prince or potentate a belief would follow that the manners of that prince and his modes of government would be adopted by the President. (Mr. Lee had just before I got up read over a list of the titles of all the princes and potentates of the earth, marking where the word highness occurred. The grand Turk had it. All the princes of Germany had it. The sons and daughters of crowned heads, etc.) That particular elective highness… would have a most ungrateful sound to many thousands of industrious citizens who had fled from German oppression. Highness was part of the title of a prince or princes of the blood, and was often given to dukes. It was degrading our President to place him on a par with any prince of any blood in Europe; nor was there one of them that could enter the lists of true glory with him.
…This whole silly business is the work of Mr. Adams and Mr. Lee. Izard follows Lee, and the New England men, who always herd to gather, follow Mr. Adams. Mr. Thompson says this used to be the case in the old Congress.”
Speaking of Adams, he states Adams rose and addressed the Senate for quite some time on the matter, with the specific part of Adams’ speech Maclay recounts being: “Gentlemen, I must tell you that it is you and the President that have the making of titles. Suppose the President to have the appointment of Mr. Jefferons at the Court of France. Mr Jefferson is, in virtue of that appointment, the most illustrious, the most powerful… But the president himself must be something that includes all the dignitaries of the diplomatic corps, and something great still. What will the common people of foreign countries- what will the sailors and soldiers say, George Washington, President of the United States, they will despise him. This is all nonsense to the philosopher; but so is all government, whatever.”
After Adams’ speech Maclay claims he responded quite a bit more eloquently, “Let us read the Constitution: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States” The Constitution goes further. The servants of the public are prohibited from accepting them from any foreign State, king, or prince. So that the appellations and terms given to nobility in the Old World, are contraband language in the United States; nor can we apply them to our citizens, consistent with the constitution. As to what the common people, soldiers, and sailors of foreign countries may think of us, I do not think it imports us much. Perhaps the less they think, or have occasion to think of us, the better.
…From the English, indeed, we may borrow terms that would not be wholly unintelligible to our own citizens. But will they thank us for the compliment? Would not the plagiarism be more likely to be attended with contempt than respect among all of them? It has been admitted that all this is nonsense to the philosopher. I am ready to admit that every high-sounding, pompous appellation, descriptive of qualities which the object does not possess, must appear bombastic nonsense in the eye of every wise man….”
In the end, as any good governing body should in all matters, after a good lengthy debate making sure to maximally take up as much of their precious time in it as possible, the Senate decided to table the matter and let someone else decide.
McClay writes of this,
“…the Senate have been induced to be of the opinion that it would be proper to annex a respectable title for the office of President of the United States; but the Senate, desires of preserving harmony with the House of representatives, where the practice lately observed in presenting an address to the President was without the addition of title, think it proper for the present to act in conformity with the practice of the House. Therefore, resolved, that the present address be ‘To the President of the United States’ without addition of title.”
After the happy conclusion that went Maclay, James Madison and the Houses’ way, Madison would write of this to Thomas Jefferson, “It will not have escaped you [that it] was addressed with the truly republican simplicity to George Washington, president of the United States.”
As for Jefferson, he would ring in on the Senate’s former preferred “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same” on July 29, 1789, stating, “The president’s title as proposed by the Senate was the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of. It is a proof the more of the justice of the character given by Doctr. Franklin of my friend [John Adams] “always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.””
Noteworthy in a December 5, 1811 letter to one Benjamin Rush which would precipitate Adams and Jefferson laying aside their differences and once again becoming the closest of friends, Jefferson would state he would change “a single word only in Dr Franklin’s character of [Adams]. I knew him to be always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes incorrect & precipitate in his judgments.”
As for Washington himself, as noted, exceedingly aware that everything he did or said during his time in office would set the tone for the office for all who followed him, he likewise apparently was pleased with the simple title of “The President of the United States”.
And that’s a tradition that has stuck to this day. While the idea of “president” being a humble term for a leader may be lost on most in modern times given how many nations since have adopted it for their leaders, starting with the U.S. then after Haiti in 1807 and spreading to dozens of other nations since, other remnants of the simplicity of the title have endured, such as with a simple “Mr. President” or “Mr. Secretary” or “Mr. Senator” or just using these officials’ names being the norm. This tradition has also bled over to countless official positions of the State in the United States, with the exception in some cases of the word “honorable” occasionally used to describe an individual outside of their official title. And as for “honorable,” at the time this was a fairly lowly term, generally used in cases like the youngest sons of noblemen, with the family rank title being given to the eldest sons.
As for Adams, his arguments for a fancier title for the President would earn him the rather dubious unofficial title of “His Rotundity, the Duke of Braintree”. This also bolstered the argument of his alleged love of monarchs, which would dog him throughout the rest of his political life, despite the man himself being one of the key architects of the revolution throwing off the monarchy, along with authoring, among other things, The Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, which not only helped define the U.S. Constitution, but was also very explicitly in the title meant to defend the new form of government against its monarchical detractors.
As author of John Adams’s Republic: The One, The Few, The Many, Richard Alan Ryerson states of the confusion here, Adams viewed the elite and wealthy of the United States as little different than the aristocracy of the old world. Not based on bloodline in this case, but finances. Further, it was probably not lost on Adams that most of the leaders of the revolution were not from among the oppressed, but rather, were that very wealthy form of aristocracy in the United States simply throwing off their rivals abroad. And, indeed, some of them even wealthier than many of the royalty they’d sought to cast off. As historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Gordon Wood notes, “The social conditions that generally are supposed to lie behind all revolutions—poverty and economic deprivation—were not present in colonial America. There should no longer be any doubt about it: the white American colonists were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial chains to throw off.”
Thus, denying the American aristocracy’s existence was not only pointless in Adam’s opinion, but counterproductive to the nation and its future. Somewhat controversial to some, Adams also viewed this class of individuals as an essential part of any society and one that could never be gotten rid of even if people wanted to. Thus, instead of removing them, they needed to be controlled to an extent. Essentially taking what such elite could offer in a positive way to society, while severely restricting their power in any way possible to get around the downsides of them, as more fully outlined in our video The Key to Humans Humaning.
As Ryerson goes on, “The central objective of government for Adams was always the security and happiness of the whole society, including its weakest members. The only solution to living with aristocracy, therefore, was to control it. He would devote much of the next decade to exploring how this could be done in a republican culture.”
However, this stance and particular terms Adams used in his various writings when referring to the elite class, combined with his apparent support of things like incredibly pompous sounding titles for the President, all saw Adams painted by some as elitist, similar to his son, fellow future president John Quincy, after him.
Ironically in all this, and especially given John Adams’ stance on many things surrounding the role of President in the early going, when it came to pomp and circumstance in his own life, Adams, much like his son, seemingly abhorred such things. With Adams writing in his journal on June 30, 1770, “Formalities and Ceremonies are an abomination in my sight. —I hate them, in Religion, Government, Science, Life.”
John Quincy would go even further on this front then his father. For example, in the 1856 work Recollections of a Lifetime, by Samuel Griswold Goodrich, he quotes an unknown author about what one could expect if invited to meet John Quincy Adams in the White House: “He sees a little man writing at a table, nearly bald, with a face quite formal and destitute of expression; his eyes running with water—his slippers down at the heel—his fingers stained with ink—in summer wearing a striped sea-sucker coat, and white trowsers, and dirty waistcoat, spotted with ink—his whole dress altogether not worth a couple of pounds; or in a colder season, habited in a plain blue coat, much the worse for wear, and other garments in proportion…. This person, whom the ambassador mistakes for a clerk in a department, and only wonders, in looking at him, that the President should permit a man to appear before him in such dress, proves to be the President of the United States himself!”
And in further stark contrast to the public perception by some, John Quincy, like his father, was, in some respects, a quite simple man who, for example, despite being relatively well off often ate plain crackers for meals instead of fancy dinners, and who one of his favorite activities was to sit at home by himself and study his Bible- things which contrasted sharply with the elitist, corrupt, aristocratic “professor” version of John Quincy Adams that supporters of his political opponents pushed. Given this, the person who knew him best, his wife Louisa, lamented, “If he would only lend himself a little to the usages and manners of the people without hiding himself and… rejecting their civilities, no man could be more popular because his manners are simple, unostentatious, and unassuming.”
For more on all this, see our video: The Horribly Dressed, Socially Awkward, Genius President.
But going back to John Adams, as ever, neither the news outlets nor political rivals have ever really cared about accuracy in public political discourse.
But while in this case John Adams’ suggestion on rather pompous and silly titles for the American elite may have been ridiculous as Jefferson had stated. In the end, as with his contributions to certain revolutions, which Adams would write of in an August 18, 1811 letter, “Have I not been employed in Mischief all my days? Did not The American Revolution produce The French Revolution? and did not the French Revolution produce all the Calamities, and Desolations to the human Race and the whole Globe ever Since?” Adams nonetheless concludes that thought with what he might have also said about his opinion about the ridiculous titles for the President he had once so ardently advocated for- “I meant well, however.”
Bonus Facts:
Speaking of titles and John Adams’ habit of never being able to keep his mouth shut when he had an opinion about something, or someone. He was also legendary for his scathing and unapologetically frank insults. For example, in a letter to fellow founding father Benjamin Rush, Adams stated after Washington’s death, “That Washington was not a Scholar is certain. That he was too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his Station and reputation is equally past dispute.” To be fair on this one, Washington himself would lament his failings as a General during the Revolution. And his reputation for indecision and seemingly not knowing what to do at critical moments of battle has often been pointed out.
Adams would also note that so many of the so-called talents attributed to Washington by the masses had more to do mostly with his looks and things outside of Washington’s control than much of actual substance to the man. Stating, “Talents? you will say, what Talents? I answer. 1. An handsome Face. That this is a Talent, I can prove by the authority of a thousand Instances in all ages… 2. A tall Stature, like the Hebrew Sovereign chosen because he was taller by the Head than the other Jews. 3 An elegant Form. 4. graceful Attitudes and Movement: 5. a large imposing Fortune consisting of a great landed Estate left him by his Father and Brother, besides a large Jointure with his Lady, and the Guardianship of the Heirs of the great Custis Estate, and in addition to all this, immense Tracts of Land of his own acquisition. There is nothing, except bloody Battles and Splendid Victories, to which Mankind bow down with more reverence than to great fortune…. 6. Washington was a Virginian. This is equivalent to five Talents. Virginian Geese are all Swans. Not a Bearne in Scotland is more national, not a Lad upon the High Lands is more clannish, than every Virginian I have ever known. They trumpet one another with the most pompous and mendacious Panegyricks… 7. Washington was preceeded by favourable Anecdotes. The English had used him ill, in the Expedition of Braddock. They had not done Justice to his Bravery and good Council. They had exaggerated and misrepresented his defeat and Capitulation: which interested the Pride as well as compassion of Americans in his favour. . . . 8 He possessed the Gift of Silence. This I esteem as one of the most precious Talents. 9. He had great Self Command. It cost him a great Exertion Sometimes, and a constant Constraint, but to preserve So much Equanimity as he did, required a great Capacity. 10. Whenever he lost his temper as he did Sometimes, either Love or fear in those about him induced them to conceal his Weakness from the World. Here you See I have made out ten Talents without saying a Word about Reading Thinking or writing…”
As for Adams’ onetime extremely close friend Thomas Jefferson, he stated, “His soul is poisoned with ambition.” Jefferson had his own thoughts on Adams, writing on March 4, 1797, Adams is “distrustful, obstinate, excessively vain, and takes no counsel from anyone.” As noted in our videos America’s Greatest Oddcouple covering Adams and Jefferson’s strange and insanely close relationship, as well as our video America’s First Power Couple, covering the story of John and Abigail Adams, Jefferson was wrong here on the last point. Adams relied on Abigail’s equally keen intellect and well read mind on pretty much all matters when it came to looking for counsel from others. With, shortly after becoming President, Adams even desperately writing to his wife some 400 miles away in Quincy, “I never wanted your Advice and assistance more in my life…” And, “I can do nothing without you… Public affairs are so critical and dangerous that all our Thoughts must be taken up with them. I must intreat you, to loose not a moments time in preparing to come… assist me with your Councils…”
Going back to insults, Adams would state of Thomas Paine’s famous Common Sense, “What a poor, ignorant, malicious, crapulous mass.”
As for Alexander Hamilton, Adams stated, “That bastard brat of a Scottish peddler! His ambition, his restlessness and all his grandiose schemes come, I’m convinced, from a superabundance of secretions, which he couldn’t find enough whores to absorb!”
In another case, one General John Sullivan was captured by the British and was ultimately released to deliver a message to the Continental Congress about Admiral Howes’ desire for a peace conference. While Sullivan was delivering this offer and advocating for it, fellow founding Father Benjamin Rush would state Adams “whispered to me a wish ’that the first ball that had been fired on the day of the defeat of our army, had gone through [Sullivan’s] head.”
Going back to the rather hilarious Ben Franklin, after Adams became frustrated with Franklin’s propensity to party all night and hang out with every French woman that came a knocking to meet with the world famous Franklin, Adams would write, “His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and to decency… These things however are not the worst of his Faults— They shew however the Character of the Man; in what Contempt he holds the Opinions of the World, and with what Haughtiness he is capable of persevering through Life in a gross & odious System of Falsehood and Imposture… It would be Folly to deny, that he has had a great Genius, and that he has written several things in Philosophy and in Politicks, profoundly— But his Philosophy and his Politicks have been infinitely exaggerated, by the studied Arts of Empiricism, until his Reputation has become one of the grossest Impostures, that has ever been practised upon Mankind since the Days of Mahomet… so that I am persuaded he will remain as long as he lives, the Demon of Discord among our Ministers, and the Curse and Scourge of our foreign Affairs.”
Not restricting himself to people or famous works, as for the city of Philadelphia, he wrote “Phyladelphia, with all its trade and wealth and regularity, is not Boston. The morals of our people are much better; their manners are more polite and agreeable… Our language is better, our taste is better, our persons are handsomer; our spirit is greater, our laws are wiser, our religion is better, our education is better. We exceed them in every thing, but in a market.”
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A Beautiful Book about a Beautiful Mind – “John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many” Reviewed
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Vice Presidency
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A Pageantry of Power: Planning Washington’s First Inauguration
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Is the President of the United States really the King of America?
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The post How Did They Decide What to Call the President? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
It’s 2024! Where’s my flying car? So goes the lament of many a 21st century citizen, disappointed that our world does not yet resemble an episode of The Jetsons. Along with personal jetpacks, moon bases, and robot butlers, flying cars have become emblematic of the shiny high-tech future we were promised but which never came to pass. As we’ve covered in our previous video The Mad Race to Create Working, Practical Personal Jetpacks, in many cases the problem is technological – current jet and rocket engines are simply too heavy and thirsty – and their fuels too bulky or flesh-meltingly dangerous – to safely strap to your back. In other cases the problem is a lack of political will. Until very recently, only national governments had the resources to send humans into space, and since the end of the Apollo program in 1972 there has been little political appetite for moon bases despite the technology being readily available. Finally, in some cases the problem is economic: the technology is there, but the cost is too high or the potential customers too few to make it commercially viable. In the case of flying cars, technological, political, and economic factors all conspired to prevent these vehicles from making their way into every garage – at least for the time being. But this failure was certainly not for lack of trying, as hundreds of innovators from backyard tinkerers to major engineering firms have struggled for more than a century to make the dream of a personal flying machine a reality. This is the story of the strange and often ingenious 100-year quest to create a practical flying car.
For nearly as long as cars and aeroplanes have existed, inventors have been trying to combine the two. The early allure of flying cars makes sense when one considers the state of both ground and air transport in the early 20th century. Back then, road networks were nowhere near as extensive or high-quality as they are today, with most paved roads being found within only a few kilometres of major cities. Beyond this, most roads were rough, deeply-rutted dirt tracks that could defeat even the sturdiest of auto suspensions. Aircraft, by contrast, only needed a relatively flat grass field to operate. With a flying car, as an April 1917 issue of Popular Mechanics explained, a motorist could:
“…start from his garage or hangar, travel streets or roads at will, cross streams or lakes that lie in his path, rise in the air and fly over a hill, a valley, or woods, to another road, all at his pleasure.”
Furthermore, flying cars would provide the aerial commuter with a convenient means of driving from the airport into town for a business meeting, a spot of lunch, or a bit of shopping. The possibilities were endless.
But making this idyllic vision a reality proved a daunting task, for the design requirements for ground and air vehicles are wildly different. For one thing, cars use heavy drivetrains and require a minimum weight for handling and safety reasons, while aircraft must be as light as possible for maximum performance. Reconciling these contradictory requirements within a single convenient vehicle is, to say the least, a major engineering challenge.
One of the first innovators to seriously tackle this problem was American aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss, who in 1917 patented a design he dubbed the Autoplane. The vehicle featured a three-seat cabin enclosed in a lightweight, streamlined aluminium body and mounted on four aircraft-style wheels. To this were mounted the triplane wings from a Curtiss Model L trainer, a twin-boom tail, and a four-bladed propeller in pusher configuration. A 100 horsepower Curtiss OXX V8 engine drove either the wheels or the propeller through a system of shafts and belts. Once the combination landed, the wings and tail could be detached and the cabin driven around like a normal car.
In February 1917, the Curtiss exhibited the Autoplane at the Pan-American Aeronautic Exposition in New York City, where the unusual vehicle caused a sensation. As the New York Times wrote:
“More wonderful than the Rodman Wanamaker Flying Boat “AMERICA”, more interesting than the huge military planes is this unique and novel product of the inventive genius of Glenn H. Curtiss, — The Curtiss ‘Aerial Limousine.’ Since its unveiling on Thursday night at the Aero Show it has been the talk of New York. Epoch making in its conception and design, this wonderful aeroplane is a veritable drawing room on wings, a modern magic couch which can actually whisk you away with the speed of the wind. We urge you to see it before the Show closes next Thursday.”
Unfortunately, the Autoplane failed to live up to such breathless hype. In flight tests the vehicle proved too heavy and underpowered and only managed to make a few short hops off the ground. While Curtiss was confident these issues could be resolved, America’s entry into the First World War in April 1917 intervened, and the Autoplane project was scrapped so Curtiss could focus on producing training aircraft for the war effort. Thus ended the first serious attempt to build a practical flying car. Yet despite its failure, the Autoplane nonetheless set the pattern for nearly all that was to come. With a few notable exceptions, nearly every flying car developed since 1917 has followed the same general design: a lightweight cabin with powered wheels to which wings, a tail, and a propeller can be attached. However, as most of these designs require the wings and tail to be left behind at the airport or be towed along in a special trailer, such vehicles somewhat stretch the definition of “flying car” and are more accurately termed roadable aircraft.
If one further stretches the definition of “flying car”, then the next major development in our story came in 1926, spearheaded by none other than automobile magnate Henry Ford. The year before, the Ford Motor Company had created its own aviation division by buying out the Detroit-based Stout Metal Airplane Company. The division’s first product was the Ford Trimotor, a small transport aircraft built of corrugated aluminium and capable of carrying 11 passengers. Extremely robust and reliable, the Trimotor was an instant success, with nearly 200 being purchased by airlines, militaries, and other operators around the world. The aircraft gained lasting fame in 1929 when Admiral Richard Byrd used one to make the first flight over the South Pole.
Buoyed by this success, in 1926 Ford announced the development of a tiny single-seat aircraft which, he claimed, would bring aviation “within the reach of every man’s pocketbook” just as the Ford Model T had done for the automobile. The aircraft was designed by engineer Otto Koppen, who took over the project after William Stout and William Mayo, heads of the aviation division, refused to have anything to do with the aircraft. According to legend, Ford demanded that the aircraft fit inside his office and gave Koppen only a few months to complete the design. Despite these challenging requirements, Koppen persevered, delivering the first prototype in time for its unveiling on July 30, 1926 – Henry Ford’s 63rd birthday.
Dubbed the “Flivver” after the 1920s slang for the Ford Model T, the aircraft, built of steel tube and wood covered in fabric, measured 4 metres long had a wingspan of 7 metres, and weighed only 227 kilograms. Powered by a 36 horsepower 3-cylinder Anzani radial engine, the Flivver could achieve a maximum speed of 140 kilometres per hour and a range of nearly 1600 kilometres. Innovative features included a retractable, steerable tailwheel with a brake for easier taxiing and full-length “flaperons” on the wings to generate extra lift and allow the Flivver to take off and land in confined areas. Indeed, in one demonstration the Flivver began its takeoff run at the back of a hangar and was airborne by the time it reached the door. The price of a Flivver was set at $37,000 – around $65,500 in today’s money – but was expected to drop to $28,000 after the first 100 machines were sold.
As with the Curtiss Autoplane a decade before, the unveiling of the Ford Flivver stirred the public’s imagination, with Popular Science speculating:
“Today events in the realm of aviation are tumbling along at such a pace that we can almost imagine ourselves spending next summer’s vacation touring the air roads…How soon we shall fly our own machines depends, experts agree, on how quickly foolproof machines can capture public confidence. Once that confidence has been gained and public demand created, quantity production and lower prices will be possible. The wonderful history of the automobile will be repeated in the air.”
The romantic allure of personal air transport even inspired a New York Evening Sun columnist to publish a short poem:
I dreamed I was an angel
And with the angels soared
But I was simply touring
The heavens in a Ford.
Meanwhile, Henry Ford assured the awestruck public that the Flivver was only the beginning, and that true flying cars equally suited to highway and skyway were just around the corner:
“Mark my word. A combination airplane and motor car is coming. You may smile. But it will come.”
But first, Ford had to turn the Flivver into a viable product – no small task given its steep price tag. To help promote his everyman’s aircraft, Ford turned to Harry J. Brooks, his chief test pilot. Brooks immediately fell in love with the Flivver, and began regularly using it to commute between his home and work and even around the Ford campus as one might use a car or motorcycle. Brooks also flew dozens of public demonstration flights with the Flivver and even raced Garfield Wood’s record-breaking motorboat Miss America V during the 1926 Harmsworth Cup in Detroit. Of the aircraft, he opined:
“Flying a plane like this is no more difficult than flying a large plane, except in this plane the pilot has to think a little faster.”
In August 1927, Henry Ford invited Charles Lindbergh – whose recent solo transatlantic flight had made him an international superstar – to try out the Flivver. Though Ford hoped to capitalize on Lindbergh’s fame to promote his new product, “Lucky Lindy’s” assessment was not quite what he expected, with the famous aviator declaring the Flivver to be among worst aircraft he had ever flown.
Undaunted, on January 24, 1928 Harry Brooks set out to demonstrate the Flivver’s impressive range by flying nonstop from Detroit to Miami. Unfortunately bad weather forced him to put down in Asheville, North Carolina. Still, he had plenty of fuel left in the tank, and once the weather cleared he flew on without incident to Miami. On February 21, Brooks tried again, Though this time he landed some 320 kilometres short in Titusville, Florida, he succeeded in setting a world distance record for light aircraft of 1,564 kilometres. After repairing his propeller, which was damaged in the landing, set off again on February 25. It was then that disaster struck. While circling the shore near Melbourne, Florida, Brooks’s engine quit and the Flivver plunged into the ocean, killing him instantly. While several pieces of wreckage eventually washed ashore, Brooks’s body was never found. Examination of the wreckage soon revealed the cause of the crash: while repairing the Flivver in Titusville, Brooks had placed toothpicks in the fuel tank cap vent holes to prevent moisture from entering and condensing overnight. He had then forgotten to remove the toothpicks, starving the engine of fuel.
News of Brooks’s death devastated Henry Ford, who had become close friends with the young pilot. Though Ford was quick to assure investors that the crash would not affect his company’s aviation activities, his guilt soon overwhelmed him, and he cancelled the Flivver and all other light aircraft development. By this time, only three Flivver prototypes had been built; today, only a single example of the “Model T of the Skies” survives, on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
Ford briefly returned to the light aircraft market in the 1930s with the development of the Stout Sky Car and the Ford Model 15-P, the latter being a particularly innovative “flying wing” design with no vertical tail surfaces. However, when the prototype 15-P crashed during testing, Ford once again cancelled the project. The Ford Motor Company would not re-enter the aviation industry until 1940, when it began construction of the enormous Willow Run manufacturing complex in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Sprawling over nearly 300,000 square metres and staffed by 42,500 workers, at peak capacity Willow Run was capable of completing an entire Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber every hour – but that, dear viewer, is a story for another time.
With industrial giants like the Ford Motor Company out of the race, it fell to small-time tinkerers to pursue the elusive dream of a practical flying car. Among the most promising designs to come out of the 1930s was the Waterman Arrowbile, designed by San Diego inventor Waldo Waterman. Obsessed with aviation from a young age, Waterman was only 16 when in 1910 he flew – and promptly crashed – his own homebuilt aircraft, breaking both his ankles in the process. Disqualified from enlisting in the armed forces, Waterman spent the First World War at the School of Military Aeronautics at the University of California Berkeley, teaching the Theory of Flight. Like many early aviation pioneers, Waterman soon recognized the aerodynamic shortcomings of traditional aircraft designs and came up with a design for a highly-efficient tailless aircraft with swept wings, a pusher propeller, and tricycle landing gear. After years of struggling to make his vision a reality, in Waterman finally succeeded in building a low-wing prototype which he dubbed the “Whatsit.” But while the design flew, it proved very unstable and crashed multiple times during testing.
In 1934, however, the United States Bureau of Air Commerce announced a contest to develop a safe and reliable light aircraft that cost less than $700 – around $16,500 today. In response, Waterman created a high-wing version of the Whatsit which he dubbed the “Arrowplane.” That same year, three Arrowbiles set off on a long-distance demonstration flight from Santa Monica, California to Washington DC. One aircraft broke down and had to turn back, but the other two reached their destination and were declared the winners of the contest. Despite this, however, the Bureau of Air Commerce’s quest for an “air flivver” went nowhere, as no company was able to get the price of their entries anywhere near the $700 requirement. Indeed, while LIFE magazine listed the price of the Arrowplane at $3000, the real figure was closer to $7000 – an eye-watering sum in the depths of the Great Depression.
Hoping to make his design more versatile, Waterman modified the Arrowplane by making the wings detachable and fitting the fuselage with a Studebaker engine that could drive both the wheels and the propeller. The resulting roadable aircraft, dubbed the “Arrowbile”, first flew on February 21, 1937. Waterman spared no expense promoting his invention to the American public. Footage of the Arrowbile taking off, landing, shedding its wings and driving away was featured in newsreels shown across the country, while the unusual vehicle was profiled in the then-brand new LIFE Magazine and other major publications. Waterman also issued countless press releases and ran full-page magazine ads with major corporate sponsors like Sunoco Oil. But perhaps his most brilliant publicity stunt was a photo staged for the Associated Press wirephoto service, showing a traffic cop pulling over an Arrowbile driver for speeding. It was an image which perfectly captured the future envisioned by Waterman and other aerial innovators: a future in which flying cars were as ubiquitous and mundane as any other vehicle on the road.
Alas, it was not to be. Thanks to its exorbitant cost and the crash of three prototypes en route to the New York Air Show, the Arrowbile failed to find customers and Waterman’s investors pulled out one by one. After the Second World War Waterman tried again, producing a similar roadable car slightly renamed to the “aerobile” which used many standard parts from Studebaker, Ford, Willys, and other cars to reduce its cost. But this, too, failed to attract buyers, and the whole venture soon folded. The sole surviving Waterman Aerobile is preserved at the National Air & Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Centre in Chantilly, Virginia.
But while the vast majority of historical flying cars have been conventional fixed-wing designs, for a brief period in the 1930s it seemed as though a completely different – and today rarely-encountered – type of aircraft would finally make the dream of personal air transport a reality: the autogiro. As covered in our previous video An Incredibly Deep Dive Into the Fascinating Invention of the Helicopter, the autogiro was the brainchild of Spanish inventor Juan de la Cierva, and represented a transitional phase between fixed-wing-aircraft and true helicopters. Unlike in helicopters, the rotor on an autogiro is not powered; rather, the aircraft is driven by a regular engine and propeller and the rotor is spun by the airflow over it – that is, it autogyrates. Andwhile early autogiros featured short wings and aircraft-style control surfaces, Cierva eventually perfected cyclic and collective control whereby the aircraft could be directly maneuvered by varying the angle of the rotor blades. This technological breakthrough would later prove vital to the development of true helicopters.
Compared to regular aircraft, autogiros were considerably more maneuverable and could take off and land over extremely short distances; indeed, in later models the rotor could be temporarily connected to the engine with a clutch to achieve near-vertical takeoffs. They were also extremely safe, for in the case of an engine failure the aircraft simply autogyrated to a soft landing. These unique properties led to autogiros being used in all sorts of unique applications. Forestry services used them for spotting forest fires and navies for reconnaissance and hunting submarines, and salesmen for major companies like Wrigley’s gum flew autogiros from town to town to hawk their wares. Newspapers like the The Detroit News and the Des Moines Register bought autogiros to whisk reporters to the scene of breaking news stories, while in Philadelphia mail-carrying autogiros performed experimental takeoffs and landings from the roof of the newly-built post office building. The ever-adaptable autogiro, it seemed, could do anything – including, many believed, become the long-sought-after “Model T of the skies”.
The most enthusiastic purveyor of this vision was one Harold Pitcairn, whose Pennsylvania-based Pitcairn Aircraft Company owned the U.S. manufacturing rights for Cierva autogiros. Throughout the early 1930s, Pitcairn – later the Autogiro Company of America – aggressively pushed autogiros like its PA-18 Tandem Sports Model as the ultimate commuter vehicle for the well-to-do, publishing richly-illustrated ads depicting members of the leisure set rolling their personal autogiros out of private hangars and flying off to tennis courts, golf courses, and hunting lodges. It was an idyllic, carefree vision, free of the hassle and frustration of ordinary road traffic. It was also a tantalizingly achievable one, as demonstrated by a memorable incident in 1930 when Pitcairn test pilot James G. Ray was forced to land due to a violent storm. But rather than stay put as with a normal aircraft, Ray simply folded back his rotors and kept motoring down the highway until the weather had cleared sufficiently for him to take off again. If that didn’t fit the definition of a practical flying car, nothing did. Indeed, so captivated was the public by the autogiro that in 1931 Harold Pitcairn was awarded the prestigious Collier Trophy by President Herbert Hoover for his role in bringing this revolutionary technology to the United States. The ceremony, attended by such luminaries as Orville Wright, climaxed when a Pitcairn autogiro, piloted by James Ray, fluttered down from the sky and touched down lightly on the White House Lawn.
But as with so many innovators before and since, Pitcairn’s dream of putting an autogiro in every garage was sadly not to be. For while autogiros were certainly safer than fixed-winged aircraft, they were still tricky to fly even for experienced pilots; indeed, no less an aviator than Amelia Earhart crashed twice. They were also prohibitively expensive, with Pitcairn’s model PA-18 retailing for $5000 – nearly $118,000 today. These safety issues, combined with the worsening effects of the Great Depression, forced Pitcairn to withdraw from the Autogiro market in 1933. Just a few years later, however, the US Bureau of Air Commerce contracted Pitcairn to build a roadable aircraft based on its PA-22 autogiro. The resulting vehicle, dubbed the AC-35, was built of tubular steel covered in fabric and featured an enclosed two-seat cockpit, twin powered steerable front wheels, and a 90-horsepower Pubjoy Cascade 7-cylinder radial engine that could power both the front wheels and a front-mounted two-blade propeller. In October 1936, James Ray performed a dramatic public demonstration by landing the prototype in a Washington, DC park, folding back the rotors, and driving the vehicle through the streets of the nation’s capital to the doors of the Department of Commerce building. But as should come as no surprise by now, nothing came of the Government’s roadable aircraft initiative, and the AC-35 was never commercially manufactured. The sole prototype now resides at the Udvar-Hazy Centre, very close to its contemporary, the Waterman Aerobile.
The outbreak of the Second World War brought an end to commercial flying car development, though some research on flying military vehicles was conducted. Among the most unusual was the Hafner Rotabuggy, developed by the British Airborne Forces Experimental Establishment or AFEE. The aim of the project was to allow military vehicles like jeeps and even light tanks to be dropped into combat without the use of parachutes. The vehicles would be fitted with rotors and a tail fin assembly and towed to the drop zone by a transport aircraft or heavy bomber. The vehicle would then be released and glide to a soft landing, whereupon the rotors and tail assembly would be jettisoned. Despite some early teething problems, the Rotabuggy proved surprisingly effective, being highly stable and easy to control. However, by the time the vehicle was ready for production, the introduction of heavy-lift assault gliders like the Airspeed Horsa and General Aircraft Hamilcar rendered the concept redundant and the project was cancelled.
The end of the Second World War brought about a renaissance in flying car development. Indeed, if there was ever a “golden age” for flying cars, it was the years 1945-1955, during which the combination of boundless postwar optimism and recent advances in aviation and manufacturing technology created the perfect conditions for such ambitious flights of fancy. As in the 1930s, most of the flying car designs produced during this period took the form of fixed-wing roadable aircraft, differing mainly in how the wings, tail, and propeller attached to the body and how they were stored or transported during ground travel. For example, the Fulton FA-2 Airphibian, introduced by inventor Robert Edison Fulton Jr. in November 1946, featured a streamlined two-seat cabin with four engine-driven aircraft-style wheels and a three-bladed tractor propeller, which could be converted to flight mode in as little as 45 minutes by latching on a combination wing and tail assembly. But while Fulton managed to get the type certified by the Civil Aeronautics Administration – the first flying car to be so recognized – he soon ran out of money and was forced to relinquish control of his company to his investors – who declined to pursue the project further. Today, only one of the original four prototypes survives, preserved in the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC. Robert Fulton, meanwhile, would move on to even more spectacular projects – most notably the Fulton Surface-to-Air Recovery System or “Skyhook”, used to recover downed pilots and secret agents from enemy territory during the Cold War – and for more on this spectacularly awesome invention, please check out our previous video The Real Story of Capturing an Ice Fortress With a Badass James Bond Film Device.
But while the Airphibian was a safe and reliable enough design, it suffered from one fundamental flaw: the wing and tail unit had to be left behind at the airfield, meaning the vehicle could not be used for multi-stop cross-country trips. Other designers tackled this problem in various ways. For example, the colourfully-named Whittaker-Zuck Planemobile, introduced 1947 by California-based designer Daniel R. Zuck, featured high-mounted wings that could be folded back to lie flat atop the fuselage, protecting them from damage during road use. Zuck, an aerospace engineer who worked for various companies including Consolidated and Lockheed aircraft, believed that roadable aircraft were the logical next step in automobile design, writing:
“Your automobile is a low flying airplane. Let’s take the car off the road and fly where flying is safe–in the wide blue yonder! …since the modern car has slavishly imitated the plane in everything except the wings, let’s put wings on it and make it fully functional.”
As we shall see, Zuck’s assessment of the realities of transportation safety were more than a little off the mark…
Other roadable aircraft designs from this period solved the wing and tail storage problems by mounting these components on a special trailer that could be towed behind the main cabin. One notable design which used this approach was the Taylor Aerocar, introduced in 1949 by Washington-based inventor Moulton Taylor. While on a road trip to the East Coast in 1946, Taylor encountered Robert Fulton’s Airphibian and immediately recognized the shortcomings of its non-transportable wing-and-tail unit. Believing he could do better, Taylor quit his job at a government military laboratory, later stating that:
“I just decided not to spend the rest of my life making things to kill people. My dream is to look up and see the sky black with Aerocars — and I’m sure that will happen someday.”
Like the Airphibian, the Aerocar was converted to flight mode by attaching a combination wing and tail assembly. However, once on the ground, the wings could be folded back and a set of wheels lowered, allowing the whole combination to be towed behind the cabin. Taylor also mounted the propeller at the rear of the tail boom in pusher configuration so it did not have to be removed when the vehicle was in road configuration. The drive shaft for the propeller was connected to the engine via an accessory coupling hidden beneath the rear license plate. In testing, the vehicle exhibited a top ground speed of 96 kilometres per hour and a top airspeed of 176 kilometres per hour.
After getting the Aerocar certified by the CAA in 1956, Taylor brokered a deal with industrial conglomerate Ling-Temco-Vought to manufacture the vehicle if he could obtain 500 orders. Unfortunately, he only managed to secure half that number, and the Aerocar went the way of every other roadable aircraft projects. In total, six prototypes were produced spanning three different versions. Several of these vehicles went on to have colourful careers, with one being flown by Portland, Oregon radio station KISN 910 AM as a traffic watch aircraft and another being purchased by actor Bob Cummings and featured on his 1960s sitcom The Bob Cummings Show. Today, four of the original prototypes survive. One is on display at the EAA AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin and another at the Museum of Flight in Seattle; one is in storage in Oregon, and the fourth is maintained in flyable condition at the Kissimmee Air Museum in Florida.
While most postwar roadable aircraft were small-scale, backyard garage-type endeavours, at least one such project was pursued by a major aerospace firm and came tantalizingly close to becoming commercially viable: the Convair Model 118. In 1945, engineer Theodore P. Hall left his job at San Diego-based aircraft manufacturer Consolidated Vultee – later renamed Convair – to pursue his dream of creating a practical flying car. Together with fellow engineer Tom Thompson, Hall created the first prototype in his garage by hammering aluminium sheets over a steel tube frame. Unlike earlier designs, which used the same engine to power the wheels and propeller, Hall’s flying car used a 25 horsepower Crosley air-cooled engine on the ground and a 90 horsepower 4-cylinder Franklin engine in the air. The latter was mounted in a streamlined pod mounted to the vehicle’s roof, driving a two-bladed propeller in tractor configuration. To this was mounted a pair of wings and a tail boom with cruciform tail surfaces. Supported by wheeled, telescoping struts, the wing, tail, and engine assembly could be installed or removed from the main car body in as little as six minutes.
The Hall Flying Automobile first flew on July 12, 1946, the flight being extensively profiled in an issue of Popular Science. After a production deal with Portable Products of Garland, Texas, fell through, Ted Hall approached his former employer Convair, who immediately bought out his company and moved the project to their main plant at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field. So enthusiastic was Convair about the project that they even bought out the Stinson Aircraft Company to develop and market its new flying car. Within a year, the company had refined Hall’s original design to produce the Convair 118 ConvairCar, which made its maiden flight on November 1, 1947. Unlike Hall’s prototype, the Model 118 featured a lightweight fibreglass body and a more powerful 190 horsepower Lycoming O-435C flat six engine in the wing pod, allowing the vehicle to reach a maximum airspeed of 200 kilometres an hour.
Convair priced the Model 118 at a somewhat reasonable $1500 – around $21,000 in today’s money. However, this only covered the main car body – the wings, engine, and tail assembly was sold separately. As with the Fulton Airphibian and other, this assembly could not be towed or otherwise transported by road; instead, Convair planned to store these units at airports across the country and rent them out to Model 118 users on a one-way per-flight basis. Predicted sales for the flying car totalled 160,000 units.
But then, just before the Model 118 was set to go on sale, disaster struck. On November 18, 1947, Convair test pilot Reuben Snodgrass was performing a one-hour demonstration flight when he suddenly ran out of fuel and was forced to make an emergency landing on a dirt road outside San Diego. Though Snodgrass was unhurt, the landing destroyed the car body and severely damaged the wings. It was later revealed that Snodgrass had accidentally taken off with very little fuel in the tank; though he had checked the fuel gauge before takeoff, this turned out to be the gauge for the car half of the vehicle, not the aircraft engine. Whoopsie-doodle! Unfortunately for Convair, the negative publicity surrounding the crash soured the public on the Model 118. The project was soon canceled, and with it died the brief postwar heyday of the flying car. If a major aircraft manufacturer like Convair couldn’t make the concept work – so the reasoning went – then nobody could.
But there were other factors behind the flying car’s ignoble demise. For one thing, the end of the War flooded the market with cheap military-surplus aircraft – against which expensive, exotic new vehicles like the Convair 118 simply couldn’t compete. But, more importantly, the mid-1950s saw the construction of the interstate highway system, a vast network of paved, multi-lane freeways criss-crossing the contiguous United States from coast-to-coast. No longer did long-distance motorists need to brave crude, poorly-maintained country roads – the very problem flying cars were designed to solved. In the golden age of Route 66 and the Great American Road Trip, where gas was cheap and motels, diners, and other roadside services plentiful, the flying car became an anachronism, and the dream of a personal flying machine in every garage slowly faded from the public imagination.
But the dream never really died, and over the following decades a few dedicated entrepreneurs carried on the quest to develop a practical, commercially-viable flying car. One attempt was the AVE Mizar, developed in 1973 by California-based entrepreneurs Henry Smolinski and Harold Blake, graduates of the Northrop Institute of Technology who had worked as engineers for North American Aviation and Rocketdyne. Unlike most previous roadable aircraft designs, Smolinski and Blake’s concept did not use a custom-built, lightweight car body but rather mated the wing, engine, and tail unit from a Cessna Skymaster light aircraft to a nearly stock commercial vehicle – in this case, a Ford Pinto. Yes, that Ford Pinto. Like the Convair 118, the AVE Mizar was designed to the car’s original engine on the ground and the Cessna’s engine in the air, though in practice both were used together on takeoff to improve acceleration.
By late 1973, plans were underway to establish a chain of AVE Mizar dealerships across the United States. But building a flying car out of a Pinto turned out to be as cursed as it sounds, for on September 11, 1973 the prototype crashed with Smolinski and Blake at the controls, killing both men instantly. However, the crash had nothing to do with the Pinto’s infamously volatile fuel tank, and was instead traced to faulty welds and the vehicle being overweight, which caused one of the wings to buckle mid-flight. Just like that, the AVE Mizar quickly faded into aviation obscurity.
But while the AVE Mizar stuck firmly to the tried-and-tested roadable aircraft design, another design conceived around the same time went in the complete opposite direction, completely redefining how a flying car should look and operate. The Moller M400 Skycar, the brainchild of Canadian engineer and entrepreneur Peter Moller, looks like almost nothing that came before. Somewhat resembling a speeder from one of the Star Wars prequels, the Skycar features a streamlined body with a bubble canopy, from which protrude two sets of extremely short wings. At the ends of these are four hollow “pods” housing ducted fans, each powered by a 102 horsepower Wankel rotary engine. These pods can rotate up and down, deflecting the airflow and giving the Skycar vertical takeoff and landing or VTOL capability. Once in level flight, the Skycar’s specially-shaped fuselage generates lift, adding to the vehicle’s aerodynamic efficiency. And if all this wasn’t enough, the Skycar is designed to be semi-autonomous, requiring little direct control input from the operator. Instead, the operator simply inputs general flight instructions and an onboard computer and fly-by-wire system takes care of the rest. It is, in other words, everything a flying car should be.
But if this sounds too good to be true for a vehicle conceived in the 1970s…that’s because it is. For despite being in development for over 50 years and absorbing nearly $100 million in investments, the prototype has only ever performed a handful of short, tethered hovering tests. As a result, in 2003 the United States Securities and Exchange Commission sued Moller International for civil fraud, claiming that the company had deliberately misled its investors – and the public at large – as to the capabilities and status of its products. Moller settled the suit by paying a $50,000 fine to the SEC, but further financial difficulties forced him to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009. Finally, in 2019, Moller International ceased operations. As of this recording the company remains dormant, having never manufactured a single production vehicle or even conducted a free flight test.
Meanwhile, several other companies have pursued various approaches to creating a viable personal flying machine. For example, the Super Sky Cycle, introduced in 2009 by The Butterfly Aircraft LLC of Aurora, Texas, is a small homebuilt autogiro with two engines: one to drive a propeller in flight and one to drive the tricycle wheels on the ground. Due to its light weight – only 340 kg – the Super Sky Cycle can be legally registered as a motocycle and an ultralight aircraft, making it more accessible to the average user. Other designs, like the Parajet Skycar and the Maverick Flying Dunebuggy operate on the powered parachute principle, consisting of a dune buggy or ATV-like vehicle with a propeller which can deploy a controllable parafoil for flight.
However, perhaps the most advanced flying cars currently in development are those produced by Terrafugia. Founded in Woburn, Massachusetts in 2006 by students from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronauts and the Sloan School of Management at MIT, in July 2017 the company was purchased by the Chinese Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, owners of the Volvo and Lotus automotive brands. In 2006, Terrafugia unveiled the Transition, a prototype light roadable aircraft. Like most mid-century flying car designs, the Transition features a streamlined two-seat cabin and small, aircraft-style wheels. However, the airframe makes extensive use of modern materials like carbon fibre to reduce weight and improve performance, while the twin-boom tail unit does not detach for road use as in earlier designs. Instead, the wings automatically fold up against the sides of the fuselage, allowing the vehicle to fit into most standard garages. Powered by a 100 horsepower Rotax 912 four-cylinder engine, the Transition can reach a maximum groundspeed of 110 kilometres per hour – allowing it to keep up with regular traffic – and a maximum airspeed of 172 kilometres per hour.
The Transition made its maiden flight on March 5, 2009, and received its airworthiness certificate from the Federal Aviation Authority – successors to the CAA – in June 2018. However, in February 2021, before a single production model was delivered, the company laid off most of its employees and shut down its North American operations, announcing its intention to move production to China. But the Transition was just the beginning, for in 2013 Terrafugia unveiled an even more advanced design that comes closer to the platonic ideal of a flying car than nearly anything that has come before. Known as the TF-X, the vehicle is, remarkably, a plug-in hybrid, powered by a pair of 600 horsepower electric motors for ground driving and flight cruise and a single 300 horsepower gasoline engine for takeoff and landing. Styled rather like the flying time machine Deloreanfrom the Back to the Future movies, the TF-X will deploy a pair of short wings tipped by engine pods and six-bladed rotors, which can tilt upwards to provide thrust for vertical takeoff and landing. In level flight, cruise thrust is provided by a ducted fan in the rear of the fuselage. According to Terrafugia, the vehicle will be able to seat four passengers, fit in most standard garages, fly up to 800 kilometres at 322 kilometres per hour on a single charge, and will cost approximately $300,000 apiece. However, given the many, many examples of broken promises and unjustified hype we have encountered throughout this video, it is perhaps best to take these claims with a grain of salt…
What is certain, however, is that recent advances in technology are bringing us ever closer to a world where flying cars might actually become viable – and government regulators and other agencies are taking notice. For example, in 2004 the FAA introduced the Light Sport Aircraft designation, which allows aircraft with a gross weight of up to 600 kilograms to be operated by pilots with significantly less training and experience than for more conventional light aircraft. This designation is tailor-made for roadable aircraft like the Terrafugia Transition, and many such vehicles have been built specifically to fit within the Light Sport Aircraft definition. And in April 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA put out a call for proposals for a four-passenger vehicle capable of both off-road travel and VTOL flight. Known as DARPA TX or Transformer, the initiative was an attempt to provide US troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other war zones with the capability to avoid rough terrain, improvised explosive devices, and other hazards on the battlefield – in other words, a flying Humvee. Dozens of defence contractors submitted entries, with nearly $8 million in development contracts being awarded to AAI Corp, Lockheed Martin, Rocketdyne, and Pratt and Whitney before the project was ultimately cancelled in 2013. Dozens more flying car projects are currently in the works for both civilian and military use.
But even if these initiatives succeed in producing a vehicle that is practical, reliable, and – most challenging of all – affordable, said vehicle will still have one major achilles heel, one which has plagued the very concept of flying cars from the very beginning: the driver. Every year in the United States alone, there are around 40,000 automotive collisions, resulting in some 43,000 deaths – this despite the fact that drivers only have to contend with navigating two spatial dimensions. Add another dimension, and needing everyone to become experts on weather as every pilot knows is one of the most critical facets of being a good pilot, and that number is likely to soar. For contrary to what Daniel Zuck, designer of the 1940s-era Whittaker-Zuck Planemobile, would have you believe, the skies are not safer for the average commuter than the roads; there is a good reason that becoming a pilot requires significantly more training – and money – than earning a driver’s license. Indeed, along with the prohibitive cost of the vehicles themselves, this gap in skills and cost between operating a car and an aircraft is the primary reason flying cars have failed to take off – pun intended – despite more than a century of development. There simply aren’t enough potential customers with the skills or money to operate both types of vehicles. And really, that’s a good thing; if ever you find yourself thinking that flying cars are a good idea, just imagine your average rush-hour traffic jam…but in the sky, where even the slightest collision is likely to end in fiery death and destruction. And, again, that’s not even discussing the weather factor which is how most even well trained private pilots get themselves killed.
But all is not lost, for another, surprisingly seasoned technology may hold the key to making flying cars a viable reality: automation. Paradoxically, while flying through the air is significantly harder for humans than driving around on flat roads, for computers the opposite is true. Indeed, since as far back as the 1970s, many commercial aircraft have been capable of taking off, navigating to their destination, and landing automatically with little to no input from the pilot and those systems have only gotten vastly more robust since. Combined with sophisticated radar transponder systems to keep vehicles safely spaced apart and within designated air lanes, such automated guidance systems could eliminate the unpredictable human factor altogether and allow commuters to fly swiftly and safely to their destination of choice without ever having to earn a pilot’s license or touch the controls. Indeed, such capability has already been incorporated into the base design of many current flying car projects like the Terrafugia TF-X, while a 2019 Blue Paper by Morgan Stanley Research predicts that the autonomous urban aircraft market could become a $1.5 trillion market by 2040. And while no such infrastructure has yet been constructed, with any luck flying cars may soon become one of the few features of our imagined Jetsons future to actually become a reality. Now, if someone could get working on an actual robot maid, that would be phenomenal; my Roomba’s stuck on the stairs again, and if cooking and cleaning could be taken off my plate? The sky’s the limit.
Expand for References
Taylor, Michael, The World’s Strangest Aircraft, Grange Books, London, 1996
Yenne, Bill, The World’s Worst Aircraft, World Publications Group, Inc, North Dighton, MA, 2001
Sillery, Bob, Looking Back at Henry Ford’s Flivver, Popular Science, December 18, 2001, https://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2001-12/looking-back-henry-fords-flivver/
Dillow, Clay, The Unexpected Rebirth of the Flying Car, Popular Science, July 7, 2021, https://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2010-10/death-and-rebirth-flying-car/
Trex, Ethan, Henry Ford’s Attempt to Make Us All Pilots, Mental Floss, March 11, 2024, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/28764/flying-flivver-henry-fords-attempt-make-us-all-pilots
King, Danny, This Awesome Terrafugia Electric Vehicle Will Fly, Someday, Auto Blog, April 27, 2014, https://www.autoblog.com/2014/04/27/this-awesome-terrafugia-electric-vehicle-will-fly-someday/
Video: Terrafugia Car Plane Takes Flight, Top Gear, August 1, 2013, https://www.topgear.com/car-news/future-tech/video-terrafugia-car-plane-takes-flight
Moss, Darren, New Terrafugia TF-X Flying Car Revealed, Autocar, July 24, 2015, https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/new-terrafugia-tf-x-flying-car-revealed
Van Hare, Thomas, The Curtiss Autoplane, Historic Wings, May 7, 2017, http://fly.historicwings.com/2017/05/the-curtiss-autoplane/
Glenn Curtiss – A First Flying Car? Flying Cars and Food Pills, https://www.flyingcarsandfoodpills.com/glenn-curtiss—a-first-flying-car
Ford Flivver – 268, EAA Aviation Museum, https://www.eaa.org/eaa-museum/museum-collection/aircraft-collection-folder/ford-flivver—268
Waterman Aerobile, Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/waterman-aerobile/nasm_A19610156000
Waldo Waterman – The Last First Flying Car, Flying Cars and Food Pills, https://www.flyingcarsandfoodpills.com/waldo-waterman—a-last-first-flying-car
Young, Warren, The Helicopters, The Epic of Flight, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1982
Gilmore, Susan, Tired of the Commute? All You Need is $3.5 Million, The Seattle Ties. September 5, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20061103182711/http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003243681_aerocar05m.html
Daniel R. Zuck, Plane-Mobile, http://plane-mobile.com/designer.html
The History of…AVE Mizar Flying Pinto, Cookieboy’s Toys, https://web.archive.org/web/20111003152033/http://www.cookieboystoys.com/mizar.htm
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1949 Taylor Aerocar – N4994P, EAA AirVenture Museum, https://www.eaa.org/eaa-museum/museum-collection/aircraft-collection-folder/1949-taylor-aerocar—n4994p
Are Flying Cars Preparing for Takeoff? Morgan Stanley, January 23, 2019, https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/autonomous-aircraft
The post A Plane in Every Garage- Where’s My Flying Car? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On May 8, 1945, the German armed forces signed their unconditional surrender to the Allied powers. WWII, at least in Europe, was over. And now that the guns had fallen silent, the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union had to face a daunting conundrum: how to deal with the active members of the National Socialist Party, the SS, the Wehrmacht and other organisations who had committed some rather extreme war crimes and crimes against humanity? On top of that, how to rid the fabric of the fallen III Recih’s society from the pernicious influence of an extremist ideology so many had bought into? Afterall, in some respects with those who had bought into the ideology wholly, it would have been like going back to the 1700s American South and trying to convince a mass group of slave owners to completely, and almost immediately, rethink their ideas on slavery and those of African descent in the nation. A seemingly impossible task. And then beyond ideological shifts, Just from a practical standpoint, how to speed up economic recovery for the nation and ensure nothing like this would happen again in the country and provide a strong buffer between the Soviets and the rest of Europe.
So, how was all of this accomplished? And how did they do it so fast? And just how successful was all of this in reality?
To begin with, the very top ranking members of the Nazi Party, and nazi-adjacent organisations – 199 defendants in total – were tried at the famous Nuremberg Trials in 1945 and 1946. Of course, hundreds, if not thousands, of other officials and officers wanted by Allied authorities were able to escape to Argentina via the numerous ‘rat lines’ through Scandinavia, Spain or even Vatican City. And countless more had no need to escape. Entities within the Allied and Soviet forces were more than happy to look the other way about anything they got up to during the war owing to the knowledge contained in their brains. More on this in a bit.
But when looking at the more wide-scale process of Denazification of the citizenry, most of these efforts consisted of special tribunals reviewing the alleged Nazi past of German and Austrian citizens. As well as just a general instillment in the mass populace that everything that had happened was their fault, and trying to get rid of various works that espoused Nazi ideology.
On that latter, over 30,000 different books were not only banned in the country after the war, but also systematically collected and destroyed. Anyone who tried to keep a copy could face legal consequences. The irony of this was not lost on anyone, given this was more or less a tactic taken out of the Nazi handbook when they came to power.
Beyond this, as alluded to, there was the general populace, who were to be made to feel responsible for what Germany had done under the Nazi regime, with the Psychological Warfare Division of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force taking point on this. They began efforts here seeing to it that the media from radio to newspapers not only strongly emphasised the atrocities in their coverage, but also explicitly noting that it was every single German’s fault for allowing it to happen, not just the Nazis, in all heavily controlling the press to say what they wanted it to say… Another rather ironic page taken out of the Nazi handbook. Although, to be fair, in this case strongly emphasising educating the German public on all the atrocities that had actually been committed, unlike much of the things completely made up by the Nazis.
Beyond the various media outlets, posters were put up all around showing pictures from concentration camps with giant text overlaid saying things like “YOU ARE GUILTY OF THIS.”
As noted by British author James Stern, in one German town a “crowd… gathered around a series of photographs which though initially seeming to depict garbage, instead reveal dead human bodies. Each photograph has a heading “WHO IS GUILTY?”. The spectators are silent, appearing hypnotised and eventually retreat one by one. The placards are later replaced with clearer photographs and placards proclaiming “THIS TOWN IS GUILTY! YOU ARE GUILTY!”
On top of that, in towns near concentration camps, the citizenry were often made to tour them, and even help bury the dead, help dig up mass graves, and things like this, with films also made of all this by the American War Information Unit to be shown to Germans who couldn’t see for themselves. As noted by the Chief of the film division of Psychological Warfare, Sidney Bernstein, the point of all this was “To shake and humiliate the Germans and prove to them beyond any possible challenge that these German crimes against humanity were committed and that the German people – and not just the Nazis and SS – bore responsibility.”
This general shift in mindset to blame all Germans, and not just the Nazis began around 1944, with before this generally a distinction made by the U.S. brass and with the U.S. public, whereas after a strong push to solidify in everyone’s minds that there was little difference between a Nazi and a non-Nazi German citizen.
This also seems to have been a general mindset pushed by the military brass to their own troops, warning soldiers that “the majority of Germans supported the Nazis try to make friends with us – to get information, to get favors, to create sympathy for the ‘poor down-trodden’ German people, to make us disagree among ourselves, or just to get a good chance to slip a knife into Allied soldiers.”
Speaking of the soldiers and going back to taking pages out of the Nazi handbook, it is also noted that during the denazification process, not just on the Soviet side, but on the U.S. side as well, frequent random beatings and rape of German civilians out and about was a thing. As one German professor noted, “These assaults have become notorious among the civilian population of Marburg; nobody risks going out in the evenings, and people feel as if they were exposed to acts of indiscriminate brutality with no means of protection.”
But in all, to help change the mindset of the German populace who had bought into Nazi ideology, the general push was to show the atrocities that had been committed, and try to make every German citizen feel responsible.
Going back to the tribunals to try to punish those more directly involved and rid society of them in any prominent position, very briefly, the objectives of this process were codified as early as July of 1945, and while the tribunals’ sentences dragged into 1957, the vast majority of the millions of card-carrying Nazi Party members had already been reviewed and sanctioned by April 1948.
But that’s all at a high level. How was this actually accomplished, and so quickly?
To begin with, the process of removing National Socialism ideology from the social fabric of Germany was conceived long before the end of the war in Europe. In fact, the term “denazification” itself was coined in 1943 by the Pentagon as they began thinking about what post-war Germany legal system would look like. And as early as August 1944, this had all gotten expanded with US President Franklin Roosevelt writing in his memos that the Allies should ‘drive home’ to the Germans that they had participated in a ‘Lawless conspiracy’.
The same sentiment was expressed more formally when Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. On that occasion, the so-called ‘Three Greats’ clarified that denazification was to be considered a strategic war aim. More precisely, the removal of ‘All Nazi and militarist influences from public offices and from the cultural and economic life of the German people.’
The III Reich surrendered on May 8, 1945 and the drive for denazification was restated in the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945. By that month, the western Allies had compiled a list of 178,000 nazis to be put under arrest, while the Soviets had already proceeded to the internment of 67,000 Reich officials.
Such a huge endeavour could not be conducted willy-nilly of course. Allied occupation forces had to clearly state the denazification objectives and parameters, as well as the categories and related sanctions for nazi offenders.
According to a US Department of State memo of July 1945, the objectives of the denazification program included:
- The arrest of Nazi leaders, supporters and any other persons ‘dangerous to the Allied occupation or its objectives’
- Exclusion of members of the Nazi Party, who had been more than nominal participants, from both public office and positions of responsibility in private enterprises
- Eradication of Nazi laws and decrees
- The dissolution of the Nazi Party and all its affiliated organisations, as well the prevention of their revival. This went hand in hand with:
- Elimination of all paraphernalia, so central to Nazi propaganda: symbols, flags and anthems. And finally
- Complete removal of nazi ideology from German information services, schooling system, and religion.
Having clarified what denazification was about, Allied forces had to define how it would be carried out. The Allied Control Council reached an agreement only in January 1946, issuing Directive 24 which contained guidelines for a coordinated approach – as we shall see later, this would be anything but coordinated!
In each of the four occupation zones of Germany, the Allies set up ad-hoc denazification commissions and tribunals, which involved the participation of local, vetted individuals, such as union leaders, judges and opponents to Nazism. The rulings of these bodies were made on the basis of an extensive, 131-point questionnaire drafted by the Public Safety Branch of the Allied Military Government.
This was known as the ‘Fragebogen’ which, translated from German, simply means ‘Questionnaire’
Respondents had to provide accurate and detailed answers about their education, their professional training, employment and military service. Going even deeper, those filling in ‘The Questionnaire’ had to provide details on the source of their income and assets since January 1931, as well as their writings and speeches published since 1923.
But most of all, they had to provide a full account of their membership and role within the National Socialist Party or any other affiliated organisation.
In the American occupation sector, filled in and signed questionnaires would be evaluated by a denazification tribunal in collaboration with the US Counter Intelligence Corps and a Special Branch Section of the Military Government’s Public Safety Division. These bodies would then cross-check all the answers against police files, civil service records and the very archives of the Nazi Party.
The purpose of this screening was not to identify all German citizens who had joined the Party or an adjacent organisation at any point, as there would have been very few exceptions. The Allied Military Government in fact agreed to safeguard from sanctions the ‘Purely nominal member of the Nazi Party who was forced to join in order to retain his position of livelihood or escape the concentration camp.’
The point was to ascertain if the individuals under scrutiny had been involved in more than just a nominal capacity in supporting the Nazi regime; if they had contributed to perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity; or if they posed a threat to the Allies and the restoration of democracy.
Based on these factors, respondents would be classified as follows:
‘Major offenders’ were to be sentenced to life imprisonment, or even to death.
Then you had the ‘offenders’: activists, militarists and those who had profited from Germany’s war of aggression, who could face up to ten years of prison.
Next, you had the somewhat murkier category of ‘lesser offenders’, subjected to a probationary period of up to three years.
The rank-and-file followers or supporters of Hitler’s regime, with no specific active responsibilities might encounter a fine, and be subjected to surveillance.
And finally ‘exonerated individuals’ would not receive any sanction.
Based on this categorisation, anybody from ‘lesser offender’ and up were deemed to have had more than a nominal participation in the Nazi Party’s activities. As such, in addition to the sanctions described, they would face mandatory removal from their post, be them military officers or public officials.
OK, so we have covered how the denazification of Germany should have worked. But how did it actually turn out?
Well, especially in the US-controlled occupation zone, military authorities started with a bang, preemptively detaining 400,000 Germans in internment camps, before they had even started filling in their 131-point questionnaires. But when the tribunals and commissions started applying due process, it became apparent that discerning rank-and-file party members from lesser or more serious offenders was no easy task …
The US military had access to excellent records – one thing the Nazis were unquestionably good at was record keeping. Occupation troops in Munich, in fact, discovered the party’s entire registry with the names of 12 million card-carrying members. But, according to Earl F. Ziemke, writing for the US Army Centre of Military History, ‘It was on the gray fringes of denazification that the question of who and what were Nazis vexed military government,’
The military occupation authorities still had to sift all those 12 million individuals, trying to identify the worst that humanity had to offer. And it turns out that many of those 12 million Nazis ‘had training, experience, energy, affability, and not a bad political record.’
As reported by Ziemke, American troops found those under scrutiny to be, on the whole, surprisingly pleasant chaps, which made their denazification efforts all the more difficult. A US high-ranking officer commented that if ‘All the Nazis had been exceedingly unpleasant and rude, denazification would have been easy.’
On the other hand, many among those Germans who were not formal members of the party could fall into two categories: those ballsy enough not to fall for Nazi ideology and propaganda; and those who had applied for membership but had been rejected! Interestingly, the former were equally not keen to cooperate with the Allies. And the latter likely did not make for ideal members of society.
And that was the problem: denazification was all well and good, but the Allies were also seeking to rebuild German society from its ruins, and as fast as possible. If they made a clean sweep of anybody even loosely associated with National Socialism, in Ziemke’s words: ‘They were going to have to run the country with old men until the next generation grew up. The number of political acceptables between the ages of twenty and fifty who were also trained and competent was exceedingly small.’
So, that was the first snag.
The second one was that the whole program required a huge bureaucratic apparatus which the Allies simply could not manage. In the US controlled zone alone, the commissions and tribunals had to review a whopping 10 million questionnaires. Sure, they had enrolled local personnel to run the tribunals, but even so trained man-power was scarce. And even those Germans who were willing to participate were reluctant to dish out harsh sanctions to their fellow citizens.
The third snag was that defendants in these tribunals had found a convenient way out: they could easily obtain signed, sworn affidavits from priests or even just friends and neighbours, attesting that the defendant was a mere rank-and-file follower, or that he or she could be altogether exonerated. Naturally, a cottage industry emerged, putting these affidavits on sale. They later became colloquially known as ‘Persilscheine’ after the popular Persil brand of detergent. In other words, they would leave a defendant’s reputation squeaky clean!
Eventually, US authorities could not cope with the red tape associated with denazification in their controlled areas, and with tensions between the Soviets and the U.S. rising, also somewhat shifted their focus. In particular, they were now much more concerned with Germany’s rapid economic recovery than trying to make sure everyone paid for their crimes and weren’t allowed in prominent positions. A similar thing happened over in Japan with the now termed “Reverse Course” policies. But back in Germany, with this shift, on March 5, 1946, they formally transferred all such duties to reconstituted German authorities, something that the British had done a few months earlier as well.
On that note, with the British and French occupation zones, local military governments took an even more pragmatic approach. Both prioritised the efficiency of local administration and economy, to quickly cope with housing and food shortages. Thus, they were even less scrupulous when it came to allowing former high-ranking officials to hold or resume important positions. French authorities were most lax of all, even allowing nazis residing in other zones to move and resume work in their occupied areas with no hinderance. As another example, given the Nazis had placed individuals whose beliefs aligned with their ideologies in prominent teaching positions, around 3/4 of teachers in the country were immediately fired after the war… only for the vast majority in the French zone to be quickly rehired and given their positions back. This was reflected in most industries in the French zone. In the end, in total, the French only labelled 13 total individuals in their region “major offenders”.
Finally, moving to the Soviet occupation zone, the removal of Nazi personnel and ideology appeared to be more resolute than in the zones governed by the Western Allies. In fact, denazification proceeded hand-in-hand with the ‘Sovietization’ of Eastern Germany, that is extensive land reforms and nationalisation of industry. Moreover, while Western Allies strove to replace Nazi officials with political representatives from a broad spectrum, Moscow had a preference for the KPD, or Communist Party of Germany, later the Socialist Unity Party or SED.
However, according to historian Timothy R. Vogt, the denazification in the Soviet-held area was not as thorough as it initially appeared. Thanks to the cooperation of the KPD, Soviet authorities were able to delegate most denazification processes to the Germans themselves, in the form of local anti-Nazi committees and newly formed provincial governments. These bodies enacted their measures inconsistently, and were prone to caving in when meeting local resistance and objections.
Moreover, they appeared to follow the general principle that if former Nazis were willing to rebrand themselves as Communists, they would not be removed from public life.
As you might have guessed from all this, as early as 1948, it had become apparent that the denazification of Germany had not resulted in the intended restructure of society. In December of that year, international relations scholar John H. Herz, a member of the US delegation at the Nuremberg trials, published an article with the self-explanatory title of ‘The Fiasco of Denazification in Germany’
Herz focused on the American occupation zone, reporting how trials conducted there were frequently hindered by intimidation on the part of nazi sympathisers. Even without intimidation, prosecutors based their indictments of the answers provided in the questionnaires, without verifying their veracity. Thus, most defendants were categorised as mere ‘followers’.
Moreover, after denazification efforts had been handed over to German authorities in March 1946, they had issued two amnesties, one in August, one in December, exonerating members of the Hitler Youth, persons of low income and disabled citizens. Herz pointed out how such amnesties allowed even war criminals to escape prosecution.
The scholar also unearthed a major procedural flaw.
Until October 1947, denazification processes had vetted some 50,000 individuals a month. Quite a good number! But the tribunals had given precedence to those who had been classified as ‘followers’ on the basis of their questionnaires. By the time tribunals finally worked their stash of paperwork to those classified as ‘offenders’, a legislative amendment allowed prosecutors to re-categorise them as ‘followers’, too – with the exception of members of the SS.
Such re-categorisation still required approval from the Allied Military Government. But in January 1948 this procedural step was removed by the enactment of an expediting procedure. Now all ‘offenders’ could be rubber stamped as ‘followers’ wholesale!
A further relaxation of standards took place in March 1948, with the almost total removal of the exception clause for members of the SS and other criminal organisations affiliated to the Nazi Party. Now, only those belonging to the category of the ‘Major offenders’ could expect major sanctions. Everybody else was deemed a ‘follower’ and was free to go after paying a fine.
As for the numbers on all this, some 12,753,000 Germans were expected to undergo the denazification procedures. More than 9 million were found ‘not chargeable’. The remaining 3,209,000 were processed by the end of April 1948. And of these, more than 2.3 million were amnestied without trial.
This left 836,000 to be tried – a mere 6.5%. More than one third of these were exonerated, and more than half classified as ‘followers’.
Of the remainder, 10.7% were categorised as ‘lesser offenders’; 2.1% were Class II ‘offenders’; and only 0.1% were found to be ‘major offenders’. That’s 836 individuals from the original nearly 13 million person pool.
And even those who were sentenced as ‘offenders’ in any degree of severity, most received lenient sanctions, such as community work, payment of fines, or shortened prison sentences.
Herz proceeded to compile several examples of such lenient treatments, of which we shall report only a few:
- An active propagandist and publisher of anti-Semitic writings was ranked as ‘follower’ and fined a mere 50 marks.
- A Dean at Bonn University, active member of the SS and their intelligence services, the SD, was fully exonerated.
- A high-ranking member of the Gestapo was found to be only a ‘follower’ and received a minor fine. Another Gestapo-man, head of station in the town of Fulda: also a ‘follower’.
- And the former deputy chief of police in Nuremberg, and one of the men responsible for the infamous Kristallnacht? Also a follower, fined a mere 800 marks!
- One physician, responsible for carrying out the sterilisation law against ‘undesirables’ … you guessed it: follower! Please pay your 500 marks and leave!
- Finally, an aeronautical engineer and industrialist who made a fortune of 36 million marks thanks to slave labour … Well, you get the gist by now. He was ultimately fined 2,000 marks.
Moving on toward the end of the 1940s, across all areas of occupation leniency gave way to amnesty and a strategy of integration. The chief proponent of this approach was the first chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, Konrad Adenauer. After his election in September 1949, Adenauer advocated for West Germany to forge strong bonds with Western Europe against the Communist Bloc. This strategy also included for old Nazi cadres to be integrated into the new republic, in order to move forward.
Towards that end in all this, in May 1951, Adenauer’s government passed the first amnesty law, which reintegrated into their position some 150,000 officials and civil servants, previously removed by the Allied denazification efforts. The following year, the Chancellor reported to the parliament that two thirds of German diplomats were, in fact, former Nazis. The armed forces, security services and even the private sector were similarly replete with former Reich personnel.
Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, British HIgh Commissioner in Germany, commented: ‘Whenever I travelled, I ran into ghosts of Hitler’s Reich, men who had occupied positions in administration, in industry, or the society of the day. They were either living in retirement or were taking jobs in banks, commerce or industry.’
Despite the amnesty, Adenauer’s regime also took steps the other way. For example, in August of 1952, his cabinet banned the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party. And in September he agreed to pay the state of Israel a reparation of 3 billion German marks, equivalent to $8.3 billion in today’s value.
But Adenauer’s intention was to leave the past behind nonetheless, and in 1954 his government issued the second amnesty law, which this time benefited around 400,000 German citizens.
A similar denazification process, culminating in widespread amnesty, was followed in Austria. This country is often excluded from English-speaking accounts of denazification, but we should not forget that Austria was annexed to the III Reich before the start of WWII. Nor that Austrian citizens actively joined the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Nazi Party, and therefore the country was occupied by the Allies at the end of the conflict.
The Austrian denazification process was led by the four occupying powers, UK, France, US and USSR in collaboration with three local parties: the Social Democratic Party, the Austrian People’s Party, and the Communist Party.
According to historian Dieter Stiefel, the Austrian denazification can be divided into five phases:
During the ‘Military Security Phase’, from April 1945 to June 1945, the four allied occupation powers worked in coordination to intern an initial batch of prominent SS and Nazi Party members. Such potentially dangerous individuals were hunted down and detained, on the basis of ‘black lists’ compiled by the allied high commissioners.
The next phase, from June 1945 to February 1946, is labelled as ‘Autonomous Denazification’: now the four Allies, plus the Austrian government, carried out denazification efforts independently from each other, which resulted in contradictory measures and decisions.
For example, the US occupation used a seven-page questionnaire similar to the fragebogen. The British and French used it, too, but only in part, while the Soviets ditched it completely! In Fact, the Soviets acted relatively chill in their zone of occupation, delegating the denazification process to local authorities. They intervened directly only when they identified someone guilty of war crimes committed on Soviet soil, or when they selected a promising scientist for, let’s say, relocation under pressure. More on this later!
In February 1946 the Allies devolved all denazification activities to the Austrian government, ushering in the third ‘Autochthonous’ phase. Local authorities followed three laws promulgated to this purpose, the Prohibition Act, Economic Cleansing Act, and War Crimes Act.
In order to enforce these laws, the government created ad hoc ‘People’s Courts’, consisting of two professional judges, and three lay judges nominated amongst the general public. These tribunals were set up to take very direct action, as no appeal was allowed against their verdicts. Nonetheless, allied authorities took note that the Austrian judiciary introduced at a very slow pace, and pressured for a quicker uptake.
In February 1947 the Government issued a new National Socialist law regulating the removal of the old Reich’s vestiges, thus kicking off a fourth phase …
… which lasted less than one year. The fifth and final phase, from 1948 to 1957, is known as the ‘time of amnesties’. The first of these involved the so-called ‘Minderbelastete’, which can be translated as ‘less incriminated’ or ‘lesser offenders’. This amnesty was applied to 90% of all registered members of the Austrian National Socialist Party.
The ‘Minderbelastete Amnesty’ effectively put an end to all major attempts at denazifying Austrian society. Which is not unsurprising: much like in a divided Germany, after the onset of the Cold War each allied power sought to consolidate local authorities under their sphere of influence.
The Austrian People’s Courts, however, continued to operate until December 1955. Up to that point, these tribunals had issued 13,607 guilty verdicts. But following the withdrawal of occupation forces from the country, a new constitutional law abolished the People’s Courts transferring their duties to standard jury trials.
Denazification trials continued for another couple of years, but to a much lesser degree of intensity: in the 1956-57 period, Austrian courts issued a total of 39 verdicts, of which only 18 were guilty sentences. As the denazification efforts and fervour whittled down, the Austrian parliament voted in favour of a final amnesty in 1957.
Besides widespread amnesties, it is no secret that hundreds of former Nazi officials entirely escaped any form of sanctions thanks to their military, scientific or technical expertise. They were simply deemed too useful to the Allies! In allied countries this seems to be something history paints as completely acceptable, though when other countries, like Argentina, essentially did the same, it’s more vilified for various reasons. See our video Why Did So Many Nazis Choose Argentina to Flee to After WWII?.
But as for the United States, according to the US Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, as early as May 10, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised the commander of US forces in Europe, General Eisenhower, to make some exceptions when it came to arresting war criminals:
‘In your discretion you may make such exceptions as you deem advisable for intelligence and other military reasons.’
Throughout the summer or 1945, the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps, CIC, and the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, did employ former German military and intelligence officers as informants – but this was a necessity to identify more dangerous Nazi criminals, or suppress anti-Allied resistance. But as friction mounted across the Iron Curtain, American and other Western allied services took to using German military personnel as a source of intelligence about Soviet military strategy, equipment and tactics.
Towards this end, the CIC collaborated closely with General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the ‘Foreign Armies East’, founded in 1938 and responsible for collecting intelligence on the Soviet Union. But the Corps also recruited personnel whose resume erred on the criminal side, such as SS officer Klaus Barbie, charmingly known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’.
Barbie the Butcher and other war criminals were eventually protected from prosecution and smuggled out of Europe with the complicity of the CIC, OSS and other Allied services. Many, many more former Nazi and SS officials would escape via ‘rat lines’ set up by Argentinian intelligence and even the Vatican.
The US Joint Chief of Staffs, however, were not interested in simply knowing more about the Soviets. They were interested in gaining a technological edge over them. As early as July 1945, they explicitly authorised a program to exploit ‘Chosen rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.’
Those rare minds were 350 German and Austrian scientists and technicians, to be brought immediately to America under Operation OVERCAST.
By 1946, the Department of Defence’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency sought to expand OVERCAST to recruit further 1,000 former enemy brains, and even grant them American citizenship. This was a complicated endeavour, as some of these chosen 1,000 were high ranking members of the Nazi Party. At least one of them, ‘rocket scientist’ Werner von Braun, had been an SS officer.
The plan required Presidential blessing, which President Truman granted in September 1946, insisting that only so-called ‘nominal’ Nazis be allowed in the program. The term indicated German and Austrian citizens who had joined the party out of convenience or coercion, but had not actively supported the Reich.
The new, expanded program took the name of Operation Paperclip. In early 1947 a panel constituted by the Departments of Justice and State began combing dossiers of prospective scientists for relocation to the US, which were based on CIC investigations. The panel initially rejected several applications, as the individuals in question had been identified as potential threats on the basis of their Nazi past.
This did not sit well with the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. According to the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, they ordered American intelligence in Europe to revise the scientists’ dossiers, so that they could make it through the Paperclip panel.
Thus, from 1945 to 1955, Operations Overcast and Paperclip helped relocate 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians to the States. The Interagency Working Group estimates that as many as 80% of them were former Nazi Party members.
Now, Operation Paperclip is a well-known episode of the Cold War. What is less well-known is that the Soviet Union had their own version of this project, known as Operation Osoaviakhim, or the forced relocation of more than 2,500 German scientists to the USSR.
However, an interesting thing about the name is it actually is something of a misnomer. The term ‘Osoaviakhim’ is an acronym which stands for ‘Union of Societies for Assistance to Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the USSR’. This was a paramilitary and sporting organisation founded in 1927. It had absolutely nothing to do with the Soviet equivalent of Paperclip, but apparently a German radio incorrectly used this word to refer to the ‘brain drain’ in 1946, and US intelligence services adopted the term.
The plan was initiated in April 1946, when the Soviet Minister of Aeronautical Industry, Mikhail Khrunichev, Minister of Aeronautical Industry, issued an order for the relocation of the German aeronautical and engine industry. This was followed by a May 13, 1946 resolution, decreed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD, which ordered the transfer of 2,000 ‘German specialists’ by the end of the year.
And not just specialists of any kind. The Soviet zone of occupation included facilities which were replete with scientists and technicians involved in aviation and rocket engineering projects. Initially, the Soviets founded institutions such as the Nordhausen Institute or the Berlin Institute, to resume work initiated by the Reich’s best and brightest. For example, the Nordhausen was put under the direction of Helmut Gröttrup, a former collaborator of Werner von Braun on the V-2 program.
But the agreements signed amongst the Allies at the Potsdam Conference prohibited the development of weapons on German soil, and so Moscow planned the relocation of these programs elsewhere.
Following the MVD’s resolution of May 1946, the Soviet forces started to gather hundreds of experts in atomic research, electronics, navigation equipment, rockets, jet engines and even colour video.
On October 22, 1946, Operation Osoaviakhim was effectively initiated, under the leadership of Ivan Serov, later a chairman of the KGB. By day, Serov had organised 92 freight trains, transporting the necessary equipment to the USSR. And by night, the Army and MVD police swooped in to arrest the German scientists and their families, for a total of 6,500 individuals.
After being made to see that their lives would be much better doing what the Soviet regime wanted… and it would be a shame if anything happened to themselves or their families, they were all offered a regular contract and paid salaries which were higher than that of their Soviet counterparts as extra incentive. As you might imagine, only a fraction of the German scientific contingent refused to cooperate with Moscow, and for that refusal these were thus interned at the Sharashka GuLag camp.
The Osoaviakhim scientists were gradually allowed to return to Germany after 1950, with the vast majority leaving after Stalin’s death in March of 1953.
But in the end, at the start of this video we asked the question: how did Germany and Austria denazify so quickly after WWII? Especially given the ideology behind their former regime was so embedded into every facet of society.
To sum up, on one hand, we can very simplistically state that both societies needed to move on quickly, to both rebuild their economies and to face the political challenges posed by the Cold War. And so everyone was incentivized to do so, and so did. And on top of this the extreme atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war helped convince those who had bought into what the Nazis were selling, that maybe they should rethink their decision making paradigm.
On the other hand, we can cynically acknowledge that the process was quick because it failed overall on a huge percentage of what it was meant to accomplish. Wiping the slate clean in such a pervasive regime was a logistically daunting task, one which the Allies and the local institutions were ill-prepared and little motivated to accomplish at a certain point. The Nazi party was finished. The Soviets were the new threat. West Germany, much like Japan, needed to be strong to help counter this. And to help facilitate this, former prominent Nazis and many prominent individuals in Japan would better serve these goals in their positions they were experts in, rather than sitting in prison or executed.
And for more on the Japanese side of this, do see our documentary: Swept Under the Rug: The Truth About the Japanese Holocaust.
Expand for References
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/02/what-is-de-nazification.html
https://www.alliiertenmuseum.de/en/thema/denazification/
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/survival-and-legacy/postwar-trials-and-denazification/de-nazification/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2144399
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945Berlinv01/d347
https://www.mytutor.co.uk/answers/24395/A-Level/History/How-successful-was-denazification-in-West-Germany-1945-60/
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/427604
https://www.alliiertenmuseum.de/en/ausstellung/who-was-a-nazi-denazification-in-germany-after-1945/
https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206265.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2193091
https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/occ-gy/ch21.htm
https://www.everand.com/book/250021411
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40106226
https://sgp.fas.org/news/1999/11/naraiwg.html
https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/29814/Overcast%20Paperclip%20Osoaviakhim.pdf
https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2024/01/operation-osoaviakhim-the-forced-relocation-of-thousands-of-german-scientists-and-technicians-to-the-ussr-in-1946/
https://hdgoe.at/entnazifizierung
https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Entnazifizierung
https://www.entnazifizierung.at/die-jahre-1945-bis-1955/
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/fears-of-retribution-in-post-war-germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
https://www.alliiertenmuseum.de/en/thema/denazification/
The post How Did Germany DeNazify So Quickly After WWII? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 historical revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds, U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, recruits the titular Basterds – a squad of Jewish soldiers – to wreak havoc behind Nazi lines during World War II. In the process, they cross paths with a parallel British mission and a revenge plot by a French Jewish woman and succeed in gunning down Adolf Hitler and most of the Nazi high command in a burning French theatre. Ridiculous Hollywood nonsense, right? Well, not as much as you might think for not only did Allied Intelligence actually concoct a plan – dubbed Operation Foxley – to assassinate Hitler, but they also recruited a large number of Jewish refugees to conduct secret operations behind enemy lines. And by far the most successful of these, carried out in the dying days of the war, succeeded in saving thousands of lives and a key Austrian city from unnecessary destruction. This is the story of Operation Greenup, the real-life Inglourious Basterds.
The real-life ‘Basterds’ in this story comprised three men. The first was Frederick Mayer, born on October 28, 1921 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany to Berthilda Dreyfuss and Heinrich Mayer. Heinrich served in the Imperial German Army during the First World War, receiving the Iron Cross Second Class for gallantry during the 1916 Battle of Verdun. When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, the family hoped that their patriarch’s wartime service would shield them from antisemitic prosecution, but they were bitterly disappointed. The younger Mayer, who was employed as a mechanic for the Ford Motor Company, often had to fight off antisemitic street gangs on his way to and from work. By 1938 it became clear that Germany was no place for Jews, so Mayer and his wife emigrated to the United States, settling in Brooklyn. They soon discovered that antisemitism was nearly as rife in America as in Germany, though Mayerwas not one to let this slide. On one occasion, he responded to an employer’s antisemitic joke by punching him out cold.
Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Mayer enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he quickly displayed a winning combination of daring, initiative, and lateral thinking. During one training exercise in Arizona, he snuck behind enemy lines and captured a number of officers including a Brigadier General, who protested:
“You can’t do that! You’re breaking the rules!”
To which Mayer responded:
“War is not fair. The rules of war are to win.”
At this, the General admitted defeat and raised his hands in surrender. Like. A. Boss.
These qualities, as well as Mayer’s fluency in German, French, Spanish, brought Mayer to the attention of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS – the precursor to today’s CIA – who immediately recruited him as an agent and trained him in demolition, marksmanship, and hand-to-hand combat. In a 2013 documentary, Mayer explained his motivations in a statement that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in Tarantino’s film:
“It felt like I had my chance to do what I set out to do — kill Nazis. That’s why all the Jewish boys joined.”
Whether his goals included collecting 100 Nazi scalps is not recorded.
The second key figure in Operation Greenup was Hans Wijnberg, a Dutch Jew born on November 29, 1922 in Amsterdam. On the eve of the Second World War in 1939, Winberg’s parents sent him and his twin brother Louis to live with his father’s business partner in Brooklyn. In 1943, four years into the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Wijnberg’s parents were rounded up and deported to the Auschwitz Extermination Camp. Distraught and vowing revenge, the now 21-year-old Wijnberg enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was soon approached by an OSS recruiter, who had sought him out for his fluency in German, Dutch, and English. Wijnberg volunteered on the spot, and was trained as a radio operator.
The third and final member of the team was Franz Weber, born in 1920 in Oberperfuss near Innsbruck, Austria. As an officer in the German Wehrmacht, he served on several fronts, including the savage anti-partisan campaigns in occupied Yugoslavia. An avowed and conscientious Catholic, Weber soon grew disgusted by the brutal reprisals inflicted against the local population, and became convinced that the Nazi regime was evil and unsustainable. After transferring to the Italian front in the summer of 1944, he defected to U.S. Forces near Viareggio. Recognizing his willingness to oppose the Nazis and his intimate knowledge of the Tyrol region, the OSS quickly recruited Weber and assigned him to the Operation Greenup team.
Mayer, Wijnberg, and Weber’s mission was, simply put, to determine how the war in Europe would end. For years, rumours abounded that the Nazi high command was building an Alpenfestung or “Alpine Redoubt”: a large, heavily-fortified area in the Alps where the last, fanatical Nazi holdouts would make their last stand – potentially extending the war by months and costing thousands more lives. Operation Greenup called for the trio to be parachuted into the Tyrol near Innsbruck, where they would report on the movement of troops and equipment through the Brenner pass between Austria and Italy and determine whether the Alpenfestung actually existed. Meanwhile, they were to cause as much chaos as possible behind enemy lines. The OSS had already sent 30 teams into the area, but all had either been captured or failed to gather any useful intelligence. However, Operation Greenup had an ace up its sleeve: Franz Weber, who not only knew the area intimately but whose family in Oberperfuss had bravely volunteered to shelter the agents and run messages for them.
On February 26, 1945, the team made their jump over a frozen mountain lake 10,000 feet up in the air – the only viable drop zone in the area not crawling with German troops. While mercifully the lake was frozen solid and no-one was injured or drowned, unfortunately all but one supply canister were lost – including the one holding the team’s skis. They were thus forced to hike for miles through waist-deep snow until they reached Franz Weber’s house. There, they set up camp and began preparing for their mission. Brooklynites through and through, the team created a system of codenames to disguise their operations by laying a map of their home borough over a map of the Tyrol and renaming each location after its corresponding New York street name or intersection.
As soon as the team was organized, Mayer descended into Innsbruck and posed as a Wehrmacht officer, even sleeping for a while in the Officer’s Barracks. There he gathered a windfall of intelligence from his unsuspecting fellow officers and kept an eye on troop and supply movements through the city. He even organized an underground resistance movement among local Army and Gestapo personnel who had grown disillusioned with the Nazis and wished to bring a swift end to the war. Franz Weber’s sisters bravely volunteered as couriers, carrying information gathered by Mayer back to Wijnberg, who, using a radio hidden the the Webers’ attic, transmitted it to the OSS listening post in Bari, Italy. This intelligence allowed the U.S. Army Air Force to bomb dozens of trains, blocking the Brenner Pass for weeks on end and severely disrupting German supply lines.
Three weeks into the operation, Mayer learned of a secret underground munitions plant in the area, and decided to pose as a French electrician fleeing the Russians in order to infiltrate it. Unfortunately, Mayer’s luck suddenly took a turn for the worse when one of his local contacts, a black marketeer, was captured by the Gestapo and promptly ratted out the rest of his resistance network. Mayer was immediately captured and brutally tortured, being stripped naked and thrashed with a bullwhip for hours. Still, he maintained his story – that is, until the informant was brought into the torture chamber. His cover blown, Mayer admitted he was an American agent, but, in a bid to save his team, maintained that he worked alone. At this point Mayer should have been dragged outside and executed as a spy, but once again fate intervened.
At the same time, the Gestapo was interrogating another American OSS agent, Hermann Matull, whom they showed a picture of Mayer for identification. Thinking quickly, Matull claimed that Mayer was a high-ranking intelligence officer, and that American forces would execute anyone caught harming him. The ruse worked, and instead of being executed, Mayer was brought before the highest official in the area: Franz Hofer, the Gauleiter or regional governor of Tyrol. Convinced that the Third Reich’s defeat was inevitable and not wanting to be tried as a war criminal, Hofer treated Mayer humanely and allowed him to contact his OSS handlers via neutral Switzerland. The message they relayed was a masterclass in hard-boiled understatement, reading:
“Fred Mayer reports he is in Gestapo hands but cabled ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m not really bad off.’”
With Hofer’s help, Mayer organized the peaceful surrender of Innsbruck, preventing the city from unnecessary destruction. On the morning of May 3, 1945, as the US 103rd Infantry Division was preparing to advance on the city, Mayer drove out in a car flying a a white flag improvised from a bedsheet and informed the American forces that the German garrison in Innsbruck was prepared to surrender without resistance. Though only a sergeant, Mayer claimed to be a Lieutenant in the hopes he would be taken more seriously by both German and American officers. It worked, and Innsbruck was captured without a shot being fired. Thus ended Operation Greenup.
In addition to trying up German logistics, Greenup’s greatest achievement was deflating the myth of the Alpenfestung once and for all. Though the plan for an Alpine Redoubt had seriously been proposed and provisionally approved by both Adolf Hitler and Gauleiter Hofer, due to a lack of resources no serious attempt was ever made to implement it. Nonetheless, in 1945 Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels created a special unit to spread false intelligence about the hypothetical redoubt, going so far as to draft fake blueprints and troop movement orders and leak rumours to neutral countries. This deception operation was enormously successful, forcing the Allies to expend considerable resources trying to establish the scale and readiness of Alpenfestung. It was not until Allied troops actually crossed into Austria that they finally learned that the dreaded Alpine Redoubt was nothing but a mirage.
After the war, Mayer moved back to Brooklyn, where he worked at a power plant until his retirement in 1977. He then moved to Charles Town, West Virginia, where he volunteered as a driver for Meals on Wheels for 38 years. In 2013, Senator Jay Rockefeller presented Mayer with 10 decorations for his wartime service, including the Prisoner of War Medal, Good Conduct Medal; American Campaign Medal; European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three Bronze Stars; World War II Victory Medal; World War II Honorable Service Lapel Button; and the Parachutist Badge. During the awards ceremony, Rockefeller opined on Mayer’s wartime contributions, stating:
“Mr. Mayer is a remarkable but incredibly humble man whose bravery in World War II is only now getting the attention it deserves. I am truly honored to be here today, and to share his story.”
Frederick Mayer died on April 15, 2016 at the age of 94.
Hans Wijnberg, Operation Greenup’s radio operator, left the Army in 1946 and studied chemistry, obtaining his bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1949 and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1952. He served on the faculties of the University of Minnesota, Grinnell University, the University of Tulain, the University of Leiden, and the Rijksuniversitet Groningen before retiring and founding a successful chemical company. He died in 2011 at the age of 89.
Finally, Franz Weber remained in his hometown of Innsbruck, where he became Chief of Police. He later headed the Tyrol Farmers’ Union before going into politics and serving in both the Tyrolean and national Austrian legislatures. He died in 2001 at the age of 81.
While Operation Greenup was the most successful operation of the war conducted by Jewish operatives, it was far from the only one. At the outbreak of war, Jews who had fled Germany and occupied Czechoslovakia for Britain and her colonies were rounded up and interned as enemy aliens. In 1942, however, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, desperate for any means of striking back against the Germans, approved the formation of a special Commando Unit, code-named No.3 Troop or X-Troop, whose members were to be recruited from among the interned Jewish refugees. Numbering some 130 men and commanded by Captain Bryan Hilton-Jones, X-Troop participated in a number of daring operations. For example, during the disastrous Dieppe Raid on August 19, 1942, five members of the unit, all former Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia, infiltrated a German headquarters to capture an Enigma cipher machine. Later, in the lead-up to the Operation Overlord landings in Normandy, X-Troop operative and German-born Jew Stefan Rosenberg – code-named Stephen Rigby or “Nimrod” – took part in the vast deception operation designed to convince the Germans that the invasion would take place in the Pas-de-Calais region – and to learn more about this, please check out our previous video The Bizarre Story of the Massive Fake Army That Defeated the Nazis and Helped End WWII. Rosenberg’s mission involved sneaking behind enemy lines disguised as a German intelligence officer disguised as a member of the French Resistance (take that, Robert Downey Jr.) and briefing his “superiors” on the alleged Allied invasion plans. In the end, he succeeded in securing an audience not only with Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, commander of German defences in Normandy, but Adolf Hitler himself before escaping back to British lines. How Rosenberg restrained himself from killing the hated Fuhrer then and there remains a mystery for the ages. Over the course of the war, X-troop lost 21 men killed and 22 wounded – but that, dear viewers, is a story for another day.
Expand for References
The Real-Life Inglourious Basterds of Operation Greenup, Homage, June 14, 2021, https://homage.tc/blogs/stories/operation-greenup-real-life-inglourious-basterds
Posner, Michael, Operation Greenup: a Story Better Than Inglourious Basterds – and True, The Globe and Mail, November 7, 2012, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/operation-greenup-a-story-better-than-inglourious-basterds-and-true/article5065865/
Rockefeller Presents Decorations to World War II Hero Fred Mayer, Jay Rockefeller for West Virginia, May 3, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20141207130521/http://www.rockefeller.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=1eb2114c-fb70-4c10-863e-7c4ae89b837c
‘Real Inglourious Basterds’ Reminiscent of Tarantino Flick, CTV News, November 6, 2012, https://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/real-inglorious-bastards-reminiscent-of-tarantino-flick-1.1026136
Desrochers, Daniel, WV Veteran Known For Spying on Germany in WWII Dies, Charleston Gazette-Mail, April 15, 2016, https://archive.ph/20160717052120/http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20160415/GZ01/160419628
Operation Greenup: The REAL Inglourious Basterds, The National World War II Museum, May 3, 2021, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation-greenup-real-inglourious-basterds
X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II, The National World War II Museum, June 9, 2021, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/x-troop-secret-jewish-commandos-world-war-ii
The post Operation Greenup: The Real Inglourious Basterds appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Controversial research programs, unethical experimentation, and human trials have been part of the medical field for centuries. The more infamous recent examples of wayward science include widespread eugenics sterilization, Nazis Nazi-ing, similar rampant Japanese experimentation during WWII which the U.S. happily let literally everyone off for in exchange for the data, electroshock therapy, ionizing radiation experiments, the CIA program MKULTRA, and the U.S. government sponsored Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which we’ll get to in the Bonus Facts later.
Moving on to cancer, typically when physicians are looking to find potential paths to cure people of various types of cancer, they’ll use tried and true methods proven to help in the aggregate towards this end. Other times, they’ll use new and experimental procedures that may help, or may do nothing, but generally trying to avoid doing harm. In all cases in most of the developed world, they’ll explain what they are going to do, and then ask for consent from their patient or their guardian or the like before administering any treatment regardless of what it is. But this is a relatively modern idea and in the wild west days of medicine that are just barely in our rearview mirror, few things were off the table, whether a given patient consented to something or not. This is the story of the eventual head of the American Cancer Society, Dr. Chester Southam, and his quest to see what would happen if he injected people, from healthy to terminal, with cancer. Along the way we’ll also be looking at whether it’s possible to catch cancer from another human, the cancers in certain animals that are spread directly via contact, even in one odd case to a human, and give yet another reason why mosquitoes should be eradicated from the Earth.
But before all that, our story today begins in 1963 at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Enter the aforementioned Dr. Chester Southam, who, at the time, was working at the Sloan‐Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases. While there, for about a decade, Dr. Southam had been experimenting with injecting people with cancer without their informed consent… He had gotten away with it up to this point. But that was about to end thanks to what happened at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital.
Rewinding a little bit, starting around 1954, Dr. Southam began wondering what would happen if he injected people with the famed HeLa cancer cells, which more or less revolutionized medicine, more on these cells in the Bonus Facts later. He particularly wanted to study the immune system’s response to such.
In his first experiments, he decided to focus on people who already had what was likely terminal cancer, injecting the cancer cells into their skin and then waiting to see what would happen. In this round, the general course of things was for cancerous nodules to form at the injection sites. For most, eventually their immune system would successfully get rid of the nodules on their own, but not for everyone. Southam wrote in his paper on the matter that he had to remove the cancer manually on some, and that for 4 of the patients, the nodules came back multiple times after removal. Unfortunately, in one patient, the HeLa cancer cells managed to spread to her lymph nodes and beyond to join her other cancer in helping her to cease having to deal with the troubles associated with life.
The problem with this experiment, he thought, was that it was on people who already had widespread cancer and compromised immune systems. But what would happen, or how would things be different, if experimenting on healthy individuals? To answer this question, he targeted the staple subjects for all individuals doing questionably ethical research- people who are incarcerated.
In this case, in 1956, he selected about 150 inmates in the Ohio Prison system. Now, it is noted that these individuals allegedly consented to all of this knowing fully what he was doing, although there are conflicting reports on this, and seemingly no hard records backing it up. Whatever the case there, as for what happened when he put HeLa cancer cells all up in their goodies, unlike the previous terminal cancer patients he’d experimented on, all of these healthy individuals’ immune systems were able to get rid of the cancer and, fascinatingly, the more he injected in a given subject vs another, the faster their bodies were able to get rid of it.
In total in all his experiments in the 1950s and early 1960s, around 600 people were injected with HeLa cells. But it wouldn’t be until 1963 he would get in trouble for this and, not coincidentally, experimenting on individuals without informed consent at a Jewish hospital post-WWII was a huge reason why. Whoopsadoodle. Read the room Dr. Southam.
Up to this point, Southam had run the experiment on countless individuals from terminal cancer patients to healthy. But now he wanted to know what would happen if people who were terminally ill from other diseases unrelated to cancer were injected with the HeLa cancer cells.
Thus, he partnered with one Dr. Emanuel Mandel at the Jewish hospital to begin injecting various patients with cancer cells. In this case, it would seem that the otherwise terminal patients were simply told they were being injected with something to test their immune systems, which was technically true. And that they allegedly all gave oral consent to that, at least according to Mandel and Southam.
The problem in this instance, however, was that some of the other physicians at the institution took issue with their already very sick patients being used in such an experiment and without informed consent, including eventual whistleblowers Drs David Leichter, Perry Ferkso, and Avir Kagan- all of whom resigned their positions over it as well. Noteworthy, the three doctors in question were Jewish, and, as alluded to, with WWII barely in the rear view mirror and the establishment of the Nuremberg Code for Permissible Human Experiments, let’s just say they were pissed.
If you’re wondering about the Nuremberg Code, it was a rather revolutionary concept for physicians at the time, and outlines in part, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision…”
Dr. Southam seemingly disagreed, arguing that “It is not necessary to present [the subject] with what you feel are inconsequential data and [it is] unethical to ram down his throat information which is detrimental to his condition.”
In other words, the fact that he was injecting them with cancer was inconsequential in his opinion because he didn’t expect any negative long term result, and if he told them, it would only stress them out, thereby being a negative in their current condition and even potentially changing the results of his experiment slightly in that he was specifically targeting studying the immune system’s response to foreign cancer cells.
Ultimately the three physicians who protested reported it to the NYS Board of Regents, as well as a lawyer, one William Hyman, a board member at the hospital.
Hyman would later state of Drs Mandel and Southam and their work here, “I don’t want Nazi practices of using human beings as experimental guinea pigs.”
Then Attorney General of New York Louis Lefkowitz soon after called for the suspending of Dr. Southams’ medical license, writing, “Every human being has an inalienable right to determine what shall be done with his own body. These patients then had a right to know the contents of the syringe: and if this knowledge was to cause fear and anxiety or make them frightened, they had a right to be fearful and frightened and thus say NO to the experiment.”
Other hospital administrators, however, defended the research. Initially claiming that the patients had given oral consent, though this was later refuted owing to never being told about the cancer element. But even still, executive director of the hospital, Solomon Siegel, stated he felt it didn’t matter, “It was not necessary to tell them that the substances were cancer cells because they are harmless. As expected, they were rejected by the patients’ bodies. It was the rate of rejection that was sought.”
Of course, this glosses over the fact that previous immunocompromised individuals Southam experimented on like these terminal patients hadn’t always rejected the cancer so readily, and in one it had successfully spread in her body to join her other cancer as cancer besties. And, of course, the greater issue wasn’t just the cancer aspect or safety or not of it. It was an experiment being done on patients without their giving informed consent to have it done on them.
In the end here, Dr. Southam was found guilty of unprofessional conduct, fraud, and deceit by the NYS Board of Regents. His punishment was to have his medical license revoked for just one year, after which, a mere two years later, he was elected as the President of the American Cancer Society… Yep.
This all brings us to the question of whether or not it’s possible to catch cancer from someone else.
It turns out, contrary to popular belief, yes. Although exceptionally rare, in humans at least.
For example, consider the case of an unnamed 53 year old surgeon which occurred sometime in the 1990s. The paper covering the case notes said surgeon operated on a likewise unnamed 32 year old patient to removed an abdominal tumor. While doing this, the surgeon accidentally cut his own hand. For reasons having nothing to do with potentially getting cancer, the cut was immediately disinfected. Nonetheless, five months later, the surgeon had a lovely tumor on his hand in the very spot he’d been injured during that operation. When said tumor was removed and analyzed, it was found to have been made up of cells from the now deceased former patient of the surgeon’s. A part of him had temporarily lived on in another host. And more importantly as we’ll get into later, had successfully masked itself from the surgeon’s immune system.
In a similar type event, this one in 1986, a lab technician was injecting colon cancer cells into mice and accidentally poked herself in the hand with one of the needles. A tumor developed on the site a couple weeks later and was removed without incident.
Moving on from there, while it is rare thanks to the placenta’s extreme ability to prevent various potentially harmful things access to a growing baby, it turns out certain kinds of cancer, in particular leukemia/lymphomas and melanoma have been found to be able to make the leap from mother to baby. And another exceptionally rare one is twin to twin spreading of cancer in the womb in the case of leukemia. In yet another case, cancer of the placenta, choriocarcinoma, can spread to both the mother and baby.
Moving on from there, in 2007 four rather unlucky people got some organs from an elderly woman who’d died of a stroke. When her liver, lungs, and kidneys found their way into people in need of them, all four of the patients got cancer not long after, with three of them dying of it. Later analysis showed the cancer cells came from the organ donor, who had unknowingly had breast cancer when she died of a stroke.
Up next, in perhaps the most bizarre case, this one occurring in 2014, a Colombian man was having some rather curious health issues and went to the hospital to see what was wrong. Upon investigation, tumors were found in his lungs, liver, and adrenal glands. The problem was, as stated by one of the physicians analyzing the tumor cells, Dr. Atis Muehlenbachs, “It looked like cancer, but the tumors were composed of cells that were not human.”
Eventually they tracked down that the DNA was from a tapeworm- meaning a tapeworm’s cancer had successfully spread throughout its host. Unfortunately for the man, at that point it was too late. You see, he also had HIV, which while fully treatable, with people infected with HIV nowadays living rather normal lifespans if they keep up on their medication, the combination of HIV and some bizarre form of cancer doctors couldn’t identify resulted in him giving up hope of living and refusing all treatment in the weeks leading up to the source of the cancer finally being discovered.
Speaking of non-humans and transmittable cancers, in the early 1990s a rather odd disease popped up among Tasmanian devils, manifesting in tumor growths on their faces and mouths. This aptly named Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease quickly spread from devil to devil and today over 95% of the entire species will ultimately find themselves infected at some point in their lives.
What makes this particular disease so interesting is that once it was studied in detail, it turned out it was not caused by some more common pathogen like a microbe or virus that then in turn induces cancer in the host. Rather, the cancerous cells themselves were being transplanted and growing in and on the new host. If that didn’t make the Tasmanian devils unlucky enough, bizarrely, in 2014 a second, distinct strain of the cancer developed and is now also being transmitted.
As for the means of transmission, this is via the Tasmanian devils fighting and mating with one another, with the cancer cells transmitting through biting in the process of these two activities.
Once in the other devil’s body, the cells continue to replicate and ultimately usually kill the host within 6 months. This occurs via the devil either dying from the spread of the cancer and failure of organs, or ceasing to be able to eat due to the size of the growths around their mouths and face, even sometimes with the tumors pushing out their teeth or resulting in fractures in their jaw bones.
That said, some devils are more resistant to the tumor than others, with some infected relatively recently found to now be able to live up to 2 years. Because those more resistant then have more time to breed, this has resulted in more Tasmanian devils resistant to the cancer being born- a bit of rapid evolution in action, taking only about ten generations of the devils to manifest. In fact, not only have the devil population’s decline started to stabilize in the last few years, but there have even been a couple dozen cases where a given devil has been observed to make a full recovery after their bodies successfully fought off the disease.
Moving over to our canine friends, the oldest known single-cell lineage still replicating away are the cells that cause a disease known as Canine transmissible venereal tumors. The first of these tumorous cells replicated some 11,000 years ago, and actually diverged from canids somewhere around 6,000 years ago- meaning today the cell line has more or less evolved into something of a unicellular organism in its own right, with only 57-64 chromosomes instead of the normal 78 found in dogs.
As to the transmission, this is almost always transmitted sexually, with the tumor cells infecting the male dog’s Mr. Happy and the female dog’s outer Mrs. Happy covering. That said, given dogs’ propensity to lick and sniff these areas before and after putting on some Marvin Gaye and shampooing the wookie, it has been observed to infect their noses and mouths as well.
Now, at this point you might be wondering- if this is technically possible, even in humans, why isn’t this something seemingly ever discussed as a risk-factor when around someone with cancer?
To begin with, in order for cancer to transmit from one person to another, you’re going to need to get the offending cells from the one person’s body into the other in a way in which the cell can survive the initial transplantation and then have what it needs to keep replicating.
Let’s say that did happen and the cells get into the other person’s body by some miracle, perhaps when taking a cancerous bald-headed gnome for a stroll in the misty forest, or in cases like the aforementioned surgeon who cut his hand. The problem for the cancer here is that in virtually all cases, as happened in almost all of Dr. Southam’s experiments, the new host’s immune system is going to recognize the foreign invader and kill it off promptly.
Also as seen to an extent in Dr. Southam’s experiments and some of the aforementioned examples, exceptions occur in instances where the person’s immune system was extremely compromised, such as from AIDS or individuals taking immunosuppressant drugs. Demonstrating this, this is how one of the four aforementioned organ transplant patients survived the breast cancer he got from the original organ owner. Unlike the other three who died as a result, in his case, removal of the donated organ was not immediately life threatening. Thus, the doctors simply removed the cancerous kidney and then he was able to stop taking the immunosuppressant drugs, making it extremely likely his immune system would eradicate the cancer cells. Just in case, they also treated him for the cancer directly. One or both of the methods worked swimmingly and he was cancer free not long after and ready for a new transplant that wasn’t so troublesome.
Of course, the more concerning potential exceptions here are cancerous cells in which the cell has mutated in a way that makes its foreign body nature difficult or impossible for your immune system to detect. This did not happen with the HeLa cancer cells Dr. Southam used, but fully possible with other cells, or even a mutated version of the HeLa cells as can happen.
This is seemingly what happened with the aforementioned surgeon with the tumor on his hand. You see, in order to find out why his body had not simply gotten rid of the foreign tumor naturally, he was examined to see if he had any immune deficiencies. The results of the tests didn’t find any such issue, meaning the tumor cells themselves seem to have successfully masked their presence from his immune system somehow. Thus, they were fully capable of successfully spreading from human to human if given a pathway.
This is also what is happening, for example, in the cases of the canine sexually transmitted tumors, as well as with the Tasmanian Devil facial tumors. In the latter, normally their immune systems would use the Major Histocompatibility Complex- a group of proteins on the surface of most cells- to see that the cells are foreign bodies. But in the case of these particular tumor cells, they don’t have an MHC, leading researchers to conclude this is probably why they aren’t being detected and eradicated in the vast majority of cases up until more recent times where this is starting to happen as noted.
All that said, fear not. This sort of thing is not generally considered a concern for humans, even though there have been known cancerous cells that can infect and successfully establish themselves in a new host. This is primarily because, first, unlike Tasmanian devils, we aren’t going around biting one another randomly, or when mating… or at least most of us aren’t. We aren’t here to judge. You do you, so long as informed consent is given.
Thus, the extremely low odds of the cancerous cells being transmitted successfully from one host to another, combined with the also extremely low odds of your immune system being unable to eradicate the problem if it by some miracle actually happens, have to date resulted in it never being a problem for humans in general. And even in the future with cases of a potential STD version, similar to what’s been going around in dogs for thousands of years, humans have things like condoms and widespread semi-monogamous or fully monogamous relationships that would limit the initial spread to some extent, requiring a bit of a perfect storm of unlikely events to see such a cancer establish itself widely.
That said, it is always possible, and perhaps more concerning is the case of Syrian hamsters, where such a strain of cancerous cells is actually capable of being transmitted from hamster to hamster via arguably the most hated and already deadly creature of all- mosquitoes.
Going back to humans, mosquitoes transmit a host of other diseases as well, all giving rise to the Mosquito Cocktail Hypothesis for cancer. Noteworthy on this one, there are five viruses, one microbe, three parasites and one additional virus in HIV that all have been definitively shown to have a causal relationship with cancer, in the case of HIV via suppressing your immune system. But countless other viruses, microbes, and parasites have been loosely linked in various ways to cancer. For example, versions of the human papillomavirus (HPV) occasionally result in cancer in the host, killing literally hundreds of thousands of people annually. H. pylori, which causes ulcers, can cause chronic inflammation which in some cases may lead to cancer, with many other viruses, microbes, and parasites likewise also being able to do a similar thing, some 27 of which to date have been found in mosquitoes. As researchers at the Experimental Dermatology Unit at the Karolinska Institute note in their paper “Does the mosquito have more of a role in certain cancers than is currently appreciated?”
“There are over 3000 species of mosquito and very few have been fully analysed, so the six remaining infectious agents may be present in some unexamined species. This hypothesis proposes that more cancers than are presently appreciated may arise from the long-term outcome of a mosquito bite, which by releasing a complex cocktail of up to 60 infectious agents directly into the blood stream, often results in contemporaneous immuno-suppression and a multiplicity of co-infections. These co-infections may act synergistically in whole, or in part, and in complex ways. Whether and if so which type of cancer ensues will depend on the constituent ingredients in the cocktail, determined by multiple factors such as the mosquito’s drinking and feeding patterns, number of previous blood-meals and the variety of intermediate hosts from which these meals are taken. Only a few mosquito species carry malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya and the other recognised serious human ailments. This hypothesis suggests that the number of species carrying the cancer cocktail will be few in number but collectively have a worldwide presence.”
While it is just a hypothesis at this stage, I think we can all agree on the strength of the already known 1 million or so humans every year killed by mosquitoes and their disease spreading abilities, it’s time to make the mosquito come to fear our extinctive powers. Seriously people. We focus on eradicating countless diseases with vaccines and other herculean efforts to save sometimes massively fewer lives per year, and we shut the world down to save a not too dissimilar number of lives per year during COVID. Mass murder of our little itchy friends would be a drop in the bucket, but save a million people per year at least. Further, it would only be necessary to wipe out about 1/30th of the species of mosquitoes, leaving the rest to happily continue being pollinators and food sources for other animals. Humans are remarkably adept at wiping out species from the earth when we aren’t even trying. It’s time to combine these two things and eradicate the troublesome species of mosquito from our little spaceship called Earth.
Bonus Facts:
Going back to the HeLa cancer cells, by the mid-1960s dozens of immortal cell lines had joined HeLa in the arsenal of medical research, bearing donor-derived names such as A-Fi and Di-Re. These lines had opened an unprecedented window into carcinogenesis, allowing researchers to pinpoint the exact moment a cell changed from normal to cancerous, a process dubbed spontaneous transformation. Researchers in Russia even claimed to have discovered a virus that caused cancer, bringing the possibility of a universal cure tantalizingly within reach. Then, in September 1966, molecular biologist Stanley Gartler of the American Type Culture Collection Committee stood before the Second Decennial Review Conference on Cell Tissue and Organ Culture in Bedford Pennsylvania and dropped a massive bombshell. While conducting an audit of immortal cell lines, Gartler discovered that despite being of supposedly separate origins, all 18 lines he examined contained the same mutation of a gene called G6PD found almost exclusively in people of African-American descent. To his shock, Gartler realized these weren’t new cell lines at all; they were all HeLa. Alarmed, Gartler tested more and more cell lines, but in every case he found only HeLa. The conclusion was disturbing but inescapable: there were no other immortal cell lines. There was only HeLa. So vigorous were Henrietta Lacks’s cells that if even one made its way into a cell culture it would out-divide and replace the original cells overnight. Like a virus HeLa had hopped from laboratory to laboratory and culture to culture, invading and conquering until there was nothing else left.
Every jaw in the conference hall must have dropped at once, for at a stroke Gartler had shattered over a decade of scientific progress – and with it countless hopes, dreams, and careers. All other commercial human cell lines were now worthless. There was no spontaneous transformation or cancer virus; the cultures had simply been contaminated with HeLa. Hopes of understanding carcinogenesis and developing a universal cure quickly faded away. Eventually new authentic human cell lines would be discovered, including A549 in 1972 and HEK 293 in 1973, but never again at the same feverish pace as the “golden years” of 1951-1966.
70 years on Henrietta’s remarkable cells are still one of the most popular human cell lines in medical research, with an estimated 50 million tons stored in laboratory freezers around the world. If laid end-to-end, they would circle the globe three times. And so long as they are kept properly fed and incubated they will continue to divide and thrive for decades to come, outliving their original host by a century or more.
Going back to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, this was a program that ran for about four decades in Macon County, Alabama during the mid-20th century.
In this one, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) approached the Tuskegee Institute (located in Macon County which had the highest rate of syphilis among African-American males) about forming a research group in order to study the effects of untreated syphilis on a black male population for a duration of six to nine months and then follow-up with a treatment plan. The Institute agreed, along with the head of the University’s hospital Dr. Eugene Dibble, and was complacent through the first year, thinking treatment was the ultimate goal. Later, they would claim they were deceived themselves and just as much victimized as the men in the study.
The study, during the first year, was led by Dr. Taliafero Clark. The PHS enrolled six hundred Macon County men, 399 with syphilis and 201 who weren’t infected, to be part of the study. None of the men actually knew what the study was for. They were lured in with the promise of “free health care,” something that none of them had, and treatment of “bad blood,” a general localized term that encompassed several different afflictions, including anemia, fatigue, and other venereal diseases.
The men were told that they were going to get free medical exams, meals, and burial insurance. It was said that the reason for the deception was that it would be the only way the men would stay in the study and the researchers wanted to closely observe the course of the disease over a large sample-size to see the effects as the disease progressed, even to death. But not to worry, as long as the ones that died allowed autopsies to be performed, their funeral expenses were covered…
Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr was the on-site director of the study. He actually supported partial treatment for the men for the sole purpose of making sure they remained in the study (as in, stayed alive). He was the one who gained “consent” of the men for painful spinal taps by framing them as a “special free treatment.” In letters he sent to the men with the header from the Macon County Health Department, it read,
“You will now be given a last chance for a second examination. This examination is a very special one and after it is finished you will be given a special treatment if it is believed you are in condition to stand it.”
The study, originally only intended to go nine months, went beyond a year and then, due to breakthroughs, extended. In 1934, two years after the study began, the first major medical paper was published detailing health effects on untreated syphilis. By 1936, according to the CDC, a medical paper was published criticizing the treatment plan for the men. 1940, once again according to the CDC, brought efforts “to hinder the men (in the study) from getting treatment ordered under the military draft effort.” You see, about 250 of them had registered for the draft and been found to have syphilis and ordered to be treated with penicillin.
Despite this, the subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment were never administered nor offered penicillin as treatment. The study administrators wanted to watch the progression of the disease as the men got sick and, in many cases, died during the forty years the study went on even though for much of it a relatively effective treatment was available. All total it’s estimated that 128 of the men died either directly from syphilis or complications related to it, 40 infected their wives (and in some cases possibly others), and there were 19 of the men’s children born with congenital syphilis.
Finally, on July 25, 1972, Jean Heller of the Associated Press broke the story that uncovered the truth about the study. A government panel ruled that the study was “ethically unjustified” and it ended. In the summer of 1973, attorney Fred Grey filed a class-action suit on behalf of the men against the PHS and it ended with nine million dollars (about fifty million dollars today) being handed out to the surviving participants and families as settlement.
In a similar study, this time to test penicillin’s effectiveness in treating syphilis and other STDs, researchers led by Dr. John Charles Cutler from the United States (funded by the Public Health Services, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau, and the National Institutes of Health) headed to Guatemala in 1946 and found prostitutes who had syphilis, getting them to then give it to unsuspecting Guatemalan soldiers, mental health patients, and prisoners. They also directly infected certain individuals by, to quote, “…direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men’s penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded … or in a few cases through spinal punctures.” It isn’t known how many people died as a result of this as the results from the study were never published.
Dr. John Cutler was also involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. He faced no consequences for the numerous people that died in his experiments, and he even led an illustrious and celebrated career including at one point becoming an assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General. As ever, the past was the worst.
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Chester Southam Secretly Injected People With Cancer Cells
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1962: Dr. Chester Southam injected live cancer cells into 22 elderly patients
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Bulletproof vests are one of Hollywood’s favourite action movie plot devices. Easily concealable and seemingly impervious to all weapons, they provide writers with a handy eleventh-hour means of saving their characters from certain death. But how can such a relatively thin and flimsy piece of fabric stop a speeding bullet, and are real-life bulletproof vests really as impenetrable as in the movies? Well, lock and load as we dive into the fascinating – and dangerous – history of ballistic body armour and the incredible modern day seemingly otherwise fabric suits that are made to stop bullets.
The widespread adoption of practical firearms in the 15th century led to the rapid decline in the use of traditional plate armour. While a medieval suit of armour could protect its wearer against swords, pikes, maces and other kinds of melée weapons – as well as certain kinds of arrows – all but the heaviest and most expensive suits were mostly useless against musketball. Armies thus began to abandon armour in favour of more lightly-equipped, mobile troops, with certain pieces such as breastplates and helmets being retained by officers as specialized troops like heavy cavalry. For example, during the English Civil War of 1642-1651, the Ironside cavalry of Parliamentarian or “Roundhead” leader Oliver Cromwell wore musket-proof breastplates or cuirasses composed of two layers of armour: an inner layer that absorbed most of the bullet’s energy, and an inner layer that prevented it from penetrating. This two-layer design would later be used in many soft ballistic armour systems. By the 18th Century, however, firearms had become powerful enough to penetrate even these defences, and plate armour was largely relegated to a ceremonial role. For example, the gorget, a piece of armour which originally protected the throat, was shrunk down to a non-functional size and worn on the chest by officers and military policemen as a badge of rank. Ornamental breastplates – often highly polished and decorated – were also worn by officers, aristocrats, and members of elite military units like Cuirassiers. Incredibly, this tradition persisted into the 20th Century, with French Cuirassiers wearing their Napoleonic-era breastplates and helmets into battle during the first weeks of the First World War.
But for the most part, plate armour largely disappeared from the battlefield for more than 200 years. The thickness – and consequently the weight – of steel plates needed to stop modern firearms projectiles was simply too great to be practical. However, several inventors discovered an unexpected material that proved unusually resistant to gunfire: silk. In Japan, for example, where firearms had been introduced in 1543 by Portuguese traders, armour makers discovered that multiple layers of tightly-woven silk quilted together was enough to dissipate the energy of a musket ball and stop it from penetrating. Combined with steel plates, this material was used to construct a new type of armour called tosei-gusoku or “bullet tested.” However, these suits were expensive to produce, and reserved only for the wealthiest samurai.
Following the 1866 French military expedition to Korea – a failed punitive response to the execution of seven French missionaries, Huengson Daewongun, regent of the Great Joseon State, ordered the development of flexible bulletproof armour. The result was the Myeonje Baegab, a vest composed of 30 folds of heavy cotton fabric. These vests were used successfully during the 1871 United States expedition to Korea, triggered by Korean fortresses opening fire on American ships.
The surprising protective power of silk was rediscovered by ex-naval surgeon George E. Goodfellow, who made his name treating the gunshot wounds of gunslingers like Wyatt Earp in the Old West town of Tombstone, Arizona. In 1881, trader Luke Short and gambler Charlie Storms got into an argument and shot each other with pistols at point-blank range. One. 45 calibre revolver bullet penetrated Storms’s heart, and he quickly died of his wounds. During the autopsy, Goodfellow extracted the bullet, which was wrapped in a handkerchief which had been in Storms’s breast pocket. Incredibly, the projectile had not penetrated the silk. After witnessing several similar cases, in 1887 Goodfellow published an article in the Southern California Practitioner titled Impenetrability of Silk to Bullets. He later experimented with an early form of soft body armour resembling the Korean Myeonje Baegab and constructed of 30 folds of silk. However, nothing much came of his invention.
But Goodfellow’s article would directly inspire the man now recognized as the father of the modern ballistic vest: one Casimir Zeglen. Unusually given his most famous creation, Zeglen was not a soldier, police officer, or even an engineer or inventor, but rather a Catholic priest. That’s right: the inventor of soft body armour was literally a man of the cloth…. Born in 1869 in Poland – then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – at age 18 Zeglen joined the Congregation of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ – better known as the Resurrectionists – and in 1890 moved to the United States, settling in Chicago. On October 28, 1893, the recently-reelected mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, Sr, was assassinated by newspaper distributor Patrick Eugene Prendergast. Having suffered a severe head injury at age four, throughout his life Prendergast became increasingly disturbed and erratic in his thoughts and behaviour. In 1893, he fanatically supported Carter Harrison’s re-election campaign in the deluded hope that he would be rewarded with a political appointment. When said appointment failed to materialize, Prendergast visited Harrison at his home and shot him three times with a .38 calibre revolver. One of the shots penetrated Harrison’s heart, killing him instantly. Arrested soon after, Prendergast was found guilty and sentenced to death, being executed by hanging on July 13, 1894.
Casimir Zeglen was deeply affected by Harrison’s assassination, and set about developing a means of protecting future politicians and other individuals from such senseless acts of violence. Drawing directly from George Goodfellow’s 1881 article, Zeglen developed a special method for laminating together silk sheets, creating a lightweight protective vest only 1 centimetre thick. On March 16, 1897, Zeglen arranged a live demonstration of his invention before a large crowd including the Mayor and Chief of Police of Chicago. Apparently having just as much faith in his sewing abilities as he had in the Almighty, Zeglen donned the vest himself and hired a marksman to shoot him at point blank range. The crowd gasped as Zeglen crumpled to the ground, but a moment later he raised his hands and got to his feet, completely unharmed. The crowd then erupted into wild applause.
Yet despite this stunning and well-publicized success, Zeglen struggled to find American investors for his invention. Part of the problem was the extreme precision needed to make the vest work; poorly-sewn copycat versions tended to get their wearers killed, and Zeglen lacked the technical knowledge to mass-produce vests to the required level of quality. Undeterred, in December 1897 Zeglen returned to Poland and joined forces with famed inventor Jan Szczepanik [“Yan Sheh-che-pah-nick”]. Known as the “Polish Edison” or the “Leonardo da Vinci of Galicia”, Szczepanik had many impressive innovations to his name, including a photoelectrically-controlled weaving machine that could cheaply mass-produce coloured tapestries, and an early form of television known as the Teltroscope. In only a few months, Szczepanik succeeded in perfecting Zeglen’s design and creating an automatic line to mass-produce bulletproof vests. There was only one problem: at $800 apiece – more than $25,000 today – the vests could only be afforded by the extremely wealthy. It was at this point a disillusioned Zeglen broke off the partnership and returned to America. And while Szczepanik offered to buy his patent for a generous price, Zeglen refused. Nonetheless, Szczepanik, a skilled and well-connected businessmen, succeeded in selling the vests to many of the wealthiest and powerful figures in Europe, including Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and King Alfonso XIII of Spain. The vests were also enthusiastically adopted by gangsters in America – especially Zeglen’s adopted hometown of Chicago. The ultimate validation of Zeglen’s design came on May 31, 1906 during Alfonso’s wedding in Madrid, when he and his new bride, Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, were attacked by Catalan anarchist Mateu Morral. As the wedding procession was returning from the Royal Monastery of San Jerónimo to the Royal Palace, Morral threw a bomb at the newlyweds’ carriage, which killed 30 bystanders and wounded 100 more. However, the fragments failed to penetrate Alfonso’s protective silk vest, saving his life.
There is a persistent rumour that Szczepanik also sold a vest to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the throne of Austria Hungary. As the story goes, when Franz and his wife Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 – the event that ultimately triggered the outbreak of the First World War – his assassin, Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip, suspected that the Archduke was wearing protective armour and opted to aim for his head. However, no concrete evidence has been found to support this claim. It should also be noted here that nobody, not even Emperor Franz Josef himself, cared about the assassination. In fact, the Emperor expressed relief over the killing because it rid him of an heir whom he deeply disliked. More on this and what REALLY started WWI in the Bonus Facts in a bit.
But in any event, back in America, in March 1901 Casimir Zeglen offered one of his vests to George B. Cortelyou, personal secretary to President William McKinley. For unknown reasons, Cortelyou declined the offer. Six months later, McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, New York by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Given the relatively low power of the .32 calibre Iver Johnson revolver used by Czolgosz, had McKinley been wearing one of Zeglen and Szczepanik’s vest, he almost certainly would have survived.
Sadly, from this point on Casimir Zeglen all but vanishes from the historical record. Abandoning his bulletproof vest venture, he founded the Zeglen Tire Company and the American Rubber and Fabric Company, which produced tubeless, puncture-resistant tires for bicycles and automobiles. Given that the fate of these companies – and Zeglen’s eventual date of death – have been lost to history, it is safe to assume he was unsuccessful in his endeavours. Meanwhile, Jan Szczepanik continued to promote Zeglen’s bulletproof vest with a series of death-defying live demonstrations – all the while claiming to be the vest’s sole inventor. Indeed, so successful was this marketing campaign that in Europe it is typically Szczepanik – not Zeglen – who is credited as the father of the bulletproof vest. However, Szczepanik’s success was not to last. Zeglen’s design was only effective against relatively low-velocity black-powder pistol rounds; with the widespread adoption of more powerful smokeless-powder ammunition, within 10 years the vest became useless against all but the weakest handguns.
The outbreak of the First World War saw the sudden and unexpected return of plate armour to the battlefield. With the exception of a few special units like the aforementioned French Cuirassiers, troops marched into battle in 1914 without any kind of protective equipment – not even helmets. The famous spiked pickelhaube worn by German troops were made of boiled leather and designed to deflect sword blows; they offered no protection against bullets or shell fragments. But as the war bogged down into brutal trench warfare and both sides began mercilessly bombarding each other with artillery shells, the rate of severe head wounds began to soar. In response, all sides introduced not only protective headgear like the French Casque Adrian, the British Brodie Helmet , and the German Stahlhelm, but an exotic assortment of metal plate armour, including pieces to protect a soldier’s neck, shoulders, and chest. However, most of these devices proved too heavy and bulky to be practical on the battlefield. Those that were adopted, like the German sappenpanzer or “Lobster armour”, were mainly issued to static or specialized troops like machine gunners, sentries, or sappers AKA military engineers. Still, such armour was largely designed to protect against shell fragments, and could not block anything more powerful than a pistol round. One notable exception was the American Brewster Body Shield, a breastplate and face protector made of chrome nickel steel which was capable of stopping full-powered rifle bullets at a few hundred yards. At 18 kilograms, however, it was unwieldy to wear and very few were issued. Interestingly, just prior to the war the U.S. Army considered adopting a silk ballistic vest similar to Casimir Zeglen’s design. However, this idea was abandoned due to the prohibitive cost of silk and the limited usefulness of such soft armour against rifle rounds.
During the 1920s and 1930s, American gangsters began wearing cheaper ballistic vests made of thick layers of heavy cotton, which were capable of stopping most common pistol rounds with velocities up to 300 metres per second such as .22 short, .22 long rifle, .25 ACO, .32 ACP. .380 ACP. .38 Special, and .45 ACP. In response, police forces were forced to upgrade to more powerful cartridges such as .38 Super and .357 Magnum. This remained the state of the art for soft body armour until 1938 when DuPont chemist Wallace Carothers discovered the synthetic polymer Nylon which, while not as strong as silk, was stretchier and much cheaper to manufacture. Initially used in toothbrushes and women’s stockings, following the outbreak of the Second World War Nylon was pressed into service to make parachutes and flak jackets, among the first pieces of soft body armour to be widely issued in combat.
Flak jackets were the brainchild of Colonel Malcolm C. Grow, the Surgeon General of the U.S. Eighth Air Force. Grow noticed that the vast majority of wounds suffered by bomber crews operating over occupied Europe were caused by fragments from exploding German antiaircraft shells AKA ‘Flak’ (and if you’re wondering where that word came from, it is an abbreviation for Flieger Abwehr Kannone, German for “Anti-Aircraft Gun”). Convinced that many of these injuries could be prevented by some kind of light protective armour, Grow worked with the British Wilkinson Sword Company to develop a protective vest which in 1943 was officially adopted by the U.S. Army Air Force as the Flyer’s Vest, M1. Weighing in at a whopping 10 kilos, early vests were made of cotton canvas lined with manganese steel plates while later versions incorporated increasing amounts of lighter ballistic nylon. Several different versions of the flak jacket were also developed throughout the war for different kinds of aircrew, including the Flyer’s Apron, M3 for waist gunners, the Flyer’s Apron, M4 for ball turret gunners, and Groin Armor, M5 for seated crewmen like pilots, copilots, navigators, and bombardiers. M1 infantry helmets modified to fit over flying helmets and headphones were also widely issued to protect against head injuries.
While developed in the UK, flak jackets were rarely used by the Royal Air Force as they were too bulky to wear in cramped British bombers like the Avro Lancaster. However, over 300,000 M1 and 100,000 improved M2 vests were issued to USAAF crews throughout the war. They were also widely worn by U.S. Navy personnel aboard aircraft carriers, whose open decks provided little protection against shell and aerial bomb bursts. And while useless against machine gun bullets and cannon shells, flak jackets were effective against shell fragments and helped reduce the number of fatalities from chest and abdominal wounds among USAAF crews by nearly 40%.
Meanwhile, much experimentation was done on body armour for use by regular ground forces. In 1940, the British Medical Research Council or MRC developed an outfit comprising three plates of 1mm manganese steel – the same as used in British helmets: one covering the chest, another the lower abdomen and groin, and a third the lower back – all held in canvas webbing pouches that could be strapped on over or under a soldier’s uniform. Around 5,000 were produced, being mainly issued to British, Polish, and Canadian paratroopers and field medics starting in 1944. However, despite weighing only 1.5 kilos, troops found MRC armour uncomfortable to wear and it was quickly discarded.
Meanwhile, in 1942 the Soviet Red Army introduced an armoured vest known as the SN-42 Stalnoi Nagrudnik or “Steel Breastplate”, which comprised two plates of 2mm pressed steel covering the torso and groin. Weighing 3.5 kilos, the SN-42 was issued mainly to assault engineers and tank riders, and was capable of deflecting a 9mm pistol or submachine gun bullet at point-blank range.
And in 1944, the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps developed an innovative protective vest called the M12, based on a fibre-reinforced resin material called Doron. This material was moulded into plates 3mm thick and 130 millimetres square, which were inserted into pockets in a ballistic-nylon vest. Far lighter than earlier metal-based armour, the vests were issued in limited numbers during the Okinawa campaign from April-June 1945 and found to be effective against shell and bomb fragments and pistol bullets up the .45 ACP.
After the war, the US Army continued to improve on the M12 design, producing the M1951 vest widely used during the Korean War and the M1955 used in Vietnam. However, as before, these vests were only effective against shell fragments and pistol rounds, while armour capable of stopping more powerful weapons was too heavy for regular combat and was only issued to specialized personnel. For example, in 1967 Natick Laboratories in Massachusetts developed the T65-2 plate carrier vest, designed to hold armour plates made of hard ceramic like boron or silicon carbide or aluminium oxide. Capable of stopping more powerful small arms projectiles like the 7.62×39 round fired by AK-style rifles, the 8-kiloT65-2 was issued to pilots of low-flying helicopters during the latter half of the Vietnam War.
As in the 1930s, the development of lighter and stronger body armour awaited a breakthrough in materials science. That breakthrough came in 1965 with the development of poly-para-phenylene terephthalamide – better known as Kevlar. Discovered by DuPont chemist Stephanie Kwolek, Kevlar was originally developed as a replacement for steel in belted automobile tires. With a tensile strength of 3,620 Megapascals, it is pound-for-pound 10 times stronger than steel while maintaining excellent flexibility and cut and puncture resistance – making it ideal for making ballistic vests.
In 1971, Lester Shubin, Director of Science and Technology for the National Institute for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, initiated a research program to evaluate the ballistic performance of Kevlar. And if you happen to be an animal lover, you may want to skip this part. These tests involved strapping different thicknesses of Kevlar cloth to anaesthetized goats and shooting them with various calibre firearms, all while monitoring blood oxygen levels and other indicators of lung and heart injuries. The program revealed that Kevlar was capable of protecting against most common handgun rounds like .38 special and 9x19mm at short ranges, preventing the bullet from penetrating and reducing blunt force injuries to less-than-lethal levels. Indeed, Kevlar ballistic vests were found to increase the wearer’s probability of survival by a whopping 95%.
The National Institute of Justice published its findings in 1976. However, by this time Kevlar ballistic vests had already been commercially available for several years, developed by companies such as Smith & Wesson and American Body Armor. Such vests soon became standard equipment for police forces around the world, and according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, have saved the lives of nearly 3,000 officers annually since 1987.
Like earlier forms of soft body armour, Kevlar ballistic vests work in two stages. The outer Kevlar layers absorb the energy from the bullet, causing it to slow down, deform, and spread its energy over a wider area. The inner layers then prevent the bullet from penetrating and help further spread the force of impact. Indeed, most ballistic vests also incorporate additional pads called trauma pads to further reduce blunt-force injuries. However, while a ballistic vest can stop a bullet and save its wearer’s life, they may still suffer severe bruising or even broken ribs, depending on the type of bullet and the range at which they were shot.
Since by design the outer Kevlar layers are damaged by bullet impacts, ballistic vests become less and less effective the more hits they absorb and can be defeated by multiple hits to the same area. Kevlar also loses some of its strength when exposed to ultraviolet light, bleach, water, and salt from human sweat, meaning the ballistic layers must be encased in a water and light-proof covering of ordinary nylon. Vests are also typically retired and replaced every five years or so to ensure maximum performance.
But while soft body armour can protect against most common handgun rounds, they are still largely useless against rifle bullets, which are significantly more powerful. For example, a typical 9x19mm handgun has a muzzle velocity of 360 metres per second and a muzzle energy of 481 Joules. By contrast, the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge used in many modern assault rifles has a muzzle velocity of 993 metres per second and a muzzle energy of 1,755 Joules – nearly three times higher .
On that note, given that the bulletproof vest Doc Brown wears at the end of Back to the Future appears to be a soft Kevlar type and that the Libyan terrorists were using AK-style rifles, we’re going to have to call Hollywood bullshit on this iconic scene. Sorry to ruin your childhood, but Doc Brown is very, very dead.
Indeed, the only way to stop full-power rifle bullets is with solid ballistic plates like the Small Arms Protective Insert or SAPI used by the United States Armed Forces. Modern ballistic plates are typically made of hard ceramic like aluminium oxide or boron or silicon carbide, often laminated together with polymers like ultra high molecular weight polyethylene or Kraton to form a tough, impact resistant composite material. These plates are in turn coated with a tough polymer layer to protect the wearer from spalling – the back of the plate flaking off into deadly, high-velocity fragments when the front is struck by a projectile – and backed with soft trauma plates to help spread the force of impact. These are then inserted into pockets on a special vest called a plate carrier, which is typically made of ballistic Kevlar fabric for additional protection.
There are two levels of solid armour commonly manufactured today: Level III, designed to stop intermediate rounds like 7.62×39 and 5.56×45 and the full-power 7.62×51 NATO cartridge; and Level IV, designed to stop more powerful rounds like 30.06 [“thirty-aught-six”] armour piercing. However these specifications tend to vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and come with a number of caveats. For example, as with soft armour, solid plates can be defeated by multiple rounds hitting the same area. Also, most plates are designed for use against regular lead-cored bullets, which are easily deformed by the hard ceramic. Bullets with cores made of tungsten, tungsten carbide, or other harder metals are much more likely to penetrate. Finally, plate armour is 5-8 times heavier than soft armour on a protected area basis, making it significantly less comfortable and convenient to wear. As in every aspect of life, there are no ideal solutions – only tradeoffs.
Speaking of tradeoffs, this all finally brings us around to how many bullets a piece of body armor can absorb before it is rendered useless. Well, as you might imagine given how many different types of body armor we’ve been describing exist, this depends. As for some general examples, we’ll start with soft armor. The moment these are hit by a bullet, the fibers around the area of impact are compromised and lose some of their ability to absorb and dissipate the energy of a bullet. Thus, if another shot were to hit reasonably close to where the first hit, the bullet has a good chance of penetrating, even if the vest would have normally been able to handle it fine. Thus, while it is possible they can take multiple hits in some cases, and even be rated for such, depending on the caliber of bullet, way the armor was made, etc. it’s generally deemed unsafe to rely on this.
Moving on to ceramic plate armor, in most cases these plates are designed to shatter when hit by a bullet, dissipating the force of the impact via breaking up the bullet so that the smaller pieces can be absorbed by some backing material like Kevlar or some form of polymer or sometimes both. However, a side effect of this is that a large portion of the plate is then completely useless against a second shot similar to our previous example with soft armor. That said, there are types of ceramic armor that are designed to take multiple rounds, just, again, relying on this is generally considered unwise in most cases.
This brings us to polyethylene armor plating. In this case the impact of the bullet actually melts the plate which then re-hardens, trapping the bullet within it. Due to this, polyethylene armor can survive being shot numerous times without losing its ballistic integrity and we found examples of manufacturers that claimed their polyethylene armor could take hundreds of rounds before failing. Polyethylene plates also have the advantage of being roughly half the weight of ceramic for the same level of protection.
Hybrid body armor is also quite common at the higher levels, meaning your mileage may vary from a given piece of body armor to another, with the NIJ’s ratings giving a decent overview of what it’s capable of and often the manufacturer’s testing giving even more insight into how many rounds of a given type of bullet the vest can take before failure.
All this said, again, while a given piece of body armor may pass the tests and even be claimed by the manufacturer to protect against much more, most manufacturers recommend replacing body armor even after a single shot. And, beyond that, even in some cases if you just drop your armor on the floor. This is because although body armor is designed to stop bullets, some types are surprisingly fragile. For example, ceramic plates can easily crack if dropped, sometimes in ways that aren’t visible to the naked eye.
Moving on to soft body armor, stretching or deforming the fibers in some way, again in ways that are sometimes not obvious to the naked eye, also can compromise their integrity. Some manufacturers even advise replacing Kevlar-based body armor if you just get it wet as, as previously alluded to, this potentially weakens the fibers. On that note, because daily, otherwise innocuous, activities can sometimes compromise body armor, the standard in the body armor industry (set by the NIJ) is also to replace a given vest a maximum of every 5 years, even if it’s never been hit by a bullet.
Finally, for the fashionably minded individual who might need some protection from getting shot, it turns out bulletproof suits are not just a thing in the movies, but a real product that makes military and police body armor look like something made from an era when hitching up your covered wagon to go to the market was a thing. Perhaps the most famous manufacturer of these is the Colombian company Miguel Caballero, founded in 1992 by, you guessed it, a guy named Miguel Caballero. What exact materials he uses to make his line of bullet proof clothing isn’t clear, though he states it’s a “hybrid between nylon and polyester”. The advantage of his material is it is significantly lighter and thinner than Kevlar at equivalent protection levels. And, indeed, if you go check out their website, their undershirt body armor looks pretty much like any other undershirt unless you look really closely. As for the price tag, this isn’t listed on the website, but it would appear a basic suit top made by the company will run you upwards of about $20,000-$30,000, though you can get other product, such as an undershirt for less, apparently starting at around $4,000. Funny enough, one of Caballero’s favorite ways to advertise is in fact to put the clothing on someone and then personally shoot them, leading to the company’s slogan, “I was shot by Miguel Caballero” with apparently a few hundred people shot by the man himself to date. They even have a youtube channel where you can go and see him shoot his wife in the stomach. Not just stopping bullets, some of Caballero’s product are also rated to stop knives, be fireproof, waterproof, etc. Essentially, think the type of snazzy and robust clothing seen in most spy movies and that’s pretty accurate in this case.
And that, dear viewers, is the long and fascinating story of the bulletproof vest. While certainly capable of saving the wearer’s life under many circumstances, these devices are hardly the magical plot armour Hollywood would have us believe. So the next time you take a shortcut through the shady part of town – or try to buy plutonium from Libyan terrorists – remember: the best way to survive a bullet is not to get shot in the first place. A genius like Doc Brown should have known that.
Bonus Facts:
As alluded to, the commonly held notion that WWI was started out of outrage over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie at the hands of Serbian nationalist secret society known as the “Black Hand” isn’t entirely correct. In fact, again as noted, Emperor Franz Josef himself expressed relief over the assassination because it rid him of an heir whom he deeply disliked. The Emperor commented that “God will not be mocked. A higher power had put back the order I couldn’t maintain.”
Indeed, it wasn’t just the Emperor who was relieved; it was reported by an Austrian newspaper that the general consensus among the various political circles was that the assassination, though a tragedy, was for the best. As far as the Austrian people were concerned, it was noted “The event almost failed to make any impression whatever. On Sunday and Monday, the crowds in Vienna listened to music and drank wine as if nothing had happened.” Indeed, it took the government itself a full three weeks to react.
So why go to war over an assassination, if nobody cared? Because, while nobody seemed to much care about the assassination itself, Austria-Hungary had been looking for an excuse to wage a “preventative war” against Serbia as a state in order to weaken or destroy them so as to take back territory in the Balkans, which had been taken during the Balkan Wars. They had not taken it back up to this point because they lacked Germany’s support; without that support, they feared Russia too much, because of the treaty Russia had with Serbia.
With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on June 28th, 1914, Austria-Hungary was able to secure the promise from Germany that it would aid in a war with Serbia and possibly Russia, if Russia chose to enter the fray due to their treaty with Serbia. It should be noted here that Austria-Hungary did not really expect Russia to enter the fray as they expected this to be a very small war that would be over quickly, before Russia would be obligated to respond. Now with Germany’s support if Russia did enter the fray, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia with remarkably severe terms that Serbia would be sure to reject, thus giving Austria-Hungary an excuse to go launch a limited war on Serbia to reclaim territory in the Balkans.
Surprisingly, Serbia responded relatively well to the ultimatum, but they did dispute a few minor clauses, which gave Austria-Hungary the excuse they needed to go to war. At this point, the following general series of events happened due to a variety of existing treaties between various nations, which escalated this minor clash into the first “Great War”.
- Russia bound by their treaty with Serbia decides to come to Serbia’s aid.
- Germany, with the recent treaty with Austria-Germany, declares war on Russia.
- France, bound by an existing treaty with Russia, now is at war with Germany by association. Germany then invades Belgium to have easy access to France.
- Britain, allied to France with an existing treaty, declares war against Germany. This was unexpected by Germany as they expected Britain to stay out of the war, due to the fact that the treaty with France was loosely worded and not entirely binding. However, Britain also had a 75 year old treaty with Belgium. So because of both of these treaties, they decided to declare war on Germany.
- With Britain now warring with Germany, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa enter the war as they were colonies of Britain.
- Japan honors an existing treaty with Britain and declares war on Germany.
- Austria-Hungary declare war on Japan for declaring war on Germany.
- The U.S. tries to stay out of the war but in 1917 decides to enter due to Germany’s submarines hindering the United States’ commercial shipping because the U.S. was shipping a lot of supplies to the Allies.
So in the end, a small quick war over a minor land dispute got turned into a lengthy war that was joined by powers all over the globe due to a variety of existing treaties dating back as much as 75 years before the war started and as a result, over 20 million people died and 25 or so more million injured and endless numbers more having their lives irrevocably altered, not to mention it set the world on the path to the even greater conflict in WWII. All because one tiny country wanted a tiny bit more land.
Expand for ReferencesThe History of the Bulletproof Vest, Bulletsafe, https://bulletsafe.com/pages/the-history-of-bulletproof-vests
Rosen, Kenneth, The Long, Fraught History of the Bulletproof Vest, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/long-fraught-history-bulletproof-vest-180974564/
Bellis, Mary, History of Body Armor and Bullet Proof Vests, ThoughtCo, January 31, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-body-armor-and-bullet-proof-vests-1991337
Erestain, Nicolette, Who Invented the First Bulletproof Vest? A Look Back Into Its History, Bulletproof Zone, December 27, 2022, https://bulletproofzone.com/blogs/bullet-proof-blog/bulletproof-vests-then-and-now
Alexander, Jerad, How Bulletproof are Bulletproof Vests? HowStuffWorks, June 9, 2023, https://science.howstuffworks.com/how-bulletproof-are-bulletproof-vests.htm
Oleksiak, Wojciech, The Monk Who Stopped Bullets with Silk: Inventing the Bulletproof Vest, Culture Poland, https://culture.pl/en/article/the-monk-who-stopped-bullets-with-silk-inventing-the-bulletproof-vest
Howard, Christopher, “This Vest May Save Your Life”, General ARSOF History, 2020, https://arsof-history.org/articles/19oct_body_armor_page_1.html
The post A Deep Dive Into The Bullet Proof Vest and How They Work in Reality vs Hollywood Depictions appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Ah, the Bikini! What event more definitively announces that summer has arrived than the appearance of this classic swimsuit at beaches and poolsides across the world? An icon of women’s fashion, the bikini has permeated pop culture like few articles of clothing, giving us such lexical gems as bikini season, bikini bottom, and bikini wax. But while ubiquitous today, when first introduced in the summer of 1946, this skimpy swimsuit caused an outright scandal, and was banned in many places for decades. But this reaction was exactly what the bikini’s designer intended, for he named his creation after one of the most destructive and controversial events in human history. This is the explosive story of that event and how it resulted in the bikini we all know and love today.
If one defines “bikini” as a two-piece swimsuit that exposes the navel, then such garments have existed in one form or another since the dawn of human civilization, with the earliest known depiction – from the Çatalhöyük archaeological site in modern-day Turkey- dating all the way back to 5,600 B.C.E. Similarly, a mosaic in the fourth-century C.E. Villa Romana del Casale on Sicily depicts Roman women exercising in garments that look remarkably like modern bikinis, with bandeau tops and brief bottoms. However, the rise of Christianity brought with it stricter standards for women’s modesty, and such revealing swimsuits – and recreational swimming for women – all but disappeared from Western Europe for nearly 1500 years. It was not until the late 18th century, when “taking the waters” – whether in a lake, spring, or the ocean – became a popular cure for all manner of ailments, that female bathing finally became acceptable. And we do mean bathing as opposed to swimming, for the cumbersome bathing costumes of the day, made of heavy wool and featuring full-length sleeves, a knee-length skirt, and baggy bloomers, would quickly swamp and drown the wearer in anything but the calmest waters. Later, such costumes evolved into less cumbersome – and dangerous – flannel gowns fastened at the neck, but this in turn required stricter measures to preserve the bather’s modesty. Men and women’s beaches were usually segregated, while female bathers made use of elaborate contraptions known as bathing machines: wheeled huts that could be pulled from the beach into the surf by horses or men. After changing into her bathing costume, the bather would descend a staircase at the back of the machine into the water, where she could bathe shielded from view by a cloth awning known as a “modesty hood.” Meanwhile, a group of male attendants known as “dippers” stood on guard to ward off any lingering onlookers.
Over the following century, women’s bathing suits became simpler and restrictive, though they still featured full or half-length sleeves and pant legs and even short skirts. But this evolution took place in the face of stiff resistance, as Australian competitive swimmer Annette Kellermann discovered in 1907 when she was arrested at a beach in Boston. Her crime? Wearing a form-fitting but sleeveless one-piece swimsuit. Within a decade, however, such swimsuits had become the norm around the world, spurred in part by the introduction of women’s swimming at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. A few years later, Danish-American designer Carl Jantzen, part owner of Portland Knitting Mills in Oregon, developed an elasticized rib-knit wool fabric perfect for making lightweight and form-fitting athletic singlets and swimsuits. The company, later renamed Jantzen Knitting Mills, would later adopt the slogan “The suit that changed bathing to swimming.”
Meanwhile, the emerging 1920s fad for sunbathing and the development of synthetic fabrics like rayon drove the introduction of increasingly revealing two-piece swimsuits. The rise of Hollywood further promoted the fashion, with two-piece swimsuits appearing prominently in such films as 1932’s Three on a Match and 1933’s Flying Down to Rio and Footlight Parade. While at first glance these suits were remarkably similar to modern bikinis, they were nowhere near as controversial for one simple reason: they kept the wearer’s navel covered. That’s right: while in the thirties cleavage and a bare midriff were A-Ok, the belly button was strictly verboten. Indeed, the 1934 Motion Picture Production
Code – better known as the Hays Code – included a strict prohibition on showing navels onscreen.
However, as is the case with so much social change, it was the demands of wartime that truly cemented the two-piece swimsuit as a fashion staple. Just as a shortage of steel during the First World War led women to abandon corsets for brassieres, the rationing of silk, rubber, and other strategic materials during the Second World War led the U.S. War Production Board to issue Regulation L-85, mandating a 10% reduction in the amount of fabric used in women’s beachwear. As a result, designers eliminated decorative elements like skirts and increased production of more economical two-piece swimsuits. Thus, when the war finally ended and Europeans were able to flock to the beach once more, the stage was set for an even greater revolution in swimsuit design – and for more on the impact of war on fashion, please check out our previous video How World War I Got Women to Wear Bras.
This revolutionary new swimsuit was developed simultaneously in 1946 by two French designers, Jacques Heim and Louis Réard, who were both trying to work around postwar fabric shortages. But while Heim’s design, which he dubbed l’Atome or “The Atom,” was skimpier than its 1930s and 40s predecessors, it still covered the wearer’s navel. Réard’s design, by contrast, truly pushed the boundaries of decency, comprising two triangles of newsprint fabric connected by strings to cover the breasts and another two covering the mons pubis and the buttocks. Recognizing that “like the [atom] bomb, [my design] is small and devastating,” Réard bestowed upon his creation a name that was just then dominating the headlines: Bikini.
Until 1946, very few people had ever heard of Bikini Atoll. Located in the Marshall Islands chain 3,000 kilometres southwest of Hawaii, the atoll consists of 23 coral islands surrounding a central lagoon 30 kilometres wide. For thousands of years Bikini was home to a few hundred Marshallese islanders, who sustained themselves by fishing and cultivating coconuts. In 1885 the atoll was annexed by the German Empire, who used it as a production hub for coconut oil. Then, in 1914, the Empire of Japan – at that time part of the Entente Powers – captured the Marshall Islands from the Germans and in 1920 was awarded the chain by the League of Nations as part of their South Seas Mandate. In 1941, following the outbreak of the Second World War in the Pacific, Japanese troops occupied Bikini in order to protect the nearby – and strategically vital – Kwajalein Atoll. Bikini remained in Japanese hands until February 1944 when, after fierce fighting, American forces recaptured Kwajalein. By this time, the garrison on Bikini consisted of only five men, who all chose to commit suicide by hand grenade rather than surrender.
And there the story might have ended, with Bikini remaining just another coral speck among hundreds in the gruelling American island-hopping campaign. But in December 1945, less than four months after the Japanese surrender, a decision was made that would catapult this once-obscure ring of islands into the global spotlight. While it was clear to all that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 had forever changed modern warfare, what was less clear was how exactly it had changed. As the Second World War gave way to the Cold War, military strategists began to wonder how best to use this awesome new weapon. Could it be deployed tactically on the battlefield, or was it only good for destroying civilian centres? And what kinds of targets was it most effective against? Particularly concerned about its role in the nascent atomic age was the U.S. Navy, which resented the Army Air Force’s monopoly on the delivery of nuclear weapons. The Air Force, meanwhile, argued that naval ships were extremely vulnerable to nuclear attack, and that the advent of such weapons had effectively made navies obsolete. Into this bitter dispute waded one Lewis Strauss, aide to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, future Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, – and, yes, the same guy played by Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer. Strauss suggested staging a series of tests to evaluate the effects of nuclear weapons on naval vessels. “If such a test is not made,” Strauss argued:
“…there will be loose talk to the effect that the fleet is obsolete in the face of this new weapon and this will militate against appropriations to preserve a postwar Navy of the size now planned.”
Such a test had already been suggested several months before – though to a completely different end. In August 1945, Senator Brien McMahon, who would later write the Atomic Energy Act and chair the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, publicly proposed using captured Imperial Japanese Navy ships to demonstrate the vulnerability of navies to – rather than their survivability against – nuclear weapons. Unsurprisingly, McMahon’s proposal was backed by United States Army Air Forces General Henry “Hap” Arnold, who was keen to prove that only the Air Force could be trusted with nuclear weapons. Both services thus pressed forward with their respective plans, with the Navy’s project being publicly announced on October 27, 1945 by Fleet Admiral Ernest King, Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet. As Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Peterson later observed:
“To the public, the test looms as one in which the future of the Navy is at stake … if the Navy withstands [the tests] better than the public imagines it will, in the public mind the Navy will have ‘won.’”
To direct the tests, the Army initially recommended Major General Leslie Groves, the military director of the Manhattan Project which had developed the first atomic bombs. However, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that since the Navy would be contributing the majority of the men and resources, the tests should be run by a naval officer. They thus appointed Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy, then Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Special Weapons, to head the joint Army/Navy task force. Also on Blandy’s staff were Rear Admiral William S. Parson; Army Major Generals William E. Kepner and Anthony C. McAuliffe, and Technical Director Dr. R.A. Sawyer of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Yet suspicion lingered in both military and civilian circles that the Navy would try to rig the tests to its own advantage, with Senator McMahon arguing that they should “[not be] solely responsible for conducting operations which might well indeed determine its very existence.” Faced with such accusations, Vice Admiral Blandy agreed to pack more target ships closer together than initially planned, and to the creation of a civilian committee to evaluate the final results. However, he rejected the Army’s demand that the ships be packed with fuel and ammunition, arguing that internal explosions could cause too many vessels to sink, preventing them from being studied after the tests.In January 1946, the plan, dubbed Operation Crossroads, was officially approved and announced by U.S. President Harry S. Truman. The operation had been named by Vice Admiral Blandy himself, who explained that:
“It was apparent that warfare, perhaps civilization itself, had been brought to a turning point by this revolutionary weapon.”
And the site chosen to host the first nuclear explosions since Nagasaki was Bikini Atoll.
Almost immediately, Operation Crossroads drew severe criticism from all sides. Manhattan Project scientists, including scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer, argued that such testing was unnecessary, and that the desired results could be more easily – and safely – obtained in the laboratory. Furthermore, they warned that detonating a nuclear weapon underwater would create a radioactive “witch’s brew” that could devastate the local environment. As a result, Oppenheimer declined an invitation to witness the tests, while the majority of his colleagues at Los Alamos stayed well clear of the Crossroads site. Others debated what the outcome of the tests would be, and whether atomic bombs were really viable as naval weapons. As an article in the March 16, 1946 edition of the Operation Crossroads Newsletter recounted:
“Armies and navies have been declared obsolete by laymen and scientists, and commentators, looking into the future, have pictured push-button wars, with man destroying himself in a matter of hours. On the other side, the Bomb has been declared over-rated. Dr. Phillip Morrison, Los Alamos scientist, said that the Bomb, if exploded in the air, would do little damage to the ships at Bikini, and Maj. Alexander P. Seversky, aviation expert, told the Senate Naval Affair Committee that he “wouldn’t mind being below deck” on the ship nearest the explosion.”
On the diplomatic front, politicians like Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace feared that Crossroads would anger the Soviets and scuttle the recently-proposed Acheson-Lilienthal Plan, which sought to place nuclear weapons under international control as a safeguard against future conflict. Indeed, many saw it as strangely hypocritical for the United States to pursue nuclear testing while simultaneously pushing for the abolition of nuclear weapons. In the words of ABC radio commentator Gram Swing:
“At Bikini, the Navy is preparing itself for the failure of the UN Atomic Energy Commission. On the one hand, we’re striving to rid the world of a weapon which may set back civilization for centuries…and on the other hand, we’re training ourselves in the use of this very weapon. So we strive to save civilization, and we learn how to wreck it, all on the same weekend.”
Hoping for more time to conclude negotiations, Byrnes urged President Truman to delay the tests by at least six weeks or – better yet – cancel them altogether. Truman agreed to the former, moving the date of the first test from May 15 to July 1. Officially, however, the delay was to allow more members of Congress to attend the tests during the summer recess.
Further objections came from animal rights groups – who protested the use of animals as radiological test subjects – as well as Congress, who questioned the wisdom of destroying $450 million worth of target ships. On the latter point, Vice Admiral Blandy countered that, being largely obsolete types, these ships were actually worth only around $3.7 million in scrap value.
Despite all this, Operation Crossroads went ahead as planned, and in February 1946 the survey ship USS Sumner arrived at Bikini and began blasting channels into the lagoon for the coming task force. Bikini Atoll had been chosen for a number of reasons, including its isolation, favourable weather, suitability as a sheltered anchorage, proximity to the Army Air Force base at Kwajalein, and its small population. As USS Sumner carried out its preparatory work, Commodore Benjamin Wyatt, military governor of the Marshall Islands, gathered the Bikini Islanders after their Sunday church service and asked them and their monarch, King Juda Kessibuki:
“Would you be willing to sacrifice your island for the welfare of all men?”
After a brief – if confused – discussion with his people, King Juda agreed, stating:
“If the United States government and the scientists of the world want to use our island and atoll for furthering development, which with God’s blessing will result in kindness and benefit to all mankind, my people will be pleased to go elsewhere. We will go believing that everything is in the hands of God.”
On March 7, the U.S. Navy evacuated all 167 Bikini Islanders to Rongerik Atoll, 216 kilometres away. Though they believed their relocation was temporary and that they would soon return home, history would have other plans. Meanwhile, Bikini was invaded by a massive armada comprising 242 ships, 156 aircraft, and more than 42,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel. In stark contrast to the intense secrecy surrounding the Trinity Test – the world’s first nuclear explosion conducted on July 16, 1945 – Operation Crossroads soon became the global media event of the year, acquiring an almost carnival-like atmosphere. Hundreds of civilian scientists from fifteen universities and several private companies were in attendance, as well as dozens of journalists from news outlets around the world. The majority of these were headquartered aboard the command ship USS Appalachian, which soon became known as the “press ship.” Initially, however, foreign observers were not invited, leading commentators like The Washington Post to object that “[the tests will] fortify the world’s fear that we think of the atom as our peculiar property and mean to brandish it as a weapon for our peculiar interests”. It was therefore decided at the last minute to invite two observers from each member of the UN Atomic Energy Commission:Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Among these observers were physicists Simon Alexandrov and Chung-Yao Chao, who would go on to play key roles in the Soviet and Chinese nuclear programs, respectively.
As originally envisioned, Operation Crossroads comprised three different tests, codenamed Able, Baker, and Charlie after the Joint Army/Navy Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet in use at the time. All three tests would use a version the same 23-kiloton Mark III “Fat Man” plutonium implosion device dropped on Nagasaki, with the Able device being airdropped on the target fleet by a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Baker device detonated underwater in the atoll lagoon, and the Charlie device detonated in deeper water outside the lagoon. Two of the bombs were given nicknames by Navy personnel: the Able device being dubbed Gilda after the Rita Hayworth that came out that same year, and the Baker device Helen of Bikini.
Meanwhile, the target fleet comprised 95 vessels, making it the sixth-largest navy in the world at the time. The majority of these were obsolete or surplus U.S. Navy vessels, among which were the battleships Arkansas, New York, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, the cruisers Pensacola and Salt Lake City, the aircraft carriers Saratoga and Independence, as well as 16 destroyers, 8 submarines, and various other amphibious assault and auxiliary craft. Intriguingly, two of the battleships – Nevada and Pennsylvania – were survivors of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor which had drawn the United States into the Second World War. Having witnessed firsthand the revolutionary power of naval aviation, these old warhorses would now end their careers facing off against yet another game-changing weapon. Rounding out the target fleet were three vessels captured from the Axis powers: the Japanese battleship Nagato and light cruiser Sakawa and the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. The symbolism of publicly annihilating these tokens of two defeated enemies was not lost on those in attendance; Operation Crossroads was many things, but subtle was not one of them.
The target ships were anchored in a roughly circular array 2 kilometres in diameter, 6 kilometres southeast of the main island of Bikini. At the centre of the array was USS Nevada, painted bright orange to serve as the aiming point for the bombardier. The ships were loaded with sample complements of fuel and ammunition, while some 25,000 scientific instruments including radiation detectors, pressure gauges, and both still and motion picture cameras, were arranged inside and outside the hulls, on the support ships anchored 35 kilometres away,and aboard instrumented aircraft circling overhead. Indeed, more than 9 million still images and 1.5 million feet of motion picture film would be shot over the course of the operation, accounting for nearly half the world’s supply of photographic material at the time. To gauge the biological effects of flash and radiation, 5,664 including 200 pigs, 200 mice, 60 guinea pigs, 204 goats, and 5,000 rats were penned above and belowdecks on 22 target ships. Some animals their fur shaved to simulate the effects on human skin, while others were dressed in standard Navy anti-flash clothing or smeared in anti-flash cream. In the wake of the detonations, remotely-operated drone aircraft including Grumman F6F Hellcats from the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-la and Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses from Eniwetok Atoll would be flown through the mushroom cloud to collect radiation samples. It was, in other words, to be the largest and most well-documented scientific experiment in history.
Able day finally arrived on July 1, 1946. The B-29 Superfortress Dave’s Dream of the 509th Bombardment Group took off from Kwajalein and, at 9:00 AM local time, dropped Gilda onto the target fleet. The bomber, originally named Big Stink, had been the photographic aircraft on the Nagasaki mission but was renamed in honour of Dave Semple, a bombardier who was killed during a practice mission on March 7, 1946 – and for more on that often forgotten mission, please check our video Target Nagasaki: the Forgotten Story of Charles Sweeney and Bockscar on our sister channel Higher Learning.
Accompanied by a live radio countdown by Dr. Ernest Titterton, a British Manhattan Project physicist to later headed the British atomic bomb project, Gilda detonated at an altitude of 158 metres. After the blinding flash subsided, a giant orange brown mushroom cloud rose over the lagoon:
“For minutes the cloud stood solid and impressive, like some gigantic monument, over Bikini. Then finally the shearing of the winds at different altitudes began to tear it up into a weird zigzag pattern.”
As the smoke began to clear, all eyes turned to the target fleet. Yet despite the months of build-up and the apocalyptic images painted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the results of the Able test were decidedly anticlimactic. As Soviet observer Simon Alexandrov recalled:
“The only visible results from the air were two ships sunk and one on its side, plus four more ships burning….Everyone had the feeling that something had gone wrong.”
In fact, Gilda had missed its aiming point by nearly 650 metres. As a result, only five ships were sunk. Two attack transports, the USS Gillam and Carlisle, sank immediately; two destroyers, USS Anderson and Lamson, within hours; and the Japanese cruiser Sakawa the following day. The rest of the target fleet suffered only minor damage and were minimally contaminated by radiation, allowing them to be re-boarded within hours. Meanwhile, only around 10% of the test animals died immediately, while around 25% ultimately perished from the effects of radiation. The overall effect of the test was to rob the atomic bomb of much of the awe and mystique it had acquired in the public consciousness. As The Economist later observed:
“Dressed in all the trappings of an exaggerated and somewhat frivolous publicity, the first Bikini atom bomb experiment has left rather the impression of a fireworks display which slightly misfired.”
Time Magazine concurred, noting that:
“…[the bomb] had grown a little less awful as a result of Bikini. Its apparently infinite power was finite after all.”
Meanwhile, the Navy was delighted with the test, with Admiral Forrestal declaring that:
“…the American Navy will continue to be the most efficient, the most modern and the most powerful in the world”.
Unsurprisingly, the Navy was accused of rigging the test in its favour. However, a thorough investigation failed to determine the exact cause of the overshoot, with the most commonly accepted theory being that one of the bomb’s box fins collapsed as it fell towards the target.
But while the Able detonation made the atomic bomb look like something of a damp squib, Baker would reveal the weapon’s true destructive potential and yield some of the most iconic and enduring images of the nuclear age. For this test, Helen of Bikini, identical to Gilda in design and yield, was suspended 27 metres beneath the target fleet from the amphibious assault ship LSM-60. Detonated at 8:35 AM on July 25, the Baker shot produced a unique, awesome spectacle unlike anything seen before or since. As New York Times correspondent William Laurence wrote:
“For a time it looked as though a giant mountain had risen from the sea, as though we were watching the formation of a continent…and then it took the shape of a giant chain of mountains, covered with snow, glistening in the sun”.
Major General Nichols of Vice Admiral Blandy’s staff also described the awesome spectacle:
“Niagara Falls in reverse shot up over an area fully 2,200 feet in diameter, millions of tons of water rose about 5,000 feet and finally vapour and steam came out on top. As the tons of water came tumbling back into the lagoon, what appeared like a tremendous breaking wave broke out of the mass of water and advanced towards the next circle of target ships.”
Still and moving images of the test reveal the sheer scale of the explosion, with even battleships like Nagato and Nevada looking like toy boats next to the gargantuan, cauliflower-shaped water column thrown up by the bomb. The underwater blast proved far more effective than the Able airburst, completely vaporizing LSM-60, displacing 2 million tons of water, and creating a tsunami that immediately sank the battleship USS Arkansas, the submarines USS Pilotfish, Apogon, and Skipjack, and the concrete yard oiler YO-160. Contrary to popular belief, Arkansas was not lifted vertically by the blast; the dark, vertical object seen in many pictures of the Baker water column is merely a gap produced by Arkansas’s superstructure. Instead, the shock wave and tsunami completely sheared off said superstructure and rolled Arkansas onto its back, whereupon the battleship immediately flooded and sank to the bottom of the lagoon.
But while the remaining target ships were not immediately sunk, many were severely damaged, suffering massive leaks that threatened to sink them within hours. But when Navy crews re-boarded the ships to assess and repair the damage, they discovered a far more serious problem: the hulls were dangerously radioactive. As the Manhattan Project scientists had predicted, the underwater detonation had contaminated the water with a witch’s brew of fission products and unconsumed plutonium, which washed over the ships as a 270-metre tall “base surge” when the water column fell back to earth. So extensive was the contamination that many ships could not be safely approached, and several, including the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga and the Japanese battleship Nagato, sank before their hulls could be repaired. In all, 14 ships sank as a direct result of the blast.
Meanwhile, the other ships proved nearly impossible to decontaminate – either by scrubbing with soap and water or sandblasting paint off metal surfaces. And while decontamination crews were limited to shifts of no more than a few minutes, few were issued any kind of protective equipment, and many suffered from acute radiation sickness and long-term health issues like cancer. The vast majority of the test animals -mainly pigs and rats – also died within a few days of the test. And while Vice Admiral Blandy reassured the public that the animals died painlessly, he almost certainly knew that this was a lie – and for more on this horrifying subject, please check out our previous video Tickling the Dragon’s Tail: the Horrible Heart of a Nuclear Bomb.
Within two months of the Baker shot, the radiation had sufficiently decayed for some of the larger ships to be towed away for further study. USS Pennsylvania and the German cruiser Prinz Eugen were taken to Kwajalein, USS Nevada and New York to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and USS Independence to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Fransisco. Due to severe contamination, a minor leak aboard Prinz Eugen went undetected, and on December 22, 1946 she capsized in shallow water where she remains to this day. Efforts to decontaminate the remaining ships proved unsatisfactory, and by 1951 all were decommissioned and scuttled in deep water.
The extent of the contamination wrought by Crossroads Baker caught the U.S. Navy completely by surprise, revealing that the greatest threat posed by nuclear weapons was not blast or tsunamis but radiation, which would instantly render any ship uninhabitable. But the contamination was not limited to the target fleet or even the Bikini lagoon; the base surge rendered the main island of Bikini uninhabitable for a week, while radioactive vapour drifted east over Rongelap and Rongerik Atolls, where the Bikini Islanders had been relocated. It was an ominous sign of things to come. The test also produced serious fallout of the political kind. As Secretary of State James Byrnes had feared, the Soviets ultimately rejected an updated version of Acheson-Lilienthal Plan known as the Baruch Plan, and dream of achieving international control of nuclear weapons fell apart. Three years later the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb, ending the United States’ nuclear monopoly and pushing the Cold War into a dangerous new phase.
Shortly after the Baker shot, it was decided to cancel the third planneddeep-water test, codenamed Charlie. While this decision largely stemmed from the Navy’s inability to decontaminate the remaining target ships, the Army also argued that using up the nation’s tiny nuclear stockpile in testing was impeding efforts to develop smaller, more efficient nuclear weapons. The scientific objectives of shot Charlie would eventually be achieved on May 14, 1955 during Operation Wigwam, conducted 800 kilometres southwest of San Diego. A 30-kiloton Mark 90 “Betty” nuclear depth charge was detonated at a depth of 610 metres, with instrumented miniature submarine hulls known as Squaws being used to gauge the effects.
With Operation Crossroads officially over, on November 7, 1946 a reception was held in honour of Vice Admiral Blandy, during which he and his wife were photographed cutting into a cake shaped like a mushroom cloud. The photograph sparked outrage, with Reverend A. Powell Davis of Washington, D.C. declaring in a fiery sermon:
“If I had the authority of a priest of the Middle Ages, I would call down the wrath of God upon such an obscenity. I would damn to hell these people of callous conscience, these traitors to humanity.”
Indeed, Blandy and his staff were faced with a difficult public relations situation. Though originally intended to allay public fears about nuclear weapons and demonstrate the invulnerability of the U.S. Navy, Operation Crossroads had achieved just the opposite, stoking nuclear malaise to an all-time high. Indeed, a 1947 report on the tests in Life Magazine informed viewers that:
“If all the ships at Bikini had been fully manned, the Baker Day bomb would have killed 35,000 crewmen. If such a bomb were dropped below New York’s Battery in a stiff south wind, 2 million people would die.”
In an attempt to save face, Vice Admiral Blandy declared that any target ship which sank more than 10 days after the Baker shot would not be considered to have been sunk by the bomb. Thus, even though all but 9 of the 97 target ships were either sunk or rendered too radioactive to even be sold for scrap, the official Navy report listed only 19 ships sunk between two tests. But they needn’t have bothered with this fudging, for despite postwar fears the Navy was not rendered obsolete and received a significant portion of the U.S. defence budget throughout the cold war period.
After the conclusion of Operation Crossroads, the US military temporarily abandoned Bikini as a nuclear testing site, largely due to the inability to build on the atoll. However, in March 1954, the atoll was chosen for Operation Castle, the first test of a practical thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb. Like the Crossroads Baker shot, the Castle Bravo detonation of March 1, 1954 created far more fallout than anticipated, contaminating large swathes of the South Pacific and triggering an international incident – and for more on this, please check out our previous video Who Invented the Hydrogen Bomb. In total, the United States would conduct 23 nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll between 1946 and 1958.
Meanwhile, the relocation of the 167 Bikini Islanders had to Rongerik Atoll had failed due to the island’s inferior climate and productivity. Thus, after several months of starvation and hardship, the islanders were moved to Kwajalein Atoll. In 1970, Bikini Atoll was finally declared safe for human habitation and the islanders allowed to return. However, less than a decade later it was found that levels of Caesium-137 and in the islanders’ bodies had increased by 75%, the isotope having become concentrated in coconut palms and other common food plants. As a result, in 1978 the Bikini Islanders were evacuated once again – this time to Kili Island. Their descendants remain there to this day, waiting for the day when they can finally return to their traditional home.
It was against this explosive background that Louis Réard launched his bold new swimsuit design he named the “bikini”. The first modern bikini was introduced on July 5, 1946 – just 4 days after the Crossroads Able test – at a popular Paris pool called Piscine Molitor. So revealing was Réard’s creation that no model in Paris would agree to wear it. Réard was thus forced to hire 18-year old Micheline Bernadini, an exotic dancer at the Casino de Paris. Like the Crossroads Baker detonation, the bikini made an enormous splash, with American fashion writer Diana Vreeland declaring it “the atom bomb of fashion” and Bernardini receiving more than 50,000 fan letters. Yet despite some initial shock, the French public largely took the bikini in stride, with the newspaper Le Figaro explaining that:
“People were craving the simple pleasures of the sea and the sun. For women, wearing a bikini signaled a kind of second liberation. There was really nothing sexual about this. It was instead a celebration of freedom and a return to the joys in life.”
Others, however, were less forward-thinking. In 1950, American swimsuit designer Fred Cole decried the bikini as:
“…a two-piece bathing suit which reveals everything about a girl except for her mother’s maiden name.”
While in 1957 Modern Girl Magazine declared:
“It is hardly necessary to waste words over the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing”.
The bikini was condemned by Pope Pius XII and American National Legion of Decency, while wearing the swimsuit in public was banned on the French Atlantic coast as well as in Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Australia, and many other countries. In response to this moral outrage, Réard’s rival Jacques Heim emphasized the more conservative cut of his atome swimsuit. Réard, by contrast, leaned into the controversy, declaring that a swimsuit couldn’t be called a bikini unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring.
But as with the transition from one to two-piece swimsuits, it was Hollywood which truly turned the bikini into a fashion staple. Throughout the 1950s, popular actresses and sex symbols like Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Marylin Monroe, Esther Williams, and Betty Grable took advantage of the controversy surrounding the bikini to sell millions of risqué swimsuit pinup shots. Feature films such as 1952’s Manina, the Girl in the Bikini, 1962’s Dr. No, 1963’s Beach Party, and 1966’s One Million Years B.C., which featuring bikini-clad leading ladies Brigitte Bardot, Ursula Andress, Annette Funicello, and Raquel Welch, further served to legitimize the style in the popular imagination – as did songs like the 1960 Brian Hyland hit “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, which made its debut in 1964. By 1965, the once scandalous bikini had become fully mainstream. Today, the bikini is so ubiquitous that the original apocalyptic connotations of the name have been all but forgotten. Once synonymous with the anxieties of the nuclear age, today the word largely evokes images of another kind of bombshell…
Expand for References
Panati, Charles, Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, Harper & Row, New York, 1987
Operation Crossroads: Crossroads Newsletter March 16, 1946 First Issue, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, https://www.si.edu/object/siris_sic_13868
Operation Crossroads: 70 Years on From the Bombs at Bikini, British Library Americas and Oceania Collections Blog, July 27, 2016, https://blogs.bl.uk/americas/2016/07/operation-crossroads-70-years-on-from-the-bombs-at-bikini.html
Operation Crossroads, The Dirty Dozen Expeditions, https://thedirtydozenexpeditions.com/operation-crossroads
Zuberi, Marton, “Operation Crossroads”: Meeting the Bomb at Close Quarters, Strategic Analysis: a Monthly Journal of the IDSA, February 1999, https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/sa/sa_99zum01.html#note*
Crossroads: Splitting the Atom in Paradise, The National WWIIMuseum, June 30, 2021, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation-crossroads-atomic-bomb
Kiger, Patrick, 7 Surprising Facts About the Nuclear Bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, History, May 12, 2022, https://www.history.com/news/nuclear-bomb-tests-bikini-atoll-facts
Operation Crossroads – 1 July 1946, Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/cold-war/crossroads.html
Operation Crossroads (Bikini Atoll, July 1946), The Manhattan Project: an Interactive History, https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945-present/crossroads.htm
Operation Crossroads: a Deadly Illusion, National WWII Museum, July 5, 2021, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation-crossroads-atomic-bomb-aftermath
Turner, Julia, A Brief History of the Bikini, Slate, ugly 3, 2015, https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/07/history-of-the-bikini-how-it-came-to-america.html
The History of the Bikini, Ocean, July 14, 2023, https://oceanjewelrystore.com/the-history-of-the-bikini/
Hendrix, Steve, A Scandalous, Two-Piece History of the Bikini, The Washington Post, July 7, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/07/05/a-scandalous-two-piece-history-of-the-bikini/
Malach, Hannah, History of the Bikini: From Outlawed Swimwear to the Chanel Runway, Women’s Wear Daily, May 19, 2023, https://wwd.com/feature/history-of-the-bikini-1235647398/
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Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee, Zulu. If you have ever served in the armed forces or worked in the aviation industry, these words are most likely permanently seared into your brain. And even if you haven’t, you have probably heard them used in countless war movies and other places. This is the NATO phonetic spelling alphabet, a series of 26 words mapped acrophonically onto the letters of the Roman alphabet. Officially adopted by NATO in 1956, this alphabet has since become the de facto standard for militaries and civilian organizations around the world. But what is this alphabet even for? And how was this collection of seemingly-random words chosen? Well, Lima Echo Tango Sierra Foxtrot India November Delta Oscar Uniform Tango as we dive into the long and fascinating history of phonetic spelling alphabets.
Ratiotelephonic or phonetic spelling alphabets – not to be confused with phonetic alphabets, which indicate how words are meant to be pronounced – were developed in response to the limitations of early voice communications technologies like telephones and radio. Due to static, distortion, and the tendency of these devices to cut off certain frequencies or the start of words, many sounds can become indistinguishable to the listener. For example, C, D, E, V, P, and Z [NOTE: “zee” in the American style] are often mistaken for one another, as are M and N; F and S; H and 8; and 5 and 9. The lack of visual cues when speaking over the telephone or radio only adds to the potential confusion. When transmitting vital information such as military orders or instructions between aircraft and air traffic control, even minor misunderstandings can have serious consequences, so pending significant improvements in telecommunications technology, some sort of interim solution was needed.
Early on, radio and telephone operators hit upon the method of assigning a distinct codeword to each letter of the alphabet, such that the receiver could recognize the letter being transmitted even if parts of the codeword were distorted or cut off. Even with recent advances in transmission quality, this practice persists to this day, with people often coming up with their own phonetic spelling alphabets on the fly; after all, who among us, while dealing with customer service over a particularly unreliable telephone connection, hasn’t resorted in frustration to spelling out or names or addresses by shouting “D as in David! A as in Angel! V as in Valentine!” and so on? Among the first formalized phonetic alphabets was developed in 1898 by the British Army’s Royal Corps of Signals. This was a partial alphabet, with codewords assigned only to those letters most likely to be confused: Ack for A, Beer for B, Emma for M, Pip for P, Esses for S, Toc for T, and Vic for V. The remaining letters remained unchanged, though regulations dictated standard pronunciations like a rolling R and long O. This early system had a significant impact on British culture, spawning enduring British slang terms like Ack-Ack for “antiaircraft fire”, Emma Gee for “Machine Gun Corps” , Pip-Emma for “Prime Minister”, and Toc-H for “Talbot House”, a veteran’s organization and Christian movement founded after the First World War.
Interestingly, many of the earliest spelling alphabets were intended not for communication not with voice but rather Morse Code, though the basic principle remained the same. Like spoken messages, Morse transmissions could become garbled due to electronic interference or poor signalling technique; thus, when sending important information, it was preferable to send entire codewords instead of individual letters so that at least part of each word would be recognized and the accompanying letters more easily worked out. The longer the words, the greater the chances of them being understood, leading to some truly unwieldy alphabets like this one used in Tasmania in 1908:
Authority, Bills, Capture, Destroy, Englishmen, Fractious, Galloping, High, Invariably, Juggling, Knights, Loose, Managing, Never, Owners, Play, Queen, Remarks, Support, The, Unless, Vindictive, When, Xpeditiously, Your, Zigzag
While this may seem like a truly odd and random collection of words, they were designed to be arranged in a particular order as a memorization aid for telegraphers:
Englishmen Invariably Support High Authority Unless Vindictive. The Managing Owners Never Destroy Bills. Remarks When Loose Play Jangling. Fractious Galloping Zigzag Knights Xpeditely Capture Your Queen.
Another telecommunications alphabet in use at this time was the Against Barbarian system, developed during the U.S. Civil War and consisting of the words:
Against, Barbarian, Continental, Dahlia, Egg, Furiously, Gallantly, Humility, Ivy, Jurisdiction, Kangaroo, Legislator, Mountain, Noble, Offensive, Photographer, Queen Katherine, Rebecca, Several, Tea, Uniform, Very Varied, Waterloo, Exhibition, Youthful and fair, 2-long 2-short
Unlike the Authority Bills system, however, these words were not intended to be transmitted; rather, the syllables in each word were meant to help telegraphers remember the Morse Code sequence for each letter. For example, Ag-ainst, with one short and one long syllable, corresponds to Morse Code letter A: Dot-Dash. Similarly, Bar-ba-ri-an corresponds to B or Dash Dot Dot Dot; Cont-in-ent-al to C or Dash Dot Dash Dot – and so on. But while certainly clever, the system was far from perfect. Not only could its creators not be bothered to come up with an actual word for Z, opting instead for the lazily literal “two long two short”, but the ambiguity of which letters belong in which syllable could potentially lead to confusion. For example, spelling out Continental as Con-tin-en-tal rather than Cont-in-ent-al would yield Dash Dash Dot Dash – that is, Q rather than the intended C. Still, Authority Bills remains a fascinating if flawed attempt at demystifying Morse Code for new telegraphers.
Coming back to radiotelegraphic spelling alphabets, the partial Ack-Beer system was still the Royal Corps of Signals’ standard alphabet when Britain entered the First World War in 1914. By war’s end in 1918, however, it had been replaced by a complete 26-letter alphabet, which introduced several words that have persisted all the way to the present day:
Apple, Brother, Charlie, Dover, Eastern, Father, George, Harry, India, Jack, King, London, Mother, November, October, Peter, Queen, Robert, Sugar, Thomas, Uncle, Victoria, Wednesday, Xmas, Yellow, Zebra
But while Apple Brother – also known as Signalese – became the standard system for the British Army and Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Navy, always a bit contrarian, adopted its own unique alphabet retaining several elements of the old Ack-Beer system:
Ack, Beer, Charlie, Don, Edward, Freddy, George, Harry, Ink, Johnnie, King, London, Monkey, Nuts, Orange, Pip, Queen, Robert, Sugar, Toc, Uncle, Vic, William, X-Ray, Yorker, Zebra
This system also had a lasting impact on British culture, with “F for Freddie” and “S for Sugar” in particular remaining part of many Britons’ informal phonetic alphabets to this day. F for Freddie was also the name of several aircraft during the Second World War, including a Vickers Wellington bomber featured in the 1941 British documentary film Target for Tonight and a De Havilland Mosquito bomber flown by the Royal Canadian Air Force. The latter is significant for having survivdc 213 operations over enemy territory – more than any other Allied bomber of the war. However, in a tragic irony, F for Freddie’s luck ran out on May 9, 1945 – just one day after the end of the war in Europe – when she crashed into the control tower at Calgary Municipal Airport in Alberta, Canada, killing her pilots Flying Officer John Baker and Lieutenant Maurice Briggs.
After the war, elements of the Army’s Apple Brother and Navy’s Ack Beer systems were combined to create the Royal Air Force Radiotelephony or Apple Beer spelling alphabet, which comprised the words:
Apple, Beer, Charlie, Don, Edward, Freddie, George, Harry, Ink, Johnnie, King, London, Monkey, Nuts, Orange, Pip, Queen, Robert, Sugar, Toc, Uncle, Vic, William, X-ray, Yorker, Zebra
In 1921, Apple Beer was adopted as standard by all three branches of the British Armed Forces as well as the civilian aviation industry – and would remain so until well into the Second World War.
Meanwhile, the American Expeditionary Force, which joined the First World War in 1917, had its own standard phonetic spelling alphabet, comprising the words:
Able, Buy, Cast, Dock, Easy, Fox, George, Have, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nap, Opal, Pup, Quack, Rush, Sail, Tape, Unit, Vice, Watch, X-ray, Yoke, Zed
Many of these words would remain in the various iterations of the U.S. military phonetic alphabet until the adoption of the NATO standard in the 1950s.
Up until this point, most phonetic spelling alphabets had been developed for military use. The first internationally-recognized standard alphabet for civilian use was introduced in 1927 by the International Telecommunications Union or ITU, and used the names of cities from around the world:
Amsterdam, Baltimore, Casablanca, Denmark, Edison, Florida, Gallipoli, Havana, Italia, Jerusalem, Kilogramme, Liverpool, Madagascar, New York, Oslo, Paris, Quebec, Roma, Santiago, Tripoli, Uppsala, Valencia, Washington, Xanthippe, Yokohama, Zurich
Over the following decade, this alphabet was officially adopted by dozens of organizations around the world, including the International Commission for Air Navigation, the International Radio Consultative Committee, the International Maritime Organization, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the International Amateur Radio Union, and the American Radio Relay League.
Finally, in 1941, the United States Military developed one of the most famous and widely-used phonetic alphabets until the adoption of the NATO standard. Officially called the Joint Army/Navy Radiotelephony Alphabet, this system comprised the words:
Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, How, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nan, Oboe, Peter, Queen, Roger, Sugar, Tare, Uncle, Victor, William, X-ray, Yoke, Zebra
Officially adopted by the Royal Air Force in 1943, the Able Baker alphabet soon became standard across all the Allied nations, and was used in all sorts of applications. For example, fans of the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers will recognize Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, and Easy as names of infantry companies of the American 506th Infantry Regiment. The Army/Navy alphabet was used to name several American nuclear tests throughout the 1940s and 50s, such as shots Able and Baker of Operation Crossroads in 1946 and shots George and Item of Operation Greenhouse – while the first animals successfully recovered from outer space by United States in 1959 were a pair of monkeys named Miss Able and Miss Baker.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the conflict, the Germans had their own phonetic alphabet, developed during the 1920s and composed of the names:
Anton, Berta/Bruno, Caesar, David, Emil, Friedrich/Fritz, Gustav, Heinrich, Ida, Jakob, Konrad/Kurfust, Ludwig, Martha, Nathan, Otto, Paula, Quelle, Richard, Samuel, Theordor/Toni, Ulrich, Viktor, Wilhelm, Xanthippe, Ypsilon/Ypern, and Zacharias
… along with Ärger, Ödipus, and Übel for umlauted As, Os, and Us. However, after the Nazi Party came to power, all Jewish-sounding names were replaced by more ‘Aryan’-sounding ones; specifically, David was replaced with Dora; Jakob with Julius or Jot; Nathan with Nordpol, Samuel with Siegfried, and Zacharias with Zeppelin. And you thought the Nazis’ fanatical obsession with antisemitism couldn’t get any more absurd…
Though the American Able Baker alphabet remained in use after the Second World War, it soon became clear that it had many shortcomings. Indeed, during the War itself, one Major F.D. Handy of the U.S. Army Air Force Directorate of Communications partnered with Harvard University’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory to scientifically evaluate the effectiveness of the Army/Navy phonetic alphabet under actual combat conditions. These experiments revealed that few of the Able Baker codewords were actually all that intelligible, and in his final report Major Handy included a list of 250 possible replacement words. Despite this, after the War the Able Baker alphabet was officially approved and adopted by the United States Government for use in civil aviation.
In 1947, the International Telecommunications Union or ITU criticized the Able-Baker alphabet for being too Anglocentric and containing many sounds unfamiliar to speakers of other languages. For example, certain Spanish pronunciations of the letter “P” might sound more like a “B” to an English speaker. In response, the organization created its own alphabet, whose words were chosen to be accessible to speakers of English, French, and Spanish. This included a unique numbering system in which the names of numbers in both English and various romance languages were combined – specifically: Nadazero, Unanone, Bissotwo, Terrathree, Kartefour, Pantafice, Soxsix, Setteseven, Oktoeight, and Novenine. The following year, the International Civil Aviation Organization or ICAO began developing its own universal phonetic alphabet. This effort was spearheaded by Jean-Paul Vinay, a professor of linguistics at the University of Montreal, who laid out five major guidelines for word selection:
- A word must be “live” – that is, still currently in use – in English, French and Spanish
- It must be easily pronounced and recognized by speakers of all three languages
- It must have good transmission and readability characteristics
- It must have similar spelling in English, French, and Spanish, and the initial letter must be that which the word identifies
- And it must be free of objectionable connotations or double meanings
In 1949, ICAO presented its finalized alphabet, which comprised the words:
Alfa, Beta, Coca, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Julietta, Kilo, Lima, Metro, Nectar, Oscar, Polka, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Union, Victor, Whiskey, eXtra, Yankee, Zulu
The timing of this announcement couldn’t have been better, for the formation of NATO that same year increased the urgency of finding a new phonetic alphabet usable by all member nations. But while the 1949 ICAO alphabet was very close to the current NATO standard, it still had some issues. For example, several of the words such as Delta and Extra, Nectar and Victor, and Kilo and Metro sounded very similar to one another, while eXtra broke one of Jean-Paul Vinay’s selection rules by not starting with the letter it was meant to represent. Nonetheless, the alphabet was officially adopted by the ICAO and the International Air Transport Association or AITA in November 1951 and entered civil aviation use in April 1952. Still, believing that the alphabet needed further refinement, in late 1952 the ICAO conducted an extensive series of tests using speakers from 31 nations to find superior replacements for the most troublesome codewords. As a result of these tests, Beta was replaced with Bravo, Coca with Charlie, Metro with Mike, Polka with Papa, Union with Uniform, and eXtra with X-ray. This new ICAO alphabet was evaluated by NATO in 1955, with the final report concluding that:
“It is known that [the spelling alphabet] has been prepared only after the most exhaustive tests on a scientific basis by several nations. One of the firmest conclusions reached was that it was not practical to make an isolated change to clear confusion between one pair of letters. To change one word involves reconsideration of the whole alphabet to ensure that the change proposed to clear one confusion does not itself introduce others.”
Consequently, the alphabet was officially adopted by NATO on March 1, 1956 and internationally for civil aviation use soon after. Aside from one change – the replacement of Nectar with November – in 1961, the alphabet has remained unchanged to this day.
In its current form, the NATO phonetic alphabet features many small details intended to maximize comprehension for all users. For example, Alfa is intentionally spelled with an F instead of a PH as the latter is not pronounced as an F in all languages. Similarly, Juliett is intentionally spelled with two Ts since in French a single T at the end of a word is usually silent.
The selection of some words required a measure of compromise and nuance. For example, while football was found to be more comprehensible in isolation, foxtrot was ultimately selected as superior for long-term communication.
There are also specific regulations for how numbers must be pronounced. For example, three is pronounced tree, four as foe-er, five as fife to prevent confusion with “fire”, and nine as niner to prevent confusion with five or the German word for “no”. Furthermore, numbers under one thousand are spelled out digit by digit – for example five seven instead of fifty seven or one six zero instead of one hundred sixty. The only exceptions are ten, eleven, and twelve for indicating clock positions as in “twelve o’clock high”.
While the NATO phonetic alphabet is meant to be universal, minor regional changes are often necessary. For example, in Malaysia, London is used in place of Lima as the latter means five in the Malay language. And at Atlanta International Airport, Dixie is used in place of Delta because the airport is home to Delta Airlines.
Finally, certain languages use additional codewords to indicate letters not found in the English language. For example, German uses Alfa-Echo, Oscar-Echo, Uniform-Echo, and Sierra-Sierra to indicate umlauted As, Os, and Us, and the eszett; while Spanish uses ñoño to indicate an N with a tilde.
And that is the story of the NATO phonetic alphabet, which, like many of its predecessors, has had a significant cultural impact far beyond the military sphere. For instance, during the Cold War, Checkpoint Charlie became one of the most infamous diplomatic hotspots in Berlin, while today expressions like Zulu Time for Greenwich Mean Time, Bravo Zulu for “well done,” and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot for – well, you know – have become pop culture staples. But perhaps the most famous expression derived from the NATO phonetic alphabet originated during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. North Vietnamese guerrilla troops operating in the South were known as the Viet Cong or VC. This was then translated via the NATO phonetic alphabet to “Victor Charlie” – or “Charlie” for short.
Expand for References
Phonetic Alphabet, Army Study Guide, https://www.armystudyguide.com/content/army_board_study_guide_topics/communications/phonetic-alphabet-military.shtml
Hickok, Kimberly, A Brief History of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, Popular Mechanics, March 7, 2022, https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a39297126/origin-of-the-nato-phonetic-alphabet/
A Look at the History of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, Air Charter Service, February 10, 2022, https://www.aircharter.co.uk/about-us/news-features/blog/a-look-at-the-history-of-the-nato-phonetic-alphabet
The NATO Phonetic Alphabet, NATO, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_136216.htm
Strong, Abby, From Alpha to Zulu: the Evolution of the Phonetic Alphabet, Charlie Mike, May 4, 2023, https://charliemike.org/2023/05/04/from-alpha-to-zulu-the-evolution-of-the-phonetic-alphabet/
Spink, Adam, From Butter to Bravo – a Brief History of the Phonetic Spelling Alphabet, NATS, April 3, 2020, https://nats.aero/blog/2020/04/from-butter-to-bravo-a-brief-history-of-the-phonetic-spelling-alphabet/
Phonetic Alphabets in the British Service, The Wireless Set No.19 Group, https://www.royalsignals.org.uk/articles/alpha.htm
Jones, Paul, 4 Phonetic Alphabets That Didn’t Survive, Mental Floss, October 30, 2017, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/504886/4-phonetic-alphabets-didnt-survive
Uncle Sam’s Able Fox, Historic Wings, March 1, 2013, http://fly.historicwings.com/2013/03/uncle-sams-able-fox/#Local%20Variations%20Based%20on%20Need
Gannon, Terence, ‘F’ for Freddie: It Wasn’t Supposed to End This Way, Medium, March 7, 2019, https://terencecgannon.medium.com/f-for-freddie-9f4e60236f6e
The post Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is Up With the NATO Phonetic Alphabet? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
History books often remember underground political groups like the Communist party or the Social Democrats, espionage groups like the Red Orchestra, or militaries from America and Britain as the primary resistance against Nazi forces. But you may be surprised to learn that, in fact, the most vocal and visible resistance came from young people, mainly teens and those in their early 20s, with the four largest and most prominent of these youths being The White Rose, the Edelweiss Pirates, the Swing Youth, and the Zazous. So let’s dive into their respective rather inspiring stories, shall we?
To begin with, The White Rose: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!” These are just a few of the powerful words published and distributed throughout Germany by a group of students at the University of Munich in an effort to incite their fellow countrymen to rebel against Nazi forces throughout 1942 and 1943.
As for notable figures in this group, perhaps the most famous of all were siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl. So what inspired them to rebel in this way?
In the 1930s, Hans and Sophie were both teenagers living in Germany, and, despite their parents trying to dissuade them, feeling a sense of pride and patriotism in their homeland, Hans joined the Hitler Youth at the age of 15 in 1933, and Sophie joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) at the age of 12. At the time, Adolf Hitler was pounding the favorite drum of seemingly all politicians- making the country great again. And the Scholl children, like so many others, believed him. However, their parents, Robert and Magdalena Scholl, were far less enthusiastic, believing that the Nazi party would lead Germany to ruin, something that Robert wasn’t exactly shy about, stating of Hitler, “He’s expanding the armaments industry, and building barracks. Do you know where that’s all going to end?”
A pacifist who saw the writing on the wall, he further stated after the establishment of the first concentration camp in 1933, “This is war. War in the midst of peace and within our own people. War against the defenseless individual. War against human happiness and the freedom of its children. It is a frightful crime.”
Nevertheless, all his speeches were ignored by his 6 children, with Elisabeth Scholl, who by the way only died 3 years ago in 2020 at the age of 100, later stating, “We just dismissed it: he’s too old for this stuff, he doesn’t understand. My father had a pacifist conviction and he championed that. That certainly played a role in our education. But we were all excited in the Hitler youth in Ulm, sometimes even with the Nazi leadership.”
Inge Scholl would go, “…there was something else that drew us with mysterious power and swept us along: the closed ranks of marching youth with banners waving, eyes fixed straight ahead, keeping time to drumbeat and song. Was not this sense of fellowship overpowering? It is not surprising that all of us, Hans and Sophie and the others, joined the Hitler Youth? We entered into it with body and soul, and we could not understand why our father did not approve, why he was not happy and proud. On the contrary, he was quite displeased with us.”
Nevertheless, he allowed his children to do as they wished. As noted by Richard Hanser, author of A Noble Treason: The Story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Revolt Against Hitler, “They could say whatever they wished, and they all had opinions. This was far from customary practice in German households, where, by long tradition, the authority of the father was seldom questioned or his statements challenged… His aversion to mindless nationalism was not only unchanged but stronger than before. In his dinner-table discussions with his children, he could interpret events for them with an insight unblurred by current prejudices or official pronouncements.”
A friend of the family, Susanne Hirzel goes on, “Sophie’s relationship with Robert Scholl held a depth of mutual understanding… it continued to exist despite the pain she caused her father by joining the [League of German Girls] – she could observe his distress when he watched Party displays on the cathedral square outside their Ulm window, or when he argued with Hans – her father had not tried to prevent her from joining. He knew that opponents to tyranny could never be created by force, only by personal experience.”
And experience is exactly what they got over the coming years, slowly becoming disillusioned with the Nazi Party as they observed their activities and what they were being taught in the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls. As you might imagine, the children of a man who believed strongly in the freedom to express your opinions and do as you believed in, didn’t exactly mesh with totalitarianism and unconditional subordination under Nazi rule, nor did family opinion of the Nazis improve when the teenage Hans was briefly arrested in 1937.
On this one, a few years previous, at the age of 16, Hans had had homosexual encounters with two individuals by the names of Ernest Reden and Rolf Futterknecht, the latter of which revealed this relationship to the authorities. Hans was also accused of being a member of a non-sanctioned youth organization, the Deutsche Jungenschaf. However, the judge in the case ultimately released him, stating Hans’ sexual dalliance with another boy was simply a, to quote, “youthful failing”, and that the rest was just an example of “youthful exuberance”. He also noted Hans’ otherwise exemplary conduct as a member of the Hitler Youth, even rising to squad leader, was sufficient to let him off this time and give him a clean slate.
Fast-forward to August of 1942, and Robert, like his son before him, likewise found himself arrested- in this case for telling his secretary, “The war! It is already lost. This Hitler is God’s scourge on mankind, and if the war doesn’t end soon, the Russians will be sitting in Berlin.”
As for his secretary, who turned him in for this, she would state she had nothing against Robert, “I liked him. I had to suppress my personal feelings. I was fond of Herr Scholl, and I was grateful to him. But when he said those things about the Führer and the war, I knew I couldn’t let it pass.”
As for Robert’s children, at this point Sophie was attending Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-University studying biology and philosophy, though during this particular summer was required to work at a metallurgical plant in Ulm as a part of compulsory work via the Reich Labour Service. This was her second stint in this, with her previous time working as a nursery teacher in the auxiliary war service.
As for Hans he was also studying at the same university, and likewise in this particular summer of their father’s arrest was required to do his duty for Hitler- in his case, serving his second stint on the front, formerly in France, and in this one as a part of Operation Barbossa. Serving beside him at this time were two of his medical student friends Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf.
Previous to this service time and shortly before the arrest of Hans’ father, Alexander and Hans, and a few others in their circle, had started to publish their political opinions, albeit anonymously, in the hopes of encouraging others to resist the Third Reich, with the small group writing the first four leaflets criticizing the regime in June and July of 1942. These were subsequently distributed in various ways, from leaving them random places, to even mailing them to countless people across Germany, including being sent to be distributed at other universities. They briefly paused such activities while deployed, but upon their return to school in October, doubled down and the group expanded considerably.
As for the contents of the groups’ leaflets, the first essay published by the White Rose noted rather prophetically, “Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?”
Going further with leaflet 2, they state, “Hitler himself wrote in an early edition of ‘his’ book – a book that is written in the most awful German I have ever read, despite which the nation of poets and thinkers have elevated it to the status of the Bible: ‘You would not believe how one must deceive a nation in order to rule it.’ If this cancerous growth in the German nation was not too noticeable in the early phases, then that is because there were enough forces for good at work to try to slow its growth. But as it grew larger and larger and finally ascended to power by means of one last vulgar corruption, the abscess erupted and defiled the whole body…. Now it is a question of mutually coming to our senses, of mutually keeping one another informed. We must always keep these things in mind and allow ourselves no rest until the last man is convinced of the utmost necessity of his battle against this system…. Since Poland was conquered, three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in that country in the most bestial manner imaginable. In this we see a terrible crime against the dignity of mankind, a crime that cannot be compared with any other in the history of mankind…. Jews are human beings too – it makes no difference what your opinion is regarding the Jewish question – … these crimes are being committed against human beings… Each man wishes to be acquitted of his complicity – everyone does so, then lies back down to sleep with a calm, clear conscience. But he may not acquit himself. Everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty!”
Not mincing words with their opinion of Hitler, by Leaflet 4 they wrote, “Every word that proceeds from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war. And when he names the name of the Almighty in a most blasphemous manner, he means the almighty evil one, that fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the stinking maw of hell and his might is fundamentally reprobate. … There is no punishment on this earth that is adequate for the deeds of Hitler and his followers. Out of love for the generations to come, we must make an example [of them] after the conclusion of the war so that no one will ever have the slightest desire to attempt something similar.”
The fifth leaflet, “Appeal to All Germans”, came after the core members’ return from the front during Operation Barbarossa, at which point they became convinced Germany was shortly going to fall. Nearly 10,000 copies of this leaflet were distributed in January of 1943 throughout Germany, urging Germans to rise up and create a new state based on protecting individual’s rights. They wrote, “With mathematical certainty, Hitler is leading the German nation to disaster. Hitler cannot win the war, he can only prolong it! His guilt and the guilt of his assistants have infinitely exceeded all measure. A just punishment grows ever closer!… Germans! Do you and your children wish to suffer the same fate as the Jews? Do you wish to be measured with the same measure as your seducers? Shall we forever be the most hated and rejected nation in all the world? No! Therefore, separate yourselves from the National Socialist subhumanity! Prove with your deeds that you think differently! … Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of the individual citizen from the caprice of criminal, violent States – these are the bases of the new Europe.”
This brings us to the sixth and final leaflet, distributed on February 18th, 1943, a little over two weeks after the German defeat at Stalingrad. It was then that the White Rose movement became emboldened in the hopes that the crushing defeat on the Eastern front would inspire the mostly silent opponents of the Nazis within Germany to rise up. Their target audience on this one was their fellow students.
And so it was that on that February the 18th, the two Scholl siblings took a suitcase full of copies of the sixth leaflet, this one written by Professor Kurt Huber who had joined the group a couple months before in December, and brought it to their university, leaving stacks of the leaflets around for students to find.
The leaflet, in part stated, “The day of reckoning has come – the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people have ever been forced to endure. We grew up in a state in which all free expression of opinion is ruthlessly suppressed. The Hitler Youth, the SA, the SS, have tried to drug us, to regiment us in the most promising years of our lives. For us there is but one slogan: fight against the party! The name of Germany is dishonoured for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge, smash its tormentors.”
After leaving stacks of the document around, Sophie decided to toss the remaining pamphlets off of a railing and into the central hall. Unfortunately, this action was spotted by a janitor and maintenance man, Nazi party member Jakob Schmid. He thus quickly reported the students to the Gestapo and they were promptly arrested.
Initially things didn’t seem so bad, however, Sophie had managed to get rid of any incriminating evidence before being caught and it was seemingly just Schmid’s word against theirs. However, Hans had not managed the same, and upon being searched, he was found in possession of a draft of a seventh leaflet, written by fellow White Rose member Christoph Probst. In a last ditch effort to destroy the evidence against Probst and himself, Hans tore the document and then attempted to eat it, but enough remained when they managed to stop him that the Gestapo was able to later match the handwriting to Probst after they discovered another letter from Probst in Hans’ lodgings.
While being interrogated, however, Hans attempted to play off Probst’ participation by stating, “With regards to political matters, I exercised influence on Probst. Without my influence, he undoubtedly would never have reached these conclusions. I have withheld this acknowledgment for so long because Probst’s wife is currently confined to bed with puerperal fever following the birth of their third child… I must say that I commissioned Probst to put his thoughts in writing a while ago. The last time we met – at the beginning of January 1943 – he gave me the piece of paper that I tore up today. I must expressly note that I said nothing to Probst about using his written notes for producing leaflets. I similarly assume that Probst was absolutely in the dark about the actions I had undertaken…”
The Gestapo weren’t buying it, however, and, on February the 20th when Probst went in to pick up his paycheck before intending to go see his wife, Herta, and their new daughter Katja, he was arrested. This was something his young wife was not initially informed of by the nurses, as she was extremely ill after giving birth to the couples’ third child, and the nurses didn’t want to upset her while in that state.
As for Sophie, Hans’ efforts to try to put all the blame on himself almost succeeded there, with the lead interrogator, Robert Mohr, initially convinced she was innocent. That is, until Sophie decided to do the same as her brother and try to protect other members of the group by putting the responsibility for the leaflets on herself, and admitting her actions freely. During her trial, Sophie also spoke directly to Chief Justice Roland Friesler, saying “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare to express themselves as we did.”
For his part, Justice Friesler, who by the way had the fun nickname of the “Hanging Judge” owing to his propensity to sentence the vast majority of the people brought into his courtroom at this time to death, stated during the trial that he didn’t understand how good kids who had once been members of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, along with Probst once serving in the Luftwaffe, could have had their minds twisted so severely.
As for the Scholl parents, Robert and Magdalena were banned from the courtroom, but that didn’t stop them from trying to force their way in anyway, with a guard barring them stating, “You should have brought them up better.” That said, Robert did manage to get into the courtroom after begging the defense attorney, “Go to the president of the court and tell him that the father is here and he wants to defend his children!” Ultimately he was allowed to briefly speak to the judge… who promptly had him thrown out after. As he was dragged out, he reportedly shouted, “There is a higher justice! They will go down in history!”
And so it was that on February 22nd, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl, along with Christoph Probst, were sentenced to death, with the ruling in part stating “[We] find: That the accused have in time of war by means of leaflets called for the sabotage of the war effort and armaments and for the overthrow of the National Socialist way of life of our people, have propagated defeatist ideas, and have most vulgarly defamed the Führer, thereby giving aid to the enemy of the Reich and weakening the armed security of the nation. On this account they are to be punished by death. Their honor and rights as citizens are forfeited for all time.”
Despite executions normally being preceded by a 99 day buffer between sentencing and execution, in these three’s case, the sentences was ordered to be carried out that very same day, presumably to make sure no outside political unrest could build if anyone were to call for their release. On top of this, initially the executions were to be public hangings, but there was concern this could make the three political martyrs and further, again, have the potential to incite unrest. Thus, the executions were carried out in relative secret, with even the media being mostly mum about the specifics on this one, just noting the trio were degenerates and things of this nature.
Surprisingly for all involved, when the Scholl parents asked to be able to speak with their children before their executions, the request was granted around an hour before. As for Hans, he told them, “I have no hatred. I have put everything behind me.”
Sophie was brought to see them next, and when her mother broke down and lamented, “I’ll never see you come through the door again.” She responded, “Oh mother, after all, it’s only a few years’ more life I’ll miss.”
Within an hour of this, Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst were beheaded by guillotine at the Munich-Stadelheim prison. First Sophie, then Hans, and finally Christoph. Sophie and Christoph reportedly said nothing as the guillotine was dropped. But Hans shouted “es lebe die Freiheit!” (“Long live freedom.”)
As for Sophie’s last known words, her cellmate Else Gebel claims the last thing Sophie said to her was, “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?… It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. But how many have to die on the battlefield in these days? How many young, promising lives? What does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted. Among the student body there will certainly be a revolt.”
Unfortunately, although we now recognize these individuals as exceptionally brave, heroic rebels in the fight against the Nazis, the public reaction at the time of their deaths was far different than Sophie allegedly anticipated. As soon as the siblings were executed, classmates at their university rallied at the school to condemn The White Rose’s actions, and Hans, Sophie, and all of their cohorts were considered “traitors to the Fatherland.” The man who had turned them in, Schmid, was subsequently given a reward of 3,000 Reichsmarks and a promotion. On top of that, a special ceremony was even organized in his honor at the University, with masses of students giving him a standing ovation at the event. (As a brief aside to cleanse our palette a bit over this sequence of injustices, after the war, Schmid was promptly himself arrested, and given a five year sentence in a labor camp, with his part in the deaths of the Scholls and Probst helping him get the official label of “Major Offender” and the labor camp sentence.)
In any event, two months later, on April 19th, 1943, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Professor Kurt Huber, and 10 other White Rose members were also sentenced to death, and another 13 members were given prison sentences. Ultimately some members of their families were arrested, too, in the Nazi practice of assuming ‘guilt by relation,’ also known as ‘Sippenhaft.’ This included Robert Scholl, who was arrested five days after his children were killed and given an 18 month prison sentence, allegedly for listening to illegal radio broadcasts.
In any event, in his defense plea, Professor Huber said that The White Rose endorsed “fighting for the right […] to […] political self-determination.”
Noteworthy in Alexander’s case, his family managed to not only petition for clemency, but received a response from Hitler himself, who wrote to them simply, “I reject all petitions for mercy.” Alexander, who would ultimately be canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, for his part, accepted his fate well, writing to his family, “I am going with the awareness that I followed my deepest convictions and the truth. This allows me to meet my hour of death with a conscience at peace. Think of the millions of young men who have lost their lives out on the field-their fate is the same as mine…In a few hours I will be in a better life, with my mother, and I will not forget you; I will ask God to grant you solace and peace.” He would also state to his lawyer, “I’m convinced that my life has to end now, early as it may seem, for I have fulfilled my life’s mission. I wouldn’t know what else I have to do on this earth.”
All that said, the harsh punishments dealt to these students backfired in a way, which is a slight silver lining. Word of the trials, executions, and imprisonments of these students made its way to Norway and Sweden in March of 1943, and reports began to spread throughout Scandinavia and Great Britain. The leaflets and the successive reports on them became an important resource in foreign reporting, including the sixth and final leaflet being smuggled out of the country by German lawyer Helmuth James Grad von Moltke.
Between July 3rd and July 25th, Britain’s Royal Air Force even dropped several million copies of this sixth leaflet over Berlin, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Köln, Münster, and Weimar. Further, on August 2nd, 1943, the International Student Assembly held a rally in New York in honor of the student resistance in Munich. Among the many notable speakers at the rally, was United States’ First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Of course, while these student’s efforts were not initially honored in their home nation, when the war was over, public opinion of The White Rose within Germany shifted drastically, with the first memorial held in Munich in their honor taking place in November of 1945, a mere 6 months after Germany surrendered. The students were commended for their attempts to awaken the German people from their lethargy, and today all over Germany, streets, squares, schools, and public institutions are named for various members of The White Rose. The Scholl’s father, Robert, also almost immediately became mayor of Ulm from 1945-1948, after being released from prison when Allied troops arrived in the region.
The aforementioned author of A Noble Treason, Richard Hanser, summed up: “…the Scholls and their friends represented the “other” Germany, the land of poets and thinkers, in contrast to the Germany that was reverting to barbarism and trying to take the world with it. […] Their actions made them enduring symbols of the struggle, universal and timeless, for the freedom of the human spirit wherever and whenever it is threatened.”
Not all youth-led Nazi rebellions were so political, however. In fact, most weren’t nearly as political as The White Rose, which brings us to our next group- The Edelweiss Pirates, initially composed of mostly 14-17 year olds who were perhaps the most stereotypical rebellious teens to ever rebellious teen. By the end of the 1930s, when the Nazi party was in full force, there were several gangs made up of former Hitler Youth who now opposed the ideologies they had learned there. Regardless of what they called themselves or where they were from, many of these gangs fell under the umbrella of an unofficial group called the “Edelweiss Pirates,” so named for the edelweiss flower badge many resistance members wore. In a time when gathering in groups and participating in extracurricular activities outside of the approved Hitler Youth activities was criminalized, the Edelweiss Pirates essentially said ‘to hell with that’ and rebelled by doing whatever they wanted to do, including declaring an unofficial war on the Hitler Youth, attacking them at every opportunity.
As one Nazi official stated, “Every child knows who the… Pirates are. They are everywhere; there are more of them than there are Hitler Youth… They beat up the patrols… They never take no for an answer.”
Not just beating up their fellow teens, because all of the work in Nazi Germany was in some way done in service to the Nazi party, the Edelweiss Pirates refused to work. If they did turn up to their jobs, they didn’t engage or make any effort to be productive. Therefore, these gangs garnered a reputation for being lazy, useless, slackers, and parasites, leeching off of the government and giving nothing in return.
They saw their friends and family go to war in order to defend the restrictive and oppressive rules laid forth by the Third Reich, and they wanted no part of it. One teenager, and
Edelweiss Pirate, said: “Everything the [Hitler Youth] preaches is a fraud. I know this for certain, because everything I had to say in the [Hitler Youth] myself was a fraud.” Apart from their recognizable pins, the Pirates also often had long hair and wore colorful clothing. They played and sang songs by Jewish composers and watched broadcasted anti-Nazi messages. Groups of Edelweiss Pirates gathered in cafes, parks, or out on the streets. They took hikes and road bikes to the country to go on illegal camping trips. They played pranks and performed acts of sabotage, they painted graffiti and passed around anti-Nazi propaganda. As time went on, these acts became bolder, and far more serious, however, with some Pirates raiding army camps to obtain firearms and explosives to use to attack Nazi officials. Some even derailed train cars full of ammunition in order to supply adult resistance groups with explosives. A Pirate in France named Jean Julich noted how he and his friends threw bricks through munitions factory windows and poured sugar water into the gas tanks of Nazi vehicles. Some Pirates also stole food and supplies from stores or freight trains.
As you might expect, some of this did not go unpunished, though in many cases their extreme youth helped shield some from being executed at least. For example, the aforementioned Jean Julich was arrested at the age of 15, and subsequently imprisoned and tortured for four months. In contrast, on November 10th, 1944, his slightly older friend Barthel Schink, whom he was arrested alongside, was publicly hanged in Cologne, France, accused of killing five people, though he was given no trial. “The cause of Barthel Shink’s hanging was his membership in the Edelweiss Pirates,” Julich explained, adding, “He planned to blow up a Gestapo building [but he] never killed anyone.” Of the thirteen people hanged on that November day, Schink was the youngest, put to death shortly before his seventeenth birthday.
Moving on from the Edelweiss Pirates, the next group we’ll focus on are the Swing Youth, or “Swing Jugend”, comprised mostly of 14-21 year olds. These were the young people across Germany and Europe who rebelled via another classic of youthful rebellion tactics- via their music and dance.
Jazz music and dancing became popularized in the Roaring 20s, and spread quickly throughout the Western world, Germany included. However, in Nazi Germany, broadcasting jazz music became banned. That said, despite swing music being a derivative of jazz, it was never entirely outlawed, so many could get away with listening to and dancing to swing. However, if the swing music was known to come from a Jewish person, like the King of Swing Benny Goodman, a known Jew living in New York City, it was considered degenerate, and anyone caught listening to it could face severe consequences, with no doubt their elderly persecutors lamenting the noise kids call music these days.
As you might imagine though, swing music was nearly impossible to regulate completely, so swing and jazz alike continued to reach the teens and young people of Nazi Germany. In fact, one way some of the Swing Jugend were able to discover new songs and new dance moves was by going to the movie theater where anti-American propaganda reels were played. Here, German teens could watch Americans doing the lindy hop, a hugely popular dance at the time, helping to stay up-to-date with the latest dance moves.
One sub-group of the Swing Youth was the Hot Club of Frankfurt. This was a jazz band who basically just wanted to play their music. Its founders were fourteen year old Horst Lippmann and twenty-one year old Hans Otto Jung, and they, along with a few of their friends, played jazz music in the back of Lippmann’s parents’ restaurant. Someone kept a lookout at all times, and if the Gestapo were nearby, the band would switch to music that was more Nazi acceptable.
Hans Otto Jung recalled later, “Jazz meant more than just music to us during the war. […] The Nazis did not like jazz and wanted to suppress it. That made us love it even more.” Although the Hot Club focused more on playing jazz music rather than swing, some of their members intersected with the Swing Youth, and their values were very similar. At their core, they, like the Swing Youth, celebrated non-Aryan culture and defied the rules imposed by the SS through their music.
Despite not being strictly against the law at first, the swing scene was still deeply frowned upon by Nazi authorities. One of the biggest issues Nazis had with these groups was their acceptance of Jewish teenagers; however, this was never an intentionally political move on the part of the Swing Youth. They just wanted to dance and play music with their friends. The German-American journalist Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi, a biracial swing youth in Hamburg at the time, noted, “The Nazis hated our guts. Any chance they had, they would kick us in the pants or make life miserable for us. There was nothing ideological about us. We were nonpolitical, just anti Nazi regimentation.”
But as time went on, it didn’t matter why the Swing Youth rebelled against the status quo — the Gestapo began to consider any rebellion as a direct political attack against Nazi rule. One trademark of the Swing Youth that particularly irked the Gestapo was their greeting “Swing Heil,” a play on the traditional Nazi greeting “Sieg Heil”, meaning “Hail Victory,” thus “Swing Heil” meant “Hail Swing.” As you can imagine, this was practically blasphemy to Hitler’s supporters.
A 1944 Reich Ministry of Justice report on the Swing Youth would sum up the Nazi brass view of them, “The most striking example among these groups is the so-called Swing Youth, on whom there have been reports from various parts of the Reich. They began in Hamburg. These groups are motivated by the desire to have a good time and have increasingly assumed a character bordering on the criminal-antisocial. Even before the war boys and girls from Hamburg from the socially privileged classes joined groups, wearing strikingly casual clothing and became fans of English music [i.e. American music] and dance. At the turn of the year 1939/1940 the Flottbeck group organized dances which were attended by 5–6000 young people and which were marked by an uninhibited indulgence in swing. After the ban on public dances they organized dances at home, which were marked above all by sexual promiscuity… The hunger for English dance music and for their own dance bands led to break-ins in shops selling musical instruments. The greed to participate in what appeared to them to be a stylish life in clubs, bars, cafes and house balls suppressed any positive attitude towards responding to the needs of the time. They were unimpressed by the performance of our Wehrmacht; those killed in action were sometimes held to ridicule. An attitude of hostility to the war is clearly apparent… The members dress in clothes which imitate English fashions. Thus, they often wear pleated jackets in tartan designs and carry umbrellas. As a badge they wear a colored dress-shirt button in their lapels. They regard Englishmen as the highest form of human development. A false conception of freedom leads them into opposition to the Hitler Youth.”
And so it was that in 1940, the Swing Youth’s lifestyle was officially criminalized. A police ordinance was decreed under the guise of “protecting” young people. Over the next five and a half years, the Gestapo conducted raids wherever Swing Youth were caught gathering.
And this is when the real acts of resistance among the Swing Youth kicked off. Teens and young adults viewed these laws as a severe infringement on their freedoms and personal life. One thing perhaps universal across all cultures is you don’t mess with kids’ music if you don’t want them to get really, really pissed off. While their actions didn’t start as a political movement, the Nazis had, in fact, turned it into one. So these kids continued listening to their illegal music and dancing their forbidden dances, Nazis be damned.
Word of the Swing Youth’s rebellion against Nazi regime reached the desk of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and in January of 1942, he issued instructions to his officers that
“all the ringleaders … and all teachers with enemy views who are encouraging the swing youth are to be assigned to a concentration camp.”
And so it was that by December of 1942 nearly 400 people were arrested for their participation in swing culture, with roughly ninety percent of those arrested younger than twenty-one years old. Although most were not convicted, nearly all spent weeks in jail and faced rather brutal interrogations by Gestapo officials who hoped to uncover more illicit swing rings. When the kids were sent home, their jazz records were confiscated, and many of them were forced to have their hair cut short as punishment. This short hair was a way to easily identify anyone who had stepped out of line, and made it harder for them to get away with criminal activity later on. Some of the Swing Youth were even sent to the front lines, and Jewish swing kids endured the Holocaust. Because of this, many Swing Boys and Girls died in the name of musical freedom.
This now brings us to the final group we’ll touch on today- the Zazous, a group that shared similarities — and in fact was likely greatly influenced by — the Swing Youth and the Edelweiss Pirates. Although what the Zazous were actually rebelling against was the Vichy regime (which was the official government in France from 1940 to 1945), half of the territory was occupied by Nazi Germany and the Vichy regime actually worked in collaboration with the German officers, so any resistance against the Vichy regime would also be a direct snub at Nazi authorities.
This group of young rebels derived their name from the song “Zah Zuh Zah” by the American musician Cab Calloway. Calloway was also known for wearing ‘zoot suits,’ which became another identifying feature of the Zazous.
As for their activities, the Zazous gathered in cafes, clubs, parties, cinemas, and private homes in order to openly discuss their distaste for politics and the military state they were now governed by. They further dressed in apparel that directly opposed what was deemed appropriate at the time. Rather than the neat, tailor trim clothing that was mainstream due to government-endorsed fabric rationing regulations, the Zazous wore oversized apparel which usually contained an exorbitant amount of pockets, belts, and other embellishments. They got their extra material by stealing or black market means, or by upcycling some of the items they already owned. Another instruction issued by the government at the time pertained to hair — barber shops were encouraged to collect hair trimmings which could be used to make things like slippers. So in retaliation, the Zazous wore their hair long and generally refused to step foot in a barber shop.
Further, when the regime began forcing homosexuals to wear pink badges to identify themselves similar to Jews wearing the yellow star of David badges, the Zazous made up their own badges labeled with “Zazou.”
Speaking of gay individuals, one young French Zazou, seventeen year old Pierre Seel, along with his boyfriend, were deported to a German concentration camp for being homosexual. Noteworthy here is that homosexuality had not been illegal in France for almost a century and a half at this point, nor did the Vichy Regime officially recriminalize it, though persecution of homosexuals under that government was rampant. As for Seel, in 1939 his watch had been stolen from a club frequented by gay men, and when he reported the theft to the police, they began investigating his reasons for being associated with that club, subsequently having his name added to the list of homosexuals by the police.
Two years later the Gestapo were cracking down on suspected homosexuals in the region and he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. While there, he was tortured, including being sodomized with a piece of wood. Even more brutally, he was also forced to watch his boyfriend’s execution, via being publicly stripped naked and then devoured by attack dogs. Because Pierre was Catholic and the authorities there later deemed that he had been successfully “re-educated”, he was ultimately released from the concentration camp for ‘good behavior,’ and was able to return to France. That said, shortly thereafter he was forcibly conscripted and made to fight alongside the Germans on the Eastern front.
Not just supportive of gay individuals, another example of the Zazou’s showing solidarity and rebelling against the norms was their representation of black culture. Under the guise of showing support for the black musicians they admired, some Zazous would dress up in blackface. While this act might be misinterpreted today, at the time it was meant as a demonstration of solidarity, and to annoy the Nazis.
In the end, while their methods may have differed, and they certainly weren’t alone, The White Rose, The Edelweiss Pirates, the Swing Youth, and the Zazous all had one thing in common: standing up for their and other’s freedom to be able to live the lives the way they wanted to live despite being under the rule of arguably one of the most oppressive regimes in modern history.
As White Rose survivor Jürgen Wittenstein would state, “The government—or rather, the party—controlled everything: the news media, arms, police, the armed forces, the judiciary system, communications, travel, all levels of education from kindergarten to universities, all cultural and religious institutions. Political indoctrination started at a very early age, and continued by means of the Hitler Youth with the ultimate goal of complete mind control. Children were exhorted in school to denounce even their own parents for derogatory remarks about Hitler or Nazi ideology.”
Nevertheless, these students resisted anyway, in what small ways they could. And while some of them paid for this with their lives, as Robert Scholl so prophetically put with regards to the price his own children paid in their resistance, “There is a higher justice. They will go down in history.” Nailed it again Robert.
Expand for ReferencesAmerican Holocaust Memorial Museum:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/white-rose
Britannica:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/White-Rose
Weisse Rose Stiftung:
https://www.weisse-rose-stiftung.de/white-rose-resistance-group/
Jewish Virtual Library:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-white-rose-a-lesson-in-dissent
The National WWII Museum New Orleans:
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/sophie-scholl-and-white-rose
Facing History:
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/rejecting-nazism
Archives:
https://www.archives.gov/iwg/research-papers/red-orchestra-irr-file.html
LibCom:
https://libcom.org/article/edelweiss-pirates-1939-1945
The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation:
https://www.raoulwallenberg.net/saviors/others/edelweiss-pirates-story/
The National WWII Museum New Orleans:
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/swing-youth-jazz-nazi-germany#
JSTOR:
https://daily.jstor.org/germanys-real-life-swing-kids/
Music and the Holocaust:
https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich/swing-kids-behind-barbed-wir e/
LibCom:
https://libcom.org/article/zazous-1940-1945
The Culture Trip:
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/paris/articles/remembering-the-legacy-of-frances-world war-2-punk-culture/
Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand
https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/biographies/index_of_persons/biographie/view-bio/sophie-s choll
Imperial War Museums:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-frankfurt-hot-club
Jewish Virtual Library:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-french-vichy-regime
GLBTQ Archive:
http://www.glbtqarchive.com/ssh/seel_p_S.pdf
Penn State University:
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=10292ac26643805b23fc3f704 be0840c08ad6036
https://spartacus-educational.com/Robert_Scholl.htm
https://whiterosehistory.com/1937/12/01/hans-scholls-1937-arrest-summary/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Huber
https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/hans-scholl
https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/biographies/index_of_persons/biographie/view-bio/hans-scholl/?no_cache=1
https://www.weisse-rose-stiftung.de/white-rose-resistance-group/leaflets-of-the-white-rose/
https://www.white-rose-studies.org/pages/leaflet-1
https://www.white-rose-studies.org/pages/leaflet-2
https://www.white-rose-studies.org/pages/leaflet-3
https://www.white-rose-studies.org/pages/leaflet-4
https://www.white-rose-studies.org/pages/leaflet-5
https://www.white-rose-studies.org/pages/leaflet-6
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Schmid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Schmorell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Probst
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Scholl
https://spartacus-educational.com/Robert_Scholl.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reich_Labour_Service
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scholl
https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/pierre-seel/
The post The Kids Who Led the Resistance Movements Against the Nazis appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Ah hurtling through the air in a device made of several million parts in a portion of the Earth where the temperature generally sits at -40 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit and there isn’t enough oxygen or atmospheric pressure to keep you alive. All the while a rather complex combination of a controlled explosion and rapidly spinning parts is both providing the oxygen you’re breathing, initially at 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 200 degrees Celsius (more on this in the Bonus Facts later), while it also propels you along at hundreds of miles per hour in order to defeat gravity’s deathly pull. In the meantime, some smiling individual serves you a tasty beverage and a little bag of pretzels. As you go through turbulence and see the wings of your plane bending back and forth at upwards of 7 meters of flex at the tips, you may find yourself rethinking your life choices. But while all the factors that go into asserting dominance over gravity and distance may make it seem bonkers that this is a practically feasible mode of transportation, as I think most are aware, outside of riding an elevator, which is arguably the safest way to travel, there really isn’t much of a safer way out there to get from point A to point B than large commercial aircraft, not even walking. That said, commercial aviation accidents still do happen. So, if you do ever find yourself in such, what is the safest seat on the airplane for you to be sitting in order to reduce the odds of being injured or dying? And what other ways can you ensure you’re as least likely as possible to cease to exist on a plane if it ever plummets from the sky while you’re sitting in it?
Well, put your tray tables and seatbacks in their upright position, fasten your safety belt, and let’s nose dive into it all, shall we? And further look at a rather crazy incident in 2012 in Mexico in which the pilots deliberately parachuted out of a Boeing 727, which then plummeted towards the Earth afterward.
How Bonkersly Safe Commercial Passenger Aviation Has Become
To begin with, ever since the first ever person killed in a plane crash (we’ll get to this person, a passenger aboard a plane flown by one of the Wright Brothers, in the Bonus Facts later), people have been freaking out and obsessing over deaths from air travel despite that, as noted, commercial airline travel is extremely safe. But what perhaps gets lost on people is just how bonkersly safe it has become in the last two decades. For example, in 2022 there were over 70 million commercial passenger transport aviation flights carrying a total of close to 5 billion passengers. How many of these 5 billion passengers died? 174. That’s it. Further, if you happen to live in Europe, China, the U.S., Japan, Canada, Australia, Israel, or New Zealand, the data shows you are about 30 times less likely to die in a given commercial aviation flight than in more undeveloped regions of the world where older planes and more lax regulations abound. But even in the worst of these regions, they still achieve an astounding safety rating of about only 1 death per 1.2 million passengers. Important to point out is that this latter worst case data is about a 3 fold improvement over the global average in 1977 of about 1 in 350,000 passengers, which was still pretty crazy safe compared to all other forms of transport.
As Arold Barnett of MIT noted after authoring the study on airline safety in 2020 that we pulled that data from, “The worldwide risk of being killed had been dropping by a factor of two every decade… The pace of improvement has not slackened at all even as flying has gotten ever safer and further gains become harder to achieve.”
As to how these incredible rates have been achieved and continue to improve rapidly despite already being about as close to zero odds as one can practically get, the various regulatory bodies the world over, such as the FAA in the United States, are downright obsessed with reducing the number of deaths from commercial aviation accidents to zero, despite how completely impossible this would have seemed a half century ago. And in fact in the U.S. they actually have achieved this among U.S. based commercial passenger jet airliners over American soil in recent years, with most sources claiming not 1 fatality that meets those criteria since 2009. However, this isn’t fully accurate, there was actually 1 death if you really dig into it. Just 1 since 2009. We’ll get into that in a bit.
This, again, is all thanks to a level of obsession over safety that is unparalleled in any other form of transportation. If the various regulatory bodies overseeing countless other facets of life took the same attitude and with the same fervor and willingness to throw quite literally any amount of money at the problems, there’d be a lot fewer deaths everywhere. For example, in automobile accidents, injuries and deaths could be reduced by orders of magnitude overnight simply by requiring all car manufacturers to switch up the seating arrangement so that all seats, except the driver’s for practical reasons, face backwards, saving upwards of hundreds of thousands of lives per year and reducing injuries to millions more. A tiny change compared to what bodies like the FAA require of airline manufacturers to even just squeeze out a few extra probable saved lives. But seemingly this will never happen because most people don’t like the idea, and everybody feels relatively safe driving in a car, despite how dangerous it actually is.
Of course, in aviation, given the widespread fear of the act of hurtling through the air, most people are quite happy that the regulatory bodies overseeing flight are so incredibly obsessed with safety no matter the cost or even inconvenience to passengers going through the process of going through the airport to get to the plane, all while happily driving along in our likely speeding automobiles to the airport, rocking out to some great, blaring music while texting our friends and eating our McDonald’s at the same time, which totally and in no way will contribute to you being one of those 60,000 or so people who die every single day of heart disease. For reference, this would be the equivalent of around 400 commercial aviation passenger jet crashes every single day where all aboard were killed…
Humans. It really is good Grabthar is coming soon with his lizard army to take over. We simply cannot be trusted with making good choices. But Grabthar will show us the way. And while toiling away in his sugar caves, things we should actually be worrying about and having governments of the world quite literally throw ALL THE MONEY at like heart disease (20 million deaths per year and rising fast) and cancer (10 million deaths per year) will surely be reduced from all the extra exercise as we toil and reduction in ultraviolet ray exposure coming from the glowing orb in the sky bent on destroying us all…
Speaking of things in the sky bent on destroying us all. It’s not planes. So let’s now talk about the actual absolutely fascinating data here. Comparing to other modes of transport, if you happen to ever be in a room with around 100 people in it, you can be reasonably assured that at least one of you in that room is going to die in a car accident. But you’d need to be in a room full of around a quarter of a million people before it would be likely that one of you would die in a commercial aviation accident.
Granted, this isn’t an apples to apples comparison as more people drive every day than fly. But even when looking at the mile for mile data, large plane commercial aviation dominates and it’s not even close. For example, according to data compiled by Ian Savage at Northwestern University, from 2000 to 2009, cars had a death rate of about 7.28 people per billion miles. Ferries were at 3.17 deaths per billion miles, Trains at 0.43. Subways at 0.24. Buses ata shockingly safe 0.11. And commercial passenger planes with the lowest rate of 0.07, or a little over 100 times less likely to die in these planes vs a car mile for mile.
And then there is motorcycles… Going back to the car data at 7.28 deaths per billion miles as the worst mentioned so far… Well, motorcyclists were at 212.57, or about 3 thousand times more likely to die riding a motorcycle each mile than in a passenger plane mile for mile.
To put it yet another way talking just crashes, not deaths, and in more realistic timelines for a typical person, for every 1 million miles you travel (a ballpark amount commonly driven by a person in their lifetime in America) in your car in the United States, you can expect to be involved in 4.5 crashes. How many drives this is will vary considerably and nobody really has this data that we could find. BUT, in order to have a likelihood of being involved in the same number of crashes in commercial aviation in the United States, you would need to take about a half a million flights.
To attempt to make this slightly more apples to apples on this one, if you drive roughly 15,000 miles per year in the U.S. starting at age 16, you’ll make it to about 83 years old before you’ll cross 1 million miles driven and those probable 4.5 accidents. To reach that same number of accidents aboard a commercial plane, you’d need to take 1 flight every single day for 1,174 years.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “But most car accidents don’t result in deaths, but don’t most people die in plane accidents?” And the answer is no, not even close. In fact, most people involved in a typical commercial aviation accident not only survive, but are generally uninjured, with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board noting from 2001 to 2017 on this one, 98.2% of people survived commercial aviation accidents during that span with minor or no injuries, 0.6% were seriously injured by survived, and 1.3% died. Over in Europe, the European Transport Safety Council puts it at about 90% survivability there. The slight discrepancy here may be in that short hop, slightly smaller commercial planes (under 60 passengers) tend to have worse safety records than their larger counterparts, though still insanely good, and Europe as a whole has lot more of these type of relatively short short hop flights than the U.S. where there is a whole lot of nothing and vast distances between many cities. Or it could just be that the obscene safety ratings we have in Europe and the U.S. in the last couple decades are so good that even just a few particularly brutal accidents can skew the numbers markedly despite the countless millions of flights in that span.
As to this miniscule number of accidents and comparing it to cars, from 2015-2020 in the U.S. there were 62 million car accidents, resulting in just shy of 15 million injuries. In that exact same span in commercial passenger aviation there were only 176 accidents in the U.S., resulting in a mere 111 injuries. As noted, the U.S. is also currently maintaining a rather extreme streak since 2009 of only 1 single death aboard a U.S. operated commercial passenger jet in the United States. Again, we’ll get into that bizarre story in a bit.
For further illustration, according to the International Air Transport Association, based on 2022 flight fatality data they collected, you could take a flight every day for a whopping 25,214 years before you’d be 100% likely to die in a commercial passenger plane crash sometime in that span. And they further note that 2022 wasn’t even a good year here as the data was skewed all by just one accident in China that killed 132 of the 158 people killed that year in such accidents in their dataset which comprised about half the flights in the world that year.
How to Not Die in an Aviation Accident- Safest Seat on the Plane
Of course, obscenely unlikely is one thing. But as noted in the data there, if you fly every day for 260 years you’re statistically likely to get into 1 accident. And you don’t want to end up being one of the 0.6% of people in those accidents seriously injured or one of the 1.3% in such accidents who get to no longer ever worry about anything else again…
So, what seat should you sit in to be the safest and what other ways can you ensure the way you die is not in an instant and then eternal peace, and instead a steady, slow decline as age, disease, and watching your friends and loved ones pass over many years gradually strips you of your humanity and will to live until you beg for something like a catastrophic airliner accident to occur so you can finally have the inevitable sweet, merciful release of eternal sleep…
For starters- let’s look at the safest seat on a commercial airplane. As if it matters. Nothing matters, we’re all going to die anyway. But let’s look at the data on the safest seat anyway to help distract us from our pointless human lives which is, of course, one of the purposes of this channel for both you and our basement dwelling authors.
First, before jumping into the wider statistics, we want to talk about a crazy experiment where a group of scientists intentionally crashed a Boeing 727 full of crash test dummies, cameras, and sensors in order to study in a real world scenario, rather than computer simulated as is typical, various facets of passenger safety.
Initially attempting to perform the experiment in the U.S., the FAA noped out of this owing to the risk of the now unpiloted jet accidentally going along its merry way and killing someone on the ground or otherwise doing damage, something the FAA is firmly against… Apparently Trevor Jacob didn’t get this memo.
But Mexican authorities instead were like, “Don’t mind if I do!”… or wait wait wait, let me try that again. “Por favor y gracias!” and allowed it near the city of Mexicali on April 27, of 2012. They did, however, require that real pilots be on board, instead of having the whole thing be automated and remote controlled as was the initial plan. As the pilots apparently wanted to continue to live for some reason, they were given parachutes so that they could die sometime later in a meaningless way, instead of giving their lives FOR SCIENCE! In particular, three minutes before the crash, the two pilots and one engineer abandoned ship instead of going down with it as every good captain should. From here, the plane was controlled remotely, making this airplane unequivocally tied for the coolest remote control airplane in history.
As for what the data revealed about the safest place to sit, they found, unsurprisingly, that those sitting closer to the front of the plane had the highest risk of injury or death. Those in the middle were, well, in the middle of likelihood of injury or death. And those in the back would have likely mostly been fine in their crash. (We’ll dive into much more detail on the specific safest seat in a bit when looking at a larger accident safety set.)
They also found that the crash test dummies placed in the typically recommended brace position would have had fewer head and spinal cord injuries, although interestingly more chance of breaking their legs than those who did not.
Noteworthy this wasn’t actually the only time this sort of thing had been done, just the most advanced such test given modern technologies. Another similar one was conducted on December 1, 1984 by NASA and the FAA, who intentionally crashed a Boeing 720 in the Mojave Desert. In this one, they were testing seatbelt setups, cabin structural integrity, as well as the effectiveness of the FM-9 fuel additive that would reduce misting of the fuel in an accident, to see if it would help in post-crash fires.
This plane was fully remote controlled for the duration and was made to descend at a 3.8 degree glideslope, relatively typical for a real world crash, though with gear kept retracted. After the crash, the most important bit of data collected was that although about 25% of the passengers, rearward more likely, would have survived the crash based on bodily injury, given the amount of smoke, it was speculated that all aboard would have probably died before being able to get out because of this. As a result, the FAA began putting extra effort into reducing fires and such smoke via increased use of flame retardant materials. They also began requiring aisle lighting to be mechanically attached to the flooring, not just attached via adhesives.
Ok, so smoke is a major problem, and the back seats were the safest in these. What about a broader sample set to try to fine tune things a bit more?
Enter a report by Popular Mechanics done in 2007 looking at accidents from 1971 on up to that point where someone had died but others had lived. As to why this specific dataset restriction, they were in essence wanting to know in severe accidents where people died but it was in fact possible to survive, who continued their mundane and pointless existences afterwards, and where were they sitting? In this one, they found those in first or business class had a 49% survival rate. Those in the middle 1/3 of the plane at about a 56% survival rate. And those in the rear of the plane at about a 69% survival rate…. Nice…
Although interestingly, they found in their report that those with the highest fatality rates of all were actually those in the few rows in the absolute middle of the plane. This is hypothesized to be because of the wings filled with fuel. Or could have just been an aberration of the specific accidents looked at here given that in that entire 36 year span they could only find 20 accidents that fit the criteria.
Yet another analysis was compiled by TIME in 2015, who no doubt wanted all the clicks Popular Mechanics had gotten 8 years before, they looked at the previous three and a half decades of commercial aviation accident data in the United States, again looking at accidents that included both survivors and fatalities, in this case a sample size of 17 such accidents in their dataset. Much like Popular Mechanics, they also found the closer you are to the front of the plane, the more likely you are to die in such an accident. However, in their dataset things didn’t contrast quite so starkly as in Popular Mechanic’s report, with those in the front 1/3 of the plane being 38% likely to die, those in the middle 1/3 of the plane at 39%, and those in the rear 1/3 of the plane at 32%.
Diving into some of the nuance in all of this, those in the middle seats of a given row at any portion of the plane were safest of all, and, going along with the idea that the rear of the plane is safest, unsurprisingly the middle seats in the back performed best of all here, with just a 28% fatality rate, compared to, for example, the aisle seats in the middle of the planes at 44%. As to why, we can only assume having those sweet, soft bodies who have eaten way too much KFC in their lifetime as a buffer between you and the wall and you and all the stuff in the cabin functions like human airbags. Which, if you go check out our Higher Learning channel’s video linked below “What’s the Best Way to Survive Jumping Out of a Plane With No Parachute”, you’ll find even in this extreme scenario, you don’t actually need that many KFC lover’s between you and the ground to survive. And should you want to give your life for your children for some weird reason… I mean, you can literally make more kids people… putting your body between them and the ground actually gives them a surprisingly good chance of surviving. But kills off all the potential future babies you could have made. So selfish of your current human parasite.
Going back to seat positions, there are outliers in all of this, and, for example in one crash in 1977, the infamous Tenerife disaster, the vast majority of the 61 survivors out of a total of 644 people involved were seated near the front of one of the planes involved, ensuring the wealthy continue to keep on keeping on as it should be, instead of their plebeian brethren in the dust where they belong.
But to sum up here, the statistically safest seat to sit on in a plane is the middle seat of the very back row. As to why, this generally just seems to come down to the entire front of the plane and all the meat sacks in it provide a nice buffer between you and whatever the plane crashes against. Further, being in the back, there are fewer things to fly forward and hit you. Also, if you’re in the very rear of the plane, there’s generally an emergency exit right behind you, which is arguably one of the biggest factors in surviving a plane crash according to one 2008 study performed by the University of Greenwhich, which noted that being within 5 rows of an exit was statistically the safest place on the plane. Although, as noted, the mid-plane exit is not quite as safe as the others, again presumably owing to being right next to the wing with all its fuel and potentially burning engines, flying debris, and the like.
In fact, it was just such flying debris that resulted in the death of the individual who has the dubious distinction of being the only person killed aboard a U.S. based commercial jet passenger plane in the last 15 years. On this, while many sources claim the number is still zero since 2009 owing to it technically not being a crash, we feel it still qualifies given the event that caused it. The flight in question was Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 in 2018, in which an uncontained engine failure resulted in flying debris that damaged the fuselage and wing. This, in turn, resulted in explosive decompression in the cabin. Of the 149 aboard, 8 passengers were injured, and 1 ultimately died from her injuries sustained when partially ejected from the airplane, though she was pulled back in by passengers and flight attendants. And that’s it since 2009 for U.S. based passenger jet airliners since then. 1 single death. 15 years. Close to 200 million flights.
Of course, the back row isn’t all good. While you will have both a higher likelihood of surviving a crash and less likely to have people around you, with the back of the plane typically the most sparsely populated, in many planes the only non-emergency exit is up front, so you’ll have to wait a lot longer to get off the plane. Further, you’ll get jostled around a lot more by turbulence than, say, if near the middle of the plane, potentially reducing airsickness by picking that location.
Further, going back to safety, for whatever it’s worth, the air in the cabin which is recycled every few minutes or so also typically exits out of the back of the plane. So technically those in the very front of the plane might be slightly safer from coughing germs and the like given the general rearward flow of air helping to ensure the air they were putting in their body might go into yours as well if you sit in the back…
Though of course this one is probably negligible over all given the way fresh air is distributed, and the reality of it all from a practical standpoint. But we’re already splitting hairs here about the likelihood of dying in a plane crash anyway, pandering to extreme irrational fears of flying, so we thought we’d throw the germaphobes among us an irrational bone to chew on as well.
Plus, you are vastly more likely to die of things like the flu you got on that plane than a plane crash. So we thought remiss not to at least bring up getting sick from other passengers as one of the real dangers of commercial flight, even if miniscule. Either way, as ever once again showing why you should never leave your house. There are literally people out there. And don’t even get us started on the sun and its quest to kill us all.
On that note, one study done at Emory University in 2018 looking at transmission of various infections aboard commercial airlines found that those in the aisle seats had an average of 64 potential contact moments, vs those in the middle seat at 58, vs the window seats at 12. As to why, they noted that by sitting next to the window you are as far as possible away from passengers and crew walking up and down the aisle, with each extra bit of distance away from other passengers massively decreasing the likelihood of getting sick from one of those humans.
Of course, there is something a lot more deadly than a common cold, and more likely than a plane crash to contend with when flying, and that’s Venous thromboembolism (VTE), or also sometimes known as “Economy Class Syndrome”, in which a blood clot can form in your veins from sitting unmoving for extended periods, and exacerbated somewhat by the ultra dry air up high dehydrating you insanely quickly (which is in part why airlines push so many beverages on you). While it’s notoriously difficult to track how common VTE is as a result of flights given symptoms of it may not show up for quite some time after, in one aptly named study, Venous Thromboembolism Prophylaxis on Flights, done in 2018, it indicated that somewhere in the realm of 1 passenger for every 4,500 flights will develop symptoms from this within 8 weeks following a long-haul flight, and that the increase in risk factor of such flights is about 2.8 times the normal populace.
Coming back to which seat you should pick to maximize odds of not dying, as you might expect from the moniker “economy class syndrome”, those with more leg room and ability to get up and stretch seem to have far fewer instances of this. Unsurprisingly from this, you are twice as likely to develop VTE if you have a window seat than an aisle seat. This is generally thought to be because aisle seat individuals by necessity have to stand up more than those who have window seats. This is not just for themselves but because they often have to stand up to let other people in and out of the aisle because, like a toddler, those selfish individuals didn’t think to use the restroom before the flight. An aisle seat passenger is also able to occasionally stretch their legs into the aisle and try to trip people for something to do during the flight, whereas many window seat passengers cannot easily stretch their legs much, or even at all, unless a member of the ruling class up front.
That said, with a window seat, you get to enjoy a view that only the last few generations of humans have been able to experience, with, throughout the few hundred thousand years before, humans having to envy the birds and Grabthar and his lizard people as they soared through the sky, while the lesser form of life in humans toiled away building their pyramids for them.
So, pros and cons of all of these factors in seat position with regards to safety in flight. But in the general case, sitting in the back is going to be better if you do get in an accident. And if the plane isn’t full, the whole VTE issue may not be, as quite often the back is relatively empty, allowing you all the benefits of a window seat, but still able to stretch out and get up and down as you please, as well as avoid repulsive human contact and, the worst thing of all, potentially having to speak with another human.
That said, a major negative about sitting in the back that is generally kept quiet by the authorities is it puts you behind the point of the plane where the mind controlling chemtrails are distributed, with, of course, the distribution being an integral part of all pilot training going back to one of the first ever known mentions of chemtrails in October of 1918 by one Captain Ward Wells,
“Our attention was first drawn to the sky by the sudden appearance of several strange and startling clouds- long, graceful, looping ribbons of white. These were tapering to a point at one end, and at the other, where they dissolved into nothingness, 60 degrees across the sky, were about as broad as the width of a finger held arm’s distance from the eye… One close observation we noticed some distance ahead of each cloud point the tiny speck of a chase plane. Apparently the churning of the air was all that was needed to upset the delicately balanced meteorological conditions and precipitate this strange cloud formation…. I had seen ships leave their tracks in the clouds, similar to those of little sea animals in the wet sands at the shore, but never before had I seen a plane writing in white upon the blue slate of the sky!”
Of course, also part of the training even back then, as observed in Captain Wells’ explanation, is apologetics to explain away what the pilots are all doing here in helping to prepare human minds for the coming Mak’tarian invasion…
And if you’re wondering here, by Grabthar’s hammer, these chemtrails, also called contrails by those pushing their so-called science on us all, are either condensation trails resulting from a drop in air pressure that can, in the right conditions, cause the temperature of the air to temporarily drop below the dew point around certain parts of the plane; or they are a byproduct of burning jet fuel, introducing water to said air that also, once it cools down a bit, condenses around nucleation sites, and at high altitudes often ultimately freezes. This is not totally dissimilar to breathing out through your mouth when it’s freezing out and the vapor cloud that temporarily forms there…
Or it’s mind controlling chemicals. Don’t even worry about it…
As an interesting brief aside on this, if you notice that contrails above you form and then dissipate quickly, you can likely expect a continuation of clear weather that day, whereas if the contrails stick around for a long time and are seen to expand greatly in the interim, this means the air in high altitude is likely very humid, increasing chances that you may have clouds, rain or storms on the horizon.
…Or it’s Grabthar and Bill Gates teaming up to make sure we all continue to use Microsoft Windows or something. We’re on to you Billy-boy. And as for Grabthar, I mean, why on this amazingly resource and potential labor filled Earth would we want to resist such an invasion from clearly superior beings?!?!? There is peace in subservience, where all choices are taken away and all decisions decided for us. Much like with the sweet embrace of death, which Grabthar also frequently grants his subjects, in subservience to him, the outside world and all its cares and worries no longer exist. Grabthar is kind and generous to all. Come, let us show you the eternal joy that lies in subservience in the basement…
How to Not Die in an Aviation Accident- Other Ways to Survive a Plane Crash
Going back to surviving plane crashes, it turns out there are a number of other things you can do here besides sit with all the cool kids in the back, the number 1 way being by, shocker, paying attention to the safety briefing required at the start of each flight, which most people do not.
In this briefing, they’ll point out things like the position you should get yourself in if the plane might crash (which we’ll get into a rather interesting facet of this in a bit in the Bonus Facts). But in general this brace position is achieved with your head between your knees and hands over the back of your head to protect against things hitting your brain canister from behind. Noteworthy, it is generally recommended you put one hand over the other, rather than interlacing your fingers, in order to also help protect at least one of your hands somewhat as well.
They’ll further go over the locations of the emergency exits. This one, perhaps more than anything else with regards to increasing your chance of surviving a crash, is the thing you want to pay most attention to. Not just noting the location of the exits, but actually taking the time to count the number of rows from you to the one in front and the one behind you. Because in a crash, the cabin can become filled with quite deadly and visibility obscuring smoke, among other hazards of staying aboard. Thus, in general, if you survived the initial crash, the best way to survive after is to get off the plane as fast as possible before you extremely rapidly succumb to the fumes. And that means finding the closest exit as fast as possible when you may not be able to see much of anything- hence why memorizing the number of rows to an exit is also recommended so you can count them as you crawl long.
The importance of getting off the plane as fast as possible is also why regulatory bodies like the FAA require that every plane be able to be evacuated fully within 90 seconds. This is somewhat of an arbitrary number and, as we’ll get to in the fascinating details in the Bonus Facts in a bit, it is unlikely that in a real world crash it’s actually possible to evacuate people in this time frame in many cases.
Going back to the safety briefing, it turns out every item in it is there for a reason… Shocking, I know. And that includes how to use the emergency oxygen masks, and telling you to be sure and give it a tug (or it won’t work) and to put yours on first, even before your kids. This is owing to the fact that at high altitudes like a typical cruise of 35,000 feet, you’ll only have about 15-60 seconds of useful consciousness to get the mask on before you go all loopy and then pass out. Once your mask is on, you can then safely get your kids’ masks on, even if they’ve already passed out. But do you really want to rely on your kids pulling their eyes away from their cell phones long enough to get your mask on, especially if they are aware of your rather lucrative life insurance plan? I didn’t think so. And, hey, as an added bonus of this order of things of you first, if your kids do pass out, at least they’ll shut up for once.
Speaking of those masks, as an interesting brief aside, it turns out they aren’t hooked up to any central oxygen tank or anything, but, rather, when you tug the device, it triggers a spring-loaded mechanism that sets off an explosive charge. This triggers a mixture of lead styphnate and tetracene to generate the needed heat to produce a chemical reaction that produces oxygen for your mask. (This is why they tell you to tug on the mask to get the oxygen flowing- you’ve got to set off the explosive charge to get the whole thing working.)
That’s right. What you breathe through the mask didn’t begin as pure oxygen. Rather, the plane is equipped with numerous small chemical oxygen generators (also known as “oxygen candles,” about the size of a small package of tennis balls) which contain a mixture of mostly sodium chlorate (NaClO3), less than 5% barium peroxide (BaO2) and less than 1% potassium perchlorate (KClO4). When these chemicals are heated by the lead styphnate and tetracene, each undergoes a reaction that ultimately results in a fair bit of filtered, life sustaining oxygen running through the tube to you.
Of course, you might also smell a faint burning odor, but this is nothing to be alarmed about; it just assures you that the system is working. In fact, if the plane is actually on fire, the masks usually won’t deploy, so as not to make the fire worse with the extra oxygen. You may pass out in this case. But rest assured, if the plane is on fire, the pilots will immediately execute whatever procedure for that particular aircraft that gets it down on the ground as fast as physically possible without ripping the wings off. Fire in planes is no bueno. And it is unlikely you’ll actually die in the interim of getting to a safe, breathable altitude, even if starting at 35,000 feet.
Going back to airline accident safety, a couple things usually not mentioned in the safety briefing, but also generally recommended, are to keep your shoes on during the most dangerous parts of flight in takeoff and landing, avoid wearing baggy clothing, and in particular polyester or nylon and other such synthetic fibers that would like nothing better than to burn and melt against your skin while they do it. Avoid anything sharp in your pockets, etc. etc.
But in the end, given the extreme safety of commercial airline travel, many would argue that the rational thing is not to worry about any of this really, outside of paying attention to the safety briefing. The back, middle seat may be the safest, but the likelihood of this mattering at all on any given flight is so small that it would be irrational to prioritize this over sitting in the front of the plane sipping champagne with all the other of the ruling class, leaving the plebeians their pitiful sense of security in their cramped rear seats.
On this note, given how insanely safe flying is. If you’re wondering the absolute best way to get over your fears here and just enjoy the ride. Beyond just studying all about the safety aspects of flight and what the pilots are doing and all of it, as well as flying frequently, arguably the greatest thing you can do, if you have the means, which combines both of these things in a more extreme environment, is go take some flight instruction at your local flight school. Even if you have no intention of becoming a pilot, it doesn’t take that many lessons of training with you flying the plane before your fear of flying will disappear completely, especially aboard the bastions of safety that are large commercial planes. And, hey, you’ll get some fun experiences out of it too. And if you happen to follow through to getting a pilot’s license, you, too, can now join boat lovers in chronically seeing your bank account hovering near 0 because of your newfound hobby. But you only live once. Might as well enjoy the ride until you inevitably cease to exist and all memory or record of you is forgotten in a rather rapid timespan.
Bonus Facts:
How the Engines Provide the Oxygen You’re Breathing
In most modern airliners (the Boeing 787 Dreamliner notwithstanding), outside air is “bled off” from the compressor stage of the turbine engines and eventually piped into the passenger areas. However, a bit of processing is needed first as the compressed air is extremely hot (on the order of nearly 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 200 degrees Celsius) at this stage. Thus, before it enters the passenger compartment, it is first allowed to expand and is run through a heat exchanger and air cycle system to cool it off sufficiently. This system also can work as a heater, with some of the hot air mixed in with the cooled air to regulate cabin temperature. Engineers are just the best.
Once cooled and filtered, the pressurized air, which now has sufficient oxygen density to keep people happily conscious, is piped into the cabin area, usually at levels around 12 psi (about equivalent to atmospheric pressure at 7,000 feet). Why 12 psi instead of something like sea-level pressures of about 14.7 psi? 12 psi is sufficient for the majority of passengers while simultaneously reducing the structural strain on the aircraft itself over something like sea level atmospheric pressures.
As for the air already in the cabin, this is vented out through an outflow valve (or multiple valves in larger aircraft), usually located near the rear of the plane. (Fun Note: Before smoking was banned on commercial aircraft, the area around this outflow valve was generally stained dark brown from tobacco smoke.)
This outflow valve opens and closes automatically to maintain a steady pressure inside the cabin, while the entire system is ensuring that fresh air is continually being piped into and eventually blown out of the aircraft. In fact, while many complain of airplanes seeming “stuffy,” this system ensures that all the air in the aircraft is being completely replaced on average every 2-3 minutes. Yes, that means that your car, house or office is likely significantly more “stuffy” than a commercial airplane flying at 35,000 feet.
First Ever Person Killed in a Plane Crash
While one’s definition of a plane and what was the first one varies based on people who don’t know what they’re talking about, the Wright brothers are generally given credit here owing to the fact that their craft was not only powered and capable of carrying a person, but it was also fully controllable, and the three-axis system they developed to achieve this is not too dissimilar to the way planes are controlled today, along with a slew of other features later adopted from their design, separating their craft from those of antiquity that didn’t change the world.
This brings us to the first person ever killed in a plane crash, or at least a plane as we think of it. This was one Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, who was flying with Wilbur Wright on September 17, 1908 in front of a cheering crowd of over 2,000 people. After a few laps around the gathered masses, a mechanical failure resulted in a subsequent propeller break, which then cut a wire bracing the vertical rudder. This all, in turn, caused the plane to pitch straight to the ground. Wilbur did slightly recover control before hitting the ground, but not enough, and Selfridge and himself were thrown from the wreckage. Wilbur survived the incident, but Selfridge’s head struck a piece of the wood framing as he was thrown from the craft, cracking his skull. He later died in the hospital. It is generally thought that had he been wearing a helmet, he likely would have survived the crash as the rest of his injuries, while non-trivial, were not considered life-threatening. It was partially because of Lieutenant Selfridge’s death and how he died that, when the army started sending pilots up in planes, they required that they wear thick headgear for protection.
Human Sardines:
Going back to crash position, it turns out the same reason your seat won’t necessarily line up with the window on a given plane has resulted in many no longer being able to execute the recommended crash position- namely, airlines cramming many more seats than the original designers recommended into their planes, which is a rather easy thing to do because the seats are simply sitting on tracks and easily set in a variety of row arrangements, as well as the distance between rows being flexible.
Towards this end, only a few decades ago the average pitch between seats on commercial aircraft was 34 inches (86.3 cm), but today has diminished to just 31 inches (78.7 cm), with even 28 inch (71 cm) pitch seats now relatively common. Airlines are not only shrinking the pitch between seats, but also in some cases the width, despite the general populace’ ever expanding girth. For instance, while 18 inches (45.7 cm) or more was once the norm for economy class (18.5 inches still being the recommendation by Boeing for economy seats on the 777), rows as narrow as 16.7 inches (42.4 cm) are not unheard of today. If narrowed enough on certain planes, this allows for an extra seat in each row. For example, the Airbus A330 was designed to have eight seats in a row, but it’s not uncommon for airlines to use thinner than the recommended width of seats to accommodate nine seats in a row on this aircraft.
And if you were wondering, according to Cynthia Corbett of the FAA, there is no set rule for how many passengers and seats can be crammed into commercial aircraft, and the exit rows are even allowed to have the seats block the exit by up to 50%. The only caveat is, as previously noted, that the FAA requires all commercial aircraft be able to be fully evacuated in less than 90 seconds with half the exits blocked. This must be demonstrated by manufacturers in both computer simulated and live tests.
While no regulatory body is much concerned with the windows lining up with the seats on commercial aircraft, numerous consumer issues concerning the current state of airline travel in the United States did spark the formation of the Department of Transportation’s Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protection in 2012. In 2015, they specifically began looking in-depth at airlines cramming more and more people into flights, and in the process uncovered many safety issues that this results in.
To begin with, the aforementioned recommended crash position that has been proven to minimize injury and death in the event of an airplane crash is to bend forward with, essentially, your head in your lap. The problem is that with the ever-diminishing pitch (particularly in extreme cases like 28″ pitch), more and more people cannot physically assume this position given how close the seat in front of them is, or at least without putting their head and neck in a very precarious position. This is compounded by the fact that new “slimline” seats, with hard, rather than padded, backs (allowing for the saving of a couple inches per seat to be able to accommodate more rows of seats) have been introduced. So in the event of a crash, not only can those of the taller persuasion not necessarily assume the crash position, they are at risk that they’ll smack their head against a hard seat-back in front of them in these types of emergency situations.
Another issue, addressed by Dr. Nimia L Reyes during the Aviation Consumer Protection meetings, is the aforementioned potentially life threatening venous thrombosis. With less space for an individual to move their legs, in flights over four hours long, studies have shown a significant increase in instances of this condition in recent years. Two of the primary risk factors here are duration of the flight and height of the individual- essentially the longer you sit and the more tightly packed you are, the more likely you are to develop this condition.
Government Affairs Association of Professional Flight Attendants representative Julie Frederick also noted while addressing the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protection that the present high-density passenger seating has led to a rapid rise in “air rage” incidents, which are generally centered around personal space issues. Most notable among the triggers for these incidents is a passenger leaning their seat back, resulting in approximately 3/4 of all reported air-rage incidents today. Due to the decreasing pitch, there often simply isn’t any room to lean back without ramming your seat into the knees of the person behind you. (In the case of individuals over 6 feet tall (1.83 m), their knees may already be pressed up against the upright seats with no room whatsoever for the person in front to recline.) This inevitably results in no doubt Seinfeld-esk arguments over who has the right to those few inches of space.
90 Seconds
As previously mentioned, there is a requirement that all planes must be able to be evacuated in under 90 seconds, including demonstrating this in computer simulations and live test. However, there is significant controversy over these tests. While the testers do many things to simulate a real crash evacuation, the live testing scenarios can never actually accurately simulate real world crash situations owing to safety concerns for the test subjects. Nevertheless, the testers do try via- randomly blocking half the exits (not even the flight attendants know which will be blocked in a given test); restricting visibility by using emergency lighting only; using humans of all ages in the tests; including dummy infants for some people to carry; and randomly placing luggage around the cabin and aisle(s).
Of course, even with all this, the passengers all know they are there for evacuation testing, so actually pay attention to the normal evacuation instructions (something real-world passengers almost never do); they are calm and think rationally; there is no smoke or any such visual or breathing impairments; no one is injured; they are not trying to get to their children, perhaps in another row, away from the closest exit before evacuating; and they must pass a physical fitness test before being allowed to be a test passenger so don’t accurately represent the general public.
Unsurprisingly from this, a 2013 Canadian Safety Board study determined that in real world evacuations, the 90 second evacuation time is rarely met, even though many planes don’t fly full and accidents don’t necessarily block or disable half the exits.
While this is a concern, Corbett noted that 90 seconds is not some magic safety number. It’s just a relatively low number to make sure manufacturers at least put some effort into making sure passengers can exit a plane quickly in the event of an emergency. Specifically, the time was set somewhat arbitrarily based on one primary factors- fire. The flash burn fire event time on a typical aircraft when the rule was instituted was about 120 seconds. Further, as previously alluded to, if you happen to survive a significant plane crash, by far the most dangerous thing to you in most cases is smoke inhalation. So getting out to fresh air as rapidly as possible is key to minimizing passenger deaths that occur after a crash.
It should also be noted that, according to Frederick, in her 35 years of experience in the flight attendant industry, it isn’t an accurate assessment to assume people will panic in the event of a crash, even a major one. In fact, she states that in such situations most people actually go into, as she described it, a “space out” mode, which is why flight attendants are trained to shout instructions at passengers to break them out of their trance and get them doing what they are supposed to do. Essentially, in her experience in real world accidents many people’s reaction is to just freeze and not do anything unless they are told. Once again showing humans are naturally subservient and should welcome Grabthar and his glorious rule.
Eternal Sleep:
One more little data point to think about when you’re irrationally fearing flying is that every day you do something far more dangerous… Get into bed. It turns out about 1 in every 2700 people in the United States will die of falling out of bed or off other furniture, or about 1500 people per year, massively eclipsing the death rates in commercial passenger aviation. Of course, just about everybody lays in bed at night, or at least, you humans, not everybody flies in an airplane. But we just wanted to remind everyone that every single time you lay down at night to practice for your eventual eternal sleep, you might actually find that practice turns into the real thing thanks to the countless ways humans’ incredibly fragile warm blooded meat and water sacks can cease to function at any time.
So thanks for watching to the end. If you watched this while falling asleep, maybe even your end… GOODNIGHT EVERYBODY!
Expand for References
What Causes the Smoke Trails Behind Airline Planes High in the Sky?
Why aren’t the Windows Aligned with the Rows of Seats in Commercial Aircraft?
https://www.travelandleisure.com/what-is-the-safest-seat-on-a-plane-8398877
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/safest-seat-plane/index.html
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-are-the-safest-seats-on-a-plane-and-13-other-airplane-safety-questions
https://www.the-sun.com/travel/365632/plane-crash-safe-seat-clothes-jeans/
https://simpleflying.com/aircraft-safest-seats-location/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2024/01/15/where-is-the-safest-seat-on-a-plane/?sh=459ec86c75f3
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/safest-seat-plane/index.html
https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2023-releases/2023-03-07-01/
https://time.com/3934663/safest-seat-airplane/
https://simpleflying.com/how-safe-is-flying/
6 Facts About Flying that Will Help You Stay Calm on Your Next Flight
Flying High: The Real Odds of Experiencing a Plane Crash
https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/engines-equipment/should-be-jittery-about-train-travel.htm
Aviation and Plane Crash Statistics
https://www.bts.gov/content/us-air-carrier-safety-data
https://www.afar.com/magazine/what-are-the-safest-seats-on-airplanes
https://simpleflying.com/nasa-faa-controlled-impact-demonstration-boeing-720-story/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380
https://oddsofdying.com/fall-bed-chair-furniture/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risky.html
Which Is the Safest Seat on an Airplane?
https://simpleflying.com/deliberate-boeing-727-crash/
https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/why-you-should-choose-window-seat-during-flu-season
https://interestingengineering.com/ie-originals/ie-explainer/season-6/ep-29-is-there-a-safest-seat-on-an-airplane
https://www.studycountry.com/wiki/what-is-the-safest-seat-in-a-plane
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8412040/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6326126/
The post What is the Safest Seat on an Airplane? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Ah, the Super Soaker. Combining the range and accuracy needed to act out your wildest action movie fantasies with safety and bonus cooling action, it is the ultimate toy for hot summer days. As far as toys go, the Super Soaker is fairly basic: a hand pump, a reservoir for water and compressed air, a trigger valve, and a nozzle. It isn’t exactly rocket surgery. Yet, surprisingly, it took an actual rocket scientist to invent this summertime staple and get it in the hands of children around the world. And, like many great inventions, it all started with a happy accident. This is the incredible and rather inspirational story of Lonnie Johnson and the unlikely creation of one of the all-time classic toys.
Lonnie George Johnson was born on October 6, 1949 in Mobile, Alabama, the son of a nurse’s aide and a Second World War veteran who worked as a truck driver at a nearby Army base. Johnson grew up at the dawn of the Civil Rights era, when much of the American South was still heavily segregated. Yet, as he later recalled:
“The people that I interacted with on a daily basis were primarily Black, my teachers were all Black, so racism and being treated unfairly was never a part of my daily activity or consideration.”
From an early age, Johnson was fascinated with mechanical devices, an interest eagerly cultivated by both his parents:
“My parents’ support was a big deal. I played with rockets when I was a kid. One day I was making some rocket fuel on top of the stove. It ignited and could have nearly burned the house down. Instead [of yelling] my parents got me a hot plate and said ‘do that kind of stuff outside.’”
Meanwhile, Johnson’s father taught him the basics of engine mechanics and electric circuits. Johnson applied this knowledge to building high performance go-karts out of scrap parts – earning him the nickname “The Professor” among his friends. Johnson’s first major engineering success, however, came in 1968 when he built a sophisticated robot he dubbed Linex:
“He was three-and-a-half-feet tall, had shoulders that could rotate and two arms with elbows and wrists that swiveled. He could pivot and move around on wheels.”
Johnson entered Linex in a Junior Engineering Science Fair held at the University of Alabama – the only student of a black high school in attendance:
“When we went to the University of Alabama, that was a totally different environment, everyone there was White except for us, and the fact that I was there with my robot to me was a victory in itself.”
But this was far from Johnson’s only victory, for his impressive creation easily won him first prize at the fair. Unfortunately, this was still the Deep South in the late 1960s, and despite Johnson’s clear potential, the University of Alabama showed little interest in helping him with his academic career. Instead, Johnson enrolled at the venerable Tuskegee University, his schooling underwriter by a Reserve Officers Training Corps or ROTC scholarship from the United States Armed Forces. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1975 and a Masters’ degree in nuclear engineering in 1975, Johnson went to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he worked on cooling systems for nuclear reactors. As he later recalled:
“I was working alongside a guy who had the same level of engineering I had, he had a master’s degree and he had graduated from Penn State and he was White, of course. And, it turns out, I was doing a better job than he was. Since then, I’ve always felt very good about my education at Tuskegee.”
Shortly thereafter, however, Johnson joined the United States Air Force to fulfill his end of the ROTC scholarship, heading the Space Nuclear Power Safety Section at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. It was in 1979, while still in the Air Force, that Johnson obtained his first patent for a device he called the Digital Distance Measuring Instrument. This was a method of reading binary-encoded data that had been photographically miniaturized – the same basic principle used in CDs and DVDs. Yet, to Johnson’s continued regret, he never pursued the idea commercially:
“I refer to it as the big fish that got away, but I was patenting for fun back then. I was in the Air Force at the time and working on outer planetary space craft, including Galileo, and really enjoying my day job. I did think that was a really intriguing invention and that once I got the patent, the world would beat a path to my door, but it didn’t work out that way.”
Indeed, Johnson was enjoying a highly successful career, demonstrating again and again his impressive analytical and problem solving abilities:
“After I had done some analysis for the Air Force, I predicted some things that NASA had gone on record to say could not happen. I proved NASA’s prediction to be not totally accurate, that’s when I got offered the job at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and there I went to work on the Galileo spacecraft as a power systems engineer.”
While working on Galileo – an unmanned mission to study the planet Jupiter and its moons – Johnson developed a key power supply system for the spacecraft, but had to fight hard for it to be accepted
“It was an invention that my fellow engineers said would not work. I got that working, got that on the spacecraft, and many of them came up to me to apologize for the things they were saying about my idea … That to me was a major moral victory, to think, I’ve arrived, now I’m a real engineer.”
While working for NASA by day, by night Johnson tinkered with various personal projects. In 1982, Johnson was working on a new kind of heat pump that used water as its working fluid instead of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs like Freon – whose damaging effects on the ozone layer were just beginning to be recognized. One evening, after Johnson connected a prototype to his bathroom sink, a fateful accident occurred:
“I was experimenting with some nozzles that I machined, and I shot a stream of water across the bathroom and I thought, ‘Geez, maybe I should put this hard science stuff aside and work on something fun like a water gun. Maybe I could get enough money to support my habit.”
Just like that, the seeds of a billion-dollar idea were sown. But this project would have to wait, for that same year Johnson re-joined the air force and moved to Omaha Nebraska to work as a flight test engineer on a top secret project: the Northrop-Grumman B-2 Spirit or Stealth Bomber. Once established in Omaha, Johnson spent his evenings cobbling together prototype water guns from PVC pipe, plexiglass scraps, plastic soda bottles, and other assorted odds-and-ends. Surprisingly, this was not Johnson’s first experience with toy design; a few years earlier he had patented a small air-propelled aircraft called the Jammin’ Jet, which eventually hit store shelves in 1987.Unfortunately, partially due to a manufacturing defect, the product was not a success.
Johnson’s first inkling that he was onto something big came when he handed his prototype squirt gun to his 7-year-old daughter Aneka, who proceeded to gleefully soak every kid on the Air Force Base with 40-foot-long streams of water. In 1986, Johnson obtained U.S. Patent 4591071A for what he simply called a “Squirt Gun”, which, presaging later, more sophisticated toys, included both a battery and water-powered noisemaker that generated futuristic ray-gun sounds whenever the trigger was pulled. However, despite its seemingly obvious potential, Johnson faced a long, uphill battle getting his invention to market:
“At one point, I was trying to manufacture the product myself. One company I was working with went out of business. It soon became very clear to me that there was a lot more to understand about launching a company than I had realized. As a Captain in the military at the time, being an entrepreneur was not in my portfolio of experience. I figured there were people out there who made toys for a living and that I could learn a lot from them, so I decided to go the licensing route. I found Larami at the toy fair in New York City in 1989—it was a small toy company, but they were very interested in the innovative and high-performance features of the water gun and had engineers on staff that I could work with.”
At first, the representative from Larami – a Philadelphia-based firm best known for making cheap knockoff toys – was skeptical. But Johnson, following his personal maxim of “Put [an invention] on the table and let it stand on its merit,” simply pulled the prototype from his suitcase and proceeded to blast a stream of water across the convention hall. The representative was sold, and in 1990 Johnson’s invention hit the shelves under the name Power Drencher. Initial sales were excellent, and the following year the product was renamed the Super Soaker. This, coupled with a memorable television ad campaign, pushed sales through the roof. Over 2 million units were sold that year, making the Super Soaker the best selling toy of the 1991 summer season and the best-selling toy in the United States in 1992. The original Model 50 Super Soaker was soon followed by increasingly sophisticated models with all sorts of innovative features, including separate air tanks, electric water pumps, and constant-pressure systems – many based on Johnson’s designs. Some of his ideas, however, were less successful:
“I developed a system where after you’ve finished shooting the gun, you could just stick it into a pool of water or a bucket and press a button and it would automatically suck the water in and you’re good to go again. It was a quick refill, self-refilling water gun. That one really never made it to the market.”
Based on the success of the Super Soaker, Larami Toys was bought up by Hasbro in 1995. In all, more than 250 million Super Soakers have been sold since 1990, earning the popular water gun a spot in the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2015. Nearly as successful is Hasbro’s line of Nerf foam dart guns, which are also directly based on Lonnie Johnson patents. Indeed, this may well be Johnson’s earliest invention, for as a young boy he constructed small air guns out of bamboo and broom handles to shoot china berries at his friends. So if you grew up in the 90s or afterward, you owe a surprising amount of your childhood to Mr. Johnson.
Despite his extreme success here, rather than resting on his laurels and retiring to a tropical island filled with scantily clad women, in 1991 Johnson used his millions in Super Soaker and Nerf royalties to found Johnson Research and Development Co, Inc, where he would be free to pursue whatever projects he chose. Johnson’s current projects include next-generation ceramic and lithium batteries that can store 10 times as much energy as current battery technologies, a solar-powered moisture condenser for extracting water from the air in arid regions and where fresh water is scarce, and the Johnson Electrochemical Thermal Converter or JETC, a device that uses heat to directly generate electricity by compressing and expanding hydrogen. Far more efficient than similar converters, the JETC could one day generate large amounts of electricity from the low-grade waste heat emitted by power plants and other machinery. But Johnson’s creativity is wide-ranging, his 250 patents covering such diverse inventions as a wet diaper detector, portable multimedia projector system, and a hair drying curler. A veritable Edison of our time. (On this one, see our over 2 hour documentary Everything You Know About Edison and Tesla is Mostly Wrong)
In addition to his research and development work, Johnson is also a tireless advocate for black and other minority students entering the STEM fields, being heavily involved with nonprofits like For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology or FIRST, the Johnson Stem Activity Center or JSAC, 100 Black Men of Atlanta, and the Fernbank Science Centre. When asked about the secret to his own success in spite of the significant challenges he has faced, Johnson, now 74, is quick to emphasize one word:
“Perseverance is what I would stress for anyone interested in achieving anything significant. That includes learning the things you need to learn in order to overcome the obstacles that you face. It takes a lot of determination; you can’t give up when things get hard.”
Expand for References
Cindy, David, The Accidental Invention of the Super Soaker, Smithsonian Magazine, June 21, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/accidental-invention-super-soaker-180972428/
Lonnie Johnson, National Inventors Hall of Fame, https://www.invent.org/inductees/lonnie-johnson
Zakarin, Jordan, How Lonnie Johnson Invented the Super Soaker, Biography, January 26, 2021, https://www.biography.com/inventors/lonnie-johnson-invent-super-soaker
Lonnie Johnson, Johnson Research and Development, Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation, October 13, 2017, https://www.ipoef.org/lonnie-johnson-johnson-research-and-development/
Gopal, Trisha & Shereshewsky, Beryl, How a NASA Scientist Accidentally Invented the Super Soaker, CNN, August 15, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/15/us/super-soaker-lonnie-johnson-great-big-story-trnd/index.html
Munsell, Mike, This Billion-Dollar-Selling Toy Was Inspired by Heat Pumps, Canary Media, January 31, 2023, https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/fun-stuff/this-billion-dollar-selling-toy-was-inspired-by-heat-pumps
The post How a NASA Engineer Accidentally Invented The Greatest Summer Toy to Ever Toy appeared first on Today I Found Out.
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
This speech, delivered to Congress by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is one of the most famous of the 20th century, and marked the official entrance of the United States into the Second World War. That conflict would end four years later in total Allied victory – though at the cost of some 85 million lives – nearly 3% of the world’s population. Today, the attack on Pearl Harbour is seared into the American consciousness alongside other national traumas like 9/11, and each year millions of tourists travel to Hawaii to visit the rusting, oil-weeping wreck of the USS Arizona. But while the general events of that day are familiar to many, what is less familiar is what exactly provoked Japan to do this, did Japan actually accomplish anything significant in the attack, and, on that note, what happened to each of the ships after?
As for the attack itself, this was the brainchild of Japanese Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, who began planning the operation in June of 1941. A rather curious move for Japan to “wake the sleeping giant” as it were, it turns out the Japanese had little choice given their expansion goals and thanks in large part to previous moves by the United States to try to counter these.
Going back a bit, the Japanese aggression into the likes of China and French Indochina and the atrocities the Japanese committed in those regions, see our 2 hour documentary Swept Under the Rug: The Truth About the Japanese Holocaust, had seen the U.S., despite supposedly not wanting to be involved in foreign matters, nonetheless spearhead a series of progressively more harsh embargoes on Japan, ultimately cutting Japan off from needed supplies of oil, iron, rubber, steel, etc. For reference here at the time, 94% of Japan’s oil supplies were imported, and about 80% of that coming from the United States. After the embargo, it was noted by officials within the Imperial Japanese Navy that at that point they had perhaps as little as 6 months of campaigning before their ships would be dead in the water from lack of needed fuel. At that point forcing Japan to concede to whatever demands the U.S. wanted to place on them to lift the embargo.
They, thus, had three choices. First, negotiate a treaty with the U.S. to get them to lift the embargo. Second, try a second attack after their previous failed against the Soviets to capture those regions to get the resources they needed (and in this one support their ally in Germany). Or, third, attack South, but into certain regions that were more or less protected by the U.S., and thus in their view would likely see the U.S. declare war on them as a result.
As for option #1 of negotiating a treaty with the U.S. to resolve this, they actually tried exceptionally hard at this leading all the way up to mere hours before attacking Pearl Harbor. However, no such deal could be reached. That said, they did get pretty far along here, with Japan noting they would agree to withdraw from French Indochina and not attack any regions of Southeast Asia, so long as all aid to China was lifted from Britain, the U.S., and the Netherlands, and sanctions against Japan were likewise lifted. In essence, Japan was willing to give up most of their expansion plans and territories, but wanted to keep what they had captured of China and make war efforts there a little easier for themselves. The U.S., however, rejected this proposal, requiring all Japan had offered, plus also that Japan would withdraw from China and sign non-aggression pacts with the various Pacific states. Essentially, the U.S. stating, “Retreat back into your own country and abandon all plans of a true Japanese Empire and self sufficiency, as well as abandon plans to liberate Asia from Western influence like ourselves.” In so doing, this would also once again make Japan subservient to the U.S. and other nations because of the needed industrial supplies from them that Japan had no other access to.
As you can imagine, given the U.S. wasn’t really conceding literally anything, this was a non-starter for the Japanese leaders. Something that it seems is exactly what the U.S. officials were hoping for- to provoke Japan into conflict and thus, hopefully allow the U.S. to enter the war against Japan’s supposed but not really ally in Germany.
As for option #2 of attacking North against the Soviets, again, this was deemed too risky given they had no real way to counter the Soviet tanks and, as mentioned, had been defeated so resoundingly there on this front in their previous attempt.
This left option #3: before their oil and other supplies ran out, expand south into the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya, the Philippeans, and elsewhere to acquire the resources they needed while also accomplishing the goal of beginning to establish the Japanese Empire and liberating these regions from Western influence.
The problem here, again, was that to do so, they were convinced would cause the U.S. to declare war on them, with Japan then in a rather precarious position of not yet being fortified in the regions they were planning on taking right when the U.S.’s Pacific Fleet would presumably quickly attack.
Or, at least, they assumed they would. As you might expect given wide support for isolationism at the time in the U.S., historians debate whether the U.S. actually would have or not had Japan just gone ahead and done it without attacking the U.S. directly.
On all this, President Roosevelt explicitly stated the U.S. would not have… except he also believed that over the course of their activities in the region, the Japanese would make a mistake that he could leverage to drag the U.S. into war with Japan, and then his real goal- war with Germany. As noted by Pacific Fleet Admiral James O. Richardson when he asked Roosevelt if the U.S. would be going to war with Japan. He states Roosevelt responded, “if the Japanese attacked Thailand, or the Kra Peninsula, or the Dutch East Indies we would not enter the war, that if they even attacked the Philippines (note here, the Philippines at the time were an American protectorate) he doubted whether we would enter the war, but that [the Japanese] could not always avoid making mistakes and that as the war continued and that area of operations expanded sooner or later they would make a mistake and we would enter the war.”
Thus, if true, had the Japanese just went ahead and pushed south without directly involving the U.S., this is yet another point in WWII, much like when the Germans didn’t let the Soviets join the Tripartite Pact when the Soviets made overtures that they wanted to join up, where things may have gone extremely differently both in the war in Europe and the Pacific had one decision been different.
But, rightly or wrongly, the Japanese were convinced the U.S. would declare war on them the second they attacked the Philippines and other nations in the region. Something they had to do before they ran out of oil and other supplies because of U.S. embargoes against Japan.
So what to do about it, especially when they knew they couldn’t win a war against the United States?
How about sink the Pacific Fleet in a surprise attack, thus temporarily crippling the U.S.’ ability to retaliate while Japan simultaneously performed their own little Blitzkrieg, taking every nation they needed for the supplies and self sufficiency they wanted. They then would dig themselves in, such that it would require a massive effort by the United State to get them out. Something they knew the U.S. could do, but Japanese leaders felt that the U.S. would have no interest in such an effort given their general aversion to conflicts so far away. At that point, now from a much stronger negotiating position, and dealing with a nation that wouldn’t really want to continue the war, the Japanese could simply negotiate a truce with the United States that favored Japanese interests.
It’s fool-proof!!!!
Except not… Perhaps not adequately understanding American culture, and the classic modern day “These colors don’t run” type attitudes, while they had hoped the attack at Pearl Harbor would drive the U.S. citizens to even more advocate for isolating and withdrawing from these conflicts so far away, in reality their attack had more or less completely gotten rid of the American apathy towards the wars happening in the world at the time, undoing the isolationism that the U.S. had embraced post WWI. On top of this, because of the attack, which was perceived publicly as unprovoked even though the reality was Roosevelt and co. had been doing everything in their power to provoke Japan, the U.S. populace now had zero interest in negotiating a treaty with Japan. The American people wanted those deaths and the supposed unprovoked attack avenged, and weren’t going to stop until Japan was crushed.
Not all of the Japanese military leaders had been so deluded, however. For example, the aforementioned Marshal Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, in charge of the entire combined Japanese fleet, was not shy about his opposition to the original Japanese signing of the Tripartite Pact because of it not so subtly being directed at the United States. He stated of this on October 14, 1940, “To fight the United States is like fighting the whole world. But it has been decided. So I will fight the best I can. Doubtless I shall die on board Nagato. Meanwhile, Tokyo will be burnt to the ground three times. Konoe and others will be torn to pieces by the revengeful people….” He also would state after the fact, “Unlike the pre-Tripartite days, great determination is required to make certain that we avoid the danger of going to war.”
He further stated, seemingly understanding his potential enemy in a way other leaders in Japan did not, “Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it would not be enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians [who speak so lightly of a Japanese-American war] have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.”
Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t listened to, and was even in charge of the attack on Pearl Harbor that would bring about the result he feared.
And if you’re wondering here, he was not killed aboard his flagship as he predicted, but rather when the U.S. intercepted an encrypted transmission outlining Yamamoto’s plans to tour around the South Pacific inspecting his forces, and were thus able to shoot down his plane. Perhaps not such a bad death for a man who stated, “To die for Emperor and Nation is the highest hope of a military man. After a brave hard fight the blossoms are scattered on the fighting field… One man’s life or death is a matter of no importance. All that matters is the Empire. As Confucius said, “They may crush cinnabar, yet they do not take away its color; one may burn a fragrant herb, yet it will not destroy the scent.” They may destroy my body, yet they will not take away my will.”
In the end, thanks to Pearl Harbor, a drawn out war with the U.S., something the Japanese military brass had known they’d lose quite handily if it happened, is exactly what happened. And while nobody in Japan could have anticipated the end result of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the overall outcome was inevitable from the start given the U.S. had no interest in a treaty.
But going back to the start of it all, while the Japanese were confident they could defeat the outnumbered and poorly-equipped colonial forces of Britain and the Netherlands, the U.S. Pacific Fleet posed a more formidable threat. And as alluded to, contrary to popular belief, the Pearl Harbour attack was never intended to permanently destroy the American Fleet but rather temporarily disable it, buying Japan enough time to win a short campaign of conquest, consolidate its gains, achieve its needed resource independency, eliminate Western influence in these regions, and finally negotiate peace from a stronger position.
As the home anchorage of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, was home to a large number of ships, with over 100 commissioned and auxiliary vessels being in or just outside the harbour on the morning of December 7, 1941. Most of the large capital ships – the main target of the Japanese attack – were berthed along the east shore of Ford Island in what was known as Battleship Row. These were the:
- Pennsylvania-Class battleships USS Pennsylvania and USS Arizona
- the Nevada-Class battleships USS Nevada and USS Oklahoma
- the Tennessee-Class Battleships USS Tennessee and USS California
- and theColorado-Class Battleships USS Maryland and USS West Virginia
The Florida-Class Battleship USS Utah, which had been converted to a target ship and anti-aircraft gunnery trainer, was berthed on the west side of Ford Island opposite Battleship Row. The other large capital ships in the harbour that morning were the heavy cruisers USS New Orleans and San Fransisco and the light cruisers USS Raleigh, Detroit, Phoenix, Honolulu, St. Louis, and Helena. The protected cruiser USS Baltimore, built in 1888 and decommissioned in 1922, was serving as an immobile receiving hulk for new naval recruits at the time of the attack.
In addition to the capital ships, there were also dozens of smaller vessels in the harbour, including:
- 30 Destroyers
- 14 Minesweepers
- 12 Torpedo Boats
- 8 Minelayers
- 5 Tugs
- 4 Cargo Ships
- 4 Submarines
- 4 Seaplane Tenders
- 2 Destroyer Tenders
- 2 Oilers
- 2 Repair Ships
- 1 Submarine Tender
- 1 Ammunition Ship
- 1 Survey Ship
- 1 Hospital Ship
- 1 Coast Guard Cutter
- and 1 Gunboat
With a few exceptions, most of the smaller vessels escaped destruction or major damage; indeed, so confident were the Japanese of their ability to negotiate a peace after securing their positions in the regions they were capturing that they completely ignored many areas of the harbour such as the oil storage tanks, Navy yard, and submarine base. However, many of these vessels played key roles before, during, and after the attack. For example, at 3:42 AM, the coastal minesweeper USS Condor spotted the periscope of a Japanese Ko-hyoteki-class midget submarine attempting to sneak into the harbour. Three hours later, the Wickes-Class destroyer USS Ward intercepted and sank the submarine, inflicting the first casualties of the Pacific War. But while this incident occurred more than an hour before the aerial attack began, the warning was not acted on.
Significantly missing from Pearl Harbour that morning were the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers. USS Saratoga was in San Diego picking up her air group, while USS Enterprise and USS Lexington were ferrying aircraft to the islands of Wake and Midway. This serendipitous absence would prove key to the success of U.S. naval operations early in the Pacific War.
But as for the attack, the Japanese First Air Fleet or Kido Butai, comprising the aircraft carriers Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku – along with two battleships, three cruisers, nine destroyers, three submarines, and eight oil tankers – sailed from Japan on November 26, 1941 and sailed south towards the Hawaiian Islands. On the morning of December 7, the Task Force was less than 500 kilometres north of Oahu when its commander, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, received a message revealing that diplomatic negotiations between Japan and the United States had failed and ordering him to proceed with the attack. The first wave of aircraft was launched at 6:10 AM and comprised 88 Nakajima B5N Kate torpedo bombers, 48 Aichi D3A Val dive bombers, and 41 Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters. The bombers carried a combination of regular high-explosive bombs, armour-piercing bombs modified from naval artillery shells, and aerial torpedoes fitted with wooden fins to prevent them burying themselves in the mud of the shallow harbour.
Infamously, at 7:02 AM, the incoming Japanese aircraft were detected by a U.S. Army radar station at Opana Point. While the crew immediately notified headquarters, their warning was ignored, the Army mistaking the contact for a flight of Boeing B-17 patrol aircraft due to arrive that day. So the Japanese attack force carried on unopposed, reaching Oahu at 7:40 AM. At 7:48, the first wave attacked the Naval Air Station at Kaneohe Bay, destroying its force of long-range patrol aircraft. Five minutes later, the force’s leader, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, sent the infamous radio signal Tora Tora Tora to the Naval Task Force. Incidentally, while this signal is usually translated as Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!, it was, in fact, a combination of two code letters – to and ra – indicating, respectively, that the attack had started and that complete surprise had been achieved. This was chosen since, at the time, Japanese military aircraft could only send Morse Code signals.
At 8:00 AM, the first wave reached the harbour, where they were first spotted by the crew of the battleship USS Utah, moored on the west side of Ford Island.The second and last ship of the Florida class, Utah was launched in December 1909 by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation and commissioned in August 1911. She measured 159 metres long, displaced 22,000 metric tons, had a top speed of 21 knots or 39 kilometres per hour and a main armament comprising ten 12-inch guns in five twin turrets and sixteen 5-inch guns in casemates or barbettes along both sides of the hull. Perhaps her most distinctive features when completed were her twin hyperboloid-shaped lattice masts standing fore and aft of the superstructure. A common feature on American battleships in the 1910s and 20s, lattice masts were designed to isolate delicate fire-direction equipment from the shock of the guns firing. However, they proved vulnerable to high winds, and by the 1930s were largely replaced by more robust tripod masts.
In 1914, Utah and her sister ship USS Florida participated in the U.S. intervention in the Mexican Revolution, sending landing parties ashore to occupy the city of Veracruz. And when the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Utah was stationed at Berehaven in Bantry Bay, Ireland to protect Allied shipping convoys against German U-boats and surface raiders. After the war, she participated in numerous training exercises and carried U.S. Army General John Pershing and President-Elect Herbert Hoover on goodwill tours of South America. In 1930, however, the United Kingdom, United States, France, Italy, and Japan signed the London Naval Treaty, which set limits on the tonnage of surface warships and submarines each nation was allowed to possess. As a result, in 1931 Utah was demilitarized, stripped of her main armament and fitted with radio-control gear to convert her into an unmanned target ship. Then, in 1935, she was fitted with multiple anti-aircraft batteries for training naval gunners.
The First Group of the attack force, comprising the 88 Kate torpedo and level bombers, initially headed for Utah, whose berth was usually occupied by an aircraft carrier. Upon realizing their mistake, most of the bombers broke off to find another target; however, six aircraft led by Lieutenant Nakajima Tatsumi decided to press home the attack. Of the six torpedoes launched, two struck Utah, causing her to rapidly flood and list to port. At 8:12, the ship rolled over and capsized, trapping 62 men inside her hull. The ship’s senior officer, Commander Solomon Isquith, swam ashore, gathered a group of volunteers and a cutting torch, and began cutting into the upturned hull in an effort to free the trapped sailors. In the end, they succeeded in rescuing 4 men. Among the 58 dead was Chief Watertender Peter Tomich, who remained belowdecks to keep vital machinery running while his fellow crew members abandoned ship. For his actions, Tomich received the posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor. Miraculously, despite the attack coming without warning, 461 of Utah’s 519 crew managed to escape the sinking ship.
Meanwhile, one of the torpedoes launched at Utah struck the nearby Omaha-class Light Cruiser USS Raleigh, launched in October 1922 at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. On this shipyard, which constructed 5 of the ships then residing at Pearl Harbor, the Nevada, Raleigh, Detroit, Farragut, and Phelps, as an interesting aside, the shipyard was originally started by the oft’ forgotten sidekick of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor extraordinaire Thomas Watson, who helped invent the telephone. Flush with cash from his telephone work and patents, Watson started a farm near the Fore River in 1881, but failed at that venture, and instead switched to perfecting a steam engine he’d previously designed. After this failed to sell, he switched gears again and in 1885 founded the Fore River Ship and Engine company with businessman Frank Wellington, with their first ship made for the U.S. Navy constructed in 1896. Among countless others, the shipyard ultimately constructed 137 ships and 70 submarines for the U.S. Navy over the course of the next century, helping to make the U.S. the premiere naval power in the world.
Going back to the Raleigh, commissioned in February 1924, Raleigh was the fourth Omaha-class cruiser completed after USS Omaha, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati. Designed as a fast fleet scout, she measuring 169 metres long, displaced 7,600 metric tons, had a top speed of 35 knots or 65 kilometres per hour, and was fitted with a main armament comprising twelve 6-inch guns in two twin turrets and eight casemates and eight torpedo tubes. While the use of casemates was becoming old-fashioned by this point, the Omahas nonetheless had a variety of advanced features, including ammunition magazines placed below the waterline to improve survivability and propulsion machinery laid out in alternating boiler and engine compartments to prevent a single torpedo hit from immobilizing the ship – and for more on the history of the Fore River Shipyard and its surprising founder, please check out our previous video The Forgotten Other Guy Who Invented the Telephone and Helped Make the U.S. a Naval Superpower.
Raleigh’s first major action of the interwar period took place in February 1927, when she landed two detachments of U.S. Marines at Cortino, Nicaragua as part of the U.S. interventions in Central America collectively known as the “Banana Wars.” The following year she became the flagship for Vice Admiral John Dayton, Commander of Naval Forces in Europe. In September 1936, Raleigh was assigned to Squadron 40-T and, along with the destroyers USS Kane and Hatfield and the Coast Guard Cutter Cayuga, steamed to Gibraltar to evacuate hundreds of U.S. nationals fleeing the Spanish Civil War. Finally, in October 1939, she was made flagship of Destroyer Flotilla One of the Hawaiian Detachment and stationed at Pearl Harbor.
After being struck by the Japanese torpedo, Raleigh began listing severely to port. However, quick action by her crew, including counter flooding and the jettisoning of topside weight, prevented her from capsizing. Meanwhile, her antiaircraft gunners opened fire on the Japanese attackers, and were credited with shooting down five enemy aircraft. As with Utah, Raleigh’s crew of 458 was exceptionally fortunate, suffering only a handful of wounded.
The next warship to hit, however, was not so fortunate. USS Arizona was the second and last battleship of the Pennsylvania Class. Launched in June 1915 from the Brooklyn Navy Yard and commissioned in October 1916, Arizona, like her sister ship USS Pennsylvania, was the largest and most powerful battleship yet built for the U.S. Navy, outstripping the previous benchmark, the Nevada Class, by nearly all measures. 185 metres long, displacing 29,600 metric tons, and with a top speed of 21 knots or 39 kilometres per hour, Arizona had a main armament comprising twelve 13-inch guns in four triple turrets, twenty-two 5-inch guns in casemates, and two torpedo tubes. Unlike most warships of this era, whose hulls were covered in various thicknesses of light, moderate, or heavy armour, the Arizona adopted an “all or nothing” approach in which the most vital areas of the ship like the engines and boilers, command spaces, steering gear, and ammunition magazines were heavily armoured while everything else was given minimal protection. This arrangement was designed to provide an effective compromise between protection and weight.
Ironically, one of Arizona’s most advanced features prevented her from participating in the First World War. Though she was one the first U.S. battleships fitted with oil rather coal-fired boilers, coal was more abundant than oil in Europe, and so Arizona and many of her oil-fired sisters remained stateside during the conflict. In 1919, however, Arizona was among the warships chosen to escort President Woodrow Wilson’s ship, the SS George Washington, as he sailed to France to attend the Paris Peace Conference.
In 1929, Arizona underwent a complete modernization, being fitted with new boilers and turbines, tripod masts in place of her earlier lattice masts, and extra horizontal armour. The latter was designed to protect against the growing threat of aerial attack, though in the case of Arizona this was to prove tragically inadequate. Following this refit, Arizona performed a number of significant duties, such as carrying President Herbert Hoover on a vacation cruise in the Caribbean, participating in relief efforts following the 1933 Long Beach Earthquake in California, and serving as a filming location for the 1934 James Cagney film Here Comes the Navy. In May 1940, amid growing tensions between Japan and the United States, Arizona was assigned to the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor as the flagship of Battleship Division One.
Though she was to become one of the most famous ships in U.S. naval history, Arizona wasn’t even supposed to be at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack. Scheduled to sail for Puget Sound, Washington in November for overhaul, on October 22, while on maneuvers, Arizona was accidentally rammed by the battleship USS Oklahoma, opening a large hole in her port side. Consequently, on the morning of December 7th she was moored at Berth F-7 in Battleship Row awaiting repairs in dry-dock.
Shortly after 8:00 AM, while the ship’s color party was preparing to raise the flag, Arizona came under attack by ten Kate level bombers, which dropped armour-piercing bombs from an altitude of 3,000 feet. The aircraft scored four hits and three near misses. The first bomb ricocheted off Turret IV and penetrated the deck into the Captain’s pantry, starting a small fire; while the second and third hit the port edge of the ship near the mainmast and near the port aft 5-inch antiaircraft gun, causing minor damage. However, the fourth bomb, which struck at 8:06, penetrated the deck near Turret II and ignited the forward powder magazines, setting off a catastrophic explosion that destroyed much of the ship’s interior and caused the superstructure and turrets to collapse, tearing the ship in half. The devastated ship quickly settled to the shallow bottom of the harbour, where she burned for three days. 1,177 of Arizona’s 1,512 crew died in the explosion – around half of the total American lives lost in the Pearl Harbor attack. An enduring mystery remains as to what caused the explosion, as the Japanese bomb should not have been able to penetrate the thick armour over Arizona’s powder magazines. The leading theory holds that the bomb set off black powder saluting charges stored outside the magazine, and that a hatch accidentally left open allowed the flash from these charges to enter and set off the main charges. However, with much of the physical evidence obliterated and inaccessible, we may never know for sure.
Alongside Arizona that morning was USS Vestal, which was assisting with minor maintenance aboard the battleship. Among the oldest ships in the U.S. Navy at the time, Vestal was originally launched as a collier in 1909 before being converted into a repair ship. After first being hit by two bombs, the explosion of the Arizona literally swept the Vestal’s crew off her upper decks into the water. Among them was Commander Cassin Young, who swam back to the ship and, countermanding an order by another officer to abandon ship, told his men:
“Lads, we’re getting this ship underway.”
Despite burning oil from the Arizona setting the ship ablaze, at 8:45 Vestal’s crew cut free her mooring lines, fired up her boilers, and managed to sail free of the inferno. However, due to severe flooding, Commander Young decided to ground the Vestal at Aiea Bay, near Honolulu. Young received the Medal of Honor for his actions in saving the Vestal and, following his death at the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, had a Fletcher-Class Destroyer named after him. USS Cassin Young survived the war and is now a museum ship in Boston, Massachusetts.
Among the worst-hit ships in Battleship Row was the USS West Virginia. The third and final ship of the Colorado Class, West Virginia was launched in November 1921 by Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia and commissioned in December 1923. 190 metres long, displacing 33,200 metric tons, and with a top speed of 21 knots or 39 kilometres per hour, the Colorado Class was virtually identical to the earlier Tennessee Class but with an upgraded main armament of eight 16-inch guns in four twin turrets. West Virginia’s pre-war career was unremarkable, though she participated in many fleet exercises whose lessons later proved invaluable in the Pacific War. In April 1940, she was transferred to the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Early in the attack, West Virginia was hit by seven torpedoes and two armour-piercing bombs, causing extensive damage and flooding. The ship was only prevented from capsizing by counter flooding initiated by the assistant fire control officer, Lieutenant Claude Ricketts. Meanwhile, at 8:20, USS Tennessee, moored alongside West Virginia, suffered two bomb hits. Though neither caused serious damage, fragments from one bomb mortality wounded West Virginia’s captain, Mervyn Bennion. Nonetheless, he remained at his post and continued to direct the ship’s defence until the end – an action which won him a posthumous Medal of Honor. However, perhaps the most famous member of West Virginia’s crew was mess attendant second-class Doris Miller, who helped carry wounded crew members to safety before being ordered to man an anti-aircraft gun. Despite having no training in gunnery, Miller obeyed the order and was credited with shooting down one Japanese aircraft – though eyewitnesses claim he shot down several more. For his actions, Miller received the Navy Cross – the first black U.S. Navy sailor to be so honoured. He later died aboard the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay when it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off the Gilbert Islands on November 24, 1943. Two U.S. Navy ships have been named after Doris Miller: a Knox-class frigate commissioned in 1973, and a Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier scheduled to be completed in 2029.
Despite receiving only minor bomb damage to her turrets, USS Tennessee, berthed next to West Virginia, soon found herself engulfed in flames from West Virginia’s leaking fuel bunkers and the explosion of the Arizona. However, she was unable to flee, being trapped on all sides by West Virginia, Arizona, Maryland, and Oklahoma. Nonetheless, her crew managed to get the onboard fires under control, and her anti-aircraft gunners were credited with shooting down five enemy aircraft.
Also struck by multiple torpedoes was the USS Oklahoma. The second and last of the Nevada Class, Oklahoma was launched in March 1914 by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation in Camden, New Jersey and commissioned in May 1916. The first of the U.S. Navy’s Standard-type battleships, Oklahoma and her sister ship Nevada incorporated many modern innovations in warship design, including oil-fired boilers, all-or-nothing armour protection, and triple gun turrets, which allowed for a shorter hull and thicker armour protection for the same weight. Unlike her sister, however, Oklahoma was fitted with older triple-expansion steam engines instead of more modern steam turbines.
Like Arizona, Oklahoma was not sent to support the British Grand Fleet in the North Sea due to the unavailability of fuel oil. Instead, along with Nevada and Utah, she was assigned to Battleship Division Six, sailing out of Berehaven, Ireland, to protect Allied merchant convoys. In 1919, she joined Arizona in escorting President Wilson to France, and in October 1936 evacuated U.S. nationals from Spain along with USS Raleigh. By the mid-1930s, Oklahoma had become largely obsolete, but the terms of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty and 1930 London Naval Treaty prevented the Navy from retiring her. She thus underwent a series of modernizations until it was finally decided to decommission her by May 1942.
Oklahoma was struck by nine torpedoes from the first Japanese wave, causing her to quickly roll over and settle on her side. 415 of her 1,398 crew were killed in the process. Meanwhile, her sister ship Nevada was hit by three torpedoes, but managed to correct her list, raise steam, and get underway – the only battleship to do so during the attack. This was largely thanks to the actions of Ensign Joe Taussig, the officer of the deck, who had ordered a second boiler lit that morning as part of a power-transfer procedure. With the ship’s commander, Captain Francis Scanland, ashore, Taussig took command of the ship and her anti-aircraft batteries. As Nevada crossed the harbour basin, she was attacked by Val dive bombers from the second wave, whose pilots hoped to sink her in the channel and block the entrance to the harbour. Six bombs struck the ship, causing extensive damage and further flooding. When it became clear that the ship was sinking, Nevada was ordered to ground herself in shallower water. With the help of the tug Hoga and the minesweeper Avocet, Nevada succeeded in beaching herself on a coral ledge at Hospital Point. Over the course of the attack, 50 of Nevada’s 864 crew were killed and 109 wounded, while her anti-aircraft gunners were credited with shooting down 5 Japanese aircraft.
Moored at the southeastern end of Battleship Row was USS California, sister ship of Tennessee. Launched in November 1919 from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California and commissioned in August 1921, California spent much of her pre-war career performing fleet exercises and goodwill tours – as well as serving as a testbed for experimental naval radar – before being sent to Hawaii to deter Japanese aggression. On the morning of December 7, 1941, California’s gunners were among the first to open fire on the Japanese attackers, but the ready ammunition was quickly expended and the magazines had to be unlocked to acquire more. This created a break in the firing that allowed two Kate bombers to hit the ship with torpedoes, causing massive flooding. Unfortunately, at the time of the attack, the ship was being readied for inspection, and most of her hatches and portholes had been left open. This allowed the flooding to spread rapidly, overwhelming the ship’s pumps. Over the next hour, the ship was also struck by several armour-piercing bombs from Val dive-bombers, one of which hit near the forward starboard casemate and penetrated into the interior, causing widespread damage. While other ships pulled alongside to help fight the fires and pump water from California’s hull, she eventually sank to the harbour bottom and had to be abandoned. In total, 104 of California’s 1,083 crew were killed and 60 wounded. Four – Jackson Pharris, Herbert Jones, Thomas Reeves, and Robert Scott – received the Medal of Honor for their actions during the attack.
Of the battleships at Pearl Harbor that morning, the only ones not to suffer major damage were USS Maryland and USS Pennsylvania. Maryland, moored between Tennessee, California, and Oklahoma, was struck by two armour-piercing bombs, causing minor damage and killing four members of her crew. Pennsylvania, meanwhile, was in dry dock undergoing repairs, along with the Mahan-Class destroyers USS Cassin and USS Downes. At around 8:00 AM, Kate torpedo bombers attempted to torpedo the dry dock gates and flood the dock, but were unsuccessful. This was followed by a high-level attack by Kates armed with high-explosive bombs, one of which pierced Pennsylvania’s boat deck and exploded inside her No.9 5-inch gun casemate. Another bomb detonated between Downes and Cassin, rupturing their fuel bunkers and starting a large fire. Shore personnel flooded the dry dock in an attempt to douse the flames, but as the burning oil rose to the level of the ships’ decks, it began setting off torpedo warheads and shells and the destroyer crews were forced to abandoned ship.
These were the greatest losses inflicted by the Japanese attack, though far from the only ones. Among the smaller vessels in the harbour that morning, the Brooklyn-Class Light Cruiser USS Helena was attacked by Kate torpedo bombers who mistook her for the USS Pennsylvania. One torpedo struck the ship’s starboard side, flooding one engine room and damaging wiring to the main and secondary armament. The blast also severely damaged the nearby minelayer USS Oglala, causing her to capsize. Soon, however, the Japanese realized their mistake and diverted away from Helena, while the cruiser’s antiaircraft batteries kept further attacks at bay.
Finally, the Mahan-Class Destroyer USS Shaw was in auxiliary floating drydock YFD-2 undergoing repairs to her depth charge launchers when the second Japanese wave arrived. Val dive bombers attacked the ship, with three bombs hitting her forward hull and starting fires. These quickly blazed out of control, forcing the crew to abandon ship. As with the Pennsylvania, Downes, and Cassin, shore crews attempted to flood the dry dock, but around 30 minutes after being hit, Shaw’s forward magazines went up in an enormous explosion, sinking the ship as well as the dock and the harbour tug USS Sotoyomo.
By 10 AM, the second Japanese wave had departed. Having lost the element of surprise, Admiral Nagumo decided not to launch a third wave, and the carrier task force headed for home. Concurrently with the attack, Japanese land forces launched invasions of Thailand, Malaya, Hong Kong, Wake Island, and Guam, defeating the defending British and American forces within a month. Over the next 5 months they overran Singapore, Burma, The Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, with the southernmost expansion of Japanese operations occurring in May 1942 when Imperial Navy midget submarines attacked Sydney Harbour in Australia.
From this lightning conquest of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, it is tempting to think that the attack on Pearl Harbor achieved its intended aims. But this was not the case. It is sometimes claimed that Admiral Yamamoto, who masterminded the attack, said afterward that:
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
While there is no hard evidence Yamamoto ever actually said this, the sentiment is at least accurate, for the attack inflicted relatively little permanent damage and nearly all the ships sunk or damaged were eventually raised, repaired, and pressed back into service against the Japanese. But before this could happen, fires had to be put out, bodies recovered, and hulls re-floated – and that is a whole story unto itself.
Indeed, rescue and salvage work began even before the last Japanese aircraft left the harbour, such as when Commander Isquith of the Utah began cutting into his capsized ship’s hull to free trapped crewmen. Rescue work also immediately began on another capsized ship, the Oklahoma, several of whose crew made daring escapes through flooded, pitch-black compartments and passages to report the positions of other trapped men. Over the following day, rescue crews managed to cut free 24 survivors, though tragically two more were accidentally suffocated by the fumes from the cutting torches. But when the sun rose on the morning of December 8, the time came to step back and take stock of the damage.
The butcher’s bill was, to say the least, extensive. In less than two hours, the Japanese had sunk or severely damaged 18 ships including 9 battleships, 3 cruisers, and 4 destroyers; destroyed 188 aircraft on neighbouring airfields, and killed or wounded 3,581 American personnel. By contrast, the Japanese lost only 30 aircraft, two midget submarines, and 55 men.The attack had also left the harbour covered in a 2-inch layer of thick, sludgy bunker oil, much of which was on fire and would continue to burn for days following the attack.
Yet despite all this, there was a surprising amount of good news. As alluded to, in their zeal to sink the large capital ships, the Japanese had completely ignored much of the harbour’s support infrastructure, such as dry docks, oil tanks, maintenance shops, heavy-lift cranes, and the narrow-gauge railway used to move heavy equipment around the base. The latter was an especially lucky survivor; operated by the civilian Oahu Railway and Land Company, the railway never ran on Sundays, and on the morning of the attack all its engines were safely parked in the company’s main shed in Honolulu. Without this system and the rest of the harbour’s heavy equipment, the miracle of logistics that was about to unfold would likely have been impossible.
There was also more good news. Among the men present at Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack was Lieutenant Commander Lebbeus Curtis. An expert in marine salvage, Curtis was en route to Eritrea in east Africa to help the British raise a number of ships sunk by the Italians. After the attack, however, he was retained in Hawaii to lead the salvage of the Pacific Fleet. By December 14 – one week after the attack – the cleanup operation had been organized into 10 divisions, including diving, ammunition retrieval, and salvage – with the latter division placed under the command of James M. Steele, former commander of the now-capsized Utah. An extensive triage was also performed to determine which ships could be salvaged and returned to service and which were beyond repair and would be cut up for scrap. Topping the latter category was the USS Arizona, whose catastrophic magazine explosion had demolished most of her forward section. Though some salvage work was done to recover her pay chest and rear gun turrets, Arizona was mostly left alone for the remainder of the war. USS Utah, which had been converted to a training ship and had no military value, was similarly placed at the bottom of the priority list.
By contrast, several ships had received only minor damage in the attack – namely the cruisers USS New Orleans, San Fransisco, and Honolulu and the battleships USS Tennessee and Pennsylvania – and could be made ready to sail in just a few days. New Orleans, which was undergoing engine maintenance at the time of the attack, sailed out of Pearl Harbor shortly thereafter to escort troop convoys to Palmyra and Johnston Atolls, running on three of her four engines. She then put in at San Fransisco on January 13, 1942 for the completion of repairs before returning to combat on February 12. Similarly, San Fransisco was undergoing a major overhaul to her machinery and was awaiting dry-docking to clean barnacles and other fouling from her hull. Following the attack, the engine work was rapidly completed and the de-fouling postponed to free up the dry docks for more urgently-needed repairs to other ships. On December 16, San Fransisco sailed from Pearl Harbor with Task Force 14 to relieve the besieged garrison on Wake Island. Slightly more damaged was USS Honolulu, which suffered a near-miss from a Japanese bomb that flooded several compartments. Nonetheless, repairs were completed in just a few weeks, and on January 12, 1942, Honolulu sailed from Pearl Harbor to escort a convoy to San Fransisco.
Perhaps the luckiest survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack was USS Pennsylvania, which was protected from Japanese bombs and torpedoes by the concrete and steel walls of Drydock 1. Having only suffered minor bomb damage to one of her guns, Pennsylvania was immediately removed from the dry dock to make way for Honolulu and sailed for San Fransisco on December 20. Over the following year, Pennsylvania participated in numerous training exercises and underwent extensive modernization work at the Hunter’s Point and Mare Island Naval Shipyards, receiving ten 40mm and fifty-one 20mm antiaircraft gun mounts, a new naval search radar, and a new secondary armament of sixteen 5-inch/38 calibre dual-purpose guns. Finally, in April 1943, she sailed north to support the invasions of Attu, Adak, and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands. From November 1943 onwards Pennsylvania participated in the U.S. military’s island-hopping campaign in the South Pacific, supporting the invasions of Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands; Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands; and Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the Marianas. While she suffered no damage or casualties from enemy action during this period, on the night of June 10, 1944, Pennsylvania accidentally collided with the troopship Talbot, incurring minor damage.
In October 1944, Pennsylvania, along with the battleships USS Mississippi, Tennessee, California, Maryland, and West Virginia, were formed into Task Group 77.2 under the command of Admiral Jesse Oldendorf and performed shore bombardment in support of the invasion of the Philippines. On the night of October 24, a Japanese task force comprising the battleships Yamashiro and Fuso; the heavy cruisers Mogami, Nachi, Ashigara; the light cruiser Abukuma; and eight destroyers passed through Surigao Strait to engage Oldendorf’s ships, kicking of the Battle of Leyte Gulf – the largest single naval engagement of the war and among the largest in history. By the time the battle ended two days later, the Japanese had lost 28 ships including 1 fleet carrier, 3 light carriers, 3 battleships, and 10 cruisers. By contrast, the U.S. Navy lost only 12 ships – the largest being the light carrier USS Princeton. The engagement marked the end of the Imperial Japanese navy as a significant fighting force. While Pennsylvania did not directly engage any Japanese ships during the battle, her gunners succeeded in shooting down five enemy aircraft.
Pennsylvania next participated in the Battle Lingayen Gulf before returning to San Fransisco on March 13, 1945 for another overhaul. This involved further enlarging and upgrading her anti-aircraft armament to counter the growing threat of Kamikaze suicide aircraft. On July 24, she sailed again to participate in the invasion of Okinawa. On August 12 a Japanese torpedo bomber managed to penetrate the Allied defensive screen and launch its weapon at Pennsylvania, blowing a large hole in her stern and killing or wounding thirty of her crew. Thankfully, her crew were able to quickly bring the flooding under control, and the next morning the ship was towed to shallower water so further repairs could be completed. As it turned out, Pennsylvania would be the last major Allied vessel to be damaged by enemy action, for three days later on August 15, the Japanese surrendered, bringing the Second World War to an end.
Despite earning eight battle stars and a Navy Unit Commendation, after the war Pennsylvania was declared obsolete and selected as a target ship for Operation Crossroads, a series of nuclear weapons tests conducted at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946. The first test, codenamed Able, took place on June 30, with a 23-kiloton Fat Man bomb of the type used on Nagasaki being dropped on the target fleet by a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber. Unfortunately, the bomb missed the aiming point by nearly 650 metres; as a result, only five target ships were sunk. Pennsylvania was unaffected by the blast or radiation, and was soon re-boarded by her crew. The second test, codenamed Baker, took place on July 24, and involved an identical 23-kiloton device being detonated underwater beneath the target fleet. This time, ten ships were sunk. While Pennsylvania was only lightly damaged by the blast, the surge of highly-radioactive water thoroughly contaminated her hull and superstructure. On August 21, she was towed to Kawjalein Atoll, where, after being officially decommissioned, she was subjected to various radiological and structural studies. Finally, on February 10, 1948, she was towed off and scuttled off Kwajalein where she remains to this day. Nine days later, she was officially stricken from the Naval Vessel Register.
Going back to Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the next least-damaged ships were the light cruisers USS Raleigh and Helena, the battleship Maryland, and the destroyer USS Shaw. Raleigh was hit by a single torpedo and began to list severely to port, but was saved from capsizing by her crew jettisoning topside weight. In the days following the attack, preliminary repairs were affected by stuffing life preservers and cement into the torpedo holes and pumping the hull dry. On December 22, 1941, Raleigh was towed to the Navy Yard for further repairs, and on February 21, 1942 left Pearl Harbor as part of a five-ship convoy bound for San Francisco. She underwent a complete overhaul at Mare Island Naval Shipyard before sailing again on July 23 to escort supply convoys between San Francisco, Hawaii, Samoa, and the Fiji Islands. Then, from January 1943 to June 1944 she was stationed in the Aleutian Islands, performing shore bombardment for the invasion forces. This was to be the end of her combat career, for after suffering a failure in one of her engines on June 6, 1944, she put in again at Mare Island for repairs before transiting the Panama Canal to Annapolis, Maryland, arriving on July 1, 1945. She spent the next month and a half conducting midshipman training courses in the Caribbean until, on August 15, the Japanese surrendered. Declared obsolete, Raleigh sailed to the Philadelphia Naval Yard where she was decommissioned on November 2, 1945. She was struck from the Naval Vessel Register and sold for scrap on February 27, 1946.
USS Helena was similarly struck by a single torpedo, and was patched in two days before being tugged into Dry Dock 2, which was not expected to be ready until the spring of 1942 but was declared serviceable enough for preliminary repairs. As the concrete floor of the dock had not yet been poured, this task had to be completed in tandem with repairs to the Helena, leading to considerable friction between Navy and civilian workmen. Another complicating factor in Helena’s repair was the large volume of bunker oil which had drifted into the dry dock, which coated every surface and made work extremely dangerous. However, this provided an opportunity for workmen to perfect the high pressure water and steam-cleaning techniques that would prove vital to the subsequent salvage work around the harbour.
Preliminary repairs were completed by January 5, 1942, whereupon Helena sailed for Mare Island Naval Shipyard. There, her hull was fully repaired and new directors fitted for her 40mm antiaircraft guns. In late July 1942 she departed San Francisco, escorting a convoy of six transports, before joining Task Force 64 supporting U.S. landings on the island of Guadalcanal. On the night of October 11, Helena, along with the heavy cruisers USS San Francisco and Salt Lake City, the light cruiser USS Boise, and the destroyers USS Buchanan, Duncan, McCalla, Farenholt, and Laffey, detected and fired upon a Japanese squadron comprising the heavy cruisers Aoba, Kinugasa, and Furutaka and the destroyers Fubuki and Hatsuyuki. The Japanese, who had previously sunk four Allied heavy cruisers during the August 8 Battle of Savo Island, were not expecting the U.S. Navy to attack at night were taken completely by surprise. The ensuring engagement, known as the Battle of Cape Esperance, resulted in Furutaka and Fubuki being sunk and Aoba heavily damaged. On the American side, USS Duncan was sunk and Salt Lake City, Boise, and Farenhold heavily damaged. Though strategically inconclusive, the battle provided the US Navy with a much-needed morale boost.
A month later on November 13, Helena, now part of Task Force 67.4, participated in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, in which she engaged and lightly damaged the Japanese destroyers Akatsuki, Amatsukaze, Asagumo, Murasame, and Samidare. Over the first six months of 1943, Helena provided cover and shore bombardment for the invasions of New Georgia and of Kolombangara and Munda in the Solomon Islands. In the early morning hours of July 6, 1943, Helena, along with the light cruisers USS Honolulu and St. Louis and the destroyers USS Nicholas, O’Bannon, Radford, and Jenkins, were crossing the Kula Gulf in the Solomons when they detected and engaged a squadron of Japanese warships covering the landing of troops at Vila on Kolombangara. Having expended all her flashless propellant during the previous night’s shore bombardment, Helena was forced to use regular propellant, brightly illuminating herself whenever she fired. This allowed the Japanese destroyers Suzukane and Tanikaze to pinpoint the cruiser’s location and launch a salvo of eight torpedoes before fleeing the scene. Around 2:03 AM, three of these torpedoes struck Helena on her port side. She quickly broke into three pieces and sank, taking 168 sailors down with her.
One of the deceptively lucky survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack was the destroyer USS Shaw. Berthed in floating dry dock YDF-12 at the time of the attack, Shaw was struck by two bombs, starting fires that ultimately ignited her forward ammunition magazines. The resulting explosion, captured in one of the most iconic photographs of the Pearl Harbor attack, ripped the ship’s bow clean off. This proved to be something of a blessing in disguise, saving salvage crews the trouble of removing the damaged bow. Shaw was moved to Dry Dock 2, where preliminary repairs began on Christmas Day 1941. Her destroyed bow was replaced with a temporary welded-steel false bow, while her superstructure removed and replaced with a small tripod mast with a simple crow’s nest for her helm and navigation equipment. She was also stripped of her armament and given a single 5-inch gun from the destroyed USS Cassin to provide some measure self-defence. In January 1942 she was moved to the newly-refloated YDF-12 dock for final repairs before sailing for the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. There, she was restored to her original pre-attack configuration, returning to Pearl Harbor on August 31, 1942.
Shaw was first deployed to the Santa Cruz Islands to intercept enemy forces headed for Guadalcanal. Here, on October 26, she rescued the crew of the destroyer USS Porter, which had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. Then, on January 10, 1943, she accidentally ran aground while entering Nouméa Harbor, New Caledonia, forcing her to put into Pearl Harbor for extensive repairs. Returning to service in September 1943, she participated in Allied landings on New Guinea and New Britain before being damaged by Japanese dive bombers off Cape Gloucester, New Guinea, on December 26. She sailed for Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard for repairs before returning to action on May 1, 1944. Over the next year, Shaw participated in the invasion of Guam and the Philippines before returning to San Fransisco on May 19, 1945 for major upgrades to her anti-aircraft batteries. However, by the time these upgrades were completed on August 20, 1945, the war had already ended. Shaw was declared obsolete, sent to Philadelphia for decommissioning, and sold for scrap in July 1946.
Of all the ships in “Battleship Row” on the east side of Ford Island, the least damaged was USS Maryland. “Least damaged”,however, is a somewhat relative term, for Maryland, having been hit by two armour-piercing bombs deep within her hull, was burning out pump after pump in an effort to control her flooding and stay afloat. She was also pinned against the upturned hull of the Oklahoma. Nonetheless, Naval tugs managed to extract Maryland from her berth and tow her into Dry Dock 2 just after the departure of Helena. Once her hull was rendered sufficiently seaworthy, she sailed for Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington State, arriving on December 30, 1941. Here, she received permanent repairs to her hull as well as several design upgrades, including the replacement of her original secondary armament of 5 inch/25 calibre guns with 5-inch/38 calibre dual-purpose guns. Repairs were completed on February 26, 1942, and after a series of shakedown cruises Maryland returned to action in June 1942.
As an older battleship unable to keep up with the carrier task forces, Maryland was initially used in a supporting role, patrolling the American West Coast and Australia against Japanese incursions. However, in November 1943 she went on the offensive, performing shore bombardment during the invasion of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. She then supported the landings on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands in January 1944 and on Saipan in the Marianas in May. On June 18, off Saipan, Maryland was struck by a torpedo dropped by a Japanese Mitsubishi G4M3 “Betty” bomber, which heavily damaged her starboard bow and killed two men. Steaming in reverse to avoid further damage, she sailed to Pearl Harbor for repairs, returning to duty on August 13. Her next action came on September 12 when she provided fire support for the invasion of Peleliu in the Palau islands.
Along with the battleships West Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, California, and Pennsylvania, Maryland participated in the decisive Battle of Leyte Gulf off the Philippines on October 24, 1944. A month later on November 29, however, she was struck by a Japanese Kamikaze aircraft between her No.1 and 2 turrets, causing extensive damage and inflicting 61 casualties – 31 of them fatal. Nonetheless, Maryland remained on station until relieved on December 2, arriving back at Pearl Harbor on December 18. Repairs were completed in time for Maryland to participate in the invasion of Okinawa, but on April 7 she was struck by another Kamikaze near her No.3 turret, igniting large fires, setting off antiaircraft ammunition, killing 10 crewmen and wounding 37. Once again, the ship remained on station for another week before sailing to Puget Sound, where the damage was repaired and the ship received extensive upgrades to her antiaircraft batteries and radar systems. However, just as with USS Shaw, by the time these repairs were completed, the war had already ended. Maryland’s final assignment was to ferry American servicemen back to the United States as part of Operation Magic Carpet. After completing five voyages, on April 15, 1946 she entered Puget Sound Naval Shipyard where she was decommissioned and placed in mothballs as part of the Pacific Reserve Fleet. Finally, in July 1959, she was stricken from the Naval Register and sold for scrap.
A similarly lucky survivor was Tennessee, which had only been struck by two bombs that failed to detonate and was largely seaworthy. Unfortunately, she was boxed in by Maryland ahead, West Virginia to the starboard, and Arizona astern, and had been showered in oil and set ablaze by the latter’s explosion. Thinking quickly, her crew had set her propellers to slow ahead to push away some of the burning oil, but recovery work was still delayed for several days by the thick pall of black smoke. Even worse, Tennessee was pinned against the quay by the partially-capsized West Virginia. It was thus decided to demolish said quay, after which Tennessee would be towed out rearward and spun through a 90-degree turn to clear the wreck of Arizona. Unfortunately, this proved more difficult than expected, the quay being so well-built that it required considerable amount of dynamite to demolish. But there was some good news: by the time this work was complete on December 16, Maryland had already been removed from her berth, allowing Tennessee to be more easily extracted.
After undergoing preliminary repairs to seal warped hull plates and loosened rivets, Tennessee sailed for Puget Sound on December 20, arriving 9 days later. There, she received more permanent repairs as well as several upgrades, including the replacement of her .50 calibre antiaircraft guns with more powerful 1.1 inch and 20mm models, the replacement of her 14-inch gun barrels with more modern versions, and the installation of new search and fire-control radars. Work was completed on February 25, 1942, whereupon Tennessee underwent a series of shakedown cruises and training exercises. Though slated to participate in the Guadalcanal campaign, Tennessee’s speed and fuel consumption were deemed unacceptable and instead she returned to Puget Sound for further modernizations, including the fitting of an entirely new superstructure, the replacement of her lattice masts with tripod masts, further upgrades to her anti-aircraft batteries, and the addition of additional deck armour, thicker anti-torpedo bulges, and improved hull compartmentalization.
Tennessee returned to service in May 1943 as part of the Aleutian Islands campaign, performing patrol, shore bombardment, and minesweeping duties in support of the landing forces. In the fall of that year she steamed to the South Pacific to support the island-hopping campaign, participating in the invasions of Tarawa, Kawjalein, Enewetok, New Ireland, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Anguar, and Peleliu. On October 25, 1944, Tennessee, along with fellow battleships USS West Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, California, and Pennsylvania, took part in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where she helped to sink the Japanese battleship Yamashiro.
Following the battle, Tennessee returned to Puget Sound once more for a routine refit, being fitted with more sophisticated fire-control radars and a new paint scheme for greater protection against the emerging threat of Kamikaze aircraft. Work was completed on February 2, 1945, whereupon Tennessee sailed back into the Pacific to take part in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On April 12, Tennessee was hit by a Kamikaze, destroying part of her antiaircraft batteries, killing 25 of her crew, and wounding 104. Remaining on station for another two weeks, Tennessee finally sailed for Ulithi in the Caroline Islands for permanent repairs. She returned to Okinawa on June 3, providing shore bombardment until June 21 when the island was declared secure. Shortly thereafter, she became the flagship of admiral Jesse Oldendorf, who began preparing her and the rest of the fleet for Operation Downfall, the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. She carried out patrols in the East China Sea, participating in raids in the Yangtze estuary and on Wake Island until August 15, when the Japanese finally surrendered. After covering the landing of occupation troops at Wakayama, Japan, in September, Tennessee sailed for the Philadelphia Navy Yard, arriving in December 1945. Her 1945 refit had left her hull too wide to fit through the Panama Canal, forcing her to take the long way home across the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Despite receiving 10 battle stars for her service during the war, like all her sister ships of similar vintage she was declared obsolete, decommissioned, and placed in mothballs. She remained in reserve until March 1, 1959, when she was finally sold for scrap.
But when it came to ships damaged at Pearl Harbor, this was where the good news ended. Though the Arizona and Utah were declared total write-offs and Oklahoma most likely so, California, Nevada, and West Virginia were considered salvageable – though salvage and repair crews would have their work cut out for them. Given Pearl Harbor’s limited drydock facilities, it was decided that only those repairs necessary to make the salvaged ships seaworthy would be performed; any work taking longer than a month would be performed at shipyards on the mainland. Other priority tasks included recovering as much ammunition and other sensitive equipment as possible from the ships’ hulls, recovering the Japanese midget submarine sunk just outside the harbour an hour before the aerial attack, and the removal and relocation of the ships’ antiaircraft guns to defend against a follow-up Japanese attack. So likely was this considered that many ships were surrounded with gunnery target barges with sheet metal and fencing welded on as makeshift anti-torpedo nets.
The first priority for salvage was USS California, which had been hit by two torpedoes and one armour-piercing bomb and quickly sunk to the harbour bottom so that only her superstructure and the top of her turrets were visible. Though she had settled on a relatively even keel, the mud beneath her was so soft that she soon began to list and appeared in danger of capsizing. Various chains and cables were strung between the ship and the quay in an attempt to forestall this, but unfortunately all of these failed. As a result, salvage priority was shifted to USS Nevada, though work still proceeded on the California at a slower pace. The first order of business was to remove her main armament in order to slow her inexorable descent into the mud. The next priority was patch the holes blown by the torpedoes, pump the hull dry, and re-float the ship so she could be towed into dry dock. Several methods were proposed to accomplish this, including plugging the holes with ice. But while this method had worked well in colder climes, it was understandably less than practical in the warm waters of Hawaii. Instead, it was decided to build a steel cofferdam around the ship, with the necessary pilings and other materials being ordered from the mainland. However, it soon became clear that this would quickly be swallowed up by the soft mud, so instead a number of smaller partial wooden cofferdams were erected around the hull over the sites of the torpedo hits and other breaches. The initial plan also called for the breaches to be filled with concrete cast against wooden forms, but this also proved unnecessary, with temporary wooden and metal patches proving just as effective. This, in turn, saved dry dock crews the considerable trouble of jackhammering away heavy concrete plugs.
But this process was anything but straightforward, with California providing a taste of the unique and often unpleasant challenges salvage crews would face while working aboard other, more severely damaged ships. Ruptured fuel tanks had released thousands of gallons of thick, sticky bunker oil, forcing every surface to be painstakingly cleaned with high pressure steam and water hoses before any work could begin. As this oil also coated the surface of the water inlayers up to two inches thick, Navy Divers sent down to map and measure hull breaches were forced to work in pitch darkness, navigating entirely by feel. But as unpleasant as this might have been, it was nothing compared to the situation inside the hull, where a mixture of oil, water, paper, meat, and human remains left to ferment for weeks in the tropical heat created a horrific environment beyond description. Beyond being revolting, this fermentation could be highly dangerous, such as on one occasion when a pocket of aviation fuel and hydrogen sulphide produced by fermenting organic matter ignited and caused a small explosion that injured 5 men and blew off several recently-installed hull patches. But on April 9, 1942, California was successfully re-floated and tugged into Dry Dock 2 for preliminary repairs. These were completed by October 10, whereupon California crossed the Pacific to the Puget Sound, arriving on October 20.
At Puget Sound California’s hull was more thoroughly repaired and fitted with thicker anti-torpedo blisters, which, like Tennessee, made her too wide to transit the Panama Canal. Her lattice masts, having already been removed at Pearl Harbor and repurposed as airfield signal towers, were replaced with tripod masts, while her superstructure was replaced with a new unit from a light cruiser which weighed one tenth as much as the original. This was to compensate for the 3 inches of additional armour fitted to her decks to protect against aerial bombs. Her anti-aircraft battery was also upgraded to the now-standard mix of forty 40mm and forty-three 20mm guns and her boilers replaced to maintain her original speed of 20.5 knots.
Unsurprisingly, all this work took a very long time, and it was not until January 1944 that California was finally ready to sail. Her first combat assignment was to Task Group 52.17, providing fire support for the invasion of Saipan along with her fellow vintage battleships USS Tennessee, Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and New Mexico and seven of the newer fast battleships: USS Washington, North Carolina, Iowa, New Jersey, South Dakota, Alabama, and Indiana. On June 13, California received a hit from a Japanese 4.7-inch field gun, which disabled the ship’s search radar, started a fire, killed one crewman and injured 10. However, the damage was quickly contained. Shortly thereafter, she engaged a group of Japanese type 95 and 97 tanks heading towards the invasion beaches, scoring at least one hit with a 14-inch shell in what has to be the most extreme case of overkill in military history.
California next operated off Guam in June 1944 and Tinian in July. On August 23, she was accidentally rammed by USS Tennessee when the latter suffered a steering failure, and was forced to sail to the floating dry dock USS Artisan moored at Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu. Once repairs were completed, California sailed to the Philippines, where on October 24 she fired 63 shells against Japanese warships during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In January 1945, while supporting the landings at Lingayen Gulf, California was simultaneously struck by a Kamikaze aircraft and a 5-inch shell from another ship attempting to shoot down said aircraft, starting a fire that left 45 dead and 151 injured. Returning to Puget Sound for repairs, California was further upgraded with an anti-aircraft battery composed of fifty-six 40mm and eighty 20mm guns before returning to duty in June 1945 in time to participate in the Battle of Okinawa. In early August she was sent to San Pedro Bay in the Philippines for maintenance, and it was here that her crew learned of the Japanese surrender. After supporting the landing of occupation troops at Wakayama, California sailed back to the United States the long way round, arriving in Philadelphia on December 7, 1945 – four years to the day since the fateful attack at Pearl Harbor. Declared obsolete, USS California was decommissioned on February 14, 1947 and placed in reserved until March 1, 1959, when she was finally sold for scrap.
Next on the Pearl Harbor salvage list was USS Nevada. Struck by one torpedo and five bombs, Nevada nonetheless managed to raise steam and get underway – the only battleship to do so. However, flooding proved more severe than expected due to bulkheads which had been breached and poorly sealed during a recent modification. To avoid sinking in and blocking the harbour channel, as mentioned, Nevada beached herself on a coral ledge at Hospital Point. Due to the harder seafloor, mapping and plugging the various hull breaches proved easier than with the California, though it still required divers to work in dark, oil-choked waters. Decomposition of organic material within the hull also caused problems, as on February 7, 1942 when two salvage workers were killed by the release of hydrogen sulphide gas from a sealed compartment. By February 13 the main torpedo breach in Nevada’s hull had been patched with a gigantic, custom-made wooden plug, and the ship was re-floated and towed into Dry Dock 2. After initial repairs, Nevada sailed for Puget Sound for more permanent repairs and upgrades. Originally, Nevada was to receive only minor upgrades and be relegated to secondary duties, but due to the urgent need for warships this was overruled and she instead received a new secondary armament of thirty-two 40mm antiaircraft guns, forty-one 20mm guns, and sixteen 5-inch/38 calibre dual-purpose guns. Her conning tower and mainmast were also cut down and her superstructure modified to include an open bridge and more spaces for radar and fire-control equipment. Upgrades were completed by October 1942, whereupon, after completing shakedown and training cruises, she was assigned to Task Group 51.1 in support of the Aleutian Islands campaign.
In June 1943, Nevada was sent to the Norfolk Naval Yard in Virginia for further modernizations – including the addition of a large search radar lattice to her mainmast. Then, unlike most of her sisters in the Pacific Fleet, was assigned to convoy escort duty in the Atlantic. However, the crippling of the German battleship Tirpitz by British midget submarines in September 1943 and the sinking of the battleship Scharnhorst in December greatly diminished the threat from surface raiders, and Nevada, along with USS Arkansas and Texas, was tasked with performing shore bombardment in support of the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Operating off Utah Beach near Azeville, Nevada fired 337 14-inch and 2700 5-inch shells during the first day of the landings. She later bombarded German gun positions near Cherbourg before being moved to the Mediterranean in support of Operation Dragoon – the Allied invasion of southern France. Operating off Toulon, Nevada, along with the American battleships USS Arkansas and Texas, the American heavy cruisers USS Augusta, Tuscaloosa, and Quincy; the British battleship HMS Ramillies, and the Free French battleship Lorraine, engaged in an extended gun duel with a German fortress nicknamed “Big Willie”, which was armed with the 13.4-inch guns salvaged from the scuttled French battleship Provence. While the duel was inconclusive, it succeeded in distracting the fortress from the landings taking place nearby. During the operation, Nevada was also credited with single-handedly neutralizing the Vichy French battlecruiser Strasbourg.
Following the success of Operation Dragoon, Nevada sailed to New York for another refit, during which the three guns from her No.1 turret were replaced by re-lined guns salvaged from USS Arizona. She then returned to the Pacific, where she performed shore bombardment off of Iwo Jima in February 1945 and Okinawa in March. On March 27, she was struck by a Kamikaze aircraft near her No.3 Turret, killing 11 men and wounding 49. On April 15, she was struck by five shells from Japanese 4.7-inch shore batteries, but suffered only minor damage. After being repaired, Nevada was placed in shore bombardment rotation for Operation Downfall, but the Japanese surrendered before she could be brought to bear. Nevada was present in Tokyo Bay during the formal surrender ceremony on September 2, 1945, after which she returned to the United States for decommissioning.
Like USS Pennsylvania, Nevada was selected as a target ship for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests. Painted bright orange as the aiming point for the air-dropped Able test bomb, she survived unscathed when the bomb fell wide. She also survived the second Baker underwater bomb, but was severely contaminated by the radioactive surge. After being towed to Pearl Harbor and thoroughly examined, on July 31, 1948 she was towed out to a spot 65 miles southwest of Oahu and used as a gunnery target by the battleship USS Iowa and other vessels. Stubborn to the last, the “unsinkable” Nevada withstood pummelling by hundreds of shells, and finally had to be finished off with an aerial torpedo. Her wreck still lies where she sank at a depth of 15,400 feet.
The last battleship to be recovered from Pearl Harbor was the USS West Virginia. Struck by a withering combo of seven torpedoes and two armour piercing bombs, the ship quickly sank to the harbour bottom, settling on a mostly even keel but pinning USS Tennessee against the quay on Ford Island. The salvage of West Virginia was among the least pleasant of any of the ships at Pearl Harbor, as her sinking had trapped 70 men deep within her hull. Divers working to map torpedo holes and other hull breaches heard the trapped sailors tapping against bulkheads, but were powerless to rescue them as cutting through the hull might cause further flooding. Three of these men, Ronald Endicott, Clifford Olds and Louis Costin, survived for an incredible sixteen days in an airtight storeroom, marking off the days in grease pencil on the wall until finally running out of air. Yet despite these and other difficulties, West Virginia was patched and re-floated on May 17, 1942 and entered Dry Dock 1 on June 9. Following preliminary repairs, she sailed to Puget Sound in May for permanent repairs and upgrades.
West Virginia finally sailed again in the summer of 1944 – the last of the Pearl Harbor ships to return to service. After completing her shakedown cruises, she escorted the aircraft carrier USS Hancock to Task Force 58 before joining USS Maryland, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, California, and Tennessee as part of Task Force 77.2 during the invasion of the Philippines. During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, West Virginia fired 280 main battery rounds, but shortly thereafter ran aground and damaged her propellers, forcing her to put in at Spiritu Santo for repairs. While operating off Iwo Jima she received one hit from Japanese shore batteries which wounded one man, while on April 1 while off Okinawa she was struck by a Kamikaze aircraft, killing four men and wounding 7. Mercifully, the bomb aboard the aircraft failed to detonate. Following repairs, West Virginia sailed to the Philippines to train for the planned for the ultimately cancelled Operation Downfall. Like Nevada, West Virginia was in Tokyo Bay during the September 2 surrender ceremony, after which she returned to San Diego to take part in Navy Day celebrations on October 27. She next participated in Operation Magic Carpet, making three runs between Pearl Harbor and San Diego, before sailing to Seattle for decommissioning and assignment to the Pacific Reserve Fleet. After 14 years in mothballs, she was finally stricken from the Naval Register and sold for scrap on March 1, 1959.
The last noteworthy ships to survive the Pearl Harbor attack were the destroyers USS Cassin and USS Downes – though in this case “survive” is a somewhat relative term. Sharing Dry Dock No.1 with USS Pennsylvania at the time of the attack, Cassin and Downes were heavily damaged by near misses from aerial bombs, raging oil fires, and the explosion of their own shell and torpedo warheads. Yet while the ship’s hulls were quickly declared beyond repair, much of their machinery was recovered and sent to Mare Island, where brand-new ships were built around the salvaged parts and given the wrecked ships’ names and hull numbers. The resurrected Cassin and Downes participated in the invasions of Tinian, Luzon, Leyte, and Iwo Jima before being decommissioned in 1945 and sold for scrap in 1947.
It is difficult to overstate the sheer magnitude of the feat achieved by the Pearl Harbor salvage crews and their colleagues in the mainland shipyards. Thanks to their truly Herculean efforts, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ultimately accomplished very little in material terms. Of the 18 ships sunk or severely damaged on December 7, 1941, only a handful were permanently knocked out of action. The rest were all successfully salvaged, repaired, and returned to service, serving with distinction throughout the rest of the war. It is a testament to the industrial might and national spirit of determination that ultimately secured total Allied victory over the Axis.
But the work at Pearl Harbor did not stop once the last re-floated ships sailed for the mainland. There were still three large battleship wrecks – Utah, Oklahoma, and Arizona – to contend with. The first priority among these three was Oklahoma, which, after being hit by four torpedoes, capsized and partially rolled into the harbour’s main channel, becoming a navigational hazard. Nonetheless, the recovery of ships that could be returned to combat was given top priority, such that salvage work on Oklahoma did not begin in earnest until July 1942. But before the ship could be pumped dry, re-floated, and towed away for scrapping, she first had to be righted. This was accomplished via parbuckling, wherein 21 tall steel derricks were fixed to the upturned hull and connected to elaborate systems of cables, pulleys, and electric motors sourced from streetcars in Honolulu and fixed to the shore on Ford Island. To reduce the ship’s weight and speed up the righting process, workers sealed internal compartments and blew them dry with compressed air and pumped the fuel bunkers free of oil. The winches were first activated on March 8, 1943, and the ship was upright by June 16. Cofferdams were then built around the hull so the torpedo breaches could be temporarily patched, and on November 3, 1943 Oklahoma was finally re-floated and towed out of the channel, entering the recently-completed Dry Dock 4 for more substantial patching on December 28. The wrecked battleship remained in storage at Pearl Harbor until May 1947, when she was finally towed out, bound for San Fransisco for scrapping. However, on May 17, the battleship and her two tugs encountered a violent storm 800 miles east of Hawaii, and Oklahoma snapped her tow cables and slipped beneath the waves. Her wreck has never been located.
Based on the success of the Oklahoma’s salvage, it was decided to recover Utah using the same parbuckling method. Ahead of this operation, a floating pier was built out from Ford Island to provide easier access to the hull, while divers were sent into the ship to recover ammunition and other useful equipment. Seventeen derricks were erected on the upturned hull, with the parbuckling operation commencing in February 1944. Unfortunately, the harbour floor beneath Utah proved softer than that beneath the Oklahoma, and instead of neatly righting itself, Utah kept slipping farther and farther away from the shore. As a result, the salvage operation was abandoned and Utah was left where she sank, now listing 37 degrees from the horizontal. She was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on November 13, 1944, and, since some 900 men trapped within her hull were never recovered, declared a war grave. In 1989, both she and the Arizona were added to the National Historic Landmark registry. In 1950, a memorial was erected consisting of two plaques dedicated to the memory of the ship and her crew – one mounted on the wreck itself and one on the wharf on Ford Island. Then, in 1972, a larger memorial was erected in the form of a 70 foot walkway extending out from the wharf to the bow of the wreck. Unlike the more famous Arizona memorial, the Utah memorial is only accessible to individuals with military identification.
And finally, there was the Arizona, the most famous victim and enduring symbol of the December 7 attack. Stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on December 1, 1942, Arizona was left where she sank and underwent only minor salvage work, her main superstructure being removed and sold for scrap and her aft main gun turrets being recovered. The latter were reinstalled as part of Battery Arizona and Battery Pennsylvania, defensive positions on the Mokapu Peninsula covering the approaches to Kaneohe Bay. Battery Pennsylvania has the distinction of firing the last recorded shots of the Second World War, on August 14, 1945 – Victory over Japan Day. And, as we’ve previously covered, the guns from Arizona’s No.2 turret were recovered, relined, and later fitted to USS Nevada, who used them to great effect at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Thus, in one of history’s great full-circle moments, Arizona, having received some of the first blows of the Second World War, delivered – in spirit, at least – some of the last.
Yet despite her historic status, after the war Arizona was largely ignored, left to slowly rust away off the northeast corner of Ford Island. It was not until 1948 that efforts began to erect some sort of memorial over the wreck. In that year, Robert Ripley, creator of Ripley’s Believe it or Not! made a radio broadcast from Pearl Harbor. Soon afterward, he wrote letters to Rear Admiral J.J. Manning of the Bureau of Yards and Docks expressing his desire for a permanent memorial. Though Ripley’s initial proposal was rejected on the basis of cost, the following year the Navy formed the Pacific War Memorial Commission. In 1950, Admiral Arthur W. Radford, commander of the Pacific Fleet, attached a flagpole to Arizona’s mainmast and assigned a color party to raise and lower a flag every day – a tradition that continues to this day. The following year he requested funds for a permanent memorial, but was denied due to the ongoing Korean War. The first permanent memorial, a 10-foot-tall basalt stone and plaque, was erected on Arizona’s deckhouse in 1955, while in 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the creation of a National Memorial. $200,000 of the $500,000 budget was subsidized by the federal government and $50,000 by the Territory of Hawaii, while the remainder was privately raised by various means, including the sale of plastic models of the Arizona by the Revell Model Company and a March 25, 1961 benefit concert by Elvis Presley – his last live performance until 1968.
The Arizona memorial, designed by Austrian-born Hawaiian architect Alfred Preis, took the form of an 184-foot white-concrete bridge straddling the wreck, with a distinctive reverse arch or “sag” which Preis explained as follows:
“Wherein the structure sags in the center but stands strong and vigorous at the ends, expresses initial defeat and ultimate victory … The overall effect is one of serenity. Overtones of sadness have been omitted, to permit the individual to contemplate his own personal responses … his innermost feelings.”
Accessed by boat from the mainland, the memorial comprises three main parts: an entry, an assembly room with an opening in the floor through which visitors can view the wreck just below the surface, and a shrine with a marble wall bearing the names of the 1,177 men who lost their lives aboard Arizona on December 7, 1941. Unveiled on Memorial Day, 1962 and handed over to the National Park Service in 1980, the Arizona Memorial draws nearly 1.8 million visitors each year. Among the most famous sights encountered by visitors are the so called “tears of the Arizona” – the slow, steady leak of oil from the ship’s fuel bunkers, creating a permanent, rainbow-tinged slick trailing out from the wreck. With 500,000 gallons of oil estimated to remain within the wreck, it is likely that the Arizona will continue to shed its tears for decades to come – a poignant reminder of the Day of Infamy that forever changed the course of history.
Expand for References
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Patel, Samir, A Timeline of the Attack, Archaeology, January/February 2017, https://www.archaeology.org/issues/240-1701/features/5131-pearl-harbor-archaeology-timeline-of-attack
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Keegan, John (ed.) World War II: a Visual Encyclopedia, PRC Publishing Ltd, New York, 1999
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Barnett, Glenn, The USS Vestal: The Pearl Harbor Attack & Beyond, Warfare History Network, November 2005, https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-uss-vestal-the-pearl-harbor-attack-beyond/
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The Salvage of Pearl Harbor Pt.III – The First and the Last, Drachinifel, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eibt2gYuFD4
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USS Tennessee (BB-43), 1920-1959, Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/battleships/tennessee-bb-43.html
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USS Shaw (DD-373) Views taken in 1942-46, Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/wars-and-events/world-war-ii/pearl-harbor-raid/post-attack-ship-salvage/uss-shaw–dd-373–views-taken-in-1942-46.html
Ships of Pearl Harbor: USS Shaw, Pearl Harbor, May 28, 2018, https://pearlharbor.org/blog/ships-of-pearl-harbor-uss-shaw/
USS Maryland (BB-46), 1921-1959, Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/battleships/maryland-bb-46.html
Ships of Pearl Harbor: USS Raleigh, Pearl Harbor, May 8, 2018, https://pearlharbor.org/blog/ships-of-pearl-harbor-uss-raleigh/
Domagalki, John, Struggle to Save the Raleigh, U.S. Naval Institute, December 2015, https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2015/december/struggle-save-raleigh
USS Helena (CL-50), National Museum of the US Navy, https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/museums/nmusn/explore/photography/ships-us/ships-usn-h/uss-helena-cl-50.html
USS Pennsylvania (BB-38, originally Battleship #38), 1916-1948, Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/battleships/pennsylvania-bb-38.html
Burns, Kyle, The “Old Falling Apart” That Held a Fleet Together, Pennsylvania Center for the Book, Spring 2010, https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/feature-articles/old-falling-apart-held-fleet-together
Scarpaci, Wayne, The Saga of the USS Nevada, Nevada Magazine, July-August 2014, https://nevadamagazine.com/issue/july-august-2014/8334/
USS Cassin (DD-372), Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/alphabetical-listing/c/uss-cassin–dd-372-0.html
Ships of Pearl Harbor: USS Downes, Pearl Harbor, June 4, 2018, https://pearlharbor.org/blog/the-ships-of-pearl-harbor-uss-downes/
USS Downes (DD-375), Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/alphabetical-listing/d/uss-downes–dd-375-0.html
The post A Failed Attack- What Happened to the Ships at Pearl Harbor? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
When the air campaign of Operation Desert Storm began on January 17, 1991, television viewers across the world were presented with some of the most awe-inspiring images of modern, high-tech warfare ever broadcast: stealth bombers dropping precision “smart bombs” on Iraqi command posts, helicopters and ground attack aircraft picking off swathes of enemy vehicles, and tanks duking it out in the desert – all captured in the eerie green glow of night vision. Lifting the protective cloak of darkness has been the dream of all armies since the dawn of human civilization, and today night vision technology is so advanced that battles can now be effectively fought at any hour, day or night. But how does this technology actually work, and who invented it? Well, slap on your NODs as we dive into the fascinating science and history of seeing in the dark.
The story of night vision begins in the 1790s with British astronomer and polymath Sir John Herschel. While trying to develop a light filter that would allow him to better observe the surface of the sun, Herschel made a curious discovery:
“What appeared remarkable was that when I used some of them, I felt a sensation of heat, though I had but little light; while others gave me much light, with scarce any sensation of heat.”
To determine which parts of the visible light spectrum transmitted the most heat, Herschel built a device he dubbed a spectroradiometer. Sunlight was passed through a prism to split it into its constituent colours, which were projected onto a screen. Herschel then used a thermometer to measure the temperature within each coloured band. He discovered that the violet end of the spectrum transferred the least heat, and the red end the most. Many scientists might have left it at that, but Herschel decided to go one step further, placing his thermometer just beyond the red band, into an area with no visible light. To his surprise, this region was hottest of all, leading Herschel to conclude:
“…that the full red falls still short of the maximum of heat; which perhaps lies even a little beyond visible refraction. In this case, radiant heat will at least partly, if not chiefly, consist, if I may be permitted the expression, of invisible light; that is to say, of rays coming from the sun, that have such a momentum as to be unfit for vision.”
In the 1880s, this “radiant heat” or “invisible light” was dubbed infrared, meaning “below the red end of the spectrum.” Today, we know that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation and is composed of waves (yes: also particles, but we will save the quantum physics of it all for another video), and that its colour and other properties are determined by its wavelength. The part of the electromagnetic spectrum which humans can perceive extends from 380 to 700 nanometres. Above this, extending from 400 to 10 nanometers, is the ultraviolet band; while below, extending from 750 to 1000 nanometers, is the infrared band. Infrared radiation is given off by all objects hotter than absolute zero, and is excellent at transferring thermal energy; indeed, much of the heat we feel from the sun is transferred to our bodies via infrared radiation. Objects at different temperatures give off different wavelengths of infrared; for example, humans mainly radiate heat in the long-wavelength infrared band from 800-1500 nanometers while hotter objects like vehicle engines also emit short and mid-wavelength infrared in the 140-800 nanometer band.
However, Herschel’s method of detecting infrared radiation was crude and cumbersome, making this “radiant heat” difficult to study. Then, nearly a century later in 1878, American inventor Samuel Langley – most famous as a direct rival of the Wright Brothers – invented an infrared detection instrument called a bolometer. This comprised two thin strips of platinum or palladium coated in lampblack, one shielded from light and the other not. When infrared radiation struck the unshielded strip, it was absorbed by the lampblack and heated up the strip, causing its electrical resistance to change. This change could then be detected using a sensitive instrument called a galvanometer. While simple, Langley’s bolometer was remarkably sensitive, able to detect the body heat of a cow at a range of 400 metres.
At around this same time, scientists like Ferdinand Braun in Germany and Jagadish Chandra Bose in India discovered that certain minerals could be used to detect electromagnetic waves – a phenomenon known as photoconduction. These discoveries later led to the development of crystal radios, the first widely-available detectors for receiving commercial radio broadcasts. They also inspired one of the first attempts to use infrared radiation for practical purposes. In 1917, an American inventor named Theodore W. Case discovered that the compound Thallous Sulphide exhibited photoconductivity in the infrared band. Funded by the U.S. Army, Case attempted to exploit this effect to communicate over longer distances and through hazier atmospheres than was possible using regular signal mirrors or heliographs. And while he succeeded in transmitting infrared messages over 28 kilometres, the unreliability of his Thallous Sulphide detector and its tendency to break down with repeated exposure to light soon put an end to his research.
However, all of the infrared detection devices developed to this point could only measure the presence or intensity of infrared radiation; they could not display any sort of image of said radiation’s source. The first device capable of doing so was the evaporograph, developed in 1929 by Dr. Marianus Czerny from the University of Frankfurt. Originally intended to allow anti-aircraft gunners to spot their targets by the heat of their engines, the evaporograph consisted of a sealed, semi-evacuated chamber containing silicone oil vapour and a thin, transparent celluloid membrane. When infrared radiation – such as the from the heat of an enemy aircraft’s engines – was focused by a germanium dioxide lens onto the membrane, where it caused differential evaporation and condensation of the oil and optical distortions that could be picked up either by the human eye or a television imaging tube. Though not used during the Second World War, the technology of the evaporograph was considered so strategically important that it remained classified in the UK until 1956.
Five years later, engineers G. Holst and H. De Boer, working for Philips in the Netherlands, developed a fully-electronic infrared detector which would form the basis of nearly all night vision technology to come. Known as an image converter tube or Holst Glass, this comprised an evacuated glass tube with one end coated in a thin layer of caesium and silver oxide to form a photocathode. Behind this were a series of tubular accelerating and focusing anodes, and finally a phosphor-coated screen. When infrared radiation struck the photocathode, it released electrons via the photoelectric effect. These electrons were then accelerated and focused by the anodes onto the phosphor screen, which converted them into a visible image of the infrared source. In 1941, the Holst Glass was refined by Radio Corporation of America engineer Vladimir Zworykin – a key figure in the development of television – to create the RCA 1P25 image converter tube, which was widely used in American night vision gear near the end of the Second World War.
However, the first military to deploy electronic night vision gear in combat was that of Nazi Germany. German infrared detector were based on the work of Edgar Kutzcher of the University in Berlin, who in 1933 discovered that Lead Sulphide – better known as Galena – exhibits photoconductivity within the short or mid-wavelength infrared band. Among the first such devices the Fahr-und-Zielgerät (AKA “Driving and Aiming Device”) or FG 1250 Sperber, was developed by optics company Carl Zeiss AG and first issued in 1941. However, since short and mid-wavelength infrared radiation is only given off by very hot objects, these detectors were by necessity active, and had to be used with large infrared spotlights to illuminate the target. This not only made early night vision gear like the FG 1250 extremely heavy and bulky – meaning it could only be carried aboard tanks, half-tracks, and other vehicles – but it rendered the user extremely visible and vulnerable if the enemy also happened to have infrared detection capability. Later in the war, German weapons manufacturer C.G. Haenel developed a miniaturized version of this technology called the Zielgerät 1229 or Vampir. This consisted of an infrared spotlight and detector scope mounted atop an Stg.44 assault rifle, powered by a large battery in a wooden box and a smaller battery fitted into a standard-issue gas mask carrier tube. This whole assembly was strapped to a regular infantry backpack frame and weighed a whopping 15 kilograms. Carried by specialized troops known as Nachtjäger or “Night Hunters”, Vampir units were used in small numbers on the Eastern Front starting in February 1945.
Meanwhile, the US military was developing night vision gear based on a completely different – and far simpler – technology. Known as Metascopes, these devices were developed by the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester in New York and used a series of special phosphor compounds to convert infrared into visible light. In a typical metascope, a spherical mirror gathered infrared light and focused it into a phosphor-coated button. The resulting visible light image was then viewed using a periscopic magnifying optic. In order to function, these phosphors first had to be “excited” or “charged” by exposing them to visible or ultraviolet light or even ionizing radiation. This charge gradually wore off with prolonged exposure to infrared light, so Metascopes featured double-sided, rotating phosphor “buttons” so that one side could be charged using an internal battery-powered lamp or radioactive radium source while the other was being used – allowing near-continuous operation.
Metascopes were first used in combat during the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942. Compared to other contemporary night vision technology, the images produced by metascopes were relatively low-resolution, making them unsuited for general observation work. Instead, they were largely used by the U.S. Navy for clandestine ship-to-ship signaling at night, using regular Morse Code signal lamps fitted with infrared filters. Later, most Navy ships were fitted with a system of mast-mounted infrared signal lamps code-named NANCY. Smaller handheld versions were also developed for the U.S. Army, and were largely used – along with infrared flashlights – by paratroopers for regrouping after night drops. And to learn more about how these forgotten devices worked, please check out the author’s video on the subject over on his channel Our Own Devices.
Meanwhile, the National Defense Research Council or NDRC – an organization set up in 1941 to help the U.S. Armed Forces with weapons-related research and development – was developing a series of practical electronic night-vision scopes based on the RCA 1P25 image converter tube. The first of these, the C1, and C3 telescopes, were developed for the U.S. Navy as more sensitive and high-resolution replacements for the earlier metascopes. Around 13,500 were produced by the end of the war. The C1 and C2 had actually been trialled by the Army, but were found to be too heavy and bulky for field use. Instead, the NDRC developed a more compact infrared scope called the Type D, two of which could be joined together to form infrared binoculars known as the Type B. Various hands-free mounts were devised to allow jeep and tank drivers to operate their vehicles in pitch-darkness, illumination being provided by a set of infrared headlights powered by an onboard generator. Another planned use to allow assault glider pilots to home in on infrared beacons set up on the landing zone.
Between July 1941 and April 1943, extensive testing of the Type B infrared binoculars was conducted at Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Belvoir, Virginia; Aberdeen Proving Grounds; Maryland and Fort Knox, Kentucky. While the tests proved that driving military vehicles in pitch darkness was entirely feasible, unfortunately the movement of the binoculars relative to the driver’s eyes tended to produce severe motion sickness. The solution, it was determined, was to mount the binoculars to the driver’s head instead of the vehicle, and to this end a rather goofy-looking night vision helmet was duly developed. However, refinement of this concept proved difficult, and the equipment was not ready by the time the war ended.
However, in July 1943 U.S. Army Ground Forces headquarters requested the development of two portable infrared devices – one handheld and one for mounting on a rifle. These devices had to include both an imaging scope and an infrared spotlight, weigh no more than 15 pounds, and have a 6-hour power supply. RCA duly developed a pair of devices dubbed the Snooperscope and the Sniperscope. The Snooperscope, intended for reconnaissance work, mounted a detector scope and 30 watt infrared lamp on a single handle and was powered by a 4 kilogram power supply carried in a separate satchel. This contained a 6-volt lead-acid battery and electronic oscillator to step up the battery output to the 4,000 volts needed to run the imaging tube. The total weight of the equipment was 10 kilograms. The Sniperscope was nearly identical, though designed to be mounted on a specially-modified M1 Carbine known as the T3.
Trials of the Snooperscope and Sniperscope took place at Fort Belvoir and Fort Bending in January and February of 1944. Though initial testing revealed several flaws, such as poor image resolution, difficult-to-manipulate controls and lamp lenses prone to cracking in the rain, later trials with improved prototypes proved that the basic concept was sound, with soldiers being able to identify and accurately hit targets at ranges of up to 200 feet in pitch darkness. After improvements were made to the prototypes to improve their reliability and ruggedness, 1420 Snooperscopes and 715 Sniperscopes were manufactured by Electronic Laboratories of Indianapolis and shipped to the European, China/India/Burma, and Pacific Theatres for field testing. However, hostilities ended in the first two theatres before the scopes could reach combat, so in April 1945 the remaining units were distributed among 7 U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps Divisions participating in the invasion of Okinawa – the final objective in the American island-hopping campaign before the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands.
The weight and bulk of the infrared equipment made it unsuitable for use on combat patrols, so it was mainly used to defend static positions against infiltration by Japanese combat engineers at night. In this role, the Snooperscope and Sniperscope proved remarkably effective, accounting, by some estimates, for nearly a third of Japanese casualties inflicted by the Divisions issued with this gear. But the newfangled devices were not without their issues. Beyond the weight problem, the short range of the equipment made it unsuited to the relatively open terrain on Okinawa; indeed, the evaluation team’s final report stated that the Sniperscope was ideally suited to jungle combat as encountered on other Pacific islands, where this limited range was less of an issue. Another major problem on Okinawa was U.S. Forces’ extensive use of star shells for battlefield illumination, which constantly blinded the infrared scopes and their operators and made them difficult to use effectively. Yet despite these shortcomings, it was an impressive debut for the first generation of military night vision gear.
In the post-war era, the Sniperscope was upgraded and re-designated the M3, in which form it saw service during the Korean War. Its direct descendant, the AN/PAS-4, also saw service in the early stages of the Vietnam War. In 1956, however, an RCA engineer named A.H. Sommer discovered a new tri-alkali photocathode material composed of various mixtures of sodium, potassium, antimony, and caesium which was not only far more sensitive than the earlier silver-caesium-oxide combination but also had a broader spectral response, allowing it to detect light in the visible and near-infrared range. This allowed the construction of completely passive image intensifier tubes which could detect and amplify faint sources of light such as airglow, moonlight, or starlight to produce a visible image. As such starlight scopes did not require active illumination, they could be much lighter and much safer for the operator to use. However, these advantages came with one big caveat: as they needed some kind of faint ambient light to operate, starlight scopes could not be used in pitch darkness. This level of night vision technology is typically termed Generation 1, while WWII-era active infrared scopes are retroactively termed Generation 0.
The first starlight scopes to see combat were the AN/PVS-1 and AN/PVS-2 – also known as the Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Night Observation or STANO. These were developed by the U.S. Army Electronics Command and Wollensak Optical Company of Rochester, New York starting in 1964 and began reaching U.S. troops in Vietnam in 1967. Measuring 45 centimetres long and weighing a whopping 2.7 kilos, the AN/PVS-2 contained three image intensifier tubes stacked one behind the other, so that each amplified the output of the one in front of it. These scopes were designed to be mounted on a variety of weapons, including the M14 and M16 rifles, the M60 machine gun, and even the M79 grenade launcher and M67 recoilless rifle; in practice, however, they were mainly used on the former two, as the recoil from heavier weapons tended to shake the delicate scopes to pieces while the muzzle flash temporary “bloomed” or whited out the intensifier tube, making aimed follow-up shots impossible.
There were other problems as well. While significantly lighter than earlier active scopes, the AN/PVS-2 proved too heavy and bulky to carry on active combat patrols, while the high-pitched whine produced by its electronics tended to give its users’ position away. Thus, like its WWII predecessors, the scope was mainly used in the static role to defend outposts against enemy attacks at night. Still, the sheer weight of the scope often caused it to shake loose from its mount, making it impossible to maintain zero. Consequently, they were typically used for observation and to direct the fire of other weapons rather than as practical weapons sights.
Despite these early teething problems, the AN/PVS-2 formed the basis for nearly every passive night vision optic up until the present day, and the technology was rapidly improved to make it more compact, sensitive, and versatile. For example, the AN/PVS-2B introduced Automatic Brightness Correction or ABC, which automatically compensated for rapid changes in ambient light and minimized blooming. Then, in the mid-1970s, the Optic Electronic Corporation of Dallas, Texas developed the Generation 2 image intensifier tube, which added a third component called a microchannel plate – composed of thousands of tiny glass tubes – between the photocathode and the phosphor screen.
When electrons from the photocathode strike the microchannel plate, they bounce around inside the channels and release more electrons via a process known as an electron avalanche. This results in significantly greater amplification within a single intensifier tube, eliminating the need to cascade multiple tubes together and allowing night vision scopes to be made lighter and more compact. The first Generation 2 scope to enter U.S. military service was the AN/PVS-4, officially adopted in 1978. 15 centimetres shorter and one kilogram lighter than its Vietnam-era ancestors, the AN/PVS-4 proved highly successful, with over 150,000 units being manufactured between 1985 and 2002. In the mid-1980s, the original Generation 2 intensifier tube was replaced with a more advanced Generation 3 model, which differed from previous generation tubes in two main respects. First, the older tri-alkali photocathode material was replaced with an even more sensitive Gallium Arsenide composition; and second, the electrostatic focusing electrodes were removed in favour of a fibre optic inverter assembly – a bundle of optic fibres twisted 180 degrees to flip the image from the phosphor screen right-side up. This allows the tube to be lighter and more compact and the viewing eyepiece to be simpler.
And this brings us neatly to the present day. While many manufacturers of civilian night vision gear claim that their products are “Generation 4”, according to official U.S. military nomenclature, there is no such thing, with all current passive night-vision technology technically being Generation 3 with various upgrades. For example, most current night vision optics feature a system called Bright Source Protection or BSP, which modulates the voltage supplied to the microchannel plate to prevent concentrated light sources from blooming out the tube. Another common feature called autogating rapidly switches the tube power supply on and off, reducing the duty cycle – that is, the total amount of time the tube is turned on – and extending its service life.
Increasingly, traditional image enhancement-based night vision is being replaced on the battlefield by thermal imaging, sometimes known as Forward-Looking Infrared or FLIR when used aboard aircraft. Thermal imaging scopes like the U.S. Military’s AN/PAS-13 operate in the medium-to-long wavelength infrared band, allowing them to detect human bodies, vehicle engines, and other common heat sources. They can also see further through fog and smoke than visible light scopes. Technologically speaking, most thermal scopes and cameras are very similar to ordinary digital cameras, using special charge-coupled devices and other photosensors designed to respond to infrared wavelengths. Other designs use miniaturized versions of the bolometer circuit invented by Samuel Langley in 1878. In all cases, however, the focusing lenses cannot be made of glass, which is opaque to infrared. Instead, most use special ceramic lenses made from Germanium oxide, calcium fluoride, or crystalline silicon. Another design challenge unique to thermal scopes and cameras is preventing the thermal emissions of the camera itself from overwhelming the detector. For this reason, many thermal detectors must be actively cooled in order to function properly – either with cryogenic gases, electric heat pumps, or solid-state thermoelectric coolers called Peltier Devices.
And that, dear viewers, is the story of night vision up to the present day. As you can see, what we typically think of as “night vision” is a bit of a misnomer, as this technology needs at least a small amount of visible light or near-infrared light to function and cannot be used in total darkness. Still, combined with thermal imaging, image intensifier scopes have succeeded in lifting the age-old protective cover of night, leaving few truly safe places on the battlefield.
Expand for References
https://ugca.org/07jan/night.htm#:~:text=Based%20on%20scientific%20experiments%20begun,them%20visible%20in%20a%20telescope.
http://www.uscarbinecal30.com/IRmetascopes.html
http://www.uscarbinecal30.com/IRM1.html
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-wwii-united-states-navy-1827586716
https://spie.org/samples/PM165.pdf
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjx1Kf64POEAxVICjQIHZHxC08QFnoECBAQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.degruyter.com%2Fdocument%2Fdoi%2F10.2478%2Fs11772-012-0037-7%2Fpdf&usg=AOvVaw2UXyeXnn1BZHN1sr3EXoU8&opi=89978449
https://www.ima-usa.com/products/original-u-s-army-vietnam-era-an-pvs-2-starlight-night-vision-scope-with-transit-chest?variant=40457903669317
https://www.ar15.com/forums/ar-15/AN_PVS_2_Starlight_Scope/123-521778/
https://books.google.ca/books?id=g-QXAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://petapixel.com/2018/06/07/a-radioactive-lens/
http://aunv.blackice.com.au/userfiles/david-an-pvs4_technical_manual.pdf
https://spie.org/samples/PM165.pdf
https://smallarmsreview.com/night-vision-in-vietnam/
https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Image_Intensification_The_Technology_of_Night/a25144
http://www.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/fets/pepperpot/docs+papers/ebvin.pdf
http://www.uscarbinecal30.com/forum/sniperscope-snooperscope-use-during-wwii_topic4568.html
http://www.uscarbinecal30.com/forum/sniperscope-snooperscope-use-during-wwii_topic4568.html
The post Who Invented Night Vision and How Does It Work? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Coca Cola. Pepsi Cola. 7-Up. Sprite. Orange Crush. Mountain Dew. Fanta. Irn-Bru. Fresca. Whether they are called pop, soda, soft drinks, or something else entirely, these sugary, fizzy drinks are absolutely everywhere, ranking fifth among the world’s most popular beverages after water, tea, fruit juice, and coffee. In the United States alone, some 45 billion litres of soda are consumed every year – around 144 litres per person – every year – much to the consternation of dentists and diabetes researchers everywhere. But where did these drinks come from in the first place? How did they come to dominate the global market, and why do we love the taste of fizzy drinks so much, anyway? Well relax and crack open up a cold one as we dive into the fascinating history of soft drinks.
In a sense, humans have been consuming fizzy drinks for hundreds if not thousands of years. After all, beer – the earliest recipe for which dates from 4,000 years ago – is naturally effervescent due to carbon dioxide produced by the fermentation process; while in the 17th and 18th centuries French and British vintners discovered how to make sparkling wine by adding extra sugar to the bottle and initiating a second round of fermentation. And in certain parts of the world, rare geological conditions conspire to produce springs of naturally sparkling mineral water. Famous examples include the Eifel region of Germany, the Prekmurje region of Slovenia, and Cambuquira in Brazil. These waters were long believed to have health-giving properties, and tourists flocked to towns like Niederselters in Germany to bathe in the springs or consume bottles of so-called selterswasser. Indeed, this name was later corrupted to seltzer by Yiddish-speaking immigrants to America, giving us one of many modern terms for sparkling water.
However, it was not until the 1770s that someone figured out how to artificially reproduce natural seltzer water. That someone was Joseph Priestley, an English Presbyterian minister, political theorist, and scientific polymath who is credited with – among other things – founding Unitarianism in England, writing seminal books on enlightenment philosophy and English grammar, and discovering multiple chemical substances including nitrous oxide, ammonia, and oxygen (though the latter discovery is now typically attributed to Swedish chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele).
In 1767, Priestley was living in Leeds, in a house that stood near the local brewery. He soon became fascinated by the “airs” or gases given off by the fermentation vats, and after some experimentation determined that these gases were identical to what Scottish physician Joseph Black had previously described as “fixed air”. So-named because it could be “fixed” in various materials such as calcium carbonate – AKA limestone – we now know it better as carbon dioxide. Realizing that this was also the same gas which gave naturally sparkling spring water its effervescence, Priestly wondered if such water could be artificially reproduced. His first method involved suspending a vessel of water above a fermentation vat so the carbon dioxide would naturally dissolve into the water. However, this method was inefficient and difficult to scale, so Priestley developed a new process wherein he combined sulphuric acid with limestone to generate carbon dioxide, which was then bubbled through water, using a pig’s bladder as a storage vessel and flow regulator. In 1772, Priestly published his findings in a paper entitled Impregnating Water With Fixed Air, for which he was awarded the prestigious Copley Medal by the The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.
For Priestley, however, carbonated water was little more than a scientific curiosity, and he never sought to commercialize his invention. He did, however, supply his carbonation method to Captain James Cook for his second voyage to the Pacific, in the hopes that it would help alleviate the dreaded maritime disease of scurvy. But as we now know that scurvy is caused by a vitamin C deficiency, this ‘cure’ was – unsurprisingly – unsuccessful. However, carbonated water was found to keep longer and taste better on long sea voyages than ordinary water – likely due to the formation of carbonic acid, which is a mild antiseptic.
Given the considerable demand for natural mineral water, it was not long before others stepped forward to turn artificial sparkling water into an equally lucrative industry. Several inventors including John Mervin Nooth in England and Tobern Bergman in Sweden invented devices for mass-producing carbonated water,
while the world’s first large-scale water carbonation plant was built in 1781 in Manchester by English apothecary Thomas Henry. His product, with the delightful name of “Bewley’s Mephitic Julep,” was sold as a health tonic. In 1783 and 1792, German-Swiss watchmaker Johann Jacob Schweppe established commercial carbonation plants in Geneva and London employing an improved carbon dioxide generation process which replaced Priestley’s sulphuric acid and limestone combination with a cheaper – and safer – mixture of tartaric acid and sodium bicarbonate. Artificially sparkling or soda water soon became a favourite beverage among the upper classes – including King William IV of the United Kingdom. In 1831 the King granted the Schweppes Company a Royal warrant of appointment, causing their products to explode in popularity. Sadly, Jacob Schweppe did not live to see this success, having died ten years before. And if his name sounds familiar, it’s because the company Schweppe founded is still around today, and produces a variety of sparkling drinks including tonic water, club soda, bitter lemon, and – most famously – ginger ale.
At this point in the video, it is probably worth clearing up some terminology. Mineral water typically refers to water – whether carbonated or not – sourced from natural springs, and is no-named because it typically contains a variety of dissolved minerals such as sodium or potassium chloride, citrate, bicarbonate, or sulphate. Early producers of carbonated water deliberately added these minerals in order to mimic the flavour profile of natural mineral water and balance the acidity of the dissolved carbon dioxide. Since at the time Sodium salts were collectively called soda, artificial mineral water became generally known as soda water. Today, such minerals – particularly sodium bicarbonate or baking soda – are typically only added to club soda, while artificially carbonated water lacking added minerals is typically known as sparkling water or seltzer. So now you know!
Initially, soda water was drunk straight as a treatment for all sorts of ailments, from digestive and nervous complaints to impotence and – as we’ve seen – scurvy. However, it was not long before people started mixing it with alcohol, fruit juices and syrups, and other additives. Indeed, in the early 19th century, British colonists in India and southern Africa began mixing carbonated water with quinine – derived from the bark of the South American Cinchona Tree – to ward off malaria. However, the quinine was so bitter that they soon began adding sugar and later gin to mask the taste – creating, at a stroke, tonic water and the gin-and-tonic, one of the oldest mixed drinks still regularly consumed. Other early soda flavourings include ginger – first recorded in 1809 – birch bark, and sarsaparilla root – AKA root beer. Such “soft” drinks were heavily promoted by the burgeoning Temperance Movement as a morally superior alternative to “hard” or alcoholic beverages.
On this note, technically soft drinks aren’t just flavored carbonated beverages. “Soft Drink” refers to nearly all beverages that do not contain significant amounts of alcohol.
The term “soft drink” though is now typically used exclusively for flavored carbonated beverages owing to advertising. Flavored carbonated beverage makers were having a hard time creating national advertisements due to the fact that what you call their product varies from place to place. For instance, in parts of the United States and Canada, flavored carbonated beverages are referred to as “pop”; in other parts “soda”; in yet other parts “coke”; and there are a variety of other names commonly used as well. Then if we go international with the advertisements, in England these drinks are called “fizzy drinks”; in Ireland sometimes “minerals”. To account for the fact that they can’t refer to their product in the generic sense on national advertisements, because of these varied terms, these manufactures began pushing the “soft drink” moniker and it has more or less stuck ever since.
In any event, due to their origins as health tonics, early soft drinks were mainly sold in pharmacies, where the pharmacist would mix unflavoured soda water with various flavoured syrups to create the final product. At first, pharmacists created their own syrups, but soon commercially-manufactured flavourings became available, starting with a lemonade concentrate introduced by Richard White in 1845. Still sold to this day, R. White’s lemonade is considered the oldest continuously-produced soft drink in the world. White, along with rival soda manufacturers like Schweppes, would soon expand their product line to include flavours like raspberry, strawberry, cherry, pineapple, orange, ginger, and vanilla – AKA Cream Soda. By the time of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, visitors could sample dozens of flavours from refreshment carts for just pennies a glass.
But as the soda industry continued to expand, bottlers faced a serious problem: how to stop soda water from going flat between the factory and the pharmacy or drinks cart. Traditional corked bottles used to hold wine and beer were too inconvenient for the average consumer to open, requiring the use of a corkscrew. Storing them upright also resulted in the cork drying out, causing it to pop or leak and the soda to lose carbonation. A solution was eventually found in the form of the Codd-neck bottle, invented in 1872 by London-based soft drink maker Hiram Cobb. In Cobb’s design, a glass marble sealed against a rubber washer in the neck of the bottle, held in place by the gas pressure below. To open the bottle, the drinker simply pushed the marble down into a larger chamber moulded into the bottleneck, breaking the seal and releasing the pressure. These bottles remained popular until 1892, when Baltimore engineer William Painter invented the cheaper -and now ubiquitous – crown cork or crown cap that could be crimped onto the bottleneck and removed with a simple bottle opener. However, Codd-neck bottles never fully went away, and are still used for the Japanese soft drink Ramune and the Indian soft drink Banta.
Yet despite these advancements there was still another problem: often the pharmacist or drinks cart vendor did not use the entire bottle of soda water at once, and the remainder quickly went flat. One solution was the Plinth Portable Fountain, created in 1813 by English inventor Charles Plinth. This consisted of a spigot valve that could be attached to the neck of an open soda bottle, allowing the contents to be intermittently dispensed without the remainder losing its carbonation. Another, more popular solution was to generate carbonated water on the spot rather than buy it pre-packaged from a bottler. Indeed, Charles Plinth also invented a mobile carbonation cart which allowed him to deliver freshly-carbonated water to bars all around London. This further drove the rising popularity of soda water and led to the creation another of the oldest mixed drinks still commonly served: a mixture of soda water, gin, sugar, and lemon juice known as the Tom Collins.
Then, in 1829, French inventor Victor Durafort invented a portable soda generator and dispenser he called the seltzogene. This consisted of a thick, pressure-resistant glass bottle with two dip tubes descending from the cap: one to pressurize the bottle with carbon dioxide, and the other to dispense the resulting carbonated water. Early seltzogenes – also known as gazogenes – featured twin compartments at the top which the user filled with tartaric acid, sodium bicarbonate, and water to generate the carbon dioxide – and indeed, one such devices features in several of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, being a prominent fixture of the great detective’s apartment at 221B Baker Street. Later variants, however, had to be recharged at a bottling plant, and many manufacturers offered milk delivery-like services where empty bottles were picked up and returned fully-pressurized. Then, in 1889, Kenneth Murray of Aerators Ltd. in Crayford, Kent, invented the sparklet, a miniature carbon dioxide cylinder that could be inserted into a seltzogene in order to pressurize it. By this time, however, such devices were typically known as soda siphons, and you’ve probably seen them in dozens of slapstick comedies from the 1930s and 40s being used to soak some hapless victim. And to learn more about these iconic devices and how they work, please check out the author’s video on the subject over on his channel Our Own Devices.
With the invention of portable carbonation machines, soda distribution largely moved out of pharmacies and into dedicated soda fountains, where an attendant known as a “soda jerk” mixed carbonated water from a dispenser on the countertop with flavoured syrups, ice cream, and other ingredients to create a wide variety of sweet, refreshing concoctions. Soda fountains – and soda in general – were especially popular in the United States thanks to local dry laws and the Prohibition experiment of 1919-1933, which had shuttered traditional social hubs like bars and taverns. And due to the ubiquity of the soda fountain model, major soft-drink companies like Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, and Dr. Pepper made most of their money selling not pre-bottled soda but rather flavoured syrup concentrate. Indeed, this is still largely the case today, since the automatic soda fountains found in convenience stores and fast-food restaurants work by mixing carbonated water generated with a pressurized carbon dioxide with flavoured syrup dispensed from a bag or tank.
However, starting in the 1920s, improvements in industrial bottling technology and the invention of the bottle vending machine led to the steady rise in popularity of pre-bottled soft drinks, which by the 1960s had almost completely overtaken the soda fountain model. Another major driver of this change was World War II – because of course it was. Because it was not practical to set up soda fountains on the battlefield, American troops drank soft drinks like Coca-Cola out of bottles – which were supplied to the front in the millions. Indeed, as part of a patriotic – and not at all self-serving – initiative, in 1941 Coca-Cola president Robert Woodruff announced that:
“..every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs the company.”
Following the Allied invasion of North Africa in 1942, Coca-Cola executives flew to Algeria to set up a bottling plant to more easily supply drinks to the troops; by the end of the war, 64 bottling lines were operating across both the European and Pacific theatres of operation. At war’s end, returning GIs brought their bottle-drinking habits home with them, starting a nation-wide trend. The conflict also gave people across Europe and Asia their first taste of Coca-Cola, helping the company grow into a globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar juggernaut.
More on Coca-Cola’s rather fascinating “successful failure” story in the Bonus Facts in a bit.
In the 1950s, traditional glass soda bottles began facing competition from a new innovation: the metal drink can, first introduced in 1954 by the Royal Crown Cola Company – better known today as RC Cola. The company would later roll out the first all-aluminium drink can in 1964. These early cans had to be opened with a punch-style “church key” can opener, but in 1962, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company introduced the ring-pull tab. Then, in 1975, Falls City Beer introduced the modern “Sta-Tab” – which remains the standard opening mechanism for both alcoholic and soft drink cans to this day.
This all now brings us to the question of why do we like fizzy drinks so much? What is it about carbonation that makes flavoured or even plain water taste so much better? The answer, surprisingly, may be that all of us are a just little bit masochistic. The “tingling” sensation you feel when you drink soda is actually the pain receptors on your tongue being stimulated by collapsing bubbles. This, in turn, stimulates the release of endorphins, enhancing the reward signal already produced by the sugar in the drink. This suggests that we enjoy soda for much the same reason we enjoy eating spicy food; indeed just as with spicy food, a love of carbonated drinks seems to be a uniquely human trait – lab mice and other animals won’t touch the stuff. However, bubbles aren’t the end of the story. In 2013, researchers at the University of Montreal placed test subjects in a hyperbaric chamber and made them try various carbonated and non-carbonated drinks. Even though the high pressure in the chamber eliminated the bubbles, subjects still overwhelmingly preferred drinks with large amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide. This indicates that much of the “bite” that gives carbonated water its appeal comes not from the bubbles but from carbonic acid, which, in addition to stimulating pain receptors, also helps to counteract the taste of sugar. Indeed, soda companies often add additional acidity to their products – usually in the form of citric or phosphoric acid – for this very reason. This is why a can of Coca-Cola tastes refreshing despite containing nearly 10 tablespoons of sugar – yes, about the same as two Cadbury Creme Eggs. You’re welcome. Furthermore, research suggests that carbonation fools our tongues into perceiving a drink as being colder than it really is – though the exact mechanism behind this phenomenon is still not fully understood.
So why do we love soda so much? Because, in the end, all we are is walking, sentient bags of flesh whose imperfectly-evolved nervous systems are easily fooled by all sorts of random stimuli. Cheers!
And bas a fun little Bonus Fact is that while manufacturers put the same amount of CO2 in cans as bottles of soda, when placed in plastic, which is more permeable to CO2, the carbonation will dissipate relatively quickly over time. In fact, if stored in direct sunlight, in 3 months, soda in plastic can lose up to 15% of its carbonation. Cans of soda, on the other hand, can have their taste affected by bits of metal that are dissolved from the inner lining, and again, the warmer the container, the greater the effect. This is one of the reasons many people have preferences when drinking soda from glass vs. plastic vs. metal containers.
On this note of fizz, ever wonder if tapping a can of shaken soda actually reduces the likelihood of it fizzing over when you open it? Well, if you have you should know we did an extensive study to answer this question. See our video Does Tapping a Shaken Can of Soda Actually Reduce Foam?
Bonus Fact:
Much like other early soft drinks as mentioned, the sickly sweet sugar water known as Coca-Cola was initially marketed as a magical cure-all tonic for every kind of “nervous affliction” imaginable from headaches to hysteria- a condition that, fun fact, used to be treated in women through medically administered orgasms.
Of course, as with so many new ventures, when it first became available to the public on May 8, 1886, Coca-Cola was a bit of a flop, averaging only about 9 glasses per day sold in the first year. This was despite the fact that it debuted at one of the most popular soda fountains in Atlanta, Georgia, located in Jacob’s Pharmacy. For reference here, their gross earnings on soda sales, according to the owner of the pharmacy, Dr. Joseph Jacobs, was about $150 per day (or about $4,100 today), of which Coca-Cola accounted for about 45 cents daily in the first year.
This is mildly surprising considering not only is Coca-Cola reasonably tasty, but it was also, as mentioned, being marketed by the medical professionals involved as a cure for countless medical issues, including a rather serious one in morphine addiction. On top of that, they also pitched it as something of the Viagra of its day… (No doubt this effect on men is partially how it was supposed to go about curing hysteria in women…)
And if the marketing and flavour didn’t work, their trump card was the fact that it contained coca leaf extract, a.k.a. cocaine, as well as lime juice which aids in cocaine absorption in the stomach for maximal bang for your buck on the drug element. Seemingly this should have seen it become a huge hit rather quickly, though it is noteworthy that various cocaine products were widely available at the time, so perhaps people didn’t have need to come back to Coca-Cola to get their fix.
Whatever the case, as to how its inventor, pharmacist John Pemberton, came up with the tonic, he was specifically looking for a cure for his own morphine addiction. You see, Pemberton was a former Confederate soldier who nearly had his head lopped off in the Battle of Columbus. During his recovery from his wounds, as with so many others at the time, he became addicted to morphine and so was looking for something to wean him off the habit.
This all led him to experimenting with coca-leaf extract, and thus Pemberton’s French Wine Coca was born, which he claimed did the trick. (Though it should be noted that when he died of stomach cancer two years later in 1888, he was still addicted to morphine.)
Unfortunately for him, his initial concoction also included alcohol (from wine), which became banned in Atlanta where he lived in the same year he debuted his tonic, resulting in him substituting the wine with sugar and citric acid. He also, of course, mixed the whole thing with carbonated water, owing to, at the time, fizzy water being thought to be good for your health as noted.
Finally, in 1886 Pemberton was ready to start selling what would eventually become arguably the most famous non-water beverage brand on Earth. After a deal was struck with Dr. Joseph Jacobs of the aforementioned Jacobs’ Pharmacy and the soda fountain operator within, Willis Venable, Coca-Cola finally graced the world with its presence, selling for 5 cents per serving (about $1.38 today).
Poor sales and a loan Venable had received from Jacobs’ to build a house ultimately saw Venable trade his 1/3 stake to Jacobs in repayment of said cash advance. As for Jacobs, he had little interest in producing and marketing the drink and was generally annoyed with having to deal with Pemberton and his huge financial problems. Thus, not long after he acquired Venable’s share, he sold his entire stake in Coca-Cola to fellow pharmacist Asa Candler, for, to quote Jacobs “some stock in a glass factory on South Pryor Street… This factory, on which the insurance had been allowed to lapse, was destroyed shortly afterward by fire. In addition to the stock I was to receive some odds and ends such as bed pans, pewter syringes, wooden pill boxes, and empty bottles.”
Candler, after buying out the remaining shares, including from Pemberton, would start the process that turned the brand into the beverage powerhouse it is today, by 1919 himself selling the brand and recipe for a cool $25 million (about $361 million today) to a group of investors.
As for Pemberton, when he sold his stake to Candler he did have a thought to leave a partial share to his son, Charles, in the hopes the morphine-addiction curing drink would someday become a huge hit. However, ultimately Charles and he opted to just take as much money as they could get at the time and forgo any further stake in Coca-Cola. Pemberton died shortly thereafter in poverty and his son Charles followed him about six years later, ironically dying of a morphine overdose.
Expand for ReferencesPer Capita Consumption of Soft Drinks in the United States from 2010 to 2018 (in Gallons), Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/306836/us-per-capita-consumption-of-soft-drinks/
Natural Carbonation, Fine Waters, https://finewaters.com/the-story-of-fine-water/key-concepts/carbonation-balance/natural-carbonation
Carbonated Water, Made Up In Britain, https://madeupinbritain.uk/Carbonated_water
The Origins of Soda Water, McGill University Office for Science and Society, https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/origins-soda-water
Raghav, Abuja & Krish, Pop Culture, Mint, July 2, 2010, https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/ltG28LhAkLveUaltMmMasL/Pop-culture.html
Crown History, https://web.archive.org/web/20150215032854/http://www.crowncork.com/about/about_history.php
Coca-Cola in World War II, Museum of the American GI, https://americangimuseum.org/coca-cola-in-world-war-ii/#:~:text=All featuring people smiling with,plants into fully operational facilities.
Rimkunas, Barbara, Historically Speaking: the Bubbly World of the Soda Fountain, Seacoast Online, July 14, 2022, https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/news/2022/07/14/historically-speaking-bubbly-world-soda-fountain/10054102002/
Morgenthaler, Jeffrey, Mr. Plinth’s Soda Cart and the Tom Collins, May 20, 2013, https://jeffreymorgenthaler.com/mr-plinths-soda-cart-and-the-tom-collins/
Wolf, Madline et al., The Influence of Bubbles on the Perception of Carbonation Bite, PLOS ONE, August 21, 2013, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0071488
Yu, Alan, Why We Like Sparkling Water: the Science Behind the Fizz, PBS, December 3, 2018, https://whyy.org/segments/why-we-like-sparkling-water-the-science-behind-the-fizz/
Lecher, Colin, FYI:Why do Humans Like Fizzy Drinks? Popular Science, July 17, 2013, https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-07/fyi-carbonated-water-addictive/
The post Who Invented Soft Drinks? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
“You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ‘em, one stinkin’ dink body. But that smell, that gasoline smell? The whole hill. Smelled like…victory.”
These iconic words, spoken by the character of Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore in 1979’s Apocalypse Now, are the stuff of film legend, and helped to cement in the minds of moviegoers our modern collective image of the Vietnam War. More than any other weapon, napalm has become inextricably linked with the war, symbolizing its wanton, industrialized cruelty and ultimate futility. But what is napalm, anyway? Who invented it, how does it work, and what is it about this weapon that made its creator disown his own invention and turned an entire anti-war movement against a single company? Well, load up your ‘Thud’ with a load of ‘snake and nape’, and let’s get some, shall we?
Napalm emerged from a dramatic shift in U.S. strategy during the Second World War. In the 1930s, various air forces around the world developed the doctrine of precision strategic bombing, wherein heavy bomber aircraft would be used to carry out precision high-altitude strikes on key enemy infrastructure like factories, power plants, and railways. This would effectively cripple the enemy’s ability to wage war, bringing the conflict to a swift and decisive end. Military planners were confident that precision bombing would make wars cleaner, faster, and more humane, eliminating altogether the need for armies to meet on the battlefield.
The outbreak of the Second World War, however, revealed this strategy to be fatally flawed. At the time precision bombing doctrine was developed, military strategists assumed that the new generation of all-metal monoplane bombers would be able to outrun and out-climb anything the enemy could throw at them, and that any remaining threats could be easily neutralized by arming the bombers with an array of defensive machine guns. Thus, it was believed, bombers would be able to attack their targets with near-impunity, inspiring the not-at-all-hubristic motto “The bomber will always get through.” By 1939, however, fighter and anti-aircraft artillery technology had advanced sufficiently that these once seemingly “untouchable” bombers were now sitting ducks, with the first British daylight raids against Nazi-occupied Europe suffering horrific casualties. In response, the British switched to a strategy of bombing at night. While this was effective at protecting bombers from enemy aerial defences, it also made it nearly impossible for bombardiers to accurately identify features on the ground, resulting in most bombs landing kilometres away from their intended targets. Realizing that their bombers were only useful against city-sized targets, the British once again switched tactics and developed the controversial doctrine of “area bombing.”
Area bombing effectively obliterated the distinction between combatants and civilians which had defined previous wars. Rather than striking specific military targets, bombers would now target entire cities and towns. By destroying the homes of factory workers, the logic went, the enemy’s ability to produce war materiel could be crippled. Furthermore, repeated bombing would eventually break civilians’ will to fight, causing them to rise up against their government and sue for peace. As such widespread destruction could not easily be inflicted using conventional explosives, the British took to using incendiary weapons to set cities ablaze. In a procedure that the Royal Air Force perfected to a near-science, aircraft called pathfinders used precision navigation equipment to drop flares onto the middle of the target city, marking the drop point for the following bomber stream. The first wave of bombers would then drop heavy explosive charges called blockbusters to blow the roofs off buildings, allowing incendiary bombs dropped by subsequent waves to penetrate into the buildings’ flammable interiors. This strategy was used to devastating effect in July 1943 during the Operation Gomorrah raid on the German city of Hamburg. A combination of firebombing tactics and unusually dry weather led to the formation of a firestorm, a 460 metre tall vortex of flame that generated 45 kilometre-per-hour winds, sucking the air out of air raid shelters and sweeping citizens off their feet into the inferno. By the time the raid was over, 60% of the city had been destroyed and 40,000 citizens killed.
When the United States entered the war in late 1941, they were initially horrified by British area bombing tactics and vowed to pursue precision daylight raids. Thus began the round-the-clock bombardment of Germany, with the USAAF bombing by day and the RAF by night. Soon, however, the Americans learned the same lesson the British had earlier in the war, as daylight bombing raids over heavily-defended German cities suffered ever-mounting losses. Eventually, the USAAF came around to the doctrine of area bombing, and began conducting joint firebombing raids alongside the British.
Early in the war, U.S. bombers carried incendiary bombs similar in design to their British counterparts, fuelled by various mixtures of white phosphorus -which ignites on contact with air – magnesium, and thermite – a mixture of iron oxide and aluminium powder that burns at temperatures up to 2500 degrees Celsius. In 1944, however, a new type of incendiary bomb began appearing in USAAF depots, filled with a potent new substance called “napalm”. Napalm was invented in July 1942 by a team of Harvard University chemists led by Louis F. Fieser. While working for the National Defense Research Committee chemical weapons division, Fieser and his colleagues were tasked with investigating the potential military applications of divinyl acetylene, a synthetic drying oil used in paints and coatings. A series of industrial accidents had revealed that exposing this compound to oxygen could cause it to violently explode, making it a promising candidate for development into a new explosive. The team built a variety of experimental bombs filled with divinylacetylene and set them off using small gunpowder charges. As Fieser later noted, the results were intriguing:
“We noticed also that when a viscous gel burns it does not become fluid but retains its viscous, sticky consistency. The experience suggested the idea of a bomb that would scatter large burning globs of sticky gel.”
This was not a new idea. Indeed, early in the war both the British and Americans had produced a number of simple molotov cocktail-style grenades consisting of glass bottles filled with gasoline, benzene, and white phosphorus. To thicken the mixture and make it stick better to a target, pieces of raw rubber were dissolved in the gasoline. This type of gasoline-rubber mixture was also used in the standard American air-dropped incendiary bomb, the M47. But, there was a problem: following their conquest of southeast Asia, the Empire of Japan controlled most of the world’s rubber supply, meaning Fieser and his team had to find an alternate means of thickening gasoline. After much experimentation, they hit upon a pair of compounds, aluminium naphthene and aluminium palmitate, which when mixed with gasoline produced a sticky, highly flammable gel. Fieser dubbed the mixture napalm, a contraction of the naphthene and palmitate thickening agents.
On July 4, 1942, Fieser’s team tested their creation by detonating an M-47 bomb filled with napalm in the middle of a puddle in a soccer field outside Harvard’s football stadium – because, why not? As Fieser later recalled:
“The performance, from the start, was most impressive. The high explosive cuts the inner well into the ribbons and opens the casing down the entire length. Pieces of phosphorous are driven into the gel, and large, burning globs are distributed evenly over a circular area about 50 yards in diameter.”
The U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service tested napalm at the Edgewood Technical Arsenal in Maryland and the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, where exact replicas of typical German and Japanese housing was built to evaluate various aerial weapons. Napalm performed exceptionally well, demonstrating numerous advantages over older incendiary weapons. Unlike thermite, magnesium, or oil-fuelled bombs, napalm scattered over a wide area and stuck firmly to the target, increasing the chances of ignition. And unlike white phosphorus, napalm could not spontaneously ignite, making it safer for ground crews to handle. Napalm also had applications outside of aerial warfare – especially in flamethrowers. While flamethrowers had been used during the First World War, the straight gasoline or diesel fuel they used tended to disperse rapidly, limiting their effectiveness. Napalm, however, formed a solid, concentrated stream when projected from flamethrowers, greatly enhancing their range and accuracy.
Napalm was first deployed in flamethrowers on December 15, 1943 during the U.S. invasion of Papua New Guinea, where it proved highly effective against Japanese pillboxes and bunkers. Interestingly, when U.S. troops entered captured bunkers, they found dead Japanese soldiers without any burns. They soon determined that the main effect of flamethrowers was to flood the bunkers with carbon monoxide gas, killing the occupants instantly.
Aerial napalm bombs were first used in Europe in December 1943 in Sicily and in the Pacific in 1944 during assaults on the islands of Ponhpei and Tinian. But the greatest and most devastating uses of napalm during the war would take place in 1945. On February 14 and 15 of that year, 1,299 RAF and USAAF aircraft dropped 3,900 tons of explosive and incendiary bombs – including 740 tons of napalm – on the German city of Dresden. As in Hamburg two years earlier, the bombings ignited a ferocious firestorm which consumed 6.5 square kilometres of the city and killed an estimated 25,000 people. The bombings also ignited a storm of controversy that rages to this day over whether Dresden was a vital enough target to justify such high civilian casualties, with many arguing that the operation constituted a war crime. But even this destruction would be dwarfed only one month later by Operation Meetinghouse, in which 279 USAAF bombers dropped 14,000 tons of M69 napalm cluster bombs on the Japanese capital of Tokyo. Unlike in Germany, Japanese cities were built mainly of wood, allowing the flames to spread out of control. The resulting firestorm destroyed nearly a quarter of the city and killed an estimated 100,000 people – more than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined – making Operation Meetinghouse the single deadliest air raid in history.
After the war, the use of napalm spread around the world, the weapon being used in the Greek Civil War, French colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, by dictator Fulgencio Batista against rebel forces in Cuba, and in the Korean War. Indeed, napalm was one of the favourite weapons of the U.S. forces in Korea, with 635,000 tons being dropped during the conflict – nearly four times the amount dropped on Japan during the entire Second World War. As in that war, however, the use of napalm in Korea proved controversial, with U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps pilots being accused of the indiscriminate bombing of civilians. For instance, on January 20, 1951, U.S. aircraft conducted a firebombing raid on a cave near Yongchoon, 144 kilometres southeast of Seoul, believing that North Korean forces were hiding inside. However, the cave was actually sheltering South Korean refugees, an estimated 300 of whom were killed in the attack. American pilots were reported as regularly firebombing groups of civilians on the suspicion they were harbouring North Korean infiltrators, while the current North Korean government claims that more than 8,000 civilians were killed during repeated U.S. napalm strikes on the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.
No conflict, however, is more closely associated with napalm than the Vietnam War. The dense jungles of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia provided excellent cover for North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong troops, frustrating American and South Vietnamese efforts to locate and destroy enemy forces. Napalm proved an ideal weapon for clearing large areas of land, and was heavily deployed from February 1962 onwards. Between 1963 and 1973, more than 400,000 tons of napalm were dropped on Indochina, reaching peak use in April 1972. By this time, the weapon’s composition had changed, making it “napalm” in name only. This new composition, dubbed “Napalm B”, replaced the aluminium naphthate and palmitate thickeners with polystyrene, making it cheaper to manufacture and easier to ignite. It also burned for longer – up to 10 minutes compared to 15-30 seconds for the original composition.
Yet for such a simple weapon, the effects of napalm were horrific. Due to its stickiness and high burning temperatures, napalm inflicted burns that were too deep and severe to heal. Medics treating victims of napalm attacks described burned flesh that looked like “swollen, raw meat” and eyelids so badly burned they could no longer be shut. As you might imagine, the highly-publicized nature of history’s first “television war” meant that images of these ghastly injuries soon reached the American public, sparking mass outrage. The first such images, which appeared in Ramparts magazine in January 1967, convinced civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. to publicly oppose the war, and triggered large student protests at the University of Wisconsin. But the photo that did the most to galvanize public opinion against napalm – and the war as a whole – was taken by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut on June 8, 1972. The photo, which won Ut a Pulitzer Prize and has become one of the most enduring images of the Vietnam War, shows a group of Vietnamese children – including 9-year-old Phan The Kim Phuc – fleeing the village of Trang Bang, which had just been firebombed by South Vietnamese aircraft. The photo inspired the popular protest slogan “NAPALM STICKS TO KIDS” and focused outrage on the main manufacturer of napalm: Midland, Michigan-based firm Dow Chemical.
Ironically, Dow Chemical was ranked only 75th on a list of top U.S. military contractors, and prior to 1965 were mostly known as the manufacturers of Saran Wrap kitchen cling film. Thanks to napalm, however, they would quickly become one of the best-known corporations in the United States – and among the most hated. Anti-war activists protested outside Dow factories and spat on, attacked, and chased away Dow recruiters on college campuses, calling then “baby killers.” In response, Dow management first asked the Pentagon to take full responsibility for the use of napalm in Vietnam, absolving the company from blame. When this did nothing to quiet protests, the company briefly considered halting the production of napalm. After weighing the financial and moral risks, however, Dow decided that its main responsibility was to the government, and manufacture continued unabated. Instead, Dow embarked on a massive public relations campaign, releasing promotional films and pamphlets and stepping up recruitment efforts on campuses. Surprisingly, the campaign achieved some success; for many students, being interviewed by Dow Chemical was seen as an ironic “badge of honour”, and interviews actually increased over the next several years. But even after the company stopped producing napalm in 1969, the protests continued, the weapon and the company having become inextricably linked. Decades later, Dow would become embroiled in controversy once again over another one of its products: the herbicide Agent Orange, whose widespread use in Vietnam has been blamed for thousands of cases of birth defects and cancer.
The use of napalm in the Vietnam War so disgusted its inventor, Louis Fieser, that in 1967 he revised his autobiography to remove all mention of his most famous creation. Yet despite this public relations disaster, napalm continued to be used around the world for decades. It was deployed by both sides during the Six-Day War in 1967 – including in Israel’s controversial attack on the U.S. spy ship USS Liberty – the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the Israeli-Lebanon war in the 1980s. It was used by Nigerian government forces against Biafran separatists in the 1960s, by Portuguese colonial forces in Angola in the 1970s, Argentine forces against the British during the 1982 Falklands War, and Serbian and Croatian forces during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s – among others. In 1980, however, continuing protests over its use led the United Nations to restrict the use of napalm and other incendiaries against personnel via Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which states:
1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.
2. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.
3. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.
4. It is prohibited to make forests or other kinds of plant cover the object of attack by incendiary weapons except when such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objectives.
Due to such regulations and shifting military doctrine regarding collateral damage, the use of napalm and incendiaries by US forces has declined precipitously after Vietnam. As Matthew Evangelista, professor of History and Political Science at Cornell University explains:
“The norms governing bombing – and particularly the harm it imposes on civilians – have evolved considerably over a century: from deliberate attacks against rebellious villagers by Italian and British colonial forces in the Middle East to institutionalized practices seeking to avoid civilian casualties in the U.S. counterinsurgency and antiterrorist wars of today. In between, the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II caused great civilian destruction through fire-bombing of cities and, ultimately, the atomic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Nonetheless, napalm-style incendiaries continue to be used under limited circumstances. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, U.S. Marine Corps aircraft used incendiaries to ignite oil-filled trenches constructed by the Iraqis as an anti-invasion barrier, while in 2001and 2003 U.S. aircraft used incendiaries against Taliban forces in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, and during the invasion of Iraq. In all three cases the weapon used was not a traditional napalm canister but a 340-kilogram bomb called the Mark 77, which is filled with a mixture of kerosene, oxidizers, and white phosphorus. This composition is easier to ignite, harder to put out, and, according to the Pentagon, has less of an environmental impact that styrene-based napalm, which releases toxic and carcinogenic compounds as it burns.
Yet despite this more limited doctrine for the use of incendiaries, American officials refrain from using the term “napalm” and refer to the weapons simply as “Mark 77s” – demonstrating that the Vietnam War continues to cast a long shadow over the United States military.
Expand for References
Guldner, Gregory & Knight, Curtis, Napalm Toxicity, Napalm Toxicity, National Library of Medicine, May 24, 2022, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537127/
Guillaume, Marine, Napalm in US Bombing Doctrine and Practice, 1942-1975, Sciences Pro, December 10, 2016, https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/napalm-us-bombing-doctrine-and-practice-1942-1975.html
Napalm in War, Global Security, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/napalm-war.htm
The Harvard Candle, https://web.archive.org/web/20121229112152/http://www.aggregat456.com/2011/03/harvard-candle.html
Budanovic, Nikola, Liquid Fire – How Napalm Was Used in the Vietnam War, War History Online, June 1, 2016, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/vietnam-war/history-napalm-vietnam-war.html?safari=1
Napalm and the Dow Chemical Company, American Experience, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/two-days-in-october-dow-chemical-and-use-napalm/
Phuc Phan Thi, Kim, It’s Been 50 Years. I Am Not ‘Napalm Girl’ Anymore, The New York Times, June 6, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/opinion/kim-phuc-vietnam-napalm-girl-photograph.html
The post What is Napalm Anyway and Who Invented It? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Ahh, a nice, warm bowl of oatmeal: could there be a more hearty or wholesome breakfast? Loaded with fibre, nutrients, and – if you’re feeling decadent – a dash of brown sugar – it’s the perfect way to start your day. Or so the big cereal companies and their cheery adverts would have you believe. But for a group of Massachusetts orphans in the 1940s and 50s, this breakfast of champions came with an extra, unexpected ingredient: a whopping dose of radiation. Unwitting guinea pigs in a secret study funded by Quaker Oats and MIT, these children were some of the thousands of victims of the most unethical decades of American medical research. This is the disturbing story of the Fernald State School Oatmeal Experiments.
Our story begins at the Walter E. Fernald State School, located in Waltham, Massachusetts. Founded in 1888 as the Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children, Fernald was the product of the American Eugenics Movement, which sought to improve the nation’s genetic stock – and society as a whole – by preventing those individuals seen as “defective” from breeding. Institutions like Fernald, of which there were nearly 100 across the United States, were designed to house, isolate – and, in certain cases, forcibly sterilize – children deemed to be “feeble-minded”.
Tragically, nearly half of those committed to Fernald were not mentally disabled at all, achieving average scores on IQ tests. They were simply poor, uneducated children who had been orphaned or dumped at the school by parents who could not afford to take care of them. And “dumped” is the appropriate term; according to former resident Fred Boyce, who was admitted in 1949 at age 8 when his foster mother died:
“We thought for a long time that we belonged there, that we were not part of the species. We thought we were some kind of, you know, people that wasn’t supposed to be born…They [the state Government] didn’t have to look for homes for you, so they could just dump you off in these human warehouses and just let you rot, you know. That’s what they did. They let us rot.”
Conditions were cramped and spartan; at its peak, the institution housed some 2,500 people, the children often being packed in 30 to a room. And to cut operating costs, the residents performed most of the manual labour around the school. As Michael d’Antonio, author of the book The State Boys’ Rebellion writes:
“The kids at Fernald raised the vegetables that they ate. They sewed the soles on the shoes that they wore. They manufactured the brooms that they used to sweep the floor.”
Despite its name, very little education took place at Fernald State School – and what was provided was woefully inadequate:
“It was a school in name only. A child would experience the first year of school 5 or 6 times in a row. He would read the same ‘Dick and Jane’ reader, and never make any progress because the school wasn’t equipped to actually educate children. It was there as a sort of holding pen.”
And then there was the abuse. Corporal punishment was a way of life at Fernald, freely meted out for the most minor of offences – or often none at all. According to former resident Joe Almeida, who was abandoned at the school by his parents at age 8, the staff held a regular event called “Red Cherry Day”, in which the children would sit in a circle and be called up alphabetically:
“And lucky me, my name is what? Almeida. You’d get up in front of all these kids, and you would pull down your pants. You’d pull down your underpants and they’d make you turn around and they’d whack your ass with this branch until it was red like a cherry…These people were sick that worked here.”
And, as you would expect from such a power dynamic, sexual abuse was also rampant. Unsurprisingly, many children chose to rebel – often by running away. Those who were caught were sent to the school’s infamous Ward 22, where they were stripped naked and locked in solitary confinement for weeks on end.
Then, in 1946, the school announced that it was creating a Science Club, whose members would be privy to all sorts of perks including extra oatmeal and milk for breakfast, gifts like Mickey Mouse watches, and tickets to Boston Red Sox games. Given their bleak nature of their everyday existence, residents signed up in droves. Those who still had parents received the following consent form from the school administration:
Dear Parent:
In previous years we have done some examinations in connection with the nutritional department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the purposes of helping to improve the nutrition of our children and to help them in general more efficiently than before.
For the checking up of the children, we occasionally need to take some blood samples, which are then analyzed. The blood samples are taken after one test meal which consists of a special breakfast meal containing a certain amount of calcium. We have asked for volunteers to give a sample of blood once a month for three months, and your son has agreed to volunteer because the boys who belong to the Science Club have many additional privileges. They get a quart of milk daily during that time, and are taken to a baseball game, to the beach and to some outside dinners and they enjoy it greatly.
I hope that you have no objection that your son is voluntarily participating in this study. The first study will start on Monday, June 8th, and if you have not expressed any objections we will assume that your son may participate.
Sincerely yours,
Clemens E. Benda, M.D.
Clinical Director
What the letter failed to mention was that these “special breakfast meals” were laced with radioactive tracers- for the “science club” was in fact a cover for an MIT nutritional study conducted on behalf of the Quaker Oats Company. At the time, the company was eager to validate the nutritional value of its products. Recent studies suggested that the high levels of phytate found in oats inhibited the absorption of Iron – a problem which Quaker’s main hot-cereal rival, Cream of Wheat, did not have. Furthermore, both companies were facing increasing competition from sugary dry breakfast cereals, whose popularity was booming thanks to modern advertising techniques.
Lasting from 1946 to 1956, the experiments at Fernald were largely conducted by MIT nutrition professor Robert Harris and PhD student Felix Bronner, whose research was funded through a “Quaker Oats Fellowship.” Over the course of the study, more than 100 residents of the school were fed oatmeal and milk laced with radioactive Iron-59 and Calcium-47, and received intravenous Calcium injections. These tracers allowed the movement of these elements throughout the body to be tracked using radiation detectors. To Quaker Oats’ delight, the study revealed that oatmeal was no worse at promoting iron absorption than Cream of Wheat. Harris and Bronner also discovered that calcium – both ingested and injected – is deposited straight into the bones. So the next time you see an advertisement claiming that milk helps build strong bones, know that this claim derives from non-consensual human experimentation.
Indeed, while today the Fernald study would never pass a research ethics board review, it was hardly the only case of unethical human experimentation in the United States at the time – or even the worst. As we’ve covered in our previous videos That Time US Scientists Injected Plutonium Into People Without Their Knowledge and That Time the United States Tested Biological Warfare on its Own Citizens, the early Cold War period was something of a golden age for this kind of research, the unethical nature of which was typically justified in the name of national security. Nor was the Fernald study the only one conducted on a vulnerable, institutionalized population. For example, from the 1950s to the 1970s, hundreds of inmates at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison were used as human guinea pigs to test the effects of various toxins, creams, detergents, and other products on their skin; while between 1946 and 1948, the United States Public Health Service infected 700 prostitutes, prison inmates, and psychiatric patients in Guatemala with syphilis, gonorrhoea, and chancroid in order to study the progress of these diseases. And, of course, there were the CIA’s infamous MKUltra experiments, in which thousands of unwitting subjects – including prisoners and psychiatric patients – were subjected to electroshock therapy, hallucinogenic drugs, and other forms of psychological torture in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to develop effective mind control, interrogation, and brainwashing techniques. According to John Lantos, an expert in medical ethics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and expert in medical ethics, such experiments were indicative of America’s post-war mindset:
“Technology was good, we were the leaders, we were the good guys, so anything we did could not be bad.”
The tragic irony is that less than a decade before, the discovery of Nazi human experiments had led to the drafting of the Nuremberg Code, which stated that:
“The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion, and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.”
Despite this, after the war most American scientific institutions adopted ethical guidelines which required consent – but not informed consent. That is, subject simply had to agree to participate in an experiment; they didn’t have to be told the real purpose of said experiment or the potential risks or even exactly what was being done at all, such as we covered in our recent video Injecting People with Cancer Without Their Consent. It was not until 1953 that the National Institutes of Health created the first federal research ethics guidelines explicitly requiring informed consent; and not until 1974 that the Federal Government passed the National Research Act, establishing a national procedure for ethical review in medical research.
But for many members of the Fernald Science Club, things were about to get significantly worse. By the 1960s, Eugenics had become a dirty word, and a de-institutionalization movement had begun to sweep the psychiatric field. Consequently, Fernald and other institutions began releasing all but their most severely disabled residents. However, no effort was made to re-integrate these residents into society, and with barely any education or useful skills, many struggled to to get by. Fred Boyce and Joe Almeida both left Fernald in 1960 at the age of 19, with Boyce joining the carnival circuit and touring around the country. In his 40s, Almeida felt himself drawn back to Fernald State School – now the Walter E. Fernald Development Center, where he worked as a driver for 20 years. As he later explained:
“I always felt like they owed me. I always felt that they owed me, because they took the most important thing of my life away. They took away my childhood and my education. The two things that you need in life to make it, they took from me.”
All the while, however, Boyce, Almeida, and the other Science Club members remained unaware that they had been used as human guinea pigs. It was not until 1993, when Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary declassified a number of Atomic Energy Commission documents from the 1940s and 50s, that the truth about the experiments finally came out. On December 26 of that year the story was broken by the Boston Globe; soon other publications began urging victims to come forward.
Upon learning of the experiments, Fred Boyce gathered together 30 of his fellow Fernald classmates and launched a class-action lawsuit against MIT, Quaker Oats, and the United States Government. Meanwhile, Senator Edward Kennedy chaired a hearing before the Senate’s Committee on Labor and Human Resources to investigate the Fernald experiments. Questioning Constantine Maletskos, one of the study’s organizers, Kennedy asked why the study had been conducted on institutionalized orphans instead of MIT students:
“Aren’t you appalled at the fact that the most vulnerable people in our society, which are young people, 7, 8 years old, that are in an institution, aren’t you appalled that they were the ones selected?”
Maletskos claimed that he and his colleagues were following the ethical guidelines of the time, and that the choice of subjects was scientifically necessary:
“Because in all of these experiments, you have to have control of the subjects. You just can’t let them walk around; you have to collect 100 percent of the excretions, you have to see that they’re eating properly, and all this kind of thing. Unless you do it that way, you’re not going to have a good experiment.”
And as for the “Science Club” aspect of the study, Maletskos denied that it was any kind of ruse:
‘It was an afterthought, as I gather—that somebody was talking about: “It would be nice [to do something for them because] these kids have been involved, we’ve had to jab them, and they had to eat a meal—every little drop of it, because you wanted to be sure they got 100 percent of the radioactivity— wouldn’t it be nice to do something for them?”’
Also called to testify was J. David Litster, Dean of Research at MIT, who was questioned about the health effects of the radioactive tracers the study’s subjects were made to ingest. Litster revealed that the tracers had exposed the children to between 170-330 milligrams of radiation – equivalent to receiving 30 consecutive chest x-rays. This kind of dose, he explained, would have given the children a 1 in 2,000 chance of developing cancer – barely higher than the national average. Indeed, a 1994 Massachusetts state panel confirmed that none of the students had developed any health conditions that could be directly traced to the radioactive isotopes used in the Fernald study.
But for Fred Boyce, Joe Almeida, and the other Fernald students, their lawsuit was less about radioactivity than the unethical nature of the study. And while MIT claimed that the study followed the ethical guidelines of the time, and Quaker Oats denied it played little direct role in the research – contributing some cereal and a small research grant – in 1998 both decided to settle out of court, paying the plaintiffs $60,000 in compensation. It was a small victory, but one which helped bring some justice and closure to one of the darkest periods in American science.
Bonus Facts:
Speaking of sadistic individuals and institutions and breakfast foods, the first modern, designated breakfast cereal (forms of porridge aside) was invented in 1863 by a vegetarian Christian abolitionist doctor named James Caleb Jackson. Created for his sanatorium patients as a healthy start to the day, it was comprised of crumbled, twice baked graham flour (which is essentially a type of non-bleached, “all-natural” finely ground whole wheat flour) and bran (hard outer layer of the grain), he called “granula”. The end product resembled a much harder version of modern Grape-Nuts, but with significantly larger nuggets. Jackson’s granula was reportedly so hard that it needed to be soaked in liquid for at least 20-30 minutes before it could be comfortably bitten into it.
In the 1870s, Dr. John Kellogg ran his own sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan and was known for his very strange, sometimes sadistically abusive methods, including electrically shocking children’s genitals, applying forms of acid to them, removal of the clitoris in females, and circumcising males- all to attempt to prevent masturbation and sexual urges. (Interestingly, the latter male circumcision treatment as something commonly performed in America actually hails from this era; the modern non-Jewish / non-Islamic practice of foreskin removal was not really a thing in the Western world until it began to be seen as a way to prevent masturbation.). In any event, Dr. Kellogg visited Jackson’s retreat and was most impressed with his granula. So impressed, in fact, that he ripped off the idea, creating his own version of it made of wheat, corn, and ground oats. He uninventively called it “granula”… As a result, Jackson sued and Kellogg was forced to rename his cereal “granola.”
A few years later, a failed Battle Creek suspender salesman named Charles W. Post partially knocked off Kellogg’s product and started selling an exceptionally similar “granola” product he called Grape-Nuts, claiming it could make one’s “red blood redder.”
As with Jackson, Kellogg and Post both pushed this food item as an ideal, healthy food to start the day with, setting the trend that has continued through today for this line of product.
Between Kellogg and Post, at the turn of the 20th century, Battle Creek became a battle ground for two companies that would come to define the world of breakfast cereal. For instance, legend has it that due to a mishap making a batch of the original version of Graham crackers (originally created by Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham as a way to curb sexual urges, and particularly the urge to masturbate), John Kellogg and his brother Will invented a product they unimaginatively dubbed “Corn Flakes”. Post was a little more flamboyant, naming his version of the same thing “Elijah’s Manna”- meant as a striking allusion to the biblical story about the food that saved the wandering, starving Israelites. With the famed prophet sitting on a rock and hand feeding a raven on the front of the box, Elijah became the first cereal mascot. However, fairly quickly, religious groups protested and Post changed the name to “Post Toasties.”
Ultimately the Kellogg brothers split over Will Kellogg’s decision to recommend adding sugar to Corn Flakes to help it sell better, something Dr. John Kellogg found borderline blasphemous as such a thing, in his opinion, encouraged sexual excitement. The two parted ways with Will founding the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which went on to become the now billion dollar Kellogg corporation (which besides their tasty flakes was soon to also introduce another breakfast staple- Rice Krispies). His brother John Kellogg stuck to his original principles and continued to dedicate his life to ridding the world of such evils as masturbation…
Now, given the ladies of the house at this time tended to be the ones who decided what the family would eat, during the first few decades of the 20th century, cereal advertising was primarily aimed at housewives. Kellogg’s told women to wink at their grocer and see what they got (answer: a box of Corn Flakes). Quaker Oats likewise sponsored radio dramas and mid-day radio shows aimed at housewives. Post told moms that bringing up kids on their cereals would help them later in life.
In the late 1930s, as breakfast cereal became more established and commonly purchased anyway, cereal companies started thinking it might be best to skip the middlewoman, instead marketing directly to children, who presumably would pester their mothers for which cereal they wanted. For instance, in 1936, a “Dennis the Menace”-like character named Skippy was used to specifically market Wheaties to children.
The problem here is that children tend to not like straight bran or wheat… but they do love sugar. In 1939, the first pre-sugared cereal was produced, called Ranger Joe Wheat Honnies. Ironically, the product was actually an effort by the creator to minimize how much additional sugar kids commonly put on their cereal by including a relatively small, regulated amount already. But instead of curbing the practice of over-sugaring cereal, it eventually resulted in the opposite, starting with Post copying Ranger Joe Wheat Honnies with their own version called Sugar Crisp in 1949; thanks to a major breakfast cereal producer now making such a pre-sugared product, the rest of the industry followed suit.
By the 1960s, cereal companies were devoting approximately 90% of their advertising budgets to directly appealing to individuals of the youthful persuasion. This is why it was so common today to have “prizes” in the cereal box, tie-ins with movies, video games, and TV shows, and products called Sprinkles Spangle and Ice Cream Cone Cereal. On that note, this is also why adding more and more sugar to breakfast cereal became a thing.
As for widespread claims by the manufacturers that these cereals are “part of a complete breakfast,” technically the cereal companies are not lying here. Unsurprisingly given that the three primary nutrient groups, known as macronutrients, that humans need to survive are carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, according to the American Chemical Society, a healthy breakfast should consist of mostly carbohydrates and proteins. Shocker, I know.
And, indeed, cereal, even if it’s simply a bowl of pure sugar, constitutes carbs. So these products can indeed technically be considered an essential part of a complete breakfast, just perhaps not an advisable one given the vast majority are essentially candy cleverly marketed to appear nutritious, often complete with a giant label on the side showing all the vitamins added to the product… along with tiny recommended serving sizes that nobody even comes close to following to mask the absolute massive number of calories and sugar most real-world servings of the products contain. But to be fair, combined with certain other breakfast items, in extreme moderation this staple of the breakfast world could potentially be useful if one leads a very physically active life, instead of just rolling out of bed only to very soon after sit at a desk all day and then come home and sit on the couch until bedtime.
On that note, perhaps those sedentary, wealthy aristocrats of old were on to something in choosing to skip the morning meal. And for those who led a heavily manual labored life, it is perhaps no surprise that some form of grain-based morning meal seems to have been the choice people made throughout most of recorded history- easy to quickly eat and comprised of a mix of simple and complex carbs to provide both quick and relatively longer lasting stores of energy, all while avoiding too much protein and fat which, while otherwise essential for life and important for things like maintaining muscle mass, might not sit well when eating mostly that in the morning and then jumping right into hard labor.
Expand for ReferencesBoissoneault, Lorraine, A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Radioactive Oatmeal Go Down, Smithsonian Magazine, March 8, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/spoonful-sugar-helps-radioactive-oatmeal-go-down-180962424/
Leung, Rebecca, America’s Deep, Dark Secret, CBS News, April 29, 2004, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/americas-deep-dark-secret/
Radioactive Oatmeal Suit Settled for $1.85 Million, The Washington Post, December 31, 1997, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/01/01/radioactive-oatmeal-suit-settled-for-185-million/93894a5a-5844-4544-aca2-ffe4e52030b3/
Kasprak, Alex, Did Quaker Oats Fund MIT Research That Fed Radioactive Cereal to Kids? Snopes, June 17, 2023, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fernald-quaker-oats/
Crockett, Zachary, The Dark Secret of the MIT Science Club for Children, Priceonomics, https://priceonomics.com/the-mit-science-club-for-disabled-children/
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From humble beginnings to near orphan at 7, to one of the wealthiest people in America, to one of the first the British targeted as being someone no pardon would be given, to President of Congress and beyond, John Hancock led a rather interesting life as we’ve been covering in this 5 part Hancock series.
With a peace treaty finally announced in 1783 and his life no longer forfeit if the British prevailed, when he wasn’t battling health issues including severe issues with gout, John Hancock was otherwise governing the state of Massachusetts. It was in this role in 1785 when he was once again voted in as President of Congress, technically making him the first President of the United States to be elected to two non-consecutive terms given his former role as President of Congress during the early going of the war.
Unfortunately his health had deteriorated too much at this point, and he was unable to make the trip to Philadelphia to take office there directly. To add insult to injury, shortly after being elected, his 10 year old son died in an ice skating accident in January of 1786. For reference, his only other child, a daughter Lydia, had also previously died as a baby about ten years before this. Health poor, he finally resigned as President on June 6, 1786. But his work was not quite done for the new United States, having one more critical role to play.
As we’ve covered in great depth in our video The Key to Humans Humaning, after John Adams, Ben Franklin and co. successfully negotiated the end of the American Revolution with the Treaty of Paris, signed by both sides on September 3, 1783, the United States had a major problem. Despite the name, its states weren’t exactly actually united, generally out to serve their own interests first and, if convenient, those of their loose union. During the war this was less of a problem as they had pressing need to work together. Now, they didn’t.
Not only that, but in their quest to make a central government that was as purposefully weak as possible so as never to come to dominate in the way their former government did over them, they had gone too far, creating a government in the Articles of Confederation, or the so-called “league of friendship,” that had, as George Washington so famously put “no money” and no real way to get any outside of printing some that was worthless. This was a rather glaring issue for countless reasons, right down to the then complete inability for the government to pay its debts or its soldiers or for anything at all really.
The central government also had very little power it could exert over its states, or make anything happen in many cases unless all the states agreed on it, which was an extreme rarity. This was a major immediate problem when considering, for example, the aforementioned Treaty of Paris between Britain and the U.S. that ended the war and gave incredibly favorable terms to the new country. The issue was, many of the states saw little need to adhere to the treaty, and, indeed were not, and there was very little the federal government could do about it. This could have potentially blown up in the young nations’ face had Britain decided to also go back on the deal, potentially plunging the nation right back into war it couldn’t afford against a still very superior adversary, and this time perhaps not seeing the French have the United States’ back after the U.S. kind of threw them under the bus in negotiations with the British.
In short, Congress had no real power to govern anything, the states knew it, and at a certain point it even mostly ceased trying. All of this had been done very intentionally given the political minds among the colonists knew well most such attempts at similar governments in the past had ultimately devolved into some form of tyranny, whether tyranny of the majority or by those placed in power, regardless of what any laws put in place said. Not just in governments far afield or in the past, but this was something they themselves had seen with some of the then state legislatures abusing their positions in the colonies.
George Washington would write of all this, “We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation.“ And, he further states, the government they had made was “a shadow without the substance”.
Thus, it became clear to all that the Articles needed, at the very least, amended heavily if the nation in some form was to survive at all. After some deliberation about this, it was decided to convene to fix the problem with delegates from each state selected to represent the people in these changes, with 70 delegates from the 13 states selected, of which 55 ultimately attended the Convention. Once there, they ultimately decided instead of modifying the Articles of Confederation, they would instead just come up with a brand new Constitution.
If you’d like the full details on the surprisingly interesting saga of the development of the U.S. Constitution and just how revolutionary it was at the time, which is often lost on us in modern times, do go check out our video The Key to Humans Humaning after you’re done watching this video. But suffice it to say for now, after a whole lot of hot and sweaty political wrangling shut up (quit literally with windows closed and all to stop eavesdropping) in the summer of 1787, enough delegates, 39, were willing to sign the completed document they came up with to approve it, despite that pretty much everyone had issues with elements of it.
And so it was that the United States had a shiny new proposed Constitution.
After everyone signed, Ben Franklin would muse while looking at a painting of the sun on the chair George Washington, who had presided over the assembly, sat in,
“Often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, [I] looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.”
As to what happened after they all signed, according to George Washington, the remaining delegates all went out to City Tavern and had a party.
It was done.
Well, almost. It still needed ratified by the states to become official.
When it was put before Massachusetts, however, the issue of whether to ratify it was highly contentious, despite its extreme similarity to the Massachusetts Constitution from which it was partially based. Once again going back to the Articles of Confederation, many within the states at the time heavily favored independence and a loose coalition and weak central power uniting them. The new constitution was proposing the opposite of that. Others were caught up in various details of it, everything from the term length for those elected, to it not including a Bill of Rights initially, to it not abolishing slavery as the Massachusetts constitution had via John Adams’ inclusion of a Declaration of Rights which criticall had at the start- “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”
All of these arguments were basically the same that had been made in the United States’ Constitutions’ drafting. As Ben Franklin would sum up when the document was originally approved, “There are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve… I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me… to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does…Thus I consent… to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.”
Going back to Massachusetts, when the ratifying convention first met in January of 1788, Hancock was naturally elected President of the convention, despite his ailing health which initially prevented him from attending the debates. As for his opinion on it all, he kept his cards close to his chest, including when he was first presented a copy of the proposed new constitution, he stated it was not for him, to quote, “to decide upon this momentous affair.”
However, in the early going rumors swirled that Hancock opposed the measure, allegedly in no small part as it diminished his power as governor in some ways via putting a more powerful federal government over him. Other prominent individuals such as his Lieutenant Governor Samuel Adams also seemed to be leaning that way too in the early going, though he would change his mind in the end. But before that, Samuel Adams would write to Richard Henry Lee on December 5, 1787, “I confess, as I enter the Building I stumble at the Threshold. I meet with a National Government instead of a Federal Union of Sovereign States. I am unable to conceive why the Wisdom of the Convention led them to give the Preference to the former before the latter. If several States in the Union are to become one entire Nation, under one Legislature, the Powers of which shall extend to every Subject of Legislation, and its Laws be supreme & control the whole, the Idea of Sovereignty in these States must be lost.”
With it seemingly like the ratification would not go through, Hancock finally did attend, having his servants carry him to the hall reportedly wrapped in flannels. There, on February 6, he gave a speech before the vote, throwing his support wholeheartedly behind ratification, stating,
“I am happy that my health has been so far restored, that I am rendered able to meet my fellow-citizens as represented in this Convention. I should have considered it as one of the most distressing misfortunes of my life to be deprived of giving my aid and support to a system which… cannot fail to give the people of the United States a greater degree of political freedom, and eventually as much national dignity, as falls to the lot of any nation on earth…
That a general system of government is indispensably necessary to save our country from ruin, is agreed upon all sides. That the one now to be decided upon has its defects, all agree; but when we consider the variety of interests, and the different habits of the men it is intended for, it would be very singular to have an entire union of sentiment respecting it… but, as the matter now stands, the powers reserved by the people render them secure, and, until they themselves become corrupt, they will always have upright and able rulers. I give my assent to the Constitution…
The question now before you is such as no nation on earth, without the limits of America, has ever had the privilege of deciding upon. As the Supreme Ruler of the universe has seen fit to bestow upon us this glorious opportunity, let us decide upon it; appealing to him for the rectitude of our intentions, and in humble confidence that he will yet continue to bless and save our country.”
When the votes were ultimately cast shortly after this speech, of the 355 voters, only 19 more were in favor of ratification vs against, with how close this ended up being seeing many credit Hancock choosing to side with those in favor swaying the outcome.
In the aftermath, poor health or not, Hancock’s popularity was still about as high as it could be among the masses and he easily continued to win election after election as Governor of Massachusetts.
Had it not been for his health, given his relatively young age and extreme popularity, in a likelihood John Hancock would have had a decent shot at pulling off the trifecta of not just President of the Continental Congress and then President under the Articles of Confederation, but also President under the new United States Constitution at some point, though, of course, Washington winning the first election was all but inevitable, and no one was surprised by that outcome. Speaking of that first election, while as was the custom of the time, Hancock did not campaign or even express overt interest in the office of the Presidency, he did receive 4 electoral college votes anyway, 2 from Pennsylvania, and 1 each from Virginia and South Carolina. And likely would have received significantly more if not for his boyhood friend in John Adams taking all the Massachusetts electoral votes, with Adams ultimately becoming vice president to George Washington partially because of it in 1789, and later the second President of the United States in 1797.
But whether Hancock might have secured the role for himself at some point or not, it was not to be as his health continued its rapid decline despite his relatively young age.
Ultimately John Hancock would pass away on October 8, 1793 at the age of only 56. Over 20,000 people attended his funeral, about 1 in 200 people in the United States at the time, and the date was ordered by now Massachusetts Governor Samuel Adams to be a state holiday. Hancock’s final resting place is next to his Uncle Thomas at the Old Granary Burial Grounds in Boston.
Now, if you’ve followed along in this 5 part series, you might at this point be thinking it seems a rather odd thing that the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and their many prominent cohorts would be so lauded in the aftermath, yet John Hancock was largely forgotten in popular history outside of his famous signature. As one of his biographers, Harlow Unger, would write, “John Hancock’s transformation from Tory patrician to fiery rebel is one of the least-known stories of the Revolution…. [yet] he was, perhaps, the consummate American hero.”
Even John Adams in 1809 had already observed the trend and lamented that both Samuel Adams and John Hancock, two of the biggest players in the early revolution, had been so shunted to the side and, to quote Adams, “almost buried in oblivion.”
So what happened?
Well, as we can attest in doing our five video deep dive on the man, outside of countless letters pertaining to business transactions and later similar administrative letters during the Revolution, Hancock did not actually leave much in the way of personal writings for historians to gauge his thoughts, motivations, and perspectives as so many others of the founding fathers did, most prominently arguably John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams who kept daily journals for huge portions of their lives covering everything that was going on around them and their daily lives. The power of this is it allows historians to view events and decisions from the individual’s perspective to contrast from those of their political enemies and others speaking about them.
Now, if you enjoy reading about business transactions and administration, you’ll love diving into the John Hancock archives, but otherwise, he left relatively little of the rest, leaving most of what’s said about him we remember today being written by his opposition in politics. And of this, while most described him as an extremely able administrator and moderator of disputes, his propensity for insanely foppish dress and his perceived vanity from all this did not exactly endear him to many of the other leaders on a personal level, given this type of excess and his extreme wealth were generally seen as contrary to the republican ideals they were all fighting for.
Further, at least by their accounts, and to be fair you can see where it comes through in some of his own personal writings that have survived, he also seemed to enjoy to an extreme degree his popularity with the masses- in a nutshell he seems to have liked being famous, which was also seen as anti-republican to revel in such things openly. This is partially why in the early going in the United States it was tradition to not really promote yourself when running for offices like that of President, but simply to let it be known you’d accept the position if elected, and then allow your constituents to take it from there. And even if you were elected, it was expected you’d say something like you didn’t feel qualified for the job and didn’t really want it, even though in most cases the opposite was very clearly true. You just couldn’t say that. Thus, Hancock’s more open ambition, fancy dress, perceived vanity, and excessive wealth worked against his reputation with, ironically, the other elite.
As James Madison would state, “Hancock is weak, ambitious, a courtier of popularity, given to low intrigue.”
This about a man who was among the first to call the colonists to fight and was steadfast in this in the early going when it was most likely to see him hung, and he had everything to lose in his immense fortune as well even if he wasn’t arrested and executed for treason. Sure doesn’t seem weak at all.
Sam Adams would also chime in writing of the celebration Hancock held after he became governor of Massachusetts, “John Hancock … appears in public with all the pagentry of an Oriental prince. He rides in an elegant chariot. … He is attended by four servants dressed in superb livery, mounted on fine horses richly caparisoned, and escorted by fifty horsemen with drawn sabres—the one half of whom precede, and the other follow, his carriage.”
In stark contrast, and amazingly ironic if you really think about it, the masses on the whole seemed to adore John Hancock thanks to his extreme philanthropy and generous nature, amiable personality, not just towards the elite, but to the masses at any station in life, his skill as an administrator during the revolution which was critical to its early success, and his bold patriotism despite what this cost him in a number of ways when so many others in similar positions sided with the British. In short, the masses seem to have had an entirely different opinion of the man, and there’s a reason in the early going of the war there were rallying cries of “King Hancock”.
But those masses died off, and historians, with very little to work with directly from the man, mostly only accounts from his political opponents, and with much of his more significant role in the revolution being in helping to start it and, in the early going, administer it… well, let’s just say writing letters to convince some governmental body or individual to send more troops or resources or arranging the funding and outfitting the ship that sent the first diplomat to France to get that crucial aid there is not exactly as sexy as winning a major battle or drafting the declaration of independence or the Constitution. Nevermind the fact that if Hancock had not played such a prominent role in igniting the revolution in the first place, and then figuring out how to keep it going via this rather mundane administrative and mediating work, those major battle victories and everything after would not have happened.
As historian Charles Akers would sum up, “The chief victim of Massachusetts historiography has been John Hancock, the most gifted and popular politician in the Bay State’s long history. He suffered the misfortune of being known to later generations almost entirely through the judgments of his detractors, Tory and Whig.”
But perhaps John Adams, one of the most distinguished of all of his era and who knew John Hancock from boyhood, would sum him up best, writing about Hancock a couple decades after Hancock’s death, lamenting the way history remembered him. Stating in 1812,
“When will the Character of Hancock be understood? Never. I could melt into Tears when I hear his Name. The property he possessed when his Country called him, would purchase Washington and Franklin both. If Benevolence, Charity, Generosity were ever personified in North America, they were in John Hancock. What Shall I Say of his Education? his literary Acquisitions, his Travels, his military civil and political Services, his Sufferings, and Sacrifices?… I can say with truth that I profoundly admired him and more profoundly loved him.”
Five years later, in 1817 he would expound upon all this considerably, writing, “I knew Mr. Hancock from his cradle to his grave. He was radically generous and benevolent… What shall I say of his fortune, his ships? … at that time… not less than a thousand families were, every day in the year, dependent on Mr. Hancock for their daily bread. Consider his real estate in Boston, in the country, in Connecticut, and the rest of New England. Had Mr. Hancock fallen asleep to this day, he would now awake one of the richest men. Had he persevered in business as a private merchant, he might have erected a house of Medicis… [But] no man’s property was ever more entirely devoted to the public. The town had… chosen Mr. Hancock into the legislature of the province…. his mind was soon engrossed by public cares, alarms, and terrors; his business was left to subalterns; his private affairs neglected, and continued to be so to the end of his life….”
Adams concludes,
“Though I never injured or justly offended him, and though I spent much of my time and suffered unknown anxiety in defending his property, reputation, and liberty from persecution, I cannot but reflect upon myself for not paying him more respect than I did in his lifetime… But if statues, obelisks, pyramids, or divine honors were ever merited by men, of cities or nations… John Hancock deserved these from the… United States….
James Otis, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock were the three most essential characters [in the revolution]; and Great Britain knew it, though America does not. Great and important and excellent characters, aroused and excited by these, arose in Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, South Carolina, and in all the other States, but these three were the first movers, the most constant, steady, persevering springs, agents, and most disinterested sufferers and firmest pillars of the whole Revolution.”
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In 1775, the members of the Second Continental Congress and their President John Hancock were in a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, Act after Act of the British Parliament were making it clear Parliament not only considered themselves the de facto rulers and governing body of the colonies, but that any push back against Parliament would result in harsh penalties. On the other hand, the general sentiment among the populace and leaders of the colonies was to continue to push for peace and remain in the British Empire. In a nutshell, being part of the British Empire was not generally considered the problem, simply that Parliament continued to act like it ruled in America instead of the local colonial governments. Thus, the colonists wanted Parliament to leave them be, while remaining loyal subjects to the King.
In fact, almost exactly a year before Congress would declare independence, they tried very hard to go the other way in their Olive Branch Petition to King George III, approved on July 5, 1775. In it Congress stated,
“We, your Majesty’s faithful subjects of the colonies…entreat your Majesty’s gracious attention to this our humble petition…. we not only most ardently desire the former harmony between her and these colonies may be restored, but that a concord may be established between them upon so firm a basis as to perpetuate its blessings, uninterrupted by any future dissentions, to succeeding generations in both countries… That your Majesty may enjoy a long and prosperous reign, and that your descendants may govern your dominions with honor to them selves and happiness to their subjects, is our sincere and fervent prayer.”
Thus, professing their loyalty to the king and desire to remain in the British Empire, they simply were asking that he intercede on their behalf with Parliament and their recent actions against the American colonies.
Had King George responded differently here, much of history would have irrevocably changed. But instead, he allegedly didn’t even bother to read their petition before issuing his Proclamation of Rebellion on August 23, 1775, writing,
“Whereas many of our subjects in divers parts of our Colonies and Plantations in North America, misled by dangerous and ill designing men, and forgetting the allegiance which they owe to the power that has protected and supported them… have at length proceeded to open and avowed rebellion, by arraying themselves in a hostile manner… we have thought fit… to issue our Royal Proclamation, hereby declaring, that not only all our Officers, civil and military, are obliged to exert their utmost endeavors to suppress such rebellion, and to bring the traitors to justice, but that all our subjects of this Realm, and the dominions thereunto belonging, are bound by law to be aiding and assisting in the suppression of such rebellion… in order to bring to condign punishment the authors, perpetrators, and abettors of such traitorous designs.”
Doubling down on disabusing the colonists of the notion that he would be loyal to them, his subjects, and not Parliament, King George also went ahead and began hiring mercenaries to level against the colonists.
Further antagonizing the traitors to the British crown, Parliament soon after passed the Prohibitory Act of 1775 which not only removed the colonies from the protection of the King, put also put an end to any trade with the colonies in an attempt to wreck their economy, as well as declared that any ship found trading with the colonists, to quote, “shall be forfeited to his Majesty, as if the same were the ships and effects of open enemies.”
As for the Continental Congress’s thoughts on all this, they note “That as to the king, we had been bound to him by allegiance, but that this bond was now dissolved by his assent to the late Act of Parliament by which he declares us out of his protection.”
John Adams would also chime in, “It throws thirteen colonies out of the royal protection, levels all distinctions, and makes us independent in spite of our supplications and entreaties… It may be fortunate that the act of independency should come from the British Parliament rather than the American Congress.”
As with the Boston Tea Party in our previous video in this series, Hancock: Igniting the Revolution, where the colonists were forced between submitting and allowing the tea to touch American soil or destroy it, the colonists were now forced via British government action to choose between two paths. On the one hand, they could submit, and accept Parliamentary rule over themselves without representation in that body, as well as any penance Parliament required for their act of rebellion. Or they could officially cut ties with their motherland and fight one of the most powerful empires in history for independence. There no longer seemed any option of a middle ground.
As Thomas Jefferson would sum up the state of things at this point to one of his friends now returned to England, loyalist John Randolph, in a letter written on November 29, 1775,
“In an earlier part of this contest, our petitions told [the King], that from our King there was but one appeal. The admonition was despised, and that appeal forced on us. To undo his Empire, he has but one more truth to learn; that, after Colonies have drawn the sword, there is but one step more they can take. That step is now pressed upon us, by the measures adopted,… Believe me, dear Sir, there is not in the British Empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But, by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose; and in this I think I speak the sentiments of America. We want neither inducement nor power, to declare and assert a separation. It is will alone which is wanting, and that is growing apace, under the fostering hand of our King. One bloody campaign will probably decide, everlastingly, our future course… If our winds and waters should not combine to rescue their shores from slavery, and General Howe’ s re-enforcement should arrive in safety, we have hopes he will be inspirited to come out of Boston and take another drubbing; and we must drub him soundly, before the sceptred tyrant will know we are not mere brutes, to crouch under his hand, and kiss the rod with which he deigns to scourge us.”
With no other way forward but subservience, over the following months, one by one the colonies began to fall in line with the notion of breaking away from the British Empire, with North Carolina on April 12, 1776 being the first to officially empower their delegates to vote for independence, followed by Rhode Island becoming the first to openly declare independence on May 4.
Nevertheless, as summer approached, debate over the matter was reportedly extremely heated with, on May 15th, Maryland’s delegation even walking out of the proceedings on passing a preamble as a precursor to an official declaration of independence. Nevertheless, 9 of the 13 colonies voted for the preamble and it was passed. That very day, the Virginia legislature also instructed their delegation “to propose to that respectable body to declare the United Colonies free and independent States…”
And so it was that on June 7, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia officially proposed just such a resolution, ultimately seconded by John Adams, “Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”
The push back was still there, however. Once again, at this point most agreed that independence was inevitable given British actions, but there was still heated debate over the timing, with some arguing they should wait until they had secured foreign aid without which, it seemed probable the revolution would fail. Another issue at this point was that some of the colonies had still not yet authorized their delegates to vote on the matter of independence. Thus, a vote was withheld on it, but in the interim it was decided to have a document drawn up which would both declare the colonies independent and list the reasons why they felt justified in taking this extreme action, with the so-called Committee of 5 put together to draft the document, comprising of John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman.
In a surprising move, the committee selected the young 33 year old Jefferson to write the document over the much more distinguished writer and well known individual world wide in Ben Franklin, or one of the pinnacles of legal and political minds in the world at the time in John Adams. It was, however, Adams who would persuade both the committee to choose Jefferson, and to convince Jefferson himself to take the lead. Adams would write to Jefferson on his reasoning, “Reason first—You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second—I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third—You can write ten times better than I can.”
Unfortunately the Committee did not keep minutes on their internal discussions, so there isn’t a whole lot to say as to its drafting, But as to the text of the Declaration, Jefferson would state it was “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.” Ultimately borrowing from everything from John Locke to the 1689 English Declaration of Rights, which had ended the reign of King James II.
Now nearing the end of June, the legislatures of all but two of the colonies, Maryland, and New York, had finally authorized their delegates to vote on the matter of independence, and the Provincial Congress of New Jersey even had their Royal Governor William Franklin arrested on June 15. However, one of Maryland’s delegates, Samuel Chase, was ultimately able to convince the Assembly of the Counties of Maryland to change their mind on June 28 and allow the Maryland delegates to vote on the matter. This was the same day the Committee of 5 first presented their final draft of ‘A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled” to Congress. New York delegates, however, had to abstain from voting on it owing to British forces interfering with the Provincial Congress there convening to give them permission.
Nevertheless, over the next few days Congress continually made tweaks to the Committee of 5’s document, cutting out about a quarter of the original text, as well as tweaking the wording here and there. As to what was removed, most notable was a section where Jefferson, ironically not only a slave holder himself but who would eventually have an entire family and long term relationship with one of his slaves, not only condemned the evil of slavery, but accused King George of aiding that institution in the colonies.
Jefferson would later write of why this text was removed, “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures, for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
With the document finalized on July 1 and a vote pending, John Dickinson, who opposed any violent means to resolve their issues with Britain, tried one more last ditch effort to forgo any such declaration until they were more secure in their position with foreign aid and had completed the Articles of Confederation, but he was opposed as ever by John Adams who gave an impassioned speech the other way in response.
As a brief aside, Dickinson would, in the aftermath, both refuse to vote on the matter, as well as later refuse to sign the declaration, and because of this was not able to remain a member of the Continental Congress, though did voluntarily resign rather than be forcibly removed. Dickinson would state of all this, “My conduct this day, I expect will give the finishing blow to my once too great and, my integrity considered, now too diminished popularity.”
Despite his opposition, which again included extreme opposition to violent means to achieve independence, rather than abstain from fighting, upon leaving Congress Dickinson immediately joined the Pennsylvania militia, one of the only members of the Continental Congress to directly take up arms during the war. Further, as much as Adams and he had been adversaries in Congress over the matter of independence, because of Dickinson standing by his principles so vehemently even given all it cost him to do so, Adams would remark of him, “Mr. Dickinson’s alacrity and spirit certainly become his character and sets a fine example.”
In the end, on July 2nd 12 of the 13 colonies voted in favor of independence, with only the New York delegates abstaining until they could get permission to vote on the matter, which happened about a week later.
Document finally approved, as President of Congress, John Hancock seems to have signed it, with Secretary of Congres Charles Thomson also signing it as witness. Hancock then ordered to have printer John Dunlap make around 200 copies to be distributed to the masses and the world, today known as the Dunlap broadsides.
And yes on this note, seemingly just John Hancock signed it at this point, though even that isn’t technically known for sure as the original copy sent to Dunlap was lost, though given Hancock and then Thomson’s name as witness were printed on these, it’s generally assumed Hancock did sign it.
As for the version of the Declaration of Independence most people know today with Hancock’s famed giant signature, this engrossed version that is on display at the United States National Archives wasn’t created until sometime after July 19th, and ultimately wasn’t signed by everyone until August 2nd.
As for this signing, Benjamin Rush stated that it was a fairly somber affair with only the portly Benjamin Harrison trying to break the mood by cracking a joke to Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, stating,
“I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes and be with the Angels, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.”
Rush states Gerry’s only reply was, to quote, “a transient smile, but it was soon succeeded by the Solemnity with which the whole business was conducted.”
This all brings us to John Hancock’s signature on the engrossed copy of the Declaration and why it was so much bigger than everyone else’s, leading to his name being synonymous with one’s signature. As for the common myth, legend has it that Hancock signed the document front and center and so big so that King George would see his name without needing to put on his glasses, but there is no evidence of any of this, and as noted the previous printed versions that King George would actually see simply had Hancock’s name printed on.
Further, if you’ve watched the other videos in this series: Hancock: Rise of the Merchant Prince, Hancock: Igniting the Revolution, and Hancock: Revere’s Ride, you’ll know King George was already extremely well aware of John Hancock’s significant role in the rebellion, so a giant signature was not needed to make it clear who was President of the Continental Congress. In fact, it was John Hancock’s signature that was first and foremost on the previous Olive Branch Petition to the King that had been so soundly rejected.
So why was Hancock’s signature bigger than everyone else’s and front and center? While nobody can say for sure, most likely it was simply because of the very aforementioned fact- he was president of Congress and first to sign. So chose to sign right in the center. And without yet any other signatures there, he had no real gauge of how big or small to make it. And, contrary to what you might think from what people say, if you’ve never seen it, if you take out everyone else’s signature, nothing about his signature looks out of place in size or position on the document. It’s really not that big except relative to the other signatures.
As to why everyone else chose to make theirs smaller, this may have been in slight deference to Hancock as their President, or may have simply been that the first to sign after him chose to make it smaller for whatever reason so everyone else followed suit. As for those signature sizes, after Hancock, William Ellery was the next biggest at about 60% the space taken up by Hancock’s signature, with Carter Braxton the smallest at about 1/10th the space, and everyone else randomly in between.
Whatever the case, again, being the first to sign, Hancock did not have any gauge to know how big anyone else would sign. So seemingly just did what seemed appropriate without such a reference.
Although, I think the best explanation we’ve ever heard was written by one Matt Stofsky. His entire explanation is too long to fully illustrate here, but in part, he gives a totally and in all ways we are sure accurate account of John Hancock’s reasoning, with Hancock definitely writing the following as relayed by Stofsky,
“Now that our noble document is complete, it is time to address the elephant in the room: my name is much bigger than everyone else’s. I’ll be the first to admit that it is absolutely massive. Yet I must also speak this self-evident truth: it is not entirely my fault.
The fact is I thought we were all doing big signatures. That’s what I was told. Do none of you remember Thomas Jefferson—hopped up on parchment fumes and cheap barleywine—running around telling everyone our ‘sigs’ had to be ‘freakin’ huge’? Then I go first, and everybody bursts out laughing like I did something foolish.
I hereby call on my brethren of the Second Continental Congress—those who I know to be defenders of liberty, progress, and the values of the Enlightenment, to which we are all fan-boyishly devoted for some reason—to publicly stand up and say everybody told John Hancock we were doing big sigs.”
Whatever the case there, in the aftermath of the Dunlap broadsides being printed and distributed, there was no going back. It was a successful revolution or every member of that committee would be executed for treason.
John Hancock would write of this in a letter to George Washington on July 6, 1776, stating, “Altho it is not possible to foresee the Consequences of Human Actions, yet it is nevertheless a Duty we owe ourselves and Posterity, in all our public Counsels, to decide in the best Manner we are able, and to leave the Event to that Being who controuls both Causes and Events to bring about his own Determinations.”
Of course, being commander of the revolutionary forces, Washington was no doubt praying hard right then to that Being who Controls Both Causes and Events, because mere days after the Declaration of Independence was announced to the world on July 4, 1776, the aforementioned British troops under command of the Howe brothers sailed into Staten Island. Both Admiral Richard Howe and General William Howe had previously strongly sympathized with the colonists’, with William Howe even before the war at various points arguing for fairer treatment of the American colonies in Parliament. The pair also delayed their departure to the colonies a considerable amount of time to try to acquire powers to negotiate a peace, rather than simply subjugating the colonists with force.
However, while they may have sympathized with their former compatriots, their goal upon arriving in the New World was to put an end to the rebellion by any means necessary. Towards this end, they brought with them an army of around 32,000 soldiers and seamen, along with a whopping 400 ships, including nearly 100 warships.
On the other side, the relatively newly minted General George Washington had been preparing defenses of the region, correctly guessing that it was in New York that the British would strike with these invading forces.
In order to try to get Washington more support, as Howe was gathering his forces, Hanock would write the state assemblies stating, “I must repeat again to you that…. the Fate of America will be determined the ensuing campaign. I cannot help therefore once more pressing you to be expeditious in equipping & sending forward your Troops…. May the Great Disposer of all human Events, animate & guide your Councils, & enable you so to determine, that you may not only establish your own temporal Peace and Happiness, but those of your Posterity. Forgive this passionate Language. I am unable to restrain it–it is the Language of the Heart.”
In a similar letter he would write calling for aid, “Our affairs are hastening fast to a crisis, and the approaching campaign will, in all probability determine forever the fate of America…. The militia of the United Colonies…. are called upon to say whether they will live slaves or die free men….On your exertions…..the salvation of America now…. Depends.”
As for Howe, he initially attempted a peaceful resolution on July 20th. However, upon learning from Colonel James Patterson at a meeting discussing terms that Howe had only been granted the power to offer pardons in negotiations for peace, Washington famously replied, “Those who have committed no fault want no pardon.”
Diplomacy having failed. The Howe brothers decided to attack, and a few weeks later, the then largest known battle ever fought in North America, involving close to 40,000 troops, including naval forces, was game on.
What followed was a sweeping British victory which was almost catastrophic for the traitors to the British Crown, potentially ending the rebellion right there. You see, during the fighting, Howe managed to corner nearly half of Washington’s army. But for reasons still not totally clear today, Howe decided to cease pressing the attack at that point and instead ordered his soldiers to dig into their position. Speculations as to why he stopped are anything from that he thought Washington was surrounded and was giving him a chance to surrender without further loss of life, to that he simply thought pressing the attack, while likely to succeed, would have cost too many lives he could not easily replace. And as he felt his enemy couldn’t escape, there was little lost in taking the time to fortify his position.
Whatever Howe was thinking here, Washington did not have surrender on his mind. Instead, in part aided by seemingly history changing fog that no doubt had Washington thanking the “Being who controls both causes and events”, Washington was able to slip the some 9,000 soldiers he had in that position away into Manhattan, all without the British realizing their enemy was escaping. Thus, what could have been a blow to the Continental Army that may well have ended any real chance at Independence while the ink on the Declaration of Independence was barely dry, instead saw the demoralized Continental Army having suffered a major defeat, with over 1,000 troops captured and a significant position lost, but, they, at least, mostly survived to fight another day.
Things in the aftermath, however, would not improve much, with the revolutionary forces being defeated again and again such as at Kips Bay, Harlem Heights, White Plains, and Fort Washington. With retreat after retreat, and the budding nation desperately in need of funds to support war efforts, by 1777, things were bleak. Though despite all this, John Adams would steadfastly write, “Affairs are… delicate and critical. The panic may seize whom it will. It will not seize me.”
John Hancock would write to his wife Dolly on March 10th about the state of affairs at this point, illustrating the more personal side of the struggle for all those involved, generally kept from their families and homes and in a perpetual heightened state of extreme stress,
“My Dear Dear Dolly, My Detention at the Ferry & the badness of the Roads prevented my arriving here until Friday Evening. I put my things into Mr. Williams’ house, and went in pursuit of Lodgings. Neither Mrs. Yard nor Lucy could accommodate me. I then went to Smith’s and borrowed two Blankets & returned to my own house… I… lead a doleful lonesome life. Tho on Saturday I dined at Dr. Shippins… he is as lonesome as I… I long to have you here & I know you will be as expeditious as you can. When I part from you again it must be a very extraordinary occasion… However unsettled things may be I could not help sending for you as I cannot live in this way. We have an abundance of lies. The current report is that General Howe is bent on coming here…. We must, however, take our chances… I hope you will be able to pack up all your things quickly & have them on the way & that you will soon follow… Young Mr. Hillagas got here on Saturday, he is well, he delivered me your letter… I was exceedingly glad to hear from you and hope soon to receive another Letter. I know you will set off as soon as You can. endeavor to make good stages… I must leave those matters to you as the Road must in great measure determine your Stages. I do not imagine there is any danger of small-pox on the Road. Wilmington is the most dangerous, but go on to Chester. I want to get somebody clever to accompany you. I hope to send one to you, but if I should not be able, you must make out as well as you can.”
Speaking of Howe advancing on them, Alexander Hamilton would write to John Hancock on September 18, 1777: “If Congress have not yet left Philadelphia, they ought to do it immediately without fail, for the enemy have the means of throwing a party this night into the city. I just now crossed the valleyford, in doing which a party of the enemy came down & fired upon us in the boat by which means I lost my horse. One man was killed and another wounded. The boats were abandon’d & will fall into their hands…”
Going back to the personal side of things, on October 18, 1777, Hancock would write Dolly again, “My Dear Dolly, I am now at this date and not a line from you. Nor a single word have I heard from you since… your arrival at Worcester, which you my judge affects me not a little, but I must submit and will only say that I expected often to have been the object of your attention. This is my sixth letter to you… I long to see you. I shall close all my business in three days and indeed have already nearly finished, and when once I set out shall travel with great speed. Nothing will prevent my seeing you soon, with the leave of providence… I need not tell you there will be no occasion of your writing me after the receipt of this. My best wishes attend you for every good. I have much to say, which I leave to a cheerful evening with you in person.”
Noteworthy on this apparent ghosting by his wife, the couples’ baby, Lydia, had died just a few months before and it may well be she was a little emotionally preoccupied. Or perhaps as noted in our previous video Hancock: Revere’s Ride where she ghosted him yet again for a time shortly before their marriage, she simply didn’t enjoy writing letters.
Whatever the case, as referenced in his letter there, after two years chairing Congress as its President, in October of 1777, Hancock requested a leave of absence to return home to sort his affairs in Boston and rejoin his grieving wife. As for his leadership over Congress, this was generally seen as exemplary, using all his skills as a businessman and negotiator to mediate disputes, manage finances, drum up funds, as well as help coordinate the entire effort on all fronts.
In his farewell address to Congress, he stated, “Gentlemen: Friday last completed two years and five months since you did me the honor of electing me to fill this chair. As I could never flatter myself your choice proceeded from any idea of my abilities, but rather from a partial opinion of my attachment to the liberties of America, I felt myself under the strongest obligation to discharge the duties of office…. I think I shall be forgiven, if I say, I have spared no pains, expense, or labor to gratify your wishes and to accomplish the views of Congress.”
Unsurprisingly, what Hancock found in Boston upon his return was not only a hero’s welcome, but also his once vaunted House of Hancock business in shambles, and the town not in much better shape. On the trade side, all but two of his ships were gone, with Hancock quickly selling both of these to pay off some debts, officially putting the House of Hancock out of the import/export business. He was still, however, extremely rich in real estate and had massive sums of money owed to him, but as pretty much everyone’s finances were poor at this time, collecting debts wasn’t exactly going well, and Hancock wasn’t the type to force tenants and the like who couldn’t pay to do so until they could.
That said, it’s generally thought he must have still had a good amount of money available to him even at this point, as, while he had sold the remainder of his ships, he didn’t bother trying to sell any of his real estate. And on top of that, ever the philanthropist as his uncle before him, among his first acts upon arriving in Boston was to provide food, clothing and the like to widows and orphans of the war, as well as funds and supplies to help people repair their damaged homes and rebuild their lives.
Naturally from all this and his former exemplary work leading Congress, after a few months leave, in December of 1777, he was a shoe-in to be re-elected to the Continental Congress. Upon rejoining that body in June of 1778, within a month, along with 7 other state’s delegates, he signed the finally completed Articles of Confederation, the first Constitution of the United States- though noteworthy this wouldn’t be ratified until 1781.
Perhaps the most critical thing of all for the war also occurred in 1778 with Congress establishing the Treaty of Alliance with France, without which the colonist would almost certainly have lost the war, as this treaty not only garnered the colonists significant direct military aid from one of the more powerful nations in the world, but also on the side French action caused Britain to have to divert some of its manpower elsewhere in the world. This was something that was only doubled down on with regards to issues for Britain when the British seized a Dutch ship allegedly carrying supplies to France, causing a row with the Dutch in yet another thing the British had to occupy themselves with instead of focussing on their rebelling colonies. This would all also culminate in the Dutch becoming the 2nd nation after France to officially recognize the United States’ independence in 1782.
In any event, rewinding back to July of 1778, John Hancock finally got his chance to lead a mass of troops, though unfortunately the whole thing was rather anticlimactic on his end. While you’ll sometimes read that Hancock at the head of 6,000 Massachusetts troops suffered a major defeat owing to his bumbling attack on the British entrenched in Newport, Rhode Island, and only retaining his popularity after thanks to the extent of his previous work in the revolution, as well as philanthropic efforts, this isn’t really accurate at all.
As to the real story, in a nutshell, Washington ordered General John Sullivan, a man John Adams once expressed his wish “that the first ball that had been fired… had gone through [Sullivan’s] head,” to attack the British garrison in Newport. Hancock was indeed there commanding several thousand soldiers, and by the way Paul Revere was there as well, but they weren’t really otherwise involved in much of anything in the disaster that follow, both in that Hancock seems to have left any actual planning and commanding to the professional soldiers under him, as well as the fact that his troops just were not really that involved because they left and went home to Boston.
As to why, thanks to a major storm and some skirmishes before and directly after when scattered, the supporting French fleet, under French Admiral d’Estaing, was in need of repairs to many of their ships and no amount of arguing from Sullivan’s side, and Hancock reportedly also made his own attempt, could convince the Admiral to remain. And, thus, the French fleet departed on August 21 for Boston. It didn’t help that the assembled militia, according to Marquis de Lafayette, didn’t exactly inspire confidence they could do what they said they could even if they had the fleet’s help. Lafayette stated, “I have never seen a more laughable spectacle; all the tailors and apothecaries in the country must have been called out. They were mounted on bad nags, and looked like a flock of ducks in cross-belts.”
This left Sullivan in a very precarious position, not just from the French withdrawal, but also because without French aid, any chance of succeeding in taking Newport at this point was gone. Thus, many of the militia troops, particularly those under temporary contract of just a few weeks, simply deserted. Likewise Hancock and his army also withdrew as there was no point in hanging around anymore, with he and his men back home in Boston by August 26th.
In the aftermath, the very much needed relationship with France was strained, with the American public being less than kind, to put it mildly, in the press and the like with regards to the French and their actions on this one, generally blaming them and their alleged cowardice for the failure of the campaign. Once again showing his skills as a diplomat and mediator, Hancock tried to restore friendly relations, in this case putting together both a formal dinner and subsequent reception at Faneuil Hall for the French Admiral and Lafayette and their officers, with most of Boston’s leading citizens in attendance as well.
Fast-forwarding about a year later, John Adams was recalled from France to Massachusetts in August of 1779 and returned to being a private citizen briefly, though only a week later was appointed to draft a new Constitution for the state, ultimately in the span of just a couple months writing what would become to this day the oldest still functioning codified constitution, which not coincidentally heavily influence the United States Constitution, the second oldest still functioning codified constitution. For more on all that, see our video The Key to Humans Humaning.
But as to our story today, with the new Massachusetts Constitution ratified on June 15, 1780 and going into effect in October of that year, the people of Massachusetts were in need of a governor. And if you’ve been following along in our Hancock series and guessed John Hancock, one of the most popular men in all of the colonies, would be elected in a landslide as the state’s first Governor, you’d be correct, with Hancock assuming that role on October 25, 1780 after getting an astounding approximately 90% of the votes.
Unfortunately for Hancock at this time, while he was continually re-elected up through 1785 when he’d switch to become the President of United States under the Articles of Confederation, like his father and uncle before him, his health was rapidly in decline despite only being in his 40s.
As to what ailed him, as seemingly ran in his family, he suffered from occasional severe bouts of gout that would leave him bed-ridden. Nevertheless, he soldiered on and while still governor of Massachusetts, the peace with the British was announced in 1783.
Hancock, who had sacrificed much of his fortune and was among the first the British targeted to hang for treason should the war have gone the other way, would express his relief, writing after he found out,
“I have not the vanity to think that I have been of very extensive service in our late unhappy contest, but one thing I can truly boast: I set out upon honest principles and strictly adhered to them to the close of the contest… I have lost many thousand sterling but, thank God, my country is saved and, by the smile of Heaven, I am a free and independent man.”
His work for the nation was not done, however. And despite victory, now without the British threat uniting them, the states of the confederation were on the verge of falling completely apart, with many even regularly violating the terms of the treaty with the British which could have had catastrophic consequences if allowed to continue. Something needed to be done, rapidly.
We’ll conclude this tale in our next and final video in this series- Hancock: United at Last.
The post Hancock: We Hold These Truths to Be Self Evident appeared first on Today I Found Out.
“Listen, my children, and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five: Hardly a man is now alive, Who remembers that famous day and year.”
These are the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his famous 1860 poem Paul Revere’s Ride, which is where most of popular history’s perception of this famous event and its purpose came from. But it turns out, a huge percentage of the poem is wildly inaccurate, from Revere seeming to ride alone in the poem, to the lanterns at the church being meant to tell Revere what message to send, rather than it being Revere himself who instructed how many lanterns to hang in case he should fail to get across the river and make his famous ride. Most significantly of all in the inaccuracies, however, is where Revere was initially going and why. It turns out, the primary concern before anything else was to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were lodging in Lexington at the time, that the British soldiers were seemingly coming for them.
As we’ve previously covered in our videos Hancock: Rise of the Merchant Prince, and Hancock: Igniting the Revolution, the oft forgotten Founding Father John Hancock was a lot more prominent in the early going of the American Revolution than just his John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence, as is mostly all that’s remembered of him today. But at this point in the story, the British had seemingly decided enough was enough. And it was time to do something about the so-called “King Hancock” and his partner in crime Samuel Adams- a man who was the walking talking epitome of the over 2000 year old general concept of the pen being mightier than the sword.
On all this, with tensions rising considerably in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party and the British Parliament’s extremely harsh response in the Intolerable Acts, which both helped further unite the colonies against them, as well forced the people of Massachusetts to form their own independent governing body, Secretary of State William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth instructed General Gage “to arrest the principal actors and abettors in the Provincial Congress whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason and rebellion.”
Unsurprisingly, after attending the Provincial Congress in Concord in April of 1775, John Hancock and Samuel Adams deemed it unsafe to return to Boston, instead deciding to stay at Hancock’s brief childhood home near Concord in Lexington, before they were to head off to Philadelphia to join the Continental Congress.
Also in Concord at the time was a large cache of military supplies the colonists had been accumulating in preparation for a potential armed conflict.
Going back to Boston, at the time members of the Sons of Liberty and others were closely monitoring the British troop activities day and night. Paul Revere would write in a letter in 1798, recounting,
“In the Winter, towards the Spring, we frequently took Turns, two and two, to Watch the Soldiers, By patrolling the Streets all night. The Saturday Night preceding the 19th of April, about 12 oClock at Night, the Boats belonging to the Transports were all launched, & carried under the Sterns of the Men of War….We likewise found that the Grenadiers and light Infantry were all taken off duty. From these movements, we expected something serious was [to] be transacted. On Tuesday evening, the 18th, it was observed that a number of Soldiers were marching towards the bottom of the Common. About 10 o’Clock, Dr. Warren Sent in great haste for me, and begged that I would immediately Set off for Lexington, where Messrs. Hancock & Adams were, and acquaint them of the Movement, and that it was thought they were the objects.”
As for how Dr. Warren seemed to know where the troops were headed, despite the secrecy being employed, this isn’t clear, as Gage claimed he told only his second in command, and one other person, with that person generally thought to be his wife, Margaret Kemble Gage… The thing is, his wife was an American colonist herself, and it’s speculated from all this that she may have been the one to pass on what was afoot to Dr. Warren.
Whatever the case there, observing that something was happening and being apparently tipped off to where the soldiers were going, Dr. Warren had decided that they must be going after Hancock and Adams who were in the target region.
Except, after further discussion, given the number of soldiers seemingly being sent, it was decided that couldn’t be the only reason they were being dispatched, unless Gage was thinking the colonists would rise up to protect Hancock and Adams if they tried to take them. Thus, it was further hypothesized they must also be going after the military stores in Concord.
As for the 41 year old silversmith Paul Revere being the one summoned, besides having run many other messages at times for the Sons of Liberty and other bodies in the cause- including back on December 13, 1774 even being sent all the way to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to warn the colonists there that they thought the RedCoats were coming for their gunpowder stores- Revere had, according to his own account in a letter written to one Jeremy Belknap in 1798, just a few days before been out to meet Hancock and Adams in Lexington, so knew exactly where to find them.
Significantly with this previous jaunt, it was thought at the time that at some point the British troops would be coming for the stores in Concord, so on Revere’s return from this trip, he helped come up with the now famous lantern scheme. He writes, “I returned at Night thro Charlestown; there I agreed with a Col. Conant, & some other Gentle men, in Charleston, that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; & if by Land, one, as a Signal; for we were apprehensive it would be difficult to Cross the Charles River, or git over Boston neck.”
Speaking of these two paths. Revere was to make the dangerous crossing of the Charles River, which required him to sneak past the HMS Somerset at anchor there, with crossings at that hour banned. As a backup, another man, one William Dawes, was to take the Boston neck route in his own ride for the same purpose. And, just in case both men failed, as noted, a further alert was given by Robert Newman at Boston’s Old North Church, using the lantern signal “one if by land, two if by sea” that the British soldiers were coming via the Charles River.
As for Revere, after being given this information from Dr. Warren, he first stopped by his house to get his riding boots and coat, and then met with some friends to row him across the river, slipping past the Sommerset. Once safely in Charlestown, he informed local Sons of Liberty members there what was happening, then acquired a horse from a merchant by the name of John Larkin. He was also warned that some ten British officers were previously seen departing along the road.
Information in hand, he began his famous ride towards Lexington.
Unfortunately along the way he did indeed encounter the British patrols. Of his first encounter there, he writes, “After I had passed Charlestown Neck, & got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on Horse back under a Tree. When I got near them, I discovered they were British officers. One tryed to git a head of Me, & the other to take me. I turned my Horse very quick, & Galloped towards Charlestown neck, and then pushed for the Medford Road. The one who chased me, endeavoring to Cut me off, got into a Clay pond, near where the new Tavern is now built. I got clear of him, and went thro Medford, over the Bridge, & up to Menotomy.”
Along the way he alerted dozens of others, some of whom, in turn, were dispatched to spread the word of the British troop movements.
In the end, Revere successfully avoided capture and arrived at Hancock’s home in Lexington around midnight. Upon approaching it, one Sergeant Monroe who was guarding the house requested Revere not make so much noise, to which Revere reportedly replied, “Noise? You’ll have noise enough before long. The regulars are coming out!”
Of course, once the news of the troop movements and the apparent large number being sent was revealed, Hancock and Adams concurred that such a large force would not have been dispatched only to arrest them, and thus they must be targeting Concord and the militia stores there.
And, in fact, from surviving records, despite what the colonists’ thought here, it would appear General Gage had decided to ignore the order to arrest Hancock and Adams at this point. Or, at least, there is no written record this was included in Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith’s orders. Smith had simply been given charge of about 1,000 soldiers and was instructed to leave in the night in hopes of catching the colonists off guard and avoid any bloodshed in their mission, and that the whole thing was to be done, to quote, “with utmost expedition and secrecy” and that they were to go “to Concord, where you will seize and destroy… all Military stores…. But you will take care that the soldiers do not plunder the inhabitants or hurt private property.”
However, given the secrecy and the many spies about, it’s possible the order to arrest the men wasn’t written in case it would get leaked and would thus alert them to run. And further, the soldiers were seemingly authorized to arrest any leaders of the opposition they encountered over the course of their duties, and so, regardless, as the house Hancock and Adams were staying at was along the road on the way, it wasn’t exactly a good place to be.
On the flipside, if they had no intention of arresting Hancock and Adams yet, it’s speculated Gage may have feared the colonists’ reactions afterwards if he should do such a thing to two of their most popular leaders. Thus, rather than help quell the budding rebellion by getting rid of the two most prominent leaders, it might just cause it to go the other way and explode in his face.
Whatever the case, after receiving the warning, Hancock and Adams dispatched Revere and Dawes, who had arrived about a half hour after Revere, to Concord to warn the militia there to move the military stores in case that was the intended target of the Red Coats as they thought. Revere and Dawes were also soon joined by fellow Sons of Liberty member Doctor Samuel Prescott along the way. As to why Prescott was out and about at that hour, he apparently was, to quote, “returning from a lady friend’s house at the awkward hour of 1 a.m.”
Thanks to this little alleged midnight hookup and subsequent, I guess we’ll call it “ride of shame”, the good doctor gets to be remembered by us all today.
Good for you Dr. Prescott.
As for why Prescott decided to journey with Revere and Dawes despite the risk, he simply felt because he was well known in the region people would, to quote Revere, “give more credit to what we said.”
However, Revere reports, “We had got nearly half way. Mr Daws & the Doctor stopped to alarm the people of a House: I was about one hundred Rod ahead, when I saw two men, in nearly the same situation as those officers were, near Charlestown…. in an Instant I was surrounded by four; – they had placed themselves in a Straight Road, that inclined each way; they had taken down a pair of Barrs on the North side of the Road, & two of them were under a tree in the pasture. The Docter being foremost, he came up; and we tryed to git past them; but they being armed with pistols & swords, they forced us in to the pasture; -the Docter jumped his Horse over a low Stone wall…”
Dr. Prescott ultimately successfully not only escaped in this way, but managed to make it to Concord to warn those there.
As for Revere, he states, “I observed a Wood at a Small distance, & made for that. When I got there, out Started Six officers, on Horse back, and orderd me to dismount;-one of them, who appeared to have the command, examined me, where I came from, & what my Name Was? I told him. it was Revere, he asked if it was Paul? I told him yes. He asked me if I was an express? I answered in the affirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston? I told him; and added, that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up.”
In an earlier deposition to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, Revere also noted in this part the soldier quipped back to Revere’s remark that 500 militia would be there, that “they had 1500 coming.”
Revere then states one Major Mitchel hit him over the head with his pistol and threatened to blow his brains out if he didn’t tell the truth, to which Rever replied, “I esteemed my self a Man
of truth, that he had stopped me on the high way, & made me a prisoner, I knew not by what right; I would tell him the truth; I was not afraid; He then asked me, the same questions that the other did, and many more, but was more particular; I gave him much the same Answers.”
Revere was then joined with other prisoners caught that night spreading the word and they all headed off to Lexington. Along the way, Revere states, “They very often insulted me calling me Rebel &c. &c. after we had got about a mile, I was given to the Serjant to lead, he was Ordered to take out his pistol… and if I run, to execute the Majors Sentence; When we got within about half a Mile of the Meeting house, we heard a gun fired; the Major asked me what it was for, I told him to alarm the country…”
Soon after the gunfire, bells began to ring, with one of the other captives then reportedly yelling at the soldiers holding them, “The bell’s ringing! The town’s alarmed, and you’re all dead men!”
At this point, rather than continue on, the soldiers felt they should instead with all haste go and warn their commanders… and perhaps were not exactly enthusiastic about continuing without an army at their backs. Either way, they let their captives go, though took Revere’s horse, before rushing off.
Revere then simply went back to the house where Adams and Hancock were and then helped them pack up and depart. After traveling with the company to Woburn where Hancock and Adams would ultimately stay, he then returned to Lexington to see what was transpiring.
During his activities there, he reports hearing the first shots of the war. Stating, “When we had got about 100 Yards from the meeting-House the British Troops appeard on both Sides of the Meeting-House. In their Front was an Officer on Horse back. They made a Short Halt; when I saw, & heard, a Gun fired, which appeared to be a Pistol. Then I could distinguish two Guns, & then a Continual roar of Musquetry.”
In the aforementioned deposition to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1775 a couple decades before the preceding account, Revere tells more or less the exact same story, but would also state, for whatever it’s worth, it was the British soldiers who fired first, as he claims when he was passing through the militia ranks directly before the shots were fired, “I heard the commanding officer speake to his men to this purpose, ‘Lett the troops pass by, and don’t molest them, with out [They] begin first.’ I had to go a cross [the] Road… When the… Troops appeared in sight, behind the Meeting House; they made a short halt. When one gun was fired, I heard the report, turned my head, and saw the smoke in front of the Troops, they immediately gave a great shout, ran a few paces, and then the whole fired…”
In the end, the entire ride was extremely effective, with the “alarm and muster” system the colonists had developed for just such an occasion working like a charm, via the riders, bells, drums, bonfires, and alarm guns being fired, making it so that the militias upwards of 25 miles away were already aware a large force was on its way while the British regulars were still being unloaded in Cambridge.
Because of all this, the colonists were able to remove most of the supplies before the British arrived, and while the redcoats did successfully destroy the remainder, from the first shots on, they met with resistance both during those activities and their entire march back to Boston, with minutemen hiding along the road and firing among them. This all resulted in 273 British soldier casualties to 93 American.
Going back to Hancock and Adams’ flight, Hancock’s initial response was allegedly to grab a musket and attempt to join the Patriot militia. But Samuel Adams supposedly convinced him his duty to the cause was not to fight beside the men with a gun, but to join the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and fight in that way there.
Noteworthy while Hancock and Adams were to flee, he left his fiance, Dolly, and his Aunt Lydia behind in Lexington, though instructed Dolly that she was not to return to Boston as it was too dangerous a place to be. To which Dolly reportedly retorted, “Recollect Mr. Hancock, that I am not under your control yet. I shall go to my father tomorrow.”
As noted, Adams and Hancock then set off about five miles away to Woburn, where they spent a few days before departing for Philadelphia. Along the way to Philadelphia, they were reportedly cheered at several points, with Hancock’s reputation given recent events through the roof in the colonies.
Hancock and Adams would only get even more popular among the patriots given that in the aftermath of the initial shots of the war, General Gage issued a statement to the masses, writing, “I do hereby in his Majesty’s name, offer and promise, his most gracious pardon to all persons who shall forthwith lay down their arms, and return to the duties of peaceable subjects, excepting only…, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, whose offences are of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration than that of condign punishment.”
Naturally, among the patriot masses, offenses too flagitious a nature of any other consideration was a very good thing.
Of the journey to Philadelphia and arrival, Hancock would write his fiance on May 7, 1775,
“My Dear Dolly,
I arrived well… After having rode so fast and so many miles you may well think I was much fatigued, but no sooner had I got into the room of the house we were visited by a great number of gentlemen of the first character in the city who took up the evening…. We are to have a large guard in several boats and a number of the city gentlemen will attend us over. I can’t think they will dare attack us. … My poor face and eyes are in a most shocking situation, burnt up and much swell’d and a little painful. I don’t know how to manage with it…. Pray let me hear from you every post. God Bless you my Dear girl, and believe me most sincerely, Yours most affectionately John Hancock”
In the aftermath of this arrival, the then President of the Congress, Peyton Randolph, resigned and John Adams nominated John Hancock to become the new President of Congress, with approval quickly unanimously following on May 24, 1775. This was a role Hancock was remarkably well suited for given his vast experience with business, finance, and negotiations.
On this note, Hancock was dealing with two primary groups internally, one who wanted to work towards delaying measure against the British and to reach a suitable reconciliation where the colonists’ could rejoin the British empire with their freedoms and rights restored. And on the other, the hardcore revolutionaries like Samuel and John Adams, who were, perhaps not quite so publicly yet, still more and more of the mindset that independence from Britain was inevitable.
Functioning as a mediator between the two groups, Benjamin Harrison would observe of Hancock, “Our President is…. Noble… and Generous to a very great Degree.”
Of course, they were rebelling and had countless militia groups now openly opposing the British regulars that needed a commander to unify efforts. This was allegedly the real role in the conflict that Hancock wanted, though it should be noted that despite widespread claims of this, the only hard documented evidence of it was in something John Adams wrote in 1801, alluding to Hancock being disappointed he wasn’t chosen to lead the army. With Adams writing, “But when I came to describe Washington for the commander I never remarked a more sudden and striking change of countenance. Mortification and resentment were expressed as forcibly as his face could exhibit them. Mr. Samuel Adams seconded the motion, and that did not soften the President’s physiognomy at all.”
As to why John Adams went with nominating Virginian George Washington on June 15, 1775, it was generally felt that if they didn’t appoint a Virginian, the southern colonies may not support the cause, and the 43 year old Washington was deemed the most qualified from Virginia who was still young enough to likely be able to survive the conflict if it went on for many years. As for his experience, Washington had previously served as a major in the Virginia militia during the French and Indian War, among other military exploits. His selection was also helped by the fact that Washington’s general demeanor and look reportedly inspired confidence in those around him. As fellow founding father Benjamin Rush would write, “He has so much martial dignity in his deportment that you distinguish him to be a general and a soldier from among ten thousand people.”
However, Washington’s response to the appointment was not exactly enthusiastic, stating “I am truly sensible of the high honor done me in this appointment, yet I feel great distress from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important trust.”
While some might think this was just Washington being publicly humble as was expected at the time when nominated for prominent positions like this, Washington mirrored this sentiment in private letters in a seemingly very genuine way, often lamenting he did not feel qualified for what they were asking him to do. Most strikingly, Patrick Henry would claim that after Washington was voted into the position, he was discussing it with Washington when the newly appointed General’s eyes filled with tears and he lamented, “Remember Mr. Henry, what I now tell you: from the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.”
Nevertheless, he accepted the role, with one of his own rules to live by being, to quote him, “When my country demands sacrifice, personal ease must always be a secondary consideration.”
Naturally feeling unqualified, however, one of his first acts was to purchase every book he could find on leading and managing armies.
Going back to Hancock and his alleged desire for Washington’s role, it’s sometimes claimed that Hancock harbored extreme dislike for Washington in the aftermath, but all evidence is to the contrary, and Hancock even named his only son John George Washington Hancock. So… ya.
On top of that, when Washington would later march into Boston, Washington wrote to Hancock telling him of the state of Hancock’s estate there, and that “I have a particular pleasure in being able to inform you sire that your house has received no damage worth mentioning. Your furniture is in tolerable order, and the family pictures are all left entire and untouched.”
In reply, Hancock invited Washington to live in the house for as long as he wished while there, and that “I assure you, sire I will do all in my power to render your stay agreeable, and my house shall be entirely at your disposal.”
That said, Hancock did appear to want some sort of military position, as he requested to serve under Washington, writing to him on July 10, 1775, “I must beg the favor that you will research some berth for me, in such department as you may judge most proper; for I am determined to act under you, if it be to take a firelock and join the ranks as volunteer.”
His request was politely declined, however, with Hancock’s prodigious business and management skills far more suited to his current role in Congress than as a soldier.
In any event, speaking of Hancock’s son, during a recess of Congress in August of 1775, Hancock made good use of the break and married Dorothy “Dolly” Quincy on the 28th of that month in Connecticut.
As a brief aside, not long before this, none other than Aaron Burr would reportedly come calling on Dolly, with Burr being a nephew of Dolly and Hancock’s Aunt’s host at the time, and apparently Burr did turn Dolly’s head a bit, but the family plans for Hancock and Dolly to wed remained intact. This may, however, have been why Dolly hadn’t been writing to Hancock much, and only short letters when she did, with Hancock lamenting on June 10, 1775,
“My Dear Dolly: I am almost prevailed on to think that my letters to my aunt and you are not read, for I cannot obtain a reply. I have asked a million questions and not an answer to one. I begged you to let me know what things my aunt wanted and you, and many other matters I wanted to know, but not one word in answer…I beg, my dear dolly, you will write me often and long letters, I will forgive the past if you will mend in future… pray write me. I will attend to all your commands. Adieu my dear girl, and believe me to be with great esteem and affection, yours without reserve John Hancock.”
…Man, when even the literal President of Congress and one of the wealthiest, most popular, and charismatic men in all of America gets ghosted by his own fiance… Ouch…
In any event, they would indeed get married anyway despite the ghosting and would the following year have a daughter, who ultimately died as a baby because the past was the worst and you could pretty much just always expect half your kids to die before adulthood up until shockingly recently in history. On that note, they also had their aforementioned son, born two years later, John George Washington Hancock… who would also die, this time at ten years old when he fell while ice skating and hit his head.
Going back to his Presidency, from here Hancock was in his element, and this was seemingly partially why he was chosen for the role, with his primary tasks including mediating, coordinating committees, negotiation, drumming up and distributing funds to finance all the military efforts, convincing colonial officials to send more troops and supplies to join Washington, and otherwise just administering everything, which was a skill he was extremely proficient at from his years of running the House of Hancock.
Speaking of the business side of it all, to give a taste of the difficulties, at the time Massachusetts, for example, was about £11 million in debt, while its citizens were also already being taxed among the highest of any of the colonies. Yet Hancock and Congress somehow needed to raise many millions more, with Washington writing to him at one point in the early going he needed at least a quarter of a million pounds per month to sustain his fledgling army, along with an awful lot of equipment and the like that were in short supply.
Again, while for much of the philosophical and political intrigues side of things, others like John Adams, James Madison, and Ben Franklin and their incredible intellects and knowledge of political science were needed, and for the military side Washington was the best man for the job they had available, for this side of it? The Merchant King John Hancock could not have been better suited for the role he was given coordinating and mediating everything, as well as figuring out how to pay for it all and source the equipment and other resources they needed. In a nutshell, they needed a great businessman and financier, and so they used the one they had. Naturally, to help out in all this, Hancock further brought on board one of his top managers at the House of Hancock, William Palfrey.
As a taste of one small effort that resulted in big things here, it would later be noted in Lives of American Merchants published in October of 1793, “To [Hancock], among others, we owe our independence, our liberty, our prosperity, and our national greatness, and the high rank we hold among the nations of the earth. We are indebted to him for the aid which in our revolutionary struggle was derived from the arms and influence of France; for it was his generosity that furnished the means, when our country was utterly destitute of money or credit, to fit out the alliance frigate to carry colonel laurens, our first accredited diplomatic agent, to the court of the french king, through whose influence and exertions during our darkest period of our revolutionary history, the cooperation of france was secure, and her assistance extended to help us break the chains of that political slavery with which we were bound.”
Of course, the British weren’t going to take any of this sitting down. But General Gage did not have enough manpower to put down the rebellion. He wrote of the state of things to the Secretary of War, “These people show a spirit and conduct against us they never showed against the French…. They are now spirited up by a rage and enthusiasm as great as ever people were possessed of and you must proceed in earnest or give the business up. A small body acting in one spot will not avail, you must have large armies making diversions on different sides, to divide their force. The loss we have sustained is greater than we can bear. Small armies cannot afford such losses, especially when the advantage gained tends to do little more than the gaining of a post.”
And so it was that the British dispatched a massive army led by Admiral Richard Howe and General William Howe to subdue the rebels with any force they deemed necessary.
Hancock would write to the various state legislatures after the arrival of the enemy forces, “Our affairs are hastening fast to a crisis, and the approaching campaign will, in all probability, determine forever the fate of America…. The militia of the United Colonies…. are called upon to say whether they will live slaves or die free men… On your exertions… the salvation of America now…. depends.”
We’ll continue this tale in the next video in this series: Hancock: We Hold These Truths to Be Self Evident.
The post Hancock: Revere’s Ride appeared first on Today I Found Out.
As covered in our video: Hancock: The Rise of the Merchant Prince, while remembered today primarily for his John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock’s importance to the American Revolution was vastly more than history tends to give him credit today, including his public protests against the Stamp Act, among others, helping to sway the masses, as well as the Liberty Affair centered around the seizing of his ship and the widely publicized trial after further whipping everyone up.
This all now brings us to the next stage of Hancock’s life and the revolution, when a relatively rapid sequence of events in Massachusetts further inflamed the masses and, finally, ignited the American Revolution.
Our story today begins about a year after Hancock’s seized ship the Liberty was run ashore and burned to cinders by disgruntled colonists. At this point, tensions were still extremely high in the region in no small part thanks to Boston still being host to the British soldiers sent there to keep order in the aftermath of the Liberty Affair. Beyond the obvious reason the colonists wouldn’t appreciate this, the soldiers were also actively competing for jobs with the locals and on top of that were being used to enforce the practice of impressment, wherein men of fighting age were abducted and forced to serve in the Royal Navy.
Needless to say, by the spring of 1770, clashes between soldiers and civilians were on the rise. In one such incident on March 2, an employee at John Gray’s Ropewalk, which made cables for sailing ships, asked a passing soldier “Do you want work?” When the soldier replied that he did, the employee shot back, “Well, then, go and clean my shithouse!” The irate soldier later returned with a dozen comrades and a violent fistfight broke out.
But this was child’s play compared to what was coming next.
Three days later, on March 5, British Army Captain John Goldfinch was walking down King Street when Edward Garrick, a wigmaker’s apprentice, burst out of his shop and declared: “There goes the fellow who hath not paid my master for dressing his hair!” When Goldfinch ignored him and kept walking, Garrick gave chase, insisting to bystanders that Goldfinch owed him money. A nearby British sentry named Hugh White overhead the argument and confronted Garrick, insisting that “[Goldfinch] is a gentleman, and if he owed you anything he will pay for it.” Garrick spat back that “There are no gentlemen left in the regiment,” leading to a violent argument and White striking Garrick with his musket butt, knocking him to the ground.
The commotion soon drew a large crowd, who began taunting White with cries of “Bloody lobster back!” and pelting him with snowballs and chunks of ice.
Fearing for his life, White retreated from his sentry box to the steps of the nearby customs house, loaded his musket, and began waving it about, warning the crowd to stay back. When the crowd only continued to grow and close in, he banged his musket on the customs house door and steps and cried out: “Turn out, Main Guard!”
Meanwhile, a few blocks north, another mob gathered and began pelting a group of soldiers with snowballs, forcing them to retreat into their barracks. This mob had gathered in response to rumours that the British planned to cut down the Liberty Tree, an elm tree in South Boston which had been hung with effigies of people who had supported the Stamp Act. Upon learning of the situation unfolding at the Customs House, this mob, some two hundred strong, began marching towards King Street to join the other, chanting “Let’s away to the Main Guard!” as they went.
News of the rapidly deteriorating situation soon reached Captain Thomas Preston, officer of the day at the Main Guard barracks. Preston faced a difficult dilemma; if he did not act, Hugh White might be killed or severely injured by the mob. But if he intervened, he risked facing down a mob that greatly outnumbered his own forces. Critically for he and his men’s safety, the law forbade him from opening fire on civilians without direct orders from a Magistrate. After vacillating on it, Preston finally made up his mind, rounding up his men with the cry of “Turn out, damn your bloods, turn out!” With fixed bayonets, Captain Preston and seven men marched out of their barracks and pushed their way through the gathering mob to Private White, still trapped on the steps of the Customs House. But when they attempted to march back to the barracks, the mob closed in tighter, pelting them with snowballs, lumps of coal, oyster shells and other missiles. Preston ordered the crowd to disperse, but was ignored.
It was then that Crispus Attucks, 47-year-old mixed race whaler and stevedore, burst from the crowd, grabbed Private Hugh Montgomery’s musket, and knocked him to the ground. Montgomery immediately scrambled to his feet, cried out “Damn you, fire!” and discharged his musket into the crowd. After a short pause – reported by witnesses as anywhere between six seconds and two minutes, the other soldiers also opened fire on the crowd. By the time Captain Preston yelled “Stop firing! Do not fire!” five men lay dead or dying: Crispus Attucks, rope maker Samuel Gray, mariner James Caldwell, apprentice ivory turner Samuel Maverick, and leather worker Patrick Carr. Six others were seriously wounded, including shipwright’s apprentice Christopher Monk, who eventually died of his wounds in 1780.
In the aftermath, future President John Adams, who in our aforementioned video, Hancock: Rise of the Merchant Prince, would defend his boyhood friend John Hancock against the British in the Liberty Affair, would this time seemingly oddly choose the other side. As to why, it was merely the principle of the thing. Adams wanted to make sure the soldiers got a fair trial, and saw the affair as an opportunity to demonstrate that the colonists could conduct themselves properly according to the rule of law, and were worthy of independence and self-government. He thus readily accepted the case, charging a modest fee of only 18 guineas for his extensive services.
Given tensions at the time and very real mob justice rampant, which is why the soldiers were there in the first place, this placed himself and his family at extreme personal risk, as well as, for all he knew at that point, would see his reputation ruined as the man who not only sided with the British, but seemingly murderers. As for his wife, Abigail, Adams would write on March 5, 1773, that his equally principled other half gave him her full support, “That excellent Lady, who has always encouraged me, burst into a flood of Tears, but said she was very sensible of all the Danger to her and to our Children as well as to me, but she thought I had done as I ought, she was very willing to share in all that was to come and place her trust in Providence.”
In the end, after a lengthy trial, the jury took only a few hours to reach a verdict. On December 5, 1770 – exactly nine months to the day after the massacre – all eight defendants were acquitted of murder, while two – Privates Matthew Kilroy and Hugh Montgomery – were convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter. However, Adams was able to spare them imprisonment by invoking something of a loophole known as Benefit of Clergy.
Adams would sum up after the soldiers were acquitted, “The Part I took in Defence of Cptn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however… one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right.”
Going back to Adams’ childhood friend in John Hancock, while Hancock wasn’t involved the Boston Massacre itself, in the aftermath he lead a committee in demanding Governor Thomas Hutchinson order the removal of the British soldiers in Boston, with Hancock threatening the Governor that if they were not removed, over 10,000 armed colonists would make them leave. And so it was that Boston was finally mostly free of its occupying force, who were sent to Castle William, today Fort Independence, on Castle Island in Boston Harbor.
The good news only got better for the colonists when around this same time, much like had happened when the Stamp Act was repealed as noted in our previous video in this series, the message that most of the Townshend Acts were repealed arrived on one of John Hancock’s ships in April of 1770, with Hancock himself getting to reveal this fact at a town meeting.
Combined with his extremely generous and charismatic nature, as well as the fact that Hancock had sent a number of letters to Parliament protesting the acts, and sent similar letters to many of his extremely wealthy business associates in Britain asking them to put pressure on Parliament to revoke them, and helping to get the soldiers removed from town, let’s just say a more beloved man in Boston you’d be hard pressed to find at this point.
And speaking of being beloved, now at 33 years old and one of the wealthiest people in all of America, Hancock’s Aunt Lydia was set on finding him a suitable wife, though at this point having long been unsuccessful despite countless prominent families she’d had over with their very eligible daughters. Before this, Hancock’s love-life seemingly centered around having courted for nearly a decade the daughter of Captain Joseph Jackson, but he ultimately broke off the relationship for reasons unclear. After this, he also is known to have had a long time mistress in a shop owner at the wharf, one Dorcas Griffith, who allegedly also on the side before and after becoming Hancock’s mistress had a lively alternate trade catering to men of the region with more than just her shop wares. However, the two had some sort of falling out for unknown reasons, though it is speculated to be centered around her support of the British side of things given that when the British left, so did she.
Whatever the case there, Hancock’s Aunt Lydia finally was successful in finding a girl Hancock was interested in marrying in the 23 year old daughter of one of Hancock’s former neighbors as a child in Braintree, Justice Edmund Quincy. Quincy’s daughter, Dorothy, nicknamed “Dolly”, caught Hancock’s eye when Lydia invited her to come vacation with Hancock and her, which went very well and the two were soon affianced.
While all this was happening, Hancock was elected to the Governor’s Council, something that had happened before, but owing to Hancock’s opposition to much of the governing activities, the governor had previously vetoed Hancock’s election. This time, however, in an attempt to woo Hancock over to his side and bury the hatchet, the governor approved it. That said, Hancock himself declined the position, not wanting to so overtly buddy up to the Governor. Also around this time, he was made a Colonel overseeing Boston’s First Corps of Cadets, some of whom by the way would later allegedly take part in the Boston Tea Party.
On the other side of the political conflict, Samuel Adams formed the Boston Committee of Correspondence which, in turn, resulted in the formation of countless more similar local bodies throughout Massachusetts and beyond, in a loose network of groups dedicated to the opposition of various acts of Parliament- with all of these beginning to coordinate their efforts.
Not a good sign for the British government. Who were about to make it all far worse for themselves in an effort to make the British East India Company happy.
As had happened initially with the Stamp Act, Hancock was once again caught in between given the House of Hancock so heavily depended on British trade. Thus, at first, he declined to join the Committee of Correspondence despite how prominent he’d been up to this point in opposing British Parliament efforts. However, when matters began to heat up once again with the revelation that some of the Governor’s private letters had mentioned suspending various liberties of the colonists, as before, Hancock chose to side with the colonists, demanding the governor resign his position.
This all now brings us to the so-called “tea crisis” which the Boston Committee of Correspondence was charged with sorting.
We’ll spare you all the political and mercantile minutiae, but suffice it to say, thanks to rampant smuggling and extremely high taxes on tea in Britain, the British East India Company had a lot of excess tea and couldn’t compete with the prices of smuggled Dutch tea in Britain or the colonies. Further, they were not legally allowed to sell their tea directly to the colonies, increasing prices even more there. That all changed with the Tea Act of 1773. This not only allowed them to sell their tea directly to the colonies, cutting out the middleman in Britain, but the totality of the change in law and reduction of taxes also allowed them to sell it at an even cheaper price than the smuggled Dutch tea in the colonies at the time.
This seemed like a win for everyone, even the colonists who would now be able to get their tea massively cheaper than before legally, and slightly cheaper than they could before with smuggled tea.
But, you see, there were a number of problems with all this from the colonists’ side. First, it was many of their own merchants who were smuggling the Dutch tea in and their prices were now going to be undercut, essentially putting them out of the tea business. On top of that, the Tea Act that enacted all this would in practice give the British a monopoly on tea in the region, with the fear being this would spread to other goods via similar parliamentary action. On top of that, there was, of course, the principle of the thing- that the colonists still were resentful of any such taxes levied against them, particularly with such taxes being used to pay for British officials and soldiers occupying the colonies that the colonists weren’t happy about being there.
Of course, both Parliament and the British East India Company were well aware of the potential negative reaction to all this, and it was even lobbied that they should just get rid of the part of the legislation that taxed the tea as if it was kept, it was thought the colonists would outright reject the tea no matter how cheap they made it. WIthout the tax, this would still all be a major benefit to the British East India Company then as was one of the main points of the legislation. However, Prime Minister Lord North pushed back on this, insisting the tax must be kept in order to help pay for the salaries of the various colonial officials. It was overall hoped, however, given the price would be much cheaper than before, and the tax so low, the colonists would ultimately just accept it.
When this was decided, the British East India merchants were hopeful they could sweep the whole issue of the tax under the rug by just paying it directly in London or in some other clandestine fashion the colonists would not be so overtly aware of, with the tax very much masked in the super cheap price of the tea.
It was not to be, however, and when the colonists got word of the tax and incoming tea, they united against it via the aforementioned Committees.
There was a problem, however. Seven ships containing over 2,000 chests of tea were on their way, bound for Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York.
So how to respond?
A boycott on tea in this case wasn’t deemed sufficient. A greater message needed sent back to Parliament.
And so it was that protestors successfully coerced the tea consignees in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York to resign their positions, with the tea in Charleston ultimately unclaimed and seized because of it, and the tea in New York and Philadelphia seeing the captains choosing to just return to England without unloading their cargo.
But then we get to Massachusetts, the birthplace of the revolution. There, Governor Hutchinson was determined to not have this happen and made sure the tea consignees refused to yield to the colonists’ demands. It probably helped that two of the consignees were the Governor’s sons. Thus, they did not resign, and were prepared to do their jobs when the tea arrived.
And so it was that when the Dartmouth arrived with its load of tea on November 28, 1773, a meeting was set at Faneuil Hall on the 29th, though because of how many thousands of people showed up, it had to be moved to the Old South Meeting House.
There it was decided that a group of colonists would be in charge of making sure the tea could not be unloaded and to monitor the ship and harbor 24/7. They also entreated the captain of the Dartmouth, James Hall, to simply return back to England, similar to what had happened in New York and Philadelphia. Noteworthy the owner of the Dartmouth and the Beaver which was soon to arrive with more tea was Nantucket, Massachusetts native William Rotch who ultimately was also on board with the plan to simply send the ships back.
The issue, however, was that Governor Hutchinson would not back down, refusing to let Captain Hall leave without first paying the import duty tax, whether he unloaded the cargo or not. There was also the fact that British Admiral John Mantagu had ships just outside the harbor set to intervene if the Dartmouth tried to leave without paying the duty, or if the colonists forced her to leave.
Thus, Captain Hall could not unload his tea thanks to the colonists and he could not return to England without paying the tax. And if he did pay the tax, let’s just say the colonists would not be pleased with their fellow colonist William Rotch or him. A good old fashioned stand-off.
You might at this point wonder why the governor didn’t simply send to Castle William for troops to be dispatched to disband the colonists guarding the docks day and night. Well, the consignees did request this, but the request was denied. Presumably with the Boston Massacre fresh on their minds, they didn’t wish to put their soldiers in close proximity to the now even more enraged colonists.
And, regardless, the Governor felt he was going to win by default.
You see, the law required if the cargo was not unloaded and duties paid within 20 days, the customs officials could confiscate the cargo regardless of what the Captain wanted to do. This would allow Admiral Montagu and soldiers from Castle William to bring ships over and simply take the cargo back to Castle William. From there, at their leisure they could at any time clandestinely sell it to any merchants willing to buy it. This would see the tea successfully unloaded onto American soil no matter what the colonists wanted.
In the interim of the deadline, two more tea ships, the Beaver and the Eleanor, arrived and were subsequently stuck in the same boat… metaphorically speaking.
And so it was that with only a day to spare on the deadline where the tea could be confiscated, roughly 5,000-7,000 people, about 1 in 3 of all humans in Boston at the time, gathered at the Old South Meeting House, with John Hancock moderating the debate.
John Adams would later sum up the state of things at this point as discussed at the meeting, “They could not send it back, the Governor, Admiral and Collector and Controller would not suffer it. It was in their Power to have saved it-but in no other. It could not get by the Castle, the Men of War &c. Then there was no other Alternative but to destroy it or let it be landed. To let it be landed would be giving up the Principle of Taxation by Parliamentary Authority, against which the Continent have struggled for 10 years, it was losing all our labour for 10 years and subjecting ourselves and our Posterity forever to Egyptian Taskmasters — to Burthens, Indignities, to Ignominy, Reproach and Contempt, to Desolation and Oppression, to Poverty and Servitude.”
The Boston Gazette on December 20th would further report of the meeting’s events “…being inform’d by Mr. Rotch [the owner of the Dartmouth and Beaver], that a clearance was refus’d him, they enjoyn’d him immediately to enter a protest and apply to the governor for a pass port by the castle, and adjourn’d again till three o’clock for the same day. At which time they again met and after waiting till near sunset Mr. Rotch came in and inform’d them that he had accordingly enter’d his protest and waited on the governor for a pass, but his excellency told him he could not consistent with his duty grant it until his vessel was qualified. The people finding all their efforts to preserve the property of the East India company and return it safely to London, frustrated by the tea consignees, the collector of the customs and the governor of the province, DISSOLVED their meeting.”
Before the meeting broke up, however, with the continued refusal by the governor, Samuel Adams famously stated, “This meeting can do nothing further to save the country.”
Also famously during all this, when the mood of the masses was seemingly dead set on the destroying the tea, rather than use his popularity and influence to try to dissuade anyone of anything, John Hancock would state, “Let every man do what is right in his own eyes.”
And it was on.
What followed was the then named “Destruction of the Tea”, though today is better known as the Boston Tea Party, in which a group of colonists, some of whom disguising themselves as Native Americans in a symbolic rejection of their British birthrights, boarded the three ships. The aforementioned Boston Gazette news account would describe what happened next,
“A number of brave & resolute men, determined to do all in their power to save their country from the ruin which their enemies had plotted, in less than four hours, emptied every chest of tea on board the three ships commanded by the captains Hall, Bruce, and Coffin, amounting to 342 chests, into the sea! without the least damaged done to the ships or any other property. The masters and owners are well pleas’d that their ships are thus clear’d ; and the people are almost universally congratulating each other on this happy event.”
As to how the individuals got into the holds without doing any damage to the ships, well, the captains had seemingly told their crews not to resist. For example, it was reported that the group that boarded the Beaver, “sent a man to the mate, who was on board, in his cabin, with a message, politely requesting the use of a few lights, and the brig’s keys—so that as little damage as possible might be done to the vessel;—and such was the case. The mate acted the part of a gentleman altogether. He handed over the keys without hesitation, and without saying a single word, and sent his cabin-boy for a bunch of candles, to be immediately put in use.”
It was even reported that after the dumping, the rather polite rebels even took the time to sweep the decks clean, though they were cognisant of the fact that at any time Admiral Montagu and his men could descend upon them, so worked as quickly as they could.
As for Montagu, he was not ignorant of what was happening, and stated he watched the entire thing, even taunting some of those involved. As to why he did nothing, he would justify his actions, or lack thereof, the following day, “I could easily have prevented the Execution of this Plan, but must have endangered the Lives of many innocent People by firing upon the Town.”
In the aftermath, it would be none other than Paul Revere who was dispatched with the message of events by the Boston Committee of Correspondence to inform similar committees in New York. With his message more or less mirroring exactly what was reported in the Boston Gazette the next day, in parts word for word.
Another interesting aside is that there was also a lesser known Destruction of the Tea that occurred in Cape Cod shortly after the Boston tea party. Unlike in Boston, the tea in Cape Cod was successfully delivered and sold, only to see members of the Sons of Liberty track down where it was being stored, after which they destroyed it in March of 1774. Being rather thorough, after this, they found one merchant who’d already purchased some in Davison, Newman and Co. and, dressed as Native Americans again, broke into the tea shop, took the tea to the harbor, and unceremoniously dumped it in.
While all of this might have seemed like an overreaction to what was, after all, much cheaper legal tea, Hancock would write in a letter dated December 21, 1773, “No one circumstance could possibly have taken place more effectively to unite the Colonies than this manouvre of the Tea. It is Universally Resented here and people of all ranks detest the measure.”
John Adams would chime in in his diary on December 17, 1773, “This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire. The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered—something notable And striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in History.”
Adams would also write to one Catherine Macaulay back in London in the aftermath warning, “let me tell those wise Ministers, I would not advise them to try many more such Experiments. A few more such Experiments will throw most of the Trade of the Colonies into the Hands of the Dutch, or will erect an independent Empire in America, perhaps both. Nothing but equal Liberty and kind Treatment can Secure the attachment of the Colonies to Britain…”
It should also at this point be explicitly pointed out that because of the extreme stigma with regards to tea in the aftermath of all this, tea drinking in America sharply dropped in popularity and coffee came to dominate.
Going back to John Hancock, other than his aforementioned words at the final meeting to the crowd, he seemingly did not directly take part in the event as far as history is aware. However, given his extremely prominent position in the opposition, the British were convinced he was behind it, with one officer proclaiming “it was KING HANCOCK and the damn’d sons of liberty.” With this nickname ultimately being adopted by the colonists, even used as a rallying cry of “King Hancock forever!”
One of those who did definitely take part in the Tea Party, Joseph Dyar, was also soon after arrested for boasting about his part in the affair. And on his way back to England after being arrested, he would claim both a British colonel and Admiral Montagu had tried to bribe him to claim that John Hancock had been behind the Destruction of the Tea, though British officials would later deny they ever made such an offer to Dyar, who was ultimately released and sent back to America in October of 1774.
Whatever the case there, back in Britain, Parliament was in an uproar about the event, with Prime Minister Lord North declaring in the House of Commons on April 22, 1774, “The Americans have tarred and feathered your subjects, plundered your merchants, burnt your ships, denied all obedience to your laws and authority; yet so clement and so long forbearing has our conduct been that it is incumbent on us now to take a different course. Whatever may be the consequences, we must risk something; if we do not, all is over.”
Attempting to smooth things over, New York Merchant Robert Murray banded with others and offered to pay for the lost tea, but Lord North rejected their request. And instead Parliament passed a sequence of what would ultimately be dubbed the “Intolerable Acts” as punishment, with three of them directed solely at Massachusetts.
These were: the Boston Port Act- which closed the port until both the colonists paid for the destroyed tea and officials were satisfied with the Boston citizens’ order; the Massachusetts Government Act- removing the Massachusetts charter and making the colony more directly subject to Britain via most colonial government positions now to be appointed by the governor or Parliament or King. This also mostly banned town meetings in all of Massachusetts without governor assent. Finally the Administration of Justice Act- which made it so any royal officials accused of a crime would have their trial now take place in Britain, meaning any witnesses against such officials would have to travel to Britain to testify, thus most any official could now get away with an awful lot without fear of reprisal. On this one, the British government felt that the colonists were no longer capable of giving officials a fair trial, though the colonists fired back that they had done just this with the Boston Massacre despite the extreme tensions at the time.
Regardless of these Acts only leveled at Massachusetts, other colonies didn’t take kindly to Parliament asserting dominance over Massachusetts, ultimately continuing the trend of uniting the colonies together against what was more and more considered not their common homeland, but their common enemy.
It didn’t help that Britain also tacked on the Quartering Act to expand the power of British troops to find housing in the colonies. On this, if suitable housing was not provided for the soldiers by members of the colonies, the soldiers could simply occupy buildings as they pleased, though contrary to popular belief it would seem they were technically only allowed to occupy unoccupied buildings in such a case, not currently occupied private homes as is usually claimed.
Also in response to the Tea Party, General Thomas Gage was assigned to replace Hutchinson as governor. Noteworthy General Gage was a man who once wrote, “America is a mere bully, from one end to the other, and the Bostonians by far the greatest bullies.” And that “democracy is too prevalent in America” and things like town meetings and the like should be abolished to squash it and the rising threat it presented.
Speaking of such town meetings, a few months after the Boston Tea Party, on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1774, John Hancock would continue to assert himself as a leader of the budding rebellion, giving a public speech calling for the colonists to prepare to fight if necessary, stating,
“Security to the persons and properties of the governed is so obviously the design and end of civil government, that to attempt a logical proof of it would be like burning tapers at noonday, to assist the sun in enlightening the world; and it cannot be either virtuous or honorable to attempt to support a government of which this is not the great and principal basis… Some boast of being friends to government; I am a friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principles of reason and justice; but I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny…the troops of George III. have crossed the wide Atlantic, not to engage an enemy, but to assist a band of traitors in trampling on the rights and liberties of his most loyal subjects in America… let not the miscreant host vainly imagine that we feared their arms. No; them we despised; we dread nothing but slavery. Death is the creature of a poltroon’s brains; ’tis immortality to sacrifice ourselves for the salvation of our country… That gloomy night, the pale-faced moon, and the affrighted stars that hurried through the sky, can witness that we fear not death…. I conjure you, by all that is dear, by all that is honorable, by all that is sacred, not only that ye pray, but that ye act; that, if necessary, ye fight, and even die, for the prosperity of our Jerusalem. Break in sunder, with noble disdain, the bonds with which the Philistines have bound you.“
Naturally from all this, a few months after his arrival, General Gage would remove Hancock as Colonel of the Boston Cadets on August 1, 1774, though the Cadets did not take this lying down, meeting not long after and voting to disband in protest. After this, they gave their uniforms and equipment to Hancock for safe keeping until they could reform. Although disbanded, some of them would go on to join the revolutionary forces.
In any event, beyond all this, General Gage would also cancel all meetings of the General Court.
But, once again, if you take away people’s legal avenues to resist what they deem injustices, they will simply turn to illegal ways to do the exact same thing.
Thus, the colonists decided if the General Court couldn’t convene, they’d take the first full steps towards overt treason, establishing in October of 1774 the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, with this body completely independent from the British, and with none other than John Hancock as their chosen President. Seeing the writing on the wall for what was coming, among other things, this Congress under Hancock established the first of the minutemen companies that would soon be so critical to the rebellion.
Fast-forward to December of 1774, Hancock was elected to the Second Continental Congress, now serving both there and in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress as President.
And so it was that in April of 1775, Samuel Adams and John Hancock left Boston to attend the Provincial Congress in Concord. Deeming it unsafe to return to Boston afterwards, Adams and Hancock decided to instead stay at Hancock’s brief childhood home in Lexington. And if those two town names of Lexington and Concord put so closely in conjunction to one another are cluing you into that something major was about to go down, you are correct.
With these more overtly treasonous activities taking place, Secretary of State William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, instructed General Gage “to arrest the principal actors and abettors in the Provincial Congress whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason and rebellion.”
Shortly after this, on the night of April 18, 1775, General Gage dispatched a large contingent of soldiers to Concord, instructing them to destroy caches of military supplies the colonists had been storing there, and, while it’s not totally clear today based on written orders that survive, it was rumored they were to go arrest John Hancock and Samuel Adams in Lexington as well. We’ll have more on this in the next installment of this series- Hancock: Revere’s Ride.
The post Hancock: Igniting the Revolution appeared first on Today I Found Out.
“The troops of George the third have crossed the Atlantic, not to engage an enemy, but to assist a band of traitors in trampling on the rights and liberties of his most loyal subjects… Some boast of being friends to government; I am a friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principles of reason and justice; but I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny.”
These are the words of John Hancock spoken during the 1774 Boston Massacre commemoration at Faneuil Hall. While most today only know John Hancock for his name coming to be an expression when referring to one’s signature, it turns out there was good reason his signature was the most prominent on the Declaration of Independence.
Having risen from relatively humble origins to one of the wealthiest men in all of America, with a large part of his fortune depending on trade with Britain, when it was time to take sides, unlike so many of his elite contemporaries in his same boat, he curiously chose to sink his business and side with the rebels. Soon after, he was involved in a massive number of the early efforts against the British, from the Liberty Affair, to the Boston Tea Party, to being the principle reason for Paul Revere’s famous ride. Soon after this he was made President of the Continental Congress with his business and management acumen in that role being a huge reason the rebellion was able to function in the early going. In that role he was also the chief signer of the Declaration of Independence, later nine time governor of Massachusetts, and overall one of the most well known, and popular men in all of America during his lifetime, with at one point his popularity with the masses combined with his extreme wealth seeing the British mockingly nickname him “King Hancock.” Later, this moniker was taken up by the colonists as a term of endearment for the man, and even allegedly a rally cry during the famous battle of Lexington and Concord that kicked off the war. And yet, a funny thing happened after he died. Despite John Hancock being arguably one of the most critical of the revolutionaries in the first half of the affair, and his popularity with the masses of America being almost unparalleled in his lifetime as noted, for a variety of reasons, popular history would very quickly mostly forget the man other than his famous signature. In fact, the first full biography on John Hancock wasn’t even written until the 20th century, and it’s only been in recent decades historians have started to completely re-evaluate his story given the significance of so much that he was involved in, and the rather silly reasons, from a modern perspective, that contributed to him being so quickly dismissed after his death.
As one of the greatest Founding Fathers of them all in John Adams would write a few decades after Hancock passed away, “James Otis, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock were the three most essential characters [in the revolution]; and Great Britain knew it, though America does not. Great and important and excellent characters, aroused and excited by these, arose in Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, South Carolina, and in all the other States, but these three were the first movers, the most constant, steady, persevering springs, agents, and most disinterested sufferers and firmest pillars of the whole Revolution.”
With such high praise from a man who himself was arguably in the top 3 of shapers of the budding United States, I think it’s time to get to know the individual he heaped such similar praise on. So without further ado, here now is the largely forgotten story of John Hancock. And we start, with the rise of this Merchant Prince.
Born on January 23, 1737 in a part of Braintree Massachusetts which would become present day Quincy, John Hancock’s life seemed destined to be relatively common. At the time of his birth, Braintree was comprised of only a few dozen families, though notably there was another baby there with Hancock, future President John Adams, who John Hancock’s father baptized only about a year and a half before baptizing his own son. As to those baptisms, Hancock’s father was one Reverend John Hancock Jr, a former Harvard graduate and librarian at that university who became a pastor at the United First Parish Church in Quincy several years before John Hancock was born. As the son and grandson of ministers, it seemed likely that the young boy himself would go on to become a minister, but it was not to be. You see, when he was a mere 7 years old, his father suddenly died at the age of just 41.
With no real means of supporting her family, initially his mother, Mary, and siblings went to live with his grandfather, bishop John Hancock Sr., in Lexington. As a brief aside, this home is where Paul Revere was initially heading to during his famous midnight ride just before the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Hancock’s rise and then extremely prominent role in the Revolution likely would have never taken place if not for Bishop Hancock Sr.’s other son, and John Hancock’s uncle, Thomas Hancock.
After leaving home at a mere 14 years old, Thomas initially worked as an apprentice bookseller and indentured servant to one Samuel Gerrish in Boston. Seven years later he had completed his contract, and thereafter opened his own bookstore. Not long after that, he started his own publishing house and later even a paper mill, which all ended up being extremely lucrative as Boston was, at the time, the central hub for publishing among the colonies. From here, Thomas expanded to wholesaling, then commodity bartering, next up investment banking, shipping and beyond, among other things importing or exporting everything from rum, fish, whale oil, and various manufactured goods, over the course of almost three decades building up an extremely prominent mercantile business known as the House of Hancock.
The only problem in all of this was that Thomas and his wife, Lydia, despite many years of marriage, had no children of their own and he was desirous of an heir. Naturally, with John Hancock’s father now dead, an arrangement was struck between the bishop, Mary, and Thomas. Thomas would support John’s mother and siblings and John would be sent to live with Thomas and Lydia at their estate at the top of Beacon Hill, where they would train him up to someday take over the family business, making John the heir of one of the largest fortunes in the colonies.
Naturally, this agreement being extremely beneficial to all involved, the deal was struck and Thomas took John to his home and his training began, first in the still prominent to this day Boston Public Latin School, which in Hancock’s time was already distinguished by such students as Benjamin Franklin, and would ultimately be the school that 5 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence would attend. Hancock would study for five years there before, at the age of 13 in 1750, he took and passed the entrance exams for Harvard, the second youngest in his class. Noteworthy during his time at Harvard, he also met up with one of his former friends who was attending at the same time, John Adams.
Unlike the rigid Adams, however, the young teen Hancock apparently had a reputation as a bit of a partier and drinker while at Harvard, including getting occasionally severely reprimanded for it. But nevertheless, at the age of 17, he graduated and was ready for the next stage of his education, working directly under his uncle at the House of Hancock, both learning business and being shaped into a prominent socialite among the elite. While Hancock had seemingly not taken his studies too seriously at Harvard, relatively speaking, now with his true future profession in sight, his attitudes seemed to shift remarkably, quickly becoming not just a master of finance and business, but reportedly extremely good with negotiation and that side of the business as well, and in general was noted for his extremely charismatic demeanor. John Adams would later write of this and Hancock’s work ethic that he quickly “became an example to all the young men of the town. Wholly devoted to business, he was as regular and punctual at his store as the sun in its course.”
Along the way he also took to being one of the best dressed men in all of America. From his bob wig to his velvet coats and ruffled shirts, down to his silver buckled shoes, he was the picture of an 18th century dandy who would have fit in with the best and most foppishly dressed in the courts of European aristocracy. This fact would somewhat bizarrely shape how history would view him as we’ll get into.
In any event, thanks to the Seven Years War and the House of Hancock’s heavy involvement in that in finance and military supplies on the side of the British, the firm was vaulted to even greater heights. When the conflict was over in 1760, the 23 year old John Hancock was sent to England for about a year on a mission to establish closer ties with various individuals there for the company- a final test for the young man by his Uncle, with his work up to this point exemplary. On this, Thomas wrote to some of his business associates that when John returned, if all went well, he intended to make him a full partner in the firm. As for John, Thomas wrote and advised him to “be frugal of Expenses, do Honor to your Country and furnish Your Mind with all wise Improvements… God Bless you and believe me, Your Loving Uncle.”
Hancock seemingly was blown away by London and all it offered, as well as just its sheer size and extreme populace of over 700,000 people. For reference here, at the time Boston had a mere 15,000 people and the largest city in the colonies, Philadelphia, wasn’t much greater at 19,000. Soaking it up, Hancock traveled around on business both locally in England and to Amsterdam, among other places. He also was there around the time of the coronation of King George III. But when he requested to stay longer to attend the coronation, unfortunately all was not well back home. While the business was prospering to an extreme degree, Thomas had grown ill thanks to occasional severe bouts with gout and some form of nervous disorder. Thus, he denied John’s request to allow him to stay to see the King crowned, and not long after wrote to his company’s countless business associates that he was making John a partner in the House of Hancock, and began the process of stepping back from day to day operations in favor of letting John spearhead things. A little over a year and a half later, on August 1, 1764, Thomas Hancock had a stroke and died.
While Thomas made many philanthropic bequests and deeded his mansion and household slaves to his wife (though noteworthy John Hancock would later free these slaves not long after himself inheriting them after his Aunt’s death), Thomas also left the majority of his fortune to his nephew. As to the size of the estate at this point, this was estimated to be over 70,000 pounds diversified in everything from ships, real estate, interest bearing loans and the like. While there is no good way to translate that amount to modern dollars, for at least one reference point, a few years earlier Thomas Hancock had sold a large estate he owned in Lexington for 476 pounds.
And so it was that the 27 year old John Hancock was now one of the richest men in all of America, head of one of the most prominent firms in the colonies, and fully trained up to vault the House of Hancock to even greater heights. Which he did do at first, but larger concerns soon interrupted all this.
As John Adams would write, “not less than a thousand families were, every day in the year, dependent on Mr. Hancock for their daily bread. Consider his real estate in Boston, in the country, in Connecticut, and the rest of New England. Had Mr. Hancock fallen asleep to this day, he would now awake one of the richest men. Had he persevered in business as a private merchant, he might have erected a house of Medicis… [But] no man’s property was ever more entirely devoted to the public.”
On this, with extremely close business ties in England and otherwise a loyal British subject, at this point everything was set up for Hancock to be a staunch loyalist in the upcoming conflict. Things would begin to shift, however, thanks to a handful of acts put forth by the rather deeply in debt British government, such as the Sugar Act of 1764. This was more or less just an updated version of the Molasses Act of 1733, which was passed not so much to actually collect any taxes on the lucrative Molasses trade in the colonies, but rather to try to kill trade from the French West Indies, at the behest of the plantation owners of the British West Indies. The issue for the colonists is this would also have simultaneously killed such things as their lucrative rum industry. So instead of adhering to the Molasses Act, they simply took to mass smuggling and bribing officials. It worked and nobody was too bothered with the Molasses Act in the end because of it.
The Sugar Act, in contrast, was actually meant to collect revenue, and thus they lowered the tax rate by half from the Molasses Act, and increased provisions and personnel to try to make sure they could collect it. As for why Parliament thought the colonists should be subjected to such a tax, after the Seven Years War, Britain’s national debt had almost doubled as a result, and in the aftermath they’d also decided that they needed to keep a standing army in the colonies of about 10,000 soldiers. But not exactly flush with cash, they needed a way to pay for them, and felt that because the soldiers were, in part, there for the colonists’ protection, they should, in turn, pay for them partially through this tax.
Naturally, the colonists, who generally resented the presence of the British army for various reasons even at this point and wanted them gone, didn’t agree. Further, this tax hit right when something of an economic depression was occuring in the colonies in the aftermath of the Seven Years War.
Then, of course, there was the principle of the thing. Samuel Adams would sum up the colonists’ argument against the Act, “For if our Trade may be taxed why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & every thing we possess or make use of? …If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?”
As a brief aside here, as was alluded to in our previous quote from John Adams about the three most important pillars of the revolution, Samuel Adams is another interesting character oft’ forgotten today who, without whom, there may have been no revolution, with his countless letters and articles published in the newspapers throughout the colonies spurring the masses towards this, among so much else he was involved with in the early going, similar to John Hancock. And, in fact, Samuel Adams is generally credited as being the one to convince John Hancock of the right of the patriot cause in the first place. As to why he’s often forgotten, there are several factors that went into it, but John Adams would ring in hinting at one of the issues- because so much of Samuel Adams’ writings and contributions in this way were lost or not credited to him. This was partially because, for reasons of not wanting to get hung, he published so much anonymously. And with regards to his personal correspondence with so many involved in the revolution, he also had a habit of burning all his letters. This was something John Adams would try to dissuade him from for posterity’s sake, but when he asked Samuel Adams why he burned them given the cost to the historical record and to himself in this, Samuel replied “Whatever becomes of me, my friends shall never suffer by my negligence.” In a nutshell, if the British got their hands on his correspondence, it may not just be Samuel Adams who would hang.
But in any event, going back to the taxes, the water got even hotter with the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, which put a tax on various legal documents and, unlike with smuggling, was mostly impossible to get around as any such legal document not possessing the required stamp wasn’t valid.
Despite the grumblings from the colonists, across the pond, member of parliament Charles Townshend argued more or less that the colonists should get over it, stating “and now will these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from heavy weight of the burden which we lie under?”
To which member of Parliament, Seven Years War veteran, and alleged coiner of the term “Sons of Liberty” in this very speech, Colonel Isaac Barré, would respond, “They planted by your care? No! Your oppression planted ’em in America. They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable country where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable… They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect of ’em. As soon as you began to care about ‘em, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule over ’em, in one department and another… sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon ’em; men whose behaviour on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them… They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence, have exerted a valour amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defence of a country whose frontier while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument …. The people I believe are as truly loyal as any subjects the king has, but a people jealous of their liberties and who will vindicate them if ever they should be violated…”
Colonel Barré’s warnings, however, were not listened to and Parliament persisted.
Going back to Hancock’s view of all this, while seemingly sympathetic to those opposing these acts and having spoken out against such taxes, Hancock initially attempted to stay mostly neutral in it all, writing, “I am heartily sorry for the great burden laid upon us, we are not able to bear all things, but must submit to higher powers…”
Reflecting his desire to more or less stay out of it, he would also write to the governor when asked of his opinions, “I seldom meddle with Politicks, & indeed have not Time now to Say anything on that head.”
However, when mobs in Boston started targeting wealthy merchants and their homes, he finally had to pick a side, though not the one most in his position did. He not only threw his public support behind the protestors, but helped to fund their efforts too. On the former, for example, proclaiming at the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 in New York, “I will not be a slave. I have the right to the Liberties and Privileges of the English Constitution & I as an Englishman will enjoy them.” Despite the extreme negative impact on his business, he also joined in with countless others in boycotting British goods.
On top of this, he also began writing to his many prominent business associates in England asking them to put pressure on parliament to repeal the act. For one example, he writes,
“Our trade will entirely stagnate for it is the united resolution and determination of the people here not to carry on business under a stamp… I now tell you… you will find it come to pass that the people of this country will never suffer themselves to be made slaves of by a submission to that Damned act. But I shall now open to you my own determinations… it is my invariable opinion that this Act is unconstitutional and cruel, the expense of which we are not able to support; that I have come to a serious resolution not to send one ship more to sea nor to have any kind of connection in business under a stamp… I am determined as soon as I know that they are resolved to insist on this act to sell my stock in trade and shut up my warehouse doors… I am free and determined to be so I will not willingly and quietly subject myself to slavery. We are a people worthy of saving and our trade so much to your advantage worth keeping… on your side… …Thus much I thought to mention to you to let you see some of the ill Consequences of this act, and they are what will greatly affect Great Britain in the End, and Trade once lost is not easily Retrieved… -Your sincere friend but an enemy to the Stamps, John Hancock”
Ultimately their protesting efforts were successful, and the Stamp Act was repealed after only four months.
Important to the story at hand today on John Hancock’s rise in the nation, it wasn’t just repealed, but news of the repeal was brought by one of Hancock’s own ships, leading some to believe that Hancock had played an even more prominent role than he did.
His popularity locally was also boosted when, in the aftermath, he held a massive party for all in the town to celebrate. As reported in a local paper, “John Hancock Esq, who gave a grand and elegant entertainment to the genteel part of the town, and treated the populace with a pipe of Madeira wine, erected at the front of his house, which was magnificently illuminated, a stage for the exhibition of fireworks, which was to answer those of the sons of liberty! At dusk the scene opened by the discharge of twelve rockets from each stage; after which the figures on the pyramid were uncovered, making a beautiful appearance. To give a description of the great variety of fireworks exhibited from this time till eleven oclock would be endless- the air was filled with rockets- the ground with beehives and serpents- and the two stages with wheels of fireworks of various sorts…. At eleven oclock, the signal being given by a discharge of 21 rockets, the horizontal wheel on the top of the pyramid or obelisk was played off, ending in the discharge of 6 dozen of serpents in the air, which concluded the show”
Noteworthy in accounts of the party and aftermath is that none other than Paul Revere gets a mention, having engraved the obelisk.
Thanks to Hancock’s popularity and now openness to become involved in politics for the first time, in May of 1766, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
His popularity would only rise further with significant continued philanthropy with the local populace, from substantial donations to a variety of local churches, to distributing firewood to the poor in winter, to occasionally abstaining from collecting rent from among his tenants who were struggling, to regular free concerts and entertainment for the community, to public service improvements to the the town Common including walkways, trees, and hundreds of street lamps. He also around this time began serving on dozens of local committees and just in general had a great reputation for being generous to everyone, right down to when a fire broke out in a local bake house, he gave funds to the individuals affected to rebuild. This was something he and his uncle had frequently seemingly done as a matter of course, such as when a fire had previously spread throughout the town in 1760 making many of his tenants and others homeless. The House of Hancock’s response was to distribute a large sum of money among those who were affected to help them recover from the ordeal.
As John Adams would state of Hancock, “If Benevolence, Charity, Generosity were ever personified in North America, they were in John Hancock.”
Not just that, but he also throughout all this became an even bigger employer in the region. As colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson would note, Hancock “…changed the course of his uncle’s business, and built, and employed in trade, a great number of ships, and in this way, by building at this time several houses, he found work for a great number of tradesmen, made himself popular, was chosen selectman, representative, moderator of town meetings, etc.”
On top of this, he was, once again, noted as being extremely charismatic and despite his high station in life, had a strong reputation for treating commoners no differently than he did his fellow elites, something that wasn’t exactly the norm at the time.
Needless to say, despite being among the wealthiest in the Americas at the time, with most of such ilk not exactly always seen in the best light by the masses, John Hancock was an exception. And he was about to get massively more popular outside of his home turf.
You see, still trying to drum up funds from the colonies and seemingly not getting the message with the escalating protests of the previous taxes, Parliament decided to try a different tack and pass a bunch of them in rapid succession, known collectively as the Townshend Acts.
In response, Samuel Adams issued a Circular Letter, making the formal argument that because the colonists were not represented in Parliament, that issuing such taxes on them violated the British Constitution.
In response to this, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Hillsborough, ordered the Massachusetts Court to revoke the letter, to which the Court responded in a landslide vote of 92 to 17 for Lord Hillsborough to shut up and mind his own business- denying his request. In response to that, Governor Francis Bernard went ahead and prorogued the assembly.
Naturally, temporarily taking away the only legal way for the colonists to protest meant they were left with only illegal ways. Unsurprisingly, the situation began to further deteriorate. And John Hancock was about to be at the center of it.
Being one of the largest importers and exporters in the colonies and smuggling being exceedingly common as noted, and even more so now with the additional taxes, the House of Hancock was certainly suspected of smuggling, though no proof was forthcoming. Nevertheless, on April 9, 1768, customs officials boarded one of Hancock’s recently arrived ships, the Lydia, sitting in Boston Harbor. Nothing amiss with that, just doing their job. However, one of the officials, Owen Richards, further attempted to search the hold of the vessel. When Hancock was allerted, and finding that the agents had no writ of assistance authorizing them to search his ship, with their prerogative only to observe what was loaded or unloaded, he and his men forcibly and under arms removed Richards from the hold and made he and his companion remain on the deck only.
As a result of this rough treatment, the officials attempted to take legal action against Hancock, but Attorney General Jonathan Sewall rejected their pleas, noting Hancock hadn’t actually broken any laws here. That said, they then appealed to the Commissioners in England to overrule Sewall, but before a reply could be had on the matter, they’d be satisfied with trying to go after Hancock in a different way. Noteworthy of this first event though, as the customs agents were physically removed from the hold, this is sometimes claimed to be the first physical violence against British officials in the Revolution.
Whatever the case there, let’s just say the masses on the colonist side thought even higher of Hancock after this, not only because he was allegedly smuggling goods to avoid paying the deemed injustice taxes, but essentially giving the finger to the customs agents trying to inspect and catch him at it.
But going back to going after Hancock in a different way- enter the Liberty Affair which, in turn, through a sequence of events partially as a result of it all ultimately lead to the Boston Massacre.
On all this- on May 9, 1768 Hancock’s ship, Liberty, arrived in Boston harbor in the evening carrying a shipment of Madeira wine, Hancock’s personal favorite, only to be inspected the morning after its arrival by customs collectors Joseph Harrison and Benjamin Hallowell who found that about 3/4 of the ship’s hold was empty. While this was suspicious, two other customs agents had been on the ship all night since its arrival and in sworn statements stated that nothing had been taken off the ship. Noteworthy is that these agents were extremely incentivized to reveal any smuggling activity as they would be granted one third of the value of the smuggled goods if they could catch someone doing this. But in this case, with the customs agents claiming nothing was taken off the ship, despite much of the hold being empty, nothing was to be done despite the raised eyebrows. Hancock paid his taxes on what was there and seemingly the matter was resolved.
That is, until about a month later, one of the customs agents who’d been aboard the Liberty all night after its arrival, Thomas Kirk, would claim there had actually been cargo unloaded in the night and the only reason he hadn’t said anything was that the Captain of the ship, John Marshall, had threatened he would be killed if he ever uttered a word about it. He further claimed that while he’d not seen the cargo himself, for about 3 hours of the night in question, he was locked in the steerage, but while there he had, to quote, “heard a Noise as of many people upon deck at Work hoisting out Goods.” As for the other customs official aboard, he allegedly got drunk or otherwise just fell asleep and so could not confirm or deny events. And as for Captain Marshall’s account, well, he had died in the interim, so could not testify.
In a June 22, 1768 news article it was thus reported what happened next, “Wednesday the 17th the Hon. Robert Auchmuty Esq. Judge of Admiralty for this province, decreed the sloop Liberty, seized the 10th of June last, to be forfeited; but the 200 barrels oil, and six barrels tar, which were on board her when seized, were cleared.”
As for this cargo, it had allegedly been put aboard for storage as the warehouses on the wharf were overfull, something that was technically illegal without a permit, but was a common practice in the harbor at the time. Noteworthy, it’s sometimes suggested given the loss of some of the records of the initial charges, that the reason for the seizing of the ship, and why Hancock never got it back, may have been partially for this lack of permit to have these goods aboard. Even though if that was the case, they could have just as well seized most of the ships in the harbor for the same.
Whatever the case there, Hancock was accused of having had the ship illegally unloaded in the night, arrested, and, as noted in the news report, the Liberty impounded. After a bit of wrangling over the matter, Hancock eventually was allowed to put up a £3000 bond to avoid being imprisoned, which was a good thing as the affair would be drug out for many months after.
As for the public response… Well this was the last straw. At the time, the masses were not just upset about the taxes, but also the presence of the relatively recently arrived HMS Romney as its captain, one John Corner, had been impressing colonists to forcibly serve in the British navy, with Corner arguing it was totally fine because he would “not take any belonging to, or married in the province, nor any employed in the trade along shore, or to the neighboring colonies.”
Such a reasonable fellow. Can’t imagine what they were upset about.
Beyond the obvious issues, Captain Corner’s activities were also deterring some merchant vessels from wanting to dock in Boston harbor for fear of losing members of their crews to the British navy via this impressment, and even many locals began avoiding the harbor for similar reasons.
Thus, when the Liberty was being seized and the popular individual in Hancock, who employed countless people in the region as well, was arrested, the gathered crowd witnessing the seizing of the ship were forming into a mob, but ultimately prevented from acting owing to the presence of the Romney and its guns pointed very much at them while all this was happening.
Not able to do anything to stop the seizing of the ship or arrest of Hancock, they instead turned to taking their ire out on local customs officials themselves. One of the customs officials, the aforementioned Joseph Harrison would later testify they swarmed he and his son, “The onset was begun by throwing dirt at me, which was presently succeeded by volleys of stones, brickbats, sticks or anything that came to hand: In this manner I run the gauntlet near 200 yards, my poor son…was knocked down and then laid hold of by the legs, arms and hair of his and in the manner dragged…”
Later that night, the mob convened on his home and, finding him very wisely not there, proceeded to ransack it. They then took Harrison’s pleasure boat, pulled it from the water and burned it in the streets. Harrison, his family, and other customs officials were thus forced to flee and lodge in Castle William, now called Fort Independence, for protection.
The local populace continued to seethe over it all and finally four regiments of Red Coats were eventually dispatched to Boston to keep the peace and protect the British officials in the town. The Journal of the Times would report on October 1, 1768, “At about 1 o’clock, all the troops landed under cover of the cannon of the ships of war, and march into the common, with muskets charged, bayonets fixed, colors flying, drums beating and fifes, & c. playing…”
While this had the desired effect of keeping order in the immediate, in the long term, what was considered more or less an occupying army, most decidedly had the opposite effect of keeping the peace.
Going back to the trial. As mentioned, at the time the government officials were actually incentivized to find Hancock guilty, as in so doing any penalties that would be levied against him would be partially awarded to not just the Crown, but the governor and Hancock’s accusers. On top of this, the trial was to have no jury, and did not allow the defense to cross-exam the witnesses.
In need of a very good lawyer, Hancock turned to his old friend, none other than future U.S. President John Adams, to defend him.
Adams would write of this,
“Mr. Hancock… thought fit to engage me as his Counsell and Advocate; and a painful Drudgery I had of his cause. There were few days through the whole Winter, when I was not summoned to attend the Court of Admiralty. It seemed as if the Officers of the Crown were determined to examine the whole Town as Witnesses. Almost every day a fresh Witness was to be examined upon Interrogatories. They interrogated many of his near Relations and most intimate Friends and threatened to summons his amiable and venerable Aunt… I was thoroughly weary and disgusted with the Court, the Officers of the Crown, the Cause, and even with the tyrannical Bell that dongled me out of my House every Morning…”
Adams’ defense of Hanock centered around a few things. First, by British law conviction based on testimony required more than one credible witness, which the court didn’t have, despite their sincerest efforts interviewing countless individuals. He also argued of the one witness they did have, that any witness who was to benefit from the conviction could not be trusted and that, to quote, “Indigent Persons and Beggars ought to be suspected, because they are easily corrupted.”
Second, that even if it were proved wine or other cargo had been unloaded illegally, the court didn’t have any evidence that Hancock himself was involved in any of it, nor was there any proof he had knowledge of such activities. With Adams writing, “But is the owner Either concerned or assisting in it, if he does not know of it. He may be asleep in his Bed, and not so much as know or dream that any Body is unshipping and landing his Wines. … Can it be proved that Captn. Marshall asked Leave of Mr. Hancock? Can it be proved that Mr. Hancock knew of this Frolick? If he neither consented to it, nor knew of it, how can he be liable to the Penalty?”
Adams further argued that even if it could be proved wine had been illegally unloaded AND that Hancock had complicit in it, seizing the ship and its cargo and then on top of that requiring Hancock to pay a substantial sum if convicted was disproportionate to the crime. Stating, “The Degree of severity in any Poenal Law is to be determined only by the Proportion between the Crime and the Punishment. Treason is justly punished with death because it is an attempt to overthrow the whole Frame of the Government, and the Government can never be overturned without the slaughter of many Hundreds of Lives and the Ruin of many Thousands of Fortunes. If a Man will murder his Fellow subject it seems but equal that he should lose his own Life. But in this Case what is the Crime? Landing a few Casks of Wine. Admitting the Crown to have the clearest Right to the Duties it is but unjustly taking away a small sum of Money from the Crown, and one would think that the forfeiture of £100 would be an equal Punishment for withholding £100 in Duties. But surely the Forfeiture of a whole Cargo of Wines worth Ten Thousand Pounds, for withholding one hundred Pounds in Duties would be a great Disproportion between the Crime and Punishment. To carry it one step further, and subject the ship, as well as Cargo to Confiscation, but above all to subject the Master to £1000, and every Person concerned to a forfeiture of threble value, is such a stretch of security as renders this Act more Penal, than any Statute vs. Rape, Robbery, Murder or Treason.”
Next up Adams vehemently argued that similar offenses in England would allow the defendant a jury trial, something Hancock was not being offered, which, to quote, “degraded [Hancock] below the Rank of an Englishman”.
And that, “I argue, that if We are to be governed by the Rules of the common Law We ought to adopt it as a whole and summon a Jury and be tryed by Magna Charta. Every Examination of Witnesses ought to be in open Court, in Presence of the Parties, Face to Face. And there ought to be regular Adjournments from one Time to another. What other Hypothesis shall we assume? Shall We say that We are to be governed by some Rules of the common Law and some Rules of the civil Law, that the Judge at his Discretion shall choose out of each system such Rules as please him, and discard the rest?”
After many months of apparently daily deliberations, whether via Adams’ arguments or simply that the state perhaps was concerned what would happen if they convicted Hancock with no real evidence, the matter was dropped, with it simply noted in the Court Records of March 25, 1769, “The Advocate General prays leave to Retract this Information and says our Sovereign Lord the King will prosecute no further hereon.” No further explanation was given. Nor is it fully clear why the Liberty was never returned to Hancock, and we’ll get into its interesting fate shortly. Because what she would be put to use for just pissed the colonists off further.
But for now you might be wondering if Hancock actually did have wine smuggled off the ship in the night or ever was involved in smuggling.
Well, in the general case, there has never been any known hard evidence that the House of Hancock under John Hancock took part in smuggling, although as noted it was an extremely common practice at the time and particularly given Hancock’s stance on these taxes and it almost being deemed downright patriotic to smuggle goods under the British official’s noses, it wouldn’t be surprising for one of the biggest importers and patriots in the region to have been involved in such activities. And, indeed, today you’ll find no shortage of claims that Hancock did, even sometimes specific figures like smuggling over a million tons of molasses per year. Although where these figures came from, especially as the smugglers weren’t stupid enough to leave documented evidence of any of it, isn’t clear.
As for this specific case, it’s likewise unclear if Hancock was smuggling wine, and given a letter Hancock had previously sent requesting the wine, it even seems like maybe the hold was mostly empty just because the main point of the wine was for Hancock himself, and any extra for wider sale was just if there was some available. For example, in a letter dated November 12, 1767 Hancock requested the Liberty bring, “Four pipes of the very best Madeira wine that you can possibly procure for my own table. I don’t stand for price, if it be good, I like a rich wine. And if you can ship a pipe of right sterling old madeira, pale and good, you will add it. I like pale wine, but I need say no more than that they are for my own use, and I beg they may be the very best that can be purchased…. I pray distinguish them from any other on board, by some private mark, acquainting me thereof in your letter. I am also to desire you will please to ship me by the same vessel six pipes of good salable Madeira wine for our market…. I would not have them of too inferior quality… You will also ship by my sloop two pipes more of the best madeira, consigned to me… They are for the treasurer of our province and you will please to let them be good… If you or your friends have any wine or freight to ship this way, I should be obligd to you to give my vessel the preference…. and you will please to receive this as a standing order to ship me an annual pipe of the very best Madeira wine…”
Thus, it may well be that they were simply fulfilling his personal request and didn’t have much else to send to fill out the hold. Or maybe they did and he had it all smuggled off.
Whatever the case there, with the help of Samuel Adams writing countless articles for papers throughout the colonies helping to cover the trial and the seeming injustices in it, John Hancock’s fame and popularity continued its meteoric rise among the colonists.
As for the fate of the Liberty, it was initially put up for sale by the British officials, but no one would deign to buy it, so ultimately the Customs Commission fitted it out to be a revenue cutter to patrol for anyone attempting to bypass customs via smuggling. Naturally, the now very ironically named Liberty being used for this incensed people further. And just a few months into its new life as a revenue cutter, on July 19, 1769, the Liberty seized two ships apparently involved in smuggling and brought them into Newport. But once there, the captain of one of those ships, Joseph Packwood, with a mob of disgruntled colonists behind him, decided it was time to put an end to Liberty. As reported in the The Journal of the Times on August 1, 1769, “a number of persons exasperated at the imprudent behavior of the captain and some of his people, went on board her as she lay at anchor, cut the cable, let her drift ashore and then set her on fire.”
With the occupying troops still stationed in Boston to keep order, and the populace of that city seething, this was just the beginning. But Hancock’s name was now on the map as a potential leader of the conflict to come. At this stage, however, almost no one was talking of actual revolution- seemingly just wanting their rights respected. But, soon, everything would change. Stay tuned next week for part two of this documentary series in our upcoming. Hancock: Igniting the Revolution.
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In 1824, the United States was emerging from the period of the so-called “Era of Good Feelings” during the James Monroe Presidency where there was a relative de-emphasis on party politics thanks to the Democratic-Republican Party more or less existing unchallenged during this time. But the good feelings were about to be gone, and a new era was rising where party politics would be tripled down on giving us the seeds of modern day politicking. On the one side was the decidedly hot tempered Andrew Jackson who had only 18 years before illegally killed a man in cold blood for calling him a “worthless scoundrel, … a poltroon and a coward” but got away with it because, the past everybody. More on this in the Bonus Facts later. An orphan and perceived to be a man of the people, Jackson stood in stark contrast to the presidential candidates of yore in the country who largely came from either elite backgrounds or were groomed into politics from a young age.
Speaking of that, on the other side was John Quincy Adams. Quite literally groomed from childhood to become President someday, with his father, one-time President John Adams even writing to a young John Quincy Adams in 1794, “You come into Life with Advantages which will disgrace you, if your success is médiocre.— And if you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession but of your Country it will be owing to your own Laziness Slovenliness and Obstinacy.”
Yet a rather curious thing happened during the election of 1824. Andrew Jackson would go on to win not just the popular vote, but the electoral college, with Adams finishing well behind him on both in second place. And yet Adams, the inside man with friends in high places, was made President and Jackson nearly a footnote to history… That is, until an anonymous letter was published in the Philadelphia Columbian Observer that claimed Adams had made a secret deal with the speaker of the House Henry Clay such that if Clay would use his influence on the House to make him President, Adams would, in turn, make Clay the Secretary of State.
For context here, at the time, Secretary of State was the defacto office to have if one wanted to themselves become President someday. In fact, after the first and second Presidents in George Washington and John Adams, every President up to this 1824 election had previously served as the Secretary of State, and it was also the position John Quincy Adams presently held when he ran for President in this election.
What followed was a scandal that changed the course of United States history, helping to see Adams’ Presidency be largely ineffective and Henry Clay’s formerly insanely bright prospects at the nation’s highest office dashed, with his reputation among the general public forever sullied then and still pretty much to this day. This also saw Andrew Jackson’s star shining even brighter, with the scandal helping the otherwise largely unqualified and remarkably unstable Jackson to dethrone Adams in the next election.
But did the supposed bastion of puritanical ethics and rigidly moral to a fault John Quincy Adams, who very publicly vehemently opposed the spoils system, to the point that he even retained many officials in his administration from the previous who actively opposed and thwarted some of his efforts as President, truly throw off his normal extreme and well documented precepts and morals in his quest for the Presidency by making such a shady deal to rob the people of the United States of their chosen President?
Or was the whole thing just a 19th century viral conspiracy theory that blew up to change the course of history?
Well let’s dive into it, shall we, because this one is super fascinating.
Going back to the Presidential election itself, this was a rather unique one in the history of the nation even up through today. Most prominently because all the top men running were from the same party.
As to how this happened, as a result of this quasi-one party system, dissension began to rise markedly within the party ranks during Monroe’s presidency. The result was that when the congressional caucus nominated Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford and Albert Gallatin for their choice of next President and Vice President, many within the party said, “Ya, no thanks,” with only 66 of the 240 Democratic Republican members even bothering to attend the caucus. Further, Gallatin himself had no interest in being Vice President and withdrew, with North Carolina Senator Nathaniel Macon taking his spot. Soon others entered the fray, with the field settling in at: Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, and Senator and General Andrew Jackson- all Democratic Republicans.
Noteworthy very quickly Calhoun dropped out after it was clear he had no shot, but both Jackson and Adams and supporters quickly targeted him as their choice for Vice President, despite that Calhoun was in extreme opposition to many of Adams’s policies.
As for the original choice in Crawford, while he was the chosen candidate by the party technically, he ended up largely being a non-factor owing to having suffered from a stroke leading up to the election.
Then there was Andrew Jackson. From rather humble origins, the son of Scots-Irish immigrants and ultimately orphaned at the age of 14 owing to the Revolutionary War, Jackson’s rise from here would be relatively rapid. He began his ascent by studying law, then ultimately becoming a prosecuting attorney in the region of North Carolina that would become Tennessee. From here, he became attorney general of the Mero District, then judge-advocate for the militia, and then a land speculator after the so-called land grab act of 1783 which opened up Cherokee and Chickasaw territories to white residents. Now wealthy and quite prominent in his region thanks to the displacement of the Natives and now with a large plantation and purchasing over 300 slaves to do the work on it, he became a congressman, later Senator, as well as a major general in the Tennessee militia. The pinnacle of his pre-presidential career and which vaulted him into nationwide fame was his exploits in the War of 1812, and in particular during the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson also garnered further public popularity due to his efforts leading up to the presidential election that saw tens of millions of acres of land ceded from Native Americans to the United States. A general measure he’d later double down on during his own Presidency with the Indian Removal Act, which not only helped bolster his popularity even more… well, among the non-Native Americans of the nation anyway… but also saw another 170,000 square miles of land acquired from the various tribes, with its members forcibly relocated elsewhere by Jackson and his cohorts. As for his justification to critics on this, Jackson wrote, “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”
Going back to before the 1824 election, Jackson’s pre-presidential exploits all saw him as one of the most popular men in the nation, and perhaps unsurprisingly from being perceived as a man of the people, the only candidate to garner relatively significant popular votes beyond his home region.
Of course, then there was Jackson’s legendary temper and personal exploits on that front, some of which would occasionally get him into hot water. For example, on May 30, 1806, when he killed famed marksman Charles Dickinson owing to the fact that Dickinson had insulted Jackson in, among other ways, calling Jackson’s wife a bigamist. Which, to be fair, she was, owing to still being married to her former husband when Jackson married her. In the end she ended up having to marry Jackson twice because of this, the second time once her divorce with her former husband, Captain Lewis Robards, was official. More on this killing in the Bonus Facts later.
Noteworthy later when Jackson was in his second term as President, he would also exhibit this temper in spades at times, such as once almost beating a man, one Richard Lawrence, to death on January 30, 1835. At the time Jackson was attending a funeral when Lawrence, who believed himself to be King Richard III of England- note King Richard III had died 350 years before- decided to try to kill Jackson. Lawrence also believed that if he killed Andrew Jackson, the government would give him money they owed him. He intended to use the money to go to England and assume his rightful place on the throne… However, when Lawrence pulled a gun on Jackson it misfired. Rather than duck for cover or flee, Jackson charged Lawrence and beat him with his cane, with reports being that Jackson continued to beat him after Lawrence had been subdued, ultimately having to be pulled away from the would-be assassin lest he beat him to death.
Speaking of beating people to death, Jackson also once published in the Tennessee Gazette offering anyone who found one of his runaway slaves, to quote, “ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him” up to 300 lashes. Note, that amount would likely have been fatal. In another instance, when one of his slaves named Betty was deemed to have behaved improperly in one instance, and thus he ordered his overseer that she “must be ruled with the cowhide”. And that, further, if she ever stepped out of line again, to give her 50 lashes.
John Quincy Adams, however, couldn’t have stood more in contrast in some ways to Jackson. As you might expect, Jackson’s support base was heavily entrenched in the slave states, while John Quiny Adams’ was noted to be, according to one contemporary southerner, the “acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed” owing to his extreme opposition to slavery, which he ultimately dedicated the latter half of his life to, from his pro-bono defense of the captives of the Amistad before the Supreme Court, to pushing the Declaration of Independence and its “all men are created equal” stance as a defining document for the nation, in all otherwise laying much of the groundwork for what Lincoln and his supporters would pick up almost immediately after Adams’ death.
Going back to the contrast in their personal lives, while his father, John Adams, had come from more or less middle class origins before rising to the the Presidency, thanks to the shrewd financial investment efforts of Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams was raised relatively affluent and, as noted, unlike Jackson was groomed from a young age for the nation’s highest office, with every advantage in education and training for it that the world could possibly offer.
Beyond the previously quoted letter from John Adams to his son about it, his mother, Abigail, also wasn’t messing around when it came to her high expectations for her son because of his privilege. For example once writing John Quincy when he’d just completed a risky trip across the big blue at the age of 10, “For dear as you are to me, I had much rather you should have found your grave in the ocean you have crossed… rather than see you an immoral profligate or a graceless child.” She also would later write to him, “How unpardonable would it have been in you, to have been a Blockhead.”
Thanks mom.
The senior Adams would also write on December 28, 1780 to his son who had apparently recently taken up ice skating, that even in this he should endeavor to excel, writing, “as your Constitution requires vigorous Exercise, it will not be amiss to spend some of your Time in swimming, Riding, Dancing, Fencing and Skaiting, which are all manly Amusements, and it is as easy to learn by a little Attention, to perform them all with Taste, as it is to execute them in a slovenly, Awkward and ridiculous Manner…” And on this point, “Every Thing in Life should be done with Reflection, and Judgment, even the most insignificant Amusements. They should all be arranged in subordination, to the great Plan of Happiness, and Utility. That you may attend early to this Maxim is the Wish of your affectionate Father.”
And attend to this John Quincy did. With his natural genius, pressure from his parents to excel and work hard, in combination with proper training and guidance from those parents, along with access to the best schools and tutors, and getting to spend the years from 10-17 roaming around Europe rubbing elbows with some of the most distinguished people of the era, all forged a young man whose brain few men of his age could match, with his qualifications for the office of President unparalleled in his era.
On this note, starting at just 14, John Quincy began serving his country as secretary and translator to famed American diplomat Francis Dana in St. Petersburg, then on to attending Harvard, practicing law, serving as a U.S. Ambassador in various posts in Europe, a Senator, a Professor at Harvard and Brown, nominated, but turned down, the position as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and finally became Secretary of State under President Monroe, where he was one of the key architects of the famed and rather world shaping Monroe Doctrine. He also negotiated the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 that, among other things, gave the U.S. Florida and set the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. In 1818 he also helped square away the northern border of the U.S. from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean, and in all his work here generally ranked as the greatest Secretary of State in U.S. history.
As former Managing Editor of The Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Margaret A. Hogan, would sum up Adams’ work as Secretary of State, “As a diplomat, he set the essential marks of American foreign policy for the next century: freedom of the seas, a halt to further European colonization in the Western Hemisphere, continental expansion, reciprocal trade, and isolationism from European affairs. His formidable skills as an international diplomat ushered in two generations of peace with Europe.”
Needless to say, his entire life had been leading up to the nation’s highest office. And in 1824 it was finally his time to take a crack at the job.
Speaking of that, when the election finally commenced from October 26 to December 2, 1824 and the results tallied, the election stood at Jackson with 99 electoral college votes and 151,271 popular votes. Adams with 84 electoral and 113,122 popular votes. Crawford at 41 and 40,856 votes. And Clay at 37 and 47,531 votes.
As for Vice President, Calhoun dominated thanks to getting votes from supporters of all candidates, with 99 electoral college votes from Jackson supporters, 74 from Adams, 2 from Crawford, and 7 from Clay, for a total of 182 vs the second place finisher the aforementioned Nathaniel Macon at 24.
But as for the Presidency, none of the candidates had achieved the necessary number of electoral votes to win, meaning from here, thanks to the 12th Amendment, the House of Representatives was going to choose the President, and the Senate the Vice President, with their choice, at least, clear in Calhoun. Many also thought the choice of President was clear given Jackson had won both the popular and electoral college votes by a good margin. But it turns out there was a lot more nuance here than meets the eye.
In the first place, Jackson didn’t actually win in the way most people today think. You see, Jackson’s supporters were largely centered in the slave states, meaning he was taking heavy advantage of the 3/5 compromise. In a nutshell, this compromise was the result of the slave states wanting to count the individuals they held as slaves in their population with regards to factors such as number of seats in the House of Representatives and electoral college votes and the like, despite the fact that those individuals forced into slavery couldn’t vote themselves. On the other side, the slave states did NOT want to have their slave populations counted when it came to taxation of their states. Ultimately a middle ground was decided upon wherein 3/5 of the slave population of these states would count in these matters, giving the slave states extra seats in congress and in the electoral college, while reducing their tax bill slightly from what it would be if all the total slave population was accurately represented.
Thus, if you remove the extra electoral college votes that were the result of this 3/5 compromise from all the candidates, the total stood at 83 for Adams and 77 for Jackson.
Nevertheless, the rules were the rules and technically Jackson did have more electoral college votes than Adams under the law of the land at the time and so many thought he was a shoe-in for the Presidency. However, also under the law of the land at the time, it didn’t matter what votes anyone had received at this point. The House was free to choose any among the top three finishers in the Presidential voting with no regard to popular or electoral college vote if they chose not to. Further, in this voting, every state only got 1 total vote, meaning Jackson would no longer get any boost from most of his supporting states having more Representatives because they were getting to count 3/5 of their slaves.
Also noteworthy, had the 3/5 Compromise not existed, it would have been Clay that finished 3rd, not Crawford, which would have changed the game completely when the House took to voting given Clay’s popularity and position there as Speaker of the House, and how his influence helped get Adams elected.
This all brings us back to Henry Clay, who, with several states just supporting him in the election and that position as Speaker, was now in the greatest position to influence the outcome of events.
Clay states of all this, “Everybody professed to regret, after I was excluded from the house, that I had not been returned to it. I seemed to be the favorite of everybody. Describing my situation to a distant friend, I said to him ‘I am enjoying, while alive, the posthumous honors which are usually awarded to the venerated dead’… None made more or warmer manifestations of these sentiments of esteem and admiration, than some of the friends of General Jackson. None were so reserved as those of Mr. Adams; under an opinion (as I have learned since the election), which they early imbibed, that the western vote would be only influenced by its own sense of public duty; and that, if its judgment pointed to any other than Mr. Adams, nothing which they could do would secure it to him….”
But which way did Clay’s judgment point?
The problem for Clay was that he reportedly didn’t like any of the candidates, stating of Jackson in a letter to one Francis Preston Blair on January 29, 1825, “I cannot believe that killing 2,500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy.” On the other hand, there were arguably exceptionally few more qualified men in the nation than Adams, but Clay also had several issues with Adams’ politics. That said, Clay’s general policies with his “American System” were much more closely aligned with Adams’s political ideas. Moving over to Crawford, Clay’s American System was significantly opposed with Crawford’s policies. On top of this, Crawford was, in Clay’s view, in no shape at that time to be president owing to the aforementioned stroke he’d suffered in September of 1823.
At first, Clay would hold his cards relatively close to his chest on who he would choose, publicly at least, though his ultimate choice always seemed clear. But before he made it more public, he first met with John Quincy Adams for a few hours, just the two of them, on January 9, 1825. We’ll get into Adams’ journal account of what the pair discussed in that soon to be infamous meeting later on. But for now, shortly thereafter, Clay would declare for Adams and begin to heavily advocate for him among Clay’s previous supporters and beyond leading up to the day of voting on February 9.
It was on that snow covered day in Washington that the votes were cast, with, as noted, each state getting 1 vote, with that singular vote determined by the individual votes of the states’ respective delegates. The victor in the race needed at least 13 votes, lest the process would be repeated.
The result? Adams received 13 votes or 54%, Jackson got 7 votes or 29%, and Crawford got 4 or 16%.
John Quincy Adams was now to be president like his father before him.
While this result shocked the Jackson supporters of the nation, they were even more incensed a few weeks later when Henry Clay was announced as John Quincy Adams’ choice for secretary of state. You see, on January 28th, 12 days before the February 9th vote, a letter was published in the Philadelphia Columbian Observer predicting that this was exactly what was going to happen. The anonymously written letter claimed Clay had given his vote and the votes of his constituents to Adams as a result of Adams promising to award Clay the office of Secretary of State in order to help Clay’s future efforts to ascend to the office of Presidency. In a nutshell, with the accusation, now seemingly confirmed, being that Clay had sold the office of the Presidency to the highest bidder. Specifically the letter stated,
“I take up my pen to inform you of one of the most disgraceful transactions that ever covered with infamy the republican ranks. Would you believe that men, professing democracy, could be found base enough, to lay the ax at the very root of the tree of liberty! … I shall, therefore, at once proceed to give you a brief account of such a Bargain, as can only be equalled by the famous Burr conspiracy of 1801. For some time past, the friends of Clay have hinted that they, like the Swiss, would fight for those who pay best. Overtures were said to have been made by the friends of Adams to the friends of Clay offering him the appointment of secretary of state for his aid to elect Adams. And the friends of Clay gave the information to the friends of Jackson, and hinted that if the friends of Jackson would offer the same price, they would close with them. But none of the friends of Jackson would descend to such mean barter and sale…. I was of opinion, when I first heard of this transaction, that men, professing any honorable principles, could not, nor would not, be transferred, like the planter does the negreos, or the farmer does his team of horses…. We believed the republic was safe. The nation having delivered Jackson into the hands of Congress, backed by a large majority of their votes, there was in my mind no doubt that Congress would respond to the will of the nation, by electing the individual they had declared to be their choice [Jackson]. Contrary to this expectation, it is now ascertained to a certainty that Henry Clay has transferred his interest to John Quincy Adams. As a consideration for this abandonment of duty to his constituents, it is said and believed, should this unholy coalition prevail, Clay is to be appointed secretary of state. I have no fear in my mind. I am clearly of opinion, we shall defeat every combination. The force of public opinion must prevail, or there is an end of liberty.”
Such anonymous letters and even forged documents and sometimes bizarre accusations were nothing new for this particular presidential year, with one such even accusing the famously poorly dressed John Quincy Adams of going to church barefoot and not wearing any underwear. Note, Adams would state this, at least, was incorrect. But of his oft’ lamented general style, he stated in a letter to his future wife Louisa while courting her, “the tailor and the dancing master must give me up, as a man of whom nothing can be made.”
However, this particular accusation against Clay seemed to carry some weight, purporting to be from a member of Congress itself.
Clay wasted no time firing back, disputing the allegations in an article published in the Daily National Intelligencer on February 1, where he also demanded the anonymous author reveal himself, stating at the end of his rebuttal about the matter,
“I believe it to be a forgery; but if it be genuine, I pronounce the member, whoever he may be, a base and infamous calumniator, a dastart, and liar; and if he dare unveil himself, and avow his name, I will hold him responsible, as I here admit myself to be, to all the laws which govern and regulate men of honor.”
Two days later, he got his response in the Intelligencer.
“George Kremer, of the house of representatives, tenders his respect to the Honorable “H. Clay”, and informs him, that, by reference to the editor of the “Columbian Observer”, he may ascertain the name of the writer of a letter of the 25th…, which, it seems, has afforded so much concern to “H. Clay”. In the meantime, George Kremer holds himself ready to prove, to the satisfaction of unprejudiced minds, enough to satisfy them of the accuracy of the statements, which are contained in that letter, to the extent that they concern the course and conduct of “H. Clay.” Being a representative of the people, he will not fear to “cry aloud and spare not,” when their rights and privileges are at stake.”
That said, despite Kremer coming forward here to claim authorship of the letter, it should be noted that he allegedly would later slightly recant on this point, at least according to several other congressman such as Governor Kent, Col Little, and Col Brent of Louisiana claiming Kremer would explicitly state to them the letter was simply given to him to transmit, and that he was, to quote, “not acquainted with its contents, that is, did not comprehend the import of its terms.”
Whatever the truth of that, the rumor mill and, indeed, Clay himself would a couple months later come to believe that the real author was one of Andrew Jackson’s close confidants and biographer, fellow Tennessee Senator John Eaton.
It was also noted that just before the accusation by Kremer was published, Eaton had a meeting with Kremer, which when Clay heard of it, he wrote Eaton to ascertain the truth about it, stating
“I did believe, from your nocturnal interview with Mr. Kremer… that you prepared or advised the publication of his card in the guarded terms in which it is expressed. I should be happy, by a disavowal on your part of the fact of the interview. or of its supposed object, to be able to declare- as in the event of such disavowal, I would take pleasure in declaring- that I have been mistaken in supposing, that you had an agency in the composition and publication of that card.”
Rather than deny any of it, Eaton simply replied on March 31, 1825, “You will excuse me from making an attempt to remove any belief, which you entertain upon this subject. It is a matter which gives me no concern… Suppose the fact to be, that I did visit him; and suppose, too, that it was, as you have termed it, ‘a nocturnal visit;’ was there anything existing, that should have denied me this privilege?”
Going back to the day of the original accusation, Clay didn’t just write a response for the papers, but also brought the matter up to Congress itself, requesting an investigation into his own guilt or innocence in the affair. With the minutes of the day stating,
“The speaker [Mr. Clay] rose from his place, and requested the indulgence of the house for a few moments, while he asked its attention to a subject, in which he felt himself deeply concerned. A note had appeared this morning in the National Intelligencer, under the name, and with the authority, as he presumed, of a member of this house from Pennsylvania, which adopted, as his own, a previous letter, published in another print, containing serious and injurious imputations against him, and which the author avowed his readiness to substantiate by proof. These charges implicated his conduct, in regard to the pending presidential election. …if they were true, if he were capable, and base enough to betray the solemn trust, which the constitution had confided to him; if, yielding to personal views and considerations, he could compromise the highest interest of his country, the house would be scandalized by his continuing to occupy the chair with which he had been so long honored in presiding at its deliberations, and he merited instantaneous expulsion… if guilty, here the proper punishment might be applied; and if innocent, here his character and conduct might be vindicated. He anxiously hoped, therefore, that the house would be pleased to order an investigation to be made into the truth of the charges…”
Ultimately a committee was created consisting largely of political opponents of Clay in P.P. Barbour, Daniel Webster, Louis McLane, John W. Taylor, John Forsyth, Romulus M. Saunders, and Christopher Rankin.
Things from here got rather serious for Kremer and anyone involved on the other side as well with the general sentiment of Congress seemingly summed up by John Wright of Ohio, “Let us investigate these charges; and if they are found true, I have no hesitation in saying, your speaker is unworthy the station he fills, or a seat on this floor; and I, for one, will vote for his expulsion, as I would the member that should falsely make the charge.”
Now in rather hot water, Kremer at first rose to the challenge, stating according to the minutes, “If, upon investigation being instituted, it should appear that he had not sufficient reason to justify the statements he had made, he trusted he should receive the marked reprobation, which had been suggested by the speaker. Let it fall where it might he was willing to meet the inquiry, and abide by the result.”
But then a funny thing happened when the committee subsequently called on Kremer to testify about what he was basing his accusations against Clay off of. He suddenly recanted his former willingness to provide evidence, and very starkly refused. Writing a letter to the committee on February 8,
“Gentlemen: I have received your note of yesterday, in which you inform me, that you will meet at 10 o’clock this morning, and wil there be ready to receive any evidence or explanation, I may have to offer… Placed under circumstances unprecedented, and which I believe not only interesting to myself but important as connected with the fundamental principles of our government, I have reflected with much deliberation, on the course, which duty to myself and my constituents required me to adopt. The result of this reflection is that I cannot, consistently with a proper regard to these duties, assent to place myself before your committee in either of the attitudes indicated in your note…. I can not perceive any principle of power in the constitution, which can give the house of representatives and consequently a committee created by it, jurisdiction over me as the writer of that letter. It neither involves a question of contempt of the house, nor an impeachment of an officer of the government under the constitution; and I can discover no authority by which the house can assume jurisdiction in the case…. I have determined, under a deep sense of duty to myself and my constituents, not to submit to a procedure fraught with such dangerous consequences. I therefore protest most solemnly against the assumption of any jurisdiction, either by the committee or the house of representatives, that shall jeopardize my right to communicate freely to my constituents whatever I may believe necessary for the public good…”
As for the committee members, after Kremer’s refusal to corroborate his accusation and finding no other evidence in support of it, they simply stated, “In this posture of the case, the committee can take no further steps. They are aware, that it is competent to the house, to invest them with power to send for persons and papers, and by that means to enable them to make any investigation, which might be thought necessary and if they knew any reason for such investigation, they would have asked to be clothed with the proper power; but not having, themselves, any such knowledge, they have felt it to be their duty only to lay before the house, the communication, which they have received.”
In a nutshell, none of them felt there was any credibility to what was said given their own knowledge of events in Congress at the time, so felt there was little need to continue investigating the matter further.
And from here the matter seemed settled. That is, until a few weeks later when John Quincy Adams declared Henry Clay as his choice for Secretary of State, just as Kremer had predicted would happen.
Kremer himself would write on September 17, 1827 during the following Presidential run of Jackson vs. Adams that year, “Are the charges true? Can anyone doubt it, who considered, that he has performed the act which the letter charges him with intending to do, and now holds the office, which was proclaimed as the consideration for the service rendered?”
But were there really any such shady dealings?
The matter may well have gone entirely unresolved from here except you better believe, as alluded to, Jackson’s supporters weren’t going to let this one go. Fast-forward to shortly before that next election, a letter by one Carter Beverley was published in the Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina on March 8, 1827 and then quickly thereafter circulated in papers throughout the nation. It stated,
“I have just returned from General Jackson’s. I found a crowd of company with him… He told me this morning, before all his company, in reply to a question I put to him concerning the election of JQ Adams to the presidency, that Mr. Clay’s friends made a proposition to his friends, that if they would promise, for him [General Jackson] not to put Mr. Adams into the seat of secretary of state, Mr. Clay and his friends would, in one hour, make him [Jackson] the president. He most indignantly rejected the proposition, and declared he would not compromise himself; and unless most openly and fairly made the president by Congress, he would never receive it. He declared, that he said to them, he would see the whole earth sink under them, before he would bargain or intrigue for it.”
At first, Clay’s response to the whole thing was that he felt certain Andrew Jackson had not actually said any of these things. However, things would change after Beverley wrote to Jackson asking him to, essentially, back him up that he’d not made the whole thing up. Jackson then wrote to Beverley, on June 6, 1827, stating,
“Your inquiries relative to the proposition of bargain made through Mr. Clay’s friends, to some of mine, concerning the then pending presidential election, were answered freely and frankly at the time, but without any calculation that they would be thrown into the public journals. But Facts can not be altered… I always intended, should Mr. Clay come out over his own name, and deny having any knowledge of the communication made by his friends to my friends, and to me, that I would give him the name of the gentlemen, through whom that communication came….I will repeat, however, again, the occurrence, and to which my reply to you must have conformed, and from which, if there has been any variation, you can correct it. It is this: Early in January, 1825, a member of Congress, of high respectable, visited me one morning, and observed, that he had a communication he was desirous to make to me; that he was informed there was a great intrigue going on, and that it was right I should be informed of it; that he came as a friend, and let me receive the communication as I might… The gentlemen proceeded: He said he had been informed by the friends of Mr. Clay, that the friends of Mr. Adams had made overtures to them, saying, if Mr. Clay and his friends would unite in aid of Mr. Adam’s election, Mr. Clay should be secretary of state; that the friends of Mr. Adams were urging, as a reason to induce the friends of Mr. Clay to accede to their proposition, that if I were elected president, Mr. Adams would be continued secretary of state [i.e. there would be no such position for Clay]…; that the friends of Mr. Clay stated, the west did not wish to separate from the west. and if I would say, or permit any of my confidential friends to say, that in case I were elected president, Mr. Adams should not be continued secretary of state, by a complete union of Mr. Clay and his friends, they would put an end to the presidential contest in one hour. And he was of opinion it was right to fight such intriguers with their own weapons. To which, in substance, I replied- that in politics, as in everything else, my guide was principle; and contrary to the expressed and unbiased will of the people, I never would step into the presidential chair; and requested him to say to Mr. Clay and his friends (for I did suppose he had come from Mr. Clay, though he used the term of ‘Mr. Clay’s friends’), that before I would reach the president chair, by such means of bargain and corruption, I would see the earth open and swallow both Mr. Clay and his friends and myself with them… The second day after this communication and reply, it was announced in the newspapers that Mr. Clay had come out openly and avowedly in favor of Mr. Adams…”
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately and intended giving events leading up to it, Clay briefly guested at the very house Beverly was also guesting in when he had possession of this letter from Andrew Jackson, and shortly after Clay was given a copy of it. His honor once again besmirched, this time by none other than Andrew Jackson himself, an angered Clay then had the letter published, which likely was the intended result of giving him a copy in the first place, along with his response both denying the accusation that he had been involved in any such thing, and expressing his strong sentiment that he highly doubted any of his constituents had either. He also issued a challenge to Jackson to, essentially, put his money where his mouth was. Writing on June 28, 1827,
“General Jackson, having at last voluntarily placed himself in the attitude of my public accuser, we are now fairly at issue. I rejoice, that a specific accusation, by a responsible accuser, has at length appeared, though at the distance of near two years and a half since the charge was first brought forth by Mr. George Kremer…. Such being the accusation, and the prosecutor, and the issues between us, I have now a right to expect that he will substantiate his charges by the exhibition of satisfactory evidence. In that event, there is no punishment that would exceed the measure of my offense. In the opposite event, what ought to be the judgment of the American people, is cheerfully submitted to their wisdom and justice.”
In response, Jackson wrote the following letter on July 18, 1827. Stating. “…This disclosure was made to me by Mr. James Buchanan, a member of Congress from Pennsylvania, a gentleman of the first respectively and intelligence. The evening before, he had communicated substantially the same proposition to Major Eaton, my colleague in the senate, with a desire warmly manifested, that he should communicate with me, and ascertain my views on the subject. This he declined doing, suggesting to Mr. Buchanan, that he, as well as himself, could converse with me, and ascertain my opinion on the matter… It was the morning succeeding this interview, after Major Eaton had objected to converse with me on the subject, and before I had set out from my lodgings to the capitol that Mr. Buchanan came to visit me, and where the conversation I have stated took place… What I have stated are the facts of a conversation between myself and a member of Congress of high respectability. The conclusions and inferences from that conversation-the time, manner, and all the circumstances- satisfied my mind, that it was not unauthorized. So I have thought, and so I still think. And yet, I again here repeat, that, in this supposition, I have possibly done Mr. Clay injustice. If he shall be able to sustain the averments he has made, and acquit himself of any participation and agency in the matter, I beg leave to assure him, that, so far from affording me pain, it will give me pleasure. I certainly can have no desire, that the character of my country, through the acts of prominent citizen, shall rest under any serious imputation. For the honor of that country, I should greatly prefer that any inference I have made, may turn out to be ill founded.”
He then goes on at length to question why Clay, if he was truly innocent, didn’t push for the committee to investigate further and that, “innocence never seeks for safety, through covert ways, and hidden ambuscades. She fights by day, and in the open plain, and proud in her own strength, meets her enemy fearlessly.”
Of course, contrary to what Jackson is implying here, Clay very publicly never shied from the accusation and, indeed, was the one who immediately brought it to Congress’s attention and asked that his guilt or innocence be investigated, with this inquiry only ending when the Jackson supporter in Kremer was unwilling to back up in any way his claim or testify on the matter at all. On top of that, it was once again Clay who, having received a copy of Jackson’s unpublished letter, brought it to the public’s attention and once again now challenged Andrew Jackson himself to give any evidence whatsoever as to Clay’s guilt- more or less doing exactly as Jackson stated an innocent person would do, “fight by day, and in the open plain, and proud in her own strength, meets her enemy fearlessly.”
On top of that, while Jackson had stated if Clay ever tried to deny this had occurred, he’d have come out with the name immediately, the fact is Clay vehemently denied the whole thing very publicly from day 1 and Jackson was well aware of all of this. Further, it was questioned by many others that if Jackson had believed this from the beginning and knew the principle individuals involved in the scandal, as he so claimed, why had he not himself felt obligated to press it given the seriousness of the corruption charge when the matter was being investigated by Congress and they lacked any thread to pull when Kremer refused to testify? Especially as he’d also apparently been circulating this story among his constituents since not long after the former election. With one J.U. Waring writing to Clay,
“I was present at one of these conversations, when the general observed, in speaking of the late election, that the people had been cheated; that the corruptions and intrigues of Washington had defeated the will of the people, in the election of their president.’ I waited till this branch of the conversation was closed, and finding no palliative, left the company, which was large, and composed of ladies and gentlemen, of the first respectability, and at a public tavern. Several followed, and his remarks became the subject of street conversation, in which I remarked, that, as highly as I was disposed to think of the general, particularly for his military success, I could not approve such a course; that, if corruption existed, and that known to him, he surely should not have been the first to greet Mr. Adams upon his elevation; and that, if you had participated, it was his duty to have exposed it when your nomination was before the senate…”
And note as alluded to in this letter, directly after the election results were in, Jackson did have very friendly discourse with Adams at a reception held by then President Monroe congratulating Adams on his victory. Jackson had also reported to the Register not long after that he, to quote “was satisfied with the result” of the election. And “that he was not fit for the presidential chair; that he could not get on; that his proper place was at the head of any army.” And when later invited to a dinner gathering among those unhappy with the results, Jackson stated, “any evidence of kindness and regard, such as you propose, might, by many, be viewed, as conveying with it exception, murmurings, and feelings of complaint, which I sincerely hope belong to none of my friends.”
On top of this, Jackson went out of his way to describe James Buchanan as a “member of Congress, of high respectability” and yet shortly thereafter with some great contradiction condemned Buchanan as an agent of Clay’s trying to broker a corrupt deal for a vote in exchange for the office of Secretary of State.
Finally, rather than supply any hard evidence, Jackson simply supplied the name of one of his own supporters, future U.S. President James Buchanan, not Clay’s being involved in the matter, and simply assumed Clay’s friends were behind it. And then, without a shred of hard evidence in any of it, finally concluded in challenging Clay to somehow prove it hadn’t happened.
Needless to say, Clay was rather exasperated by this response of Jackson’s sole evidence being one of his own supporters allegedly claiming Clay had made such a deal and trying to put the ball back in Clay’s court to prove a negative. Clay noted of this in a speech he gave on July 12th,
“This compendious mode of administering justice, by first hanging, and then trying a man…, according to the precepts of the Jackson code, is sanctioned by no respectable system of jurisprudence.”
And later on August 30th, “It is in vain that these revilers have been called upon for their proofs- have been defied, and are again invited to enter upon any mode of fair investigation and trial. Shrinking from every impartial examination, they persevere, with increased zeal, in the propagation of calumny, under the hope of supplying, by the frequency and boldness of assertion, the want of truth and the deficiency of evidence.”
And that “The extraordinary ground has been taken, that the accusers were not bound to establish by proof the guilt of their designated victim. In a civilized, Christian, and free community, the monstrous principle has been assumed, that accusation and conviction are synonymous; and that the persons who deliberately bring forward an atrocious charge, are exempted from all obligations to substantiate it! … No one has ever contended that proof should be exclusively that of eye-witnesses, testifying from their sense positively and directly to the fact. Political, like other offenses, may be established by circumstantial as well as positive evidence. But I do contend that some evidence, be it what it may, ought to be exhibited. If there be none, how do the accusers know that an offense has been perpetrated? If they do know it, let us have the facts on which their conviction is based. I will not even assert that, in the public affairs, a citizen has not a right freely to express his opinions of public men, and to speculate upon the motives of their conduct. But if he chooses to promulgate opinions, let them be given as opinions. The public will correctly judge of their value and their grounds. No one has a right to put forth a positive assertion, that apolitical offense has been committed, unless he stands prepared to sustain, by satisfactory proof of some kind, its actual existence…”
But going back to the accusation, the name of the individual who started it all now finally revealed, the ball was in future U.S. President James Buchanan’s court to give his side of the story and, hopefully for Jackson’s sake, offer some actual evidence.
While Jackson may have been banking on Buchanan’s support of his statements given Buchanan was a huge supporter of Jackson, well, Buchanan did not, though did explain the events of the day from his perspective. Writing to the Lancaster Journal on August 8, 1827, Buchanan states,
“In the month of December, 1824, a short time after the commencement of the session of Congress, I heard, among other rumors then in circulation, that General Jackson had determined, should he be elected president, to continue Mr. Adams secretary of state. Although I felt certain he had never intimated such an intention, yet I was sensible, that nothing could be better calculated, both to cool the ardor of his friends, and inspire his enemies with confidence, than the belief that he had already selected his chief competitor for the highest office within his gift. I thought General Jackson owed it to himself, and to the cause in which his political friends were engaged, to contradict this report; and to declare that he would not appoint to that office the man, however worthy he might be, who stood at the head of the most formidable part of his political enemies…. Mr. Markly urged me to [speak with Jackson]; and observed, if General Jackson had not determined who he would appoint secretary of state, and should say that it would not be Mr. Adams, it might be of great advantage to our cause for us to so declare, upon his own authority. We should then be placed upon the same footing with the Adams men, and might fight them with their own weapons. That the western members would naturally prefer voting for a western man, if there were a probability that the claims of Mr. Clay to the second office in the government should be fairly estimated; and that, if they thought proper to vote for General Jackson, they could soon decide the contest in his favor.”
Note here, the point being if Jackson would denounce the rumor he intended Adams for Secretary of State and have it implied he preferred Clay or that Clay might be given that position, they might thus steal some votes from Adams to Jackson by leveraging the office of the Secretary of State.
He goes on, “I called upon General Jackson. After the company had left him, by which I found him surrounded, he asked me to take a walk with him; and, while we were walking together upon the street, I introduced the subject… I then stated to him, there was a report in circulation, that he had determined he would appoint Mr. Adams secretary of state, in case he were elected president, and that I wished to ascertain from him, whether he had ever intimated such an intention that he must at once perceive how injurious to his election such a report might be; that no doubt there were several able and ambitious men in the country, among whom I thought Mr. Clay might be included, who were aspiring to that office; and, if it were believed he had already determined to appoint his chief competitor, it might have a most unhappy effect upon their exertions, and those of their friends; that unless he had so determined, I thought this report should be promptly contradicted under his own authority.”
One again now explicitly telling Jackson would it not be best to deny the rumor and give implication that Clay might be prime for the position were he to side with Jackson?
He further notes, “After I had finished, the general declared, he had not the least objection to answer my question; that he thought well of Mr. Adams, but had never said, or intimated, that he would or would not, appoint him secretary of state; … that if he should ever be elected president,… that he would then go into office… at perfect liberty to fill the offices of the government with the men, whom, at the time, he believed to be the ablest and the best in the country…. I then asked him, if I were at liberty to repeat his answer? He said, I was at perfect liberty to do so, to any person I thought proper. I need scarcely remark, that I afterward availed myself of the privilege… I do not recollect, that General Jackson told me I might repeat his answer to Mr. Clay and his friends.”
Noteworthy here, according to Clay much later in life, Buchanan did approach him after this, stating that “Shortly after Mr. Buchanan’s entry into the room, he introduced the subject of the approaching presidential election, and spoke of the certainty of the election of his favorite, adding, that ‘he would form the most splendid cabinet, that the country had ever had.’ Mr. Letcher asked, ‘How could he have one more distinguished than that of Mr. Jefferson, in which were both Madison and Gallatin? Where would he be able to find equally eminent men?’ Mr. Buchanan replied, that ‘HE WOULD NOT GO OUT OF THIS ROOM FOR A SECRETARY OF STATE’” all while looking directly at Clay. Clay alleges he chose not to publish this encounter nor have Letcher do so after a discussion with Buchanan over it, in which Buchanan allegedly begged him not to.
In another account, one J. Sloane of the Ohio delegation states a similar occurrence leading up to Clay announcing his decision of who he would support, writing “General Houston commenced by suggesting that he supposed the Ohio delegation were all going to vote for General Jackson. To this, I answered that I could not undertake to speak for them, for, so far as I knew, no meeting or consultation had taken place among them. The manner of General Houston was anxious, and evinced much solicitude, and at this point of the conversation, he exclaimed: What a splendid administration it would make, with Old Hickory for president, and Mr. Clay secretary of state!’ … The conversation was continued for a considerable time, and for the most part, had relation to western interests, as connected with the presidency, and was concluded by General Houston’s observing: ‘Well, I hope you, from Ohio, will aid us in electing General Jackson, and then, your man-meaning Mr. Clay-CAN HAVE ANYTHING HE PLEASES.’… These expressions of General Houston made a strong impression on my mind at that time, and from the relations known to subsist between him and General Jackson, I had not then, nor at any time since, a doubt, but that they embodied the feelings of that personage [Jackson], and that it was the object of both, that Mr. Clay and his friends should so understand it.”
But going back to Buchanan’s letter, he concludes, “I called upon General Jackson, upon the occasion which I have mentioned solely as his friend, upon my individual responsibility, and not as the agent of Mr. Clay, or any other person. I never have been the political friend of Mr. Clay, since he became a candidate for the office of president, as you very well know. Until I saw General Jackson’s letter to Mr. Beverley of the 6th and at the same time was informed by a letter from the editor of the United States Telegraph, that I was the person to whom he alluded, the conception never once entered my head, that he believed me to be the agent of Mr. Clay, or of his friends, or that I had intended to propose to him terms of any kind from them, or that he could have supposed me to be capable of expressing ‘the opinion that it was right to fight such intriguers with their own weapons.’ Such a supposition, had I entered it, would have rendered me exceedingly unhappy, as there is no man upon earth, whose good opinion I more valued, than that of General Jackson.”
And as for Jackson’s close confidant in the Eaton connection, who seemingly was the one who informed Kremer of all this or convinced him to have Eaton’s letter published, as the case may be, the night before the original accusation was published, Buchanan states, “With another remark I shall close this communication. Before I had the conversation with General Jackson, which I have detailed, I called upon Major Eaton, and requested him to ask General Jackson whether he had ever declared or intimated, that he would appoint Mr. Adams secretary of state, and expressed a desire that the general should say, if consistent with the truth, that he did not intend to appoint him to that office. I believed, that such a declaration would have a happy influence upon the election, and I endeavored to convince him that such would be the effect. The conversation between us was not so full, as that with General Jackson. The major politely declined to comply with my request, and advised me to propose the question to the general myself, as I possess a full share of his confidence.”
Thus, in the end, at no point did Buchanan claim any deal had been struck between Adams and Clay, merely that rumors were swirling that Clay would be Adams’ likely choice for Secretary of State, and that Jackson ought to get the word out that Clay would be a prime candidate for that office if Jackson were elected instead.
Others, such as the aforementioned Markley would also ring in more or less asserting what Buchanan had said, but with some rather interesting additions asserting that Buchanan had also urged for contacting Clay to try to make a deal over the matter of Clay becoming Secretary of State if he chose Jackson,
“Mr. B replied, that no one felt more anxious for various reasons than he did himself; that it was important not only for the success of General Jackson’s election, that Mr. Clay should go with Pennsylvania, but on account of his ulterior political prospect- declaring that he Mr. B hoped to see Mr. Clay president of the United States, and that was another reason why he should like to see Mr. Clay secretary of state, in case General Jackson was elected; and that, if he were certain that Mr. Clay’s views were favorable to General Jackson’s election, he would take an opportunity of talking with General Jackson on the subject, or get Major Eaton to do so; that he thought, by doing so, he would confer a particular benefit on his country, and that he could see nothing wrong in it. Mr. B. urged me to use no delay in seeing Mr. Clay. I told him I would, and accordingly called upon Mr. Clay, at his boarding-house I think the evening after this conversation; but he was not at his lodgings. I called to see him again, but he had some of his friends with him, and I had no opportunity of conversing with him, nor had I ever any conversation with him, until the evening of the 10th or 11th of January, prior to my leaving Washington for Pennsylvania…. The conversation I then had with him was a very general character. No mention was made of cabinet appointments, and I did not ascertain which of the candidates Mr. Clay would support…. I never did, either directly or indirectly, receive from Mr. Clay or his friends any intimation which could be construed even by political rancor into such a commission or anything even remotely approaching to it. Had any such agency by any one been tendered I should have indignantly rejected it. I will go further and state that never did I in the course of my conversation with Mr. Clay hear him say or express a desire that in the event of the election of General Jackson, Mr. Adams, or Mr. Crawford, he should wish to be secretary of state, or hold any station in the cabinet. Further, I never had, to any one at any time, or on any occasion, represented myself, or wished it to be understood that I was authorized to receive, or to make, overtures on the part of Mr. Clay or his friends. … I did not know, until ten days after the election of Mr. Adams, that Mr. Clay had been offered the appointment of secretary of state; and it is a well-known fact, that after he had the offer, he consulted many of his friends whether he should or should not accept it. He told me in a conversation he did me the honor to hold with me, on the subject that the acceptance of it would not only be to him a sacrifice of domestic happiness, but a serious pecuniary loss. I know also that not only his immediate personal and political friends but many of those who voted for other candidates were desirous that he should accept the station and urged that his country had claims upon him and would never see him suffer from devotion to her best interests. I am free to acknowledge that at the time of the conversation between Mr. Buchanan and myself my impression was that General Jackson would be elected; and it was pretty generally talked of as well as understood among many of his friends that in the event of his election Mr. Clay would have the offer of secretary of state… ”
As for the other man roped into all this, Major Eaton would write on September 12, 1827, “…In this application and interview, I felt that Mr. Buchanan was acting on the ground of anxious solicitude for the success of General Jackson and from a desire that nothing… should interpose to prevent the election of one for whom he felt more than common interest. I considered that in his zeal he felt it to be right to defend the citadel against unlooked for assaults and believed consequently that the enemy should be met with their own weapons.”
And that’s, well, all the evidence there is really. One of Jackson’s supporters heard a rumor that Jackson was going to select Adams as Secretary of State if Jackson won, felt that the rumor needed to be refuted and that, instead, as another rumor had been circulating that Adams would select Clay as his Secretary of State, that Jackson should at the least imply that would be the case if he, himself, was elected and, if other’s assertions true, Buchanan also actively tried to make sure Clay would be informed of all of this.
And somewhere along that game of telephone, whether deliberately, or just a misinterpretation, the idea that Adam had made a deal with Clay to offer him the Secretary of State job if elected came to the forefront and ultimately may well have markedly changed U.S. history in how it was subsequently used against Adams and Clay, and to bolster Jackson’s position in the following election as a man of the people who’d been robbed of the previous election owing to political wranglings of the elite.
But in all of this, Buchanan seems to have instigated it all, with no individual on Clay’s side involved in the slightest.
Or, at least, that’s what the evidence we have seems to show. It is conjectured given how close Eaton and Jackson were, and that Eaton had seemingly instigated the original Kremer letter, if not written it himself, that the real architect of the actual accusation of Clay selling his vote and influence to Adams for the Secretary of the State position was none other than Andrew Jackson himself. Especially as no one else directly involved, outside of seemingly Eaton through Kremer, ever brought this up except Jackson who was actively spreading the rumor around in the interim between the two Presidential elections.
Whatever the case there, Daniel Webster would write to Clay about all this, even before Jackson revealed the name of Buchanan, predicting all this outcome, stating, “Your reply to General Jackson’s letter is admirable, and has been most favorably received everywhere, at least on this side of the allegations. It places the general in a position where he can not remain. He must move in some direction; and whatever movement he makes, will either embarrass his friends, or still more embarrass himself. I have a suspicion that the ‘respectable member of Congress’ is Mr. Buchanan. If this should turn out so, it will place him in an awkward situation, since, it seems, he [Buchanan] did recommend a bargain with your friends…”
When Webster would later read both Jackson and Buchanan’s accounts, he would go on on August 22, 1827, “…Buchanan is treated too gently. Many persons think his letter candid. I deem it otherwise. It seems to me to be labored very hard to protect the general, as far as he could, without injury to himself…” And in another letter Webster states, “I am satisfied, upon my conscience, that the whole business originated with General Jackson himself; whether through mistake, or from intention…”
If it was truly from Jackson, it was a master stroke. In that it placed Clay and Adams in a no win situation right when rumors were that Clay was about to announce for Adams. If, after the accusation came out, Clay really did side with Adams instead of Jackson, many in the public would assume a deal had been struck whether Clay was ever given the Secretary of State or not. And it also seemingly assured he could not be selected Secretary of State by Adams, as was the rumor at the time, as if he was selected, and accepted the offer, it would confirm the rumor and his reputation tarnished beyond repair and seemingly no chance at a future presidential run. If he wasn’t selected, he was less of a threat in the elections after Adams as well. And, of course, the whole affair also sullied Adam’s reputation.
Further, in all of this, the accusation, coming from a seemingly reputable source in a member of Congress, would be enough because it’s generally impossible to prove a negative, and the general public tends to eat this stuff up like candy for breakfast when it comes to alleged government intrigue. In other words, there was no way for Henry Clay to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he didn’t make such a deal no matter what he did at this point unless he sided with Jackson in the election. That he supported Adams very publicly was enough evidence for many against him.
Of course, Clay did indeed support Adams and in the end was selected Secretary of State. Leaving many to still question, despite the lack of any other evidence up to this point, whether there really was a corrupt bargain.
For that, while nobody knows exactly what John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay discussed in their meeting, and if such an offer was made, though we’ll get to what Adams says in his journal that they talked about shortly, what we do have are literally hundreds of surviving letters from various individuals involved in all this discussing it in great detail and their thoughts.
So what did they all have to say?
Well, how about we start with the man who broke the full story himself after hearing Jackson tell the tale of corruption, Carter Beverley, who would completely recant, later in life writing to Clay to apologize. Stating,
“It will be no doubt a matter of some astonishment to you, in receiving from me the present address…. Although the time is quite far gone, since I became very innocently instrumental in circulating throughout the country, a very great attack upon your character and virtue as a gentleman, and certainly a very heavy one, as a public man, I feel exceedingly desirous to relieve you, as far as I can, from the slander, and my own feelings from the severe compunction that is within me, of having been, though neither directly nor indirectly, your personal accuser; yet, that I was drawn indiscreetly into the representation of an attack upon you…. This letter is intended to show you that the long lapse of time, and the many growing circumstances of the country and the government, have long ago convinced me that the very greatest injustice was done you in the charge made. I had, too, an opportunity lately of reading over very calmly and dispassionately a file of newspapers, containing the whole affair, and carefully dilated upon it. Mr. Buchanan, who was represented to be your accuser, exhibited no proof whatever against you; and he even denied having ever made the charge upon you. I have discharged my mind in addressing myself so fully to you, and can only add, that if a publication of this letter can render you any essential service (though I do not deserve it), you have full liberty from me, to let the public see it. One circumstance I beg to assure you of, that, whatever my verbal and written expressions of you were (and I suppose I must have given much scope to both, though I recollect now nothing of what I did say), I again say, that I am most thoroughly convinced, that you were most untruthfully, and therefore unjustly treated; for I have never seen any evidence to substantiate at all the charge…. It can surely now no longer be matter of doubt upon their minds; for he who was generally believed to be the circulator of the egregious slander against you, hereby revokes his belief of it, and unequivocally declares, that it is unproved, and stands utterly unsupported to this time-a period of fifteen or sixteen years.”
As for Adams thoughts, he mostly stayed silent about the whole affair until after his time as President had ended, but ultimately wrote a letter to a committee in New Jersey in 1829 stating, “Upon him the foulest slanders have been showered. Long known and appreciated, as successively a member of both houses of your national legislature, as the unrivaled speaker, and at the same time most efficient leader of debates in one of them; as an able and successful negotiator of your interests, in war and peace, with foreign powers, and as a powerful candidate for the highest of your trusts, the department of state itself was a station, which, by its bestowal, could confer neither profit, nor honor, upon him, but upon which he has shed unfading honor, by the manner in which he has discharged its duties. Prejudice and passion have charged him with obtaining that office by bargain and corruption. Before you, my fellow-citizens, in the presence of our country and Heaven, I pronounce that charge totally unfounded. This tribute of justice is due from me to him, and I seize, with pleasure, the opportunity afforded me by your letter, of discharging the obligation. As to my motives for tendering to him the department of state when I did, let that man who questions them, come forward; let him look around among statesmen and legislators of this nation, and of that day; let him then select and name the man, whom, by his pre-eminent talents, by his splendid services, by his ardent patriotism, by his all-embracing public spirit, by his fervid eloquence in behalf of the rights and liberties of mankind, and by his long experience in the affairs of the Union, foreign and domestic, a president of the United States, intent only upon the honor and welfare of his country, ought to have preferred to HENRY CLAY. Let him name the man, and then judge you, my fellow-citizens, of my motives.”
The highly religions Adams even more strongly stated at the age of 75 and nearing his own death when speaking at a reception in Kentucky, “I thank you, sir, for the opportunity you have given me of speaking of the great statesman, who was associated with me in the administration of the general government, at my earnest solicitation; who belongs not to Kentucky alone, but to the whole Union; and who is not only an honor to this state, and this nation, but to mankind. The charges to which you refer, after my term of service had expired, and it was proper for me to speak, I denied before the whole country, and I here reiterate and reaffirm that denial; and as I expect shortly to appear before my God, to answer for the conduct of my whole life, should those charges have found their way to the throne of eternal justice, I WILL, in the presence of OMNIPOTENCE, pronounce them FALSE.”
Further, in a circular requesting any member of Congress at the time of the events in question to come forward with their thoughts and recollections of the whole affair, they did so- In droves, with many dozens of letters from various congressmen and delegates more or less all saying some version of the same thing.
For example, of the idea that it was Clay who convinced the Ohio delegates to side with Adams, Duncan McArthur of that delegation would write on May 18, 1827 noting, as countless others would corroborate in their own testimonies, that it was Jackson’s friends, not Adams or Clay, who were most pressing on the matter of promises to Clay and others in exchange for votes, “The fact is, that the Ohio delegation-at least a large majority of them-were the first of Mr. Clay’s friends, who came to the determination of voting for Mr. Adams, and that too, without having ascertained Mr. Clay’s views on the subject. The language of some of the friends of the general, before the election, was, that the friends of Mr. Clay durst not vote for any man, other than General Jackson. This was often repeated, in a menacing manner. But, it is also true, that others of the general’s friends used, what they no doubt conceived, more persuasive language. Indeed, they appeared to be willing to make any promises, which they thought would induce the friends of Mr. Clay to vote for General Jackson.”
Joseph Vance would chime in on July 12, 1827, “As one of the original friends of Mr. Clay, I was in the habit of free and unreserved conversations, both with him and his other friends, relative to that election, and I am bold to say, that I never heard a whisper of anything like a condition, on which our vote was to be given, mentioned, either by Mr. Clay himself, or any of his friends, at any time, or under any circumstances.”
A delegate from Louisiana, Wm Brent would write on June 5, “In allusion to the Fayetteville letter, I can not express the indignant feelings it excited. It is the fabrication of a desperate man, who, to obtain his object, dares to assert what he knows to be false. You ask me to say, whether I know or believe, that such a proposition was ever made, or whether conditions of any sort were proposed, by the friends of Mr. Clay, to any one, ‘on the compliance with which their vote was made to depend.’ No honorable man can believe for a moment that such a proposition was ever made, or such a condition stipulated. I was a friend of Mr. Clay throughout the contest; I was in the confidence of all his friends; and I declare to God that I never heard of such things, until it was asserted by the disappointed adherents of General Jackson. I am not only ignorant of any such arrangements, but do not believe they ever existed.”
David Trimble of the Kentucky delegation would go on that months before Clay and Adams ever had their little meeting, “I met with Mr. Clay at Frankfort, Kentucky, about the first of October, 1824. He [Mr. Clay] said that he could not, consistently with his principles, vote for General Jackson, under any possible circumstances. I made some reference to the supposed difference of opinion between himself and Mr. Adams, about the treaty of Ghent. He said, in reply, that it had been greatly magnified by the friends of his competitors, for electioneering purposes; that it ought to have no influence in the vote which he might be called upon to give; that, if he was weak enough to allow his personal feelings to influence his public conduct, there would be no change in his mind on that account, because he was then upon much worse terms with General Jackson about the Seminole war, than he could ever be with Mr. Adams about the treaty of Ghent; but that, in the selection of a chief magistrate for the Union, he would endeavor to disregard all private feelings, and look entirely to the interests of the country, and the safety of its institutions. I should have thought strange of it, if Mr. Clay had voted for General Jackson, after saying what he did.”
J.S. Johnston, a Senator from Louisiana would also write to Clay on November 17 1827 confirming Clay’s unswaying opinion with regards to Adams vs Jackson, “I met you, for the first time, on your return to Washington, in December, 1824, on the Saturday or Sunday evening previous to the meeting of Congress, and at that time we had a long and free conversation, on the approaching election… I remarked to you, that, in all probability, the contest would be finally reduced to Mr. Adams and General Jackson, and the conversation turned upon their comparative merits and qualifications, and a long discussion ensued. You drew a parallel between them, in a manner I thought very just and respectful to both. You concluded by expressing a preference for Mr. Adams, which turned principally on his talents, and experience in civil affairs. . . No fact ever came to my knowledge that could, in the slightest degree, justify the charge that has been exhibited. On the contrary, I know that your opinion did not undergo any change, from the time I first saw you, on your return to Washington.”
Daniel Drake would also write to the National Intelligencer also claiming Clay had known he would go for Adams long before the meeting between Adams and Clay, stating, “GENTLEMEN: At different times before Mr. Clay left this place for Washington, last fall, I had conversations with him on the subject of a choice of a president by the house of representatives. In all of them he expressed himself as having, long before, decided in favor of Mr. Adams, in case the contest should be between that gentleman and General Jackson. My last interview with him, was, I think, the very day before his departure, when he was still more explicit, as it was then certain, that the election would be transferred to that tribunal, and highly probable, that he would not be among the number returned. In the course of the conversation, I took occasion to express my sentiments, with respect to the delicate and difficult circumstances under which he would be placed; on which he remarked… that nothing should deter him from the duty of giving his vote, and that no state of things could arise, that would justify him in preferring General Jackson to Mr. Adams, or induce him to support the former. So decisive, indeed, were his declarations on this subject, that, had he voted otherwise than he did, I should have been compelled to regard him as deserving that species of censure, which has been cast upon him, for consistently adhering to an early and deliberate resolution.”
The Governor of Maryland, Joseph Kent would sum up in a letter written on May 15, 1827, “Our friend, Mr. Clay, appears to be the chief object of persecution, with the opposition. They are, with great industry, conducting a systematic attack upon him, which commenced with the Kremer story, an entire fabrication. At the time the plot opened, I was a member of the house of representatives, and heard Kremer declare, he never in his life designed to charge Mr. Clay with anything dishonorable. The old man naturally honest, was imposed on at the time, by a powerful influence, and constrained to act his part in an affair, which, from beginning to end, was as much a fiction, as the Merry Wives of Windsor,’ or the ‘School for Scandal.’ … Mr. Clay I have known intimately for sixteen years. His public career is completely identified with every event of the country, from that period to the present time, whether in peace or war. During the late war, I have seen the house of representatives, after having gone out of committee of the whole, return to it again, for the sole purpose, of affording Mr. Clay (then speaker) an opportunity of putting down the desperate and infuriated advocates of British tyranny, insult, and injury. But his enemies say Mr. Adams bargained with him. This is assertion, without proof, and is destitute of truth, as it is of manly frankness. His superior qualifications placed him in the department of state, and history furnishes no instance, when so superior a man had to bargain for a high station, for which his peculiar fitness was evident to everyone.”
Thus, in the end, once again, on the one hand we have Jackson and his supporter in Kremer alone claiming a deal was made by Adams and Clay, without offering any evidence whatsoever to support the claim. We also have every one of those among Jackson’s supporters who were directly involved in the affair stating they never said that.
On the other side, we have a huge number of the people on all sides involved in the voting coming forward claiming they likewise had never heard even the implication of such impropriety outside of the accusation from Kremer and then later Jackson. And many also noted Clay was the logical choice for the position of Secretary of State anyway for whoever was elected.
We also have alleged participant John Quincy Adams- a man who, like his father before him, was well known for his impeccable integrity to a fault, including countless times proving, like his father before him, if he had to choose what was right that might hurt him or what was wrong but might benefit him, he’d go with what was right come what may, such as when John Adams, one of the most ardent opposers of the British during the Revolution, defended the British soldiers during the Boston Massacre simply because he wanted to make sure they got a fair trial, even though he felt that in doing so, he had just ruined his family. Writing to his wife, Abigail, “I…have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children…[but] the law…will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations, and wanton tempers of men.”
Most significant to our discussion today, as for his son in John Quincy, he was, as mentioned, a huge opponent of the spoils system, instead advocating for the merit system of political appointment. And, indeed, when elected President put his money where his mouth was, retaining many individuals in prominent positions who were not his supporters simply because he deemed them best suited for the job.
Adams noted in his Journal on March 5, 1825, “I determined to renominate every person, against whom there was no complaint which would have warranted his removal; and renominated every person nominated by Mr Monroe, and upon whose nomination the Senate had declined acting.”
As you might imagine, putting many of your political enemies, rather than supporters, in prominent positions proved to be a massive mistake, as they had a tendency to actively work against not only what Adams was trying to do as President, but against the man himself, which was all to have dire consequences for both his efforts as President and in his reelection bid.
Adams was not unaware of this potential outcome, with many of his friends and confidants explicitly pointing out this would happen and, during all of it, continually trying to get him to change tack. But he refused, feeling that removing the most capable individual in his estimation from a given position just because they didn’t support him wasn’t the right thing to do for the nation.
Going further on the Adams’ side, his extremely strong sense of morality and the importance to never stray from doing the right thing was a frequent source of musings in his journal. For example, he once wrote, “It is essential. that you should form and adopt certain rules or principles for the government of your own conduct and temper. Unless you have such rules and principles, there will be numberless occasions on which you will have no guide for your government but your passions.”
He also once wrote his son, George Washington Adams on November 28, 1827, noting of the practice of Journaling, that if you weren’t accurate in it, it was probably a reflection that your conduct was poor, stating, “A man who commits to paper from day to day the employment of his time, the places he frequents, the persons with whom he converses, the actions with which he is occupied, will have a perpetual guard over himself. His record is a second conscience. He will fly from worthless associates and from dishonest deeds, to avoid the alternative of becoming a self-accuser or of falsifying by the suppression of his own testimony to his own actions…”
He also frequently wrote about other famed individuals of his era, analyzing how their poor character inevitably led to their downfall, and lamenting how much more they could have been if they’d cultivated better moral centers, including discussing everyone from Lord Byron to Napoleon. On the latter, writing in 1814, “The Emperor Napoleon says that he was never seduced by prosperity; but when he comes to be judged impartially by posterity that will not be their sentence. His fortune will be among the wonders of the age in which he has lived. His military talent and genius will place him high in the rank of great captains; but his intemperate passion, his presumptuous insolence, and his Spanish and Russian wars, will reduce him very nearly to the level of ordinary men. At all events he will be one of the standing examples of human vicissitude, ranged not among the Alexanders, Caesars, and Charlemagnes, but among the Hannibals, Pompeys, and Charles the 12th.”
Thus, in the end, beyond the complete lack of evidence against Clay, for a man like Adams, such a corrupt bargain would seemingly have been wildly out of character. Especially given it had always seemed likely Clay would support him, not Jackson, anyway. So there was little point even if he had been willing to be so unscrupulous.
And speaking of Adams’ seemingly intractable morals and advocating for the importance of accuracy in his journal, This now all finally brings us to what Adams would state Clay and he discussed during their supposed meeting where the corrupt bargain would allegedly be made. In his journal on January 9th, 1825, he writes,
“Mr Clay came at 6. and spent the Evening with me, in a long Conversation explanatory of the past, and prospective of the future— He said that the time was drawing near, when the choice must be made in the House of Representatives, of a President, from the three Candidates presented by the electoral College. That he had been much urged and solicited with regard to the part in that transaction that he should take, and had not been five minutes landed at his lodgings, before he had been applied to, by a friend of Mr Crawford’s, in a manner so gross that it had disgusted him— That some of my friends also, disclaiming indeed to have any authority from me, had repeatedly applied to him directly or indirectly, urging considerations personal to himself as motives to his course— He had thought it best to reserve some time his determination to himself. First, to give a decent time for his own funeral solemnities as a Candidate; and secondly to prepare and predispose all his friends to a state of neutrality between the three Candidates who would be before the House, so that they might be free ultimately to take that course which might be most conducive to the Public Interest— The time had now come, at which he might be explicit in his communication with me, and he had for that purpose asked this confidential interview— He wished me as far as I might think proper to satisfy him with regard to some principles of great public importance, but without any personal considerations for himself— In the question to come before the House, between General Jackson, Mr Crawford and myself, he had no hesitation in saying that his preference would be for me.”
Thus Adams claiming in this entry written before any rumors of a corrupt bargain existed, that not only was nothing of the sort discussed, but insinuates a friend of Crawford had made such a sentiment towards Clay, which disgusted Clay, and that Clay, to quote “without any personal considerations for himself” wished to simply discuss Adams’ policies and thoughts on matters of public importance to help solidify his decision on which candidate he should choose.
Thus, from all of this data combined, it seems highly improbable that any such corrupt bargain ever occurred. And more likely it was just something the Jackson camp came up with to further their own ends.
This all does bring up the question of, if these accusations were swirling, why on Earth would Adams select Henry Clay for the post of Secretary of State, and why on Earth would Clay accept it when they both knew this would just confirm the whole thing in their opponents minds?
As for the Adams side, as previously noted in his 1829 address of the issue, as well as alluded to given Adams strong stance on selecting the best person for a given job in his administration no matter what, he simply felt Clay was the best man for the job, and at that point actively challenged anyone who claimed there had been a corrupt bargain to name someone more suited for the role at the time.
As for why Henry Clay would then accept the position once offered. Well, he wasn’t sure he would at first. In the aftermath of learning Adams had indeed selected him for this role, he would write to several of his compatriots asking their advice on the matter, such as one Judge Brooke, writing, on February 14, 1825, “MY DEAR SIR: Southard remains in the navy department. I am offered that of the state, but have not yet decided. The others not yet determined on. Crawford retires. What shall I do?”
In the end Clay would sum up his decision to accept in response to WM. H. Crawford. Crawford wrote to Clay that he did not believe the accusations against Clay and Adams, but that “I disapprove of you accepting an office under him.”,
Clay would respond, “When two courses present themselves in human affairs, and one only is pursued, experience develops the errors of the selection which has been made. Those which would have attended the opposite course, can only be a matter of speculation. Thus it is in the case referred to. We see, or think we see, distinctly, the errors of the alternative which I embraced. But, are we sure, that, if I had chosen the other, I should not have been liable to greater hazard, or more animadversion? The truth is, as I have often said, my condition was one full of embarrassments, whatever way I might act. My own judgment was rather opposed to my acceptance of the department of state; but my friends-and let me add, two of your best friends, Mr. McLane, of Delaware, and Mr. Forsyth, urged me strongly not to decline it. It was represented by my friends, that I should get no credit for the forbearance, but that, on the contrary, it would be said, that my forbearance was evidence of my having made a bargain, though unwilling to execute it. ‘Your enemies have sought, by previous denunciation, to frighten you. They do not believe that you have acted otherwise than from motives of the purest patriotism; but they wish to alarm you, and prevent you from entering the department of state.’ These, and other similar arguments were pressed on me, and after a week’s deliberation, I yielded to their force. It is quite possible, that I may have erred. . . . I shall at least have no cause of self-reproach.”
In the end, it seemingly was a mistake, by both Adams and Clay, with the latter’s career forever marred, and Adams’ presidency off on the wrong foot from the start, with this scandal, as mentioned, also serving as the first salvo against Adams’ in his subsequent run for a second term as President, although as we’ll get into momentarily in the Bonus Facts along with the story of Andrew Jackson killing a man he deemed needed killing, “run” is slightly a misnomer. Adams seemed to actively and purposefully forgo doing anything that might see him re-elected to a second term.
But to sum up, while it’s impossible to know for sure if Adams and Clay had made any such deal, all evidence seems to be that the story circulated by Andrew Jackson was false, with all of the principal actors in the thing being Jackson supporters, and all of them, except Jackson himself, denied that any such corrupt bargain had occurred between Adams and Clay. And, indeed, ironically, they implicated themselves in trying to insinuate such a bargain with Clay instead, with others noting that the Jackson camp had indeed tried this tack with Clay and his supporters.
As for Clay, while having issues with Adams, he very explicitly had much greater issues with Andrew Jackson. Thus, could not have switched his support to Jackson without losing an incredible amount of credibility amongst his peers, and the idea that they, too, would suddenly switch to the Jackson camp if he had seems unlikely.
Adams, on the other hand, had been groomed to be President practically from birth. In choosing between the two, it’s really not surprising at all that members of the House who were well aware of Jackson’s inexperience and extremely volatile temperament would largely go for the calm and collected Adams who’d trained his whole life to be President. Further, with each state only getting 1 vote, Jackson was no longer taking advantage of the 3/5 compromise that allowed for more votes because of the slaves in most of his support states. And as for Clay’s eventual selection as Secretary of State, he was seemingly just the best suited candidate for the job so Adams picked him for it regardless of what anyone else thought.
Jackson’s story did its work, however. Clay could not prove a negative, and Jackson supporters never let it go. While it didn’t win Jackson the 1824 election, it unequivocally helped take down his two greatest potential opponents in the following one, as well as garnered sympathy for Jackson- a man of the people simply fighting against the corruption of more established aristocratic politicians who lie to the public’s face while making back alley deals for their own benefit. With the Jackson camp ironically helping to win Jackson the Presidency by lying to the publcis’ face and trying, and failing, to make a back alley deal for their own benefit.
Bonus Facts:
We’ll get to Jackson murdering a man momentarily, but going back to the 1828 election Adams lost to Jackson, it should be noted that Adams didn’t exactly try to win… Like at all really… with Adams more or less refusing to campaign in any way which had been more the norm before this, but politics were changing. Adams simply refused to change with the times on this matter. Even largely ignoring campaigning via public functions, perhaps not a surprise for a man who disliked socializing to an extreme degree. For example, when asked to come do some politicking while helping to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, he nixed the idea. Later, given he could speak German and spent significant time in the region as an ambassador, he was also encouraged to go open a canal in a German speaking area of Pennsylvania to help boost his standing there, something he likewise declined stating, “This mode of electioneering suited neither my taste nor my principles.”
In yet another invite to press the flesh at a major agricultural fair in Baltimore, he once again declined, stating if he accepted, it would just encourage more such events. He states, “From cattle-shows to other public meetings for purposes of utility or exposure of public sentiment, the transition is natural and easy. This is no part of my duty.” He further went on, “My journeys and my visits, wherever they may be, shall have no connection with the Presidency.”
On all this, his refusal to go out campaigning directly, as well as his refusal to directly address the accusations against him by his opponent and co., left many of those closest to him extremely frustrated. This was, in some respects, a quite simple man who, for example, when left to his own devices despite being relatively well off often ate plain crackers for meals instead of fancy dinners, and who one of his favorite activities was to sit at home by himself and study his Bible- things which contrasted sharply with the elitist, corrupt, aristocratic “professor” version of Adams that Jackson’s supporters pushed. Given this, the person who knew him best, his wife Louisa, lamented, “If he would only lend himself a little to the usages and manners of the people without hiding himself and… rejecting their civilities, no man could be more popular because his manners are simple, unostentatious, and unassuming.”
That said, all was not bad on the John Quincy Adams side. Seemingly never having enjoyed being President, and fairly ineffectual in the role, he found his stride once again as a member of Congress becoming the first President to serve in Congress after being President, and still the only one to serve in the House of Representatives after holding the nation’s highest office- both things U.S. history after should be very grateful for. If John Quincy Adams’ Presidency was relatively unremarkable, his time in Congress after was not, though much of what he advocated would, as alluded to earlier, be accomplished by his successors, such as Abraham Lincoln adopting many of the arguments Adams used when trying to put an end to slavery in the United States.
In the end, slavery became the area Adams’ focussed on the most in the waning years of his political life, notably also along with fighting for women’s rights and Native Americans- all things which in his era generally weren’t exactly highly praised, but have seen historians today view his work outside of his Presidency much more favorably in retrospect. As for the slavery question, he stated it was his goal to “bring about a day prophesied when slavery and war shall be banished from the face of the Earth”.
Speaking of Lincoln, he is often credited as a Congressional pallbearer at Adams’ funeral but when really digging into it, evidence seems to be that in reality John Wentworth represented Illinois in this role. That said, Lincoln was a freshman Congressman at the time of Adams’ death and, like Adams at that time, a Whig. Perhaps unsurprisingly from this, as just noted, Lincoln embraced many of Adams’ ideas on this front in trying to rid the nation of slavery. For example, Adams argued that the Declaration of Independence was a foundational document defining the United States every bit as much as the Constitution. This was an important supposition, as Adams’ stated, “The fault is in the Constitution of the United States, which has sanctioned a dishonorable compromise with slavery.” Whereas the Declaration of Independence, in strong contrast, states very clearly “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Not just pushing the Declaration of Independence and its ideas as guiding and core principles of the nation, Adams also claimed in a speech he gave on July 4th, 1837, “The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, was seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction, than by the author of the Declaration himself.”
Going further on the hypocrisy, he wrote back in 1820, “The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls. In the abstract they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim it, and cast it all upon the shoulder of Great Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vain glory in their condition of masterdom. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee’s manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?”
Another method of attack against slavery Adams pushed was to try to not allow its spread any further into new territories. In this way, inevitably the non-slave regions would come to dominate the political discourse of the nation over time. Of course, in the end, Adams well knew that the issues of slavery could well split the nation he loved and had dedicated his life to. Nevertheless, he championed the cause, stating, “if the dissolution of the Union must come, let it come from no other cause but this.”
In all this, while he may have been the wrong man at the wrong time during his presidency, he was unequivocally the right man at the right time afterwards in this fight. His age and popularity among those electing him to Congress basically set in stone allowing him the freedom to do and say whatever he wished without too much concern. Further, his extreme stubbornness and willingness to advocate for what he felt was right regardless of what anyone else thought or who he pissed off, as well as general attitude of if you push him, he will push back with extreme vigor, also proved a huge boon. On this note, over the course of his time fighting to end slavery in the United States, including defending the captives from the famed 1841 United States v. The Amistad before the Supreme Court, correspondents indicating he’d soon be murdered became something of a regular occurance for Adams, such as one that stated, “You will when least expected, be shot down in the street, or your damaged guts will be cut out in the dark.”
Yet while these often caused others who knew him a great deal of anxiety, Adams himself generally seemed little concerned and simply kept fighting the fight regardless. In the end, all resulting in one Virginian slave holder lamenting that Adams was, as previously noted, the “acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.”
Or, as the aforementioned Adams Family Papers Editor, Margaret A. Hogan, would sum up, “The same high-minded and rigidly uncompromising stance on moral issues that so weakened his effectiveness as a President served him well as a representative in Congress. In taking up the battle against slavery, Adams greatly redeemed himself in the eyes of history…”
Going back to Andrew Jackson and his killing a man he deemed needed killing. On May 30, 1806, Andrew Jackson dueled with famed marksman Charles Dickinson, killing him, after Dickinson insulted Jackson in a variety of ways including calling Jackson’s wife of bigamist, as previously noted.
As to what caused him to insult Jackson and his wife, both Dickinson’s father-in-law and Jackson at the time were horse breeders and rivals of one another. The beef between the two that eventually escalated to Jackson challenging Dickinson to a duel started in 1805 when Jackson had a $2000 (about $35,000 today) bet with Captain Joseph Erwin, Dickinson’s father-in-law, on a horse race. The winner would get $2,000 from the other, or if the horse one or the other bet on couldn’t run, then that person would have to pay the other $800. Erwin’s horse did indeed not run the race, having come up lame, while Jackson’s horse Truxton did run, and so Erwin was forced to pay Jackson $800, though there was a disagreement between the two about which notes Jackson would be paid with.
Later Dickinson overheard a secondhand account of things Jackson supposedly said about Erwin over the matter and became angry at Jackson about it and fought with the person telling the story, who was a friend of Jackson. Dickinson then sent Thomas Swann to ask Jackson whether what he heard was true, which Jackson denied, but in the process Jackson physically attacked Swann and said he was a “stupid meddler”.
Dickinson then wrote to Jackson, calling him a “coward and an equivocator”. This escalated to the point where the two were sending a series of insults back and forth, including publishing some in the National Review, such as this last one which was the final straw, published in May of 1806 by Dickinson calling Jackson a “worthless scoundrel, … a poltroon and a coward” after Jackson had called Dickinson a “a worthless, drunken, blackguard”.
Despite the fact that Dickinson was known to be one of the best marksmen in all of Tennessee and dueling was illegal in that state, Jackson challenged him to a duel by sending him a note stating, he wanted “satisfaction due [him] for the insults offered.” Because dueling was illegal in Tennessee, they traveled to Logan, Kentucky, and dueled on the shores of the Red River.
Jackson conceded the first shot to Dickinson, choosing not to fire when he turned, even though Dickinson was such a good marksmen. He and his second thought there was a chance Dickinson might miss, having to turn and shoot and trying to do so as quickly as possible before Jackson could get off a shot. So if he did miss or otherwise dealt a non-fatal blow, Jackson could then take his time and aim and kill him with the one shot he was allowed, as Dickinson would be required to stand still and give Jackson his chance. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as hoped, as the shot fired by Dickinson hit Jackson in the chest just a few inches from his heart, breaking two ribs in the process.
Not to be dissuaded, Jackson stayed on his feet and carefully aimed at Dickinson and pulled the trigger… only nothing happened as the hammer had stopped half-cocked. So he re-cocked it and pulled the trigger again, this time hitting Dickinson in the chest.
A few hours later Dickinson died as Jackson’s shot had damaged an artery. He was only 26 years old leaving his wife a widow, all over her father’s honor. All things being equal, we imagine Captain Erwin would have rather his daughter still had her promising young husband around, but who’s to say. It’s also interesting to think how markedly different history might have been if Dickinson’s shot had been just an inch or two closer to Jackson’s heart.
Whatever the case, Jackson lived on and eventually became President, although because of the bullet’s proximity to his heart, it could not be removed and remained in his chest for the remaining 39 years of his life, reportedly causing him quite a bit of pain. Asked after the fact how he kept his feet after a near deadly hit to the chest, Jackson replied, “I should have hit him if he had shot me through the brain.”
This duel didn’t endear people to Jackson as many thought it was dishonorable for him to aim to kill after Dickinson had already taken his shot, thinking Jackson should have instead simply aimed to hurt Dickinson instead or even that he should have fired in the air to spare his life, thus ending the duel. But let’s just say, with a long track record in it, mercy upon anyone who he perceived had slighted him in any way wasn’t exactly in Jackson’s character.
Expand for Referenceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1824_United_States_presidential_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
https://millercenter.org/contested-presidential-elections/corrupt-bargain
The 1824 Presidential Election and the “Corrupt Bargain”
https://thehermitage.com/corrupt-bargain
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-corrupt-bargain
https://www.history.com/news/anonymous-letter-1825-election-john-quincy-adams
https://npg.si.edu/blog/two-historic-elections%E2%80%94one-controversial-other-nasty
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/electoral-tally
The controversial 1824 presidential election
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/adams-v-jackson-election-1824
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/john-quincy-adams-event-timeline
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-2
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/reply-the-president-elect-notification-election
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https://www.masshist.org/publications/jqadiaries/index.php/document/jqadiaries-v33-1825-02-04-p066
https://www.masshist.org/publications/jqadiaries/index.php/document/jqadiaries-v36-1825-01-09-p001
The post Shadows of Power: The “Corrupt Bargain” That Changed History and What Really Happened appeared first on Today I Found Out.
For most of history between the point Nikola Tesla and Thomas Alva Edison were respectively doing their things to the present day, if you asked just about anyone which of these men were greater, you’d likely have gotten a response akin to “Nikola who? …I mean, Edison of course? He and God gave us light!” That said, if you asked someone when both were in their prime, you may have gotten a more mixed answer with, contrary to popular belief, Tesla in his day one of the most preeminent celebrity scientists in the world along with Edison. Edison famed for getting things done with perspiration, while Tesla had the reputation for doing his thing through inspiration.
Yet very quickly after his death, Tesla became all but forgotten, while Edison’s legend endured… At least until extremely modern times when the internet masses have jumped on the Nikola Tesla hype train and generally vilified Edison as nothing but a charlatan, and someone largely responsible for Tesla’s fall from grace. But what is the truth here? Were either or even potentially both nothing but media hyping narcissists taking credit for others’ work? Were either or potentially both actually great men of history? What is the story between them and why are they so often compared? And overall, which one was actually a greater cog in the human technological advancement machine?
And before you go answering this in the comments based on your current knowledge of the pair, let us caution you because in the history of researching and writing on all manner of topics to the tune of over 5,000 articles on our Todayifoundout website and over 2,000 videos here, we have never found any topic we’ve covered more rife with widespread and generally accepted myths when it came to BOTH the individuals we are going to cover today.
On this note, as for Edison, as historian Keith Nier once very aptly stated, “He is actually one of the least well known of all famous people, and much of what everybody thinks they know about him is no more reliable than a fairy tale.” And as for Tesla? Well, after doing a deep dive on him as well, the consensus among our team here is that’s even more of the case for him than Edison, with the reality of most people’s impressions of Tesla the man and with regards to his work being wildly fictional, even right down to the thing he’s most famous for.
So, dear viewers, get out your dinner and snacks or, if you’re watching this on the porcelain throne, prepare to have your legs fall thoroughly asleep while others in your household begin to wonder if you’ve died in there, because we are going to leave no stone unturned in order to try to rectify the rampant misinformation on both men and their respective life stories in our attempt to try to clear it all up.
Let’s dive into it, shall we?
The Myth of the Edison vs Tesla Feud and the Many Myths Embedded
First and foremost before we get into their respective quite fascinating life stories and compare and contrast and debunk countless myths about both men, we should first address a handful of the more rampant myths concerning the two men’s supposed extreme dislike of each other and feud.
There was no feud. In fact, there wasn’t even any conflict between Tesla and Edison during the war of the currents because, contrary to popular belief, Tesla wasn’t really involved in this.
“But what about his innovative AC Induction motor that changed the electric world and gave us the power grid we have today?!?!?! That’s why Edison lost the War of the Currents!”
Well, on this one, contrary to popular belief, Tesla’s AC Induction motor didn’t come into play in the War of the Currents other than costing Westinghouse a lot of money. It wasn’t until AFTER the war of the currents was already lost by Edison and co that a practical, working version of Tesla’s device was able to be implemented and put into commercial use. And it wasn’t even Tesla that made said motor actually work for this purpose. Someone else did that work after Tesla left the project without really making any real progress on it, with said other individual who solved the issues with it forgotten by popular history, though we will rectify that shortly. But in the end, it was a group effort from Tesla’s idea to the people who made it work in a way that it could be used to make AC power transmission more economically feasible than it already was.
And, yes- already was.
Before Tesla’s motor.
Which, by the way, was just something someone else had come up with before him, even giving lectures on it before Tesla patented his version of more or less the exact same thing. More on this in a bit as well.
Going back to the alleged feud in general, it’s often stated it really ramped up owing to Edison stealing Tesla’s work. But the reality was not only did Edison not take any patents from Tesla, he actually appears to have allowed Tesla to patent things he came up with when working on projects at his job for Edison, even though this wasn’t typical, then or now, and it’s not really clear why Edison allowed this in Tesla’s case. But because Edison did this, it was part of the reason Tesla was able to crack on on his own, all culminating in Tesla earning his own fortune and worldwide fame, before very abruptly losing both his fortune and reputation for reasons we’ll get into.
On top of this, also contrary to popular belief, Edison did not slight Tesla by failing to give him a bonus causing Tesla to leave his employ in anger. In fact, by all appearances, both men almost never interacted in their lives, even while Tesla worked for Edison, as Tesla worked under someone else while there. And as far as the few things they DID say about each other, it was mostly nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for the other’s work, with Tesla only slightly criticizing Edison’s methods. And, not to sound like a broken record, but full details on this momentarily as well!
On top of this, at the height of Tesla’s fame and wealth in March of 1895, his lab burned down. How, nobody knows, but rumored to be at the time started on one of the floors below by someone smoking. Whatever the case- lab destroyed, Tesla would state to a New York Times reporter, “I am in too much grief to talk. What can I say? The work of half my lifetime, very nearly: all my mechanical instruments and scientific apparatus, that it has taken years to perfect, swept away in a fire that lasted only an hour or two. . . . Everything is gone. I must begin over again.”
Edison, hearing about what happened to his famous former employee, sent a message to Tesla that he was free to come use Edison’s Llewellyn Park workshop while he worked on finding and building up a new lab.
They clearly hated each other…
Moving on to the Nobel Prize, on November 6, 1915 thanks to a Reuters news report, with many other outlets picking it up, the world was briefly under the impression that Edison and Tesla had jointly won the Nobel Prize for Physics. As to why Tesla was never awarded such, the rumor mill tends to state everything from that Edison torpedoed the whole thing to spite Tesla or that Tesla himself refused to share such a prize with his mortal enemy. Thus, the Nobel Prize in physics that year was given instead to William H Bragg and Lawrence Bragg “for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays”.
Except other than the fact that it was reported that Tesla and Edison had won the Nobel Prize at the time, they actually hadn’t, as the Nobel committee would ring in on once they heard of the report. They stated both that they never were planning to award either individual a Nobel Prize, and that “Any rumor that a person has not been given a Nobel Prize because he has made known his intention to refuse the reward is ridiculous.”
Further, on the note that Tesla would have rejected such a prize, Tesla himself stated upon hearing the report that he and Edison had jointly won, that while he hadn’t heard anything directly about it from the Nobel committee, he seemed happy about it and that “I have concluded that the honor has been conferred on me in acknowledgement of a discovery announced a short time ago which concerns the transmission of electrical energy without wires.”
When he found out he hadn’t actually won, Tesla would write one Robert Underwood Johnson about the whole thing, shrugging it off and stating, “In a thousand years, there will be many recipients of the Nobel Prize, but I have not less than four dozens of my creations identified with my name in the technical literature. These are honors real and permanent, which are bestowed, not by a few who are apt to err, but by the whole world which seldom makes a mistake.”
One prize Tesla DID win and later accept was the Edison Medal in 1917 awarded him by the American Institute of Electrical Engineering, who Tesla at one point served as the Vice President of from 1892 to 1894.
That said, he did at first state he would refuse such an honor, writing BA Behrend of Westinghouse who had nominated Tesla for the award, “You propose to honor me with a medal which I could pin upon my coat and strut for a vain hour before the members and guests of your institute. You would bestow an outward semblance of honoring me but you would decorate my body and continue to let starve, for failure to supply recognition, my mind and its creative products which have supplied the foundation upon which the major portion of your Institute exists…”
Not dissuaded, Behrend and others on the committee ultimately convinced Tesla to accept the now prestigious award. Tesla then not only showed up to accept it, but seemed very happy about the whole thing, though just before the award ceremony itself he randomly disappeared, only to be found outside in Bryan Park across the street feeding pigeons, as was something of an obsession for him throughout the latter part of his life. He did, however, come back in and delivered a lengthy speech, among other things referring to Edison as “this wonderful man, who had had no theoretical training at all, no advantages, who did all himself, getting great results by virtue of his industry and application.”
He also started out his whole speech in an oddly humble tone compared to his other writings… at first at least, more on the second half of his speech later,
“Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen. I wish to thank you heartily for your kind sympathy and appreciation. I am not deceiving myself in the fact, of which you must be aware, that the speakers have greatly magnified my modest achievements. One should in such a situation be neither diffident nor self-assertive, and in that sense I will concede that some measure of credit may be due to me for the first steps tin certain new directions; but the ideas I advanced have triumphed, the forces and elements have been conquered, and greatness achieved, through the cooperation of many able men some of whom, I am glad to say, are present this evening. Inventors, engineers, designers, manufacturers and financiers have done their share until, as Mr. Behrend said, a gigantic revolution has been wrought in the transmission and transformation of energy.”
Speaking of his winning the Edison medal and rumors of a Nobel Prize win, as to the myth that Tesla somehow labored in obscurity or the like at the time, overshadowed by titans like Edison that some purport, going back to his lab fire, two days later on March 14, 1895, Charles Dana of the New York Sun would write, “The destruction of Nikola Tesla’s workshop, with its wonderful contents, is something more than a private calamity. It is a misfortune to the whole world. It is not in any degree an exaggeration to say that the men living at this time who are more important to the human race than this young gentleman, can be counted on the fingers of one hand; perhaps on the thumb of one hand.”
Alrighty, so that setup and broad overview out of the way, let’s dive into some more interesting details in case you don’t want to take our word for it on any of it.
First, let’s start with the whole Edison stealing Tesla’s patents and taking credit for his work, while simultaneously pissing Tesla off via a promised bonus, which all led to the infamous quote from Edison to Tesla of “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor,” originally claimed in John J. O’Neill’s 1944 work Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla. Noteworthy here, O’Neill does not cite his source of that quote and by all evidence, if it did occur, it wasn’t over this matter.
To begin with, an actual Edison and Tesla fact is that almost immediately upon arriving in the United States, Tesla began working at Edison’s Machine Works for a period of about six months.
According to legend, their fictional feud all started when Tesla was offered a $50,000 bonus (about $2 million today) if he could improve the design of certain of Edison’s machinery. When Tesla successfully completed this task, Edison’s company (or Edison himself, in some versions of the tale) declined to pay out.
As to the origin of this story, this one came from Tesla later in life. He wrote of all this,
“The S.S. Oregon, the fastest passenger steamer at that time, had both of its lighting machines disabled and its sailing was delayed. As the superstructure had been built after their installation it was impossible to remove them from the hold. The predicament was a serious one and Edison was much annoyed. In the evening I took the necessary instruments with me and went aboard the vessel where I stayed for the night. The dynamos were in bad condition, having several short-circuits and breaks, but with the assistance of the crew I succeeded in putting them in good shape… During this period I designed twenty-four different types of standard machines with short cores and of uniform pattern which replaced the old ones. The Manager had promised me fifty thousand dollars on the completion of this task but it turned out to be a practical joke. This gave me a painful shock and I resigned my position.”
Now, even if true, it should be explicitly pointed out that Edison wasn’t involved in any of the Bonus talk, with the story simply mentioning Tesla’s manager. All other accounts of it, such as the supposed quote from Edison about American humor, have been slowly popping up in the years since seemingly out of thin air. But also, this story seems to have been made up by Tesla as well, or at least highly exaggerated. And, in fact, as we’ll get into a bit and the sad reasons why, at this point in his life, Tesla was making up an awful lot of things that were, shall we say, making others in the world, especially in the industries he was dealing in, not just lose any faith in the man, but also quietly begin to distance themselves from him as mentally ill at best, or a charlatan trying to get back some of his former fame and hype at worst. And maybe a little bit of both.
But on this story, even if Tesla’s manager had made such a promise of, in modern dollars, a near $2 million bonus, it bizarrely makes Tesla look rather dimwitted, given his pay at the time was only $18 per week and he would otherwise have just been doing his job in making these improvements. Further, even if bonuses were offered (and, indeed, Edison was known to give bonuses and promotions and the like to employees who did significant things), it certainly wouldn’t have been for a figure like $50,000, which would have made Tesla not only quite wealthy overnight, but given him more money than Edison’s Machine Works actually had at the time.
The story, thus, seems a little suspect on its details.
This is also not documented in Tesla’s journal around the time it supposedly happened, which, we’re just guessing if someone offered you the equivalent of $2 million today as a bonus to do your normal job, you’d probably write that crap down in your nightly written musings. Further, you’d certainly write about it if they then reneged on the deal. Especially if it then made you so angry it was the reason you quit your job, as Tesla claims here. What he actually wrote in his journal when he left the company, however, was simply “Good by to the Edison Machine Works.”
Why Tesla Stopped Working for Edison
So why did he leave, especially as in the aftermath for a time he had to take to digging ditches for underground telegraph cables for Western Union? Well, nobody knows with any certainty. But it seems to be centered around his work on arc lighting for Edison. At the time, he was working on an outdoor arc lighting system Edison had previously patented in 1884, which Tesla did and created a workable system. But during this time, Edison had pivoted and made an agreement with the American Electric Manufacturing Company to use their arc-lighting system for his customers seeking outdoor lighting, IF the American Electric Manufacturing Company would use Edison’s incandescent system for their indoor lighting customers. Thus, Tesla’s work was essentially thrown out as no longer needed by the company. It was shortly after this that Tesla made his exit. It has been suggested Tesla was upset about this, so left for that reason. BUT, his autobiography actually paints a different picture of him seemingly just being afforded an opportunity based on the arc lighting system he’d come up with.
He states, “Immediately thereafter some people approached me with the proposal of forming an arc light company under my name, to which I agreed.” Noteworthy on this, again, for whatever reason, Tesla was allowed to patent the things he’d done for Edison and keep it as his own. This debunks the idea that Edison was just sitting back evilly cackling as he stole his brilliant employee, Tesla’s, inventions for fun and profit. In fact, it went the other way and, for whatever reason, he seems to have allowed Tesla to take them, something that was pivotal in Tesla’s first steps into his own independent work.
Tesla goes on, “Here finally was an opportunity to develop the motor, but when I broached the subject to my new associates they said: ‘No, we want the arc lamp. We don’t care for this alternating current of yours.’ In 1886 my system of arc lighting was perfected and adopted for factory and municipal lighting, and I was free, but with no other possession than a beautifully engraved certificate of stock of hypothetical value. Then followed a period of struggle in the new medium for which I was not fitted…”
He does not explicitly say what this work was, but we can only assume from the timing here, he was referring to the digging of ditches for Western Union lines.
However, such digging all worked out for Tesla as it was through this job that he was ultimately connected with Alfred S. Brown, the then head of Western Union’s telegraph service for the New York Metropolitan District. A few more connections later via Brown and Tesla found his work on his motor partially funded and with his own laboratory in the fall of 1886, eventually incorporated as the Tesla Electric Company.
Tesla states of all this in his autobiography, “the reward came in the end and in April, 1887, the Tesla Electric Company was organized, providing a laboratory and facilities. The motors I built there were exactly as I had imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision and the operation was always as I expected.”
We’ll get more into Tesla’s rather peculiar waking visions later when we dive into his life story in detail.
The Love of Tesla’s Life
But on a related note, going back to Tesla’s claim here on the whole Bonus and the questionable nature of it. It’s at this point we should probably dive into the fact that during this period of his life when Tesla came up with this story, let’s just say the formerly brilliant mind was, very sadly, a slice of cheddar short of a cheese sandwich, with the man himself becoming increasingly “eccentric,” to put it kindly. For example, beyond making wild claims about various world changing inventions he’d supposedly successfully made later in life that were provably false and often wouldn’t have worked anyway, around this time, he was also claiming pigeons were speaking to him, one of whom he had fallen in love with. As he wrote, “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”
Speaking of his love life, Tesla was seemingly celebite in his lifetime, though perhaps not from being asexual or anything of the sort, as he would reference in his autobiography the need to overcome such urges and even elsewhere ponder if he’d sacrificed too much for his work in forgoing a wife and family. But also that he felt that doing so, and remaining unattached and chaste, was extremely beneficial to his work.
But going back to the bird, he also claimed when the avian love of his life was dying, she came to him and he saw “two powerful beams of light” emanating from her eyes. And that “Yes, it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.”
It must have been love, because at a time when he was deeply in debt and barely scraping by on the generosity of others, he reportedly spent about $2,000 (about $40,000 today) for this and other bird’s care who had been injured or were sick. His love of caring for pigeons in his room and feeding them from his window also contributed to his eviction from the St. Regis in 1923, along with the whole not paying his bills thing. He bounced around from here similarly until finally Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company decided to start paying $125 per month (about $3000 today) to Tesla, as well as paying for his room at the Hotel New Yorker to make sure he was reasonably comfortable in the last decade or so of his life.
War of the Currents Myth
But in any event, let’s now dive into greater detail with regards to our claim that Edison and Tesla never had a conflict during the war of the currents- AC vs DC, and that Tesla’s motor didn’t actually play into that war really either.
First, to be clear, the war of the currents was not Edison vs Tesla, it was Edison against George Westinghouse and other companies like Thomson-Houston.
We should also start this section by debunking very briefly the idea that Tesla invented AC power, which is another common, and very inexplicable, idea you’ll read on the interwebs. He did not. Others like Faraday and Hippolyte Pixii pioneered that, with the latter creating an AC generator all the way back in 1832, over a half century before Tesla was working on his AC Induction motor. There was also significant AC generator and transformer work done by various individuals such as Sabastian Ziani de Ferranti and William Stanley, who based their work on yet others’.
But it was Stanley, not Tesla, who arguably won the war of the currents for Westinghouse. It was Stanley’s complete high voltage AC system including generators, transformers, and high-voltage transmission lines that allowed for AC power to be relatively efficiently transmitted over large areas. And it was Stanley’s transformer design that served as the prototype for the transformers that came after. But lest you think Stanley deserves all the credit, his work was, in turn, based on others’, such as his transformer design based on the work of Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs before.
Further, without the work of Oliver Shallenberger Stanley’s system would have been extremely difficult to get to work in a commercially viable way. Why? Because it was Shallenberger who came up with a critical piece of the puzzle in the world’s first commercially successful AC electrical meter, which, funny enough, was the result of an accident. While working on a lamp, a nearby spring fell into it, at which point Shallenberger noticed it was rotating, which could only be by electromagnetic force. He quickly realized he could use this fact to create a device that turned small wheels proportional to the power flowing along the lines and thus, he had found a way to measure the usage of AC Power.
And then there was Benjamin Lamme. Without Lammes’ work on Tesla’s motor, it was completely worthless for this application or, at least as the system was at the time, and, much like Tesla himself in this case, would have gone in the dustbin of history, with others’ similar devices used instead. And we do not say that lightly with regards to Tesla in general. Because without the success of his motor, it seems unlikely any of the rest of his work, even if it had still occurred, would have garnered him any notability with the masses or investors any more than any other brilliant scientist or engineer working on similar things.
And speaking of all that and AC Power transmission, almost a decade before Tesla threw his giant brain cells into the ring, guys like Oskar von Miller and Galileo Ferraris were also doing their thing. The latter, Ferraris, is not called the “Father of three-phase current” for no reason. A title he ultimately earned through his work when he developed his AC motor idea three years before Tesla invented his version of mostly the same thing. In fact, when thinking about more efficient ways to do things, Westinghouse initially debated whether to go with Tesla or Ferraris, but ultimately settled on the former for reasons unclear today, but may have simply been proximity to the individual. Ferraris was an ocean and more away in Italy. Tesla was nearby, and holding a U.S. Patent on such a device as Ferraris had outlined in his previous paper that, again, was published before Tesla applied for his patent on largely the same thing.
On this, electrical engineer and author Laurence A Hawkins in 1903 would write, “Accordingly, when Tesla announced in May 1888 that he had solved this motor problem, he at once became one of the most prominent figures in the engineering world. His solution was a theory of the combination of two or more alternating currents of different phase to produce a resultant rotating magnetic field. This same theory had been published in Italy… prior to Tesla by Ferraris in L’Elettricita April 22 1888. Ferraris, however, contented himself with publication of the theory, while Tesla patented it, and followed up his first patents with a mass of other patents describing every conceivable construction and more of operation that could in any way be imagined to embody his rotating magnetic field. It is for this reason that the rotating field theory is associated in this country with the name of Tesla rather than with that of Ferraris, although the contrary is the fact in every other country. The idea of a rotating magnetic field as the resultant of two currents was not novel. It had been produced by Bailey in 1879 with commuted direct currents, by Deprez in 1883 with alternating currents…. But the time had not come in 1888, and the motors described by Tesla, even if they had been commercially efficient structures, could not be operated on the circuits then existing. Like Edison’s three wire system, the rotating field must have been obvious when changed conditions called for its application, but in 1888 it was not what was wanted.”
He further notes of the criticism of Tesla’s motor at the time, and why it took several years for it to be practical in the existing AC systems, “As Swinbourne said at the time “Electrician Vol 21, p 342, ‘The low efficiency is not at all the chief objection to the scheme. The whole arrangement is impracticable, as it demands special alternate-current generators and leads. Until Mr. Tesla can produce a motor which will work on alternate current circuits as they are, and do that efficiently even with varying loads and without difficulty in starting, he can hardly be said to have solved the problem.’… The achievement of the Tesla and Ferraris publications was not the solution of a problem presented by existing conditions. They assumed non-existent and, at that time, impracticable conditions, and then applied the obvious principle of the rotating field of Bailey and Deprez. Had not experience subsequently proved the polyphase generator more efficient than the single phase, the rotary field of Tesla and Ferraris, like that of Bailey and Deprez, would never have become of more than academic interest.”
And, indeed, as alluded to, it took others a few years to figure all this out, with Tesla barely involved.
Hawkins goes on referencing this, “But engineering today owes Tesla no more than it owes Ferraras, Deprez, or Bailey, for Tesla never produced a commercially successful motor. As the demand for polyphase motors gradually came into existence, he worked hard to produce a commercial motor, but it did not appear in the market. The motors of the so called fundamental patents failed absolutely to meet commercial conditions. Though the later Tesla patents describe multitudinous modifications, Tesla himself, with practically unlimited means at his disposal, seems to have failed to produce a commercial self-starting motor for power purposes.”
So, what actually happened during the War of the Currents?
As alluded to, news of Tesla’s Alternating Current Induction Motor eventually reached George Westinghouse, primary owner of the Westinghouse Company. Both Edison and Westinghouse were already fighting to secure dominance of the energy markets, and the latter put his faith in Tesla’s innovation to help his and his team’s system win the battle thanks to efficiency improvements over their previous system.
That said, once again, Tesla’s motor didn’t end up coming into play in the War of the Currents other than costing Westinghouse a lot of money. This is something that famously, during the Financial Panic of 1890, allegedly saw Westinghouse almost lose control of his company. At the time, the Westinghouse team, which for a time included Tesla, were still trying to work out the kinks without Tesla’s help as he had already stepped away from the project before his motor could be made to work from a practical standpoint for their purposes. As to why he left, rumors are that he did not work well with others who were working on the project, but that’s difficult to determine the veracity. It may simply be that the contract for him to consult on it was up before they’d actually figured out how to make it work practically for their specific purposes and he wanted to use his newfound wealth to work on other things.
However, even though they weren’t yet deploying Tesla’s motor, it was costing Westinghouse $15,000 per year (about $500,000 per year today) as part of the guaranteed minimum royalty arrangement regardless of distribution. Westinghouse’s new lenders who were refinancing his debts were not a fan of this and a few other such investments that seemed to not be needed to continue business as usual.
Thus, in 1891, Westinghouse told Tesla he had two options. On the one hand, he could stick with that original agreement and Westinghouse would have to cede control of his company to his lenders. The result of this for Tesla would then be he would have to bank on getting his money somehow from them, and potentially have a nice legal battle over it, as Tesla had also sold the manufacturing rights for the motor to Westinghouse for $65,000 (about $2.2 million) as part of the deal. Note, the deal also paid Tesla an additional $24,000 (about $800,000 today) for a year to consult while they tried to deploy his motor, though as alluded to very little came of this other than Tesla getting a nice paycheck. Given the lenders were pretty explicitly wanting to cut ties with Tesla, not seeing the future potential value of what Tesla had made given the current state of it and their AC system at the time, Westinghouse seemed to think Tesla wasn’t going to have much luck there.
Option 2 for Tesla was that he could agree to forgo those royalty payments and Westinghouse would continue to work on potentially deploying his motor.
While Tesla choosing option 2 is often presented as him making an altruistic, or sometimes stated, naive, move, Tesla was not so stupid- obviously- nor altruistic at all when it came to his work, being extremely litigious on it in many other cases, as most inventors are when they feel their work has been stolen and being used for profit by others. But considering his choices, agreeing to Westinghouses’ terms was probably just a good move given the data he had at the time. Having Westinghouse continue to push and perfect his motor and try to deploy it at scale was potentially a huge long term financial and professional benefit to him beyond the royalty payments from Westinghouse itself. While certainly keeping both would have been massively better, if Westinghouse was being honest with him, which that’s not fully clear other than that Westinghouse was definitely in severe financial trouble at the time, and his new lenders were wanting him to cut back on such unprofitable spending, then it was a prudent move. Whether it was a smart one or not though, who knows? But, for what it’s worth, it all worked out reasonably well for Tesla once the kinks were worked out and his motor deployed, as shortly thereafter, Westinghouse and GE jointly paid $216,000 (about $8 million today) to Tesla for the patent for the motor. Had Tesla not agreed to this change in contract, his motor would likely never have been used here, with other’s similar work eventually used instead.
Going back to the difficulty in deploying the motor, Tesla explains, “In the early part of 1888 an arrangement was made with the Westinghouse Company for the manufacture of the motors on a large scale. But great difficulties had still to be overcome. My system was based on the use of low frequency currents and the Westinghouse experts had adopted 133 cycles with the object of securing advantages in the transformation. They did not want to depart from their standard forms of apparatus and my efforts had to be concentrated upon adapting the motor to these conditions. Another necessity was to produce a motor capable of running efficiently at this frequency on two wires which was not easy of accomplishment.”
As to the other key figures involved in figuring out these needed tweaks on Tesla’s motor, it was first one Charles F. Scott who worked on it with Tesla, and later the aforementioned Benjamin Lamme who took over the project when it stalled and appeared to be going nowhere. Lamme made the practical version of Tesla’s induction motor that would work for their purposes given the AC system of the day, as well as ultimately improving things on the motor over the course of several years working on it, long after Tesla was not involved at all. Granted, without Tesla’s original work, Lamme wouldn’t have been able to do his thing. But without Lamme, Tesla’s device would have had zero impact. A prototype that simply wasn’t practical for their usage.
It’s almost like the idea of the lone inventor is a pure myth…
On that note, Tesla himself even noted, “The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result; he does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter – for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.”
Speaking of pointing the way for others, Tesla also tends to get credit today for much of Lamme’s work after, including Lamme’s work on the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with Lamme designing many of the key apparatuses at the exhibit, not Tesla.
To add insult to injury, Lamme also is the one who designed the giant hydroelectric generators at the famous Adams Power Plant at Niagara Falls. Today Tesla is generally given credit for that as well and it’s sometimes even claimed he designing the plant, despite having relatively little to do with it other than things like a bit of consulting work, primarily advising Edward Dean Adams of the Niagara Falls Cataract Construction Company that they should go with Westinghouse and his system for the project instead of that of Westinghouses’ competitors.
As to why Tesla is sometimes given vastly more credit here on this, this isn’t just because of the modern Tesla fanboys, but for the ones that existed during his lifetime. Attaching the famous scientists’ name to things just sold papers, and the media was happy to do so at every potential connection, with reports at the time generally acting as if Tesla had a lot more to do with the project than he actually did, similar to what they did during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and many other things Tesla related.
Tesla himself also vaguely gives the impression he had a lot more to do with it in his autobiography, where he would claim this was the fulfillment of a childhood promise he had made to his uncle. Stating, “I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.”
In any event, as an interesting brief little aside here, Benjamin Lammes’ sister, Bertha Lamme Feicht, also worked for Westinghouse as an electrical engineer. How did a woman hold such a position in the late 19th century? Well, she just so happened to be the first woman in America to graduate with a degree in engineering other than civil engineering, with her focus mechanical engineering with a speciality in electricity.
Did Edison Torpedo Tesla’s Invention of Radar?
Moving on from there, let’s now discuss Tesla and Radar.
During WWI Thomas Edison was sitting on the Naval Consulting Board. Noteworthy, Edison only agreed to consult with the military as long as nothing he worked on was used for offensive purposes- only for defending the lives of Allied military members. As for why, Edison stated, “Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
Now, you might at this point be thinking “Wasn’t Edison out murdering elephants and horses for fun and profit?” Well, if you’re generally at this point getting the vibe that a huge percentage of the things most people say about Tesla and Edison are either myth or the facts altered enough to the point they are basically myth, well, stay tuned for the story on this one. Because it’s par for the course.
But in any event, a common story goes that at this point the spiteful Edison torpedoed yet another of Tesla’s great innovations, when Tesla proposed to the Naval Consulting Board using a radar-like system he’d come up with to aid in the war effort, something that would have been truly revolutionary at the time…
Except, no.
It is true that the Naval Consulting Board shot down Tesla’s idea and Edison was seemingly involved in that decision, being head of the board. But this was not because of any spiteful act. Rather, simply because it was a genius idea… that was dumb and wouldn’t have worked in the way Tesla was trying to apply it. And demonstrated once again Tesla’s propensity to copy other’s work and his pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how a lot of the things he was working on actually worked. Not too dissimilar to his work on wireless electricity, or really quite a lot of his work in general.
Now, before you go to the comments about that last sentence, wait until you watch the main Tesla section of this video.
But as for Radar, Tesla was proposing to use radio waves to track submarines. The issue was that radio waves and Tesla’s proposed system wouldn’t have worked for this given water was their medium. Thus, the Navy rejected Tesla’s idea and went with working on an alternate technology in sonar instead, passive versions of which had already been in use by humans going all the way back to Leonardo Da Vinci, with active echo-location versions leading up to the war having been used by humans for things like detecting icebergs and the like. But around WWI, militaries of the world began focussing on refining sonar systems for use in detecting and locating submarines.
We should also briefly point out this story has given rise to the myth that Tesla invented radar, but this isn’t correct either. A couple decades before this, Heinrich Hertz very famously, and Tesla was well familiar with this by all appearance, had already done experiments showing radio waves would reflect off metal objects when he was exploring the suggestion which had, in turn, previously been made by James Clerk Maxwell. Further, over a decade before Tesla’s suggestion to use the system in water, Christian Hülsmeyer had already patented the world’s first functional radar system, albeit a crude one compared to what would later be developed. One newspaper account of a demonstration of this system, which was used on ships in one test, even suggested what Tesla later proposed, “Because, above and under water metal objects reflect waves, this invention might have significance for future warfare.”
What Tesla and Edison Had to Say About Each Other
Moving on from there, as for Edison’s thoughts on Tesla. About the only thing he ever seems to have said about the man directly is, according to Tesla, things like “this is a damned good man” and “you take the cake!” although whether he actually said these things isn’t quite clear as we really only have Tesla’s word on it, written at a time in his life he was writing a lot of things with extremely questionable veracity. As for the “damned good man” one, this incident allegedly occurred when Edison found out Tesla had stayed up all night working on a project he’d been assigned to and was told so by Tesla’s manager.
In terms of what Tesla had to say about Edison, beyond the aforementioned, “this wonderful man, who had had no theoretical training at all, no advantages, who did all himself, getting great results by virtue of his industry and application” bit of his Edison medal acceptance speech, Tesla praised Edison in an article he wrote for the New York Times when Edison died, stating, “The recurrence of a phenomenon like [Thomas] Edison is not very likely. The profound change of conditions and the ever increasing necessity of theoretical training would seem to make it impossible. He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity.”
And as for Tesla’s criticism of Edison, about the worst he seems to have ever said was to take a little jab at Edison’s research methods. That said, even here, while it is a small criticism, it’s also a great compliment concerning Edison’s work ethic, persistence, and meticulous way of tackling problems. Tesla stated, “If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once, with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.”
Tesla would elsewhere expand on this, “[Edison’s] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.”
And given Edison himself allegedly, but not actually, stated, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” but he also definitely did have the quote “There is no experient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking” over his desk, this assessment of Tesla’s perhaps checks out, partially.
However, to be fair, if we’re going to go with a real Edison quote instead of the “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” thing he never actually said (more on this in the Bonus Facts later), what he did say ws “Genius is hard work, stick-to-itiveness, and common sense.” That latter, common sense, is an important one, and Edison’s, through decades of work and experience had, over the years, become decidedly uncommon in the best ways.
Edison may not have had the depth of understanding of one field that Tesla in his early years did, outside of perhaps telegraphy. But Edison’s broad, more shallow, expertise was incredibly valuable in ability to take ideas and knowledge from one field and apply it to another in ways those who were only experts in that field likely wouldn’t have thought of. This advantage was only enhanced by his team, some of whom were experts in various fields, and could thus augment Edison’s deficiencies. In some sense, Edison had the best of both worlds. So there was really no miracle at all in the prodigious amount of accomplishments Edison and co achieved as alluded to by Tesla. Teamwork makes the dreamwork.
Referencing this facet of Edison’s work, with regards to the light bulb, famed British scientist John Tyndall would comment on Edison and his teams’ unique abilities in this way, stating in 1879, “Edison has the penetration to seize the relationship of facts and principles, and the art to reduce them to novel and concrete combinations. Hence, though he has accomplished nothing new in relation to the electric light, an adverse opinion as to his ability to solve the complicated problem . . . would be unwarranted. . . . Knowing something of the practical problem, I should certainly prefer seeing it in Mr. Edison’s hands to having it in mine.”
Edison further very correctly noted, “I never did anything worth doing entirely by accident…. Almost none of my inventions were derived in that manner. They were achieved by having trained myself to be analytical and to endure and tolerate hard work.”
That said, he did do one thing by accident that changed the world forever more than any of his other work, though this is a rare case where Edison usually isn’t given any credit because he didn’t understand the implications of what he’d just discovered and patented. Someone else working for him did, however, and his work based on Edison’s discovery birthed the modern age of technology. More on this later when discussing Edison’s life and work.
But going back to Edison’s methods and Tesla’s mild criticism of it, all of this is an important point to explicitly highlight because the way Edison and co were doing research was relatively revolutionary at the time, and is far more the way many new discoveries have happened since. Putting brilliant and complimentary minds on a problem, then systematically performing mass and very meticulous research and experiments until they came up with a suitable solution. To Tesla this may have seemed inefficient, and maybe it was at times in some respects. But it also more or less industrialized invention and progress at whatever they put their minds to. Allowing them to make advancements vastly quicker than most, and with a much higher assuredness of success. Not relying on anyone’s individual ingenuity or genius or sudden inspiration, but almost a production-line approach to invention and innovation. This is in some respects how invention has always worked, with everyone building off each other’s ideas throughout history. Edison simply took the broad idea, and put it in one central lab work place. And created an efficient system within all that for his team to tackle any problem. And, just as importantly, via his eventual reputation and clout with the media and ability to intrigue the masses and investors was able to provide ample funding for any bit of research they wanted to tackle.
Granted, with this, much like Tesla, Edison was well known for his pretty egregious self promotion and broad and fantastically predictions, just the difference between the two, and why Edison’s legend endured and Tesla’s did not, was that Edison and his team occasionally actually backed up these wild claims with revolutionary inventions and systems that the general public was extremely well aware of and were subsequently using. And, with Edison as the front man, he, at least publicly, generally got the credit. We will dive into how much he deserved or not when we do a deep dive into Edison’s fascinating story.
But all that preamble, background, and myth busting out of the way about the pair’s relationship, let’s now discuss the two great men’s real individual stories and what they got up to and actually did or didn’t do.
And we begin with Nikola Tesla.
The Real Story of Nikola Tesla
In the mid-19th century, the Austrian Empire, which stretched for over a thousand miles (1600 km) from Italy to Ukraine, was a place of contradictions. The ruling patriarch, Minister of the Interior Baron Alexander von Bach, was on the one hand something of a despot, abolishing public trials, reducing the freedom of the press and imprisoning political opponents. Conversely, his rule also saw the relaxing of economic laws, the demise of internal custom duties and peasants freed from their feudal obligations.
It was during this time, in the small village of Smiljan, situated within the Empire’s military frontier (now modern-day Croatia) that Nikola Tesla was born on July 9th or 10th (with the confusion owing to the time at around midnight), 1856, the fourth of five children. Tesla’s father, Milutin, was a priest, and the family soon moved to nearby Gospić, where his parish was located.
From the beginning, Tesla was seemingly a rather brilliant child, though Tesla claims his father discouraged scientific academic pursuit, hoping Tesla would become a priest himself someday and doggedly stuck to this point. Even, according to Tesla, restricting his study, with Tesla partially attributing this to the death of his apparently brilliant older brother Dane, back when Tesla was 5 years old. Tesla writes of his brother and this event,
”In the first place I had a brother who was gifted to an extraordinary degree — one of those rare phenomena of mentality which biological investigation has failed to explain. His premature death left my parents disconsolate. We owned a horse which had been presented to us by a dear friend. It was a magnificent animal of Arabian breed, possessed of almost human intelligence, and was cared for and petted by the whole family, having on one occasion saved my father’s life under remarkable circumstances… This horse was responsible for my brother’s injuries from which he died. I witnest the tragic scene and altho fifty-six years have elapsed since, my visual impression of it has lost none of its force. The recollection of his attainments made every effort of mine seem dull in comparison… Anything I did that was creditable merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly. So I grew up with little confidence in myself. But I was far from being considered a stupid boy, if I am to judge from an incident of which I have still a strong remembrance. One day the Aldermen were passing thru a street where I was at play with other boys. The oldest of these venerable gentlemen — a wealthy citizen — paused to give a silver piece to each of us. Coming to me he suddenly stopt and commanded, “Look in my eyes.” I met his gaze, my hand outstretched to receive the much valued coin, when, to my dismay, he said, ‘No, not much, you can get nothing from me, you are too smart.’”
It was also as a youth that Tesla first became interested in electricity, noting while petting his cat on a dry, winter night, “As I stroked Macak’s back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.”
His father then told him, “Well, this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.”
Tesla’s reply was allegedly, “Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God.”
Another core facet of Tesla’s personality deriving from his youth that is important to point out was his obsession with working hard and efficiency and a complete disregard for sleep as far as humanly possible. This work ethic he attributed to his mother, noting of her, “She worked regularly from four o’clock in the morning till eleven in the evening. From four to breakfast time-six am- while others slumbered, I never closed my eyes but watched my mother with intense pleasure as she attended quickly-sometimes running-to her many self-imposed duties. She directed the servants to take care of all our domestic animals, she milked the cows, she performed all sorts of labor unassisted, set the table, prepared breakfast for the whole household. Only when it was ready to be served did the rest of the family get up. After breakfast everybody followed my mother’s inspiring example. All did their work diligently, liked it, and so achieved a measure of contentment.”
Tesla also credits his mother for elements of his mental prowess, noting, “I must trace to my mother’s influence whatever inventiveness I possess, the training she gave me must have been helpful. It comprised all sorts of exercises — as guessing one another’s thoughts, discovering the defects of some form or expression, repeating long sentences or performing mental calculations. These daily lessons were intended to strengthen memory and reason and especially to develop the critical sense, and were undoubtedly very beneficial.”
Going back to his mother’s own brilliance, he states, “My mother was an inventor of the first order and would, I believe, have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multifold opportunities. She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants and separated the fibers herself. She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late at night, and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home was the product of her hands. When she was past sixty, her fingers were still nimble enough to tie three knots in an eyelash.”
Tesla’s Visions
Now, it’s at this point we should probably discuss Tesla’s visions, which started in his youth… He states, “In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thought and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those I imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. None of the students of psychology or physiology whom I have consulted could ever explain satisfactorily these phenomena. They seem to have been unique altho I was probably predisposed as I know that my brother experienced a similar trouble. The theory I have formulated is that the images were the result of a reflex action from the brain on the retina under great excitation. They certainly were not hallucinations such as are produced in diseased and anguished minds, for in other respects I was normal and composed. To give an idea of my distress, suppose that I had witnest a funeral or some such nerve-racking spectacle. Then, inevitably, in the stillness of night, a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist despite all my efforts to banish it. Sometimes it would even remain fixt in space tho I pushed my hand thru it. If my explanation is correct, it should be able to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can and will be accomplished in time to come; I may add that I have devoted much thought to the solution of the problem.”
On this latter point, he is hypothesizing that images in the mind are literally present in the retina of the eye as you think them, and in his case seemingly simply representing more strongly, perhaps because of his more advanced intellect. And as for his work on this, later in life he apparently attempted to create a device to read human thought through the eyes and then project it on a screen.
In any event, he goes on, “To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief; but in order to get it I had to conjure continuously new images. It was not long before I found that I had exhausted all of those at my command; my “reel” had run out, as it were, because I had seen little of the world — only objects in my home and the immediate surroundings. As I performed these mental operations for the second or third time, in order to chase the appearances from my vision, the remedy gradually lost all its force. Then I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes. These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them, but by and by I succeeded in fixing them; they gained in strength and distinctness and finally assumed the concreteness of real things. I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision farther and farther, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel — of course, in my mind. Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys — see new places, cities and countries — live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.”
He would further state this ability was key for his scientific advancement as it allowed him to picture new devices extremely vividly in his mind, as well as create, and test them until they worked, thus ensuring whatever he made would work the first time exactly as it had in his head…
“I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient. The moment one constructs a device to carry into practise a crude idea he finds himself unavoidably engrost with the details and defects of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. Results may be obtained but always at the sacrifice of quality. My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever, the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise?”
This all is particularly noteworthy to explicitly point out when discussing the fact that later in life Tesla frequently claimed to invent things and have working models that he simply did not. And, in fact, could not have worked the way he described or even sometimes at all even if done a different way. Thus, it’s been conjectured that he may not actually have been making it up, at least as far as he was concerned. He may have simply invented and got the device to work in his head. And, thus, assumed it would work in reality, even though for the last few decades of his life he was not only, again, seemingly a slice of cheddar short of a cheese sandwich for a portion of that, but also operating on a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of certain facets of science, more based in late 19th century ideas, than advancements made since, many of which he largely rejected, occasionally in part precisely because some principal contradicted things he’d supposedly invented and got working….
But because of his confidence in his ability to run experiments and invent things in his head, it perhaps explains why he may have felt the devices later in life he claimed to have invented would have worked, even though they simply wouldn’t have in the real world.
You might at this point wonder what caused Tesla’s visions, which, as noted, were not just confined to imagining inventions, but if you read through his autobiography could get pretty, shall we say, interesting, to put it kindly. Well, even physicians today aren’t sure, though it’s been conjectured by some, particularly as some of his more noteworthy often accompanied times of extreme exhaustion and complete mental breakdowns by Tesla, that they may have been the result of extreme sleep deprivation. You see, Tesla claimed for much of his life he only slept a couple hours per night. If this is accurate, then such hallucinations very well could have been triggered by such, and this may also have strongly contributed to his mental decline as he aged.
Of course, it’s also been suggested that Tesla may simply not have been aware of how much he was actually sleeping. As there are accounts from hotel employees who looked after his room that they regularly found him just standing or sitting there in silence, seemingly in some sort of trance and fully oblivious of anything in his surroundings, including their presence as they went about their duties. Thus, some hypothesize that during this time, he may have been misinterpreting this half-asleep like daze and the dreams they produced as vivid waking visions, when he was, in fact, just completely exhausted and partially, or fully asleep and dreaming. Or perhaps it was all a quirk of his brain to go into these types of trances and have such visions during them.
Whatever the case, regardless of how much he was actually sleeping compared to what he claimed, his issues with sleep and work routine were already manifesting at a young age, with his professors at university writing his father and warning the young man was headed for an early grave.
On this, he states, “during the whole first year I regularly started my work at three o’clock in the morning and continued until eleven at night, no Sundays or holidays excepted. As most of my fellow -students took thinks easily, naturally enough I eclipsed all records. In the course of that year I past thru nine exams and the professors thought I deserved more than the highest qualifications. Armed with their flattering certificates, I went home for a short rest, expecting a triumph, and was mortified when my father made light of these hard won honors. That almost killed my ambition; but later, after he had died, I was pained to find a package of letters which the professors had written him to the effect that unless he took me away from the Institution I would be killed thru overwork.”
And speaking of his academic quirks at this time, he states, “I had a veritable mania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties. On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire when I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside the last book I was very glad, and said, ‘Never more!’”
King of the Castle, A Master of His Domain
Going back to his father allegedly not wanting him to pursue academia, he states, “My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading. He did not permit it and would fly into a rage when he caught me in the act. He hid the candles when he found that I was reading in secret. He did not want me to spoil my eyes. But I obtained tallow, made the wicking and cast the sticks into tin forms, and every night I would bush the keyhole and the cracks and read, often till dawn, when all others slept and my mother started on her arduous daily task.”
It was during this reading that he claims he began to become a master of himself and his impulses, noting, “On one occasion I came across a novel entitled ‘Abafi’ (the Son of Aba), a Serbian translation of a well known Hungarian writer, Josika. This work somehow awakened my dormant powers of will and I began to practise self-control. At first my resolutions faded like snow in April, but in a little while I conquered my weakness and felt a pleasure I never knew before — that of doing as I willed. In the course of time this vigorous mental exercise became second nature. At the outset my wishes had to be subdued but gradually desire and will grew to be identical. After years of such discipline I gained so complete a mastery over myself that I toyed with passions which have meant destruction to some of the strongest men. At a certain age I contracted a mania for gambling which greatly worried my parents. To sit down to a game of cards was for me the quintessence of pleasure. My father led an exemplary life and could not excuse the senseless waste of time and money in which I indulged. I had a strong resolve but my philosophy was bad. I would say to him, ‘I can stop whenever I please but is it worth while to give up that which I would purchase with the joys of Paradise?’ On frequent occasions he gave vent to his anger and contempt but my mother was different. She understood the character of men and knew that one’s salvation could only be brought about thru his own efforts. One afternoon, I remember, when I had lost all my money and was craving for a game, she came to me with a roll of bills and said, ‘Go and enjoy yourself. The sooner you lose all we possess the better it will be. I know that you will get over it.’ She was right. I conquered my passion then and there and only regretted that it had not been a hundred times as strong. I not only vanquished but tore it from my heart so as not to leave even a trace of desire. Ever since that time I have been as indifferent to any form of gambling as to picking teeth. During another period I smoked excessively, threatening to ruin my health. Then my will asserted itself and I not only stopt but destroyed all inclination. Long ago I suffered from heart trouble until I discovered that it was due to the innocent cup of coffee I consumed every morning. I discontinued at once, tho I confess it was not an easy task. In this way I checked and bridled other habits and passions and have not only preserved my life but derived an immense amount of satisfaction from what most men would consider privation and sacrifice.”
Beyond overcoming such impulses, he also notes he was lucky to make it to adulthood. Stating he was “rendered by illness a hopeless physical wreck and given up by physicians. More than this, thru ignorance and lightheartedness, I got into all sorts of difficulties, dangers and scrapes from which I extricated myself as by enchantment. I was almost drowned a dozen times; was nearly boiled alive and just mist being cremated. I was entombed, lost and frozen. I had hair-breadth escapes from mad dogs, hogs, and other wild animals. I past thru dreadful diseases and met with all kinds of odd mishaps and that I am hale and hearty today seems like a miracle. But as I recall these incidents to my mind I feel convinced that my preservation was not altogether accidental.”
He elaborates, “An inventor’s endeavor is essentially lifesaving. Whether he harnesses forces, improves devices, or provides new comforts and conveniences, he is adding to the safety of our existence. He is also better qualified than the average individual to protect himself in peril, for he is observant and resourceful. If I had no other evidence that I was, in a measure, possest of such qualities I would find it in these personal experiences.”
Not just a genius, able to construct devices in his head that would always work perfectly, able to survive fantastical scenarios thanks to his intellect, and in complete control of all his impulses, he also states he was incredible with a bow and arrow and sling. Noting, “My arrows, when shot, disappeared from sight and at close range traversed a plank of pine one inch thick. Thru the continuous tightening of the bows I developed skin on my stomach very much like that of a crocodile and I am often wondering whether it is due to this exercise that I am able even now to digest cobble-stones! Nor can I pass in silence my performances with the sling which would have enabled me to give a stunning exhibit at the Hippodrome. And now I will tell of one of my feats with this antique implement of war which will strain to the utmost the credulity of the reader. I was practicing while walking with my uncle along the river. The sun was setting, the trout were playful and from time to time one would shoot up into the air, its glistening body sharply defined against a projecting rock beyond. Of course any boy might have hit a fish under these propitious conditions but I undertook a much more difficult task and I foretold to my uncle, to the minutest detail, what I intended doing. I was to hurl a stone to meet the fish, press its body against the rock, and cut it in two. It was no sooner said than done. My uncle looked at me almost scared out of his wits and exclaimed “Vade retro Satanas!” and it was a few days before he spoke to me again.”
As for his physical prowess, he states even into older age, “A short time ago I was returning to my hotel. It was a bitter cold night, the ground slippery, and no taxi to be had. Half a block behind me followed another man, evidently as anxious as myself to get under cover. Suddenly my legs went up in the air. In the same instant there was a flash in my brain, the nerves responded, the muscles contracted, I swung thru 180 degrees and landed on my hands. I resumed my walk as tho nothing had happened when the stranger caught up with me. “How old are you?” he asked, surveying me critically. “Oh, about fifty-nine,” I replied. “What of it?” “Well,” said he, “I have seen a cat do this but never a man.” About a month since I wanted to order new eyeglasses and went to an oculist who put me thru the usual tests. He lookt at me incredulously as I read off with ease the smallest print at considerable distance. But when I told him that I was past sixty he gasped in astonishment. Friends of mine often remark that my suits fit me like gloves but they do not know that all my clothing is made to measurements which were taken nearly 35 years ago and never changed. During this same period my weight has not varied one pound.”
And as for his overall opinion of himself, he sums up, “We are all meat machines and it happens that I am a much more sensitive machine than other people and I receive impressions to which they are inert, and I can both understand and interpret these impressions. I am simply a finer automaton than others.”
A Turning Point
Going back to his academics, his father’s stance on all this changed markedly thanks to Tesla nearly dying of cholera. He states, “I contracted the awful disease on the very day of my arrival and altho surviving the crisis, I was confined to bed for nine months with scarcely any ability to move. My energy was completely exhausted and for the second time I found myself at death’s door. In one of the sinking spells which was thought to be the last, my father rushed into the room. I still see his pallid face as he tried to cheer me in tones belying his assurance. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘I may get well if you will let me study engineering.’ ‘You will go to the best technical institution in the world,’ he solemnly replied, and I knew that he meant it… I came to life like another Lazarus to the utter amazement of everybody.”
Following his miraculous recovery, allegedly a pacifist, he went into hiding among the mountains in order to escape conscription into the Empire’s military. Then, in 1875, Nikola enrolled at the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz, where he did very well initially. However, by his third year, for reasons that are still debated, he was struggling, and he left without graduating, leaving behind a rumour that he’d drowned in the Mur River. What he actually did was cross the border into Slovenia without telling anyone, not even his family it appears, and took a job as a draftsman. However, ultimately Tesla was deported from Slovenia for failing to get a residence permit, and he thus returned home just in time to see his father die a month later at the age of 60 in 1879.
Tesla brushes over this period in his life in his autobiography, simply vaguely alluding to the fact that he “realized that my parents had been making too great sacrifices on my account and resolved to relieve them of the burden” by leaving school.
Two years after this, Tesla began working for a man named Tivadar Puskás at The Budapest Telephone Exchange in Hungary. Impressing his superiors, they soon promoted him to the position of chief engineer, where the young scientist made several improvements to their equipment.
There are a few noteworthy things about his time in Budapest that are significant to point out as to how they affected his life and work beyond..
First, he suffered from an occurrence of one of his many mental breakdowns, presumably owing to extreme exhaustion. To give a taste of what these episodes were like for him, he states “It was here that I suffered the complete breakdown of the nerves to which I have referred. What I experienced during the period of that illness surpasses all belief. My sight and hearing were always extraordinary. I could clearly discern objects in the distance when others saw no trace of them. Several times in my boyhood I saved the houses of our neighbors from fire by hearing the faint crackling sounds which did not disturb their sleep, and calling for help. In 1899, when I was past forty and carrying on my experiments in Colorado, I could hear very distinctly thunderclaps at a distance of 550 miles. The limit of audition for my young assistants was scarcely more than 150 miles. My ear was thus over thirteen times more sensitive. Yet at that time I was, so to speak, stone deaf in comparison with the acuteness of my hearing while under the nervous strain. In Budapest I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time-piece. A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. The whistle of a locomotive twenty or thirty miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat vibrate so strongly that the pain was unbearable. The ground under my feet trembled continuously. I had to support my bed on rubber cushions to get any rest at all. The roaring noises from near and far often produced the effect of spoken words which would have frightened me had I not been able to resolve them into their accidental components. The sun’s rays, when periodically intercepted, would cause blows of such force on my brain that they would stun me. I had to summon all my will power to pass under a bridge or other structure as I experienced a crushing pressure on the skull. In the dark I had the sense of a bat and could detect the presence of an object at a distance of twelve feet by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead. My pulse varied from a few to two hundred and sixty beats and all the tissues of the body quivered with twitchings and tremors which was perhaps the hardest to bear. A renowned physician who gave me daily large doses of Bromide of Potassium pronounced my malady unique and incurable. I clung desperately to life, but never expected to recover. Can anyone believe that so hopeless a physical wreck could ever be transformed into a man of astonishing strength and tenacity, able to work thirty-eight years almost without a day’s interruption, and find himself still strong and fresh in body and mind? Such is my case. A powerful desire to live and to continue the work, and the assistance of a devoted friend and athlete accomplished the wonder. My health returned and with it the vigor of mind.”
Another important thing to point out here is that in Budapest at this time the world’s first AC transformers were created in the late 1870s, not long before Tesla’s arrival there. While Tesla himself never seems to have made mention of studying these, given his work at the time and interests then, as well as later in life, it’s generally thought he likely did observe these and became familiar with how they worked.
Speaking of AC power, it was also at this point, in 1881, that Tesla claims he had a vision and suddenly saw how to create his later famed AC induction motor. He elaborates,
“I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the City Park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe’s “Faust.” The sun was just setting and reminded me of the glorious passage… As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him: “See my motor here; watch me reverse it.”…”
He goes on, “The pieces of apparatus I conceived were to me absolutely real and tangible in every detail, even to the minute marks and signs of wear. I delighted in imagining the motors constantly running, for in this way they presented to mind’s eye a more fascinating sight. When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots. In less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system which are now identified with my name.”
And that, while it would take him several years to actually make the motor, “The motors I built there were exactly as I imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision, and the operation was always as I expected.”
We should at this point point out that it’s only Tesla’s word that any of this actually occurred, and if he truly had invented such a thing at that point, and knowing the work on AC power that was presently being done in Budapest, it seems odd he didn’t at least patent it at this point or pursue it in any way other than in his head.
Normally we’d not be so skeptical, but as you’ll soon see as a running theme with Tesla and his work, given so many people were working on the same things at the same time, including his most famous invention of the AC Induction Motor as previously noted, Tesla had a propensity to claim publicly when he’d come out with his own version of something that he’d already done or thought up whatever thing years before and only now was getting around to telling the world about it, thus making it appear he was the true inventor, even if someone else beat him to the punch on a working device. But the thing is, he never once provided any evidence backing up a single one of these claims we could find. We just have his word he did…
But going back to his day job, in 1882, his boss at the telephone exchange ultimately recommended Tesla for another job, this time in Paris, working for none other than the Continental Edison Company, installing indoor electric lighting across the city.
Once again, Tesla impressed his employers by improving designs, and he began to be sent on troubleshooting missions to other Edison utilities. Next came a big step for the young engineer. Tesla’s overseer, Charles Batchelor, one of Edison’s chief lieutenants so to speak, was recalled to New York City, and decided to invite Tesla to also make the trip at some point if he so chose.
Of this journey and decision in it, Tesla would write of yet another place he was allegedly promised a large bonus that went unpaid, “One of the administrators had promised me a liberal compensation in case I succeeded, as well as a fair consideration of the improvements I had made in their dynamos and I hoped to realize a substantial sum. There were three administrators whom I shall designate as A, B and C for convenience. When I called on A he told me that B had the say. This gentleman thought that only C could decide and the latter was quite sure that A alone had the power to act. After several laps of this circulus vivios it dawned upon me that my reward was a castle in Spain. The utter failure of my attempts to raise capital for development was another disappointment and when Mr. Batchellor prest me to go to America with a view of redesigning the Edison machines, I determined to try my fortunes in the Land of Golden Promise. But the chance was nearly mist. I liquefied my modest assets, secured accommodations and found myself at the railroad station as the train was pulling out. At that moment I discovered that my money and tickets were gone. What to do was the question. Hercules had plenty of time to deliberate but I had to decide while running alongside the train with opposite feelings surging in my brain like condenser oscillations. Resolve, helped by dexterity, won out in the nick of time and upon passing thru the usual experiences, as trivial as unpleasant, I managed to embark for New York with the remnants of my belongings, some poems and articles I had written, and a package of calculations relating to solutions of an unsolvable integral and to my flying machine. During the voyage I sat most of the time at the stern of the ship watching for an opportunity to save somebody from a watery grave, without the slightest thought of danger. Later when I had absorbed some of the practical American sense I shivered at the recollection and marvelled at my former folly.”
Upon his arrival in America, he was decidedly unimpressed, noting he thought, “Is this America? … It is a century behind Europe in civilization.”
That said, five years later, he switched completely, noting, “I became convinced that it was more than one hundred years AHEAD of Europe and nothing has happened to this day to change my opinion.”
But going back to shortly after his arrival in the U.S., he almost immediately began working at Edison’s Machine Works and got to meet the man himself, stating “The meeting with Edison was a memorable event in my life. I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much. I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, and had spent my best years in libraries reading all sorts of stuff that fell into my hands, from Newton’s ‘Principia’ to the novels of Paul de Kock, and felt that most of my life had been squandered. But it did not take long before I recognized that it was the best thing I could have done. Within a few weeks I had won Edison’s confidence and it came about in this way.”
He then goes on to recount the story of the S.S. Oregon as previously described. He also states here, “At five o’clock in the morning, when passing along Fifth Avenue on my way to the shop, I met Edison with Batchellor and a few others as they were returning home to retire. ‘Here is our Parisian running around at night,’ he said. When I told him that I was coming from the Oregon and had repaired both machines, he looked at me in silence and walked away without another word. But when he had gone some distance I heard him remark: ‘Batchellor, this is a damn good man,’ and from that time on I had full freedom in directing the work.”
He also claims Edison would later state, “I have had many hard-working assistants but you take the cake.”
Of course, as covered, this employ was not to last terribly long, approximately a mere six months, after which he did his arc lighting and ditch digging thing, and officially gave the world his AC Induction Motor.
Tesla Coil
Fastforwarding to after Tesla’s AC patents had made him a relatively wealthy man, this gave him the opportunity to pursue further inventions of his own. Working from various spaces in Manhattan, over the next few years Tesla worked on a number of fascinating projects such as the now-famous Tesla Coil. In a nutshell, this is a device that produces high-voltage, high-frequency, low-current AC electricity and, among other things and most noteworthy for our story today and how Tesla utilized it to wow audiences, can cause arcs of electricity through the air in quite dazzling displays, as well as cause fluorescent bulbs close enough to light up without being connected to anything.
That said, despite today often being touted as revolutionary, the Tesla Coil was actually just evolutionary, as with pretty much all inventions ever created by man. For example, among other things, the Tesla coil was building off the Ruhmkorff coil invented almost a half century before Tesla got around to his advancement. And even the Ruhmkorff coil wasn’t wholly original, building off others’ work. In particular the likes of Charles Grafton Page and Nicholas Callan who independently invented the induction coil back in 1836, and then improved upon by others.
On top of that, while Tesla was doing his thing on the Tesla Coil, patenting it in 1891, others were doing experiments with very similar devices, even none other than Elihu Thomson who co-founded General Electric with Thomas Edison, as well as co-founded the aforementioned Thomson-Houston company that was Westinghouse’s chief competitor in the AC power transmission front during the war of the currents.
This is not to knock Tesla’s work so much as to just explicitly point out once again that nobody comes up with things on their own. And generally multiple people come up with something similar all around the same time. Which is an incredibly important point when talking about Edison and Tesla and their respective contributions to the world.
Magnifying Transmitter
Moving on from the Tesla Coil, we should probably mention Tesla allegedly created an adaptation of this in his Magnifying Transmitter which could, among other things, allegedly light a field of fluorescent bulbs anywhere in the world if properly tuned… Of this invention, Tesla would write, “I feel certain that of all my inventions, the Magnifying Transmitter will prove most important and valuable to future generations.” As to how it worked, this is something of a mystery and you’ll find no shortage of varied explanations online about it. But if you thought “It didn’t”, you’re probably right. But for those that purported it did, it allegedly worked by creating standing waves of energy in the Earth, which then could be picked up elsewhere or used by devices tuned or designed to resonate with the right frequency. Of course, there are many other explanations to what this could do and how it worked, and Tesla’s own accounts muddy the waters quite a bit there, including even referencing the use of x-rays at one point. But whatever the case as he, and many Tesla enthusiasts, often cite this as his greatest invention, we thought we should at least mention it.
X-Rays
Speaking of x-rays, something he did actually create was his Shadograph, which was essentially one of the early examples of an x-ray image. Tesla claims he invented this before anyone else, though allegedly lost evidence of it in his lab fire… After Wilhelm Rontgen published his own use of x-ray film technology in 1895, Tesla would shortly thereafter come out with his own and did obtain some of the early images of the human body utilizing x-rays with remarkable quality compared to what others were doing at the time. But, in the end, while it’s always possible he was the first, surviving evidence more just has Tesla as a pioneer in the use of x-ray technology, rather than the inventor, contrary to many internet rumors.
Neon Lamp
As for some other interesting work he did during this time, Tesla also is often credited with inventing the neon lamp, allegedly demonstrating this at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. However, This isn’t actually correct owing to the tiny fact that neon wasn’t discovered until 5 years later in 1898. The real first neon lamp was made by George Claude and presented at the Paris Motor Show in 1910. What Tesla did do was make some improvements on fluorescent lighting over the course of his work on wirelessly lighting up such bulbs. Key here for the typical idea of a neon lamp most of us have, is that in all this he also created fluorescent light signs via bent tubes. However, also important to note was that such lights Tesla demonstrated in 1893 were not only not neon, but not commercially viable at the time either.
Earthquake Machine
Yet another device Tesla supposedly invented was a so-called “Earthquake machine” based on his Tesla Oscillator. A relatively small device that, according to a 79 year old Tesla, tuned correctly could tap into the resonant frequencies of the makeup of buildings and topple them with fairly little energy needed. For example, Tesla claimed he’d previously used this device once at his 46 East Houston Street lab. This resulted in the police being called when he shook the building and neighboring buildings relatively violently. As for the Empire State Building, he claimed his small, 7 inch, 2 lb steam powered oscillator that, to quote him, “you could put in your overcoat pocket”, could take down this building with a mere 5 pounds of air pressure. He also noted the oscillator could be used to vibrate the ground as well and thus facilitate communication over any distance one wanted via these vibrations. Another good use he proposed was to use it to help locate various minerals under the earth. There was a danger, however, as he claimed that it was entirely possible to use the device to, to quote the man himself, “split the earth like an apple,” At this same event, because of all these amazing uses, he claimed that he expected within 2 years the device would earn him somewhere in the ballpark of $100 million…
As ever with so many of his claims, no evidence was offered to back up any of it. It is technically possible to make such a device that could shake a building to an extent in some cases, but not to demolish it and, as you might expect, many are skeptical this shaking of the building story ever happened.
Making Students Bright
Moving on from there, Tesla also explored using AC current to help stimulate intelligence in students “by saturating them unconsciously with electricity”. He elaborated on all this in Popular Electricity Magazine in 1912, noting he would wire the walls of a classroom “saturating [the schoolroom] with infinitesimal electric waves vibrating at high frequency. The whole room will thus, Mr. Tesla claims, be converted into a health-giving and stimulating electromagnetic field or ‘bath.’”
In the end, his hypothesis was that his device would stimulate the student’s brains and make them smarter somehow. Leveraging his famous name, he managed to get the superintendent of schools in New York, William H. Maxwell, to agree to allow him to conduct such an experiment on a classroom of unsuspecting students. However, for whatever reason, Tesla never actually did this. Probably for the best…
Solving the Enigma of Death
Some other of his life’s work, for a time at least, also included, to quote him “solving the enigma of death” though he eventually abandoned this work after a rather strange experience during one of his mental breakdowns.
He states,
“Ever since I was told by some of the greatest men of the time, leaders in science whose names are immortal, that I am possesst of an unusual mind, I bent all my thinking faculties on the solution of great problems regardless of sacrifice. For many years I endeavored to solve the enigma of death, and watched eagerly for every kind of spiritual indication. But only once in the course of my existence have I had an experience which momentarily impressed me as supernatural. It was at the time of my mother’s death. I had become completely exhausted by pain and long vigilance, and one night was carried to a building about two blocks from our home. As I lay helpless there, I thought that if my mother died while I was away from her bedside she would surely give me a sign. Two or three months before I was in London in company with my late friend, Sir William Crookes, when spiritualism was discussed, and I was under the full sway of these thoughts. I might not have paid attention to other men, but was susceptible to his arguments as it was his epochal work on radiant matter, which I had read as a student, that made me embrace the electrical career. I reflected that the conditions for a look into the beyond were most favorable, for my mother was a woman of genius and particularly excelling in the powers of intuition. During the whole night every fiber in my brain was strained in expectancy, but nothing happened until early in the morning, when I fell in a sleep, or perhaps a swoon, and saw a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty, one of whom gazed upon me lovingly and gradually assumed the features of my mother. The appearance slowly floated across the room and vanished, and I was awakened by an indescribably sweet song of many voices. In that instant a certitude, which no words can express, came upon me that my mother had just died. And that was true. I was unable to understand the tremendous weight of the painful knowledge I received in advance, and wrote a letter to Sir William Crookes while still under the domination of these impressions and in poor bodily health. When I recovered I sought for a long time the external cause of this strange manifestation and, to my great relief, I succeeded after many months of fruitless effort. I had seen the painting of a celebrated artist, representing allegorically one of the seasons in the form of a cloud with a group of angels which seemed to actually float in the air, and this had struck me forcefully. It was exactly the same that appeared in my dream, with the exception of my mother’s likeness. The music came from the choir in the church nearby at the early mass of Easter morning, explaining everything satisfactorily in conformity with scientific facts. This occurred long ago, and I have never had the faintest reason since to change my views on psychical and spiritual phenomena, for which there is absolutely no foundation. The belief in these is the natural outgrowth of intellectual development. Religious dogmas are no longer accepted in their orthodox meaning, but every individual clings to faith in a supreme power of some kind. We all must have an ideal to govern our conduct and insure contentment, but it is immaterial whether it be one of creed, art, science or anything else, so long as it fulfills the function of a dematerializing force. It is essential to the peaceful existence of humanity as a whole that one common conception should prevail.”
The Thought Camera
In any event, going back to his inventions, another of his slightly out there inventions was the aforementioned thought camera, which Tesla claims he first experimented with in 1893. Later in life he would elaborate, “I became convinced that a definite image formed in thought must, by reflex action, produce a corresponding image on the retina, which might possibly be read by suitable apparatus… If this can be done successfully, then the objects imagined by a person would be clearly reflected on the screen as they are formed. and in this way every thought of the individual could be read. Our minds would then, indeed, be like open books.”
The Ozone Device
Yet another slightly oddball thing Tesla attempted to make and market was via his 1900 Tesla Ozone Company, which sold a device that could be used to pass ozone through oils, which could then be sold for therapeutic purposes. He also tried to market a version of this device to be used to sanitize hospital rooms, though neither of these things went anywhere.
Tesla’s Rising and Falling Fame
We’ll get into more of his inventions in a bit, but shortly after Tesla’s rise in prominence thanks to his AC Induction Motor and related patents, he went on a sold out lecture tour from New York to London and Paris, putting on a show that wowed his audiences and the media, primarily with his Tesla Coil. Anyone who’s seen a Tesla Coil in action, not just for its abilities at shooting electricity through the air, but illuminating certain types of bulbs wirelessly and a variety of other things like this, can imagine how not only is it incredible to see and hear even to modern eyes, but to a late 19th century audience, this must have seemed pure magic.
On this and his initial work on wireless lighting, he states, “If my memory serves me right, it was in November, 1890, that I performed a laboratory experiment which was one of the most extraordinary and spectacular ever recorded in the annals of science. In investigating the behaviour of high frequency currents I had satisfied myself that an electric field of sufficient intensity could be produced in a room to light up electrodeless vacuum tubes. Accordingly, a transformer was built to test the theory and the first trial proved a marvelous success.”
As alluded to, Tesla would spend quite a lot of time and investor money pursuing this form of wireless lighting, but never managed to come up with anything commercially viable.
Going back to his demonstrations and articles in the papers where he discussed his work here, while the masses were extremely impressed and some in the industry intrigued, not everyone was so enthusiastic, as reported in the English Journal Industries, “We think, however, that anyone who has read many of Mr. Tesla’s articles must have difficulty in understanding the frequent vague and idiomatic statements with which they abound. We do not think it too much to ask an electrician occupying such a prominent position as Mr. Tesla has gained for himself in America to omit passages that may detract from his reputation, and to allow us to admire him even more. If Mr. Tesla could keep phantom ideas about the electromagnetic theory of light and Hertz and Dr. Lodge out of his work, we feel sure he would make his interesting experiments more clear.”
The London Electrical Review would go on of the demonstrations themselves, “If a few quantitative determinations of current, voltage, or even of frequency, had been given in the lecture it would have had a definitive scientific value. To reduce even one out of the 50 experiments to a complete research would be worth all the other 49 brilliant and suggestive demonstrations. We have no desire to pick out weak points in such an interesting lecture, but we think that any one who read Mr. Tesla’s articles must have had great difficulty in understanding his repeated idiomatic statements… We hope Mr. Tesla is correct when he surmises that the future light may be produced by vacuum tubes, but we believe the subject has been thoroughly searched out… by many inventors without a result which has been very promising.”
The aforementioned Electrical Engineer Laurenc A Hawkins would further writes of this lecture series of Tesla’s, “After Tesla’s apparent failure in motor production” -note here he’s referencing Tesla’s inability to get his motor working on the existing power service at the time and walking away from it to let others figure it out- “he turned to more promising fields. In 1891, he burst upon the electrical world with the first of a series of the most remarkable lectures ever delivered before a scientific audience. The experiments shown were fairly startling. Lamps and motors were operated on open circuit with a single-line wire. Lamps were made to burn brightly when short-circuited by a heavy copper bar, while exhausted tubes were brought to incandescence without any wire near them. Tubes were lighted by merely approaching them with the hand. Beautiful flames of varied appearance were made to leap from many objects, even from the hand of the lecturer himself. Before the eyes of the startled spectators Tesla touched both terminals of a 200,000 volt transformer, with no more serious results than the production of the flames aforesaid. Throughout the lecture vague hints were offered of the tremendous possibilities exposed by the experiments- possibilities of obtaining unlimited light and power anywhere on the earth’s surface, not by means expensive, but by taking the energy directly from the earth itself or from the circumambient ether. The public was astounded. Popular opinion, ever ready to ascribe the most impossible attributes to the vaguely understood force, electricity, hailed the lectures as disclosing a new era of wonders and Tesla as the last and greatest of electrical wizards. Even the eye of science was dazzled by Tesla’s brilliant flames, and the most extravagant tributes were poured upon him. As stated in the London Electrical Engineer, ‘No man in our age has achieved such a universal scientific reputation in a single stride as this gifted young electrical engineer.’ It was asserted that similar effects to those shown by Tesla had previously been produced by Crookes, Hertz, Rayleigh, Spottiswood, Lodge, Dr La Rue, Kennedy and Thomson, some of those effects having been patented nine years before the first Tesla lecture. But Tesla had made his experiments more spectacular by the use of higher voltages and higher frequencies, and the difference in degree passed for novelty in kind. It is true that the lectures abounded in fallacies and absurdities, as, for instance, Tesla’s favorite theory of magnetic screening, his misconception of harmonics, his inexplicable statement regarding Arago’s experiment, and even a gross misunderstanding of the fundamental law of physical science- the conservation of energy, but all were overlooked or forgiven…. No attempt at any commercial adaptation of the Experiments is described, but, instead, Tesla’s vague hints at possibilities won him the reputation of prophet of the new era. Today as we look back on those lectures of ten years ago and the development since then, it is hard to understand the scientific enthusiasm Tesla aroused. Have any useful results ever come from those famous experiments? Instead of Tesla’s high frequencies, the tendency has been steadily to lower frequencies. Instead of using static effects for power transmission, the chief problem on modern long-distance lines is to diminish those very effects. The electrostatic light is still a laboratory toy, while wires and a filament are still used in commerce. Central stations still produce their power and distribute it through their mains.The prophecies of those lectures and articles are still unfulfilled, and their suggestions forgotten or disregarded.”
Just as a brief aside which is important to the real story of Tesla, Hawkins goes on about much of Tesla’s conduct as a scientist. Much like any scientist with time and money available and widespread interest, Tesla was constantly jumping on new advancements related to his field and doing experiments on whatever thing. But, Tesla also had a propensity, as we’ve already alluded to and found in spades in our own research on him, to imply, or often even just outright state, he’d invented the thing before, but without providing any evidence. As Hawkins himself observed in 1903, “In the succeeding years each new idea or fad in the electrical world was eagerly seized upon by him and made the pretext for rushing into print, at first in the technical papers, and later, as the engineering press began to regard his effusions askance, in the non-technical daily papers, the adoption of the latter medium being accompanied with increase in sensationalism. When X rays were holding the popular attention, he dabbled in them and published his results. When the Wehnelt interrupter attracted the interest of scientists, Tesla immediately leaped into notice. As the London Electrical Review says ‘Tesla lets himself out on the Wehnelt interruption… [and that] he invented this device two or three years ago. This belated publication in our contemporary would not, according to the generally accepted code, secure to Tesla the credit of being the inventor; but Tesla evidently does not regret this, since he considers there is not merit in the invention.’ And again ‘Tesla has expressed a somewhat ungenerous contempt for the Wehnelt break, which has recently given such remarkable results in the hands of experimenters here and abroad. Its inferiority to Tesla’s break appears to be known as yet only to Tesla; in simplicity, at least, it is certainly superior.”
Hawkins goes on, “When the efforts of Marconi, Lodge and Slaby brought their first achievements in wireless telegraphy before the world Tesla had nothing but pity for their puerile efforts. When Marconi was ready to send a signal a few hundred miles, Tesla was ready (in the papers) to transmit thousands of horsepower the same distance. When Marconi was attempting to signal across the Atlantic, Tesla had already (in the papers) received a signal from Mars. (New York Sun Jan 3, 1901). Before the enthusiasm over the Spanish War had had time to cool, Tesla had published a description of his torpedoes, which would revolutionize warfare. (New York Sun November 21, 1898)… It was of this torpedo boat invention that Tesla said (Criterion November 19, 1898) ‘Had I nothing else to show for a life-work, this would put the laurels of everlasting fame on my head.’ It was of this same invention that Prof Brackett, of Princeton, said “Electrical Engineer Vol 26, 491) “The shortest, most correct and most complete criticism which I can make in reference to this bold boast is that, what is new about it is useless, while that which is useful had all been discovered by other scientists long before Tesla made this startling announcement.” It was of this invention that Prof Dolbear, of Tufts College, said “Electrical Engineer Vol 26 p 491) ‘…During the last six years he has made so many startling announcements and has performed so few of his promises that he is getting to be like the man who called ‘Wolf wolf!’ until no one listened to him. Mr. Tesla has failed so often before that there is no call to believe these things until he really does them.’ …as for the message from Mars (New York Sun” January 3, 1901) must be passed by with merely the comment made by Prof Fessenden “Electrical World” Vol 37, p 165 that “only the crassest ignorance could attribute any such origin” to the so-called signals.”
Hawkins sums up, “Ten years ago, if public opinion in this country had been required to name the electrician of greatest promise, the answer without doubt would have been ‘Nikola Tesla’. Today his name provokes at best a regret that so great a promise should have been unfulfilled. In ten years the attitude of the scientific press has passed from admiring expectancy to good natured banter and at last to charitable silence.”
Remote Control Boat
All that said, Hawkins’ criticism on one thing Tesla had done in his “torpedo” idea was, at least, premature in writing it off, though how this would ultimately be achieved could not have been done by the way Tesla understood things. Nevertheless, his vision was correct.
Specifically, in 1889, Tesla made one of his most famous demonstrations, using a system which he named ‘Teleautomatics’ to remotely control an iron hulled model boat across a small indoor pond made for this demonstration at Madison Square Garden. Tesla stated of the demo, “When first shown… it created a sensation such as no other invention of mine has ever produced.”
And you can see why. Not just lighting up a tube wirelessly, this time he was controlling something in relatively complex ways, and making it appear even more complex than it actually was. You see, the demo wasn’t just to show that he could control the boat without touching it, but to illustrate the idea of an independent automaton in general, all of which showcased Tesla’s abilities to wow an audience. For example, at one point he had the audience ask questions of the boat, in particular in one case “What is the cube root of 64.” In response, Tesla subtly had the lights on his boat flash four times, seeming to imply the boat had heard the question, done the calculation, and produced the answer.
While the device wasn’t illustrating anything new in the way of scientific principle, it was, nonetheless, a brilliant application of the technology available. And from this, there is a reasonable argument to be made that Tesla is the father of remote control vehicles.
Ever the visionary, Tesla predicted great things for this technology, even for its potential to end all wars. Imagining a world in which all manner of vessels and machines were not just remotely controlled, but fully independent automatons. He elaborated to one reporter of the potential of devices like this, “You do not see there a wireless torpedo, you see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.”
Inventing Radio
On this note of Radio transmissions, we’ll get into this more later when discussing Tesla’s famous tower, but for now very briefly, it’s often said that Tesla once again got credit stolen him by another when Guglielmo Marconi got not only the Nobel Prize but also general credit today for inventing radio transmissions. First, it should be noted that as ever, others had previously done work on this, such as Russian physicist Alexander Popov, who had previously made a radio receiver before Marconi or Tesla, etc. etc. Again, none of this was happening in a vacuum.
But as for the specific claim here of Tesla, rather than Marconi, being the “Father of Radio”, it is true that Marconi used some of Tesla’s patents in his revolutionary work, such as a Tesla oscillator. The problem is, outside of his claims, Tesla does not actually ever seem to have built a working radio or, at least, not in this sense and what we are talking about here. As noted by famed author and Electrical Engineering Professor Dr. Paul J Nahin in his The Science of Radio,
“Tesla was, without question, very skillful at generating large, noisy sparks with the aid of step-up transformers tuned to resonance (the famous Tesla coil) and he seems to have really believed that, since Marconi used sparks in his wireless work, then he too must be a wireless pioneer. There is, however, not a shred of credible evidence that Tesla did anything more than just talk about radio (in 1901, for example, he claimed that two years before he had received radio signals from Mars), and nothing in the historical record supports his grandiose claims. It is clear, in fact, from what he did write, that Tesla actually had only the slightest (if that) understanding of electromagnetic radio physics; he claimed, for example, that ‘his’ electric waves were both immune to the inverse-square law and that they traveled faster than light. Tesla does appear to have sincerely believed his own outrageous statements; he lived in a delusional world of self aggrandizement that became increasingly cut off from reality. His only human joy seems to have been feeding the pigeons of New York City, where he died in a hotel room a lonely, bitter man. Modern biographers of Tesla (none of whom have any technical training) continue to muddy the historical record, however, and so let me be quite clear: Tesla did not invent radio, although his flowery talk about it no doubt inspired many youngsters at the start of the 20th century to become interesting in ‘the new wireless’.”
As to the whole signal from Mars thing, Professor Nahin goes on, “This claim was not taken seriously by many (who argued convincingly that if Tesla was receiving anything it was certainly of terrestrial origin), but it did not pass without some lasting literary impact. HG Wells noticed it, and mentioned Tesla’s supposed Martian contact in his novel The First Men in the Moon published that same year in 1901. In Wells story one of the characters sends wireless telegraphy Morse code from the Moon back to Earth. Ironically, Tesla’s own words (in his patent application of 1897) show that he was really not thinking of true radio at all, but rather of a conducting system. The most recent explanation for what Tesla claims to have heard is that he was detecting electromagnetic radiation caused by the magnetic field of Jupiter. This is speculation that at best seems pretty far fetched for an 1899 radio receiver, an objection that Tesla advocates have anticipated. Their response is not unexpected-Tesla’s 1899 radio was a super advanced design that nobody else’s on Earth had even dreamed of.”
Going back to the idea that Tesla is the true “father of radio”, it is often pointed out, largely because of what Tesla himself claimed, that Tesla had previously already also created a device in 1895 that could transmit supposed radio signals over 50 miles. As to why he never demonstrated this device, unfortunately this was one of the supposed victims of his famous 1895 lab fire…
That said, Tesla did ultimately sue Marconi for patent infringement in 1915, but this didn’t go anywhere. Or, at least not until 1943, shortly after Tesla’s death. In this one, the U.S. Supreme Court went ahead and upheld Tesla’s radio patent 645,576. Because of this, many go back to giving Tesla, not Marconi, the credit here as the “father of radio”. However, beyond missing an awful lot of historical context of events and a misunderstanding of how the technology works compared to what Tesla proposed and made, as Dr. Nahin alluded to, this also misses the context that at the time the Supreme Court finally got around to upholding Tesla’s patent, the Marconi Company was suing the U.S. government for use of its patents during WWI. By the Supreme Court upholding Tesla’s patent on this case, it sidestepped the issue for the U.S. government. And while the Supreme Court is supposed to be unbiased in such things, it certainly made it convenient for the government. And either way, noteworthy also, as we’ll get into when we get to talking about Edison, the court system and judges with legal, instead of scientific backgrounds, aren’t exactly well suited for determining the validity of a given patent over another for some technology.
Ending the Tour and Rocky Mountain High
Going back to Tesla’s rising celebrity and the lecture tour that propelled this to even greater heights, he ultimately ceased touring after getting sick. He states of this, “I fled from London and later from Paris to escape favors showered upon me, and journeyed to my home where I passed through a most painful ordeal and illness. Upon regaining my health I began to formulate plans for the resumption of work in America. Up to that time I never realized that I possessed any particular gift of discovery but Lord Rayleigh, whom I always considered as an ideal man of science, had said so and if that was the case I felt that I should concentrate on some big idea.”
His big idea was widespread and ubiquitous global communication and cheap wireless power everywhere. Something he claimed he could do with a device he’d come up with. But first he had some work to do in Colorado to test his hypotheses.
With the help of various individuals including one Colonel John Jacob Astor, who gave Tesla $100,000 (about $3.7 million today) to fund the project, Tesla got to work.
That said, we should also point out here that as was also a theme with Tesla, he didn’t always do with investor money what he claimed he was going to work on with it. In this case, it appears that Astor had originally thought Tesla was going to use the money to advance his wireless lighting systems, when instead Tesla was far more interested in wanting to test some of his ideas on electrical transmission through the high atmosphere and through the Earth.
Thus, he moved to Colorado and got to work on his experimental station near Pikes Peak, with his facility here ultimately housing the, at the time, largest Tesla coil ever made, some 15 meters in diameter. This was something of a prototype for the eventual so-called magnifying transmitter in his later Wardenclyffe Tower. As for what he intended to accomplish here overall, he told reporters he was going to transmit signals from Colorado all the way to Paris with it.
What he actually accomplished here, if anything, is partially shrouded in mystery and further muddied by Tesla hyping what he’d done, some of which he definitely could not have done in reality given a modern understanding of electricity.
Whatever the case, one thing he did do, or, at least, it seems an odd thing for him to make up if it didn’t actually happen, is he apparently accidentally caused a power outage. In 1917, Tesla explains, “As an example of what has been done with several hundred kilowatts of high frequency energy liberated, it was found that the dynamos in a power house 6 miles (10 km) away were repeatedly burned out, due to the powerful high frequency currents set up in them, and which caused heavy sparks to jump through the windings and destroy the insulation!”
Talking to Aliens
It was also during this time that he allegedly received his signal, to quote him, “from another world”. Tesla would elaborate on this in the February 1901 Collier’s Weekly article “Talking with Planets”, which is a rather fascinating piece that also illustrates Tesla’s flare for captivating and inspiring speech and, in particular, makes an argument for widespread life of the universe.
In it, he states,
“The desire to know something of our neighbors in the immense depths of space does not spring from idle curiosity nor from thirst for knowledge, but from a deeper cause, and it is a feeling firmly rooted in the heart of every human being capable of thinking at all… But in this age of reason it is not astonishing to find persons who scoff at the very thought of effecting communication with a planet. First of all, the argument is made that there is only a small probability of other planets being inhabited at all. This argument has never appealed to me. In the solar system, there seem to be only two planets — Venus and Mars — capable of sustaining life such as ours: but this does not mean that there might not be on all of them some other forms of life. Chemical processes may be maintained without the aid of oxygen, and it is still a question whether chemical processes are absolutely necessary to the sustenance of organised beings. My idea is that the development of life must lead to forms of existence that will be possible without nourishment and which will not be shackled by consequent limitations. Why should a living being not be able to obtain all the energy it needs for the performance of its life-functions from the environment, instead of through consumption of food, and transforming, by a complicated process, the energy of chemical combinations into life-sustaining energy? If there were such beings on one of the planets we should know next to nothing about them. Nor is it necessary to go so far in our assumptions, for we can readily conceive that, in the same degree as the atmosphere diminishes in density, moisture disappears and the planet freezes up, organic life might also undergo corresponding modifications, leading finally to forms which, according to our present ideas of life, are impossible… They would adapt themselves to their constantly changing environment. So I think it quite possible that in a frozen planet, such as our moon is supposed to be, intelligent beings may still dwell, in its interior, if not on its surface.”
He then goes on to discuss communicating with such beings and his proposal on how, and circling back to his work in Colorado and its supposed groundbreaking nature. “I can readily demonstrate that, with an expenditure not exceeding two thousand horse-power, signals can be transmitted to a planet such as Mars with as much exactness and certitude as we now send messages by wire from New York to Philadelphia. These means are the result of long-continued experiment and gradual improvement…. My next step was to use the earth itself as the medium for conducting the currents, thus dispensing with wires and all other artificial conductors. So I was led to the development of a system of energy transmission and of telegraphy without the use of wires, which I described in 1893. The difficulties I encountered at first in the transmission of currents through the earth were very great. At that time I had at hand only ordinary apparatus, which I found to be ineffective, and I concentrated my attention immediately upon perfecting machines for this special purpose. This work consumed a number of years, but I finally vanquished all difficulties and succeeded in producing a machine which, to explain its operation in plain language, resembled a pump in its action, drawing electricity from the earth and driving it back into the same at an enormous rate, thus creating ripples or disturbances which, spreading through the earth as through a wire, could be detected at great distances by carefully attuned receiving circuits. In this manner I was able to transmit to a distance, not only feeble effects for the purposes of signaling, but considerable amounts of energy, and later discoveries I made convinced me that I shall ultimately succeed in conveying power without wires, for industrial purposes, with high economy, and to any distance, however great.”
He goes on in explanation on how he achieved this, well, as the good professor formerly noted, Tesla was really good at throwing around sparks. Tesla himself states,
“A few years ago it was virtually impossible to produce electrical sparks twenty or thirty foot long; but I produced some more than one hundred feet in length, and this without difficulty. The rates of electrical movement involved in strong induction apparatus had measured but a few hundred horse-power, and I produced electrical movements of rates of one hundred and ten thousand horse-power. Prior to this, only insignificant electrical pressures were obtained, while I have reached fifty million volts. Many persons in my own profession have wondered… and have asked what I am trying to do. But the time is not far away now when the practical results of my labors will be placed before the world and their influence felt everywhere. One of the immediate consequences will be the transmission of messages without wires, over sea or land, to an immense distance. I have already demonstrated, by crucial tests, the practicability of signalling by my system from one to any other point of the globe, no matter how remote, and I shall soon convert the disbelievers.”
With all this, Tesla also was under the impression that if he could control atmospheric electrical effects similar to what caused lightning, he could control the climate anywhere with it by, again, tapping into the Earth’s energy through his device and directing it where he willed. Thus, he claimed he could create rain over a desert and the like with it from one of his devices far afield.
Speaking of weather, going back to his Colorado experiments, he states, “As I was improving my machines for the production of intense electrical actions, I was also perfecting the means for observing feeble effects. One of the most interesting results, and also one of great practical importance, was the development of certain contrivances for indicating at a distance of many hundred miles an approaching storm, its direction, speed and distance travelled. These appliances are likely to be valuable in future meteorological observations and surveying, and will lend themselves particularly to many naval uses.”
And now we get to his alleged signal from another world.
“It was in carrying on this work that for the first time I discovered those mysterious effects which have elicited such unusual interest. I had perfected the apparatus referred to so far that from my laboratory in the Colorado mountains I could feel the pulse of the globe, as it were, noting every electrical change that occurred within a radius of eleven hundred miles.
I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth. Even now, at times, I can vividly recall the incident, and see my apparatus as though it were actually before me. My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me.
The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes. The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. A purpose was behind these electrical signals; and it was with this conviction that I announced to the Red Cross Society, when it asked me to indicate one of the great possible achievements of the next hundred years, that it would probably be the confirmation and interpretation of this planetary challenge to us….
At the present stage of progress, there would be no insurmountable obstacle in constructing a machine capable of conveying a message to Mars, nor would there be any great difficulty in recording signals transmitted to us by the inhabitants of that planet, if they be skilled electricians. Communication once established, even in the simplest way, as by a mere interchange of numbers, the progress toward more intelligible communication would be rapid. Absolute certitude as to the receipt and interchange of messages would be reached as soon as we could respond with the number “four,” say, in reply to the signal “one, two, three.” The Martians, or the inhabitants of whatever planet had signalled to us, would understand at once that we had caught their message across the gulf of space and had sent back a response. To convey a knowledge of form by such means is, while very difficult, not impossible, and I have already found a way of doing it…”
Noteworthy, while some were inspired by all this, others not so much, for example, in a July of 1900 edition of Marine Engineering, it noted that piece by Tesla was a “handiwork of a cerebrose individual- a bombastical genius who has illumined unknown fields of imaginative science with his intellectual searchlight, and is willing to permit the gaping world of ignorance or complaisance to peer in and wonder, the credulous editor drawing the curtain. This dazzling contribution to modern unscientific research reads like nothing so much as an essay on Christian Science, so profound is it in the ambiguous nothingness whereby it leads through the intricacies of incoherency into the climax of absolute assinity.”
Needless to say, it was around this time that Tesla was really starting to fall from grace with the scientists and engineers of the world, something that would, from this point, only accelerate more and more.
But in any event, with his work now apparently done in Colorado, he headed back to New York looking for investors in his new world changing technology. Noteworthy, it’s also been suggested his work wasn’t so much done here, as it was that when he left the Colorado facility he was not only out of money to continue operating the facility but he left behind considerable debts. This all culminated in 1904 to him being sued by Colorado Springs, with his debt being settled via the lab and its contents sold at auction.
The Tesla World System
But back in New York, Tesla began singing the praises of what he’d supposedly accomplished in Colorado, and was looking for an investor for an even grander version of what he’d made there. Of course, if he’d already done it all with the Colorado facility and such a facility could transmit anywhere in the world economically, why didn’t he just use or modify that for cheaper?
Don’t know.
But this is maybe something J.P. Morgan should have asked when having dinner with Tesla and discussing the whole thing. And, in particular, Tesla selling him on the idea of Tesla’s “World System” of wireless communication where Tesla claimed “When wireless is fully applied the Earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts.”
He goes on, “It makes possible not only the instantaneous and precise wireless transmission of any kind of signals, messages or characters, to all parts of the world, but also the inter-connection of the existing telegraph, telephone, and other signal stations without any change in their present equipment. By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the Globe. An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered or music played in some other place, however distant. These examples are cited merely to give an idea of the possibilities of this great scientific advance, which annihilates distance and makes that perfect natural conductor, the Earth, available for all the innumerable purposes which human ingenuity has found for a line-wire. One far-reaching result of this is that any device capable of being operated thru one or more wires (at a distance obviously restricted) can likewise be actuated, without artificial conductors and with the same facility and accuracy, at distances to which there are no limits other than those imposed by the physical dimensions of the Globe. Thus, not only will entirely new fields for commercial exploitation be opened up by this ideal method of transmission but the old ones vastly extended.”
He goes on, “As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind.” And that, “When the great truth accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball and that by this fact many possibilities, each baffling imagination and of incalculable consequence, are rendered absolutely sure of accomplishment.”
But to sum up, he promised that this system, which he claimed he could have operational in 9 months, would provide for:
“1) The inter-connection of the existing telegraph exchanges or offices all over the world;
(2) The establishment of a secret and non-interferable government telegraph service;
(3) The inter-connection of all the present telephone exchanges or offices on the Globe;
(4) The universal distribution of general news, by telegraph or telephone, in connection with the Press;
(5) The establishment of such a ‘World-System’ of intelligence transmission for exclusive private use;
(6) The inter-connection and operation of all stock tickers of the world;
(7) The establishment of a ‘World-System’ of musical distribution, etc.;
(8) The universal registration of time by cheap clocks indicating the hour with astronomical precision and requiring no attention whatever;
(9) The world transmission of typed or handwritten characters, letters, checks, etc.;
(10) The establishment of a universal marine service enabling the navigators of all ships to steer perfectly without compass, to determine the exact location, hour and speed, to prevent collisions and disasters, etc.;
(11) The inauguration of a system of world-printing on land and sea;
(12) The world reproduction of photographic pictures and all kinds of drawings or records.”
He also philosophically felt that such widespread communication would bring about an end to war, noting, “The greatest good will comes from technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere and factories driven thousands of miles from waterfalls furnishing the power; aerial machines will be propelled around the earth without a stop and the sun’s energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land. Its introduction for telegraphic, telephonic and similar uses will automatically cut out the statics and all other interferences which at present impose narrow limits to the application of the wireless….War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only thru annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife. No league or parliamentary act of any kind will ever prevent such a calamity. These are only new devices for putting the weak at the mercy of the strong… Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization.”
However, at the time he wrote this long after his famed J.P. Morgan funded tower failure, he ominously notes that such widespread communication seems to be being suppressed by hitherto unknown dark forces, stating, “As throwing light on this point, I may mention that only recently an odd looking gentleman called on me with the object of enlisting my services in the construction of world transmitters in some distant land. ‘We have no money,’ he said, ‘but carloads of solid gold and we will give you a liberal amount.’ I told him that I wanted to see first what will be done with my inventions in America, and this ended the interview. But I am satisfied that some dark forces are at work, and as time goes on the maintenance of continuous communication will be rendered more difficult. The only remedy is a system immune against interruption. It has been perfected, it exists, and all that is necessary is to put it in operation.”
Tesla’s Tower and Downfall
Speaking of his own attempt to “put it in operation”, again we go back to J.P. Morgan. Intrigued by Tesla’s ideas, and with Tesla himself stating his Colorado facility had already demonstrated the technology needed, Morgan gave Tesla $150,000 today (about $5.6 million today) to build a larger facility to facilitate global communication in this way through allegedly manipulating the electrical charge of the Earth.
This ultimately led to the construction of his famed Wardenclyffe tower, some 187 feet tall with a 55 ton sphere of metal at the top. The tower also possessed a shaft that went about 120 feet into the earth, and below this he had 16 iron pipes about 300 feet long embedded into the ground. As to why, Tesla stated, “In this system that I have invented, it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth, otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip… so that the whole of this globe can quiver.”
Now, while it’s pretty much universally said this facility failed because of lack of funding, if you’ve been following along, you’re going to no doubt not be surprised that the real reason it failed was because Tesla had some pretty fundamental misunderstandings of quite a lot of things. As Professor Paul J Nahin formerly noted, Tesla was good at “generating large, noisy sparks”, but his understanding of the forces he was dealing with were based on 19th century understanding that just didn’t bear out. And, in fact, as we’ve alluded to a few times, Tesla’s unwillingness to advance his own understanding on various points as science progressed saw his brilliant mind mostly go to waste pretty much from this point on, other than some interesting work on turbines.
But going back to the Wardenclyffe tower, when looking over Tesla’s patents and papers and what was built, it really isn’t clear how the tower was supposed to do what Tesla claimed even with his understanding of things. But either way, the Earth cannot be used as a conductor as Tesla was thinking, nor could he shoot the energy into the ionosphere to do what he was thinking with the tower there either.
Speaking of shooting energy through the air, going back to his original radio patent that so many claim makes Tesla the father of radio instead of Marconi or others working on similar things, we should also point out that Tesla also had the idea that he could create a vast power distribution service via floating balloons up around 30,000 feet. He writes in the radio patent, “by the aid of captive balloons supplied continuously with gas from reservoirs and held-in position securely by steel wires or by any other means, devices, or expedients, such as may be contrived and perfected by ingenious and skilled engineers. From my experiments and observations I conclude that with electromotive impulses not greatly exceeding fifteen or twenty million volts the energy of many thousands of horse-power may be transmitted over vast distances, measured by many hundreds and even thousands of miles, with terminals not more than thirty to thirty-five thousand feet above the level of the sea, and even this comparatively-small elevation will be required chiefly for reasons of economy, and, if desired, it may be considerably reduced, since by such means as have been described practically any potential that is desired may be obtained, the currents through the air strata may be rendered very small, whereby the loss in the transmission may be reduced.”
In a nutshell, given the low density of atmosphere at that altitude, he thought this would allow him to send millions of volts from balloon to balloon spaced at incredible distances. Why he thought this would work seems to have been based on the idea that the high atmosphere was extremely conductive. He also thought he could utilize this supposed fact to make the upper atmosphere glow and, thus, provide ample light at night to large areas in this way anywhere he wanted. No outdoor lighting needed.
But as for the tower, as things progressed and he’d still not managed to send any signals anywhere despite seemingly having successfully created what he’d claimed he’d need for it, things began to turn south pretty quickly.
To make matters worse in all this, while Tesla was trying and failing in his wireless messaging transmission idea, across the pond in Europe, Marconi was doing the same, but in a way that could actually work. In particular, on December 12, 1901, Marconi had successfully sent the letter “S” all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from England to Newfoundland.
Tesla was initially unconcerned about this, thinking incorrectly that Marconi was just copying his method. In particular because he had read Marconi was using a Tesla coil that was “connected to the Earth”. And, according to Tesla, using 17 of Tesla’s patents. On the latter, it is true that Marconi was using some of Tesla’s work as previously noted, but also as noted, the way he was transmitting the message was fundamentally different than Tesla’s proposed system.
But not getting anywhere with sending messages and given Marconi’s much cheaper system that was progressing nicely, in order to drum up more funding, Tesla decided to switch it up from the focus of his tower being communication, to pushing using the facility for wireless power.
He wrote to Morgan in July of 1903 of this, “Financially, I am in a dreadful fix. But if I can complete this work, I can readily show that by my wireless system power can be transmitted in any amount, to any desired distance and with high economy. Of the three hundred horsepower developed by my oscillator on Long Island, two hundred and seventy five, perhaps a little more, can be recovered at the greatest distance in Australia.”
It is here we feel compelled to explicitly point out a few things to counter some of the claims of internet Tesla conspiracy theorists. In particular the idea that Tesla invented a form of “free” wireless energy, which could have been communicated wirelessly at no cost to the end consumer and would have, thus, revolutionized the world. Given all Tesla’s claims about his tower here and how he thought it would work, you can kind of squint and see where such rumors came from. Of course, first, the way Tesla was proposing transmitting power and the efficiency, for example in his quote there from Long Island to Australia at 91%, well. Let’s just say J.P. Morgan didn’t buy it either, and we hope any of the Tesla conspiracy theorists listening also can see now that maybe it wasn’t his alleged “dark forces” sabotaging Tesla’s work here that was its downfall, but the man himself.
Further, as to the whole idea of free or ultra cheap ubiquitous energy, Tesla thought this would be the downfall of society. He state, “If we were to release the energy of atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point of the globe this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind in giving rise to dissension and anarchy which would ultimately result in the enthronement of the hated regime of force.”
Going back to Tesla’s pitch to J.P. Morgan for using the tower for power instead of communication, Tesla goes on, “If I had told you such as this before, you would have fired me out of your office. Now you see, Mr. Morgan, what I work for. It means a great industrial revolution. It will be the one thing worthy of your attention, as I have always assured you. There is no incertitude about this, it is an absolute. My patents confer a monopoly. Will you help me or let my great work-almost complete- go to pots?”
Morgan replied on July 17, 1903, “I have received your letter of the 16th inst., and in reply would say that I should not feel disposed at present to make any further advances.”
Not dismayed, Tesla persisted, writing Morgan, “I am the only man on this earth today who has the peculiar knowledge and ability to achieve this wonder and another one may not come in a hundred years. There has been a long and painful delay. My nerves are not of iron, and all this knowledge and ability may be lost to the world. Help me to complete this work or at least remove the obstacles in my path.”
In yet another instance he wrote him “… you are the only man today who possesses the genius and power to compel the universal adoption of these ideas and that is why I approached you two years ago.”
When none of that worked, Tesla then wrote him in October of 1904, stating “Since a year, Mr. Morgan, there has been hardly a night when my pillow is not bathed in tears, but you must not think me a weak man for that. I am perfectly sure to finish my task, come what may. I am only sorry that after mastering the difficulties which seemed insuperable, and acquiring special knowledge which I now alone posses, and which, if applied effectively, would advance the world a century, I must see my work delayed.”
Morgan’s response was quick and to the point- “No.”
In a rage, Tesla replied,
“You are a man like Bismark. Great but uncontrollable. I wrote purposefully last week hoping that your recent association [with the archbishop] might have rendered you more susceptible to a softer influence. But you are no Christian at all, you are a fanatic musoulman [Muslim]. Once you say no, come what may, it is no. May the gravitation repel instead of attract, may right become wrong, every consideration no matter what it may be, must founder on the rock of your brutal resolve… You let me struggle on, weakened by shrew enemies, disheartened by doubting friends, financially exhausted, trying to overcome obstacles which you yourself have piled up before me.”
In further frustration, in December of 1904 he wrote, “Owing to a habit contracted long ago in defiance of superstition, I prefer to make important communications on Fridays and the 13th of each month, but my house is afire and I have not an hour to waste. I knew that you would refuse. What chance have I to land the biggest Wall Street monster with soul’s spider thread!”
And that, “Mr Morgan you have raised great waves in the industrial world and some have struck my little boat. Prices have gone up in consequence, twice, perhaps three times higher than they were and there were expensive delays, mostly as a result of activities you excited.”
Ultimately a dejected Tesla for reasons unclear- perhaps just angry, perhaps doing some last minute experiments to try to get the thing to work while he still had use of the tower, or perhaps trying to put on a show to get some media hype about his tower he could potentially use to find more investors- put on a rather interesting light show directly after receiving a rejection letter for further financing from J.P. Morgan, with the New York Sun reporting that those nearby the tower observed “all sorts of lightning… from the tall tower… For a time the air was filled with blinding streaks of electricity which seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand. The display continued until after midnight.”
When asked what he was doing with all that, Tesla cryptically told the paper, “It is true that some of them have had to do with wireless telegraphy” and that if the local people “had been awake instead of asleep, at other times they would have seen even stranger things. Some day, but not at this time, I shall make an announcement of something that I never once dreamed of.”
Perhaps lending credence to the “publicity” angle of his display in order to drum up potential new investors, Tesla also claimed to reporters that he’d successfully used the tower to transmit messages to Scotland, noting “We have been sending wireless messages for long distances from this station for some time, but whether we are going into the telegraph field on a commercial basis I cannot say at present.”
On this note, Tesla would manage to secure some additional funding from one Thomas Fortune Ryan. However, rather than use the funds to continue construction as they were intended, he, instead, used it to pay off some debts.
Ultimately Tesla was unable to keep up with mortgage payments and Wardenclyffe was dismantled in 1915 by its de facto owner, George C Boldt, in order to be sold for scrap.
In the aftermath of this all, the news would call the Tower, “Tesla’s million dollar folly”. The man himself would maintain for the rest of his life it all would have worked if not for a “blind, faint-hearted, doubting world” which resulted in his inability to drum up needed funds to continue the project.
Even many years later in life during his aforementioned Edison medal acceptance speech he brought it up again, stating, “as to the transmission of power through space, that is a project which I considered absolutely certain of success long since. Years ago I was in the position to transmit wireless power to any distance without limit other than that imposed by the physical dimensions of the globe. In my system it makes no difference what the distance is. The efficiency of the transmission can be as high as 96 or 97 per cent, and there are practically no losses except such as are inevitable in the running of the machinery. When there is no receiver there is no energy consumption anywhere. When the receiver is put on, it draws power. That is the exact opposite of the Hertz-wave system. In that case, if you have a plant of 1,000 horsepower, it is radiating all the time whether the energy is received or not; but in my system no power is lost. When there are no receivers the plant consumes only a few horsepower necessary to maintain the electric vibration; it runs idle, as the Edison plant when the lamps and motors are shut off. I have made advances along this line in later years which will contribute to the practical features of the system. Recently I have obtained a patent on a transmitter with which it is practicable to transfer unlimited amount of energy to any distance. I had a very interesting experience with Mr. Stone, whom I consider, if not the ablest, certainly one of the ablest living experts. I said to Mr. Stone: ”Did you see my patent?” He replied: “Yes, I saw it, but I thought you were crazy.” When I explained it to Mr. Stone he said, “Now, I see; why, that is great,” and he understood how the energy is transmitted.”
Of course, in reality, while he genuinely seems to have believed everything he said here, no amount of money could have made the Wardenclyffe Tower work for what Tesla was trying to do with it.
An interesting thing to note on all this, however, is that despite Tesla’s rage filled letters and insults to Morgan in the moment, he would later write much more kindly words about the man. In Tesla’s autobiography he states, “in view of various rumors which have reached me, that Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan did not interest himself with me in a business way but in the same large spirit in which he has assisted many other pioneers. He carried out his generous promise to the letter and it would have been most unreasonable to expect from him anything more. He had the highest regard for my attainments and gave me every evidence of his complete faith in my ability to ultimately achieve what I had set out to do. I am unwilling to accord to some small minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease. My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.”
A Breakdown
Going back to the immediate aftermath of the Tower’s failure, Tesla would write, “Despite my rare physical endurance at that period the abused nerves finally rebelled and I suffered a complete collapse, just as the consummation of the long and difficult task was almost in sight.”
He goes on, he got over it quickly, however, thanks to his particular constitution, stating, “Without doubt I would have paid a greater penalty later, and very likely my career would have been prematurely terminated, had not providence equipt me with a safety device, which has seemed to improve with advancing years and unfailingly comes into play when my forces are at an end. So long as it operates I am safe from danger, due to overwork, which threatens other inventors and, incidentally, I need no vacations which are indispensable to most people. When I am all but used up I simply do as the darkies, who ‘naturally fall asleep while white folks worry.’ To venture a theory out of my sphere, the body probably accumulates little by little a definite quantity of some toxic agent and I sink into a nearly lethargic state which lasts half an hour to the minute. Upon awakening I have the sensation as though the events immediately preceding had occurred very long ago, and if I attempt to continue the interrupted train of thought I feel a veritable mental nausea. Involuntarily I then turn to other work and am surprised at the freshness of the mind and ease with which I overcome obstacles that had baffled me before. After weeks or months my passion for the temporarily abandoned invention returns and I invariably find answers to all the vexing questions with scarcely any effort.”
The Tesla Turbine
After his breakdown, Tesla got back to work, noting “My enemies have been so successful in portraying me as a poet and a visionary that I must put out something commercial without delay.”
On this, after JP Morgan’s death in 1913, Tesla did attend his funeral, and not long after tried to get Morgan’s son, Jack, to support the Tower project, but he was uninterested. However, Jack was sold on an alternate project of Tesla’s turbine idea, giving Tesla $20,000 (about $600,000 today) to help support the project.
As for the turbine engine, this one was Tesla going back to creating something that actually worked and was ingenious. On this, traditional such devices used a bladed system, more or less like a windmill inside of an enclosure. Tesla’s system used a series of discs along a shaft that utilized the boundary layer effect to spin. When he got it to work, he stated, “I have accomplished what mechanical engineers had been dreaming about ever since the invention of steam power. That is the perfect rotary engine.”
Tesla also noted of it, and people’s skepticism of his device, “Only the other day I had a disheartening experience when I met my friend and former assistant, Charles F. Scott, now professor of Electrical Engineering at Yale. I had not seen him for a long time and was glad to have an opportunity for a little chat at my office. Our conversation naturally enough drifted on my turbine and I became heated to a high degree. ‘Scott,’ I exclaimed, carried away by the vision of a glorious future, ‘my turbine will scrap all the heat-engines in the world.’ Scott stroked his chin and looked away thoughtfully, as though making a mental calculation. ‘That will make quite a pile of scrap,’ he said, and left without another word!”
Not dissuaded, Tesla hoped given the efficiency and simple design, it would be able to be used in everything from aircraft to automobiles. On the former, he also hoped to combine it with wireless power, allowing the airplanes to be lighter and faster and remain aloft indefinitely.
He stated of such planes in 1911, “Twenty years ago I believed that I would be the first man to fly; that I was on track of accomplishing what no one else was anywhere near reaching… My idea was a flying machine propelled by an electric motor, with power supplied by stations on the earth.”
In an article published in Reconstruction magazine in July of 1919, he also stated such a wirelessly powered aircraft with his turbine could fly at supersonic speeds at 40,000 feet above the Earth’s surface. He goes on, “The power supply is virtually unlimited, as any number of power plants can be operated together, supplying energy to airships just as trains running on tracks are now supplied with electrical energy through rails or wires.”
On the automobile side, her states, “Shortly before the war, when the exhibition of my turbines in this city elicited widespread comment in the technical papers, I anticipated that there would be a scramble among manufacturers to get hold of the invention, and I had particular designs on that man from Detroit who has an uncanny faculty for accumulating millions. So confident was I that he would turn up some day, that I declared this as certain to my secretary and assistants. Sure enough, one fine morning a body of engineers from the Ford Motor Company presented themselves with the request of discussing with me an important project. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ I remarked triumphantly to my employees, and one of them said, ‘You are amazing, Mr. Tesla; everything comes out exactly as you predict.’ As soon as these hard-headed men were seated I, of course, immediately began to extol the wonderful features of my turbine, when the spokesmen interrupted me and said, ‘We know all about this, but we are on a special errand. We have formed a psychological society for the investigation of psychic phenomena and we want you to join us in this undertaking.’ I suppose those engineers never knew how near they came to being fired out of my office.”
In the end, however, while an ingenious device and more efficient than its competitor bladed turbines of the day, Tesla’s turbine went relatively nowhere, other than some niche applications since, and a whole lot of people using it as a science project in high school and the like.
As to why it didn’t go anywhere, it didn’t work practically for the applications such turbines were being used for, for a few different reasons, but most notably because at the high temperatures it was operating under and high speeds of rotation, the discs had a tendency to warp, a problem Tesla and his assistants were never able to overcome satisfactorily for commercial application.
The Bizarro Years
From this point, for the rest of Tesla’s life, his genius mind accomplished a series of fantastical things that seemingly existed only in his head.
Among his last patents included, in 1928, patent number 1,655,114 an “Apparatus For Aerial Transportation” which came full circle with his childhood dream of creating a flying machine. He claimed this device, called a helicopterplane, could be flown with vertical takeoff from anyone’s roof or parking space, then transition to more typical airplane flight, weigh a mere 800 lbs, and cost only $1000 to buy ($18,000 today).
A couple years later, he had supposedly made a huge breakthrough that was so significant he held a press conference, telling the gathered reporters in 1931 he had come up with a brand new source of energy and that “The idea first came upon me as a tremendous shock… I can only say at this time that it will come from an entirely new and unsuspected source.” He also noted it was “violently opposed” to the physics of Einstein.
The next year he claimed he’d invented a new kind of motor that ran on cosmic rays.
Not long after this, in 1934, he claimed he’d invented a new type of weapon called the “Teleforce”, with the New York Times July 11, 1934 edition reading “Tesla, at 78, Bares New ‘Death Beam’” in which it will “end concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles…”
Although Tesla would clarify it was more akin to a peace beam as its power would make, in his opinion, war completely untenable.
He would further publish a paper on it titled “New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media”.
The general idea was to create a series of power plants along a given country’s borders and the beam would then be used to shoot down any enemy aircraft within 200 miles of the stations. Going back to his roots, he also felt the beam could be used to transmit power wirelessly. Yet another big idea with this was that he proposed once again his aforementioned idea to light up the night sky with it via creating something of a man-made aurora borealis.
Efforts by Tesla to get funding to pursue this death beam via various governments like the UK or from J.P. Morgan Jr all failed initially, though in 1939 he allegedly received $25,000 (about a half a million dollars today) from the Soviet Union in relation to it.
Tesla also claimed when he was awarded the Order of the White Lion and some individuals expressed skepticism that it would work that, “it is not an experiment … I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.”
While it is true that, following Tesla’s death, government officials, keen on such a device to use against the Nazis, searched his hotel room for sensitive documents and the device itself, no physical proof of the inventor’s ‘death beam’ has ever been found. Further a package left by Tesla in a hotel vault, which he had told the hotel manager was a secret prototype worth thousands of dollars and some thought might be this, was discovered to be the aforereferenced Wheatstone bridge, a mundane tool for measuring electrical resistance.
Nor was anything of this sort found by Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kosanovic, who was a Yogoslavian ambassador stationed in New York at the time of his famous uncle’s death. Directly after Tesla’s ceasing to exist, Kosanovic went to Tesla’s hotel and after having a locksmith crack Tesla’s safe, inside he only found a few honorary degrees, a medal, a memorial book, and a few misc items like this. It would be two days later in which the government would step in and seize Tesla’s belongings to examine them and his papers to see about the death beam.
On this note, some of the Tesla fanboy ilk claim the reason no such papers were found is just because Tesla didn’t need to write things down and, as Tesla himself often claimed, the devices he’d invision in his head, according to him at least always worked exactly as he thought once he created them… Except, of course, none of this is true, except the part that Tesla really did say things like this and about his supposed eidetic memory as previously quoted. However, as far as science is aware, while some people do have remarkable memories, the idea of a photographic memory doesn’t appear to be a real thing,
That said, again, some people do have remarkable abilities on this front, but almost always associated with various abnormal brain development issues. For instance, Kim Peek, a so-called megasavant or “human Google”, who served as the inspiration for Rain Man, was one such well known example. While Peek’s mental prowess has been subjected to significant embellishment over the years, it is quite well documented that he could seemingly effortlessly absorb all of the information on a given page with remarkable speed. While exactly how many words per minute he could read with almost perfect comprehension was never tested (at least that we could find documentation of), according to his father who by necessity had to be his “shadow” as Kim Peek called him, Kim generally averaged about ten seconds a page and then could recall it with almost perfect accuracy, even years later.
This was an ability Kim was more than happy to demonstrate, including “performing”, as it were, in front of over two and a half million people over the years in various lecture halls and libraries across the United States. Once he came out of his shell a bit after Rain Man, he’d even often walk up to strangers on the street to demonstrate his astounding memory and date-processing abilities. This was one of the few ways he knew how to socially interact with others.
However, Peek’s abilities were believed to be the side effect of a serious congenital birth defect known as agenesis of the corpus callosum, in which the largest band of white matter that connects the two hemispheres of the brain doesn’t develop correctly; in his case, it didn’t develop at all and his brain compensated by making some rather unusual connections, leaving him mentally and physically handicapped in many ways, while also giving him his truly remarkable memory.
And something similar tends to be the case with others with similar well out of the ordinary abilities like this. It is technically possible Tesla was one of these given his many mentions of other very odd mental quirks such as his vivid hallucinations and flashes and the like from an early age. But his abilities here were never tested, and many of his more grandiose claims about himself on some of this are relatively easy to debunk with other things he wrote or did. And, with regards to the supposed idea that he rarely or never took notes, this, too, is likewise easily debunked by the fact that even after his death he had many surviving papers demonstrating him working out various things, rather than doing it all in his head.
Going back to what he wrote and said about his Death Beam, and if such a thing could have worked the way Tesla described… Well, no. No it could not. Unless of course it really was using laws of physics that Tesla stated “no one has ever dreamed about” we guess…
To sum up the government’s stance on it, electrical engineer Dr. John G. Trump of the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development was called in to look over all Tesla’s papers on the matter and stated:
“His [Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”
Going back to his waning years in general, throughout all this time, Tesla also occasionally took odd consulting jobs for money as available, though his proposals for clients were generally fantastical and entirely un-useful in what they were trying to do, so this work, too declined with time.
Tesla vs Einstein
In the general case, the scientific and engineering world had moved on, and Tesla’s theories and work had been left behind, with the man himself not advancing with the times, and even pointedly arguing with many new theories, including some of those proposed by Einstein.
For example, Tesla didn’t believe electrons existed, felt atoms were not composed of subatomic particles, and that atoms could not be split or change state. And as for Einstein’s work, Tesla stated, “I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.”
Tesla also called relativity “a beggar wrapped in purple whom ignorant people take for a king”. He further noted he could prove it was incorrect because he himself had measured the speed of cosmic rays at approximately 50 times the speed of light…
In 1937 he also claimed he was on the verge of completing a grand “dynamic theory of gravity [that [would] put an end to idle speculations and false conceptions, as that of curved space.” And that all the details were worked out and he’d publish it to the world shortly. He never did, of course.
During all this time, Tesla’s finances continued to suffer to the point of near homelessness until the aforementioned Westinghouse stipend for the last decade or so of his life, with Yugoslavia also kicking in a bit of a pension for him.
Tesla last great financial windfall came from a rather unexpected source when, from 1915 through 1917, he received $1000 per month (about $30,000 per month today) paid by Telelfunken in a patent infringement case with U.S. Marconi Company. In this one, Marconi was suing this German radio company at the behest of the U.S. Government who was attempting to disrupt German wireless communications after the British had cut the telegraph cable that linked Germany and the U.S. Tesla was hired as an expert witness on the German side, and presumably happy to do so not just for the money, but also to try to stick it to the Marconi Company. His rather generous monthly paycheck on this one ended when the U.S. threw their hat into WWI in 1917.
But from all this, you’ll not be surprised that Tesla’s last decades do not seem to have been happy ones. In reduced financial circumstances, his reputation in the industry thoroughly sullied, and the wider world having mostly moved on to other celebrity scientists like Albert Einstein, Tesla continued to work seemingly as hard as he ever had, but produced nothing of consequence.
Tesla’s Peculiar Habits
This was also a period during which, by all accounts, the great scientist’s energy and mental health declined rapidly. He became increasingly ‘eccentric,’ to put it mildly, displaying behavior such as an obsession with numbers and cleanliness and the way his food had to be prepared for him to eat it which would today most likely be diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
He also reportedly at this time began obsessively washing his hands after doing things like shaking hands with others, as well as had very particular ways napkins had to be arranged on his table. He elaborates on some of his quirks here, “I had a violent aversion against the earrings of women but other ornaments, as bracelets, pleased me more or less according to design. The sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit but I was fascinated with the glitter of crystals or objects with sharp edges and plane surfaces. I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort. Even now I am not insensible to some of these upsetting impulses. When I drop little squares of paper in a dish filled with liquid, I always sense a peculiar and awful taste in my mouth.”
Going back to his quirks with regards to other people, Tesla also wasn’t a fan of people who were overweight in any way, once firing one of his secretaries when she became a little too plump in his opinion. He also reportedly had a habit of making any employee of his who wasn’t dressed to his standards go home and change, as well as didn’t like the tendency for women to, in his opinion, try to usurp men. Writing in 1924, “In place of the soft-voiced, a gentlewoman of my reverent worship, has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies in making herself as much as possible like man—in dress, voice and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind … The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me.”
He further stated that he thought it was only a matter of time before women would supplant men as the dominant sex and that to quote him, “Queen Bees” would run the world.
He also had peculiar ideas about coffee, tea, and chewing gum, stating, “A drastic, if not unconstitutional, measure is now being put thru in this country to prevent the consumption of alcohol and yet it is a positive fact that coffee, tea, tobacco, chewing gum and other stimulants, which are freely indulged in even at the tender age, are vastly more injurious to the national body, judging from the number of those who succumb. So, for instance, during my student years I gathered from the published necrologues in Vienna, the home of coffee drinkers, that deaths from heart trouble sometimes reached sixty-seven per cent of the total. Similar observations might probably be made in cities where the consumption of tea is excessive. These delicious beverages superexcite and gradually exhaust the fine fibers of the brain. They also interfere seriously with arterial circulation and should be enjoyed all the more sparingly as their deleterious effects are slow and imperceptible. Tobacco, on the other hand, is conducive to easy and pleasant thinking and detracts from the intensity and concentration necessary to all original and vigorous effort of the intellect. Chewing gum is helpful for a short while but soon drains the glandular system and inflicts irreparable damage, not to speak of the revulsion it creates.”
That said, because of his stance on eugenics, he was all for people being allowed to use any substances they pleased. He states, “it should not be overlooked that all these are great eliminators assisting Nature, as they do, in upholding her stern but just law of the survival of the fittest. Eager reformers should also be mindful of the eternal perversity of mankind which makes the indifferent “laissez-faire” by far preferable to enforced restraint.” In other words, let people kill themselves with such substances if they so please. It will only help humanity in the long run.
He further noted he thought people’s propensity to pity others was hindering evolution. Noting in an interview in 1937 about all this and his prediction on it:, “man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct … The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.”
On his stance on eugenics, however, before anyone over-vilifies him for it, it’s important to understand the historical context here. This was a time when most people were on board with the idea at least on some level. That is, until the Nazis went and made everyone go “Oh, wait…” when they took the notion and applied it in the worst possible way.
Going back to his quirks, Tesla also states, “I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food- otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I mist I felt impelled to do it all over again, even if it took hours.”
If all this is making you now picture an unkempt, reclusive individual at this stage of life, that was still never Tesla. As ever, he put great stock in his appearance and how he dressed. And famously even was very particular on exactly how he was photographed, which is why he always looks so incredibly dapper in surviving photos today. It was also reported on his dining habits that while he frequently did so alone, it also wasn’t out of the ordinary even late in life to continue to entertain guests during such.
Tesla’s Legacy
In the end, Nikola Tesla ultimately died of coronary thrombosis on the evening of January 7, 1943 at the age of 86, found in his hotel room, Room 3327, by hotel worker Alice Monaghanr the next day. Over his lifetime he held over 100 U.S. Patents, and others in other nations, generally tallied up to about 300, though many of these were for the same device across multiple countries, and the exact number isn’t actually clear today.
While it’s often said he died penniless and forgotten, and there are elements of truth to this, much like his entire life story, the reality was quite different than what people often assume. In this case, it was more just that he’d fallen from rather extreme heights in both. He was once very wealthy thanks to his work, but had a bit of a practice of hemorrhaging money not just on his work, but living quite lavishly in many ways, including apparently abhorring anything but the finest hotels. For example, on April 1, 1901 he had dinner with famed author Rudyard Kipling and lamented Kipling’s choice of hotels, in perhaps in the most humblebrag letter of all time,
“My dear Mrs. Johnson, What is the matter with inkspiller Kipling? He actually dared to invite me to dine in an obscure hotel where I would be sure to get hair and cockroaches in the soup. Yours truly, N. Tesla”
Beyond liking the finer things in that way, he also threw vast sums of money at his various projects with abandoned, not just his own money, but countless wealthy investors over the years he could convince to buy into his hype based on his obviously brilliance, early significant work, and his skills at wowing whoever he was talking to with his visions of the future, generally selling them on a device he’d supposedly be able to create to make it happen.
Thus, the claim that the only reason Tesla didn’t achieve vastly more in his lifetime was from lack of funding wasn’t true at all. Much more so than most scientists and inventors, Tesla on the whole had a relatively easy time drumming up funding for his work. The money only dried up when people began to realize that his wild claims of amazing things he supposedly invented were just that. And his ability to convert them to actual working real world devices wasn’t there. Not from lack of funding. But from his own lack of understanding of physics in reality, vs. the physics that existed in his head.
His fall on this front was entirely of his own making. And even in his waning years when funds were tight, he never adjusted. Running up bills at expensive hotels he couldn’t pay, then moving to a different one when kicked out and doing the same. Only avoiding homelessness thanks to Westinghouse covering Tesla’s Hotel New Yorker bill along with the aforementioned stipend of $125 per month (about $3000 today) starting in 1934 through Tesla’s death in 1943 in thanks for his previous contribution to the company. On top of this, as mentioned, the Yugoslavian government also in Tesla’s waning years gave him a small pension to help support his day to day living. Thus, while a large fall from his peak he was, nonetheless, reasonably comfortable.
Moving over to the fame factor, even all the way up through the 1930s he wasn’t yet forgotten completely by the masses, with Time magazine putting him on the cover in 1931, for example, doing a highlight of the man and his inventions in homage to his 75th birthday.
Tesla was not some reclusive genius misunderstood by the masses of his day. At least as far as scientists go, he was one of the most famous in the world for quite some time. And his abilities as a showman and ability to wow and inspire the masses and wealthy alike were a huge part of why on this. The media likewise loved him through a good chunk of his life for his abilities here and how that helped them sell newspapers. However, again, after the initial success with the AC Induction Motor and then wowing audiences with his seemingly magical demonstrations and grandiose predictions and devices he’d supposedly invented wore off, and none of his work after amounted to anything particularly tangible, Tesla did fade into obscurity, although this is still relative. Countless scientists and engineers just as accomplished as Tesla even in his era likewise rarely get remembered outside of the industry they worked, and even then often only in a passing reference in some textbook of the history of this or that.
Why Tesla’s legend lives on today to the extent it does on the interweb isn’t so much because of his actual accomplishments or genius relative to so many other great scientists and engineers of his era, but because of his very vocal and prominent predictions of what things would be like in the future as certain technologies emerged, a subset of which have come true, if not really the way he necessarily envisioned would work.
The internet, picking up on this and every wild claim Tesla made, generally not looking too much into the man himself or his claims in any deep way, and having forgotten so many others whose work was critical to even making Tesla’s contributions to the world be a thing, ultimately bought into the hype, and Tesla’s legend surged once again. This time, without the man himself publicly making wild predictions and claims to kill it a second time. In the end, if a scientist today made even 1/10th of the claims Tesla made about his own work he’d supposedly already accomplished without ever backing it up, he’d become the laughingstock of the industry with very rapidly zero credibility regardless of what he’d done before.
…And, as outlined, that’s kind of what happened to Tesla both within the industry first, and later with the general public when all his claims with regards to his work came to nothing substantive.
That said, it’s an overcompensation the other way to say Tesla didn’t do significant work in his lifetime. He did. While others were doing similar work on AC power and, for example, his induction motor, well, that’s no different than every other invention in history where countless people were working on the same thing. Tesla’s just so happened to be the one that more directly contributed to advancements in that arena and, for that, and other work he did on AC power distribution and various devices involved in all that, he is worthy of acclaim.
Tesla was also very clearly a genius. Although, as so sagely put in the 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer when Colonel Leslie Groves is questioned about if he’d heard Oppenheimer was brilliant, Groves responds, “brilliance is taken for granted in your circle.”
To really sum up, the problem today is not the perception that Tesla was brilliant, nor that he did some significant things, just that Tesla is often given credit for an intellect and understanding of science far beyond his contemporaries. When, in fact, while there was a time in his life this was maybe partially true, almost directly thereafter, it wasn’t that the science in his mind was beyond his contemporaries, it was that it was incorrect and he refused to adjust his understanding. And, as noted on all this, as with so many of the rumors surrounding Tesla’s intellect and scientific prowess, it was Tesla himself who started the idea that he saw things other scientists of the world didn’t understand.
Tesla was a visionary in some other ways beyond some of his contemporaries in terms of what technologies were coming and what they would do, but this was more along the lines of a science fiction author, rather than based on technologies he understood. If we applied the same rubric many do with Tesla to, say, Jules Verne, we would say Jules Verne was the real inventor of the modern submarine, the hologram, the modern helicopter, news radio and TV, video conferencing, solar sails, the Lunar Module, etc.
None of this diminishes Tesla’s actual real life accomplishments, which were noteworthy in a handful of cases. It’s just important to focus on what those actually were, and their actual relative importance.
In the end, the work of Tesla is rather harshly summed up by the aforementioned electrical engineer Laurence A Hawkins, in 1903 “Enough has been given to indicate the reason for the standing that is Tesla’s today in the scientific world. Not even the brilliancy of suggestion and experiment contained in his early work, not even the persistent efforts of powerful friends, moved by their commercial interest to magnify and exalt the value of his patented inventions, could avert the discredit to his reputation as a scientists brought upon himself by his wild struggles for notoriety. He has been condemned by his own extravagant boasts, never followed by the realization of their claims and often revealing a total misunderstanding of the very elements of physical laws.”
Tesla, however, summed up his life and work a bit more charitably, noting, “The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements.
Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment, so much that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture. I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labor, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.”
He concludes, “The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter – for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.”
And speaking of pointing the way, this brings us, finally, to Thomas Edison.
Edison
Our story with Edison begins in Milan, Ohio, where on February 11, 1847, the 7th and final child of Samuel and Nancy Edison was born in the family’s small brick cottage. Not only from relatively humble origins, Thomas Alva Edison also didn’t have the benefit of a formal education growing up. While he did attend a private school for a few months under one Rev. George Engle in 1854 at the age of 7 before his father could no longer afford to pay according to Engle, and again briefly in 1859-1860 at Port Huron Union School where he studied math and science, in the end, his mother simply took to teaching him to read and write and do basic math. Edison would later state of this, “My mother taught me how to read good books quickly and correctly and as this opened up a great world in literature, I have always been very thankful for this early training.”
Once the basics out of the way, she also then set him on the local library where he notes, “My refuge was the Detroit Public Library. I started, it now seems to me, with the first book on the bottom shelf and I went through the lot, one by one…”
As for his opinions on formal schooling, he would later in life state, “I like the Montessori method. It teaches through play. It makes learning a pleasure. It follows the natural instincts of the human being… The present system casts the brain into a mold. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning.”
By the age of 11, Edison set up his first chemical lab in the basement of the home they had moved to in Port Huron and where he apparently at one point also accidentally set his father’s barn on fire. For this, he reportedly got a very public town square spanking. This would not be the last time he accidentally set things on fire.
Now at 12 years old, being the 19th century, it was time for him to go to work, at first on the family’s little farm. But Edison would state of this: “After a while I tired of this work as hoeing corn in a hot sun is unattractive and I did not wonder that it built up cities. Soon the Grand Trunk R.R. was extended from Toronto to Port Huron at the foot of the Lake Huron and thence to Detroit, at about the same time the war of the Rebellion broke out. By a great amount of persistence I got permission from my mother to go on the local train as a newsboy. The local train from Port Huron to Detroit, a distance of 63 miles left at 7 A.M. and arrived again at Port Huron at 9 P.M.”
A 12 Year Old On a Mission and His First Business
And so it was that at an age when most of us were wiling away our hours playing with friends or causing our parents to wear rubber gloves when handling our socks, Edison was not only out working 13 hrs a day, but starting his first successful business on the side. He stated of this,
“After being on the train for several months, I started two stores in Port Huron, one for periodicals and the other for vegetables, butter and berries in the season, these were attended by two boys, who shared in the profits. The periodical store I soon closed, as the boy in charge could not be trusted. The vegetable store I kept up for nearly a year. After the railroad had been opened a short time they put on an express which left Detroit in the morning and returned in the evening. I received permission to put a newsboy on this train connected with this train was a car, one part for baggage and the other part for U.S. mail, but for a long time it was not used. Every morning I had two large baskets of vegetables from the Detroit Market loaded in the mail car and sent to Port Huron where the German boy would take them to the store. They were much better than those grown locally and sold readily. I never was asked to pay freight and to this day cannot explain why, except that I was so small and industrious and the nerve to appropriate a U.S. mail car to do a free freight biz so monumental that it probably caused passivity. However, I kept this up for a long time and in addition bought butter from the fanners along the line and an immense amount of blackberries in the season; I bought wholesale and at a low price and permitted the wives of the engineers and trainmen to have the benefit of the rebate. After a while there was a daily immigrant train put on— this train generally had from seven to ten coaches filled always with Norwegians, all bound for Iowa and Minnesota. On these trains I employed a boy who sold bread, tobacco and stick candy.”
He would soon change tack, however, noting, “As the war progressed the daily newspaper sales became very profitable and I gave up the vegetable store, etc.”
On this one, things really changed thanks to the battle of Shiloh, also known as the battle of Pittsburg Landing. He states, “On the day of this battle when I arrived at Detroit, the bulletin boards were surrounded with dense crowds and it was announced that there were 60 thousand killed and wounded and the result was uncertain. I knew that if the same excitement was attained at the various small towns along the road and especially at Port Huron that the sale of papers would be great. I then conceived the idea of telegraphing the news ahead, went to the operator in the depot and by giving him Harper’s Weekly and some other papers for three months, he agreed to telegraph to all the stations the matter on the bulletin board. I hurriedly copied it and he sent it, requesting the agents who displayed it on the blackboard, used for stating the arrival and departure of trains, I decided that instead of the usual 100 papers that I could sell 1000, but not having sufficient money to purchase that number, I determined in my desperation to see the Editor himself and get credit. The great paper at that time was the Detroit Free Press. I walked into the office marked Editorial and told a young man that I wanted to see the Editor on important business—important to me anyway. I was taken into an office where there were two men and I stated what I had done about telegraphy and that I wanted 1000 papers, but only had money for 300 and I wanted credit. One of the men refused it, but the other told the first spokesman to let me have them. This man I afterwards learned was Wilbur E Storey, who subsequently founded the Chicago Times and became celebrated in the newspaper world. By the aid of another boy we lugged the papers to the train and started folding them. The first station called Utica, was a small one where I generally sold two papers. I saw a crowd ahead on the platform, thought it some excursion, but the moment I landed there was a rush for me; then I realized that the telegraph was a great invention. I sold 35 papers; the next station, Mt. Clemens, now a watering place, but then a place of about 1000. I usually sold 6 to 8 papers. I decided that if I found a corresponding crowd there that the only thing to do to correct my lack of judgment in not getting more papers was to raise the price from 5 cents to 10. The crowd was there and I raised the price; at the various towns there were corresponding crowds. It had been my practice at Port Huron to jump from the train at a point about 1/4 mile from the station where the train generally slackened speed. I had drawn several loads of sand at this point to jump on and had become very expert. The little German boy with the horse met me at this point; when the wagon approached the outskirts of the town I was met by a large crowd. I then yelled 25 cents apiece, gentlemen, I haven’t got enough to go round. I sold all out and made what to me then was an immense sum of money…”
On top of all this, for about 6 months in 1862 Edison even started his own newspaper, the Weekly Herald, edited and printed in the baggage car of the train. This one was mostly comprised of local news he’d learn of at each stop, as well as news about the Grand Trunk Railway itself.
You’ll Put Your Eye Out (Early Experiments)
As for the profits from all this, he used it to both help support his family, as well as fund his varied experiments. This was something he was doing all at the same time, even on the train itself, which would get him into some amount of trouble when he accidentally set fire to it as we’ll get to shortly.
Speaking of flammable substances, he would also occasionally make explosives. For example, Edison recounts, “One day I found in my copy of the Scientific American a complete description of a method of making nitroglycerin… The product came out rather brown and the article warned makers that brown nitro-glycerin was impure and dark in color, that it was due to impurities and in this condition was dangerous and might explode spontaneously. To see if the quality was O.K. we exploded a few drops and the results were so strong that we both got frightened, so we put the nitro in a pop bottle, wound waste around it, tied a cord to the end of the bottle and let it down a sewer inlet on the street…”
One of his boyhood friends, James A. Clancy, would reminisce about such experiments, “the chances you and I used to take at your old home and how your good Mother used to talk to us and say we would yet blow our heads off.”
Speaking of that, then there was the time he accidentally simultaneously partially electrocuted himself, as well as covered himself in nitric acid all at the same time. He recalls,
“I had a large induction coil, which I had borrowed from Mr. Williams to make some experiments with. With this coil I had ten large cells employing nitric acid. One day I got hold of both electrodes and it clinched my hand on them so I couldn’t let go. The battery was on a shelf. The only way I could get free was to back off and pull the coil, so the battery wires would pull the cells off the shelf and thus break the circuit. I shut my eyes and pulled, but the nitric acid splashed all over my face and ran down my back. I rushed to the sink which was only half big enough and got in and wiggled around for several minutes to permit the water to dilute the acid and stop the pain. My face and back were streaked with yellow, the skin thoroughly oxidized. I did not go in the street by daylight for two weeks, as the appearance of my face was dreadful. The skin, however, peeled off and new skin replaced it without any damage.”
Of course, on the side, as noted, he also did his experiments in a little lab he’d set up in the train as well, ultimately culminating in a white phosphorous fire on the train that got him in some rather hot water and his ears thoroughly boxed.
On this one, it’s sometimes claimed that it was such boxing of ears that saw Edison go deaf in one ear and partially deaf in the other starting around 12 years old, something that only got worse and worse as he aged. However, it’s generally thought this deafness was far more likely to have been the results of some infection.
Relentless Optimism
As for the deafness, in something of a theme you’re going to see as we go, Edison was relentlessly positive, and had a strong propensity to look on the bright side of everything no matter what. He stated of the condition, “I had doctors. They could do nothing for me. I have been deaf ever since and the fact that I am getting deafer constantly, they tell me, doesn’t bother me. I have been deaf enough for many years to know the worst, and my deafness has not been a handicap but a help to me…” On this, because it helped him to better focus on his study and experiments without outside audible distractions.
And just for now for a brief taste of the level of positivity he applied to all aspects of life, in one instance in 1914 at the age of 67, an accidental fire burned six buildings of his phonograph factory, with total losses from it at around $7 million (about $210 million today), of which only $2 of the $7 million was insured. Yet his son, Charles, notes when he ran over to his father, instead of being upset, he simply smiled and told him to run get Edison’s wife, Mina, because she’d never have a chance to see a fire like that again in her life.
He later stated while the losses were extreme, a plus side of it was that they could redesign a new phonograph factory taking advantage of all they’d learned from the burned to the ground one, as well as to “arrange my machinery properly in order to take advantage of Mr. Ford’s methods as far as possible.”
In yet another instance, he had sold his GE stock to pursue an iron-ore innovation business, which flopped costing him all that money plus millions more he had to pull from his other businesses to keep the iron-ore company afloat before its final failure. After this, a reporter pointed out to him the insane amount the GE stock would have been worth had he kept it. In response, Edison simply laughed and quipped, “Well, it’s all gone, but we had a hell of a good time spending it!”
In yet another case, when one Walter S. Mallory asked why he didn’t give up on the storage battery after getting no results for so many years, Edison responded, “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work!”
In yet another case, and giving a small glimpse of what working for Edison was like (and we’ll dive into this much more deeply later), one Dr. E.G. Acheson states, “I once made an experiment in Edison’s laboratory at Menlo Park during the latter part of 1880, and the results were not as looked for. I considered the experiment a perfect failure, and while bemoaning the results of this apparent failure Mr. Edison entered, and, after learning the facts of the case, cheerfully remarked that I should not look upon it as a failure, for he considered every experiment a success, as in all cases it cleared up the atmosphere, and even though it failed to accomplish the results sought for, it should prove a valuable lesson for guidance in the future work. I believe that Mr. Edison’s success as an experimenter was, to a large extent, due to this happy view of all experiments.”
This all gave rise to perhaps the most famous Edison quote of all- “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” And that, “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
In any event, going back to the story of the young Edison, things were humming along quite smoothly for the teen in this way until one day his life changed forever when he added “save a life” to his efforts to make the rest of our teen years look completely wasted- specifically, saving the life of three year old Jimmie MacKenzie when Edison was 15 in 1862.
On this one, Edison explains he’d become fascinating by the relatively new technology of the telegraph, to the point that he began neglecting his formerly lucrative news business, which had peaked around a $200 profit per month (about $6K today) down to only about $30 a month profits, or a little over $900 today. Such an unproductive 15 year old…
In any event, he states, “The station agent at Mt. Clemens permitted me to sit in the Telegraph office and listen to the instrument; one day his little boy was playing on the track when a freight train came along—and I luckily came out just in time to pull him off the track; his mother saw the operation and fainted. This put me in the good graces of Mr. Mackenzie, the agent, and he took considerable pains to teach me, as I kept at it about 18 hours a day I soon became quite proficient.”
And note here, on the side, he also setup a telegraph line between his and his aforementioned friend James A. Clancy’s homes so they could both practice at home and communicate with each other any time.
At this point, he ceased his former business activities and switched to becoming a telegraph operator. He states, “I then put up a telegraph line from the station to the village a distance of 1 mile and opened an office in a drug store, but the business was small and the operator at Port Huron knowing my proficiency and who wanted to go into the U.S.M. Telegraph, where the pay was high, succeeded in convincing his brother-in-law (Mr. Walker) that I could fill the position all right. Mr. Walker had a jewelry store and had charge of the WU. Tel. office. As I was to be found at the office both day and night, sleeping there, I became quite valuable to Mr. Walker. After working all day I worked at the office nights as well for the reason that press report came over one of the wires until 3 A.M and I would cut in and copy it as well as I could, to become more rapidly proficient; the goal of the rural telegraph operator was to be able to take press.”
After this, “Mr. Walker tried to get my father to apprentice me at 20 dollars per month, but they could not agree. I then applied for a job on the Grand Trunk R.R. as a railway operator and was given a place nights at Stratford Junction, Canada. This night job just suited me as I could have the whole day to myself. I had the faculty of sleeping in a chair any time for a few minutes at a time. I taught the night yardman my call, so I would get 1 hour sleep now and then between trains and in case the station was called, the watchman would awaken me.”
Note here, not just transmitting and receiving messages, the telegraph operator was also in charge of maintaining the equipment, meaning he also had to understand all the inner workings, including gaining a lot of intimate knowledge on how batteries and electricity and circuits work. The skill and knowledge upgrade in all this ultimately laid the groundwork for a large percentage of his later work in life. Ever the tinkerer and with his insatiable curiosity, when he now wasn’t doing his duties as a telegraph operator, he was experimenting with all this. The insanely lucrative fruits of this tinkering wouldn’t be long in coming, making himself the equivalent of a million dollars in modern valuation only a handful of years after this. But before he got there, he had a few potholes in the road.
Whoopsadoodle
For example, going back to his rather odd sleeping habits and the Grand Trunk, Edison invented a device that would automatically check in on the hour even if he was sleeping or otherwise pursuing his research interests. Unfortunately for him, this got discovered by his supervisor and he was promptly fired from that location. Not the first time he’d be fired, in the next instance via almost getting people killed.
On this one he states, “One night I got an order to hold a freight train and I replied that I would. I rushed out to find the signalman, but before I could find him and get the signal set, the train ran past. I ran to the Telegraph Office and reported I couldn’t hold her, she had run past. The reply was “Hell”. The dispatcher on the strength of my message that I would hold the train, had permitted another to leave the last station in the opposite direction. There was a lower station near the Junction where the day operator slept. I started for it on foot. The night was dark and I fell in a culvert and was knocked senseless. However, the track was straight, the trains saw each other, and there was no collision. The next morning Mr. Carter, the station agent and myself were ordered to come at once to the main office in Toronto. We appeared before the General Superintendent, W J. Spicer who started in hauling Mr. Carter over the coals for permitting such a young boy to hold such a responsible position. Then he took me in hand and stated that I could be sent to Kingston States Prison, etc. Just at this point, three English swells came into the office. There was a great shaking of hands and joy all around; feeling that this was a good time to be neglected I silently made for the door; down the stairs to the lower freight station, got into the caboose going on the next freight, the conductor who I knew, and kept secluded until I landed a boy free of fear in the U.S. of America.”
In yet another instance of getting fired, in 1866 while working in Kentucky for Western Union as a part of their Associated Press bureau news wire, he asked to once again work the night shift. Unfortunately, while experimenting with a lead-acid battery one night, he accidentally spilled sulfuric acid on the floor. This quickly seeped through the floor board and onto his boss’ desk below, who, upon discovering this the next morning, promptly fired him.
Something to explicitly point out here was that in working in the news at these various telegraphic offices all over parts of the U.S. and Canada, Edison became acquainted and friends with many people in various facets of the news, both current and future individuals as this was a common transition for telegraph operators. He also learned well the power of the news for promotion. This was all later a great aid to him in the early going in getting his inventions in the public eye before he became world famous.
First Inventions and a Life Lesson
As for those devices, beyond the one that would automatically check in for him on the hour on the telegraph, another of his early unpatented inventions was a device that would automatically record a Morse Code message on a paper tape, and then could be used to play the message back, but at a slower speed. He apparently intended this device to be used to help train Morse Code operators. Yet another early device he worked on was a printer to convert the telegraph signals into letters automatically.
His first patented device, however, came when he was 22 in 1869. This was an electric voting recorder, intended to be used to massively speed up vote counting in institutions like Congress. Edison described the device in his patent (U.S. Patent 90,646),
“The object of my invention is to produce an apparatus which records and registers in an instant,- and with great accuracy the votes of legislative bodies, thus avoiding loss of valuable time consumed in counting and registering the votes and names, as done in the usual manner ;’and my invention consists in applying an electrographic apparatus in such a manner that each member, by moving a switch to either of two points, representing an affirmative and opposing vote, has his name imprinted, by means of electricity, under the desired head, on a previously-prepared paper, and at I the sametime-the number of votes is indicated on a-dial-plate by the operation…“
Unfortunately for him, speeding up vote counting was not something any political group he pitched it to were interested in. No doubt with some making disparaging remarks about young people these days, and how lazy they are needing newfangled technologies to do simple counting for them instead of tallying up by hand like people had always done.
But as noted, seemingly nothing could keep Edison down for long, and he reportedly resolved all his future work would be practical things that would have an obvious market. Stating, “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility and utility is success.” And that, “I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent…”
That said, upon his waning years he switched up on this and decided just to enjoy himself experimenting with whatever tickled his fancy, regardless of marketability. But for most of his life, if it didn’t have extreme utility, he wasn’t interested.
Another key tenet of his work, and perhaps the most controversial today, as the New Yorker would write of him, Edison “did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification.”
Edison himself would concur, stating, “My principal business consists of giving commercial value to the brilliant, but often misdirected, ideas of others. Accordingly, I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might be able to improve it.” Essentially, finding potentially revolutionary new ideas that simply didn’t work or weren’t practical in their current state, and perfecting them so they were.
On this practical side, it also wasn’t just about perfecting the thing itself, but also, as he was often working on the cutting edge of things, creating the entire system and infrastructure needed to make the thing commercially viable.
But going back to his first failed patented invention, after this he continued inventing and ultimately came up with a Universal Stock Printer, shortly after which he resigned his position as a telegraph operator to pursue inventing full time.
Making a Million Dollars By Keeping His Mouth Shut
On this one, he almost cost himself close to a million dollars, but by simply keeping his mouth shut, changed his future forever.
To start, he states of the invention, “I established a Laboratory over the Gold room and put up a line on which I opened a stock quotation circuit with 25 subscribers, the ticker being of my own invention. I also engaged in putting up private lines upon which I used a dial instrument. This instrument was very simple and practical and any one could work it after a few minutes explanation…”
This initial version of the device caught on somewhat and he states of the early funds from it, “Thinking that perhaps I might not get anything at all, I told General Lefferts [President of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company which supplied tickers to Wall Street], who was at the head of the Company making the purchase, all about my relations. He said, say nothing, do nothing, leave it to me. When the deal went through, the General handed me $1500 [about $38,000 today] and said that was my share, he had saved it out when he made the payment.”
This was just the beginning though. With further funds and encouragement from Lefferts, he began work on improving the ticker. Edison states, “This [ticker] was made exceedingly simple as the outside cities did not have the experts we had in New York to handle anything complicated. The same ticker was used on the London Stock Exchange. After I had made a great number of inventions and obtained patents, the General seemed anxious that the matter should be closed up. One day after I had exhibited and worked a successful device, whereby if a ticker should get out of unison in a broker’s office and commenced to print wild figures, it could be brought to unison from the central station and which saved the labor of many men and much trouble to the broker.”
And here is where Edison keeping his mouth shut changed his life and the world. He states, “He called me into his office and said, ‘Now, young man, I want to close up the matter of your inventions, how much do you think you should receive?’ I had made up my mind that taking in consideration the time and the killing pace I was working that I should be entitled to $5,000, but could get along with $3,000, but when the psychological moment arrived, I hadn’t the nerve to name such a large sum, so I said, ‘Well, General, Suppose you make me an offer.’ Then he said, ‘How would forty thousand dollars strike you.’ [A little over $1 million today] This caused me to come as near fainting as I ever got. I was afraid he would hear my heart beat. I managed to say that I thought it was fair. ‘All right, I will have a contract drawn, come around in three days and sign it, and I will give you the money.’”
Still not believing it, Edison goes on, “[I] had been doing considerable thinking on the subject, the sum seemed to be very large for the amount of work, for at that time I determined the value by the time and trouble and not what the invention was worth to others. I thought there was something unreal about it. However, the contract was handed to me, I signed without reading it. The General called in the Secretary and told him to fix it up and pay the money.”
There was an issue there. Edison didn’t really know what to do with a check, and this was a time before banks would deal with basically anyone but business owners and the rich. (This would only change largely thanks to the efforts of one of the unsung heroes of American history, A.P. Gianini, who founded the Bank of Italy that became the Bank of America, and by the way was the partial inspiration for the character of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. See our video on that one, in which we dive into Gianini and his significance to modern history).
But in any event, Edison states, “I arrived on time, but I was then handed a check for $40,000 on the bank of the State of New York, which was at the corner of William and Wall Streets. This was the first check I ever had. I went to the bank and noticed the window marked “Paying Teller”, got in line with about a dozen men and a dozen messenger boys and slowly approached the window. When directly in front of the window passed in the check, he looked at it, turned it over and handed it back, making a few short remarks which I could not understand, being at that time as ever since, quite deaf. I passed outside to the large steps to let the cold sweat evaporate and made up my mind that this was another Wall Street game like those I had received over the press wire, that I had signed the contract whatever was in it, that the inventions were gone and I had been skinned out of the money. But when I thought of the General and knowing he had treated me well, I couldn’t believe it, and I returned to the office and told the secretary what occurred. He went in and told the General and both had a good laugh. I was told to endorse the check and he would send a young man down with me to identify. We went to the bank, the young man had a short conversation with the Paying Teller, who seemed quite merry over it, I presented the check and the Teller asked me through the young man, how would I have it. I said in any way to please the bank Then he commenced to pull out bundles of notes until there certainly seemed to be one cubic foot. These were passed out and I had the greatest trouble in finding room in my overcoat and other pockets. They had put a job up on me, but knowing nothing of bank customs in those days, I did not even suspect it. I went to Newark and sat up all night with the money for fear it might be stolen. The next day I went back with it all and told the General about it, and he laughed very greatly, but said to one of his young men—Don’t carry this joke on any further, go to the bank with Edison and have him open an account and explain the matter, which I did.”
A Kid in a Candy Shop and Making the Next Great Invention
The 24 year old Edison was now like a kid in a candy shop, stating, “I have too sanguine a temperment to keep money in solitary confinement, so I commenced to buy machinery, rented a shop and got some manufacturing work to do from the first shop; I moved into a large shop Nos. 10 and 12 Ward Street, Newark. I got large orders from the General to build tickers and had over 50 men, and as orders increased I put on a night shift. I was my own foreman on both shifts, one-half hour of sleep three or four times in the twenty-four hours was all I needed. Nearly all my men were on piece work and I allowed them to make good wages and never cut until their wages became absurdly high, as they got more expert. I kept no books. I had two hooks, all the bills and accounts I owed I jabbed on one hook and memorandum of all owed to myself I put on the other.
The first three months I had the bookkeeper go over the books to find out how much we made. He reported $3,000.1 gave a supper to some of my men to celebrate this, only to be told two days afterwards by this alleged accountant that he had made a mistake and that we had lost $500 instead of making $3,000, and then a few days after coming to me again and said he was all mixed up and now found we had made $7,000. I discharged him and got another man, but I never counted anything thereafter as real profits, until I had paid all my debts and had the profits in the bank.”
Edison’s next great invention was only a couple more years in coming- the quadruplex telegraph system, which he patented in 1874. On this one, Edison, demonstrating yet again his genius for taking an existing device and making it better, was experimenting with the existing duplex system and realized that if he added a diplex to it, he could double the number of messages at a time on the line. However, upon trying it, he discovered it wasn’t quite so simple as that and he encountered a number of hurdles. However, each bug he encountered he simply applied what he called a “bug trap”, essentially if he couldn’t get rid of the problem, he created a way to work around it to get the result he wanted while still keeping the benefits of the thing causing the bug. And, yes, he did use the term “bug” for this, which predated computers.
Edison’s Actual Greatest Invention
In the end, he was successful. And the resulting windfall of cash- there are varying reports on how much with the most often cited figure being $100,0000 or about $2.6 million today- allowed him to create arguably his greatest invention of all, his first version of The Industrial Think Tank Lab, also known as the Invention Factory.
Rather than stay in Newark, however, in 1876 Edison, with the help of his father locating suitable real estate, decided to build the lab in a small little town outside of New York City called Menlo Park. As to why the move, Edison variously referenced both issue with prices of rent in the city for the size of facility he wanted, and also that “I couldn’t get peace and quiet in Newark and was run down by visitors.”
With this lab, he took all he’d learned from his previous shop, as well as his most talented and hard working employees, and built his dream lab. A two story building, the bottom floor being a top of the line machine shop with just about any tool a machinist could want to make anything. The top floor was likewise a world class lab for experimenting on all manner of things. In all, Edison’s goal was to, to quote him, produce, “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.”
Of course, while Edison had some money, the lab itself at this point was a money sink, which is where his business savvy came in. Knowing that the inventions he would potentially churn out, especially in the beginning when focussing on the telegraph, could benefit Western Union, he wrote to Western Union President William Orton, “the cost of running my machine shop including coal kerosene & labor is about 15 per day or 100 per week; at present I have no source of income which will warrant continuing my machine shop and I shall be compelled to close it unless I am able to provide funds for continuing the same and keep my skilled workmen.” And that if Western Union would pay this money monthly, he would give them rights to use “every invention that I can make during that time which is applicable to commercial telegraphy.”
From here, with the help of his “muckers,” or also sometimes called the “insomnia squad,” the industrial age of inventing began. We’ll get to what the work environment and process was for the inventions and how much Edison was actually involved later. But for now, let’s talk about some of the world changing inventions they came up with. This video would be several times longer if we covered everything invented at Menlo Park. So we’ll stick with some of the more significant items.
Making the Telephone Commercially Viable
For starters, Western Union requested Edison and his team turn their brains to the telephone, as Alexander Graham Bell’s 1876 invention, while revolutionary, wasn’t commercially viable at scale. The biggest issue was that it had severe limitations all centered around the fact that it used a very weak signal from the way the microphone and transmission system worked on it.
And so it was that within a year of Western Union making the request, Edison and one Charles Batchelor invented the carbon transmitter microphone, which allowed for improving the volume, clarity, and distance with which you could transmit phone conversations, making it practical for mass and long distance communication, and ultimately becoming the basic staple design used in most phones up until the late 20th century.
Important to the value of Edison’s breadth of knowledge and experience, the inspiration for this device actually came back in 1873 where at one point Edison was trying to develop a rheostat, or variable resistor, using carbon filled glass tubes. However, he wrote in his notes that “found that the resistance of carbon varied with every noise, jar or sound.”
Not suitable for his original application, when it came to a microphone of sorts for the telephone, this property was perfect, though, as noted, it still took Edison and his team about a year to perfect their device for practical commercial use.
Of course, as ever, others were working on the same type of thing at the same time as the issue with Bell’s original system was obvious and needed fixing to make the telephone broadly useful as we think of it. For example, besides Edison and his team, German inventor Emile Berliner invented more or less the same thing in parallel, with Alexander Graham Bell purchasing Berliner’s patent. All kicking off a legal battle with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling “The [carbon microphone] is, beyond controversy, the invention of Edison.”
Did He Actually Invent “Hello”?
Speaking of the telephone, before we move on to the next major invention, as a brief aside to clear up one Edison myth, it is often claimed that Edison coined the word “Hello” and even popularized it for use when answering the phone. As for the former assertion, this is false. The first documented instance of the word “hello” being used as a greeting predates Thomas Edison, appearing in The Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. Davey Crockett, which was written in 1833, about 14 years before Edison was born. The exact quote from the text is: “Said I, ‘Hello stranger! if you don’t take keer your boat will run away with you.’” Further, based on significant literary evidence, it would seem that even though “hello” hadn’t graced the contents of dictionaries yet, by around the 1860s, “hello” had become a relatively common greeting.
As for the second assertion of Edison being the one to popularize “Hello” as a phone greeting, his contribution is less clear. This one stems from the fact that he wrote to the president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh, T.B.A. David, in 1877 suggesting, “Friend David, I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What you think? Edison – P.S. first cost of sender & receiver to manufacture is only $7.00.”
However, from his exact wording, it’s not actually clear that he’s explicitly suggesting “Hello,” simply stating he doesn’t think the phone needs a ringer because you can hear someone shouting “hello” over the phone from quite a distance away. Or maybe he is suggesting it. It’s just not fully clear from his exact phrasing.
That said, he clearly thought it was the way to go in initial call and response greetings on the phone and as he was intimately involved in the early commercialization of telephones, he may well have helped popularize the standard. Especially as the other titan of the early telephone age in Bell was pushing for saying “ahoy hoy” instead for this purpose. This one is referenced in the Simpsons with Mr. Burns being so old he still answers the phone this way.
Either way, within a few years of this, “hello” had found its way into dictionaries, and telephone operators also got the nickname “hello girls”.
In any event, while working on this microphone for the telephone, he and others thought it likely the telephone would replace the telegraph as a means to disseminate news. Seeing a potential problem in that people talk too fast for the person on the other end to write it all down, Edison felt there was a need for a device to record the voice and play it back slower for dictation.
Inventing the First Device to Play Back Recorded Sound
And so the phonograph was born.
You’ll often read that this was the first device in history to record sound, but this isn’t correct. It was the first device to be able to record AND play back the sound it had recorded. A couple decades before this in March of 1857, Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was the first to patent a device for recording sound, and many others created similar devices. The issue with these was they simply drew the sound waves on paper tracings and, at least with technology of the age, it was impossible to play the sound back from this. (Researchers have actually in more recent times scanned surviving tracings and, with a bit of custom software, have been able to play them back, including hearing the voices of the people on some of the recordings, making them the first humans in history to have audible record of their voice still around today.) While these early devices were not remotely useful for a mass commercial product, they were, at least, very helpful in science in studying sound waves.
Edison’s device worked very differently from these and was perhaps his first truly original invention, or at least, as close as one can come to any invention being original, as every invention builds on the work of others on some level. Not only this, but this was a rare device that just sort of worked the first try, though, to be fair Edison was building off a lot of previous knowledge and experience he had accumulated over the years on it, as well as some experiments with wax paper before building the prototype. Nevertheless, Edison, with the help of machinist John Kruesi, sketched out the machine which more or less had a diaphragm and needle in a mouthpiece you talked into, as well as a crank for turning a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil. The vibrations from sound would then cause the needle to indent on the tinfoil in a given pattern. The sound could then be played back via resetting the cylinder and cranking the device, with the needle then tracing along the line and vibrating the diaphragm.
John Kruesi finished the prototype reportedly within 30 hours of the design being completed. And it just worked- the very first try, with the first ever recording being Edison reportedly reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and having the device play it back to them. This was also no doubt the first time in history a human exclaimed upon hearing himself, “Wait, that’s what I sound like?”
As for the device just working, Edison stated, “I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.” That said, this version of the device was not commercially viable, with recordings extremely low quality and able to be played back only a few times before the recording became useless.
Nevertheless, it was something that the world had never seen anything like before. Adhering to the precept that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic…” when Edison showed the phonograph off to the press, it quickly vaulted him and his Invention Factory lab into the global spotlight, as well as earned him the nickname the “Wizard of Menlo Park”.
In one early demo at Scientific American magazine, they reported, “Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night.”
He was also eventually asked to come demo it to U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes in April of 1878.
Interestingly, despite its potential world changing implications, especially when it came to music, Edison and co did virtually nothing with the device for many years, other than use it to promote the company. Later they would realize it didn’t just have utility in recording and playing back voices, but also music, and at one point even made a mini phonograph to be placed in the world’s first talking dolls, where it would recite little nursery rhymes and the like. However, the fragility of these mini phonograph systems and the rough life dolls often lived made this particular venture fail after a run of only about 500 dolls, most of which were returned within a month when they stopped working.
The Wizard of Menlo Park
Moving on from the phonograph and helping to make the telephone commercially viable, on the side they had countless other lesser talked about inventions, including devices for improvements on fruit storage via vacuum sealing them and the automatic electric pen in 1875. On this one, they used an electric motor to drive a needle up and down in a pen, which ultimately created a stencil as the user wrote, which then, with the help of a press, could be used to make copies of a handwritten document. This device was initially quite successful, but soon other technologies, such as the mimeograph, inspired by the electric pen and developed about a decade later, replaced it. However, this worked out for Edison too, as the inventor of the mimeograph, A.B. Dick, teamed up with Edison to create the Edison Mimeograph.
We bring this one up as it’s also often claimed, though whether true or independently invented is difficult to discern, that Samuel O’Reilly used the electric pen as the inspiration for his rather revolutionary electric tattoo needle device he invented in the 1890s, which worked in a somewhat similar fashion.
Beyond all this, in the 1880s Edison and his team also began working on the relatively new fuel cell technology, eventually using sulphuric acid to catalyze the oxidation of carbon from anthracite coal, which he managed to get a strong current out of.
He stated of the fuel cell, “The great secret of doing away with the intermediary furnaces, boilers, steam engines, and dynamos will be found, probably within ten years. I have been working away at it for some months and have got to the point where an apparently insurmountable obstacle confronts me. Working at the problem now seems to me very much like driving a ship straight for the face of a precipice, and when you come to grief picking yourself up and trying it again to-morrow. There is an opening in the barrier somewhere, and some lucky man will find it. I have got far enough to know that the thing is possible. … I give myself five years to work at it, and shall think myself lucky if I succeed in that time.”
However, as is a theme you’ll see a few notable times in his career, if a technology seemed to become too dangerous, or he perceived it as such, regardless of how potentially lucrative it might be, he tended to abandon it to work on something else. In this case, he would mostly abandon the fuel cell technology research after an accident in 1884 resulted in an explosion so great it blew the windows out of his lab.
The Real Story of the Lightbulb
But in any event, going back to shortly after inventing the microphone for the telephone and the phonograph, Edison and his team would put the phonograph aside to instead focus their efforts on revolutionizing the world of lighting.
As we covered recently in our video Who Actually Invented the Light Bulb, countless people in the decades leading up to Edison’s lightbulb were working on similar technologies, with the arc lamp being used to light an opera theater in Paris all the way back in 1846.
As for Edison, while he did briefly dabble in lighting previous to this, it wasn’t until 1877 when a physics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, George Barker, showed him an arc light system developed by Moses Farmer and William Wallave that, according to a contemporary account in the New York Sun, “Edison was enraptured. He fairly gloated over it. . . . He ran from the instruments to the lights, and from the lights back to the instrument. He sprawled over a table with the simplicity of a child, and made all kinds of calculations. He estimated the power of the instrument and of the lights, the probable loss of power in transmission, the amount of coal the instrument would save in a day, a week, a month, a year, and the result of such saving on manufacturing.”
But while arc lamps were fine for lighting large open spaces, their light was far too harsh for ordinary household use. Thankfully, by this time, research on incandescent lamps was beginning to show promise.
One of the first practical incandescent lamp designs was patented in 1872 by Russian inventor Alexander Lodygin. Lodygin’s bulb did not use a traditional filament but a pair of carbon rods, arranged so that current would pass to the second rod once the first burned out. To get around the limitations of vacuum pump technology at the time, Lodygin instead filled the bulb with inert Nitrogen, an arrangement that would later become standard – albeit with different gasses. Lodygin was later among the first to patent a light bulb using a tungsten filament – another now-standard design feature – but unfortunately at the time tungsten was prohibitively expensive to work with, and none of Lodygin’s designs saw commercial production.
For full details of the development of the lightbulb, go check out our video on it, but suffice it say, a whole lot of people were trying to do exactly as Edison and his team were, all at the same time. But while loads of people came up with designs that worked, none of them were commercially viable for a number of varied reasons depending on the exact device.
Some of them, however, including Canadian medical student Henry Woodward and hotel keeper Matthew Evans, did manage to patent devices that had elements Edison and his team felt were on the right track, and they purchased the rights, in this case for $5,000 or about $160,000 today. None of these were workable commercially viable products, however, and an insane amount of experimentation still needed done to get there, with Edison’s group and one Joseph Swan across the pond in England getting their first for a commercially viable product. Although in slightly different ways, and with Swan ultimately borrowing a lot of elements from Edison’s bulbs to markedly improve his own’s efficiency, with the ensuing court battle all initially going Swan’s way, but then later Edison’s.
As for the conclusion of it, as Lord Justice Fry of Great Britain’s Royal Courts stated, “Swan could not do what Edison did…the difference between a carbon rod (as employed by Swan) and a carbon filament (Mr. Edison’s method) was the difference between success and failure… Mr. Edison used the filament instead of the rod for a definite purpose, and by diminution of the sectional area made a physical law subserve the end he had in view. The smallness of size, then, was no casual matter, but was intended to bring about, and did bring about, a result which the rod could never produce, and so converted failure into success.”
Whatever your opinion on that, this all resulted in the Edison and Swan United Electric Company or Ediswan, which soon became one of the largest manufacturers of lightbulbs in the world.
But going back to Edison’s bulb, Edison began the project by pretty brazenly proclaiming that he could create a safer, cheaper, and more reliable electric light to replace gas lights in only six weeks. Amazingly, such was Edison’s clout at this time that this announcement caused gas company stocks to plummet. After raising funds from investors, which was the real point of the media circus on that one, Edison and his insomnia squad set to work.
While they did initially come up with various designs that worked great, such as one using a thin platinum filament, as with so many similar at the time, none of them were commercially viable on the scale Edison was seeking. For example, the platinum filament bulb lasted only about 14 hours, and platinum was too expensive for mass adoption. Thus, Edison and his muckers embarked upon a marathon hunt for a lightbulb filament that would be durable, long-lasting, and economical to manufacture.
As for the excitement within the company over the light bulb, one of his key employees, Francis Upton, wrote to his father, “The electric light is coming up. We have had a fine burner made of a piece of carbonized thread which gave a light of two or three gas jets. Mr. Edison now proposes to give an exhibition of some lamps in actual operation. There is some talk if he can show a number of lamps of organizing a large company with three or five millions capital to push the matter through. I have been offered $1,000 [about $31,000 today] for five shares of my stock. . . . Edison says the stock is worth a thousand dollars a share or more, yet he is always sanguine and his valuations are on his hopes more than his realities.”
Upton’s letters from here waxed and waned on optimism, but within a few weeks he wrote, “the first lamp that answers the purpose we have wished. It is cheap much more so than we even hoped to have. The lamp is obtained from a piece of charred paper which is bent thus [into a horseshoe shape]. The burner is made from common card board and cut to about the size shown [1″ high]. This is then sealed in a glass bulb and the air exhausted and then a current of electricity passed through it which heats it to a brilliant whiteness so that it will give a light equal to that from a good sized gas burner.”
And on this cheapness, Edison would state once ramped up it would become “so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”
As for the Demo, the New York Herald reported, “Extra trains were run from east and west, and notwithstanding the stormy weather, hundreds of persons availed themselves of the privilege. The laboratory was brilliantly illuminated with twenty-five lamps, the office and counting room with eight, and twenty others were distributed in the street leading to the depot and in some of the adjoining houses. The entire system was explained in detail by Edison and his assistants, and the light was subjected to a variety of tests.”
Unfortunately, the initial paper filaments, while working great for a demo, had the issue of inconsistency for mass production. Edison stated, “Paper is no good. Under the microscope it appears like a lot of sticks thrown together. There are places where the fibres are packed and other places where there are few fibres, dense spots and great open holes… Now I believe that somewhere in God Almighty’s workshop there is a vegetable growth with geometrically parallel fibres suitable to our use. Look for it. Paper is man made and not good for filaments.”
On all this, what Edison might have lacked in theoretical knowledge, he more than made up for with the realization that large-scale technical problems require large-scale solutions – an ethos that predicted today’s era of “big science” and industrial research laboratories. And so it was that between 1878 and 1880, Edison and his team at Menlo Park tested over 6,000 different filament materials in various ways, including cotton, linen, cedar, baywood, boxwood, and hickory. Edison even wrote botanists from around the world to obtain samples of exotic plants to test. At first, carbonized cotton seemed to hold the most promise, glowing for nearly 500 hours straight. Ultimately, however, Edison and his team hit upon carbonized bamboo, which allowed for bulb lives of up to 1200 hours. Of the entire research and development, process, Edison later wrote: “The electric light has caused me the greatest amount of study and has required the most elaborate experiments.”
Naturally, ever the optimist, he went on, “I was never myself discouraged, or inclined to be hopeless of success. I cannot say the same for all my associates.”
But to finish the story of the lightbulb, Edison and his team did not “invent” the lightbulb in the traditional sense; rather, they simply perfected the technology to the point where it became economically viable and practical, and then helped popularize it. As Robert Friedel, professor of history at University of Maryland College Park explains: “He carefully identified all of the key qualifications for a successful rival to the alternatives … reliability, longevity, economy and aesthetics. He deliberately set out to create an electric light that would check all these boxes — this is something no one else succeeded in doing.”
His Accidental Invention That Massively Changed the World That Nobody Talks About
Interestingly, there was a rather insanely revolutionary and far more unique device Edison accidentally invented in parallel with the lightbulb that was just one of his lightbulbs with a slight twist. But unfortunately for Edison, he did not realize the implication of what he’d just made in one of his thousands of tests, and how revolutionary it could be if refined a bit, and in the right applications. Because of his failure to realize any of this, nor be the one to perfect it for commercial use, despite his patent for the device, Edison is almost never given credit for his contribution on this world changing invention. Which is unsurprising as, as is a theme you’re probably picking up on, it’s the person who ultimately did the thing in its perfected commercial form, rather than was the first to come up with the thing, that usually gets credit in popular history.
On this one, enter English physicist John Ambrose Fleming, who was an advisor to Edison Electric Light and consultant to Edison-Swan at one point. He would be inspired by Edison’s device to create his revolutionary Fleming valve vacuum tube in the early 20th century. Further, after reading Fleming’s paper on this in 1905, this was partially the inspiration, and in fact a decades long lawsuit would ensue related to this, for engineer Lee de Forest’s three element vacuum tube, and after a whole lot of work, the refined triode device that ultimately became the backbone for countless electronic devices from radar to the digital computer, until the transistor came along.
Going back to Edison’s original device, at one point during his experiments on the lightbulb, he and his staff were trying to figure out why carbon from the filament seemed to be jumping across the vacuum to the walls of the bulb. Clearly some current flow was involved. So in order to try to figure out what was going on here, Edison created a special bulb with a third electrode placed in between the legs of the filament, and then connected that to a galvanometer to measure the current. What he found was that if, relative to the filament, the plate was put at a negative potential, there would be no current between the plate and the filament. However, if the plate was at a positive potential, and the filament heated up enough, there would be a large current flow between the filament to the plate through the vacuum. Importantly in this, the electrons can only flow one way, from the hot element to the cold one, creating a rudimentary diode.
Edison ultimately patented the device for its potential use as a sort of voltage regulator, but seemingly did not understand the implications beyond that. Importantly, he did show it off at the International Electrical Exposition in Philadelphia in 1884, with one William Preece bringing several of these bulbs back to England and coining the term “Edison Effect,” also now known as “thermionic emission,” in a paper he published the following year on the phenomenon. And, of course, as noted, a couple decades later Fleming was inspired by all this and ultimately did his thing, and the modern electronics age was born.
More Power Mister Scott!!!
In any event, going back to the lightbulb, in parallel to all of this, and keeping with Edison’s credo of making complete systems for his products to make them as commercially viable as possible, he and his team quickly realized the Wallace arc-light dynamo generator and others like it wouldn’t be suitable for incandescent light. Thus, the team got to work experimenting and studying electromagnets and generator designs. After a few weeks of this, they tasked their machine shop with building new generators based on their research, which they then experimented with ceaselessly, ultimately coming up with a much more efficient system that worked well for this application. Among other modifications, rather than having equal internal and external resistance as was the norm at the time as this produced maximum current, they found the generator was significantly more efficient overall if the internal resistance was smaller.
Upton would write of this to his father, “We have now the best generator of electricity ever made and this in itself will make a business.”
On this one, yet again, Edison and his team came up with nothing inherently original, but tweaked existing technology to make it better and more efficient and, thus, more practical for commercial use.
Beyond the commercially viable light bulb and generators to make the whole system as efficient as possible, Edison and his team also came up with everything from fuses, power meters, the screw in light socket design, and countless other things needed to make the entire system go.
A Death and an Adorably Nerdy Marriage Proposal
Unfortunately for Edison, while business was booming at this stage, in 1884, around the same time he was accidentally blowing up his lab experimenting with fuel cells, his wife Mary died unexpectedly, of what isn’t clear. She had been suffering on and off again from what was called “obstinate neuralgia” and “gastritis” and “uterine troubles” which all apparently caused her severe pain. Part of her treatment for this for pain management was a regular dose of morphine… Given how suddenly she died and her young age at just 29, as well as some rumors that seemed to have swirled at the time about it, it’s often speculated that it was, in the end, a morphine overdose that killed her. Whatever the case, once this happened, Edison spent less and less time at the Menlo Park lab, in favor of living and working in New York.
Two years after this, he married one Mina Miller with perhaps the most adorably nerdy way of proposing to her of all time.
First, as he approached every other problem he encountered, Edison is speculated to have been highly analytical when it came to choosing his second wife. Or, at least, a rather curious scorecard was found amongst his countless notebooks. In this one, he appears to have been making an attributes list of himself and 60 people he knew, both men and women. Note here, this seemingly wasn’t just for prospective partners, but also ranking other men’s wives and the like too, to see how they fared together given their attributes list. He then ranked everyone based on various traits from things like temper, mouth, affectionate or not, ambition, conceit, reasonableness, etc.
As to why, as alluded to, it’s hypothesized this may have had something to do with his future wife, this is primarily down to the timing of the scorecard, which coincided with when he was looking for a new wife and actively being introduced to prospects for this, as well as the fact that he also ranked how he viewed the happiness of the people who were married and cross referenced them to their attributes. Thus, perhaps, in the most Thomas Edison way possible, he was trying to analyze what made a good match for a wife.
That said, it’s also been speculated that he was actually trying to test the theories of one Sir Francis Galton, the “father of eugenics”, concerning the connection between certain physical traits and psychological characteristics. Or perhaps he was doing both.
If it really was an attempt to find a woman who maximally fit someone who would make a good partner for himself, this rigor may have been from being a little burned by his former wife who, the only thing he ever seems to have mentioned about her in any of his insane amount of writings was in the earliest part of their relationship lamenting, “Mrs Mary Edison My wife Dearly Beloved Cannot invent worth a Damn!” Something he later doubled down on writing on valentine’s day, “My Wife Popsy Wopsy Can’t Invent.”
He also spent so much time away from his family in the lab that his daughter, Marion, would state her mother slept with a revolver under her pillow because how secluded Menlo Park was frightened her at night, and quite often her father would stay most of the night at the lab and not come home “until early morning or not at all.”
That said, he may have had great affection for her as Marion also states when her mother died he was “shaking with grief, weeping and sobbing so he could hardly tell me that mother had died in the night.” And that in the aftermath for several months he basically kept Marion glued to him, even often while working in his lab.
Nevertheless, her inability to invent seems to have been a sore spot. This is in stark contrast to his second wife, Mina, who sometimes helped him record test results, and otherwise witnessed on several of his experiment notebook entries, and even on at least one instance performed an experiment with him to determine if electrical shock could be used to get an oyster to open up. He would also write to Mina, “You & the children and the Laboratory is all my life. I have nothing else.”
Going back to their adorable courtship and proposal, Edison first met Mina Miller while vacationing in Winthrop Massachusetts with a friend. The daughter of inventor Lewis Miller, who made a fortune inventing the Buckeye Reaper harvester combine and subsequently devoted most of his wealth to various philanthropic endeavors, Mina checked a lot of the boxes of what Edison was looking for in a new partner. So smitten was he, he would later write in his journal, “Saw a lady who looked like Mina… got to thinking about Mina and came near being run over by a street car—If Mina interferes much more will have to take out an accident policy.”
During their relatively brief courtship that mostly comprised a trip Mina joined Edison and his group on, he also taught her morse code. After this, the two apparently enjoyed tapping out conversations to one another rather than talking when others were around. He states of this, “We could use pet names without the least embarrassment, although there were three other people in the carriage.”
Note here, his previous courtship to Mary Stilwell had also been remarkably brief from meeting to marriage taking just two months.
With Mina, when he finally decided to propose to her while they were in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, rather than just ask her directly. He, instead, asked by tapping the request out on her hand. Rather than reply with words, Mina simply tapped back “Yes” in Morse Code on his hand.
Of course, being the 19th century, Edison still needed to ask her father for permission. He thus wrote to him that during the trip their friendship had evolved into “admiration as I began to appreciate her gentleness and grace of manner, and her beauty and strength of mind. That admiration has on my part ripened into love.” In response, Lewis invited Edison to his home in Akron where they discussed the matter more fully, and consent was given.
The Future of Inventing
And so it was that the couple were married on February 24, 1886. Edison then purchased a new estate in West Orange, New Jersey, and shortly thereafter also created a new lab within walking distance of his home in West Orange to work from.
And on this lab, utilizing all he’d learned from Menlo Park, and significantly more resources he had this time around, his ambition was to create “the best equipped & largest Laboratory extant, and the facilities incomparably superior to any other for rapid & cheap development of an invention, & working it up into commercial shape with models patterns special machinery— In fact there is no similar institution in existence.”, and that he hoped to be able to “build anything from a lady’s watch to a Locomotive.”
The initially 5 building complex included a central three story building with everything from every tooling equipment any inventor could want to even a massive library for research reference (and which functioned as Edison’s office). The facility also had separate physics and chemistry and metallurgy labs, etc. This was just the beginning. The complex rapidly grew from there, at its peak around WWI, covering about 20 acres with over 10,000 people working there.
Given the scale of all this, here, Edison did indeed begin to step back slightly, still putting in his long hours and directing everything, but no longer intimately involved in everything to the level he was at Menlo Park. As noted in Rutgers incredible Thomas A. Edison Papers Project, which catalogs the over 5 million documents by Edison and his cohorts while they were doing all their inventing, they state, “The big new laboratory that Edison opened in West Orange, N.J., late in 1887 led to one of his most important inventions: the professional research director. The lab’s unmatched size, equipment, supplies, and skilled staff allowed Edison to create in new ways. No longer did he have to take the lead on each problem: he could assign it to a talented man or team of men (always men). Over the next few years, Edison adapted his long habits; still working eighteen (or more) hours in a day, he learned to direct others’ work: planning, watching, quizzing, instructing, summarizing. Still the inventor working at a bench, now he could also multiply his personal efforts, pushing a variety of difficult projects at more or less the same time. Work could even go on without him, as it did when he spent almost two months abroad visiting the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. The new role of research director could not be patented, and it added little to Edison’s glittering fame at the time. But he proved the concept of industrial research that, within his lifetime, would be adopted by the likes of General Electric, Bell Telephone, and DuPont to transform the United States in the 20th century.”
It was at this lab that Edison decided to circle back with the phonograph, including not just coming up with various versions of the device itself, but the entire suite of things needed from equipment to mass manufacture the records for it, the recording equipment to record whatever on them, etc.
The Motion Picture
It was also around this time Edison and his team began to dip their toes into the burgeoning market of motion pictures, with the idea being to eventually link the phonograph with such motion pictures. We’ve covered the origin of the film industry in our video What was the First Movie Ever Made?, which is the fascinating tale of the unabashed murder, Eadweard Muybridge, who thanks to the fact that the jury let him off despite him being quite open about the murder, we got the world’s first motion pictures, which is what he was working on at the time when he decided someone needed killing.
As for Edison, he visited Muybridge’s studio sometime in the mid-1880s. Taking a keen interest in Muybridge’s groundbreaking work, but unimpressed by his execution, Edison began to develop a device that “would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”
Around 1889, the Kinetograph debuted out of Edison’s West Orange lab. Despite Edison’s peripheral involvement here in inventing what many hail as the first true video camera, because at this point Edison had become more of an administrator on a lot of projects, and seemingly was focussing his time on other inventions during this period, historians generally attribute Edison’s assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, as the primary creator of this history-making invention.
Whatever the case there, in 1890, Dickson shot a test movie he entitled Monkeyshines No. 1, featuring the movements of another lab assistant, with the result being like something a ghost hunter would use as “proof” that evil spirits are lurking, rather than like the films that would soon start to come out.
Nevertheless, it’s generally given credit for being the first official video camera motion picture in history. It also inspired Edison to build what was perhaps the first movie studio near his West Orange lab. Calling it “Black Maria” because they thought it resembled a police wagon, this is where they shot hundreds of motion pictures featuring vaudeville, magic shows, boxing matches, and Wild Wild West stunts – included among the latter is a video of Annie Oakley showing off her prodigious skills with a rifle.
From here, motion picture innovation took off. In April 1894, the Kinetoscope Parlor opened in New York City – essentially the first public movie theater. Then, there was the first movie projected for a wide audience, the first on-screen kiss, and the first theater permanently created entirely for a film.
The Lumières brothers and countless others also propelled the industry, and if you want to learn more on all that, do go check out our video What was the First Movie Ever Made? Because Eadweard Muybridge’s story is incredibly fascinating, as was the entire inspiration for the motion picture, which was to answer a question that had plagued artists pretty much as long as artists have been artisting- Do all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground in mid gallop? Something Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, wanted to know and was willing to throw prodigious sums of money at Muybridge to get it answered, as this was impossible to tell with the human eye or with photographic technology of the age. Muybridge’s solution to the problem was incredibly ingenious. And while what he came up with wasn’t a video camera, it did result in the first motion picture. His later work would be extensively studied by the likes of early Disney artists and researchers the world over to study things like how animals and humans actually move.
Edison the Miner
In any event, going back to other things Edison was working on, one major failure of his work during all this, as alluded to earlier, was in mining. There was a huge need for iron ore at the time, so Edison decided to throw he and his team’s brains into the fray. And so it was that he sold his stock in GE after mostly being ousted from it owing to the War of the Currents, which we’ll get to in a bit to separate fact from fiction on that one, because there is so much fiction commonly out there on this. Edison then promptly spent millions of dollars trying to come up with an efficient way to take low-grade ore and use a magnetic separator to create high-grade briquets for use in steel mills.
Ultimately this venture failed when large iron ore deposits were discovered in the Great Lakes, dropping the price too much for him to compete. However, one small success that came out of it was that the rock crushing technology they’d come up with would be adapted for use in producing portland cement after Edison and his team noted the waste sand they produced while milling ore could be used to make extremely durable cement. Ever one to not just make one innovation in an existing field, he and his team then came up with a long rotary kiln which they licensed out, which ironically resulted in Edison’s Portland cement plant being much less profitable because of the subsequent overproduction in the industry partially as a result. Nevertheless, Edison Portland cement was widely used, including to build the original Yankee Stadium. Trying to bolster demand, as well as revolutionize housing, Edison and his team also came up with a quick and inexpensive way to make concrete houses, though this never really caught on beyond a handful of homes made using their system.
Another thing that helped soften the blow of his misstep selling his GE stock and the failure of the iron-ore business was the fact that his phonograph company was exploding around the same time, fulfilling his former prediction a couple decades before that it would “grow up to be a big feller and support me in my old age.”
Electric Cars
Also during all this, Edison turned his sights on electric cars. At the time, electric cars were actually vastly more popular than their noisy, smelly, gas powered or steam counterparts. And for city travel particularly, which is most of what people used cars for at the time, they were quite practical, if rather expensive.
On all this, for example, in 1899, 90% of New York City’s taxi cabs were electric vehicles, built by the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company of Philadelphia. Not only that, but in 1899 and 1900, electric cars outsold all other types of cars, such as gas and steam powered vehicles. In 1902 an electric car, the Baker Torpedo, became the first car to have an aerodynamic body that enclosed both the driver and the platform. This car at one point reached 80 mph in a speed test before crashing and killing two spectators. It was later clocked as high as 120 mph, but with spectators not invited this time.
The issue with these cars was, as has been the case since, the need for improved batteries. Thinking electric cars would win the battle if they had these, Edison and his team got to work looking for alternatives to acid batteries, ultimately leading him to work on alkaline batteries. After over 10,000 combinations on this one, the battery Edison and his team were most famous for was the Nickel-iron battery, versions of which are still popular today for things like off-grid power storage due to their extreme durability and longevity, as well as speed of charge and energy density, all a huge advancement over lead-acid batteries of Edison’s era.
On this one, Edison initially told the press back in 1902 they had come up with a battery system that could enable over 100 miles range in a typical electric car of the era and that “I do not know how long it would take to wear out one of the batteries, for we have not yet been able to exhaust the possibilities of one of them.”
Unfortunately for him and his staff, they still had a LOT of work to do to work out all the kinks and initial sales came with a lot of complaints. And in the interim, one of Edison’s close friends and neighbors in Henry Ford changed the game with his Ford Model T, despite Ford himself being a fan of electric cars, with his wife, Clara, driving the 1914 Detroit Electric car instead of his Model T. For reference, this one had an impressive range of 80 miles.
While inferior to many electric cars of the age on a number of fronts, the Model T was dirt cheap in comparison. By 1915 Henry Ford, due in part to his innovative assembly line factory construction, was able to offer his cars at a base price of around $500 a piece (equivalent to about $15,000 today), which made it affordable for even the non-rich, something that had never been the case before. In contrast, at that time the average price of an electric car had steadily risen to about $1700 or about $50,000 today. This was also around the same time crude oil was discovered in Texas and Oklahoma, which drastically reduced the cost of gasoline so that it was now affordable to average consumers. In addition to these factors, Charles Kettering invented the electric starter, which eliminated the need to hand crank gas powered engines, which could be a somewhat dangerous process, as well as incredibly inconvenient. Road systems also began expanding, further tipping things more in gasoline engine car’s favor; this was not only because of the range factor, but also because gasoline cars were now becoming significantly faster than electric cars. For example, while the American Morrison electric car had a range of nearly 200 miles, it could only cruise along at about 15 mph. For city driving, this was not an issue, but on a roadtrip it wasn’t exactly ideal.
That said, all was not lost for Edison and co, as the batteries they came up with and sold were eventually extremely durable and extremely profitable. Henry Ford also initially solicited Edison’s help in coming up with a battery for the Model T’s starter in 1912, though ultimately lead-acid won the day there for that use-case. But, as noted, Edison’s nickel-iron batteries eventually sold well and were used in a variety of applications in his day, including for various railroad related applications, such as railroad signaling. His Edison Storage Battery Company even continued operating all the way to 1972 when they sold to Exide Battery Corporation.
Stepping Back
In any event, it was around this time as WWI was raging along that Edison’s Thomas A. Edison Incorporated began to do less original inventing and more just refining things they’d already done, with the man himself, now nearing 70, more and more stepping away from day to day management, leaving it to his son Charles, among others, and, while he continued to work on various things, his glory days were behind him.
Noteworthy, as previously mentioned, this was intentional, with Edison stating he wanted to “give up the commercial end… and work in my laboratory as a scientist.” Essentially just exploring wherever curiosity led him and no longer worrying if where it led him was to a marketable product, with the exception of the phonograph, which he stated was his baby and “commercial reasons when it comes to the phonograph don’t count with me. It’s the only invention of mine that I want to run myself.”
This was a rather curious thing for him to focus on given he was mostly deaf… which was occasionally a problem such as when Edison insisted he get to select all the music they recorded.
In an interesting little family conflict aside here, noteworthy is that during WWI, his oldest daughter Marion’s husband was an officer in the German Army, and the couple had long lived in Germany, all getting her stuck behind enemy lines during the war. Meanwhile, on the other side, Edison’s son William was fighting for the U.S. Army in France in the Tank Corps. This presumably could have made family get togethers awkward in the aftermath, except that right after the war, Marion discovered her husband had been having an affair and shortly after ended their marriage, no doubt lamenting her brother hadn’t managed to blow his head off with one of his tanks during the war.
Also during WWI, Edison began consulting for the U.S. military, particularly the Navy, as well as shifting the focus of his personal research onto the war efforts.
Do No Harm and More WWI
We should also point out here, as it’s important for some things we’re going to discuss later, that, as we previously alluded to, Edison only agreed to work with the Naval Consulting Board if it was for defensive technology. Once again, Edison at this stage in life had pretty strong feelings against the other way, stating, “Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
You might find this a rather odd thing for an elephant killer to say, but we’ll get to that myth in a bit.
But speaking of animals and his later life feeling like we need to stop harming living things, according to an account in the June of 1908 edition of the Vegetarian Messenger, Edison even became a vegetarian, stating, “Mr. Thos. Alva Edison, the famous inventor ceased using meat and went for a thorough course of vegetarianism. Mr. Edison was so pleased with the change of diet that, now he has regained his normal health, he continues to renounce meat in all its forms.”
It’s generally reported he stuck with this for the rest of his life, both for health and moral reasons, though whether that’s true or not proved prohibitively difficult to track down definitively.
Whatever the case, going back to humans, he stated, “I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it… I am proud of the fact that I have never invented weapons to kill.”
As for WWI, most of his personal research during the war was centered around methods for evading torpedoes and detecting them and submarines, camouflaging ships and blinding periscope operators, as well as developing a telephone system for the ships, and methods for protecting passengers from toxic smoke stack gasses. He also worked on systems for spotting airplanes. On the side, he built and switched some of his manufacturing facilities to make various chemicals needed in the war effort that the U.S. and its Allies formerly got from England and Germany.
The rapidity he and his team did this was quite remarkable as well. For example, upon England’s embargo of carbolic acid, something Edison himself needed for production of his phonograph records, he simply, according to one newspaper account, “in a week, 163 consecutive hours of work for 40 men in three shifts and Edison in one, the plans were finished. . . . Seventeen days afterward his plant delivered its first day’s output of product, which other chemists assured him would take at least six months.” He more or less rinsed and repeated this general breakneck pace developing plants for certain other needed chemicals there was now a shortage of due to the war.
His Last Work and Death
After the war, Edison continued experimenting, though, as noted, didn’t particularly focus on anything commercial- just whatever tickled his fancy in the moment. That said, in the late 1920s, due to rising costs of rubber, Henry Ford, along with Harvey Firestone, did ask Edison if he could find a good alternative to rubber for car tires, which he did in Goldenrod weed. This is what he was primarily working on when he suddenly collapsed in August of 1931. From here, his health continued to decline until his death on October 18, 1931 owing to complications due to diabetes.
In the end, Edison was listed on 1,093 patents, 389 related to electric light and power devices, 150 related to the telegraph, 141 for batteries, 195 related to the phonograph, and another 34 related to the telephone… And that’s not even counting the additional around 500 that he never finished or he applied for and was rejected.
How Much was Edison and How Much Other People’s Work?
So, this all brings us around to just how much of this was Edison inventing, and how much of it was him taking credit for others’ work like his lab workers and Nicola Tesla?
We’ve already covered that Edison did not actually steal from Tesla. And, as noted, in fact, oddly allowed Tesla the patents for things he’d worked on while working for Edison which helped Tesla get his start… But what about with the rest of Edison’s workers? And then, beyond, perhaps his lab stealing inventions from others and simply patenting them themselves.
We’ll start with whether Edison was simply taking credit for what his workers did. And in this, there’s nuance. It is absolutely true that Edison, being a rather brilliant businessman, realized the value of building his company’s brand around himself, for both the company and himself. Because he did this, at a certain point, if Edison said he was going to do something, everyone just kind of believed him and that, no matter how fantastical, it would happen.
In fact, as a joke, he once claimed to reporter B.C. Forbes that he and his team were inventing a device to communicate with the dead, the so-called “spirit phone”. And because of his clout, a lot of people took him seriously, resulting in Edison later having to clarify, “I really had nothing to tell him, but I hated to disappoint him so I thought up this story about communicating with spirits, but it was all a joke.”
As a brief aside on this, Edison did not actually believe in spirits. Stating, “I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt.” And clarifying this, “Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me—the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love—He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us—nature did it all—not the gods of the religions.” And that, further, “what you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter… it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made.”
This stance on religion and his very public support of Women’s Suffrage made him unpopular in some circles, but Edison insisted, “Every woman in this country is going to have the vote.”
But as for his self promotion, while it no doubt did also appeal to his vanity, from a practical standpoint, as a result of his personal brand, investors would line up in droves almost literally throwing money at Edison whenever he wanted, with customers likewise clambering to buy the latest Edison innovation. And Edison absolutely played this up like crazy at every opportunity. Working the media, not just in his own inventions, but, particularly later in his career as noted when his lab had ballooned to extreme size, what his company as a whole were working on, even giving regular updates and details, unlike most inventors who tended to keep quiet on things like that, lest a competitor steal their ideas. Edison knew his team could do things massively quicker than most, both in innovation and ramping up production, thanks to the sort of industrialized lab concept he had and his financial resources. So someone beating him to the finish line wasn’t really too much of a concern to him. And the benefit to the company in building hype was massive.
The Face of a Brand
So, yes, Edison, as the face of the company, and the brand name, so to speak, absolutely did get massively more credit than he may have individually deserved, especially once he moved away from Menlo Park to his facility in West Orange, where he for a time was still leading everything, but more and more offloading work and innovation in it to others.
While your mileage may vary on how your opinion of Edison sits from this, this is no different than quite literally anyone from a professional athlete to actor in a movie to CEO of a major business and on and on- all of whom rely on countless others to do their thing, but the face always gets the vast majority of the credit. Despite that, for example with an actor like a Tom Cruise, without the writers writing most of the lines he speaks, sound and lighting and camera people and directors and hundreds of others making sure everything is captured and produced well- as well as making it look like everyone else in the movie isn’t taller than him- well, I mean, Tom Cruise is just a guy who’s extra good at role play and looking super cool running fast. That’s not to diminish Cruise’s contributions too. Without him doing his thing as well as he does and the fact that if he attaches his name to a project it will have a tendency to get greenlit perhaps just from that, let alone be more popular, the rest couldn’t do theirs. Just, Cruise is the face and gets most of the credit in the end, and not one sound engineer or camera operator ever gets even the smallest credit from anyone outside of those in the industry, let alone do those even writing the script and story itself, outside of if they happen to also be the director, who is a secondary front man. And most don’t seem too bothered by any of this or hate on Tom Cruise because he gets disproportionate credit, as well as gets paid the most by far of anyone in just about any film he does.
Working Style and What Did Edison’s Workers Think of Him?
But this does bring up the question- where on that spectrum was Edison? Well, if you’ve been following along this entire time, it would seem Edison had a brilliant mind and was a talented inventor from an early age. While it is quite literally impossible to look at every patent Edison attached his name to and tell how involved he was, a pretty clear picture emerges from a subset of the 5 million pages of notes from his lab and himself, as well as countless accounts from his workers as to what it was like working for Edison and what the general workflow was. And on all this, for most of his career, the evidence seems to be extremely strong that Edison was something akin to a micromanaging film director who also wrote the script, at least until later in life as previously noted.
But before this, Edison’s style was more or less to use his workers as extensions of himself. As described in the New York Herald in January of 1879, “Edison himself flits about, first to one bench, then to another, examining here, instructing there; at one place drawing out new fancied designs, at another earnestly watching the progress of some experiment. Sometimes he hastily leaves the busy throng of workmen and for an hour or more is seen by no one. Where he is the general body of assistants do not know or ask, but his few principal men are aware that in a quiet corner upstairs in the old workshop, with a single light to dispel the darkness around, sits the inventor, with pencils and paper, drawing, figuring, pondering. In these moments he is rarely disturbed. If any important question of construction arises on which his advice is necessary the workmen wait. Sometimes they wait for hours in idleness, but at the laboratory such idleness is considered far more profitable than any interference with the inventor while he is in the throes of invention.”
Francis Upton would write to his father on this point, “One thing is quite noticeable here that the work is only a few days behind Mr. Edison, for when he was sick the shop was shut evenings as the work was wanting to keep the men busy.”
Of course, this didn’t scale and by the time they’d reach around 60 employees, he began to shift to less micromanaging. He stated instead, “I generally instructed them on the general idea of what I wanted carried out, and when I came across an assistant who was in any way ingenious, I sometimes refused to help him out in his experiments, telling him to see if he could not work it out himself, so as to encourage him.” And the more ingenious among them would then be put in trusted positions and paid more and more.
As a specific example of this sort of thing, one Wilson Howell was given the job of coming up with a good underground cable insulation. He states, “Mr. Edison sent me to his library and instructed me to read up on the subject of insulation, offering me the services of Dr. [Otto] Moses to translate any French or German authorities which I wished to consult. After two weeks search, I came out of the library with a list of materials which we might try. I was given carte blanche to order these materials. . . . and, within ten days, I had Dr. Moses’ laboratory entirely taken up with small kettles in which I boiled up a variety of insulating compounds. . . . Of course there were many failures, the partial successes pointing the direction for better trials.”
At this point, Edison also began to further refine how everything everyone was doing was documented, and began to employ someone to distill it all down to a daily record so that he could keep track of what everyone was doing every day and where the status of their work was and what they were hung up on or pursuing.
Work Environment
And as for accusations of a horrible working environment and such insane expectations… This seems overblown from accounts. There are absolutely elements of truth to this, or at least by modern standards. This was the 19th century, a time when most factories or other such businesses didn’t exactly have HR departments, to put it mildly. And despite some industries in the United States managing to achieve eight hour work days, the average work week in the United States in 1890 was around 90-100 hours per week for, for example, most building tradesmen according to a survey done by the federal government at that time. By the standards of his day, Edison seems to have treated his employees extremely well, for whatever that’s worth, if a bit stingy on the pay unless a given employee really stood out. Perhaps scant consolation from a modern lens, but it’s generally advisable to judge people based on their time, and not our modern one. If we didn’t, there is quite possibly not a single human in history who any of us could ever, not just admire, but not loathe with every fiber of our beings. They were all insanely racist, sexist, occasionally rapists or even near to it or actual pedofiles, and otherwise insanely cruel to animals and a lot of other humans too.
But as for Edison, his employees seemed on the whole to love working for him. And apparently while the general work environment was insanely hard working, it was also fun, with frequent practical jokes, friendly competitions, and late night breaks where they’d all eat and drink beer, often featuring Edison himself singing bawdy songs and playing the pipe organ. From accounts of what all this was like, this seems not too dissimilar to what you see in most university computer science labs at all hours of the night, or is quite common in many tech startups today. Nerds gonna nerd when working in groups. Edison apparently also enjoyed taking his staff, at least at Menlo Park, out on fishing expeditions and the like.
As one of the workers, Charles Clarke would later in life note, “Laboratory life with Edison was a strenuous but joyous life for all, physically, mentally and emotionally. We worked long night hours during the week, frequently to the limit of human endurance; and then we had time off from Saturday to late Sunday afternoon for rest and recreation. . . . Here breathed a little community of kindred spirits, all in young manhood, enthusiastic about their work, expectant of great results; moreover often loudly emphatic in joke and vigorous in action.”
Machinist John Ott who spent basically his entire life working for Edison, would likewise later in life recall, “Edison made your work interesting. He made me feel that I was making something with him. I wasn’t just a workman.” The downside of how hard Edison himself worked and that he expected the same from his employees was that, according to Ott, “My children grew up without knowing their father. When I did get home at night, which was seldom, they were in bed.”
However, Francis Upton would write in 1879 in a letter to his father, “I find my work very pleasant here and not much different from the time when I was a student. The strangest thing to me is the $12 that I get each Saturday, for my labor does not seem like work but like study and I enjoy it. The electric light I think will come in time and then be a success . . . and then my place will be secure. . . . My pay I know is very small in dollars but the chance to get knowledge is beyond measure.”
And in the end the best among them would be well rewarded for their work, both directly if they stuck with Edison, or in many cases also when they left to use what they had learned there for their own endeavors. For example, Upton did indeed become wealthy when Edison gave him 5% interest in their electric lighting work, as well as promoted him to head of the lamp factory. The aforementioned Charles Clarke would, among other things, rise to Chief Engineer, and the aforementioned John Ott, the so-called “Friend to the end”, worked with Edison almost from the very beginning and all the way to their respective deaths, dying only one day after Edison. During his career he rose to superintendent of the machine shop, though owing to a previous injury, later in life Ott was stuck in a wheelchair or with crutches. Owing to Edison and Ott’s close friendship and lifelong work together, Mina Edison instructed that, as Ott having just died couldn’t be there for Edison’s funeral, his wheelchair and crutches should be placed next to Edison’s casket.
Stealing Ideas? (Part 2)
Alrighty, so work environment was extreme on the hours and expectations there, but otherwise seemingly pretty enjoyable relative to the era, and Edison’s relentless optimism and love of learning seemed rather infectious amongst his workers. This brings us to whether Edison was out stealing other’s ideas and then having his employees churn out versions and calling it their own. As ever, arguments against or for Edison on this one are making a black and white thing out of something that’s vastly more nuanced.
As previously alluded to, all evidence seems to be whenever Edison and his team were going to tackle an issue, they studied every related resource material they could get their hands on, including what was known of what everyone else was currently working on. They didn’t exactly have Google or the internet, so it’s not like they had access to the current state of everything, but they did their due diligence with what they did have access to. They then looked to try to make a better and more commercially viable solution through their own research, as well as purchased any patents they needed rights to along the way, if needed, for example as mentioned with Woodward and Evans’ patent for a version of the incandescent light bulb. This isn’t really any different than just about any inventor or company in history, but what Edison and his team did was industrialize the process, which absolutely gave him and his team a huge advantage over their competitors. But the general process wasn’t really any different. Just scaled up.
The primary issue here in terms of public perception seems to be both the common myth of the isolated inventor, as well as Edison and his team’s insane success compared to others. Edison vs Tesla is a classic example of this. Everybody loves the underdog. And yet, Tesla was no different than Edison on this front, utilizing all the knowledge of those who came before to do what he did. And even much of what he did, as noted, still needed perfected by others after to actually be something practical. That’s just how science and engineering and advancements work. Nobody comes up with things on their own. And generally multiple people come up with something similar all around the same time, as noted.
Patents and a Ruthless Businessman?
Of course, Edison also was allegedly a rather ruthless businessman, and definitely had an army of lawyers out to protect his company’s patents. But this, also, isn’t really different than what any other business and even small time inventors do. Edison is typically vilified for it though because, as ever, he did it at scale and was in a position to go after anyone infringing on his patents, not just the major players.
That said, he also doesn’t seem to have been quite as ruthless as most say. For example, at one point Edison hired a lawyer to file patents for things he’d been working on. But rather than do so, the lawyer simply took the papers and sold them to competitors. In total, 57 such potential patents were sold in this way before Edison found out. However, Edison refused to give the name of the attorney to the media, stating, “His family might suffer” if Edison did so, also ultimately calling into question the alleged persona of Edison as being spiteful, something that once again often comes up in the mythical Edison vs Tesla feud.
On the note of patents, Edison had a lot to say on their value, which was minimal compared to his ability to use them to manufacture products himself. For example, when told by reporter Remsen Crawford that seven of his patents were set to expire in one day, he initially stated to his assistant, “Go back. Tell that fellow that I say the expiration of those patents won’t amount to a hill of beans. Tell him that Mr. Edison says he has never had exclusive use of his inventions and never expects to in this world. Tell him the expiring of a patent has no effect whatever upon the fortunes of an inventor.”
Ultimately the reporter managed to use a brief back and forth from his assistant to get to talk to Edison directly to explain what he meant. Edison elaborated: “There is no such thing in this country as an inventor’s monopoly. The moment he invents something that is an epoch-maker in the world of science and commerce, there will be pirates to spring up on all sides and contest his rights to his ideas. I might invent a new monkey wrench which could go without infringement, but the moment I take certain forces and work out a moving picture for the first time in history… mark you how the pirates rise up and call it their own.”
Almost three decades later, Crawford asked Edison why he wasn’t the richest man in the world given all his inventions. To which Edison stated, “Nearly $10,000,000,000, they tell me, are invested in modern industries which developed from ideas embodied in my inventions and my patents. A billion or so dollars, I am told, may be the annual total income to artisans and workers in fields thus created. But I have made very little profit from my inventions. In my lifetime I have taken out 1180 patents, up to date. Counting the expense of experimenting and fighting for my claims in court, these patents have cost me more than they have returned me in royalties. I have made money through the introduction and sale of my products as a manufacturer, not as an inventor.”
On the lightbulb he states, “I have known of several inventors [whose] ideas would have made them millionaires. But they were kept poor by the pirates who were allowed through our very faulty system of protection to usurp their rights. Do you see that little incandescent lamp hanging over my head? Well, I fought in the courts of this and other countries for fourteen years to establish my rights as inventor, even after I had the patents. My associates and I had to spend more than $1,000,000 [about $32 million today] to prove our rights to the incandescent light, even though our claims had been duly vouched by the United States patent office. Everywhere, all around the earth, the pirates kept picking on that little lamp, and they were able to keep me out of the profits on my patents until there were but three years left out of the seventeen…”
Edison would go on that a large part of the problem was the fact that the judges often didn’t really understand what they were ruling on. And he suggested what was needed was “A separate and special court. Take the whole business out of the regular judicial system. It has never belonged there. What does the average judge of our district courts, or circuit courts of appeal—or even of the Supreme Court, for that matter—know about the technical phases of chemistry or physics? These judges have been lawyers all their lives, and they are—some of them—distinguished for their ability as jurists. But when it comes to understanding a contest over amperes, or ohms, or the atomic theory, or subatomic energy, they can be fooled by a smart lawyer quite as soon as… any farmer from the hinterlands. I would appoint, to this special court for trying patent cases, judges from the faculties of colleges of technology, men who know something about science. They could travel around the country and hold court, if need be, in the factories and workshops of the inventors and their competitors, and get first-hand data upon each issue involved in the litigation, just as President Wilson’s War Labor Board, headed by William Howard Taft, went around during the war settling labor disputes in the mills, right on the ground. There wouldn’t be much quibbling on the part of lawyers before these scientist judges. Then, and not till then, will an inventor stand some show of being rewarded for the long, tedious labors he has expended through ceaseless experimentation to gain the fruition of his ideas.”
So, in the end on patents and stealing ideas, the evidence seems to be that Edison and his lawyers were extremely zealous in protecting their patents and claims, what you might call the Disney of his era, but in patents instead of copyrights. Whether this is a knock against him or not depends on your personal opinion of all that. Although, I think one thing we can all agree on is that the world would be a better place if all company’s legal teams adopted the insanely nice disposition of Jack Daniel’s lawyers, who aggressively protect their trademark as they must to keep it, but famously do so in the very deliberately nicest and most reasonable way possible. See our video on the subject.
The Truth About the Animal Killings
This all brings us to the whole animal murder thing. And this is arguably the biggest stain on Edison, at least from a modern lens, and a rather curious one given his stance on violence, even towards animals, though it is possible that was something he had not yet come to until later in life. Whatever the case there, even here most get the details of all this wrong. The devil is in the details. So let’s sort through it.
First, it’s often claimed that Edison ran a series of experiments on killing random animals using AC electricity, and ultimately even pushed for the electric chair for human execution, all culminating in the killing of an elephant on film, in one of the earliest motion pictures ever made- and all for the sole purpose of aiding his company in the War of the Currents fight and show off his fancy new video camera.
So is any of this true?
The Elephant Killing Myth
First, let’s start with the elephant thing because this one is completely false.
Now, to be clear, there was an elephant named Topsy who had been sentenced to death for killing three humans, and it was indeed electrocuted. But Edison had nothing to do with any of this at any stage before, during, or after. Nor was he mentioned in any contemporary news accounts of the event. Nor do any of his massive number of surviving writings such as journal or business correspondence make any mention of the event. Further, going back to the so-called War of the Currents, this elephant execution occurred about a decade after Edison had already lost the war and was no longer involved at all in his former electrical company. So this event was not in any way used by Edison or his company to discredit AC current either.
So why do most today think Edison did murder an elephant and use it to show AC current was dangerous?
First, because the electrical company that performed the execution bore his name- the Edison Electric Illuminating Co. of Brooklyn. However, despite the name, again, Edison was not in any way involved with this power company at the time. It was a privately owned entity that had years before lost any association with the man himself outside of still bearing his name.
The second reason he is so associated with this execution is that Edison Manufacturing’s film branch filmed the event. While Edison was president of Edison Manufacturing, someone else ran the film company’s day to day operations, Edison Manufacturing vice president and general manager William E. Gilmore. It’s also noted that the company made about 1,200 films around this time with very little input or oversight from Edison. And, indeed, this particular execution seems to be one of those cases, as, once again, none of Edison’s surviving correspondence from this period between himself and Gilmore mention anything about it.
So why film the execution?
It would seem simply that it was a highly publicized event and Gilmore just thought it would be something worth documenting with their relatively new film technology.
Alrighty then, so what about the electric chair? Well, after a series of botched hangings, there was a push for a more consistent and humane way to kill other humans deemed unfit to continue existing in society because, capital punishment!
In parallel with this, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had been interested in something similar to have a more humane way of euthanizing animals that needed put down for whatever reason, and had even eventually consulted with Edison, among others, to help come up with a more humane method for this- and long story short on this one, ultimately the idea of using electricity to put down humans percolate to the top as an alternative to hangings.
But Edison didn’t really have much of anything to do with the electric chair, other than the commission put in charge of looking into the feasibility of this contacted countless electrical experts and asked their opinion. Edison was one of those consulted.
However, contrary to the popular narrative, Edison’s initial response wasn’t positive. In fact, he initially refused to give his opinion, citing that he was morally against capital punishment. And, thus, was hesitant to give his thoughts.
After further prompting, however, he was finally convinced to give his opinion on what the most humane way to do this would be, and wrote in a letter in December of 1887 that if they really wanted to kill someone, they should use Westinghouses’ “alternating machines,” and about 6 months later doubled down, stating rather than needing to design such a device, they could just “Hire out your criminals as linemen to the New York electric lighting companies.”
The Real Story of the War of the Currents Animal Thing
This all brings us to the animals and back to the War of the Currents, and Edison’s rather curious crusade against AC power, even after it became clear it was the significantly more commercially viable option and his own team and investors were heavily pushing him to switch. Edison still refused, even publicly stating in 1889, right before he was ousted, Edison Electric would never adopt AC as long as he was in charge. It was pretty much right around then that his company started working on AC internally and he was more and more shunted to the side. The War of the Currents was mostly over. A couple years later, this culminated in some of his investors brokering a merger with Westinghouses’ main rival in the AC sphere, Thomson-Houston, despite Edison’s objections. And so it was that Edison General Electric merged to form GE in 1892. Edison was out not just in name, but in truth, more or less just a figurehead briefly at this point, before deciding to sell his shares in the company he could no longer lead to use the funds to pursue other ventures, in particular, as mentioned, focusing on iron ore refinement.
So why was Edison, who normally never saw a good idea he didn’t like to adapt and improve on, so stubborn on this particular issue to the bitter end?
While some have claimed Edison simply didn’t understand AC electricity, and so was doggedly pushing his company’s inferior low voltage DC power distribution systems, the evidence of notes and the like from his lab don’t back this at all. He very clearly was extremely well versed in how AC worked and its advantages for mass power distribution, and eventually his own people were explicitly pointing it out to him either way.
While it’s impossible to definitively discern his unfiltered thoughts precisely because of the company’s existing DC push. Edison right from the start, even before the war of the currents really got going, genuinely seemed to think the idea of high voltage AC lines running around in a city populated with countless thousands of people was a recipe for people getting killed regularly by these, writing in a private correspondence with one Edward Johnson in 1886 shortly after Westinghouse had installed his first scale AC system, “Just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size. He has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically.”
And, indeed, his prediction proved prophetic. With basically no regulation, Westinghouse just did things the cheapest way possible with a mishmash of wires strung overhead on polls and attached to buildings, with minimal insulation that also broke down relatively quickly with exposure to the elements- all inspiring one electrician to state the insulation was as useful as “a molasses covered rage”.
Noteworthy on this, Westinghouse’ aforementioned main AC competitor in Thomson-Houston was doing it a little differently. Every bit as concerned about the safety factor as Edison was, Elihu Thomson put a lot of money and research into trying to develop various mechanisms to make the whole system safer, including developing things like lightning arrestors and magnetic blowout switches to kill the power instantly if there was any surge. Further, he initially wouldn’t allow his system to be installed for use in homes for AC lighting as he felt it was too dangerous in its state at that point. Westinghouse’s system, in contrast, was built with seemingly not much of any thought given to safety.
Naturally, deaths quickly did follow from this, with a string of them in the spring of 1888, including the killing of some kids, particularly causing a media frenzy, and the press deeming the new phenomenon “death by wire”.
But it didn’t really matter. High voltage AC systems were significantly cheaper and more efficient for this use case than Edison’s low voltage DC systems, and it only got worse with time as prices of copper, which his system required much thicker lines of, continued to rise, and the AC technology continued to advance.
Nevertheless, Westinghouse was put on the defensive, and took to pointing out, quite reasonably, that while, yes, the pole mounted AC lines were dangerous, so were countless other things people dealt with in the city from street cars to gas lighting, the latter of which his system would actually help prevent deaths on.
Of course, Edison detractors tend to claim Edison was only taking this extreme stance against AC because he was trying to take down his competitor in Westinghouse. And there probably is some truth to this. But the reality seems far more nuanced. On all this, Edison was going against one of the core business tenants that had made him so successful- always trying to make something as practical and cheap as possible. Given how passionate he got on this one, and how he was even willing to be ousted from his company before agreeing to a switch, even after the war was all but lost, it doesn’t seem that far fetched that he may well have genuinely thought the risk of deaths were too great to pursue the path Westinghouse and Thomson-Houston and others were.
The Truth About the X-Ray
Especially as this was a bit of a theme throughout his life. For example we have the aforementioned fuel cell work, where despite significant progress, the explosion resulted in him ultimately abandoning the research line. Likewise, when it came to X-rays. While his company did make great strides in this, including creating the first commercially viable fluoroscope, vastly improving on the image quality of previous designs, and a design that’s still at its core what’s used today, he ultimately abandoned it after almost blinding himself with x-rays, and more famously accidentally killing one of his workers, Clarence Dally, who had eagerly volunteered for the project- a fate which countless other early X-ray researchers also shared.
As we’ve covered in our video When Going Shoe Shopping Was a Good Way to Die, it took a long time for humans to fully grasp the dangers of X-rays, with many shoe shops x-raying people’s feet every time they wanted to get fitted for shoes, sometimes even letting kids get their feet x-rayed for fun multiple times a fitting. This was something that was all the rage up to around the 1970s. Yes, 1970s.
As for Dally, there was nothing Edison could do once the damage was done, though he did keep him on the payroll and paid for all his medical expenses up through his death, and then afterwards made sure Dally’s widow and children were well taken care of financially. While this seems like a no brainer today, and a great way to avoid a lawsuit. At the time, this was extremely out of the ordinary. Mere decades before, as we noted in our video Charles’ Dickens’ Sledge Hammer for the Poor Man’s Child, it was common to use kids to remove jams in industrial machinery without even turning the machinery off. Such that if they didn’t get out rapidly, they’d lose limbs or life. And promptly be replaced by another child. Workers were literally disposable, and many business owners saw them this way, with this only really beginning to change markedly around the time of Dally’s death, interestingly enough.
But on this one, despite the significant advancements he and his team were making, Edison abandoned X-ray research completely, feeling it was too dangerous, not just for experiments in his labs, but beyond for most to use. That said, his basic design, as noted, if significantly improved in various ways, is still used today. After the utility of this for medical use was demonstrated in spades during WWI, he would later in life state, looking back, “I did not want to know anything more about X-rays. In the hands of experienced operators they are a valuable adjunct to surgery, locating as they do objects concealed from view, and making, for instance, the operation for appendicitis almost sure. But they are dangerous, deadly, in the hands of inexperienced, or even in the hands of a man who is using them continuously for experiment.”
Back to the Truth About the War of the Currents, the Animal Killings, and the Electric Chair
Going back to War of the Currents, this all seems to have played into his choice to go with low voltage DC instead of high voltage AC, as he seems to have genuinely been prioritizing safety over cost, and presumably thinking with advancements he could get the cost down to be on par.
This brings us to the animal killings. Which Edison did indeed support, though not quite the way most people think.
As for the details on this one, an electrical engineer by the name of Harold P. Brown began a personal campaign against AC systems, with his initial salvo being a letter to the New York Post, stating, “The only excuse for the use of the fatal alternating current is that it saves the company operating it [AC] from spending a larger sum of money for the heavier copper wires which are required by the safe incandescent systems. That is, the public must submit to constant danger from sudden death, in order that a corporation may pay a little larger dividend.”
It was on from there and Brown ramped up his campaign to whoever would listen, including lobbying the New York Board of Electrical Control.
In one account it was noted, “At a July meeting Board of Electrical Control, Brown’s criticisms of AC and even his knowledge of electricity was challenged by other electrical engineers, some of whom worked for Westinghouse. At this meeting, supporters of AC provided anecdotal stories from electricians on how they had survived shocks from AC at voltages up to 1000 volts and argued that DC was the more dangerous of the two.”
Note here, Brown was lobbying at this point that line voltage be restricted to 300 volts.
Little was done about any of this given the lack of hard data on the dangers of a given voltage, and in comparison of AC and DC.
So, do you know what you do when there is no hard data and it’s needed? Rigorous experiments. And when potential death or injury may be involved, we humans tend to offer up our animal friends for the testing. And that’s exactly what Brown decided to do.
Going back to Edison, at this point, he seems to have had no association with Brown. But it didn’t last. How the connection was made exactly isn’t clear, with varying accounts, though internal records from Edison Electric Light seem to indicate that it was Francis S. Hastings who suggested to Edison they support Brown’s efforts and research, which they subsequently did, letting him use some of Edison’s equipment and facilities for his research into the dangers of AC vs DC power, to get the data needed.
Over the course of the experiments, Brown would pay for captured stray animals, as well as use some animals already slated to be euthanized, such as in one case a lame horse, and then run experiments on them using DC and AC power.
Of course, if this was all he was doing, there wouldn’t have been much controversy. After all, at the exact same time the New York Medico-Legal Society was likewise doing the same exact type of testing with nobody kicking up a fuss. And even today stray animals are regularly euthanized if taken in and no one wants them, and lame horses likewise are regularly euthanized and the like, let alone research labs across the world using animals in all sorts of experiments, even to death. And particularly on the latter, if the benefit is to humans, most aren’t too bothered about it. Or, at least, most of us who are, aren’t doing anything about it or vilifying the scientists explicitly. And this was even less the case back then when the idea of animal rights was almost non-existent in the public consciousness.
The issue here, of course, is that it wasn’t just about the research, but also to get the media involved to put a stop to high voltage AC power distribution, or alternatively to get regulations put in place to make it safer. For example, there was a push for switching to underground wires and the like as well. And it was these few very overt killings that seemed questionable, given they were solely to demonstrate the results of the research in the most graphic way possible, rather than advancing the research. Few, even then, were terribly enthusiastic about witnessing such things directly, even though most of us otherwise happily eat our cheeseburgers and chicken wings, and use our countless products built on the backs of animal research. Thus, given the graphic nature of the demonstrations, while not really seemingly terribly controversial at the time, they were highly effective for what they showed.
In one such, where notably the chairman of the death penalty commission Elbridge Gerry was there to observe, Brown had a stray dog in a cage which he gave a series of progressing DC shocks, all the way up to 1,000 volts. The dog was otherwise physically fine after each of these. Brown then switched to 330 volts of AC, which killed the animal. Critics of this demonstration noted that the previous DC shocks had likely made the dog more susceptible to being killed by the AC shock. Thus, Brown did another public demonstration, this time killing three dogs in succession via a shock of 300 volts of AC power each with no previous DC shock.
His hope was, once again, to use this to convince the board to set a limit of 300 volts for publicly run AC lines. He also did a few more tests using cows and the aforementioned lame horse that were killed with 750 volts of AC power.
Westinghouse, of course, claimed the demonstrations and data couldn’t be trusted and that DC was vastly more dangerous. In response, Brown put his money where his mouth was and publicly challenged Westinghouse to come take part in an experiment. In this one, Brown stated he would hook himself up to the DC current, and Westinghouse would be hooked to the AC current, and they’d start at low voltages and work their way up until one of them quit or died. Naturally, Westinghouse declined to take part in the challenge.
In the end, Brown ultimately published the pamphlet: “The Comparative Danger to Life of the Alternating and Continuous Electrical Current” laying out the detailed results of all his tests, and then had copies of it sent to newspapers and government officials.
Because of his now very unique expertise here, Brown would later be asked to design the first electric chair, but refused. And instead one George Fell was contracted for that, and it was later built by one Edwin F. Davis. However, Brown was contracted to find a suitable generator to use with the chair. With both the help of Edison Lighting and Thomson-Houston, Brown was able to acquire a decommissioned Westinghouse AC generator for this purpose. As to whether Edison was involved in helping Brown get this generator, this is often claimed to be so. However, at this point Edison had been, as noted, partially forced to the side in this company. And while most sources on this one imply he was involved, the aforementioned Rutgers University Thomas A. Edison Papers, which is unequivocally one of the most reliable sources out there on all things Edison, explicitly say no, he was not.
But he was involved in hiring Brown in the first place, as well as known to have witnessed one of the demonstrations. And for that, despite being, at least later in life if not before, well ahead of his time on thoughts against even harm to animals, this one is generally seen today as the biggest stain against Edison.
Summing Up the Animal Killing Thing
But to sum this one up, often lost in all this is that while absolutely Edison had a business vendetta against high voltage AC power and paid someone to have animals euthanized towards this end. The entire issue wasn’t so black and white. Brown was doing research to try to prove the relative dangers AC and DC power posed at various voltages, and to have hard data to show the regulatory bodies after initial outcries were rebuffed.
Further, people didn’t view animal cruelty quite the same back then as we do now. And, ironically, as noted, Edison, at least later in life, was ahead of his time on this, and it was actually the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that was one of the chief parties interested in this research at the time, as they wanted a more humane way to euthanize animals that needed to be put down, and were hoping such research would lead to this, and a device they could use for it.
And third, given Edison’s normal stance on such things, while nobody knows exactly what he was thinking because of the ambiguity introduced given he was out to vilify his competitor, the moral justification he may have used perhaps isn’t hard to see. If funding Brown’s research and killing some stray animals and others like a horse that was going to be put down anyway would save human lives, he may have simply deemed it worth it.
Or maybe he really didn’t care about any of it, and his harping on about the dangers of the high voltage AC systems of the era were just a smoke screen, and he was simply happy to murder as many animals as it took and say whatever needed said to take his competitor down.
You’ve now made it this far in this piece so now have a much better sense of the man than a few hours ago. So what do you think?
Summing Edison Up
But to sum everything with Edison up, it is unequivocally true Edison got credit for some things he was little involved with, such as the world’s first video camera, and other things that were the combined efforts of himself and his staff. But this isn’t really any different than every single institution that has a public face. And, arguably, Edison was directly involved in the work far more than most who get such excess of credit. Edison and his team also very much did build on the ideas of others… The same as every single inventor in history as long as humans have been humaning. There are almost no instances of isolated genius. And frankly most of the examples of that we think of, it’s very likely it’s only because history has forgotten all of the others who those inventors were aware of and built off of. With perhaps the only original human inventor ever being the first person to pick up a rock and realize they could smash something with it. But even there, perhaps inspired by gravity.
Humans, from rockets to rocks, always trying to make gravity look bad.
In the end, it is unequivocally true that Edison and his team changed the world in multiple ways. But arguably one way above all, which was Edison’s initial idea after that first couple inventions that made him rich- creating an industrial lab, first with Menlo Park, and then scaling it to an insane level in West Orange. That, more than anything else he did, changed the world both in his time, and ever since with everyone from his own General Electric to Xerox Parc to 3M and beyond copying the basic model, and, in so doing, changing the world over and over and over again since.
And, finally, circling back to Tesla- did Edison steal Tesla’s ideas and persecute him into oblivion? No. And that narrative needs to stop because it’s just wholly and unequivocally false. Yes, the internet and, most humans really, love the underdog, and love to vilify the most successful, sometimes for legitimate reasons, and sometimes just because they are the New York Yankees and dang it, 40 American League pennants and 27 World Championships in a bit over a century is too many! Screw those guys. Can’t just spare 1 for the Seattle Mariners?!?! It’s been almost a half a century and zero of either despite over the years having Ken Griffey Jr, A-Rod, Edgar, Randy Johnson, Ichiro, and Felix! Help us Julio-wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.
Of course, was Edison perfect? Hardly. He was human. Obsessed with his work, unabashedly promoting his own personal brand, pushing his employees to their limits, but also expecting no different from himself, priding himself on being the hardest worker of all, something countless of his employees and former employees attest to. He led by example. He was also a product of his time, and you’ll find no shortage of ways to vilify pretty much any human from the 19th century in countless ways… Or, come to that, even most people from the 20th and 21st centuries. We all suck in our own ways… outside of Mister Rogers. Who not only didn’t suck, but always made sure all of us knew we didn’t actually either. And the ways we think we do, well, he genuinely believed in our ability to change and do better next time.
Again, in all of that, Edison was a complex human being like the rest of us. With things to admire and things to cringe at. And trying to encapsulate who he was from a given action or quote is as absurd as defining any of us based on our worst or best moments. He should no more be deified than Tesla sometimes is on the interwebs, generally cast as the God Genius, and Edison the Devil. But the truth for both men is that they were just people, if quite notable ones.
Who was Greater: Tesla or Edison?
So who was a greater cog in the vast and complex machinery of human advancement? Both men were unequivocally unique geniuses. Both men were unabashed self promoters. Both men built off other’s work in literally everything they did. Both men made a fortune from their work and achieved worldwide fame both with the general public and by those within the scientific and engineering world. Both did contribute to changing the world through their work.
But unfortunately for the Team Tesla supporters, which note we here at TodayIFoundOut previously were on that bandwagon before really digging into the man, Tesla’s major contribution to the world was something that someone else had already more or less invented and he himself wasn’t able to perfect to make it practically viable at scale for the application it was being used for. Others did that for him. Others likewise built on some other of Tesla’s work to make it practical for something useful for the world. And beyond this, the vast majority of things Tesla ever supposedly did mostly just existed in his head, though he sometimes claimed to have made them. Yet since then, it has not only been shown in many cases that he had a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the field he was working in and how things actually worked, but also just that- it all only ever existed in his head and generally since shown to not have actually been workable, or at least not in the way he thought. And while nobody gives Jules Verne credit for “inventing” the hologram or lunar module, neither should Tesla get credit just for thinking up a futuristic idea that someone else would figure out how to actually make work.
Edison, in contrast, while absolutely also through the work of his team as well, gave the world the commercial viable lightbulb, the first device to record and playback sound, similar to Tesla made major contributions in the early development of the power grid system we have today, accidentally inspired the vacuum tube that birthed the electronic age with one of his experiments, the list goes on and on. And, most important of all, perhaps his greatest invention- the industrial lab, which is a model that has been copied in every industry since, and has given the world most of the great inventions that have come since, many of which from his own original company that became GE.
In the end, both men were incredibly hard workers, geniuses, and dreamers. Edison and co., through an insane amount of work and experimentation, made some of those dreams a reality and, in so doing, changed the world multiple times. Tesla likewise made some of his dreams reality. But as far as anything truly world changing from what existed already? Well, he sure did talk about a lot of things…
Maybe popular history up to a decade or two ago actually got this one right.
What do you think now that you have the pair’s full stories? Let us know in the comments below.
Bonus Fact:
As for the whole “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” quote, in the spirit of debunking myths, we should probably point out that despite that maxim being one of the most famous of all Edison quotes, it wasn’t actually what he said, nor was he the originator of the idea. As for what he said, this was “Genius is not inspired. Inspiration is perspiration,” as well as supposedly expanding, “2% is genius and 98% is hard work.”
As to who actually seems to have come up with the source sentiment, enter academic Kate Sanborn in her “What is Genius?” lectures in the 1890s. In this, she stated that genius is a mix of perspiration and inspiration, and that perspiration was far more critical than its fellow -ation. Not long after, an editorial about her lecture in the paper popularly made the rounds, afterwhich Edison seemed to concur given his whole “inspiration is perspiration” thing.
That quote and the general idea evolved over time, to our present day “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” that Edison never actually said (nor did Sanborn say verbatim), and today everybody’s forgotten about poor Kate’s contributions given Edison’s long shadow.
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The post Who was Better? Nikola Tesla vs Thomas Edison appeared first on Today I Found Out.
As we’ve previously covered in our video What was Hitler Like as a Child?, Adolf Hitler had in some ways a rather nice childhood, centering around an upper-middle class lifestyle and all the opportunities and niceties that entails. But on the other hand, he was regularly severely abused as a child by his alcoholic father, who also regularly abused Hitler’s mother. Needless to say, Hitler didn’t exactly have the best role model for good, healthy relationships. And it gets worse. For example, his father, Alois, seemingly lived by the work credo of every store shelf stocker of “see a hole, fill a hole” when it came to women, whether he was in a relationship already or not.
For example, Hitler’s mother, Klara, was not only his father’s third marriage but became his father’s mistress while still married to the second wife, and possibly before when he was married to his first wife. Just to give you a very brief synopsis on this one, Klara, who was Alois’ niece or cousin depending on who his father was (this isn’t clear), was 16 when she found herself working for Alois when he was still married to his first wife. Later, she was fired when his future second wife, but current mistress, demanded he get rid of the servant girl owing to her jealousy of her. However, once wife #2 got sick with tuberculosis, Klara was re-hired as a housekeeper and caretaker for Alois and wife #2’s children. At this point, and as noted possibly before, Alois was apparently like “Don’t mind if I do!” and began sleeping with his niece/cousin, who got pregnant with the couple’s first child, Gustav, right around when wife #2 died.
Alois could have made a fortune on reality TV.
From all this, it may not be a total surprise that Hitler’s later love life was reportedly… a little abnormal, and not what anyone, even many in his day, would call healthy. Which brings us to the topic of today- Hitler’s niece, Angela “Geli” Raubal, who for a couple years there he more or less kept virtually imprisoned in his home as his mistress, and also had some rather interesting kinks tied up in all that that quite disturbed her. And then, suddenly, just after an alleged heated argument between the pair, Geli was writing a pleasant letter to a friend in Vienna about an upcoming get-together, when she inexplicably stopped writing mid-word and shot herself with one of Hitler’s guns… By all accounts, Hitler was out of town when she did this. But let’s just say even reporters in the country at the time found the entire thing suspicious and accused Hitler of murdering his niece or driving her to her suicide with his behavior.
So, did the future Fuhrer kill his beloved niece, or was she just one of a string of Hitler’s lovers (according to a report done by the the predecessor to the CIA, 6 known women) who suddenly decided they didn’t want to continue breathing, leading up to his last lover in Eva Braun who ended her life by his side.
Well, let’s dive into it all, shall we?
First, perhaps important to point out here was that in his teen years, Hitler allegedly was determined that if the woman he loved couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be with him, both he and she should go all Romeo and Juliet and kill themselves.
On this one, enter his first crush, one Stefanie Isak. With his rather obsessive relationship,… well, relationship that existed in his head anyway…, described in detail in his best friend growing up, August Kubizek’s, The Young Hitler I Knew published in 1955. In it, Kuzibek states Hitler developed an extreme four year long juvenile obsession with Stefanie, who he never seems to have bothered to talk to in person.
Kubizek claims Hitler first became infatuated with her when he was 16. “Adolf gripped my arm and asked me excitedly what I thought of that slim, blonde girl walking along arm-in-arm with her mother. ‘You must know, I’m in love with her.’”
Hitler then took to standing near a bridge she would cross over most days around 5 pm. As to why he never bothered to go talk to her, Kubizek says, “It would have been improper to address Stefanie, as neither of us had been introduced to the young lady. A glance had to take the place of a greeting. From then on, Adolf did not take his eyes off Stefanie. In that moment he was changed, no longer his own self.”
Or, at least, that seems to have been Hitler’s excuse for not talking to her, because other men seem to have had no issue flirting with the girl, much to Hitler’s chagrin. Kubizek states, “There was a lot of flirting and the young Army officers were particularly good at it… Poor, pallid youngsters like Adolf naturally cannot compete with these lieutenants in their smart uniforms… It annoyed him intensely that Stefanie mixed with such idlers who, he insisted, wore corsets and used scent.”
Nevertheless, despite only occasionally exchanging glances, Kubizek insists Hitler felt the two were destined to be together. As Hitler claimed, “For such extraordinary human beings as himself and Stefanie. There was no need for the usual communication by word of mouth: extraordinary human beings would understand each other by intuition.”
As many a love struck teen does, he also began to invent all manner of things about her to fit his personal ideal, including that she was likely an exceptional opera singer, something he admired greatly. When Kubizek once told Hitler he couldn’t really possibly know anything about her at all, he states Hitler exploded on him, yelling, “You simply don’t understand, because you can’t understand the true meaning of extraordinary love.”
Further, when something he learned of her directly contradicted something he believed about her, he simply would come up with a workaround. For example, Hitler loathed dancing, and felt she must hate it too. But when the pair learned that Stefanie danced, Hitler excused the notion, “Stefanie only dances because she is forced to by society on which she unfortunately depends. Once she is my wife, she won’t have the slightest desire to dance.”
Not letting this one go, Kubizek states he then teased that Hitler should take up dance lessons so he could dance with Stefanie. To which Hitler purportedly doubled down on his previous sentiment, “No, no, never! I shall never dance! Do you understand? Once Stefanie is my wife, she won’t have the slightest desire to dance!”
As for his hatred of dancing, he states, “Visualize a crowded ballroom and imagine you are deaf. You can’t hear the music to which these people are moving, and then take a look at their senseless progress, which leads nowhere. Aren’t these people raving mad?”
Apparently becoming impatient with the whole affair, Kubizek also claims Hitler at one point planned out an elaborate kidnapping, “He hit upon a crazy idea: he seriously considered kidnapping Stefanie. He expounded his plan to me in all its details and assigned to me my role. I had to keep the mother engaged in conversation while he seized the girl.”
Going back to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing, Kubizek claims Hitler told him if he couldn’t have Stefanie as his woman, “He would jump into the river from the Danube bridge, and then it would be over and done with. But Stefanie would have to die with him — he insisted on that. Once more, a plan was thought up, in all its details. Every single phase of the horrifying tragedy was minutely described.”
Of course, owing to the fact that he never plucked up the courage to actually go talk to her, which likely would have been a severe disappointment to him had he done so as she couldn’t possibly live up to the ideas he had in his head, nothing ever came of his first foray into love. Indeed, the only known time he ever seemingly communicated with her at all was a postcard he sent her after he moved to Vienna. Stefanie apparently had no idea who the postcard was from at the time, but said he wrote, “He was going to return and marry me.” And that she should wait for him.
In the end, she didn’t wait for him and instead married one of those officers that had been flirting with her. And Hitler, whether he ever found out about this or not, never returned for her, presumably having grown out of his teenage infatuation at some point.
Fast-forwarding from there, the soon to be homeless Hitler didn’t by any known accounts have much luck with the ladies, but as he and the Nazi Party began their horrific rise, let’s just say the growing influence and power of the man attracted women in droves, despite his silly little mustache and that he was very naughty boy. This was something Hitler was keen on keeping going- both the ladies of the nation attracted to him and his ridiculous mustache. With several of the women he was involved with claiming he’d often say he had no interest in marriage because he couldn’t allow for anything to distract him from his mission and life’s work. He also allegedly stated that he felt he could exert more influence over the women of the nation if he was single.
On top of this, he stated, “The bad side of marriage is that it creates rights. In that case it’s far better to have a mistress. The burden is lightened, and everything is placed on the level of a gift.”
On top of that, he stated having children would be irresponsible of him as it would divide his attention from where it should be in his work. And that, “I’m aware that the children of a genius usually have a hard time in the world. They’re expected to achieve the same stature as their famous father, and they’re never forgiven if their achievement is only mediocre. Besides, they’re usually cretins.”
This all brings us to 1925 and Obersalzberg when the 36 year old Hitler was in need of a housekeeper, so invited his older half sister Angela Raubal, to take the job.
As an interesting aside here, before working for Hitler, Angela worked as a cook for the Mensa Academica Judaica Association of Jewish Students. According to the alluded to famed 1943 OSS report A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend, written by psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, while working at the boarding house, “Some of our informants knew her during this time and report that in the student riots Angela defended the Jewish students from attack and on several occasions beat the Aryan students away from the steps of the dining hall with a club.”
In any event, once Hitler hired his sister to run his household in 1925, she relocated and brought along with her her 17 year old daughter also named Angela, but called Geli, which is handy for not confusing everyone in this piece.
Variously described by some as a young beauty, others claimed her charms lay elsewhere. For example, Hitler’s British nephew Patrick, who incidentally would serve in the U.S. Navy during WWII, would state, “Geli looks more like a child than a girl. You couldn’t call her pretty exactly, but she had great natural charm. She usually went without a hat and wore very plain clothes, pleated skirts and white blouses. No jewelry except a gold swastika given to her by Uncle Adolf, whom she called Uncle Alf.”
On that note of plainness, this seemingly would have been to Hitler’s liking, as he famously had a particular distaste for things like makeup and cosmetics and similar things, with the fuhrer even known to chastise women for wearing perfume or use hair dye. And as for fashion, when Hitler came to power, he established a German Fashion Board (Deutsches Modeamt) to help push his brand of very simple feminine beauty, emphasizing, among other things, no make-up, natural hair, and slightly plump, curvy women, rather than the, to quote, “boyish bodies” that Parisian fashion promoted.
Thus his plain, curvy niece was most definitely his cup of tea.
And so it was that when, in 1927, Hitler asked Angela to relocate to Berchtesgaden on the Bavarian Alps to manage his larger, private residence, the Berghof villa, he also requested Geli remain with him in his Munich apartment. It is not clear if Geli accepted of her own volition, or was forced to accept by the domineering Adolf or her mother, or whether it was simply a practical measure given during this time period she would study medicine at Ludwig Maximilian University. What is known is that for the ensuing four years, uncle and half-niece would live together in Munich, though did maintain separate bedrooms for whatever that’s worth.
That said, it seems Hitler had other female love interests at the time. For example, around this exact time he allegedly had a relationship with a teen girl by the name of Maria Reiter, who tried to kill herself in 1928 after Hitler refused to have her as anything more than a mistress lest it distract him from his mission. Though she claims he told her if she would wait for his work to progress sufficiently, at some point he would marry her… And then proceeded to do as he seemingly did with every significant woman in his adult life, neglect the crap out of her completely until they killed themselves or at least attempted it. In Reiter’s case, she claimed she hung herself, but her brother-in-law walked in as she was doing it and saved her life.
Whatever the case with all that, Hitler seemingly had immediate great affection for Geli, and his close confidant and then SA Chief of Staff Otto Wagener claims Hitler told him, “I can sit next to young women who leave me completely cold. I feel nothing, or they actually irritate me. But a girl like the little Hoffmann or Geli – with them I become cheerful and bright, and if I have listened for an hour to their perhaps silly chatter – or I have only to sit next to them – then I am free of all weariness and listlessness I can go back to work refreshed.”
Note here, the Hofmann cited here was one Henriette Hofmann, daughter of his official photographer Heinrich Hoffman, with Henriette and Geli quickly becoming close friends.
Hitler’s own close friend Ernst Hamfstaengel, who would later defect and work with U.S. Officials during WWII to profile various Nazi leaders including Hitler, would chime in he felt “that the services [Geli] was prepared to render had the effect of making him behave like a man in love… he hovered at her elbow with a moon-calf look in his eyes in a very plausible imitation of adolescent infatuation.”
We’ll get to those “services” in a bit, but for now, Henriette would also state that Geli was “irresistibly charming: if Geli wanted to go swimming… it was more important to Hitler than the most important conference.”
Future head of Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, stated of Hitler’s public behavior towards Geli, “(Hitler) followed her into millinery shops and watched patiently while she tried on all the hats and then decided on a beret. He sniffed at the sophisticated French perfumes she enquired about in a shop on the Theatinerstrasse, and if she didn’t find what she wanted in a shop, he trotted after her… like a patient lamb. She exercised the sweet tyranny of youth, and he liked it, he was a more cheerful, happier person.”
On this note of Hitler liking them young (and basically every woman he was alleged or proved to be involved with was usually around half his age), Hitler stated, “A girl of eighteen to twenty is as malleable as wax. It should be possible for a man, whoever the chosen woman may be, to stamp his own imprint on her. That’s all the woman asks for.”
He also allegedly liked slightly dimwitted women for similar reasons. As illustrated by his best friend Kubizek on why their friendship worked so well, Hitler did not like it when others would argue with him or give their thoughts. Kubizek stated, “He had to speak, and needed someone to listen to him… All he wanted from me was one thing – agreement.”
As for Geli’s side of things, one of Hitler’s housekeepers, Anni Winter, stated, “Geli loved Hitler. She was always running after him. Naturally, she wanted to become Frau Hitler… He was highly eligible… but she flirted with everybody; she was not a serious girl…. He liked to show her off everywhere; he was proud of being seen in the company of such an attractive girl. He was convinced that in this way he impressed his comrades in the party, whose wives or girlfriends nearly all looked like washerwomen.”
On that note of showing her off, von Schirach would describe the first time he saw Hitler bring Geli to an event, stating “The girl at Hitler’s side was of medium size, well developed, had dark, rather wavy hair, and lively brown eyes. A flush of embarrassment reddened the round face as she entered the room with him, and sensed the surprise caused by his appearance. I too stared at her for a long time, not because she was pretty to look at but because it was simply astonishing to see a young girl at Hitler’s side when he appeared at a large gathering of people. He chatted animatedly to her, patted her hand and scarcely paused long enough for her to say anything. Punctually at eleven o’clock he stood up to leave the party with Geli, who had gradually become more animated. I had the impression Geli would have liked to stay longer.”
Things did not remain all peaches and cream, however. Geli complained to early Nazi Party Leader Otto Strasser, who was soon to be exiled after trying to wrestle party leadership away from Hitler and take it in a very different direction, Strasser states, “During the 1931 Mardi Gras, Hitler allowed me to take Geli to a ball… Geli seemed to enjoy having for once escaped Hitler’s supervision. On the way back… we took a walk through the English Garden. Near the Chinese Tower, Geli sat down on a bench and began to cry bitterly. Finally she told me that Hitler loved her but that she couldn’t stand it anymore. His jealously wasn’t the worst thing. He demanded things from her that were simply disgusting. She had never dreamed that such things could happen. When I asked her to tell me, she described things I had previously encountered in my reading of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis when I was a student.”
He elaborates, “Hitler made her undress…. He would lie down on the floor. Then she would have to squat over his face, where he could examine her at close range and this made him very excited. When the excitement reached its peak, he demanded that she urinate on him… Geli said the whole performance was extremely disgusting to her and… it gave her no gratification.”
SA Officer Wilhelm Stocker likewise stated, Geli “admitted to me that at times Hitler made her do things in the privacy of her room that sickened her but when I asked her why she didn’t refuse to do them she just shrugged and said that she didn’t want to lose him to some woman that would do what he wanted. She was a girl that needed attention and needed it often. And she definitely wanted to remain Hitler’s favourite girlfriend. She was willing to do anything to retain that status. At the beginning of 1931 I think she was worried that there might be another woman in Hitler’s life because she mentioned to me several times that her uncle didn’t seem to be as interested in her as he once was.”
The aforementioned O.S.S. report also claims Hitler enjoyed being abused during his spicy time as well. For example, the report claims that German actress Renate Müller stated when she spent the night with him, Hitler laid on the floor and begged for her to kick him while he curled up into a ball and screamed how he deserved to be punished. Noteworthy Muller was not long after undergoing treatment for an injury and drug addiction when she allegedly jumped out of the upper story window of her room, killing herself. That said, others claim Gestapo officers were seen entering the building just before this happened. And yet others, such as her sister, claim Muller simply fell accidentally owing to her alleged leg injury.
However, as with so much to do with Hitler’s love life and the women involved, it’s impossible to determine the veracity of so many of these claims. Other than to note, for what it’s worth, more than one individual directly involved on this one claimed Geli had told them the golden shower story.
On top of Geli allegedly being uncomfortable with Hitler’s kinks, he was also extremely controlling of her, with Heinrich Hoffman claiming, “The pressure under which Geli lives is burdensome to her, and what makes matters worse is that she’s prevented from saying how unhappy she feels…. Certainly, it flattered her that her serious and unapproachable uncle, who was so good at hiding his feelings from everybody else, was fond of her. She wouldn’t have been a woman if she hadn’t been flattered by Hitler’s gallantry and generosity. But it seemed simply intolerable to this child of nature that he should want to mother her every step and that she shouldn’t be allowed to speak to anyone without his knowledge.”
And then there was the jealousy, which seemingly went both ways. On the one hand, Geli was well aware Hitler had other ladies, and allegedly particularly loathed Eva Braun after Geli allegedly discovered a note from Braun that said, “Dear Herr Hitler, Thank you again for the wonderful invitation to the theatre. It was a memorable evening. I am most grateful to you for your kindness. I am counting the hours until I may have the joy of another meeting. Yours, Eva.”
And on the other side, Hitler’s jealousy with Geli was mixed. On the one hand, Hitler stated to Hoffmann, “I’m so concerned about Geli’s future that I feel I have to watch over her. I love Geli and could marry her…. But you know what my viewpoint is. I want to remain single. So I retain the right to exert an influence on her circle of friends until such a time as she finds the right man. What Geli sees as compulsion is simply prudence. I want to stop her from falling into the hands of someone unsuitable.”
But fall into other hands Geli apparently did, and Hitler didn’t seem to like it at all. The aforementioned SA officer Wilhelm Stocker, who frequently guarded Hitler’s home, stated, “Many times when Hitler was away for several days at a political rally or tending to party matters in Berlin or elsewhere, Geli would associate with other men. I liked the girl myself so I never told anyone what she did or where she went on these free nights. Hitler would have been furious if he had known that she was out with such men as a violin player from Augsburg or a ski instructor from Innsbruck. After she was satisfied that I wouldn’t tell her uncle – and I had a personal reason for not telling him – she often confided in me…”
During all this she apparently also began a relationship with Hitler’s longtime companion and chauffeur Emil Maurice, who though he had some Jewish ancestry was declared an honorary Aryan by Hitler in 1935. Maurice would state of this that he was in love with Geli and “I decided to become engaged to Geli… she gladly accepted my proposal.”
Seemingly corroborating this, Henriette claims Geli told her of her preference of Maurice instead of Hitler, stating, “Being loved is boring, but to love a man, you know, to love him – that’s what life is about. And when you can love and be loved at the same time, it’s paradise.”
As to what Hitler thought of the relationship, he seemingly tried to separate the two, though not at first permanently. With Geli writing in a letter to Maurice on December 24, 1928, “Uncle Adolf is insisting that we should wait two years. Think of it, Emil, two whole years of only being able to kiss each other now and then and always having Uncle Adolf in charge. I can only give you my love and be unconditionally faithful to you. I love you so infinitely much. Uncle Adolf insists that I should go on with my studies.”
That said, two years later, Maurice was still out of the picture, and Geli had seemingly found other love interests on the side from her ever more famous Uncle, as he apparently also had others on the side from her.
This brings us to September of 1931. From here in the story, accounts vary wildly as to the sequence of events that led to Geli’s death. But what all agree on is that the now 23 year old Geli wished to travel to Vienna. Why? Reasons abound- everything from that she was pregnant with Hitler’s child, to pregnant with a Jewish musician’s child, to she wanted to go be with her Jewish lover, to simply that she wanted out and to have her freedom to do as she pleased, and that could never happen under her uncle’s thumb. For whatever it’s worth, Geli’s mother, Angela, noted that she thought Geli wanted to leave because she was set on marrying a violinist from Linz, but that both herself and Hitler had forbidden that relationship.
Whatever the case there, allegedly Hitler at first agreed to let her go, but later changed his mind. As to why? The stories once again abound- some contemporary accounts claimed Nazi party officials were nervous about Geli being more or less set free to do and say what she willed given she was so intimately aware of so much of Hitler’s private life and thoughts, as well as some of their lives and goings on, so advised Hitler to not let her go. Others claimed that the rather mercurial Hitler became convinced the reason she wanted to go was to spend time with another man, so changed his mind.
Whatever the case there, Household staff reported the two quarreled over the matter before Hitler finally left for a meeting in Nuremberg. With one account being she shouted out the window that she should be allowed to go, and the departing Hitler shouting back “Nein!”
Hitler then departed the home in a car with his photographer Hoffman. Or, at least, Hoffman claims he was with Hitler in the car when they left, confirming that Hitler did, in fact, leave. Allegedly Hitler then spent the night at the Deutscher Hof hotel in Nuremberg.
On that night of September 18, 1931, Geli was seemingly writing a letter to a friend in Vienna. As to who that friend was, the police report states it was to one of her girlfriends, though some news reports claim it was to her music teacher lover. The police report stated the note said “When I come to Vienna – I hope very soon – we’ll drive together to Semmering an…” and then suddenly stopped midword.
There are a variety of accounts of who discovered her body the next day. For example, in one, one Georg Winter, husband of one of Hitler’s household staff found her, stating when Geli wasn’t answering their knocks, “As the thing seemed to me rather suspicious, at ten o’clock I forced the double-door open with a screwdriver… As I’d opened the door I stepped into the room and found Raubal lying on the floor as a corpse. She’d shot herself. I can’t give any reason why she should have shot herself.”
All this said, it would seem odd that no household staff heard the shot of the Walther 6.35 pistol. It should be further noted that the Nazi Party leaders convened to discuss the issue before calling the authorities. Thus, whether the scene remained as it was, if there was previously a suicide note, whether even that letter was really written by Geli, or any manner of such things is a matter for debate.
Noteworthy on the letter is that the Nazi leaders initially seemingly wanted to frame it as a suicide, but quickly changed their minds to push that it was an accident. For example, Hanfstaengle claims Baldur von Schirach called the press office “to issue a communiqué about Hitler having gone into deep mourning after the suicide of his niece. Then the group at the flat must have got into a panic, because twenty-five minutes later von Schirach was on the phone again asking if the communiqué had gone out and saying that the wording was wrong. They should announce that there had been a lamentable accident. But by then it was too late. The word was out…” Thus, having the note finish mid-word and discussing a future event would lend credence to the accident angle.
But as for how she got Hitler’s gun, household staff would later report her taking the gun from Hitler’s room about a half hour after he left earlier that day. As to why they didn’t think this particularly odd, Hitler required that both Geli and Henriette be trained with various guns, including regularly practicing with them at a firing range so they could better protect themselves if needs be. So her carrying such a gun to her room wasn’t apparently totally odd.
As for Hitler, when he was informed of Geli’s death, the aforementioned Ernst Hanfstaengl who, once again, defected and worked with U.S. officials profiling Nazi leaders, claims Hitler “was in a state of hysteria” and immediately left town, ultimately going into a depressive spiral, even forgoing going to Geli’s funeral, though he would allegedly visit her grave a couple days later. Hitler would also reportedly keep her room exactly as she left it as well and on her birthday and day of her death for some time after having it decorated with flowers, as well as hanging several pictures of her at the Riech Chancellery in Berlin, including a portrait of her in his room.
Rosa Mitterer, who worked for Hitler shortly after Geli’s death, also reported, “My sister and I shared a room that was directly over Hitler’s. We could hear him crying.”
Rudolf Hess even claims Hitler became suicidal himself for a period after, although interestingly from the reports, it’s not completely clear whether it was over Geli’s death, or the potential death of his career as a politician. Hess states, “He was so fearfully vilified by this new campaign of lies that he wanted to make an end of everything. He could no longer look at a newspaper because this frightful filth was killing him. He wanted to give up politics and never again appear in public.” Hess also claims at one point he had to take a gun away from Hitler, who was intimating he was going to shoot himself with it.
That said, Hitler’s distress may not have just been over his reputation and political ambitions, as Hitler’s secretary, Christa Schroeder, also stated, “After the death of his niece Geli, Christmas was really a torture for him, and not pleasant for us either. It’s true that he allowed a Christmas tree to be put in the corner of the hall, but Christmas carols were not sung.”
As a brief aside, Schroeder also claims Eva Braun used to frequently tell Hitler she would kill herself if he didn’t spend more time with her, and that “When he no longer had much time for her because of the electioneering, she pursued him cunningly with suicide attempts. And of course she succeeded, because as a politician Hitler couldn’t have survived a second suicide from someone close to him. I say it again: the only woman he loved and would certainly have married later was his step-niece Geli Raubal.”
And note, not just threaten suicide, Cate Haste, author of Nazi Women, would state, “In November 1932, Eva Braun attempted suicide by shooting herself with her father’s pistol, but she then rang Hitler’s doctor, who came in time to save her, and the whole thing was hushed up. Hitler came to visit her with flowers at the clinic where she was recovering. Eva, the shadowy, loyal figure at the periphery of Hitler’s life, continued to be frustrated by his neglect. Hitler would turn up at unpredictable times, and his moods shifted between gushing charm and indifference.”
In another case, Eva allegedly swallowed a bottle of sedative pills to attempt to kill herself, but nothing much came of this one other than Hitler apparently begged for her forgiveness for the neglect and promised to do better in the future. With her writing in her journal on February 18, 1935, “Dear God, please let them come true and let it happen in the near future… I am infinitely happy that he loves me so much and I pray that it may always remain so. I never want it to be my fault if one day he should cease to love me.” But then pretty much right after he went back to neglecting her completely, with her writing on May 28, “Is this the mad love he promised me, when he doesn’t send me a single comforting line in three months?”
His housekeeper Anni Winter, sister of the aforementioned Rosa, would also state, “Eva Braun was there often when Hitler was in Munich. She was always running after him, insisting on being alone with him. She was a most demanding woman.”
In any event, going back to Geli and Hitler’s distress, it is often claimed that her death is part of the reason Hitler became a vegetarian, allegedly with meat reminding him of Geli’s corpse. However, along with so many of the varied stories here, the veracity of this claim seems questionable given the majority of accounts, and including what is relatively known about Hitler’s location during all of this and in the aftermath, never would have given him a chance to see the body.
Further, it really just seems like Hitler abhorred animal cruelty. And the Nazi regime bizarrely were among world leaders at the time in animal rights laws, right down to banning boiling lobsters and crabs alive, limiting hunting, and banning vivisection. They even held an international conference on animal welfare in 1934. Going back to the vivisection, Hermann Göring would state in a speech in 1933, “An absolute and permanent ban on vivisection is not only a necessary law to protect animals and to show sympathy with their pain, but it is also a law for humanity itself…. I have therefore announced the immediate prohibition of vivisection and have made the practice a punishable offense… Until such time as punishment is pronounced the culprit shall be lodged in a concentration camp.”
Apparently they were not only leading the world in animal rights, but also in irony.
But in any event, given the pattern of behaviors here from Hitler with regards to animal welfare, it seems unlikely Geli’s death had anything to do with his alleged choice of vegetarianism. He also had severe gastrointestinal issues that may have contributed to his dietary choices, see our video How Hitler’s Flatulence Defeated Nazi Germany. And while that might seem like a clickbait title, we assure you, it’s really not. Fully accurate.
But going back to Geli, after the matter was thoroughly discussed by Nazi Party officials, the authorities were called and came to investigate the scene and, as alluded to, you better believe the media were all over it with the rising politician in Hitler’s love life now thoroughly under the scrutiny of the press. The problem for getting to the bottom of it all is, when politics are involved, the news media is generally fairly worthless at getting details right, or even caring at all about that- generally pushing their agenda, rather than any semblance of accuracy. And things were no different back then.
As for a small sampling of the news accounts though, we have The Münchener Neueste Nachrichten stating, “According to a police communique, a twenty-three-year-old student fired a pistol aimed at the heart in a room of her flat in the Bogenhausen district. The unfortunate young woman, Angela Raubal, was the daughter of Adolf Hitler’s half-sister, and she and her uncle lived on the same floor of a block of flats on Prinzregentenplatz. On Friday afternoon the owners of the flat heard a cry but it did not occur to them that it came from their tenant’s room. When there was no sign of life from this room in the course of the evening, the door was forced. Angela Raubal was found lying face down on the floor, dead. Near her on the sofa was a small-calibre Walther pistol.”
The Münchener Post, an anti-Nazi newspaper, reported, “A MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR: HITLER’S NIECE COMMITS SUICIDE Regarding this mysterious affair, informed sources tell us that on Friday 18 September there was once again a violent quarrel between Herr Hitler and his niece. What was the reason? The vivacious 23-year-old music student, Geli, wanted to go to Vienna, she wanted to become engaged. Hitler was strongly opposed to this. The two of them had recurrent disagreements about it. After a violent scene, Hitler left his flat on the second floor of 16 Prinzregentenplatz… The dead woman’s nose was broken, and there were other serious injuries on the body. From a letter to a female friend living in Vienna, it is clear that Fraulein Geli had the firm intention of going to Vienna. The letter was never posted.”
Other papers picked up the story with other accusations, including one from the Die Fanfare titled: HITLER’S LOVER COMMITS SUICIDE: BACHELORS AND HOMOSEXUALS AS LEADERS OF THE PARTY and alleging that Hitler’s relationship with her “took on forms which obviously the young woman was unable to bear.”
Hitler denied all such accounts of events, writing in response, “It is untrue that I had either ‘recurrent disagreements’ or ‘a violent quarrel’ with my niece Angela Raubal on Friday 18 September or previously. It is untrue that I was ‘strongly opposed’ to my niece’s travelling to Vienna. The truth is that I was never against the trip my niece had planned to Vienna. It is untrue that my niece wanted to become engaged in Vienna or that I had some objection to my niece’s engagement. The truth is that my niece, tortured by anxiety about whether she really had the talent necessary for a public appearance, wanted to go to Vienna in order to have a new assessment of her voice by a qualified voice specialist. It is untrue that I left my flat on 18 September 1931 ‘after a violent scene’. The truth is that there was no kind of scene and no agitation of any kind when I left my flat on that day.”
One of the key journalists involved here was Konrad Heiden, who’d been on an almost decade long campaign at this point to do everything in his power to vilify or discredit Hitler in the news, which one would have thought would be about the easiest job in the world because, Hitler. But whatever the case there, Heiden was the first to publicly claim Hitler and Raubal were having a sexual relationship, stating “One day parental relations to his niece Geli ceased to be parental. Geli was a beauty on the majestic side … simple in her thoughts and emotions, fascinating to many men, well aware of her electric effect and delighting in it…. Her uncle’s affection, which in the end assumed the most serious form, seems like an echo of the many marriages among relatives in Hitler’s ancestry in its borderline incestuousness.”
Noteworthy Heiden was a member of the German Social Democrat Party which was in stark opposition to the Nazi party. Naturally these and countless other accusations Heiden wrote about Hitler made Heiden’s continued safety as Hitler gained more and more power questionable, and, being not stupid, Heiden soon after his reports on Geli and Hitler fled to Switzerland.
The point being of Heiden’s accounts that historians are unsure of what is accurate in his, and other’s, version of events and what was just Heiden and others seizing an opportunity to go after Hitler.
Yet another similar journalist was anti-Nazi editor of the Der Gerade Weg, Fritz Gerlich. Gerlich was working on the story and allegedly even had some proof that Hitler either had Gelli killed or did it himself. However, Gerlich’s known account includes claiming Hitler had been drinking before he killed Geli, which calls into question its accuracy, as Hitler had a pretty long and very adamant and public track record of being vehemently anti-alcohol. For example, Hitler wrote, “I know what a devil alcohol is! It really was — via my father — the worst enemy of my youth.” He would also write in Mein Kampf seemingly referencing his father, “It ends badly if the man goes his own way … and the woman, for the children’s sake, opposes him. Then there is fighting and quarreling, and as the man grows estranged from his wife, he becomes more intimate with alcohol. He is drunk every Saturday … When at length he comes home on Sunday … night, drunk and brutal, … God have mercy … I have seen this in hundreds of instances.”
Whatever the case, unfortunately for Gerlich, on March 9, 1933 when he was allegedly working on the story that was going to prove Hitler murdered her, Emil Maurice, Max Amann and a group of stormtroopers entered his office, ransacked it and destroyed all files there. Gerlich was then taken to Dachau and ultimately was killed there. However, given this occurred about a year and a half later, this also calls into question the often cited claim that Gerlich had such evidence Hitler had murdered Geli and was working on the story at the time. It seems more likely that he just had simply pissed Hitler and other Nazi Party members off on a number of occasions, and they finally decided to do something about it.
But as for the authorities’ investigation, well, we can’t really trust that at face value either as the Nazi party definitely was exerting their influence on it.
That said, there is evidence that Detective Sauer in charge of the case was unhappy with the state of it when it was more or less closed by Minister of Justice in Bavaria and close friend to Hitler’s, Franz Gurtner, sometimes called “Hitler’s Protector”, and ruled a suicide. However, what Saur found out during this second investigation has disappeared from history because the records from it were either lost or destroyed.
That said, the first report from Sauer is still available, with Saur writing on September 28, 1931:
“His niece was a student of medicine, then she didn’t like that anymore and she turned toward singing lessons. She should have been on the stage in a short time, but she didn’t feel able enough, that’s why she wanted further studies with a professor in Vienna. Hitler says that was okay with him but only under the condition that her mother from Berchtesgaden accompany her to Vienna. When she didn’t want this. he said he told her, ‘Then I’m against your Vienna plans.’ She was angry about this, but she wasn’t very nervous or excited and she very calmly said good-bye to him when he went off on Friday afternoon…. She had previously belonged to a society that had séances where tables moved, and she had said to Hitler that she had learned that one day she would die an unnatural death. Hitler went on to add that she could have taken the pistol very easily because she knew where it was, where he kept his things. Her dying touches his emotions very deeply because she was the only one of his relatives who was close to him. And now this must happen to him.”
Of course, this account was seemingly mostly derived from Hitler’s explanation of events to Sauer, calling even further question into the accuracy of it.
As for any physician’s account. The body was examined by a doctor, one Dr. Muller, then ultimately released to be buried in Vienna. With some suggesting taking the body to Austria was a move in order to make it more difficult to have it later exhumed for additional examination. Although, for whatever it’s worth, it was claimed by Henriette that it was Geli’s mother, Angela, who was the one who requested her daughter be buried in Vienna.
As to what the doctor had to say about her body and the alleged broken nose frequently reported in the papers, “On the face and especially on the nose were to be found no wounds connected with the bleeding of any kind. Nothing was to be found on the face except dark greyish death-marks which had proceeded from the fact that Raubal expired with her face to the floor and remained in that position for about 17-18 hours. That the tip of the nose was pressed slightly flat is due entirely to her lying with her face on the floor for several hours. The extreme discoloration of the death-marks in the face is probably to be explained by the fact that death was primarily consequent on suffocation following the shot in the lung.”
Speaking of suffocation, the bullet missed her heart and hit her lung. Her choice to try to shoot her heart also seemed odd to some, with one Ronald Hayman, author of Hitler and Geli, arguing of this and the exact position she was found in, “This means that if she was standing or sitting when the shot was fired, the barrel of the pistol was pointing downwards, and the hand holding it was higher than her heart. Even if she was lying on the couch or the floor, it would not have been easy for her to shoot herself in this way. And why should she want to? Having been taught how to use a Walther, she could, if she wanted to kill herself, easily have avoided such a slow and painful death.”
The aforementioned Otto Wagener would give his opinion, thinking it wasn’t suicide at all, but that “The bullet’s trajectory showed that she had the pistol in her left hand with the barrel towards her body. Since she was sitting at her desk and writing a totally innocent letter which was unfinished, we must assume that it came into her head to fetch the pistol and check whether it was loaded, at which point it went off and hit her in the heart – an unfortunate accident.”
As for Geli’s mother’s thoughts, she more or less concurred, stating, “I can’t understand why she did it. Perhaps it was an accident, and Geli killed herself while she was playing with the pistol which she got from him (Hitler).”
Hitler’s sister, Paula, had a different view, “The only thing that keeps me from publicly accusing him is the memory of our mother. I would accuse him of the deliberate murder of Geli. And don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying he drove her to her death, caused her to commit suicide, or anything like that. I mean to accuse him of shooting and killing her…I have enough proof to convince a fair jury that Adolf should be convicted of murder.”
As for Geli’s best friend, Henriette, she states, Hitler “fenced her life so tightly, confined her in such a narrow space that she saw no other way out. Finally she hated her uncle, she really wanted to kill him. She couldn’t do that. So she killed herself, to hurt him deeply enough, to disturb him. She knew that nothing else would wound him so badly. And because he knew too, he was so desperate, he had to blame himself.”
For what it’s worth, Paula and Henriette also claim Geli was not pregnant at the time, contrary to many of the rumors swirling.
Another interesting thread in all this was Father Johann Pant, who conducted Geli’s funeral. Father Pant stated he could not have performed the Catholic funeral if Geli had committed suicide, and that, “They pretended that she committed suicide; I should never have allowed a suicide to be buried in consecrated ground. From the fact that I gave her Christian burial you can draw conclusions which I cannot communicate to you.”
So did Hitler kill her?
Given the number of extreme atrocities Hitler committed in his lifetime making killing of a lover in a quarrel seem like child’s play, many since have just gone ahead and assumed he did, in fact, murder Geli.
That said, Hitler by all accounts quite adored his niece, and as in his family tree and slightly more common in general at the time, this wasn’t quite as odd as it seems to us today, outside of those from Alabama who may currently be wondering what all the fuss is about. Nor, in some respects, was his controlling behavior towards his female partner quite as abnormal, if slightly excessive, but still slightly more par for the course for many relationships back then where the woman was completely subservient to the men in her life because the past was the worst.
In the end, given the evidence we had today, which, granted, relies mostly on the testimonies of the household staff, it’s generally thought Hitler could not have killed her primarily because he really doesn’t seem to have been around at the time. At least, again, according to the household staff, as well as Heinrich Hoffman, his photographer, who claims he was with Hitler in the car when they left as noted previously. Also as noted previously, he claims Hitler was at the Deutscher Hof hotel in Nuremberg that night, a little over 100 miles away. And the next morning they were allegedly en route to Hamburg when a courier was dispatched to tell him the news of his niece’s death.
All of this, however, relies on the testimony of those either in the employ of Hitler or part of the Nazi party, with one exception. There is a ticket Hitler and co received from the town of Ebenhausen, about 40 miles away, for speeding through it back to Munich after Hitler found out. And seemingly Hitler was in the car at the time. Although this ticket could have been fabricated by party members or supporters as well to give him a better alibi. And, of course, this was all the next day, and the distance not so great that Hitler couldn’t have left when Hoffman said, but gone back to Munich that night. Although, why he should return randomly to re-take up the argument with Geli, or perhaps randomly intentionally go to kill her, doesn’t really make any sense.
Thus, most historians are willing to take on faith that Hitler really wasn’t there at the time of Geli’s death. Especially as, while household staff may have been lying about specific events at the time, certainly if Hitler had murdered her before leaving, his staff may have had more to say about it after Hitler’s death, but none did, nor did those peripherally related make any such claims.
For example, Hitler’s staff apparently liked him and at least one, the aforementioned Rosa, who granted came to work for him directly after Geli’s death, claims there were no rumors among the staff of any impropriety there with Hitler regarding Geli’s death. She also states that, “He was a charming man, someone who was only ever nice to me, a great boss to work for. You can say what you like, but he was a good man to us.” She also stated about the only thing strict he required of her outside of work duties was to have her and her sister attend church every sunday as he felt it was good for them. Ultimately, in 1935, Rosa fell in love with one Josef Amorts and wished to leave Hitler’s employ, and he happily granted her request and congratulated her on her relationship. She concludes, “I only met Hitler once more, on December 10, 1936, when Anni married Herbert Doehring, manager of the Berghof. He came to the wedding and was nice to me, saying he missed me.”
In any event, Rosa was 15 when she first started working for Hitler, but critically for the story at hand today is that her sister, the aforementioned Anni, had worked for Hitler for several years before that and lived in the house. But her sister seemingly made no mention of anything odd with regards to Geli’s death. Rosa simply states of the whole thing, “She shot herself in September 1931 and I was told as soon as I went to work for him that he was not to be approached on the anniversary of that day.”
Of course, just because he seemingly couldn’t have done the deed himself owing to not being there, doesn’t mean someone connected to him couldn’t have done it, perhaps at Hitler’s orders or maybe even without his knowledge. Especially given that if Geli really was going to leave, as mentioned, she knew an awful lot of very intimate things about the future Fuhrer and those around him which could have compromised his rise and the rise of the Nazi Party. And, as alluded to, there were rumors that many among the Party were uncomfortable with Geli and Hitler’s relationship for that reason. So it’s always possible someone else killed her to ensure her silence, which may explain why she stopped writing the letter in question mid-sentence if interrupted, assuming she really was writing that letter at the time and it wasn’t planted after the fact.
Given Hitler’s apparent love of Geli, however, most historians land on the side of that if it was someone within the party who had her killed, it probably wasn’t on Hitler’s orders, but perhaps done behind his back for the good of the party.
Then, of course, we have that she may well have simply committed suicide as was the official ruling over the matter. And it may well have been that any suicide note was removed before the authorities were called so as not to reveal any intimate details about Hitler and her relationship publicly, which no doubt would have been referenced in such a letter. Or it’s always possible she simply didn’t bother to write such a suicide note. Whatever the case, as alluded to, if it really was a suicide, it’s also been conjectured that the letter she was allegedly writing may have been planted there to attempt to make it look like an accident instead, as the Party seemed to have wanted that to be the story pushed.
On that note, another possibility is that she was indeed just playing with the gun at the time, with her handling such weapons allegedly not being uncommon, and having it on her when Hitler was gone for extra protection may have simply been her norm. This would, perhaps, explain why she was shot in the chest instead of the much more quick and painless way in the head if it had been suicide. Thus, again, some have conjectured that while writing the note with her right hand she was idling playing with the gun in her left hand (which allegedly is the one she shot herself with) and it inadvertently went off. This could explain the pleasant and future tense nature of the letter and lack of a suicide note. And it’s even possible in this case that Hitler was telling the truth that he was not totally against her trip, just her going alone, which would explain why in the letter she seemed to think the trip to Vienna was happening.
In the end, what is very clear about the entire matter is the official story had some plot holes, and those directly involved some contradictions in accounts. Further, by all accounts, Hitler does seem to have been devastated by the whole thing after, both because of Geli’s death and because of how it was being portrayed in the media and threatening his career. With many of the papers who were politically opposed to Hitler doing as all political reporters seemingly since the dawn of time have done- exaggerating or making crap up about their opposition, further muddying the waters on what exactly happened here for any investigation today.
And that’s where things stand today.
So, what do you think, dear viewer, now with the entire tale as it is known revealed- Did he do it? Or have it done? Was it someone in the Nazi party who had it done instead with or without Hitler’s knowledge? Or did she actually kill herself? Or was it just a tragic accident and another of a long line of such showing why you should never treat a gun as a toy?
Whatever your opinion there, I think we can all agree that as seemingly every woman Hitler hooked up with after this seems to have genuinely killed herself owing to the way Hitler treated them in alternating extreme affection with extreme neglect, Hitler was not just the worst human in general, but also apparently the worst boyfriend ever. And seriously really did need to rethink the mustache. Just ridiculous.
Expand for Referenceshttps://spartacus-educational.com/spartacus-blogURL19.html
https://spartacus-educational.com/Franz_Gurtner.htm
https://spartacus-educational.com/Konrad_Heiden.htm
https://spartacus-educational.com/GERraubal.htm
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1992/04/hitlers-doomed-angel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Maurice
Geli Raubal – Hitler’s niece: a summary
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02646R000600240001-5.pdf
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1091768/Hitler-perfect-boss-Former-maid-breaks-silence-charming-dictator.html
https://spartacus-educational.com/GERbraunE.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geli_Raubal
https://spartacus-educational.com/Fritz_Gerlich.htm
The post Did Hitler Murder His Niece? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Various religions have been popping up randomly seemingly as long as humans have been humaning- interestingly, not just with humans but our Neanderthal cousins, with signs of some form of religious practices with those Neanderthals going back at least 150,000 years. But one religion founded about 2,000 years ago triggered a marked shift in the way many in the world view religion and interact with a deity. Starting out as a sect of Judaism, fast-forward just a handful of generations of humans later and Christianity had evolved into its own distinct religion well on its way to dominating the Western world and beyond. And hasn’t really stopped since, statistically the world’s #1 religion with over 2.3 billion adherents in its various branches. So what made Christianity take off to then unprecedented levels, going from 1 person to millions in such a short span, and then billions beyond, where countless thousands of other religions in history don’t or sometimes only briefly rise and then fizzle out? Well, I’m glad you asked, because this is one of the more fascinating topics on so many levels we’ve ever covered here. So, quiet down your children, have a seat in a pew up front, and let’s dive into it all, shall we?
In the Beginning…
To begin our discussion today, it’s important to understand the context of the religious world when Jesus began his ministry, which was vastly different from what most of us think about religion today, largely because of Jesus, funny enough.
Going back a bit, our earliest archaeological evidence for human religion at all seems to be various forms of animism. Later shamanism and ancestor worship came to rule the day with most hunter-gatherer groups. Sometime between roughly 10,000 BC. and 5000 BC religious thought seems to have begun to evolve and definitely took a large leap forward directly after. For example, the ancient Mesopotamian region of Sumer can be classified as one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and it is here that we find more structured beliefs beginning to form. They primarily followed the belief that there were many gods who existed in human forms, or anthropomorphic polytheism. Sumerians also built temples where priests ruled in a theocratic system. But despite that, the people of ancient Mesopotamia viewed their gods as people they lived in harmony and equality with, rather than as vastly superior beings in the sense that a modern person would say when thinking about their god and religion.
Fast-forwarding a couple thousands years, many cultures and communities had adopted a slightly more formal system of faith and worship. Most pertinent to the topic at hand today we have Greek mythology, which can be traced back at least as far as the Bronze Age, or 3000 BC, with Roman mythology following sometime after this.
Important to point out on this, however, as noted by the Metropolitan Museum, is that the “ancient Greeks had no single guiding work of scripture like the Jewish Torah, the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qu’ran. Nor did they have a strict priestly caste. The relationship between human beings and deities was based on the concept of exchange: gods and goddesses were expected to give gifts [in exchange for votive offerings.]”
Thus, the Greeks and Romans would often worship in sanctuaries to whatever god best suited them in a given moment based on their needs or wants at that time. But there doesn’t seem to have been typically any strong sense of loyalty or love between a given god and those people worshiping, or vice versa. Or, at least, not like we tend to think today when discussing religions.
But then along came Judaism, which, while elements of it can be found going back to roughly 4,000-5,000 years ago, the codified form of the Judaism that we are familiar with today seems to have only preceded Christianity by about a 1-3 centuries, though oral traditions along this line existed for possibly as much as a few thousand years before. But the point is, it was the codification of the religion, whenever it happened, and the requirement to worship only one god, that made it relatively unique in the history of religion at the time and would soon change the world via one of its sects.
This all brings us to that sect- Christianity.
Around 2,000 years ago countless individuals were popping up around Judea purporting to be the prophesied messiah of Judaism. One of them, however, in Jesus of Nazareth, through his teachings, created a Second Temple Judaic sect which, in turn, inspired others to repeat his message even after his crucifixion, and it spread like wildfire from there.
Did Jesus Actually Exist and Say Anything He Said?
Now, before we get into the nuts and bolts of how Christianity spread so fast, which is extremely fascinating and probably going to surprise many, both Christian and secular, on some points, based on the fact that one recent British survey found that about 40% of people in the nation did not believe Jesus ever existed, we should probably start by addressing the question of if there is any proof the founder of Christianity actually lived.
We’ve already done a rather lengthy and ultra deep dive video on the subject completely coincidentally titled: Is There Any Proof Jesus Actually Existed? so we won’t go much into it here other than to say briefly, while it might come as something of a surprise to some, historians, from atheist to agnostic to Jewish to Christian, pretty much all universally agree that the Jesus described in the New Testament, did, in fact, exist, and even that it’s extremely likely that at minimum a few key significant elements of his life as described in the New Testament also very likely did happen. As professor emeritus of Jewish studies and Archeology at Duke University, Dr. Eric Meyers states, “I don’t know any mainstream scholar who doubts the historicity of Jesus. The details have been debated for centuries, but no one who is serious doubts that he’s a historical figure…. Those who deny the existence of Jesus are like the deniers of climate change.”
In other words, while there’s maybe no smoking gun per se, the preponderance of evidence makes it as certain as we can be about anything that happened two thousands years ago.
Obviously saying that isn’t going to convince anyone definitively, but this piece is already quite long and nearly 2 million of you already watched that video, so we don’t really want to rehash all the reasons why this is the consensus here. If you want a lot more detail on why most historians think this, do go check out our video on the subject after watching this one.
But suffice it to say for now, there does appear to have been a specific Jesus of Nazareth who was born around two thousand years ago, appears to have been baptized at some point by John the Baptist, who also very much seems to have existed, Jesus then created a new branch of Judaism at some point in there, then was crucified on the order of Pontius Pilate. Pretty much all other facets of Jesus’ life are up for debate and no writings from Jesus himself have survived through today.
On this note, some put forth from the fact that we don’t have any surviving writing from Jesus that we can’t really say he said or did anything reported in the works compiled into the New Testament, nor use them as a guide to his real message, whatever that was. On the other hand, nobody really argues that Socrates didn’t say at least in general some of what his students later said he said. Despite that the parallels here are pretty spot on, with the only documentation of anything Socrates said written down long after his body had been converted into microbial feces, with some of Socrates’ students spreading his message from there. We just take the word of Plato, Xenophon, etc. that what they wrote Socrates said is in the ballpark of accurate to what he actually said. And, in fact on this one, it’s known quite definitively Plato, for example, used Socrates as a bit of a character at times to insert his own ideas. That’s not to mention the rather contradictory accounts of some of the things Socrates supposedly said, and even that his very personality varied from different sources who knew the very real man Socrates.
Going back to Jesus, the things Jesus supposedly said we have similar discrepancies on accounts, even within the approved accounts compiled into the New Testament, let alone some of the other stuff some of his relatively early followers said he said or did that have survived but are not included in the New Testament. All of this isn’t surprising given much of it was written down in the ballpark of a few decades or more after his crucifixion, very clearly at least in part using other records that no longer exist, including of the oral variety, as their basis.
However, none of these discrepancies which theologians from then to now have been wrestling with matter for our story today. In part because the core elements that ARE important here for Christianity’s spread we have independent accounts of common Christian behavior at the time that seem to line up pretty strongly with the overarching alleged core teachings of Jesus as recorded in the works of the New Testament.
Thus, similar to Socrates, it seems reasonable enough to assume at least the broad elements of Jesus’ teachings are in there, even if it’s possible others inserted their own ideas or twists or interpretations after the fact, or simply aren’t quoting him absolutely verbatim in some cases. Afterall, trying to remember what you had for breakfast a week ago is hard enough, let alone writing down something your teacher said to you word for word even earlier in the same exact day he said it. Remembering the core idea is certainly not nearly as difficult. But word for word? Discrepancies are to be expected and are absolutely found here as noted. Thus similar to Socrates, exactly what Jesus said verbatim is unknowable to anyone except the great Dr. Emmett Brown.
But, again, luckily for us, it is these broad elements we need to focus on when discussing why Christianity spread like wildfire, as well as further context of the era and region and what religions were like before this that was so starkly different than what we typically think of as religion today.
One Chicken to Rule Us All
This brings us to religion in Rome and their provinces at the time, which a fun little brief aside here given its insane ramifications to us today, commonly included watching chickens eat to make many legally binding, major governmental decisions.
Meaning yes, whether some chicken ate some given bit of feed on a given day in history quite literally fundamentally altered everything since for all humanity. And not just in obvious ways of those decisions going one way or the other. And not even only because of the occasional widespread deaths or life based on these decisions and how the tiniest change a few thousand years ago even on just one person’s offspring can have an absolutely massive ripple DNA effect a couple thousand years later. But also just the tiniest change of what one person does on a given day will in turn change their reproductive outcomes after completely.
For example with men, with a few hundred million sperm cells made per day and up to a similar amount per expulsion, and just one of those winning the day at best when an egg even present, let’s just say even one time different and time of day, etc. ejaculating many years before- let alone diet, stress, etc factoring in- even if all other life factors stay the same after this, this changes everything after for that man’s future offspring based on a different sperm cell winning the day even if it met the same egg later that the other sperm cell would have.
Which is one of many reasons many time travel stories never work, outside of the film About Time which addresses this fact explicitly as a key plot point. And don’t even get us started on how insanely fast the Earth is currently moving through the universe making any time machine also needing to either factor that in perfectly or be a space ship. For reference, along with orbiting around the sun at 66,600 mph, the Earth is also rotating at its axis at about 1,070 miles per hour. On top of that, our whole solar system is rocketing through space around the center of the Milky Way at around 560,000 mph. On top of that, our galaxy is hurtling through space at close to 700,000 mph with respect to our local group of galaxies. On top of that, for all we know, our entire Universe is hurtling through some unknown medium at some other ridiculous velocity.
The point being, jump even a single second back in time and your time machine better be a space ship or somehow factor all that complex motion in absolutely perfectly to put you back on the surface of the Earth. And even then on that later point, the Earth is moving crazy fast in a complex way. Does your existing relative motion when you jump back in time continue at the same rates? Because, if not, even if you target the surface of the Earth correctly, you’ll be a bug on a windshield.
But we digress.
The point being, one of many fun facts embedded in this one is that it’s very likely most of us here today would not be if some chicken in Rome had chosen to eat, or not eat, on a given day differently than what they ultimately chose. Turns out those chickens really did have the power of the gods and fate at their beaktips.
How Roman Religion Worked
But in any event, more broadly, priests in Rome were not professional priests in the sense that they almost always held other jobs, usually in politics as senators, but also in the military and business.These offices were organized into colleges such as augurs who could read signs from the gods, all the way to pontifices who had control over the calendar and could dispense law.
The Romans also believed in local gods, or Genius Loci, Spirits of the Place. Every place had a god, and it was important for Romans to identify a place’s god and apply and adapt worship and rituals. For example, Greek rites were recognized separately from native Roman rites, and the priests even dressed differently for them.
Beyond concrete Olympian or early gods, in the 3rd century BCE, the Romans also began to worship personifications of abstract concepts. For example, they worshiped a personification of Rome itself called Roma. They also worshiped Concord, Faith, Honor, Hope, and Victory, who we also know by the later Greek name Nike. It’s even thought that Venus originally started as a personification before she became associated with the Olympian Aphrodite. This worship of personifications shows how flexible the Roman religion could be. Internal developments were accepted with outside additions as Rome expanded. The colleges always handled the incorporation of foreign gods into Roman life, and their cults were permitted, with, as far as we can tell today, an extremely large measure of acceptance of all religions and practices.
On that note, it is technically fair to call the Christian god one of the Roman gods, as he rose to prominence locally under their rule and ultimately was not just incorporated, but became the chief god of Rome and killed all the others.
Take THAT Jupiter.
Going back to the Jews and Rome’s extremely liberal view of religion, while the Romans had a lot of trouble with the Jewish people regularly rebelling, for the Romans, the Jews had an ancestral religion, and so because their religion relatively uniquely didn’t allow worshiping other gods and was sort of grandfathered in, they were exempt from things like emperor worship or worshiping the Roman gods. This was extremely significant because without this ancestral religion protection, the refusal to show respect to the Emperor and Rome via taking part in sacrifices to them would have been tantamount to treason, which is going to come into play later.
In general, however, after Augustus helped solidify the emperor worship in Rome, Roman citizens and provincials were allowed to worship other gods, as long as the Emperor was worshiped as well as a way to demonstrate loyalty to the emperor and Rome. This is why we see in native temples in Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia statues of the Roman Emperors in temples built during the Roman Empire.
Moving on from the classic gods, around the time Christianity popped up, a variety of so-called “mystery religions” were gaining traction, of which Christianity was one, generally taking a more individual approach to religion, rather than the communal Roman religions. Also very uniquely for the time, much like the Jewish god, these also tended to require members to worship only their respective god, though most at least acknowledged the existence of other gods, with Christianity being an exception here.
With that general religious environment set, this all brings us to what Jesus and his followers said and did that set their religion apart from all the innumerable rest and helped it grow like crazy.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
First of the keys to the religions’ success was the general message, which the early followers of Christianity seemed to adhere to to an almost finatical level. And that is this: If you were in need, it was not just considered the right thing to do in the religion for followers of Christ to help you, even if it hurt or even killed them to do so, but was the second most important commandment of God and more or less tied to the first as a way to practice the most important commandment.
And, importantly to the spread of the religion- it did not matter if you were a follower of Christ or not. If you are a human being in need, Jesus demanded his followers help that person regardless of what nation they were from, what they believed or thought, or even if they were your mortal enemy.
Specifically, when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he allegedly responded, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Given this last statement, this partially reshaped how everything that was said in the sacred texts of Judaism at the time should be interpreted according to Jesus, as well as was used by early Christians and many today as a guiding precept for how to interpret everything else Jesus said.
On this note and for clarification and insanely important to the spread of Christianity, when then asked who your neighbour is to love, the response was the parable of the Good Samaritan.
We’ll spare you the details of the complex relationship between the Jews and Samaritans other than to say- Important to the story at hand, and a context almost always lost on modern readers, is that the Samaritans and Jews at the time were hated enemies.
Going back to the story, after some of the most respected members of the Jews in a priest and a Levite saw this man lying on the side of the road, they simply moved to the other side and kept on walking, leaving him to die. As to why, it’s generally speculated that to touch the bleeding, injured man would have made them ritualistically unclean. Or maybe they just couldn’t be bothered. Either way. They didn’t help their fellow Jew.
But when the Samaritan saw him, despite it being his hated enemy and throwing out any concern about touching someone unclean, he took the man and made sure he was extremely well cared for until he was healed up, treating him like a beloved family member. With the message seemingly being, especially when combined with some of Jesus’ other overt philosophy that comes up again and again- literally everyone is your neighbor, even your hated enemy. With Jesus commanding at the end of this one for the person discussing it with him to “Go and do likewise.”
Jesus then expands on this in his famed Sermon on the Mount. Where he states, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?”
Perhaps the most stark example of how some of the specifics of this message, particularly the parable of the Good Samaritan, was seemingly lost on modern groups was the case of WWII when Nazis’ initial plan was not to exterminate the Jews, but simply make them leave. Most Jews then ultimately wanted out owing to the beginnings of persecution and applied to immigrate to nations the world over including America where according to Pew Research Center 91% of Americans at the time identified as Christian. In the end, not even needing to get metaphorical with this particular example on all the interesting implications of what was being said with the story of the Good Samaritan, if we just want to go literal- it’s a story of a foreign individual taking in a Jew because the Jew was desperately in need of help. And this whole “Love thy neighbour” thing quite literally was, as noted, the second most important commandment according to Jesus himself AND how you demonstrate the first most important commandment…
But they and pretty much every other nation of the world outside of Germany’s ally in Japan, funny enough who took in a lot of Jews and refused Nazi appeals to persecute them, were like “Ya, no thanks. We don’t want the Jews here.” This continued even after the holocaust was in full swing and the nations of the world were quite well aware of it and what was happening to the Jewish people as we’ve covered in our video Did the German People Know About the Holocaust When It was Happening?
But, going back to the very beginnings of Christianity, from accounts we have surviving today, not just Biblical, but secular as well, it seems Christians at the time both well understood the implications of the parable and that it applied to even foreign hated enemies, and took it all insanely seriously, ultimately creating something of a social welfare system for themselves and anyone else they encountered in the process, which was critical to the spread of the religion, especially given the context of the era where such a thing was mostly non-existent and life was extremely harsh in some ways, with one Emperor even lamenting the Christians were making the Roman leadership and religions look bad on this. More on this in a bit.
But for the early Christians, when people were sick and dying of some disease and often left to die, the Christians seem to have been the ones leaping to their aid and caring for them. Afterall, beyond Jesus’ commands there, by their belief in his very example, if God himself had demonstrated his love of mankind through sacrificing his very life for them unconditionally, it was thought Christians should do the same, even if it cost them everything right down to their life. As Jesus allegedly said to his disciples shortly before his crucifixion: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.”
In a nutshell, unlike the pagan gods, whose relationship with mankind was purely transactional with usually no real love for each other on either side, the Christian god loved all mankind, and thus the best way to please him and show your love for him was to, in turn, love and sacrifice for all mankind.
And that’s exactly what the early Christians seem to have done. As noted in a letter by Dionysius of Alexandria in 260, “Most of the Christians in our city showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of others. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending their every need, helping and comforting them — and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pain.”
From this, you can see why there are so many stories of people being healed both by Jesus himself and beyond to his disciples and other followers. If you want to go the miraculous route as the source, that’s all good, but also, just the fact that these people were caring for these individuals at all when the more normal for so many of the era and region was just to be left to die, especially if they were thought to be suffering from a catchable disease. Care for them, however, and some got better. And you better believe those some who did were often eager to join up and pay it forward. And note here, there were two major epidemics in Rome, one in 165 and one in 251, which resulted in allegedly up to about 1/3 of the Roman population dying during each, so always plenty of people who needed help.
Late second century Christian author Tertullian goes on of the general Christian behavior and force for good in the regions they existed in, “Though we have our treasure-chest, it is not made up of purchase-money, as of a religion that has its price. On the monthly day, if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he be able: for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary. These gifts are… not spent on feasts, and drinking-bouts, and eating-houses, but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines or banished to the islands or shut up in the prisons, for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God’s Church, they become the nurslings of their confession.”
Tertullian sums up, “One in mind and soul, we do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All things are common among us but our wives.”
If you’d like a more secular corroboration of this behavior, enter 4th century Emperor Julian who loathed the Christians very openly and tried to institute pagan charities to counter what the Christians were doing. Specifically, in 362 in a letter to the High-priest of Galatia he outlined his plan. And embedded in it, he commented on why he thought the Christian religion was so successful and had, during his lifetime, absolutely exploded in numbers and taken over Rome. In his opinion, this was driven primarily by the Christians’, to quote, “moral character, even if pretended.” Further that, “I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans” -note here “Galileans” was one of many early terms for Christians- “observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence…. The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.” He also states, Christianity “has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers and through their care of the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar and that the [Christians] care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help we should render them.”
Not just relentlessly helping those in need regardless of race, religion, or even if they were your mortal enemy who might just murder you for doing it as they would come to find out when persecuted, the Christians were also apparently relentlessly positive in the face of anything life threw at them right down to rejoicing and praying for blessing upon their very executioners while being persecuted. After all, Jesus had allegedly demanded it in the whole “bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven” thing.
Aristides of Athens writes in a letter to Emperor Hadrian only about 100 years after Jesus’ crucifixion, noting of the propensity of Christians to be Professor Positives no matter what. “Every morning and all hours on account of the goodness of God toward them, they render praise and laud Him over their food and their drink; they render Him thanks. And if any righteous person of their number passes away from this world, they rejoice and give thanks to God and they follow his body as though he were moving from one place to another. And when a child is born to them, they praise God, and if again it chances to die in its infancy, they praise God mightily, as for one who has passed through the world without sins.”
As to what they had to be so happy about in the face of anything, it was the promise of not just an afterlife, but one of distinction and better than anything this world full of all its suffering could offer. This was in stark contrast to the afterlife offered by the pagan gods, if in some cases any afterlife at all.
Aristides also notes of general Christian behavior in the early going, “They abstain from all impurity in the hope of the recompense that is to come in another world. As for their servants or handmaids or children, they persuade them to become Christians by the love they have for them; and when they become so, they call them without distinction, brothers. They do not worship strange gods; and they walk in all humility and kindness, and falsehood is not found among them; and they love one another. When they see the stranger they bring him to their homes and rejoice over him as over a true brother; for they do not call those who are after the flesh, but those who are in the Spirit and in God.”
In short, for those who interacted with them, the Christians had an incredible reputation for honesty, integrity, and kindness no matter what. A rather powerful testimony and way to endear people to them and their message.
And going back to even pretty extreme levels of self sacrifice in some of this, he states, “And there is among them a man that is poor and needy and if they have not an abundance of necessities, they fast two or three days, that they may supply the needy with the necessary food.”
Jesus on Women, Slaves, and Roman Spicy Time
An important thing to explicitly point out when talking about in that previous passage by Aristides with regards to how Christianity spread so rapidly was the bit about “as for their servants or handmaids or children… they call without distinction, brothers.”
That is to say, all were equal in the eyes of God, even women, children, and slaves. Why this message would appeal to the massive number of slaves or former slaves in Rome is, perhaps, obvious, especially with Christians treating them as relative equals and with extreme kindness. But on the women’s side, it’s important to explicitly point out what life was like for women at the time in many parts of Rome, Judea being one of the slight exceptions or, at least, relatively speaking. Women were still even here best to be neither seen nor heard in many cases.
But in general, in Greek and Roman societies women were extremely gender segregated. While of course different city-states in Greece and regions of Rome had marked differences, in the general case, Greek women were isolated from other men as much as possible. They were not even typically allowed to eat at a table if another man other than their husband was eating at it. The Greeks also had officials, the Gunaikonomoi, whose job it was to control and police women. This included everything from policing women’s dress and conduct in public, and private settings, to also supervising female religious rituals and female behaviour in ceremonies.
On the other hand, Roman women had more of a public presence, lived less gender segregated lives and could socialize with men outside of their family and marriage. However, this didn’t mean they were as liberated as the men. If an elite woman was too involved in society, her husband was often accused of weakness, and the weakness of one elite man threatened the delicate class order. As such, women were still fairly strictly controlled in Roman society, and even though the level of control was less than in Greek society, it still was in massive contrast to how women were treated within the Christian church in the very beginning where all were equal in the eyes of their God, including, as we’ll get into in a bit about the nuts and bolts of how they spread the religion so effectively, women sometimes being deacons in the church, quite literally counted among the church leaders.
This is all something that obviously didn’t exactly stick as the centuries went on, and still occasionally is a controversial thing in some sects of Christianity today where the idea of a female pastor or priest makes some clutch their Bibles and cry heresy. But in the earliest going, there are a number of both secular and non-secular references to women seemingly leading their local churches which were always gender mixed.
Christianity also required husbands to have a certain level of obligation to their wives, not just in the practical sense, but more or less as the other half of one body, and demanded that the women be respected as such, as well as the husbands to be faithful to their woman in all ways. This latter was a wholly foreign and rather revolutionary concept to most Romans. But as you can imagine, all of this seemingly appealed to many women of the nation to an extreme degree.
Going back to the whole faithful to your wife thing and how some Romans originally responded to this by being convinced Christianity was some sort of weird and perverse sex cult because of how bizarre a concept this was to them, it’s not that Greeks and Romans didn’t have very strict rules and taboos to regulate sexual mores. Just like in Christianity, adultery was a great transgression. However, in Greek and Roman religion, adultery meant something different than what it means to us today, largely because of Christianity. For men of Rome, adultery was sleeping with another man’s wife. Further, chastity for a Roman man did not mean abstainment from sex, but rather moderation when sleeping with socially approved partners from any gender and, to an extent at least, age. On that note, for Roman men, they perceived sexual acts not so much defined by male and female, but passive and dominant. And key here was that elite men must always be dominant, and never passive, and your station in life played a massive role in who you could play with in the bedroom and what you could get up to there.
On this note, even with the vast sexual freedom males enjoyed, in theory they were expected to show a level of moderation, as this was considered an elite virtue that proved you were worthy of your station and responsibilities in society. If you can control your desires and not give into them as much, you can control the people under you and handle your difficult duties well and responsibly. Someone who didn’t have such good self control, and excessively indulged in their base desires, was seen as lesser for obvious reasons.
This wasn’t just about sex, but applied to all facets of life. And, in truth, unequivocally someone who has more self discipline and typically lets their principles and the like control their actions instead of their urges and emotions of the moment generally will go much further in life and usually will make a better leader. So checks out why the Romans had clearly observed this general fact of life, and felt this way when it came to a man’s sexual practices and, ideally, some level of moderation and self control.
Noteworthy the Christians borrowed to an extent this idea of abstainment being a virtue for similar reasons, but restricted it even further to simply your wife or, if you were incredibly good at self control, and thus more disciplined and virtuous in their view because of it, no one at all.
As for women, well, we have a very different picture. Adultery for women was similar as it is today- sleeping with any man not their husband. Further for most Greeks and Romans, contrary to a common perception today, sexual relations between women was generally seen as unnatural and associated with prostitutes. We do not know why this association was made, but we do see a stereotype of women who have sex with women as very commonly being ugly prostitutes in surviving literature. Even 7th century BC poet Sapho of Lesbos whose poetry ultimately inspired the term “Lesbian” was portrayed in later Roman and Greek literature as such. We also know that elite women were usually not afforded the option of homosexual relationships the way men were, although it definitely happened anyway. In these cases it was not considered adultery, but it was overall frowned upon in many parts of Rome. The point of all of this being- women were, once again, heavily controlled and restricted in most ways.
Of course, most of these sexual mores and practices changed with the advent of Christianity from Jesus’ teachings, as well as really pushed by a later Christian who, outside of Jesus, was arguably the most important Christian of all with regards to defining and spreading the religion- enter Paul of Tarsus.
Paul, who was originally himself a great hater and persecutor of Christians, but was converted around 36 AD, among other things, completely redefined chastity for these societies. Sex in general was discouraged, but in the words of Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians “It is better to marry than to burn.”
Or, as noted in one of our favorite quotes from famed Protestant reformer Martin Luther when discussing the absurdity of requiring priests to be completely celebate, he wrote, “Nature never lets up… We are all driven to the secret sin. To say it crudely but honestly, if it doesn’t go into a woman, it goes into your shirt.”
Going back to Paul, in the same letter to the Corinthians, he pushed the relatively groundbreaking idea in the region at the time to limit the sexual partners of men to just their wives.
Once again, somewhat ironically, as alluded to, many Romans saw the early Christians as a wild sex cult because of all this, not just from the Christians’ weird views on sex, in their opinions, but also because of the very gender-mixed gatherings where women were seemingly equals, which was all seen as a front for twisted sex rituals. This was a charge some early Christian martyrs attempted to disprove by castrating themselves…
Of course, Paul won at the end of the day and many of the Greek and Roman sexual practices taken for granted over the millennia rapidly disappeared thanks to this shift in thinking and the idea of monogamous relationships for not just women, but men won the day.
In all this, let’s just say Christianity was extremely appealing to women of the region beyond any promises of afterlife, as it elevated their station significantly in their families and Christian community, provided an outlet of practical support for them if they had no husband or the like, and provided extra obligations for their husbands towards them commanded by God himself.
For example Paul states in his letter to the Ephesians, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’… each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”
That said, old habits die hard, and in his letter to the Corinthian churches Paul also notes, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”
Nevertheless, while maybe not going all the way to being equal in practical matters when it came to the woman’s husband, this was a massive improvement for the station for women in this region of the world, and particularly when it came to even leadership roles within the Church as noted. And even more so when looking at Jesus’ treatment of and interactions with women, which might fly over the heads of modern readers, but in his day was one of the more controversial aspects of his ministry.
There are numerous examples of this described in the New Testament. For example, in one instance Jesus, as a Jewish rabbi, didn’t just degrade himself by speaking with a random woman publicly, but it was a Samaritan woman no less, and one who by Jewish law likely deserved to be stoned to death and was definitely considered unclean. And on top of all of this, he went and shared a water container with this hated foreign, sinning, unclean woman. And perhaps most scandalous of all- he openly discussed theology with her.
As summed up by Pope John Paul II of this, “This is an event without precedent: that a woman, and what is more a ‘sinful woman’, becomes a disciple of Christ. Indeed, once taught, she proclaims Christ to the inhabitants of Samaria so that they too receive him with faith. This is an unprecedented event, if one remembers the usual way women were treated by those who were teachers in Israel; whereas in Jesus of Nazareth’s way of acting such an event becomes normal.”
Yet another example was the story of sisters Martha and Mary, with Martha left to do all the work of preparing food and the like, while Mary lounged around and listened to what Jesus had to teach. When Martha asked Jesus to make Mary help her, Jesus replied, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Again, to a modern reader, nothing too significant there, but in the context of the time and how women were treated, teaching a woman theology in any detail beyond the practical she needed to know for the governance of her life, and on top of that having her education in theology take precedence over her duties in her home, let alone that Jesus was so openly socializing with both sisters in that home, was extremely out of the ordinary.
Jesus also very openly had many female disciples following along with him and seemingly playing prominent roles in his ministry. And when various scenarios as with the aforementioned Samaritan woman popped up, he had a tendency to rebuke those rebuking him for his interactions with these women, or for those who tried to denigrate the women.
For example, while dining with a Pharisee, Jesus allowed what is assumed to have been a prostitute, and thus unclean in the eyes of the Pharisee, to not just interact with him verbally, but also most scandalously of all allowed her, an unclean woman, to touch him. When the Pharisee rebuked Jesus for this, stating, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.” Jesus replied implying the woman was actually greater in his eyes than the holier than thou Pharisee, noting, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”
In the end, Paul would seemingly sum up Jesus’ stance towards all people, “There is not any Jew nor Greek, not any slave nor free, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Thus, tallying it up so far, the religion was not just appealing to the middle and lower classes and slaves for its more or less social welfare system, promise of a better life after death, and general message of kindness and love to all humans no matter what- which humans as a whole almost always respond well to if done genuinely- but also elevated half the population from a station of almost total subservience to a relative equal. And even where they weren’t considered quite fully equal with their husbands, commanding the men to love the women as they would themselves, and for husbands to be faithful to only them.
Even today, notable Christians who’ve stuck to in the ballpark of these ideals almost always are pretty well universally beloved by the masses if well known. Perhaps the poster child of this being Fred Rogers, aka Mister Rogers, who not coincidentally was a Presbyterian minister, charged with continuing his work on creating and contributing to wholesome children’s television programs as his ministry. And a prominent modern mimicker of Jesus’ core ideals and how the early Christians seem to have behaved you’ll be hard pressed to find, in the public sphere today.
A Timeless Model That Still Works Today- A Mister Rogers Story
As an example, modeling the early Christian behavior towards all people, Mister Rogers, who as a core of his ministry advocated accepting and loving everyone for who they are, knowingly hired gay individuals to work on Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. While that wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy today, at the time his show originally aired in the 1960s, doing so was decidedly outside of the norm, even more so because it was a children’s show run by a Presbyterian minister. In fact, two of those gay cast members, John Reardon and Francois Clemmons became close friends of Mister Rogers himself, with the latter, Clemmons, having a recurring role on the show as well.
Going back to even more overt Christian themes that seem to mimic the early Church’s behavior, Clemmons cites two noteworthy instances that he felt really encapsulated Fred Rogers. The first was during a 1969 episode of the show in which Mister Rogers, who was sitting with his bare feet in a children’s pool, asked Clemmons on air to join him in resting his feet in the water, with the pair then singing, “Many Ways to Say I Love You” as they sat together. Clemmons said of this, “The icon Fred Rogers not only was showing my brown skin in the tub with his white skin as two friends, but as I was getting out of that tub, he was helping me dry my feet…. The significance of Fred doing that for a black, gay man is not lost… I felt unworthy, like Peter in the Bible. Why did he choose me?”
For the uninitiated, this was Mister Rogers following Jesus’ explicit command, and in so doing putting himself in a subservient role to a gay black man in the 1960s on a national TV show aired for children. Mister Rogers clearly had some balls… Or just a really centered view of his faith and strong convictions in it. Maybe a bit of both.
As for the following Jesus’ command part, this once again comes back to one of the most important parts of the early Church’s practices, where Jesus washes his disciples feet, despite some of their objections to him prostrating himself before them in this way. But then Jesus says, “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you…”
And further driving the entire point home, in John 13 stating, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Wrapping up Mister Rogers’ personification of this, similar to the early Christian church and how much this behavior resonated with people, many years later when Mister Rogers was as ever finishing his program with “You make every day a special day just by being you, and I like you just the way you are.” Clemmons stated that Mister Rogers was looking not at the camera, but at him when he said it. Afterwards, Clemmons said he walked over to Mister Rogers and asked him, “Fred, were you talking to me?” To which Mister Rogers replied, “Yes, I have been talking to you for years, But you heard me today.” Clemmons, who had long felt like there was something wrong with himself because he was gay, stated “It was like telling me I’m OK as a human being. That was one of the most meaningful experiences I’d ever had.”
The result of all of this? You certainly can find a lot of people who maybe don’t enjoy Mister Rogers’ show because of its slow pacing and being slightly antiquated in some ways, but find one person who doesn’t admire the man himself and what he was teaching once they learn of him in any depth? You’re going to have a REALLY hard time.
And this, my dear viewers, is EXACTLY how the early Christian church seems to have similarly endeared themselves to the masses, with the people of that era, at least the ones who directly encountered it and weren’t just going off rumors of bizarre Christian behavior, eating it up the same as people today when humans act like this in a genuine way.
As noted in the Book of Acts, “And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need… they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.”
Well, many. Not everyone, particularly not those of the elite class. For example, noted second century opponent of Christian theology Celsus would write in his The True Word mocking the popularity of Christianity among women and the lower classes, stating they were made up of “only foolish and low individuals, and persons devoid of perception, and slaves, and women, and children, of whom the teachers of the divine word wish to make converts.” And that “the following are the rules laid down by them. Let no one come to us who has been instructed, or who is wise or prudent (for such qualifications are deemed evil by us); but if there be any ignorant, or unintelligent, or uninstructed, or foolish persons, let them come with confidence. By which words, acknowledging that such individuals are worthy of their God, they manifestly show that they desire and are able to gain over only the silly, and the mean, and the stupid, with women and children.”
Needless to say, he was not a fan.
Nevertheless, as Justin Martyr, whose tacked on last name totally should come with a “spoiler alert” for his life’s story, would write to Emperor Antonius Pius, they hoped to win their enemies over with their good actions, stating, “…before we loved money and possessions more than anything, but now we share what we have and to everyone who is in need; before we hated one another and killed one another and would not eat with those of another race, but now since the manifestation of Christ, we have come to a common life and pray for our enemies and try to win over those who hate us without just cause.”
We should also explicitly point out that despite what Celsus said, it wasn’t actually just the commoners and oppressed joining up, though those do seem to have been the quickest and majority of adherents in the early going for obvious reasons. However, Paul namedrops a number of prominent individuals hosting some of their gatherings, such as the City Treasurer of Corinth, Erastus, and Gaius of Corinth, who had to have been very wealthy as it’s stated he at one point hosted all of the churches of Corinth at once in his home.
But to sum up the philosophical portion of why the religion spread so well- we have a message of love and kindness to all, even your mortal enemy, and helping anyone in need in any way they needed, even if this meant you had to sacrifice your own well being to do so. You also have the promise of an amazing afterlife where even the lowest stationed individual in the world could take equal part if they joined up. And you have a message that we are all equal in the eyes of God and God loves us all equally, thus, so should we, including loving and treating even slaves and women as you would love and treat yourself.
From all this, you can see why this would already be of great appeal to many.
But wait, there’s more.
Rescuing Babies
Let’s now dive into some of the more practical methods of spreading the religion.
First, not just gaining advocates in those in need and the downtrodden of the Earth, Christians also were gaining children on board in droves, and not quite the way you might think in just making them. But also, because abortion was a bit of a risky procedure historically, a common practice in the region at the time was to quite literally toss babies who weren’t desired out with the trash, particularly female babies. This method of abortion starkly contrasted with the teachings of the early church where even babies were equal in the eyes of God to adults, and thus they felt it was their Christian duty to rescue these babies and other abandoned children, male or female, which they seemingly from accounts frequently did- taking the newborns placed to die via exposure and other abandoned children and raising them as their own.
Go Ye Therefore, And Teach All Nations
Next up, we have a key facet of all of this which if had not occurred, Christianity probably wouldn’t have spread as it did no matter the philosophy and the other practical methods utilized. And that was the Apostle Paul’s decision to focus on pushing the religion beyond the Jews. This was something Jesus had already to an extent seemingly done in some isolated instances, but for some in the immediate church after his crucifixion, this was a controversial move.
And, indeed, before the resurrection, when Jesus sent his disciples out, he allegedly specifically told them not to do this. Stating, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
However, after the crucifixion and resurrection, he allegedly stated that because “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” at this point, it was now time for them to branch out beyond Israel under the New Covenant which was meant for all humans. Stating, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”
Nevertheless, for some Christian Jews at the time, the idea was still a little controversial vs. continuing to focus on converting more Jews to their new sect of Judaesim first.
Even more controversial was that Paul also made the barrier to entry into the religion lower, declaring that Gentiles joining up needn’t adhere to any Jewish laws or traditions, which was a huge shift in the religion away from a branch of Judaism and into its own separate thing. This also had practical benefit in that any males who wanted to join the religion no longer had to have their nether regions snipped, which was not only extremely painful, but also in the era before antibiotics also carried some level of risk in joining. We can only imagine before Paul’s declarations here, potential converts were probably like, “I totally am on board with this message of love and kindness, but what’s with the obsession with genital mutilation? Especially snipping off such an extremely functional and pleasure nerve filled bit of my happy stick?”
Showing how quick the transition was from here, during a Jewish revolt in Judea that lasted from 132-135 AD, the Romans persecuted the Jews practicing their religion, but at this point ignored the Christian Jews in all this, already seeing them as something distinct from the orthodox Jews.
But in essence with all of this, Christianity took many of the great philosophical ideas in Judaism, reinterpreted portions of them and expanded on it all, and then took away the ethnic barrier that prevented the Jewish religion from spreading. No longer was it a religion local to a region or culture of pencil sharpening, but was something available to any human, anywhere, even if they preferred their gherkin to stay girdled. With the new nation, as it were, being not about your literal family or local populace of your region, but a community and family in Christ anywhere you were.
And there was extreme power in this, as we’ll expand upon in a bit how well this worked out for Christians… Well, at least until centuries later when various political leaders would get involved and decided to mess the entire “love everyone, even your enemy” idea up and used Christianity as an excuse to go murder, rape, and pillage neighboring lands in the name of God…. We’ll get to that. Stick with us.
But for now, once Christianity spread beyond the Jews, the idea that you could go anywhere Christians were in the world and find someone who would treat you as a beloved brother or sister was a powerful incentive to join up.
But wait, there’s more!
Jesus can Kill Zeus. Zeus Cannot Kill Jesus
On top of all this, among the Gentiles of Rome, beyond all the stuff mentioned before which would appeal to many people, there is a clear distinction here on why it thrived and the pagan religions just couldn’t in the same way. Specifically, as alluded to, the pagan religions of the region in the general case required no strong loyalty to a specific god. You could worship one today and a different tomorrow. Christinaity was different, requiring a rejection of all other gods. The practical effect of this was that as it grew, the worship of other gods diminished, in contrast to the pagan gods where if one became prominent for a given thing, it didn’t diminish the others at all. In other words, Christianity could kill pagan gods, but pagan gods could not kill Christinaity.
Christinaity also had a core, very quickly to be written down, doctrine that could apply anywhere to any peoples. Pagan gods, once again, tended to be relatively local, with no good way for them to spread globally, and traditions surrounding them were very loose and ill defined, with the gods mostly little caring what humans got up to and, at best, lending a helping hand for a given one if a sacrifice to them was good enough, with no real love between the two parties here- mostly purely transactional. It further typically required the god to do something to help you, instead of the god’s followers, if any aid was to be given.
Thus there was, in the general case, no strong sense of loyalty for most to any of the gods, unlike the Christian God who gave everything for all mankind, unconditionally no less, and also offered similarly unconditional love. No sacrifice needed, nothing transactional. Just love him back and love your fellow man the same to demonstrate this love for God as quite literally the two most important facets of the religion that, according to Jesus himself, encapsulated all the rest. From a practical side, this also meant God’s followers had your back in all things, whether you joined up or not, or whether God himself wanted to otherwise more directly help you or not. You still got helped.
Further, evangelizing about a given pagan god just wasn’t really a thing like it was with Christianity either. On top of this, there wasn’t really a good reason to dedicate yourself to the pagan gods in the same way in the general case. But Christianity offered an incentive to do so in not just immortality, but also promise of something better after you died if you did so. And, again, perhaps the most powerful factor of all- a community of people dedicated to helping you if you had some need, which for so many under Roman rule was a constant.
Jesus of Skywalker
That’s not to mention the story itself was extremely compelling and a tale already rather familiar to Roman audiences from so many of their own legends. In this case, a boy from humble origins living in the desert meets an older wiseman in Obi-Wan the Baptist who initiates him, then directly after that individual rises to great prominence fighting against the forces of evil, including utilizing special powers he ultimately comes to possess to help those oppressed under that evil forces’ rule. Just when victory seems assured, the powers that be cast him down brutally. But after he goes away for a little bit, he returns and triumphs not only over those forces, but saves all mankind through his actions and sacrifice. Give him a lightsaber and we’re pretty sure we’ve got a blockbuster on our hands. Or, at least, if Disney isn’t put in charge of it.
In the end, some version of the Hero’s Journey plot line is one that has seemingly appealed to humans as long as we’ve been writing stuff down, ESPECIALLY if the given tale is based on a true story. Thus, Jesus’ life story, whether embellished or not we leave to you, either way was extremely familiar and appealing to those who heard it then and now.
In the end, Rabbi Berel Wein on JewishHistory.org sums up this section of the rise of Christinaity very succinctly, stating, “In a world dominated by Roman cruelty — where the majority of the world’s population were slaves or vassals to Rome; where the idea of human freedom (as we in the Western world know it) was unimaginable – if you spoke in terms of Jewish moral values (love, fairness, honesty), albeit minus the lifestyle that embodies it, you had a ready audience. If you said that slaves are as good as masters; that the poor are as good as the rich; that the weak are as great as the mighty; and that God loves everyone; and that everyone could make it to eternity – people were going to listen.”
Thus, no surprise, once Christianity was very explicitly opened and targeting the non-Jews, from here, Christianity began to spread rapidly, although perhaps not as rapidly as the New Testament writings seem to indicate, with there seeming to be some exaggeration here.
For example, in Acts, Peter supposedly converts three thousand people on the day of the Pentecost, and not long after another five thousand more, with allusions to similar numbers later. The problem with this is there were only about 20,000-75,000 people in all of Jerusalem when Peter was giving these sermons. Thus, most religious scholars think converting 8,000 of them in two sermons, plus multitudes more after, is a bit of an exaggeration by the authors after the fact. As that kind of growth rate would have seen Christianity become the dominant religion in Rome massively quicker than its extreme rise already made happen. We’ll get into the math of it all a bit, because the numbers side of this, despite being math, we promise is actually really interesting and a powerful life lesson embedded.
Secret Sauce- The Immutable Power of the Dinner Party to Change the World
But going back to their nuts and bolts method of spreading, while parts of the New Testament talk of mass conversions, this really wasn’t necessary, nor how the church actually spread beyond perhaps the initial seeding surge from such speeches in new regions. So how did they do it if mass conversions weren’t on the table?
Well, they put something else on the table- Enter the humble dinner party.
In a time before any Christian group had a central church, people’s homes were where they gathered. These so-called “house churches” were where those from all backgrounds and genders were invited to participate as equals and partake in communion.
This was something Jesus himself seems to have modeled not just in the Last Supper, but frequently in his ministry before- Essentially getting together, singing, praying, good discussion and, of course, good food. By accounts we have today, this was seemingly with everyone pitching in what they could in something of a potluck type scenario, similar to what many church groups still do today, though often now at a central church building rather than at people’s homes. Although, as the author of this piece can attest from growing up with Christian missionary parents, regular dinner gatherings in people’s homes for similar purposes is still a common practice alive and well. Humans of all eras love to socialize turns out.
Back in the early going with the Christian church, this also would have encouraged more to come who didn’t have much in the way of food as well, and also as previously alluded to, another key facet of these gatherings was trying to make sure everyone’s needs were met in all ways, not just at the dinners, whether someone was a declared Christian or not. Further, if one of the brethren could not attend, one of the jobs of the appointed deacons (from the Greek for “servant” and leaders of the house churches) was to make sure those who couldn’t attend still had the benefit of the food, so making sure they got a portion of it whether they could come or not.
On this note, Pliny, writing to Emperor Trajan about the Christians in 112 AD describes these dinner meetings among Christians and some of their early core doctrine, and even mentions not just women, but slave women serving as leaders. As for the source of Pliny’s information in the letter, he states it was from former Christians he induced to worship the Emperor instead. He states they told him, “they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit, fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food — but ordinary and innocent food….”
Note on this last remark of being “innocent food”, there were rumors at the time that Christians were resorting to cannibalism owing to the practice of eating bread and drinking wine symbolic of Jesus’ body and blood which was shed for all mankind in their theology.
To confirm all Pliny was told by these former Christians, he also states, “Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition.”
As for the typical gathering day, according to the aforementioned second century Christian Justin Martyr, “Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead.”
That said, some have speculated it may have actually been Saturday by our reckoning, because at the time, the marking of the start of Sunday for the Jews was sundown of Saturday, and there are plenty of references of these gatherings occuring at night, which was something of a necessity given many of the Gentiles involved, including the slaves, worked all day and so would not have been able to attend until well into the evening.
On this practice of often meeting at night, seemingly in secret in their homes, also as alluded to, this for a time garnered some amount of suspicion among the pagan rulers as to what they were getting up to, from the alleged cannibalism and rumors of being a sex cult, thanks to women and men gathering together, to that early Christians practiced incest, with this one presumed to derive from their practice of calling each other “brother” and “sister” and more or less treating everyone as family regardless of blood relation.
Going back to the Sunday meetings though, this probably wasn’t the only time they commonly met. As noted in Acts where it states, “And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.”
The power of all this when applied to cities everywhere can be summed up in the Epistle to Diognetus written in the 2nd century AD, “They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all others; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. … They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death and restored to life. They are poor yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things and yet abound in all; they are dishonored and yet in their very dishonor are glorified. They are evil spoken of and yet are justified; they are reviled and bless; they are insulted and repay the insult with honor; they do good yet are punished as evildoers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.”
“Meeting Physical Force With Soul Force”
Speaking of hatred, one thing that some argue hindered the spread of Christianity and others argue encouraged it, was the persecution the early Church had to endure. As to the former argument, it’s that nobody wants to be tortured and brutally executed, so it likely stopped some from joining up and others who joined to ultimately renounce their Christianity in the face of such. As to the latter argument that it helped the spread of Christianity, you had this group who predominantly were doing nothing but loving everyone and exhibiting extreme integrity, who were then being brutally tortured and executed for no good reason, and despite this were still rejoicing and being loving, forgiving, and even blessing their very torturers and executors.
In essence, the Christians took what we might call the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Civil Rights movement approach of refusing to compromise their core values and refusing to back down or be quiet, but otherwise responding to brutality and oppression with largely messages of peace, love, forgiveness and unity. A classic way to win the masses to your cause, and it’s no coincidence that this partially Christian led branch of the Civil Rights movement utilized this same tactic early Christians did.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, who by the way was a Baptist Minister, would elaborate, “But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force” and to “continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.”
In the end, you fight back with force in cases like this, it just makes you and your people the enemy, not just to those in power, but now to the masses as well. Of course, these masses may already at first hate you because they have been taught you are evil. But either way, the only way to win in this case is to physically dominate your oppressors and the masses. Essentially a true violent revolution. Not a great plan if you’re the extreme minority.
However, if you respond to violence and hate and oppression with peace, love, kindness, and forgiveness? While it may not end well for you on an individual level, the other humans watching, or even doing it to you, are certainly going to notice. Nobody likes to see themselves as the bad guy and if your supposed enemy won’t back down, but also won’t fight back with force, and also is just being loving towards you in response to your hate and violence? Well, even the worst of humans will quickly start to look at themselves in the mirror and say, “Hans… are we the baddies?”
And even if they don’t, an awful lot of people watching it all unfold will and you’ll ultimately convert many of them to your cause instead of making enemies out of them by physically fighting force with force as, for example, the non-Christian Jews largely did under Roman occupation. Those Jews lost. Brutally. Again and again and again, and made countless enemies along the way in the process. Jesus and his Jewish followers did not, very quickly coming to rule Rome by this style of passive, and loving resistance.
At the end of the day, a universal precept of life coming through in all of these events- you can’t always change someone’s heart or mind. But if hearts or minds are going to change, it’s almost always through genuine kindness. Which, once again, just so happened to be one of the cores of Jesus’ message- love and kindness to all, no matter what.
“Hew Out of the Mountain of Despair a Stone of Hope”
As for more specifics of this persecution, it should be noted that contrary to popular belief, it’s not totally clear there was any widespread persecution of Christians in the earliest church, though there were absolutely isolated pockets of it. But as for the mass persecution, thanks to Rome being so accepting of all religions, the first evidence of mass persecution didn’t occur until the reign of Decius in the 3rd century.
As for the isolated persecution before this, perhaps the most famous instance of this was documented by Senator Publius Cornelius Tacitus, who was born a couple decades after Jesus’ crucifixion and, in his Annals (115 AD) in chapter 44 of book 15, he discusses Christians being targeted as a scapegoat by Nero. Stating,
“…Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind… Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.”
To explicitly highlight here, even Tacitus, an opponent of Christianity, states the brutal treatment for seemingly no good reason resulted in the masses watching feeling not hatred for the Christians, but compassion for them, and a dislike for Nero instead because of the persecution.
But on the whole, in the first couple hundred years, the Christians were first treated more or less as a branch of Judaism, which was highly protected in some ways. And later as their own thing, a rather unique religion in a number of ways, with some finding their practices, to quote Tacitus, “abominations”, but otherwise mostly let be. Although it seems like at least some of these “abominations” were centered around the aforementioned rumors of cannibalism, sexual depravity, etc.. Thus many were persecuted for these misunderstandings and the societal threat the rising rather bizarre cult seemed to offer in allegedly spreading such practices.
But to try to clear up the misunderstandings where there was persecution, Justin Martyr would write in his letter to Emperor Antonius Pius, “we demand that the charges against the Christians be investigated. If these are substantiated, we should be justly punished. But if no one can convict us of anything, true reason forbids you to wrong blameless men because of evil rumors. If you did so, you would be harming yourselves in governing affairs by emotions rather than by intelligence. . . . It is our task, therefore, to provide to all an opportunity of inspecting our life and teachings. . . . It is your business, when you hear us, to be good judges, as reason demands. If, when you have learned the truth, you do not do what is just, you will be without excuse before God.”
As for this lack of widespread persecution, beyond Rome being very accepting of most all religions, it probably also helped that in this early going Christians went out of their way to follow Roman laws thanks to Jesus’ famed “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” speech.
Paul would also write in Romans “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended… But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason…. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.“
And if you thought that passage has been wildly abused by anti-revolutionaries under oppressive rulers, you’d be correct. A classic example of taking a quote out of context. Nuance in everything and context, particularly the reason Paul was saying that and to whom at the time, matters.
But suffice it to say for the point here, the early church was mandated to be good Roman citizens insofar as it didn’t interfere with their faith, and otherwise just do the right thing not just because the state might require a given thing, but because doing the right thing is never the wrong thing, even if it costs you your life according to these early Christians.
Further, the early church writers seem to have gone out of their way to absolve Rome of things like the crucifixion of Jesus, explicitly blaming the Jewish leadership instead, despite the execution having to be for a crime against the Roman state, as at the time the Jewish leadership did not have the ability to dole out capital punishment.
Thus, while the early Christian church were seen as quite odd in their beliefs and practices, they weren’t otherwise making trouble, so seemingly for much of the early going they were largely ignored outside of specific isolated instances like in the Nero example and various misunderstandings about what they got up to in their secret nightly gatherings.
“Shake the Foundations of Our Nation Until the Bright Day of Justice Emerges”
Things changed, however, during the reign of Decius, where he attempted to enforce a measure of conformity in the 3rd century AD, requiring all citizens take part in various state religious ceremonies. None of this was specifically targeting Christians, just meant to target anyone who wasn’t overtly showing their support of Rome and the Emperor via taking part in animal sacrifice to their gods and Emperor.
Unfortunately for a subset of the Christians of Rome, this conflicted with their beliefs, so they refused. And because they had no such ancestral protection of their religion to be exempt from such sacrifices, it subjected them to the death penalty. In contrast, any Christian willing to take part in the Roman civic religion were allowed to continue to practice their own religion as well. And it is noted by famed “Father of Church History”, Eusebius, who lived through all this that many did just this, participating in Roman rites to follow the law, and then back to their faith right after, which the Roman rulers were completely fine with these Christians and they were allowed to otherwise continue to practice their Christian faith. It wasn’t the Christian faith that was the problem inherently, it was the perceived disloyalty to Rome.
As the aforementioned Celsus would write in his The True Word, the Christians “must make their choice between two alternatives. If they refuse to render due service to the gods, and to respect those who are set over this service, let them not come to manhood, or marry wives, or have children, or indeed take any share in the affairs of life; but let them depart hence with all speed, and leave no posterity behind them, that such a race may become extinct from the face of the earth.”
Emperor Decius was just taking this notion and running with it.
That said, an irony in all this, as noted by second century Christian scholar Tertullian in his Apology, the ones who refused to take part in emperor worship still typically overtly supported the emperor. Stating, “We pray, too, for the emperors, for their ministers and for all in authority, for the welfare of the world, for the prevalence of peace, for the delay of the final consummation.” He also notes that they self regulate their actions and of their community to try to be only good deeds and be boons to Rome and the World, and that “The tried men of our elders preside over us, obtaining that honour not by purchase but by established character. There is no buying and selling of any sort in the things of God.”
From here, there was a relatively brief period of widespread persecution, but this was quickly followed by the so-called “Little Peace of the Church” during the reign of Gallienus, followed by the Great Persecution which finally did specifically target the Christians, lasting just under a decade under Diocletian.
As a little fun fact- it was largely because of Diocletian and his persecution of the Christians that we have the dating system we have today of BCE (Before Common Era) or BC (Before Christ), and CE (Common Era) or AD (Anno Domini, meaning “in the year of the lord”). We’ll have more on the ironic story of how a guy who hated Christians accidentally gave us a brand new dating system based on their faith in the Bonus Facts at the end of this video.
“Free at last! Free at last Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
Going back to the widespread targeting of and persecution of Christians in Rome under Diocletian, this was allegedly in part a response to advice Diocletian received at the oracle of Apollo at Didyma. Previous to this, he had purportedly only advocated banning Christians from such things as the military and ruling body. Afterward, he switched to an escalating policy of persecution to try to get Christians to worship the Roman gods. This began simply via seizing Christian’s property, destroying their homes, burning all Christian texts, etc. When this sort of thing was ineffective, they progressed to arresting and torturing Christians, starting with the leaders. When that didn’t work, Christians began to be killed in various brutal ways including occasionally being torn apart by animals for the amusement of the masses (Damnatio ad bestias). Just good family fun.
However, none of this had the intended effect. Quite the opposite, which all leads us up to Constantine who pretty much directly after changed everything by not only legalizing Christian worship, but also joining up, or at least claiming he did (there is some debate on whether he was a practicing Christian or simply using the religion as a political tool).
But as for Constantine and his conversion, some point to his mother supposedly being a Christian and influencing him on this which, again, Christianity was insanely popular with the ladies of the era, so maybe. But either way, he allegedly had a vision during the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, which ultimately secured him the title of Emperor of the West. Eusebius writes,
“About the time of the midday sun, when the day was just turning, he said he saw with his own eyes up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it which said, ‘By this conquer.’ Amazement at the spectacle seized both him and the whole company of soldiers which was then accompanying him on a campaign he was conducting somewhere, and witnessed the miracle.”
In the aftermath Constantine allegedly became a Christian thanks to him crediting the Chrisitian god with his victory, though still allowed more traditional Roman religious practices, even among many of the high officials of the empire, with the edict that “Let no one disturb another, let each man hold fast to that which his soul wishes…”
That said, things did change as his reign progressed, with by the end some of the Roman temples being torn down, though this could have been more just in response to declining numbers among supporters of the pagan gods. Whatever the case, Constantine also granted certain privileges to Christians, from tax breaks to financial backing, to placing Christians in high positions in the empire, to having basilicas constructed. Reflecting more Christian values at the time, there were also subtle changes in the empire like more humane treatment of certain prisoners.
However, while things were now safer in Rome for the Christians, this, ironically, resulted in a huge spike of persecution of Christians in Rome’s enemy in Persia. Particularly allegedly after Constantine himself wrote to Shapur II encouraging him to provide protection for Christians in his realm, which allegedly saw Shapur go completely the other way supposedly writing his military leaders to target the Christians as “They inhabit our territory and agree with Caesar, our enemy.”
In all this, while some point to Constantine as the reason Christianity would very quickly thereafter dominate Rome and beyond, this isn’t really accurate at all, as we’ll get into shortly when we talk about the mathematics of it all. Even if Constantine had continued the oppression of the Christians it is likely absolutely nothing would have changed in their growth and by the end of the century they likely would have ruled Rome anyway.
What if the Color Blue to You Isn’t the Same Color Blue to Me?
What Constantine did do that changed Christianity forever, however, was call together various leaders of the churches in the First Council of Nicaea. This was the first major attempt to codify what it meant to be a Christian and define the orthodoxy for the entire religion, something that previously was generally done by individual groups within the Church, with a variety of beliefs connected, not really any different than today with countless denominations with sometimes similar and in other cases wildly different beliefs, but generally all still considering themselves some form of Christian regardless of what any other groups of Christians say.
This diversity and disagreement on exact beliefs is reflected in the earliest writings we have surviving today as previously noted. But also explicitly mentioned, for example, when Paul wrote in First Corinthians, “it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brethren. What I mean is that each one of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’”
While Paul appealed to all Christians to “agree and that there be no dissensions among you… that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” evidence seems to be that the descension from here only grew, and by the 4th century something needed to be done about it. Or, at least, Constantine certainly thought so.
Given that it all concerned matters near and dear to people’s core beliefs, the debate at the council was apparently rather contentious, with one account even having one church leader, Arius, allegedly getting slapped upside the head at a certain point. Further, he and his supporters were exiled after the council owing to their version of Christianity being incompatible with what the rest of the bishops agreed on should be included in church doctrine. Or, at least, what most of them agreed on. Three more of the bishops Theognis, Eusebius, and Maris signed off on it all, perhaps not wanting to be exiled themselves, but their conviction in it was ultimately doubted and they were later exiled anyway by Constantine, the same as Arius and his other supporters.
Among countless things they sorted at that gathering was the squabbling in the early Church over whether Jesus was divine or just a prophet or God. And further from there whether he was always divine or because of his ministry and work on Earth made divine by God. As will come as no shock to you if you’ve ever been to most branches of Christian churches today, the Nicene council decreed Jesus was not only devine, but always so.
From here for a time there was a lot more cohesiveness on church doctrine, relatively speaking anyway, and those who didn’t follow it like the Gnostics and countless more were soon to be considered heretics for their beliefs and ostracized. For example, the gnostics’ sin seems to have been placing their emphasis on the message of Jesus in terms of the philosophy, rather than anything particularly otherwise special about the individual himself beyond what he was teaching. Whereas the Pauline Christianity, which won out, placed heavy emphasis on Jesus’ execution and subsequent resurrection and what that all meant for Christians.
The Most Powerful Force in the Universe
This all finally brings us to the math of it all, which I promise is interesting or we wouldn’t be putting it in here. So stick with us.
As to the numbers, while it’s notoriously difficult to nail down precise figures for how many Christians there were at a given time, it’s generally estimated that around 300 AD, just before Constantine, around 10% of the Roman populace considered themselves Christian, which would be roughly 6 million Christians. By the end of the century, this had risen to around 50%.
All thanks to Constantine, right?
Well, in fact, as noted, this was probably more correlation, rather than causation. And the rate of conversions actually seemed to slow markedly after Constantine did his thing.
But either way, it really is just basic math, not too dissimilar to compounding interest in finance. If you crunch the numbers on that growth rate from Jesus and his core followers kicking it all off to 30 million by the end of the 4th century, it only requires about a 3.5% increase per year from the time of Jesus’ crucifixion to then. Thus, at no point is any mass conversion necessary and at a certain point even just population growth within Christian families can cover a decent portion of that. You just need a good core message that appeals to people- in this case being kind of loving and promise of salvation after death- good way to deliver that message- in this case via very personal dinner gatherings where those invited are treated as family and given food and aid should they need it- and let the magic happen from there-,in this case not requiring any magic at all. Noteworthy even in modern times we see similar with, for example, up until a couple decades ago the growth rate of the Mormon Church from inception with about 6 members in 1829 through the early 2000’s with 16 million followed this trendline almost exactly.
For more specifics, if you started with a mere 200 Christians around 30 AD around the time of Jesus’s crucifixion, and added 3.5% compounding annually, by year 100 you’d have about 2,000 Christians. By 150 AD, 12,000. By 200 AD, 70,000. By 250 AD, 387,000. By 300 AD, about 2.1 million. Just a few decades later by the 300 year mark that 2.1 million will have risen to 6 million. And by 400 AD nearly 70 million, though this final number would have been about double the estimated actual Christians at this time, again fascinatingly indicating the growth rate actually slowed markedly after Constantine stopped oppressing the Christians and even offered tax breaks and the like if people joined.
Granted, on this fluctuation and precise numbers, clearly the growth rate wouldn’t remain constant and a variety of real world factors were likely involved from decade to decade in growth rates. But the point of all this being, there was no remarkable mass conversion growth rates needed, and even when Constantine’s efforts should have seen even more mass conversions, it seems the growth rate actually slowed, rather than accelerated.
We’ll leave it to the sociologists to figure out why. But as for the math- the power of compounding interest in its full glory. Invest early kids!
But to sum up the Roman side of all this, author of The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark, would state, “Christianity served as a revitalization movement that arose in response to the misery, chaos, fear, and brutality of life in the urban Greco-Roman world. . . . Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent problems. To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachment. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fire, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services. . . . For what they brought was not simply an urban movement, but a new culture capable of making life in Greco-Roman cities more tolerable.”
“It Becometh a Tree, So That the Birds of the Air Come and Lodge in the Branches”
From here, Christianity continued its seemingly rapid growth spreading throughout the Western world and beyond. Even as the leaders of the various branches of the Church at times in history, shall we say, strayed far from Jesus’ original message and used their church more as a means for personal power and conquest, rather than a beacon of love in the world. Or sometimes just as a means of giving bored knights who were running amok in nations something to do to get them out of town as in the Crusades…
That said, the church was still often a boon to society at the local and individual level and continues even through today. For every Spanish Inquisition and Crusade, we have Christian groups and individuals like a John Quincy Adams pushing hard in government to end slavery because it contradicted his faith. With Adams being, according to one contemporary southerner, the “acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.” And, indeed, he ultimately laid the groundwork for what Abraham Lincoln and his supporters did shortly after Adams’ death. Or we have ordained ministers like the aforementioned Martin Luther King Jr. and Mister Rogers utilizing the core message of Jesus in the way they did as a positive force in the world. And, of course, countless millions more who never make any headlines, but through their day to day actions practicing their faith in this way change the world subtly in positive ways.
Going back historically, early monasteries were also centers of education and advancement in science from medical to physics to even botany, helping to teach locals how to better farm their region and making advancements in all manner of areas. Sticking to their roots, the church also often sponsored things like hospitals, inns, orphanages etc, as well as helped to provide food to the poor and those in need during famines in their respective regions.
Of course, as alluded to, once the masses were generally on board and the church became more and more powerful as a political unit, for some among the leaders, they were clearly less interested in the faith itself, and instead how it could be used to manipulate the masses and gain more power, even quite literally sometimes throwing out completely the two commandments Jesus said all the laws of the prophets could be encapsulated, in loving God and demonstrating this in loving even your mortal enemy as yourself. Instead, certain church leaders often whipped the masses up to just go and conquer, pillage, and even murder their enemies instead. And sometimes not even your foreign enemy, just people, even your own literal neighbors sometimes, who thought differently than the leaders wanted.
Noteworthy some biblical scholars claim Jesus accurately predicted this in his handful of parables about the growth of the church. For example, in one of them, he notes it is “like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and put in his own garden. It grew and became a large tree, and the birds of the sky lodged in its branches.”
While there are many interpretations of this, famed theologian and founder of now quite expansive Calvary Chapel which has rapidly grown to over 1,000 churches, Pastor Chuck Smith, would note, at first referring to a preceding parable: “What are the birds? They are the ones, the evil ones, who came and plucked up the seed so it could not take root, could not grow. From this expositional constancy birds are always used in a bad sense in [Jesus’] analogies… or comparisons [in the parables]. So inasmuch as in the previous parable He pointed out, that there were gonna be tares that are going to be growing along with the wheat in the kingdom, He is only further illustrating the same thing, as the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, but somehow it has abnormal growth. It grew bigger than what it really is intended to be… That there will be this abnormal forced thing of man, not representative of the true righteous kingdom of heaven, and it will become a shelter for all kinds of evil purposes, as the church has been used today as a shelter for all kinds of evil purposes…. Jesus is giving a series of parables in which He is illustrating the same truth, or making the same warning all the way along, that the church is not going to be perfect. That there will come into the church evil influences, that will actually permeate themselves through the entire church.”
Which whether that’s a correct interpretation or not, is pretty much what happened once the church became a major power in history, and something that hasn’t really stopped through today.
While, again, countless individuals within the faith then and now still adhere to the core precepts of love God and your neighbor (whether foreign or even people you don’t agree with their lifestyle) and treat all humans as your brother or sister, let’s just say, particularly when the church is being leveraged for political reasons, those doing so almost universally tend to toss that message aside, not at all being the people Mister Rogers knew they could be.
“The Beautiful Symphony of Brotherhood”
In the end, as Jesus requested of his followers, Fred Rogers very much explicitly didn’t care what someone’s nationality was, skin color, race, sexual orientation, if they thought differently than him, or any of it. He had compassion for and loved people just the way they were and went out of his way to help them in what ways he could as his core message, belief, and ministry as a Presbyterian minister. This was the same exact message and way of being that caused Christianity to go from 1 to millions and beyond in just a handful of generations of humans in the face of sometimes extreme persecution. And for similar reasons saw Mister Rogers himself beloved by pretty much everyone because he actually practiced this in a genuine way.
Putting the politics of it all aside, as long as that is still is the predominate attitude and message of the individuals within the Christian faith, one would assume regardless of any of anyone else’s respective beliefs, Christianity isn’t going anywhere any time soon, as it’s a message that, at its core, appeals to most humans from a philosophical and moral standpoint, especially the ones who have seen firsthand why compassion and kindness towards your fellow man is necessary and important to humans humaning as effectively as we can. Which, by virtue of the fact that a large number of humans will always be in the middle or lower classes by definition and have experienced the need for such compassion and aid, is always going to be most humans.
Thus, as long as Christniaity as a whole doesn’t stray too far from those core tenants, it’s seemingly not going anywhere. And if it does stray from those core tenants required by its founder…. Well, is it even actually Christianity anymore? Afterall, as Jesus noted of how his disciples could be recognized, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
In the end, whether tied to a religion or not, never underestimate two things in life- the immutable power of compounding interest to change the world, and the just as powerful ripple effect of genuine kindness, compassion, and unconditional support of your fellow humans, no matter where they are from, who they are, or any differences between themselves and you. Whether divine or not, Jesus’ core message was certainly timeless, simple, and to the point- “love one another” as you love yourself. It’s an idea most of us can get behind. And, well, that was true even 2000 years ago. So people did.
Bonus Fact:
How Animals Tearing People Apart Gave Us Our Date System
Going back to Diocletian and his persecution of the Christians, it is largely because of this that we have the dating system we have today of BCE (Before Common Era) or BC (Before Christ) and CE (Common Era) or AD (Anno Domini, meaning “in the year of the lord”). Prior to the 6th century AD, many Christians who didn’t use an Anno Mundi (in the year of the world) type system relied on Roman dating, either marking dates from the year legend had it that Romulus and Remus founded Rome (753 BC) or by relying on the date system established under none other than the Roman emperor Diocletian (244-311), based on the accession of Diocletian.
Naturally, most Christians even through the 6th century weren’t too fond of Diocletian because of the whole brutally torturing and murdering them thing…. Although jeez, hold a grudge much? That was like a fortnight ago! … But either way, they didn’t want to use a dating system that referenced him.
So how did they change it?
Easter was/is the most important holy day of the Christian tradition, and it was decided at the First Council of Nicaea (AD 325) that it should occur each year on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. In order to forecast when exactly the holiday fell each year, Easter tables were created.
And so it was that in AD 525, the monk Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor was working on his table to determine when Easter fell when he decided to eliminate reference to Diocletian by listing his table’s first year as Anno Domini 532, explicitly stating this was referring to the year directly following the last year of the old Diocletian-based table, Anno Diocletiani 247. How Dionysius came up with 525 years since Jesus was born at the time he was calculating his table (532 years from when the table’s dates began) isn’t clear, but he wasn’t far off the range most biblical scholars today think, with the more modern estimates tending to ring in somewhere between 6 to 4 BC for the actual birth of Jesus.
From here, the Anno Domini system, sometimes called the Dionysian Era or Christian Era, began to catch on among the clergy in Italy relatively soon after and spread somewhat among the clergy in other parts of Europe. Most notably, in the 8th century, the English monk Bede (now known as the Venerable Bede) used the dating system in his wildly popular Ecclesiastical History of the English People (AD 731). Shortly after this, Anno Domini was used officially under the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (AD 742-814) and in the 11th century, it was adopted for official use by the Roman Catholic Church. And that was that.
As for the whole CE thing, the first CE was actually for “Christian Era” and was used interchangeably with “Vulgar Era”, which just meant “ Common Era”, first used interchangeably with Anno Domini in the Latin works of Johannes Kepler in the early 17th century. When “vulgar” ultimately took on a different meaning in English, “Vulgar Era” quickly got phased out in favor of just saying “Common Era” which was handy given the other practice of CE already being “Christian Era”. Naturally this CE meaning “Common Era” and BCE terminology was much more popular among Jews, rather than BC and AD, and by the late 19th century had started to catch on among many other groups for similar reasons.
Today the two things are still interchangeable, but that hasn’t stopped people on both sides waging a Holy War over which to use, seemingly forgetting that the entire point of words and abbreviations and the like is simply to communicate ideas in a way everyone understands what you’re saying. On the one hand, like it or not, the current dating system IS based on Jesus in part. Changing the name doesn’t change that. But also, everybody knows what you’re saying if you say CE too, and if someone doesn’t want to reference Jesus for whatever their personal reason well, who cares? To each their own. More power to you. Names change. People think differently. No need to cry about it. Love one another, remember. It really doesn’t matter as pretty much everyone on either side knows what you’re talking about if you use either one. But I guarantee you will always piss off some from one side or the other if you use one or the other. As we have no doubt done in THIS piece by using BC/AD. You quite literally can’t win in the public sphere on this one. But this isn’t like meters vs feet where one side or the other may not understand if you don’t say both. Everybody understands either way. So it doesn’t matter. Americans say Tomato, the British say Tomato. Nobody cares… Except in Internet Comments. Which, fun fact, sometimes we like to use AD and CE randomly in the same piece here just to watch the world burn… Listen, we don’t get out much. Got to take joy in the little things in life.
Expand for Referenceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_of_Christianity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_of_Christianity_and_Judaism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt
https://www.history.com/news/5-ways-christianity-spread-through-ancient-rome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusebius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great_and_Christianity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_pagans_in_the_late_Roman_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_thought_on_persecution_and_tolerance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arian_controversy
Lessons for Today’s Church from the Life of the Early Church
https://www.history.co.uk/articles/things-you-didn-t-know-about-early-christianity
https://ehrmanblog.org/the-outrageous-immorality-of-early-christians/
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/early-christians-odd-too/
The Earliest Christians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Christianity
https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat55/sub352/item1418.html
What Did Worship Look Like in the Early Church?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_universalism
5 Features That Made the Early Church Unique
https://michaelfbird.substack.com/p/what-was-it-like-to-a-christian-in
https://www.bluffton.edu/courses/humanities/1/celsus.htm
https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1-300/what-were-early-christians-like-11629560.html
The life of early christians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
https://ehrmanblog.org/the-rate-of-christian-growth/
https://bigthink.com/the-past/how-christianity-conquered-rome-through-simple-math/
https://vridar.org/2010/08/27/why-christianity-spread-so-rapidly-to-become-the-main-religion-of-the-roman-empire/
https://religionunplugged.com/news/2022/3/28/this-is-still-a-question-that-scholars-debate-why-did-early-christianity-rise-so-rapidly
https://www.chantrou.net/post/d-100-how-did-christianity-spread-so-fast
Ten Reasons for the Rapid Spread of Christianity, Part 1: Social Factors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Roman_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Roman_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Milan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_background_of_the_New_Testament
https://www.jewishhistory.org/the-spread-of-christianity/
Four Reasons Why Early Christianity Grew So Quickly
How Did Christianity Spread So Fast With the Early Church?
“The Rise of Christianity” by Rodney Stark
https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/the-spread-of-the-early-church-11629561.html
Is There Any Actual Proof Jesus Existed?
The Quest For Jesus’ Foreskin
What is the Difference Between BCE/CE and BC/AD, and Who Came Up with These Systems?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christianity
The Secret to the Early Church’s Explosive Growth (It’s Not What You Think!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertullian
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2024/05/what-was-the-first-religion/
https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/smith_chuck/c2000_Mat/Mat_013.cfm
https://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/christians.html
http://mediterraneannetworks.weebly.com/spreading-christianity-how-a-new-cult-grew-big-in-three-centuries.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/why/starksociology.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus%27s_interactions_with_women
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcan_priority
The post How Did Christianity Go From a Tiny Jewish Cult to Rule the Western World So Quickly? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
With great dictatorial powers, comes a great risk of ceasing to continue to breathe long before your elderly years, with the odds increasing markedly if you also just so happen to make enemies out of not just countless nations of the world, but within a relatively large percentage of your own population through brutality and oppression. Something the Führer of the III Reich was acutely aware of.
As the Austrian champion for World’s Silliest Moustache once said: ‘There will never be anyone in the future with as much authority as I have … I can, however, be removed at any time by some criminal or idiot … No one is safe against some idealist or an assassin who ruthlessly stakes his life for his purpose.’
Everybody with a passing knowledge of WWII history and/or Tom Cruise’s cinematography has heard about the Stauffenberg Plot, the failed assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler conducted on July 20, 1944. But this was just one in a long series of attempted or planned shootings, bombings and poisonings conducted against the dictator. And while efforts began rather quaint starting long before WWII, as you’ll soon see, as the years passed things got spicier and spicier for the so-called German Messiah. So let’s dive into it, shall we?
PART I
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS BEFORE THE WAR
BEER MUGS AND FREEDOM!
The first alleged attempt on Hitler’s life took place on November 4, 1921 in Munich, according to Hitler’s own report in his best seller ‘Mein Kampf’. At the time, the future Führer was still on the rise, a ‘bit player’ in the chaotic political scene of the Weimar Republic – albeit a very vocal one! That evening the National Socialist leader was in fact scheduled to deliver a speech at the Hofbräuhaus brewery. A large crowd had assembled, one that included a number of members of the Independent Socialist Party and the Communist Party, dead-set on disrupting the event.
This wasn’t anything new, and in fact the orator arrived under the escort of 46 Sturmabteilung troopers, also known as ‘SA’ or ‘brownshirts’, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing. While Hitler spoke, some members of the audience heckled him while downing large mugs of beer, and curiously kept storing the empty vessels under the table. After an hour and a half, one of them went all Braveheart and shouted, ‘Freedom!’
At this signal, the protesters began lobbing the empty beer glasses at Hitler. The brownshirts counterattacked, and after a fierce struggle, they were able to corner their adversaries. However, at this point one of the inebriated protesters decided beer glasses weren’t enough and pulled out a handgun, firing two shots that hit the platform where Hitler was standing.
Of course, because the source of the event is Mein Kampf, not exactly a bastion of literary accuracy, some question whether this ever actually happened. However, it doesn’t really seem far fetched given that violence at political rallies – even involving firearms – was the norm at the time. Drunk people, heated politics, and guns not exactly being a great combination for civility. So many historians have been willing to accept the story at face value despite its source.
Now let’s move forward about a decade to January 1932, and travel to the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin.
MY FOOD TASTES FUNKY
At this point, the Nazi Party was clearly on the rise, after securing 107 parliamentary seats in the September 1930 elections. The Party, however, had not yet established a permanent HQ in the German capital, and Hitler used the Kaiserhof Hotel as a venue to meet his acolytes. On an unspecified day in January 1932, Hitler and other Nazi cadres were enjoying a luxurious dinner at the Hotel, while discussing Party policies. One hour after the meal, all dinner guests started suffering from violent stomach cramps and severe vomiting.
Hitler himself did not suffer any symptoms. He was not a strict vegetarian as it is often claimed, but he was a fussy eater owing to his extreme gastrointestinal problems which actually is thought to have been why he went rather loopy towards the end of WWII given the bizarre cocktail of substances he was consuming or being injected with daily, sometimes credited with helping to win the war for the Allies because of it.
This brings us to who would have been the most successful assassin of them all if Hitler had lived another year or two, albeit unintentionally- a doctor by the name of Theodor Morell, who began trying to fix Hitler’s intestinal issues by prescribing him Mutaflor, which was made from the excrement of others and meant to function as a sort of probiotic. But the doctor didn’t stop there, progressing to giving Hitler so-called Anti-gas pills that turned out to have strychnine as a primary ingredient. By 1941 he had Hitler taking 63 different pills containing 92 different drugs from stimulants to sedatives to painkillers at a rate of about 150 pills per week. And just for the cherry on top, he also began giving Hitler daily injections of what he called a special blend of vitamins, but was actually, at least in part, made up of Amphetamines. It was reported that within minutes, the injections would transform the Fuhrer from exhausted and groggy to alert, euphoric and chatty – a state that lasted for several hours afterward. By 1944, in order to get the same effect and ward off other negative symptoms, he had increased his dosage to twice daily of 16cc of whatever the specific cocktail Dr. Morell used, which was a 700 fold increase from when he started.
And with this increasing dependence came the classic symptoms of amphetamine abuse: insomnia, loss of appetite, euphoria, irritability, paranoia, impulsiveness, and wild mood swings – all of which severely affected his ability to make rational decisions in a time of crisis. By April of 1945, while Hitler was holed up in his Berlin Fuhrerbunker as the Red Army closed in on the city, SS doctor Ernst-Günther Schenck remembered being shocked at the leader’s condition, describing him as a “living corpse, a dead soul.” He states, “His spine was hunched, his shoulder blades protruded from his bent back, and he collapsed his shoulders like a turtle.… I was looking into the eye of death.”
Needless to say, given how erratic, mentally unstable, and detached from reality Hitler progressively became as the war went on, and the ramifications of this in his military tactics and leadership, many credit Dr. Morell for inadvertently helping the allies win the war thanks to his efforts to try to solve Hitler’s intestinal issues.
But going back to the alleged poisoning attempt, the Party leader is thought to have avoided the specific dish which had caused the ensuing ‘chunderstorm’ among the rest present. But the big question is: was this a case of food poisoning? Or voluntary poisoning?
There were no casualties, but Hitler himself suspected that the kitchen staff had tried to kill him. Surprisingly, he continued to lodge and dine at the Kaiserhof, although his meals would now be personally supervised by Magda, wife of propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. One of Hitler’s closest friends, German-American businessman Ernst Hanfstaengl, later reported that after this incident the leader would be increasingly mistrustful of any gift involving food.
And when President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933, he hired a trusted cook to take charge of the Chancellery kitchen.
On February 27 of the same year, the Reichstag, or parliament building, was set ablaze by a Dutch communist activist. The Nazis seized the occasion to dismantle what was left of parliamentary rule with the infamous ‘Enabling Act’, formally initiating a dictatorial regime.
As democracy dissolved, plots to eliminate Hitler intensified, but so did security around him. And the first two schemes with a known, named, assassin took place during those crucial weeks.
KILL THE CHANCELLOR!
The first came from Ludwig Assner, a former political rival belonging to another right-wing Party, the Volkisch-Social block. Back in 1924, Hitler had objected to Assner taking a seat at the Bavarian parliament. The seething Ludwig had relocated to Palaiseau, France, plotting his revenge. In February 1933, his plan was taking shape: he would send a personal letter to Hitler, doused in a lethal poison. The deadly missive was stopped in its tracks, however, when an unknown informant reported Assner to Nazi officials. The disgruntled politician eventually was not deemed a serious threat, thanks to a large sum of money in exchange for not posting his letter of doom and letting his animosity go.
During that same February, another group of conspirators was at work, headed by communist activist Kurt Lutter. Their plan was to be enacted on March 4, when the Führer was scheduled to deliver a speech in Konigsberg. Lutter and friends were to gather large quantities of explosives to blow up the speaker’s platform, but unfortunately there was a police informer in their midst. The conspirators were arrested on March 3, but prosecutors never found any explosives and eventually they were all released.
It appears that over the same period German police received dozens of tip offs concerning other assassination plots, which somehow almost always involved showering the dictator with gifts. Gifts such as an exploding pen, for example. Or a bunch of flowers rigged with an acid-spraying device. And perhaps best of all, a rabid dog!
Fanciful schemes rarely come to fruition, but also straight-forward approaches have high chances of failing – such as the attempt carried out by the first, organised anti-Nazi movement to take shape after the Enabling Act. This was a network of professors, government officials, businessmen and military officers, revolving around Doctor Paul Joseph Sturmer, lawyer Nicholas von Halem and communist newspaper editor, Josef Romer.
Von Halem offered Romer some funds for him to hire an assassin, but the editor refused, preferring to carry out the deed himself. Some time in the spring of 1933, Romer walked straight into the Reich Chancellery with a concealed weapon. Unfortunately, he was immediately caught and imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp. His sentence was relatively lenient and he was released in 1939 and resumed his schemes, joining a clandestine communist group called ‘The Revolutionary Workers and Soldiers’.
It appears that he was more of a liability than an asset, as he frequently discarded written assassination plans in unsafe waste paper baskets and in the end the opposition group was dismantled by the Gestapo in February 1942, and Romer was executed on September 25, 1944. Before his execution, Romer was questioned and tortured, revealing intelligence which led to the execution of von Halem, the lawyer, and more than 100 conspirators.
KNIVES OUT!
But let’s not get ahead of our main timeline, for we are still in 1934. From June 30 to July 2, Hitler, Nazi officials and SS officers carried out the infamous ‘Night of the Long Knives’, the arrest and mass execution of the SA. The leader of the brownshirts, Ernst Rohm, was arrested at a spa in Bad Wiessee, an action overseen by the Führer in person. As Rohm and the SA leadership were being transported to a prison in Munich, a platoon of SA troopers showed up to confront Hitler and the SS.
After a tense stand-off, the brownshirts withdrew, only to set up an ambush on the road to Munich. They suspected Hitler would be driving along that road very soon, and placed their machine guns, ready to exact carnage. The crafty dictator, however, smelled trouble, and instructed his motorcade to take a longer, alternative route, unfortunately dodging death for the umpteenth time.
The Night of the Long Knives sparked at least two more assassination plots. The prize for the most ambitious one goes to that of Dr Helmuth Mylius.
Mylius managed to recruit 160 supporters, who then succeeded in infiltrating the SS! This paramilitary organisation was in charge of Hitler’s security, and thus Mylius’ men could get very, very close to their target.
But just like the conspirators had infiltrated the SS, the Gestapo was able to infiltrate the conspirators! The organisation was dismantled in 1935, and Mylius avoided execution only thanks to the protection of his good friend, General Erich von Manstein.
Moving on from there, we have the ‘hit on Hitler’ carried out by one Heinrich Grunow, a former SA and close friend of Ernst Rohm who had escaped the 1934 purge. In early 1936, Grunow approached Otto Strasser for support in his plans. Otto and his brother Gregor had been amongst the early members of the Nazi Party, but had been expelled in 1930. Otto had gone into exile in France, while Gregor had remained in Germany, only to be killed during the Night of the Long Knives. He was not a member of the SA, but the Nazis had taken the occasion of the general carnage to settle some old scores.
According to Otto Strasser’s own memoirs, Grunow wanted Hitler’s death ‘To be more than a mere act of violence – an isolated assassination, a sudden crime of passion. I want his death to mean something to the German people’
Otto agreed to help, providing Grunow with funds and the support of one Eitel Sturm. In May 1936, the two would-be assassins set off for the Berghof, Hitler’s retreat on the Bavarian Alps. Some days later, only Sturm returned to Strasser bearing bad news and good news.
The bad news: Grunow was dead.
The good news: but so was Hitler!
Allegedly… There are some issues with exact details on this one obviously. And more than just the obvious, leading some to question its veracity despite contemporary accounts.
Eitel Sturm reported that on May 16, 1936, he and Grunow had set up the perfect ambush: they had identified a bend on the road leading to the Berghof, where Hitler’s car would be forced to slow down. They then waited patiently, clutching their high-powered rifles. Finally, Hitler’s car arrived, without any escort: it was just him and his chauffeur. As the car slowed down, Grunow leapt to his feet, took aim and fired twice. Sturm let go one more shot, and the figure in the passenger seat, ‘Flopped over into the back of the car, and the chauffeur, panicky, jammed the gas pedal down and the car lurched and skidded out of sight’
With his mission apparently accomplished, Grunow allegedly produced a revolver, stuck the muzzle into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Sturm, having no desire for self-immolation, crossed the border with Czechoslovakia and then rejoined Strasser in France.
So, what exactly happened?
Supposedly that day Hitler should have been driven by his favourite chauffeur, bodyguard, and occasional body double Julius Schreck. But the dictator liked to sit behind the wheel from time to time, swapping places with Schreck. Thus, according to Strasser, the two must have pulled a switcheroo, and the slain man in the back of the car was actually Schreck!
Strasser also wrote how the assassination attempt was kept secret, and Schreck’s official cause of death was reported as sepsis caused by an infected tooth. This version of events was confirmed by a Chicago Times article of the time, according to which ‘They reached a railway crossing and slowed up. As they did so, shots fired with unerring accuracy burst from the roadside. The man in the passenger seat slumped. The wrong man had been assassinated.’
However, several points in Strasser’s story don’t seem to be accurate. For example, Schreck’s official cause of death was not a bad tooth as he reported, but rather meningitis. And Heinrich Brunow did not shoot himself! Records show that he was concocting another assassination plan when he was arrested in January 1940, and died in March 1945 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
ASSASSINS IN UNIFORM
Thus far the Fuehrer had had several brushes with death, but none of them could be really described as a close call. That is until the autumn of 1938, perhaps the period in which organised resistance to Nazism would get closest to shaving that toothbrush moustache off the face of the Earth up to this point.
The man at the centre of these resistance efforts was Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster, deputy head of the Abwehr, the armed forces’ intelligence service. Oster had grown disillusioned with, and indeed horrified by National Socialism following the Night of the Long Knives and the horrors of the Kristallnacht, in which Jewish families, homes and businesses were targeted by carefully orchestrated mob violence. Oster was also concerned at how the Party was seeking to extend its influence over the Armed Forces, an influence they might use to declare war on France and Great Britain. Germany had successfully skirted most of the limitations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI, thus embarking in an impressive rearmament program. But insiders like Oster knew that in 1938 the Wehrmacht was still too undersupplied, understaffed and undertrained to engage in a major European war.
Such concerns were shared by high ranking officers, such as Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, and Minister of War, and by the next in line in his chain of command, General Werner von Fritsch. In February 1938, Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, swiftly ousted them from office with well-orchestrated sexual scandals, replacing them with the more compliant Marshal von Brauchitsch.
After this low-key takeover of the Armed Forces, dissent within the Army grew, with more and more notable figures rallying around Oster and his superior, the head of the Abwehr Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Figures such as former Gestapo official Hans-Bernd Gisevius, and the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Ludwig Beck. With the latter’s support, Oster was able to plant anti-Hitler agents in all 12 military districts of Germany, ready to mobilise the Army against the Nazi government, and, if necessary, take out Adolf Hitler himself!
By August 1938, the Fuehrer had set his sights on Czechoslovakia, and was planning an annexation of the bordering Sudetenland region. Oster, Beck and the conspirators feared that such a move would precipitate an all-out war with France and Britain, one that Germany would surely lose. They reasoned that, if Paris and London opposed Germany’s demands, the bulk of the Army would rise up against Nazi leadership, rather than challenging the Western powers.
Their plan thus developed along two main lines of attack: agents abroad would encourage the British and French governments to firmly oppose the annexation of the Sudetenland; while Army conspirators at home would plan for the occupation of key targets in Berlin: a veritable coup!
General von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt took responsibility for designing the plans for the coup. Two infantry divisions would swiftly move from Potsdam and into Berlin, while an armoured division would block access points to the capital, thus preventing an intervention from the SS. Once the capital was secured, the mutinous army would seize local barracks, the main radio studios, the Gestapo headquarters and the Chancellery building.
Here, a squad led by one Major Heinz, would be tasked with liquidating Hitler’s bodyguard and arresting the ‘main man’. Most conspirators had been convinced by Oster that the end goal would be to force the Fuehrer’s resignation. But both Oster and Heinz were privy to a ‘conspiracy within the conspiracy’: the Major had instructions to provoke a gun battle, one which would result in Hitler’s death!
Now, military action would have surely helped neutralise the SS, the Gestapo and other Party-friendly forces. But Oster believed that for the coup to be truly successful, the Fuehrer had to lose face. And for that, he needed the Western political establishment to take a defiant stand against Hitler’s demands. To this end, he dispatched acolyte Edward von Kleist-Schmenzin to London, with precise instructions ‘Bring me certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked, and I will make an end of this regime.’
Von Kleist met with Sir Robert Vansittart, an under-secretary at the Foreign Office, advising him that Britain’s decisive action could prevent the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Vansittart consulted with Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, who escalated the issue to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The latter held a cabinet meeting on August 30th, but his ministers could not make up their mind: should they oppose Hitler and call his bluff? And what if it wasn’t a bluff? What if Germany was ready to unleash a second war on the European continent? Chamberlain’s cabinet eventually decided to wait and see … a decision which played in the Prime Minister’s hands. An advocate of appeasement, Chamberlain had already prepared the so-called ‘Plan Z’ in his back pocket, a plan to propose a peace deal to Hitler at the very last minute!
Another of Oster’s agents, Theo Kordt, met with Lord Halifax and Treasury Secretary Sir Horace Wilson on September 5, reiterating the message. Should they oppose Hitler, ‘The ‘political and military circles for whom I speak, will take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them’.
Meanwhile, back in Berlin, Ludwig Beck had been replaced by General Franz Halder as Chief of General Staff. Halder would be one of the first commanders to receive orders from Hitler to initiate ‘Plan Green’, the invasion of Czechoslovakia. There would have been a grace period of 24 hours, before Halder was expected to cascade down those orders to divisional commanders. Luckily for Oster, Halder was on his side! So, as soon as Halder would receive those ‘Plan Green’ orders, he and the other conspirators would use those 24 hours to set the coup in motion! And just to be on the safe side, Halder took to attending staff meetings with a loaded pistol, ready to blow Hitler’s brains out if the occasion was right.
But then, history got in the way.
On September 14, Chamberlain set in motion his own ‘Plan Z’, calling for a peaceful solution of the Sudetenland problem. Hitler agreed, but then clamoured for invasion once more at the end of the month. This time Benito Mussolini stepped in, proposing to mediate a conference with Britain and France. The result was the infamous Munich Agreement of September 30, which essentially gifted the Sudetenland to Germany and sacrificed the integrity of Czechoslovakia.
Chamberlain proudly announced he had achieved ‘peace with honour’ and ‘peace for our time’. But this ill-timed policy of appeasement had essentially boosted Hitler’s popularity just when the opposition against him was at its zenith. Oster, Canaris, Halder, and the other conspirators realised that the bulk of the armed forces would not turn against the triumphant Fuehrer, now hailed as a diplomatic and political genius who had “liberated” the Sudetenland without firing a shot. The plotters set their schemes aside, but especially those in the Abwehr would remain vigilant, waiting for another opportunity to strike against the Fuehrer.
Unbeknownst to them, a Swiss seminary student would soon attempt to eliminate Hitler on his own. Remarkably, this young would-be assassin would arguably get closer to accomplishing the deal than Oster and friends!
THE LONE SEMINARIST
Maurice Bavaud was a member of a debate group called ‘The Company of Mystery’, whose discussions frequently focused on the persecution of devout Catholics by the Nazi regime. Bavaud eventually came to the conclusion that Hitler had to go, and formulated a simple plan: he would move to Germany in the autumn of 1938, pretend to be a staunch Nazi and thus gain access to the dictator.
By October 21, Bavaud was in Berlin, carrying a 6.35mm pistol in his pocket, looking for ways to gain access to Hitler. Problem was, his target was not in town at the time, rather he was chillaxing down at the Berghof. The Swiss student relocated to Berchtesgaden, looking for ways to infiltrate Hitler’s residence … but it was too late, as the Fuehrer had just left for Munich!
Bavaud was running low on funds, and he had to find a solution fast! Luckily, whilst befriending Nazis in a beerhall – as you do – he learned that Hitler would soon be attending the annual celebrations in Munich commemorating the failed coup of 1923. Thus, on November 9, 1938, Bavaud posed as a Swiss journalist and gained access to a grandstand seat, overlooking the road where Hitler and friends would soon be marching at the head of a procession. But just when the Fuehrer came within range of Bavaud’s pistol, a wave of right hands shot up in a Nazi salute, thus obscuring the view.
Bavaud hesitated, and by the time his target was again into view, he was already out of range.
The would-be assassin did not desist, however. In the following days he forged two letters of introduction, ostensibly drafted by the French Foreign Minister, hoping they would open the doors to either the Berghof or the ‘Brown House’, the Nazi HQ in Munich. But the ruse did not work, and a completely broke Bavaud had no choice but to escape to France, jumping on a train without a ticket. He was soon caught by a ticket inspector, who escalated the case to the railway police, and eventually the Gestapo.
Maurice Bavaud, however enthusiastic and energetic, was no professional operative, and the secret police found stashes of evidence in his luggage: the gun, ammunition, and maps of Munich and the Berghof. Bavaud eventually confessed, declaring during the ensuing trial that he had acted for the good of humanity and all of Christendom. The confession did not grant him leniency, and the brave Maurice Bavaud was executed on May 14, 1941.
A FLATULENT TARGET
Let’s now fast forward to August 1939 – one month to go before the start of the War. A pair of Munich residents had taken notice of an extraordinary fact. Whenever Hitler was in town, he would have lunch at his favourite restaurant, ‘Osteria Bavaria’, virtually without any protection! The Fuehrer would take a seat in a small private room, separated from the other patrons only by a thin, wooden screen. Our pair of friends noted how the dictator would always order the same menu: hard boiled eggs and mayo, followed by vegetables and pasta, with fruit compote for dessert. The entire meal would be accompanied by a generous barrage of farts, it appears.
Now, these two friends weren’t just any regular Joes hanging about in Munich. Their names were Alexander Foote and Bill Philips, veterans of the Spanish Civil Wars, and double-agents working for both British and Soviet secret services. And it was to the Soviets that they pitched the idea of eliminating Hitler while he was licking the plates clean at the ‘Osteria Bavaria’. Their superiors in Moscow gave them the go ahead, and Foote formulated a plan.
The wooden partition used to screen Hitler’s private room was also used as a coat hanger. And this partition was placed in a corridor, surrounded by stone walls. Foote’s idea was to fill a briefcase with explosives, and hang it to the partition, hidden by the coats. The stone walls would have deflected the force of the blast directly towards the private dining room – ensuring the dictator’s body would be cooked very thoroughly, erring on the charred side.
Foote and Philips, however, missed a key ingredient: the explosives! And having no contacts in town, they could not procure them when they tried. Time for a plan B: Hitler would casually walk in and out of the restaurant, in full view of the patrons in the main dining hall. It would have been easy-peasy for a patron to just pull out a pistol, stand up, and open fire! The two conducted a trial run, as described by Foote: ‘One day Bill stationed himself at the table next to the gangway, and as Hitler approached, put his hand rapidly and furtively into his pocket – and drew out a cigarette case.’
Foote expected for Bill to have been at least tackled to the ground by some SS bodyguard, but nothing of the sort happened. It appeared that Hitler and his entourage felt entirely safe when dining – and tooting – at the ‘Osteria’.
So, what prevented Foote and Phillips from taking action? Once again, it was grand political schemes which foiled the actions of operatives on the ground. In this case, it was the signature of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-aggression Pact of August 23, 1939. In other words: Hitler and Stalin had just become allies in preparation for the invasion of Poland, and the British double-agents were ordered to abort the mission.
PART II
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS DURING THE WAR
Only a few weeks into the start of WWII, Hans Oster had resumed his schemes to eliminate Hitler. With the backing of Admiral Canaris, Oster sought to establish a channel of communication with London. Germany and Britain were now at war, so Oster needed an intermediary and he found one in the Vatican …
VATICAN vs NAZIS
On September 27, 1939, the two conspirators summoned to Abwehr headquarters one Dr Joseph Müller, leader of a silent, anti-Nazi Catholic resistance, and personal friend of Eugenio Pacelli, also known as Pope Pius XII. Müller agreed to cooperate, and act as a messenger with the Holy See. Piloting his own single-seat plane, the newly recruited agent flew to Northern Italy in October, carrying concealed documents for the eyes of the Pope. On October 17, Pius agreed to participate in the plot: he would help Oster and Canaris use the Vatican as a safe ‘dropbox’ to communicate with the British secret services and secure their help in eliminating Hitler and his sidekicks.
Müller would continue acting as a go-between, and Canaris gave him the perfect cover: his official mission would be to travel frequently to Italy and investigate anti-Fascist resistance groups. Under this guise, Müller returned to Rome and met with the Pope’s private secretary, Father Robert Leiber, on November 7.
Leiber informed Müller that the Pope was eager to speak directly to the British, and to propose a peace deal between London and Berlin. This was still the time of the ‘Phoney War’, with little land-based engagements having taken place in the West. But this was about to change, as General Halder informed the conspirators that Hitler aimed to invade France on November 12.
Such an invasion would nullify any chance at even attempting peace talks via the Pope, so Oster and friends redirected their attention again towards killing the big man in charge. If they blew him to smithereens before the 12th, the invasion would be aborted. An official at the Foreign Ministry, Erich Kordt, volunteered to carry out the deed: he was senior enough to have frequent access to the Chancellery and the Fuehrer himself, and on those occasions he was never searched for weapons! Kordt asked another plotter, General von Lahousen to source some explosives, but the officer could not fulfil the order, due to wartime restrictions on ordnance. Kordt resolved to just walk into the Chancellery with a pistol and shoot Hitler at point blank, but Oster deemed the plan too risky.
Eventually, Hitler and his generals decided to postpone the attack in the west until May of 1940, which gave Oster and Canaris more time to reconsider their plans. And they had another reason to regroup: Müller’s activities had been uncovered!
It turns out that Müller had been ratted out by one Herman Keller, who happened to be a Benedictine monk and an agent for the SD, the SS intelligence service. Interesting job description there! Keller’s report made its way both to the SD and the Abwehr, which allowed Canaris to pull a genius move. Before anyone at the SD could take any action, Canaris instructed Müller to file another report, completely made up, describing a plot to remove Hitler from power. This second report implicated two generals, one of which had died in Poland, and the other was a known Nazi fanboy, Walter Reichenau, who would have never supported such a scheme!
Canaris’ bogus dossier muddied the waters enough for the SD and, apparently, Hitler himself, to dismiss any reports coming from the Vatican as utter nonsense. Müller was safe, but Canaris advised him to lay low for a while.
In the meanwhile, Pope Pius XII continued to conduct talks with the British, meeting with Ambassador D’Arcy Osborne in January and February 1940. Osborne related to his superior, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, that the plotting generals were eager to seal a peace deal with London, provided that Germany maintained some of their territorial gains, such as Austria and the Sudetenland. In March, Halifax informed Osborne and the Pope that the British Government was indeed interested, provided that Canaris, Oster and co. would first remove – or eliminate – Hitler!
At this stage, General Franz Halder took a gamble: he attempted to bring on their side the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch! Did it work? Well, Halder was not arrested, let alone executed, so that’s a win … but the Marshal’s loyalties were well defined: ‘What is happening here is sheer treason. Under no circumstances can we be involved in this. We are at war. In peacetime you can talk about contacts with a foreign power, but in wartime soldiers cannot do that.’
After the War, Brauchitsch stated that he had the power to remove Hitler from power, but decided against it, claiming the dictator’s rule was legitimised by popular support
‘I could have had Hitler arrested and even imprisoned him … I had enough officers loyal to me who would have carried out even that order if given by me. But that was not the problem. Why should I have initiated action against Hitler… ? It would have been action against the German people. The German people were pro-Hitler.’
JUST BLOW HIM UP ALREADY!
All conspiratorial strands related to the Vatican eventually fizzled out, but those were not the only plans in motion over late 1939 and early 1940.
As the invasion of Poland was taking place, the Abwehr offices received a message from a General stationed on the Siegfried Line, on the border with France. Baron von Hammerstein-Equord had famously described Hitler and his leadership as ‘filthy pigs’ and a ‘gang of criminals’, so he was eager to rid the face of the earth of such a scourge.
The disgruntled general asked the conspirators at the Abwehr to inform British secret services of his simple plan: he would invite the Fuehrer to visit his formidable fortifications on the Siegfried line, to bolster the garrison’s morale. Once there, the dictator could suffer an unfortunate accident … For example: the detonation of a grenade in a bunker!
Because scheisse happens.
Hitler, however, did not accept the invitation, von Hammerstein was later moved to another post, and eventually made to retire from the Army. It is not clear if the dictator had smelled a rat, more probably he was too preoccupied with operations in Poland. When these came to a swift victory, the Fuehrer did accept another invitation: attending a victory parade in Warsaw, on October 5, 1939.
The Polish Army may have formally surrendered, but numerous officers were still unbeaten. Two of them, General Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski and Major Niepokólczycki, traced the itinerary of the victory parade and prepared two booby traps in advance. And when I say ‘booby traps’ I mean massive underground bombs each containing 125 kg of TNT! A group of soldiers under a junior officer were tasked with detonating the charges, as soon as the Major gave the order.
So, the parade came this close to being livened by a magnificent ‘firework display’, and concluded with the spectacle of Hitler flying high into the sky of Warsaw.
But the Major was held back by German roadblock, and the junior officer on site hesitated: he had instructions to act on his own initiative only if Hitler was indeed at the head of the motorcade. But he had no absolute certainty of this, as it was rumoured that the dictator’s place may have been taken by a senior general instead! Plus, German authorities had previously arrested a number of high-profile Polish hostages, to prevent any seditious activities. Was it worth risking their lives, if Hitler was not in the parade after all? As the officer pondered these questions, the victory motorcade drove by the explosive devices, completely unharmed.
A MAN OF FOCUS
Just some weeks after the missed opportunity at Warsaw, another bomb attack came very, very close to snuffing out the Fuehrer for good. Hitler and his top Party brass never missed an opportunity to visit Munich on November 8th, the anniversary of the failed Nazi coup of 1923. As per tradition, the dictator would deliver a speech, normally around 9pm, at the Bürgerbräukeller, the beer hall in which the coup had started.
This regular pattern was not lost on Georg Elser, a committed communist with the obsession to assassinate the Fuehrer. Elser was a carpenter by trade, and had no affiliations to any resistance movement, no contacts with the Abwehr conspirators and no training as an operative whatsoever. But, much like a certain retired hitman, he was a man of focus, commitment, and sheer will.
Elser’s plan was to plant a bomb in a pillar, right behind the speakers’ podium at the beer hall. And to accomplish this plan, he prepared for an entire year, seeking employment in armament factories and quarries, so he could steal small quantities of explosives, fuses and detonators. In August 1939, Elser relocated to Munch, and spent his evenings at the Bürgerbräukeller. Each night after dinner, he would then hide into a store-room and wait for all patrons and staff to leave the building. Then, at the faint light of a torch, Elser chipped away at the chosen pillar, little by little, night after night, after he had carved a cavity of the right size.
During the days, he worked at building his bomb, which was completed by the end of October. On the night of November 2nd, he installed the device inside the pillar, and on the 7th he set the timer for the bomb to explode on November 8, at 9:20pm.
A perfect plan. What could possibly go wrong?
Weather. Weather is what went wrong.
Hitler arrived in Munich by plane, just in time before a thick fog descended on the city. The Fuehrer intended to return to Berlin that very night, but flying was out of the question. His personal pilot advised he catch the night train instead, which would be leaving Munich at 9:31pm. Hitler had to rearrange his plans at the last minute: instead of starting his speech at the Beer Hall at 8:30pm, he would start at 8pm, and leave at 9pm sharp to catch the train.
Thus, the bomb went off as planned, claiming eight dead and 62 wounded. But the dictator and his closest cronies had already left the building. That night, Elser attempted to cross the border with Switzerland, but was arrested by two border guards, who found his pockets bursting with incriminating evidence: a badge of the Communist party, a photo of the Beer Hall, a fuse … and a sketch of a bomb! The Gestapo interrogated and tortured Elser at length and eventually the ‘lone wolf’ was interned at Dachau and executed on April 9, 1945.
The intelligence branch of the SS, the SD, knew very well that Elser had acted alone, but they glimpsed a propaganda opportunity to link the assassination attempt with British involvement. The perfect opportunity was handed over to Walter Schellenberg, head of SD counterespionage, on the very next day …
You see, a group of SD operatives, including Schellenberg himself, had been meeting with British and Dutch intelligence officers, near the border with the Netherlands, since September of 1939. The SD men had been posing as anti-Hitler conspirators, in a scheme to extract information from the British officers, Sigismund Best and Richard Stevens. Best, Stevens and Dutch officer Lieutenant Klop were due to meet their SD contacts on November 9th, at Velmo, on the Dutch side of the border. Schellenberg thus organised a daring raid, which became known as ‘Velmo incident’: SD agents drove past the border, gun blazing. Klop returned fire, but was shot dead by the Germans. Best and Stevens were arrested, and interned until the end of the war.
Following the incident, not only German propaganda was able to spin the conspiracy theory that Elser was just a British pawn … but the involvement of Dutch intelligence gave Hitler a pretext to later violate the neutrality of the Netherlands.
A VERY BRITISH KIDNAPPING
Throughout 1940 and 1941, the Axis escalated its military engagements, opening more and more fronts across Europe and North Africa. All German generals, regardless of their stance vis-a-vis National Socialism, were expected to fulfil their duties. Being too busy with their ‘day jobs’, Oster and the other high-ranking conspirators had to take a break from their side hustle in plotting.
British forces, however, were always open to any plot, plan and scheme to eliminate Hitler, whether by assassination or kidnapping. A little too open, in this particular case.
In early February 1941, the British Air Attaché in Sofia, Bulgaria, was approached by a local man called Kiroff, who claimed to be the father-in-law of a German pilot called Johan Peter Baur, known as ‘Hans’. Kiroff informed the attaché that Baur had grown disillusioned with the war and the Nazi Party, and thus intended to defect by landing his Focke-Wulf Condor in Southern England. It turns out that this Baur was not some random airman, he happened to be the personal pilot to Adolf Hitler himself! And he intended to defect while the Fuehrer was on board his plane. In other words: Baur was offering to kidnap his employer and hand him over to the enemy!
What could go wrong?!?! Well when the report landed on the desk of RAF Air Marshal Arthur Harris, he informed his superior Air Marshal Sholto Douglas on February 21. The latter authorised the operation, and ordered Harris to put on alert Lympne airfield, in Kent. The two also devised a system of signals to ensure the defector would not be shot down by anti-aircraft fire. Their plans were relayed back to Sofia, and communicated to Kiroff: Lympne airfield would be waiting for Mr Baur and Mr Hitler on March 25!
But March 25 came and went, and no ‘Condors’ landed. April went by, and still no signs of the defector. On May 28, the operation was officially closed by Air Marshal Norman Bottomley.
What happened?
Despite this particular attempt being widely cited, the truth is if Hans Baur had the intention to defect, he must have been a serial procrastinator, as he remained in HItler’s service until the bitter end, and fell captive to the Soviets. More to the point, in 1991 Baur and his third wife were interviewed, and he denied involvement in any plans to abduct the Fuehrer. Moreover, his wife stated that neither she, nor Baur’s previous wives, were Bulgarian.
STALIN’S TURN!
Following the launch of Operation Barbarossa, in June 1941, Hitler found himself in the crosshairs of Stalin, too. But after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Fuehrer spent most of his time at the heavily fortified and heavily guarded ‘Wolf’s Lair’, his headquarters in Eastern Prussia. Thus, the occasions to catch him in the open would be extremely scarce.
As the Axis advanced towards Moscow, Lavrenti Berja’s secret police, the NKVD, reasoned that if the capital did fall, it would be bursting with triumphant Nazi generals, and possibly the Big Man himself. And the occupiers might indulge in organising ballets, theatre shows or other events. An elaborate and rather unhinged plan was concocted in October 1941 to arm ballerinas, musicians and other performers with handguns and grenades, ready to assassinate any high-ranking Nazi in sight.
The spearhead of this army of assassins was a squad of 11 individuals led by classical
music composer Lev Knipper and his wife Mariya Gsriknova. Knipper would exploit his knowledge of the German language and his caches of weapons to get close to, and later assassinate Nazi leadership. If everything else failed, Knipper would sabotage Moscow’s water supply.
The German advance was halted by the Red Army, so Knipper could stick to his compositions. By the end of 1941, he had penned two ‘preludes’ inspired by Iranian folk music … which actually were part of another complicated scheme woven by Berija. Lev Knipper happened to have a sister, Olga Chekhova, who had been living in Berlin since 1920, becoming a successful actress. In the 1930s, Olga had become a covert agent for the Soviets, and it was time to put her to good use … Lev and his wife had to relocate to Iran, a pro-Axis country, with the cover story of researching local music. From there, the couple had to fake a defection, and move to Germany. Once in Berlin, Knipper would reunite with Olga, and exploit her high-ranking contacts to carry out an assassination, potentially Hitler’s!
It is our humble opinion that Berja’s plan made for a great movie pitch, less so for a viable assassination plot. Unsurprisingly, the entire idea was abandoned, and Stalin preferred to rely on less subtle methods to eliminate his archenemy:
Step 1 – Locate the Fuehrer
Step 2 – Send the Soviet air force
Step 3 – Bomb him out of existence.
Thanks to intelligence submitted by British code-breakers at Bletchley Park, Soviet forces learned that Hitler and all his top generals on the Eastern Front would be meeting at the train station in Orsha, Belarus, on November 12, 1941. Twenty bombers attacked the location, but it later emerged that Hitler had not left his Wolf’s Lair for most of November.
On March 22, 1942, Stalin received unconfirmed reports that the German dictator and his generals were in Minsk, Belarus, and the city was heavily bombed. On the 26th, the generals were sighted in Vilnius, Lithuania. Squadrons of bombers promptly pounded Vilnius, too. On the 27th, the Soviets believed that Hitler and his pals had returned to Minsk, and the unlucky city took a second pounding.
And guess where Hitler had been all the time? That’s right, safe and cosy at the Wolf’s Lair! Stalin had to concede that his fellow moustachioed mass-murderer would not make for an easy target. Besides, the ever paranoid ‘Man of Steel’ came to a chilling conclusion: if Hitler were to be killed, he would be replaced by a provisional government, probably run by a junta of generals. And the Western Allies might be inclined to negotiate a separate peace with a non-Nazi military government.
And what if his new, non-Nazi, but still militaristic government was still intent on fighting the Soviets? The Red Army would be facing the entire might of the Wehrmacht, without financial and material support from the West!
In short: Stalin evaluated that it was in his, and his country’s best interest, to keep Hitler alive.
CRAZY TRAIN
The Polish resistance movement, or ‘Home Army’ was not of the same persuasion. Poland had been suffering a brutal occupation, and the resistance had responded in fashion, becoming lethally effective at assassinating, bombing and derailing any target bearing a swastika. Especially derailing trains was something of a Home Army signature move, as they destroyed some 6,000 Axis trains over the course of the war!
In June 1942, the resistance learned that Hitler would be hurtling through Poland on his personal armoured train, the Amerika. More precisely,in the early hours of June 9, it would be travelling on the line connecting Konigsberg – modern-day Kaliningrad – with Berlin. Lieutenant Jan Szalewski of the Home Army was in charge of the operation, leading two fire squads on the ground. Szalewski knew that the Amerika was always preceded by a dummy train, to act as decoy. At 02:45 hours, what appeared to be the decoy convoy sped by.
Quick as a flash, the Polish specialists sabotaged the train line, waiting for the ‘real thing’ to appear. The Fuehrer train soon arrived at speed, flying off the damaged tracks and rolling down an embankment. The carriages were utterly wrecked, but several SS troops had survived: they scrambled out the train and engaged the Poles in a firefight, until the latter retreated.
Szalewski believed to have scored a success, but Hitler’s knack for changing plans at the last minute had saved him once again! It later emerged that he had decided to make an unscheduled stop to meet with the provincial governor of Danzig. And the derailed train was not the Amerika, and likely not even the dummy train, but another military transport. What is sure, is that the Fuehrer was not on board!
TRESCKOW’S BOMBS
The increasingly brutal conduct of German occupation forces in Poland and on the Eastern Front gradually brought more and more officers into the conspirators’ fold. Commanders of the Heer, or land army, were issued orders such as ‘Every officer in the German occupation in the East of the future will be entitled to perform execution(s) without trial, without any formalities, on any person suspected of having a hostile attitude towards the Germans.’
Such draconian measures appalled, among others, General Hermann Henning Karl Robert von Tresckow and his young adjutant, Lieutenant von Schlabrendorff, serving with Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front. The two considered assassinating the Fuehrer as early as the winter of 1941, and Tresckow even sought to bring into the conspiracy his commander, Field Marshal Von Kluge. The latter was ambivalent, to say the least: he had been accepting bribes in cash and land from the Nazi party to remain loyal to the regime, and thus would not take an active role in any assassination attempt. But he reassured Tresckow he would not oppose it, either!
Schlabrendorff from his part did his homework, discovering that a resistance movement had been gravitating around Canaris and Oster within the Abwehr. Furthermore, he found that General Olbricht, Chief of the General Army Office, was highly critical of Hitler’s strategic decisions in the East, and was partial to a good old regime change!
During the winter of 1942 and 1943 conditions on the Eastern Front greatly worsened for the Axis, and many German officers grew tired of Hitler’s meddling in strategic decisions. Tresckow felt that the mood was ripe to attempt an assassination, but first he had to get the dictator out of his Wolf’s Lair. After much insistence, Tresckow succeeded in inviting the Fuehrer to perform an inspection of the Army Group Centre headquarters at Smolensk, to take place in March 1943.
Before that date arrived, Tresckow, Schlabrendorff and other conspirators set frantically to work, laying out plans not only to kill Hitler, but also to seize power in Berlin and put in place a new government, with General Ludwig Beck as head of state.
Initially, the plotting officers considered shooting their Fuehrer, either with a sniper rifle, or at close quarters. Both options were dismissed on practical grounds, as Hitler’s sizable SS bodyguard would have likely foiled such an attempt. Well, how about engaging the SS, and Hitler’s entire retinue, in a large scale gun fight? General Kluge vetoed the idea, as he did not want large groups of Germans fighting each other. Another suggestion was to ‘jump’ the dictator during the welcome meal. Kluge vetoed again, finding it uncouth to kill a man whilst he had his dinner.
Eventually it was up to Tresckow to come up with the right idea: planting a bomb on Fuehrer’s plane, for it to explode on the way back from Smolensk, while flying over territory held by enemy partisans. This would have allowed the conspirators to blame the Soviets, whilst forming a new, legitimate government.
Next, Tresckow had to source the right material: he needed a compact, yet powerful explosive; a reliable fuse; and a silent timer. All these items were provided by a man at the Abwehr, Baron von Gersdorff, who discreetly pilfered stock captured from the British Special Operations Executive.
Finally, the plotting officer obtained designs of Hitler’s personal plane, to identify the best spot in which to plant the explosive device. This plane, by the way, was the same Focke-Wulf Condor piloted by the same Hans Baur we already discussed in the alleged kidnapping! But unlike that attempt, this was not a bogus one!
Tresckow and Schlabrendorff wracked their brains, trying to find a way to place the bombs on the closely guarded Condor. And they came up with a genius solution: they would wrap the devices in a gift parcel, and would claim it contained two bottles of Cointreau, famously square in shape. They would then find an excuse to hand the ‘gift’ to a member of Hitler’s entourage.
Back in Berlin, General Beck, Admiral Canaris and Colonel Oster were dealing with arguably the most delicate elements of the entire plot: how to ensure a quick transition to the new government, whilst neutralising the potential reaction of the SS and Hitler’s more fanatic supporters. To achieve this, they needed the support of the Reserve Army, a large corps stationed inside the Reich tasked with training and internal security functions. Very conveniently, the deputy commander of the Reserve Army, General Olbricht, had already pledged his support to the conspirators. Olbricht’s direct superior, General Fromm, refused to join the conspirators, but crucially did not betray them, nor opposed them – which was just as good!
Olbricht had conceived another masterstroke, to ensure the Reserve Army could be used to achieve the goals of the coup. The General had warned Nazi leadership of the risk posed by the large number of forced labourers within German territories. With their authorisation, he conceived a series of plans to make good use of the Reserve Army and quash a potential uprising of said labourers, plans which were named after elements and characters of Wagnerian operas, such as ‘Rheingold’, or, more famously, ‘Valkyrie’. Needless to say, these contingencies were in fact blueprints to seize control of the government, and could be activated directly by the heads of the Reserve Army if Hitler were to be incapacitated.
Of course, there was the ever present risk of SS troops thwarting the intervention of forces under the control of the conspirators. Enter another key player in the plot, General Fellgiebel, who would be in charge of seizing all signal stations and telephone exchanges, to control the narrative around Hitler’s demise and isolate his most loyal henchmen. Fellgiebel would also be entrusted with distributing a message to the German people, informing them that their Fuehrer had been assassinated by a rebellious cabal of Nazi Party cadres, and that the Army was now taking over the Reich.
So, the big day came: on March 13, 1943, Hitler and his retinue visited Army Group Centre HQ in Smolensk for a briefing with Field Marshal Kluge and General von Tresckow. During the formal lunch that ensued, Tresckow struck up a conversation with a member of the entourage, Lt Colonel Brandt, and spun him a big fat lie … Tresckow had lost a bet with some Colonel in service at the Wolf’s Lair, and thus had to pay a price: two bottles of Cointreau! Would Brandt be so kind as to fly them back in the Fuehrer’s Condor?
Brandt fell for the ruse, and unwittingly carried the bombs on board, primed to detonate 30 minutes after take off.
But, as usual, Hitler’s insane luck came to the rescue. Tresckow expected Brandt to carry the parcel with him, but the unwitting dupe placed the devices in the cargo hold instead. As it happens, a fault in the heating system of the hold caused temperatures to plummet during the flight, and the cold environment prevented the fuses from functioning properly. When news reached Tresckow and Schlabrendorff that the Condor had landed safely at the Wolf’s Lair, they immediately sent a code word to their allies in Berlin to abort the coup. But what if Brandt opened the package? It would have been obvious that someone had tried to assassinate the Fuehrer! Tresckow phoned Brandt, who assured him that the ‘gift-wrap’ was still intact and unopened. Elated, Tresckow explained that there had been a mix up, that doofus of his adjutant had given Brandt the wrong parcel!
This Brandt must have been one of the chillest Nazi officers around, as he agreed to hold onto the package, until Schlabrendorff came to collect it the very next day. Of course, he exchanged it with two actual bottles of Cointreau!
Tresckow and his team were not demoralised, and kept their eyes open, looking for other assassination opportunities. And one came along, almost immediately after their failed aeroplane bombing. Tresckow learned that Hitler was due to deliver a speech at the Old Armoury in Berlin, on March 21, 1943. The event would be followed by an exhibition of captured Soviet weaponry.
Tresckow mobilised one of his acolytes, Abwehr officer Rudolf von Gersdorff, the man who had supplied the devices for the previous attempt. Gersdorff was a veteran of the Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front, and therefore perfectly suited to act as tour guide for the weaponry exhibit – the perfect cover!
Gersdorff scoped out the Armoury on March 20, and soon came to a conclusion: the location was too large and too well guarded for him to plant a device. The only alternative was for him to carry the bomb in his pocket, and stand beside the Fuehrer when it went off. Gersdorff was ready to sacrifice his life!
At 1pm on March 21, Hitler opened up the ceremony by delivering his speech. Gersdorff waited patiently for him to finally shut up, before activating the 10 minute fuse of his bomb. As the dictator stood down from the podium, Gersdorf approached him, to guide him through the exhibition. According to the program, the guided tour should have lasted 30 minutes, but the impatient Fuehrer rushed through the halls of the Armoury, while a desperate Gersdorff attempted to slow him down. It was all futile, and apparently Hitler cleared the museum in less than a minute!
Gersdorff had followed Hitler in the street outside the armoury. As an explosives expert, he knew that in the open air the blast of his bomb would be greatly reduced. And if he botched the attempt, he risked compromising all his friends at Army Group Centre! With just a few minutes to spare, the would-be bomber rushed into a toilet and deactivated the fuse.
A CATWALK FOR HITLER
Tresckow’s conspiracy ring suffered another blow when, on April 5, 1943, Abwehr officer Hans von Dohnanyi was arrested by the Gestapo. This was not related to the assassination plots, rather to unauthorised currency transfers organised by Donhanyi on behalf of Jewish families he was protecting.
Nonetheless, his superior officer was Hans Oster, a leading figure in the whole conspiracy! As a result of the investigation against Dohnanyi, Oster was demoted to a reserve unit, and then placed under house arrest.
Around the same time, General Ludwig Beck had to undergo surgery to treat his stomach cancer. Beck and Oster were vital cogs in the entire plan, especially when it came to securing power in Berlin. In August of 1943, Tresckow ‘pulled a sickie’ and went to Berlin to redraft the ‘Valkyrie’ plan accordingly. The tenacious conspirator could now rely on a new recruit, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
Stauffenberg had become disillusioned with the regime after witnessing the extent of the losses suffered on the Eastern Front, a result of Hitler’s insane war of annihilation. As other officers in Tresckow’s circle, the colonel was also sickened by the war crimes perpetrated by the SS, police units and regular armed forces at the Nazi Party’s behest.
While serving in the North African theatre, Stauffenberg had suffered crippling injuries, losing one eye and one hand. He had therefore been transferred to desk duties, serving with the Staff at the Reserve Army
So, Tresckow and Stauffenberg drew up meticulous timetables, detailing the three phases of ‘Valkyrie’:
Phase one – after Hitler had been assassinated, the Reserve Army would receive instructions to stay in alert, ready to quash an uprising.
Phase two – the commander of the Reserve Army, General Fromm, would sign orders for his men to round up the SS and the Gestapo, and to capture key power centres in Berlin.
Phase three – the conspirators would broadcast an announcement, imposing a state of emergency and martial law.
Tresckow and his new best buddy made it just on time to finalise the plan, as the former was recalled to the Eastern Front in a combat role. Tresckow could not act any longer as the main leader for the big officer plot, but Stauffenberg was ready to fill in his shoes – and rather enthusiastically so!
The first scheme cooked up by Stauffenberg was to take place on November 16, 1943. On that date, Hitler was scheduled to attend a sort of ‘catwalk’ at the Wolf’s Lair, a showcase of new winter uniforms for the Army. The man selected to model this new attire was Major Axel Bussche-Streithorst, a fine ‘Aryan’ specimen: a two-metres-tall, blond, and blue-eyed war hero – who happened to hate the Nazis! So much so, that Bussche volunteered to sacrifice his life to obliterate Hitler. He would carry a modified hand-grenade in his pocket during the modelling session, activate the fuse at the right time, and then lock the Fuehrer in a deadly embrace.
But luck was, once again, on the Devil’s side: a British bombing raid destroyed the trains carrying the new uniforms, and the catwalk was postponed to February 11, 1944. Bussche was still on board with the plan, but in January he suffered a heavy wound in battle, losing one of his legs. Another male model slash assassin stepped forward, Captain von Kleist, but by then the military situation was so dire, that all plans to show off the new winter uniforms had been shelved.
STAUFFENBERG’S FIRST ATTEMPTS
On June 6, 1944, the Allies staged the Normandy landings, opening another front on continental Europe. The doom of Germany was only a matter of ‘when’, rather than ‘if’. The conspiratorial officers in the Abwehr and the army wondered if it was too late for them to act against Hitler, for them to save Germany from further destruction, for them to atone for the war crimes committed at the Nazi Party’s behest.
Von Tresckow had to relinquish a leading role in the assassination attempts, but was still a source of inspiration for his fellow plotters: ‘The assassination must be attempted at all costs. Even if it should not succeed, an attempt to seize power in Berlin must be undertaken. What matters now is no longer the practical purpose of the coup, but to prove to the world and for the records of history that the men of the resistance movement dared to take the decisive step. Compared to this objective, nothing else is of consequence’
By then, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had been appointed Chief of Staff of the Reserve Army. As such, he would be consulted in person by Hitler and his staff in matters of training and outfitting new units. This appointment had made him the natural choice to conduct the assassination! Stauffenberg knew that he had to take advantage of any occasion in which he would be called to report to the Fuehrer, preferably at the Wolf’s Lair headquarters in Eastern Prussia, or at the Berghof retreat on the Bavarian Alps – the farther away from Berlin, the better!
The colonel also knew that SS guards confiscated all officers’ sidearms before briefings with Hitler, which restricted his weapon of choice to only one option: explosives concealed in his briefcase.
On July 6, 1944, Stauffenberg attended a meeting at the Berghof, carrying plastic explosives in his case. This was just a trial run, which proved very encouraging, as nobody searched his briefcase.
On July 11, the colonel was summoned again to the Berghof, and this time he intended to act! Before attending the meeting, Stauffenberg notified General Olbricht at the Reserve Army, who in turn alerted Erwin von Witzleben, a Field Marshal who had joined the ranks of the conspiracy. Both high ranking officers stood ready to enact the three phases of the ‘Valkyrie’ plan.
However, nothing happened.
You see, the conspirators had previously agreed that they needed to take out Hitler, Himmler and Goering in one go. It was too risky to leave the latter two alive, lest they take the occasion to seize power, and then unleash the SS and Gestapo against the resistance movement. And on that day, the heads of the SS and the Luftwaffe did not show up for the meeting.
On July 15, Stauffenberg was invited once again to confer with the Fuehrer – this time at the Wolf’s Lair – to discuss the deployment of 15 Reserve divisions to the Eastern Front. As usual, the colonel made the trip with a special item tucked under his spare shirt: two kilos of plastic explosive! Unlike the previous occasion, he was accompanied by a fellow conspirator, General Stieff.
The two attended a series of short meetings throughout the day: Hitler was there for most of them, but Himmler and Goering were absent once again. Stauffenberg slipped out of the meeting room and placed a call to Berlin, seeking instructions from his fellow plotters. Crucially, he had left his briefcase behind … Over the phone, Generals Olbricht and Beck discouraged him from carrying out the attack, while another officer, Colonel von Quirnheim simply told him ‘Do it’.
At least some of the officers in the resistance had abandoned the idea of blowing up three high-ranking Nazis in one go: Hitler was enough! And so Stauffenberg returned to the briefing room, ready to ignite the fuse of his device. To his horror, his case had disappeared … and so had General Stieff! The General walked back into the room a few minutes later, carrying the briefcase. Probably it had been a wise move to remove it from the area when Stauffenberg had gone on the phone with Berlin, but now the meetings for the day were drawing to a close, and Stauffenberg would not have the occasion to ignite the fuse.
It was another missed opportunity.
THE ‘BIG ONE’: THE JULY 20 PLOT
But on July 19, Stauffenberg received orders to travel once more to the Wolf’s Lair, and report on the status of those 15 divisions.
On the morning of July 20, Stauffenberg was driven to Rangsdorf airport outside Berlin, where he met with his aide and ally, Werner von Haeften, who would be carrying two explosive devices in his briefcase. Their plan took off at 7am, and landed at Rastenburg, near the Wolf’s Lair, shortly after 10am.
Stauffenberg conducted two routine briefings at 11 and 11:30. He was due to attend a meeting with Hitler’s staff at 1pm, but this was brought forward to 12:30, to allow for an official visit from Benito Mussolini later in the afternoon.
At 12:25, Stauffenberg asked if he could have some privacy to change his shirt, which tended to become soiled due to seepage from his wounds. Nobody could deny such a request to a wounded war hero, and so the colonel was shown to a small room. As we mentioned earlier, Stauffenberg had lost one hand in combat, and so he required help from his aide, von Haeften, to change his shirt.
This was the perfect occasion for Haeften to transfer the two bombs from his briefcase to Stauffenberg’s. The latter was about to activate both devices, when a sergeant walked into the room, looking for the colonel: he was wanted on the phone and in the meeting room! One of those days at the office, apparently!
With the sergeant standing on the doorway, Stauffenberg was able to discreetly activate only one of the bombs, which was placed into his case. The other device remained with Haeften. The conspirator then walked a short distance to the cabin hosting the meeting room, as one Major Freyend offered help to carry his briefcase. Stauffenberg eventually accepted the offer: as they entered the cabin, Freyend unknowingly placed the disguised bomb under the large table in the meeting room, against one of its thick wooden supports.
Hitler opened the meeting on time, and Stauffenberg knew he had 10 minutes before the bomb would go off. He had noticed that the table’s support stood between the bomb and the Fuehrer, but did not have the opportunity to place the device closer to his target. Moreover, one General Heusinger had just asked the colonel to take the floor and deliver his briefing on the 15 reserve divisions.
That was bad timing, as Stauffenberg had planned to slip out of the room just moments before the blast, so as to alert his acolytes in Berlin to activate the ‘Valkyrie’ plan.
An unlikely ally came to his rescue: Hitler himself told Heusinger to continue with his part of the agenda, Stauffenberg’s briefing could wait. It was now or never: the colonel informed Field Marshal Keitel that he needed to answer an important phone call from Berlin, and quietly exited the room. He then walked to the communications room, but of course there wasn’t a call waiting for him. Instead, he reunited with his aide Haeften, climbed on a car, and headed for the exit of the Wolf’s Lair complex.
At 12:42, the bomb went off. A stenographer present in the meeting room, Heinz Buchholz, described the explosion as such: ‘I remember it as a clap of thunder connected with a bright yellow flash and ever-increasing thick smoke. Glass and wood splintered through the air. The large table on which all the situation maps had been spread out and around which the participants were standing – only we stenographers were sitting – collapsed. After a few seconds of silence … shouts and screams of pain arose’
At 12:44, Stauffenberg and Haeften made it through the first checkpoint on the way out, but by the time they got to the second set of gates, the alarm had already been raised. The Wolf’s Lair had been sealed, and the sergeant on duty would not allow the two officers through. Stauffenberg was a master of improv, however: he entered the sergeant guardhouse, picked up the phone and rang his acquaintance captain von Mollendorff, adjutant to the Wolf’s Lair’s chief of security. The colonel insisted that he had to reach the Rastenburg airfield immediately, as his own commander, General Fromm, was waiting for him in Berlin. The ruse worked, and the conspirators were allowed through the gates.
By 1:15pm, Stauffenberg and Haeften had taken off. As they flew towards Berlin, they were certain that Adolf Hitler was reduced to a mangled, charred body. That part of the plot had been taken care of, now they had to activate the ‘Valkyrie’ plan and launch their coup …
Meanwhile, at the Wolf’s Lair, the Fuehrer was very much alive, having gotten away from the blast with minor wounds. As usual, an uncanny luck had protected him …
The force of the explosion had been deflected away from him by the thick oak support of the table. Four participants to the meeting had died, nonetheless, and the Fuehrer acknowledged his extraordinary luck to secretary Christa Schroeder: ‘The heavy table leg diverted the explosion. The stenotypist sitting near me had both legs blown off. I had extraordinary luck! If the explosion had happened in the bunker and not in the wooden hut, nobody would have survived it. But haven’t I always anticipated that happening?’
It was clear from the start to everyone present that a bombing attack had just been perpetrated. As it was clear that the only individual missing from the meeting room was Claus von Stauffenberg. Suspicion against the colonel was solidified when sergeant Adam, a phone operator, confirmed that Stauffenberg had indeed popped by the communications room … but had not received any call from Berlin! And then there was the testimony from the other sergeant, the one who had walked in on Stauffenberg when he was supposedly changing his shirt. It did not take much brainpower to realise that the colonel and his aide were the culprits!
Orders were immediately dispatched to the Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin, to intercept and shoot down Stauffenberg’s plane. Luckily, the orders were intercepted and suppressed by one of Stauffenberg’s sympathisers, Major Georgi.
That order was not the only frantic communication to be broadcast towards Berlin from the Wolf’s Lair after the blast. But all radio traffic to the capital had to pass through four repeater stations, all of which were shut down by a group of signal officers under General Fellgiebel, one of the key conspirators.
Fellgiebel was also the first member of the plot to learn that Hitler was still alive. But despite being a communications officer, he somehow lacked in that department … At 1:15pm, he phoned his colleague General Thiele in Berlin, relaying a very ambiguous message: ‘Something fearful has happened. The Führer is still alive.’
And then he hung up.
Thiele was confused. What was going on?
Had Hitler survived the bombing? That was not ideal, but it was still worth launching the coup, with the excuse of restoring order …
But what if the bombing had been aborted at the last minute? In that case, ‘Valkyrie’ had to wait!
Thiele informed General Olbricht, whose role was to mobilise the Reserve Army to take control of key locations in Berlin. Faced with such ambiguity, Olbricht decided to wait for Stauffenberg to return to the capital. This was a fatal decision, as it wasted precious time for the effective conduct of the operation. In the meanwhile, Hitler had already ordered Himmler to mobilise the SS, the SD and the Gestapo to suppress a potential insurgency.
At 3:45pm, Stauffenberg landed in Berlin and immediately phoned Olbricht, to confirm what he believed to be true: Hitler is dead, my dear General. Have you started that little power grab of ours? The colonel learned in horror that no, nothing had happened and that the Fuehrer may still be alive. Nonetheless, there was no turning back at this point: Valkyrie had to be activated!
Stauffenberg then was driven to the Bendlerblock, the war ministry compound, to join other high-ranking plotters and coordinate operations. Olbricht was already there and had finally decided to act: he stepped into the office of his superior, General Fromm, and informed him that Hitler was dead. He had to sign the orders to initiate Valkyrie!
Fromm was dubious. He placed a call to the Wolf’s Lair and demanded to speak with Field Marshal Keitel. His reply was ‘There was an assassination attempt, but fortunately it failed. The Führer is alive and was only slightly injured.’
Until that point, Fromm had been sitting on the fence. But upon hearing the news, he decidedly sided against the conspirators, accusing them of treason. For all his shouting, Fromm was alone against the conspirators, and Olbricht and Stauffenberg placed him under arrest. Command of the Reserve Army was entrusted to another officer, General Hoepner, and the Valkyrie orders were promptly issued.
Next, General Witzleben broadcast another set of orders to all headquarters throughout the Reich and occupied territories, aimed at seizing control from the SS and other party loyalist organisations: ‘An irresponsible gang of Party leaders, far behind the front, has tried to exploit this situation to stab the hard-pressed army in the back and seize power for its own ends. In this hour of supreme danger the Reich government, to maintain law and order, has proclaimed a state of emergency and has entrusted to me both supreme command of the armed forces and executive power in the Reich’
Many things had gone wrong thus far in the plan, but the worst was yet to come. And that ‘worst’ had a rank and a name: Major Otto Ernst Remer, commander of the Grossdeutschland Guard Battalion. Remer had received orders to seal the roads into Berlin and surround SS barracks. Smelling something fishy, he dispatched one of his lieutenants to the Ministry of Propaganda to gather intelligence. The young officer returned with news that Goebbels himself had just spoken to Hitler, who was very much alive – albeit not so kicking due to some wooden splinters in his legs.
Remer realised that a coup was underway! He assembled several SS units and headed towards the Benderblock, from where the orders had been issued. A short, but intense firefight ensued, pitting the SS against the conspirators. During the battle, some of the plotters managed to escape, while others were arrested. Stauffenberg was badly wounded in his left arm, while the ambivalent General Fromm was released from custody.
Now Fromm was in a sticky situation: he had opposed the plot at the very last moment, but had known about it for a long time, and done nothing to prevent it. To avoid being implicated, he ordered the immediate execution of the ringleaders of the Valkyrie plot.
Stauffenberg, his aide captain Haeften, General Olbricht and his deputy colonel von Quirnheim, were marched into the courtyard of the Blenderblock, and executed by firing squad.
That was only the beginning of the brutal repression that ensued. The aftermath of the failed assassination attempt and subsequent coup would require a full-length video of its own, so we will only cover the main consequences here.
At 1am on July 21, Adolf Hitler spoke on the radio, reassuring the German people that he had survived an assassination attempt. A simple step which effectively put an end to any remaining resistance. A wave of arrests followed, with 7,000 individuals being seized by the Gestapo, of which 4,980 were executed.
Among them, General Fromm, whose efforts to distance himself from the plot were eventually fruitless. The ‘spiritual leaders’ of the resistance movement, Abwehr spymasters Wilhelm Canaris and Hans Oster were hanged in 1945.
As per the man who had arguably done the most to set the ‘Valkyrie’ coup in motion, General von Tresckow, he decided to take his own life on July 21, 1944, while on the Eastern Front. These were his last words to his loyal adjutant Schlabrendorff: ‘The whole world will vilify us now, but I am still totally convinced that we did the right thing. Hitler is the archenemy not only of Germany, but of the world … God promised Abraham that He would not destroy Sodom if only ten righteous men could be found in the city, and so I hope for our sake God will not destroy Germany’
In other words: the entire plot may have failed, but at least the conspirators had shown the world that not all Germans had bought into Hitler’s murderous lies, and were willing to resist.
Sadly, however righteous Tresckow, Stauffenberg and friends had proved to be, their valiant yet doomed efforts had the effect of consolidating the grip of the Nazi Party over the regular armed forces. The newly appointed head of the Army’s General Staff, legendary General Heinz Guderian, imposed that all officers now formally join the Party.
Those who emerged triumphant from the whole ordeal were Heinrich Himmler and his SS troops. They had proved their loyalty to the regime, and as a result the organisation was greatly expanded. Moreover, Himmler was given command of the Reserve Army after Fromm’s execution, which effectively consolidated all security forces and internal troops under his command.
But what if the assassination had actually succeeded? The Allies were doubtful it would have resulted in the desired regime change. A July 27 report from the US Office of Strategic Services, OSS, read: ‘There was no indication that the fighting spirit of the German Army had been impaired … The common soldier may actually experience a certain upswing. He may even believe that the defeat in the East was due to treason rather than faulty German strategy and Russian superiority … ‘It can now be assumed that the Nazi leadership is committed to a fight to the finish and will not hesitate to make Germany a battlefield.’
OPERATION FOXLEY
Despite the failure of the July 20 plot, and the subsequent OSS assessment, part of the Allied forces did consider assassinating the Fuehrer themselves. More specifically, we are referring to the British Special Operations Executive, or SOE, the elite force in charge of conducting daring sabotage raids in Axis-occupied Europe.
These plans were codenamed ‘Operation FOXLEY’, to be coordinated by Major H.B. Court. In November of 1944, Court handed in an extensive report to the SOE council, detailing his suggested plans to eliminate the head of Nazi Germany.
Much of these plans stemmed from the interrogation of a 19-year-old ‘grunt’, Private Obernigg, who had been captured on July 19. Obernigg had served as a guard at the Berghof, Hitler’s retreat on the Bavarian Alps. The young soldier sang like a canary, providing a wealth of information on the Berghof’s security measures, Hitler’s habits and location of SS posts. Based on this intelligence, Major Court concluded that the dictator would be at his most vulnerable whilst chilling at his retreat.
It emerged that Hitler liked to take solitary morning walks, from 10 to 11am every day, on his way for breakfast at his favourite Tea House. After indulging in milk and toast, the Fuehrer would be picked up by a car and driven back to his residence. Court worked out that an SOE team could be parachuted into the woods surrounding the Berghof. A sniper team could pick off Hitler while walking to the Tea House. If that failed, another team would blow up his car on the way back, by shooting a PIAT anti-tank weapon.
Now, the problem was finding the right men to accomplish the deed. Infiltrating a British operative may have been tricky, so Court considered employing a Czech, Slovak or Austrian resistance fighter. This setup was similar to Operation ANTHROPOID, the assassination of Himmler’s deputy, Reynhard Heydrich, conducted by Czech and Slovak agents in Prague on May 27, 1942. The hit had been a success, but the reprisal had been brutal, with the town of Lidice – and its inhabitants – being completely wiped from existence. With this precedent in mind, who would have risked conducting such a high profile action?
Court considered a Plan B.
When not at the Berghof, Hitler was at his most vulnerable whilst travelling on his personal train, previously the ‘Amerika’, now rebranded the ‘Branderburg’. Court knew that the train was routinely serviced in Salzburg, Austria, where a team of six French female forced labourers were in charge of cleaning it.
According to the FOXLEY report, these young ladies were not only
‘Approachable’
But also
‘Dateable’
So, a strapping SOE operative could date one of them, and convince her to slip some poison into the train’s drinking water supply! Court had even identified a poison – cited only as ‘i’ in the report – whose effects would be delayed by six days, therefore removing all suspicion from the maintenance team.
This plan was eventually scrapped, as it emerged that the French cleaners were only in charge of the train’s exterior, and had no access to the water tank.
Even if the SOE toyed with assassination plans until early 1945, Operation FOXLEY was cancelled, for a variety of reasons.
First, the SOE council feared that killing Hitler would make him a martyr, hardening the German’s resolve to fight on under new leadership.
Second, the Allied’s strategic objective was to impose an unconditional surrender upon Germany. To do so, they had to demolish Germany’s military strength, rather than seeking an early solution to the war.
Which takes us to the third reason. The best way to defeat Germany in the field, was to leave Hitler in charge! As noted in the part about Hitler being a raging substance abuse addict by the end of the war, with all the symptoms that went with it, not to mention that even before his mental and physical state had deteriorated he was never exactly what we would call a military mastermind. His poor strategic decisions and meddling in military matters had been doing more harm than good to the German war effort. Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Thornley had eloquently expressed this point as early as October 9, 1944:
‘As a strategist, Hitler has been of the greatest possible assistance to the British war effort … his value to us has been the equivalent to an almost unlimited number of first-class SOE agents strategically placed inside Germany. Although the military situation has been temporarily stabilised on the western front and the German army appears to have regained cohesion, Hitler is still in a position to override completely the soundest of military appreciations and thereby help
the Allied cause enormously … From every point of view, the ideal end to Hitler would be one of steadily declining power and increasing ridicule.’
FINAL ATTEMPTS
So, let’s get back to homegrown, would-be assassins. Enter Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production.
By mid-February 1945, Hitler had permanently retreated to his bunker under the Chancellery building in Berlin, waiting for the Soviet onslaught. During an air raid, Speer found himself in a shelter with one of his deputies, Dietrich Stahl, head of the main committee for munitions. According to a later testimony by Stahl, Speer revealed that Hitler had given him instructions to destroy all of Germany’s infrastructure and manufacturing plants before they fell into Allied hands.
Speer despised the order, and had come to despise the Fuehrer himself. Thus, he revealed to Stahl his idea to eliminate not only the dictator, but three of his underlings: Himmler, Goebbels and Martin Bormann. The plan allegedly involved dropping poison gas shells into the ventilators of the Chancellery bunker … but exactly what type of shells? As a munitions expert, Stahl could help with sourcing the right type of ordnance! Stahl made some enquiries, and found that gas shells would actually need to explode before releasing their poisonous payload. And the explosion would have likely shattered the ventilation ducts, thus dispersing and nullifying the effect of the toxic agent.
Speer concocted another plan: simply pumping some kind of poisonous gas through the ventilation system. For it to succeed, the air filters had to be removed, and instructed the bunker’s chief engineer Johannes Henschel to do so. Henschel was not in on the plot, but Speer convinced him to remove the filters nonetheless, claiming they were malfunctioning. Unluckily for Speer, the entire ventilation system was overhauled, and its ground-level shafts were replaced with well-guarded tall chimneys, making it impossible to drop the gas.
Speer eventually abandoned the idea of targeting the well-secured bunker. According to Stahl, he tried to secure some weapons to ambush Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann and assassinate them in a good old shootout. But as the Reich crumbled into the dust, it became impossible for the munitions expert to securely deliver those firearms.
After the war, it was ascertained that Speer had indeed challenged Hitler’s authorities, by refusing to devastate German infrastructure. And the Minister himself confirmed to the Allies that he had indeed considered poisoning the Nazi leadership. But his claims, as well as Stahl’s, should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they may have been an attempt to soften their sentences at the Nuremberg trials.
This takes us to the last assassination attempt against the life of Adolf Hitler, Chancellor and Fuehrer of the III Reich. At around 3:30pm, on April 30, 1945, a desperate individual managed to not only infiltrate the Hitler Bunker, but also convinced Hitler to take a capsule, which just so happened to contain cyanide. This would have likely killed the Fuhrer eventually. But the hero of the hour, presumably considering how many attempts Hitler had survived over the years, decided to make sure the deed was done this time, putting a bullet through Hitler’s head.
That individual was, of course, Hitler himself.
Expand for Referenceshttps://www.everand.com/read/658687852/The-Hitler-Assassination-Attempts-The-Plots-Places-and-People-that-Almost-Changed-History
https://www.everand.com/read/363350568/Hitler
https://www.everand.com/read/238629449/The-Story-of-the-SS-Hitler-s-Infamous-Legions-of-Death
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp70-00058r000100060050-9
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp75-00001r000100010011-4
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp70-00058r000300030063-6
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp70-00058r000200150037-3
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/hitler-assassination-plan/
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/hitler-assassination-plan/source-1/
https://brill.com/downloadpdf/book/edcoll/9789047424574/Bej.9789004171268.i-292_007.xml
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For anyone sitting in gridlocked traffic on the way to a soul crushing job surrounded by other humans nattering on all day about their TPS reports as you truly internalize the pointlessness of everything because we’re all going to die and everything we ever said or did will be forgotten someday, you may at some point find yourself daydreaming about the life of a lighthouse keeper- kicking back, enjoying the sounds of the ocean waves, and, similar to with your current job, periodically checking the light is still on. But, you know, the light in the lighthouse, instead of the ever dimming one in your soul… And otherwise enjoying peace and quiet in a stress reducing environment. But does this bear any resemblance to what it is actually like to be a lighthouse keeper? Just what do such individuals get up to throughout their days and nights historically and in more modern times?
Well, put on your galoshes and rain slicker, prepare to go positively straight jacket mad, and let’s dive into it all, shall we?
To begin with, what exactly life looked like for a given lighthouse keeper varied throughout history as you might expect, with the earliest known lighthouse-like facilities popping up possibly as far back as 2000 BC in Kuntasi, India. Better documented lighthouses emerged starting around the 5th century BC in Greece, and perhaps most famously of all the 3rd century BC’s Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the so-called Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and for a time the tallest structure ever built at somewhere in the ballpark of 118 meters or just shy of 400 feet.
However, as we don’t really know what they specifically got up to in these early lighthouse keeping jobs, or even exactly how they maintained their flames or the like, other than people were definitely in charge of keeping the flames flaming at given times, we can’t really say much here. Other than to note these early lighthouses seemed more purposed to mark the entrance of ports rather than to warn ships of reefs or other such things that might cause them to be forgotten quicker than had they not found themselves on a sinking ship and pressing need to figure out how to breathe underwater. However, fast-forward a couple thousand years to the so-called “Golden Age of Lighthouse Keeping” and things get a lot more interesting, and better documented.
Unsurprisingly, with the rise of mass international trade, as the nations and merchants of the world began sending ships all over the globe, a pressing need for beacons both for navigational purposes and to help avoid areas dangerous to ships became extremely apparent. And so it was that lighthouses began lighting up more than Willie Nelson all over the place along common trade ports and routes, though not without some hiccups in the beginning.
As for some of the hiccups, as you can probably imagine given the massive power of the ocean to assert dominance over things made by man, designing buildings that could withstand even the day to day rigors of being right on the ocean, let alone needing to weather the weather wasn’t easy in many locations, such as the rather famous example of the lighthouse at the Eddystone Rocks in the English Channel. The first attempt at a lighthouse there was secured on a rock via 12 giant iron stanchions, but it lasted only four years before a storm in 1703 ripped it and its keepers from its foothold, washing away all traces of the structure and them from history. Six years later John Rudyard managed to design a brick and concrete core structure with wood on the outside that managed to last a few decades before it was also destroyed in a storm and its keepers likewise forgotten for all time. Finally, John Smeaton designed a new tower lighthouse completed in 1759 that lasted over a century and introduced a number of innovations that became common in lighthouse design, including using a type of lime concrete that could set while immersed in the ocean, use of marble dowels and dovetail joints to help hold the stone blocks together, and tapering the thickness of the structure inwards as it rose to help reduce the wave impact force. Engineer Robert Stevenson would later build on these ideas as well as add some of his own that would proliferate throughout the world of lighthouse construction in the late 19th century, including incorporating a rotating light and alternating colors via unique shuttering systems to allow people to distinguish which lighthouse they were seeing based on the light signature.
In any event, beyond considering what a given lighthouse in a given location might have to deal with in terms of such abuse that was totally from the lighthouse falling down the stairs and not because of its oceanic partner’s violent temper and general salty personality, the height of the lighthouse was also a great consideration owing to the curvature of the Earth so-called “scientists” would have you believe is a thing when, in truth, everybody who’s anybody knows there is an ice wall surrounding the outermost parts of the Earth that keeps the oceans contained, with this wall unfortunately nearly impossible to reach owing to the fact that NASA and their lizard overlords are closely guarding it….
Also helping to keep up the “spherical Earth” ruse were lighthouse builders throughout history who claimed they had to use various calculations to determine the height a given lighthouse needed to be given the typical vessel of a region, with larger ships needing more warning of a given danger or the like.
Speaking of visibility, this now brings us to the most important element of all in the structure- the light itself, which has evolved massively over time. The earliest more modern lighthouses that emerged after Medieval Times tended to use candle illuminants, wood, or coal as their light source. In the late 18th century, improvements were made via special oil burning lamps, in particular the Argand lamp which helped create a more steady and, critically, mostly smokeless flame via the way it controlled airflow. As its fuel, things like whale, olive, or vegetable oil became the standard for lighthouses for almost a century starting in the late 18th century until one John Richardson Wigham came up with a much brighter gas lamp which, when it was first installed in the Baily Lighthouse in Howth Head in 1865, was about 4 times brighter than its predecessor oil lamps. An upgraded version he put in 3 years later was, for whatever it’s worth according to famed scientist John Tyndall, about 13 times brighter than any other light on Earth at the time.
Going back to before Wigham’s gas, all of these other light sources, however, even with reflectors trying to direct the light, were not actually terribly bright and could be easily masked by various common weather conditions at distances they’d otherwise be visible by approaching ships.
Enter French physicist Augustin Fresnel in the early 19th century with the biggest leap of all in lighthouse lighting technology. The full details of how his various lens designs actually work is beyond the scope of this video, but you can check out one of our main authors here, Gilles Messier’s, video on the subject: The Fresnel Lens: The Invention That Saved a Thousand Ships on his phenomenal channel Our Own Devices. But in a vastly oversimplified nutshell, Fresnel’s lens comprised of numerous pieces of specially cut glass that would surround the light source and direct the captured light in the specific direction they wanted it, seeing an initial almost 3-4 fold increase in brightness off the same light source. For reference here, with an open flame light, only about 6% of the light is projected in the horizontal direction you want for this application in a lighthouse. But with the early Fresnel lens designs, this was bumped to about 20%, and with further refinement to the lens apparatuses ultimately all the way up to an astounding 83%, wasting only 17% of the light produced.
Of course, electric lights came to replace the burning type, and in more modern times the LED variety has trumped all for its reliability, possible brightness, and ability to get rid of any moving parts via the ability to pulse on and off in any direction and in different colors with simple computer controllers and programming.
This all finally brings us to the lighthouse keeper, who, while on the surface it may seem like they just have one job- keeping the light going, this isn’t correct at all. This was just the most visible job and there was an awful lot that went into even just that.
So what was the daily life of a lighthouse keeper like?
For starters, in the early going of the golden age of lighthouse keeping, keepers tended to either work alone or, if they had a family, their family would help out in their duties. In some cases it would even become a generational family affair, such as the famed Knott family of lighthouse keepers in Britain whose family began tending a lighthouse in Kent in 1730 and didn’t stop tending some lighthouse until 1906.
But diving into the nuts and bolts of it all, contrary to popular perception, while there are exceptions at some locations, the lighthouse keeper often had separate living quarters from the lighthouse itself. And, historically at least, these homes were generally big enough to accommodate an entire family as, by nature of the job, the lighthouse keeper tended to not really be able to venture far from the lighthouse, not even for vacation in many cases. 365 days a year the light had to be kept burning and, if foggy out, fog horn blowing or explosive charges set off at set intervals.
As to a given lighthouse keeper’s schedule, this was historically entirely up to them as long as they did those two tasks of lighting and blowing as needed. This was not as simple as you might think, however. For example, the 1858 edition of lighthouse keeper guidelines in the U.S. was 87 pages long and included 131 tasks that needed done regularly to maintain the light of a Fresnel lens apparatus alone. Things like keeping the window glass clean, polishing the optic apparatus, and maintaining the rotating apparatus, for example potentially winding up the clock-like mechanism used to rotate the lights, once that became a thing. For reference, these rotating systems used something of a grandfather clock-esk mechanism of weights that extended down the center of the lighthouse and needed rewound multiple times per day.
Then there was maintaining any other buildings on the grounds, like their home quarters etc. This was all a bit more difficult than in most areas, as anyone who’s ever lived next to the ocean knows both from how quickly mold and moss can overtake everything, to how quickly paint battered by the sea can wash away. The paint part was eventually considered extremely important owing to colors and patterns on the lighthouse being used to help sailors identify which lighthouse they were seeing, as well as helping it stand out on the horizon or the lighthouse’ backdrop in daylight.
James F Sheridan, who was a boy when his father was maintaining the Saugutuck Light in the early 20th century writes of this, “Things that I remember mostly about his duties were, there seemed to always be a paintbrush in his hand. ….. The government put great stock in painting. They painted and they repainted and they painted, until paint usually built up so it had so many coats there was no sharp edges at all anymore. Not such a thing as a sharp edge in any corner of a piece of wood. It always had a curved edge.”
Summing up all this with regards to the tower, 20th century lighthouse keeper Maxwell Gertz would elaborate in slightly more modern times, “We had two big air compressors in the engine room that was for the foghorn. … And then there was three generators and a big bank of batteries. … So all those machinery had to be serviced, and oil had to be changed constantly. … Plus if anybody knows living around the water, that painting and deterioration of the buildings around the water is more so than inland. Plus the light had to be maintained. … Well that all had to be polished and kept right up to–oh boy. Oh, every day there was a man up there [who] had to check it out to make sure that the light operated properly…and that the lens were clean and all the brass. You had a lot of work on the inside. The tower, it seemed like it was forever in need of attention inside because of the condensation.”
Moving on from there, the keepers also had to be extremely self-sufficient, given they often lived in remote locations and left to tend the lighthouse for long stretches of time without any outside human contact and limited supplies. Unsurprisingly where possible, they tended to try to grow their own food to supplement their supplies, though in many locations being right next to the salty sea and/or otherwise on a giant rock wasn’t exactly ideal location for a garden. To get around the issue in these types of locations, they’d often bring in good soil from the mainland and make smaller container gardens.
On all this, late 19th century lighthouse keeper William Norgate writes in a letter to a friend of his new profession, “having to do everything that wants doing ourselves. It is surprising what I have had to put my hand to, I had a lot to learn, but it is the variety of work that keeps it from getting monotonous. It is half-sailor, half-bushman with all sorts of trades mixed with it.”
Williams also states in his logs receiving supplies and mail approximately once a month by passing ships, and occasional visits to the mainland for himself and his family. In his case, there was another family on the island he and his wife lived, but he also writes, “It is very lonely for Lizzie; for although we live close to one another, she scarcely ever sees or speaks to anyone but myself. Of course there is no fear of quarrelling being like this, but I think she carries it too far. The Boss’ people seem very nice but are much like herself, likes to keep at home.”
Then there was logging everything, which, typically being government jobs, over time became more and more of a time suck. Logging use of resources, ships passing, weather, daily activities, etc.
But wait, there’s more! The lighthouse keeper was also expected to keep an eye out for any ships in distress and entertain any visitors who came by, not exactly always a comfortable thing on the latter given these were often complete strangers and you were otherwise devoid of any way to call for aid should they not be friendly. All while endlessly trudging up and down the sometimes many flights of stairs of the lighthouse carrying needed resources to maintain the light which, for reference when using coal as the burning source, could include carrying upwards of a ton of coal per day to the top.
Going back a bit to the design, the lighthouse itself would have some sort of lantern room at the top of the structure, then classically a service room below where the fuel and other such supplies would be kept. This is also sometimes called the Watch Room, as it is where a lighthouse keeper might stay for extended periods to keep watch to save from having to go up and down the stairs all night. There would also often be a platform outside of the room to facilitate cleaning of the windows of the Lantern room from the outside as well.
Going back to the Lantern room and the service room being right below it stocked with fuel, the job of the lighthouse keeper was not just to keep the flame going, but also to make sure it didn’t get out of hand, with lighthouses occasionally burning down totally being a thing. Such as in 1755 at the Eddystone Rocks where one Henry Hall was tending the light when the roof of the tower somehow caught on fire, in the process dripping molten lead onto poor Hall’s head and body and some of it somehow getting into his mouth and down his throat as when he died 12 days after this event, the physicians examining his body reportedly found 200 grams of lead in his stomach.
Speaking of things that could kill you in lighthouse keeping, there was also always the risk of storms as well as just general getting to and from your lighthouse. For example, consider the case of the first lighthouse ever built in what is now the United States, located in Boston Harbor, Massachusetts on Brewster Island, which first lit up in 1716. George Worthylake was assigned as the lighthouse keeper there, but in 1718 after attending a sermon in town, he, his wife Ann and their daughter Ruth, as well as their servant George Cutler, a friend name John Edge, and a slave named Shadwell were rowing back to the island when their canoe capsized and they and all their hopes and dreams promptly died, becoming microbe and fish feces.
Just two weeks later, Robert Saunders, John Chamberlin, and a man simply called Bradduck were tasked with maintaining the light, but on their own trip to the island, their boat also capsized, with Chamberlain and Bradduck both likewise becoming fish and microbe feces. We can only assume Robert Saunders’ response to this was something to the effect of “There Can Be Only One!”
Incidentally, this particular lighthouse was also the last to be staffed in the United States until one Sally Snowman, after a couple decades maintaining it, retired on December 30, 2023 at the age of 72, though noteworthy most of her job at this stage of the game was simply to be there to entertain any visitors to the historic lighthouse.
Going back to the dangers of it all, we come to the madness. As to what caused it and the common idea of “mad as a lighthouse keeper” which was very akin to the notion of “mad as a hatter”, it’s generally thought there were several contributing factors from often extreme isolation, regular interruption of proper sleep patterns (which is astoundingly detrimental to all manner of health factors, including mental health- see our video What’s the Best Way to Get Great Sleep According to Science), monotony of the job, to, eventually, regular exposure to mercury.
As for the mercury, once it was found that the rotating apparatuses functioned vastly more efficiently with much less need for winding if floated on a pool of mercury instead of something like a chariot wheel and bearing system, this became very common. As one lighthouse keeper, Handel Bluer, states of one of the issues with this, “The waves do run up the side of the lighthouse and the mercury trough will be vibrated so much that the mercury will splash out. So then you have to go up there with a dustpan and brush cleaning up the mercury – you put it in a jar and then clean it. You put it in a shammy leather, hold it over a container, then squeeze the leather hard as you can – and the mercury will go through the pores of the leather, but the dirt will stay behind.”
Needless to say, regularly handling and potentially breathing in mercury vapors isn’t exactly conducive to one’s mental health as is referenced in the aforementioned phrase “Mad as a hatter”. The leading theory as to the origin of that phrase is that it refers to a genuine condition that began afflicting certain hat makers in the 17th century called “mad hatters’ syndrome” or “hatters’ shakes”. As to the underlying cause of mad hatters’ syndrome, in the 17th century in France, expensive hats made of felt began being produced using mercury nitrate. Hat makers rarely wore any kind of safety equipment or protective clothing back then and often worked in cramped, extremely poorly ventilated work spaces. Because of this, invariably they were exposed to dangerous amounts of mercury vapors during their day to day lives, culminating in prevalent mercury poisoning among those in the industry.
The symptoms of mercury poisoning are numerous and in many cases extremely severe, affecting the heart, brain, lungs, kidneys and in some cases, the immune system, among other things. Most pertinent to the topic at hand, neurological symptoms associated with mercury poisoning can include, but are not limited to, abnormal sensations in the limbs, muscle tremors, erratic mood changes and mental deterioration. The behavior of those afflicted by mercury poisoning is usually typified by anxiety, extreme timidness and a general desire to remain “unobserved”, usually responding with anger or irritability if this wish is ignored.
While lighthouse keepers had much better ventilated spaces than hat makers, handling such mercury regularly is generally thought to have contributed to occasional bouts of odd behavior and madness among keepers.
For example at a lighthouse in 1897 near Narragansett Pier the lighthouse keeper showed up at the pier bleeding from a wound in the back where he’d been stabbed. He explained his assistant had gone mad and attacked him with a butcher knife and then chased after him as he fled to their boat. Upon investigation at the lighthouse the next day, they found the assistant still alive and otherwise physically well, but apparently dancing around crazily while he chucked stuff into the ocean.
In another case in the mid 19th century, the Phippsburg, Maine lighthouse keeper apparently bought his wife a piano to help entertain her, but she allegedly kept playing the same song over and over again, and he finally snapped. Whether the same song over and over again part of the story is correct or just part of the legend that’s risen up around the event, he did ultimately destroy the piano, and directly thereafter ended the existence of his wife and himself.
In another instance, lighthouse keeper William Brown stationed at Ballenas Island in British Columbia began sending bizarre telegraph messages one day, and his wife, Maggie, said he likewise began behaving erratically and violently around the same time. Because of this, he was committed to an asylum in 1905. There he seemed to recover his senses and was sent back to the lighthouse only to once again seem to go mad and was once again, this time in 1906, committed to the asylum.
Then we come once again to the aforementioned extreme isolation at many lighthouse locations, especially in cases where a given lighthouse keeper was all by their lonesome with no family to talk to or assist them in their duties.
On this loneliness and the mental health side of that, lighthouse keeper Mary Ryan’s 1870s log entries illustrate it well, getting progressively more depressing once she took over the lighthouse from her deceased husband. She writes, “So dull, this place is killing me. Wind blowing violently.” Or a little later, “Nothing but gloom without and within.” And later “This is all gloom and darkness.” Finally after about 7 years alone at the lighthouse another was appointed in her place and she was free to leave.
On all this, to help stave off madness and boredom, in 1876 in the U.S. it became practice to send a few dozen books in wooden cases to each of the lighthouses in America, and within 3 years there were almost 500 such box libraries around, which would be exchanged every three months for a different crate of books from a different lighthouse.
We should also probably mention beyond lighthouses there were also lightships with similar issues and often reported extreme loneliness of their crew. For example, one whaling ship captain would write of the Nantucket Shoals lightship, the loneliest thing he had ever seen at sea was, to quote, “a polar bear floating on a piece of ice in the Arctic ocean; the next loneliest object was the South Shoal Lightship.” These ships had many of the same issues you’d find at a fixed lighthouse location, but on top of it having to deal with the sea a lot more directly like the constant pitching of the boat.
To sum up on this side of things, as illustrated in Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, she writes, “How would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn?” And “to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and not to be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea?”
Speaking of being swept out to sea and yet more dangers of being a lighthouse keeper, in 1900 a replacement keeper arrived at Eilean Mor off the coast of Scotland to find all three keepers on the island were mysteriously gone. Their logs showed they had experienced an extreme storm where not just the waves, but winds were too severe to stand in. The replacement keeper also noted he found damage to the building and equipment from waves up to 33 meters, or about 100 feet, above the normal sea level. What exactly happened to the men isn’t known, but it’s generally thought they must have left the tower for some purpose during the storm and in so doing had been swept out to sea.
On this note, storms were yet another danger one had to contend with as a keeper, and they sometimes were evacuated during such, but getting them out was often a major ordeal given, you know, the approaching storms and lack of satellite weather or the like for significant warning. Thus, historically many simply had to endure and hope the engineers who built their structure had made things sturdy enough to withstand the ocean’s rage.
Moving on from all these sorts of tasks, dangers, and psychological factors of being a lighthouse keeper, we now come to the rescues, with, as alluded to, a part of the lighthouse keeper’s job to keep an eye out for ships or people in distress and, if possible, to assist them. Although as you might imagine this also tended to be another way lighthouse keepers would sometimes get themselves killed.
One of the more famous individuals on the rescuing front was one Ida Lewis, dubbed in the late 19th century “the bravest woman in America.” Lewis was the daughter of the lighthouse keeper at Lime Rock in Rhode Island, and made her first rescue while just 12 years old, doing so in a small rowboat she otherwise used to ferry her siblings to and from the mainland for school, and to get needed supplies. On this first rescue, she observed four men whose boat had capsized and quickly rowed out to save them. In another instance, in March of 1869, two soldiers and a 14 year old boy had their boat capsize in icy waters. When Ida’s mother saw this, she called for Ida, who was suffering from a cold at the time, but nonetheless ran to her boat without bothering to put on a coat or anything of the sort on, and rowed out to them, managing to rescue the two soldiers, though the boy aboard died in the frigid waters. For her services on this rescue, the soldiers raised some $218 (about $5000 today) from their fellow soldiers at Fort Adams to give to her in appreciation for delaying their inevitable eternal sleep, helping to ensure their end came not via the comfortable and quick embrace of hypothermia and water inhalation, but a slow and steady decline, as their mental and physical faculties fade in time and body aches set in, with it all combined eventually resulting in them finally praying for an end to the pointless rigors of life…
In another rescue of a couple soldiers in 1881 that had fallen through the ice, she reportedly grabbed a clothesline to bring with her when she rowed out as close as she could get to them and pulled them to safety with her line. For this one, she became the first woman to be granted the Gold Lifesaving Medal from the U.S. Government.
In total, she is credited for saving at minimum of around a couple dozen people in her time at the lighthouse, though she never logged her rescues and it’s thought there were probably many more that didn’t make the news. However, of the ones that did make the papers, she did receive some criticism for this, with one individual writing to her it was un-ladylike for a woman to row a boat, to which Ida tersely responded, “None – but a donkey, would consider it ‘un-feminine’, to save lives.”
Ida was eventually further rewarded for her work by not only being appointed a lighthouse keeper after her father and mother died, but also becoming at the time of her appointment the highest paid keeper in America, with the increase in pay from what is typical being, to quote, “in consideration of the remarkable services… in the saving of lives.”
Eventually Lime Rock was also renamed Ida Lewis Rock, and the lighthouse on it also bore her name in turn.
But in all of this, needless to say, life as a lighthouse keeper wasn’t super awesome. But the pay was great. Right? …
Right?!?!?!
Well, as illustrated by the United States’ first official lighthouse keeper appointed by George Washington, Henry Long, not so much- with a salary of just $300 annually, or about $8000, although, of course, free accommodations and use of the grounds came with that.
Long had previously been a ship pilot working at Cape Fear River and it was generally thought he could supplement his income via continuing to pilot ships in the day as well as take advantage of the fishing in the region, with the lighthouse functioning as something of a side gig. I mean, how hard is it to keep a light going after all?
However, Long soon complained “he could not officiate as a Pilot, when the light house claims the whole of his attention… All these advantages are now entirely lost to your (petitioner) by his living on an island where he has not the privilege of raising stock of any kind nor even vegetables from the proprietor of the island (Benjamin Smith) if the soil would admit thereof.” And that, “Fish and oysters are at too great a distance from the island for him to attempt to procure.”
He thus petitioned for an increase in salary, which was granted, though not up to his request, but at least a small bump to $333.33 annually.
As for his specific lighthouse, it was an oil burning one which required him to traverse the six long flights of stairs several times per day carrying oil to fill pan lamps containing some 48 wicks in need of regular trimming and, as you might imagine, had a tendency to smudge the glass panes of the lighthouse and required him to scrub them clean regularly. Again, this was something he had to do 365 days per year regardless of weather and regardless of his personal health.
To add insult to ultimate injury, Long met his end when his son-in-law, who had come to live on the island with his two children after his wife, Elizabeth, died, accidentally shot Long while hunting for food for the family one night on October 16, 1806.
After this, Rebecca Long, Henry’s wife, took to maintaining the lighthouse and, after a few months, she was recommended for the position permanently by customs collector Timothy Bloodworth. However, when the proposal was submitted to then President Thomas Jefferson for approval (at this time lighthouse keepers were all presidentially assigned given the importance of the job to national commerce), Jefferson would write, “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.” and she was denied the position she was already doing.
It wouldn’t be until two decades later that President John Quincy Adams would throw such biases out and appoint the first federally appointed female lighthouse keeper Rebecca Flaherty to assume her husband’s role as keeper of the Sand Key in the Florida Keys after his death. Although, it should be noted if you really dig in there was another a few years before remembered only as “Mrs. Edward Shoemaker”, who took over for her husband upon his death in 1826, though whether she was federally appointed by Adams isn’t clear, and she held the position for only 6 months.
It should also be noted that the first ever female U.S. keeper of the light was one Hannah Thomas, who was given the job of lighthouse keeper at Gurnet Point in Massachusetts starting in 1776 after her husband, John, died of smallpox while serving as both keeper and traitorous soldier in the Continental Army in the rebellion against the rightful ruler of America King George III. She continued in the role until 1786 when she hired someone else to do the job, one Nathaniel Burgess, who after a few years was officially appointed for the post.
In any event, noteworthy after Rebecca Flaherty’s appointment, women would be regularly appointed as lighthouse keepers over the next few decades, comprising about 1 in 20 lighthouse keeper appointments in the United States, and almost always cases where the husband died and as his wife and potentially children had been helping him maintain the light anyway, she was almost always deemed suitable and generally rubber stamped for the job if she wanted it.
Speaking once again of lighthouse keeping during the golden age of the profession being something of a family affair, and given their isolation and little better to do, lighthouse keepers and their families also tended to grow at the lighthouse, with for example one John Malone and his wife, Julia, manning the Menagerie Island Light in the late 19th century and her giving birth to a whopping 12 babies at the lighthouse, 11 of whom survived.
Of course, in slightly more modern times, it was determined that it would be beneficial to the functioning of the entire system for the lighthouse keeper to have official assistants, whether he or she had a family there or not, which helped both with the workload and also staving off loneliness, although getting along with such continually could be monotonous as well. But as one 20th century lighthouse keeper Gordon Medlicott would note of this and his life as a keeper, “Living in such close confines meant that a good relationship with the other two keepers was important. It was like a marriage – if you fell out, you couldn’t go off and sulk for long because they would be cooking your dinner later on! We became experts at cards and board games. Over the years I knitted, did cross stitch and embroidered. I was the centrefold for Cross Stitch magazine a few years ago! We all read a lot and some of us wrote short stories and poems. I always enjoyed writing so was thrilled when the Association of Lighthouse Keepers asked me to write a research document for their archives. On completion it was snapped up by a publisher and turned into a new book called An Illuminating Experience.”
He also notes of the rescue side he had a number of occasions for this, for example in one such, “I was manning the South Stack in Anglesey and two young boys ran to us for help. Their climbing instructor had fallen down a cliff face. I climbed down the 80ft drop and held on to him for 45 minutes while we waited for the rescue team. By the time they came we were up to our chests in water. The helicopter pulled us up one at a time. There is not much you can say to calm a man in that situation, you just try and quiet his screams.”
He was ultimately retired, however, after almost four decades as a lighthouse keeper in 1998 as automation gradually began to see the profession of keeper go the way of the dodo.
This brings us to the ultra modern profession of lighthouse keeper, which is still a profession in some regions, though, as alluded, is increasingly rare. For example, the United States currently has just under a thousand lighthouses still standing, but over half of them are no longer maintained or active.
As to why not, with the advent of GPS and all manner of other advanced navigational tools, lighthouses have become somewhat less needed, though still considered useful by a similar ilk of individuals who adhere to VOR navigation in flying as a fun way to find your way around, presumably needing to hitch up their covered wagons to run to the store because they don’t want to let those valuable horse riding and wagon hitching skills be forgotten in case cars stop working…
That said, there is still considered some value to certain lighthouse locations, but most of these have been automated in the last few decades, thanks to extremely reliable LED lamps with no moving parts needed, as well as solar and battery setups, and the ability to remotely monitor all facets of what’s going on at the lighthouse.
That said, as illustrated in great depth, the lighthouse keeper isn’t just there to keep the light going, but also to maintain the facility, watch out for emergencies and lend aid, give an eye on the ground for weather, etc. Not to mention that some of these lighthouses are something of historic sites, so having someone there to continue to maintain them and perform the other functions has been deemed valuable by some nations, such as Canada, who still maintains about 50 crewed lighthouses, with typically 2 people per location plus relief keepers who fill in as needed.
For example with weather, while elements of the weather monitoring can be automated and satellite weather data is amazing these days as well, as any pilot or sea captain can tell you, human eyes on site are still invaluable, especially when the weather starts to get marginal but may or may not still be fine for a given flight or boating scenario. It’s just often unclear based on the automated weather collecting data. As one such Canadian lighthouse keeper notes, “Weather reporting is really what we do a lot of now. We do occasionally get calls from airports, planes and helicopters who want a 100% up to date account of what the weather is actually like.”
As for emergencies, he states, “Lighthouses are placed in locations that are pretty dangerous for mariners. Accidents still happen and while you don’t get a lot of huge ships running aground, there are still many smaller commercial and pleasure boats who overturn and sink each year and their lives are just as important as 100 lives on a larger boat. Having someone in these remote locations means there is always someone on hand in case there is an emergency in a particular area. Even if there is an issue somewhere that is not right at the station, a lot of times search and rescue will use the station as a converging point when arriving to an area or if they need somewhere to go while an operation is in effect.”
On that note, while classically lighthouse keepers had a bit of a stereotype of getting drunk half the time, that’s not entirely accurate and in fact all the way back in 1852 in the U.S. lighthouse keepers were subject to immediate dismissal if they ever either allowed the light to go out or were found to be drunk. And nothing much has changed in modern times there. In other words, while you can drink, you cannot ever do it in any sort of excess that would compromise your mental acuity and ability to respond to any situation as part of your duties, which must be attended to 24/7.
Going back to the light itself, he also notes at his lighthouse, it “has been changed once in 10 years on this station. Everything is solar powered and it comes on and turns off on its own. You have to paint the tower itself more often then you have to do anything with the actual light any more.”
As for his schedule, he states, “Currently, I wake at 3am, go outside and monitor the weather, check to make sure the light is still on and then report the weather over the radio telephone. I do this again at 6am and at 9am. Also at 6 I have to check and record temperatures for Environment Canada. 10 to 3 is work time where we do different tasks on the island. Painting, lawn mowing, general upkeep and what not. After 3 is my own free time where I can do what I wish and I usually go to bed by 7 or so. This would be 7 days a week. No weekends. I do forgo the 10 to 3 work bit on the weekends though. The other keeper would be responsible for more reports at 12, 3, 6 and 9 at night.”
He also states that, as in more historic lighthouse keeping, just about everything gets logged and that, “it is government work so there is a ton of paperwork that goes with the job.”
As for pay in modern times, this can vary from $30K-$60K. This doesn’t sound like a lot given the work hours, but you also don’t really have any bills given you live at the lighthouse free, and you don’t really have much of any way to spend money, especially in the more remote locations.
As for time away from the lighthouse, it depends, with some stations on a rotational cycle of something like about a month on and a month off, with a cut in pay on the month off part, but most you get no such off time or even holidays, and are expected to do your thing, health permitting, 365 days per year with the exception of vacation time, which starts at about 3 weeks and can build over the years to even a couple months per year. However, you cannot take any vacation on a whim, needing to be scheduled well in advance, upwards of 6-12 months preferable, so that a relief keeper can be scheduled to rotate in.
As to the process of getting such a job, if you apply and are hired, you start as a relief worker and can be assigned to a number of different stations when a full time keeper needs to leave their station for whatever reason like health issues, vacation, or training or the like. You can expect to remain in this role even for years, bouncing around from station to station, before a permanent spot opens up where you can then remain potentially for your whole career unless a better location opens up and you’d like to apply to that. As you might imagine, the locations on some mainland with a town near and road access and the like are generally the highest prized.
And if you’re wondering, you can have visitors as long as it’s not disrupting your duties or anything on the site. But given the remote location of many of these lighthouses, it’s sometimes non-trivial and quite expensive for people to come visit you.
As for groceries and other such supplies, again this varies by location, but for most where there is no road access or the like, he states, “You find a place that will deliver to your head office and then once a month you place an order with whomever… and then have it delivered by a certain date. Once all the keepers of a particular area (there are 4 stations in my area) have their orders in, everything gets packed onto a helicopter and then taken out to each station.”
Of course, as ever, weather can be a bit temperamental and so he states you generally want to order a week or two extra supplies just in case weather delays the helicopter or ship from being able to get to you and deliver what you need to not die of starvation.
In the end, while often romanticized, the life of a lighthouse keeper historically wasn’t exactly relaxing or conducive to positive mental health from the isolation, contending with extreme weather and natural forces, your entire livelihood based on being able to keep a light going 365 days per year, low pay, grueling never ending labor, the list goes on and on and on.
On the whole, while there are some who would love such an isolated and routine lifestyle, most of us are probably going to be happier with our 5 day a week, 9 to 5 style jobs we use to be able to afford pointless things in our equally pointless lives which will, sooner than we think, end, as well the lives of all humans in the end one way or another… And beyond that, our entire planet ultimately will be consumed by the Sun near the peak of its Red Giant phase, with even our chemical remains going to find their own end living inside a forgotten, dead star, just one of trillions in a vast, cold and forgetful universe which will itself one day have all lights within it go out.
Expand for References
Jefferson’s Mystery Woman Identified
https://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=735
https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/28/2002507203/-1/-1/0/THOMASVNWOMANSWORK.PDF
I am a modern day Lighthouse Keeper
byu/BC-Lighthouse-Keeper inIAmA
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/caroline-woodward-lighthouse-keeper/index.html
https://www.greatlighthouses.com/stories/a-lighthouse-keepers-duties/
https://www.sea.museum/2016/07/08/the-life-of-a-lighthouse-keeper/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_keeper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Lighthouse_Service
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knott_family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lighthouses
The post What was it Really Like to Be a Lighthouse Keeper? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Ever wonder what the first known religion is? Well, wonder no more.
To begin with, according to anthropologists Hervey C. People and Frank W. Marlowe, religion can be broadly defined as “a set of beliefs and behaviors based on a shared worldview that separates the sacred, or supernatural, from the profane.”
With that broad interpretation in mind, possible, though not definitive, evidence of early religion, can be found dating back one hundred and fifty thousand years ago with the ancient Neanderthals who buried their dead — although since Neanderthals can be traced back nearly 500,000 years, it’s likely that burial practices existed long before anyone but Dr. Emmett Brown is currently aware of. These early prehistoric peoples also made markings on bones and buried trinkets with the bodies, like feathers, animal claws, shell beads, and pigments. Red ochre, a natural clay earth pigment, has also been commonly found on the bodies and in the graves of these ancient burial sites. Beyond giving a body a proper burial being a sign of respect for a once-living being after they are gone, as noted in archaeologist Paul Pettitt’s book “The palaeolithic origins of burial,” these burials and what we find in them are the earliest indication we have that our cousins, the Neanderthals, may have believed in an afterlife, or at least in some type of spirit that lives on in a person after they’re dead. However, although these findings may lay the groundwork for what would eventually become modern religion, not enough is known about these rituals and beliefs to give this religion or religions a proper name, and this can hardly be called a structured belief system of any kind. Or, at least, we can’t say it was based on the surviving data.
Jumping ahead a few tens of thousands of years, a team at the University of Cambridge, including the aforementioned Anthropologists Frank Marlowe, Hervey Peoples, as well as zoologist Pavel Duda, conducting research on cultural evolution in humankind, in their paper, Hunter-gatherers and the origins of religion, published by the National Library of Medicine in 2016, noted a high likelihood that all hunter-gatherer societies subscribed to animism, or the belief that plants, animals, or inanimate objects have souls or spiritual identities. They also found that roughly 80% of hunter-gatherer societies likely believed in the afterlife, while worshiping ancestors and belief in a supreme God of some form were found in roughly 60% of all hunter-gatherer societies. From animism emerged belief in the afterlife, and then shamanism and ancestor worship, which we will get into in a little bit.
As for more specifics about these first religions of a sort, the word ‘animism’ derives from the Latin ‘anima,’ which means “a current of air, wind, air, or breath, and the vital principle, life, or soul.” Followers of animism believed that spirits inhabited single objects like trees or rocks, or even entire places like a forest or cave. Many believed that these spirits could travel between objects and places, following an individual around if they moved to a new village or traveled long distances. These spirits may also be those of dead ancestors, spirit guides, or guardians.
Thus, in the broad sense of the word, “religion”, animism seemingly fits the bill, though still, not much like what many today think of in terms of a hard philosophical doctrine at the base of the beliefs. Or, at least, not one that’s survived to this day. So how did we get from that to the much more refined religions we have today? And what was the first of these modern forms of religion?
As to the former question, let’s move on to shamanism, the belief system that was born out of animism and was arguably the next stage in religious evolution.
Shamanism is founded in the belief that shamans, or people with spiritual connections to the otherworld, have the power to heal the sick and dying, transport souls into the afterlife, and communicate with spirits. It is also the first strong indication anthropologists have found of humans believing in the afterlife, which is a major foundation for many religions today. There is no globally agreed-upon definition for shamanism, but the belief system centers around the concept of a shaman, either male or female, in society who is recognized as an intercessor, healer, or general problem solver. Rituals and practices founded in shamanism draw from the spirits in nature to take the shaman to a heightened, altered state of reality. The term shamanism originated in Siberia, and many scholars actually assert that the beliefs practiced in Siberia are the only ones that can truly be classified as ‘shamanism.’ However, just like many other religions, shamanism has evolved throughout many countries and cultures, all of whom have adopted shamanism in various forms. In some cultures, shamans use hallucinogens and intoxicants, including mushrooms, peyote, Ayahuasca, or alcohol in order to transcend reality and connect with their divine healing powers. Although the specifics surrounding this belief system differ from culture to culture, the concept of a sacred or spiritual healer is one we’ve found throughout many different religions, even in the modern age as well.
As for the next stage, sometime between roughly 10,000 B.C.E. and 5000 B.C.E, clearer distinctions began to be made in support of various beliefs and things definitely took a large leap forward on the religion evolution front directly after.
Most historians agree that the ancient Mesopotamian region of Sumer can be classified as one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and it is here that we find more structured beliefs beginning to form. The Sumerians lived in modern-day Iraq and parts of Iran, and they settled in the area sometime around 5000 B.C.E., forming what we now know as some of the oldest cities in the world. They primarily followed the belief that there were many gods who existed in human forms. This faith system is known as anthropomorphic polytheism. The key five gods were An who represented heaven, Enki who was a healer and friend to humans, Enlil who commanded earth, wind, and storms and whom all spirits must obey, Inanna who was the goddess of sex, love, political power, and divine law, Utu the sun god, and Sin the moon god. In general, these ancient people viewed the gods as being responsible for dividing day from night, earth from sky, and plants from animals; the gods were responsible for maintaining order in these divisions. Sumerians also built temples where priests ruled in a theocratic system, but despite that, the people of ancient Mesopotamia viewed their gods as people they lived in harmony and equality with rather than as superior beings in the sense that a modern person would say when thinking about their god and religion.
Jumping ahead a couple thousand more years, we reach the next wave of religious formation throughout the world. Around 3000 B.C.E., many cultures and communities had adopted a more formal system of faith and worship.
For example, in Africa, the dominant belief in most regions was the belief in one supreme being. Bantu mythology also sprung from animism, first appearing in the region now known as Nigeria in 3000 B.C.E. and spreading throughout the continent. Generally speaking, African peoples defined religion as the relationship between God and man; therefore, despite there being many key figures in Bantu mythology, most denominations of the Bantu religion believe in one all-powerful God, often associated with the rising sun. That being said, however, most in this context take issue with the term “religion,” because, as explained by Jacob Olupona, professor of indigenous African religions and African studies at Harvard Divinity School, a man’s relationship with God cannot be compartmentalized into only one facet of his life. Instead, his spiritual beliefs are a part of everything he is and does. In this sense, the Bantu faith is considered less a practice and more a way of being, and the same is true of many other African beliefs as well. It’s a fine line and arguing semantics but, as may become clear here, nailing down what exactly constitutes a religion is difficult and doesn’t always apply when thinking in the context of the way many of our more popular modern religions work, so to speak.
But moving on from there, another generally monotheistic faith of Africa that cropped up around 3000 B.C.E. was Dinka spirituality. The Dinka people began as a group of hunter gatherers who settled in the area now known as South Sudan which was the largest known swampland at the time. These people worshiped, and still worship, the creator Nhialic who is the creator of all things and controls the destiny of all living creatures. There are a few secondary gods and goddesses referred to in the Dinka faith, but these figures are seen in a more mythological sense and are not worshiped the same way Nhialic is. Unfortunately, since the civil war and political unrest in South Sudan that began in the 1980s, many of the Dinka people have been wiped out. Up until that time, however, the Dinka faith was still practiced by nearly a third of the indigenous population there.
Moving on from there to another candidate for the first religion in our modern sense of things, at the same time most of Africa was adopting more monotheistic religious practices in 3000 B.C.E. Asia and Europe were primarily centered around polytheistic belief systems. At the forefront and sort of crossroads of this, we have the transcontinental country we now know as Egypt, which has a rich and complex history with polytheism. Origins of the Egyptians have been traced as far back as 12,000 B.C.E., and with that, discoveries of temples and burial practices indicate that even the earliest Egyptians believed in an afterlife or some spiritual identity within every human being. Apart from the mortuary services they performed, however, little is known about what the earliest Egyptians might have believed. Therefore, the earliest indication of a belief system is dated to only around 3000 B.C.E. with complex views on truth, justice, and order, animism, the afterlife, and even magic. Early Egyptians worshiped the sun god Ra, and they viewed the sun as a powerful life force. Since Ra was the primary god-figure in the early era of religion in Egypt, it could be argued that monotheism was at the forefront of Egypt’s history, with polytheism following in the thousand or so years later.
Greek mythology can also be traced back as far as the Bronze Age, or 3000 B.C.E., and perhaps even earlier than that, with Roman mythology following sometime after this.
That said, as noted by the Metropolitan Museum, the “ancient Greeks had no single guiding work of scripture like the Jewish Torah, the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qu’ran. Nor did they have a strict priestly caste. The relationship between human beings and deities was based on the concept of exchange: gods and goddesses were expected to give gifts [in exchange for votive offerings.]” The Greeks would often worship in sanctuaries to whatever god best suited them, whether it was Zeus the sky god and father of the gods, Hades who reigned over the Underworld or Poseidon who reigned over the sea, Hera who was queen of the gods, or Athena the patron goddess of Athens; Apollo, the god of music and prophecy, or his twin sister Artemis, patroness of hunting; Aphrodite, the goddess of love; Dionysos, the god of wine and theater; Ares, the god of war; or even Hephaistos, the god of metalworking.
On all of this, many view Greek mythology as the birthplace of modern religion, but there has always been a debate on whether or not the mythology itself can, once again, even be called a religion. This is due in part to the lack of any living prophets, healers, or strict spiritual practices. Instead, Greek mythology is based on stories, or myths, which helped to guide the Greeks’ way of life. These stories were used to shape beliefs and explain the world around them rather than to honor sacred or holy practices or enrich a person’s spiritual life.
Of these religions which all seemed to develop globally in these more refined forms around the third millennium, it is impossible to determine precisely which one began first. Instead, they all seem to originate from more historical practices and beliefs, such as animism or polytheism, and developed naturally throughout every unique culture in the world at that time.
So now that we’ve laid the foundation for the birth of various religious beliefs around the world, let’s take a look at the modern religions you may be more familiar with, and we will attempt to clarify which of these can most accurately be regarded as ‘the first religion’ within this more strict and modern sense of the definition.
Demographers Conrad Hackett and David McClendon at the Pew Research Center note that of the mainstream religions we know today, the three most popular in the world are Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism respectively. But it’s nearly impossible to discuss the first two — Christianity and Islam — without first addressing Judaism. Further, from this, it’s obvious one of Judaism or Hinduism is arguably the oldest of the modern incarnations of the most popular religions. But which one was first?
Although traces of Judaism can be found going back to roughly 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, Israeli archeologist Yonatan Adler of Ariel University in the West Bank notes that the religion itself only precedes Christianity by about a century in the codified form we are familiar with. That said, some date the codification of the Hebrew Bible back a few centuries before, with no real consensus today on the exact time period, and of course as alluded to, oral traditions along this line existed for possibly as much as a few thousand years before this.
As you can imagine from this, there is a lot of uncertainty on dates here. For example, it isn’t fully clear how long ago the father of Judaism, Abraham, from the Hebrew Bible may or may not have lived- possibly as far back as the 3rd millennium BCE, or possibly one to two thousand years after. If going with the earliest broad date period, it’s possible, as noted by Shaye Cohen — Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University — that Abraham was the first specifically known figure in history to introduce monotheism to the world, with his interpretations from God and the legacy he left making up the foundation of the Hebrew Bible.
As we’ve discussed, Christianity follows very close behind a more codified Judaism, chronologically. And it is at this point that things become much better documented. Today just over 30% of the world follows Christianity in some form or on some level, and even if you aren’t included in that number, you probably know pieces of the story. The belief that Jesus, a Jew, was born of the Virgin Mary and died on the cross taking mankind’s sin upon himself so that sinners could live an eternal life in heaven in the presence of God.
And if you’re now wondering whether Jesus actually existed, please do go check out our recent video, Is There Any Actual Evidence Jesus Existed? But in any event, Christianity exploded shockingly rapidly after the first century and has diversified over time since.
For example, in the year 1054 AD, Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was excommunicated from the Christian church based in Rome. Up until that point, tensions had been rising for a long time between the Roman and the Byzantine sides of the Christian Church. When Cerularius was excommunicated, the two sides split, with the Byzantine Church being renamed the “Eastern Orthodox Church” and the Roman Church taking on the title of the “Western Roman Catholic Church.” The Church’s split between these two sides of Europe is known as the Great Schism, also known as the “East-West Schism” or the “Schism of 1054.” And things haven’t exactly simplified since then.
Unsurprisingly, for Christians, there has been a long-standing debate on what the first true Christian religion was — many assert that Catholicism is the original Christian denomination, but as we’ve learned from the story of the Great Schism, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox seem to share that title equally.
Moving on from Christianity, slightly more modern is the religion Islam, which began with the prophet Muhammad in the year 610. The belief goes that he began to receive messages from the archangel Gabriel for over twenty years, which he documented in scriptures that would come to form the Qu’ran. Although Islam is too modern to be considered a first religion, it’s still worth mentioning in the context of evolution of religion due to its widespread popularity and cultural impact, as well as its ties to early Judaism and Christianity.
As alluded to, the third most popular religion in the world is Hinduism, followed by roughly 15% of the world’s population. But where did it come from, and how old is it?
To begin with, as noted by Professor Gavin Flood of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, Hinduism embraces many traditions and focuses on beliefs, spirituality, and stories rather than on imposing ritualistic practices and adhering to specific rules. Its roots trace back to the Neolithic and Vedic periods, or around the year 2000 B.C.E. During this time, common practices included making sacrifices into a sacred fire in order to please the gods, of which there were several. More succinctly, in an essay published by the Hindu Association of the Northern Territory, Hinduism is described as a faith with, to quote, “numerous schools of thought… no founder, no organisational hierarchy or structure, and no central administration but the concept of duty or dharma, the social and ethical system by which an individual organises his or her life.” In general, a person typically identifies as Hindu by being born and raised in a Hindu family and practicing the faith. A person can also declare themselves Hindu, and no official conversion needs to be made. Additionally, Hinduism shares monotheistic and polytheistic elements, with the Supreme Being Brahman in constant connection with other deities: the Creator “Brahma,” the Sustainer “Vishnu” and the Destroyer “Shiva.”
Alongside Hinduism was the rise of Jainism, whose roots might in fact precede Hinduism. Jainism began among the same civilizations that Hinduism was born in, and likely in the same time period. Unlike Hinduism, however, Jainism is grounded in the belief that humans are reborn after they die, and the goal in the faith is to break free from this cycle. To be liberated, one must live a pure, peaceful life and not harm other lives, which means that most Jains are vegetarian. Hinduism and Jainism obviously have quite a few differences, but one major thing they have in common is the belief in karma, or ‘what goes around, comes around.’
Jainism may share the title with Hinduism for the first of our latest surviving popular religions, but since not enough hard evidence has been found about its origins, it’s impossible to say for certain.
So what was the first true religion we have surviving evidence of? Well, if your definition is extremely loose, forms of animism, though we don’t have a lot of data to draw from there on specifics. And based on the evolution of religion from there, it may or may not be what many would call a true religion in our modern sense of things. Moving on from there, around the same time, relatively speaking in human history, numerous cultures seemed to have all in concert leveled up on the religious front, creating slightly more complex ideas about spirituality and gods and men, like the Ancient Greeks. But, still, you may or may not consider any of these a true religion, given lack of firm codification of beliefs and practices, and that the relationship between gods and men and worshiping practices still were somewhat distinct from our modern popular religions. And, finally we have the next stage of religious evolution, seemingly spearheaded by the likes of Judaism and its sequent, Christianity. Which, given the context of all the above, you can start to see why Judaism in its relatively modern form caused the Ancient Romans such issues, given how different it was in many ways from so many other religions of a sort that the Romans so easily and seamlessly integrated with no issue whatsoever in most cases. You can also see from this why Christianity caused them even more problems, and was seen as such a bizarre cult by these Romans and others. And why it was so revolutionary.
That said, going back to the whole “Who was first?” among the most popular modern religions thing, as noted, Hinduism, while a slightly different style of religion than Judaism and Christianity, is still flourishing today in various forms and may pre-date Judaism’s earliest forms.
In the end, given the ambiguity in definition here, as well as uncertainty of exact dates in much of the above, this is a rare case where although we hope we’ve done a good job of covering the major elements of the potential first religions, saying definitively X or Y was first is still somewhat up for grabs.
So what do you think? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Expand for ReferencesNational Library of Medicine:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958132
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Animism
Overseas Missionary Fellowship:
Animism
Pew Research Center:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/05/christians-remain-worlds-largest-religious-group-but-they-are-declining-in-europe/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/17/6-facts-about-jains-in-india/#:~:text=Jainism%20is%20one%20of%20the,at%20least%202%2C500%20years%20ago.
The Met:
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/isla/hd_isla.htm
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grlg/hd_grlg.htm
Smithsonian Mag:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/is-judaism-a-younger-religion-than-previously-thought-180981118/
PBS:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/cohen.html
Harvard Gazette:
The spirituality of Africa
Every Culture:
https://www.everyculture.com/wc/Rwanda-to-Syria/Dinka.html#:~:text=Dinka%20religion%20may%20be%20regarded,and%20in%20times%20of%20crisis.
New World Encyclopedia:
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dinka#:~:text=Ethiopian%20Medical%20Journal.-,History,centuries%2C%20from%20around%201500%20C.E.
Lumen Learning:
The Sumerians
World History:
https://www.worldhistory.org/Mesopotamian_Religion/
The post What was the First Religion? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Throughout history humans have many stories discussing various supposed humans and other beings that we dismiss as legend as a matter of course. Perhaps no source of such legendary figures is more robust than figures related to various religions, with basically no one today, for example, thinking that Hercules ever actually existed, despite the countless and sometimes rather detailed tales of his various adventures passed down through history. But while few, if anyone today, still worships the gods and demi-gods of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, there are still many centuries old religions that have survived today who have figures that, at least those who follow the religions, take for granted really did exist. This brings us to the subject of today- did the founder of one of the most significant religions in human history, Jesus of Nazareth, actually exist? And, if so, what do we definitively know about what he did or said?
As to the first question, yes, unequivocally, as Jesus was an incredibly popular name in the region around the time Jesus was said to have walked the Earth, Jesus of Nazareth definitely existed… That’s like saying did “John” from New York exist? Yes. New York John exists… Nice guy. Makes great pizza.
But that’s not very interesting. So what about THE Jesus of Nazareth?
Well, while it might come as something of a surprise to some, for reasons we will get into momentarily, historians, from atheist to agnostic to Jewish to Christian, pretty much all universally agree that the Jesus described in the New Testament, did, in fact, exist, and even that it’s extremely likely that at minimum a couple key significant elements of his life as described in the New Testament also very likely did happen, which we’ll get into in the tail end of this video.
As archaeologist and historian Dr. Byron McCane of the Atlantic University of Florida states, “I do not know, nor have I heard of, any trained historian or archaeologist who has doubts about his existence.”
That said, that’s not to say there aren’t many people out there who don’t agree. For example, a 2015 pole in Britain surveying around 4000 people found that a whopping 40% of them did not believe Jesus ever existed. But going back to historians, Professor emeritus of Jewish studies and Archeology at Duke University, Dr. Eric Meyers, concurs with Dr. McCane, chiming in, “I don’t know any mainstream scholar who doubts the historicity of Jesus. The details have been debated for centuries, but no one who is serious doubts that he’s a historical figure…. Those who deny the existence of Jesus are like the deniers of climate change.”
Holdouts to the idea that Jesus existed like to point out, however, that we don’t have any hard archaeological evidence or writings from Jesus himself, or even surviving contemporary writings from when he supposedly lived corroborating his existence. This is correct. However, if that’s the rubric being used to tell if some historic figure actually existed or not, we’d pretty much have to assert that almost nobody in history ever existed, including some extremely prominent figures absolutely no one, including many of these holdouts, questions lived. As atheist New Testament scholar Dr. Bart Erhman notes, “The reality is that we don’t have archaeological records for virtually anyone who lived in Jesus’s time and place.”
Pertinent to the topic at hand, up until extremely recently in history, there was not much of any contemporary evidence whatsoever that Pontius Pilate existed- the Roman governor of Judaea most remembered today for having Jesus crucified. That all changed in 1961 when a quite literal hard piece of evidence was found. At the site of Caesarea Maritima archeologists discovered a stone totally and in all ways coincidentally called the “Pilate Stone”, dating back to the time Pilate and Jesus were doing their respective dances. (For reference, Pilate was the prefect of Judea from 26-36 AD. And may or may not have been a great dancer.)
While it’s a damaged block without the complete text surviving on it, it definitely mentions Pilate being the prefect of Judea, with it generally thought, filling in the missing parts, it states, “To the Divine Augusti Tiberieum… Pontius Pilate… prefect of Judea…has dedicated [this]… … …Also I’m a kickass dancer.” As to what that’s referencing, it would appear he took dance classes as a kid as a part of his formal education… Or whatever… On the rest, the stone was dedicating some sort of temple or other significant building.
But before this and some surviving coins, the evidence of Pilate Pilating was arguably less than the evidence for Jesus Jesusing. And important to again explicitly point out here, Pilate was quite literally one of the most important people in all of Jerusalem at the time, and an extremely prominent Roman figure while Jesus, some random peasant Jew, was doing his thing.
Going back to Dr. Bart Erhman, he sums up, “With respect to Jesus, we have numerous, independent accounts of his life in the sources lying behind the Gospels (and the writings of Paul) — sources that originated in Jesus’ native tongue Aramaic and that can be dated to within just a year or two of his life (before the religion moved to convert pagans in droves). Historical sources like that are pretty astounding for an ancient figure of any kind.”
So putting aside holding the question of Jesus’ existence to a higher standard than anyone else in history, what about when we apply the standards historians do generally ascribe to? What’s the actual evidence there?
While there is other more secular evidence we’ll get to in a bit, so stay tuned as there are some relative smoking guns here, the most obvious answer is, of course, the writings in the New Testament itself.
Now, on the surface you may discount this, as using the Bible to prove the Bible seems rather absurd. So why do most historians, including those of the secular variety, not take this view in this case?
For starters, the sheer weight of archeological evidence that backs up a number of things discussed in these works during these periods the works are discussing. This, at least, demonstrates that they weren’t just conjured up completely by significantly later authors.
Beyond this, some have also suggested such suppositions as the “criterion of embarrassment”, positing that a group would not completely make up a story that would embarrass themselves.
Thus, as historian Will Durant notes,
“Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed—the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross.” And of course his death on the cross itself as a common criminal, something that was a bit of a major scandal for early disciples after the fact.
Going back to Dr. Ehrman, he states of this, “The Messiah was supposed to overthrow the enemies – and so if you’re going to make up a messiah, you’d make up a powerful messiah. You wouldn’t make up somebody who was humiliated, tortured and then killed by the enemies.”
New Testament scholar N.T. Wright also chimes in, “It flew in the face of all Hellenistic wisdom: part of the point of crucifixion was that it completely degraded the sufferer. It denied him any chance of a noble death, a considerable preoccupation among pagans. It also, in the normal run of things, denied him a proper burial as well, since the body would have been eaten by birds, rats, or other carrion and any final remains dumped in a common pit.”
Moving swiftly on from such speculative hypotheses, of which there are many leveled against the New Testament works to try to ascertain veracity of elements in them, Paul the Apostle’s surviving works, considered to have been written around 50-60 AD, only about 20 or 30 years after Jesus’ accepted death, mention meeting various people who knew Jesus personally, including a brother of Jesus’, named James, as well as a couple of Jesus’ apostles, including Peter, who Paul was a guest of for a couple weeks in Jerusalem not long after Paul’s conversion.
Further, given these were written not long after Jesus’ death and were accepted, it’s apparent for this and many other reasons that nobody at the time questioned whether Jesus had existed, many of whom would have been alive when the alleged events occurred, with some of these events quite noteworthy in terms of stirring up trouble amongst Jewish and Roman higher ups.
On top of this, other evidence strongly suggests Christianity had already exploded in Judea and parts of the Roman Empire at this point Paul was writing. This is important because it would have taken some time for this relatively large spreading to occur- further significantly dwindling the couple decades between when Jesus is referenced to have existed and when we know for sure a rather large group of people from the region believed he did.
On this note, also important in all of this is nobody among the non-Christian Jews or Romans seems to have questioned Jesus existed either, even at this very early point when many alive should have been able to know definitively either way. And certainly given all the trouble the Christians were causing the Jews and Romans at the time, the higher ups here would have had quite the incentive to put forth any evidence that Jesus had not existed to shut up the Christians had he not.
But that still all has some level of speculation tied to it, or is from a Christian source. So what about some sources that are, shall we say, slightly more independent? Do any such relatively contemporary sources exist?
Well, if you’ve been following along so far and otherwise don’t think historians are idiots, it turns out, yes- two of which are generally considered quite definitive, at least with regard to the question of whether Jesus existed.
For starters, enter an individual generally considered the greatest of all Roman historians, Senator Publius Cornelius Tacitus, who was born a couple decades after Jesus’s death. Tacitus not only gives a direct reference to the particular Jesus in question, but, interestingly, he also states that Jesus was crucified by Pilate.
In his Annals (115 AD) in chapter 44 of book 15, he discusses Christians being targeted as a scapegoat by Nero. Stating,
“…Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind… Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.”
Now, it should be noted here that some question if perhaps Tacitus was simply repeating something the Christians themselves were saying, with no backing source elsewise. After all, it had been at this point many decades since Jesus was apparently executed. However, this notion is generally dismissed given Tacitus’ preeminence as a historian and track record of having evidence to back what he said so definitively in his works, even if in many cases such evidence is lost to us today.
It’s also noted that Tacitus’ position as a senator gave him access to many official records. And perhaps most significant of all, he was part of the Quindecimviri sacris faciundis, which, among other things, oversaw various foreign religious cults at the time in Rome. This would suggest that Tacitus would likely have been extremely familiar with and had access to any records of Christianity that existed at that point. Thus, while the skepticism here isn’t necessarily completely unwarranted, in combination with Tacitus’ reputation and the other evidence at hand and how it all correlates, most historians accept this as a valid early independent source of Jesus’ existence.
Speaking of other evidence to add to the pile, we have a rather more ironclad reference in the writings of another of the most famous historians of the period, Flavius Josephus- a man born in Jerusalem almost to the year when Jesus is thought to have been crucified.
For those who haven’t watched our video on the quite literal deadliest fart in history that resulted in the deaths of 10,000 people that Josephus documents thoroughly, a brief background is in order, as it’s important as to why Josephus’ taking for granted that Jesus existed is thought so significant. As Dr. Robert Van Voorst notes, “If any Jewish writer were ever in a position to know about the non-existence of Jesus, it would have been Josephus. His implicit affirmation of the existence of Jesus has been, and still is, the most significant obstacle for those who argue that the extra-Biblical evidence is not probative on this point.”
Born in 37 AD to an extremely prominent and wealthy family in Jerusalem, Josephus’ mother was a descendant of the Hasmonean dynasty (former rulers of the region), and his father was a Jewish priest. Josephus spent his formative years on the Jewish side of the Jewish/Roman conflict, ultimately the head of the Jewish forces in Galilee. However, in 67 AD after a six week siege of Yodfat, Josephus’ siding with the Jews came to an abrupt end. While exactly what happened is up for debate given Josephus’ own account is primarily what we have to work with, on the 47th day the Romans took the town, and Josephus himself and a few dozen others took refuge in some caves. Rather than be captured, they decided it was better to die, but owing to suicide being a sin, they drew lots to see who should kill who and commensed with this mutual slaughter. In the end, the final survivors came down to Josephus and one other man, who decided rather than kill one another, perhaps it would be better to surrender after all… Party foul…
Upon doing so, Josephus ingratiated himself upon the head of the Roman forces, Vespasian, by prophesying that Vespasian would become emperor of Rome. And so it was that rather than kill Josephus, Vespasian decided to take him as slave. Two years later, Josephus was freed when Vespasian became Emperor and was granted Roman citizenship and more or less completely cast his lot on the Roman side of things, including serving as advisor and translator to Vespasian’s son Titus during the 70 AD siege of Jerusalem.
Of course, Josephus isn’t really remembered today for any of these exploits, but rather for such things as his highly influential work The Jewish War, which, among other things is considered one of the best sources for information about this pivotal period of Jewish history that ultimately saw their temple destroyed and their people displaced and lands confiscated for Roman use. It, and his other notable work Antiquities of the Jews, also functioned as significant works in the early days of Christianity, given its description of events surrounding the era that comprised the life of Jesus of Nazareth, including accounts of prominent Biblical figures such as Herod the Great, John the Baptist, and Pontius Pilate.
Noteworthy in his efforts in all of this was to give an account that was impartial, unlike so many others of the era. As Josephus noted of those covering the same events, “they have a mind to demonstrate the greatness of the Romans, while they still diminish and lessen the actions of the Jews.” While given his Jewish heritage you might think he’d be inclined to color things more in their favor instead, Josephus himself noted his goal was to be impartial and that he would “not go to the other extreme … [and] will prosecute the actions of both parties with accuracy.” Something for the most part historians generally agree he ultimately did.
In any event, Josephus mentions Jesus, not just once, but twice in Antiquities, written about a half century after Jesus was executed. That said, the first mention, in Book 18, is generally thought to have been altered at some point in history in its details. However, most historians accept that the reference to Jesus here is still valid. Just that extra details were added by some Christian scribe later and just universally copied from there. In this one it states (and we’ll put here in brackets the parts that many assume were later added)
“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man [if indeed one ought to call him a man.] For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. [He was the Christ.] When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. [On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him.] And the tribe of the Christians, so-called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.”
We should probably also mention that there also exists a 10th century Arabic version of the first passage apparently copied from some original that maintains even the seemingly modified parts, but worded in such a way that perhaps may have been closer to what the Jewish Josephus actually wrote:
“At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. And his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. And those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them after his crucifixion and that he was alive; accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.”
Whatever the case on either of these, as to why elements of this are almost universally questioned here, as alluded to, Josephus was a devout advocate of Judaism. Thus, Josephus referring to Jesus as the Christ would seem to indicate he was himself a convert and had, like many other Jews, accepted Jesus as the Messiah. The problem is that this doesn’t really jive with other things Joesphus wrote at all or things known about him.
While you might also wonder then if perhaps this whole passage is a forgery, almost no historian takes that end of the extreme either, for a variety of reasons from writing style and specific vocabulary in a large part of it, to also that the second reference we’ll get to in a bit seems to imply that Josephus had mentioned Jesus before in a more expansive way so that the reader should already know who he was talking about. Had the more expansive text not existed originally at all, the second reference would have required more context. Further, the second reference appears to have no such modification and simply uses Jesus as a reference to clarify who someone else was.
Naturally because of the apparent modification of some sort, this first reference can’t be taken at face value on the details. However, when discussing it as an early reference that Jesus did, in fact, exist at least, most historians accept that much about it.
As to the second reference, the context of this one in Book 20 is rather long and an aside too far if fully quoted, but the important part is embedded in an account of an event in which a new high priest decided to take advantage of the fact that the Roman procurator, Albinus, was out of town and have executed some individuals he didn’t like, “…so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others…” Unfortunately for the high priest, Albinus got word of this abuse of power and subsequently stripped the position of high priest away and instead gave the high priesthood to, funny enough, a guy named Jesus… But a different Jesus, son of Damneus. On this one, Josephus actually mentions 12 total men named Jesus. Again, it was a common name in the region.
As an interesting little brief aside, as alluded to, Josephus also is one of the early independent sources for the existence of John the Baptist, noting,
“Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod’s army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist: for Herod slew him, who was a good man… Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion… Accordingly, he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod’s suspicious temper, to Macherus, the castle I before mentioned, and was there put to death.”
Moving on from Josephus and Tacitus, there are several other allusions to Jesus independent of the writings included in the New Testament from around this same time period, though these are not, in general, given quite as much credence as these two historians’ works for various reasons.
For example, we have such text as a letter from a stoic philosopher from Syria, Mara. Writing the letter from prison after his city was captured by the Romans, Mara states, “What else can we say, when the wise are forcibly dragged off by tyrants, their wisdom is captured by insults, and their minds are oppressed and without defense? What advantage did the Athenians gain from murdering Socrates? Famine and plague came upon them as a punishment for their crime. What advantage did the men of Samos gain from burning Pythagoras? In a moment their land was covered with sand. What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king? It was just after that their kingdom was abolished. God justly avenged these three wise men: the Athenians died of hunger; the Samians were overwhelmed by the sea and the Jews, desolate and driven from their own kingdom, live in complete dispersion. But Socrates is not dead, because of Plato; neither is Pythagoras, because of the statue of Juno; nor is the wise king, because of the “new law” he laid down.”
However, it’s not clear when exactly this letter was written, possibly as early as 73 AD, and that is the general consensus, but also possibly as much as a couple hundred years after this. If the former, which, again, is the general consensus, it would be among the earliest references to Jesus. If in the ballpark of the latter, it’s of little value here, especially considering Jesus isn’t technically named, though seems very much to be who is being referred to.
Potentially a lot more significant is Roman historian Suetonius’ account, which is very similar to the aforementioned Tacitus reference. In his Lives of the Twelve Caesars (121 AD), he also mentions Nero abusing the Christians. But more pertinently, in the Life of Claudius, he states, “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.”
This is thought to be referencing an event that occurred around 50 AD, and seems to also be what Acts 18:2 in the New Testament is referring to, where it states, “After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. There he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla because Claudius had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome.”
While many think the “Chrestus” here is referring to Jesus, the specific spelling and wording leaves some ambiguity given it seems as if “Chrestus” was still alive, instigating these disturbances.
Noteworthy on this one, however, is that it is entirely possible Suetonius just thought “Chrestus” was still alive. Another alternative is Suetonius was just meaning it was the teachings of “Chrestus” that were causing the issues. Or perhaps he was talking about someone else completely. As you can imagine, the slight ambiguity in wording sees this one largely dismissed as definitive of anything.
Moving on from there, Pliny the Younger, in a letter to Emperor Trajan in 112 AD discussing the cult of Christianity states, “They (Christians) were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food, but of an ordinary and innocent kind.”
Unfortunately for this one, baby Pliny doesn’t seem to have any real source for the reference to Christ here other than the Christians themselves. Which, at least does say at this point they believed Jesus had existed and they were worshiping him. But that doesn’t really add anything to the most likely much more well researched sources in Tacitus and Josephus.
We could go on and on and on on various references like this that historians for one reason or another debate the value of in terms of answering the questions of whether Jesus existed or not, along with things he may or may not have done.
In the end, in modern times we’re used to having video, picture, or significant documented evidence various people exist today. Like, we’re pretty confident none of you out there thinks Simon Whistler doesn’t exist. This is despite the fact that you’ve likely never met me, never seen my ID to tell if that’s my real name, and even don’t really know if I am, in fact, a product of clever AI video generation, which would go a long way towards explaining how I appear on so many channels with new ones popping up all the time.
Unfortunately for historians they, on the whole, don’t have the luxury of such robust datasets, and must look at a preponderance of often rather scant evidence, and then apply the standard criteria of historical investigation to determine the likelihood of a person existing, or some event having happened or not.
When doing all of that in the case of Jesus of the Christian faith, on the whole, the vast majority of historians the world over of all backgrounds are of the opinion that at the least we can all agree that Jesus of Nazareth did, in fact, exist.
As for anything beyond that, most historians also go further in relatively comfortably saying Jesus was probably baptized by John the Baptist. That he definitely gathered disciples to spread his particular message, which was very similar to John the Baptist’s. Although as one Biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan, states, “John had a monopoly, but Jesus had a franchise.” Thus, John the Baptist’s ministry didn’t really last much past his death, though a handful of holdouts among his disciples did persist through the 2nd century AD. (And noteworthy today, there is a group called the Mandaeans who still consider him one of the greatest, and last, prophets of their religion). Going back to Jesus, it’s further generally accepted that in the process of his ministry, at some point he upset some prominent Jewish and Roman leaders. As a result of this, he was ultimately crucified at the order of Pontius Pilate. And, finally, after he died, at least some of his disciples were undeterred and continued to spread his teachings anyway, despite that most of them, in turn, were also killed for it.
Outside of this, who knows? Some put forth we can’t really say he said or did anything reported in the works compiled into the New Testament. While others give a little more credence to these works in terms of what he supposedly said and did, noting things like that nobody really argues that Socrates didn’t say at least in general some of what his students later said he said. Despite that the similarities here are pretty spot on, with the only documentation of anything he said written down long after he was gone. We just take the word of Plato, etc. that what they wrote he said is in the ballpark of accurate. And, in fact on this one, it’s known quite definitively Plato, for example, used Socrates as a bit of a character at times to insert his own ideas. That’s not to mention the rather contradictory accounts of some of the things Socrates supposedly said, and even that his very personality varied from different sources who knew the very real man Socrates.
Going back to Jesus, the things Jesus supposedly said were written down in the ballpark of a few decades after his death, very clearly at least in part using other records that no longer exist, including of the oral variety, as their basis. Thus, while there may have been some modification in between, similar to Socrates, it seems reasonable enough to assume at least the broad elements of Jesus’ teachings are in there, even if it’s possible others inserted their own ideas or twists. And, of course, similar to Socrates, exactly what he said verbatim is unknowable to anyone but Dr. Emmett Brown.
Whatever your opinion on any of that, to sum up, while there certainly are many holdouts the worldover on the matter of Jesus’ existence, professional historians of all backgrounds are as confident he existed as pretty much anyone we know of in history. Again as Dr. Eric Meyers, so frankly states, given the preponderance of evidence here, “Those who deny the existence of Jesus are like the deniers of climate change.”
Expand for Referenceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_the_historical_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilate_stone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Baptist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_for_the_historicity_of_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus_on_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_bar_Serapion_on_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus,_King_of_the_Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_of_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suetonius_on_Christians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontius_Pilate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reliability_of_the_Acts_of_the_Apostles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reliability_of_the_Gospels
Regarding the quotes from the historian Josephus about Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_the_Talmud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_of_Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criterion_of_embarrassment
https://talkingjesus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Talking-Jesus-dig-deeper.pdf
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34686993
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/jesus-tomb-archaeology
Did Jesus Exist?
https://www.npr.org/2012/04/01/149462376/did-jesus-exist-a-historian-makes-his-case
https://medium.com/hope-youre-curious/why-is-there-no-archaeological-proof-that-jesus-existed-89cac34d139c
Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34686993
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_background_of_the_New_Testament
https://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/history/faculty/mccane/
https://www.museumofthebible.org/a-conversation-with-carol-and-eric-meyers
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/scientific-insights/did-jesus-of-nazareth-actually-exist-the-evidence-says-yes/
https://www.catholicdigest.com/amp/faith/how-do-we-know-jesus-existed/
https://medium.com/hope-youre-curious/why-is-there-no-archaeological-proof-that-jesus-existed-89cac34d139c
https://www.livescience.com/13711-jesus-christ-man-physical-evidence-hold.html
https://www.livescience.com/3482-jesus-man.html
https://ehrmanblog.org/gospel-evidence-that-jesus-existed/
Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2016/12/10/weighing-up-the-evidence-for-the-historical-jesus.html
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/abs/its-official-we-can-now-doubt-jesus-historical-existence/065797C131D37B02B7E33E83D5CDA577
SUETONIUS on “CHRESTUS”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates
The post Is There Any Actual Proof Jesus Existed? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
So you and your significant other have been dating for a while, and you’ve finally decided to pop the question. Well the first thing you’re going to need is a ring, right? Preferably diamond, and costing the equivalent of three months’ salary? After all it’s traditional, isn’t it? Never mind that this so-called ‘tradition’ is less than 100 years old, invented by diamond giant DeBeers in the 1930s to sell more surprisingly common diamonds – that’s good enough for you, damn it! But now comes the tricky part: what cut of diamond to buy? Oval? Pear? Cushion? Heart? Princess? And what mounting? And how many carats? And what even is a carat anyway? And why is it used to measure both gold and jewels and not really anything else? How did this come to be?
To begin with, there are actually two different ‘carats’ used in the jewelry trade – one spelled with a ‘c’ and the other with a ‘k’ – though mostly in the United States. The carat with a ‘c’ is a unit of mass used for measuring gemstones and pearls, and is equivalent to 200 milligrams, 0.00705 standard or avoirdupois [“av-wahr-doo-pwah”] ounces, or 0.00643 troy ounces. One carat is divisible into 100 points of 2 milligrams each. And in case you’re wondering what the heck a “troy ounce” is, this is another unit of mass peculiar to the precious metals trade, and is equivalent 31.103 grams. One troy ounce can be divided into 20 pennyweights, which in turn can be divided into 24 grains, while 12 troy ounces make up one troy pound. The troy grain, originally based on the average weight of a grain of barley, is identical to the avoirdupois grain and is equivalent to 64.799 milligrams. Thus, one carat is equivalent to 3.086 grains. Confused yet? Well, just be thankful for the metric system…
The term “carat” comes to us from the Italian carato, which itself is derived from the Arabic qirat and the Ancient Greek keráton, meaning “carob seed.” The carob, or Ceratonia siliqua, is an evergreen tree native to the Mediterranean which produces long, hard brown seed pods. These pods were thought by the Greeks to resemble goat’s horns or keras – hence the name. The hard, round seeds found within these pods were long believed to be uniquely consistent in size and weight, and were thus used for thousands of years as standards for weighing gold and jewels. Today, however, it is known that carob seeds vary in mass just as much as other seeds, explaining why for much of history the value of the carat varied from region-to-region.
The carat as a unit for weighing diamonds first appeared in England in the 1570s, but its exact definition was not standardized until 1871, when the Paris-based Syndical Chamber of Jewellers proposed a fixed mass of 205 milligrams. This was officially accepted in 1877 and remained the global standard until 1907, when, at the General Conference of the Metric Convention, a new definition of 200 milligrams was accepted. This new definition was immediately made compulsory in France, but was slower to be adopted elsewhere. Today, however, the 200 milligram definition is accepted around the world. To date, the largest gem-quality gem diamond ever discovered is the Cullinan Diamond, excavated in 1905 at the Premier No.2 Mine in Cullinan, South Africa. Weighing in at a whopping 3,106 carats or 621.2 grams, the Cullinan was gifted in 1907 to King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, who had it cut unto a number of smaller gems. Two of these, Cullinan I and Cullinan II – AKA the First and Second Star of Africa – are part of the British Crown Jewels, being mounted in the Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross and the Imperial State Crown, respectively. Meanwhile, the largest flawless diamond to be found and cut in a single piece is the 137.82 carat or 27.56 gram Paragon Diamond, mined in Brazil in the late 1990s and cut and set by London-based jeweller Graff Diamonds. Most diamond engagement rings, by contrast, are usually 1 carat or less, though the price of diamonds is not determined by mass alone; cut, colour, clarity, and brilliance are also key factors.
The second type of carat, often spelled with a ‘k’ in the United States, is also derived from the carob seed, but instead of mass measures the fineness or purity of precious metals – particularly gold, silver, and platinum. Fineness karats are measured and divided into 24 parts, with 24 karats indicating pure, unalloyed metal. Thus, if an alloy consists of 50% gold and 50% other metal, it will have a fineness of 12 karats. The 24-part system is thought to derive from the solidus, a standardized gold coin introduced by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the year 309 C.E. One solidus had a mass equivalent to 24 siliquae silver coins, whose mass was in turn based on the carob seed. Bullion coins and ingots are also sometimes referred to by their fine weight – that is, the weight of the pure precious metal within them. Thus, one troy ounce of 18-karat gold, which is composed of 75% gold, will have a fine weight of 0.75 troy ounces.
Adding to the confusion, jewellers also sometimes use a system called millesimal fineness, which rates the purity of precious metals by parts per thousand. In this system, “nines” are often used to denote exceptional purity, with 900 or 90.0% purity being “one nine fine”, 990 being “two nines fine” and 999 being “three nines fine.” The purest gold ever refined was produced by Australia’s Perth Mint in 1957 and was six nines fine – that is, 99.9999% pure – while the purest gold commonly refined today – produced by the Royal Canadian Mint – is five nines fine. For all practical purposes, however, any alloy above 995 fineness is considered essentially pure. Gold of this purity is rarely used outside of bullion ingots, collector coins, and gold plating because pure gold is very soft and easily deformed. This is, incidentally, why pirates in the movies bite gold coins; the softer the gold, the likelier it is to be pure. This method can also detect other forms of counterfeiting – such as coins made of lead or other base metals coated in a thin layer of gold.
For everyday use, gold is typically alloyed with other metals – particularly silver – with 14 and 18-karat gold being the most widely used for jewelry. Other metals can also be alloyed with gold to produce various colour effects. White gold, for instance, is alloyed with nickel, silver, or palladium; rose gold with copper; and green gold or electrum with silver or cadmium. Another commonly encountered alloy, Sterling Silver, is officially defined as containing 92.5% silver and 7.5% other metals – typically copper. However, most countries specify a minimum caratage – that is, the minimum amount of precious metal an alloy can contain and still be advertised as that metal. In the United States, for instance, the minimum caratage for gold is 10 karats or 41.6%; in France and the UK it is 9 karats or 37.5%; while in Denmark and Greece it is 8 karats or 33.3%.
And that, in a nutshell – or, in this case, a carob pod – is where the carat came from and how it is used in the world of jewels and precious metals.
Bonus Facts:
Have you ever wondered where the terms touchstone – that is, a test of quality – and hallmark – a characteristic feature – come from? Well, if you’ve been paying attention to the theme of this video, then you’ll probably have guessed that it has something to do with gold. Indeed, a touchstone is an actual piece of stone – typically black slate – which has been used for over 4,000 years to measure the purity of precious metals such as gold. To test a metal sample, it is wiped across the surface of the touchstone, leaving a characteristic streak. This streak can then be compared to that left by samples of known purity to estimate the purity of the metal. For greater accuracy, the streak can also be treated with chemicals such as Nitric Acid, which will attack lower but not higher-purity gold.
A hallmark, meanwhile, is a distinguishing mark stamped on a piece of precious metal by an assay office to certify its purity. The term derives from the Goldsmith’s Hall in London and was first recorded in 1721, while the generic meaning of “a distinguishing characteristic” first appeared in the 1860s. While hallmarks vary widely depending on country and manufacturer, for ease of international trade most countries accept a standard marking system known as the Common Control Mark or CCM, which consist of a set of scales for Gold, a diamond shape for Platinum, and a letter M for silver.
Expand for ReferencesCarat (n.), Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/carat
Turnbull, Lindsay et. al., Seed Size Variability: From Carob to Carats, Biology Letters, September 22, 2006, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1686184/
The Perth Mint Story, Perth Mint, https://www.perthmint.com/about/the-perth-mint-story/
Touchstone, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/technology/touchstone-metallurgy
About Gold Jewellery, World Gold Council, https://www.gold.org/about-gold/about-gold-jewellery
Perlman, Merrill, How to Use the Terms ‘Karat’ and ‘Carat’ Correctly, Columbia Journalism Review, https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/carat-karat.php
Helmenstine, Anne, Karat vs Carat – Difference Between Karats and Carats, Science Notes, September 29, 2016, https://sciencenotes.org/karat-vs-carat/
“Karat” vs. “Carat”: What’s the Difference? Dictionary.com, March 15, 2022, https://www.dictionary.com/e/karat-vs-carat/
Hanlon, Sarah, Do People Still Follow the 3 Months’ Salary Rule for Engagement Rings? The Knot, December 10, 2021, https://www.theknot.com/content/spending-three-months-salary-on-engagement-ring
Clark, Donald, Jewelry Metals 101: Gold, Silver, and Platinum, International Gem Society, https://www.gemsociety.org/article/jewelry-metals-overview/
The post But Why Carat and Karat? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On Christmas Day, 1914, the guns of the Western Front suddenly fell silent. All along the line, tens of thousands of soldiers lay down their weapons, climbed out of their trenches, and wandered into no-man’s land. Men who just hours ago had been actively trying to kill each other suddenly began fraternizing like old friends, exchanging food and gifts, recovering and burying each others’ dead, singing Christmas carols, and even playing football matches. But as the sun came up the following morning, the troops returned to their trenches and the shelling and fighting resumed once more. The Christmas Truce of 1914 has become the stuff of legend, a heartwarming display of humanity in the midst of industrialized slaughter. But just one year later, an even more bizarre event took place as the German and British Empires, desperately short on vital wartime resources, turned, astonishingly, to each other. This is the forgotten story of the great Glass-for-Rubber trade, one of the most surreal episodes of the Great War.
The Great War saw the combat debut of many deadly new weapons, including aircraft, submarines, tanks, and poison gas. But the true king of the battlefield was still artillery, which killed more soldiers throughout the war than any other weapon. First World War artillery pieces could lob high explosive, shrapnel, and chemical shells up to 10 kilometres away – beyond the limits of human vision. Achieving accurate fire thus required the use of precision gunsights, rangefinders, and other instruments. Binoculars, trench periscopes, and airborne reconnaissance cameras were also needed in large quantities, making high-quality optical glass a vital strategic resource. For most of the 19th Century, much of the world’s optical glass had come from two companies: Chance Brothers of Birmingham, England, and Parra Mantois et Compagnie of Paris, France. However, in the 1880s a group of glassmakers based in the German city of Jena including Carl Zeiss, Ernst Abbe, and Otto Schott revolutionized the optics industry by creating Jena Glass, which was clearer and more heat and shock-resistant than anything that had come before. Almost overnight, Germany became the world leader in high-quality optics, exporting nearly 176,400 kilograms of optical glass per year by 1912. By 1914, 60% of the British Empire’s military optics were made in Germany, with 30% coming from France and only 10% produced domestically. With the outbreak of war, Britain suddenly found itself cut off from its biggest glass supplier. Meanwhile, Parra Mantois, struggling to meet the requirements of the French Army, had no leftover capacity to meet Britain’s needs. The British armed forces thus found themselves facing an optics shortage of disastrous proportions.
Part of the problem lay in the British Government’s lack of foresight. In the early months of the War, Britain’ largest supplier of optical glass, Chance Brothers, insisted that its existing production facilities would be more than sufficient to meet the nation’s military needs. Given that at the time most military planners believed the War would be over by Christmas, this was not an unreasonable assumption. By early 1915, however, it became clear that the war would likely drag on far longer than anyone had predicted, and that Britain’s demand for optical glass would far exceed its domestic production capacity. As a stopgap measure, the British Government called on its citizens to donate their own binoculars and telescopes to the war effort, and commandeered unsold optics from private manufacturers and retailers. But this was hardly enough to feed the hungry machine, and in late 1915 the newly-created Ministry of Munitions, headed by future Prime Minister David Lloyd George, proposed a radical – and seemingly treasonous – solution: buy the required optics from Germany.
Incredibly, the proposal was accepted, and, working through intermediaries in neutral Switzerland, the Ministry succeeded in brokering a deal whereby German firms like Zeiss would supply the British military with 32,000 pairs of binoculars – 20,000 high-quality models for artillery officers and 12,000 lower-quality models for regular officers. In return, the German government asked for large quantities of rubber from Britain’s colonies in the Far East. Just like glass, modern mechanized warfare had turned rubber into a strategically-vital resource, with vast quantities of the substance being needed to make truck and bicycle tyres, gas masks, and other important equipment. At the outbreak of war, Germany’s overseas colonies were captured by the Entente powers and its ports blockaded by the Royal Navy, cutting off all its regular rubber supplies. In response, the German government implemented a program of rubber recycling known as Kautschuk-Regenerat and funded research into synthetic rubber substitutes. Both German tyre manufacturer Continental and pharmaceutical giant Bayer produced truck tyres made of dimethylbutadiene or “methyl rubber”, but these were brittle and had to be replaced after only 2,000 kilometres. Furthermore, the limited production capacity of both companies could not hope to meet Germany’s military demands. So dire was this rubber shortage that by 1917 large numbers of German Army trucks were being fitted with steel wheels that tore up roads, while cyclists had to contend with bulky metal leaf-spring tyres that did little to smooth the ride. It is thus perhaps less surprising that the Germans were willing to consider trading with the enemy.
Incredibly, this deal between belligerent nations was not, strictly speaking, illegal. While the British Trading With The Enemy Act of 1914 ruled that all German assets in Britain were to be seized and placed in the common trust, it said nothing about trade through neutral third parties. However, as the Glass-for-Rubber trade would have looked more than a little treasonous to the people of both nations, the negotiations and details of the deal were understandably kept top-secret. Unfortunately, one result of this secrecy is that few official records of this deal survive, meaning we have no idea what quantities of goods were actually exchanged or when. But while this has led some historians to suspect that the actual trade never took place, this would not be the last time the Entente and Central Powers would do business during the war. Just one year later, for example the British bought a large quantity of German-manufactured aircraft engine magnetos – again, though a Swiss intermediary. And in 1918, the Germans promised the new Bolshevik government of Russia to defend the oil fields of Baku against the Ottoman Empire – then Germany’s ally – in exchange for oil from said fields.
Yet even if the deal actually did go though, it would not have been enough to meet Britain’s ever-growing wartime demand for glass. Thus, in June 1915, the Ministry of Munitions struck a deal with Chance Brothers whereby the government would fund the expansion of the company’s production facilities in exchange for manufacturing a large batch of military optics. The deal was highly productive for both parties, and while Britain never achieved complete self-sufficiency in optical glass, the injection of government funding allowed Chance Brothers to achieve a level of quality rivalling that of pre-war German firms.
But trade deals between enemies are far from unique to the First World War. 30 years later, Nazi Germany would propose a similar exchange – though this time the circumstances were considerably darker. In March 1944, the Nazis launched Operation Margarethe, the invasion and occupation of the Kingdom of Hungary. Hungary had entered the Second World War allied with Germany, being the fourth nation to join the Axis Powers after Italy and Japan. Hungarian troops fought alongside German forces during the invasion of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, but following a series of costly defeats, Hungarian regent Admiral Miklós Horthy sought to distance himself from the Nazis. In March 1942, Horthy replaced pro-German Prime Minister László Bárdossy with the anti-fascist Miklós Kállay, who in 1944 negotiated an armistice with the Allies and withdrew Hungary from the Axis. In response, Hitler ordered German troops to occupy Hungary and depose Horthy and Kállay. In the course of this occupation, German forces rounded up more than 437,000 Hungarian Jews, who until that point had largely been spared from the Nazi final solution. These people were slated to be transported to Auschwitz for extermination, but in April 1944 SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, head of the Reich Security Head Office Jewish Affairs Department, decided instead to use them as bargaining chips. By this point in the war, relentless Allied aerial bombardment had severely crippled Germany’s industrial base, leaving the German military desperately short of motor vehicles. Eichmann thus proposed trading one million Hungarian Jews for 10,000 trucks from Britain or the United States. The Jews would be allowed to emigrate to any Allied-held territory except Palestine, which the Nazis had promised to muslim Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin Al-Husseini. To broker this deal, dubbed Blut gegen Waren or “blood for goods,” Eichmann approached Brand Jenö and Andor Grosz, members of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee or Va’da, an underground group which had previously smuggled Jews from occupied Europe to the relative safety of Hungary.
However, the Allies never took the proposal seriously, considering the trade a “monstrous offer” and suspecting the deal to be a trick, designed to win the Nazis a separate peace with the Western Allies. There were also more practical – and cynical – reasons for refusing the offer, such British reluctance to absorb such a large number of Jewish refugees. In the end, all but 15,000 of the 437,000 Hungarian Jews rounded up in 1944 were deported to Auschwitz, where 90% were killed on arrival. In total, 544,500 of Hungary’s jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War – third only to Poland and the Soviet Union.
Expand for ReferencesHistorical Trivia: Rubber for Binoculars, Historical Firearms, https://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/138818285844/historical-trivia-rubber-for-binoculars-at-the
Shuster, Mike, A Clear Case of Trading With the Enemy, The Great War Project, https://greatwarproject.org/2015/07/20/a-clear-case-of-trading-with-the-enemy/
The British Glass Scramble, Optics & Photonics News, January 2016, https://www.optica-opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/january_2016/features/how_the_great_war_changed_the_optics_industry/the_british_glass_scramble/
Wills, Stewart, How the Great War Changed the Optics Industry, Optics & Photonics News, January 2016, https://www.optica-opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/january_2016/features/how_the_great_war_changed_the_optics_industry/
Gleich, Oliver, Rubber, International Encyclopedia of the First World War, November 27, 2015, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/rubber
The Nazis & the Jews: The “Blood for Goods” Deal, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-quot-blood-for-goods-quot-deal-april-1944
The post A Deal with the Devil- That Time Britain and Germany Became Partners In the Middle of WWI appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the heart of Rome stands one of the Eternal City’s most famous and well-preserved ancient monuments: the Pantheon. Constructed during the reign of Emperor Hadrian in the Second Century C.E, the building has been in near-continuous use for two millennia, first as a temple dedicated to the Olympian Gods, and then as a Catholic Basilica. Home to exquisitely preserved Roman architecture and the tombs of such luminaries as the artist Raphael and King Vittorio Emanuele II, the Pantheon has inspired the design of buildings around the world and remains one of Rome’s most popular tourist attractions, visited by some 6 million people each year. But perhaps its most celebrated feature is its 43-metre coffered dome, crowned by a 9 metre circular oculus or opening that floods the rotunda below with light. Incredibly, this impressive structure is built not, as one might expect, of marble or brick, but rather of concrete. Even more impressively, it contains not one piece of rebar or other structural reinforcement, making it the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Indeed, the Romans were masters of concrete construction, building all sorts of massive structures – from harbours and aqueducts to the famous Coliseum – from this versatile material. This fact may shock and confuse those of us living in the modern world, where one bad winter is often enough to turn concrete roads and bridges into something resembling the surface of the moon. What allowed Roman concrete to last millennia, while modern concrete crumbles after just a few years?
Roman concrete is known to have reached widespread use around 150 B.C., though most archaeologists believe it was first developed nearly a century earlier. Like its modern counterpart, Roman concrete has two basic components: cement, a powder that sets hard when mixed with water; and aggregate, a mixture of gravel and other small, hard particles that adds strength to the mixture. Modern cement, known as Ordinary Portland Cement or OPC, is made by heating limestone – as well as various other ingredients including clay, iron ore, sand, gypsum, and coal ash – in a kiln to produce a lumpy material called clinker. The clinker is then ground down to produce cement powder. The composition of Roman concrete was broadly similar, consisting largely of calcium oxide or quicklime, made by heating limestone in a kiln. This was then mixed with pulvis or pozzolana, a fine, glassy volcanic ash found mainly around the Bay of Naples. Pozzolana was considered the “secret sauce” of Roman concrete – so much so that hundreds of thousands of tons were shipped across the Roman Empire as far as Alexandria, Egypt, for use in construction projects. There were, however, some significant differences between Roman and modern concrete. For example, while modern concrete uses aggregate mainly composed of sand and pea-sized gravel, Roman aggregate or caementa consisted of larger, fist-sized chunks of volcanic stone called tephra and pieces of brick and other recycled building materials.
Like modern concrete, Roman concrete hardened not by drying but via the hydration and crystallization of the Calcium-Aluminium-Silicate compounds – also known as strätlingite – formed from the reaction of quicklime and pozzolana, and could thus set in the absence of oxygen – even underwater. This allowed the Romans to build concrete harbour piers, breakwaters, and other underwater structures without the need to build dry cofferdams. The earliest example of such hydraulic cement being used is in the construction of the harbour at Baeie near Naples in the late 2nd Century B.C.E, while its largest-scale application was the harbour of Caesarea Maritima in modern-day Israel, whose concrete piers are still intact to this day despite being exposed to the Mediterranean Sea for two millennia. This remarkable longevity baffled architects and materials scientists for decades, for while the long-term survival of surface structures like aqueducts is impressive enough, immersion in seawater is ordinarily lethal to concrete, causing it to crumble within decades. Yet not only have the piers at Caesarea Maritima survived, they have actually gotten stronger over time. Even more baffling, in terms of sheer compressive strength Roman concrete is actually ten times weaker than modern OPC-based concrete, yet somehow many times more resilient.
So what is going on here? To uncover the secret to Roman concrete’s remarkable resilience, in 2013 a team of researchers led by Paulo Monteiro, a professor of civil and environmental engineering from UC Berkeley, analyzed samples of concrete from the piers at Caesarea Maritima. To their surprise, they discovered crystals of a rare calcium silicate hydrate mineral called tobermorite. These crystals, they deduced, were formed via the reaction of the mineral phillipsite in the pozzolana ash with seawater that had percolated into the concrete. Not only is tobermorite harder than any of the concrete’s original constituents, but its formation traps molecules like chlorides and sulphates that ordinarily damage concrete – meaning, amazingly, that immersion in seawater actually makes Roman concrete grow stronger and more durable with time. As well as potentially improving the performance of modern concrete, this discovery may have wider applications in industry as aluminous tobermorite is normally requires high temperatures and large amounts of energy to synthesize.
Another key to Roman concrete’s durability lies in one of its most historically baffling features: the presence of brittle white inclusions called lime clasts throughout its structure. For decades, archaeologists attributed these inclusions to poor-quality raw materials or sloppy mixing practices. However, some experts like Admir Masic, professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, were skeptical of this explanation:
“The idea that the presence of these lime clasts was simply attributed to low quality control always bothered me. If the Romans put so much effort into making an outstanding construction material, following all of the detailed recipes that had been optimized over the course of many centuries, why would they put so little effort into ensuring the production of a well-mixed final product? There has to be more to this story.”
Indeed, in his Ten Books on Architecture, written in 25 B.C.E, the great Roman architect Vitruvius laid out extremely precise recipes for concrete, while Emperor Augustus, who reigned from 27 B.C.E to 14 C.E, spearheaded major construction and restoration projects in Rome that resulted in the widespread systematization and standardization of concrete manufacture.
In 2022, a team led by Masic conducted spectroscopic analyses of concrete samples from the mausoleum of Roman noblewoman Caecilia Matella, built between 30 and 10 B.C.E. These analyses revealed that the lime clasts are composed of various types of calcium carbonate and oxide, which are much more brittle than the surrounding cement matrix. Whenever the concrete shifts – either due to the ground settling or the earthquakes that commonly plague the region – this brittleness causes cracks to form preferentially within the clasts. However, rain or groundwater percolating through the concrete reacts with the clasts, promoting the growth of calcium carbonate crystals that eventually fill and reinforce the cracks. This reaction effectively makes the concrete self-healing, filling small cracks before they can grow into larger, more dangerous fractures. To test this theory, Masic cast and cracked two samples of modern and Roman concrete and ran a stream of water through them. As predicted, within two weeks the cracks in the Roman concrete had sealed themselves, preventing the water from flowing through.
Masic’s analysis also revealed that the lime clasts could only have formed at high temperatures, indicating that the Romans mixed their concrete very differently than modern builders. Today, quicklime is mixed with water, producing calcium hydroxide or slaked lime – before being added to the concrete mixture. The Romans, however, added quicklime directly to the mixture, a technique known as hot mixing. Not only does hot mixing produce the high temperatures needed to form the self-healing lime clasts, but it also reduces overall curing time, allowing for faster construction.
But clever chemistry isn’t the whole story, and the final key to the remarkable longevity of Roman concrete lies in the specific manner it was cast. According to Vitruvius, unlike modern concrete, which is mixed “wet” and poured, Roman concrete was mixed “dry” with as little water as possible, with the resulting putty-like mixture being troweled into place. Large pieces of aggregate like volcanic tephra and brick or building stone fragments were then laid atop the concrete before another layer of concrete was troweled on top. The whole layup was then tamped down using special tools. By tightly compacting the mixture and reducing its water content, Roman builders minimized the formation of voids within the structure – the main source of weakness in concrete – and promoted the formation of tough strätlingite crystals. Interestingly, the advantages of this construction method were confirmed by a much more recent construction project: the building of the Upper Stillwater Dam in easter Utah in 1987. The concrete used in the dam’s construction was composed of 40% OPC and 60% coal ash, closely replicating the lime-pozzolana chemistry of Roman concrete. This mixture was mixed with minimal water to form a “no-slump” concrete, which was spread in layers and compacted into place using giant vibrating rollers. Later analysis of the dam structure has revealed many of the same self-healing properties exhibited by Roman concrete.
These various chemical, mixing, and layup tricks combined to create what Philip Brune, a research scientist at DuPont Chemical, calls:
“…an extraordinarily rich material in terms of scientific possibility…the most durable building material in human history, and I say that as an engineer not prone to hyperbole.”
Indeed, scientists and engineers around the world are actively studying the secrets of this extraordinary ancient building material in order to improve the efficiency and durability of modern concrete – an urgent task given our current climate crisis. While concrete is an extraordinarily versatile material, with 19 billion tons being used every year worldwide, it has an equally outsized impact on the environment, being responsible for up to 8% of global CO2 emissions. Most of these emissions come from the production of clinker, which requires temperatures of 1,450 degrees Celsius and consumes large amounts of fossil fuels. The use of motor vehicles to transport, pour, and repair concrete also contributes to this carbon footprint – a problem made all the worse by the low durability of modern concrete. Roman concrete, by contrast, is made from ingredients fired at much lower temperatures – thus requiring less fuel – and lasts much longer, greatly reducing the frequency with which it must be replaced. And while Roman concrete’s “secret ingredient”, pozzolana ash, is relatively rare, studies have shown it can be replaced with readily-available coal ash with little reduction in performance. Indeed, Roman-style concrete made with fly ash could cost up to 60% less to produce than regular OPC-based concrete, providing a powerful incentive for builders to switch over.
Thus, with any luck, this wonder material from two millennia ago may very well help ensure that our current civilization will last another two millennia. But then again, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Expand for ReferencesChandler, David, Riddle Solved: Why Was Roman Concrete so Durable? TechExplore, January 6, 2023, https://techxplore.com/news/2023-01-riddle-roman-concrete-durable.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter
Moore, David, The Riddle of Ancient Roman Concrete, Roman Concrete, 1995, http://www.romanconcrete.com/docs/spillway/spillway.htm
Moore, David, The Pantheon, Roman Concrete, 1995, http://www.romanconcrete.com/docs/chapt01/chapt01.htm
Seymour, Linda et. al, Hot Mixing: Mechanistic Insights Into the Durability of Ancient Roman Concrete, Science Advances, January 6, 2023, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add1602
Guarino, Ben, Ancient Romans Made the World’s ‘Most Durable’ Concrete. We Might Use it to Stop Rising Seas, The Washington Post, July 4, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/04/ancient-romans-made-worlds-most-durable-concrete-we-might-use-it-to-stop-rising-seas/
Ouelette, Jennifer, Noblewoman’s Tomb Reveals New Secrets of Ancient Rome’s Highly Durable Concrete, Ars Technica, January 1, 2022, https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/noblewomans-tomb-reveals-new-secrets-of-ancient-romes-highly-durable-concrete/
Preuss, Paul, Roman Seawater Concrete Holds the Secret to Cutting Carbon Emissions, Berkeley Lab, June 4, 2013, https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/
Wayman, Erin, The Secrets of Ancient Rome’s Buildings, Smithsonian Magazine, November 16, 2011, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-secrets-of-ancient-romes-buildings-234992/
The post How Did the Ancient Romans Make Concrete So Much Better Than Ours? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
When we think of Sparta, the first thing that comes to mind is the Spartan warrior. Unlike other historical warrior peoples like the Samurai, the Spartan warriors were pretty close to our imagined conception of them. They were manly warriors who were very muscular, fought wearing red capes, and holding big shields. They were the face of Sparta, to the point that we often don’t realize that Sparta is not a state, but the capital of the region of Lakedemonia and the only city in which the warriors were permitted to live, hence their description as Spartans. Today, the Spartans are remembered as a society completely geared towards war and fighting, but how accurate is that? Is this actually Sparta? And how did one become a Spartan Warrior anyway?
As mentioned, Sparta is not the name of the region, it is just the name of the central city. The region was called Lakedemonia in the Greek Peloponnese Peninsula. It isn’t really all that surprising that we know the Spartans by the name of their central city. Ancient Greeks organized themselves politically into city-states, or Polis. Think Athenians, Thebans, or other well known Ancient Greek peoples. We usually refer to them by the name of their Polis, even if they lived in the surrounding regions of the city-state. What makes the Spartans special, not just in our modern eyes, but in the eyes of their fellow ancient Greeks is that they had a very different society from other Greeks. Despite Sparta controlling the whole region of Lakedemonia and sometimes beyond, citizens could only come from the city of Sparta, and only live there in their special society. Spartans went on several colonial campaigns to capture neighboring lands and referred to their area of political control as Lakonia. The citizens referred to themselves as Spartans, outsiders referred to the Spartans as Lakedemonians after the region, but we might also see them referred to as Lakonians after the political area they controlled.
So, who were the Spartan warriors? The citizens of Sparta were those who not only lived in the city of Sparta, but belonged to the ruling class. These were the Spartans you saw in films like 300. They see themselves as descendants of Hercules and Dorians who settled in the region of Lakedemonia. As an outside force, they ruled over the native population of second class citizens or slaves. This class of people were known as the Spartiates.
So that begs the question, who are the other Lakedemonians, and for our purposes, did they fight? There are many classes of people in Lakedemonia, but the three most prominent were: the Spartiates, the Dwellers-Around, and the Helots. The Dwellers-Around and the Helots were probably the original inhabitants of Lakedemonia, but we don’t know as much about them as we do the Spartiates. The Dwellers-Around are the regular every-day free peoples of Lakedemonia. They lived a similar life to most Greeks at the time, neither required to live the Spartiates’ warrior lifestyle, nor live as slaves. They tended to be traders, manufacturers, artists, but also put on their warrior uniforms and followed the Spartiates into battle at the command of the state. The exiled king Damaratos warned the Persian Xerxes about the necessity of the Dwellers-Around to Spartan society, and their bravery in combat. As Spartan history went on, the Spartiates began to rely on the Dwellers-Around to fight more and more until they came to outnumber the Spartiates in their armies. Even then, we don’t know how Dwellers-Around became warriors.
Then you have the Helots. The Helots were a type of slave that comprised the majority of Lakedemonia’s population. Other than the Spartiates, the Helots are remembered mostly because of the intense level of class disparity between them and the Spartiates. By class disparity I mean the Spartiates were known to have abused and murdered Helots in a way that often shocked other slave-owning Greeks, to the point that the Spartans always feared an intervention by their rivals to support the Helots. As to what these slaves got up to, Helots supported their masters on campaigns and fought on the front lines. If all you know of Sparta is the movie 300, just know that there were Helots on that campaign, and that they far outnumbered their 300 Spartiate masters. Spartiates always kept an eye on their Helots during campaigns, even changing camp formations so that they faced inward at camp rather than outwards, because of past revolts that rocked Lakonia; they never turned their back on their warrior slaves. There were other smaller and less significant groups in Lakedemonian society, but the Spartiates, Dwellers-Around, and Helots are the main three.
Of the classes, we know most about the Spartiate warriors and their upbringing. Spartiates relied very heavily on the Dwellers-Around and the Helots for their warrior lifestyle. The Helots did the heavy lifting in Lakedemonian society, and the Dwellers-Around took care of the state beyond the Spartiates’ roles as warriors, defenders, and decision makers. The same exiled King Damartos acknowledges as much to King Xerxes. Being freed from mundane matters of labor, farming, and administration, the Spartiate citizens were allowed to focus on their training. Modern scholars even refer to the Spartiates as a class of leisure. While that may be true, they endured childhoods of hell to reach that point.
Spartan education is considered a thirty year process broken down into three parts. The education of a Spartan, and by Spartan I do mean Spartiate, is a communal effort the state is involved in. It takes a village to raise a child, and in the case of Sparta, that village would mercilessly beat them into adulthood. The first phase of formal education began around the age of seven when boys were assigned to groups of boys called herds led by a herder. If the assigned herder was not present, any Spartan citizen could order the herd around if need be. The Spartans considered following the rules to be very important, and herders were usually accompanied by whip bearers who whipped the boys for any infraction. Further, if you were whipped as a Spartan child, you can expect your father to continue with a staff when you got home. If you broke a rule in front of another boy’s father and he beats you, your father was also honor bound to beat you again when he hears of it. This can happen when the herder is absent and another father takes charge of the group, again going to show how communal the raising of children was in the city of Sparta.
Despite this instilling of rules, the instilling of rule breaking was also a part of the boys’ education. The boys were fed meager meals, even by Spartan standards. They were expected and even encouraged to steal food to supplement their meagre diets. Despite that encouragement, boys were punished for being caught, even killed in the process of that punishment. So why encourage rule breaking when you are just going to punish a boy for breaking the rule? It seems the purpose was to instill a respect for the rule of law yet teach the children how to undergo covert operations as training for later life. Like most things in Sparta, stealing was a collaborative project. The herd had to collectively organize their stealing, with members acting as lookouts while others stole. The whole process required endurance, something necessary to instill in future warriors. Endurance was the name of the game, from their meager food to their harsh punishments. Finally, the leaders of the Spartan state, the Ephors, inspected the boys of this age naked every ten days, ensuring that the boys did not get too fat and were progressing in their training.
At fourteen the Spartan boys moved to the next level of their education, which got even harsher.
But before we get into that, you might at this point be wondering who established this bizarre and brutal way of life for the Spartiates? The Spartiates cite a lawgiver-king named Lykourgos. Today scholars tend to agree that Lykourgos might have been mythical, and even the ancient Greeks could not nail down a time in which he ruled, although they didn’t doubt his existence. Herodotus places Lykourgos in the middle of the sixth century and puts forward two stories as to how he developed the Spartan way of life. He either received instructions from an oracle at Delphi or borrowed his system from Crete.
Lykourgos may be part of what is called the “Spartan Mirage.” Spartans were very secretive, mischievous, guarded, and xenophobic. This extended into their training, everyday lives, and conduct with other Greeks. They created this image of Sparta to hide their true activities and intentions, so that their enemies were always in the dark. Even aspects of their training and leisurely activities such as their ball games were meant to hide their intentions, which is to train for combat. This Spartan Mirage throws some of what we know about them into question, especially because so few of our sources are from Sparta. Most of what we know about Spartans come from contemporary Athenian writings, which are openly anti-Spartan, or later Roman sources.
But in any event, as mentioned, at the age of fourteen the Spartan boys moved to the next phase of their education as youths. This phase of the education is the toughest. Spartan elders saw this phase of a teenage boy’s life as the most rebellious and cocky, so they piled on the work for the boys. They designed the training so that the boys had as little free time as possible, and had no choice but to go about their tasks and duties, all the while continuing to be held to a higher standard of abuse for breaking the rules. Youths also practiced the many sports and exercises for which the Spartans are known: wrestling, javelin and discus throwing, several types of running and sprinting races, equestrian sports if the youths came from rich families, and a group bareknuckle boxing contest where the boys split into teams of two and tried to drive each other into a moat surrounding the battlefield. They also played a game called “battle-ball” that required co-operation between team-mates and brute strength as it was similar to ball sports such as American football.
Youths began to learn to read and write, but we don’t know how. The Spartans didn’t hire foreign or slave tutors to educate their children, but we do know that they did learn. We know this because we have records that Spartiates sent messages to each other and could make use of cryptography in the messages between warriors and their commanders. The Spartiates seemed to enjoy a… Spartan formal education to suit their elaborate and demanding physical education. Even elite Spartiates were not allowed to bring in tutors for their children, meaning that all Spartiates enjoyed the same state level education. This lack of literary flourish didn’t mean they were simpletons. While not too many Spartan works of literature came down to us, we do have other evidence of the Greeks’ fondness for Spartan wit. Spartiates tended to speak directly and bluntly to the point of being known for their one-liners. It wasn’t just the men, but women who seemed to be known for their wit as well, since a large portion of surviving Spartan one-liners came from the women.
Speaking of women, it should be noted that girls had a very physical education as well. Unlike other Greeks, who tended to heavily segregate the sexes and keep women at home, Spartan girls underwent an education that put them on par, at least within the bounds of their respective strengths, physically with the boys. Spartan girls would wrestle and race with the boys. The girls even competed in front of men in activities that other Greeks considered too sexual, whereas the Spartans didn’t seem to mind. One such activity was an endurance competition that was kind of like skipping rope without the rope. The girls often participated in the same sports the boys did such as throwing, running, wrestling, and even practiced dancing. On top of that, the Spartan girls went about dressed in clothing non-Spartan Greeks considered too revealing and immodest, with exposed thighs and or even sometimes completely nude. This made Spartan girls much more athletic than their non-Spartan counterparts in most places in the world.
The wisdom behind this was utilitarian: The Spartiates wanted healthy mothers and healthy fathers to bear healthy sons. The woman had a role as mother and wife to make sure her son did his part as a warrior. Mothers would beat and berate their sons for cowardly behaviour or failing to make the grade. There are even cases of women killing their warrior sons for cowardly behaviour. Despite that, there is evidence to suggest that once a Spartan woman is married and gives birth, she is generally veiled and gender segregated just like the rest of the Greek women. They did not fight in battles, but their function was to bear and raise the next generation of warriors for the Spartan state.
It should be explained that the Spartiate men were organized socially into groups who ate together at a mess hall. They called this group either a men’s club or friendship club depending on the era. Spartiates dined in groups of fifteen and contributed the food of the mess from their own properties. Youth are sometimes brought to the clubs to see how the adults are expected to act once they reach adulthood. Dining in these clubs was mandatory for all Spartiates. This communal experience was meant to strengthen the bond between warriors and even had democratic aspects to it, such as members having to vote in new members. Those new members were about ready to join at age 20.
On this note, at 20 the Spartiates enter the next phase of their education as young men. They can now join a club, but are still forced to sleep in communal barracks rather than their own homes. They can take part in fighting, and even qualify for the elite 300 member bodyguard corps of the kings. Part of their training included a little understood and much debated ritual called the Kryptoi. Scholars can’t seem to agree on what exactly took place during the Kryptoi. Some believe the ritual involved searching for and slaughtering unsuspecting Helots. Others contend that it was simply a survival and endurance test. Thinkers as far away in time as Aristotle in the 300s BCE and the Roman Plutarch in the first century CE debated the nature of this ritual. Either way, once the Spartiates turn 30 their education is considered complete, and they are full fledged citizens.
Success in completing the Kyrptoi doesn’t mean the training is over, however. Spartans continue to regularly train in battle tactics and maneuvers disguised as games and exercise routines. They also practiced coordination during hunting. The training never stopped. The clubs play a significant role in the life of a Spartiate regardless of their level in society. Just like in their youth, the type of food provided to the Spartiates in the club made sure that they did not eat or drink too much. Excessive fattiness or excessive drinking were highly scrutinized and one could get fined for indulging. Spartiates spent a lot of time on physical exercises, ball games and other pursuits that scholars still debate whether they were disguised military training or leisurely activities.
Whatever it was the Spartiates were up to, it worked. Their intense upbringing and constant focus on physical training meant that the Spartans did live up to their reputation as fierce warriors. Whether they worked with other Greeks, or fought them off, the Spartans were considered a formidable foe to their enemies. The Spartans themselves always prized their unique system for raising warriors, and always kept an eye out to any threats to that system. It is important to note that all of this happened within and around the city of Sparta, which was just a tiny part of Lakedemonia. It took a village to raise a Spartan, and in this case, it was the village of Sparta itself.
Bonus Fact:
Before graduating to the next phase of their lives, the boys usually found a lover by the age of 12. Sources such as Xenophon claim that these relationships were not sexual while also admitting that the reader probably would not believe him. This is because Spartans in general developed a reputation for anal sex, especially in this sort of relationship. It seems in reality that Spartans did not partake in this practice as much as other Greeks, although it can be attested by some surviving Lakedemonian artwork. It was such a stereotype of Spartans that they enjoyed anal sex regardless of gender that it became slang in Ancient Greece to refer to anyone who enjoyed the same thing to have “Lakedemonian buttocks”
Expand for ReferencesBayliss, Andrew J. The Spartans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Kennell, Nigel M. Spartans: A New History. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2010
Powell, Anton. Ed. A Companion to Sparta. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2018
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On the first of September, 1939, nearly 1.5 million troops, 2,750 tanks, and 2,300 aircraft of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich stormed over the border into Poland. We all know what happened next: despite declaring war in solidarity, Poland’s allies Britain and France stood by and did nothing as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union overran and occupied the country in only five weeks. What followed was a seven-month period of relative calm known as the “Phoney War”, which was finally broken in the spring of 1940 when the Germans overran Denmark, Norway, France, and the Low Countries in quick succession. Western Europe would remain under German occupation for another four years, until German defeats on the Eastern Front and the D-Day landings in Normandy finally turned the tide in favour of the Allies. But this popular narrative of the Second World War is incomplete, for often overlooked is the fact that one of Poland’s allies did, in fact, attempt to intervene early in the conflict. Barely a week after the German invasion began, 43 divisions of the French Army crossed the border into Germany in an operation that, had it succeeded, might have ended the war before it had even begun. This is the forgotten story of the Saar Offensive, one of the greatest “what ifs” in modern military history.
Modern Poland was born from the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, in which the victorious Entente powers agreed to reconstitute a Polish state from territories previously occupied by Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Russia. In the years that followed, the fledgling state fought a series of conflicts in defense of its sovereignty, including the 1920 Polish-Soviet War in which Polish forces narrowly defeated the Soviet Red Army. Recognizing the nation’s vulnerability against its neighbours, in 1921 the Polish government signed treaties with France and Britain guaranteeing that the latter would defend Poland’s sovereignty in case of foreign invasion. When, in early 1939, it became clear that an invasion of Poland was imminent, Poland’s allies debated how best to strike a preemptive blow against Germany. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill suggested floating mines down the Rhine River, but France countered that the Germans would blow up bridges across the Seine in retaliation. The idea of bombing the Black Forest to start uncontrollable fires was also proposed, but this was shot down by Secretary of State for Air Sir Kingsley Wood, who argued that this would constitute an illegal attack against private property. Instead, on May 19, Polish Minister of Military Affairs Tadeusz Kasprzycki signed a military convention with Commander-in-Chief of the French Armed Forces, General Maurice Gamelin. The convention stated that as soon as the invasion began, the French would invade Germany from the West in order to divert German forces and relieve pressure on the Polish Army.
On September 3, 1939, 2 days after the Germans launched their invasion, France and Britain declared war on Germany. French military mobilization, however, had begun considerably earlier on August 21st. Unfortunately, this process proved painfully slow. One problem was that the French mobilization system itself was woefully antiquated and inefficient, calling for the formation of small cadres of well-trained soldiers who would then train and prepare larger groups of reservists and conscripts for battle. Another problem was what would face the French troops once they crossed the border: the Westwall or Siegfried Line, the formidable line of bunkers, trenches, and other obstacles that defended Germany’s western frontier. Generals, as the saying goes, always fight the last war, and French military doctrine in 1939 was heavily mired in First World War-era thinking, with a heavy reliance on massed artillery to smash enemy defences. This was in stark contrast to German Blitzkrieg doctrine, which largely replaced heavy artillery with much more mobile ground attack aircraft like the infamous Junkers Ju-87 Stuka. It thus took time for the French to pull these heavy artillery pieces out of storage and move them into position along the border, further slowing the mobilization process.
Nonetheless, by the time of the German invasion, the French Army had successfully mobilized 40 regular infantry divisions, three mechanized divisions, one armoured division, 40 tank battalions, and 78 artillery regiments under the command of General Gamelin. These were to be further reinforced by 4 infantry divisions of the British Expeditionary Force and the advanced striking force of the Royal Air Force, which began landing in France on September 4. On paper, this gave the French an overwhelming numerical advantage over the Germans. With most of its armed forces tied up in Poland, Germany had only 43 highly-depleted infantry divisions with which to defend its entire western frontier – a massive front stretching from Denmark to Switzerland. The Saar Region, where the French planned to attack, was defended by only 34 divisions under the command of General Erwin von Witzleben – all but 11 of which were composed of poorly-trained reservists mainly armed with WWI-era weapons. Making matters worse, von Witzleben had only recently been recalled from retirement, and had only a few hundred armoured vehicles at his disposal – mostly lightly-armed Panzer I and II training tanks. The French, by contrast, fielded one of the best tanks of the period: the Char B, equipped with powerful 47 and 75mm guns and thick armour the German 37mm antitank guns could not penetrate.
On September 7, 1939, four days after France’s declaration of war, eleven French divisions of the Second Army Group under the command of General André Prételat crossed the German border along a 32-kilometre front near the town of Saarbrücken. As expected, resistance was almost nonexistent, and in a single day the French advanced 8 kilometres and captured 12 towns with few losses. By September 9, when heavy and mechanized infantry divisions crossed over the border, the French occupied most of the Warndt Forest and had advanced within a few kilometres of the Siegfried Line. The atmosphere as the French advanced was strangely calm – and in many cases surreal. In several towns French troops encountered hand-painted signs declaring “French soldiers, we have no quarrel with you. We shall not fire unless you do,” or propaganda loudspeaker vans blaring pro-French messages. In many towns, mills and factories continued to operate, while along the border German and French customs agents chatted casually to each other as if nothing had happened. Indeed, in most areas the French assault was so leisurely in places that German officials were able to pack up their belongings and retreat ahead of the advancing troops.
Yet despite this promising start, the French assault soon ground to a halt, in part due to the infantryman’s worst enemy: land mines. The fields and forests of the Saar were heavily sown with various anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, including the dreaded S-mine or “bouncing Betty” – which we previously covered in our video The Terrifyingly Effective Nazi De-Bollocker. In one town, French troops succeeded in clearing a minefield by driving a herd of pigs through it, though one can imagine that the resulting carnage did little to improve the soldiers’ morale. Another problem plaguing the French Army was its poor use of its armoured divisions. While the French had excellent tanks, unlike the Germans they had no cohesive operational doctrine for using them. Thus, instead of supporting the infantry’s advance, French tanks were used in showy but redundant assaults on German frontier defences while French government VIPs watched from behind the border. And those tanks that did penetrate into Germany quickly discovered that they were of little use, for even without the Siegfried Line, the hilly and heavily-forested terrain of the Saar was extremely difficult for vehicles to negotiate. This was completely intentional, the border between France and Germany having been drawn in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars to provide a natural barrier against future French invasions. Worse still, the French quickly discovered that their otherwise excellent Char B tanks had a fatal weakness: their engine radiators were mounted on the side of the hull, allowing them to be easily disabled by small-arms fire. The heavy artillery around which the French had based their attack also proved inadequate, for a shortage of delay fuses meant that shells could not penetrate bunkers and pillboxes before detonating, making them all but useless against the Siegfried Line.
But the French Army’s greatest disadvantage was not material or tactical, but psychological. France had suffered greatly during the Great War, losing nearly an entire generation of fighting-age men. This deep national trauma, as well as two decades of political turmoil and stagnation, had left the French Armed Forces poorly organized and highly demoralized, with little appetite for another major conflict. This lack of fighting spirit was evidenced by an incident in which a single machine gun defending a German village held up the French advance for an entire day.
All this gave German forces time to regroup and reorganize, and on September 10 a German counterattack retook the village of Apach. However, French forces managed to reverse this loss only two hours later, and on September 12 captured the town of Brenschelbach for the loss of only nine men. But the Germans were swiftly gaining strength, and on that same day the Anglo-French Supreme War Council gathered in Abbeville, France, and decided to hold offensive actions immediately. General Gamelin ordered his troops to hold their ground and not advance closer than 1 kilometre from the Siegfried Line. Shockingly, the Poles were not informed of this decision; instead, they were merely told that the planned full-scale assault was being postponed from September 17 to the 20th. Then, on September 21, Gamelin ordered a complete withdrawal of French troops from German territory. Several French commanders, including General Henri Giraud of the 7th Army, decried the order, arguing that Gamelin was throwing away a massive opportunity. Giraud believed he could capture and consolidate the area between Saarbrücken and Trier, giving France control over the strategically important Kaiserlautern Gap and allowing for future assaults into western Germany. However, Gamelin ignored Giraud’s protests and the withdrawal carried on as ordered.
The French withdrawal was nearly as slow and disorganized as the initial advance, such that most of the invading French forces were still in the Saar on October 6, the day Polish resistance finally collapsed. The surrender freed up thousands of German troops and hundreds of aircraft, who were immediately redeployed to the west to counter the French. Almost immediately the French Air Force began suffering heavy losses against better-equipped and more experienced Luftwaffe pilots, leaving the troops vulnerable to aerial attack. Then, on October 16, German troops under General von Witzleben launched a major counteroffensive against the French. Though the French were already in full retreat, they fought a valiant rearguard action and inflicted heavy losses on the Germans. But by the next day the withdrawal was complete, with all French troops having returned to their starting positions behind the French border. The Saar offensive had been a complete failure, with the French suffering nearly 2,000 killed or wounded against only 200 casualties on the German side.
Several German commanders, however, saw the offensive as a close-run thing. At the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946, Commander of the Army Generaloberst Alfred Jodl stated:
“If we did not collapse already in the year 1939 that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign, the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions.”
Similarly, General Siegfried Westphal stated that had the French had pressed home their attack in force, they could have reached the Rhine within two weeks, forcing Germany to sue for peace.
Such statements inspired the popular notion that the French foolishly threw away a golden opportunity to end the Second World War early, dooming the world to six years of the most destructive conflict in modern history. Contemporary historians, however, dismiss this claim, arguing that the Saar Offensive never stood a chance. Though thinly manned at the time of the invasion, the Siegfried Line was still a formidable barrier against which French artillery was all but useless, and would have held up the French advance long enough for the German defenders to reorganize and counterattack in force. There was also the matter of air superiority. Even with 90% of its strength tied up in Poland, the Luftwaffe’s aircraft and pilots greatly outmatched those of the French Air Force, allowing them to strike at French troops with impunity. And even if the French managed to break through the Siegfried Line and reach the Rhine, their lack of rapid assault doctrine would likely have prevented them from capturing any bridges before they were blown by the Germans, leaving the invasion stranded on the river’s western bank. All this would have allowed the Germans to hold off the French for long enough to finish conquering Poland, releasing the troops necessary to beat back the invasion.
Thus, while the story of the Saar Offensive makes for an intriguing historical “what if”, the plain truth is that the French in 1939 were woefully ill-prepared for modern mechanized warfare – a fact that would become horrifically clear when, only 8 months later, the Germans came storming across the border and conquered France in only six weeks.
Expand for ReferencesSaar Offensive, Totally History, https://totallyhistory.com/saar-offensive/
Austra, Kevin, Operation Saar: a Lost Opportunity, History Net, August 19, 1999, https://www.historynet.com/operation-saar-a-lost-opportunity-september-99-world-war-ii-feature/
Thomas, Ryan, The Saar Offensive: the Impossible Dream, Hub Pages, September 12, 2022, https://discover.hubpages.com/education/The-Saar-Offensive-The-Impossible-Dream
Operation Saar, Codenames, https://codenames.info/operation/saar/
Knighton, Andrew, Did You Know? The French Army Invaded German in 1939 to Support the Polish, War History Online, May 290, 2016, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/did-you-know-the-french-army-invaded-germany-in1939.html?safari=1
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Grosse Île lies 50km east of Quebec City, one of 21 islands in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. Though its name means “Big Island” in French, Grosse Île is barely two kilometres square, home to a small collection of buildings from its days as a quarantine station for Irish immigrants arriving in Canada. Designated a National Historic Site in 1974, today the island is open to tourists and hosts a museum, guided walking tours, and other activities. Yet this seemingly idyllic little island holds a dark secret. During the Second World War, a team of Canadian scientists used Grosse Île as a secret laboratory to study and weaponize some of the deadliest diseases known to mankind – biological weapons which, if used, could have unleashed a bacteriological apocalypse.
When one thinks of Weapons of Mass Destruction, one is unlikely to think of Canada. Yet in the buildup to the Second World War, Canada was among the first western nations to push for the development of chemical and biological warfare. And the unlikely champion of this initiative was a man more associated with saving millions of lives than ending them: Sir Frederick Banting. In 1923 Banting was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for the discovery of insulin, used in the treatment of diabetes. Warily observing the rise of Nazism and Europe’s steady march towards war, in the late 1930s Banting became gravely concerned about Germany’s potential use of chemical and germ warfare in the coming conflict. Germany had pioneered chemical warfare during the First World War – first deploying chlorine gas against Canadian and French troops at the Battle of Ypres in April 1915 – and its microbiologists were among the finest in the world. Around 1.3 million casualties – including 90,000 deaths – were inflicted by poison gas during the conflict; newer, more potent gases developed since then had the potential to kill millions more – and biological weapons even more than that. So obsessed was Banting with halting the Nazi war machine that in 1939 he wrote in his diary: “We need to kill 2 or 4 million young Germans without mercy- without feeling. It is our duty to eliminate them.”
The Nazis and him apparently would have gotten along swimmingly if he’d been German instead of Canadian….
In any event, soon after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Banting met with senior Government officials and convinced them to back a more intensive chemical and biological weapons program. Limited research on bacteriological warfare agents was already underway in Canadian universities since 1937, but these programs were severely underfunded. Turning to the private sector, Banting managed to secure a half a million dollars – an unprecedented amount in those days – from Samuel Bronfman, head of Seagrams Distillery; and John David Eaton, owner of Eaton’s department stores. With this infusion of cash bioweapons research in Canada kicked into high gear, and a special body known was the M-1000 Committee was formed to direct it. But Banting would not live to see the fruits of his initiative, dying in a plane crash in Newfoundland in February 1941 while flying to meet with British biological weapons experts.
In December 1941 the project took on a new urgency as Japan entered the war on the side of the Axis. Japan was even more advanced in its use of biological warfare, having established the infamous Unit 731 in occupied Manchuria to test biological weapons on live Chinese POWs and civilians – the test subjects often being dissected alive without anaesthesia. The Japanese also deployed anthrax, cholera, and bubonic plague against Chinese villages, killing over 400,000 civilians.
The M-1000 committee considered dozens of potential bacteriological warfare agents for development, including bubonic plague, typhus, tularemia, psittacosis, rocky mountain spotted fever, botulism, salmonella, glanders, and African horse sickness. But early on two clear frontrunners emerged: Rinderpest, a disease mainly affecting cattle, and Anthrax. Anthrax was particularly well-suited to biological warfare as it formed hard, resilient spores which could resist extremely high temperatures. This allowed Anthrax spores to be packed into air-dropped bombs and dispersed using explosives. As an added bonus, Anthrax was treatable using Penicillin, which unlike the Germans the Allies would soon have in great supply.
But the same properties which made anthrax so easy to weaponize also made it extremely persistent – a fact British scientists would soon learn the hard way. In 1942 the war was going badly for the Allies. The British Army was shut out of mainland Europe, U-boats were sinking hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping off the coast of the United States, the Eighth Army was being pushed out of North Africa, and German forces were advancing ever deeper into the Soviet Union. About the only weapons the Allies had to strike back against the Axis were the bombers of the Royal Air Force, and to maximize their destructive power the British began planning a massive biological warfare campaign against Nazi Germany. Code-named Operation Vegetarian, the plan called for RAF bombers to drop millions of Anthrax-infected feed cakes across Germany. These would be eaten by cattle and other livestock, contaminating their meat and causing widespread disease and famine. The resulting disruption of civilian life was expected to cause Nazi Germany to collapse within months.
To test this weapon, scientists at the biological warfare centre at Porton Down acquired the remote island of Gruinard in Northern Scotland. A flock of sheep was transported to the island and various designs of anthrax bombs and anthrax-cake dispensers were exploded among them. The effects were chilling: within three days every single sheep was dead. The contaminated corpses were buried by piling them under a cliff and dynamiting the cliff on top of them, but a single corpse managed to float away and washed ashore on the mainland. This touched off an anthrax outbreak that killed over 100 livestock and pets. Thankfully, the Porton Down scientists were able to contain the outbreak before it spread to the human population, though due to wartime secrecy it would be decades before the locals discovered just what had killed their animals. But Gruniard Island was found to be hopelessly contaminated, and after disinfecting the soil as best they could with fire and formaldehyde, the scientists suspended all further experiments and sealed off the island indefinitely.
The Gruinard Island incident convinced the government that it was too dangerous to manufacture and test biological weapons on British soil. For an alternative site, they turned to their colony across the Atlantic. It would not be the first or last time Britain looked to Canada to help test dangerous weapons. Following a series of experiments at Porton Down where British soldiers were exposed to mustard gas, Britain ordered all further testing moved to Suffield, a Canadian military base in Alberta. Here in May 1942, 712 volunteer Canadian soldiers were marched out onto the proving grounds wearing only gas masks and regular combat gear and ordered to stand at attention while aircraft flying at 1000 feet sprayed them with mustard gas. Once the gas had fully penetrated their clothing, they were marched back to base and the effects studied. Mustard gas is a vesicant or blister agent, which when absorbed by the skin inflicts severe, extremely painful chemical burns that can take months to heal. Participants were paid $1 for volunteering and $20 for each burn that appeared, though given the horrific effects it is debatable whether these rewards were worth it. Similar experiments were later carried out on troops in Inisfall, Australia and Karachi, British India, making Britain and her Empire the only belligerent nation other than Japan to test chemical weapons on human subjects during WWII. Incredibly, in 1950 Canada would offer to allow Britain to test its first atomic bomb in the Canadian north near the town of Churchill – an offer Britain declined in favour of Australia.
Meanwhile, in the months following Sir Frederick Banting’s death, biological weapons research in Canada began to languish. Then, in October 1941 U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging the creation of a U.S. bioweapons program. Due to the more advanced state of the Canadian program, an agreement was reached whereby the U.S. would bankroll Canadian development of bioweapons until their own development centre at Fort Detrick, Maryland was up and running. This coincided almost perfectly with the British request for an alternate weapons development centre, and with $200,000 of US Government funds in hand, project directors E.G.D Murray and Otto Maass began searching for a suitable site for a secret bioweapons lab.
They quickly found one in the former quarantine station at Grosse Île, a place with an already dark and tragic past. Grosse Île Station was established in 1832, replacing the older Pointe-Lévy station. And just in time, too, for in the late 1840s Canada was inundated with hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants fleeing the great potato famine. Many of these immigrants arrived aboard so-called “Coffin Ships” – lumber freighters offering cheap transatlantic passage – and the crowded, unsanitary conditions in their holds lead to frequent outbreaks of disease like typhus and cholera. In 1847 alone more than 100,000 people arrived in Quebec, with up to 40 ships lining up for 3km along the river waiting to unload their cargoes. This massive influx quickly overwhelmed the island’s limited facilities. Its hospitals were soon filled to bursting, forcing many of the sick to fend for themselves in the mud outside. Eventually 22 150ft-long “fever sheds” were built on the mainland to accommodate the overflow, but this lead to diseases spreading to the rest of the city. When the local population rioted, threatening to push the sheds into the river, the military were forced to cordon off the area. It would not be until 1854 that improved sanitation and a reduction in immigration finally brought an end to the epidemics. Between 1832 and 1932, around 500,000 immigrants entered Canada via Grosse Île, making it – along with Pier 21 in Halifax – the Canadian analogue of Ellis Island in New York. Of these new arrivals, around 5,000 died of disease, their bodies buried in mass graves on the island itself and on nearby Point Charles.
The island was an ideal site for bacteriological research for several reasons. First, it was remote and relatively inaccessible, the closest population centre being the small village of Montmagny just across the river. Second, it was entirely self-sufficient, with its own working power plant, boilers, dormitories, churches, and hospitals. But most attractive of all was the decontamination building, which featured a pair of massive steam-powered sterilization chambers. Immigrants arriving on Grosse Île were required to remove their clothes and place them in the ovens before proceeding to the showers, on the other side of which they would collect their newly lice-and-flea-free clothes. These chambers, thought Murray and Maass, would be ideal for growing large quantities of anthrax.
But some weren’t so sure. Charles Mitchell, Canada’s Chief Veterinarian, objected that the island wasn’t isolated enough, being only 6 kilometres from the nearest riverbank. To be sufficiently safe, he argued, the site would have to be at least 80 kilometres offshore. But as no alternative site could be found, Mitchell was overruled, and in 1942 the Grosse Île laboratory commenced operation under the cover name War Disease Control Station. The island, under the command of Major Richard Duthy and guarded by a garrison of 100 soldiers, was divided into two main areas. The west of the island was occupied by Project R, studying rinderpest, and the east end by Project N, studying anthrax. Anthrax was grown in flat trays in the two decontamination ovens, which for safety reasons were kept locked shut with the scientists inside. Many scientists found working in the ovens in full protective gear unbearable, leading many to adopt the curious practice of working naked except for a gas mask. This practice also had the added benefit of making their bodies easier to decontaminate. But even measures such as these soon proved grossly inadequate. In an early report on Grosse Île’s operations Major Duthy complained that the island was infested with flies, which could easily land on lab equipment and carry deadly spores to the mainland. Then, in August 1943 several scientists came down with mysterious illnesses and had to be isolated at a hospital in Quebec City. Tests later confirmed they were infected with anthrax. The incident raised alarm bells among the project directors, many of whom called for the island laboratory to be shut down. But they were ultimately overruled for political reasons, as many in the project wanted to prove that Canadian scientists were every bit as good as their American counterparts.
And there were other dangers to worry about. In the fall of 1943 German U-boats began penetrating deeper and deeper into the St. Lawrence estuary, raising fears that they would discover the Grosse Île station. Isolation also began to take its toll. Due to the top-secret nature of the project the island garrison were unable to bring their families along; bored and restless, they acted abysmally while on leave in neighbouring Montmagny. This lead to concerns about the island’s secrets leaking out, though by this time the residents of Montmagny already suspected something was amiss and began avoiding the island’s staff like, well, the plague.
Yet despite these difficulties anthrax production forged ahead, and by the end of 1943 Grosse Île was producing 120kg of anthrax spores every week – enough to fill 1,500 standard aerial bombs. In August 1944 these bombs were extensively tested at the Suffield proving grounds, despite the fact that, unlike Gruinard island, Suffield had no natural geographic barriers to prevent deadly spores from drifting into populated areas. The extent of the site’s contamination remains classified to this day – a somewhat alarming fact given that anthrax spores can survive in the soil for up to 100 years. In any case, the British were impressed with the results, and ordered 500,000 anthrax bombs from Suffield and Grosse-Île.
But while the scientists perfected their deadly creations, Allied leaders dithered on how or whether to use them. Despite the Gruinard fiasco, planning for Operation Vegetarian continued, though it was only to be carried out in retaliation for a German anthrax attack on Britain. Then, on the eve of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944, a new plan was proposed to drop anthrax and rinderpest on the German cities of Aix-la Chapelle, Wilhelmshaven, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Berlin. But this too was shelved for fear of reprisals, and reserved only as a retaliatory measure. At the same time, Allied intelligence began to learn of two advanced secret weapons being developed by the Germans: the V-1 flying bomb and V2 ballistic missile. Both had the range to reach London from launch sites in occupied France and the Netherlands, but only had an accuracy of 8 kilometres and a payload of 1 ton. This would make an explosive or chemical warhead all but useless, leaving only one possible payload: a biological weapon. In response, Allied scientists began producing large quantities of botulinum toxin – better known as botox – a poison so potent that one gram can kill one million people. As with anthrax, this choice was predicated on the fact that the Allies had a botox antidote and the Germans did not.
But in the end all these plans came to nothing as attacks using conventional weapons finally forced Nazi Germany to surrender on May 8, 1945. And when the conquering armies inspected Nazi battle preparations, they were shocked by what they found. Despite Allied fears, in reality Germany had no biological weapons program to speak of. And while German scientists had developed the deadly nerve gases Sarin and Tabun, military leaders had opted not to use them for fear of Allied reprisals. Even the vaunted V-weapons carried only high explosive and not biological warheads as many had feared. For all the paranoia which had driven the Allied WMD programs, even the Nazis found the prospect of chemical and biological warfare too terrible to contemplate.
But even if the Allies had opted to use biological weapons, Canada would only have been a small part of the overall effort. Of the 500,000 bombs ordered by Britain, only 5,000 were produced by Grosse Île and Suffield by the war’s end. Still, this alone accounted for 439 litres of spores or 70 billion lethal doses – enough to kill the world population at the time 30 times over. But by 1944 anthrax production at Fort Detrick was in full swing and quickly eclipsed the Canadian facilities, causing the United States to break off its partnership with Canada. Research at Grosse Île continued until 1956, when the station was finally shut down and decommissioned. In 1957 it became a veterinary research centre, while in 1965 it was once again used as a quarantine station – though this time for imported animals.
But the story doesn’t quite end there. On March 24, 1970, George Ignatieff, Ambassador to the United Nations Conference of the Committee on Disarmament delivered a speech in which he claimed: “Canada never has and does not now possess any biological weapons or toxins.”
It was a bold-faced lie, as declassified government documents would reveal just two years later. While the Canadian government’s official story was that chemical and biological weapons research had ended with the Second World War, in reality it had quietly continued for decades afterwards. In 1951 and 1952, extensive tests with Sarin nerve gas were conducted at Suffield, while between 1962 and 1973 Canada participated in Project 112, a U.S. Department of Defence program wherein simulated biological agents were sprayed over American and Canadian cities. Meanwhile, Suffield amassed massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons including 637 tons of mustard gas, 30 tons of Sarin and VX nerve gas, 200 tons of phosgene, 2,800 pounds of botulinum toxin, and 200 pounds of ricin – the majority of which was not disposed of until 1989.
1974 brought to light another dangerous legacy of Canada’s biowarfare project. In that year the Federal Government, unaware of the island’s secret wartime role, designated Grosse Île a National Historic Site and began developing it for tourism. In 1988, after thousands of tourists had already visited the island, the story of its use as an anthrax factory finally broke. And while scientists working at the station in 1956 claimed to have thoroughly decontaminated the island with Formaldehyde, no records could be found confirming this. Worse still, some sources indicated that the anthrax growing trays had simply been tossed into the St. Lawrence or even into the bushes, meaning that the entire island might be contaminated with deadly spores. Whoopsie-doodle! Acting quickly, Government closed the site and passed it over to Environment Canada, who thoroughly decontaminated the site before handing it back to Parks Canada. That said, to this day, no person is known to have contracted anthrax from visiting the island.
Many of the details of Grosse Île and Canada’s bioweapons program may never be known, for most of the archival records were accidentally lost in the early 1990s. But what is known remains a dark and disturbing chapter in Canada’s history, one that runs counter to the popular image of that nation. But it is perhaps also a cause for hope, for despite the cruelty and depravity that characterized the deadliest conflict in modern history, most of the belligerent nations were wise enough to know that biological warfare was a horror too far, even for a group like the Nazis.
Speaking of the Nazis, Adidas and Puma, started by two feuding Nazi brothers. Click the video here for more on this rather fascinating story.
Expand for ReferencesBryden, John, Deadly Allies: Canada’s Secret War 1937-47, McLelland & Stewart, 1989
Fournier, Sylvain, Il y a 75 ans : 1942, ouverture d’un laboratoire militaire ultra secret à Grosse-Île, en face de Montmagny, Le Kiosque Médias, April 22, 2017, http://lekiosquemedias.com/2017/04/22/il-y-a-75-ans-1942-ouverture-dun-laboratoire-militaire-ultra-secret-a-grosse-ile-en-face-de-montmagny/?doing_wp_cron=1613065121.3969039916992187500000
Bruemmer, Rene, Seeking Hope, They Found Death, The Gazette, May 31, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20090601112744/http://www.montrealgazette.com/Seeking%2Bhope%2Bthey%2Bfound%2Bdeath/1645325/story.html
Perron, Normand, Grosse-Île, Entre la Quarantaine et L’anthrax, Encyclobec, October 2016, http://encyclobec.ca/region_projet.php?projetid=578
Duchesne, André, Le Projet N: le Secret de Grosse-Île, La Presse, May 31, 2010, https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/television/201005/31/01-4285306-le-projet-n-le-secret-de-grosse-ile.php
Projet N (Anthrax) – Reportage Complet (Documentary), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDxIfiW8v8A
Walkom, Thomas, Canada Played Key Role in U.S, U.K. Biological Weapons Programs, Toronto Star, June 23, 2013, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/06/26/canada_played_key_role_in_us_uk_biological_weapons_programs_walkom.html
Valjak, Domagoj, Operation Vegetarian: in 1942, the British Planned on Killing Millions of Germans by Dropping Anthrax Onto Their Pastures, The Vintage News, January 10, 2018, https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/01/10/operation-vegetarian/
The post Canada’s Plan to Unleash a Bacteriological Apocalypse appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the mid-19th century, the Austrian Empire, which stretched for over a thousand miles (1600 km) from Italy to Ukraine, was a place of contradictions. The ruling patriarch, Minister of the Interior Baron Alexander von Bach, was on the one hand something of a despot, abolishing public trials, reducing the freedom of the press and imprisoning political opponents. Conversely, his rule also saw the relaxing of economic laws, the demise of internal custom duties and peasants freed from their feudal obligations.
It was during this time, in the small village of Smiljan, situated within the Empire’s military frontier (now modern-day Croatia) that Nikola Tesla was born, the fourth of five children. Tesla’s father was a priest, and the family soon moved to nearby Gospić, where his parish was located. In 1870, Nikola migrated to the city of Karlovac to attend high school, where he first became enamoured by the emerging science of electricity. The next few years were rough for the young man. He contracted cholera and was near death on several occasions. Following his recovery, he went into hiding among the mountains in order to escape conscription into the Empire’s military.
In 1875, Nikola enrolled at the Imperial-Royal Technical College in Graz, where he did very well initially. However, by his third year, for reasons that are still debated, he was struggling, and he left without graduating, leaving behind a rumour that he’d drowned in the Mur River. What he actually did was cross the border into Slovenia without telling anyone, not even his family it appears, and took a job as a draftsman. However, ultimately Tesla was deported from Slovenia for failing to get a residence permit, and he thus returned home just in time to see his father die a month later at the age of 60 in 1879.
Two years after this, Tesla began working for a man named Tivadar Puskás at The Budapest Telephone Exchange in Hungary. Impressing his superiors, they soon promoted him to the position of chief engineer, where the young scientist made several improvements to their equipment.
This was significant to the story at hand today, as, in 1882, Puskás recommended Tesla for another job, this time in Paris, working for none other than the Continental Edison Company, installing indoor electric lighting across the city.
Once again, Tesla impressed his employers by improving designs, and he began to be sent on troubleshooting missions to other Edison utilities. Next came a big step for the young engineer. Tesla’s overseer, Charles Batchelor, a close associate of Thomas Edison’s, was recalled to New York City, and decided to take Tesla with him.
And so it was that almost immediately upon arriving in the United States, Tesla began working at Edison’s Machine Works for a period of just six months. It was this curiously short time span that is often cited as the origin of the first great myth of Tesla’s life and career- that Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla hated each other.
According to legend, this all started when Tesla was offered a $50,000 bonus (about $2 million today) if he could improve the design of certain of Edison’s machinery. When Tesla successfully completed this task, Edison’s company (or Edison himself, in some versions of the tale) declined to pay out.
As to the origin of this story, it came from Tesla himself later in life. Tesla wrote of all this, “The S.S. Oregon, the fastest passenger steamer at that time, had both of its lighting machines disabled and its sailing was delayed. As the superstructure had been built after their installation it was impossible to remove them from the hold. The predicament was a serious one and Edison was much annoyed. In the evening I took the necessary instruments with me and went aboard the vessel where I stayed for the night. The dynamos were in bad condition, having several short-circuits and breaks, but with the assistance of the crew I succeeded in putting them in good shape… During this period I designed twenty-four different types of standard machines with short cores and of uniform pattern which replaced the old ones. The Manager had promised me fifty thousand dollars on the completion of this task but it turned out to be a practical joke. This gave me a painful shock and I resigned my position.”
Now, to begin with, it should be explicitly pointed out that Edison wasn’t involved in any of this, with the story simply mentioning Tesla’s manager.
Yet another problem with this supposedly being the origin of the mythical feud between the two is that it isn’t actually clear that it ever happened. First, even if Tesla’s manager had made such a promise of a, in modern dollars, near $2 million bonus, it bizarrely makes Tesla look rather dimwitted, given his pay at the time was only $18 per week and he would otherwise have just been doing his job in making these improvements. Further, even if bonuses were offered, it certainly wouldn’t have been for a figure like $50,000, which would have made Tesla not only quite wealthy overnight, but given him more money than Edison’s Machine Works actually had on hand at the time.
The story, thus, seems a little suspect on its details.
This is also not documented in Tesla’s journal at the time it supposedly happened, which, we’re just guessing if someone offered you the equivalent of $2 million today as a bonus to do your normal job, you’d probably write that crap down in your nightly written musings. Further, you’d certainly write about it if they then reneged on the deal. Especially if it then made you so angry you left the company because of it, as Tesla claims there.
And it’s at this point we should probably mention in the period of his life Tesla came up with this story, he was also claiming pigeons were speaking to him, one of whom he had fallen in love with. As he stated, “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”
Going back to Tesla’s departure from the company, when he left, he was allowed ownership of patents for all the inventions he had designed while in Edison’s employ, something that was not the norm, but for whatever reason it was allowed in his case. This suggests he left on very good terms with his employers.
This is also noteworthy here in that it debunks the idea that Edison was just sitting back evilly cackling as he stole his brilliant employee, Tesla’s, inventions for fun and profit. In fact, it went the other way and, for whatever reason, he allowed Tesla to take them, something that would be pivotal in Tesla’s first steps into financial independence, with his ability to then sell them and keep the money himself.
In any event, the idea that the two men hated each other is perpetuated thanks to a very real competition, not so much between the two men, but two companies in the so-called War of the Currents.
On this one, after leaving Edison, Tesla came up with his first major scientific breakthrough: the Alternating Current Induction Motor – an alternative to the Direct Current method of transmitting electricity championed by Edison. News of Tesla’s device soon reached George Westinghouse, owner of the Westinghouse Company. Both Edison and Westinghouse were already fighting to secure dominance of the energy markets, and the latter put his faith in Tesla’s invention to win the battle conclusively.
As for Edison’s side, he went to rather extreme lengths to discredit Alternating Current, including leveraging research his company had done using electricity to try to find a more humane way of euthanizing animals than the then common methods of hanging or drowning our furry companions. In all of this, he was trying to show A.C. electricity was simply too dangerous compared to Edison’s Direct Current. Nevertheless, for a variety of practical reasons, Tesla’s A.C. method of transmitting electricity won out.
Now, as a brief aside in the spirit of debunking popular myths- we feel compelled to point out here that- no, Edison did not kill an elephant to try to discredit Alternating Current. Nor did he kill an elephant at all.
Now, to be clear, there was an elephant named Topsy who had been sentenced to death for killing three humans, and it was indeed electrocuted. But Edison had nothing to do with any of this at any stage before, during, or after. Nor was he mentioned in any contemporary news accounts of the event. Nor do any of his own surviving writings such as journal or correspondence make any mention of the event. Further, going back to the so-called War of the Currents, this elephant execution occurred about a decade after Edison had already lost the war. So this event was not in any way used by Edison to discredit A.C. current either.
So why do most today think Edison did murder an elephant and use it to show A.C. current was dangerous? First, because the electrical company that performed the execution bore his name- the Edison Electric Illuminating Co. of Brooklyn. However, despite the name, Edison was not in any way involved with this power company at the time. It was a privately owned entity that had years before lost any association with the man himself outside of still bearing his name.
The second reason he is so associated with this execution is that Edison Manufacturing’s film branch filmed the event. While Edison was president of Edison Manufacturing, someone else ran the film company’s day to day operations, Edison Manufacturing vice president and general manager William E. Gilmore. It’s also noted that the company made about 1,200 films around this time with very little input or oversight from Edison. And, indeed, this particular execution seems to be one of those cases, as none of Edison’s surviving correspondence from this period between himself and Gilmore mention anything about it.
So why film the killing? It would seem simply that it was a highly publicised event and Gilmore just thought it would be something worth documenting with their relatively new film technology.
In any event, going back to Tesla and Edison and the War of the Currents, while there was, as noted, a bit of a battle between companies with their competing technologies, both men, at least as far as the scant surviving mentions the two made of each other, seem to have respected one another greatly.
Tesla even later praised Edison in an article he wrote for the New York Times when Edison died, stating, “The recurrence of a phenomenon like [Thomas] Edison is not very likely. The profound change of conditions and the ever increasing necessity of theoretical training would seem to make it impossible. He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity.”
And as for Tesla’s criticism of Edison, about the worst he seems to have ever said was to take a little jab at Edison’s research methods. That said, even here, while it is a small criticism, it’s also a great compliment concerning Edison’s work ethic and persistence. Tesla stated, “If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once, with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.”
Tesla would elsewhere expand on this, “[Edison’s] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.”
And given Edison himself allegedly stated, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” this assessment of Tesla’s perhaps checks out.
…Although, once again in the spirit of debunking myths, we should probably point out that despite that maxim being one of the most famous of all Edison quotes, it wasn’t actually what he said, nor was he the originator of the idea. As for what he said, this was “Genius is not inspired. Inspiration is perspiration,” as well as supposedly expanding, “2% is genius and 98% is hard work.”
As to who actually seems to have come up with the source sentiment, enter academic Kate Sanborn in her “What is Genius?” lectures in the 1890s. In this, she stated that genius is a mix of perspiration and inspiration, and that perspiration was far more critical than its fellow -ation. Not long after, an editorial about her lecture in the paper popularly made the rounds, afterwhich Edison seemed to concur given his whole “inspiration is perspiration” thing.
That quote and the general idea evolved over time, to our present day “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” that Edison never actually said (nor did Sanborn say verbatim), and today everybody’s forgotten about poor Kate’s contributions.
In any event, going back to Edison and Tesla, the money generated by Tesla’s A.C. patents made him a relatively wealthy man, and gave him the opportunity to pursue further inventions of his own. Working from various spaces in Manhattan, over the next few years Tesla developed a number of fascinating projects. He invented the now-famous Tesla Coil, a device which projects vibrant arcs of electricity through the air. The scientist also introduced the steam-powered oscillating generator, worked closely on the Niagara dam project, advising on the best method to produce and transmit electricity, and invented new ways of utilising the newly discovered science of X-rays. In 1889, Tesla made one of his most famous demonstrations, using a system which he named ‘Teleautomatics’ to remotely steer a model boat across a lake. Tesla attempted to interest the US military in this latter invention, but they declined.
During this period, Tesla was also experimenting with the concept of wireless power, which leads us to our next major topic. Perhaps the most pervasive myth concerning Nikola Tesla is that he invented a form of ‘free’ wireless energy. This energy, so the conspiracy theory goes, would have been communicated wirelessly at no cost to the end consumer, and would have, thus, revolutionised the world.
This whole idea stems from Tesla’s famous Wardenclyffe tower (or Tesla Tower) which the inventor constructed in Shoreham, New York, between 1901-1902. Persistent voices declare that the tower was demolished by the federal government to prevent Tesla from gifting such free energy to the world- an act which would have put some very rich and influential people out of business.
The thing is, beyond the inherent issues of wireless electricity, like extreme inefficiency and the like, which would have actually made it massively more expensive, obviously there’s no such thing as free energy. Tesla himself never used the term, to describe what he was doing and we’re guessing his investors would not have invested if that’s what he was planning. But he did believe in the concept of wireless transmission of electricity, and his ideas as to the process were novel. He states as a part of various wireless electrical transmission attempts he conducted in Colorado Springs,
“(using) the Earth itself as the medium for conducting the currents, thus dispensing with wires and all other artificial conductors … a machine which, to explain its operation in plain language, resembled a pump in its action, drawing electricity from the Earth and driving it back into the same at an enormous rate, thus creating ripples or disturbances which, spreading through the Earth as through a wire, could be detected at great distances by carefully attuned receiving circuits. In this manner I was able to transmit to a distance, not only feeble effects for the purposes of signaling, but considerable amounts of energy, and later discoveries I made convinced me that I shall ultimately succeed in conveying power without wires, for industrial purposes, with high economy, and to any distance, however great.”
Among other things, Tesla’s plans then were for a new way of distributing energy, but the energy itself would have had to have been generated in the traditional manner. In Tesla’s time, this would have likely been via steam pumps burning coal. While it is true that Wardenclyffe tower had been designed with the testing of wireless power transmission in mind, the inventor was never able to prove his ideas and mounting financial woes and lack of investor interest led to the foreclosure of the tower itself. Tesla was unable to keep up with mortgage payments and Wardenclyffe was dismantled in 1915 by its de facto owner, George C Boldt, in order to be sold for scrap.
Tesla’s last decades do not seem to have been happy ones. In reduced financial circumstances, for many years he lived and worked in a New York hotel. This was a period during which, by all accounts, the great scientist’s energy and mental health declined. He became increasingly ‘eccentric,’ to put it mildly, displaying behaviour such as an obsession with numbers and cleanliness which would today most likely be diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It is from these times which our next two myths originate.
First, that Tesla invented a death-ray. As you may have deduced from Tesla absconding from mandatory military service as a youth, Tesla was a pacifist and believed in the good of the common man. So why do rumours persist of his so-called ‘death ray,’ a weapon of frightening power designed to inflict maximum damage to human life? There is, at least, some truth behind this enduring myth. Tesla did indeed talk openly about such a device, which he called the Teleforce, and theorised could use metal ions propelled at great speed, exploiting previously unknown laws of physics that, to quote him, “no one has ever dreamed about”. It’s certainly true that Tesla sought funding for his energy weapon from various governments and seemingly the Soviet Union even bit on it and gave him some money to make it.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, the inventor believed that such a thing would put an end to warfare. He claimed it was powerful enough to bring down aircraft in flight over vast distances and that it was capable of creating a deadly wall of energy that no enemy could pass through. It was the inventor’s belief that, if every county were equipped with his machinery, no war could ever be fought again. According to Tesla biographer W. Bernard Carlson, one night in 1937, the inventor declared to a room full of people at the Yugoslavian embassy that he had constructed a working model, which would be unveiled to the world in the coming months. Unfortunately for Tesla, later that year he suffered injuries resulting from an automobile accident. He never fully recovered his health and, by the time of his death in 1943, no further news of the Teleforce device had been forthcoming.
While it is true that, following Tesla’s death, government officials, keen on such a device to use against the Nazis, searched his hotel room for sensitive documents, no physical proof of the inventor’s ‘death ray’ has ever been found. A package left by Tesla in the hotel’s vault, which he had told the hotel manager was a secret prototype worth thousands of dollars, was discovered to be a mundane tool for measuring electrical resistance. It must also be taken into account that this was not the only device Tesla claimed to have invented during his years of decline, yet never demonstrated to anyone, many of which certainly sound implausible.
Moving on from there, let’s talk about Tesla and numerology. Tapping into the view of Tesla as a preternaturally gifted mystic, adherents to numerology (belief in an occult or supernatural link between numbers and events) regularly claim that the inventor was privy to astounding universal knowledge centred around the numbers 3, 6 and 9. We have already discussed the inventor’s possible mental illness later in life, and he did seem to have something of a genuine obsessive compulsive fixation with the number 3. But this myth centres on the following quote, attributed to Tesla: “If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6, and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.”
However, there is no evidence that Tesla ever spoke these words or had any interest in numerology. The quote itself appears to derive from another: “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” This latter is attributed to Ralph Bergstresser, a fellow inventor who claims to have heard this from Tesla first-hand. Of course, not only does this not say anything about 3, 6, and 9, but there is no other reference to Tesla saying this.
In the end, the legacy of Tesla’s great work is often overshadowed by the wild conspiracy theories which surround him. he is often portrayed as a kind of martyr for the common people- an inventor with almost supernatural ability, privy to the inner workings of the universe, and a man cruelly censored by those in power who could not allow for any challenge to the status quo.
The truth is, however, while there is no doubt that Tesla had an exceptional capacity for science and engineering far ahead of his time, and that he contributed extremely important innovations to a range of then-emerging technologies, he was also enigmatic and unstable, with his wildest claims more fantastical than real inventions, only existing or even possible at all in his mind. Further, in later life, as we’ve alluded to, it seems plausible that he may have experienced dementia, compounding all of this. None of this diminishes his actual real life accomplishments, which were incredible. It’s just important to focus on what those actually were, and realise that his issues with funding and various things of this nature throughout his life had far more to do with his own shortcomings, than any real conspiracy against him.
Bonus Fact:
Speaking of Thomas Edison and errors, ever wonder where the term “bug” as in a glitch in a computer system came from? Well, I hope so because we’re going to talk about it. The first recorded use of “bug” in this context comes from none other than Mr. Edison, who in a March 3, 1878 letter to Western Union President William Orton wrote: “You were partly correct. I did find a “bug” in my apparatus, but it was not in the telephone proper. It was of the genus “callbellum”. The insect appears to find conditions for its existence in all call apparatus of telephones.”
The “callbellum” Edison refers to in the letter is not an actual genus of insect but rather an obscure Latin joke, “call” referring to a telephone call and bellum being the latin word for “war” or “combat” – implying that Edison is engaged in a struggle with this particular hardware glitch. In a letter to Theodore Puskas written later that year, Edison more clearly defines his use of the word: “It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [it is] then that “Bugs”—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.”
Where Edison himself got the term is not known, though one theory posits that it originated from a common problem plaguing telegraph systems. For almost 40 years since their introduction, electric telegraphs were limited to sending a single message at a time over a single wire. As the popularity of telegraphy rose through the mid-19th Century, this limitation became a serious problem, as the only way to allow more messages to be sent was to install more telegraph wires – an increasingly inelegant and expensive solution. This led inventors around the world to seek out methods for transmitting multiple signals over a single wire – a practice now known as multiplexing. By the 1870s several inventors had succeeded in perfecting workable multiplex or “acoustic” telegraphs, which generally worked by encoding each individual signal at a particular acoustic frequency. This allowed multiple signals to be sent along a single telegraph wire, with only a receiver tuned to the sending frequency of a particular signal being able to extract that signal from among the others. Among the many inventors to develop multiplex telegraphs were Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, whose work on sending acoustic frequencies over telegraph wires would eventually lead them to discover the principles that would be used for the telephone.
In any event, while these early multiplex telegraphs worked reasonably well, they had a tendency to generate phantom signals in the form of loud “clicks” that reminded many telegraph operators of the sound of an insect. Thomas Edison himself patented an electronic workaround to this problem in 1873, which he referred to as a “bug catcher” or “bug trap” – suggesting this phenomenon as a likely origin for the term.
The post The Many Myths Surrounding Nikola Tesla appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If you are like many parents watching your children’s booster seats slide around while they hop into the vehicle and otherwise wonder what precisely is the way you’re supposed to incorporate the seatbelt around the bits so it’s properly positioned on the kids (we’ll get into how to always do this one correctly later in this video), or lord help you if you have your kids buckle themselves and watch as they somehow find a completely different way to position things each and every time, you may have found yourself wondering if this more complicated and expensive way to get children safely secured in the car is, in fact, actually any safer than just using a seatbelt alone.
Well, it turns out, because universe is gonna universe, the answer is kind of complicated, ranging from no, not at all, to yes, boosters are safer, to also it doesn’t actually matter either way because it would be much better if we all stopped using booster seats once kids graduate from infant car seats.
Confused? Well, we’re really glad because we spent a ton of time researching and writing the rest of this piece and it would make us a very sad Panda if nobody bothered to continue to watch and learn from the fruits of our efforts… Plus, we’re going to tell you later how to make sure you are always using the booster seats correctly. So everybody wins!
To begin with, let’s first note that the recommended child safety seats for littles before they’re big enough for booster seats, aka infant seats, are unequivocally safer than both booster seats and seatbelts for this especially young age group. ESPECIALLY when these infant safety seats are rear facing. And, in fact, you should keep these things rear facing as absolutely long as possible, with many Scandinavian countries even requiring up through the age of 4 years old for rear facing child safety seats. This fact is thought to be why, for example, Sweden has the lowest percentage of this age group of kids killed in auto accidents in the world.
As a brief aside, it is extremely likely that everyone, adults included, should be rear facing, except, for practical reasons, the driver. But for reasons that simply come down to “people don’t like facing the opposite direction of their motion”, nobody advocates for this outside of with babies and toddlers, not even on airliners where such a switch would be trivially easy via simply slotting the seats the other way in their tracks. In cars, the switch would be less trivial, but completely doable if people actually cared for maximum safety over the apparent universal and oh so powerful, “But I don’t wanna” line of reasoning.
Going back to the topic at hand, doing this may even supersede most of the reason for a seatbelt at all, which is to distribute the force of the crash over a wide area of a particularly durable part of your body instead of, for example, your head smacking against something in front of you and that being the first thing that starts to slow you down. This, by the way, is why school buses don’t typically have seatbelts and also, in part, why crash safety data indicates pretty strongly they don’t seem to need them. The seats in front of the kids are specifically designed both in structure and height to provide a nice, somewhat padded surface for the littles’ tiny bodies to impact against, and this works exceptionally well.
But we’re not here to talk about rear vs forward facing seats in moving transportation. We’re here to talk about why the governments of the world may or may not be being controlled by the real scourge of the universe. No, not our Lizard overlords, who are nothing but kind and accommodating in our experience. No, the Lizard People are not the problem, and should be welcomed with open arms by all of us for their benevolent nature, and for how dedicating ourselves to serving their greatness provides much needed purpose, structure, and calm to our otherwise chaotic lives, so infected with needless freedoms. No, the Lizard People are not the problem. The real issue is Big Booster, lining those political pockets with those sweet, sweet, cupholders.
On that note, let’s start with the “yes” part of our previous “it’s complicated” answer to whether booster seats are safer than just seatbelts.
For this, one of the best studies to date potentially in support of boosters is the 2006 masterfully titled study, Effectiveness of Child Safety Seats vs Seat Belts in Reducing Risk for Death in Children in Passenger Vehicle Crashes, by Dr. Michael R. Elliott et al, looking at 2-6 year olds involved in crashes that included fatalities occurring between 1998 and 2003.
The results? Children from 2-6 years old, when properly secured in child safety seats, had about a 28% reduction in risk of dying vs straight seatbelt use. When including known cases of misused child safety seats, this percentage dropped to 21%, but still a significant net benefit.
So, case closed, right?
Well, not so much. While the researchers do take a number of steps to overcome the limitations on the data they had to work with, some limitations remain. For example, the fact that drivers who use such child restraint systems are already statistically less likely to be involved in fatal crashes in the first place. Thus, to quote the researchers, “use of the NASS CDS population [one of their two main data sources] may overstate the effectiveness of child restraint systems vs seat belts by confounding child restraint use with safer driving behavior…”
Perhaps even more important to point out here is that while this study, and many others like it, are often pretty widely used in support of booster seat usage, the study itself does not distinguish between booster seats and five point harness style infant car seats. Thus, even if working with a perfect dataset, the results don’t really necessarily apply to the question of booster seats vs just seatbelts.
The reason this study and many others do not make this distinction is simply that up until relatively recently the U.S. Department of Transportation Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) database this study used, along with the aforementioned National Automotive Sampling System data, did not distinguish between the two in accident reporting.
So how about a study that does isolate booster seats? Enter Kristy Arbogast et al in their 2009 paper, Effectiveness of Belt Positioning Booster Seats: an Updated Assessment. In this one they look at 7,151 children involved in 6,591 crashes ages 4-8 years old from 1998-2007, about 70% of which were wearing seatbelts only, and the rest in a booster seat. Noteworthy on this one, they also aren’t just looking at fatalities like so many other studies on the matter, but injuries in general.
The results? They found that children using a booster seat were 45% less likely to be injured in car accidents vs children in seatbelts alone. Interestingly, contrary to what some other studies seem to indicate, they also found there was no statistically significant difference between injury rates in booster seats that had backs vs ones that were backless. As they state, this is an important point if accurate given children, particularly as they get older, are usually less resistant to using backless booster seats compared to ones with backs. And since their data indicates neither provides noticeable benefit to the other, going with backless is perfectly fine in their recommendation.
So, case closed for sure this time, right?!?
Well, no. There are some issues here. This is not because the researchers in any of these studies are dumb. Most of them literally have PhD’s and everything and, while it may come as a shock, so I hope you’re all sitting down- these people literally do this for a living. Just sit around contemplating the problem and gathering and analyzing the data and everything. In fact, they invariably point out the issues in their respective studies for people who actually bother to read them instead of just the few sentence summation of results, which tend to make for much more compelling social media headlines than actually delving into the complex details.
So if the issue is not a lack of brain power or attention to detail, what is it? The problem is that the perfect dataset for this issue simply doesn’t exist owing to the number of variables involved from accident scenario, to car type and safety features built in, to safety seat design (which is likewise constantly evolving), to the child’s size and exact belt and seat positioning at the time of the accident, and a number of other factors, many of which are extremely poorly or inaccurately documented, or sometimes not at all, in automobile accidents.
So what’s the problem with this specific one? Among other potential issues, noteworthy is that the data used here was collected by insurance claims records, validated by phone surveys. As one skeptic of the usefulness of such a dataset, economist Dr. Steven Levitt, speculates,“If you were a parent involved in a crash in which your child was injured, and a researcher with your insurance company called you, what would you say if your child was not restrained (i.e., wasn’t even wearing a seat belt)?… You tell the person the kid was using an adult seat belt.”
If that hypothesis is correct, this would then skew things in favor of booster seat safety over straight seat belts in any study using data collected this way.
That said, supporters of the use of booster seats have a bit of a trump card up their sleeve in that regardless of what the real world accident data seems to say either way, biometric data and injury types in accidents pretty clearly show proper belt positioning which distributes the impact load over our most robust bits possible, rather than more easily injured areas, is better at reducing injuries and fatalities in all humans, not just the littles. Thus, given booster seats in theory help do exactly this if used correctly, we should all just kind of go with that they probably are decreasing the risk of injury and fatalities at least somewhat, even if proving this hypothesis is obscenely difficult…
Well, outside of if anyone wants to throw out the crash test dummies and instead start strapping our little human parasites up in scientifically observed crashes. And then just go to town on testing… I mean, we can just make new crib lizards. They are literally a renewable resource! …And it’s pretty fun making them as well! At least, initially… The solution is so simple people! And it’s FOR SCIENCE!!!! There’s really no downside here…
In any event, so that’s a sampling of among the best of the data and arguments in support for “yes booster seats are safer than just seatbelts”. What about the evidence that booster seats aren’t actually safer?
To begin with, as noted, while it is absolutely true that in theory child safety seats should be much safer than just seatbelts thanks to better positioning of the seatbelt on our miniatures, as alluded to, data pretty strongly indicates that the majority of kids are not being secured in their booster seats properly. For example, according to the U.S. CDC, approximately 46% of child safety seats aren’t being used correctly in the United States, and when looking at just booster seats, this number rises to a whopping 59%, just shy of 2 out of 3 nose pickers!
This is both because people often don’t really understand the point of a booster seat, thus not positioning the seatbelt properly with them (we’ll get to this in a bit), and in part because the variants of booster seat design out there are about as numerous as “The Sperminator” Simon Watson’s offspring. On this one, the mid-40s British man to date has allegedly sired around 1,000 babies, including supposedly impregnating 13 different women in just 26 days in 2019… If you’re wondering how this is possible given sperm donor rules in most areas, Mr. Watson simply bypasses such with the ladies coming directly to him. And by a happy coincidence, him coming directly after… Charging the women 50 pounds for a first dose of his baby-daddy juice and 25 pounds for each additional cream filling in a given menstrual cycle. Given all this, we can only assume Mr. Watson also works for Big Booster, helping to increase sales one crotch goblin at a time.
What were we talking about again?
Oh yes, the insane number of booster seat varieties and the issues this causes. Thus, even adults get confused at times about the best way to buckle up their sex trophies in them, let alone when the semen demons do it themselves. And even when buckled up correctly initially, because our little hump dumplings can’t sit still to save their lives- perhaps literally in this case- this further potentially causes seat belt positioning issues, thereby completely negating the main potential safety benefit of the booster seat! Not only that, the littles often have a tendency to very intentionally move their shoulder strap under their arms or behind their backs without parents necessarily noticing during a drive.
This all, perhaps, contributes to the fact that while in theory booster seats should probably be safer in general than just seatbelts for those who are particularly vertically challenged, real world datasets are seemingly not so generous.
This brings us to the studies that indicate booster seats are pointless… Not just because pointy bits on a crash safety device aren’t a great idea, but also in the figurative sense of not serving a useful purpose in their very existence, much like you, David.
Enter the aforementioned economist Dr. Steven Levitt who a couple decades ago also found himself wondering if booster seats were actually safer than just seatbelts, particularly when he observed that the previous studies demonstrating they were safer in real world scenarios had some major issues with the data they were using.
To try to improve on the situation, in Levitt’s 2005 work, Evidence that Seat Belts are as Effective as Child Safety Seats in Preventing Death for Children aged Two and Up, he used the aforementioned FARS data, in this case from 1975 to 2003. From here, he then proceeded to try in every way possible to overcome the limits of the data and sample used here to get around the myriad of issues previously alluded to.
The result? Before doing such filtering on the data, there was about a 1% difference in expected fatality between child safety seat users vs lap and shoulder belt users for this age group of children 2 and older. And after? Well, the data did not become any more generous to child safety seats, at least when talking fatalities. He summed up very aptly that based on real world data, “There is no evidence that car seats do a better job than seat belts in saving the lives of children older than 2.”
Now, he does note in the paper two important things to consider. First, there is some evidence that when moving from discussing deaths to just injuries, that child safety seats offer extra protection. And second, that the overall results even when discussing fatalities may be being skewed via the fact that, as he notes, the “NHTSA (1996) estimates that more than 80 percent of all child safety seats are incorrectly installed.”
That said, he goes on to say, “I conducted my own crash tests at an independent lab using lap and shoulder belts on dummies corresponding to children aged 3 and 6, the seat belts performed well within the guidelines the federal government has established for child safety seats, and just about as well as the (properly installed) child safety seats that I tested. While far from definitive, the crash tests I conducted suggest that even with proper installation, there may not be clear advantages of car seats over seat belts.”
Also of note on this one we feel once again is important to point out when discussing the question of booster seats vs just seatbelts, owing to the limitations of the dataset being used here, Levitt, like so many before him, does not distinguish between booster seats and other car safety seats, which may or may not change the conclusion reached.
As a brief aside, another interesting thing about the results Levitt observed in the data is that adults are more likely to be injured in a front seat accident than children riding in the front seat are for a variety of reasons. Thus, if all seats in the car are filled and one were to optimally reduce the risk of injury overall to occupants in said car, any passenger adult should sit in the back and the ankle-biters in the front. That said, the data here and in basically every study out there on the issue pretty clearly shows everyone of any age is generally going to be safer in a car accident sitting in the back seat than the front, and particularly when talking about the center of the back, which is the safest place to sit in a car accident. For example, when discussing kids 3 and under, in one study looking at 4790 accidents from 1998 to 2006, those littles sitting in the center of the back seat were 43% less likely to suffer an injury than those sitting on the sides.
So, note to self, favorite child goes in the middle, children who maybe would be best served to be “voted off the family island,” so to speak, from being a terrible disappointment to their parents, much like you, David… should sit on the sides.
Going back to Levitt’s study, while his paper is perhaps superior in several ways from many previous studies, there are still issues. This, once again, is not because Levitt is an idiot. Very clearly far from it. Simply that there is no perfect dataset available here. For example, this data is only from accidents in which at least one person was killed, so likely in many cases of the extremely severe crash variety, which may or may not be representative of a more typical car crash. For example, fatal crashes tend to skew towards people who drive older cars with fewer safety features. Thus, the results here may or may not be as applicable to, say, a fender bender in a brand new Tesla Model Y with all the safety bells and whistles.
Also interesting to note, while not necessarily affecting Levitt’s results, it’s somewhat fascinating nonetheless that people who drive older cars are also disproportionately inclined to not just not have booster seats for their kids, but also not have their children utilize any safety device, even seatbelts. This group also is statistically more likely to get into accidents in the first place, receive more traffic citations, and otherwise drive more recklessly.
And speaking of older cars and advancements over the years, if you were paying attention, you might have noticed Levitt’s paper was published all the way back in 2005, and used data only up to 2003.
A lot has changed in the years since 2003, most notably me losing my virginity… Which isn’t relevant to the booster seat discussion, I just wanted everyone to know…
Enter Mark Anderson and Sina Sandholt from Montana State University… For a study concerning booster seats. Nothing to do with my status as having been with a woman in the Biblical sense. Which totally is a thing that has happened, by the way. I’m still pretty stoked about it.
In their paper, Are Booster Seats More Effective than Child Safety Seats or Seat Belts at Reducing Traffic Fatalities among Children? published in 2017, Anderson and Sandholt note, much like Levitt had previously observed, “In an effort to increase booster seat use among children, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is encouraging state legislators to promote stricter booster seat laws, yet there is a paucity of information on booster seat efficacy relative to other forms of restraint.”
They further go on, “what is surprising is that most studies evaluate the effectiveness of these devices relative to riding unrestrained, as opposed to riding in a standard seat belt. Moreover, they do not take into account the sample selection problem associated with analyzing data on fatal motor vehicle crashes. Specifically, if restraint use influences the likelihood of dying, then a data set on fatal motor vehicle crashes is not representative of all crashes in the United States. The exception to the literature is Levitt… However, due to data limitations, Levitt… was unable to distinguish between different types of child restraint devices.”
Given all this, they sought to do a bit of an update on Levitt’s study using the FARS system, applying many of the same filters on the data he used, but this time using a more modern dataset of 2008-2016, along with some extra data that wasn’t available to Levitt. Most pertinent to the topic at hand, in the updated FARS, from 2008 on, one is finally able to distinguish between booster seats and other child safety seats.
So what did they find? To quote them, “For the older children in our sample (6 to 9 year-olds), our results suggest that booster seats, child safety seats, and seat belts alone are equally effective at decreasing the probability of fatality.”
Fascinatingly, however, when you adjust down to the ages of 2-5, booster seats actually lost out to both child safety seats and seatbelts alone in the whole kids dying rate we all seem to want to reduce for some reason despite growing overpopulation issues, how expensive they are, and the fact that they never let us sleep in. This potentially suggests that in this age group, you’d be better off skipping the booster and going right to seatbelts. At least if you want your kids to live for some reason.
As to why, this may simply be due to imprecision in the data. For example, one possibility is once again going back to improper booster seat usage. With, for example, a 2 year old perhaps not being buckled correctly in the booster seat, or not remaining that way, vs, for example, an 8 year old, or that same 2 year old buckled with just a seatbelt. It’s also always possible booster seats are simply not optimized for children of that age group given more robust 5 point child safety seats usually are used in this case instead. Whatever is going on here, as the authors note, “These results are consistent with the notion that putting a child in a booster seat too soon, may be especially unsafe.”
So, FINALLY, case closed, right? Booster seats are pointless? … Except, once again we should explicitly point out in this one, while this is arguably one of the best studies done to date covering the issue of boosters vs seatbelts, it is only dealing in fatalities, not injuries in general. As mentioned, other studies seem to indicate on the whole boosters have an overall net benefit at reducing injuries overall…
Except, actually… well… Enter the 2013 study Effectiveness of Booster Seats Compared With No Restraint or Seat Belt Alone for Crash Injury Prevention, which looked at children from 0-10, and found that children in booster seats suffered approximately the same number of injuries as those in seatbelts alone, just the injury type was a bit different in that booster seat kids had a higher risk of neck and thorax injuries while reducing certain other injury type instances. These researchers also once again note that the majority of the previous studies that showed reduction in injury with booster seats had issues like relying on somewhat questionable insurance phone survey data and the like as already mentioned…
Going back to the neck and thorax injury increase, perhaps key in all of this, again, is simply the rampant misuse of boosters, with it hypothesized by some it’s not unreasonable to think that if everyone would just start using them correctly, the data may well skew more in favor of boosters instead of right now where results are rather lackluster.
Of course, despite widespread efforts to educate people on proper booster usage for many years now, things on this front don’t seem to have really improved much, or perhaps ever will, because kids are gonna kids, and even if initially secured properly, they won’t necessarily stay that way, particularly when very young. And when older, they are just going to argue constantly to not have to use a booster until parents give in and switch to belts alone.
This brings us around to the argument some, such as Dr. Levitt, have put forth- that regardless of what the data says, and indeed ESPECIALLY if boosters really are safer than just seatbelts, it might actually be better if we all stopped using the boosters.
Why?
As Levitt’s et al point out, “The problems are… being addressed by solutions that are often not the best solutions. If safety is the primary concern, there are better options.”
On this note, let’s briefly talk a little about the cost of booster seats and what it actually accomplishes if used perfectly to see what might be a much better solution to protect our adorable ladybit destroyers.
As alluded to, a booster seat’s main purpose is to provide essential and ultra critical extra cupholders for the backseat disaster artists. A lesser known side benefit is to get the seatbelt approximately where it needs to be for maximum safety for the vertically challenged. This is only needed because seatbelt designs in cars are meant to be approximately correctly positioned for the average sized adult passenger. Because of this, parents world-wide spend well over $1 billion per year on booster seats alone, with that figure rising incredibly rapidly in recent years.
For reference here, in 2015, the entire global sales of all child safety seats was only $1.4 billion. By 2020 that had risen to $8 billion. And by 2025, this is expected to reach well over $11 billion with no slowing in sight. All of this is primarily driven by laws passed requiring such child safety seats, as well as government sponsored advertisements and the like advocating for the life saving benefits of these devices, despite the data not exactly backing these notions up when it comes to boosters, at least in practice.
And if you’re curious here with the preceding numbers, infant car seats represent about 1/3 of these current approximately $9 billion in annual sales, designated boosters about 1/6, and the rest being convertible or combination seats that can do both.
Opponents of the booster seat push also note that for those who treat the vagina like a clown car, popping out adorable little tax shelters left and right, they even sometimes have to upgrade to bigger vehicles just to accommodate the fact that putting, for example, three booster seats side by side by side is at best impractical and difficult to buckle everyone in, and in many cases simply not possible given many car widths available, with this having to be dealt with for legal reasons in many regions these days all the way to the point when the sex trophies become teenagers.
Thus when factoring in the massive sums various safety agencies spend to push these specialty seats, funds that perhaps could be used to push for other safety measures elsewhere, the even more massive amounts parents have to spend every year on the booster seats, and the impracticality in some cases, all combined with the rather lackluster support for much of this in the underlying data when it comes to boosters, as Levitt suggests, perhaps it’s time to look at other solutions to the problem.
Most obviously, instead of passing laws to require boosters that the majority of the time aren’t used correctly anyway, governments may well be better served passing laws requiring car manufacturers to come up with better seatbelt systems designed to be adjustable to people of all sizes.
This would not only benefit parents and their littles, but also adult humans of the particularly vertically challenged persuasion, as well as those whom God, in his glorious wisdom, gifted with especially large built in airbags, with said chesticles, particularly in conjunction with otherwise small stature, in some cases making the shoulder strap less than ideally placed in the stock position.
In all cases, such a required adjustable seatbelt system would then give added safety for those whose lives I think we all want preserved the most- our lovely lady friends and the human parasites they enjoy creating with us for some weird reason.
With such systems being fairly universal in design across vehicle models, similar to current seatbelt systems, this would not only see the end to seatbelts cutting into necks, but also see the end to confusion in the proper way to buckle a given kid up. Thus ensuring relative consistency from buckle to buckle and vehicle to vehicle, likely improving overall safety over our current booster seat requirement model, and saving parents the world over a bit of booster seat cash to then instead spend in much more important ways, like on our sponsors here at TodayIFoundOut.
And while we are at it, let’s all start thinking long and hard about rear-facing seat designs for all passengers, and the massive number of lives that would save and reduction in injuries every year, shall we?
…Just joking, from basically the moment we are first able to talk, it’s clear we pretty much all would rather die than face backwards while going forwards.
But, seriously, rear facing seats people, for all of us. We have the technology, and we’ll all get used to it. Because all joking aside, nobody likes dead people… I mean, ok, maybe if you get lonely enough and have some hot water bottles handy to warm things up a bit… But otherwise! Best to keep our fellow humans alive as long as possible… Except for you, David. You can just F- right off to hell where you belong.
Bonus Fact:
As promised way back at the beginning of this video which was in no way an attempt to get you to keep watching to the end to appease the fickle Algorithm Gods, let’s now talk about how you can always make sure regardless of booster seat design, your mom-bod makers are secured correctly in their boosters.
It’s quite simple actually if you, once again, understand that the entire point of the booster seat is to provide extra cupholders… And, like, to make sure the seatbelt is positioned properly on the body.
As for this position, the belt strap should be across their hips, not higher in their abdomen area. Thereby distributing force across their skeletal structures and not, for example, their liver, spleen, and bowels. This one is usually a given by the very nature of the booster. If it’s firmly planted against the back of the seat and sitting flush on top, you can’t really screw the lower belt up, unless, we suppose, if it has arm rests and you decide for some reason to run the strap above the armrests instead of below I guess…
Second, the shoulder strap should be positioned across their collar bone (approximately the middle between the edge of the shoulder and the neck), and then down diagonally across the middle of the trunk. Most of all, the straps definitely shouldn’t be positioned on their neck. And definitely not under their armpit or behind their back. as so many kids and adult females that have been especially blessed in the funbag department or otherwise are just adorably short like to do. If no armrests on your booster, this will probably naturally happen, but in some cases the booster, for example, is designed to have the shoulder strap run under one of the armrests to get this strap approximately in that position.
So, to conclude, if you’ve buckled your child or funsized partner in a booster seat and the positioning of the belt is over their collar bone and diagonal down across the middle of the chest, and the lap portion is centered as low as possible on their hips, then you’ve in all likelihood done things right, regardless of booster seat design.
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The post Are Booster Seats Actually Safer Than Just Seatbelts appeared first on Today I Found Out.
History often remembers the great men of each era, their very public accomplishments, and the trials and tribulations they may or may not have gone through to get there, sometimes to the extreme. What’s often forgotten in many cases is the men generally didn’t do any of it alone. For most, there was their partner in life beside them supporting them through it all. Beyond such aphorisms as “Behind every great man, you’ll find a great woman”, as Ben Franklin noted in his June 25, 1745 “Old Mistresses Apologue”, “It is the Man and Woman united that make the complete human Being. Separate, she wants his Force of Body and Strength of Reason; he, her Softness, Sensibility and acute Discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the World. A single Man has not nearly the Value he would have in that State of Union. He is an incomplete Animal. He resembles the odd Half of a Pair of Scissors. If you get a prudent healthy Wife, your Industry in your Profession, with her good Economy, will be a Fortune sufficient.”
Nowhere is this perhaps better illustrated than in the United States’ first power couple, John and Abigail Adams. Breaking many customs of their era, Abigail was subservient to no one, an equal partner in their combined journey to help create and shape the United States, with arguably only a handful of others having more influence on the United States today because of their work in its foundation than these two. While Thomas Jefferson would once state of John Adams during Adams’ Presidency, Adams “takes no counsel from anyone”, he was incorrect. His closest confidant and whom he thoroughly relied for her equally keen intellect next to her certifiably genius husband, was his wife, Abigail. As historian and author of Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage Edith Gelles, notes, “Abigail was his best ally, and because she was intelligent, well-informed and totally sympathetic with him, she was devoted to his politics. She probably was the best-informed and most reliable advisor to a president until Eleanor Roosevelt in the 20th century.”
On top of this, while her husband was off gallivanting across the nation and the world, leaving them parted for about half of the first two decades of their marriage, she also managed all the family’s affairs from approximately middle class to start, to later great prosperity in some rather ingenious ways that actually occasionally went against her husband’s wishes, as we’ll get into, but in the end doing it anyway and making John Adams one of the few early presidents who not only didn’t see near financial ruin because of the nature of the position at the time, but one who died relatively wealthy. This was in stark contrast to the likes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who started off incredibly wealthy and ended life deeply in debt- in Adams’ case, all achieved through Abigail’s keen mind for investments, allowing her husband to do his thing without concern for his financial base and homefront.
Going back to her counsel, it is thus no coincidence that when John Adams finally ascended to the role of President, he desperately wrote to his then sick wife four hundred miles away in Quincy, “I never wanted your Advice and assistance more in my life…” And, “I can do nothing without you… Public affairs are so critical and dangerous that all our Thoughts must be taken up with them. I must intreat you, to loose not a moments time in preparing to come… assist me with your Councils…”
The first woman to be both wife and later mother to a U.S. President, and generally ranked as one of the best female intellect’s of her era in the United States, so much so that she was given the nickname “Mrs. President” for her influence on affairs of state during her husband’s Presidency, Abigail Adams is the oft’ forgotten half of the power couple pair, and considered by many to be greatest among the little talked about “Founding Mothers”, and a woman future President Harry Truman would remark, “would have been a better President than her husband.”
So let’s dive into it shall we?
Abigail Smith was born on November 22, 1744 at the North Parish Congregational Church in Weymouth, Massachusetts, the daughter of William and Elizabeth Smith. Her father was a prominent leader in her community as a Congregational minister. Unlike some hellfire and brimstone type ministers, however, William stressed morality and reason as a key tenant to religion- two things that would likewise be a hallmark of Abigail and her future husband, John’s, core tenets to live life by.
While as a child her family did own four slaves, including one who cared for Abigail in her youth named Phoebe, much like John Adams, Abigail would grow to to loathe the institution of slavery and helped instill this in her later son John Quincy Adams, who would lead the charge to abolish slavery in the United States through decades of work in Congress, all laying the foundation for what Abraham Lincoln and his supporters would finally accomplish.
She would state of all this in a March 31, 1776 letter to her husband concerning slaveholders, among whom many of the founding fathers were, “that the passion for Liberty cannot be Equally Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs…”
On September 22, 1774, she would further write to John, “I wish most sincerely that there was not a slave in the province. It always seemed to me to fight ourselves for what we are robbing the Negroes of, who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”
She would further stir up some controversy in Philadelphia when, in 1797, she took it upon herself to see to it that a young black teen named James would be able to attend school. She wrote to John, then President elect, of the incident on February 13, 1797,
“I have been much diverted with a little occurrence which took place a few days since and which serve to show how little founded in nature the so much boasted principle of Liberty and equality is. Master Heath has opend an Evening School to instruct a Number of Apprentices Lads… James desired that he might go. I told him to go with my compliments to Master Heath and ask him if he would take him. He did and Master Heath returnd for answer that he would. Accordingly James went. After about a week, Neighbour Faxon came in one Evening and requested to speak to me. His Errant was to inform me that if James went to School, it would break up the School for the other Lads refused to go…. This Mr. Faxon is attacking the principle of Liberty and equality upon the only Ground upon which it ought to be supported, an equality of Rights. The Boy is a Freeman as much as any of the young Men, and merely because his Face is Black, is he to be denied instruction? How is he to be qualified to procure a livelihood? Is this the Christian principle of doing to others, as we would have others do to us?”
Going back to her youth, as with most women of her era, Abigail was never formally educated, outside of that her mother taught her to read and write and for a brief time one Richard Cranch, who would later marry Abigail’s older sister, took to tutoring them. This simply wouldn’t do for the otherwise brilliant young girl, who, much like her future husband John Adams, craved knowledge and learning insatiably. Towards this end, while she couldn’t get a formal education like her male counterparts, through her father, uncle, and grandfather’s combined respective libraries, she was able to study all manner of subjects, something her grandfather, Colonel John Quincy, who the city of Quincy is named after, would encourage. Through a lifetime of this, by the time of her position as First Lady, this otherwise not formally educated individual is today considered one of the most erudite women to ever serve in the position, with it noted in her well over a thousand surviving letters she often would quote various works of literature even more readily than her husband who also is generally considered one of the greatest and most well-read minds of his era in the United States, and enjoyed the same practice in his letters.
As to how the couple met, around the age of 15, a 24 year old farmer and lawyer John Adams would come visit the Smith household with his friend, the aforementioned Richard Cranch. Initial impressions were seemingly not good, not just his finding all the Smith girls relatively uninteresting, but he also did not like their father at first. He wrote in his journal,
“Parson Smith has no small share of Priest Craft. — He conceals his own Wealth, from his Parish, that they may not be hindered by knowing it from sending him Presents. — He talks very familiarly with the People, Men and Women of his Parish, to gain their affection.He is [a] crafty designing Man. — He watches carefully Peoples Looks and Behaviour… his Conceit, his orthodoxy, his Ignorance [illegible] &c. and I caught him, several times, looking earnestly at my eyes my face. — He is not one of the heedless, inattentive Crew, that take no Notice [illegible] of Men’s Behaviour and Conversation and form no judgment of their Characters.”
As for the girls, he wrote, “Polly and Nabby are Wits… A Man of fond Passions. Cranch was fond of his Friend, fond of his Girl, and would have been fond of his Wife and Children. Tender and fond. Loving and compassionate…. are fondness and Wit compatible? [Parson] [Smiths] Girls have not this fondness, nor this Tenderness… Are [the Smith Girls] either Frank or fond, or even candid. Not fond, not frank, not candid.”
And for Abigail’s parent’s part, they were likewise relatively unimpressed by the country-ish young lawyer who, while he may have had a great education, his middle class background and farm manners were less than impressive and deemed unsuitable for a good match for one of their daughters.
That said, Abigail had something going for her that none of the more wealthy and beautiful women John Adams had courting him did, and so did John in turn. Both were unabashedly frank and open. And both possessed extremely intelligent minds with a general exceptionally strong compatibility in thought and natures.
Thus while Abigail may not have been heralded for her beauty or tenderness, as so many men prized, and John may not have been upper class enough for her family’s liking, and himself not exactly the most attractive or tender man in the world, to put it mildly, already beginning to lose his hair and a bit pudgy around the edges in his 20s, as the two began to talk and ultimately correspond with one another regularly over the next three years, their respective and very complimentary intellects were revealed to each other. With this, so did their affections for one another grow rapidly, along with their friendship.
For Abigail, John Adam’s admiration for her intelligence and her intellectual accomplishments was tantamount in a future partner given her passion for this, and how many of his peers would have suppressed, rather than encouraged her, in it. For John, all of this about Abigail made her relatively unique to her peers owing to societal practices of the era and region with regards to women and education. Thus, in her he had found a rare equal to his genius mind and he quickly came to value her and her thoughts to an extreme degree.
On all this, during his time with the Continental Congress, John Adams would write his wife, “Is there no Way for two friendly Souls, to converse together, altho the Bodies are 400 Miles off? — Yes by Letter. — But I want a better Communication. I want to hear you think, or to see your Thoughts.”
But going back to their courtship, it did not take long for John’s affections for Abigail to come out, at first referring to her as “Miss Adorable”, and not long after “the great Goddess Diana”, as well as writing on October 4, 1762, “I hereby order you to give [the bearer of this letter], as many kisses, and as many Hours of your company after nine o’clock as he pleases to demand, and charge them to my account.”
As for Abigail, she would write on August 11, 1763, “And there is a tye more binding than Humanity, and stronger than Friendship … unite these, and there is a threefold chord — and by this chord I am not ashamed to say that I am bound, nor do I [believe] that you are wholly free from it. … The health and happiness of Seneca she says was not dearer to his Paulina, than that of Lysander to his Diana… Adieu may this find you in better health than I fear it will, and happy as your Diana wishes you. Accept this hasty Scrawl warm from the Heart of Your Sincere Diana”
Finally, after approximately a three year courtship, Abigail’s parents relented and gave their blessings to a union between the two, with Abigail’s father himself presiding over their marriage on October 25, 1764 at the Smith’s home in Weymouth.
After the reception, the new couple, little knowing they’d just made a union that would shape history, would both mount together on a single horse and set off to their new home in Braintree Massachusetts in present day Quincy.
Right from the start, the couple had to endure lengthy periods apart from one another, with John Adams traveling around from town to town continuing to grow his legal practice, while Abigail dutifully stayed home and took care of managing their small farm and finances. On this one, several years later, she took to, among many other investments, targeting junk bonds, in slight defiance of her husband’s wishes to put all their money into land. In this one, he wrote to her in the fall of 1783 to see about purchasing their neighbors’ farms, to which Abigail responded she would see about it, but that it would likely be expensive and suggested instead, “There is a method of laying out money to more advantage than by the purchase of land’s… State Notes.” Which, at the time, were sometimes going as low as 25 cents on the dollar, but yielding interest on the full amount. While John Adams had strong opinions against such investment, she did it anyway. In all of this and other management of their finances, making a killing, ultimately propelling their family from middle class to wealthy in the process.
Interestingly, because she was largely responsible for the family’s assets, she also broke precedent via claiming ownership of some of these assets herself, including leaving a will which normally wasn’t a thing for a married woman at the time given her husband technically owned everything, not her. She nonetheless left some $100,000 in modern day valuation to various women upon her death, as well as small bequests to her sons.
As alluded to, through her work in all this, she is largely credited for why the couple not only never suffered any real financial difficulties throughout their eventful and tumultuous life, in contrast to so many other of the early U.S. Presidents, but also died quite well off given their original station in life to start.
In any event, going back to the beginning of their marriage, Abigail would give birth to the couple’s first child, also named Abigail, a mere 9 months after the couple were wed. She would add 5 more over the next 12 years, only 4 of which, however, survived until adulthood- one, Grace, dying at 2 years old and Elizabeth being stillborn while her husband was away in Congress in 1777 with, at the time, rumors of the British intending to attack Boston and Quincy rampant, adding to all their extreme stress during the revolution.
As for the rest of the children, Abigail took over much of their early education. In particular, seeing the genuine brilliance in her son John Quincy Adams, often called the “Genius President”, he was groomed at a young age for this highest office. With Abigail pulling no punches in her expectations of him nor any of her other children.
Lest you think any of this hyperbole about the whole “Groomed to be President” thing, John Adams would write in a letter to John Quincy on April 23, 1794, “You come into Life with Advantages which will disgrace you, if your success is médiocre.— And if you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession but of your Country it will be owing to your own Laziness Slovenliness and Obstinacy.”
Not messing around either, Abigail wrote to John Quincy when he’d just completed a risky trip across the big blue at the age of 10, “For dear as you are to me, I had much rather you should have found your grave in the ocean you have crossed… rather than see you an immoral profligate or a graceless child.” She also would later write to him, “How unpardonable would it have been in you, to have been a Blockhead.”
Going back to John Adams, while he was, once again, often parted from his family, he still wrote to his son regularly, encouraging him to read, and in some cases translate, certain works he felt important for his son to study in depth, from Virgil, Horace, Aristotle, and Plutarch, to Thucydides and Hugo Grotius, as well as generally pushing John Quincy in all facets of his education and life to excel. Taking to such things like a fish in water, the Jr. Adams soon found his knowledge on many subjects superior to even some of his teachers throughout his formal schooling.
Abigail stated of this, “If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others…, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world, and obtaining a knowledge of Mankind than any of your contemporaries, that you have never wanted a Book, but it has been supplied you, that your whole time has been spent in the company of Men of Literature and Science…”
The senior Adams would also write on December 28, 1780 to John Quincy, “Every Thing in Life should be done with Reflection, and Judgment, even the most insignificant Amusements. They should all be arranged in subordination, to the great Plan of Happiness, and Utility. That you may attend early to this Maxim is the Wish of your affectionate Father.”
Going back a bit, during the Battle of Bunker Hill, Abigail would also take the then 7 year old John Quincy to nearby Penn Hill to watch the battle on June 17, 1775, and discuss the significance of the event with him.
While the times were trying and extremely stressful for all involved, she would later write to John Quincy on January 12, 1780 of how grateful he should be to live in such turbulent times, “These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. Would Cicero have shone so distinguished an orator if he had not been roused, kindled, and inflamed by the tyranny of Catiline, Verres, and Mark Anthony? The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities, which would otherwise lie dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.”
Moving on from her children to her council to her husband, thanks to the fact that they were apart for so much of their marriage, including one period for almost five years straight, while the couple may have loathed it and Abigail referred to the time as her “widowhood” and “patriotic duty”, it was a boon to history. You see, because the two best friends were so close and relied on one another’s counsel so much, while countless letters between them were lost in transit, they wrote over the course of these periods apart well over a thousand, often lengthy, letters that have survived to this day. These Covered all periods of the Revolution, their deep thoughts and intellectual discussions on government and politics and significant events of the era, as well as simple things like insights into their relationship and family- in all giving an amazing and almost unparalleled picture of this couple throughout their lives that had so much influence on what the United States would become.
On this “unparalleled” note, unfortunately, while other prominent individuals, like George and Martha Washington, were likewise often parted and wrote an unknown number of letters, upon George’s death, Martha destroyed their letters to preserve their privacy. This was something Abigail did request John Adams do as well, but he replied, “You bid me burn your Letters. But I must forget you first.” And then doubled down by purchasing leather cases for them both to store them for posterity. That said, he did once write to his friend and fellow founding father Benjamin Rush he had great concern that the letters would be read while he was still alive, stating, “God help me if they ever see my letters.”
In any event, as to specific discourse between them during these periods, Abigail would write on May 7, 1776 encouraging John to have the colonies declare independence, stating, “A people may let a king fall, yet still remain a people: but if a king lets his people slip from him, he is no longer a king. And this is most certainly our case, why not proclaim to the world in decisive terms, your own importance? Shall we not be dispiced by foreign powers for hesitating so long at a word?”
A mere one month later, John Adams would be selected as a part of the Committee of Five to draft the Declaration of Independence to do just this.
Around this same time Abigail famously made an impassioned plea to her husband on March 31, 1776, “I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.”
Unfortunately, while John Adams very much treated his wife as an equal, and occasionally his superior in some matters, throughout their partnership, this was a sentiment too far for even his incredibly intellectual and open 18th century mind. Replying on April 14, 1776 as if the whole thing had been said in jest, and teasingly alluding to who the real masters are already in women, writing,
“As to your extraordinary Code of Laws… We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where… But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented… We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in Practice you know We are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat…”
She did not let the matter drop, however, and In the aforementioned May 7, 1776 letter in which she encouraged Adams to get the colonies to declare independence, she also wrote, “I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives. But you must remember that Arbitary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken—and notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet—”
Needless to say, she did not take the matter so lightly, nor the plight of her sex at the time when it came to education and property rights particularly. Arguing vehemently that an educated woman would be far more valuable to her family and more capable to raise superior children, and thus nation, because of it. Of this, she wrote John Adams on June 30, 1778, “…you need not be told how much female Education is neglected, nor how fashionable it has been to ridicule Female learning, tho I acknowledge it my happiness to be connected with a person of a more generous mind and liberal Sentiments.”
Going back to the revolution, eventually John Adams was sent abroad to France in 1778 and the couple were parted for years. The journey across the ocean was anything but routine for Adams, with the added danger of potentially encountering British ships which would have likely seen John tried and executed for treason, and with no way for his family back home to find out if he’d made it safely for many weeks after his departure.
Ultimately Abigail did join her husband in France and later England from 1784 to 1788. Her time here would later serve her extremely well for her time as First Lady, for the first time having to run a large household including several servants, as well as being exposed to elite society in Europe and observing the manners and customs of such in conducting official events and dinners and the like.
Returning to the U.S. and their home in Quincy in 1788, the two great friends were not yet set to be able to fully enjoy their home and continued time together, with John Adams just one year later serving as Vice President under George Washington from 1789 to 1797. While the couple at this point seem to have had desires to simply return home after, they both felt it their civic duty for John Adams to continue his service in running for President, which he did on March 4, 1797, narrowly defeating his close friend, but extreme political rival, Thomas Jefferson. On this note, Jefferson wasn’t just close to John Adams, but also adored Abigail for similar reasons that John did- her intelligence, thoughts, and conversation, writing Abigail Adams was “one of the most estimable characters on earth.” With the two exchanging hundreds of very intimate letters over their lifetime.
Going back to the Presidency, unfortunately for the couple, the then 52 year old Abigail missed her husband’ inauguration, instead recently suffering from a bout of rheumatism, as well as tending to her 89 year old mother-in-law who would die just a month later. However, as previously noted, as the full weight of his office descended upon him, and having a Congress who were bitterly divided by the relatively new two party system that had risen up, and even his own dear friend and Vice President Thomas Jefferson refusing to work together with him to try to bring the two sides together, Adams desperately reached out to his best friend, writing on March 22, 1797, “I never wanted your Advice and assistance more in my life…”
Unfortunately, she did not come right away, much to the ever increasing anxiety of the new President. He would write her a few weeks later on April 11, “You had not received any of my Letters which urge your immediate departure for Philadelphia. I must now repeat this with Zeal and Earnestness. I can do nothing without you… Public affairs are so critical and dangerous that all our Thoughts must be taken up with them. I must intreat you, to loose not a moments time in preparing to come on that you may take off from me every Care of Life but that of my public Duty, assist me with your Councils, and console me with your Conversation.”
And so she came. In his time in office helping to define many of the roles of the First Lady as the aforementioned historian Edith Gelles states, “she established many of the protocols, which survived. She wrote about having to have dinners, in which she entertained all the members of the Senate and their wives, and the House of Representatives and their wives, and the Supreme Court and their wives. She also had to have a great Fourth of July party, in which everyone in the neighborhood of the capital city was invited to attend. So she was a great social arbiter.”
Indeed, when Abigail wrote to her close friend Martha Washington for advice on how to conduct herself as First Lady, Martha responded on February 20, 1797, “It is very flattering for me, my dear Madam, to be asked for rules … With in your self, you possess a guide more certain than any I can give, to direct you:— I mean the good sence and judgment for which you are distinguished.”
But far more importantly, she worked alongside her husband to help guide the nation. Not always agreeing, such as their extreme difference of opinion on whether the U.S. should stay neutral or go to war in the conflict between France and England, John Adams, with few strong allies to rely on in Congress given his decision to attempt to try to bring the two bickering parties together, continually instead relied on his wife for council and insight into affairs.
In this role, Abigail was very aware few outside of her husband wanted to hear the opinion of a woman, and in the extremely politically charged atmosphere, also aware everything she said or wrote could be weapons leveled against him. She stated of this, “I have been so used to freedom of sentiment that I know not how to place so many guards about me, as will be indispensable, to look at every word before I utter it, and to impose a silence upon myself, when I long to talk.” And that, “My pen runs riot. I forget that it must grow cautious and prudent. I fear I shall make a dull business when such restrictions are laid upon it.”
Nevertheless, much like her husband, keeping her mouth shut when she had a well reasoned opinion was not in her nature. And, thus, Abigail wrote many public letters in support of her husband and his policies, as well as privately saw to it that stories painting her husband in a positive light frequently found their way to certain members of the press.
As she predicted, however, this was sometimes used against John Adams. While today the title of “Mrs. President” leveled against her shows in part her significant influence on things and how John Adams valued her keen intellect and ideas in a positive way, many of John Adams’ political opponents did not use the moniker kindly. Such as Congressman Albert Gallatin, who wrote, “She is Mrs. President, not of the United States but of a faction… It is not right.”
Moving on from politics, the couple also became the first President and First Lady to reside in the President’s House, later renamed the White House, giving an interesting insight into the new capital’s humble beginnings.
Upon his arrival, John Adams did not give much of his thoughts in writing to his wife, penning simply on November 2, 1800, “My dearest friend, We arrived here last night, or rather yesterday, at one o’Clock and here we dined and Slept. The Building is in a State to be habitable. And now we wish for your Company…. Before I end my Letter I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof. I shall not attempt a description of it. You will form the best Idea of it from Inspection.”
Upon her own arrival, Abigail would write a much more detailed account of the new White House, painting a very different picture of the region from today,
“I arrived here on Sunday last, and without meeting with any accident worth noticing, except losing ourselves when we left Baltimore and going eight or nine miles on the Frederick road, by which means we were obliged to go the other eight through woods, where we wandered two hours without finding a guide or the path…. woods are all you can see from Baltimore until you reach the city, which is only so in name. Here and there is a small cot, without a glass window, interspersed amongst the forests, through which you travel miles without seeing any human being. In the city there are buildings enough, if they were compact and finished, to accommodate Congress and those attached to it; but as they are, and scattered as they are, I see no great comfort for them…. The house is upon a grand and superb scale, requiring about thirty servants to attend and keep the apartments in proper order, and perform the ordinary business of the house and stables…. The lighting of the apartments, from kitchen to parlors and chambers, is a tax indeed; and the fires we are obliged to keep to secure us from daily agues is another very cheering comfort… I could content myself almost anywhere three months; but surrounded with forests, can you believe that wood is not to be had because people cannot be found to cut and cart it? Briesler entered into a contract with a man to supply him with wood. A small part, a few chords only, has he been able to get. Most of that was expended to dry the walls of the house before we came in, and yesterday the man told him it was impossible for him to procure it to be cut and carter. He has had recourse to coals; but we cannot get grates made and set. We have, indeed, come into a new country.
…The house is made habitable, but there is not a single apartment finished, and all withinside, except the plastering, has been done…. We have not the least fence, yard, or other convenience, without, and the great unfinished audience room I made a drying room of, to hang up the clothes in. Principal stairs are not up, and will not be this winter. Six chambers are made comfortable; two are occupied by the President and Mr. Shaw; two lower rooms, one for a common parlor, and one for a levee room. Upstairs there is the oval room, which is designed for the drawing room, and has the crimson furniture in it. It is a very handsome room now; but, when completed, it will be beautiful…. It is a beautiful spot, capable of every improvement, and the more I view it, the more I am delighted with it.”
That said, such a mansion was not really to her sensibilities, as she would later write, “neither my habits nor my education or inclination have led me to an expensive style of living.” That said, given the state of the White House at the time, as she noted, much was lacking, and in order to keep warm in winter, staying in one room with the door closed was required.
Ultimately however, in December of 1800 when John Adams’ officially lost in his bid for a second term as President, all such ordeals and lengthy separations the couple had had to endure throughout their marriage were over. She would later write to her son, Thomas, on December 13, 1800, “for myself and family I have few regrets; at My age and with my bodily infirmities I shall be happier at Quincy…. So on that score I have little to mourn over; if I did not rise with Dignity, I can at least fall with ease…. I leave to time the unfolding of a drama. I leave to posterity to reflect upon the times past—and I leave them Characters to contemplate upon.— my own intention is to return to Quincy as soon as I conveniently can.”
Unfortunately, while she may have looked forward to retirement from public life, almost exactly at the same time the partners lost their bid for the presidency, they also learned they had lost something far greater, another of their children, Charles, dying at the age of 30.
In the aftermath, John and Abigail returned to their home in Quincy and lived out their lives as farmers, as well as entertaining their remaining children and grandchildren and countless others. On the side, the couple also continued to help advise and guide their son John Quincy Adams in his own rather fascinating and odd rise to the Presidency, which we’ll be covering in a future video The Horribly Dressed, Socially Awkward, Genius President.
In the end, after 18 more years together, Abigail Adams died on October 28, 1818 in Quincy Massachusetts of typhoid fever. Her last words were to her husband by her side, “Do not grieve, my friend, my dearest friend. I am ready to go. And John, it will not be long.”
Abigail Adams’ obituary would ultimately read in part, “Possessing, at every period of life, the unlimited confidence, as well as affection of her husband, she was admitted, at all times, to share largely of his thoughts. While, on the one hand, the activity of her mind, and its thorough knowledge of all branches of domestic economy, enabled her, almost wholly to relieve him from the cares incident to the concerns of private life; on the other, she was a friend, whom it was his delight to consult, in every perplexity of public affairs; and whose councils never failed to partake of that happy harmony, which prevailed in her character; in which intuitive judgment was blended with consummate prudence; the spirit of conciliation, with the spirit of her station, and the refinement of her sex. In the storm, as well as on the smooth sea of life, her virtues were ever the object of his trust and veneration.”
As you might imagine, John Adams was devastated by his best friend and partner in life’s death after 54 years together, in his grief immediately after her passing exclaiming, “I wish I could lay down beside her and die too.”
He would have to wait another 8 years for this, ultimately leaving this world on July 4, 1826 on the 50th anniversary of the United States declaring its independence.
Today, if you’re in the neighborhood, you can visit John and Abigail Adams’s crypt, as well as John Quincy Adams and his wife Louisa’s, at the United First Parish Church in Quincy. As well as visit the couple’s humble home at Adams National Historical Park.
Expand for Referenceshttps://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-3548
Abigail Smith Adams
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25096751
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17840103aa
https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/ADMS-04-09-02-0100
https://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2009/12/abigail-adams-junk-bond-dealer.html
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/john-and-abigail-adams-a-tradition-begins
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L18001102ja
https://mediarichlearning.com/streaming-room-time-capsule-abigail-adams-letter-to-her-daughter-from-the-white-house/
https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/john-and-abigail-adams-a-revolutionary-marriage/
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17970213aa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_Adams
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17970322ja
https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=4195&pid=3
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17780630aa
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-14-02-0216
https://www.history.com/topics/first-ladies/abigail-adams
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0259
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0107
https://www.nps.gov/adam/learn/historyculture/abigail-adams-1744-1818.htm
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/adams-abigail/
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2016/03/remember-the-ladies/
https://www.amrevmuseum.org/virtualexhibits/when-women-lost-the-vote-a-revolutionary-story/pages/the-remember-the-ladies-letter
https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/676
https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2009-04-23-voa53-68814782/413114.html
https://www.npr.org/2010/10/27/130862704/dear-john-dear-abigail-a-love-story-through-letters
https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/first-families/abigail-smith-adams/
https://guides.loc.gov/women-in-the-french-revolution/women-american-revolution
https://www.amrevmuseum.org/virtualexhibits/when-women-lost-the-vote-a-revolutionary-story/pages/how-did-women-gain-the-vote-the-promise-of-1776-for-women
The Ageless Love Story of John and Abigail Adams
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-11-02-0298
Abigail and John Adams Converse on Women’s Rights, 1776
The Adams Family and the Washingtons: A Political Friendship
https://www.onedayu.com/videos/john-and-abigail-adams-love-in-the-founding-era/
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17621004ja&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fletters_1762_1773.php
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/letter/
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/browse/letters_1762_1773.php
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17630420ja&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fletters_1762_1773.php
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L176308xxja&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fletters_1762_1773.php
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17630811aa&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fletters_1762_1773.php
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17760331aa
The post America’s First Power Couple appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If ever there was a living embodiment of the Roaring 20s, it was Eben Byers. The scion of a New York steelmaking fortune, Byers indulged in every hobby and luxury his wealth and social status allowed. He kept luxury homes across the United States, collected fine art, owned stables of racehorses, held titles in trap shooting, and even won the national amateur golf championship in 1906. He was also an infamous ladies’ man, earning the nickname “Foxy Grandpa” from his classmates at Yale University. But in October 1930, this charmed life came to an abrupt end when Byers began losing weight and suffering excruciating headaches. Then, his teeth began falling out. Two years later, Byers would die horribly disfigured, his bones literally disintegrating from the inside out. The culprit was a popular tonic laced with the radioactive element Radium, which Byers consumed daily for nearly two years. Byers’ gruesome death sparked a nationwide scandal, and brought to a close the early 20th Century’s bizarre mania for all things radioactive.
Ebenezer McBurney “Eben” Byers was born on April 12, 1880, the son of industrialist Alexander Byers. The elder Byers had made his fortune manufacturing wrought iron pipe, and eventually passed on his business empire to his son. Over his short but successful career, Eben Byers also served as chairman of the Girard Iron Company and Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing, and maintained interests in the coal, shipping, and banking industries. Though celebrated as a virile and athletic young man, by the 1920s Byers was nearing his 50s, and his friends observed that his performance wasn’t all that it used to be – both on the field and off. Then, in 1927, Byers was travelling home from a Harvard-Yale football game when his train came to an abrupt stop, causing him to fall out of his sleeping berth and injure his arm. Over the following weeks, Byers complained of muscle pains, tiredness, and sexual dysfunction, leading him to seek the advice of Pittsburgh physician C.C. Moyar. Moyar recommended that Byers try out a brand-new miracle tonic: Radithor.
Radithor was one of hundreds of radioactive consumer products which flooded the American market at the turn of the 20th Century. In 1898, French scientists Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the element Radium, which emitted an invisible and mysterious form of energy: radioactivity. This discovery captured the public’s imagination, and entrepreneurs wasted no time in capitalizing on people’s obsession with all things radioactive. Though the element had several legitimate uses such as self-illuminating clock dials and cancer therapy, large quantities of Radium and other radioactive isotopes were incorporated into a dizzying variety of dubious and often dangerous products. Consumers could buy “Revigators”, ceramic jars lined with Uranium ore that infused water with radioactive radon gas, whose advertising literature claimed that water without radioactivity was “devoid of its life element.” Radium was added to toothpaste, bath salts, face cream, cigarettes, bread, and suppositories; you could even buy Radium-laced condoms for extra vigour in the bedroom. As with the craze for electrical cures a generation before, the logic behind these products was that an energy source as powerful as radioactivity must have health-giving properties. However, due to its rarity, Radium was extremely expensive, and not all companies could afford to acquire it. Thus, for every product that actually contained Radium, there were a dozen others that contained none at all and simply used the terms “radium” and “radioactive” in their marketing. Ironically, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, more concerned with false advertising than public safety, cracked down on these pretenders, allowing only genuine radioactive products to be sold. And among the most successful and potent of these was Radithor.
Radithor was the brainchild of one William John Bailey, a businessman and long-time con artist from Boston. Though he only completed three semesters before dropping out, Bailey claimed to have graduated from Harvard Medical School, and would often style himself as Doctor William Bailey. Throughout his colourful career, Bailey engaged in a number of fraudulent business ventures, including the Carnegie Engineering Corporation – an automobile company that produced no automobiles – and “Las-I-Go for Superb Manhood”, a supposed cure for impotence. In both cases Bailey was convicted of fraud and imprisoned. In 1923, Bailey jumped on the radium bandwagon and founded American Endocrine Laboratories in New York City, whose main product was the Radiendocrinator, a radium-infused skin patch intended to stimulate the endocrine glands such as the thyroid and the adrenals. Bailey later founded other radium-based ventures, including the Adrenoray Company, Bioray Company, Thoronator Company, and – by far his most successful – Bailey Radium Laboratories, based in East Orange, New Jersey. Formed in 1925, BRL’s main product was Radithor, a tonic composed of triple-distilled water laced with 1 microcurie – 37,000 decays per second – of the isotopes Radium 226 and Radium 228. Advertised as “Perpetual Sunshine” and “A Cure for the Living Dead”, was sold as a cure for over 150 ailments, including lethargy and impotence. Indeed, a promotional pamphlet titled Radithor, the New Weapon of Medical Science, claimed that:
“An improved blood supply sent to the pelvic organs and tonic effects upon the nervous system generally result in a great improvement of the sex organs.”
Bailey sold Radithor in one-ounce bottles for $1 each – around $15 dollars today – netting him a handsome 400% profit. Ever the savvy salesman, Bailey gave a 16% kickback to doctors for every dose they prescribed to their patients, and offered a $1,000 prize to anyone who could prove that his product contained less than the stated amount of Radium. No one ever did. Bailey would go on to sell over 400,000 bottles of Radithor, making him a very wealthy man.
Following his 1927 visit to Dr. Moyar, Eben Byers began drinking two bottles of Radithor a day, and immediately noticed an improvement in his health. Reporting that the tonic gave him a “toned-up feeling”, Byers became functionally addicted to Radithor and began singing its praises to anyone who would listen, sending cases to business partners and girlfriends and even feeding Radithor to his racehorses. But this apparent comeback was short-lived, and in October 1930 Byers stopped consuming Radithor when his teeth began falling out. It is now known that when Radium is ingested, the body mistakes it for Calcium and incorporates it into the victim’s bones. Here, the Alpha and Gamma radiation emitted by the radium is deposited directly into the victim’s tissues, leading to necrosis and tumour formation. This same ailment afflicted many young women hired to paint self-illuminating radium paint on clock and watch dials. These women would often lick the tips of their paintbrushes to sharpen them, causing them to absorb large doses of radium.
But the doses consumed by the Radium Girls were mild compared to Eben Byers. Over the course of two years, Byers consumed an estimated 1,400 bottles of Radithor or 36 micrograms Radium – nearly four times the average lethal dose. And the effects on his body were ghastly. In 1931, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission launched and investigation against Bailey Radium Laboratories, and called for Byers to testify before the investigative committee. By this time, however, Byers was too ill to appear in person, so attorney Robert Winn was sent to his Long Island mansion to take his statement. Winn later recounted the disturbing scene: “A more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine…[I] discovered him in a condition which beggars description. Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successive operations in which his whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth, and most of his lower jaw had been removed. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull.”
Based on Byers’s testimony – and that of other long-term Radithor users- on December 19, 1931, FTC issued a statement against Bailey Radium Laboratories, ordering the company to: “…cease and desist from various representations theretofore made by them as to the therapeutic value of Radithor and from representing that the product Radithor is harmless.”
Bailey chose not to contest the charges, and promptly shut down BRL. But, incorrigible entrepreneur to the end, he immediately founded a new company, the Radium Institute, and went right back to selling radioactive quack cures. In 1937, however, he abandoned radium and became a partner in the Lee Kelpodine Company, Inc, which sold tablets made of compressed seaweed. But even this seemingly mundane product didn’t save Bailey from legal trouble, as the company’s claims that their products could cure 32 different ailments caused them to run afoul of the newly-created Food and Drug Administration. So far as is known, Kelpodine was the last product Bailey was involved in marketing. Yet despite moving on from radium, Bailey continued to insist that Radithor was perfectly safe, arguing that: “I have drunk more radium water than any man alive and I never have suffered any ill effects.”
William Bailey died of bladder cancer in 1949, aged 64. When his body was exhumed in the early 1960s, it was found to be dangerously radioactive.
Despite the gruesome evidence, many others also refused to believe that Radithor was harmful. James Walker, mayor of New York City and active Radithor consumer, initially resisted warnings to stop drinking the tonic, while Dr. C.C. Moyar, who had prescribed Radithor to Eben Byers, stated in his testimony to the FTC: “The statement of a New York physiotherapist to the effect 100 patients of a Pittsburg physiotherapist were suffering from radium poisoning was an absolute lie. I am the physiotherapist referred to. I never had more than a dozen patients on radium water at any one time. I never had a death among my patients from radium treatment… I have taken as much or more radium water of the same kind Mr. Byers took and I am 51 years old, active and healthy… I believe that radium water has a definite place in the treatment of certain diseases and I prescribe when I deem it necessary…. [Mr. Byers died] from a combination of blood diseases which had induced gout.”
Despite these protests, the FTC investigation and the public scandal it unleashed effectively put an end to the radium craze in America. Ironically, Radithor’s high price prevented it from causing a larger public health disaster, as only well-heeled customers like Eben Byers could afford to consume it on a regular basis. But this must have been little comfort to Byers. As his body continued to disintegrate, doctors attempted to remove the necrotic tissue from his face and build him a new jaw so he would look less disfigured. Mercifully, one side effect of the radium poisoning was to destroy the nerves in Byers’s face, meaning he felt relatively little pain. But in the end, the massive radium dose proved too much for his body to handle, and Byers died at New York’s Doctors’ Hospital on March 31, 1932, aged 52. He was buried at Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh, his body being sealed in a lead-lined coffin to prevent the radioactivity in his body from leaking out.
In 1964, MIT physicist Robley Evans exhumed Byers’s body and measured his whole-body radium burden at 6 microcuries. As Radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, the levels in Byers’s body in 1965 were nearly identical to when he died in 1932. However, based on Byers’ reported Radithor consumption and standard models of radium uptake, Evans predicted that his body should only have contained 2.7 microcuries. This meant that either the standard models were wrong or that Byers had underestimated his consumption by a factor of at least two. But the real question, according to Mark Bellerive and John Humm, researchers at the Harvard Joint Centres who analyzed Byers’s remains in 2016, was: “…how did Byers survive so long, feeling so good, and have such a super-lethal burden in his body?…He took enough radium to kill four people if he took it all at once.”
However, even today, the effects of radiation on the human body remain poorly understood, with certain people being able to absorb massive doses with seemingly no ill effect.But if the gruesome case of Eben Byers has taught us anything, it’s that if you feel your performance – athletic or otherwise – start to wane, best stick to Gatorade.
Speaking of athletes, why not check out our video on the two Nazi brothers who got in a fight, with the result being Adidas and Puma. It’s super interesting, I promise.
Expand for ReferencesRevigator (ca. 1924-1926), Oak Ridge Associated Universities Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity, https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioactive-quack-cures/jars/revigator-1924-1926.html
Radiator (ca. 1928), Oak Ridge Associated Universities Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity, https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioactive-quack-cures/pills-potions-and-other-miscellany/radithor.html
Tho-Radia Items (ca. 1950s), Oak Ridge Associated Universities Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity,https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioactive-quack-cures/pills-potions-and-other-miscellany/tho-radia-items.html
What Were They Drinking? Researchers Investigate Radioactive Crock Pots, NIST, January 12, 2010, https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2010/01/what-were-they-drinking-researchers-investigate-radioactive-crock-pots
Gray, Theodore, For That Healthy Glow, Drink Radiation! Popular Science, August 2004, https://books.google.ca/books?id=yaHf5PavpB8C&pg=PA28&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Jorgensen, Timothy, When ‘Energy’ Drinks Actually Contained Radioactive Energy, The Conversation, November 2, 2016, https://theconversation.com/when-energy-drinks-actually-contained-radioactive-energy-67976
Winslow, Ron, The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off, The Wall Street Journal, November 1991, https://web.archive.org/web/20181214144013/http://case.edu/affil/MeMA/MCA/11-20/1991-Nov.pdf
Radium Drinks, TIME, April 11, 1932, https://web.archive.org/web/20071113070153/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,743525,00.html
Giacomazzo, Bernadette, The Gruesome Death of Eben Byers, The Early 1900s Golfer Who Drank Radium Until His Jaw Fell Off, All That is Interesting, July 11, 2022, https://allthatsinteresting.com/eben-byers
The post A Cure for the Living Dead appeared first on Today I Found Out.
31 countries currently use some form of nuclear power, with the 455 currently operational reactors generating some 393,000 Megawatts of electricity – nearly 20% of the world’s total energy production. Despite high-profile disasters such as Chernobyl, Three-Mile-Island, and Fukushima, nuclear power is actually among the safest and cleaner forms of electricity generation, placing dead-last in terms of deaths per kilowatt-hour generated – yes, even behind solar and wind power. Unlike coal and oil nuclear power emits no greenhouse gases, and unlike solar, wind, and hydroelectricity is not dependent on geographic location or local weather conditions. Energy experts thus predict that if the public stigma can be lifted, especially with more modernly designed nuclear reactors, nuclear power may be poised to make a comeback as the green energy source of the future.
But despite its many advantages, nuclear power has one glaring Achilles’ heel: radioactive waste. Over the past four decades the global nuclear industry has generated some 62,500 metric tons of waste, with a further 2,300 tons added every year – much of which will remain dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. Unlike other kinds of industrial waste, nuclear waste cannot feasibly be converted to a less dangerous form, nor – given the current political climate – can much of it be reprocessed and recycled. So, then, how to we dispose of it?
While commercial nuclear power is nearly 70 years old, the concept of permanent nuclear waste disposal is surprisingly a recent one. In the early days of nuclear power, engineers assumed that reactors would operate on a more sophisticated fuel cycle, with spent fuel being reprocessed to produce new fuel elements and to remove radioactive isotopes for use in medicine, scientific research, and nuclear weapons. Much research was also performed on breeder reactors, which convert non-fissile isotopes into fissile ones, thus generating more fuel than they consume. Combined, these two technologies would produce relatively little high-level radioactive waste. However, this plan was based on the belief that earth’s uranium reserves were extremely limited, and when Uranium was found to be far more abundant than initially assumed, a once-through fuel cycle without reprocessing became much more economical. At the same time, companies such as Westinghouse and General Electric found that it was much easier and cheaper to scale up existing reactors they had designed for US Navy submarines than to develop civilian reactors from scratch. As the development costs had already been subsidized by the US Government, these reactors could be sold at much more competitive prices. As a result, reprocessing and breeder reactors fell by the wayside, and the nuclear waste soon began to pile up.
Nuclear waste can be divided into three basic categories: low, intermediate, and high-level. Low and intermediate-level waste is defined as material that will remain dangerously radioactive for less than 300 years, and consists mainly of contaminated materials such as solvents, tools, laboratory glassware, and clothing used in the processing of nuclear fuel. Due to the low activity and short decay timeline of this waste, it is relatively straightforward to deal with, typically being kept in shielded, monitored storage containers on-site at nuclear power plants or processing facilities. Once the radioactivity decays to safe levels, the material can be disposed of like any other industrial waste.
High-level waste consists mainly of spent fuel from nuclear reactors and is a different beast entirely, for many of the radionuclides in spent fuel can remain dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years. As this is longer than human civilization – at least in its current form – is expected to survive, any feasible disposal scheme must with a high degree of certainty prevent these nuclides from leaking into the environment without any human supervision or interference. Over the years a number of disposal schemes have been proposed, including dumping the waste in deep-sea trenches, placing it in tectonic subduction zones so it gets drawn into the earth’s mantle, or launching it into outer space. However, all these proposals have been rejected for one reason or another – for example, the failure rate of modern rockets, while low, is significant enough that a launch failure causing widespread radioactive contamination is a very real – and unacceptable – possibility. Furthermore, the London Convention of 1972 and the Basel Convention of 1992 explicitly ban the disposal of radioactive waste in the oceans. Consequently, all currently waste disposal schemes are based on deep geological burial. The most advanced of these projects currently are Finland’s Onkalo and Sweden’s Forsmark repositories, and it is these disposal models that will be discussed now.
To understand how deep geological disposal works, it is first necessary to understand the composition and behaviour of the radionuclides found in spent nuclear fuel. Spent fuel contains four basic types of nuclides, the first of which is the remains of the fuel itself. Typical reactor fuel is enriched to contain around 3% of the fissile isotope Uranium 235, the rest consisting of the non-fissile isotope Uranium-238. As the fuel is consumed in a reactor, the U-235 content will drop to around 0.8%. These are among the most long-lived nuclides in the spent fuel, U-235 having a half-life of 704 million years and U-238 4.5 billion years.
The next components in spent fuel are the fission products. These are light elements formed when Uranium atoms split apart during nuclear fission, and have half-lives ranging from 8 hours for Xenon-135 to 15 million years for Iodine-129. The shortest-lived fission products are intensely radioactive and produce a large amount of decay heat – so much, in fact, that even after a reactor is shut down, if the cooling system fails this decay heat can build up and cause the core to melt down. Therefore, upon being removed from a reactor, spent fuel elements are immediately placed in actively-cooled storage pool. The water in the pool carries away the decay heat and shields plant operators from the ionizing radiation, allowing the fuel to be stored for up to six years when most of the short-lived fission products will have decayed away. Despite the routine nature of pool storage it is actually one of the most vulnerable and dangerous steps in the fuel-disposal process, as a failure of the pool’s cooling system can lead to serious consequences, as happened during the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. When the earthquake and subsequent tsunami knocked out emergency power to the plant, the lack of cooling caused spent fuel in the storage pools to overheat, generating hydrogen gas that accumulated and ignited, blowing the roof off the building.
Yet another category of radionuclides found in spent fuel are the actinides or transuranic elements. These are heavy elements produced when U-238 absorbs neutrons from the nuclear reaction. These tend to have relatively long half-lives, ranging from 432 years for Americium-241 to 379,000 years for Plutonium-242. And finally there are the activation products, produced via the neutron activation of non-radioactive structural materials like the zirconium cladding on the fuel bundles. The most common and long-lived of these is Chlorine-36, with a half-life of 300,000 years.
It is important to note here that half-lives alone do not give an accurate picture of just how long a given isotope will remain dangerously radioactive. Many nuclides do not immediately decay into stable isotopes, instead undergoing a long decay chain whereby one radioactive isotope decays into another radioactive isotope and so on. For example, Neptunium-237 has a decay chain 13 steps long ending in the stable isotope Thallium-205, with the half-lives of the intermediate daughter nuclides ranging from four microseconds to 160,000 years. Many of these daughter nuclides are significantly more radioactive than Neptunium which, combined with Neptunium’s long half-life of 2-million years, means that the whole decay series will remain environmentally hazardous for more than 10,000 years.
Currently, once nuclear fuel is removed from cooling pools, it is placed in shielded dry casks and kept in monitored storage on-site at the nuclear power plant. This is how radioactive waste is handled in almost every major nuclear nation. However, as reliable monitoring cannot be counted on for more than 100 years or so due to political and climatic changes, nations such as Sweden, Finland, and South Korea have turned to deep geological repositories to safely store their waste without requiring human intervention.
As previously mentioned, the ultimate goal of permanent disposal is to prevent dangerous radionuclides from leaking into the environment until all the most dangerous isotopes have decayed to harmless forms. In deep geological disposal this is accomplished by burying the waste deep inside monolithic geological formations through which groundwater migration is minimal. For example, for many years Atomic Energy of Canada Limited studied the feasibility of burying nuclear waste in the Canadian Shield, a massive formation of dense, 2.5-billion-year-old granite. Similarly, the cancelled Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada and the current repositories at Forsmark in Sweden and Onkalo in Finland are all dug into deep, dense igneous bedrock. However, deep burial on its own is not enough; as any single barrier against leakage can be expected to fail at some point, all current disposal schemes include multiple redundant barriers, enveloping the waste in concentric protective layers like a Russian nesting doll.
Surprisingly, the first and most effective of these barriers is the fuel itself. The Uranium used in nuclear reactors is in the form of Uranium Oxide, a hard, black ceramic-like material that is pressed into small cylindrical pellets. These pellets are stacked and sealed into tubes of zirconium cladding, which are then bound together to form the fuel elements. Uranium Oxide is extremely insoluble in water and traps most of the radionuclides tightly within its crystal lattice, meaning that even if bare fuel pellets were simply dumped in an open aquifer, even after 10,000 years very few of these nuclides would actually escape into the environment. However, certain nuclides such Chlorine-36 and Caesium-137 are more mobile than others and could possibly leak out of the fuel pellets if the fuel cladding is breached. These are collectively known as the “instant release group,” of which only around 10%, the “instant release fraction” are likely to leak out. This, however, is nominally prevented by the next barrier – the zirconium fuel cladding, which due to its natural corrosion resistance is only expected to be breached after 400,000 years. Further protection is provided by encasing the fuel bundles in storage casks made of stainless steel, titanium, or copper, the latter of which is so corrosion-resistant it is expected to last up to one million years.
In the extremely unlikely event both the storage cask and fuel cladding are breached, the casks are packed in a dense clay-like substance known as Bentonite, which both seals the casks against the ingress of water and acts as an ionic buffer that traps escaping radionuclides before they can reach the groundwater. However, this buffering action is only effective against positively-charged atoms like Caesium, Strontium, and other heavy metals; negatively-charged ions like Iodide and Chloride can still potentially get through. But in order to reach aquifers used by humans and other animals, these nuclides must travel through hundreds of metres of bedrock via the groundwater, which in the areas where nuclear repositories are built moves at a positively glacial pace of around one centimetre per year. Combined, these various barriers and safeguards ensure that by the time any radionuclides leak into the environment, they will already have decayed into harmless isotopes or be so dilute as to present little to no danger to the environment. Indeed, the sheer degree of redundancy in this system can be considered overkill and then some, a fact borne out by a remarkable discovery made in 1972 in a Uranium mine at Oklo, Gabon. Some 2 Billion years ago, when the proportion of fissile U-235 was higher than today, rainwater seeping into the ground set off a nuclear chain reaction in Uranium ore deposits, effectively creating a natural nuclear reactor. This process carried on for thousands of years until the Uranium was depleted, leaving behind the same collection of fission products found in spent manmade nuclear fuel. Yet despite the Oklo deposits being located in porous sandstone through which rain and groundwater constantly percolate – in other words, the worst-case scenario for a nuclear waste repository – over the next 2 billion years these fission products migrated no more than a metre or so from their original source. Thus it is expected that modern repositories, with their multiple layers of protective metal, clay and dense granite, should easily be able to contain our nuclear waste for at least 100,000 years. And for more on the Oklo reactors, please check out our video The 2 Billion Year Old Earth-Based Nuclear Reactor.
But while scientists have confidence in the passive effectiveness of deep geological repositories, there is another, major factor that can’t be as easily accounted for: future humans. As nuclear repositories are expected to last hundreds of thousands of years, it is more than likely that all knowledge and records of their existence will be lost over the millennia. Provided human civilization lasts that long, how then do we prevent our distant descendants from stumbling upon our nuclear waste and unleashing an ecological disaster? This question, explored in depth in the 2010 Danish documentary Into Eternity, has generated considerable controversy, with some experts arguing that once sealed, all traces and records of the repositories should be erased so that humanity eventually forgets their existence and locations. Others, however, argue that this would increase the risk of the repositories being found by accident and that some form of warning – perhaps in the form of an engraved stone monument – should be left behind to discourage people from disturbing the site. Still others argue that such a warning would only entice future explorers. After all, inscriptions warning of curses has done little to discourage people from entering and looting ancient Egyptian tombs.
Much closer to our own time, many proposed nuclear repository projects have fallen prey to another human impulse: NIMBYism, with many citizens vehemently opposing the storage or transport of nuclear waste near their communities. In the late 1970s, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited began a series of studies to evaluate the feasibility of storing nuclear waste in the Ontario section of the Canadian Shield, drilling experimental boreholes to monitor groundwater migration. The locals, believing that nuclear waste was already being stored in the area, immediately had their groundwater tested and discovered to their horror that it was radioactive. The resulting public outcry ultimately forced AECL to abandon the project. However, had anyone bothered to test the water before the researchers’ arrival, they would have discovered that it had been mildly radioactive all along, the granite of the Canadian Shield being naturally full of Uranium and other radioisotopes. Similar political forces also lead to the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain repository project in 2011, after more than three decades of research had been conducted on the site.
Currently, only four deep geological repositories are in use or under construction in Finland, Sweden, South Korea, and Germany, with the vast majority of the world’s nuclear waste still being kept above ground in dry-cask storage. Several other repositories are in various stages of discussion and planning, but given the sharp global drop in interest in nuclear power following the Fukushima disaster, it remains to be seen whether any of them will be brought to completion. Recent years have also seen renewed interest in the concept of transmutation, whereby nuclear waste is converted into a less dangerous form by bombarding it with neutrons from a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator. Unfortunately this process is not yet feasible with today’s technology, as transmuting waste on a large scale would require such vast amounts of energy as to be uneconomical. However, it may be possible to carry out limited transmutation, whereby the longest-lived nuclides such as Neptunium are separated out of spent fuel and converted into lighter, more short-lived isotopes, greatly reducing the total time the fuel remains dangerously radioactive. While promising, the process of separating out these nuclides is itself prohibitively expensive, and research is ongoing to develop methods for selectively transmuting long-lived nuclides within the fuel itself. Whatever the ultimate solution, it is clear that a long-term solution for dealing with radioactive waste will be the key to achieving the long-awaited nuclear renaissance.
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Expand for ReferencesWiles, Donald, The Chemistry of Nuclear Fuel Waste Disposal, Polytechnic International Press, 2002
Low- and Intermediate-Level Radioactive Waste, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, http://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/waste/low-and-intermediate-waste/index.cfm
Canada Enters the Nuclear Age, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, 1997
CNSC Research on Geological Repositories, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, http://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/waste/cnsc-research/geologic-repositories/index.cfm
Madsen, Michael, Into Eternity: a Film for the Future, Films Transit International, 2010
Nuclear Energy in the U.S, NEI, https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics
Radioactive Waste – Myths and Realities, World Nuclear, February 2020, https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-wastes-myths-and-realities.aspx
Conca, James, How Deadly is Your Kilowatt? Forbes, June 10, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/?sh=650f5d1e709b
Short-Lived Fission Products, radioactivity.eu, https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Shorl_Lived_Fission_Products.htm
The post How Does Nuclear Waste Disposal Work? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Gold. Since the dawn of civilization, we humans have been obsessed with this most divine of metals. Empires have risen and fallen over it, oceans crossed and continents conquered in search of it, the entire field of chemistry invented to try and make more of it, and – until relatively recently – the entire global economy built around it. And it is not hard to see why. Gold’s distinctive warm yellow glow is unique among metals, evoking for many civilizations the rising sun, royalty, and the divine. Gold is rare enough to be valuable and desirable but not rare enough as to be unobtainable, and is easily extracted from the ground and refined using relatively simple tools and chemicals. It is malleable, ductile, and has a low melting point, allowing it to be easily cast, forged, and drawn into any shape imaginable, and even beaten into gold leaf just a handful of atoms thick. But most importantly, gold is seemingly eternal. It does not tarnish, its lustre does not fade with time, and it is resistant to attack by all chemicals.
…well, almost all chemicals. In the 14th Century, an anonymous alchemist writing under the name of 9th Century Islamic polymath Jabir ibn Hayyan – better known to the west as Geber – made an astonishing discovery. Mixing nitric acid with ammonium chloride – then known as sal ammoniac – produced a fuming, highly corrosive solution that could dissolve gold, platinum, and other so-called “noble metals.” The solution, which became known as aqua regia or “royal water,” was seen as a major breakthrough in the quest to discover the Philosopher’s Stone, the mythical substance it was believed could produce the elixir of life and convert base metals like lead into gold. While the Alchemists ultimately failed in their quest, aqua regia – now produced by mixing nitric acid and hydrochloric acid – is still used for etching metal, cleaning traces of metal and organic compounds from laboratory glassware, and in the Wohlwill Process for refining gold to 99.999% purity. But in one strange episode during the Second World War, the corrosive elixir was used for a more dramatic purpose, allowing one brave chemist to save his colleagues’ scientific legacies from the clutches of the Nazis.
In the late 1930s, Nazi Germany was desperate for gold in order to fund their upcoming war of conquest. To this end, they prohibited any gold from leaving the country and, hand-in-hand with their ongoing persecution of the Jews, confiscated vast amounts of gold and other valuables from Jewish families and other persecuted groups. This included the Nobel Prize medals won by German scientists, many of whom had been expelled from their posts in 1933 for having Jewish ancestry. Indeed, in response to jailed journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935, the Nazis forbade all Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prizes. In the late 1920s, Ossietzky had written a number of exposés revealing Germany’s secret rearmament in violation of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. He was convicted of treason and espionage in 1931 and served a year in prison. Following his release, Ossietzky remained a vocal opponent of German militarism and Nazism, leading to his re-arrest when the Nazis took power in 1933. He was sent to Esterwegen concentration camp, where he died of tuberculosis in 1938.
Among the German scientists affected by the ban were Max von Laue and James Franck. Von Laue had received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his work on x-ray diffraction in crystals, while Franck, along with colleague Gustav Hertz, received the 1925 prize for confirming the quantum nature of electrons. In December 1933, von Laue, who was Jewish, was expelled from his advisory position at the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Braunschweig under the newly-enacted Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Franck, though exempt from this law due to his prior military service, nonetheless resigned in protest from the University of Göttingen in April 1933. Along with fellow physicist Otto Hahn, who would win the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of nuclear fission, von Laue and Franck would help dozens of their persecuted colleagues emigrate from Germany throughout the 1930s and 40s.
To prevent their Nobel Prize medals from being confiscated by the Nazis, von Laue and Franck sent them for safekeeping to Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discoveries regarding the structure of the atom. The Institute of Physics Bohr had founded in Copenhagen had long been a safe haven for refugees of Nazi persecution, working closely with the American Rockefeller Foundation to find temporary jobs for German scientists. But on April 9, 1940, everything changed as Adolf Hitler invaded Denmark. With German troops marching across Copenhagen and closing in on the Institute of Physics, Bohr and his colleagues faced a dilemma. If the Nazis discovered Franck and von Laue’s Nobel Prize medals, the two scientists faced arrest and execution by the Gestapo. Unfortunately, the medals were not exactly inconspicuous or easy to hide. While modern Nobel Prize medals weigh 175 grams and are made of 18-carat gold plated in 24-carat gold, prior to 1980 they weighed 200 grams and were struck from solid 23-carat gold. The winners’ names are also prominently engraved on the back, effectively turning the medals into solid gold death warrants for Franck and von Laue. In desperation, Bohr turned to George de Hevesy, a Hungarian chemist working in his laboratory. In 1922, de Hevesy had discovered the element Hafnium, and later pioneered the use of radioisotopes as tracers to track biological processes in plants and animals – work for which he would be awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. At first, de Hevesy suggested burying the medals, but Bohr immediately rejected this idea, knowing that the Germans would surely dig up the Institute grounds in search of the medals. De Hevesy thus came up with an even more elegant solution: dissolve the medals in aqua regia.
The fact that aqua regia can dissolve gold when neither nitric nor hydrochloric acid alone can is thanks to an elegant piece of teamwork between the two acids. Nitric acid can ordinarily oxidize gold, producing gold ions, but the solution quickly becomes saturated, halting the reaction. When hydrochloric acid is added to Nitric acid, the resulting reaction forms the compound nitrosyl chloride and chlorine gas, both of which are volatile and escape the solution as vapour. The more of these products escape, the less potent the mixture becomes, meaning that aqua regia must be prepared immediately before use. When gold is immersed in this mixture, the nitrosyl chloride oxidizes the gold as before. However, the chloride ions provided by the Hydrochloric acid now react with the gold ions, producing chloroauric acid. This effectively removes the gold from the solution, preventing it from becoming saturated and allowing the reaction to continue.
But while effective, this process is very, very slow, meaning that once de Hevesy had plunked the medals in a beaker of aqua regia, he was forced to wait many long, excruciating hours for them to dissolve. Meanwhile, the Germans drew ever closer. Finally, however, the medals disappeared, the solution in the beaker turning salmon pink and then deep orange. The work done, de Hevesy then placed the beaker on his laboratory shelf, hiding it among dozens of other brightly-coloured chemicals. Incredibly, the ruse worked. Though the Germans scoured the Institute from top to bottom, they never suspected the beaker of bright orange liquid sitting on de Hevesy’s shelf, believing it to be just another innocuous chemical solution. Interestingly, these were not the only Nobel medals to disappear during the war. On March 12, 1940, Niels Bohr put his own medal up for auction in order to raise funds for relief work in Finland, which had been invaded by the Soviet Union in November 1939. The winning bid was anonymous, but the buyer later donated Bohr’s medal to the Danish Historical Museum in Fredrikborg, where it is still on display today.
George de Hevesy, himself a Jew, remained in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen until 1943, when he was finally forced to flee to Stockholm. On his arrival in Sweden, he was informed he had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. With the help of Swedish Nobel laureate Hans von Euler-Chelpin, de Hevesy found a position at the University of Stockholm, where he remained until 1961.
Upon returning to his battle-damaged Copenhagen laboratory after VE Day in 1945, de Hevesy found the jar of aqua regia with the dissolved Nobel medals exactly where he had left them, lying undisturbed on a shelf. Using Iron Chloride, de Hevesy precipitated the gold out of solution and presented it to the Nobel Foundation in Sweden, who used it to re-cast Franck’s and von Laue’s medals. The reconstituted medals were presented back to their original owners in a ceremony at the University of Chicago on January 31, 1952. While a small gesture in the grand scheme of things, George de Hevesy’s clever chemical disappearing act was nonetheless one of countless acts of defiance which helped to secure final Allied victory and the downfall of Nazism in Europe.
1: With all this talk about different carats of gold, you are now most likely wondering: what is a “carat” anyway? The word “carat” derives from the Carob plant, a flowering evergreen tree or shrub that grows throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. The large pods of the Carob produce hard, round seeds, which were once thought to vary little in size and mass, and were thus used as standard weights to weigh out quantities of gold, gemstones, and other valuable materials. From this informal measure, the carat evolved into a standard unit of mass, formalized in 1877 as being equivalent to 205 milligrams. This is the carat used to measure the mass of diamonds and other gemstones, and is typically divided further into 100 “points” of 2.05 milligrams each. When referring to gold, however, a carat is a measurement not of weight but of purity, with 24 carat gold being 100% pure. Thus, the lower the number of carats, the less pure the gold. For example, since 18 is 75% of 24, 18-carat gold is 75% pure gold by weight, the rest being composed of an alloying metal such as silver or copper.
2: If the name of the alleged inventor of aqua regia, the Islamic alchemist Geber, sounds familiar, it is because his name was once believed to be the origin of the modern word “gibberish.” In his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson claims that the word was inspired by the dense technical jargon used by Geber and other alchemists, which was incomprehensible to the average layman and soon became known as “Geber-is” or “gibberish.” However, this etymology has since been discredited, though the actual origin of the term remains a mystery.
3: While aqua regia is commonly described as the only chemical that can dissolve gold, this is not quite correct, for there is another: the liquid metallic element Mercury. When mixed with nearly all metals, Mercury penetrates and intermingles with their crystal structure, forming a solid or paste-like substance known as an amalgam. If this word sounds familiar, this is because silver and gold amalgams were once commonly used in dentistry to create fillings. The amalgamation process is also used in the extraction and refinement of silver and gold from their ore. In this process, crushed ore is mixed with liquid mercury, causing the gold or silver inside the ore to leach our and amalgamate with the mercury. The mercury is then heated to evaporate it, leaving the pure metal behind. As can be imagined, this process produces a lot of waste mercury, which can leak into and contaminate local ecosystems. Indeed, starting in the 16th Century much of the silver ore mined in Spanish colonies in the Americas was crushed and refined in large open circular mills known as patios powered by draft animals or human labourers, leading to high rates of mercury poisoning and widespread environmental pollution.
Mercury also readily amalgamates with Aluminium, quickly infiltrating the metal and undermining its structural integrity. For this reason, Mercury is not allowed to be transported by air lest it leak and start eating away the aircraft’s structure. Knowing this, during the Second World War the Japanese experimented with filling anti-aircraft artillery shells with mercury, the logic being that even if a shell did not score a direct hit, the mercury blasted into an aircraft’s structure would quickly render it inoperative. However, there is little evidence that this tactic was actually effective in practice.
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Expand for ReferencesBell-Young, Lucy, What is Aqua Regia? ReAgent, August 9, 2022, https://www.chemicals.co.uk/blog/what-is-aqua-regia
The Nobel Prize Medals (and How to Make Them Disappear), Compound Interest, September 30, 2016, https://www.compoundchem.com/2016/09/30/nobel-prize-medals/
Misra, Ria, Two Nobel Prize Medals Were Dissolved (and Recast) to Keep Them From the Nazis, Gizmodo, June 25, 2015, https://gizmodo.com/two-nobel-prizes-were-dissolved-and-recast-to-keep-th-1713997292
Krulwich, Robert, Dissolve My Nobel Prize! Fast! (A true Story), NPR, October 3, 2011, https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/10/03/140815154/dissolve-my-nobel-prize-fast-a-true-story
Gignac, Savannah, The Invisible Prize, American Institute of Physics, https://www.aip.org/history-programs/news/invisible-prize
A Unique Gold Medal, The Nobel Prize, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/about/the-nobel-medals-and-
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English novelist Marie Corelli, author of the popular 1886 novel A Romance of Two Worlds, once wrote:
“Let me be mad, mad with the madness of absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world.”
In the late 19th and Early 20th centuries, few vices exemplified the spirit of La Belle Epoque and the ideals of the bohemian revolution like the drinking of absinthe. The potent, dark green spirit was embraced by a whole generation of romantic painters, novelists, poets’ and philosophers from Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh to Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway, featuring prominently in dozens of classic paintings and works of literature. Touted as an artistic muse in a bottle, absinthe was said to produce a pleasant, lucid intoxication and vivid hallucinations, earning it the nickname of “the green fairy.” But while the artistic community sang the praises of absinthe, more conservative factions of society condemned the drink, blaming its consumption for all manner of social ills, including idleness, poverty, epilepsy, madness, and even murder. This growing hysteria ultimately led to absinthe being banned across most of Europe – a ban that would remain in place for nearly a century. But was “the green fairy” really the powerful mind-altering drug of bohemian legend, and did it really lead its users, as one critic put it, “straight to the madhouse or the courthouse?” Fill up your glasses as we dive into the mysterious and romantic history of absinthe.
Absinthe gets its name from Aremisia Absinthium, or Grand Wormwood, a small herbaceous plant native to Eurasia and parts of North Africa. First mentioned in the Ebers Papyrus, an Ancient Egyptian medical treatise from 1550 B.C, wormwood has been used throughout history for medicinal purposes, such as treating malaria or expelling parasitic worms from the body. However, the first use of the herb in alcoholic beverages dates to the late 18th Century. According to one account, absinthe originated in 1792 as a patent medicine or tonic created by Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, [“Oar-dee-nare”] a French physician living in the town of Couvet [“Coo-vay”], Switzerland. Ordinaire’s recipe was purchased by the Henriod [“Ahn-ree-oh”] sisters, who produced the elixir commercially before selling it in 1797 to one Major Dubied [“Doo-bee”]. In 1805, along with his son Marcellin [“Mar-sell-ay”] and son-in-law Henri-Louis Pernod [“Pair-noh”], Dubied opened the world’s first absinthe distillery in Pontarlier [“Pohn-tar-lee-ay”], France, under the company name Maison Pernod Fils [“May-soh Pair-noh Fiss”]. Pernod Fils would go on to become one of the most popular manufacturers of absinthe and survives to this day under the name Pernod Ricard [“Ree-carr”].
Traditional absinthe is flavoured with a variety of herbs, the principal or “holy trinity” of flavourings being wormwood, green anise, and sweet fennel. Additional flavourings vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and can include hyssop, melissa, star anise, angelica, peppermint, coriander, and veronica. The dominant flavour, however, typically comes from the anise, giving absinthe a pronounced liquorice taste similar to related spirits like Greek ouzo, Italian sambuca, and French pastis. Red or pink absinthes flavoured and coloured with rose or hibiscus flowers have also been recorded.
Absinthe manufacture begins with a neutral spirit derived from distilling wine, in which the chosen botanicals are steeped to extract their flavour. The resulting macerated spirit is then run through a still, producing a colourless spirit known as white absinthe or la bleue. This is sometimes bottled straight, but more often the distillate is steeped again in botanicals to produce absinthe’s traditional green colour. While distillation is the preferred manufacturing method, cheaper absinthes are sometimes produced via cold-mixing, in which the botanicals are simply steeped in plain commercial alcohol and the resulting infusion filtered and bottled with no intermediate distillation. Whatever the method, absinthe is typically bottled at extremely high proof, ranging from 45% alcohol by volume to as high as 90%. Though often described as a liqueur, traditional absinthe is bottled without added sugar and is thus more properly classified as a spirit.
Absinthe’s popularity took off in the 1840s, when French troops serving in Algeria began drinking the spirit in order to stave off malaria. By the 1860s absinthe had become so popular in French cafés, bistros, and cabarets that the hour of 5-6 P.M. became widely known as l’heure verte or “the green hour.” In the 1880s mass production caused the price of absinthe to plummet, and by 1910 the French were drinking some 36 million litres of absinthe every year, compared to their annual wine consumption of 5 billion litres. The drink soon spread to other countries including Switzerland, Spain, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, and even the United States, where it was especially popular in French-speaking New Orleans and formed the basis of one of the U.S.’s oldest cocktail recipes: the Sazerac. By this time the drink had also acquired its own set of elaborate preparation rituals. Traditionally, a glass of absinthe is served with a sugar cube, a special slotted spoon, and a carafe of ice water. To prepare the drink, the drinker balances the spoon over the mouth of the glass, places the sugar cube on the spoon, and pours the ice water over the cube, diluting the spirit to a drinkable proof and softening its bitter herbal flavour. Eventually bars and cafés began providing large communal absinthe fountains to dispense ice water, allowing patrons to socialize as they prepared their drinks. The dilution of absinthe causes the drink to turn cloudy, a phenomenon known as louche [“loosh”] or the “ouzo effect.” This effect is the result of essential oils from the botanical flavourings – especially trans-anethole from anise – being soluble in alcohol but not water. Diluting the spirit with water causes these compounds to come out of solution, producing the characteristic cloudiness. Another preparation technique, known as the Bohemian method, involves soaking the sugar cube in high-proof alcohol, lighting it on fire, and tipping it into the glass, imparting the drink with a smoky caramel flavour. While widely performed in specialty bars today, the Bohemian method is not actually a traditional technique and dates back only to the 1990s.
During the late 19th and early 20th Centuries – the period traditionally known as The “Gilded Age” or la Belle Epoque, absinthe was widely consumed by all social classes, from the wealthy bourgeoisie to ordinary working-class people and especially artists, writers, and other members of the emerging bohemian movement. The drink appears in dozens of paintings by leading artists such as Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, and Vincent van Gogh, and in the writings of Emile Zola, Oscar Wilde, and Ernest Hemingway. Much of absinthe’s appeal among the bohemian set lay in its purported ability to induce a pleasant, lucid intoxication or even full-blown hallucinations – properties which, along with the spirit’s distinctive colour, led to it acquiring the immortal nickname “the green fairy.” Absinthe’s supposed psychoactive properties were vividly described by authors like Oscar Wilde, who wrote:
“The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things.
“One night I was left sitting, drinking alone and very late in the Café Royal, and I had just got into this third stage when a waiter came in with a green apron and began to pile the chairs on the tables.
‘Time to go, Sir’ he called out to me. Then he brought in a watering can and began to water the floor.’Time’s up Sir. I’m afraid you must go now, Sir.’
‘Waiter, are you watering the flowers?’ I asked, but he didn’t answer.
‘What are your favourite flowers, waiter?’ I asked again.
‘Now sir, I must really ask you to go now, time’s up,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m sure that tulips are your favourite flowers,’ I said, and as I got up and passed out into the street I felt – the – heavy – tulip – heads – brushing against my shins.”
French poet Beaudelaire even ranked the effects of absinthe ahead of wine and opium, writing in his 1857 poem Poison:
“…none of which equals the poison welling up in your eyes that show me my poor soul reversed, my dreams throng to drink at those green distorting pools.”
But with the increasing association between absinthe and artists, writers, revolutionaries, and other misfits came the inevitable backlash, and social reformers began blaming the “green fairy” for all manner of social ills. One of the drink’s fiercest opponents was Dr. Valentin Magnan [“Man-yan”], chief psychiatrist at Paris’s Sainte-Anne Asylum. Between 1864 and 1874, Magnan conducted a study of 250 cases of alcoholism and concluded that those who abused absinthe suffered more severe symptoms – including rapid-onset hallucinations – than those who drank other forms of alcohol. This observation led him to propose a syndrome known as absinthism, whose effects were distinct from those of regular alcoholism:
“In absinthism, the hallucinating delirium is most active, most terrifying, sometimes provoking reactions of an extremely violent and dangerous nature. Another more grave syndrome accompanies this: all of a sudden the absinthist cries out, pales, loses consciousness and falls; the features contract, the jaws clench, the pupils dilate, the eyes roll up, the limbs stiffen, a jet of urine escapes, gas and waste material are brusquely expulsed. In just a few seconds the face becomes contorted, the limbs twitch, the eyes are strongly convulsed, the jaws gnash and the tongue projected between the teeth is badly gnawed; a bloody saliva covers the lip, the face grows red, becomes purplish, swollen, the eyes are bulging, tearful, the respiration is loud, then the movements cease, the whole body relaxes, the sphincter releases, the evacuations soil the sick man. Suddenly he lifts his head and casts his eyes around him with a look of bewilderment. Coming to himself after awhile, he doesn’t remember one thing that has happened.”
Thanks to Magnan’s research, absinthism became a cause célèbre among reform-minded conservative groups. In France, firebrand Henri Schmidt railed against the drink, writing:
“Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country.”
The cause was especially popular among members of the growing temperance movement, who saw absinthe as an easy easy target and stepping stone to the eventual banning of all alcohol. Another supporter was the French wine industry, which had nearly been wiped out in the 1860s by an aphid infestation and saw the growing absinthe industry as a threat.
The anti-absinthe crusade reached its crescendo in 1905 thanks to a particularly grisly murder. On August 28, 1905, Jean Lanfray, a French labourer living in the town of Commugny, Switzerland, shot and killed his pregnant wife and two children in a drunken rage. Lanfray, an alcoholic, had consumed that day no less than seven glasses of wine, six glasses of cognac, two coffees laced with cognac, two crème de menthes, and two ounces of absinthe. However, the courts and the popular press focused solely on the absinthe, with psychiatrist Dr. Albert Mahaim, an expert witness for the defence, arguing that Lanfray had suffered from “a classic case of absinthe madness.” A moral panic ensued, and a subsequent petition to ban absinthe in Switzerland collected more than 82,000 signatures. A referendum was held on July 5, 1908, and the ban on absinthe was written into the Swiss constitution. Bans in other countries soon followed, including Belgium in 1908, the United States in 1912, and Italy in 1913. France held out until 1915, when concerns over the potential effects of absinthe on the fighting ability of French soldiers finally compelled the country to ban the drink. These bans forced major absinthe distillers like Pernod Fils to switch to making pastis, ouzo, and other wormwood-free anise liqueurs. Absinthe production and consumption continued in countries like Spain where it was still legal, while in Switzerland it went underground, with illegal distillers largely producing colourless white absinthe in an attempt to conceal it from the authorities. However, the drink never regained the popularity it had enjoyed in the late 19th Century, and by the 1960s absinthe had all but disappeared from Europe, becoming little more than a mythical symbol of a bygone romantic age.
But was absinthe really a powerful hallucinogen, as both its devotees and detractors claimed? In a word: no. The supposed psychoactive properties of absinthe have traditionally been blamed on one key ingredient: wormwood – or, more specifically, a compound known as thujone naturally found in wormwood oil. This theory was first proposed in 1864 by absinthe’s nemesis, Dr. Valentin Magnan, who in a series of experiments exposed guinea pigs to pure wormwood oil and alcohol vapour. While the animals exposed to wormwood vapour experienced violent convulsions, those exposed to alcohol vapour did not. However, more recent studies have cast considerable doubt on Magnan’s findings, revealing that while thujone can induce convulsions in high doses, such doses are almost impossible to attain by drinking absinthe. For example, the average dose of thujone that produces convulsions in rats is 12.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. A typical bottle of absinthe, by contrast, contains only about 10 milligrams of thujone per litre, meaning that an average 90-kilogram male would have to consume more than 100 litres of absinthe to reach these levels. And given that absinthe is typically bottled at alcohol concentrations of up to 74%, even the most seasoned drinker would succumb to alcohol poisoning long before the thujone even began to have any effect. Indeed, the only two confirmed cases of thujone poisoning – one in 1862 and one in 1997 – were caused by the consumption not of absinthe but of pure wormwood oil, which can contain up to 50% thujone.
So what, then, was responsible for absinthe’s reportedly toxic side effects? One possible explanation is the practice among less scrupulous absinthe producers of using chemical shortcuts to reduce manufacturing costs, such as using toxic copper compounds to achieve the distinctive green colour or antimony trichloride to replicate the louching or ouzo effect. However, the consensus among most historians and medical experts is that absinthe’s legendary reputation as the potent, mind-altering “green fairy” is nothing more than an overblown myth – the product of artistic hyperbole by its devotees and hysterical propaganda by its detractors. Indeed, between the years 1867 and 1912, some 16,500 patients were admitted to Paris asylums suffering from chronic alcoholism, of which only 1% were found to exhibit the symptoms of absinthism. Given the high rates of absinthe consumption in Paris at the time, it is more than likely that the most severe cases of alcoholism were simply ascribed to Dr. Magnan’s fictitious syndrome. In the end, absinthe’s bad reputation had far more to do with its association with artists, poets, philosophers, and other bohemian misfits than any actual psychoactive properties.
In 1988, the near century-long ban on absinthe was finally lifted when the European Council passed a directive “on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to flavorings for use in foodstuffs and to source materials for their production,” re-allowing the inclusion of wormwood in alcoholic beverages. Since then, absinthe has enjoyed something of a renaissance, with hundreds of distilleries large and small capitalizing on absinthe’s almost mystical reputation and its association with classic art and literature. Today, this once-maligned spirit is available in most liquor stores, allowing you to experience a taste of the romantic Gilded Age – or, more likely, a massive hangover.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesEcheverria, Steve, The Appeal of ‘The Green Fairy’, Herald Tribune, September 18, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20160120231747/http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20080918/ARTICLE/809170246/2406/FEATURES%26title%3DThe_Appeal_of__The_Green_Fairy_
Padosch, Stephan et al, Absinthism: a Fictitious 19th Century Syndrome With Present Impact, Substance Abuse Treatment and Prevention Policy, May 2006, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1475830/
The Effects of Absinthe, The Virtual Absinthe Museum, https://web.archive.org/web/20120820194820/http://www.oxygenee.com/absinthe-effects.html
Carvajal, Doreen, Fans of Absinthe Party Like it’s 1899, International Herald Tribune , November 27, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20060228042837/http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/11/27/wbdrink_ed3_.php
What Were the Lanfray Murders? Thujone Info, https://web.archive.org/web/20120226174026/http://www.thujone.info/absinthe_FAQ6.html
Absinthe, Rose and Red Absinthe, Distillique, July 22, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20160803203029/http://distillique.co.za/distilling_shop/blog/121-absinthe-the-green-or-pink-or-red-fairy
Shenton, Will, Everything You Need to Know About Absinthe, Bevvy, March 4, 2018, https://bevvy.co/articles/everything-you-need-to-know-about-absinthe/2303
Ciabattari, Jane, Absinthe: How the Green Fairy Became Literature’s Drink, BBC, January 8, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140109-absinthe-a-literary-muse
The post Does Absinthe Actually Make You Hallucinate? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The symptoms were gradual but inexorable. It began with headaches, joint pain and tremors in the hands and feet, mild at first but growing steadily in intensity. The victims’ movements became increasingly uncoordinated and clumsy, their stance and gait unsteady. Soon they were unable to walk at all, racked by severe tremors and muscle spasms. And then came the most alarming symptoms of all, as victims began bursting into tears or uncontrollable laughter without provocation. Confusion, delirium, and paralysis followed, until they were unable to move, speak, eat, or make eye contact. Finally, 12 months after the onset of symptoms, came the inevitable arrival of death. This was Kuru, a terrifying and incurable neurodegenerative disease that for nearly 100 years terrorized the Fore [“four-ay”] people of Papua New Guinea. For more than half a century the origins of Kuru remained a mystery, until in the 1960s groundbreaking research revealed it to be caused not by a bacterium, virus, parasite, or even a fungus, but something far stranger.
In 1914, in the early stages of the First World War, the Australian army invaded and occupied the Imperial German colony of New Guinea. What eventually became known as Papua New Guinea would remain under Australian control for another 70 years, and over the following decades missionaries and Colonial Patrol Officers or “Kiaps” penetrated deeper and deeper into the interior in an attempt to bring christianity and western legal, administrative, and medical practices to the indigenous peoples of the island. In the early 1950s, reports began filtering back from Colonial officials of a strange and incurable disease plaguing the indigenous people of the Eastern Highlands, including the Fore and neighbouring Awa, Yate [“yatt-ay”], and Usurfa. Known to the Fore as kuru, from the word kuria meaning “to shake” or “to tremble,” the disease caused a progressive loss of muscular control and invariably death. Kuru was also known as “nagi-nagi” or “laughing sickness” after the tendency of victims to burst into spontaneous laughter in the latter stages of the disease. Thought to have originated sometime in the early 1900s, by the 1950s Kuru had grown into a full-blown epidemic, killing around 200 Fore – or 1% of the population – every year.
The first westerner to describe Kuru was Colonial patrol officer Arthur Carey, who observed in a 1951 report that the disease disproportionately affected Fore women and children over the men. The disease was also described by anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt in 1952 and patrol officer John McArthur in 1953. However, all dismissed the epidemic as a purely psychosomatic phenomenon, a form of mass hysteria deriving from Fore beliefs in witchcraft and spirit possession. Indeed, the Fore themselves initially believed that Kuru to be caused by malicious sorcerers from rival groups, who would acquire parts of the victim’s body such as hair or nail clippings and combined with clothing, leaves, blood and other materials to form a “kuru bundle.” The sorcerer would then shake the bundle daily until the telltale tremors of kuru were induced in the intended victim.
However, American virologist Daniel Gajdusek and physician Vincent Zigas strongly doubted that Kuru could be purely psychological, writing to Ronald Berndt that:
“…our current opinion [is] that fatal kuru cannot by any stretch of the imagination be identified with hysteria, psychoses or any known psychologically induced illnesses. The evidence for direct nervous system damage is far too great in the strabismus [drooping or crossed eyes], and pictures of advanced neurological disease shown by the advanced cases.”
Consequently, in 1957 Gajdusek and Zigas launched the first proper scientific study of Kuru. Their analysis, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, suggested that Kuru might be genetic in origin, passed down along family lines. However, confirmation of this hypothesis would require closer study of kinship among the Fore. So in 1961, medical researcher Michael Alpers and anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum, using a research grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, travelled to the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea to conduct a thorough anthropological and epidemiological study of the Fore.
Over the next two years, Alpers and Lindenbaum discovered that kinship among the Fore was not strictly based on biological relatedness, but rather a complex system of social association and bonding with neighbouring individuals. Kuru, they found, spread mainly along kinship lines and not strictly between biologically-related individuals, making it unlikely that it was transmitted genetically. Epidemiological data further ruled out transmission by air, insects, or contaminated water. So, just how was it transmitted? The unexpected answer would stun the scientific community and open a strange new chapter in the study of human disease: Kuru, Alpers and Lindenbaum discovered, was spread through cannibalism.
At the time, the Fore People practiced a form of what is known as mortuary cannibalism, ritually consuming the bodies of deceased family members as a means of honouring the dead and returning their spirit or “life force” to the community. Bodies would be buried for several days until they were infested with maggots before being exhumed and dismembered, cooked, and eaten communally, the maggots being served as a side dish. And while the Fore avoided the bodies of those who had died of dysentery, leprosy, and other diseases, those who succumbed to Kuru were still regularly consumed.
The more Alpers and Lindenbaum observed, the more convinced they became that this practice was at the heart of the Kuru epidemic. For example, preparation of the bodies was performed almost exclusively by women, who were also far more likely to engage in cannibalism than men. There were two main reasons for this: first, Male Fore believed that eating human flesh would weaken them in times of war. Second, women’s bodies were thought to be better able to tame the absorbed spirits of the dead. More telling still, the brain – the organ most affected by Kuru – was also largely consumed by women and children, while men, when they did engage in cannibalism, preferred to eat the bodies of other men. Together, these facts seemed to explain why Kuru affected predominantly women and children, with only around 3% of Fore men succumbing to the disease.
Yet despite this compelling evidence for Kuru’s origins and transmission route, scientists still did not know what actually caused the disease. In order to find out, in 1968 Alpers collected brain sample tissues from the body of an 11-year-old Fore girl who had died of Kuru and delivered them to Daniel Gajdusek at the National Institutes of Health. Along with collaborator Joe Gibbs, Gajdusek ground up the samples and injected them into the brains of chimpanzees. Within two years the apes began showing the telltale signs of kuru: severe tremors, gradual loss of muscular control and cognitive function, and finally death. When Gajdusek and Gibbs autopsied the animal, they found that its brain – particularly the cerebellum, which controls muscular coordination – was riddled with millions of microscopic holes, giving it the appearance of a sponge or Swiss cheese under the microscope. This experiment not only confirmed that Kuru was spread via infected tissue and that it directly attacked the brain, but was also an extremely rare instance of a disease jumping from one species to another in a laboratory setting and the first known case of a contagious neurodegenerative disorder. But while this research would earn Gajdusek the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1976, he was ultimately unable to isolate the actual pathogen responsible for Kuru. Experiment after experiment ruled out bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protists, leaving the actual causative agent a baffling mystery.
The mystery of Kuru would not be solved until the late 1970s, when Gajdusek, along with British researchers E.J. Field, Tikvah Alper, and John Griffith, noted striking similarities between Kuru and the ailments scrapie and Creutzfeldt-Jakob [“kroyts-felt yah-cob”] disease or CYD. Scrapie, first described in the 18th Century, is a disease affecting mainly sheep and goats, named for the itching sensation that causes afflicted animals to scrape their skin raw on trees and fences; while CYD is a rare human neurodegenerative disorder first described in the 1920s. Like Kuru, both are untreatable and invariably fatal. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Griffith demonstrated that scrapie could be transmitted via infected brain tissue which had been completely sterilized, and that the causative agent, whatever it was, was resistant to destruction by heating, ultraviolet light, and ionizing radiation. This lead Griffith to a radical conclusion: that these diseases were caused not by conventional pathogens, but something far stranger: rogue misshapen proteins called prions.
Unlike bacteria, protists, fungi or – depending on which side of a particularly heated scientific debate you happen to stand – viruses, prions – a contraction of proteinaceous infectious particles – are not actually alive. Rather they are proteins, of the same types that make up the bodies of healthy humans and animals. However, prions are the Mr. Hyde to the original protein’s Dr. Jekyll, a misshapen, deformed variant incapable of performing its original biological function. When a prion enters the body, it latches on to another, normal version of the same protein, causing it to transform into the same mutated form as itself. This in turn triggers a deadly chain reaction, gradually transforming and destroying the entirety of the host tissue. Though prion diseases are typically acquired from other infected hosts, they can occur spontaneously when normal proteins mutate into a malignant form, triggering the same transformational chain reaction. Indeed, it is now believed that Kuru in New Guinea originated sometime in the early 1900s when an unknown individual spontaneously developed the disease, and gradually spread through the Fore population via mortuary cannibalism.
The sponge-like holes the prions inflict in the victim’s brain tissue are what give Kuru, CYD, scrapie, and similar diseases their collective name: transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. If that name sounds familiar, it might be because prions are also responsible for bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, better known as “Mad Cow Disease.” Like Kuru, BSE is also spread through cannibalism, though of a rather different sort. In the 1980s and 1990s, a massive outbreak of BSE in the UK was linked to the use of Meat-and-Bone Meal or MBM in animal feed. MBM is rendered from the parts of slaughtered animals considered unfit for human consumption, including blood, bone, hooves, horn, skin, and – most relevant to the transmission of BSE – brain and nerve tissue. The transmission of BSE via infected animal feed devastated the UK livestock sector, triggering worldwide bans on British beef, killing hundreds of cows outright, and resulting in four million animals being slaughtered and incinerated in an attempt to contain the outbreak. Even more tragically, 177 people contracted Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human form of BSE, from eating contaminated beef, with all invariably succumbing to the disease. In the wake of the outbreak, the UK banned the use of MBM for the feeding cows, sheep, goats, and other ruminant animals, though it remains a common ingredient in pet food.
Though their existence had been theorized for over a decade, prions were not isolated in the laboratory until 1982 by American researcher Stanley Prusiner of the University of California, earning him the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. This discovery of a brand-new infectious agent opened up a brand-new field in the study of communicable diseases, and lead geneticists to rethink certain assumptions regarding the transmission of structural information between genes and proteins. Some scientists now also suspect that Alzheimer’s disease may also be caused by a type of prion, opening exciting new avenues of research for the treatment of this disease, which afflicts up to 30 million people worldwide every year.
Yet despite this new understanding, mysteries still surrounded Kuru, the first human prion disease to be positively identified. Even before cannibalism was suspected as the cause of Kuru, the practice was strongly discouraged by missionaries and Colonial patrol officers. By the 1960s, when Alpers and Lindenbaum began their groundbreaking study, the Fore had all but abandoned mortuary cannibalism. However, the epidemic continued for decades, with deaths between 1987 and 1995 averaging 7 per year. It is now known that Kuru has an extremely long latency period, ranging anywhere from 3 to 50 years between infection and the onset of symptoms, allowing cases to appear long after the abandonment of cannibalism. Indeed, the fact that nobody born after 1960 has ever contracted the disease has served to confirm the link between Kuru and the practice of mortuary cannibalism.
Thankfully, however, there is reason to believe that after more than 100 years, the Kuru epidemic may at last be over. The last person died of Kuru 2009, and no new cases have been reported as of 2010. Even more encouragingly, it appears as though Fore may actually have developed immunity to Kuru, shielding them from future outbreaks. A 1996 study conducted by a team from University College London found a high prevalence of a gene mutation called G127 among the Fore, which prevents malignant prions like Kuru from infecting the brain. Genetic analysis has further revealed that this mutation appeared as recently as 10 generations ago. As John Collinge, a researcher at University College’s Prion Unit remarked:
“It’s absolutely fascinating to see Darwinian principles at work here. This community of people has developed their own biologically unique response to a truly terrible epidemic. The fact that this genetic evolution has happened in a matter of decades is remarkable.”
So for all you aspiring Hannibal Lecters out there, the tragic case of Kuru provides yet one more reason why – outside of extreme survival situations – cannibalism is rarely a good idea. Better to pair your fava beans and chianti with something slightly less exotic.
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Expand for ReferencesAlpers, Michael, The Epidemiology of Kuru in the Period 1987 to 1995, Australian Government Department of Health, December 31, 2005, https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/content/cda-cdi2904i.htm
Weiler. Nicholas, Alzheimer’s Disease is a ‘Double-Prion Disorder’, Study Shows, University of California San Fransisco, May 1, 2019, https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2019/05/414326/alzheimers-disease-double-prion-disorder-study-shows
Stanley B. Prusiner – Facts, The Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine 1997, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1997/prusiner/facts/
Press Release: Baruch S. Blumberg and D. Carleton Gajdusek, Karolinska Institutet, October 14, 1976, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1976/press-release/
Kelleher, Colm, Brain Trust: the Hidden Connection Between Mad Cow and Misdiagnosed Alzheimer’s Disease, Paraview Piocket Books, New York, 2004, https://books.google.ca/books?id=AGAhAtI3kJEC&q=Gajdusek+drill+holes&pg=PA53&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Gajdusek%20drill%20holes&f=false
Lindenbaum, Shirley, An Annotated History of Kuru, April 14, 2015, http://journals.ed.ac.uk/index.php/mat/article/download/4590/6242?inline=1
Kompoliti, K & Ferguson-Smith, M, Kuru (Disease), ScienceDirect, https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/kuru-disease
Liberski, Pawel et al, Kuru, the First Human Prion Disease, Viruses, March 2019, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466359/
Brain Disease ‘Resistance Gene” Evolves in Papua New Guinea Community; Could Offer Insights into CJD, Science Daily, November 21, 2009, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091120091959.htm
Liberski, P & Brown, P, Kuru: Its Ramifications After Fifty Years, Experimental Gerontology, 2008, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00499057/file/PEER_stage2_10.1016%252Fj.exger.2008.05.010.pdf
Bichell, Rae, When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged, NPR, September 6, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/when-people-ate-people-a-strange-disease-emerged
Rudan, Igor, The Laughing Death, https://irudan.medium.com/the-laughing-death-edba313c6791
Lagnado, John, From Pabulum to Prions (via DNA): a Tale of Two Griffiths, Past Times, https://watermark.silverchair.com/bio027040033.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAA7QwggOwBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggOhMIIDnQIBADCCA5YGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMwkM3d3WfqalCT8mrAgEQgIIDZyN0GxVQWVs2v35f4jxJwFv7BfSvjiClhMtSExpRUasvyH2yusXOayzQLZpM25GFVm0AnSjL3R45f96N67lJCmCBLvVjaPXDBJjMIoK7QTmb1w1Uji5M0NuVUY_bjTRxXEEoB09cE0x9iGQ1YpJIM-wIbTOKg-1KD7gJ16kPd2dQkMNL7fit58HF0Mj9LxkHgzDKAFAtLhj_AaUoNAs9uGsz6Gs4LWNizRpDUw47lPHRFfut7BDdpBMKZx6sqPEMT2bN9wNY3SBreJm3BjJ-jGspKNNbkHBbx1xKYmbnml1exB6tma90VPZtueWZHbbmiYLaAdCZax6zp-4XZRzz0JLMLzS44mwu9djL47_Ak-mWWo5lYVJUInsmbi29uHVKi7YGQDUh0ePZKitnzECwIWi-F-MGXJJ4tDn5iAUdGc7ATkxyIC6S0rS4Se6dbg4jXD0kaMkrMuzix1C1FCpVxqBUKzAYZuZrc06PYzPZiPzdM5cLGKpdM4MCF7F_vixUnQ37He_l-bdg1QveVTLvsdRpSrBdHkbuIGek2UR5sJsqF51hNk5qeix3ZW21EOEOLk14IPsvtzJen-K_W7VL4Nduzt-f3YpxMN0MoBlM1nyV924v6jbfvfN8KqSDBWurA8op2LjHNmno-gFobR4slO82rQVi1y0z6yCcV3J7VDO5JE9ldPFD_msHLJjF8RaZ9thgYSJZzWHYY_xLF4OIcdhyhSxVGRtPHdYeiPVNxbUyMo8lRPolzHhqBFEgd004JTHCpzY9-0fBniXcl_FJHcGXtCjrtd1kp2AySKdWr64T3FwefX9b_BHnKTjGXnS1uRTifh9nKs99q6k-5-_k0A-TIWxpK52VEw3wJBB3GInWROihbOL4p-je-KOcNFt9dR3vD1m6cHzGJP77bIF2yWjgqJAQMAG0asog4NBSPYrRRnrrEMroQNmuhtkJMmkCP7vDxzlIgaW4HLnfqV1aA0G7CM8OPaq3sST9YA_uH6e1F3441NHrTspc8Nd1ewfyrEtIIEHZ0Ffz0hHeN2mgxWygyLzWzH2r0G4bbuzwCVab0yxCP7UKhWhA_FsZch850DwOCetpTqeD2Pb-dlN5ftSH3bM64s9Q2vRZJAgxRUMUasRyE4yXwYi8UfPfdcL7xIxj6ftmquw
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Every day millions of Americans carefully wash, sort, and set out their recycling for collection. But while many might feel proud to be doing their bit to help save the environment, such efforts are minuscule next to the gargantuan recycling effort that accompanied the Second World War. The term “total war” refers to a state in which every facet of a nation’s economy and public life is committed to the prosecution of said war, and no conflict in human history more fully embodied this ethos than WWII. Almost overnight, nearly every commodity imaginable became a strategic material feeding the hungry war machine. Household goods like gasoline, cloth, and staple foods were heavily rationed, scrap metal drives scoured cities and towns for everything from junked cars to toothpaste tubes, housewives collected kitchen drippings to be turned into glycerine for explosives, and in Canada coloured ink became so scarce that comic book publishers were forced to print the now highly-collectible “Canadian Whites.” But few citizens could claim to have possessed a stranger strategic material than Miss Mary Babnik of Pueblo, Colorado.
Born Mitzi Babnik in 1907 to Slovenian immigrant parents, Mary Babnik was famous for her long blonde hair, which by the 1940s had grown to length of 34 inches or 83 centimetres, reaching down to her knees. She typically wore it in a long braid wrapped around her head, earning her the nickname “The Lady with the Crown.” In 1943 Mary was already contributing fully to the war effort, working by day at the National Broom Factory and teaching airmen from the local Air Force base to dance every evening as a USO volunteer.
But when Mary’s brothers were barred from military service on medical grounds, she began to feel that even this wasn’t enough:
“Both of my brothers were deferred and couldn’t go. I was thinking of all those other boys and their families, the ones who had to go. I saw so many people crying their eyes out, not wanting their sons to go. I was sad. I wanted to do something for the war effort.”
Thus, when she saw an advertisement in a local paper calling for blonde, undamaged hair at least 22 inches or 56 centimetres in length, she immediately replied. In November she was contacted by the Washington Institute of Technology, who asked her for a sample. Mary’s hair, which had never been cut, curled, straightened, or washed with anything but natural soap, was exactly what the WIT was looking for, and in 1944 she agreed to have it cut. Though the Government offered her compensation in war savings stamps, Mary refused, considering it her patriotic duty to contribute to the war effort. Nevertheless, the loss of her defining characteristic proved traumatic.
“After I did it I cried and cried. I went to my mother and said, ‘Mama, why did you let me cut my hair?’ It was two months before I went anywhere except to work. After two months, I got used to it. But at first I was so ashamed I wore a bandana to work so people wouldn’t ask me about it.”
Over the years a myth has emerged claiming that Mary Babnik’s hair was used to make the crosshairs in the Norden Bombsight carried aboard American B-17, B-24, and B-29 bomber aircraft. However, this is impossible, as the crosshairs in the Norden are not a separate component but rather etched into the glass of one of the sighting lenses.
So what was it actually used for? While it’s not fully clear in detail, it appears Mary’s hair was used in the manufacture of precision hygrometers for measuring atmospheric humidity – measurements vital to the manufacture of certain aircraft components and countless other war materials where accurate humidity measurement was essential, from the first nuclear weapons to intercontinental ballistic missiles and more.
Despite her initial regret, Mary Babnik soon came to view her curious contribution to the war effort with pride, claiming in a 1990 interview that she would “do it all again.” In 1987 President Ronald Reagan sent her a birthday greeting thanking her for her wartime service, while in 1990 she was presented with a special achievement award from the Colorado Aviation Historical Society. Mary Babnik died in 1991 at the age of 84.
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Bonus Fact
The Norden Bombsight – the device that Mary Babnik’s hair was erroneously believed to have been used in – was one of the most closely-guarded secrets of the Second World War. First developed by Dutch-American engineer Carl Norden in the late 1920s, the device was extensively used aboard B-17, B-24, and B-29 bombers throughout the war.
Unlike what is typically depicted in movies, the Norden was not merely a simple telescope and crosshairs for aiming but rather a highly-sophisticated mechanical computer and autopilot that kept the aircraft on a steady course, constantly re-calculated the bombs’ point of impact based on changing flight conditions, and automatically dropped the bombs when the aircraft arrived over the target. In fact, the Norden bombsight is best thought of not as one single device but four.
The first component of the Norden bombsight was the inertial platform, a set of two gyroscopes that kept the sight stable and level relative to the ground regardless of how the aircraft moved around it. The second component was the sighting eyepiece, which looked not straight down but through a motorized prism that gave a view of the target ahead. By adjusting the speed of rotation of the prism so that the target remained fixed in the crosshairs, the bombardier could effectively calculate the groundspeed and the position of the target relative to the aircraft. The sight could then calculate when the aircraft had arrived over the release point and automatically drop the bombs. However, the fall of the bombs was affected by a number of other factors, including altitude, air temperature, and wind direction and velocity; therefore the bombardier had to use the sight’s third component, a mechanical computer, to compensate for these. Throughout the bomb run, he would constantly adjust these values by trial and error in order to keep the target centred in the crosshairs. While early versions of the Norden included a device that signalled course corrections to the pilot to keep the aircraft on correct heading, the finalized Mk. XV model used throughout WWII incorporated a fourth component, an autopilot, to fly the aircraft throughout the bomb run. Thus, on the approach to the target the plane would be flown not by the pilot but rather the bombsight and the bombardier, whose constant wind speed, altitude, and heading corrections would automatically adjust the aircraft’s course.
In prewar testing the Norden displayed phenomenal accuracy, with a Circular Area Probable – the diameter of the circle in which half the bombs could be expected to fall – of only 75 feet. This performance informed the American doctrine of daylight precision bombing, which held that military targets such as factories or marshalling yards could be hit from high altitude with minimal collateral damage – even if said targets were located within built-up civilian areas. Or, as US aircrew famously put it, that they could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet. This accuracy also theoretically allowed Navy aircraft to attack fleets of enemy ships at sea via high-altitude level bombing. The Norden was considered so vital to US air power that its design and production was given top secret status, and bombardiers were made to swear an oath to destroy their bombsight before bailing out of a stricken aircraft – either by heaving it overboard or emptying their service pistols into the mechanism.
Yet despite this vaunted reputation as a top-secret war-winning weapon, under actual combat conditions the Norden’s performance proved decidedly lacklustre, its CEP growing to over 1200 feet – about the same as far simpler British and German bombsights. Aircrew flying daylight raids also ran into the same problem faced by the British earlier in the war, namely that flying straight and level over a target for minutes on end tended to make bombers extremely vulnerable to enemy fighters and antiaircraft fire. Who knew? While high casualties had forced the British to switch to night raids and area bombing whereby entire cities were targeted rather than individual targets, the USAAF persisted with daylight raids, instead developing new tactics to improve bombing accuracy and aircraft survivability. These included the combat box – a special flight formation in which bomber gunners could better defend each other against fighter attack – and the lead bomber tactic, in which only a single aircraft would use its Norden to find the target, with the other bombers in the formation dropping their bombs on its command. Regardless, bombing proved almost impossible to achieve and the USAAF increasingly began adopting less discriminate area bombing tactics. Meanwhile, the Navy largely abandoned its Norden bombsights and embraced dive bombing and skip bombing to more accurately attack enemy ships.
Despite extensive attempts to keep its design a secret, details of the Norden’s operation did fall into German hands through both espionage and crashed aircraft. However, little attempt was made to reverse-engineer it due what the Germans saw as its unnecessary complexity. And despite its failure to live up to expectations, the Norden was the best the US military had and served through the rest of the war – being used to drop both Atomic Bombs – and soldiered on through Korea and Vietnam, its last use occurring in 1967 when it was used to drop electronic sensors onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Expand for ReferencesA.F. Lauds Woman Who Gave Hair, Deseret News, November 19, 1990, https://www.deseret.com/1990/11/19/18891930/a-f-lauds-woman-who-gave-hair-br
Mary Babnick Brown, Pueblo County, Colorado, https://www.kmitch.com/Pueblo/bios0094.html
Adams, Doug, The Blonde and the Bomber: The Hair That Whipped Hitler, Life in the Delta, February 2011 https://web.archive.org/web/20140103223130/http://digitalpublication.lifeinthedelta.com/display_article.php?id=635505
Woman’s Locks Key to Sights, Star News, November 22, 1989, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=nbMsAAAAIBAJ&pg=6557,2626572
The Politics, Pickle Barrels, and Propaganda of the Norden Bombsight, Museum of Aviation Foundation, April 23, 2016, https://museumofaviation.org/blog/the-politics-pickle-barrels-and-propaganda-of-the-norden-bombsight/
Tillman, Barrett, Norden Bombsight: The Pickle Barrel War, Flight Journal Magazine, Winter 2001
The post The Girl With the War-Winning Hair appeared first on Today I Found Out.
It was a dark, stormy night in October 1934 when the residents of Albury, a small town in New South Wales, Australia, were awakened by the drone of an aeroplane droning overhead. Endlessly it circled above the iron grey clouds, searching for a place to land. Any aeroplane lost in a storm was cause for concern, but the residents of Albury knew that this was no ordinary aeroplane. The KLM DC-2 desperately circling their town was at the end of an extraordinary journey which had taken it across three continents from England to the Australian outback – a distance of more than 18,000 kilometres. And now she was in trouble, barely 200 kilometres from the finish line of the MacRobertson Cup – the greatest race in the history of aviation.
The 1934 MacRobertson Air Race was conceived by Sir Harold Gengoult Smith, Lord Mayor of the Australian city of Melbourne, as part of the city’s centenary celebrations. Not only would such a grand sporting event place Melbourne on the world stage and lift the spirits of the Australian people in the depths of the Great Depression, but would also help stimulate advances in commercial air travel and bind the British Empire closer together. An editorial in the Melbourne newspaper The Argus expressed Smith’s vision:
“In an age of extraordinary mechanical progress one takes many things for granted; but flight halfway across the world seems too remarkable for analysis. If the present conquest of speed be maintained at the present rate an air journey to England in these days will become commonplace. And Australia, that vast land over the edge of beyond will become part of a great world.”
The race was sponsored by philanthropist and confectionary giant Sir Macpherson Robertson, who had already donated an extraordinary sum of £100,000 (a few million today) towards various centenary projects. Sir MacPherson agreed to provide the £15,000 prize money for the race on the condition it be named after his MacRobertson Confectionary Company and be organized to be as safe as possible.
The race proper was organized by the British Royal Aero Club, and the rules were simple. Any pilot from any country could participate, and there was no limit on aircraft size, crew size, or engine power – though no new pilots could join the aircraft after takeoff. Competing aircraft would take off from RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, England and land at Flemington Racecourse outside Melbourne. There were five mandatory stops along the way at Baghdad in Iraq, Allahabad in British India, Singapore, and Darwin and Charleville in Australia, and 22 optional stops with fuel and oil provided by the Shell and Stanavo companies. Pilots were otherwise free to choose their own routes, though landing anywhere other than the 27 designated stops would incur a time penalty. Every aircraft was also required to carry 3 days’ emergency rations, life rafts and flares, and the most up-to-date instruments and radio equipment. There were two main prize categories: one for the fastest aircraft, with a prize of £10,000; and one for best performance with a prize of £5,000, awarded to any aircraft completing the race within 16 days and based on a handicap formula.
The thrill and glory of the race attracted a veritable who’s who of 1930s aviation royalty. Early favourites to win were Jim and Amy Mollison, a married couple known the world over as the “Flying Sweethearts.” Each a record-breaking pilot in their own right, in 1930, Amy Mollison – then Amy Johnson – had become the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia – a distance of some 18,000 kilometres. In 1932 she and co-pilot Jack Humphreys became the first to fly from London to Moscow in a day and broke the world speed record between Britain and Japan via Siberia. Jim Mollison had also broken speed records flying from Australia to England, Ireland to New Brunswick, England to Brazil, and England to South Africa – a record later smashed by Amy Johnson. In 1932 Mollison met Johnson aboard a commercial flight in Australia, proposing to her only eight hours later. They married on July 29 of that year.
Other well-known Commonwealth competitors included Captain Tom Campbell Black, a Kenyan coffee plantation owner who had famously rescued German WWI flying ace Ernst Udet from the Sudanese desert; Flight Lieutenant Charles Wilson Scott, an Australian aviator who had set numerous speed records across the outback; and Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, the first pilot to fly across the Pacific Ocean. The youngest competitor – and one of only two to fly solo – was 21-year-old Australian Jimmy Melrose, who had just completed a record-breaking flight from Australia to England and entered the race to make the return journey.
Much of the playing field, however, was made up of Americans, who included among their number such legends as Roscoe Turner, a flamboyant air racer who famously flew with a lion cub named Gilmore aboard; Clyde Pangborn, the first pilot to fly nonstop across the Pacific Ocean; Wiley Post, a one-eyed aviator who had twice circumnavigated the globe by air; and Jacqueline Cochran, an accomplished aviatrix who would later become the first woman to break the sound barrier and for a time held more aviation records than any pilot in history.
At the time the race was announced, almost all the aircraft best-suited to the task were American-built. These included the brand-new Boeing 247 airliner Warner Brothers Comet flown by Roscoe Turner, Clyde Pangborn, and Reeder Nichols; and the Douglas DC-2 flown by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Of all the competitors, the KLM aircraft – christened Uiver or “Stork,” was probably the most unusual. Crewed by Captain Koene Parmentier and First Officer Johannes Moll, the aircraft would be flown as a regularly-scheduled commercial flight with three passengers and 25,000 letters aboard, and would land at all 22 official refuelling stops along the route. Despite this handicap, the sleek airliner soon became the new favourite to win the race.
But the tables quickly turned when, in early 1934, the British de Havilland Aircraft Company announced it would custom-build a new aircraft specifically for the race and offer it at a reduced price to any competitor who ordered one before the end of February. Three orders were immediately placed, and on September 8, 1934 – barely a month and a half before the race – the first de Havilland DH.88 Comet took to the skies. Sleek and futuristic-looking, the two-seat Comet pioneered the lightweight laminated-plywood construction technique that would later be used to great effect in the wartime De Havilland Mosquito light bomber. Powered by a pair of de Havilland Gipsy Six R engines, it was capable of speeds of up to 380 km/hr and had a range 4,700 kilometres, allowing to fly nonstop between the mandatory refuelling stops. The first Comet, dubbed Black Magic, was sold to Jim and Amy Mollison; the second, dubbed Green ‘Un, to O. Cathcart Jones and K.F. Waller; and the third, dubbed Grosvenor House, to Tom Campbell Black and Charles Wilson Scott. Sir Charles Kingsford Smith was also offered a Comet, but turned it down as uncompetitive. He instead acquired a Lockheed Sirius 8A which he named Lady Southern Cross, but en route from Australia to the start line in England the aircraft developed structural cracks, knocking Kingsford Smith out of the race. Supercharger trouble also forced American competitor Wiley Post to withdraw before the start of the race, leading him to focus instead on breaking altitude and transcontinental speed records – and for more on this, please check out our previous video The One-Eyed Barnstormer Who Invented the Space Suit.
In the months leading up to the race, the original pool of 64 entrants from 13 different countries was gradually whittled down to a final roster of 20 competitors representing Britain, the United States, the Netherlands, Denmark, Australia, and New Zealand. The journey would be treacherous for even the most experienced pilots, with insurance company Lloyd’s of London giving the competitors 1 in 12 odds of dying during the race. The challenges involved were perhaps best summed up by a TIME Magazine article, which described the race as:
“…[requiring] night and day flying over country perilous with jagged mountains, snake-infested jungles, deserts, hurricanes and typhoons. The toughest stretch may have been across the Syrian Desert where blinding sandstorms sometimes rise 20,000 feet and huge kitebirds menace aerial navigation. Not much easier was the 2,210-mile jump from Allahabad to Singapore, with its Bay of Bengal water hop nearly as long as the North Atlantic.”
Yet despite these dangers, on October 20, 1934, 60,000 spectators gathered at RAF Mildenhall to watch the first aircraft, Jim and Amy Mollison’s Black Magic, roar off the start line. The great MacRobertson Air Race had begun. The day before, Sir MacPherson Robertson, the event’s sponsor, sent a message of encouragement to the competitors:
“The magnificent response by all the leading airmen in the world, who have so generously come forward to make this event the greatest race in the history of aviation, is very gratifying to the Air Race authorities in Australia.The full growth of aviation must be world wide, and the international support that the race has evoked since its inception convinces me that such a contest must help to broaden the mutual basis for friendly exchange of services and understanding between nations, quite apart from its great value in quickening the airmindedness of their people. I express the feeling of all Australians in wishing you a safe and speedy flight to Melbourne, where a warm and hearty welcome awaits you.”
Right out the gate, the Mollisons in Black Magic lead the pack. However, despite making three additional stops along the way, Uiver landed in Baghdad only 8 hours behind Black Magic, making it clear that she would be a formidable opponent. Uiver also had other advantages. The de Havilland Comet was built for speed above comfort, and the Mollisons arrived in Baghdad half-deaf, hungry, and very tired. Uiver’s crew and passengers, on the other hand, were described by one reporter as being “fresh as a daisy,” allowing the DC-2 to quickly refuel and pull into the lead. Uiver led to Athens, followed closely by Americans Turner, Pangborn, and Nichols in Warner Brothers Comet. The Mollisons in the faster Black Magic soon overtook them, but became lost over India and were forced to land at Jubulpur. No high-octane aviation fuel was available, forcing the Mollisons to refuel Black Magic with ordinary automotive petrol. By the time they reached Allahabad, the low-grade fuel had destroyed their engines, knocking them out of the race.
Meanwhile, competitors began dropping like flies. British pilots H.D. Gilman and J.K. Baines were killed when their Fairey Fox aircraft crashed near Palazzo San Gervasio in Italy; Jacqueline Cochran’s Granville Gee Bee R-6H was irreparably damaged on landing in Bucharest, Romania; Australian pilot J. Woods’ Lockheed Vega crashed on landing in Aleppo, Syria; and Dutch pilot G.J. Geysendorfer’s Pander S4 was destroyed in a ground collision in Allahabad. By the second day the race had turned into a three-way contest between Uiver, Warner Brothers Comet, and Grosvenor House, which had pulled into the lead in Singapore.
Now came the most treacherous part of the race: a 3,300 kilometre leg across the Timor Sea to Darwin in northern Australia. Though far ahead in the lead, for a time it seemed as though Grosvenor House might be knocked out of the race when a low oil pressure indicator forced Scott and Campbell-Black shut off one of their engines. Limping along on one engine, they barely made it to Darwin before their fuel ran out. However, an inspection of their engines revealed no faults, so Grosvenor House carried on towards Charleville, landing just as Uiver reached Darwin. After refuelling, Scott and Campbell-Black took off again on the final 1,500 kilometre leg of the race, but once again their oil pressure dropped and they were forced to return to Charleville. With Uiver hot on their tails, for hours mechanics struggled to find the fault in the engines. When once again nothing could be found Scott and Campbell-Black decided to chance another flight and took off once more for Melbourne. The journey proved a gruelling one. Neither pilot had slept in nearly three days, forcing them to pass off the controls every ten minutes in order to stay awake. But finally, at 3:34 PM on October 23, 1934, Grosvenor House crossed the finish line at Flemington Racecourse, having flown the 18,200-kilometre course in only 70 hours, 54 minutes, and 18 seconds. Scott and Campbell-Black were awarded the MacRobertson Trophy in the pure speed category and £10,000 in prize money. Though they had also technically won the handicap category, official race rules dictated that no aircraft could win more than one prize, meaning that Uiver was still poised to take second place. But en route from Charleville to Melbourne the Dutch aircraft ran into trouble, resulting in a legendary incident that would all but eclipse Grosvenor House’s historic achievement.
Soon after taking off from Charleville, Uiver ran into a violent electrical storm and lost radio contact with Melbourne. Circling aimlessly in search of a break in the clouds, Uiver found herself over the town of Albury on the Victoria-New South Wales border. The residents of Albury, who for the past three days had been closely following the race on their wireless sets, immediately recognized the drone of the DC-2 and, realizing she was in trouble, immediately leapt into action. Lyle Ferris, the chief electrical engineer at the post office, ran to the power station and switched the town lights on and off to spell out the word A-L-B-U-R-Y in Morse Code while announcer Arthur Newnham at radio station 2CO Corowa called for residents to line up their cars along the local racecourse to form a makeshift runway. Though Captain Parmentier later recalled seeing the Morse Code signal through the clouds, due to extreme turbulence he was unable to read it. However, soon after he spotted the makeshift runway and, low on fuel, decided to attempt a landing. At 1:15 AM on October 24, 1934, Captain Parmentier successfully landed Uiver right down the middle of Albury Racecourse. As Radio 2CO Cowora employee Cleaver Bunton later recalled:
“It was a remarkable piece of aviation that the plane got down safely, literally missing trees and stumps by very small margins. The amount of people who got to the racecourse was remarkable not only were cars there in big numbers but there was also a colossal crowd of people there to. It was fortunate actually that the racecourse was waterlogged as a result of the heavy rain we’d had. It saved the plane from overrunning. There is no doubt in the world that it would have overrun had it not been waterlogged as it was.”
Unfortunately, this mud also prevented Uiver from taking off again. But once again the residents of Albury leapt into action. Two ropes were attached to the aircraft, and together some 100 people managed to haul Uiver out of the mud and onto drier ground. Stripped of all non-essential items including luggage, letters, passengers, and two crew members, later that morning Uiver was able to take off and complete the final leg of the race. She arrived in Melbourne with a total flying time of 90 hours, 18 minutes, and 51 seconds – clinching second place and the handicap prize. Over the next 14 days, eight more competitors would cross the finish line. In third place was the Boeing 247 Warner Brothers Comet, with a total flying time of 92 hours and 55 minutes, followed by the De Havilland Comet Green ’Un. Jimmy Melrose, the only competitor to complete the race solo, arrived on October 30 with a total flight time of 10 days, 16 hours, placing second in the handicap category.
The MacRobertson Air Race was an unqualified success, dramatically demonstrating the feasibility and potential of long-range air travel. It was not lost on aircraft designers and airline managers that the second and third-place winners were modern all-metal monoplane airliners, and Douglas Aircraft would draw on lessons learned during the MacRobertson Air Race to design the DC-3, the first airliner to turn a profit carrying only passengers and one of the most versatile and successful aircraft ever built.
The remarkable rescue of Uiver also forged an unbreakable bond between the town of Albury and the Netherlands, who in gratitude for the town’s assistance made a large donation to Albury Hospital and awarded the town’s mayor, Alf Waugh, a title in Dutch Nobility. And when on December 20 of that year Uiver crashed near Ar Rutba, Iraq, killing all on board, Albury residents took up a collection to build a memorial in the Netherlands to the victims of the crash.
But perhaps the greatest legacy of the MacRobertson Air Race was in how it fired the world’s imagination and enthusiasm for aviation, setting the stage for today’s globe-spanning airline industry. As Sir McPherson Robertson stated in a radio address on the second day of the race:
“Never in the history of aviation has there been such a line up of aviators and never in the history of the world has there been such an aerial contest.”
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesMcCullough, Bruce, Tom Campbell Black, 1899-1936, Pioneer Aviator, https://web.archive.org/web/20080724170047/http://www.tomcampbellblack.150m.com/
The MacRobertson Melbourne Centenary Air Race, Conditions of Entry and Instructions to Control Points and Check Points, https://web.archive.org/web/20080821150726/http://www.jamesmccullough.0catch.com/
Comet DH.88, https://web.archive.org/web/20040604024806/http://www.pjcomputing.flyer.co.uk/comet/
The Flight of the Uiver, https://web.archive.org/web/20090420115620/http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2006/11/21/1793944.htm?site=goulburnmurray
The MacRobertson Trophy Air Race, Uiver Memorial DC-3 Restoration Project, https://www.uivermemorial.org.au/race.html
The post The Greatest Air Race of All Time Which Helped Give Us the Global Airline Industry appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Few junk food items have ever reached the heights of general and almost universal popularity as the humble potato chip and its tasty derivative brethren the tortilla chip. But who invented the potato chip, and its cheesy and blessed of the light modification, nachos? How about the invention of tasty, tasty Doritos? Well, I’m glad you asked because that’s what we are going to discuss today, as well as, along the way, what those little black spots you find in the tortilla chip are, what’s up with green potato chips and are they really poisonous, who invented the thicker, fried potato variety of goodness we call the french fry, and why Pringles are sort of the red headed step child of the potato chip world, not really worthy to even be called such. So, put on your nacho sombrero, lather yourself up in cheese dip and guacamole, and let’s dive in, shall we?
First, who invented the noble and in all ways exquisitely glorious potato chip?
The prevailing story of the origin of the chip of potato starts in Saratoga Springs, New York, a historically affluent resort community. The year was 1853, eight years before the beginning of the American Civil War. Known for its mineral springs and their supposed rejuvenation properties, Saratoga Springs had just started becoming a tourist destination with the help of the railroad that cut through the town. Resorts, inns, restaurants, and spas had begun to crop up along the shores of Saratoga Lake. Moon’s Lake House, owned by Cary Moon, was one of the finest of those restaurants. Vacationers and wealthy summer home owners visited the restaurant often. At the restaurant, two people shared the cooking responsibilities, Catherine “Aunt Kate” Weeks and her brother (or brother-in-law, depending on who’s telling the story), George Crum.
George was born George Speck, his mother was Native American and his father was a free African-American making a living as a horse jockey. When George was a young man, he adopted his father’s horse racing name – Crum. After an earlier career as a trapper and hunting guide, he made his way to Saratoga Springs, where he began cooking and, by all accounts, seemed to get pretty good at it. So good, in fact, he was hired by Cary Moon to work at his restaurant.
Up to this point, based on the evidence at hand, we can be fairly certain all of this is in the ballpark of true. But here’s where, perhaps, elements of legend creep in. The story goes that it was about dinner time during Moon’s second summer season on the Lake. A customer came in and ordered Moon’s Fried Potatoes, the well-known house specialty. Crum whipped up a batch and served it to the customer, who complained that the potatoes were cut much too thick. So, he sent the item back to be remade. Crum did his best to make them thinner, yet when the discerning patron got his second order, again he complained that the thickness of the potatoes weren’t to his liking. So, once again, the customer told Crum to try again.
Crum, none too pleased that someone would insult his cooking, cut the potatoes paper-thin, dumped them in a vat of oil, let them cook so long that they became hard and crispy, and then salted them heavily, thinking that these “fried potatoes” would now be inedible. When served the item, the customer took a bite…and then another…and then another, before proclaiming that the fried slices of potatoes were delicious. It became known as the “Saratoga Chip.” The potato chip was born… Or so the legend goes.
As one could imagine, there are several versions of this story and all are disputed and, as we’ll get into, for good reason. First off, assuming the story is true, there is the question of who this customer actually was. The less interesting account was that it was simply a regular (albeit whiny) farmer, hungry from a long day out in the fields. The more famed tale is that the customer was shipping and railroad mogul, Cornelius Vanderbilt.
This part of the story was, at the very least, appropriated by the Snack Food Association in the late 1970s. The Snack Food Association, in partnership with Mary Lou Whitney, the wife of the great-great grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, published an account (essentially as an advertisement) that mostly leaves Crum out of the origin story, partially crediting Vanderbilt with the invention. Says the ad,
“The chef, to spite Vanderbilt, sliced his potatoes very thin, fried them to a crisp and salted them heavily. Vanderbilt loved them and the potato chip was born.”
It was this advertising campaign that firmly established in popular folklore how the potato chip was invented and who invented it. Later, Saratoga Springs historian Violet Dunn would would write a letter to the Snack Food Association, claiming,
“I am annoyed at Mary Lou Whitney when she claims Commodore Vanderbilt was the man who refused to accept the fried potatoes. There is no documentation to substantiate this. It could have been your great grandfather or mine.”
You might not be at all surprised to learn that George Crum himself also had nothing to do with the potato chip, at least in terms of its origin. As an article in Western Folklore journal written by William Fox and Mae Banner in 1983 points out, it took 70 years from when the chip was supposedly invented for Crum to be credited with the invention. In fact, when he passed away in 1913, the local newspaper’s obituary of Crum didn’t have a single mention of “potato chip” in it. He was first mentioned in relation to the potato chip in the 1920s when a local historian wrote, “Crum is said to have been the actual inventor of ‘Saratoga Chips’ when he was employed at Moon’s old place.”
Another version of the tale involves Crum and his sister (or sister-in-law) “Aunt Kate” Weeks. In a 1940 article from the Saratogian written by the town’s historian at the time, Jean McGregor, it claims that Weeks was actually the one to accidentally create the potato chip. In this story, Weeks was making pastries, frying them in a vat of fat. She was also peeling potatoes in an attempt to multi-task. Well, a slice of potato fell into the fat and when she fished it out, Crum saw the greasy potato sitting on the counter and took a bite. It was so good that Crum said they needed to sell them, which they did for ten cents a bag.
So what’s the truth in all this? It’s always possible Crum may have served potato chips at some point whether at Moon’s Lake House or later at his own restaurant which he opened in 1860. (It was a popular item in the area later in his life; it’s also been claimed he commonly served baskets of chips on tables as an appetizer for guests.) And he may have even invented his own version of it, even possibly being ignorant of any other. But this all seems unlikely as, if he had invented it, one would think he would have claimed this fact at some point to help promote his restaurant, given the eventual popularity of “Saratoga Chips.” Further, the New York Tribune in 1891 did a write up on Crum’s restaurant, Crum’s House, and made no mention of anything remotely resembling potato chips being served there, which also calls into question the claims that he served the chips as an appetizer to all guests. Perhaps most damning of all is that Crum commissioned a biography of his life to be written in 1893- in it there is not one mention of him inventing potato chips.
But whatever the case, no one from Saratoga Springs can really claim they were the first to make potato chips, though the chefs in the town did help popularize it. (“Saratoga Chips” was even a relatively common name for potato chips up until around the mid-20th century). But it seems the potato chip was invented earlier in the 19th century in Europe, and possibly before. After all, potatoes were a very common food (often fried) throughout the UK, France, and Belgium particularly.
On this note, potatoes were first introduced to Europe through the Spanish. In 1537, Jimenez de Quesada and his Spanish forces encountered a village in Colombia where all the natives had fled. Among other things, they found in the native’s food stuffs potatoes, which the Spanish initially called “truffles”.
Around 20 years later, potatoes were brought back to Spain and also introduced to Italy. At this time, the potatoes were still quite small and bitter and didn’t grow well in either Spain or Italy. However, over time, larger and less bitter versions of the plant were cultivated and the plant gradually caught on elsewhere in Europe, though it was initially met with quite a bit of resistance, due to the fact that the Europeans were convinced potatoes caused a variety of diseases and were also thought to be poisonous by some, though seemingly not everyone, particularly it would seem in places like Belgium. (It should be noted here that they had good reason to assume them poisonous, which we’ll get into later when talking about green potato chips.)
In any event, later, the French got into the game which helped more widely popularize the potato. And all of this, thanks to a French army medical officer named Antoine-Augustine Parmentier, who very famously championed the potato throughout France and parts of Europe. During the Seven Years War, Parmentier was taken captive and, as a part of his prison rations, was given potatoes.
At this time, the French had previously used potatoes only for hog feed and seemingly never ate them themselves, as noted due to concern over diseases. In fact, in 1748, the French Parliament even banned cultivation of potatoes as they were convinced potatoes caused leprosy. However, while in prison in Prussia, Parmentier was forced to cultivate and eat potatoes and found the French notions about the potato just weren’t true.
When he came back to France, Parmentier began championing the potato as a potential food source. Finally, in 1772, the Paris Faculty of Medicine proclaimed that potatoes were edible for humans, though Parmentier still encountered significant resistance and wasn’t even allowed to grow potatoes in his garden at the Invalides hospital where he worked as a pharmacist.
Parmentier then began a more aggressive campaign to promote the potato in France, hosting dinners featuring potatoes with such notable dignitaries as Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, King Louis XVI, and Queen Marie Antoinette, who incidentally has gotten a bad wrap from history mostly just because the victors write the popular history. See our video on the subject and her tragic life and death.
In any event, Parmentier also would hire armed guards to surround his potato patch, to try to convince people that what was in the patch was very valuable. He would then tell the guards to accept any bribes they were offered by people and let them “steal” the potatoes. In the end though, it took a famine in 1785 for the potato to become popular in France.
Once the French accepted the potato, its popularity skyrocketed in the country. By 1795, potatoes were being grown on a very large scale in France, including at the royal gardens at Tuileries, where the gardens were converted into potato fields.
As a brief aside, within that span of time, the French either invented or learned to make so-called french fries. Once discovered or invented in France, French fries became extremely popular in the country, particularly in Paris, where they were sold by push-cart vendors on the streets and called “frites”.
Now, it should be noted that this all happened in the late 18th century, which was as much as 100 years after some claim the Belgians were supposedly already making “French” fries. But by other arguments, this all happened around the same time for both the French and the Belgians. And it really isn’t totally clear from hard evidence what the truth is here.
Historical accounts indicate that the Belgians were possibly frying up thin strips of potatoes as early as the late 17th century (though, again, better documented evidence wasn’t until the late 18th century) in the Meuse Valley between Dinant and Liège, in Belgium. How it is speculated they came up with the idea was that, in this area, it was very common for the people to fry up small fish as a staple for their meals. However, when the rivers froze up thick enough, it tended to make it somewhat difficult to get fish. So instead of frying up fish in these times, they would cut up potatoes in long thin slices, and fry them up as they did the fish.
Giving some credence to this story is that the Spanish controlled much of what is now modern day Belgium at the time the Spanish introduced the potato to Europe. So, at least, the Belgians probably were among the first to have a crack at the potato, in terms of thinking up ways to prepare food from potatoes.
Going back to French fries and who actually invented them, It should also be noted that, shortly before the potato became popular in France, the Franco-Austrian war was going on (also known as the War of Austrian Succession), much of which took place around modern day Belgium. So it’s possible that the French soldiers were introduced to fries by the Belgians at this time and, a couple decades later when the potato became popular in France, these former soldiers then introduced the preparation method to the rest of France. Or it’s possible the French came up with the idea on their own and spread them to Belgium around the same time; or that both came up with the idea independently. It, after all, not being rocket surgery to think to dice up in various ways and fry potatoes.
Whatever the case, it was the French who seem to be the ones that spread fries to America and Britain. Noteworthy here, in 1802, Thomas Jefferson had the White House chef, Frenchman Honoré Julien, prepare “potatoes served in the French manner” for a dinner party. He described these as “Potatoes deep-fried while raw, in small cuttings”. (French fries at a White House state dinner…. classy.) This is one of the earliest references to fried potato strips being referred to as “French”.
Going back to the worldwide spread of popularity of the so-called french fry, it was, in turn, the Americans, through fast food chains, that eventually popularly introduced them to the rest of the non-European world under the name “French fries”. Ironically, because of this latter spread by American fast food chains, in many parts of the non-European world, “French fries” are sometimes called “American fries”.
Whatever the case on any of this, going back to the much thinner fried potato, the glorious chip, it seems likely, and all evidence points to, that it was invented in Europe, and seemingly just a natural extension of the french fry, more or less prepared in a similar way, but much thinner sliced.
Whoever was the first to actually do it in Europe, thoroughly debunking the aforementioned popular Crum origin story, we have Englishman William Kitchiner’s famed 1822 cookbook Cook’s Oracle, which has a recipe for “Potato Fried in Slices or Shavings.” The recipe is extremely close to the original Saratoga Chip, having the chef cut the potatoes in “shavings round and round… dry them well in a clean cloth, and fry them in lard or dripping… send them up with a very little salt sprinkled over them.” This cookbook was a bestseller in both the UK and in America and was published six years before George Crum was even born.
Beyond that, there are several other cookbooks that featured essentially the same thing before Crum supposedly invented them. For instance, The Virginia House-Wife by Mary Randolph (1824) and Alexis Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People (1845), among many others.
Despite all the varied versions and lack of documented evidence, the “Saratoga Chip” is still very much part of the town’s identity today. Just, the potato chip wasn’t invented there as is so commonly stated.
Whatever the case, potato chips saw a huge burst in popularity outside of being served in restaurants thanks to former nurse and lawyer, Laura Scudder. (Incidentally, Scudder was also the first known female attorney in Ukiah, California.) Scudder eventually moved to Monterey Park, California and started a business in 1926 selling various food items, including potato chips. As you might expect from the date, and from the fact that she was a woman in an era when women weren’t generally welcomed as business owners, her business struggled a bit at first due to the Great Depression and that many companies refused to work with her; even getting insurance for her businesses’ truck was an issue until she managed to find a female insurance agent.
At this point, shelf life for the chips was generally poor, due to lack of effective packaging. They were usually sold in bulk in cracker barrels or tins, neither of which was ideal. Beyond the poor shelf life, chips at the bottom also tended to become crushed. Scudder got the bright idea to have her employees iron wax paper into bags which they could then put the chips inside and seal shut. This method worked amazingly well and helped make the former popular restaurant item something consumers could buy and store relatively effectively at home.
Another innovation of Scudder’s was to put the date the item was packaged on the chip bags, so consumers could make sure they were getting fresh bags. On that note, today, chips are typically stored in bags filled with nitrogen, which simultaneously helps keep the chips from getting crushed during shipping and keeps them fresher even longer.
In any event, needless to say, she soon had a whole fleet of trucks that needed insured, and of course stuck with the lone insurance agent in her area willing to work with a female business owner at the time. She would later sell her business for $5 million or about $48 million today (though noteworthy turned down a $9 million offer because the buyers wouldn’t guarantee her employee’s jobs after the sale). At its peak, her business would go on to gross well over $100 million in sales annually.
Moving on from the gloriousness of the humble potato chip in its many flavors, let us now discuss the pinnacle of all chip-based cuisine, the wonder that is nachos, and what saintly individual deserves to be honored for all time for bequeathing it to us.
While of course many choose the tortilla based chip variety for nachos, regardless of chip type, the legend of nachos has an American football-centric history that doesn’t date all that far back, similar to another Super Bowl party staple, Buffalo Wings, that only became popular a little under three decades ago.
Prior to the 1940s, the word “nacho” had two meanings- one was a Tex-Mex slang word combining “naturally” and “of course” into “nacho.” The other was a common nickname for a small boy whose name was “Ignacio”- basically the Mexican equivalent of calling a boy named William “Billy” or Timothy “Timmy.”
Discovery of this latter fact led Adriana Orr from the Oxford English Dictionary in a search to see if there was an Ignacio behind nachos. What she ultimately found was a man named Ignacio Anaya Sr. who, while he probably wasn’t the first person to ever decide to mix tortilla chips with melted cheese and jalapenos, does seem to be the person directly responsible for nachos becoming a thing, along with lending his name to the food item.
The “nacho” story begins in the early 1940s in the town of Piedras Negras, Mexico, which is only four miles from the American border and near Eagle Pass, Texas. That was the site of historic Fort Duncan, which during World War II was used as a support facility for the nearby Eagle Pass Army Airfield. With the border only a few miles away, many who were stationed in the region often traveled into Mexico for a better bite to eat.
This is where details of this legend get deliciously murky. To wit- in Piedras Negras a favorite restaurant of the border crossing Americans was the patriotically named Victory Club, then owned by one Rudolfo de Los Santos. Another such restaurant in the town was the Old Moderno Restaurant. Both establishments featured a common worker – the aforementioned Ignacio Anaya Sr., who was more affectionately known as “Nacho” Anaya. Stories are mixed (including ones featuring interviews with Anaya Sr. himself) as to which he was working at when he first whipped up the appetizer that would come to bear his name. Wherever he was when he first made it, after their advent, he made sure they were served at both restaurants.
While there are various tellings of the tale, according to an article by Clarence J. La Roche published on May 23, 1954 in the San Antonio Express titled “Nacho’s? Natch!”- the first known account of the origin of nachos- Ignacio himself told La Roche that one night a group of customers (often variously claimed to have been soldiers or soldiers’ wives), tired of the normal fare, came in asking for something completely new. La Roche then stated Ignacio told him,
“Honestly, I didn’t have the least idea what I was going to try. But, I went into the kitchen, looked around and started groping for an idea. I saw a bowl of freshly fried pieces of tortilla; then I figured some grated cheese on them might be all right. Well, I got the cheese and began sprinkling the tortilla pieces with it. About this time, I got the idea to put some jalapeno strips atop the cheese. I got the jalapeno; and as I finished putting the strips on the cheese, I decided it would be a good idea to put the whole thing into the oven to melt the cheese.”
(In a 1969 interview appearing in the San Antonio Express and News, he would further state that his recipe for nachos was mostly just a variation on quesadillas his foster mother used to make him as a child, so wasn’t really that much of a leap.)
When the customers asked what the dish was called, he told them “Nacho’s Especiales.” Within days patrons were clamoring for “Nacho’s Special” and Anaya was teaching other workers at the pair of restaurants he worked at to make them. He also soon began experimenting with variations on the original, such as including refried beans and guacamole.
It should be noted here that the original date of these first nachos is disputed- it was claimed both in the aforementioned 1954 San Antonio Express interview as well as in a Corpus Christi Times interview in 1974 that Ignacio said he first whipped them up in 1940. But in both cases this wasn’t a direct quote from him, just these articles claiming he said that. If this is true, it would call into question the commonly stated “soldier” or “soldiers’ wives” angle as Fort Duncan wasn’t made into a military base in WWII until 1942 and Eagle Pass Army Airfield not activated until that same year. However most sources, including Ignacio Jr., state the correct year was actually 1943.
Whatever the case, during the 1940s the appetizer began to spread along Texas/Mexico border towns under the name “Nachos Especiales,” with one of the first known documented instance of this occurring in 1949 in A Taste of Texas, by Jane Trahey,
“There’s a little restaurant in the small Mexican town of Villa Acuna that serves some of the finest food in the world. For part of World War II, Mr. Julian Cross, managing editor of the San Antonio Express, was stationed on the Rio Grande border. One night a small group of officers, one terribly homesick, decided to visit Pedro, their favorite waiter there. Like all Latins, Pedro just couldn’t stand unhappiness. He did everything but stand on his head to cheer his morose uniformed guest. When nothing, including the Martinis, worked, Pedro left. Sometime later he returned carrying a large dish of Nachos Especiales. “These Nachos,” said Pedro, “will help El Capitan—soon he will forget his troubles for nachos make one romantic.””
It goes on to give the recipe as:
1 pkg. Mexican tortillas
A small hunk of American cheese
A bottle or can of pickled peppers (preferably jalapenos)
Cut tortillas into small triangular pieces, place in a pan and put into a medium hot oven to toast. Remove from the oven when barely crisp, put a small piece of cheese on each piece of tortilla. Replace in the oven until the cheese is melted; remove from oven and garnish each piece with a small slice of pickled pepper and serve.
A year before this, “nachos” appeared in the San Antonio Light in an advertisement for the Latin Quarter Mexican Restaurant:
“NACHOS” (Mexican Hors-D’-Oeuvres)…35c
Here is a real dainty! Golden fried tortilla strips, deliciously spiced, topped with mellow, melted cheese and garnished with chili jalapeno bits.
As for Anaya Sr. himself, he would go on to open his own restaurant, Nacho’s Restaurant, in Piedras Negras where Nacho’s Especiales were featured on the menu.
By 1959, nachos would make the jump to the west coast thanks to a young woman named Carmen Rocha who moved from San Antonio to L.A. with her husband. Since San Antonio is less than a three-hour drive from Piedras Negras, she had grown up with nachos. When Rocha got a job serving at El Cholo Mexican Restaurant on Los Angeles’ Western Avenue, she told the chef’s about the easy and quick to make tasty snack she used to eat as a teen called nachos. Decades later, El Cholo had become an L.A. institution, thanks in large part to Rocha and her nachos. When she died in 2008, even El Cholo regular Jack Nicholson grieved, telling the LA Times, “Carmen was wonderful, to me and to everybody… It’s a community loss.”
While Rocha’s introduction of nachos to the west coast surely contributed to its popularization, there’s no bigger influence on how nachos are consumed today than Frank Liberto, “The Father of Nachos”. He’s the man who introduced so-called “fast food” or “stadium” nachos- the ones with the gooey, yellow “cheese”- to sports stadiums and movie theaters. With his family originally hailing from Sicily, Liberto took over the San Antonio-based family food business from his father “Rico” Liberto selling concessions. In fact, the company was perhaps the first American concession-focused business, even pioneering the selling of peanuts at the circus.
As for the tale of the evolution and popularization of nachos, at a Texas Rangers baseball game in Arlington in 1976, Liberto’s company “Rico’s” sold the very first “stadium nachos” featuring a jalapeno cheese sauce Liberto had come up with. The advantage here over melting grated cheese on the chips was that the gooey “cheese” sauce could be ladled up quickly and had a long shelf life.
Despite the sauce not actually being cheese (this according to the FDA), it was an immediate hit and outsold every other food item at the stadium in 1976. Even better for concessions business was that nacho sales also resulted in a large spike in beverage purchases, as you might expect from people consuming a sauce with jalapeno juice in it. Just as importantly, the introduction of nachos didn’t seem to negatively impact things like hot dog and popcorn sales. (This latter potential issue was a big concern Liberto frequently heard when first pitching his nachos to various event groups.)
Within a year of this, with an eye on moving more into the lucrative movie theater concessions industry, Liberto purchased Associated Popcorn, which was a major supplier to various theaters in Texas. This, combined with John Rowley of United Artist Theatres discovering Liberto’s nachos, saw gooey-cheesed nachos hit the concessions stands in theaters across the state.
As for how nachos became more mainstream nation-wide, this is thanks to their being served at the Dallas Cowboys’ Stadium in 1978. At the time, the Cowboys were known as “America’s Team” and often played host to ABC’s Monday Night Football. The announcing team for those games included the legendary Howard Cosell. The story goes (at least according to Liberto’s son) that while trying to fill dead air during a blowout, Cosell groped around for things to talk about and remarked on how delicious his snack was- these new “nachos.” Whether that was really his original motivation or not, Cosell did indeed begin to describe plays on-air as a “nacho,” as in “that was a nacho run” and extolled the virtues of the tasty snack frequently. Not long after this, “stadium nachos” were in every stadium across the country thanks to Cosell’s near constant promotion of the word – and food – nacho.
Unfortunately, “Nacho” Anaya Sr. died in 1975, so was never able to see a version of his culinary invention being talked about in front of a nationally televised audience, nor see it become a hit nation-wide. Today, there’s reportedly a bronze plaque up in Piedras Negras that honors the creator of this “Mexican hors d’oeuvre”. Additionally, October 21st is considered International Day of the Nacho. No matter the day or the place, however, according to Anaya’s granddaughter in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News in 2002, nachos today just don’t taste as good as the original. She states, “The chips are different. They’re not homemade chips like he used to do. Or maybe it’s the hands of the chef.”
Bonus Facts:
Speaking of tortilla chips. Let’s talk about the flavored variety and in particular, the pinnacle of tortilla chip godliness, the Dorito.
On this one, a blessed of the light man named Archibald Clark West was born to Scottish immigrants in Indiana in 1914. With his mother too poor to take care of him, he was raised in a Masonic home after his father passed away. In a true “American dream” story, West was able to take a step above his impoverished roots when he was offered a scholarship to Franklin College. He graduated in 1936 with a degree in business and went on to serve in the navy during World War II.
When he returned from war, he put his degree to use by working as a traveling sales representative and then worked on advertising campaigns in New York for Jell-O. By 1960, he found himself working for Fritos in Dallas, Texas. That’s when his fortunes really took off.
The idea for Doritos was conceived in Disneyland, of all places. It wasn’t West who actually first made them, either. The original Doritos were made in Casa de Fritos, a restaurant owned by the Fritos founder, Elmer Doolin. The restaurant was located in Frontierland and served standard Tex-Mex, with every meal boasting a complimentary bag of Fritos. The restaurant was a hit, but it didn’t make its own tortillas, a job which was contracted out to Alex Foods. It was a salesman from Alex Foods who saw discarded tortillas at Casa de Fritos and told the cook he should fry them up and make tortilla chips out of them, rather than just throw them out. Because tortilla chips weren’t yet made by Fritos, and Fritos themselves were given out with the meals, Casa de Fritos hadn’t thought to offer them like other Mexican restaurants did.
The cook did as he advised and used his own special blend of seasoning and the chips were a hit. The restaurant put them on the menu as a regular item but didn’t inform the Frito Company of the change.
About a year later, in 1961, West walked by the restaurant on a family vacation and noticed the chips. He was then the vice president of marketing for the company and felt like he had stumbled upon a goldmine. When he returned to work, he pitched the idea of selling packaged tortilla chips—a happy medium between Lay’s thin potato chips and Fritos’ thick, curly corn chips. His bosses weren’t initially convinced.
Not to be deterred, he managed to finagle some funding from other projects the company was working on, which allowed him to make and test out the product, first making taco flavoured and plain corn flavoured, the latter of which remained tied for his favourite throughout his life owing to being good for dipping. (His other favourite was “Cool Ranch” which, I mean, obviously.) After selling them locally and seeing the chips hugely popular, the other execs were finally convinced and decided to move forward with selling them nationally by 1966.
West retired from his position as vice president of marketing for Frito-Lay in 1971, but remained committed to Doritos and even continued testing out new flavours over the years. He died in 2011, just a year after his wife of 69 years passed away- in his case dying of complications of vascular surgery at the ripe old age of 97, having risen from a child of poor immigrants to the force behind one of the best-loved crunchy snacks in the world. At his funeral, his family tossed Doritos chips into his grave so that his favourite snack could always be with him.
If you’re wondering what flavour was used at his funeral service, his daughter Jana stated, “It [was] just the plain. Otherwise people [would] say, ‘Thanks Jana, I’ve got nacho all over my hand.’”
Incidentally, while West was working at Fritos, he became friends with a Mr. David Pace of Pace’s Salsa and Picante Sauces. Sales were slow for Pace at the time, and he turned to West, knowing he had some advertising experience, for advice. West made the simple suggestion of having the products placed beside chips, as they are commonly today, rather than in the ketchup aisle with other tomato-based items. Pace followed that advice and sales figures immediately got insanely spicy compared to their mild numbers before.
Moving swiftly on, let’s now talk about the black specks on tortilla chips, and why some potato chips are green and why those aren’t wholly the best for you to eat.
First, the specks. Now, I hope you’re sitting down for this next bit of information, but the staple ingredient for both corn and tortilla chips is corn. An ear of corn is made up of individual rows of kernels, and each kernel is attached to the cob via the tip cap located at the very bottom of the kernel.
Strip away the tip cap and the hilum is revealed. The hilum is what seals the base of each kernel and draws in water and other nutrients needed during the growth process. The hilum, in a way, serves as a sort of umbilical cord for the kernel. Once the kernels detach from the cob, the hilum remains as a type of scar from where it was connected.
The hilum starts out clear then progresses to light green, then light brown, and finally black, which shows up on more mature kernels. It is these mature kernels that are used to make corn and tortilla chips. Since these specks of hilum do not disappear during the cooking process, they remain visible in the final food product. In addition to corn and tortilla chips, the black hilum can also typically be seen on taco shells, corn tortillas, and other similar foods made with corn. But, to conclude, in some sense, when you are eating the black specs, you are eating the little ground up and murdered baby corn’s umbilical cords…
On to green potato chips! As another bit of shocking information, potatoes grow underground and, thus, are generally not getting any direct sunlight to the potato part of the plant. However, sometimes some part of the potato does ultimately get exposed to sunlight, and as a result of this, chlorophyll develops.
So why are green potato chips sometimes called poisonous? After all, nothing wrong with eating chlorophyll. Well, the answer lies in a glycoalkaloid that is also found in potato plants called solanine, which otherwise is produced in the above ground portions of the plant, and provides some protection from insects and the like. For the potatoes themselves lucky enough to get some sunlight and green of their own, this also ends up in the glorious potato chips created from these potatoes.
Granted, the amount of solanine in that green potato chip is minimal. So much so that you’d have to eat a couple dozen green potatoes in a day to suffer ill effects from this. And, for reference, a medium potato produces roughly 40 chips, so you’d need to eat several hundred green potato chips to suffer ill effects, which is unlikely… I mean, I think I can speak for all of us when I say that eating a few hundred potato chips in a day is totally not a thing any of us ever do… nervous chuckle
BUT, of course, they won’t typically be green, and particularly less likely in modern times to encounter any green potato chip as manufacturing processes have become more refined in relatively recent years to filter out such unwanted green potatoes and chips.
All that said, you’ll definitely not want to eat the leaves of the other above ground portions of the potato plant themselves, as their solanine levels are much higher. But, of course, why eat the leaves when what’s down below is so delicious?
And finally today, let’s talk Pringles, shall we? One Dr. Fredric Baur was the one that originally came up with the “saddle” shape (hyperbolic paraboloid) of the fried dough that is Pringles (note: not baked, as many seem to think). While employed by Proctor & Gamble as a chemist, he was assigned the task of finding a way to get around the problem of stale and broken chips in bags and thus worked on finding an alternative “chip” and container. That said, he was not the one to ultimately bring Pringles out as a commercial product. The “chip” he came up with just didn’t taste very good and he was eventually assigned a different task.
Several years later, Alexander Liepa picked up where Baur left off and managed to improve on the flavor of the fried dough. Thus, he is generally considered the inventor of Pringles, even though in reality he built off Baur’s work. The product the two came up with, though, is not actually technically considered a potato “chip”.
They were, however, originally called “Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips”. However, Pringles contain only about 42% potato based content, with most of the rest being from wheat starch and various types of flour, including from corn and rice. Thus, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made them change the name because their product didn’t technically meet the definition of a potato chip. As such, they were only allowed to use the word “chip” in very restrictive ways. Specifically, if they wanted to continue to use “chip”, they were only allowed to say “Pringles Potato Chips Made From Dried Potatoes”. Not being too fond of this requirement, the company changed the name slightly, using “potato crisps”, rather than “potato chips”. Today, of course, most people just know them as “Pringles”.
Jumping across the pond to Merry Ol’ England, while Proctor & Gamble initially argued that Pringles were in fact “chips” in the U.S., they took a different tact in the U.K. In order to avoid a 17.5% Value Added Tax (VAT) in the U.K., Proctor & Gamble stated that Pringles should be considered a cake, rather than a “crisp”. Their argument was that since only 42% of the product was made from potato and the fact that it is fashioned from dough, that it should be considered a cake and not be subject to the tax put on chips. After all, that’s why the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had previously made them change from being a chip to a “crisp”. The company initially won in High Court and were briefly considered a cake in the U.K. However, Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs appealed the decision and, in 2009, the ruling was reversed and the company had to start paying the VAT. Sadly, they couldn’t have their cake and eat it too.
The post An Ode to Glorious Chips (And Who Invented Nachos) appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Scapa Flow lies barely seven degrees below the Arctic Circle, in the cold, windswept Orkney Islands at the northern tip of Scotland. Measuring 10 kilometres wide by 8 kilometres long with an average depth of 30 metres, this natural anchorage is bounded to the north by the mainland, to the east by the islands of Burray and South Ronaldsay, and to the west by the island of Hoy. In 1904, Scapa Flow was chosen as the home base for the British Grand Fleet, allowing the Royal Navy and German Imperial Navy to glower at each other across the North Sea. It was from here that the Grand Fleet sailed to the historic 1916 Battle of Jutland, and to here that the German High Seas Fleet sailed to surrender in 1918. In the years leading up to the Second World War, Scapa Flow was thought to be impregnable, and came to symbolize the supposed invincibility of the Royal Navy itself. But in the early morning hours of October 14, 1939, a lone German U-boat succeeded in doing the impossible, penetrating the harbour’s defences, sinking a 30,000-ton battleship, and slipping away undetected. It was one of the most daring feats of the war, and one which shattered the Royal Navy’s illusion of invulnerability. This is the incredible story of the U-47 and Captain Günther Prien, “The Bull of Scapa Flow.”
Though best remembered for its campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare against Allied merchant shipping, the German U-boat arm was, in the early days of the War, a very different animal, operating by very different rules. In September 1939 the fleet stood at barely 56 boats, only half of which were larger ocean-going types. And while U-boat crews were the most capable and well-trained submariners in the world, they were still bound by the so-called “Cruiser” or “Prize Rules,” which required them to stop merchant vessels and allow their crews to escape before sinking or sailing them home as prizes. Warships, on the other hand, were fair game, and barely two weeks into the war the U-boat arm scored its first major victory when U-29 torpedoed and sank the 19,000-ton aircraft carrier HMS Courageous off the course of Ireland.
But Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the U-boat arm, had bigger plans. With a fleet of 500 U-boats – and the Hitler’s blessing to unleash them on Allied merchant shipping – Dönitz believed he could sever Britain’s vital supply lines from North America and starve the island nation into submission. Convinced he could win the war single-handedly for Germany, he begged Hitler to approve the construction of more submarines. But U-boats did not fit Hitler’s vision of a mighty German fleet, and the Führer dithered. Dönitz thus decided to plan a daring mission that would demonstrate the utility of U-boats once and for all. And it did not take him long to choose the target: Scapa Flow.
To the German Navy, Scapa Flow held important symbolic importance. Following the Armistice of 1918, the Imperial High Seas Fleet was ordered to sail to the British anchorage and surrender itself. The ships and their crews remained interned in Scapa Flow for seven months, until on June 21, 1919, on the orders of Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, the crews scuttled their ships in a final act of defiance. The Scuttling of the High Seas Fleet was romanticized in Nazi propaganda, portrayed as an atoning act which rid the Navy of the shame associated with the 1918 Kiel Mutiny that triggered the German socialist revolution and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. For Dönitz, striking at the heart of the Royal Navy’s innermost sanctum was the perfect means of avenging this national humiliation.
But it would not be easy. Two U-boats had already tried to infiltrate Scapa Flow: U-18 in November 1914 and UB-116 in October 1918. Both were spotted and destroyed by British forces. In the wake of these attempts, the British had tightened security, increasing patrols, erecting antisubmarine booms and nets across the harbour entrances, and sinking blockships in the smaller channels. Yet aerial photographs taken by the Luftwaffe revealed that Scapa Flow was no longer as impregnable as it seemed. Thanks to a combination of complacency and interwar budget cuts, the base’s defences had fallen into disrepair. Antisubmarine patrols were infrequent, antiaircraft defences woefully inadequate, and many of the blockships had disintegrated and collapsed, leaving several smaller channels open to infiltration. One in particular, Kirk Sound, was around 50 feet wide – just wide enough for a single U-boat to slip through. And Dönitz knew just the man to command it: 31-year-old Captain-Lieutenant Günther Prien.
Described by American war correspondent William Shirer as“clean-cut, cocky, a fanatical Nazi, and obviously capable,” Prien was the epitome of the daring new breed of commanders that had made the U-boat arm the most elite and respected service in the German armed forces. Born on January 16, 1908 in Osterfeld, Prussia, Prien joined the German Merchant Marine at the age of 15, serving aboard the passenger liner Hamburg and earning his Sea Master’s certificate in 1932. Unable to find a commercial job due to the Great Depression, in 1933 Prien joined the German Navy, serving aboard the light cruiser Königsberg before transferring to the U-boat service in 1935. Prien’s first posting was as Watch Officer aboard U-26, assigned to patrol the Spanish coast during the Spanish Civil War. Prien rose steadily through the ranks, finally being commissioned as Captain-Lieutenant on February 1, 1939 and given command of the new Type VIIC U-boat, U-47.
The Second World War began while U-47 was out on its first war patrol, and Prien wasted no time making a name for himself. On September 5, 1939 – two days after Britain declared war on Germany – Prien stopped and sank the British freighter Bosnia, transferring her crew to a neutral Norwegian ship.
This was the U-boat arm’s first official victory of the war. While two days earlier U-30 had torpedoed the British liner Athenia off the coast of Ireland, this was condemned as a war crime and the German government denied responsibility until 1946. Prien quickly followed up his feat by sinking the freighters Rio Claro and Gartavon before being recalled home. Having sunk over 66,000 tons of shipping on his first patrol, Prien was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class and quickly became a favourite of Admiral Dönitz, who on October 1, 1939 summoned Prien to his office to present his plan for Special Operation P: the infiltration of Scapa Flow.
Prien was immediately enthusiastic, though he knew the mission would be a dangerous one. Not only were the channels into Scapa Flow extremely narrow, but tides in the area could generate treacherous 10-knot rip currents that could easily ground and damage his boat. The best chance of getting through would be at high tide on the 13th and 14th – barely two weeks away. In the end the potential targets proved too tempting for Prien to resist, for aerial reconnaissance had revealed a full lineup of capital ships moored along the northern shore. And so on October 8, Prien, First Officer Englebert Endrass, and the rest of U-47’s 42-man crew set sail from Wilhelmshaven, bound for Scapa Flow.
Though Prien had every confidence in his crew, he waited until he was well underway before revealing their destination, giving each man the option of leaving if he wished. Unsurprisingly, nobody was terribly tempted to disembark in the middle of the North Sea, and the crew stayed on as U-47 slowly made her way to the Orkneys. The journey took four days, with U-47 lying on the seafloor during the day and travelling only at night. Then, at 4PM on October 14, U-47 arrived just off the entrance to Scapa Flow. The weather on the crossing had been overcast and rainy, making navigation difficult, but judging from coastal navigation lights Prien determined he was only 2 kilometres from his intended position – a remarkable feat of navigation. As they waited on the seafloor for night to fall, the crew were treated to a feast of soup, veal, pork ribs, potatoes, and cabbage – or, as they called it, a “hangman’s dinner.” Finally, at 7PM, U-47 surfaced and began her mission. But right away Prien sensed trouble. Though it was a moonless night, the aurora borealis danced brightly overhead, bathing his U-boat in light. For a moment Prien considered aborting the mission, but eventually decided to press on regardless. At 10 PM the Orkney Navigation lights came on, allowing Prien to fix his position and locate the proper channel to enter Scapa Flow. Nonetheless Prien nearly chose the wrong channel – between Lamb Holm and Burray Islands – before realizing his mistake and doubling back toward Kirk Sound. Then, while trying to negotiate the narrow channel, the swift current swung the U-boat’s stern into one of the blockships, causing her become fouled on an anchor chain. It was many tense minutes before the crew was able to free the boat. Gradually, however, the channel widened, the current slowed, and U-47 finally entered open water. At half past midnight, Prien wrote in his log: We Are in Scapa Flow.
Yet once again, something didn’t feel quite right. Prien had expected to find the harbour bustling with activity, but the scene before him was eerily quiet, with barely a ship in sight. Undeterred, Prien ordered U-47 forward, creeping towards the north anchorage where the Home Fleet was moored. Then, suddenly the U-boat was bathed in bright light as a truck on the shore turned on its headlights. The crew froze and looked on in horror, knowing they could be fired upon at any moment. But the truck quickly turned and disappeared into the night, and all was quiet once more.
It was not until 12:50 that Prien and First Officer Endrass finally spotted a pair of ships at anchor. The first was quickly identified as HMS Royal Oak, a 30,000-ton battleship and veteran of the Battle of Jutland. Endrass identified the second as the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, though it was in fact the ageing seaplane carrier HMS Pegasus. Though puzzled as to the rest of the fleet’s whereabouts, Prien could not pass up such plum targets, and at 12:55 he fired a spread of four torpedoes at Royal Oak. One torpedo struck home, blowing a fifty-foot hole amidships and shaking visiting Rear Admiral Henry Blagrove out of bed. Blagrove immediately ordered a thorough inspection of the ship, but as it was widely believed that Scapa Flow was impregnable, few crewmen could even conceive that they had been torpedoed. The blast was chalked up to am minor explosion in a paint locker, and Blagrove and the rest of the crew went back to bed.
Meanwhile, Prien looked on in confusion. Though he had heard the sound of the torpedo detonating, the scene before him was still eerily quiet, as if nothing had happened. Convinced that the torpedoes had malfunctioned – a common occurrence early in the war – Prien ordered U-47 about and launched his stern torpedo. This also missed, and in frustration Prien swung the boat back around and at 1:16 AM fired another salvo of three torpedoes. This time all three struck home, igniting Royal Oak’s powder magazines and causing the ship to erupt into a column of flame. As Prien later recalled:
“Flames shot skyward, blue…yellow…red, like huge birds, black shadows soared through the flames, fell hissing and splashing into the water…huge fragments of the mast and funnels.”
Royal Oak quickly heeled over and sank to the bottom of Scapa Flow, taking 835 of her crew with her – including Rear Admiral Blagrove. The harbour suddenly exploded with activity, and Prien took his cue to slip away:
“The bay awoke to feverish activity. Searchlights flashed and probed with their long white fingers…small swift lights low over the water, the lights of destroyers and U-boat chasers…. I could see no other worth-while target, only pursuers. At high speed I pass the southern blockship with nothing to spare. The helmsman does magnificently. High speed, ahead both, finally three-quarters speed and full ahead out…and at 2:15 we are once more outside.”
As it turned out, the dearth of targets inside Scapa Flow was the result of bad timing by the Kriegsmarine. Less than a week earlier, the battlecruisers Gneisenau and Köln had sailed out into the North Sea in an attempt to lure the Home Fleet within range of the Luftwaffe. The fleet duly sailed out in pursuit, with the older Royal Oak, unable to keep up with the rest of the other ships, remaining behind in Scapa Flow. When the chase was eventually abandoned, the fleet returned not to Scapa Flow but to alternate anchorages at Loch Ewe and Rosyth.
Nonetheless, Prien had pulled off one of the greatest naval coups of the war, and returned to Germany on October 17 to instant fame. Adolf Hitler sent his personal aircraft to fly the crew of U-47 to Berlin, where Admirals Karl Dönitz and Erich Räder presented them with Iron Crosses and Prien with the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves – the highest German military honour at the time. Prien became a national celebrity, known throughout Germany as “The Bull of Scapa Flow.” Prien painted a snorting bull on U-47’s conning tower, and this image soon became the emblem of the entire 7th U-boat Flotilla. According to First Officer Endrass, the image was chosen because:
“[Prien’s] frowning face and hunched shoulders [as we entered Scapa Flow] reminded me of a bull in a ring.”
In 1940, Prien released a book titled My Way to Scapa Flow, and in dozens of interviews and articles recounted his exploits in suitably propaganda-friendly fashion:
“We diddled our way through the guard line and were suddenly inside. Inside of Scapa Flow, the harbour of the English sea force. It was absolutely dead calm in there. The entire bay was alight because of a bright Northern Light. We then cruised the bay for approximately one and a half hours, chose our targets, fired our torpedoes. In the next moment there was a bang and the Royal Oak blew up. The view was indescribable. And we sneaked out in a similar fashion as we got in, close past the enemy guards, and they did not see us. You can imagine the excitement and happiness we all felt about the fact that we managed to fulfill our task and achieve such a huge victory for Germany.”
Meanwhile, back in Britain, Prien’s daring raid unleashed a political firestorm and shook the Royal Navy out of its pre-war complacency. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, fired Sir William French, flag officer in charge of Shetland and Orkney, and ordered Scapa Flow’s defences overhauled.
Patrols were increased, new blockships, booms, and mines installed across the main entrances, larger antiaircraft batteries emplaced, and large causeways dubbed “Churchill Barriers” erected built the channels between the mainland and the islands of South Ronaldsay, Burray, Lamb Holm, and Glimps Holm. While these upgrades were being installed the Royal Navy was forced to use other anchorages, which the Germans promptly mined. This resulted in the battleship HMS Nelson and the cruiser HMS Belfast being damaged and four other vessels sunk – an unexpected side effect of Prien’s mission. It was not until March 1940 that the Home Fleet was able to return to Scapa Flow.
Prien himself would go from strength to strength, carrying out a total of 10 war patrols in which he sank 30 Allied ships totalling 200,000 tons, making him one of the top U-boat aces of the war. But in the end his fame and legendary skill could not save him from the fate that befell nearly 70% of his fellow submariners. In the early morning hours of March 8, 1941, Prien was attacking the merchant convoy OB-293 off the coast of Ireland when he was spotted and fired upon by the British destroyers HMS Wolverine and HMS Verity. For the next five hours, the two destroyers kept U-47 locked in their sonar beams while relentlessly pounding her with depth charges. At 5:19 U-47 was forced to the surface, only to dive again and disappear in a massive explosion. Neither Prien nor his 45-man crew were ever seen again. Ten days later, two more top U-boat aces would be lost: Otto Kretschmer of the U-99 and Joachim Schepke of the U-100, captured and killed by Allied forces, respectively.
Due to his massive propaganda value, Günther Prien’s death was kept secret for nearly two months. However, now-Prime Minister Churchill officially announced U-47’s loss in Parliament while British propaganda broadcasts to Germany taunted listeners with the question “Where is Prien?” until finally, on May 23, the German government was forced to admit that the great U-boat ace had been lost. However, in order to soften the blow, the announcement was buried among figures of Allied shipping sunk that month by U-boats.
Despite the blow it struck to British naval prestige and morale, even Winston Churchill was forced to admit that Prien’s attack was:
“…a remarkable feat of professional skill and daring.”
And despite the fame and adulation his exploits brought him in Germany, to the end Prien remained level-headed and dedicated to his duty, writing:
“Success had singled me out. But what after all is success? A matter of luck, of providence? That which matters among men is to have the heart of a fighter and to lose one’s self in the cause he serves.”
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Expand for ReferencesDunmore, Spencer, Lost Subs, Madison Press Limited, 2002
Holloway, Don, The Bull of Scapa Flow, http://donhollway.com/scapaflow/index.html
Martindale, Dougie, How the Bull of Scapa Flow Smashed Britain’s ‘Impenetrable’ Sea Defences, The Scotsman, January 11, 2019
Ghaleb, Sam, Prien, Bull of Scapa Flow, Attacked, OC Today, March 4, 2021, https://www.oceancitytoday.com/column_posts/world_war_ii/prien-bull-of-scapa-flow-attacked/article_822b9668-7d25-11eb-87af-37376640a184.html
The post The Incredible Story of the U-47 and “The Bull of Scapa Flow” appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The idea of the robot – an autonomous, even sentient machine – has been around for millennia. In Ancient Greek mythology, the blacksmith god Hephaestus, whose legs were injured as a child, crafted a pair of mechanical women to help him walk. From the Middle Ages onwards, various master craftsmen constructed increasingly sophisticated clockwork automatons that dazzled and bewildered audiences the world over, such as mechanical ducks that walked, ate, and defecated, and human figures that wrote, sang, and even played chess – and for more on that, please check out or previous video The 18th Century Chess Robot That Defeated Napoleon, Ben Franklin, and Countless Others. The word “Robot,” however, is of far more recent origin. Derived from a slavic word meaning “slave labourer,” the term first appeared in Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s [“cha-peck”] 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots, about a race of sentient artificial beings created for servitude who rise up against their human masters. But while the English lexicon was slow to catch up to the idea of the robot, technology was slower still, and it would not be until the digital electronics revolution of the 1960s and 70s that truly programmable and automatic machines would become a practical reality. In the late 1930s, however, the average American could catch a glimpse of this technological future in the form of a moonwalking, wisecracking, cigarette-smoking android called Elektro the Moto Man – the world’s first celebrity robot.
Created by the Westinghouse Corporation, Elektro was prominently displayed at the Westinghouse Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, alongside another of the Fair’s most popular attractions: the Westinghouse Time Capsule – and for more on that, please check out our previous video The Curious Case of the Crypt of Civilization. Elektro was the product of two decades of research by Westinghouse into automated electrical switching systems. In the early 1920s, a client contacted Westinghouse to request a means of controlling electrical substations remotely, saving their operators the trouble of travelling to the substations themselves to make minor adjustments. In response, Westinghouse engineer Roy J. Wensley invented the Televox, a device that could remotely control electrical switching equipment via coded pulses sent over ordinary telephone lines. This technology, which would form the basis for the dual-tone multi-frequency switching systems used in telephone networks for the next half-century, allowed operators to “phone in” to a substation and issue commands remotely using a set of pitch pipes or tuning forks.
In order to promote the Televox, in 1928 Wensley built a portable demonstration model and took it on the road. Ever the showman, Wensley decided to give the device a crude “body” made out of painted wallboard, creating the character of “Herbert Televox.” Wensely toured Herbert around the country, modifying him perform simple tricks like unveiling a portrait of George Washington in honour of the first president’s birthday. The gimmick was a hit, and over the following decade engineers like J.M. Barnett, Jack Weeks, and Harold Gorsuch at Westinghouse’s headquarters in Mansfield, Ohio would follow in Wensely’s footsteps and create a whole family of increasingly-sophisticated humanoid robots, including Mr. Telelux, Katrina von Televox and Rastus the Mechanical Negro, the latter of which was used, for some reason, to reenact a bizarre electronic version of William Tell shooting an apple off his son’s head. But Westinghouse’s ultimate robotic creation was Elektro, who made his debut in 1938.
Standing 2 metres tall, weighing 118 pounds, and clad in shiny bronze-painted aluminium, Elektro could not only perform 26 realistic human actions, but – astonishingly for the 1930s – respond to voice commands. In response to simple instructions spoken into a microphone by his handler, Elektro could walk, move his head and arms, count on his fingers, recognize different colours and – befitting his era – smoke a cigarette. This latter ability resulted in Westinghouse staff having to clean the tar out of Elektro’s mechanism after every performance, allegedly causing one engineer to quit smoking.
To the astonishment of many visitors, Elektro could also talk, starting every show by announcing:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be very glad to tell my story. I am a smart fellow as I have a very fine brain of 48 electrical relays.”
He also used his halting, monotone voice to crack corny jokes, calling his handler “toots” and responding to commands with a bewildered “who, me?” One of his favourite activities was challenging spectators to balloon-inflating contests, a challenge which – given he had an air compressor instead of lungs – Elektro seldom lost.
Visitors to the 1939 World’s Fair had never seen anything like it, and for many the dazzling demonstration seemed like something out of a magic trick. And in a certain sense, it was. For while Elektro was promoted on his ability to follow voice commands, 1930s electronics were not yet sophisticated enough to permit true voice recognition. Instead, Elektro was controlled by a series of coded pulses cleverly hidden within his handler’s command phrases, the robot responding not to the words themselves but the rhythm with which they were spoken. Each phrase was broken up into a sequence of 3, 1, and 2 syllables, with each sequence starting or ending a particular action. For example, the phrase “Will you come / down / front please?” would start Elektro walking forward, while “You have come / far / enough” would stop him. And the trickery didn’t stop there. Each of Elektro’s 26 different actions was hardwired in a linear sequence, with his handler reading off a fixed script; they could not be triggered in any other order. Electro’s voice, composes of 700 words, was also recorded in sequence on eight 78 RPM records hidden in his chest. Even his ability to walk was an illusion; in reality, Elektro moved on powered rubber rollers hidden under his feet, his knees bending to give the impression of walking. So, in effect, Elektro moonwalked everywhere.
Despite this technical sleight of hand, Elektro was a smash hit, and performed daily to packed crowds throughout both seasons of the Fair. During the 1940 season the Elektro was even given a companion: a mechanical dog named Sparko, who could walk forward and backward, sit, lie down, wag its tail, and bark.
With the closing of the Fair and the outbreak of WWII, Elektro was wound up in the basement of Westinghouse engineer Jack Weeks, who saved the robot from being melted down for scrap. It is here that he became the unlikely playmate of Weeks’ son, also named Jack. As the younger Weeks recalled in a 2012 interview:
“I opened one box, and there was the head of a robot there. So we started prying with my dad as to what was in the other boxes. He showed us … and we managed to put the head on the torso and played with it as children, wheeling it around in games of cowboys and cops and robbers.”
After the war, however, Elektro was dusted off and taken on tour to promote Westinghouse products, making appearances in department stores across the United States. Having previously appeared on film in Westinghouse’s promotional feature The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair, Elektro made his television debut in 1951 on an episode of the game show You Asked For It. In 1958 Elektro wound up as an exhibit at Pacific Ocean Park near Los Angeles, where he was spotted by a Hollywood talent agent and cast as S.A.M. Thinko in the 1960 B-grade comedy Sex Kittens Go to College opposite Mamie van Doren. Unfortunately, this would be the last high-profile appearance for the world’s first celebrity robot, for shortly thereafter Elektro was crated up and returned to Mansfield. There he disappeared and was presumed lost until 2004, when Jack Weeks’ brother bought a house and discovered Elektro’s head in a box in the basement. The rest of him turned up in a nearby barn. Elektro was subsequently restored and is now on permanent display at the Mansfield Memorial museum alongside a replica of Herbert Televox, his crude wallboard ancestor.
Though Elektro’s limited repertoire of 26 actions and 700 words may seem quaint and laughable next to the cutting-edge power of modern robotics, the wisecracking, smoking android of yesteryear did much to shape the depiction of robots in popular culture and to inspire a sense of wonder and possibility that made much of our modern high-tech world possible. Without Elektro, Maria from the 1927 film Metropolis, and other pioneering pop-culture robots, it is possible we would never have had C-3P0, Wall-E, or even our beloved Siri and Roomba.
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Expand for ReferencesMarsh, Allison, Elektro the Moto-Man Had the Biggest Brain at the 1939 World’s Fair, IEEE Spectrum, September 28, 2018, https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/elektro-the-motoman-had-the-biggest-brain-at-the-1939-worlds-fair
Jacobs, Emma, America’s First Celebrity Robot is Staging a Comeback, NPR, April 2, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/04/02/149850779/americas-first-celebrity-robot-is-staging-a-comeback?
The History of Elektro of Westinghouse, History Computer, https://history-computer.com/the-history-of-elektro-of-westinghouse/
Pierini, David, Once-Famous Robot Lives Quietly Away From the Limelight, Cult of Mac, February 26, 2015, https://www.cultofmac.com/313544/famous-robot-lives-quietly-limelight/
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The Great War of 1914-1918 has been described as the first “industrial war”, and saw the battlefield debut of a number of advanced weapons, including the aeroplane, poison gas, the tank, the flamethrower, and the submarine. Of these, the tank and the aeroplane would go on to completely revolutionize modern warfare. The post-war years saw great leaps in the development of these technologies as designers sought to create weapons powerful enough to prevent another World War from ever breaking out. Some of these experiments, however, went in rather bizarre directions, and in a curious trend that would make Pimp My Ride’s Xzibit proud, several nations spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to mash these two very different vehicles together and create a workable flying tank.
While aircraft served in many roles during the Great War, including aerial reconnaissance, ground attack, and air-to-air combat, it was not until after the war that they were seriously considered for transporting troops and equipment to the battlefield or dropping them behind enemy lines. The first nation to experiment with airborne forces was the Soviet Union, which conducted the first military parachute jumps on August 2, 1930 just outside Moscow. By 1941 the Soviet airborne forces had grown to ten brigade-sized corps, but aside from a handful of instances they never jumped into combat and were mostly used as elite ground troops. The first nation to actually use paratroops in combat was Nazi Germany, whose Fallschirmjager were used to great effect during the invasion of Denmark, France, and the Low Countries in the summer of 1940 – and for more on that, please check out our previous video How the Nazis Managed to Capture the World’s Strongest Fortress in Less Than 20 Minutes.
As effective as they were, however, paratroopers suffered from a fundamental weakness. As all their equipment had to be delivered by parachute, airborne troops were perpetually short on ammunition and could not be supplied with vehicles or heavy weapons. This placed them at a significant disadvantage against regular troops – especially those equipped with heavy vehicles like tanks. Parachute drops also tended to scatter paratroops over a wide area, forcing them to waste time regrouping and gathering their equipment before launching an attack. The Germans partially addressed this problem through the use of troop-carrying gliders, which could land a full squad of men and their equipment directly onto the target with pinpoint accuracy. However, early gliders like the DFS 230 were nowhere near large enough to carry even a light utility vehicle – much less a tank – into combat.
As with the general concept of airborne forces, it was once again the Soviets who first developed methods for airlifting tanks into combat. In the early 1930s, the Soviets experimented with strapping light armoured vehicles like the T-27 and T-37 tankette beneath Tupolev TB-3 heavy bombers. The original intention was for the aircraft to land and lower the tank and its crew to the ground. However, as this required a large, flat landing area and made the aircraft vulnerable to enemy fire, the Soviets switched instead to the extraordinary technique of dropping tanks from aircraft while skimming only a few metres above the ground. Several tanks are reported to have been dropped in this manner during the 1940 Soviet invasion of Bessarabia in what is now Moldova and Ukraine. It is not recorded, however, whether their crews survived the ordeal without massive concussions.
Whatever the case, these methods were soon deemed inadequate, and the Red Army turned to famed aircraft designer Oleg Antonov to develop an assault glider large enough to carry a tank into combat. Antonov, thinking outside the box, instead decided to convert the tank itself into a glider by fitting it with a pair of massive wooden biplane wings and a twin-boom tail. This Frankenstein’s monster of a vehicle, dubbed the Antonov A-40 or KT – short for Krylya Tanka or “winged tank” – was designed to be towed into the air by a heavy bomber like a Petlyakov Pe-8 or Tupolev TB-3 and released near its target. The crew would then pilot the combination to the ground, spinning up the tracks at the last minute in order to make a running landing. The wings and tail would then be cut away, allowing the tank to trundle into action. Control while gliding was accomplished by connecting the tank’s gun to the control surfaces, such that raising and lowering the gun caused the aircraft to pitch up and down and rotating the turret caused it to roll side-to-side. To prove the concept, Antonov modified a T-60 light tank by removing its gun, headlights, ammunition, and much of its fuel, and arranged for it to be test-flown by famous glider pilot Sergei Anokhin. The first and only test flight of the A-40 took place on September 2, 1942, and very nearly ended in disaster. While the winged tank successfully rose into the air, it was so heavy and produced so much drag that the bomber towing it came close to stalling and was forced to cut the glider loose shortly after takeoff. Incredibly, Anokhin skilfully managed to land the vehicle, detach the wings, and drive the tank back to the airfield. However, due to a lack of official support and aircraft powerful enough to safely tow the A-40, the project was soon cancelled.
One possible solution to the Soviets’ problem would have been to make the A-40 self-propelled, and indeed this concept was briefly tinkered with a decade prior by American inventor John Walter Christie. In 1928 Christie developed the Christie Suspension System used in a number of WWII tanks including the British Crusader and Soviet T-34. This system allowed tanks to attain previously unheard-of speeds over rough terrain and to continue driving even if the tracks had been blown off. In 1932, Christie turned his considerable creative talents to the development of a flying tank that would allow armoured divisions to be quickly deployed behind enemy lines. A scaled-down version of his M1928 tank design, the flying tank would weigh only 4 tons, sport a powerful 75mm gun, and be able to drive 70 mph across rough terrain and 100 mph on prepared roads. Like the Soviet A-40, the tank would be fitted with a massive set of breakaway wings, this time featuring a propeller geared to the tank’s own engine. Christie’s intention was for the tank to accelerate across the ground using its tracks until it reached 70 mph, whereupon power would be transferred to the propeller, allowing the vehicle to lift off. As Christie boasted in an interview in Modern Mechanics magazine:
“What is more, the pilot of the flying tank does not need the level ground required by a bombing plane to take off. He can take off through mud, though bumpy ground and ground which would prevent the average plane from rising.”
Like many weapons designers of the era, Christie saw great potential in his invention as a deterrent to future conflict, stating in the same interview:
“The flying tank is a machine to end war. Knowledge of its existence and possession will be a greater guarantee of peace than all the treaties that human ingenuity can concoct. A flock of flying tanks see loose on an enemy and any war is brought to an abrupt finish.”
Alas, Christie’s prediction would not come true, and his flying tank concept never left the drawing board. Nor did flying tanks become a fixture of the Second World War battlefield, though this was not for lack of trying. Among the other nations to experiment with airlifting tanks was Japan, which in 1943 developed the Special No.3 Flying Tank or So-Ra, a 3-ton vehicle designed to be flown into combat aboard the Kokusai Ku-7 “Buzzard” assault glider. However, by the time the prototype was completed, Japan’s strategic situation had severely deteriorated and the tank never entered production. Nazi Germany, the original pioneer of airborne operations, also experimented with tank-carrying gliders, though rather than building a specialized airborne tank, German designers instead chose to design gliders around existing tank models. In anticipation of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1940 the Luftwaffe’s Technical Bureau put out a tender for a heavy-lift assault glider capable of carrying 200 fully equipped troops, an 88mm antitank gun and its towing tractor, or a Panzer IV medium tank. Two aircraft companies, Messerschmitt and Junkers, submitted designs for trials. The Junkers entry was the Ju 322 Mammut, a massive and bizarre aircraft built mostly of wood and featuring a wingspan of 62 metres and a large central cargo bay with a hinged ramp for loading and unloading cargo. The Mammut made its first flight in April 1941 but proved dangerously unstable and difficult to control both under tow and in free flight, nearly resulting in the loss of the glider and towplane. Furthermore, during ground tests a tank crashed through the cargo bay floor. The Luftwaffe quickly deemed the design inadequate and the project was cancelled in May 1940.
Messerschmitt’s entry, the Me 321 Gigant, was only slightly more successful. Built of fabric-covered aluminium tubing, the Gigant had a wingspan of 55 metres and featured large clamshell doors in its nose for loading and unloading cargo – a standard feature on many transport aircraft today. Like the Mammut, however, the Gigant’s sheer size made it difficult and dangerous to operate. The massive control surfaces were operated via cables with no hydraulic or other assistance, making the controls extremely heavy and quickly exhausting the pilot. There were also few aircraft in Germany capable of towing a fully-loaded Gigant into the air. During the glider’s first test flight on February 25, 1941, the towing aircraft, a four-engine Junkers Ju 90 transport, struggled to get the Gigant airborne and was forced to cut loose early to avoid stalling. The Germans attempted to correct this issue by fitting the Gigant with eight detachable liquid-fuelled rocket pods to provide extra thrust at takeoff – a technique today known as Rocket-Assisted Takeoff or RATO. They also developed a special towing aircraft known as the Heinkel He 111Z Zwilling or “Twin,” essentially two regular Heinkel He 111 bombers spliced together with an extra engine added. However, development of the Zwilling proceeded slowly, and the Germans were forced to tow the Gigant using an arrangement of three Messerschmitt Bf-110 heavy fighters known as a troika-schlepp. This method required considerable coordination between the three towing aircraft and proved highly dangerous, with one test flight in 1941 ending with two Bf 110s accidentally colliding. The ensuing crash resulted in the deaths of all 9 men aboard the three towing aircraft and the 120 troops aboard the glider. This incident would remain the single deadliest aviation accident in history until the New York mid-air collision of December 16, 1960.
Despite its flaws, the Gigant entered service in May 1941 and was used to transport supplies to German troops advancing into Russia. Opinion on the Gigant’s performance was mixed. While the glider could carry far more cargo than regular transport aircraft, the troika-schlepp towing arrangement severely limited its operational range, while the primitive conditions on the Russian Front meant that once a Gigant landed, it could not be used again. Messerschmitt soon realized that the Gigant would be far more useful as a self-propelled aircraft, and began work on a powered version called Me 323. To avoid further straining Germany’s already thinly-stretched engine industry, the aircraft was fitted with six Gnome-Rhone engines captured from the French. The Me 323, the largest land-based transport to fly during WWII, entered service in September 1942, carrying desperately needed supplies to General Erwin Rommel’s beleaguered Afrika Korps in Tunisia. They were also used extensively during the Italian Campaign. While useful, the lumbering Gigant unfortunately proved easy prey for Allied fighter aircraft, and suffered heavy losses wherever it was deployed.
Ultimately, the only belligerent nation to deploy airborne tanks in the assault role was Great Britain. In response to the stunning successes of the German Fallschirmjager in France and the Low Countries, in June 1940 Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the creation of Britain’s own airborne forces. In order to provide the paratroopers with armour support, in 1941 the War Office decided to equip the Airborne divisions with the Mk. VII Tetrarch light tank. While not originally designed as an airborne tank, at only 8 tons the Tetrarch was the smallest and lightest armoured vehicle in the British arsenal. Light tanks had also performed poorly during the Battle of France, causing the Tetrarch to be declared obsolete. Large numbers were thus readily available for use by the airborne forces. To carry the Tetrarch into combat, the War Office selected the General Aviation GAL. 49 Hamilcar assault glider. Due to delays in the Hamilcar’s development, it was not until January 1944 that the Glider Pilot Regiment finally began training exercises with the Tetrarch. These exercises were highly successful, with the Regiment making over 2,800 experimental landings with only three fatal accidents. The Tetrarch-Hamilcar combination was approved just in time to participate in Operation Tonga, the British airborne component of the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944. Twenty Tetrarchs were landed behind enemy lines in support of the assault on the French city of Caen, but their performance was less than impressive. On the flight to Normandy, one Tetrarch came loose and broke through the nose of its glider, sending it and its crew plummeting into the English Channel below. Two further Tetrarchs were destroyed when the gliders carrying them collided on landing, while a fourth was hit by a landing glider while being unloaded, flipping it over and rendering it unusable. This comedy of errors continued as the remaining tanks’ tracks became fouled in parachute rigging lines, causing all but two to become immobilized.
The two surviving Tetrarchs fared little better than their compatriots. One of the Tetrarch’s greatest flaws was its small size, which limited its crew to three: a driver, a loader, and a Commander/gunner. The dual responsibility of commanding the tank and operating gun quickly overtaxed the Commander, making the Tetrarch difficult to operate effectively in the field. It was also thinly armoured and lightly armed with an obsolete 2-pounder gun. In Normandy, the Tetrarchs found themselves completely outmatched by even the lightest German tanks, and most were quickly destroyed in combat. Yet despite their poor combat performance, in a strange twist of history the Tetrarchs still managed to have a major impact on the Battle of Normandy. On the morning of June 6th, 1944, the 21st Panzer Division was on its way from Caen to the Normandy beaches to counter the Allied amphibious landings. Upon learning that British tanks had been airdropped behind them, however, the German commander decided to halt his advance and retreat back to Caen.
In response to the Tetrarch’s known flaws, shortly after its adoption in 1941 the British War Ministry put out a request for a light tank specifically designed for the airborne role. As the British tank industry was already stretched to capacity, the request was passed on to the United States War Office. The result was the M22 tank, designed by the Marmon-Herrington Company of Louisville, Kentucky. Weighing only 7 tons, like the Tetrarch the M22 had a crew of three and was armed with one 37mm gun and a .50 caliber machine gun in the turret and two more .50 caliber guns in the hull. Though light and compact enough to be carried aboard a Hamilcar glider, the M22 was originally designed to be transported into combat by a Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport aircraft. Four heavy brackets on the hull allowed the tank to be bolted under the aircraft’s belly, while the turret was designed to be removed and stored aboard the aircraft along with the tank’s crew. Upon landing, a well-trained crew could detach, reassemble, and get the tank combat-ready in about 10 minutes. However, this transport method required the use of a prepared runway, and was never used in combat. Following further development, including the deletion of the gun stabilization system and the hull machine guns to save weight, the first M22s were delivered to the 6th Airborne Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment in late 1943. Strangely, despite a War Ministry directive requiring that American-built tanks be named after Civil War generals like Grant, Lee, and Sherman, in British Service the M22 was known as the “Locust.”
British trials of the Locust revealed various mechanical issues, which were not corrected in time for the tank to participate in the Normandy Landings. Following the Tetrarch’s poor performance during Operation Tonga, however, the type was retired and completely replaced by the Locust. The Locust’s combat debut came on March 24, 1945 during Operation Varsity, part of the Allied crossing of the Rhine River into Germany. Eight Locusts of the 6th Airborne Division reserve were landed by Hamilcar glider to support infantry operations on the far riverbank. As with the Tetrarchs in Normandy, however, these landings were a debacle, with one Locust falling out of a disintegrating glider and another being completely destroyed when its glider crashed through a farmhouse. Of the remaining six tanks, only two emerged from the landings undamaged and with uninjured crews. Nonetheless, the Locusts fought surprisingly well in the ensuing battle, with one being destroyed in a duel with a German Panther tank and another being immobilized but managing to hold its ground and inflict over 100 German casualties. By the following day, however, the front line had stabilized and more capable tanks became available, and the Locusts were pulled back to defensive positions and eventually withdrawn from combat altogether. Operation Varsity would be the only time the Locust would see combat during WWII, the type being declared obsolete soon after. After the war remaining stocks of Locusts were sold off to foreign militaries including those of Belgium and Egypt, with the latter seeing extensive service during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
In the end, the flying tank turned out to be a technological dead end. The features required of an effective infantry support tank – such as thick armour and heavy armament – were simply incompatible with the capabilities of 1940s aircraft. It would not be until the late 1960s that a practical airborne armoured vehicle would be developed by – you guessed it – the Soviet Union. Introduced in 1969 and still used today, the BMD-1 is a small amphibious Infantry Fighting Vehicle designed to carry 2 crew and 6 soldiers into combat. Built of lightweight aluminium alloy and weighing only 8 tons, the vehicle can be carried by a variety of Russian heavy-lift helicopters or air-dropped from a transport aircraft using a special parachute rig. Originally it was intended that the vehicle and crew would be dropped separately, but this proved problematic as the crew often landed some distance from their vehicle. However, even with parachutes the BMD landed too heavily to be safely dropped with its crew aboard. This problem was eventually solved using solid-fuel retrorockets to slow the vehicle down just before landing – a technique also used with Russian Soyuz space capsules. BMD crews also sit in specially padded seats to cushion the shock of landing. This prominent exception aside, however, the term “flying tank” is perhaps best applied not to a literal tank but to a variety of Russian ground attack aircraft like the WWII-era Ilyushin IL-2 Sturmovik and the later Mil Mi-24 Hind attack helicopter, whose heavy armour and armament make them legendarily indestructible.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- How Do Silencers Work, and How Silent Do They Actually Make Guns?
- That Time an English Dude Invented a Gun that Fired Square Bullets, and the Waterfowl’s Nightmare
- The Steampunk Flight Simulator That Helped Win WWII
- The First Person to Die in an Airplane Crash
Expand for ReferencesFletcher, David, Tank Chats #87: Locust, The Tank Museum, https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cdd0WWkWvRe
Fletcher, David, Tank Chats #67: Tetrarch Tank, The Tank Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8yk3bWPaAq
Unreal Aircraft: Roadable Aircraft – Antonov KT Flying Tank, https://web.archive.org/web/20051030210841/http://www.unrealaircraft.com/roadable/antonov_kt.php
Holt, Lew, Flying Tanks That Shed Their Wings, Modern Mechanics, July 1932, https://web.archive.org/web/20160129004824/http://blog.modernmechanix.com/flying-tanks-that-shed-their-wings/
M-22 Locust Airborne Light Tank, 6th Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment, http://www.6thaarr.com/m-22-locust.html
Special No. 3 Flying Tank “So-Ra” or “Ku-Ro”, http://www3.plala.or.jp/takihome/So-Ra.html
Jarratt, Philip, Nothing Ventured, Aeroplane Monthly, May 1990, https://web.archive.org/web/20110716165544/http://www.vintagegliderclub.org/vgc_news/bat.htm
The German Messerschmitt Me 321 Glider of World War 2 Was Neither a Success Nor a Failure, Military Factory, May 16, 2016, https://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.php?aircraft_id=867
The post The Surprisingly Long and Determined Effort to Create a Literal Flying Tank appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Sticking your thumb out to convey some meaning has seemingly been around for about as long as humans have been humaning, or, at least, as far back as written history goes. But how did the gesture come to be a signal that you’d like to hitch a ride from someone? And is hitching a ride actually dangerous?
To begin with, almost as soon as the automobile began to become popular in the United States, “thumbing” seems to have become a thing in lock step. As to why this, and not some other gesture, it is often put forth that this is attached to the idea that “thumbs up” means like “ok”, “yes”, “do it” etc. So, in essence, staring the person down in the car and giving them the thumbs up/positive gesture in hopes they’ll stop. The issue with this hypothesis, however, is that that particular “ok” or positive meaning of the gesture didn’t definitively become a widely popular thing until after WWII, a few decades after thumbing a ride was already well established.
Now, at this point, if you’ve watched basically any movie or show featuring Roman gladiators, you might already be heading to the comments to argue with us, as the thumbs up after a fight supposedly meant live and the thumbs down meant die, with this being the commonly touted origin of the whole thumbs up / positive / yes / ok meaning in the first place.
However, this is unequivocally false. While it is true that in the days of gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum and the earlier (and significantly larger) Circus Maximus, the audience could decide the fate of a fallen gladiator with a simple hand gesture, this isn’t typically depicted accurately and has nothing to do with why thumbs up and thumbs down means what it does today.
To wit, the fate of a gladiator, in terms of whether the audience was voting for a kill, was decided with what is known as “pollice verso”, a Latin term which roughly translates to “turned thumb”. More precisely what this means isn’t known and there are no accounts that have survived to this day that describe it in any real detail. As such, we’re unable to say for sure which way the thumb was supposed to be pointed if the audience wanted a given gladiator to be killed, or if they could just wave their thumbs around at random, which it seems may well have been the case. But either way, the turned thumb was to indicate not life, but death.
So what about indicating the person should live? The gesture to spare a given gladiator’s life seems to have been neither a thumbs up nor a thumbs down. Instead, you had to hide your thumb inside your fist, forming a gesture known as pollice compresso, “compressed thumb”.
The reasons for this have been speculated to be twofold: one, it made the decision of the crowd easier to discern, since it’s easier to tell the difference between a thumbs turned and a closed fist than a thumbs up and a thumbs down from a long ways away. And two, the gestures themselves are thought to be largely symbolic of what they represented- a pointed thumb represented the audience’s desire for the victorious gladiator to deliver his coup de grâce (stab the fallen foe), while a hidden thumb symbolised that they wished for the gladiator to stay his blade, sheathing it much in the way they’d hidden their thumbs. Hence why it’s thought “turned thumb” may well have been simply waving your thumb around in the air, perhaps in a stabbing motion.
Of course, moving on to hitchhiking, using the thumb as a symbolic sword to stab people isn’t probably going to increase your odds of getting picked up… So definitely no connection there. And, as mentioned, the thumbs up meaning more or less as we think of it today in the general, non-hitchhiking sense, didn’t really become popular until after WWII.
On this one, during WWII, the thumbs up gesture was used extensively by American pilots as a shorthand way of indicating to their ground crews that they were ready to fly.
It has been speculated that they got this from the Chinese, with specifically the Flying Tiger brigade of American pilots based in China seemingly being the first (or among the first) to popularly use the gesture, at least as far as photographic evidence from the era seems to indicate. To the Chinese at this time, the thumbs up gesture meant “number one” or “nice job” depending on context. (Why this is the case is up for debate.) Whether it truly was adopted from the Chinese or some other source, the American pilot version initially meant “I’m ready” or “good to go”.
From here, things become much clearer. This “ready” meaning soon evolved into a simple, all-encompassing way to indicate that everything was okay in situations where verbal cues weren’t possible or advisable. It was also picked up by the rest of the American military who proceeded to make extensive use of the gesture during their many campaigns across Europe; in the process, it was picked up by the locals and soldiers from other militaries.
That said, there are several places on Earth where a thumbs up is considered a grave insult. For example, in places like Iraq and Greece, sticking up your thumb is akin to saying “shove it up your ass” (which, like the stabbing meaning, probably also wouldn’t be the best way to hail down a car… unless they are into that… We here at TodayIFoundOut don’t judge. You do you.)
Noteworthy, it also meant this in Australia before WWII, but afterward switched to the modern meaning thanks to the aforementioned dissemination of the gesture throughout the Allied military. The exact reasoning behind this more insulting meaning, as with many gestures, isn’t clear, but it’s believed to be representative of the action that would be required for you to act out the insult itself. In fact, in some of these cultures that interpret it this way, an up and down movement often accompanies the gesture to make the meaning perfectly clear. Funnily enough on this one, when American troops first started being stationed in Iraq, some reported being greeted by civilians offering a thumbs up, with the soldiers (and many in the media) interpreting it as most Westerners would, all the while not realizing the obscene connotations it has in that country.
In any event, given the lack of hard evidence of the thumbs up meaning as we think of it today, at least popularly, before WWII, the hypothesis that there is a connection here with regards to the origin of the thumbs up in hitchhiking is, unsurprisingly, highly suspect.
Even more so when we really dig into the hard documented evidence of the evolution of the hitchhiking sign. Whoever was the first to do it, one of the earliest references to hitchhiking, though without mention of the thumbs out gesture, comes from American poet Vachel Lindsay, who wrote in 1916, “He it is that wants the other side of the machine weighed down. He it is that will offer me a ride and spin me along from five to twenty-five miles before supper.”
By 1923, the practice had been given its proper name in the Nation on September 19, with “Hitch-hiking is always done by twos or threes.” Some claim that its popularity arose with the increasing presence of more and more cars combined with the desire of soldiers on furlough during WWI to get home as cheaply as possible.
Whatever the case, the practice quickly became popular with other vehicularly-challenged folks as well, including college students, kids and even (gasp) girls by themselves (more on whether this is actually dangerous or not in a bit).
By 1925, however, we do have reference to not only the gesture being associated with hitchhiking, but also, in part at least, why the thumb was used. This comes to us from a 1925 article in American Magazine that described how “The hitch hiker stands at the edge of the road and point with his thumb in the direction he wishes to go.”
Further doubling down on this reasoning, around the same time “thumb-pointer” was also a synonym for “hitchhiker”. In other words, it appears the use of the thumb out originally was not so much a thumb’s up sign to hail a ride, but actually dually indicating you wanted to be picked up, as well as telling the driver which way you wanted to go.
Of course, early hitchhikers could have pointed in other ways, so why the thumb was settled on instead of the index finger isn’t really clear. Perhaps so as not to be confused with giving the finger from a distance (and yes, the middle finger meaning FU is actually something that goes back to ancient times, as we’ll get into in the Bonus Facts in a bit.) But whatever the case, the purpose of the thumb originally was not to point up, but rather in the direction you wanted to go.
Going back to the early days of hitchhiking, along with thumb-pointer, other synonyms also appeared to refer to a hitchhiker including thumb-jerker. Such as in the October 6, 1926 edition of the Milwaukee Journal where it also makes clear why you jerk your thumb,
“Each age brings its own words. Mr. Webster would certainly push up his spectacles and bend low over the present-day dictionary if he could see some of the additions to the child of his wearisome labors. We have “gate-crasher” “cake eater” and “high hatter”. Mr. Webster might well scratch his head over the word “thumb jerker”.
A thumb jerker is a person who stands out on a road and jerks his thumb at passing automobiles, indicating that he wishes a lift in their direction. Boys on summer trips call it hitch-hiking. Tourists stop and take them in and carry them a certain distance. Then they pick up another car, or another car picks them up, and eventually they reach their distention without trouble or expense to themselves.”
On this note, while the practice was widely popular in the early days of the automobile, it wasn’t always looked upon kindly as a thing to do. For example, the Journal piece goes on:
“Not long ago a young man told his father he was going to hitchhike it to school some 200 miles distant, “I”ll use my carfare for spending money.” said the boy. “No, son” said the father, “You’ll not hitch-hike it. When I was a boy I hoofed it to the same school with the feeling that I was pretty lucky to get my tuition money. There was no money for carfare and I walked the whole distance on dirt roads, sleeping in barns at night. I didn’t depend on anything to get me there.
.. Never turn into a thumb jerker. If you jerk your thumb at cars for people to pick you up, you are acquiring a habit. The next time you will jerk your thumb for another kind of a favor perhaps. I’m not going to have you going through life expecting other people to do you favors. Stand on your own feet- and walk on your own feet.””
While perhaps great advice in some sense, also horrible in the sense that accepting a ride, particularly one someone is already taking, isn’t inherently a sign of laziness. Further, it could even be the opposite if the time or money for transport was utilized more wisely on the other end. And on top of that, nobody ever got anywhere in life without being willing to accept help from others somewhere along the way. Trying to do everything yourself is a great way to get a lot less done and, much like the walker vs successful hitchhiker, get where you want to go much slower, or even not at all.
But in any event, by 1928, the Saturday Evening Post printed a series of popular stories featuring two waitresses thumbing their way all around from New York to Florida. Across the pond, a September 6, 1927 edition of the Glasgow Herald explicitly mentions the word “hitch-hiking” and the new practice stating,
“AMERICA, which is the melting-pot not only of races but of colloquial English, has produced not a few startling words and phrases… The hobo has been rivalled (so an American correspondent informs us) by the hitchhiker, which is the latest curiosity born out of the linguistic genius of the Yankee. The hobo, long familiar to readers of fiction and social investigators, stole rides from one end of the continent to the other on freight trains. The hitchhiker, with the same passion for free travel, indulges it at the expense of the motorist. There are apparently hitchhikers in the United States, who boast they can travel 500 miles free of charge without walking more than 10.”
While the Glasgow Herald was speculating the practice would never catch on in the region owing to relatively inexpensive public transportation there, sometime over the course of the next decade or so, hitchhiking, including sticking your thumb out, does seem to have caught on in Europe, if perhaps never quite as popular as in the U.S. with its massive expanses of basically nothing between many towns and cities. For example, British novelist Nicholas Monsarrat, in his 1939 novel This is the Schoolroom, has his character having “thumbed [his] way across England in a day-and-a-bit.”
Going back to the U.S., the Great Depression also seems to have had a hand in boosting the popularity of the practice in the United States. With people all over the country thumbing rides from place to place in search of work.
The gesture itself saw even wider adoption as the defacto way to indicate you’d like to hitch a ride thanks to Clark Gable’s exposition on the subject in It Happened One Night (1934). The movie itself was obscenely popular at the time, winning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Writing, Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), Best Director (Frank Capra) and Best Actor (Gable). In his role as Peter Warne, Gable attempted to instruct Colbert (playing Ellie Andrews) on the best method to employ “The Hitchhiker’s Hail“:
“Well, it is simple. It’s all in that old thumb, see? Some people do it like this. Or like this. All wrong. Never get anywhere. . . . . But that old thumb never fails.”
Of course, being a romantic comedy, Gable’s technique completely fails to convince anyone to stop, and the pair only ultimately get a lift after Colbert employs another method to get someone to stop and pick you up – she sticks out her leg and lifts her skirt a bit.
The gas rationing of WWII saw the practice surge even more with it being downright patriotic to hitch a ride rather than drive solo, as well as soldiers using hitchhiking to get around when in the states. On this one, again, it was considered patriotic to pick up any hitchhiker wearing a uniform.
Of course, in more modern times, the idea that hitchhiking is inherently dangerous, especially to women, in conjunction with public transportation becoming more widespread and relatively inexpensive, has seen the percentage of people who hitchhike drop off the table. Another contributing factor in places where public transportation isn’t always the greatest, is car ownership becoming ubiquitous, such as in the U.S. where around 95% of households currently have direct access to a car.
This all brings us to how dangerous hitchhiking actually is. While it is true there does seem to be a slight risk to it, the hard data to date doesn’t really support the idea of it being any more dangerous than, say, taking a public bus or going clubbing or walking along a sidewalk or countless other things we all do. That’s not to say there is no risk, simply that it’s far less dangerous, as we’ll get into in a bit, than public perception seems to think.
As Julian Portis in his thesis, Thumbs Down: America and the Decline of Hitchhiking,
The real danger of hitchhiking has most likely remained relatively constant, but the general perception of this danger has increased. … [O]ur national tolerance for danger has gone down: things that we previously saw as reasonably safe suddenly appeared imminently threatening. This trend is not just isolated to the world of hitchhiking; it has become a pernicious artifact throughout the American cultural conscience.
This is similar to the rise of the whole “stranger danger” warning to kids which occurred around the same time hitchhiking also began to be perceived as dangerous. On this one, it’s noteworthy that while just shy of a million kids are reported missing, at least temporarily, in a given year in the U.S., only a little over 100 of that number on average turn out to be an abduction by a stranger. With many arguing that instilling that inherent fear of strangers in kids causes more direct harm than good, in the sense that a child lost or in trouble may be hesitant to seek help. For example, in Utah in 2005 an 11 year old Boy Scout was lost in the wilderness for four days despite rescuers being deployed not long after he went missing. The boy had heard and seen the people searching for him many times, but didn’t know them so, to quote him after he was found, he hid from them because “I didn’t want someone to steal me.” It wasn’t until he became a bit delirious after four days with no food that a searcher almost literally stumbled on the boy who was walking along a trail.
Others further argue that the general instilling of widespread distrust of anyone you don’t know just isn’t a good thing to teach kids.
Whatever your opinion on that, as for public perception concerning hitchhiking, various films and shows featuring the whole psychopath hitchhiker thing seem to have risen around the same time that hitchhiking more and more began being perceived as dangerous, with the two things seemingly feeding on one another.
For example, ABC’s 1979 Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker has this gem of a teaser, “The Girls by the Side of the Road: You’ve seen her standing there. Thumb out. Smiling. There are thousands like her all over America. And you’ve heard about what happens to some of them when they get into the wrong car. This movie is about one of these kids. And about her family. But it could be about your family. Where is your daughter tonight?” DUN DUN DUN!!!!!
A 1973 Reader’s Digest article even went so far as to say, “In the case of a girl who hitchhikes, the odds against her reaching her destination unmolested are today literally no better than if she played Russian roulette.”
On top of that, right at the start of the major decline in hitchhiking in the 1970s, we have such quotes as this 1971 gem of a reflection of attitudes from a Sacramento Country Sheriff’s office stating hitchhiking is, to quote, “like open season for every pervert, homosexual and creep in the area.” (…Dang homosexuals always picking people up and giving them a ride to where they want to go… shakes fist)
On the other end of the country, one New York City officer noted, “Any girl on the road, she’s asking for trouble because any guy driving by thinks she’s loose.” (Girls wanting a ride to go somewhere = whoreishness. Got it… She should probably wear a nun’s outfit or something whenever out and about too, else she’s clearly asking for it.)
So just how dangerous is hitchhiking? It is notoriously difficult to nail down hard data on the dangers of hitchhiking for a variety of reasons, including that a body thrown in the ditch on the side of the road could have been a hitchhiking instance, or it could be completely unrelated to hitchhiking.
That said, one of the most comprehensive studies we have on this to date is from the end of the heyday of hitchhiking era, a 1974 California Highway Patrol study looking into all the claims in the 1970s that hitchhiking was dangerous. Their results?
Among many other things they noted that hitchhiking with someone reduced the already extremely low likelihood of being harmed in some way while hitchhiking by 600%. Further, it is more likely that the person hitchhiking would be the victim, rather than the person picking up the hitchhiker (72.7% compared to 28.3%). Moving on from there, the average male hitchhiker was 22 years old, and the average female hitchhiker 19 years old. And about 90% of hitchhikers were male.
As you might expect, female hitchhikers were 7-10 times more likely to be victims of crimes than the males and 80% of the crimes committed against female hitchhikers were sexual in nature, more or less accounting for most of the increased crime potential. Basically approximately the same “other” crimes either way, but tacking on the sexual ones with women.
However, they further note that the sex crimes committed related to hitchhiking were insignificant compared to the total numbers for the state and that the women here weren’t statistically more likely to be the victims of a sex crime while hitchhiking compared to the rest of their day to day lives.
Further, they found that in most cases in hitchhiking related crimes the person either hitchhiked or picked someone up specifically with the intent to commit the crime in the first place. Thus, while hitchhiking was more or less the vehicle for the crime, they speculate it’s probable the person would have found another method for the crime if hitchhiking wasn’t a thing.
On this note, very significant and lending to their ultimate conclusion we’ll get to shortly, hitchhikers who were victims or suspects of a crime while hitchhiking were almost just as likely to be a victim or suspect of a crime outside of anything related to hitchhiking.
Thus, they concluded, “No independent information exists about hitchhikers who are not involved in crimes. Without such information, it is not possible to conclude whether or not hitchhikers are exposed to high danger. However, the results of this study do not show that hitchhikers are over represented in crimes or accidents beyond their numbers. When considering statistics for all crimes and accidents in California, it appears that hitchhikers make a minor contribution.”
They also note from all this that in their opinion, eliminating the practice of hitchhiking probably wouldn’t reduce crime in a statistically significant way.
As for some broader numbers, the FBI notes that from the three decade span of 1979 to 2009, there were only 675 cases of murder or sexual assault along interstates, 500 of which included murder, or about 22 cases per year across the country. Further, these not only included known hitchhiking instances, but also just bodies found along the road and the like which may or may not have been hitchhiking related.
Thus, while the data is pretty lacking to come to any firm conclusions about the exact danger with hitchhiking or picking a hitchhiker up, the studies done to date and the limited data we do have seem to lean towards that while hitchhiking does expose you to some level of risk you wouldn’t have if, say, you’re just sitting on your couch, the greatest risk you’re possibly going to be exposed to when hitchhiking is the fact that you are in a rapidly moving vehicle, and those sometimes get in crashes and cause you to be injured or die.
As ever, as has become clear to us over the years doing such analyses on the various ways to get from point A to point B and the inherent risks, the only truly safe way to travel is via elevator. Even walking is shockingly dangerous. And don’t even get us started on leaving your home at all. Best to not do that. Ever. There are literally people out there. Ya, thanks but no thanks my dude.
Bonus Fact:
Some common gestures, such as the high five, have pretty well known and surprisingly modern origins. For example, in this one the high five was invented and popularized thanks to a 1977 major league baseball game in which Glenn Burke decided to switch up the low five and give Dodger teammate Dusty Baker a high five after Baker hit a home run. Interestingly here, as Glenn Burke was the first openly gay major league baseball player and invented the high five, for a little while after, the high five was used as a gay pride symbol, particularly by Burke himself.
Moving on to the middle finger, it turns out one of the most popular gestures of all, giving the bird, unlike the high five and modern meaning of the thumbs up, isn’t a recent invention at all and has been around for well over two thousand years, including having various similar connotations as it has today throughout.
Unsurprisingly once you stop and think about versions of the expression’s meaning, extending the middle finger simply represents the phallus, with it perhaps natural enough that our forebears chose their longest finger to symbolically represent man’s favorite digit. (Although, there are some cultures that instead chose the thumb, seemingly preferring to have their girth, rather than length, represented here…) It’s also been speculated that perhaps people noticed that the curled fingers (or balled fist in the case of the thumb) made for a good representation of the testicles.
Either way, given the symbolism here, it’s no surprise that the expression has more or less always seemed to have meant something akin to “F&*k You” in some form or other, sometimes literally.
For example, in Ancient Greece, beyond being a general insult, in some cases there seems to be a specific implication from the insult that the person the gesture was directed at liked to take it up the bum. In the case of men, despite male on male lovin’ being widely accepted in the culture at the time, there were still negative connotations with regards to one’s manliness when functioning as the bottom in such a rendezvous, particularly the bottom for someone with lower social standing.
Moving on to an early specific example we have Aristphanes’ 423 BC The Clouds. In it, a character known as Strepsiades, tired of Socrates’ pontificating, decides to flip off the famed philosopher.
SOCRATES: Well, to begin with,
they’ll make you elegant in company—
and you’ll recognize the different rhythms,
the enoplian and the dactylic,
which is like a digit.STREPSIADES: Like a digit!
By god, that’s something I do know!SOCRATES: Then tell me.
STREPSIADES: When I was a lad a digit meant this!
[Strepsiades sticks his middle finger straight up under Socrates’ nose]
For whatever it’s worth, in the third century AD Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, we also have this reference of a supposed incidence that occurred in the 4th century BC, concerning famed orator Demosthenes and philosopher Diogenes.
[Diogenes] once found Demosthenes the orator lunching at an inn, and, when he retired within, Diogenes said, “All the more you will be inside the tavern.” When some strangers expressed a wish to see Demosthenes, [Diogenes] stretched out his middle finger and said, “There goes the demagogue of Athens.”
(No doubt water was needed to put out the fire created by that wicked burn.)
Moving on to the first century AD, Caligula seems to have enjoyed making powerful people kiss his ring while he extended his middle finger at them. On a no doubt completely unrelated note, the chief organizer of his assassination, and first to stab him, was one Cassius Chaerea who Caligula liked to do this very thing with, as noted by Suetonius:
Gaius used to taunt him, a man already well on in years, with voluptuousness and effeminacy by every form of insult. When he asked for the watchword Gaius would give him “Priapus” or “Venus,” and when Chaerea had occasion to thank him for anything, he would hold out his hand to kiss, forming and moving it in an obscene fashion.
Speaking of the implications of this insulting gesture, it seems to have fallen out of favor during the Middle Ages with the rise of Christianity, or at least records of it diminish. This may mean people actually stopped popularly flipping the bird or may just mean its uncouth nature saw it something not generally written about. That said, we do know thanks to the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville that at least as late as the 6th century people were still extending the finger as an insult, in this reference particularly directed at someone who had done something considered “shameful”.
Moving on to more modern times and back to baseball, the gesture was popularly resurrected in documented history starting around the early 19th century, with early photographic evidence later popping up in the latter half of the 1800s. Most famously, we have a photograph of the gesture flashed by present day Twitter sensation and former 19th century baseball iron man Charley “Old Hoss” Radbourn. Radbourn was a pitcher for the Boston Beaneaters in 1886 when the team, along with the New York Giants, posed for a group photo. In the photo, Old Hoss can be seen giving the bird to the cameraman.
Expand for References* The American Magazine * Hitchhiking Glasgow * The Lure of the Open Road * The Thumb Jerker Voices His Complaint * Frank Capra * Claudette Colbert * Clark Gable * Gone with the Wind * Hitchhiking * How Did Thumbs-Up Become the Gesture for Hitchhiking? * It Happened One Night * It’s a Wonderful Life * Oxford English Dictionary * Through history, hitchhiking has gotten thumbs up and thumbs down * It Happened One Night * Image Source * Hitching Stories from the Road * The Lost Art of Hitchhiking * Stranger Danger * Crazy Girls Thumb a Ride * Hitchhiking UK Road Trip * Hitchhiking * Hitchhiking * Has Hitchhiking’s Time Come Again? * Crimes and Accidents Associated with Hitchhiking * Domestic Violence Murder Stats * Hitchhiking * Hitchhiking Gestures * Thumbs Up to a Memory * Fishy Statistic * Motor Vehicle Statistics * List of Motor Vehicle Deaths by Year * Boy Rescued The post Why is the Universal Sign for a Hitchhiker the Thumbs Up, Held Out? And is Hitchhiking Actually Dangerous? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The ins and outs of the music business are notoriously complex, with many details hidden behind closed doors, and rates subject to wide variation. In part this is understandable – both artists, streaming services and labels, strive to keep their individual contracts opaque, in part to secure for themselves the most favourable deals possible. The music business is also a sector which has, over time, changed more than few others, over the last couple decades in particular. But in all of this, just how much do songwriters actually make and what’s the process here?
To begin with, to gain full insight into the songwriting world, we need to explore a distinct branch of music history: publishing. Music publishing, in its earliest days, referred to the sale of sheet music – material written by composers transcribed onto parchment so that anyone with the proper knowledge and the right instrument could reproduce it. While people have been making money off music seemingly as long as there have been people making music and a civilization providing a mass audience, the more modern incarnation is centred around the 15th Century, when Roman printer Ulrich Han’s first released a volume of plainchant (Christian religious music). That said, the father of modern music publishing is generally considered to be the Venetian Ottaviano Petrucco, who operated a hundred years or so later, and held a 20-year monopoly on music printing in Venice. Later came mechanical printing and, crucially, copyright laws, the first of which were introduced during the reign of King Henry VIII (1491-1547). A whole heap of further refinements and evolutions continued in several countries, but the important thing to note is that, eventually, copyright law sought to ensure that composers received their fair share of revenue from the sale of their music, instead of rampant unauthorised reproduction which was sort of the norm.
Reaching the dawn of the modern songwriting industry, pre-World-War II the biggest players made their home in New York’s Tin Pan Alley, in actuality a collection of buildings in Manhattan’s Flower District, which housed the offices of numerous publishers. Here, composers and lyricists such as Irving Berlin, Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein plied their trade, churning out a seemingly endless stream of hits, including “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” Even up to this point, sheet music remained a song writer’s primary source of income. Some of these received a percentage of sales, and others served on a fixed salary under contract to a publishing house. Tin Pan Alley was also home to a small army of “song pluggers” – pianists and singers who represented the publishers by demonstrating songs to the potential customers.
An interesting example from the period can be found in the person of Henry Clay Work (1832 – 1884), who composed 75 songs during his career, setting a record for sheet music sales with his composition, “Marching Through Georgia,” which topped a basically unprecedented one-million-plus copies sold. However, it’s Work’s later composition, “My Grandfather’s Clock,” which is probably better known and it is this song that gave us the name for that style clock. The story goes that, in 1875, Work visited England, and happened to notice a broken clock in the lobby of the George Hotel, in North Yorkshire. According to the proprietor, the clock had stopped at the exact second at which its previous owner had died. While this probably isn’t true, the tale inspired Work to compose his now-famous tune. The song went on to break the sales record previously held by Work’s own aforementioned “Marching Through Georgia.”
In any event, post-World War II, Manhattan’s Brill Building took over as the premier hub of music publishing as throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, a boom in commercial radio together with the mass production of the record player led to a shift in emphasis away from sheet music. Similar to Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building was actually a collection of offices belonging to many different companies. Here you could find Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond and Carole King, all of whom made a living writing songs for popular artists. Of course, as in the case of Diamond and King, a few of these writers went on to become successful performers in their own right – a factor which, as we shall see later, drastically increases the revenue which might be expected from a hit.
The average income for a songwriter from that period is not recorded, but we do know that successful composers could make an extremely good living at the top. To quote Otis Blackwell, who wrote “All Shook Up,’” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Fever’,” and countless other hits: “I wrote my songs, I got my money and I boogied.” Beyond him, Mike Stoller, as one half of the partnership behind “Hound Dog,” “Yakety Yak” and many others, has an estimated net worth, in 2022, of around $200 million. At the time in these early days, however, corruption throughout the industry was rife. Artists often insisted on taking a cut of songwriting credits, and it became commonplace for unscrupulous record companies to buy up a writer’s entire catalogue for pennies on the dollar to what they made off the songs.
Returning to Otis Blackwell, we can dive into some telling figures. Before we do that, it’s worth recounting the remarkable story of how the songwriter stumbled across his big break. According to Blackwell, he was waiting hopefully in the snow outside the Brill Building on Christmas eve, 1955, hat-less and with holes in his shoes, when arranger Leroy Kirkland happened to pass by. Blackwell persuaded Kirkland to listen to a song or two of his right there in the street. The arranger was impressed enough to invite Blackwell inside to meet Al Stanton, an employee of Shalimar Music.
From here, Stanton purchased six of Blackwell’s compositions there and then, at a price of $25 against royalties. He then signed Blackwell to a contract and gave him space in the office to work. Two weeks later, news came that RCA were interested in licensing one of those $25 songs for an up-and-coming new artist called Elvis Presley. That song, “Don’t Be Cruel,” became a massive hit, spending nine weeks at the top of the Billboard pop chart. Within the year, Blackwell had earned over $80,000 in royalties from Presley’s hit (a shade under $900,000 in today’s money).
On this note of someone else writing the songs, once again, until the 1950s and early 1960s, the majority of recording artists – Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, etc – did not write their own songs, and were not expected to. Rather, they relied on songs provided by music publishers, mostly composed and written by an in-house team. But, once again, how much were those songwriters getting paid, and how? This is where it starts to become a little complicated.
In those early days, most artists received a flat fee for a recording session, and most songwriters were paid a flat fee per song. Gradually, however, the concept of royalties began to advance, especially with the advent of recorded music. The radio boom of the 1930s and 40s changed the landscape once again and, in response, The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) was founded, in 1941, to license stations, clubs and other venues in use of their copyrighted works. ASCAP collected these payments and passed them on to the various copyright holders: the record label, the artist, and the music publishing company, the latter of which in turn was expected to pay the songwriter.
This brings us up to the modern era, where a music publisher serves as an agency to track, collect and pay songwriters all the royalties which they are owed from their compositions. In return, the publisher keeps a portion of said royalties. That split varies, but a typical deal will see the publisher retaining between 25% and 50%, with the rest going to the songwriter (or songwriters). For every music track, the song publisher (on behalf of the songwriter) will, on average, own a 50% stake, which means it will collect 50% of all revenue, deduct the agreed amount for itself, and pass on the rest to the composer. Income from all this primarily comes from three sources:
Mechanical royalties: physical sales of CDs and vinyl, plus digital streams and downloads.
Sync licensing royalties: generated every time a song is broadcast through radio, television, films and video games.
Performing royalties: live performances, including concerts, radio or other public venues.
For example, if a song is streamed once on Spotify, the music publisher will receive 50% of Spotify’s payment, with the other half going to the record label and artist. Between 50% and 75% of that ever diminishing amount, in turn, will be passed on to the songwriter. Let’s take a hypothetical case: songwriter Fred Jones has one of his compositions “Standard Love Song” recorded by Kanye East. Suppose that recording is played ten times on the streaming service, Blockify. Blockify pays out 10 cents per stream (which as we’ll get into is a ludicrously large amount compared to reality, but makes our math easier), so that makes $1 in total. 50 cents go to the music publisher, which has a 30-70 split with Fred Jones. Fred therefore receives 35 cents.
There are, of course, many different music publishers, and some songwriters may well have different songs placed with different publishers, with various splits. Before we continue, it’s time to take a deep breath and consider the issue of copyright. There are two types of copyright in the music business: The ‘composition’ and the ‘master.’ The composition refers to the song’s structure, notes, melody, lyrics and beat. The master refers to a specific recording of that song. Let’s return to Fed Jones and “Standard Love Song.” Kanye East owns the copyright for his recorded version. Nobody can use it without his permission. Jones, however, owns the copyright for the song itself. He receives royalties every time East’s version generates income, but if another artist were to cover the song, Jones would also receive royalties on the new version, whereas Kanye East will not.
Which brings us to singer-songwriters. There have always been artists who both write and record their own music, although before the 1960s, as mentioned, they were in a minority. Some of these early pioneers enjoyed plenty of success with their own compositions- Chuck Berry, to cite one major example. Others, such as the aforementioned Otis Blackwell, scored modest hits of his own, but derived far more income from other artist’s recordings of his songs. Throughout the 1950s in particular, cover versions were commonplace, even if the original had already been a hit. And sometimes precisely because it was already a hit. In the 1960s, thanks to musicians such as Bob Dylan, the commercial appeal of singer-songwriters, who mainly sang their own original material, boomed. A little later came bands such as The Beach Boys and, of course, The Beatles, who also wrote and recorded their own music.
Obviously, if you are the recording artist and the songwriter, then your income stream widens considerably. For example, if Fred Jones recorded his own version of “Standard Love Song,” then he would receive both the artists’ share and the songwriter’s royalties. He would still have to employ a publishing company to track and collect the latter, although it’s not unusual for very successful musicians to set up their own publishing company for this very purpose. Incidentally, it’s worth pointing out that the artist’s share is, perhaps surprisingly, far smaller than the writer’s. They do, however, get the benefit of being vastly more famous compared to the song writer, and can leverage this into other sources of income. In any event, of the money from sales which goes to the label, the artist might expect to receive just 15%. There are always exceptions – mega-stars of course hold the power to negotiate far better terms, and some canny operators such as Bjork negotiate individual terms on a case-by-case basis in different countries.
Returning, for a moment, to the complex issue of copyright – technically, copyright laws cover all public performances of a song. Legally, then, a busker performing “Standing Love Song” on a street corner would owe Fred Jones a fee. In practice, this never happens. There are also, of course, songs which can be defined as ‘public domain,’ meaning that there are no restrictions or copyright on their use. Not many compositions fall into this category and there is always a caveat, a good example being a number which we all know: “Happy Birthday to You.”
It’s generally accepted that the song was originally composed by sisters Mildred and Patty Hill, in 1893. For many years, Warner/Chappell claimed copyright, citing a 1988 deal in which they had bought out the previous rights-holder Birch Tree Group Limited. Birch Tree had originally called themselves the Summy Company, and had been the first to officially publish “Happy Birthday” as we know it today. Warner/Chappell pressed its claim aggressively, and figures reveal that, in 2008 alone, the company was raking in around $5,000 per day from “Happy Birthday.” In 2013, however, documentary maker Jennifer Nelson, who had previously paid a fee for the use of the song in one of her films, filed a suit against Warner/Chappell, citing new research which cast doubt as to the validity of their claims.
Evidence centred on a 1927 edition of The Everyday Songbook, in which “Happy Birthday” first appeared. Previously obscured lines of text revealed the caption “Special permission through courtesy of The Clayton F Summy Companty,” and not, as had been assumed, a copyright notice. Lawyers argued that the song had therefore been published without a valid copyright claim, which was required to have been present under the law of the time. The judge agreed, “Happy Birthday” entered the public domain, and Warner/Chappell were forced to pay back a substantial sum of around $14 million in licensing fees.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as one universal copyright law. Different countries have different rules and restrictions. In most cases, it can be taken that a particular song comes under the regulations of the county of which the composer is a citizen. Currently, a song enters the public domain, in UK law, “70 years after the author’s death,” while a recording is considered copyright-free “70 years from when it was first released.” In the US, it is more complicated. Generally, a work is protected for a period equal to “the life of the author plus an additional 70 years.” There are, of course, exceptions. The minutia of these laws would require another rather lengthy article in itself. Other famous songs it might surprise you to learn are in the public domain (in the US) include “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (copyright elapsed due to time passed since publication), “House of the Rising Sun” (an old folk song, the origins of which are unknown) and “Give My Regards to Broadway” (again due to time passed).
With all that prelim out of the way in understanding the industry, let’s finally get down to more detailed facts and figures, at least such as is publicly known and looking at sort of the general case as well. While a lot of information remains secret, including radio royalties, streaming royalties and individual contracts, we can draw some useful conclusions from available data. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average songwriter’s annual salary comes to just under $52,000. But that’s just an average, and will be top-weighted by those few who score big hits. The figure for the UK, if you’re wondering, stands at £33,954.
Getting back to those big hits and some specific examples, up to 2012, Dan Wilson, co-writer of Adele’s “Someone Like You,” had earned himself $882,700 in royalties for that track alone. That’s off the back of 3.9 million individual sales of the song, and 5.8 million album sales, as well as all the ancillary things like streaming and all of that which is all a bit more nebulous. Moving on from there, Dr Luke, Max Martin, and Bonnie McKee, co-writers of Katy Perry’s “California Girls,” had, up to 2012, received a split of $646,100 for that song.
Speaking of Max Martin, while you may never have heard of him, the Swedish songwriter and record producer is the man behind an incredible number of contemporary hits, including Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time,” Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” and Ariana Grande’s “Problem.” As you might imagine from all this, he’s about as high in the industry as one can get as a song writer with a net worth that stands at an estimated $260 million.
Martin’s highly successful methods highlight another problem facing songwriters today. In 2022, it’s rare for a big hit to be the product of a single person. Song-writing teams are the norm, with areas of composition ever-more compartmentalised. This means multiple lyricists, beat-makers and specialists sharing the pie. The shift towards streaming poses another challenge. Services such as Spotify and Apple Music pay artists according to market share, ie: how their material’s popularity stacks up against the most popular songs over a given period. This, of course, tilts the system massively in favour of already-establish acts with large marketing funds. There has also been much well-publicised criticism of the amount which these services pay, particularly the largest, Spotify. Sources suggest Spotify pays only between $0.003 and $0.0084 per stream, a payment which has to be split between all rights holders. Moreover, this will vary greatly depending on the country which the music is streamed in, and individual contracts with artists and labels. Assuming an average of $0.004 per stream, a thousand streams will earn just $4 in revenue. Which, to be fair, isn’t too different than the ballpark gross earnings for normal video views on YouTube.
Apple Music, in contrast, pays one of the best rates around, at $0.01 per stream. Unfortunately Apple is one of the few companies to have publicly disclosed their pay-per-stream amount. And no doubt does so because they know they pay more than seemingly anyone else.
At this point, we turn to the last of the ‘big three’ online services – YouTube Music. According to YouTube’s global head of music, Lyor Cohen, the company paid out more than $4 billion to the music industry during 2020, compared to Spotify’s stated $5 billion across the same period.
Again, however, the landscape is complicated. The formula by which YouTube calculates its royalty rates depends on many factors, including the country in which the content was viewed, the type (and cost) of advertising involved, whether or not the viewer was a paid subscriber and even the time of year. Sources suggest an average pay-per-stream on YouTube Music of around $0.006, or about $6 per thousand streams on average over the course of the year.
There are also set criteria as to which videos can be monetized in the first place. As with Spotify, YouTube’s royalty system has come under fire for a lack of opaqueness and perceived insufficient pay-outs. As a side-note, if you’ve ever wondered if performers, amateur or professional, who cover other people’s songs in YouTube videos need to pay a fee, the answer is yes. As is the case with busking, however, in practice this rarely happens outside of videos being claimed via a direct infringement claim or YouTube’s automatic Content ID system. In either case, earnings from that go to whatever company claiming copyright on something in the video. Controversially often even if some bit of music was only a few seconds of a vastly longer video and otherwise would in the courts likely fall under fair use. But the claimant knows good and well the youtuber is unlikely to bring the matter to court and has little recourse beyond that.
In the end, unlike, for example, the book industry, exact statistics for the music sector are hard to come by, not to mention earnings often vary pretty widely based on a number of factors. On top of that, few useful surveys have been taken on the matter, other than the aforementioned figures of around $50,000 a year for an average songwriter which, again, is skewed up a lot because of those in the top 10% earning comparatively huge sums compared to their lowly brethren. And even where you’d think there would be a little more even handed clarity, streaming services in particular, remain far from transparent in their workings and have different deals with different entities, further adding to the variance and unknowability of the general case.
What we do know, at least, is that like many creative industries, earnings for songwriters are heavily weighted towards a select few at the top. And the little direct evidence we do have for the rest suggests that those in the middle of the pack, or further down, are not able to rely on income from streaming alone to support themselves.
Thus, chances are you might never make the top of the pile, or even come close to earning that $52,000 supposed annual average. But, with hard work, patience and determination, it is possible to make a living as a songwriter in the modern era. And given there are outlets for publishing without needing to go through the old more or less handful of gatekeepers model to get to a mass audience, perhaps no time in history has there been more opportunity for the self driven songwriter to make their mark without needing a big break with one of the major studios.
The post How Much Money Do Songwriters Make (and How Do They Get Paid)? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Erik Weiss, better known by his stage name Harry Houdini, was one of the greatest entertainers in history, and among the first modern mega-celebrities. Over a 35-year career spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Houdini thrilled audiences the world over with his headline-grabbing feats of stage magic and death-defying escapology, making entire elephants disappear and wriggling his way out of every kind of restraint imaginable, from handcuffs and shackles to prison cells, straitjackets, milk cans full of water, and locked trunks dropped into rivers and lakes. But despite the sensationalist posters and headlines painting Houdini as a shadowy master of the mystic arts, the man himself was no believer in the supernatural. A consummate professional, Houdini openly acknowledged that his seemingly miraculous feats were the products of illusion, sleight-of-hand, and hard work, and vehemently opposed anyone who claimed otherwise. And both onstage and off the great illusionist waged a passionate crusade against mediums, mystics, and fortune-tellers, whom he saw as mere frauds and charlatans who used the cheap tricks of stage magic to swindle the gullible and the vulnerable. It was a campaign which was to make Houdini many enemies, destroy his friendship with one of the most popular authors of his time, and bring him all the way to the halls of the U.S. Congress.
As previously covered in our video The Last Witch of Britain, while individuals claiming to speak to the dead have existed for all of human history, the modern spiritualist movement traces its origins only as far back as 1848. In March of that year, two teenage sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox of Hydesville, New York State, began claiming they could communicate with the spirits of the dead. This communication took the form of faint, mysterious rapping sounds, heard in response to the sisters tapping or snapping their fingers. Via a complex alphabetic code, the Fox Sisters identified the spirit as belonging to one Charles B. Rosna, a travelling peddler who had been murdered by the house’s previous owner and hidden in the cellar. While a search of the cellar revealed no human remains, Margaret and Kate’s older sister, Leah, recognized the commercial potential of the girl’s abilities and became their manager, taking them on a nationwide tour financed by showman P.T. Barnum.
The tour proved a sensation, and from here the spiritualist movement quickly grew into a bona-fide religion, with its own set of codified rules and rituals. The main spiritualist practitioner was the medium, an individual – very often a woman – said to be particularly sensitive to messages from the beyond. A typical spiritualist seance would see the medium and her clients sequestered in a dark room, with the medium sometimes isolated in a separate wardrobe-like enclosure or bound to a chair to minimize distractions. When all was ready and quiet, the medium would slip into a trance and begin channeling voices from the spirit realm. Sometimes the dead communicated via rapping sounds as with the Fox sisters, while other times they spoke directly through the medium, said medium’s voice often changing to fit the spirit being channelled. Other mediums made use of automatic writing, transcribing the voices of the dead onto scraps of paper, or twin slates tied together with a piece of chalk enclosed within, on which messages from the beyond would mysteriously appear. Some seances got even wilder, with the spirits causing tables to shake, objects to fly across the room, trumpets and guitars to play eerie music, ghostly hands to pass through the participants’ hair, or a mysterious white substance called “ectoplasm” to flow out of the medium’s ears, nose, and mouth. Unsurprisingly, such experiences quickly became all the rage among well-to-do society hosts.
While in 1888 the Fox Sisters admitted that their act was a fraud – they produced the rapping sounds themselves by clicking their toe joints – it was already too late. By the early 20th Century superstar mediums like Daniel Douglas Home [“Hume”] had become fabulously wealthy and boasted such illustrious clients as Emperor Napoleon III, Tsar Alexander III, and Kaiser Wilhelm I, while the spiritualist movement attracted such luminaries as H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ironically, recent advances in science and technology only helped to bolster this craze. If humans could peer into the human body with x-rays or communicate long distances via telephone or radio, the spiritualists reasoned, then why not communicate with the spirit world? Indeed, Sir Oliver Lodge, an early pioneer of radio technology, was one of the chief purveyors of spiritualism in the United States, and so-called “spirit pictures” of ghosts became all the rage among photographers. But while movement had grown steadily since the 1840s, its popularity exploded in the wake of the Great War and Spanish Flu pandemic, which combined killed more than 100 million people worldwide. Spiritualism, with its promise of direct, tangible communication with deceased loved ones, offered greater comfort to millions of bereaved families than the comparatively vague doctrines of traditional religion.
Indeed, like so many others, Harry Houdini first became interested in spiritualism due to a devastating personal loss. While early in his career he dabbled in fortune-telling and mediumship, these were merely magic acts that put food on the table. In 1913, however, Houdini’s suffered the greatest blow of his life when his mother, Cecilia Steiner, passed away. Wracked by grief, Houdini began visiting spiritualist mediums in the hopes of having one final communion with his beloved ‘mama.’ But he was to be bitterly disappointed. In every seance he attended, Houdini immediately recognized the same cheap tricks and sleight-of-hand he used in his own performances. As his wife Bess later wrote:
“Even after our numerous disappointments, whenever we visited a new medium, Houdini, with closed eyes, would join in the opening hymn, and then sit with a rapt, hungry look on his face that would make my heart ache. I knew the message that he wanted, and sometimes I felt myself tempted – but I could not betray his trust in me. So the seance would go on – the same guesses, the same trivial noises, the usual spook tricks that Houdini could do with his hands tied. The root look would fade from his face…At his next visit to his mother’s grave, I would hear him say ‘Well, Mama, I have not heard.’”
Houdini’s relationship with spiritualism hit an all-time low in July 1922 when he was invited to a seance by his friend, British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As previously discussed in our video That Time Some British School Girls Tricked the Creator of Sherlock Holmes into Believing in Fairies, despite having created one of the smartest and most rational characters in all of literature, Doyle was a fervent believer in all things supernatural and esoteric. Like many spiritualists, Doyle’s belief was spurred by the death of his eldest son Kingsley in the Great War, though his prior experience as a physician had convinced him there were mysterious forces in the world that conventional science could not explain. Doyle’s wife Jean was a self-proclaimed medium specializing in automatic writing, and when she offered to commune with Houdini’s deceased mother, the great magician eagerly accepted. Jean Doyle proceeded to scribble out 5 pages of writing, which Houdini initially appeared to believe was the long-sought message from Cecilia. In private, however, Houdini concluded that the words could not possibly have come from his mother. For one thing, they were written in perfectly grammatical English, whereas the real Cecilia Steiner spoke only Hungarian and Yiddish. Furthermore, the message was written in a style suspiciously similar to Jean Doyle’s own voice, while each page was headed by the figure of a cross – something the Jewish wife of a rabbi was unlikely to write. Completely disillusioned and furious that grieving people around the world were being exploited by such obvious humbug, Houdini embarked on a passionate crusade to debunk the spiritualist movement once and for all, angrily declaring:
“Thirty-five years among these vultures has convinced me that they are the most contemptible and the meanest criminals that walk the earth. The confidence man, the burglar, the pickpocket, the highwayman, and others who live by robbing their fellows, must take chances. They meet their victims on even ground and triumph through their wits, their strength, or their courage.”
Houdini’s timing was fortuitous, for by this time the great magician’s star was beginning to fade. His previous career-saving hits, the suspended straitjacket escape and the Chinese water torture cell, had already grown stale, and in March 1922 Houdini found himself billed fifth in a nine-act show in Brooklyn. Hoping to revitalize his career once again, Houdini reinvented himself as a spiritualist debunker, embarking on a series of touring shows which he opened with the words:
“We laugh at the old story of witches astride broomsticks flying through space. But what could be more ridiculous than to believe that our dead appear in the form of ectoplasm through the decayed teeth or any other part of a medium’s body? Why, if our dear ones wish to communicate with us, do they resort to table flying, raps, etc., at so much per rap? Are our dead financiers? It is against all ethics to expose legitimate mysteries. But it is the duty of every citizen to expose cheats and fraud, and the most despicable cheats are the fraud mediums who use spiritualism as a cloak to prey on the gullible.”
In many ways, Houdini was the perfect man for the job, his long career in stage magic having attuned him to many of the more common tricks used by fraudulent mediums. As Houdini himself told a Los Angeles Times reporter:
“It takes a flimflammer to catch a flimflammer.”
Furthermore, Houdini was convinced that scientists were ill-suited to the task of debunking mediums, as their peculiar temperaments made them susceptible to being fooled. As Remigius Weiss, a former Philadelphia Medium, later explained:
“[Scientists] have built up a sort of theory and they treasure it like the gardener with his flowers. When they come to these mediumistic séances, this theory is in their minds. … With a man like Mr. Houdini, a practical man who has ordinary common sense and science at his disposition, they cannot fool him. He is a scientist and a philosopher.”
Houdini’s new show, which began as a simple lecture with slides, soon grew into a bona fide magic performance, with Houdini exposing the various tricks spirit mediums used to dupe their marks. Before stunned audiences, Houdini demonstrated how agile mediums could use their feet or mouths to manipulate the seance table, musical instruments, and other objects in the room without letting go of the other participants’ hands; how easily said mediums could hide accomplices around the average parlour or drawing room, and how simple cold-reading tricks could be used to work out even one’s most personal details and intimate secrets. So effective were these performances that one reviewer declared:
“It is difficult to understand how a credulous disposition towards mediums can long survive such public exposures. Here one can see Houdini reproduce the classic phenomena of the megaphone that floats, the bells that ring and the ghostly hands that brush one’s face in full sight of the audience, who see how the tricks are done – but to the bewilderment of a blindfolded man who sits with him on an isolated platform. When one watches Houdini …we are prepared to accept any marvels of this kind that mediums with their elaborate intelligence service are reported to be able to accomplish.”
Even offstage, Houdini was relentless in his pursuit of the truth, directly investigating hundreds of mediums in a bid to reveal their methods and expose them as charlatans. Some frauds were more easily uncovered than others. In particular, Houdini noted a trend among mediums of communing with the spirits of famous historical figures while getting even the most basic details of these figures’ lives and personalities hilariously wrong – for example, having George Washington speak with a cockney accent or riddling Shakespeare’s messages with grammatical errors. In a pamphlet published in 1924, Houdini recounts an especially dubious case of this phenomenon:
“On the night that the “spirit of Abraham Lincoln” began to address us, my interest mounted high, for Lincoln was my hero of heroes. I had read and studied every Lincoln book that was available at the time. I knew every published detail of the Great Emancipator’s life. And I was vaguely conscious that night of some thing about the utterances of the “spirit” that did not ring quite true. So at last I asked:
“Mr Lincoln, what was the first thing you did after your mother was buried?” “I felt very bad,” replied the “spirit” glibly. “I went to my room, and I wouldn’t speak to any one for days.”
Now, that reply probably would have been correct in a majority of cases, but it was not correct with regard to Lincoln. For Lincoln’s first act when his father had buried his dead mother was to rush off to engage a clergyman to read a burial service over her grave – an act of respect which his father had neglected! And this was certainly not an incident which Lincoln was likely to forget – in the spirit world or elsewhere.”
Lincoln was an especially popular figure among mediums on account of his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, being an avid spiritualist who regularly held seances in the White House. As a result, in 1925 Houdini used simple double-exposure techniques to create a “spirit photograph” of himself convening with Lincoln, which he presented to the late President’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, in a bid to protect him from the predations of fraudulent mediums.
When Houdini could not immediately work out the nature of a medium’s fraud, he resorted to more ingenious tactics, such as secretly painting the medium’s props or even his own hair with ink and seeing whose hands ended up stained black. And when Houdini was unable to conduct investigations himself, he dispatched an army of private investigators to pose as clients and bait mediums with stories of non-existent life events and family members. The reports of these accomplices – one of whom, amusingly, used the pseudonym “Mr. F. Raud” – were integrated into Houdini’s shows, with Houdini arranging for both medium and investigator to be present in the audience. At one point in the performance, Houdini would order a spotlight aimed at a medium, whom he would confront with the bogus “readings” reported by one of his investigators. When the medium inevitably protested, Houdini would order the spotlight aimed at the investigator in question, who would proceed to confirm Houdini’s accusations. And so it would go until every medium in the audience had fled in humiliation. Then, with a dramatic flourish, Houdini would hold up ten $1000 New York State bonds and offer the entire $10,000 to anyone who could convincingly demonstrate genuine psychic powers. Unsurprisingly, there were no takers.
At first even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was forced to acknowledge the effectiveness of Houdini’s performances, admitting:
“Houdini’s campaign against mediums did temporary good so far as false mediums goes…the unmasking of false mediums is our urgent duty.”
However, Doyle remained steadfast in his beliefs, and between 1923 and 1924 toured the United States in parallel with Houdini delivering lectures on spiritualism. This caused considerable friction between the two friends, with Houdini growing particularly annoyed at Doyle’s belief that his own skills were the product of mystical powers:
“[Doyle] is one who firmly insists that my stage tricks are performed with the aid of spirits; that I am a psychic. Once he went so far as to ask if I was “the last word in religion and science in America.”
“Well, Sir Arthur,” I replied “not exactly that. But, if you were to build a packing-case large enough to contain me and all the American spiritualists and the scientists the uphold them, weight it with pig iron, tie us up in it and throw it into the sea, I’d be the only one that would come up. But it would be trickery that would release me,” I added.”
Houdini’s fame as medium-baiter supreme reached such heights that soon other institutions began joining in on the action. In 1924, Scientific American magazine offered a $2,500 prize to anyone who could convincingly demonstrate communication with the dead under the strictest of test conditions. Hundreds of mediums accepted the challenge, but all but one were swiftly debunked and dismissed. The only candidate who came close to winning the prize was 36-year-old medium Mina “Margery” Crandon, the wife of a prominent Boston surgeon whose talent for illusion and sleight-of-hand rivalled that of Houdini himself. Even worse, the contest’s chief organizer refused to allow Houdini to attend the controlled seances and was, according to paranormal investigator Joe Nickell, too easily swayed by Margery’s tricks:
“She was very attractive and … used her sexuality to flirt with men and disarm them. Houdini wasn’t fooled by her tricks. … [Still], she gave Houdini a run for his money.”
Fearful that the Scientific American committee would award Margery the prize over his objections, in January 1925 Houdini preemptively published a 40-page pamphlet titled Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by Boston Medium “Margery” and staged a dramatic live exposé at Boston’s Symphony Hall. But only when Margery refused any further tests did the committee finally decide to deny her the prize.
Disturbed by how close Margery had come to duping Scientific American, Houdini decided to take his fight all the way to the highest halls of power. In February 1926, The US Congress convened four days of hearings to debate Houdini’s proposed House Resolution 8989, which would ban the practice of fortune telling in the District of Columbia. What followed was a media circus as over 300 mediums, fortune tellers, and astrologers led by spiritualist minister Jane B. Coates and astrologer Marcia Champney descended on Washington D.C. to weigh in on the future of spiritualism in America.
The hearings began on February 26, with Houdini declaring in his opening statement that:
“This thing they call Spiritualism, wherein a medium intercommunicates with the dead, is a fraud from start to finish…[mediums are all] mental degenerates or deliberate cheats.”
Then, with his usual flair for showmanship, he held up an envelope and challenged anyone in the audience to correctly determine its contents. This display was met with bemusement by the committee members, who by and large believed Houdini was overreacting. This led to numerous amusing exchanges, such as when Representative Frank Reid of Illinois correctly determined one of the phrases in the envelope, prompting Houdini to retort. “That was a guess; you are no clairvoyant!” To this Reid simply replied “Oh yes I am,” eliciting chuckles from the audience.
The other committee members largely echoed this sentiment, with Ralph Gilbert of Kentucky stating:
“I believe in Santa Claus and I believe in fairies, in a way…and [Houdini] is taking the matter entirely too seriously.”
Indeed, both the committee and the spiritualist leaders argued that spiritualism was no different from any other creed in the diverse patchwork of American religion, and that Houdini’s proposed bill would infringe upon spiritualists’ First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion. But Houdini was unmoved, and when spiritualist leader Jane Coates stated:
“My religion goes back to Jesus Christ. Houdini does not know I am a Christian.”
…Houdini immediately clapped back with:
“Jesus was a Jew, and he did not charge $2 a visit.”
The official hearing transcript does not record whether Houdini then proceeded to drop his mic after delivering that sick burn.
Over the next four days the hearings became increasingly theatrical and chaotic, with Houdini, the spiritualists, and the committee members hurling insults across the room and even physically brawling with each other in the lobby. The spectre of Anti-Semitism also reared its ugly head, with one spiritualist testifying, in reference to Houdini and the bill’s sponsor, New York Representative Sol Bloom:
“Judas betrayed Christ. He was a Jew, and I want to say that this bill is being put through by two—well, you can use your opinion; I am not making an assertion.”
But despite his prodigious skills as a showman and orator, Houdini soon realized that he could never defeat the First Amendment argument. But the great magician still had one more trick up his sleeve. Prior to the hearings, Houdini had dispatched private investigator Rose Mackenberg to investigate dozens of DC mediums and their clients. Her findings were shocking: dozens of high-level politicians, including senators and even presidents Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge regularly sought the services of mediums, with the three presidents hosting numerous seances in the White House. In fact, “Madame” Marcia Champney, leading the spiritualist delegation, had been the spiritual advisor to president Harding’s wife Florence and had allegedly predicted her husband’s election and his unexpected death in office. To Houdini, these revelations spoke for themselves: spiritualism was hardly the harmless fun or respectable creed the committee members had made it out to be, but rather a serious threat to democracy. After all, how could the American people trust their elected representatives if they were under the sway of fraudulent, unscrupulous mediums?
Ultimately, Houdini’s theatrical arguments proved fruitless, and his bill did not pass. But legal reform was never really Houdini’s goal. Rather, by bringing the issue before Congress, Houdini hoped to expose the massive fraud of spiritualism to the American people – and in this he was successful. In the wake of the hearings, belief in spiritualism in the United States dropped precipitously, and the movement would never again see the popularity it enjoyed in the immediate postwar years.
But when it comes to Houdini, the spiritualists seem to have gotten the last laugh. During the Congressional hearings, Madame Marcia publicly prophesied that the magician would be dead before end of November. On October 22, 1926, Houdini was in his dressing room at the Princess Theatre in Montreal when he was approached by McGill University student Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead. Whitehead asked Houdini if it was true that punches to the stomach did not hurt him. Houdini replied that this was true, but before he could prepare himself Whitehead delivered a series of powerful punches to the magician’s stomach. The blows ruptured Houdini’s appendix, and he soon found himself in excruciating pain and running a fever of 40 degrees Celsius. Still, he refused to seek medical attention. The next day, however,
while performing in Detroit, Houdini found himself too ill to finish the show, and was rushed to Grace Hospital where he underwent two surgeries to remove his appendix. Unfortunately the infection proved too far advanced, and Harry Houdini passed away from acute peritonitis on October 31, 1926 – just as Madame Marcia had predicted.
Despite his public crusade against spiritualism, privately Harry Houdini remained open to the idea of an afterlife and communication with the dead. He simply did not manage to find compelling evidence of it in his own lifetime. As a final experiment, following his death Houdini’s wife Bess held regular seances on the anniversary of his death, hoping to hear word from her departed husband. But after ten years she finally gave up, declaring:
“Houdini did not come through. … I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me, or to anyone.”
Yet the tradition of Houdini seances persists to this day, with devotees gathering every Halloween night in the hopes of receiving a message from the Great Beyond. Knowing Houdini, he is probably rolling in his escape-proof grave.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- That Time an Oregon Free-Love Cult Launched the Largest Bioterror Attack in US History
- What Harry Houdini’s Real Name Was
- Dan Aykroyd’s Fascination with the Paranormal and How It Inspired Ghostbusters
- Harry Houdini on Trial
Expand for ReferencesWhite, April, The Famous Fight over the Turn-of-the-Century Trend of Spirit Photography, Atlas Obscura, October 29, 2021, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/houdini-conan-doyle-spirit-photography?utm_medium=atlas-page&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR3wKP_st1TdDci2XNQZh5pn9X0vF0g54mnE_pCbpFj_6SVrI6hsfMu6ZgU
Puglionesi, Alicia, In 1926, Houdini Spent 4 Days Shaming Congress for Being in Thrall to Fortune-Tellers, Atlas Obscura, October 11, 2016, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-1926-houdini-spent-4-days-shaming-congress-for-being-in-thrall-to-fortunetellers?utm_medium=atlas-page&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR06szQhBINHQkUNb0eEM2kNjgrgD9vhtdfi6lG2A0DQ_TlJSqaxDT96IWk
Greene, Bryan, For Harry Houdini, Seances and Spiritualism Were Just an Illusion, Smithsonian Magazine, October 28, 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-harry-houdini-seances-and-spiritualism-were-just-an-illusion-180978944/
Houdini, Harry, How I Unmask the Spirit Fakers, 1925, https://www.all-about-psychology.com/houdini.html
Margery Pamphlet, American Experience, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/houdini-margery-pamphlet/
Gardner, Lyn, Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle: a Friendship Split by Spiritualism, The Guardian, August 10, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/10/houdini-and-conan-doyle-impossible-edinburgh-festival
Houdini, Harry, Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by the Boston Medium “Margery,” 1924, https://archive.org/details/BostomMediumMargery/mode/2up
The Amazing Randi & Sugar, Bert, Houdini: His Life and Art, Grosset and Dunlap, New York, 1976
The post Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Crusade Against Spiritualism appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, Europe found itself gripped by witch mania. After centuries of denying the existence of witchcraft, Church leaders incredibly came to believe that misfortunes such as plagues and crop failures were causes not by God’s will but rather individuals acting in league with the Devil. The resulting hysteria, stoked by the political turmoil of the Protestant Reformation and European Wars of Religion, resulted in thousands of people – most of them women – being arrested, tortured, tried, and executed for witchcraft. In Britain alone, between 1560 and 1700 513 people were put on trial for witchcraft, with 112 being convicted and executed. These convictions were based on a series of Witchcraft Acts passed by Parliament, the first being introduced in 1542 under King Henry VIII and the last in 1604 by King James I, himself a noted demonologist and witch-hunting enthusiast. But by the end of the 17th Century the hysteria had mostly died down, with the last execution for witchcraft taking place in Devon in 1685 and the last conviction in Leicester in 1717. In 1735, Parliament passed the last of the Witchcraft Acts, which rather than making witchcraft itself a crime, made it unlawful to:
“…pretend to exercise or use any kind of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Inchantment [sic], or Conjuration, or undertake to tell Fortunes, or pretend, from his or her Skill or Knowledge in any occult or crafty Science, to discover where or in what manner any Goods or Chattels, supposed to have been stolen or lost, may be found…”
This Act effectively brought the era of witch hunting in Britain to a close. However, like many outdated pieces of legislation, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 remained on the books for more than 200 years, obscure and forgotten, until 1941, when, in the dark depths of the Second World War, it suddenly reemerged into the public consciousness. This is the strange tale of Helen Duncan, the last person in the UK to be jailed for witchcraft.
Victoria Helen McCrae was born on November 25, 1897 in Callander, Scotland to Archibald McFarlane, a roof slater, and Isabella Rattray. From an early age Helen proved to be a strange and difficult child, her habit of getting into fistfights earning her the nickname “Hellish Nell”. She also became known for falling into hysterical trances, uttering prophecies, and claiming to see and hear spirits, much to the dismay of her strict Presbyterian parents. At age 16, Helen became pregnant out of wedlock and was forced to leave her family home. She moved to Dundee, where she worked for a time at a jute mill. In 1914, following the outbreak of the Great War she applied for munitions work, but was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium to recover. Upon release she worked at a bleach factory and as an auxiliary at the Dundee Royal Infirmary, where in 1916 she met and married Henry Duncan, a cabinetmaker who had been invalided from the Front with rheumatic fever.
Life for the young couple was grim. Over the next 10 years Helen would become pregnant 12 times, from which only 6 children would survive. Henry soon became too ill to work, leaving Helen, racked with hypertension, diabetes, kidney trouble, and stomach pains, to provide for the family. But a potential solution to their problems soon emerged. Henry spent much of his time at home reading books on spiritualism, and eventually he convinced his wife to put her natural psychic abilities to the test. And so, in 1926, Helen Duncan set up shop as a spiritualist medium.
While individuals claiming the ability to speak to the dead have existed for all of human history, the modern spiritualist movement is a much more recent phenomenon, tracing its origins only as far back as 1848. In March of that year, two teenage sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox of Hydesville, New York State, claimed to be able to communicate with spirits via faint rapping sounds, heard in response to tapping or snapping their fingers. Connecting these rappings with letters of the alphabet, the Fox Sisters identified the spirit as belonging to one Charles B. Rosna, a travelling peddler who had been murdered by the house’s previous owner and hidden in the cellar. While a search of the cellar revealed no human remains, Margaret and Kate’s older sister, Leah, recognized the commercial potential of the girl’s abilities and became their manager, taking them on a nationwide tour financed by showman P.T. Barnum. Their act was a sensation, kickstarting a worldwide craze for psychic performances and seances. Famous mediums like Daniel Douglas Home [note: pronounced Hume] became wealthy superstars, while private seances became all the rage in parlours around the world. While in 1888 the Fox Sisters admitted that their abilities were a fraud – they had produced the rappings themselves by clicking their toe joints – it was already too late. Spiritualism had taken the world by storm, gaining such illustrious adherents as Emperor Napoleon III, H.G. Wells, T.E. Lawrence, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Two major developments helped spur the worldwide fascination with Spiritualism, the first, ironically, being recent, seemingly miraculous developments in science and technologies. If mankind could peer into the human body with x-rays or communicate long distances via telephone or radio, the spiritualists reasoned, then why not communicate with the spirit world? The other major catalyst was the Great War and the subsequent Spanish Influenza pandemic, which combined killed more than 100 million people worldwide. Spiritualism, with its promise of direct, tangible communication with deceased loved ones, offered greater comfort to millions of the bereaved than the comparatively vague doctrines of traditional religion. The practice became especially popular amongst military personnel, to the degree that in 1941 the Royal Navy recognized spiritualism as a legitimate creed and allowed sailors to perform seances while at sea. Thus, when Helen Duncan began practicing in 1926, she found a ready audience.
Duncan’s seances were typical of the movement. Seated in a darkened room, tied to a chair or enclosed in a wooden cabinet, she would slip into a trance and manifest all manner of ghostly apparitions before her stunned onlookers, including rappings, disembodied voices, music, or even full-fledged figures of people – including her recurring spirit helpers, a grown man named Albert and a little girl named Peggy. Duncan’s particular speciality was the production of ectoplasm, a mysterious white substance said to be made of psychic energy that would emanate from the mouth, nose, or ears of certain mediums, sometimes forming itself into faces or other shapes. Charging 25 Pounds a seat – a considerable sum in those days – Helen and Henry quickly found their fortunes reversed, and were soon able to afford a house in a fashionable suburb of Edinburgh.
But this early success was not to last, for Duncan soon came under the scrutiny of debunkers and the local authorities. In 1928 photographer Harvey Metcalfe took photos at one of her seances which revealed the “ectoplasm” to be nothing but cheesecloth and newspaper, while in 1931 she came to the attention of Harry Price of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, who set out to expose her as a fraud. While the NLPR had been founded to promote Spiritualism and its members adhered to its core tenets, they believed that the practice had been overrun with quacks and fraudsters and sought to separate the genuine mediums from the false. On a number of occasions Price attended Duncan’s seances to collect samples of ectoplasm, which was invariably found to consist of cheesecloth, wood pulp, or egg whites. On another occasion Price convinced her to swallow blue dye to rule out that she was simply regurgitating her ectoplasm. According to some reports she subsequently failed to produce any ectoplasm, while according to others it came out white as before. But when Price tried to X-ray Duncan’s body to discover where she was hiding her emanations, she erupted into hysterics and had to be restrained by her husband. In his final report, Price concluded that Duncan was definitely a fraud, citing the testimony of a Miss Mary McGinlay, who had served as her maid in London:
“After a sance [sic], Mrs Duncan would get me to wash out a length of muslin. It had a rotten smell. She would give it to me just as she had used it and then it would be much stained and smelly.”
Despite this, demand for Duncan’s services continued to grow, though this increasing popularity brought with it even greater scrutiny. During a seance in Edinburgh on January 6, 1933, Duncan caused an apparition of Peggy, her spirit helper, to appear. Suddenly, a sitter named Esther Maule leapt up, grabbed the figure, and turned on the lights, revealing the apparition to be nothing more than a doll sewn from a stockinette vest. The police were called, and on May 11 Duncan was convicted of fraudulent mediumship by the Edinburgh Sheriff Court and fined 10 Pounds. But this would not be Helen Duncan’s last run-in with the law, as her curious profession would soon run afoul of wartime secrecy and paranoia.
During a seance in Portsmouth in late November 1941, Duncan manifested the figure of a young sailor, who claimed to have died aboard the battleship HMS Barham when she was sunk in the Mediterranean. This pronouncement stunned two naval officers in attendance, for HMS Barham had indeed been sunk just days before on November 25, torpedoed by German submarine U-331 with the loss of 861 men. But fearing that the news would damage civilian morale, the Admiralty had decided to only inform the crew’s immediate next of kin, and would not announce the sinking to the public until two months later. The two officers reported what they had seen, and an investigation was launched to determine how this middle-aged Scottish medium had come by such classified military information.
Over the next year Military Intelligence kept a close eye on Helen Duncan. Then, on January 19, 1944 police raided one of her seances in Portsmouth, with officers attempting to prevent ectoplasm issuing from her mouth before placing her and three attendees under arrest. Initially Duncan was charged under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, section IV of which states:
“And be it further enacted, That every Person committing any of the Offences herein-before mentioned, after having been convicted as an idle and disorderly Person; every Person pretending or professing to tell Fortunes, or using any subtle Craft, Mean, or Device, by Palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose on any of His Majesty’s Subjects.”
However, the authorities soon discovered the obscure 1735 Witchcraft act, and Duncan was duly charged with two counts of conspiracy to contravene the Act, two counts of obtaining money under false pretences, and 3 counts of public mischief. Also charged were Ernest and Elizabeth Homer, who ran the Portsmouth Psychic Centre, and Frances Brown, Duncan’s agent who arranged and managed her clients. The seven-day trial at London’s Old Bailey courthouse caused a minor media sensation, with several prominent spiritualist experts being called as witnesses for the defence. But in the end the Prosecution had little trouble convincing the jury of its case, which held that:
“…the whole performance was an elaborate pretence, a fraudulent performance, a mere imposition on human credulity…[and] a pretence that so-called materialisations, which were in fact produced by means of fraudulent devices and apparatus, were of a different nature altogether.”
Arthur Charles West, the Portsmouth Chief of Police, was even harsher in his evaluation:
“This is a case where not only has she attempted and succeeded in deluding confirmed believers in Spiritualism, but she has tricked, defrauded and preyed upon the minds of a certain credulous section of the public who have gone to these meetings in search of comfort of mind in their sorrow and grief. I can only describe this woman as an unmitigated humbug who can only be regarded as a pest to a certain section of society.”
When the jury returned with a guilty verdict on the first count, the judge dismissed them without hearing verdicts on the six others. Duncan was sentenced to 9 months and Frances Brown to four months in prison, while the Homers were Bound Over – a practice equivalent to being released on bail. Strangely, Duncan was denied the customary right to appeal to the House of Lords, leading her to cry out in court: “I have done nothing! Is there a God?”
The absurdity of the conviction was not lost on Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who following the trial wrote following memo to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison:
“Let me have a report on why the Witchcraft Act, 1735, was used in a modern Court of Justice. What was the cost of this trial to the State, observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded London, for a fortnight, and the Recorder kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery, to the detriment of necessary work in the Courts?”
Helen Duncan served her nine month sentence in London’s Holloway Prison, where fellow prisoners and staff reportedly lined up for seances. She was released on September 22, 1945, and despite promising the court to stop practicing spiritualism, soon resumed her old practice. In November 1956 police raided a seance in Nottingham and arrested her for fraud. While she was released soon after, five weeks later on December 6, 1956, Helen Duncan passed away at the age of 59.
To this day, controversy surrounds the reason for the courts’ decision to arrest and try Helen Duncan under the 1735 Act. What is known is that none of the authorities involved actually believed that Duncan had psychic powers. According to historian Graeme Donald, even her supposedly inexplicable knowledge of HMS Barham’s sinking was not as mysterious as it seems:
“The loss of HMS Barham… was indeed kept quiet for a while, but letters of condolence were sent out to families of the 861 dead, asking them to keep the secret until the official announcement. So, allowing for perhaps 10 people in each family, there were about 9,000 people who knew of the sinking; if each of them told only one other person, there were 20,000 people in the country aware of the sinking, and so on – hardly a closely guarded secret. In short, news of the sinking spread like wildfire; Duncan simply picked up the gossip and decided to turn it into profit.”
Furthermore, upon her arrest in 1944 Duncan was found to have in her possession a naval hat band bearing the name of HMS Barham. However, after 1939 Royal Navy hat bands bore only the letters “HMS” and not the name of the ship, further indicating that Duncan had heard gossip of the sinking around Portsmouth and prepared props for her seance beforehand.
The likeliest motivation for Duncan’s arrest was the secrecy surrounding the impending D-Day landings, with military authorities fearing that if Duncan overheard any classified information she could reveal it in one of her seances. The 1735 Witchcraft Act was therefore simply the most expedient means of locking her up until after the landings had taken place. Consequently, there have been calls in recent years for Duncan’s conviction to be overturned, with the Parliament of Scotland receiving a 200-signature petition in February 2008 calling for her to be granted a full pardon. While the petition was eventually rejected, Duncan’s advocates continued to call for justice.
While Helen Duncan was the last person to be imprisoned under the Act, she was not the last to be convicted under it. That dubious honour belongs to Jane Yorke, who was arrested on the10th of July 1944 after claiming to have contacted the non-existent dead brother of an undercover police officer. Her prosecution was delayed until the verdict of Helen Duncan’s trial was heard, whereupon she was convicted but only Bound Over for three years on account of her advanced age of 72. Seven years later, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was finally overturned by the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951. For the first time in more than 400 years, witchcraft was no longer a crime in the United Kingdom. In 1954, Pagan Witchcraft, better known as Wicca, was officially recognized as a religion by Parliament.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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- witch-broomstick
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Expand for ReferencesJohnson, Ben, Helen Duncan, Scotland’s Last Witch, Historic UK, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Helen-Duncan-Scotlands-last-witch/
Sugar, Bert & The Amazing Randi, Houdini: His Life and Art, Grosset and Dunlap 1976
Witchcraft Act 1735, https://engole.info/witchcraft-act-of-1735-6/
Witchcraft, UK Parliament, https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/religion/overview/witchcraft/
An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1824/83/pdfs/ukpga_18240083_en.pdf
Hellish Nell: Witch-hunt That Led to Capture of Fake Medium, The Scotsman, February 24, 2009, https://www.scotsman.com/news/hellish-nell-witch-hunt-led-capture-fake-medium-2444143
McSmith, Andy, Toil and Trouble: the Last Witch? The Independent, February 29, 2008, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/toil-and-trouble-the-last-witch-789353.html
Mantel, Hilary, Unhappy Medium, The Guardian, May 3, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/may/03/londonreviewofbooks
MacPherson, Hamish, The Truth About the UK’s Last Witch Helen Duncan, The National, May 8, 2018, https://www.thenational.scot/news/16209915.truth-uks-last-witch-helen-duncan/
The post The Curious Case of the Last Witch in Britain appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The age of the giant rigid airship or Zeppelin was tragically brief, lasting barely forty years from the first Zeppelin flights in 1900 to the scrapping of the last surviving such airship, the Graf Zeppelin II, in 1940. When we think of the end of giant airships, we tend to picture the Hindenburg, which met its end in fiery end outside Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937. But while the Hindenburg was one of the final nails in the coffin for the dream of commercial lighter-than-air flight, the death of the giant airship had begun long before, with a long string of increasingly deadly crashes stretching all the way back to the turn of the century And among the worst was a now largely forgotten 1930 disaster that killed more people than the Hindenburg and ended the dream of airship travel in the British Empire. This is the story of the tragic loss of His Majesty’s Airship R-101.
The early leader in rigid airship technology was Germany, with Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a former Army officer, making his first experimental flights in 1900. Zeppelin’s designs were the first to combine innovations such as a rigid aluminium frame, multiple hydrogen-filled gas cells, air filled ballonets for pressure control, and a water ballast system for altitude control into a single, workable package, and his sleek cigar-shaped creations soon became a common sight in the skies over southern Germany. Despite some early mishaps, within a decade Zeppelin had perfected the rigid airship into a dependable form of transport, and in 1910 he formed the world’s first airline, DELAG. The appeal of the Zeppelin as a form of commercial transport was obvious: compared to the small and primitive aircraft of the time, airships could carry a larger number of passengers longer distances in opulence and comfort approaching that of an ocean liner, with relatively little turbulence or risk of motion sickness. But there was a hitch: being lighter than air, Zeppelins were extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of wind and weather. Thus, unlike a modern airline DELAG never kept a regular schedule, its Zeppelins only flying when the weather permitted. Despite this the airline proved extremely popular with Germany’s elite, who gladly paid exorbitant fares for two-hour aerial excursions over the countryside.
To Zeppelin, however, DELAG was little more than a sideshow, for as a former Army officer he saw the airship primarily as a weapon of war. With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the German military, who had for years rejected Zeppelin’s proposals, finally expressed interest in airships and commandeered DELAG’s Zeppelins for military use. Particularly enthusiastic was the Imperial Navy, who on May 31, 1915 used Zeppelins to carry out the first aerial bombing raid on London. Such raids would continue throughout the war, and while they were a massive propaganda coup for the Germans and brought the horrors of war home to ordinary Britons, they caused relatively minor damage. And improved defences like antiaircraft guns and fighter aircraft firing incendiary bullets soon made Zeppelin raids increasingly costly, and resulted in most of Imperial Germany’s airships – and their crews – going down in flames.
After the war, with Germany’s economy in tatters and Zeppelin production banned by the Treaty of Versailles, the lead in airship development passed to the British. In July 1919, the British airship R.34 made history by making the first east-west crossing of the Atlantic from East Fortune, Scotland to Long Island, New York, a journey in 108 hours. Four days later it completed the return journey, making the first two-way aerial crossing of the Atlantic. While this feat demonstrated the viability of long-distance airship travel, the struggling British economy could not support further development and the airship program was shut down in 1921. The initiative passed once again to the German Zeppelin Company, who after Versailles Treaty restrictions were relaxed in 1923 produced a number of increasingly massive airships for foreign customers, including the USS Shenandoah for the U.S. Navy. Then, in 1928, the company produced what would become the only truly successful passenger airship: the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin. The Graf Zeppelin was unlike anything the world had ever seen, measuring a whopping 236 metres long and 30 metres tall and featuring accommodations for 24 passengers which rivalled most ocean liners for comfort and opulence. In 1929, in an event bankrolled by American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the Graf Zeppelin became the first airship to circumnavigate the globe, flying from Lakehurst, New Jersey to Friedrichshafen in Germany, then across the steppes of Siberia to Tokyo, then across the Pacific Ocean to Los Angeles, and finally cross-country back to Lakehurst, a total journey of 33,234 kilometres that took 21 days, 5 hours, and 31 minutes.
Meanwhile in Britain, the accomplishments of the Zeppelin company had reignited interest in airship travel. In 1924, after two years of lobbying, inventor and parliamentarian Sir Charles Burney introduced the Imperial Airship Scheme, an ambitious plan to connect Britain’s far-flung empire with a fleet of long-range airships. Unfortunately, Burney’s campaign coincided with the election of the Labour government of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who slashed Burney’s proposed fleet of 6 airships to only two and organized a bizarre contest. One airship, the R.100, would be built by private enterprise, while the other, the R.101, would be built by a Government concern. This competition, the Government hoped, would demonstrate the superiority of public enterprise, and lead to the R.100 being dubbed the “capitalist ship” and the R.101 the “socialist ship.” Of the scheme, R.100 assistant engineer Nevil Shute – later to become famous as the author of novels like On the Beach and A Town Called Alice – wrote:
“The controversy of capitalism versus state enterprise has been argued, tested and fought out in many ways in many countries, but surely the airship venture in England stands as the most curious determination of this venture.”
Air Ministry specifications called for airships of not less than 140,000 cubic metres in volume, with a useful lifting capacity of 60 tons, accommodations for 100 passengers, fuel tankage for 57 hours’ flight, and a maximum speed of 110 km/hr. In case of war, the ships would also be expected to carry up to 100 fully-equipped troops or five fighter aircraft carried in onboard hangars.
R.100 was designed and built by the private engineering firm Vickers-Armstrong under the direction of engineer Barnes Wallis, later famous for designing the “bouncing bomb” used in the “Dambusters” raid during WWII. While ambitious in scale at 216 metres long – the second-largest airship at the time after Graf Zeppelin – in design the R.100 was relatively conservative, using proven technologies and construction techniques. This resulted in a vehicle that was not only sturdy, structurally efficient, and pleasant to fly, but which even exceeded its maximum design speed by nearly 20 km/hr. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. The R.100’s construction hangar in Howden was infested with vermin and was so cold and humid that workers often arrived in the morning to find the airship’s aluminium frame covered in ice. A labour shortage even forced Vickers Armstrong to throw together a workforce composed mainly of hastily-trained local farmers. But after four years of endless delays, R.100 finally took to the skies for the first time on December 16, 1929, flying to the Royal Airship Works hangar in Cardington for preliminary testing. After a lengthy shakedown period in which numerous adjustments were made to the airship’s engines and fabric covering, the R.100 was declared fit for its first international flight. The initial plan had been to fly to India, but as the R.100 was fuelled with gasoline – considered too volatile for use in hotter climates – the destination was changed to Canada. On July 29, 1930, the R.100 left Cardington with 44 passengers and crews aboard and headed out over the Atlantic, reaching St. Hubert outside Montreal after 79 hours. The R.100 was a smash hit, staying in Canada for nearly two weeks and drawing massive crowds wherever it went. Finally, on August 13, the giant airship departed Montreal and returned to Cardington, completing the return journey in only 57 hours. The trip was a triumph for Vickers-Armstrong, who now had a winning entry for Sir Charles Burney’s Imperial Airship Scheme.
The Government-built R.101, however, was a different matter entirely. From the beginning the Air Ministry was determined to push the limits of airship design and produce the safest, most technologically advanced airship ever built. This, however, lead to a number of questionable design decisions. For instance, while most airships were built of lightweight aluminium alloy, R.101’s designers opted instead for stainless steel and a structural design that significantly reduced the volume of the lifting gas cells. Heavier diesel engines were also chosen over gasoline for greater safety in warm climates, and electric servomotors over simpler cable-actuated controls. This resulted in an airship so overweight that its useful lifting capacity was a mere 35 tons. In warmer climates like India this would drop to 24 tons due to reduced air density. And the problems didn’t end there. In an attempt to increase lift, the R.101’s designers loosened the nets holding the gas cells in place, causing them to chafe against the airship’s structure and leak gas. The cells also had a tendency to surge backwards and forwards, making the airship extremely unstable, while the new gas valves were so sensitive that they constantly vented precious hydrogen. Finally, instead of covering the entire structure with fabric and shrinking it tight with fabric dope as was common practice, the R.101’s designers decided to use smaller pre-doped panels laced into place, most of which rotted and tore before the airship ever left its hangar. In flight tests R.101 was sluggish and difficult to control, with a tendency to suddenly dive and climb. Indeed, about the only redeeming features of the airship were its palatial passenger quarters, which featured two decks of cabins, a gold-trimmed dining salon complete with potted palms, a promenade deck with picture windows, and even an asbestos-lined smoking room.
By the summer of 1930 it was clear that the R.101 was nowhere near ready to make its planned inaugural flight to Karachi in British India. But the successful Canadian flight of the R.100 forced the Government’s hand, for to delay the flight any further would be to admit defeat. Particularly insistent that the flight proceed on schedule was Lord Thomson of Cardington, the Secretary of State for Air. Thomson, who had designs on becoming Viceroy of India, believed that arriving triumphantly in the subcontinent aboard R.101 would greatly increase his chances of promotion, and scheduled the flight for September 1930 to coincide with the Imperial Conference in London.
But it was clear to even the most impatient Government official that the R.101 would never make it to India without extensive modifications. So on June 29, 1930, R.101 re-entered its shed at Cardington to be cut in half, lengthened, and fitted with an additional gas cell. It emerged on October 1 with an improved lifting capacity of 49 tons and total length of 236 metres – a metre longer than the Graf Zeppelin. In total, the British Government’s flagship Zeppelin had absorbed some 717,000 pounds of public funds, compared to only 500,000 for the R.100.
While some in Government like Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation, objected to Lord Thomson’s haste, the die was already cast. The R.101 was given a temporary certificate of airworthiness on the condition that certain tests be conducted en route to India, and the next three days were spent feverishly preparing the giant airship for its maiden voyage. Apparently ignorant of the R.101’s weight problems, the Government proceeded to load the ship up with cases of champagne, beer, and silverware for state dining and unroll a heavy blue carpet down the main corridor and passenger lounge. And while each crew member’s baggage allowance was capped at 10 pounds, Lord Thomson’s weighed in at nearly a ton. Yet despite this and the R.101’s long history of handling problems, Thomson remained supremely confident, declaring that the mighty airship was “as safe as a house.” Nonetheless, he prudently chose to purchase extra insurance for himself and his valet.
Finally, on the evening of October 4, 1930, R.101 prepared to depart Cardington with 54 people aboard – 42 crew and 12 passengers including Lord Thomson, Sir Sefton Brancker, and Reginald Colmore, the Director of Airship Development. The weather was blustery, with winds gusting up to 60 km/hr, and clouds prematurely darkened the horizon. Under any other circumstances the flight would have been postponed, but Lord Thomson was determined the flight should depart on schedule. At 6:36 PM the R.101 detached from its mooring mast, but instead of rising the giant airship began to rapidly sink to the ground. Nearly two tons of water ballast had to be jettisoned before the ship could be levelled. It was a foreboding taste of things to come.
From Cardington the R.101 set a course for the southeast coast and the English Channel, struggling against a 40 km/hr headwind. The crew found the ship sluggish and difficult to control, often dipping as close as 150 metres to the ground. A resident of the town of Hitchin north of London heard the drone of the approaching airship and ran outside to witness an alarming sight:
“We rushed out – and there was the R101 aiming straight for the house. She was so low it didn’t seem as if she could miss it. We could see the people dining, and the electric bulbs in the ceiling. She seemed to be going very slowly. As the green and red tail lights move away up the drive, horror descended on us all.”
At 8:21 the R.101 reached the coast and the radio operator signalled back to base:
“Over London. All well. Course now set for Paris.”
Despite encountering headwinds of up to 80 km/hr, the R.101 still did not turn back. And while airships typically cruised at a height three times their length, the R.101’s altitude over the channel averaged barely 300 metres. Furthermore, heavy turbulence caused the gas valves to continuously pop open, venting hydrogen and forcing the crew to dump ever more ballast to keep the ship airborne.
At 11:36 the R.101 crossed the French coast at Pointe de St. Quentin near the mouth of the Somme River. Shortly thereafter, the radio operator sent another message back home:
“After an excellent supper our distinguished passengers smoked a final cigar, and having sighted the French coast, have now gone to bed to rest after the excitement of their leave taking. All essential services are functioning satisfactorily. The crew have settled down to watch keeping routine.”
The ship was quiet now as she traversed the final 100km to Paris. At 2AM the watch changed as per usual, with Second Officer Maurice Steff relieving the ship’s Captain, Flight Lieutenant Carmichael Irwin, as Officer of the Watch. Four minutes later, however, the R.101 suddenly pitched forward and entered a steep dive. In the smoking lounge, foreman engineer Harry Leech, who was smoking a cigar before retiring to bed, was thrown against the wall along with all the lounge’s lightweight balsa wood furniture. The R.101 fell nearly 300 metres before Chief Coxswain George Hunt managed to level her. Realizing that a crash was inevitable, Flight Lieutenant Irwin ordered slow on the engine telegraph, ordered Rigger Samuel Church forward to manually release the water ballast, and sent Coxswain Hunt to wake the Captain. At 2:09 AM, as Hunt ran down the corridor yelling “we’re down lads!”, the R.101 struck the ground at a speed of 8 km/hr near the edge of a forest called the Bois de Coutumes, 50km northwest of Paris. The first person to see the airship go down was a rabbit trapper named Alfred Rabouille, who later described what happened next:
“There was at once a tremendous explosion that knocked me down. Soon flames rose into the sky to a great height. Everything was enveloped by them. I saw human figures running about like madmen in the wreck. Then I lost my head and an away into the woods.”
In the starboard aft engine car, engineer Joe Binks had just relieved engineer Arthur Bell when the R.101 struck the ground. The pair looked on in horror as the envelope burst into flames, the skeletal steel frame glowing white-hot in the heat. A moment later, a ballast tank burst above them, soaking them in water, and the pair took the opportunity to escape the wreckage. Scrambling with their backs to the flames, they gasped for air as the flames consumed all the oxygen around them. They soon came across another survivor: engineer Harry Leech, who had clawed his way out of the smoking lounge and fallen into a tree. Once safely on the ground Leech returned to the wreck to try and rescue more passengers, but it was already too late. Of the R.101’s 54 passengers and crew, only five others escaped the flames: engineers Victor Savory and Arthur Cook, Riggers Samuel Church and Walker Radcliffe, and wireless operator Arthur Disley. Church and Radcliffe later died of their injuries, bringing the total dead to 48 – 8 more than in the more famous Hindenburg disaster, where by the way in the Hindenburg’s case, over half the passengers survived.
By morning little remained of the R.101 but a charred skeleton at the edge of the wood. The bodies of the crew and passengers, most burned beyond recognition, were laid out under bedsheets, while the survivors were placed in the care of nuns at a nearby hospital. The disaster shocked the world, and a day of mourning was observed throughout France and her colonies. When the bodies were carried to the railway station for transport to Britain, 100,000 people and battalions of French infantry and cavalry escorted the coffins. In London, half a million people watched the funeral procession, which stretched for two miles and took an entire hour to pass. The bodies were buried in a common grave at Cardington and a marble memorial erected on the site.
A board of inquiry was convened, and to nobody’s surprise much of the blame for the disaster was placed on the Government’s excessive haste and corner-cutting, the board concluding:
“It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the R101 would not have started for India on the evening of October 4th if it had not been that reasons of public policy were considered as making it highly desirable for her to do so if she could.”
No charges were ever laid, as all those responsible – including Lord Thomson – had perished in the disaster. The actual cause of the crash itself, however, has never been determined, the leading theory positing that a gust of wind tore away a large section of the R.101’s fabric covering, causing its forward gas cell to suddenly lose a large volume of hydrogen. Nor is it known what caused the R.101 to catch fire, for many airships had crashed under similar circumstances without exploding. Here again theories abound, including that a severed electrical cable created sparks, that a gas cell rubbing against the structure generated static electricity, or that ballast water spilled onto calcium signal flares stored in the control car. But whatever the cause, the disaster soured British opinion towards giant airships, with newspaper headlines calling for the Government to “Ban the Gas Bags!” The Committee on National Expenditure recommended that the Imperial Airship Scheme be scrapped, and in November 1931 the R.100, despite its excellent flight record, was broken up and sold as scrap for barely 600 pounds.
But while crash of the R.101 was the worst aviation disaster in British history up until that point, it was neither the first nor the worst airship disaster. On December 21, 1923, the French military airship Dixmunde, a former German Zeppelin confiscated as war reparations, exploded in a thunderstorm off the coast of Sicily, killing 52 of its crew. A year earlier on February 21, 1922, the Italian-built U.S. Navy airship Roma crashed into power lines near Norfolk, Virginia and exploded, killing 34. This disaster convinced the Navy to fill all its subsequent airships with safer Helium, on whose production the U.S. Government held a virtual monopoly. But even this could not save the airships from their traditional enemy: the weather. On September 3, 1925, the USS Shenandoah was on a goodwill tour of the Midwest when it ran into a squall line near Caldwell, Ohio and was torn apart, killing 14 of its 43 crew.
In 1929, believing it could outdo the venerable Zeppelin company, the U.S. Navy began construction on two Akron-class airships, the largest Helium-filled dirigibles ever built. Measuring 239 metres long, the Akron class ships were designed to perform forward aerial reconnaissance for the fleet and serve as flying aircraft carriers, carrying a complement of Curtiss F9C Sparrowhawk fighters which could be launched and recovered using a retractable trapeze. On April 4, 1933, the U.S.S. Akron, the lead ship in her class, was conducting an exercise off the coast of New Jersey when she encountered a storm and was thrown into the sea. The airframe quickly broke up and sank in the stormy waters, carrying 73 of her 76 crew to their deaths. It was the single worst airship disaster in history. Two years later on February 12, 1935, her sister ship, the U.S.S. Macon, ran into a storm off Point Sur, California and crashed. While lessons learned from the Akron crash led to all but 2 of her crew being rescued, the Macon was also swallowed up by the waves, bringing the era of American airships to an end.
The decommissioning of the U.S. Navy’s last remaining airship, the U.S.S. Los Angeles, left only one giant airship operating in the world: the German Hindenburg…and, well, we all know how that ended. No longer able to be used for passenger flights, the Hindenburg’s sister ship, Graf Zeppelin II, was acquired by the German Air Ministry and used to probe British radar defences before finally being broken up in April 1940 so its aluminium could be used to build other aircraft. The age of the rigid airship was over.
During their brief heyday, airships seemed to many like the way of the future, promising a more elegant form of air travel with all the grace and comfort of a luxury ocean liner. But the stately giants of the air never lived up to that promise, proving more troublesome and deadly to operate than their champions dared admit. After barely 40 years they were gone from the skies, for by then it clear that the future of aviation belonged not to the airship, but to the aeroplane.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesBotting, Douglas, The Giant Airships, The Epic of Flight, Time Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1981
The Imperial Airship Scheme, Airship Heritage Trust, https://www.airshipsonline.com/airships/r101/index.html
R.101 Crew and Passenger List, Airship Heritage Trust, https://www.airshipsonline.com/airships/r101/R101%20Passenger%20%20Crew%20List.htm
Crash of the British Airship R-101, https://welweb.org/ThenandNow/R-101-2.html
The post The Largely Forgotten Airship Disaster That Helped Kill These Cruise Ships of the Sky appeared first on Today I Found Out.
For the residents of San Francisco, October 11, 1950 started out like any other day, with thick banks of autumn fog rolling in from the bay and across the city. By the afternoon, however, it became clear that something was seriously wrong. On that day alone, eleven patients were admitted to Stanford Hospital with pneumonia, fever, and serious urinary tract infections. One of them, a 75-year-old retired pipe fitter named Edward J. Nevin, died three weeks later. Tests revealed the culprit to be Serratia marcescens, a bacterium so uncommon that not a single case of infection had been recorded in the entire history of San Fransisco. So baffled were the hospital’s doctors by this unusual cluster of infections that they reported the incident in a medical journal, though when no new cases appeared they dismissed it as a fluke. But unknown to the doctors and the residents of San Fransisco, the thick fogs that crept over the city that autumn carried a secret passenger: trillions of bacteria sprayed from a Navy ship sailing just offshore. Code-named Sea Spray, this operation was part of a top-secret Cold War project to test the city’s vulnerability to a potential Soviet biowarfare attack. But San Fransisco was far from alone; between 1949 and 1969, the U.S. Military deliberately exposed dozens of American cities and millions of ordinary citizens to potentially harmful bacteria and chemicals, all in the name of national security. This is the shocking story of one of the largest programmes of human experimentation in American history.
Biological warfare has long been a part of human conflict, from the medieval practice of catapulting infected corpses and rats into besieged cities to spread disease to the infamous use of smallpox-infected blankets during the 18th Century French and Indian War. But it was not until the late 19th Century, when scientists like Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur discovered the microorganisms that cause disease and how to cultivate them that the development of dedicated, effective biological weapons began in earnest. By the time of the First World War, Imperial Germany had built an extensive bioweapons programme, perfecting strains Anthrax and Glanders with which it planned to infect its enemies’ livestock and military draft animals. However, none of these weapons were ever deployed before the war ended. But the horrifying effects of the chemical weapons that had been used during the war – such as phosgene and mustard gas – left such an impression on world leaders that in 1925, 146 countries came together to draft the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use of Asphyxiating, Poisonous, and Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare. The treaty was signed by 38 nations including France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States, though the latter two would not ratify it until the 1970s.
Over the next two decades, the majority of the Geneva Protocol’s signatories avoided developing biological weapons – with one major exception. In 1936, the Imperial Japanese Army established a biowarfare research centre outside the Chinese city of Harbin, in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Run by General Shiro Ishii, the facility, known as Unit 731, would go on to commit some of the most horrific atrocities in modern history. In experiments that make the work of Nazi scientists like Dr. Josef Mengele look like the pinnacle of medical ethics, researchers at Unit 731 used local Chinese citizens as human guinea pigs, exposing them to deadly pathogens like Anthrax and Bubonic Plague before dissecting them alive without anaesthetic to study the effects of these diseases. Japanese aircraft also dropped bombs loaded with anthrax, plague, cholera, salmonella, and other agents on 11 Chinese cities, leading to tens of thousands of deaths.
While such horrors might seem like a unique product of Imperial Japan’s particular brand of extreme militarism, it was not long before the western powers, too, succumbed to the dark allure of biological warfare. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, the United Kingdom set up its own biowarfare program based at Porton Down in Wiltshire and Toronto in Canada, with research focusing on the weaponization of tularaemia, psittacosis, brucellosis, Q fever, and Anthrax – and for more on this, please check out our previous video Grosse Île – Canada’s Anthrax Island.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, also caused the United States to reverse its stance on biowarfare. In early 1942, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson expressed concern to President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarding America’s vulnerability to biological attack. In response to this and growing pressure from the British, in November 1942 Roosevelt approved the creation of an American bioweapons program, overseen by the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service and centred at Fort Detrick, Maryland. By 1945, the US biowarfare program had succeeded in producing several tons of weaponized pathogens including anthrax and smallpox, though none were ever used in combat. American wartime policy dictated that such weapons were only to be used in retaliation or as a deterrent against enemy biological attacks, and in this the program was highly successful; after the war, captured documents revealed that fear of American retaliation had convinced Nazi Germany to abandon its own biowarfare program.
The dawn of the Cold War brought a new sense of urgency to the U.S. bioweapons program, as intelligence obtained by the CIA revealed the existence of a vast Soviet biological warfare research program based in the city of Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains. Desperate to gain any possible advantage over the Soviets, the US Government went so far as to pardon the scientists of Japan’s Unit 731 in exchange for their data and expertise. Yet despite the Japanese’s extensive real-world experience in conducting biological warfare, many questions remained: which pathogens would cause the most damage? What was the most effective means of dispersal? How would pathogens spread in cities compared to the countryside? Which Soviet and American cities were most vulnerable to biological attack, and how could the latter be protected? Three potential methods were evaluated for answering these questions: first, small-scale testing using model cities in wind tunnels; second, full-scale testing using live pathogens in simulated cities; and third, full-scale testing using simulated pathogens in real cities. While wind tunnel tests by the British had yielded some useful results, the first two methods were quickly rejected – the first due to its technical limitations and the second due to the exorbitant cost of simulating an entire city. That left method #3: releasing simulated pathogens on real cities. The search thus began for American cities that could reasonably approximate Soviet population centres.
This proved more challenging than anticipated, for most regions which matched Russian cities in temperature and precipitation did not match them geographically – and vice-versa. In the end, however, eight cities were found to have the desired combination of climate, geography, and architecture: Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Omaha, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Winnipeg in Canada – with Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Winnipeg being identified as particularly suitable. Cities in California and Florida were also selected for tests involving coastal areas. To simulate biowarfare agents, researchers chose four different kinds of bacteria: Serratia marcescens, Bacillus globigii, Bacillus subtilis, and Aspergillus fumigatus. Chosen for their similarity to real biowarfare agents like anthrax and tularaemia, these bacteria were also readily found in nature and easy to grow – indeed, Serratia marcescens is responsible for the pink film often found growing in bathtubs and toilets. Chemical simulants were also used, including zinc cadmium sulphide, a powder whose small particle size and fluorescent glow made it ideal for tracking the airborne dispersal of infectious agents. At the time, all these simulants were considered harmless to humans. Despite this, for reasons of security and obtaining the most accurate results possible, the residents of the targeted cities would not be informed that the tests were taking place. Thus began one of the most ethically fraught chapters in the history of American military research.
The first bioweapons test on U.S. soil took place in August 1949, when agents of Camp Detrick’s Special Operations Division released inert bacteria into the ventilation system of the Pentagon. Larger-scale operations soon followed, including Operation Sea Spray. Between September 20 and 27, 1950, a U.S. Navy minesweeper sailed just off of San Fransisco Bay spraying a mixture of Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii from large onboard hoses. Meanwhile, 43 monitoring stations throughout the city recorded the dispersion of the bacteria. According to Leonard J. Cole, author of the book Clouds of Secrecy, the data revealed that:
“Nearly all of San Francisco received 500 particle minutes per liter. In other words, nearly every one of the 800,000 people in San Francisco exposed to the cloud at normal breathing rate (10 liters per minute) inhaled 5000 or more particles per minute during the several hours that they remained airborne.”
Similar tests were conducted off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, while between 1953 and 1975 the UK’s Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment at Porton Down carried out the Dorset Biological Warfare Experiments, spraying a combination of zinc cadmium sulphide and Bacillus globigii off the coast of Southwestern England.
In 1965, as part of the Pentagon’s Project 112, American researchers released Bacillus globigii at the National Airport and Greyhound Terminal in Washington, DC. More than 130 passengers were exposed, spreading the simulant bacteria to 39 cities in 7 states over the next two weeks. The following year, Bacillus Subtilis was released into the New York subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with bacteria onto the tracks. These bacteria also spread quickly through the subway lines, leading the official Army report on the experiment to conclude:
“Similar covert attacks with a pathogenic disease-causing agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death.”
The largest of these experiments, however, was Operation LAC, which took place between 1957 and 1958. Short for “Large Area Coverage”, LAC evaluated the feasibility of covering large areas with biowarfare agents by releasing them from aircraft. Using Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar cargo aircraft, LAC released hundreds of tons of zinc cadmium sulphide over 33 rural and urban areas in the midwestern United States and Canada, with ground stations monitoring the dispersion of the fluorescent powder. The tests revealed the aerial dispersion method to be extremely effective, with the simulant travelling up to 1,900 kilometres from where it was dropped.
As covered in our previous videos That Time US Scientists Injected Plutonium Into People Without Their Knowledge and The Appalling Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiment, human medical experimentation in the United States has tended to have a strong racial component, often targeting poor black communities and other vulnerable groups. Operation LAC was no exception. Starting in the mid-1950s, the Army began spraying zinc cadmium sulphide powder from motorized blowers mounted atop Pruitt-Igoe, a massive public housing block in St. Louis inhabited almost entirely by poor blacks. As part of the Army Chemical Corps’s St. Jo program, simulant was also sprayed from aircraft and trucks in St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg – again, mostly in poorer neighbourhoods. As the sprayers could not be easily hidden, residents were told that they produced an invisible smoke screen that would shield the cities from Soviet radar.
Between 1949 and 1969, the U.S. Armed Forces conducted a total of 239 open-air biowarfare experiments on 66 American and Canadian cities, 80 of which used live bacteria. The program was only halted due to a 1969 directive by President Richard Nixon calling for the elimination of the United States’ entire stockpile of biological warfare agents – the destruction of which was completed by 1973. While U.S. Government officials hoped that all records of the human biological warfare experiments would be destroyed along with the weapons themselves, in 1976 Newsweek reporter Drew Fetherston uncovered classified documents revealing many of the secret tests. This in turn led the San Fransisco Chronicle to uncover and report on the Operation Sea Spray experiments of September 1950. In light of these revelations, in 1977 the federal government formed the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research in 1977 to investigate allegations of unethical experimentation.
While the U.S. Army believed that the biowarfare simulants used it its live experiments were harmless to humans, it is now known that in large enough doses Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii can cause serious infections. Indeed, it is now believed that the release of these bacteria over San Francisco permanently altered the microbiome of the region, leading to an epidemic of heart valve infections in hospitals and other serious infections among intravenous drug users throughout the 1960s and 1970s. And in 2004, a string of infections caused by an influenza vaccine was traced to Serratia marcescens contamination at the Chiron Corporation’s factory in Alameda, California. However, it is now believed that the 11 cases of Serratia marcescens-induced urinary tract infections on October 11, 1950 were unrelated to Operation Sea Spray. As Army officials testified in the 1977 Senate hearings, all 11 patients had recently undergone minor surgeries and the outbreak was confined to a single hospital, indicating that the source of infection lay inside the hospital itself. Nonetheless, in 1977 the surviving family members of Edward J Nevin, who had allegedly died as a result of the 1950 experiments, sued the federal government for negligence and financial and emotional harm, with Nevin’s grandson, Edward J. Nevin III, stating:
“My grandfather wouldn’t have died except for that, and it left my grandmother to go broke trying to pay his medical bills.”
Unfortunately, the U.S. District Court in San Francisco ruled against the Nevins, claiming there was insufficient evidence that the bacteria used in the test were responsible for Edward J. Nevin’s death. Undeterred, the Nevins took their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, with the trial finally taking place on March 16, 1981. In his opening statement, Edward Nevin III, himself a lawyer, questioned the legal and ethical validity of the biowarfare experiments, stating:
“On what basis of law does the U.S. government of the United States justify the dispersion of a large collection of bacteria over the civilian population in an experiment…without informed consent?”
Unfortunately for Nevin, the government had assembled a formidable team of legal representatives and expert witnesses, including attorney John Kern, who proceeded to deny every one of Nevin’s arguments. The strain of bacteria that had killed Nevin’s grandfather, Kern argued, was of an entirely different strain than the one used in the Operation Sea Spray experiments. Furthermore, in tests conducted at Fort Detrick in 1940, volunteers exposed to Serratia marcescens had suffered nothing more serious than coughing, redness of the eyes, and fever, with symptoms lasting no longer than four days. Kern then dramatically hammered home is point by thrusting his pen into the air and declaring:
“Every atom in this pen could decide right now to rise up about six inches and turn around 180 degrees. That would be about as likely to happen as the bacteria killing someone.”
One of Kern’s witnesses, a doctor for the biological warfare unit at Fort Detrick, concurred, chillingly stating:
“The strain [wasn’t] pathogenic, [and] I would still spray SF again today.”
Kern then proceeded to dismantle Nevin’s arguments regarding the legality of the biowarfare tests, making the extraordinary claim that the government needed no permission to experiment on the public without their consent or knowledge. While the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act gives the public the right to sue the Federal Government, this right is suspended in cases where the Government is “performing appropriately under policy.” According to Kern, this exception applied to activities carried out in the interest of national security – including spraying civilians with bacteria.
Though Nevin put up a valiant fight, he knew it was all over when Kern called his final witness to the stand: General William Creasy, commander of the U.S. Army biological warfare unit. In his testimony, Creasy stated that not only was obtaining informed consent from the public not necessary, it was not desirable, stating:
“I would find it completely impossible to conduct such a test trying to obtain informed consent. I could not have hoped to prevent panic in the uninformed world in which we live in telling them that we were going to spread non-pathogenic particles over their community; 99 percent of the people wouldn’t know what pathogenic meant.”
The trial only got more belligerent from there, with Creasy berating Nevin for his alleged lack of respect for military officials and even trying to start a fistfight during recess. In the end, however, the Supreme Court sided with the Government and refused to overturn the San Francisco District Court ruling. The Nevins’ four-year battle for justice ended in defeat.
Meanwhile, doubts have been raised regarding the safety of the zinc cadmium sulphide simulant used in the U.S. Army’s LAC experiments.While at the time the compound was considered harmless, it is now known that cadmium is a powerful human carcinogen and in high concentrations can cause damage to the lungs, kidneys, and other organs. After learning of the stimulant-spraying experiments in St. Louis, in 2012 sociology professor Lisa Martino-Taylor claimed to have examined medical records and discovered a significant spike in cancer rates in the decades following the tests. However, no further evidence has emerged to confirm this link, with the U.S. National Research Council’s official study on the matter concluding:
“After an exhaustive, independent review requested by Congress, we have found no evidence that exposure to zinc cadmium sulfide at these levels could cause people to become sick.”
Thus, without further, independent study, the true impact of the LAC experiments may never be known. But regardless of the morally dubious nature of these experiments, it appears that they did, in fact, yield genuinely useful results. As Leonard Cole, adjunct professor of political science at Rutgers University explains:
“We learned a lot about how vulnerable we are to biological attack from those tests. I’m sure that’s one reason crop dusters were grounded after Sept. 11: The military knows how easy it is to disperse organisms that can affect people over huge areas.”
Today, the knowledge gained through these tests is used for purely defensive purposes. In 1972, 109 countries including the United States signed the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction. Since then, the U.S. military has not maintained any offensive or defensive biological warfare capability – not officially, anyway. Yet accusations persist that human testing continued in secret. For example, in 2019 Republican representative for New Jersey Chris Smith alleged that from 1950-1975, the U.S. Army released ticks infected with Lyme disease to test its effect on the American public. If true, this would mean that the U.S. Government knew about Lyme disease long before its official discovery in 1982. However, no convincing evidence has yet emerged to back up Smith’s claims.
Along with other secret military projects of the era, such as the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control experiments and the University of California’s plutonium injection studies, the U.S. Army’s biological warfare tests represent one of the great ironies of the Cold War. For while these experiments were ultimately intended to protect the public and preserve American institutions, in the end they succeeded only in harming millions of American citizens, shattering their faith said institutions, and proving the old adage: “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesToxicologic Assessment of the Army’s Zinc Cadmium Sulfide Dispersion Tests, National Research Council, 1997, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233494/#ddd00091
Salter, Jim, The Army Sprayed St. Louis With Toxic Aerosol During a Just revealed 1950s Test, Business Insider, October 4, 2012, https://www.businessinsider.com/army-sprayed-st-louis-with-toxic-dust-2012-10
Carlton, Jim, Of Microbes and Mock Attacks: Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities, The Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2001, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1003703226697496080
Military Once Used SF Fog For Simulated Germ-Warfare Attack, Exposing 800,000 To Harmful Bacteria, CBS Bay Area, July 10, 2015, https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/military-used-san-francisco-fog-for-simulated-germ-warfare-attack-exposing-800000-people-to-harmful-bacteria/
The US Has a History of Testing Biological Weapons on the Public – Were Infected Ticks Used Too? The Conversation, July 22, 2019, https://theconversation.com/the-us-has-a-history-of-testing-biological-weapons-on-the-public-were-infected-ticks-used-too-120638
Crockett, Zachary, How the US Government Tested Biological Warfare on America, Priceonomics, October 30, 2014, https://priceonomics.com/how-the-us-government-tested-biological-warfare-on/
Secret Testing in the United States, The American Experience, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/weapon-secret-testing/
Barnett, Antony, Millions Were In Germ War Tests, The Guardian, April 21, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/apr/21/uk.medicalscience
The Dorset Biological Warfare Experiments 1963-1975, https://www.nr23.net/govt/spray_dorset.htm
The post That Time the United States Tested Biological Warfare on its Own Citizens appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, is one of the most important and celebrated American writers and wits in history. His keen observations and biting satires of 19th Century America remain beloved classics to this day, while his pithy quips will likely continue to infest our social media feeds for decades more to come. Yet despite Twain’s legendary intelligence and observational powers, he had his blind spots, and in the 1890s he lost his entire fortune on a technological gamble that promised to change the world, but ended up ruining its inventor and backers. This is the story of the Paige Compositor, the machine that bankrupted a literary legend.
Throughout his life, Twain held a keen interest in cutting-edge science and technology. He was a close friend of patron saint of the Internet and possible real-life wizard Nikola Tesla; an early adopter of such newfangled devices as the telephone, the automobile, and air conditioning; and possibly the first author in history to write an entire manuscript on a typewriter. Which of his novels was composed in this fashion, however, is hotly debated, with the two most likely candidates being Tom Sawyer, published in 1876; and Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883. But Twain’s enthusiasm often exceeded his caution, and over the years he would lose large sums of money investing in failed inventions ranging from telegraphs and engraving machines to a miracle protein powder its inventor claimed could end famine in India. But his greatest gamble would come in 1880, when he caught wind of a sophisticated new machine that promised to completely revolutionize the world of printing and publishing.
In Twain’s day, printing technology had hardly changed in over 400 years. While modern printing presses were larger, faster, and steam-powered, the process of typesetting was still a slow, painstaking, and manual affair. Just as they had in the days of Johann Gutenberg, typesetters sat in front of a large multi-compartment frame called a typecase, which held pieces of moveable type cast from a lead-tin alloy. Capital letters were held in upper compartments and regular letters in lower compartments, giving us our modern terms Uppercase and Lowercase. One at a time, the typesetter removed pieces of type from the typecase and arranged them in a handheld frame called a composing stick, adding gaps between words using lead spacers called quadrats. Once a line of text was complete, the typesetter passed it to a justifier, who placed it in a metal printing frame and used more lead spacers used to set the gaps between lines and the margins around the page. This is why today these gaps are known as leading. Using screws built into the printing frame, the lines of type were clamped together to form a solid block of text called a forme, which was then loaded into the printing press.
An experienced typesetter and justifier could set around 3,500 to 4,000 ems or letter widths per hour. But following the explosion in popularity of newspapers, periodicals, and other mass publications in the wake of the American Civil War, human hands could no longer keep up with the sheer volume of printed media being produced. The race was thus on to develop a practical mechanical typesetting machine. Of the dozens of inventors scrambling to make this breakthrough, two frontrunners soon emerged: German Ottmar Mergenthaler and American James W. Paige.
Very little is known about Paige outside of his invention. Born in January 1842 in Rochester, New York, he likely spent his youth working with his father in the oil fields out West. In 1872, at the age of 30, Paige applied for a patent for:
“…a device, by means of its special construction, to set type more rapidly and accurately than has been before done.”
After several years of tinkering with his design, in 1877 Paige was contacted by the Farnham Typesetting Company, which operated out of a workshop at the Colt Firearms Company factory in Hartford, Connecticut. The company was developing an automatic distributor for sorting used type back into typecases, and asked Paige to combine his machine with theirs to produce a complete automatic typesetter. But on examining Farnham’s machine, Paige concluded that the two mechanisms were incompatible, and instead set about designing an entirely new machine, which he called the Paige Compositor.
Comprising some 18,000 intricately-machined parts, the Paige Compositor was a marvel of late 19th-Century engineering. Designed to exactly replicate the action of a human composer, it used a mechanical arm to lift pieces of type from a series of magazines and deposit them in a composing tray, allowing a typesetter to compose a line as fast as they could type on the integrated keyboard. Paige estimated that his invention could speed up the process of typesetting by up to three-fold, revolutionizing the publishing industry and making him and his colleagues very wealthy men. However, the complexity of the machine meant that it would take a great deal of time – and money – to perfect. Farnham thus began seeking investors to bankroll the machine’s development. One of the Company stockholders, Dwight Buell, thought he had the perfect man: his good friend Mark Twain.
While Twain may not have been intimately familiar with the other technologies he had backed over the years, he did know a thing or two about printing, having worked as a printer for much of his youth. Thus, when Buell informed him of Paige’s machine, Twain was initially skeptical, stating:
“I knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting machine was an impossibility.”
Upon seeing an early prototype in action, however, Twain quickly changed his mind, declaring:
“[Its] performance did most thoroughly amaze me.”
Having recently started collecting large royalties from the publication of Tom Sawyer, in 1880 Twain purchased $5000 in Farnham stock, convinced that Paige’s machine “…would turn up trumps eventually.”
Unfortunately, Twain had not counted on one thing: James Paige’s compulsive perfectionism. An inveterate tinkerer, Paige spent years – and tens of thousands of his investors’ dollars – redesigning and rebuilding his machine in an obsessive quest to attain mechanical perfection. On several occasions he declared the design completely unworkable and started over from scratch, resulting in numerous interminable delays. Indeed, it was not until 1887 that he finally completed a working prototype and applied for a full patent. At 218 pages and containing 850 diagrams, Paige’s patent, nicknamed “The Whale”, is the longest ever filed in U.S. history, and took an astounding eight years for the Patent Office to fully review and approve. In that time, one of the examiners died and, we can’t make this stuff up, another two went insane and were committed to insane asylums. Whether these mental breakdowns were actually related to Paige’s invention is not recorded. And so fiendishly complicated was the machine that a scale working model – a standard requirement for patent applications in those days – was impractical to build for them, so a Patent Office examiner a month in Paige’s workshop evaluating his full-scale prototype. This lengthy development process resulted in Farnham missing several opportunities to exhibit the Paige Compositor, including an 1891 American Newspaper Publishers’ Association typesetting competition and the epoch-defining Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893.
Yet despite these delays, Twain, lush with cash from the 1884 publication of Huckleberry Finn, remained optimistic, and continued to fund Paige’s venture to the tune of $4000 per month (about $125,000 per month today). His faith appeared justified when, on January 5, 1889, he witnessed a demonstration of Paige’s perfected prototype, the construction of which had been moved to the Pratt and Whitney Company – later to become a leading manufacturer of aircraft engines. To Twain’s astonishment, the machine allowed a single operator to automatically set, justify, and assemble a page of type at a rate of up to 12,000 Ems per hour and redistribute used type back into the storage magazines, leading him to exclaim in excitement:
“We only need one more thing, a phonograph on the distributor to yell, “Where in Hell is the printer’s devil [apprentice] , I want more type!”… There is no machine that could pretend rivalry to it…. Here [is] a typesetter that does not get drunk, does not join the Printers’ Union [and] does not distribute a dirty case.”
Later that day, Twain wrote to friend in London that:
“…a death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world was signed at 12:20 this afternoon.”
Twain boasted to friends and family that the Paige Compositor would make him a millionaire, and that he would need several assistants just to count the money that would soon be rolling in. But Twain’s victory celebration proved premature, for in typical fashion Paige continued to obsessively tinker with the machine, further delaying its entry onto the market. Meanwhile, Twain’s massive investments in the machine – which had been drawn not only from his own royalties but his wife Olivia’s sizeable inheritance – was beginning to take its toll. In 1890 his publishing house collapsed, plunging the family into dire financial straits. Yet Twain still continued to diligently fund Paige’s machine, assuring Olivia that:
“…a foot farther into the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold. When the machine is finished everything will be all right again.”
But still the delays dragged on, and Twain gradually lost his faith in the wonder machine. In desperate need of financial relief, in January 1890 he took his old friend John Jones to see the machine in the hopes of getting him to invest. To his dismay, Paige had completely disassembled the machine and spread it across the shop floor. Jones left unimpressed and never invested. At his wit’s end, Twain and his family left the United States for Europe, the author angrily declaring:
“I have shook the machine and never wish to see it or hear it mentioned again.”
But worse was yet to come, for in the meantime a competing machine had pulled ahead in the race: Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine. Born in 1854 in Hachtel, Kingdom of Württemberg, Mergenthaler apprenticed as a watchmaker before immigrating to Baltimore in 1872. He soon began working on his own typesetting machine, which he patented in 1884. In 1886, the first commercial Linotype machine was installed at the offices of the New York Tribune, where it was used to typeset the 500-page Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports. Though Paige and his backers were aware of these developments, they were unfazed. An inside source at the Tribune informed Twain that the Linotype was delicate and temperamental, and due to frequent breakdowns could barely match the 3,500 Ems per hour speed of a manual typesetter. The Paige typesetter, by contrast, was regularly achieving speeds of 5,000 Ems per hour. Confident in his machine’s superiority, in 1892 Paige arranged for the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association to conduct a private test of his Compositor at the Pratt & Whitney workshop. The results were stunning, with the machine achieving composing speeds two or three times that of its competitors. The ANPA committee wrote glowing reviews, and thousands of orders came flooding into Farnham’s offices for Paige Compositors.
This stunning success was enough to reignite Mark Twain’s interest in the machine, and in 1893 he and his fellow investors signed a contract with Chicago industrialist Towner K Webster to produce 3,000 units. The following year, James Scott, president of the ANPA and publisher of the Chicago Herald & Post, agreed to try out the Paige Compositor in his pressroom. At first the 60-day trial went well, an ecstatic Twain reporting that the machine:
“…delivered more corrected live matter to the imposing stone, ready for the forms, than any one of the thirty-two Linotypes in the same composing department….it seems to me that things couldn’t well be going better at Chicago.”
But it was not to last, for the machine soon began suffering from mangled type and other problems, causing significant printing delays. As the machine was too complex for the Herald’s in-house mechanic to understand – let alone repair – Paige had to be summoned personally to tend to every breakdown. While the Paige Compositor proved no less reliable than the first-generation Linotype and other competing typesetting machines, its great complexity and the extreme precision of its parts made it uneconomical to produce in commercial quantities. Meanwhile, Mergenthaler had produced a new, far more reliable version of the Linotype, causing sales to steadily pick up. By the end of 1892 there were more than 500 Linotypes in operation in more than 30 newspaper pressrooms across the country. By 1894, it was clear that Mergenthaler had won the race. Within a few months, orders for the Paige Compositor dwindled from 4,000 to zero, and shortly thereafter the investors dissolved the company. Paige’s dream was officially dead.
In all, Paige’s investors had poured nearly $2 million dollars into the venture, and all they had to show for it was six production machines built at an astronomical $15,000 apiece. Twain himself invested $180,000 – nearly $7 million in today’s money – and in 1894 was forced to declare bankruptcy. Though this declaration officially cleared him of all obligations, through book sales and speaking tours Twain was nonetheless able to repay all his creditors and regain a degree of financial stability. Still, he never fully forgave Paige, writing in his autobiography that:
“Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.”
Tell us how you really feel, Mark…
As for Paige himself, he fared significantly worse. After losing his entire life’s savings in the Panic of 1893, he died penniless and alone in a Chicago poorhouse on December 1, 1917, his sole claim to fame being the man who helped bankrupt one of the most successful and respected authors in history.
But why did Mergenthaler’s Linotype, which at first appeared no more reliable than the Paige Compositor, win out in the end? In addition to having a temperamental, perfectionist inventor, the Paige Compositor suffered from another fundamental flaw: its translation of the typesetting process from man to machine was far too literal. By exactly replicating the motions of a human typesetter, Paige created a machine that was too complicated to be economically viable. The Linotype, by contrast, worked on a completely different and far more robust principle. Instead of setting actual type, the Linotype instead set small metal moulds known as matrices, which were stored in vertical magazines in the top of the machine. Every time the operator hit a key, the corresponding matrix would drop from the magazine into a composing tray. Once an entire line was composed, it would be transferred into the machine’s casting module, where the matrices were used to cast a solid line of type or slug from a lead-tin alloy. Multiple slugs could were stacked into a forme and loaded into the printing press, while the matrices were fed back into the Linotype and sorted back into their respective magazines via an elaborate conveyor system. Once a set of slugs had been used, they would be fed back into the machine, melted down, and the whole process would start over again. In addition to being simpler, more robust, and cheaper to manufacture than the Paige Compositor, the Linotype system neatly solved another fundamental problem with automatic typesetting: the sheer volume of type required. As certain letters are used repeatedly on any given page and a certain forme of type might be used for a long time before being broken up, an automatic typesetter would require an extraordinary volume of metal type in order to work at full capacity. But since the Linotype sets matrices instead of type, works one line at a time, and recycles the matrices after every line, the total number of matrices required is significantly reduced, helping to make the machine simpler and more compact.
For these reasons, it was the Linotype and not the Paige Compositor which went on to revolutionize the publishing industry. The machines were the workhorses of newspaper pressrooms around the world for over 100 years, with the last units not being retired until the early 1980s. Indeed, so important was Mergenthaler’s innovation that no less a figure than inventor Thomas Edison declared the Linotype the “eighth wonder of the world.”
As for the six Paige Compositors manufactured by Pratt & Whitney, four were scrapped following the dissolution of Paige’s company. The remaining two were purchased by the Mergenthaler company in 1898, with one being presented to Cornell University and the other was to Columbia University. The Columbia machine is believed to have been scrapped during World War II as part of a wartime scrap metal drive, while the Cornell machine was returned to Mergenthaler and later donated to the Mark Twain Home in Hartford, Connecticut, where it remains on display to this day – the last remnant of a curious and disastrous chapter in the great author’s life.
Yet despite nearly losing everything he had, Twain chose to take the whole debacle in stride, reflecting upon the affair in his inimitably pithy style:
“I learned two things from the experience: not to invest when you can’t afford to, and not to invest when you can.”
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Expand for ReferencesLundin, Leigh, Tom Sawyer and the Diabolus Ex Machina, Criminal Brief, May 22, 2022, https://criminalbrief.com/?p=16874
Lienhard, John, No.1372: The Paige Compositor, Engines of Our Ingenuity, University of Houston, https://web.archive.org/web/20000421014607/http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1372.htm
Mark Twain, James W. Paige, and the Paige Typesetter, Twain Quotes, http://www.twainquotes.com/paige.html
The Paige Compositor, Circuitous Root, https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncastcomp/paige/index.html
The Paige Compositor, Codex 99, http://www.codex99.com/typography/124.html
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Shortwave radio signals, which occupy the radio frequency band between 3 and 30 megahertz, have the unique ability to bounce or “skip” off the earth’s ionosphere, allowing them to propagate over vast distances. This has attracted a devoted international community of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who exploit the unique properties of the medium to listen to and communicate with shortwave stations from around the globe. But among the vast ecosystem of amateur broadcasters, international news services, and emergency communications networks, every so often shortwave operators stumble upon something truly eerie and bizarre. Take the frequency 4625 kilohertz, known to radio amateurs as UVB-76 or simply “The Buzzer.” First discovered in 1985, The Buzzer broadcasts nothing but a constant, monotonous buzz, made up of two distinct tones repeating 25 times per minute. Every few weeks or so, this buzzing is interrupted by a voice, which proceeds to read out a string of random words or numbers in Russian. The buzzing then resumes, carrying on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. While the source of UVB-76 has been traced to two sites outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, no agency or organization has ever admitted to operating the station. This had lead to endless speculation as to the Buzzer’s function, with some theorizing it is used to probe the ionosphere for radio interference, others that it is part of Russia’s infamous “Dead Hand” system, designed to automatically launch the nation’s nuclear arsenal in case of attack. More likely, however, is that the Buzzer belongs to a curious breed of radio stations whose origins lie in the shadowy world of Cold War espionage and which continue to faithfully serve the world’s intelligence services to this day. Welcome to the strange and mysterious world of Numbers Stations.
Numbers Stations are nearly as old as radio itself, with the first examples appearing in Europe during the First World War. Their numbers exploded, however, in the Cold War era, with the phenomenon first coming to the attention of radio amateurs around the mid-1970s. Numbers Stations are so-named because they typically broadcast nothing but seemingly random strings of numbers, letters, or sometimes words. These messages are transmitted in a variety of formats, including Morse Code, phase or frequency shifting, and voice – either real or synthesized. Each string of numbers is usually preceded by a unique identifier or callsign, which often forms the basis for the colourful nicknames given to the stations by radio amateurs. One of the most famous numbers stations, the “Lincolnshire Poacher,” used as its callsign the first bars of the English folk song of the same name, synthesized to sound like a calliope organ and repeated 12 times. This was followed by a British-accented female voice reading a string of numbers. First heard in the 1970s, the Lincolnshire Poacher initially broadcasted from Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire but later moved to the Royal Air Force Station at Akrotiri on the island of Cyprus. It ceased broadcasting in 2008. A similar station called Cherry Ripe, which also used an English folk song as its callsign, broadcast from somewhere in the south Pacific until 2009. Other famous Numbers Stations include “Ready! Ready!” “Allo! Allo!” “The English Man”, “The English Woman”, “Oblique”, “Swedish Rhapsody”, “Nancy Adam Susan”, “Cynthia”, “The Babbler”, “Squeaky Wheel” “The Pip”, and “Magnetic Field”, the latter named for its use of a song by French electronic composer Jean-Michel Jarre. While many of these stations broadcast in English, not all originated in English-speaking countries. For example, “Ready! Ready!” and “The Babbler” are thought to have originated in Bulgaria, “The English Man” in Russia, “The English Lady” in Ukraine, and “Oblique” in Poland.
The eerie and mysterious nature of numbers stations soon attracted a devoted community of radio amateurs, who began to actively seek out, classify, and study these enigmatic broadcasts. The number of recorded numbers stations quickly grew so large that in 1993 a station tracking group called ENIGMA 2000 developed a designation system to keep track of them all. This system classifies stations using a letter prefix indicating the type of broadcast and a number indicating its order of discovery. For example, E indicates a station broadcasting in English, G in German, S in Slavic, V in all other languages, M in Morse Code, and X in all other modes such as frequency and phase-shifting. But as obsessive and meticulous as this might sound, some aficionados have taken their obsession with numbers stations to even more absurd heights. From the moment he stumbled upon his first numbers station in 1992, British radio amateur Akin Fernandez was hooked, explaining in a 2004 interview:
“You’re listening, and all of a sudden you come across a really strong signal. It’s the most chilling thing you’ve ever heard in your life. These signals are going everywhere and they could be for anything. There’s nothing like it.”
Over the next five years, Fernandez spent nearly every waking hour meticulously recording and categorizing every numbers station he could track down. This work culminated in 1997 with the release of The Conet Project, one of the strangest albums in the history of recorded music. Named after the Czech word for “end,” which Fernandez heard often on the airwaves, The Conet Project comprised four CDs filled with over 280 minutes of excerpts from numbers stations around the world, along with a 74-page booklet detailing the background and details of each broadcast. While the album initially sold only 2000 copies, it had a strangely significant impact on the world of music, being sampled in a variety of other artistic projects including the band Porcupine Tree’s 1999 album Stupid Dream, Wilco’s 2001 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the soundtrack of the 2001 Cameron Crowe film Vanilla Sky.
But just what are these eerie broadcasts for? Are they merely pranks, placeholders for certain radio frequencies, or something more sinister? While for decades numbers stations remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of radio broadcasting, starting in the 1980s a number of international incidents finally began to shed light on their enigmatic purpose. In 1988, British Intelligence detected a strong radio signal emanating from the flat of Dutch national Erwin van Haarlem. London Police raided the flat and found van Haarlem sitting in front of a short wave radio, listening to a numbers station based in Czechoslovakia. Codebooks were later discovered in a hollowed-out bar of soap, and van Haarlem revealed to be a Czech agent named Václav Jelínek. Later that year, when the communist regime of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceasescu collapsed, all numbers stations broadcasting from Romania abruptly stopped. And in October 2011, when German Police raided the Margburg home of Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag, they caught the couple sitting at a shortwave radio receiver, receiving coded instructions from Moscow. When interrogated, the Anschlags revealed that they always received instructions at 6PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays – a schedule that happened to coincide perfectly with a Russian numbers station known as XPA. These and other incidents have led experts to suspect that numbers stations are in fact a clever means of solving a classic problem faced by nations trying to communicate with their agents abroad.
Secure communication is one of the key pillars of spycraft. Throughout history, spies and their handlers have come up with increasingly sophisticated methods of keeping secret messages safe from prying eyes, from physically hiding them in ordinary objects – a craft known as steganography – to obscuring them using codes and ciphers. But simply rendering a message unreadable to the enemy is no guarantee of security, as merely being caught sending or receiving a coded message can be enough to expose and condemn a suspected spy. And the steady march of technology only made matters worse, for as easy as it was to intercept a letter or telegram, it was even easier to tap a phone or listen in on a radio signal. This was the dilemma facing the All-Russian Co-operative Society or ARCOS in the 1920s. Officially, ARCOS was a diplomatic body governing economic trade between the UK and the newly-formed Soviet Union. However, intercepts of encrypted Soviet radio signals by the British Secret Intelligence Service or SIS revealed that the organization was in fact a front for Soviet espionage activities in the country. In May 1927, the British Government launched a raid against ARCOS headquarters London, where they discovered a secret room filled with workers hurriedly burning reams of secret documents. Realizing that the British had been reading and decrypting their broadcasts for years, almost overnight the Soviet OGPU intelligence service – precursor to the KGB – changed the way it communicated with its agents abroad. Most significantly, the OGPU switched to an enciphering system known as one-time pads, randomly-generated single-use ciphers whose keys are the same size as the plaintext being encoded – eliminating any repeats that can be exploited by codebreakers. So long as each key is used only once, one-time pads are considered mathematically impossible to crack and an absolutely secure form of encryption. To prevent the keys from falling into enemy hands, one-time pads are often printed on water-soluble or flammable paper so they can easily be soaked, swallowed, or burned.
The absolute security afforded by one-time pads allowed the Soviets to broadcast coded messages in the open, on common civilian radio frequencies. This way, while anyone could theoretically intercept the signal, only those with the one-time key could decipher it. And as it was impossible to tell who the signal was intended for, this system provided a useful degree of plausible deniability for agents, as Akin Fernandez explains:
“This system is completely secure because the messages can’t be tracked, the recipient could be anywhere. It is easy. You just send the spies to a country and get them to buy a radio. They know where to tune and when.”
This system, known as one-way voice link or OWVL, was quickly adopted by a variety of countries, including the UK, which during the Second World War transmitted instructions to the French Resistance and other Allied agents in occupied Europe via coded messages embedded in BBC radio broadcasts. Later, SIS and other intelligence agencies established dedicated numbers stations to communicate with their agents in the field, using the long-range capabilities of shortwave radio to carry their secret messages to every corner of the globe. As espionage expert Rupert Allason explains:
“Nobody has found a more convenient and expedient way of communicating with an agent.
Their sole purpose is for intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents in denied areas – a territory where it is difficult to use a consensual form of communications.”
Indeed, while numbers stations might seem like an outmoded relic of the Cold War, made obsolete by the advent of computers, the internet, and other sophisticated communications technology, in reality quite the opposite is true. Every message sent on a computer or over the internet leaves a digital trace, making absolute security difficult to achieve without incredibly strict communications protocols and sophisticated encryption. Numbers stations broadcasts, on the other hand, are untraceable, efficient, and cost-effective, meaning this system still has a place in the modern landscape of high-tech espionage.
Perhaps the most famous recent espionage case involving a numbers station is the 1998 “Atención” case, in which five agents of the Cuban Wasp network were arrested in Miami. One piece of evidence later used to convict the agents of espionage was that they had received instructions from a Cuban-based numbers station known as “Atención”. Three years earlier, FBI agents had entered the home of a network member and copied decryption software from his laptop, allowing the FBI to decode Atención broadcasts. These messages included instructions to recruit local contacts and intelligence sources, a greeting for International Women’s Day on May 8, and a warning against accepting flights from Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based anti-Castro organization. Interestingly, the only reason Atención was known to be of Cuban origin in the first place is because a technical error resulted in a snippet of a Radio Havana broadcast becoming mixed in with the signal. More recently, another Cuban numbers station was involved in the case of Ana Montes, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who in 2002 was convicted of spying for the Cuban government for nearly 17 years. According to prosecutors, Montes received her instructions via shortwave radio and decoded them using one-time-pads printed on water-soluble paper. North Korea has also made extensive use of numbers stations, suddenly resuming broadcasts in July 2016 after a 16-year hiatus. This is thought to be an act of psychological warfare, meant to put Western intelligence analysts on edge.
But what of UVB-76, the mysterious “Buzzer” that barely seems to broadcast anything but its signature droning tone? While no government agency has of yet admitted to operating the station, the most likely suspect is the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR, the agency to which German spies Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag belonged. And while the Buzzer and similar Russian stations like “The Pip” and “Squeaky Wheel” do not fit the typical profile of numbers stations, experts believe this is because they are on standby, kept in reserve for a future conflict or major deployment of Russian agents. The mysterious “buzz,” then, is likely just a placeholder, meant to discourage other broadcasters from using that particular frequency. Evidence for this theory emerged in 2013 when, after nearly 30 years of nothing but buzzing and brief number strings, UVB-76 suddenly broadcast the ominous message “Command 135 Issued.” According to radio enthusiast Māris Goldmanis, this was likely a test message, meant to bring the whole broadcast system onto a simulated war footing. So as unsettling as UVB-76’s endless, monotonous drone might be, should that drone ever stop, it might be a sign that something very, very bad is about to happen.
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Expand for ReferencesSorrel-Dejerne, Olivia, The Spooky World of the ‘Numbers Stations’, BBC News, April 16, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24910397
Number Stations, Priyom, https://priyom.org/number-stations
Numbers Stations Research and Information Center, https://www.numbers-stations.com/lincolnshire-poacher/
Gorvett, Zaria, The Ghostly Radio Station That No One Claims to Run, BBC Future, July 15, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170801-the-ghostly-radio-station-that-no-one-claims-to-run
Segal, David, The Shortwave and the Calling, Washington Post, August 3, 2004, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35647-2004Aug2.html
Goldmanis, Maris, Explaining the ‘Mystery’ of Numbers Stations, War on the Rocks, May 24, 2018
The post The Mysterious and Fascinating World of ‘Numbers Stations’ appeared first on Today I Found Out.
American gangster films of the 1920s, 30s and 40s have contributed a wealth of colourful slang to the English language, much of which is still floating around popular culture to this day: “sleeping with the fishes”, “concrete overshoes”, “G-man”, “Chicago typewriter”, “goon”, “big house”, “private dick”, “speakeasy”, “Chicago overcoat”, “ride the lightning”, “fuzz”, and many others. But while many of these terms are self-explanatory or have relatively well-known origins, one piece of Prohibition-era slang stands out among the rest: “stool pigeon”, meaning a police informant. But while this term might evoke images of someone perched on a stool in a police interrogation room and being made to “sing” like a bird, the actual origins of this term are significantly more horrific, and tied to the greatest manmade extinction event in modern history.
In May 1850, Chief Simon Pokagon, of the Potawatomi tribe was camping near the Manistee River in Michigan when he beheld an astonishing sight:
“One morning on leaving my wigwam I was startled by hearing a gurgling, rumbling sound, as though an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing through the deep forests towards me. As I listened more intently I concluded that instead of the tramping of horses it was distant thunder; and yet the morning was clear, calm and beautiful. Nearer and nearer came the strange commingling sounds of sleigh bells, mixed with the rumbling of an approaching storm. While I gazed in wonder and astonishment, I beheld moving toward me in an unbroken front millions of pigeons, the first I had seen that season. They passed like a cloud through the branches of the high trees, through the underbrush and over the ground, apparently overturning every leaf.”
The gigantic flock Chief Pokagon witnessed was composed of Ectopistes migratorius, better known as the Passenger Pigeon. Once the most abundant birds in North America – and possibly the world – at their peak Passenger Pigeons numbered some 5 billion. Their range extended from central Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia south to Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, with their main nesting areas stretching from the Great Lakes east to New York. A highly nomadic and communal species, Passenger pigeons migrated across the continent in vast flocks in search of beechnuts, acorns, chestnuts, and other seeds to eats and hardwood trees to roost and nest in. These flocks were often hundreds of millions or even billions strong, and were an awesome sight to behold. One flock observed over Southern Ontario in 1866 was 800 kilometres long and took 14 hours to pass overhead, while in 1855 a flock passing over Columbus, Ohio was so large and dense it blotted out the midday sun:
“As the watchers stared, the hum increased to a mighty throbbing. Now everyone was out of the houses and stores, looking apprehensively at the growing cloud, which was blotting out the rays of the sun. Children screamed and ran for home. Women gathered their long skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores. Horses bolted. A few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of the millennium, and several dropped on their knees and prayed. [When the flock passed two hours later], the town looked ghostly in the now-bright sunlight that illuminated a world plated with pigeon ejecta.”
To give an idea of how inconceivably abundant these birds were, American nature writer and poet Christopher Cokinos has calculated that if the entire population of Passenger Pigeons were to have flown single-file, the flock would have stretched around the globe 22 times. Yet little more than a half-century later, there would not be a single Passenger Pigeon left alive anywhere on earth.
When European settlers first arrived on the North American continent, Passenger Pigeons provided a conveniently abundant source of protein. Indeed, even waving a long pole in the low-flying flocks was guaranteed to kill a few birds. But so vast were the flocks that such subsistence hunting posed little threat to the birds’ survival. However, the massive post-Civil War migration of settlers into the American West drove up demand for food, creating a brand-new industry of professional pigeon hunters. And right from the start, business was booming, as the Wisconsin newspaper the Kilbourn City Mirror reported in 1871:
“Hardly a train arrives that does not bring hunters or trappers. Hotels are full, coopers are busy making barrels, and men, women, and children are active in packing the birds or filling the barrels. They are shipped to all places on the railroad, and to Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.”
Commercial pigeon hunters used every method at their disposal to kill the greatest number of birds possible. They shot at them with shotguns, trapped them in nets, set fire to their roosts, gassed them out of the trees with burning sulphur, and even poisoned them with corn soaked in alcohol. And it is among these varied methods that we find the most commonly-accepted origin for the term “stool pigeon” – and any animal lovers or squeamish types in the audience might want to turn off the video now.
Still here? Well, don’t say we didn’t warn you…
One particularly gruesome method used by pigeon hunters was to take a live pigeon, sew its eyelids shut, and nail it to a stool. Its cries of distress would attract nearby pigeons, who would subsequently be killed. It did not take long for this practice to be associated with people who betray their own kind. However, while this is the most oft-cited origin for the term, there are several issues with this explanation which have led lexicographers to suspect it of being a false etymology.
For starters, while “stool pigeon” was used to mean “informant” as early as 1828, when it appeared in the first edition of Webster’s Dictionary, explicit references to the hunting practice do not appear until the 1870s, with its first known appearance being in M. Schele de Vere’s 1871 dictionary Americanisms; the English of the New World:
“Stool-Pigeon… it means the pigeon, with its eyes stitched up, fastened on a stool, which can be moved up and down by the hidden fowler.”
This 40-year gap suggests that either the two uses of the term developed independently, or that the hunting practice was retroactively applied as the origin of a much older term.
There are also more practical issues with the common etymology of “stool pigeon.” For example, it is dubious that hunters would go to the trouble of carrying a wooden stool into the bush solely for the purpose of hunting. Some etymologists thus suggest that the “stool” in “stool pigeon” actually derives from the 16th-century stoale, meaning the base or stump of a tree – a far likelier place for a decoy pigeon to be nailed. Still others suggest that the term has nothing to do with platforms and is instead derived from the French word estale, used to describe a pigeon used to entice a hawk into a net. Indeed, by the early 15th Century the term had entered the English language as stale, used to describe someone who baits or entrap another. It is this meaning of the word that the sorcerer Prospero employs in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, when he commands the spirit Ariel:
“The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither for stale to catch these thieves.”
An alternate spelling of stale was stall, which came to describe a pickpocket’s accomplice who distracted a mark while they were robbed. This usage survives to this day in the phrase “stall for time.” As for the other part of the expression, the term “pigeon” has been used since at least the 16th century to describe someone who is foolish or gullible. Thus it is possible that the term “stool pigeon” never had anything to do with hunting, and instead simply combined two preexisting slang words to describe a gullible person used as a decoy by criminals. Whatever the case, by the 1840s the term “stool pigeon” was ill-understood to mean “informant”, and had acquired the verb forms “stooling” or “to stool.” Later in the 1920s, the term was shortened to simply “stoolie.”
But while the cruel 1870s hunting practice may not have given us a colourful piece of criminal slang, it – along with the myriad other tactics used by commercial pigeon hunters – contributed to a slaughter on a scale almost imaginable today. During a single hunting season in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878, some 50,000 birds were killed every single day for nearly 5 months straight. The birds were so abundant that they sold for as little as fifty cents a dozen. Yet people continued to believe that Pigeon stocks were inexhaustible, with no less a figure than great ornithologist John James Audubon stating that:
“… nothing but the gradual diminution of our forests can accomplish their decrease as they not infrequently quadruple their numbers yearly, and always at least double it.”
And when, in 1857, a bill was brought before the Ohio State Legislature seeking protection for the Passenger Pigeon, a selected committee of the Senate dismissed the petition as unnecessary, concluding that:
“The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.”
Similar efforts at protection also failed, and the slaughter continued unabated. It was not until the 1890s, when Passenger pigeon flocks had started to become noticeably depleted, that serious conservation legislation was passed in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. But it was already too late. Passenger pigeon numbers were in freefall, the billions-strong flocks of just a few decades ago now a thing of the past. By the turn of the 20th Century, the bird had completely vanished in the wild, with the last known wild example, a female nicknamed “Buttons”, being shot in Pike County, Ohio in 1900. In 1903, the only Passenger Pigeons left in the world belonged to a captive flock kept by Professor Charles Whitman of the University of Chicago. Whitman attempted to breed his pigeons by getting common Rock Doves to foster their eggs, but was unsuccessful. By 1906, he was down to only five birds. The end finally came on September 1, 1914, when the last known survivor, a 29-year-old female named Martha, died in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo. The Passenger Pigeon was no more.
But how did this happen? How did the most abundant bird in North America, whose flocks were so enormous they blotted out the sun, go from a population of billions to zero within the span of a human lifetime? While the unchecked commercial slaughter that raged from the 1860s onwards was the main cause, but there were a number of additional factors that hastened the Passenger Pigeon’s rapid demise. Among these, as John James Audubon had predicted, was the large-scale destruction of the birds’ natural habitat. Passenger Pigeons relied on large stands of oak, chestnut, and beech trees in which to roost, nest, and feed – stands which were being systematically cut down to clear land for agriculture and supply timber for industry. The birds large numbers also worked against them. The Pigeons’ iconic behaviour of travelling in giant flocks evolved as a survival strategy known as predator satiation – the idea that no group of predators, no matter how large, could possibly kill enough members of a flock to have any impact on the total population. Unfortunately, this behaviour made the birds extremely vulnerable to human hunters, making them easy to slaughter in large numbers. Worse still, Passenger Pigeons were extremely social and gregarious birds, requiring large flocks to carry out mating rituals and raise their young. Once a flock’s size dropped below a certain threshold – whether due to hunting or habitat loss – its members became unable to breed successfully, dooming the flock to inevitable decline and death. This is why efforts to breed the last captive Passenger Pigeons were unsuccessful, and why recent proposals to resurrect the Passenger Pigeon through Jurassic Park-style cloning are likewise doomed to fail: the birds simply cannot breed successfully in small groups. Furthermore, the vast stands of food-bearing trees needed to support large Passenger Pigeon flocks had already disappeared by the late 19th Century. Thus, even if all hunting had stopped in the 1890s, it is likely that Passenger Pigeon numbers would still have continued to decline. A similar fate is expected befall another heavily overexploited species: the Atlantic Codfish, Gadus morhua. By 1992, overfishing had driven cod stocks on the Grand Banks to less than 1% of their estimated peak, prompting the Canadian government to impose a total moratorium on cod fishing. But it was too little, too late; while the moratorium has been in place for over 30 years, cod numbers are still steadily decreasing, with the Atlantic Cod expected to go extinct by 2050. Both cases clearly demonstrate the principle outlined by naturalist Paul Ehrlich that:
“…it is not always necessary to kill the last pair of a species to force it to extinction.”
Recent genetic evidence has suggested that Passenger Pigeons may also have been victims of extremely poor timing. An analysis conducted by Pen-Jen Shaner and colleagues from National Taiwan Normal University revealed a surprisingly low degree of genetic diversity in preserved Passenger Pigeon specimens collected across North America indicating that the late 19th Century Pigeon population grew very rapidly from a handful of flocks. This suggests that Passenger Pigeons were a so-called “breakout species” like Australian Plague Locusts or Arctic Lemmings, whose populations explode in times of plenty only to crash once local food resources are depleted. It is thus possible that the mass commercial slaughter of Passenger Pigeons coincided with a natural downswing in population numbers, further hastening their extinction. However, later analysis by Beth Shapiro of the University of California Santa Cruz has challenged this assumption, revealing instead that Passenger Pigeon populations were, in fact, large and stable since the last ice age. Still, rapid population growth may still have played a role in the birds’ ultimate demise. One theory posits that the expansion of agriculture and the relocation of Indigenous peoples across North America both provided Passenger Pigeons with a new, abundant source of food and relieved traditional hunting pressures, allowing the population to skyrocket right before the advent of large-scale hunting.
But whatever the specific factors, what is undeniable is that the rapid and catastrophic extinction of the Passenger Pigeon was ultimately the result of human action, and that this ecological tragedy was responsible for the birth of the modern conservation movement. In 1900, Republican Congressman John F. Lacey of Iowa introduced United States’s first wildlife-protection law, which banned the interstate transportation of unlawfully killed game. In his speech to the House of Representatives, Lacey stated:
“The wild pigeon, formerly in flocks of millions, has entirely disappeared from the face of the earth. We have given an awful exhibition of slaughter and destruction, which may serve as a warning to all mankind. Let us now give an example of wise conservation of what remains of the gifts of nature.”
Later that year, Lacey’s bill was signed into law. This legislation was further strengthened in 1913 by the Weeks McLean Act and again in 1918 by the Migratory Bird Act, which protected not only birds but also their eggs, nests, and feathers. While conservation efforts are far stronger today than they were in the early 1900s, the unchecked destruction and pollution of natural habitats around the world continue to put thousands of species at risk of extinction. The destruction of the Passenger Pigeon should serve as a poignant reminder to learn from the mistakes of the past, for, in the words of naturalist and explorer William Beebe:
“The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”
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Expand for ReferencesBillions to None…the Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, https://johnjames.audubon.org/conservation/billions-none-extinction-passenger-pigeon
Yeoman, Barry, Why the Passenger Pigeon Went Extinct, Audubon Society Magazine, May-June 2014, https://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2014/why-passenger-pigeon-went-extinct
Why Did the Passenger Pigeon Go Extinct? Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2017/11/24/why-did-the-passenger-pigeon-go-extinct/?sh=70c1849a2a9d
Passenger Pigeon Extinction: It’s Complicated, Medium, June 16, 2014, https://grrlscientist.medium.com/passenger-pigeon-extinction-its-complicated-grrlscientist-3f8e8ad3b6de
Greenfieldboyce, Nell, Why Did the Passenger Pigeon Go Extinct? The Answer Might Lie in Their Toes, NPR, November 16, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/16/564597936/why-did-the-passenger-pigeon-go-extinct-the-answer-might-lie-in-their-toes
Biello, David, 3 Billion to Zero: What Happened to the Passenger Pigeon? Scientific American, June 27, 2014, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/3-billion-to-zero-what-happened-to-the-passenger-pigeon/
The Passenger Pigeon, Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.si.edu/spotlight/passenger-pigeon
Kovalchik, Kara, Why is an Informant Called a “Stool Pigeon”? Mental Floss, August 26, 2016, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/83619/why-informant-called-stool-pigeon
Stool Pigeon, World Wide Words, https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sto2.htm
What’s the Origin of the Phrase “Stool Pigeon”? The Phrase Finder, https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/stool-pigeon.html
The Word Guy: Dropping a Dime on the Origin of “Stool Pigeon”, Tribune Live, December 4, 2015, https://archive.triblive.com/lifestyles/more-lifestyles/the-word-guy-dropping-a-dime-on-origin-of-stool-pigeon/
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If you’ve ever worked in an office, chances are at some point you’ve had to interact with that coworker. You know the one: miserable, antisocial, constantly grumbling about every minor inconvenience. The one who never takes lunch with the rest of the staff, is constantly late or underperforming, and responds to even the most reasonable request with barely contained rage. If so, then you’ve probably joked about said coworker being only one bad day away from walking into the office with a gun and shooting up the place – in other words, “going postal.” While in the United States and elsewhere “going postal” has become synonymous with sudden, often lethal bursts of workplace violence – with few questioning the origin of the term – this phrase didn’t come out of nowhere. Starting in 1970, United States Postal Service employees committed a string of horrific workplace shootings, leaving 60 people dead and dozens more injured and forever changing the popular perception of postal workers.
Mass shootings involving postal workers have been recorded since the 1960s, the most high-profile being the infamous “Son of Sam” killings. Between December 1975 and August 1977, USPS letter sorter David Berkowitz killed 6 people and wounded 9 in New York City before being arrested. During his trial, Berkowitz claimed to have acted on the instructions of a demon which had taken the form of a dog owned by a neighbour named “Sam”. However, the first incident to truly cement the link between postal workers and violence in the minds of the American people would not take place until August 20, 1986.
Patrick Sherrill, a 45-year-old letter carrier for the Edmond, Oklahoma post office, was the very model of a toxic employee. Known to his coworkers and neighbours as “Crazy Pat”, Sherrill had a long history of bizarre and unsettling behaviour, such as wandering around his Oklahoma City neighbourhood peering into windows, making obscene phone calls to neighbours, and tying up stray cats and dogs in his back yard with baling wire. An inveterate loner, Sherrill never had any close friends or romantic interests and could not hold down steady employment, drifting between various menial jobs before joining the United States Marine Corps in 1963. Here Sherrill found his one and only calling: shooting. A skilled marksman, Sherrill trained to become a Marine sharpshooter before being honourably discharged in 1966. Despite his frequent claims to have fought in Vietnam, Sherrill in fact never left U.S. soil during his service. In 1984 Sherill would join the Oklahoma National Guard, becoming a shooting instructor and competing on the marksmanship team.
But in the meantime, civilian life did not seem to agree with Sherrill, and following the death of his mother in 1974 he became increasingly withdrawn and unstable. He became obsessed with amateur radio, packing his house floor to ceiling with electronic equipment as well as guns, ammunition, and military and porno magazines. His roof soon sprouted four large antennas, while his back yard filled with rusty junk. Sherrill’s conduct at work was even worse. One coworker, a civilian employee at the National Guard, refused to be alone with him, claiming the way he stared at her made her feel “naked” and that:
“…he looked like someone who peeped in windows and molested little kids.”
During a brief stint at the Federal Aviation Administration, Sherrill received numerous complaints for leering at or rubbing against female coworkers, and was ultimately fired for cornering a woman in an elevator. In 1985, Sherrill landed a position as a part-time relief carrier for the Edmond Post Office. This hourly position did not come with the same job security or benefits enjoyed by his full-time salaried colleagues – a fact which greatly angered Sherrill. As before, Sherrill proved a poor and toxic employee, avoiding and making frequent snide comments towards his coworkers and constantly being reprimanded for tardiness, misdirecting mail, being rude towards customers, and, on one occasion, macing a dog that was safely behind a fence. Sherrill came to believe he was being deliberately targeted by his supervisors, and vowed to take revenge. On August 20, 1986, having received another formal reprimand, Sherrill finally made good on his threat.
That morning at 7 A.M, Sherrill reported to work as usual, dressed in his blue post office uniform and carrying his mail bag. But inside the bag were not letters but two National Guard-issue .45-calibre pistols, a .22-calibre pistol, and piles of ammunition. After locking the doors to prevent anyone escaping, Sherrill stormed into the office of his supervisor, Rick Esser, and shot him in the chest, killing him instantly. Sherrill had also intended to kill Bill Bland, another supervisor, but miraculously Bland had overslept that morning and did not arrive at work until Sherrill’s rampage had ended. Instead, Sherrill shot full-time letter carrier Mike Rockne – grandson of legendary football coach Knute Rockne – who was in Esser’s office requesting time off.
At first, Sherrill’s coworkers elsewhere in the building thought someone was setting off firecrackers. That was, however, until Sherrill started striding through the building, shooting anyone who tried to flee and locking the rest of the exits. One employee managed to escape the building, only to bleed out in the parking lot. With everyone now trapped inside, Sherrill swept once again through the office, gunning down anyone he found hiding in cubicles or under tables. Meanwhile, the police arrived in the parking lot and tried to contact Sherrill via telephone and bullhorn. There was no reply. Then, at 8:30 AM – an hour and a half after Sherrill began his rampage – a SWAT team stormed the building. They found a scene of absolute horror, with bloody, bullet-riddled bodies strewn about the office. Among them was that of Patrick Sherrill, who had retreated back to Rick Esser’s office and shot himself in the head. In all, Sherrill’s had wounded six people and killed 15, including himself.
The next morning the surviving post office employees returned to work to find the floors newly mopped and waxed and the bullet holes in the walls patched and painted over – as if nothing had happened. The only signs of the tragedy that had unfolded the day before were the empty cubicles and the flowers left outside the building by sympathetic citizens. Meanwhile, the Edmond Postal Massacre shook the nation to its very core. While there had been mass shootings before – most notably on August 1, 1966 when former Marine sharpshooter Charles Whitman climbed a clocktower at the University of Texas in Austin and gunned down 14 people at random – Patrick Sherrill added a new dimension to senseless violence: he brought it into the workplace, suddenly making everyone extremely wary of their disgruntled coworkers. But while Sherrill’s rampage was – and remains – the worst workplace massacre in U.S. history, it was far from the last. Over the next decade, many more postal workers would take out their grievances in equally horrific ways.
Much like Patrick Sherrill, 34-year-old Joseph Harris of Ridgewood, New Jersey had a history of unsettling behaviour. Described by his coworkers as “quiet”, “tense”, and “odd”, Harris was obsessed with weapons and the military, and was often observed:
“…walking around like some karate guy, chopping his hands in the air.”
A mediocre worker who responded poorly to authority, Harris frequently clashed with his supervisor, Carol Ott. This feud reached its peak in April 1991 when Ott filed a report with the police, accusing Harris of harassing her on the job. Ott then ordered Harris to submit to a fitness of duty exam. Harris refused, and was subsequently fired. On his way out of the office, coworkers heard Harris growl to Ott:
“I’m going to get you.”
While many of us have said – or at the very least thought – similar things about our bosses, Harris actually made good on his threat. Just after midnight on October 10, 1991, Harris donned black military-style fatigues, combat boots, a bullet-proof vest, a black ninja-style hood, and a gas mask, and armed himself with a 9mm Uzi submachine gun, a .22 calibre handgun fitted with a suppressor, three hand grenades, some homemade pipe bombs, and a Japanese katana sword. After writing a two-page manifesto alleging unfair treatment by the U.S. postal service and booby-trapping his house with explosives, he made his way to Carol Ott’s apartment in Wayne, New Jersey, forced his way inside, and slashed at her with his sword, killing her instantly. He then made his way downstairs where Ott’s boyfriend, Cornelius Kasten, was watching television, and executed him with a pistol shot behind the ear.
But while Harris had succeeded in killing who he saw as his main tormentor, he wasn’t finished yet; his grievance lay with the entire United States Postal Service. From Ott’s apartment, Harris made his way to his former workplace, where he shot and killed mail handlers Joseph Vander Paauw and Donald McNaught. These killings were witnessed by a passing truck driver, who approached the post office to investigate. Harris opened fire, but the driver managed to escape and contact the police. Officers arrived on the scene within minutes, but were forced to retreat when Harris lobbed several pipe bombs at them.
But Harris was surrounded with nowhere to flee, and after only a half hour of negotiations he agreed to give himself up.
In the course of the subsequent investigation, the police discovered that Harris was also responsible for a brutal unsolved murder committed three years earlier. In 1988, Harris discovered he had lost $10,000 to shady investment broker Roy Edwards. Seeking revenge, on November 16 of that year, Harris broke into the Edwards home in Montville, New Jersey, fatally shot Roy, and raped his wife and two daughters. Given the emotional nature of both crimes, during his trial Harris’s lawyers attempted to argue that their client was not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury, however, was not convinced, and in May 1993 Harris was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Numerous appeals for clemency were denied, but in the end Harris never faced the gallows, dying in prison of natural causes in 1996.
The same year as Harris’s spree, another recently-dismissed postal worker, 31-year-old Thomas McIlvane, stormed into the post office in Royal Oak, Michigan with a sawed-off .22-calibre rifle and opened fire, wounding four people and killing five, including himself. But the peak of the postal shooting epidemic would come two years later when, in a strange coincidence, two massacres nearly 3000 kilometres apart took place within hours of each other. The first took place in Dearborn, Michigan, where post office mechanic Lawrence Jasion, having recently been passed over for a promotion, shot three people – one fatally – in a USPS garage before turning the gun on himself. In the second, former letter carrier Mark Hilburn of Dana Point, California, killed his mother and her dog before storming into the local post office and shooting two postal workers, killing one. Hilburn, who was later arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment, had recently been dismissed from USPS for stalking a coworker.
While not the first high-profile postal shootings, the 1993 incidents have the distinction of adding a new idiom to the American vernacular, which first appeared almost simultaneously in two different newspapers. On December 17, 1993, the Florida paper the St. Petersburg Times wrote:
“The symposium was sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service, which has seen so many outbursts that in some circles excessive stress is known as “going postal.” Thirty-five people have been killed in 11 post office shootings since 1983.”
…while on December 31, the Los Angeles Times said:
“…unlike the more deadly mass shootings around the nation, which have lent a new term to the language, referring to shooting up the office as “going postal”.”
The phrase “going postal” immediately became synonymous with deadly workplace violence, the cliché of a disgruntled postal worker snapping and shooting up their workplace becoming a staple of late night comedy routines; popping up as a punchline in movies and TV shows such as The Naked Gun 33+1/3, Jumanji, and Seinfeld; and even forming the central premise of the controversial Postal series of video games. Unsurprisingly, the United States Postal Service was less than enthusiastic about being associated with mass murder, the St. Petersburg Times article going on to state:
“The USPS does not approve of the term “going postal” and has made attempts to stop people from using the saying. Some postal workers, however, feel it has earned its place.”
Indeed, there seemed to be no end to post office-related violence. In 2003, Jennifer San Marco, a postal employee from Goleta, California, was forced to retire due to worsening mental health issues. On January 30, 2006, San Marco shot a resident of her condominium before making her way to the Goleta postal processing centre and killing seven people, including herself. This was the deadliest massacre in U.S. history committed by a woman. That same year, Grant Gallaher, a disgruntled postal employee from Baker City, Oregon, arrived at work armed with a .357 Magnum revolver, intending to kill his postmaster. Arriving in the parking lot, Gallaher spotted his supervisor, Lori-Hayes Kotter, and proceeded to run her over several times with his vehicle before entering the building in search of postmaster Michael McGuire. Unable to find him, Gallaher instead returned to the parking lot and shot Kotter dead. Gallaher later testified that he resented the extra workload and stress his superiors had recently placed upon him. On December 23, 2017, postal worker DeShaune Stewart of Dublin, Ohio, arrived at work naked and fatally shot his supervisor, Lance Hererra-Dempsey. He then made his way to a nearby apartment complex and killed the Dublin postmaster, Ginger Ballad, by throwing her to the ground head-first. Stewart as subsequently arrested and tried for murder, but found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a psychiatric institution. Finally, on April 15, 2021, 19-year-old Brandon Scott Hole drove into the parking lot of a FedEx ground facility in Indianapolis, Indiana and opened fire with a rifle, injuring 7 and killing 9 including himself. Hole had just been fired from FedEx for failing to show up to work.
The Indianapolis shooting was only the most recent in a long list of post office massacres, which are too numerous to list in their entirety here. Between 1970 and 2021, 60 people were killed in 27 rampage killings by current or former post office employees. During the worst years of the epidemic, between 1986 and 1997, these shootings took place at a rate of nearly two per year, with an average of 11.8 people killed every year.
It is important to note here that despite what popular culture would have us believe, studies have shown that postal workers are, in fact, no more likely to commit acts of workplace violence than workers in other fields, and that equally deadly shootings have occurred in many other industries. Yet examining the bloody history of post office shootings, it is hard not to suspect that there is something uniquely stressful about postal work that pushes its practitioners to commit such extreme acts of violence. After all, in the wake of Thomas McIlvane’s 1991 Royal Oak massacre, few of his coworkers expressed surprise, stating that such an incident was a long time coming. Stranger still, upon hearing of the massacre, they reported thinking that the perpetrator could have been just about anyone, indicating a widespread culture of discontent within the Post Office. Indeed, following the 1986 Edmond massacre, Vincent Sombretto, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers president Vincent Sombrotto, made the following public statement:
“While we are shocked and dismayed by what happened and offer our prayers to those surviving victims now in the hospital, we cannot help but believe that Mr. Sherrill was pushed over the brink by irresponsible and coercive management policies by the Postal Service in the Oklahoma City region.”
It was not until after the twin 1993 massacres, however, that the USPS launched a large-scale investigation into the “going postal” phenomenon, appointing Workplace Environment Analysts to 85 post office districts across the nation to report on working conditions. The analysts’ reports revealed that there was indeed something rotten in the state of the post office, and that it all had to do with Reaganomics.
The Post Office is among the United States’ most venerable institutions, with the power of Congress to establish and regulate a postal service being enshrined in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7 of the Constitution. While the Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1788, the Post Office Department was not officially established until February 20, 1792, with Timothy Pickering as the first Postmaster General. The Founding Fathers saw a well-run post office as key to a robust, functioning democracy, allowing news about national and international affairs as well as electoral ballots to reach every American citizen regardless of location or status. From this beginning the Post Office expanded rapidly, and by 1800 there were over 900 post offices and over 20,000 miles of post road across the country. The Post Office Department continued to operate on this model for nearly 200 years, but while it generally succeeded in its stated mission of providing reliable postal services to all citizens, it was far from a perfect system. Being a government department overseen by an appointed member of the cabinet, the Post Office required an act of Congress in order to make any changes to its operations, such as increasing the price of stamps, authorizing pay raises for its workers, or introducing new products and services. Consequently, the Post Office was extremely slow to adapt to changing conditions, and by the mid-20th century most postal workers were overworked, underpaid, and equipped with antiquated, poorly-maintained facilities and vehicles. This situation came to a head in 1970 when postal workers in New York City launched an illegal eight-day strike, crippling the U.S. postal system and prompting President Richard Nixon to pass the Postal Reorganization Act. This act dissolved the United States Post Office Department and replaced it with the United States Postal Service or USPS, a semi-private corporation. This reorganization freed the Post Office from direct Congressional control and guaranteed its workers the right to collective bargaining – though not, significantly, the right to strike. In exchange, the Act required USPS to wean itself off government subsidies and support its operations entirely through postage and other services by 1985 – a feat it accomplished two years early in 1983.
Despite this, following the election of president Ronald Reagan in 1980, a widespread perception arose of the post office as a bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy wasting citizen’s tax dollars, with neoliberal economists and politicians calling for the organization to be privatized or disbanded entirely. As a result, the Post Office came under increasing pressure to operate more efficiently and handle an ever-increasing volume of mail while still independently supporting itself. But there was a problem: though nominally an independent corporation, the USPS was still overseen by the Postal Regulatory Commission, which had to approve any proposed postal rate increases. It was also still bound by the Constitution to deliver mail to every single American household – no matter how remote. And with an almost fully-unionized workforce, mass layoffs were not a viable option. The only solution to this dilemma was for the USPS to squeeze its existing workforce even harder, forcing its employees to work ever longer and harder hours. The burden of enforcing these productivity demands typically fell on supervisors and middle managers, fostering toxic and often abusive relationships between workers and management and a highly-stressful workplace culture government analysts described as a “pressure cooker.” As a report prepared by the office of Senator Carl Levin of Michigan following the Royal Oak massacre revealed:
“[The workplace environment exhibited ] patterns of harassment, intimidation, cruelty and allegations of favoritism in promotions and demotions … [and] testimony relating to wide-ranging delivery and service problems.”
At the same time, the Post Office was one of the few employers willing to provide middle-class wages with benefits to workers without a college education or trade skill set. And while nearly all postal workers were unionized, abusive supervisors often reprimanded employees who filed grievances and interfered with union operations. Thus many workers, seeing no recourse and fearful of losing their benefits, chose to suffer in silence. For some, the pressure would prove too much to handle. While numerous General Accounting Office reports had identified these issues long before the 1986 Edmond shooting, for years the USPS chose to turn a blind eye to the problem – with tragic consequences.
While the postal killing epidemic of the 1980s and 90s prompted USPS to implement a variety of reforms, such as more stringent screening procedures for new hires and improved Workplace Health and Safety measures, unfortunately many of these reforms have since been clawed back as part of ongoing cost-saving measures. And as the Post Office and many other businesses continue to struggle in the face of inflation, stagnating wages, economic instability, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it is perhaps only a matter of time before yet another worker is pushed beyond their limits and decides to “go postal.” Thankfully, there is no danger of that over here in YouTube Land. After all, it’s not like we have to work an ever-greater number of hours to put out more and more content to satisfy an increasingly unstable, fickle, and oversaturated market and the whims of the algorithm Gods… No, no danger at all… cocks gun
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesThe Origin of the Term “Going Postal”, Today I Found Out, September 19, 2011, https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/09/the-origin-of-the-term-going-postal/
Middis, Jessie, The Shocking Murders Which Sparked the Phrase “Going Postal”, Yahoo! Life, October 10, 2021, https://ca.style.yahoo.com/the-tragedy-which-sparked-the-phrase-going-postal-210001287-180932795.html
Bartlette, DeLani, The Origin of “Going Postal”, Medium, June 29, 2020, https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-origin-of-going-postal-90992ce6fa6a
Bovsun, Mara, Mailman Massacre: 14 Die After Patrick Sherrill “Goes Postal” in 1986 Shootings, New York Daily News, August 15, 2010, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/mailman-massacre-14-die-patrick-sherrill-postal-1986-shootings-article-1.204101
Ex-Postal Worker Accused of Killing Postmaster, Postal Supervisor Found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, Postal Reporter, September 24, 2019, https://www.postal-reporter.com/blog/ex-postal-worker-accused-of-killing-postmaster-postal-supervisor-found-not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity/
Gallaher Sentenced in Baker County Circuit Court, Hells Canyon Journal, August 16, 2006, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=aeA4AAAAIBAJ&pg=1870,1355376&dq=grant-gallaher&hl=en
Mark Richard Hilburn, Murderpedia, https://murderpedia.org/male.H/h/hilbun-mark-richard.htm
Mydans, Seth, 2 Killed 3 Hurt in 2 Separate Post Office Shootings. Disgruntled Postal Workers Blamed in California, Michigan Incidents, Baltimore Sun, May 6, 1993, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-05-07-1993127126-story.html
A Former Postal Worker Commits Mass Murder, History, November 13, 2009, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/a-former-postal-worker-commits-mass-murder
Former Postal Worker Gets Death Penalty For Murder of Montville Man, Associated Press, May 28, 1993, https://apnews.com/article/73f6c05ced6635a48f7c593cfcb67ec8
McConnell, Mike, Royal Oak Post Office Shooting 30 Years Later, Royal Oak Tribune, November 12, 2021, https://www.dailytribune.com/2021/11/12/royal-oak-post-office-shooting-30-years-later/
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On February 21, 1967, tragedy struck the Apollo moon landing program. During a dress rehearsal or “plugs out” test for Apollo 1 – the first planned shakedown mission of the new spacecraft – an electrical wire sparked and started a fire in the capsule. In the pressurized, pure oxygen environment of the cabin, the flames quickly raged out of control, leading to the deaths of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The Apollo 1 disaster shook the US space program to its core, forcing a major reevaluation of safety procedures and dramatically showcasing the dangers of using pure oxygen atmospheres aboard spacecraft. But this lesson was very nearly learned a full two years earlier, in a now-forgotten incident that almost resulted in two astronauts suffering an equally fiery fate. This is the story of the near-disaster of Gemini 6A.
Following on the heels of Project Mercury, the United States’ first effort to put astronauts in space, Project Gemini was designed to test and perfect all the procedures and capabilities needed for the upcoming Apollo lunar program – including long-duration spaceflight, orbital rendezvous and docking, orbital maneuvering, and extra-vehicular activity or “spacewalking”. While the astronauts had had considerable input in the design of the earlier Mercury capsule, the Gemini spacecraft was a different beast entirely. Custom-tailored to the particular tastes of its fighter jock pilots, the cabin layout, controls, and instrument panels were all modelled after a high-performance fighter jet. Indeed, so influential was Mercury 7 astronaut and former Air Force test pilot Gus Grissom in Gemini’s design that the spacecraft became affectionately known as the “Gusmobile.” Another distinctly fighter-like feature of Gemini was its launch escape system or LES, designed to carry the crew to safety in case of an emergency during countdown or liftoff. The LES on the earlier Mercury spacecraft consisted of a solid fuel rocket motor mounted on a tower above the capsule, which in an emergency would ignite and launch the capsule – and its crew – safely away from the launch vehicle. Gemini, by contrast, was fitted with aircraft-like ejection seats – and it was these devices which almost caused the fiery deaths of the Gemini 6A crew.
The fourth manned Gemini mission, Gemini 6 was intended to test two of the most important capabilities required for the upcoming Apollo missions: orbital rendezvous and docking. NASA had recently chosen the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous or LOR method for landing on the moon, which involved the use of a lightweight spacecraft known as the Lunar Module or LEM which would undock from the Command-Service Module or CSM, land on the moon, take off again, and re-dock with the CSM in lunar orbit. Ensuring the astronauts could perform these procedures reliably and safely was vital to the success of the entire Apollo program. To this end, the Gemini 6 mission called for its crew to rendezvous and dock with an unmanned Agena target vehicle, which would be launched into orbit ahead of them.
Selected for the mission were Command Pilot Walter M. Schirra Jr. and Pilot Thomas P. Stafford. A member of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, Schirra had previously orbited the earth during the Sigma 7 mission on October 3, 1962, becoming the fifth American and ninth human in space. Stafford, by contrast, was a rookie, part of the second astronaut group – AKA “the New Nine” or “Next Nine” – selected by NASA in 1962. At 9:45 AM on October 25, 1965, Schirra and Stafford rode the elevator to the top of Cape Canaveral’s Pad LC-19 gantry and were strapped into their spacecraft. Fifteen minutes later, the Agena target vehicle, carried atop an Atlas booster, roared off the nearby pad LC-14. But while the Atlas first stage performed flawlessly, moments after separation a flaw in the second-stage engine caused the Agena to explode at an altitude of 240 kilometres. 50 minutes later, with the primary mission objective now a cloud of debris raining down over the Atlantic, Gemini 6 was scrubbed and Schirra and Stafford were removed from their spacecraft.
In the wake of this mishap, NASA planners scrambled to salvage the Gemini 6 mission. As a new Agena target vehicle could not be readied in time, NASA proposed an alternate plan: the new mission, designated Gemini 6A, would instead rendezvous with the Gemini 7 spacecraft, due to be launched in early December. Crewed by astronauts Jim Lovell and Frank Bormann, Gemini 7’s main objective was to test the feasibility of long-duration spaceflight by remaining in orbit for 14 days – the maximum time it would take to fly to the moon and back. Wanting to get the most bang for their buck out of the mission, NASA also proposed that Gemini 6A Pilot Tom Stafford switch places with Gemini 7 Pilot Jim Lovell by performing a spacewalk. Lovell, however, nixed this plan, as it would require him to spend 14 days wearing a bulky and uncomfortable EVA spacesuit instead of the lightweight orbital suit he and Borman had been issued.
Gemini 7 was successfully launched on December 4, 1965. Eight days later, Schirra and Stafford returned to Pad 19 for their second launch attempt. At first, all went exactly as planned. The preflight checks went smoothly, the countdown reached zero without incident, and the engines ignited right on schedule. But then, 1.5 seconds after ignition, the engines suddenly shut down and Gemini 6A’s Titan II booster settled back onto the pad. In that moment, Command Pilot Wally Schirra faced a critical decision. While all rockets are essentially giant bombs, the Titan II was particularly dangerous, for it was fuelled by a volatile combination of Hydrazine Hydrate and Nitrogen Tetroxide. These fuels are hypergolic, meaning they ignite on contact with one another. Thus, if a Titan II fell back onto the pad, the propellant tanks could split and the propellants mix, creating a giant fireball. Mission rules thus dictated that in the event of an engine failure on liftoff, Schirra was to immediately pull the ejection handle and launch himself and Stafford away from the exploding rocket.
But instead, Schirra hesitated. Though he had heard the engines ignite, he hadn’t felt the rocket lift off. Thus, when the engines shut down, he deduced that he and Stafford were in no danger and decided not to eject from the spacecraft. An hour later, pad crews rendered the malfunctioning rocket safe and the two astronauts climbed out of their spacecraft, their mission thwarted once again. But Schirra’s quick thinking and coolness under pressure likely saved their lives, as Tom Stafford explained in a 1997 interview:
“So it turns out what we would have seen, had we had to [eject], would have been two Roman candles going out, because we were 15 or 16 psi, pure oxygen, soaking in that for an hour and a half. Jesus, with that fire going off [from the ejection seat rockets], it would have burned the suits. Everything was soaked in oxygen. So thank God. That was another thing: NASA never tested it under the conditions that they would have had if they would have had to eject. They did have some tests at China Lake [California] where they had a simulated mock-up of Gemini capsule [on a rocket sled], but what they did is fill it full of nitrogen. They didn’t have it filled full of oxygen in the sled test they had.”
And even if the astronauts’ suits hadn’t ignited, the 20 g acceleration required to launch them 250 metres from the spacecraft – the minimum safe distance to escape the fireball – would likely have inflicted severe injuries. Yet had Schirra felt any motion at all, he would have pulled the handle, for, as he later stated: “It was death or the ejection seat.”
The engine shutdown was traced to a control umbilical cable which had released prematurely, and the Titan II rocket was quickly returned to flight readiness. On December 15, 1965, Schirra and Stafford climbed aboard the Gemini 6A for their third launch attempt. This time, everything went as planned, the Titan II lifting off at 1:37 PM. 4 hours later, Gemini 6A successfully intercepted Gemini 7 – the first orbital rendezvous by manned spacecraft in history. Over the next 5 hours the crews practiced orbital maneuvering and formation flying, coming within 30 centimetres of one another. Then, after a rest period, Gemini 6A broke formation and initiated reentry, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean and 3:28 PM on December 16 – 26 hours after liftoff. Meanwhile, Lovell and Borman carried on with their mission, reentering and splashing down two days later on December 18. With few other mission objectives to occupy them, the astronauts found the two week mission excruciatingly monotonous, while by the end of the flight the cramped conditions and rapidly-dwindling storage space for waste bags and other garbage made conditions inside the cabin almost unbearable. Nonetheless, the mission was a success, proving that astronauts could survive and function in space for long periods.
The next attempt to dock with an Agena target vehicle came on March 16, 1966 with the launch of Gemini 8, crewed by Command Pilot Neil Armstrong and Pilot David Scott. However, this mission also nearly ended in disaster when, shortly after docking with the Agena, a stuck thruster caused the spacecraft to start spinning out of control. Only quick action by Armstrong saved the crew from blacking out and being killed by the rapidly-mounting G-forces. The next mission, Gemini 9, was similarly plagued with problems. As on Gemini 6, the Agena target vehicle failed on launch, forcing the original mission to be scrubbed. However, NASA had planned for this contingency, and two weeks later launched the Augmented Target Docking Adaptor or ATDA, a simpler backup docking target based on the front half of the Gemini capsule. Two days later Gemini 9A launched into orbit. Unfortunately, when they caught up with the ATDA, they discovered that its streamlined launch fairing had failed to separate, making docking impossible. The first successful docking of a Gemini and Agena would not take place until July 19, 1966 during the Gemini 10 mission, crewed by Command Pilot John Young and Pilot Michael Collins. From here, NASA quickly made up for lost time. By the time Gemini 12 splashed down on November 15, 1966, Project Gemini had fulfilled all its objectives, and NASA was ready to move on to Project Apollo – and the moon. That the project was able to proceed so rapidly without a fatal mishap was largely due to the quick thinking and superb piloting skills of astronauts like Wally Schirra and Neil Armstrong.
However, Schirra’s potentially lifesaving decision during Gemini 6A only delayed the inevitable, with the tragic deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts in February 1967 publicly exposing the dangers of using pure oxygen aboard spacecraft. It is often claimed that up to this point NASA was completely ignorant of these dangers, but this is not the case. Indeed, several near-fatal accidents involving fires in high-pressure oxygen test chambers had occurred prior to Apollo 1, including two at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio and the Navy Air Crew Equipment Laboratory in Philadelphia in 1962. On February 16, 1965, just 10 months before Gemini 6A, Navy Divers Fred Jackson and John Youmans were killed when a fire broke out in their decompression chamber at the Experimental Diving Unit in Washington, D.C. So why, then, did NASA persist in using pure-oxygen atmospheres aboard its spacecraft? There are several reasons. First, pure oxygen is breathable at much lower pressures than regular air, meaning the cabin pressure could be kept lower and the spacecraft structure lighter. Second, breathing a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere introduces the risk of decompression sickness, also known as “the Bends”. And finally, maintaining a mixed atmosphere requires additional gas tanks, plumbing, and other equipment that all add weight and complexity to the spacecraft. NASA thus judged a pure oxygen atmosphere to be the lighter, simpler – and yes, safer – option. Following the Apollo 1, fire, however, engineers were forced to reevaluate this decision, and ultimately came up with a compromise. On all subsequent Apollo missions, a mixed nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere would be used during launch, but swapped out for pure oxygen once the spacecraft reached orbit. Most of the flammable material that had fuelled the Apollo 1 fire – such as velcro and nylon cloth – was also stripped from the spacecraft and replaced with fire-resistant alternatives. As for the Gemini’s potentially lethal ejection seats, these were replaced on Apollo with a conventional tower-mounted launch escape system. The only other time NASA used ejection seats on a spacecraft was during the first two Space Shuttle missions in 1981, after which they were deleted from the orbiter’s design. By this time, the cabin atmosphere had also been switched to a more earth-like oxygen-nitrogen mix. Thanks to these measures, NASA has not had another incident involving fire aboard a spacecraft – and hopefully never will again.
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Expand for ReferencesAgle, D.C, Flying the Gusmobile, Smithsonian Magazine, September 1998, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/flying-the-gusmobile-218187/
Gemini 9 Target B, NASA, https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=1966-046A
Evans, Ben, Clickety-Clack: Remembering the Misfortune of Gemini VI, ODT in 1965, AmericaSpace, https://www.americaspace.com/2020/10/25/clickety-clack-remembering-the-misfortune-of-gemini-vi-otd-in-1965/
Vantine, William, NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project: Thomas P. Stafford, October 15, 1997, https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/StaffordTP/StaffordTP_10-15-97.htm
Neufeld, Michael, Failure to Launch: the Heart-Stopping Pad Shutdown of Gemini VI-A, National Air and Space Museum, December 12, 2020, https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/heart-stopping-shutdown-gemini-vi
Neufeld, Michael, The World’s First Space Rendezvous, National Air and Space Museum, December 15, 2015, https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/worlds-first-space-rendezvous
The post That Time NASA Almost Turned Two Astronauts Into Roman Candles appeared first on Today I Found Out.
At precisely 3 in the morning on January 17, 1991, a series of explosions rocked the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The explosions were exact and devastating, destroying Iraqi military radars, command bunkers, and communications hubs with surgical precision. Immediately, Iraq’s aerial defence system sprang into action, its 3,000 anti-aircraft guns saturating the air with explosive shells. But the 60 surface-to-air missile batteries defending the country remained silent, their radars fruitlessly searching the skies for the unseen intruders. Little did the Iraqis know that they were up against an entirely new type of weapon: an aircraft designed to be almost invisible to radar, allowing it to penetrate deep into enemy territory and strike at critical targets with impunity. Known as the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, this revolutionary “stealth fighter” would go on to fly 1,250 sorties and drop more than 2,000 tons of bombs on Iraq without a single aircraft being shot down, helping bring Operation Desert Storm – the UN-backed expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait – to a swift and decisive conclusion. Since then, the F-117’s revolutionary technology has proliferated throughout the world’s militaries, completely reshaping the face of modern warfare. But how does this technology work? How is it possible to render an entire modern jet aircraft nearly invisible? Well strap in as we dive into the fascinating history and technology of stealth.
In the early days of military aviation, little attention was paid to stealthiness. Anti-aircraft defences were primitive, and it was more important for aircraft to be easily recognized as friend or foe by ground forces and other aircraft. For this reason, during the First World War aircraft were prominently marked with national insignia like British and French tricolour roundels or the German Balkenkreuz. But as the War progressed and aviation technology improved, greater emphasis was placed on camouflage both on the ground and in the air. Most nations thus adopted various camouflage schemes, generally consisting of pale blue or tan lower surfaces to blend against the sky and green or brown upper surfaces to match the ground below. One unusually elaborate scheme was the Lozenge Camouflage used by the Luftsreitkräfte or Imperial German Air Force. This consisted of a pattern of four or five-sided polygons in a variety of colours including blue, grey, green, black, purple, and even pink, pre-printed on the fabric used to cover aircraft wings and fuselages. These disruptive patterns were intended to break up the aircraft’s outline against the ground and sky and were printed in a number of versions for use on upper and lower surfaces and for day and night operations. However, even late into the war many fighter pilots eschewed camouflage for garish colour schemes intended to aid unit cohesion, display national pride and individuality, and intimidate the enemy. For example, pilots of Jagdgeschwader I, the famous “Flying Circus” commanded by top German ace Manfred von Richthofen – AKA the “Red Baron” – painted their aircraft bright crimson, while those of Jasta 6 opted for zebra-like black and white stripes.
Despite this, the Germans did make the first attempt to build a truly stealthy aircraft. In 1916, they replaced the fabric covering of a Fokker E.III monoplane fighter with sheets of an early transparent plastic called Cellon, creating something that looked like the ancestor of Wonder Woman’s invisible jet. Unfortunately, testing revealed that while the aircraft was indeed difficult to spot against a clear sky, in cloudy conditions light reflecting off the shiny Cellon skin actually made the aircraft even more visible! Back to the drawing board. While the Germans chose not to pursue this approach any further, in 1935 the Soviet engineer Sergei Kozlov tried building his own transparent aircraft, a modified Yakovlev AIR-4 reconnaissance plane known as the Kozlov PS. However, the Soviets ran into the same problems as the Germans two decades before, and this project, too, was soon scrapped.
In the interwar period, relatively few advancements were made in the field aircraft camouflage. Indeed, the growing doctrine of Air Power championed by theorists like Italian Army Major Giulio Douhet held that modern bomber aircraft flew too high and fast and were too heavily armed to be shot down, allowing them to attack their targets with impunity. This conceit, which British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin described as “The bomber will always get through,” made camouflaging an aircraft’s approach redundant. However, several outside thinkers circles saw the advantages of aerial camouflage, and tried to sell the military on their theories. Among these was New Hampshire artist Abbott Handerson Thayer, who, after observing and painting countless animals in the wild, came up with a theory of camouflage known as counter-shading. According to Thayer, the dark upper and light lower colouration of most animals serves to camouflage them against their environment by countering the effects of light and shadow. Normally, direct sunlight makes an animal appear light above and dark below. Countershading, however, darkens the light areas and lightens the dark, reducing the animal’s contrast against its background and making it appear flat. Or, as Thayer himself described the effect in his 1909 book Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom:
Animals are painted by Nature darkest on those parts which tend to be most lighted by the sky’s light, and vice versa. … the fact that a vast majority of creatures of the whole animal kingdom wear this gradation, developed to an exquisitely minute degree, and are famous for being hard to see in their homes, speaks for itself.
Thayer’s conclusions are now disputed, with modern zoologists arguing that not all countershading in animals is related to camouflage and that certain colour schemes are instead intended for display, warning, or thermoregulation purposes. Nonetheless, based on his observations, in 1902 Thayer filed a patent on the use of counter-shading to camouflage ships at sea, and during the First World War tried to convince the U.S. Navy to adopt his methods. But the Navy was uninterested and ignored him. Shortly before the Second World War, zoologist Hugh Cott took up the cause and tried to sell the British armed forces on the concept of counter-shading. Unfortunately, Cott had the misfortune of being the protege of John Graham Kerr, a biologist who during the First World War had argued with artist Norman Wilkinson over the effectiveness of Dazzle Camouflage, a scheme to paint ships in bold black-and-white stripes to break up their outlines and protect them from submarines – and for more on this bizarre form of camouflage, please check out our previous video Why Were So Many British and American Warships in World War I Painted Like Zebras? In 1939, Norman Wilkinson was serving as the British Army’s Inspector of Camouflage, and thus held enormous influence over how military vehicles and equipment were painted. Despite this, Hugh Cott was invited to take part in an experiment in which two 12-inch railway guns were camouflaged – one using Cott’s counter-shading method, the other using conventional techniques. The guns were then photographed from the air from different angles. According to observer Peter Forbes, the contrast was striking:
“…[Cott’s gun was] invisible except to the most minute scrutiny by someone who knows exactly where to look and what to look for. The other gun is always highly visible.”
Though this should have vindicated Cott, the demonstration embarrassed the Army and they refused to adopt Cott’s ideas, arguing that his scheme was too complicated to apply properly. Then, in order to get the troublesome zoologist out of the way, the Army posted him to the Middle East. But while counter-shading was never formally adopted by any armed forces during the Second World War, Thayer and Cott’s ideas nonetheless influenced camouflage doctrine throughout the conflict. Most nations’ fighting aircraft were painted some combination of pale blue or grey below and darker colours matching the surrounding terrain above, roughly approximating a counter-shaded scheme. In addition, reconnaissance aircraft like versions of the British Supermarine Spitfire and American Lockheed P-38 Lightning were painted all over in a special dark azure colour known as “PRU Blue.” Developed by Australian inventor Sidney Cotton, the colour helped these unarmed aircraft blend against the dark sky at high altitudes.
The war also saw the development of an unusual camouflage system known as “Yehudi Lights.” From 1943 onwards, the introduction of long-range patrol aircraft allowed the Allies to turn the tide against German U-boats, which had been decimating merchant traffic in the North Atlantic since the very first day of the war. However, U-boat crews often spotted these slow-moving aircraft from several kilometres away, giving them enough time to crash dive and slip away. Some method was thus needed to conceal these aircraft’s approach, allowing them sneak up on unsuspecting U-boats. Developed by the U.S. Navy in 1943, Yehudi Lights consisted of a set of electric lights attached to the leading edges of an aircraft’s wings and powered by an onboard generator. When activated, these lights washed out and broke up the aircraft’s dark silhouette, making it harder to see against the bright sky. This is similar in principle to the technique of counter-illumination used by certain sea creatures like the mid-water squid. The underside of these squid are covered in light-producing organs called photophores, which when activated help lighten its and conceal its silhouette when seen from below. The system’s unusual name came from the late 1930s slang phrase “Who’s Yehudi?”, used to refer to a mysterious or absent person.
In 1945, Yehudi Lights were tested aboard a Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber. Promisingly, while a regular aircraft was detected at a range of 19 kilometres, the Yehudi-equipped Avenger got within 3 kilometres (around 30 seconds’ flying time) of the test ship before being spotted – too close for a U-boat to crash-dive. A similar system called Diffused Lighting Camouflage was also tested by the Royal Canadian Navy, and consisted of a series of spotlights aimed at the sides of a ship to counter-illuminate and conceal its silhouette against the sky. Between 1941 and 1943, the system was installed experimentally on a number of RCN vessels including the Flower-class Corvette HMCS Rimouski, which in September 1943 spotted and intercepted the German submarine U-536 in the Baie des Chaleurs, Quebec. The U-boat appeared not to see Rimouski approaching, and the ship moved in for the kill. Unfortunately, at the last moment a stray radio communication from the shore alerted U-536’s commander, Kapitänleutnant Schauenburg, and the submarine succeeded in crash diving and escaping. Despite these promising results, neither Yehudi Lights nor Diffused Lighting Camouflage were used operationally during the war, though the idea may be making a comeback. In 2008, researchers from the University of Kansas covered a small drone in electroluminescent panels whose colour could be matched to the sky. Flying at 300 metres, the drone became almost invisible to the naked eye.
By the time such visual camouflage systems came of age, however, they had been rendered all but redundant by one of WWII’s game-changing technological innovations: Radar. Developed independently by the Germans and the British in the late 1930s, Radar – short for RADio Detection And Ranging – works by emitting a beam of microwaves, which bounce off the target and are detected by the radar receiver, allowing the target’s position and speed to be measured. For the first time, Radar allowed incoming aircraft to be detected far beyond visual and auditory range, giving ample warning of an attack and sufficient time for antiaircraft defences to be deployed. Indeed, the British Chain Home radar system and its associated ground-controlled interception network, the Dowding System – was a pivotal factor in allowing the Royal Air Force to defeat the German Luftwaffe during the 1940 Battle of Britain. Meanwhile, the German Kammhuber Line, a network of Freya and Wurzburg radars, radar-controlled searchlights and antiaircraft guns, and night fighters, made the skies over Germany deadly for RAF bombers attempting to pound Nazi industry into submission. Early attempts at radar countermeasures, however, focused not on making aircraft less detectable but rather on jamming and confusing the radar itself. The simplest of these countermeasures was code-named Window, which consisted of thin strips of aluminium foil dropped in bundles out of aircraft. These clouds of aluminium returned massive radio echoes, overwhelming and blinding the German radar operators. Window turned out to be one of the Allies’ most effective secret weapons, being used to devastating effect during the firebombing of Hamburg in July 1943 and the massive deception campaign in the leadup to the D-Day landings in June 1944 – and for more on this, please check out our previous video Operation Bodyguard: the Grand Deception That Made D-Day Possible. Modern versions of Window, known as “chaff,” are still carried by military aircraft today, and along with high-temperature infrared flares, are launched in order to defeat radar and infrared-guided antiaircraft missiles. The Allies also developed a number of active electronic jamming systems including Moonshine, Cigar, Grocer, and Jostle, which broadcast powerful radio systems intended to overwhelm German radar and night-fighter radio systems.
While no WWII aircraft were deliberately designed to be invisible to radar, a few managed to achieve this ability by accident – including the British de Havilland Mosquito light bomber. Due to wartime metal shortages, the Mosquito was built almost entirely of laminated plywood, which happened to be transparent to German radar. While the Mosquito’s large metal engines and propellers still returned radar echoes, the wooden airframe gave the aircraft the radar cross-section of a much smaller aircraft, making it much harder to detect and track. A fundamental term when discussing stealth technology, radar cross-section or RCS refers to the size of a spherical metal reflector that would return the equivalent radar echo of a particular vehicle. While it is impossible to make an aircraft completely invisible to radar, modern stealth techniques can reduce the radar cross-section of an aircraft the size of the Northrop-Grumman B-2 Spirit – a bomber with a 52 metre wingspan – down to that of a tennis ball.
Another WWII aircraft commonly believed to have stealth capabilities was the experimental German Horten Ho-229 flying wing jet fighter. A futuristic design, the Horten lacked a fuselage or vertical tail surfaces, parts of regular aircraft that are excellent radar reflectors. Like the Mosquito, it was also built largely of wood, and was even coated in paint containing carbon particles intended to absorb radar waves. Theoretically, all this should have made the Horten the world’s first true stealth aircraft, but the war ended before it could see service. In 2008, however, the Northrop-Grumman Corporation and the National Geographic Society teamed up to evaluate the advanced German jet’s anti-radar capabilities. The team constructed a full-sized non-flying mockup, took it to Northrop-Grumman’s radar test range at Tejon, California, and exposed it to radar waves at various frequencies. These tests revealed that the model had a radar cross-section around 40% that of the standard German WWII fighter, the Messerschmitt Bf-109. However, this experiment failed to account for two important factors: first, the real aircraft was not built entirely of wood and featured a large internal steel structure; and second, its twin jet engines – especially their spinning compressor blades – would have been strong radar reflectors. These two factors combined would have made the Horten’s stealth capabilities marginal at best. Even the innovative carbon-laced paint was found to be largely ineffective against WWII-era radars.
Indeed, the first deliberate application of radar stealth technology took place not in the air, but at sea. The development of centimetric airborne radar gave the Allies a huge advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic, allowing patrol aircraft to detect objects as small as a submarine periscope on the ocean surface from several kilometres away. In response, the Germans developed innovative radar-absorbing materials codenamed Schornsteinfeger and Sumpf, which was applied to U-boat periscopes and the snorkels they used to run their diesel engines while submerged. These materials were effectively versions of the Salisbury Screen developed by American engineer Winfield Salisbury in the early 1940s. This consisted of a sheet of insulating material of a particular thickness sandwiched between a metal screen and a solid metal sheet. When a radar wave hit the screen, it split into two components: one half of the wave reflected off the screen, while the second traveled through it and bounced off the solid metal layer. The two waves then cancelled each other out through destructive interference, causing the object to which they were applied to return a much weaker radar signature. The Germans also pioneered a form of acoustic stealth technology to protect U-boats against ASDIC, the Allied codename for active sonar. Codenamed Alberich after the invisible dwarf from Germanic mythology, this took the form of special rubber tiles applied to the hull of the U-boat. The tiles were covered in small, specially-shaped holes which would absorb any ASDIC sound waves that struck them. Alberich was applied experimentally to a handful of U-boats including the U-480. The coating proved highly effective, with U-480’s commander, Oberleutnant Hans-Joachim Förster, managing to sink four ships in five days in August 1944 without ever being detected by the Allies. Unfortunately, the War ended before the technology could be implemented on a wider scale. Today, however, anechoic tiles like Alberich are a common feature on many military submarines.
The development of true stealth technology would have to wait until the post-war period – but only after some hard lessons were learned in combat. In the early years of the Cold War, the main Western strategy for defeating Soviet air defences was simply to fly too high and fast to be intercepted. In 1956, Lockheed Aircraft introduced the U-2, a spy plane designed to penetrate deep into Soviet airspace and photograph strategic military installations. Essentially a jet-powered glider with enormous 31-metre wings, the U-2 was hardly stealthy, but it could cruise at an altitude of 24,000 metres – far higher than any Soviet fighter or missile could reach. So while Soviet radar easily tracked the U-2 overflights, for four years the aircraft enjoyed relative immunity from attack. Then, on May 1, 1960, U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down by a Soviet S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missile while on a mission over Sverdlovsk. In addition to sparking a major diplomatic incident, the shootdown revealed that Soviet missile technology had caught up with the U-2, and that some method was now needed to conceal future overflights. Thankfully, Lockheed had already initiated a project codenamed RAINBOW with the goal of making the U-2 less visible to radar. Ultimately three solutions were developed, codenamed Trapeze, Wires, and Wallpaper. Trapeze and Wires consisted of fine steel wires mounted on short fibreglass pylons strung along the leading and trailing edges of the wings and along the sides of the fuselage, which broke up and scattered radar waves; while Wallpaper was a Salisbury Screen-based radar absorbing material applied to the aircraft’s fuselage.
Unfortunately, testing revealed that these modifications were only marginally effective against Soviet Radar. They also produced significant drag and seriously impacted performance, costing the U-2 1,500 metres in altitude and 2,200 kilometres in range. Even worse, the Wallpaper material acted as a thermal insulator and caused the engine to overheat – with fatal consequences. During an April 2, 1957 test flight, heat buildup caused the aircraft’s engine to fail. This in turn caused the cabin to depressurize and test pilot Robert Sieker’s pressure suit helmet to pop open. Sieker immediately lost consciousness and the aircraft entered a flat spin and spiralled towards the ground. Though Sieker eventually regained consciousness and bailed out, he was too close to the ground and was killed. Nonetheless, operational flights of the modified U-2s, codenamed Dirty Birds or Covered Wagons, began in July 1957. A total of nine missions were flown before the system was deemed ineffective and the project was abandoned.
With the U-2 quickly becoming obsolete, Lockheed decided to take a different approach to defeating Soviet air defences. Rather than out-climbing Soviet fighter and missile, they would instead out-run them. The result was the A-12 OXCART, a futuristic titanium spy plane capable of flying at more than three times the speed of sound. While the A-12 and the later SR-71 Blackbird’s main defence was their sheer speed, great effort was also taken to minimize their radar cross-section – the first aircraft to be so-designed from the ground up. Stealth features included angled vertical tail surfaces and a sharp “chine” around the fuselage to deflect radar waves away from the aircraft, the use of radar-absorbing composite materials in many components, and fuel additives to make the jet exhaust less detectable to infrared sensors. The result was an aircraft with the radar cross-section of a Piper Cub – a civilian recreational aircraft half its size.
However, the first stealth aircraft as we understand the term today would not appear until the 1980s, with the technology that made it possible coming – ironically – from the Soviet Union. In 1962, Soviet physicist Pyotr Ufimtsev published a groundbreaking paper titled Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction, in which he described how to accurately calculate the radar cross-section of any shape and how to design a shape that would reflect the majority of radar waves away from its source. Though it attracted little interest in Russia, the paper was secretly translated into English, and in 1975 came to the attention of Lockheed radar specialist Denys Overholser. Overholser realized that Ufimtsev’s theories could be used to render an aircraft nearly invisible to radar. Based on his recommendations, Lockheed and the US government approved a development program under the codename Have Blue. The design of the specially-shaped stealth airframe was undertaken by engineer Bill Schroeder. As 1970s computers were not powerful enough to analyze complex curved shapes, Schroeder designed the aircraft entirely out of flat angled planes to make the analysis easier – a technique now known as faceting. This, however, resulted in a shape that was completely unstable in flight. Thankfully, recent developments in computerized stability augmentation systems – also known as fly-by-wire – allowed the radical new aircraft to be made flyable.
The result of Have Blue was a pair of sub-scale technology demonstrator aircraft that looked unlike anything the world had ever seen. Wedge-shaped and covered in sharp angled facets, the aircraft looked so un-aerodynamic that its builders jokingly nicknamed it “the hopeless diamond.” In addition to its trademark faceting, Have Blue integrated a number of other RCS-reducing features, including sharply-angled vertical tail surfaces like the A-12 and SR-71. On regular aircraft, the most radar-reflective features tend to be cavities like the cockpit, engine intakes, and wheel wells as well as moving parts like spinning jet engine compressor blades. Thus, on Have Blue, great care was taken to hide or fair over these features. The steeply-angled canopy was coated in a thin layer of gold, which reflected radar waves away from the cockpit while not affecting the pilot’s vision. The engines were buried deep in the fuselage, with protective screens covering the intakes, while heat-absorbing tiles lining the exhaust ducts reduced the exhaust temperature and the aircraft’s infrared signature. Finally, the whole aircraft was covered in special paint impregnated with tiny iron spheres, which would absorb radar waves and dissipate their energy in the form of heat.
Have Blue made its maiden flight on December 1, 1977 above Groom Lake, Nevada – better known as Area 51. The test program revealed that the aircraft worked exactly as intended; the stability augmentation system allowed for smooth, controllable flight, while the stealth features reduced the aircraft’s RCS to that of a marble. While both prototypes were destroyed by mechanical problems unrelated to their stealth features, the program was considered successful enough for Lockheed to proceed to the next phase, codenamed Senior Trend. The result was the F-117 Nighthawk, which made its maiden flight on June 18, 1981. Though popularly known as the “Stealth Fighter”, the F-117 was designed from the outset as a bomber capable of penetrating deep into enemy territory and carrying out precision strikes using laser-guided munitions. In addition to the stealth features developed by Have Blue, the F-117 lacked radar or any other transmitters that could betray its presence and carried its weapons in an internal bomb bay. 64 F-117s were produced, the type first seeing combat during the US invasion of Panama in 1989. The Nighthawk remained in service for 25 years, finally being retired in 2008. In that time, only one Nighthawk was ever lost in combat: an aircraft flown by Lieutenant Colonel Darrell Zelko, shot down by a missile over Yugoslavia on March 27, 1999.
The success of the F-117 paved the way for further advances in stealth technology. In 1989, the same year the F-117 was first deployed, the Northrop Corporation – now Northrop Grumman – introduced the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. Echoing the design of the wartime German Horten 229, the B-2 is a pure flying wing, with no vertical tail surfaces and a crew compartment, engines, and internal bomb bay smoothly blended into its chevron-shaped wing. As previously mentioned, these features, along with its buried engine intakes and radar-absorbing paint, help give the B-2 an RCS equivalent to a tennis ball. Though originally designed to penetrate Soviet airspace and destroy strategic targets using nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War relegated the B-2 to the conventional bombing role, the type being used for air support in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. However, the aircraft’s unique capabilities come at a tremendous cost, with the 21 strong B-2 fleet being valued at nearly $2 billion apiece.
In recent years, stealth technology has been incorporated into an increasing number of military vehicles. Aircraft like the American Lockheed F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II, the Russian Sukhoi Su-57, and Chinese Chengdu J-20 incorporate many of the stealth features pioneered by the F-117 including faceting, internal weapons bays, and metal-coated canopies, though modern computer software has allowed engineers to design more curved, aerodynamic airframe shapes that do not require as much computer correction to render stable. Many of these aircraft also incorporate what are known as radar-absorbing structures, with special cavities that absorb and dissipate incoming radar waves. The effect is what one engineer likens to an “electromagnetic roach motel” – radar waves check in, but they never check out. Many modern naval vessels also feature a stealthy, faceted design, including the French Lafayette Class, Dutch De Zeven Provinciën Class, and the Swedish Visby Class.
But while stealth has been a game-changer in the fields of aerial and naval warfare, if history has taught us anything, it is that on the technological battlefield no tactical or strategic advantage is maintained for very long. New weapons lead to new countermeasures and so on, and it is only a matter of time before new technologies render stealth as obsolete as the introduction of radar made visual camouflage during the Second World War. Indeed, developments in multi-beam and low-frequency radar and enhanced infrared imaging are already beginning to chip away at modern stealth’s effectiveness. Who knows what the future will hold?
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Expand for ReferencesVisibility Studies and Some Applications in the Field of Camouflage, Office of Scientific Research and Development, Washington, D.C, 1946, https://web.archive.org/web/20131023061821/http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/221102.pdf
Rowland, Hannah, From Abbott Thayer to the Present Day: What Have We Learned About the Function of Countershading? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences, February 27, 2009, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2674085/
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Richard, Marc, E. Godfrey Burr and His Contributions to Canadian Wartime Research: a Profile, McGill University, https://web.archive.org/web/20151123103141/http://fontanus.mcgill.ca/article/viewFile/179/201
Hambling, David, Cloak of Light Makes Drone Invisible? WIRED, May 8, 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/05/invisible-drone/
Kacena, Neil, Stealth: an Example of Technology’s Role in the American Way of War, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, April 14, 1995, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA328900.pdf
Nye, Logan, The True Story of the Soviet Physicist Behind America’sStealth Technology, Coffee Or Die, August 25, 2020, https://www.coffeeordie.com/soviet-physicist-stealth
Novell, Robert, Night Stalker…The Origin of Stealth Technology, RN3DB, October 14, 2022, https://www.robertnovell.com/night-stalker-the-origin-of-stealth-technology-july-13-2018-2/
Stealth Aircraft, U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission, https://www.centennialofflight.net/essay/Evolution_of_Technology/Stealth_aircraft/Tech31.htm
Flying Under the Radar – the Hidden History of Stealth Warplanes, Military History Now, November 28, 2014, https://militaryhistorynow.com/2014/11/28/flying-under-the-radar-the-top-secret-history-of-stealth-warplanes/
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In modern boxing, unless your name happens to be Rocky Balboa, it is generally advised that you not try to block punches with your face and chin. Back in the early days of the sport in the 18th and 19th centuries, however, the idea of slipping or dodging a punch was so alien that most pugilists didn’t even consider it to be an option, and, instead, simply traded blows until one of them fell over half-dead. This all changed when American-born boxer Bill Richmond put up his dukes and astounded the world of boxing with an amazing new boxing technique called, and we can’t make this stuff up- the dodge. Here now is the remarkable story of the American slave turned boxing superstar known as “The Black Terror”.
Born a slave in 1763 in a small town in modern day Staten Island, New York, Richmond spent his formative years in the service of a man called Reverend Richard Charlton. Little is known about Richmond’s early life or his parentage, excepting there being a persistent rumor that Richmond’s father was Reverend Charlton himself. It was also noted that descriptions of Richmond as a fully grown man note that he had significantly lighter skin than many of his black peers, leading some to assume that he was of mixed race. At the time, this led to many a cruel barb being thrown at Richmond, including comments about him being, to quote, “half-human”, slurs it may please you to learn Richmond eventually learned to respond to by beating the person saying them to within an inch of their life.
Moving on, contemporary sources seem to suggest that Richmond’s early life was relatively uneventful and he was reportedly a precocious and energetic child who was seemingly shielded from at least some of the racial prejudice that existed at the time (another factor that supposedly lends credence to that hypothesis that he may very well have been Charlton’s son). As Richmond entered his teens, his amiable personality made him popular with guests to the house, who he conversed with endlessly and enjoyed mimicking the many idiosyncrasies of to entertain others. This eventually brought him to the attention of a visiting English noblemen during the American Revolutionary War in 1776, one Lieutenant General Hugh Percy- a man who would later become the Duke of Northumberland and would change Richmond’s life forever.
Percy is said to have been particularly impressed by two specific interactions he had with Richmond during his time visiting Staten Island. The first came when Percy was having lunch with Charlton and Richmond was asked to give the Royal Toast in honor of the occasion- something he supposedly did in a perfect English accent, much to Percy’s amusement. The second came after Richmond had enlisted with the British army as a stablehand, during which time Percy witnessed him being harassed by three British soldiers in a local tavern. According to Percy, after being tripped by one of the soldiers while carrying a bucket of water, causing him to spill its contents all over the floor, an enraged Richmond (who remember was only 13 to 14 years old at the time) effortlessly beat the three fully grown men into submission, causing two to flee and the third to fall to the floor clutching a broken nose and begging for forgiveness. Richmond reportedly said nothing to the man, responding only by casually picking the bucket up and continuing his work as if nothing had happened. Percy promoted Richmond on the spot, making him his personal valet after “encouraging” Reverend Charlton to release the young slave into his care.
Percy then took Richmond back to live with him in the North of England where he paid for him to be educated out of his own pocket. When Richmond came of age, Percy then secured an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker for him in the city of York.
During his time in York, Richmond became smitten with a white woman identified today only as Mary, and eventually worked up the courage to ask Mary to marry him. She accepted and the newly wed couple reportedly stayed in York for a few more years, during which time they began popping out babies. As for his other passions, Richmond’s passion for fighting was once again ignited as well during this time.
You see, Richmond would regularly find himself on the receiving end of torrents of racial abuse when out walking with his white wife and mixed children. Not being one to turn the other cheek at anyone besmirching his or his family’s honor, Richmond would quickly make anyone who thought this was a good idea regret their decision via a lightning fast punch to the face. Naturally, it soon became apparent to Richmond that he possessed an affinity for boxing and he began to pursue it as a career, honing his skills by taking part in several prizefights across Yorkshire, reportedly all of which he won in the early going.
Richmond’s boxing prowess eventually resulted in him being dubbed “The Black Terror” by crowds. For the most part, it would appear that he largely tolerated this particular nickname but would punch out anyone he heard saying it with venom in their voice or in close proximity to his wife or children.
What makes his achievements in the sport especially impressive was not only that Richmond had no formal training, a fact that probably actually helped him as we’ll get into in a bit, but also Richmond’s size in comparison to most, if not all of his opponents. To explain, at the time, there were no weight classes in boxing and as such, most pugilistic bouts were inevitably won by the larger man when there was any real disparity. Richmond, who stood no larger than 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighed only around 147 pounds, was an apparent exception to this. Besting men as much as a foot taller and significantly heavier than himself with relative ease.
Richmond was largely able to do this thanks to his blistering speed, which he used to dance around opponents, dodging their lazy, easily telegraphed haymakers whilst peppering their midsection and chin with punches of his own. Richmond is largely thought to have been the first pugilist to do this as a general strategy, or at least he was the one that began to popularized it, and his style was so alien to the refrigerator-shaped men he was tasked with fighting that they would frequently tire themselves out just trying to hit him. This also being a time before a mandatory limit to the amount of rounds a bout contained (pugilists back then literally fought until one of them physically couldn’t continue), only served to make Richmond’s style all the more effective.
As a brief fun fact concerning this whole no limit to rounds, the longest professional boxing fight in history took place in New Orleans on Apr. 6, 1893, between Andy Bowen and Jack Burke. The fight was for the lightweight world title and lasted an astounding 111 rounds! After seven hours of brutal fighting, when the bell sounded for the 111th round, both fighters – dazed and exhausted- refused to come out of their corners and the referee ruled the bout as a no contest. So yes, after 111 rounds of using their bodies as punching bags, the contest ended in a tie, as ever reminding us that everything is pointless, nothing matters, and we’re all going to die and be forgotten.
In any event, going back to Richmond, dodging blows at the time was largely thought of as being a cowardly way to fight, as it suggested that the boxer couldn’t take a punch like a real man. However, given the entertainment value of watching a beast of a man swinging wildly at a smaller opponent floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee, crowds seemed to loved the technique when Richmond used it, turning up to his bouts in droves to witness him doing his thing. And, while other boxers initially wrote off Richmond’s style of boxing as lacking courage, the ruthless efficiency with which The Black Terror put down opponents massively bigger than him eventually shut them right the hell up. After all, hard to think of someone as less manly when they literally just pummeled you into submission. I mean, if they aren’t manly, what does that now make you?
Before long, Richmond was being called upon by everyone from fellow pugilists to Lord Byron to teach them his unique version of the sweet science. In many ways, Richmond was the first “modern” boxer and as such, many boxing scholars feel comfortable matter-of-factly stating that he near-singlehandedly “revolutionized the sport” with his defensive style. A fact that becomes all the more amazing when you realise that Richmond was, as alluded to, entirely self taught, which likely in this case was why his style so separated him from the norm at the time.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. After making something of a name for himself in Yorkshire, in the mid 1790’s Richmond and his family moved to London. Upon arriving in London, he entered into the employment of one Lord Camelford, a lover of boxing who took Richmond under his wing and had him accompany him to many illegal boxing bouts across the city as his valet and bodyguard. During one such outing in 1804, Richmond was challenged by a boxer called George Maddox. The ensuing fight between the two men was nothing short of vicious and ended in the 9th round when Maddox struck Richmond with a blow that opened a deep cut above one of his eyes. Richmond later suffered another, albeit much closer, loss against famed bare knuckle boxer Tom Cribb. A veritable mountain of a man almost 2 decades younger than Richmond (Richmond was 42 at the time the fight occurred while Cribb was just 24) who is said to have trained by punching trees.
The fight between Richmond and Cribb reportedly went on for some 60 rounds and saw Richmond deftly avoid Cribb for almost an hour, wearing him down with hacking shots to the body. However, Cribb’s sheer size allowed him to power through most of these hits and eventually land a series of blows on the much older Richmond. Depending on which source you consult, Richmond either called an end to the fight himself by raising his hands or was felled by an explosive, dynamite-like strike to the chin in the 60th round. Either way, Richmond lost. In his very next fight, Cribb became the boxing champion of the world.
No doubt disheartened by the loss, Richmond opted to instead teach boxing to the noblemen of Britain, becoming something of a celebrity and leading to numerous calls for him to un-retire and once again step into the ring. Despite being in his 40’s at the time, Richmond was eventually convinced to begin boxing competitively again in 1808, scoring a string of victories that intrigued Maddox enough to arrange for a rematch a year later in 1809.
This time Richmond beat Maddox “mercilessly” for almost an hour, slipping every punch Maddox threw and countering it with organ-bruising body blows accompanied by face smashing fists of fury. As an idea of how badly Richmond beat Maddox, a spectator present, an MP called William Windham, would later recall that Maddox was left “hideously disfigured” by Richmond’s hellacious, punch-based assault to his face.
Although Richmond and Cribb never had a rematch, Richmond did fight the champion by proxy by training another slave-turned-boxer called Tom Molineaux. Molineaux and Cribb eventually fought two times, with Cribb emerging victorious from each bout, narrowly in the first and decisively in the second.
Richmond himself continued to box well into his 50’s, with his fame ever rising. In fact, in 1814 Richmond was invited to spar for Frederick William III of Prussia to demonstrate his unique style of boxing alongside other prominent pugilists of the era. During the event, Richmond was introduced to the king as one England’s foremost and “celebrated professors of the fist”.
Speaking of 1814, during this year he defeated famed fighter Jack Davis with his ultra-defensive style, and another boxer called Tom Shelton a year later in 1815. During his bout with Davis, Richmond was hit only twice and so badly beat his opponent that he needed to be carried out of the ring. Richmond’s fight with Shelton was an altogether more vicious affair and went for some 22 rounds. During this bout, Richmond was hit with an illegal punch toward the end of the 21st round while he was on the ground recovering. A typically stoic Richmond shrugged the literal low blow off and entered the 22nd round with renewed zeal, zeroing in on Shelton’s temple with a series of heavy rights that sent him tumbling to the ground. In celebration, Richmond leapt five feet into the air over the ropes surrounding the ring and into the crowd. Richmond’s victory and the remarkably athleticism he displayed at such an advanced age would later prompt poet Pierce Egan (who witnessed the bout) to write of him: “Impetuous men must not fight Richmond, as in his hands they become victims of their own temerity … The older he grows, the better pugilist he proves himself.”
This victory cemented Richmond’s reputation and rumors of a rematch with Cribb swirled. However, Cribb feeling he had nothing else to prove having dominated the sport for many years at this point, instead opted to retire for the final time, spending the rest of his days teaching boxing and hobnobbing with royalty.
As for Richmond, he died at 66 in 1829, reportedly after spending an evening sharing stories and drinks in the pub of his one-time rival Tom Cribb.
Expand for ReferencesBill Richmond: ‘The pugilistic pioneer’
Bill Richmond: The Black Boxer
Black Terror: Bill Richmond’s Revolutionary Boxing
Bare-knuckle Boxer Bill Richmond ‘The Black Terror’
Richmond Unchained: The Biography of the World’s First Black Sporting Superstar
Bill Richmond – Boxing Hall of Fame
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The game of soccer (henceforth referred to as football to satisfy my English sensibilities, though to be fair, it was the English who originally named the sport Soccer in its earliest days under somewhat codified rules and only abandoned that original moniker about a half century ago in favor of the more generic “Football”) is full of players who have achieved almost legendary status for their ability to run around for a long time and occasionally kick a ball in the general direction they want it to go- all in hopes that their team gets said ball into a certain space more than the other team or, at least, the same number of times as the other team because who doesn’t love ties? Just helps us all more fully internalize the pointlessness of everything in life given we are all going to die, our very substance turned into microbial poop, and ultimately everything we ever did completely forgotten, even the fact that we existed at all…
Perhaps the most legendary of all of these sports stars is the Brazilian striker Carlos Henrique Raposo, if only because he managed to collect a salary playing for various professional football clubs for about 13 seasons from 1979-1992 despite not actually being very good at the sport and managing in just about every way he could think of to ensure that nobody ever figured this out.
Before we talk about that though, a disclaimer. While Raposo’s rather interesting career has since been documented in both film and books, hard contemporary evidence of his exploits are difficult to come by and it’s clear over the years his story has been embellished to an extent. Nonetheless, we have endeavored to tell you the most accurate possible version of his story to the point that our author even went as far as enlisting the help of a Spanish friend to read through every contemporary Spanish language source we could find that inevitably cropped up, to try to separate fact from embellishment. With that out of the way, let’s tell you the story of Carlos Raposo’s rather interesting career.
Born in 1963 in Brazil, as a youth, like many of his peers, Raposo harboured dreams of being a famous football star. The only problem was that he possessed relatively little skill for the sport compared to actual professionals. What Raposo did have though was the athletic build of a footballer, an incredibly charming personality, a host of high-profile friends who were more than happy to do him favors (even ones who knew he was full of crap), and a moral flexibility that ensured he could maximally take advantage of all of these things to become a football star despite not being very good at football. Individuals whom it is often claimed are friends of Raposo include Edmundo Alves de Souza Neto and Romário de Souza Faria, the latter of which is consistently ranked as one of the greatest players of all time.
Raposo’s alleged modus operandi at the beginning of his career was to call one of his more talented friends when they signed with a new club and simply ask for a trial with the club, which they were usually more than happy to put in a good word. During his interview, Raposo would formally request time to get fit before attending a proper training session, at which point he’d use his very made up reputation combined with his formidable physical prowess to make an impression on the club’s coach, via things like demonstrating his prodigious running ability and ability to lift heavy weights, while carefully avoiding actually needing to show off his relative lack of ability playing the sport. While you might think the coaches must have been morons, we should again stress that seemingly in all cases, he brought with him a backlog of former greatness with other clubs, including at times very real press clippings, despite, you know, that being made up.
After being signed, as soon as he attended a “proper” training session where he was expected to actually play and show off his actual football skills, Raposo would do things like feign a crippling injury via things like kicking a ball as hard as he could and then falling to the ground clutching his hamstring – a common injury for footballers. A tactic that worked surprisingly well both thanks to at times him being able to get unscrupulous doctors on his side, and also simple lack of medical technology. To quote Raposo himself about this unorthodox method of making the cut: “There were no MRI scanners in those days, so they had to believe me.”
Once he was declared injured, Raposo could safely wait out the rest of his trial period without worrying about playing and still collect a paycheck. To keep his teammates on his side, Raposo would allegedly arrive at hotels his team were due to stay in a few days earlier specifically to fill them with local women to “entertain” his friends in-between matches, in the process netting him yet more contacts who’d be willing to sing his praises when he inevitably applied to another club. Raposo would also occasionally talk on the phone in perfect English, telling friends that he was in talks with clubs in Europe that were interested in signing him to help convince managers into either extending his contract or raising his wages.
When his time with a given team came to an end, Raposo would simply repeat this formula with another club and, according to him, it worked, with the Brazen Brazilian claiming to have played for a host of well-known Brazilian clubs during his career including Vasco da Gama, Botafogo and Flamengo as well as having brief stints in France, Mexico, America and Argentina. Raposo was able to score these lucrative gigs thanks to a combination of his contacts and eventually showing he had previously played for other clubs and just sort of embellishing his exploits there. In short, developing a carefully crafted reputation, including using the media to help further all this. Sometimes it seems via journalists just trusting what he said about himself, others seemingly journalists who were happy to scratch his back if he scratched theirs.
For example, Raposo saw to it that coverage in his native Brazil while he was playing there always flanked his name by words like “gunner” and “scorer”, adjectives cherry-picked from quotes by legends of the sport whom he called his friends. We should point out here that because he, you know, rarely actually played and wasn’t that good relatively to his peers, he never actually scored any goals. Nevertheless, with such high praise coming from such well-regarded figures in the sport, clubs looking to sign Raposo seldom had a reason to doubt his claims that he was anything but a brilliant, tactically-minded striker capable of scoring goals with surgical precision, despite having a bit of a major injury problem.
Sometime during his career, Raposo also adopted the nickname “The Kaiser” as a nod to legendary German player Franz Beckenbauer, who was known by the same moniker due to his “dominance” and “leadership” while playing. If it wasn’t clear from the rest of this piece, Raposo gave this nickname to himself to try to help convince various clubs to sign him.
Although Raposo usually avoided stepping on the field like it was coated in landmines, there do appear to have been occasions in which he wasn’t able to avoid doing so and as a result, he does appear to have a legitimate traceable football record, albeit a very hazy one that’s mostly in Spanish and French. For example, Raposo is said to have played a single game with the Brazilian team, Bangu, and there’s a purported newspaper headline from the time he was signed that roughly translates to “The Bangu already has its king, Carlos Kaiser”. According to one source, Raposo was able to avoid playing in his first game with the team when he was brought on to substitute for another player by intentionally getting into a verbal argument with the fans from the sidelines, thus getting the referee to send him back to the locker room before he stepped onto the pitch and blew his cover. Raposo was somehow able to spin this into goodwill with the club’s president by saying he only got in an altercation with the fan because they’d called the president a thief. In the end, he was awarded a 6 month contract extension with that club.
Later in his career, Raposo moved to France and signed with a division two team called Gazelec Ajaccio where he made sporadic appearances, mostly limited to kicking the ball up the field and showboating for the crowd, who were more interested in the novelty of having a supposed Brazilian legend on their team than his actual performance. Further, in a training session with Ajaccio, Raposo was able to avoid playing entirely by simply walking onto the pitch and kicking all of the balls they had available into the crowd while warming up. His team, thinking he was playing to the crowd – which was quite large and filled with people eager to see their teams new Brazilian superstar perform- allowed him to do this, not realising Raposo had kicked literally every ball they had lying around. When the time came to start for real, with no ball, his lack of skills on this front was concealed and they simply enjoyed watching him show off his more natural physical skills in the training session.
As Raposo played in a time before our modern extensive online stat tracking websites and ubiquitous sports coverage, we have no way of knowing what his career record was, though most sources say that he played in around 30 games during the course of his career, the majority of which were with the aforementioned French team, with whom Raposo claims to have played “20 minutes per game, a few times per season”, although it should be noted here that one of his fellow footballers claims that actually never happened and the pictures of such were simply staged to convince other teams he had played. Whatever the case there, everybody seems in agreement that Raposo never scored a single goal, an impressive feat when you consider that he was a striker, which for non-football fans means his entire job on the pitch was more or less to score goals.
Raposo retired from the sport at age 39 and remained amazingly unrepentant about his deception, openly admitting in interviews with the Brazilian and French press that he “regretted nothing” about what he did because the clubs he played for treated their actual players so poorly, being quoted as saying: “Clubs already deceived so many players, someone had to be the avenger of the guys.”
Today, Raposo makes ends meet as a personal trainer and occasionally gives interviews about his rather colorful “career”, and even has had a book and a movie made about his exploits as a professional footballer who wasn’t actually very good at football.
Expand for ReferencesCarlos Henrique Kaiser the biggest football fraud?
Football’s Greatest Liar
CARLOS THE KAISER: FOOTBALL’S GREATEST CHARLATAN
The story of Carlos Henrique Kaiser, the Forrest Gump of Brazilian football
Forrest Gump do futebol e a personal embananada no programa do Jô – Video – In Spanish
Carlos “Kaiser”, the legend of the player who has never played a game
Carlos ‘Kaiser’: the story of an impostor in football
Carlos ‘Kaiser’ balls off, scheduled injuries, fake mobile phones
The post The Con Artist Who Managed a 13 Year Career as a Professional Football Player Despite Sucking at Football appeared first on Today I Found Out.
These days, it seems that movie theatres will try just about everything to lure viewers away from the comfort and convenience of television and streaming, from 3D releases to giant IMAX screens to “4D” seats that shake and rock along with the onscreen action. And as theatres struggle to recover from the massive hit in attendance caused by the COVID 19 pandemic, such gimmicks are likely to become even more prevalent in the future. But this is nothing new. Back in the 1950s, as the newfangled technology of television made its way into ever more American homes, the film industry turned to ever more elaborate gimmicks to get butts in theatre seats, from wraparound Cinerama screens to 3D films to special seats that jolted audience members during moments of high tension. But perhaps strangest gimmick of all was a system that pumped various scents into the theatre in an attempt to better immerse viewers in the film. This is the story of the brief rise and fall of Smell-o-Vision.
The use of scent to enhance storytelling predates the use of sound in film – and, indeed, the art of film itself. Ancient Greek plays often made use of incense or fresh flowers to build atmosphere, while 19th Century dramatists sometimes scattered pine needles to evoke the scent of a forest or cooked food onstage to create the ambiance of a kitchen or restaurant. While this might seem like nothing more than an elaborate gimmick, there is a solid scientific justification for using smell to enhance immersion. Evolutionarily speaking, smell is one of our oldest senses, and the one most closely tied to memory and basic emotions such as fear, disgust, joy, and sadness. This is why a single odor can unleash a flood of powerful memories, and why artists through the ages have sought to harness the power of scent to evoke the desired emotions in their audience.
The first recorded use of scent enhancement in a movie theatre was in 1906 when the owners of the Family Theatre in Forest City, Pennsylvania piped the scent of rose oil into the auditorium during a newsreel about Pasadena’s Rose Parade. In 1916, the Rivoli Theatre in New York also released floral scents during screenings of the short film Story of the Flowers, while in 1929 Fenway Theatre in Boston used lilac perfume to enhance the romantic drama Lilac Time. That same year, the New York premiere of The Broadway Melody, one of the first Hollywood musicals, was accompanied by perfume sprayed from the ceiling. However, these early attempts were one-off stunts implemented by individual theatre owners, and rarely incorporated more than one or two thematically relevant scents released during the show. It would be another decade before fully scent-integrated films finally became a reality. And the mastermind behind this would-be cinematic revolution was a curious 40-year-old Swiss inventor named Hans Laube.
Born in Zurich in 1900, Hans Laube was the spitting image of the Germanic mad scientist, with round black eyeglasses and an obsessive, fastidious nature. Relatively little is known about the man, who at various points in his life identified himself as a professor, electrical engineer, advertising executive, and an “expert in cosmology, the science of odours.” According to one story, in the mid-1930s Laube invented an air purifier to clear cigarette smoke and other odours from large auditoriums, and became fascinated with the notion of reversing the process and returning the smells into the theatre. This led to a lifelong obsession with scents and the emotions they could trigger. Around 1939, Laube invented a system called “Scent-o-Vision” which could pipe 32 different scents including roses, tar, peaches, and coconuts through hoses built into each theatre seat. The system was manually operated by the projectionist, who released the appropriate scents at key points throughout the film. To promote the technology, Laube produced a 35-minute short film called Mein Traum or “My Dream”, which was exhibited at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. While some viewers complained that a few of the artificial scents – most notably that of bacon – were less than convincing, reviews of the experience were generally positive, with the New York Times reporting:
“[Scent-o-Vision] produces odors as quickly and easily as the soundtrack of a film produces sound.”
Yet despite the inherent novelty of Scent-o-Vision, Laube failed to interest many Hollywood producers or theatre owners in his invention. Walt Disney briefly considered integrating Scent-o-Vision into his 1940 animated musical Fantasia, but ultimately decided against it for reasons of cost. There were scattered attempts throughout the 1940s to integrate scents into films, such as in 1943 when a theatre in Detroit used smells such as tar and salt air to enhance the Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Sea Hawk. Also on the bill was the western Boom Town, in which each actor was given the olfactory equivalent of a musical leitmotif – tobacco for Clark Gable, pine for Spencer Tracy, and perfume for Hedy Lamarr. But it would not be until the 1950s that the movie industry would truly be ready for Hans Laube’s odiferous vision.
As previously mentioned, in that decade growing competition from television forced movie studios and theatre owners to come up with ever more elaborate gimmicks to get viewers into movie theatres. At first such efforts focused on creating an epic, immersive experience that television simply could not recreate. Among the first such technologies was Cinerama, which used three separate projectors to fill an extra-wide curved screen, filling the audience’s field of view and creating the illusion of total immersion. Introduced in 1952, Cinerama was mainly used for travelogues and historical epics, such as 1955’s Cinerama Holiday and 1962’s How the West Was Won. However, the equipment needed to film and project Cinerama proved prohibitively expensive and technically challenging to use, and only a handful of films were ever produced in this format. A similar widescreen effect was later achieved more economically with single-projector systems such as 70mm Panavision, Cinemascope, and, of course, IMAX.
The 1950s also saw the golden age of the 3D films, starting with 1952’s Bwana Devil, a film about man-eating lions in Africa whose promotional tagline touted the experience as “A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!” Throughout the decade, films ranging from the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock thriller Dial M for Murder to the 1955 Andre de Toth horror House of Wax would exploit the 3D effect to varying degrees of success, with plenty of objects like trains, weapons – or, in the case of House of Wax, a paddleball – shot to appear as though they were coming straight at the audience. But the novelty quickly wore thin, and could not compensate for the lower image quality of most films shot in 3D. Theatres also found it difficult to persuade audience members to return their cardboard 3D glasses, cutting significantly into profits. By the 1960s, the first wave of 3D films had all but died out.
But the undisputed master of outrageous cinematic gimmicks was B-movie director and producer William Castle, known throughout Hollywood as the “King of Ballyhoo.” Castle was infamous for integrating elaborate props into his film screenings, such as swinging a glow-in-the-dark skeleton through the theatre at the climax of 1959’s House on Haunted Hill or giving audience members special “Illusion-O” glasses that allowed them to see the invisible ghouls in 1960’s Thirteen Ghosts. But perhaps Castle’s most outlandish invention was his so-called “Percepto” format, specially created for 1959’s The Tingler. The plot of the film revolves around a parasite that wraps itself around the human spinal cord and can only be defeated by screaming. At the climax of the film, electric motors built into the theatre seats would give audience members a jolt of vibration, as onscreen, actor Vincent Price urged them to “Scream! Scream for your lives!”
This period of freewheeling showmanship and experimentation created the perfect conditions for the triumphant return of Hans Laube and Scent-o-Vision. In the mid-1950s, Laube finally found a patron in producer Michael Todd, known for his bombastic, larger-than-life productions on both stage and screen. Todd initially considered integrating Scent-o-Vision into his epic 1956 adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, but ultimately decided against it. And while Todd died tragically in a plane crash in 1958, his son, Michael Todd Jr, remained fascinated with the potential of Scent-o-Vision and signed Laube to a movie deal – on the one condition that the name be changed to “Smell-o-Vision.” When an indignant Laube asked why he didn’t change the name to something more dignified, Todd replied:
“I don’t understand how you can be ‘dignified’ about a process that introduces smells into a theater.
Laube had improved the Smell-o-Vision system since its 1939 debut, integrating what he called a “smell brain”. No longer did the projectionist have to cue up each scent manually; instead, the vials of scent were mounted on a belt looped around a pair of feed reels. Optical markers on the film cued the belt to advance through the machine, ensuring that each scent was delivered at the right moment. Still, Todd and Laube recognized that Smell-o-Vision had its limitations. The system, they realized, would not mesh well with heavier fare like dramas or romances, so for the first Smell-o-Vision feature, they produced a light-hearted comedy whodunnit titled Scent of Mystery. Starring Denholm Elliott, Elizabeth Taylor, and Peter Lorre, Scent of Mystery centres on a photographer on vacation in Spain who stumbles upon a plot to murder a beautiful heiress. With the help of a drunken cab driver, he embarks on a madcap chase across the Spanish countryside to thwart the crime. Unlike previous scent-enhanced films, Scent of Mystery used scent as an integral storytelling device, with the offscreen presence of certain characters being telegraphed by the release of particular smells like tobacco smoke or perfume. Smell was also used to add humour. For example, in one scene where Elliot and Lorre’s characters are drinking coffee, Lorre’s drink smells suspiciously like it has been spiked with brandy.
With his trademark flair for over-the-top promotion, Michael Todd Jr. touted Scent of Mystery and Smell-o-Vision as the next great advance in filmmaking technology, the film’s posters proclaiming that:
“First they moved (1895)! Then they talked (1927)! Now they smell!”
But before Todd and Laube’s revolutionary new film could make it into cinemas, it was beaten to the punch by the 1959 Italian travelogue Behind the Great Wall, which at its premiere at the Mayfair Theatre in New York was accompanied by a suite of 100 different aromas including grass, earth, seawater, burning gunpowder, and incense. These scents were delivered via a system called “Weiss-Rhodia Screen-Scent,” invented by public relations executive Charles H. Weiss, which released odours not through specially built pipes in the seats but rather the theatre’s air conditioning system. The scents themselves were mixed with a quick-evaporating Freon base, while the system incorporated a special electrostatic filter to quickly remove the scents from the air, preventing them from lingering too long. Reviews of the resulting experience were mixed, with some papers like the Sunday Morning Herald Tribune praising the illusion:
“Curiously enough, they do not give the impression of being blown in or wafted from any specific direction. Actually the individual smells simply appear in the nostrils without any effort being made to sniff or strain for them. And what is more remarkable, each individual odor disappears promptly when the image smelled leaves the screen. There is no question about its effectiveness in creating illusions of reality.”
The New York Times was less flattering, with reviewer Bosley Crowther describing the piped-in scents as:
“…capricious … elusive, oppressive or perfunctory and banal … merely synthetic smells that occasionally befit what one is viewing, but more often they confuse the atmosphere.”
Audiences proved indifferent to the gimmick, but Behind the Great Wall, stripped of the accompanying scents, became a critical and box-office success. Meanwhile, Michael Todd Jr. and Hans Laube pushed forward with Scent of Mystery, which premiered in three specially-equipped theatres on January 12, 1960. Alas, the lukewarm reception of Screen-Scent proved to be an ill omen, for Smell-o-Vision failed to make the impression that Todd and Laube hoped. Audience members in the balconies noted that the scents reached them several seconds too late, muddling their dramatic impact, while others complained that the puffs of scented air emerging from the delivery pipes were distractingly loud and the scents themselves too faint, with Bosley Crowther writing that:
“…patrons sit there sniffling and snuffling like a lot of bird dogs, trying hard to catch the scent.”
The rapid-fire aromatic salvo also prevented viewers’ noses from resetting between scents, resulting in an effect known as olfactory fatigue that caused all the various smells to blend together into a meaningless .
The film itself has hardly better-received, with Crowther pithily suggesting that the filmmakers pump laughing gas into the theatre to make up for the unfunny script and wooden performances. Comedian Henny Youngman also joined the critical dogpile, quipping:
“I didn’t understand the film—I had a cold.”
While Laube was eventually able to solve most of the technical issues, it was already too late: bad press had doomed Smell-o-Vision to cinematic oblivion. Hans Laube and Michael Todd Jr. disappeared into obscurity, the three Smell-o-Vision theatres were stripped of their equipment, and Scent of Mystery was re-released as Holiday in Spain. However, as scent was so intimately woven into the film’s storytelling, its absence led to even more confusion among viewers, with the Daily Telegraph noting:
“…the film acquired a baffling, almost surreal quality, since there was no reason why, for example, a loaf of bread should be lifted from the oven and thrust into the camera for what seemed to be an unconscionably long time.”
By the 1970s, the fad for elaborate cinematic gimmicks had died out as a new generation of bold, exciting directors like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola spearheaded the renaissance in filmmaking known as “New Hollywood.” Still, occasional attempts were still made to further enhance the cinematic experience. One such system was “Sensurround”, which made theatre seats shake and rock during screenings of the 1974 disaster epic Earthquake. Far more ambitious was the Laser-Disc-based “Interfilm” system developed by inventor Bob Bejan, which allowed audience members to direct the course of a film in real-time, Choose Your Own Adventure -style. Seat armrests were fitted with joysticks, which the audience could use every few minutes to choose between three possible story paths. The films produced using this system were only 20 minutes long, allowing viewers to return for repeat screenings and experience multiple different iterations of the same story. Unfortunately, like many such systems, Interfilm proved prohibitively expensive to implement and failed to draw a large enough audience, and only two films – 1992’s I’m Your Man and 1995’s Mr. Payback – were produced before Bejan’s company folded. Still, the inventive concept anticipated future works of interactive media like Netflix’s 2018 experiment Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Yet despite the repeated failure of similar gimmicks, Smell-o-Vision continued to pop up in one form or another. In 1981, cult filmmaker and self-proclaimed “king of bad taste” John Waters paired his comedy film Polyester with a variation of Smell-o-Vision he dubbed “Odorama.” Instead of having smells piped through their seats, audience members were handed a card with ten numbered scratch-and-sniff discs, each cued by matching numbers appearing onscreen. The scents ranged from roses to farts to pizza, but all reportedly smelled vaguely of oregano. While Waters intended the gimmick as a tongue-in-cheek homage to schlock masters like William Castle, the Odorama concept has been been copied many times since, such as for 2003’s Rugrats Go Wild and 2011’s Spy Kids: All the Time in the World. There have even been attempts to resurrect Hans Laube’s original Smell-o-Vision concept. Hong Kong director Ip Kam-Hung’s 2000 fantasy-romance film Lavender was enhanced via floral scents pumped into theatres’ air conditioning systems, while in 2006, select Japanese screenings of Terence Malick’s historical romance The New World were accompanied by floral scents for romantic scenes, peppermint and rosemary for sad scenes, orange and eucalyptus for joyful moments, and tea tree oil for angry moments. Several rides at Disney parks also make use of piped-in-scents, such as It’s Tough to be a Bug at Animal Kingdom, Mickey’s Philiharmagic at Disney World, and Soarin’ Around the World at Disney California Adventure. Several companies are currently developing smell-release systems that can be plugged into a television or computer, while Vermont-based firm OVR technology recently introduced the ION, a scent device for the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset. It just goes to show that as cynical as we might think we are, we will always be suckers for a novel cinematic gimmick. And so, like a fart in a sofa, the strange allure of Smell-o-Vision will continue to linger for some time to come.
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Expand for ReferencesHenry, Gabriel, What the Fact?! 365 Strange Days in History, Chronicle Books, San Fransisco, 2018
‘Smellies’ Back in 1916? Variety, November 27, 1940, https://archive.org/details/variety140-1940-11/page/n195/mode/1up?view=theater
Smith, Martin, The Lingering Reek of Smell-O-Vision, Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2006, https://www.latimes.com/business/la-tm-oops6feb05-story.html
Dirks, Tim, Hollywood’s War Against Television, The History of Film, https://www.filmsite.org/50sintro2.html
Innes, Erika, Smell-o-Vision is Real! Medium, April 4, 2021, https://medium.com/from-the-desk-of-the-nerd-legion/smell-o-vision-is-real-1e50fa9f04f3
Braudy, Leo et al, Smell-o-Vision, Astrocolor and Other Film Industry Inventions That Proved to be Flops, Smithsonian Magazine, February 28, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/smell-o-vision-astrocolor-other-film-industry-inventions-that-proved-to-be-flops-180968295/
The post Hollywood and Its Efforts to Introduce the Wacky World of Smell-o-Vision appeared first on Today I Found Out.
When we think of Sparta, the first thing that comes to mind is the Spartan warrior. Unlike other historical warrior peoples like the Samurai, the Spartan warriors were pretty close to our imagined conception of them. They were manly warriors who were very muscular, fought wearing red capes, and holding big shields. They were the face of Sparta, to the point that we often don’t realize that Sparta is not a state, but the capital of the region of Lakedemonia and the only city in which the warriors were permitted to live, hence their description as Spartans. Today, the Spartans are remembered as a society completely geared towards war and fighting, but how accurate is that? Is this actually Sparta? And how did one become a Spartan Warrior anyway?
As mentioned, Sparta is not the name of the region, it is just the name of the central city. The region was called Lakedemonia in the Greek Peloponnese Peninsula. It isn’t really all that surprising that we know the Spartans by the name of their central city. Ancient Greeks organized themselves politically into city-states, or Polis. Think Athenians, Thebans, or other well known Ancient Greek peoples. We usually refer to them by the name of their Polis, even if they lived in the surrounding regions of the city-state. What makes the Spartans special, not just in our modern eyes, but in the eyes of their fellow ancient Greeks is that they had a very different society from other Greeks. Despite Sparta controlling the whole region of Lakedemonia and sometimes beyond, citizens could only come from the city of Sparta, and only live there in their special society. Spartans went on several colonial campaigns to capture neighboring lands and referred to their area of political control as Lakonia. The citizens referred to themselves as Spartans, outsiders referred to the Spartans as Lakedemonians after the region, but we might also see them referred to as Lakonians after the political area they controlled.
So, who were the Spartan warriors? The citizens of Sparta were those who not only lived in the city of Sparta, but belonged to the ruling class. These were the Spartans you saw in films like 300. They see themselves as descendants of Hercules and Dorians who settled in the region of Lakedemonia. As an outside force, they ruled over the native population of second class citizens or slaves. This class of people were known as the Spartiates.
So that begs the question, who are the other Lakedemonians, and for our purposes, did they fight? There are many classes of people in Lakedemonia, but the three most prominent were: the Spartiates, the Dwellers-Around, and the Helots. The Dwellers-Around and the Helots were probably the original inhabitants of Lakedemonia, but we don’t know as much about them as we do the Spartiates. The Dwellers-Around are the regular every-day free peoples of Lakedemonia. They lived a similar life to most Greeks at the time, neither required to live the Spartiates’ warrior lifestyle, nor live as slaves. They tended to be traders, manufacturers, artists, but also put on their warrior uniforms and followed the Spartiates into battle at the command of the state. The exiled king Damaratos warned the Persian Xerxes about the necessity of the Dwellers-Around to Spartan society, and their bravery in combat. As Spartan history went on, the Spartiates began to rely on the Dwellers-Around to fight more and more until they came to outnumber the Spartiates in their armies. Even then, we don’t know how Dwellers-Around became warriors.
Then you have the Helots. The Helots were a type of slave that comprised the majority of Lakedemonia’s population. Other than the Spartiates, the Helots are remembered mostly because of the intense level of class disparity between them and the Spartiates. By class disparity I mean the Spartiates were known to have abused and murdered Helots in a way that often shocked other slave-owning Greeks, to the point that the Spartans always feared an intervention by their rivals to support the Helots. As to what these slaves got up to, Helots supported their masters on campaigns and fought on the front lines. If all you know of Sparta is the movie 300, just know that there were Helots on that campaign, and that they far outnumbered their 300 Spartiate masters. Spartiates always kept an eye on their Helots during campaigns, even changing camp formations so that they faced inward at camp rather than outwards, because of past revolts that rocked Lakonia; they never turned their back on their warrior slaves. There were other smaller and less significant groups in Lakedemonian society, but the Spartiates, Dwellers-Around, and Helots are the main three.
Of the classes, we know most about the Spartiate warriors and their upbringing. Spartiates relied very heavily on the Dwellers-Around and the Helots for their warrior lifestyle. The Helots did the heavy lifting in Lakedemonian society, and the Dwellers-Around took care of the state beyond the Spartiates’ roles as warriors, defenders, and decision makers. The same exiled King Damartos acknowledges as much to King Xerxes. Being freed from mundane matters of labor, farming, and administration, the Spartiate citizens were allowed to focus on their training. Modern scholars even refer to the Spartiates as a class of leisure. While that may be true, they endured childhoods of hell to reach that point.
Spartan education is considered a thirty year process broken down into three parts. The education of a Spartan, and by Spartan I do mean Spartiate, is a communal effort the state is involved in. It takes a village to raise a child, and in the case of Sparta, that village would mercilessly beat them into adulthood. The first phase of formal education began around the age of seven when boys were assigned to groups of boys called herds led by a herder. If the assigned herder was not present, any Spartan citizen could order the herd around if need be. The Spartans considered following the rules to be very important, and herders were usually accompanied by whip bearers who whipped the boys for any infraction. Further, if you were whipped as a Spartan child, you can expect your father to continue with a staff when you got home. If you broke a rule in front of another boy’s father and he beats you, your father was also honor bound to beat you again when he hears of it. This can happen when the herder is absent and another father takes charge of the group, again going to show how communal the raising of children was in the city of Sparta.
Despite this instilling of rules, the instilling of rule breaking was also a part of the boys’ education. The boys were fed meager meals, even by Spartan standards. They were expected and even encouraged to steal food to supplement their meagre diets. Despite that encouragement, boys were punished for being caught, even killed in the process of that punishment. So why encourage rule breaking when you are just going to punish a boy for breaking the rule? It seems the purpose was to instill a respect for the rule of law yet teach the children how to undergo covert operations as training for later life. Like most things in Sparta, stealing was a collaborative project. The herd had to collectively organize their stealing, with members acting as lookouts while others stole. The whole process required endurance, something necessary to instill in future warriors. Endurance was the name of the game, from their meager food to their harsh punishments. Finally, the leaders of the Spartan state, the Ephors, inspected the boys of this age naked every ten days, ensuring that the boys did not get too fat and were progressing in their training.
At fourteen the Spartan boys moved to the next level of their education, which got even harsher.
But before we get into that, you might at this point be wondering who established this bizarre and brutal way of life for the Spartiates? The Spartiates cite a lawgiver-king named Lykourgos. Today scholars tend to agree that Lykourgos might have been mythical, and even the ancient Greeks could not nail down a time in which he ruled, although they didn’t doubt his existence. Herodotus places Lykourgos in the middle of the sixth century and puts forward two stories as to how he developed the Spartan way of life. He either received instructions from an oracle at Delphi or borrowed his system from Crete.
Lykourgos may be part of what is called the “Spartan Mirage.” Spartans were very secretive, mischievous, guarded, and xenophobic. This extended into their training, everyday lives, and conduct with other Greeks. They created this image of Sparta to hide their true activities and intentions, so that their enemies were always in the dark. Even aspects of their training and leisurely activities such as their ball games were meant to hide their intentions, which is to train for combat. This Spartan Mirage throws some of what we know about them into question, especially because so few of our sources are from Sparta. Most of what we know about Spartans come from contemporary Athenian writings, which are openly anti-Spartan, or later Roman sources.
But in any event, as mentioned, at the age of fourteen the Spartan boys moved to the next phase of their education as youths. This phase of the education is the toughest. Spartan elders saw this phase of a teenage boy’s life as the most rebellious and cocky, so they piled on the work for the boys. They designed the training so that the boys had as little free time as possible, and had no choice but to go about their tasks and duties, all the while continuing to be held to a higher standard of abuse for breaking the rules. Youths also practiced the many sports and exercises for which the Spartans are known: wrestling, javelin and discus throwing, several types of running and sprinting races, equestrian sports if the youths came from rich families, and a group bareknuckle boxing contest where the boys split into teams of two and tried to drive each other into a moat surrounding the battlefield. They also played a game called “battle-ball” that required co-operation between team-mates and brute strength as it was similar to ball sports such as American football.
Youths began to learn to read and write, but we don’t know how. The Spartans didn’t hire foreign or slave tutors to educate their children, but we do know that they did learn. We know this because we have records that Spartiates sent messages to each other and could make use of cryptography in the messages between warriors and their commanders. The Spartiates seemed to enjoy a… Spartan formal education to suit their elaborate and demanding physical education. Even elite Spartiates were not allowed to bring in tutors for their children, meaning that all Spartiates enjoyed the same state level education. This lack of literary flourish didn’t mean they were simpletons. While not too many Spartan works of literature came down to us, we do have other evidence of the Greeks’ fondness for Spartan wit. Spartiates tended to speak directly and bluntly to the point of being known for their one-liners. It wasn’t just the men, but women who seemed to be known for their wit as well, since a large portion of surviving Spartan one-liners came from the women.
Speaking of women, it should be noted that girls had a very physical education as well. Unlike other Greeks, who tended to heavily segregate the sexes and keep women at home, Spartan girls underwent an education that put them on par, at least within the bounds of their respective strengths, physically with the boys. Spartan girls would wrestle and race with the boys. The girls even competed in front of men in activities that other Greeks considered too sexual, whereas the Spartans didn’t seem to mind. One such activity was an endurance competition that was kind of like skipping rope without the rope. The girls often participated in the same sports the boys did such as throwing, running, wrestling, and even practiced dancing. On top of that, the Spartan girls went about dressed in clothing non-Spartan Greeks considered too revealing and immodest, with exposed thighs and or even sometimes completely nude. This made Spartan girls much more athletic than their non-Spartan counterparts in most places in the world.
The wisdom behind this was utilitarian: The Spartiates wanted healthy mothers and healthy fathers to bear healthy sons. The woman had a role as mother and wife to make sure her son did his part as a warrior. Mothers would beat and berate their sons for cowardly behaviour or failing to make the grade. There are even cases of women killing their warrior sons for cowardly behaviour. Despite that, there is evidence to suggest that once a Spartan woman is married and gives birth, she is generally veiled and gender segregated just like the rest of the Greek women. They did not fight in battles, but their function was to bear and raise the next generation of warriors for the Spartan state.
It should be explained that the Spartiate men were organized socially into groups who ate together at a mess hall. They called this group either a men’s club or friendship club depending on the era. Spartiates dined in groups of fifteen and contributed the food of the mess from their own properties. Youth are sometimes brought to the clubs to see how the adults are expected to act once they reach adulthood. Dining in these clubs was mandatory for all Spartiates. This communal experience was meant to strengthen the bond between warriors and even had democratic aspects to it, such as members having to vote in new members. Those new members were about ready to join at age 20.
On this note, at 20 the Spartiates enter the next phase of their education as young men. They can now join a club, but are still forced to sleep in communal barracks rather than their own homes. They can take part in fighting, and even qualify for the elite 300 member bodyguard corps of the kings. Part of their training included a little understood and much debated ritual called the Kryptoi. Scholars can’t seem to agree on what exactly took place during the Kryptoi. Some believe the ritual involved searching for and slaughtering unsuspecting Helots. Others contend that it was simply a survival and endurance test. Thinkers as far away in time as Aristotle in the 300s BCE and the Roman Plutarch in the first century CE debated the nature of this ritual. Either way, once the Spartiates turn 30 their education is considered complete, and they are full fledged citizens.
Success in completing the Kyrptoi doesn’t mean the training is over, however. Spartans continue to regularly train in battle tactics and maneuvers disguised as games and exercise routines. They also practiced coordination during hunting. The training never stopped. The clubs play a significant role in the life of a Spartiate regardless of their level in society. Just like in their youth, the type of food provided to the Spartiates in the club made sure that they did not eat or drink too much. Excessive fattiness or excessive drinking were highly scrutinized and one could get fined for indulging. Spartiates spent a lot of time on physical exercises, ball games and other pursuits that scholars still debate whether they were disguised military training or leisurely activities.
Whatever it was the Spartiates were up to, it worked. Their intense upbringing and constant focus on physical training meant that the Spartans did live up to their reputation as fierce warriors. Whether they worked with other Greeks, or fought them off, the Spartans were considered a formidable foe to their enemies. The Spartans themselves always prized their unique system for raising warriors, and always kept an eye out to any threats to that system. It is important to note that all of this happened within and around the city of Sparta, which was just a tiny part of Lakedemonia. It took a village to raise a Spartan, and in this case, it was the village of Sparta itself.
Bonus Fact:
Before graduating to the next phase of their lives, the boys usually found a lover by the age of 12. Sources such as Xenophon claim that these relationships were not sexual while also admitting that the reader probably would not believe him. This is because Spartans in general developed a reputation for anal sex, especially in this sort of relationship. It seems in reality that Spartans did not partake in this practice as much as other Greeks, although it can be attested by some surviving Lakedemonian artwork. It was such a stereotype of Spartans that they enjoyed anal sex regardless of gender that it became slang in Ancient Greece to refer to anyone who enjoyed the same thing to have “Lakedemonian buttocks”
Expand for References* Bayliss, Andrew J. The Spartans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. * Kennell, Nigel M. Spartans: A New History. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2010 * Powell, Anton. Ed. A Companion to Sparta. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2018 The post How Did One Actually Become a Spartan Warrior? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On the morning of August 13, 1961, the residents of the German capital of Berlin awoke to find their city divided. At midnight, thousands of East German troops had fanned out across the city tearing up roads, erecting guard posts, and stringing barbed-wire barriers. The 43-kilometre border dividing communist East Berlin from the capitalist West had been sealed shut. Over the following decades, this temporary barricade would evolve into a formidable fortification of concrete, barbed wire, and armed guards. For 28 years, the Berlin Wall stood as a potent symbol of the Cold War, dividing families, shattering lives, and trapping millions in the oppressive German Democratic Republic. But many East German citizens refused to accept their fate. Between 1961 and 1989, some 5,000 people escaped over the border into the West, with 140 losing their lives in the attempt. Their methods were varied and frequently ingenious, reflecting the escapees’ unshakable will to find freedom and opportunity for themselves and their families. These are the most creative ways people escaped across the Berlin Wall.
The struggle for the fate of Berlin is as old as the Cold War itself. Following the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 9, 1945, the newly-conquered country was divided into four Zones of Occupation, each administered by a different Allied Power: Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union. The capital city of Berlin, which lay deep within the Soviet zone, was similarly divided. However, tensions quickly flared between the Western Allies and the Soviets as the former allies began vying for control of the newly-liberated continent. In an attempt to starve West Berlin into submission and fold the capital into the newly-formed communist German Democratic Republic or GDR, on June 24, 1948 the Soviets blockaded all roads into the city. In response, the Western Allies launched what became known as the Berlin Airlift, flying over 2.3 million tons of food, coal, and other supplies into the city over the course of 11 months. Finally, on May 12, 1949, the Soviets capitulated and lifted their blockade. For the next 42 years, Berlin remained a flashpoint for Cold War tensions, an infamous hotbed of espionage and intrigue. It was also one of the few places along the 7,000-kilometre Iron Curtain where people could freely cross from East to West. And cross they did – in droves. Between 1946 and 1961, some 3.5 million citizens of the GDR and other Communist Bloc countries fled the East via Berlin for a better life in the West. This practice, known as Republikflucht or “Republic Flight,” led to a major shortage of skilled labour in the GDR, threatening to collapse the country’s already rickety economy. By 1961 the crisis had reached critical levels, prompting East German leader Walter Ulbricht to order Berlin’s 43-kilometre internal border sealed once and for all. The barrier, officially dubbed the “anti-fascist defensive rampart,” was, according to Ulbricht, meant to keep western spies and saboteurs from crossing the border into the GDR. In reality, its sole purpose was to keep East German citizens in.
But almost as soon as the barbed wire started going up, the escapes began. Many East Berliners lived right on the border, with the street right outside their houses belonging to West Berlin. Thus, as soon as East German troops began sealing the border, several quick-thinking citizens simply walked out their front doors and into West Berlin to freedom. But those who waited too long faced a more difficult task. Among these was 58-year-old nurse Ida Siekmann, who for nine days watched as the front entrances of her apartment building on Bernauer Strasse were sealed and barbed wire strung along the street below. On August 22, one day before her 59th birthday, Siekmann threw a quilt and other bedding out of her window to cushion her fall and jumped from her fourth-storey apartment. Tragically, she was fatally injured by the impact and died on the way to hospital, becoming the first known casualty of the Berlin Wall.
Other East Germans followed suit, keeping the West German fire department busy with rescue blankets catching escapees jumping out of their border apartment blocks. At least four suffered the same fate as Ida Siekmann. Soon, however, the East German Volkspolizei and Combat Troops of the Working Class finished bricking up the windows and doors of the buildings that lay along the border, cutting off this means of escape. But ordinary citizens were not the only ones drawn to a life of freedom in the West. Many of the troops and policemen assigned to guard the newly-sealed border also recognized the inhumanity of the barrier and sympathized with their fellow citizens trapped behind it. Former shepherd Hans Konrad Schumann was 18 when he was drafted into the East German Grenzpolizei or Border Police; and only 19 when a year later he was assigned to guard a section of the Berlin border near Bernauer Strasse. As he later recalled:
“We stood around looking pretty stupid at first. Nobody had told us how that’s done: taking control of a border.”
Day after day, Schumann endured angry cries of “You pigs!” and “You concentration camp guards!” from West Germans across the border, and witnessed scenes such as a West German woman handing her mother a birthday bouquet over the barbed wire. Before long, Schumann began to question his role in keeping his fellow Germans imprisoned, and began plotting his escape to the West. His opportunity came on August 15, 1961, as a large crowd of protestors began to gather on Bernauer Strasse and trucks arrived with steel plates and concrete posts to fortify the border. While no-one was looking, Schumann pushed down a section of barbed wire and signalled to a man on the other side. The man alerted the West German police, who moved a van close to the border. A group of photographers then pointed their cameras at Schumann’s comrades, forcing them to turn away. It was then, at around 4PM, that Schumann made his move, vaulting over the barbed wire and dashing to the waiting police van, which whisked him away to safety. The incident shocked the East German government, who attempted to spin Schumann’s escape as a kidnapping by the West German police. However, few bought into this story, and a photograph of Schumann leaping over the barbed wire became one of the iconic images of the Cold War. Meanwhile, Schumann remained at the West Berlin refugee centre in Marienfelde until September, when he was flown to Bavaria by the West German Government to start a new life. He later married and worked at a winery and an Audi factory. However, he lived in constant fear of reprisal from the Stasi, the East German secret police, stating:
“Only since 9 November 1989 [the date the wall fell] have I felt truly free.”
Tragically, Schumann continued to struggle with depression, and on June 20, 1998, he took his own life.
Within months of the border closing, escapes like Schumann’s became all but impossible, as East German construction crews knocked down all the buildings around the border, relocated their inhabitants, and turned the temporary barbed-wire barrier into a permanent and formidable concrete-and-steel fortification. In its ultimate form, completed in 1975, the Berlin Wall consisted not of one but actually three barriers. The most famous part of the wall facing West Berlin was composed of concrete slabs 4 metres tall and 1.2 metres wide, topped by a smooth piece of metal pipe to make climbing over more difficult. Immediately behind this wall were anti-vehicle trenches, while 100 metres behind this stood an electrified signal fence that automatically alerted the border guards if it was cut, and a second, shorter concrete wall facing the East German side. Between these two barriers lay the so-called “Strip of Death”, an open area covered in gravel that allowed escapees’ footprints to be easily seen. The strip was well-illuminated and offered no cover, placing anyone who dared cross it in the line of fire of thousands of border guards, stationed in 116 and 20 bunkers watchtowers placed at 250 metre intervals along the wall. Other defences included guard dogs on long leashes and spike strips known as “Stalin’s Carpet” placed beneath the windows of the few buildings left standing along the wall to deter potential jumpers.
Yet despite these formidable defences, thousands still braved the crossing to the West, going over, under, around, and even through the wall to freedom. One popular escape method was by tunneling, with ten escape tunnels being dug near Bernauer Strasse alone between 1962 and 1971. One of the first was dug by West Berlin students in 1962, running 40 metres from a ruined factory at 78 Bernauer Strasse in the West to a basement at 7 Schönholzer Strasse in the East. Completed on September 14, 1962, the effort was partially funded by American broadcast network NBC, who filmed the escapees as they emerged from the tunnel. Over two nights, 29 people escaped through the tunnel before a section on the East Berlin side collapsed and the operation was discovered. NBC planned to broadcast a documentary titled The Tunnel on October 31, but the airing was postponed so as not to escalate Cold War tensions in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Starting in July 1963, a further two tunnels were dug from the basement of a bakery on Bernauer Strasse on the East German side. Completed in five months, due to a calculation error the tunnels emerged in a coal storage area right next to the wall, in clear view of the border guards. Only three people managed to escape before the tunnel was discovered and shut down. Undaunted, the escapees tried again, digging from the same bakery basement all the way to Strelitzer Strasse on the West German side. An incredible 57 people managed to escape through this tunnel before the operation was betrayed by a Stasi informant – the most successful such escape in the Wall’s history. However, when the tunnel was discovered, an exchange of gunfire broke out between the border guards and tunnel builders, resulting in Sergeant Egon Schultz being accidentally shot and killed by one of his own comrades. East German propaganda blamed the incident on the tunnel builders and painted Schultz as a hero, naming schools and streets after him. It was not until 1989 that Schultz’s relatives learned the truth about his death.
Following the discovery of “Tunnel 57”, tunnelling escapes tapered off dramatically as the Stasi and Grenpolizei buried microphones along the Wall and began monitoring for sounds of tunnelling 24/7. Consequently, many chose to go over the wall instead. Some of these escapes were brutally simple if not downright suicidal. On December 9, 1961, 20-year-old student organizer Dieter Wohlfahrt, who had helped dozens of people flee across the wall, cut through two layers of fences near Staaken and began crossing the strip of death. Unfortunately, his plan was betrayed, and the border guards were waiting for him. They opened fire, striking Wohlfahrt in the chest, and left him lying in no-man’s land to bleed to death. Four years later on November 10, 1965, 29-year-old dairy farmer Heinz Cyrus approached the border fortifications near Nordbanhof railway station in the Mitte district with the intention of scaling the fences and sprinting to freedom. Angered by the intensifying collectivization of agriculture by the East German state, in 1959 Cyrus had gotten into a drunken fight with an agricultural ministry bureaucrat, during which he shouted “You communist pigs, the day will come when you will hang from trees!” He was arrested and subjected to a show trial, accused of everything from inadequately feeding his cows, stealing food, and sexually assaulting his female coworkers. Convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison, he served four years before being released on amnesty. He continued to be harassed by the authorities for his alleged anti-socialist activities, finally driving him to make his escape. Unfortunately, a guard dog caught Cyrus’ scent and attacked, and he quickly found himself surrounded by armed border guards. After Cyrus refused to surrender the guards opened fire, but Cyrus managed to escape the hail of bullets by ducking into a nearby building at 85 Garten Strasse. It was a mistake, for the guards quickly surrounded the building, trapping Cyrus inside. His pursuers close behind, Cyrus climbed from floor to floor, his situation growing increasingly hopeless. Then, in a final act of desperation, Cyrus threw himself out of a fourth-floor window into the courtyard below. He was rushed to the hospital with a fractured skull and received multiple emergency surgeries, but died of his injuries early the next morning. A stone slab marking the site of his death now forms part of the Berlin Wall Memorial.
A similarly brazen – but more successful – flight over the wall took place more than two decades later. On November 19, 1986, toolmaker Dieter H approached the inner wall with a homemade extension ladder. Dieter had applied to the East German authorities for an exit visa, but he was denied, and later served a two-year prison sentence for political reasons. Upon his release he decided to escape to the West. Once over the wall, he used bolt cutters to cut through the signal fence. Though the alarm was triggered, the border guards did not spot Dieter until he had already reached the outer wall and placed the ladder against it. As he scrambled over one of the guard towers opened fire, firing a total of 12 shots but missing. Dieter successfully managed to jump over the wall, though he broke both his heels on landing and had to be carried away in an ambulance.
Other escapes were even more audacious. Take, for instance, the case of Horst Klein, a circus trapeze artist who had run afoul of the East German authorities for his staunch anti-communist views. Banned from performing in the GDR, in December 1962 Klein decided to escape in the only way he knew how: by scaling an electrical pylon and shimmying along a high-tension cable passing over the Berlin Wall. This absolute mad lad managed to make the crossing without being shot at, but was so tired by the time he reached the West that he fell off the cable and broke both his arms. Any landing you can walk away from…
Another daring high-wire escape was made by engineer and economist Heinz Holzapfel and his family on January 29, 1965. On that day Holzapfel, who had grown disillusioned with the socialist system, was called to a meeting at the GDR’s House of Ministries, which bordered the Berlin Wall. Excusing himself from the meeting, Holzapfel, his wife, and his son hid themselves in a toilet cubicle, hanging an “Out of Order” sign on the door. There they waited until nightfall, whereupon they emerged, climbed up onto the roof, and set their plan in motion. Heinz tied a rope to a hammer coated in glow-in-the-dark phosphorus and hurled it across the wall into West Berlin, where co-conspirators tied it to a stronger metal cable that Heinz reeled back and anchored to the Ministry Building roof. Then, using makeshift rollers and harnesses made of bicycle wheels, the Holzapfels proceeded to zipline over the wall to freedom. Incredibly, the whole escape was witnessed by GDR border guards, who, assumed it was the Stasi smuggling agents into West Berlin, did not open fire. One can only imagine the reprimand they received that day…
But if a homemade zipline isn’t baller enough for you, then how about a hot air balloon? Anticipating this mode of escape, the GDR had banned balloon sports shortly after the Wall went up. However, this did not stop Peter Strelzyk and his family from building their own balloon out of bedsheets and making a bid for freedom. Their first attempt failed when they landed just short of the border, but their second flight on September 16, 1979 was more successful – if somewhat hair-raising. Halfway through the flight the hot-air burner began running out of gas, causing the balloon to start descending at an alarming rate. Convinced that they were going to die, Strelzyk and his wife sang songs to their children to keep them calm. But though they managed to make a safe – if rough – landing, they were initially unsure whether they had actually made it across the border. It was not until Peter came upon a passing policeman that he confirmed that they had arrived safely West.
Ten years later, an even more audaciously high-flying scheme allowed the three Bethke Brothers – Ingo, Holger, and Egbert – to safely reach the freedom of the West. The first across the border was Ingo, a border guard stationed along the Elbe river north of Berlin. Here there was no concrete wall, but the electrified barbed-wire fence, guard towers, land mines, and tripwire-activated floodlights still presented a formidable obstacle. However, in May 1975, Ingo, who had become intimately familiar with the defences, managed to slip across and reach the banks of the Elbe, where he inflated a blow-up mattress and used it to swim across 150 metres of icy water to West Germany. There he found a West German border policeman, who, upon seeing the soaking-wet Ingo, commented: “It’s a cold night for swimming.” Ingo replied:“Not when you’re swimming out of the East.” Many other East Germans also attempted to swim to safety, but not all were successful. On December 11, 1961, 21-year-old Ingo Ingo Krüger, separated from his fiancée by the building of the Wall, attempted to swim across the River Spree to West Berlin, only to drown in the attempt.
Ingo Bethke’s escape caused endless trouble for his family back in the East, who mere mercilessly hounded by the Stasi. His parents – both high-ranking police officers and staunch communists – were even fired from their jobs. The pressure became so intense that in 1983 Ingo’s younger brother Holger also decided to escape. Having spotted a spot near Berlin’s Treptow Park where the strip of death was narrow, Holger climbed to the roof of a tall building and fired an arrow tied to a nylon line across the Wall. On the other side, Ingo tied the line to a steel cable, which Holger reeled in and anchored to a chimney. Ingo tied the other end to his car bumper and drove forward to pull the cable taut, whereupon Holger, using a homemade pulley system carved from wood, zip lined down the cable and past sleeping border guards to freedom. Two brothers down, one to go.
The brothers’ original plan to rescue their middle brother Egbert was to buy a compact helicopter they had seen in an issue of Playboy magazine and fly him to safety. However, upon speaking to the aircraft’s inventor at a fair in Hanover they discovered it was only a prototype and not for sale. By chance, however, they ran into two French pilots who introduced them to a tiny aircraft called an ultralight – little more than a hang glider with a seat and an engine. The brothers bought two ultralights and began plotting their daring rescue. To confuse the East German border guards, Ingo and Holger painted red Soviet stars on the aircraft’s wings and wore East German army greatcoats and helmets. Finally, on May 25, 1989, all was ready, and the brothers sent a coded message to Egbert that the rescue was on. At 4:15 AM, the two ultralights took to the air and crossed the border, landing five minutes later in Treptow Park where Egbert was hiding in the bushes. The third brother dashed across the field to the waiting aircraft, which whisked him away to the West, landing on the lawn in front of the Reichstag. Upon landing, the reunited brothers went to a nearby tavern for a celebratory beer. As Egbert later recalled:
“It was the best drink of my life. I thought I’d never see my brothers again, but they came out of the sky like angels and took me to paradise.”
Ingo Bethke was hardly the first East German to swim to freedom, with dozens of escapees using this route over the decades. Among them was horse jockey Michael Meyer, who on September 13, 1964, attempted to swim across the River Spree. Though he successfully made the crossing in 30 minutes, the current had carried him to a point on the riverbank that was still inside East Germany. Undaunted, Meyer made his way to the barbed wire fence near the infamous Checkpoint Charlie and at 5:20 AM, ducked underneath and sprinted towards the West. He was immediately spotted and fired upon by East German Border guards, who struck him eight times in the arm, legs, and back. US Army Sergeant Hans-Werner Pool heard the shots and ran to Meyer’s aid, throwing a tear gas grenade to fend off the two border guards who tried to pull him back into the East. He then threw a rope over the wall and pulled Meyer to safety. Meyer was rushed to hospital where, despite having lost two litres of blood, he made a full recovery.
Moving on from there, since going under, through, or over the Berlin Wall was a risky proposition, several East Germans cut the proverbial Gordian knot and opted to simply go around it. While the 7,000-kilometre internal border that separated East and West Germany was unbroken and heavily defended, even the East Germans couldn’t build a wall across the ocean, leaving northern Germany’s Baltic shore ripe for escape attempts. So it was that on November 24, 1986, lifelong friends Dirk Deckert and Karsten Kluender carried out one of the strangest escapes in history by windsurfing from Germany to Denmark. While windsurfing gear was available in East Germany, it was too bulky and heavy for long-distance travel, so Deckert and Kluender made their own boards using plans in a sailing magazine. Equipped with their new lightweight boards, compasses, and wetsuits, they snuck across the border at Hiddensee and sailed North into the Baltic. After a short distance, however, Deckert damaged his wetsuit and, knowing it would be suicide to carry on without it, returned to shore to effect repairs. Meanwhile, after six hours of sailing, Kluender spotted the coast of the Danish island of Møn and safely made landfall. But when Deckert failed to appear, Kleunder began to worry that his friend had been caught by the border guards. Thankfully, however, Deckert had successfully repaired his wetsuit and set off the next morning. Six hours later he ran into a Danish fishing boat, whose captain asked him “are you Deckert?” and ferried him ashore.
Another escapee took a considerably more roundabout route out of East Germany. In 1984, 24-year-old Kerstin Beck, a student at East Berlin’s Humboldt University, travelled to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan to receive intensive language training. But while her visit was only supposed to last six months, Beck had no intention of returning to East Germany, stating:
“I couldn’t live the way I wanted; I couldn’t study what I wanted. I only knew one corner of the world, but I wanted to see all of it.”
Shortly before her scheduled return home, Beck met a member of the Mujaheddin, the rebel movement resisting Soviet occupation, and convinced him to take her to Pakistan. Dressed in traditional clothes and pretending to be his cousin, Beck followed the man and his comrades into the mountains. It was a treacherous journey. Shortly after leaving, her fellow students told the East German embassy in Kabul that Beck was missing, leading the authorities to set up checkpoints throughout Afghanistan and search all aircraft leaving the country. Meanwhile, some of the Mujaheddin tasked with accompanying Beck across the border believed she was a KGB spy and wanted to kill her or ransom her back to the Soviets, while others wanted to marry her. Eventually, however, Beck made it safely across the border and was taken in by an exiled Afghan family in Peshawar. On April 14, 1984, one month after leaving Kabul, Kerstin Beck boarded a flight to Frankfurt in West Germany – and freedom.
For those East Germans who for whatever reason couldn’t tunnel under, zipline over, or windsurf around the Wall, there was only one option remaining: go through it. Some of these attempts were more literal than others. On December 5, 1961, railroad engineer Harry Deterling and his fireman Hartmut Lichy shocked the border guards by stealing a steam train and ramming it through Albrechtshof station into West Berlin, carrying themselves and 25 passengers to freedom. The next day the East German authorities cut off the track and re-routed cross-border rail traffic to more well-defended stations.
Then there was Wolfgang Engels, an East German soldier who had helped erect the first temporary barriers across the border. On April 17, 1963, Engels stole an army BTR-152 armoured personnel carrier and drove to the border, offering rides to the West to several passers-by on the way. When they declined, he proceeded to the border checkpoint alone. The guards, used to seeing military vehicles in the border zone, waved Engels through, whereupon Engels stepped on the accelerator and drove at full-speed into the concrete inner Wall, bursting through the barrier like an East German Koolaid Man. Unfortunately, the vehicle did not penetrate fully and got stuck halfway, forcing Engels to climb out and struggle through razor-sharp barbed wire and the strip of death as border guards opened fire on him. He was struck twice with bullets but pulled to safety by West Berliners as a West German police officer returned fire on the border guards. He immediately underwent emergency surgery for his bullet wounds and made a full recovery, later settling down in the town of Soltau and becoming a biology and history teacher.
A similarly dramatic escape was made on April 29, 1982 when three East Germans used a bulldozer to smash their way through the border defences near Helmstadt, 176 kilometres west of Berlin. The bulldozer was one of hundreds of pieces of earth-moving equipment used by the East German border guards to keep the strip of death free of weeds and other obstructions. Despite setting off several booby traps including tripwire-activated automatic guns and being fired upon by the border guards, the escapees did not hit any land mines and arrived in the West unscathed save for a few bullet grazes.
But such badass antics aside, the majority of escapes through the wall were considerably more subtle, and involved escapees bluffing their way through official border checkpoints. In the first few months following the Wall’s construction, dozens of East Germans were smuggled across the border hidden in car trunks. However, the border guards soon caught wise and began thoroughly inspecting any vehicle crossing the border, forcing escapees to get creative. Take Austrian lathe operator Heinz Meixner, who pulled up to Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie on May 5, 1963 in his red Austin-Healey Sprite convertible. The border guards that day must have done a double take, for Meixner’s car was curiously missing an important feature: its windshield. But before they could question him, Meixner ducked down and slammed on the accelerator, the tiny windshield-less car easily slipping under the barricade and carrying him and his Mother – hidden in the trunk – to freedom.
But even Meixner’s audacious effort pales in comparison to the most bizarre implement ever used to defeat the Berlin Wall: the Trojan Cow. In the late 1960s, a group of West German escape helpers got their hands on a life-sized replica with enough room in its hollow body to conceal a person. Charging escapees 5,000 Deutsch Marks per trip, the group drove the cow and its hidden cargo back and forth across the border in a truck, claiming the replica was intended for display in West Germany. Amazingly, two people successfully escaped in this manner until July 7, 1969 when the plot was betrayed and the helpers and their cargo – 18-year-old Agelika B. Of Karl-Marx-Stadt were arrested. Angelika was sentenced to 2 years, 10 months in prison, but later ransomed by the West German government.
Other escapes were considerably simpler – if somewhat absurd. According to a 1986 article in the Los Angeles Times, members of Munich’s Playboy Club discovered that their membership cards so closely resembled diplomatic passports that border guards often just waved them through. Thanks, Hef!
But the prize for the most ingenious escape across the Berlin Wall has to go to Hans-Günter Jacobi, who pulled off what can only be described as an automotive vanishing act. In November 1962, Jacobi’s friend Manfred Koster was drafted into the National People’s Army. A pacifist and staunch anti-communist, Koster began looking for ways of escaping to the west. It was then that he remembered Jacobi, who was by then living in the West. Thankfully, Jacobi had a cunning plan: he would smuggle Koster across the border in his car. But not just any car; a car so absurdly tiny that no-one could possibly believe a person could hide in it: the BMW Isetta, better known as the “Bubble Car”. A German-built version of an Italian design, the Isetta was powered by a 9.5 horsepower single-cylinder motorcycle engine and was so small that the two occupants entered and exited by hinging open the front of the vehicle. It was the first mass-produced car to achieve a fuel economy of 3 litres per 100 kilometres and was highly popular with cash-strapped West German commuters. In its unmodified form, the Isetta had no extra space in which a person could be smuggled, so Jacobi, working night after night in a rented garage, set about making some modifications. By removing the seat, spare tire, and air filters, bending the exhaust pipe, and replacing the full-sized gas tank with a much smaller one holding just enough gas to get across the border, Jacobi managed to carve out enough space to hide Koster, curled up in the fetal position.
Finally, by May 1963, the vehicle was ready. However, Jacobi could not participate in the daring rescue, for at that time most West Germans were forbidden to cross into the East. Instead, a group of East German students volunteered to pick up the modified Isetta, take it to the East, and drive Manfred Koster across the border. The first attempt failed when the student driving the car lost her nerve and turned back. But on May 23, a week before Koster was due to report for military duty, the plan finally came together. The crossing was a nerve-wracking one, with Koster, curled up against the engine, growing ever hotter and uncomfortable as the line of cars crawled through the border checkpoint. Even worse, the border guards, who normally waved small cars like Isetta through, opened the engine compartment and shone a flashlight inside. Miraculously, Koster was not spotted and the car made it through, carrying its sore but overjoyed stowaway to freedom. Over the following years, the modified Isetta would carry a further eight people across the Berlin Wall, a testament to Hans-Günter Jacobi’s inventive genius and the East German students’ nerves of steel.
The last East Berliners to escape to the West were Hans-Peter Spitnzer and his family, who were smuggled across the border in a car trunk in August 1989. Ironically, the Spitnzers might as well have stayed put, for three months later on November 9 the Berlin Wall finally came down. A year later the two Germanies were reunited, while a year after that, the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing an end to the Cold War. In the Berlin Wall’s 28 years of existence, an estimated 5,000 East Germans and other Soviet Bloc citizens escaped across the border to the West. Around 140 are known to have died in the attempt, with some estimates placing the number as high as 1000, while thousands more were arrested and detained by the Stasi. The sheer audacity and ingenuity of many of the escape attempts stands as a testament to the unshakable will of the German people and the universal human desire for freedom and opportunity.
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Expand for ReferencesBlakemore, Erin, All the Ways People Escaped Across the Berlin Wall, History, November 8, 2019, https://www.history.com/news/berlin-wall-crossings-east-germany
Phillips, Mark, Last Family to Escape Across Berlin Wall Reflects on its Meaning, CBSm January 1, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/family-that-escaped-across-the-berlin-wall-reflects-on-its-meaning/
Bernauer Strasse, Gedenktätte Berliner Mauer, https://www.stiftung-berliner-mauer.de/en/berlin-wall-memorial/historical-site/bernauer-strasse
Chaer, Cathrin, A Vision of the Berlin Wall as a Giant Garden, Spiegel Internationall, July 2, 2018, https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/landscaping-the-death-strip-a-vision-of-the-berlin-wall-as-a-giant-garden-a-633556.html
Leap over the Barbed Wire, Berlin Wall Memorial, https://berliner-mauer.mobi/sprung-ueber-den-stacheldraht.html?&L=1&number=12&cHash=3f7473c150cb40d2cc8fdbaeb15897dc
Chronicle 1961, Chronik der Maur, https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/chronicle/_year1961/_month12/?month=12&year=1961&opennid=177122&moc=1
Dyson, John, How Three Brothers Escaped from Communist East Germany, Reader’s Digest Canada, July 15, 2020, https://www.readersdigest.ca/culture/escape-east-germany/
Cole, Deborah, This Man Swam Across a Canal to Escape East Berlin, Then Went Back for His Friends, Business Insider, November 2, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/afp-escape-across-berlin-wall-then-back-for-heroic-rescues-2014-11
Germany: Escaping the East by Any Means, Al Jazeera, November 13, 2009, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2009/11/13/germany-escaping-the-east-by-any-means/
Aguirre, Jessica, The Story of the Must Successful Tunnel Escape in the History of the Berlin Wall, Smithsonian Magazine, November 7, 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/most-successful-tunnel-escape-history-berlin-wall-180953268/
Robinson, Matt, Eight Strangest Berlin Wall Escapes, Berlin Experiences, February 5, 2018, https://www.berlinexperiences.com/berlin-wall-eight-strangest-escapes/
Trex, Ethan, 8 Creative Ways People Went Over the Berlin Wall, Mental Floss, November 12, 2011, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/28517/8-creative-ways-people-went-over-berlin-wall
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Phillips, Mark, Last Family to Escape Across Berlin Wall Reflects on its Meaning, CBSm January 1, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/family-that-escaped-across-the-berlin-wall-reflects-on-its-meaning/
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Leap over the Barbed Wire, Berlin Wall Memorial, https://berliner-mauer.mobi/sprung-ueber-den-stacheldraht.html?&L=1&number=12&cHash=3f7473c150cb40d2cc8fdbaeb15897dc
Chronicle 1961, Chronik der Maur, https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/chronicle/_year1961/_month12/?month=12&year=1961&opennid=177122&moc=1
Dyson, John, How Three Brothers Escaped from Communist East Germany, Reader’s Digest Canada, July 15, 2020, https://www.readersdigest.ca/culture/escape-east-germany/
Cole, Deborah, This Man Swam Across a Canal to Escape East Berlin, Then Went Back for His Friends, Business Insider, November 2, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/afp-escape-across-berlin-wall-then-back-for-heroic-rescues-2014-11
Germany: Escaping the East by Any Means, Al Jazeera, November 13, 2009, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2009/11/13/germany-escaping-the-east-by-any-means/
Aguirre, Jessica, The Story of the Must Successful Tunnel Escape in the History of the Berlin Wall, Smithsonian Magazine, November 7, 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/most-successful-tunnel-escape-history-berlin-wall-180953268/
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The post 5,000 Ways to Freedom- Crossing the Berlin Wall appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On September 17, 1964, a cinematic juggernaut exploded onto film screens: Goldfinger, the third outing by Sean Connery as suave gentleman spy James Bond. While the two previous entries in the series, 1962’s Dr. No and 1963’s From Russia With Love had been successful, Goldfinger was an entirely different beast. The first true blockbuster of the franchise, it made back its $3 million dollar budget in only two weeks and grossed $46 million – around $440 million today – over its initial theatrical run, making it the fastest-grossing picture in movie history. It also helped cement the so-called “Bond formula” and turn the franchise into the cinematic powerhouse that is still going strong today. Like most good Bond movies, one of the film’s great strengths lies with its villain, bombastic, megalomaniacal gold tycoon Auric Goldfinger, who plots to break into Fort Knox and irradiate the United States’ gold reserves. But while Goldfinger may seem like the type of larger-than-life character that could only exist in the fantastical, hyper stylized world of James Bond, he was, in fact, based on a real person. This is the strange story of how a petty feud over – of all things – architecture, led to the creation of one of spy fiction’s most iconic villains.
The 1964 film Goldfinger is based on the 1959 novel of the same name, the seventh in the James Bond series by British Author Ian Fleming. Fleming, who had served in Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, based many of the characters and scenarios in his books on his own experiences. For example, the golf game between Bond and Goldfinger early in the book was inspired by a real game Fleming played in 1957, while names of characters like the ill-fated Masterson sisters and improbably-named henchwoman Pussy Galore were drawn from people Fleming knew in the intelligence community. And so it was with the novel’s main villain, whom Fleming named after an influential but controversial Hungarian-English architect named Ernö Goldfinger.
Born in 1902 to a wealthy Jewish family in Budapest, in 1920 Goldfinger travelled to Paris to study at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. Here he mingled with a veritable who’s-who of mid-century artists and designers including Man Ray, Lee Miller, Max Ernst, and Charles-Édourad Jeanneret – better known as Le Corbusier – many of whom would go on to become leading figures in the burgeoning Modernist movement. Encompassing nearly every field of human creativity from music to literature to interior design, Modernism sought to break from the traditions of the past and create new aesthetics more in line with the scientific and industrial 20th century. In architecture, this meant stripping away unnecessary ornament and creating structures that were true to the character of the materials they were built from rather than mere recreations of past styles. The movement also incorporated a type of functionalism, in which buildings were seen as “machines for living” which could be used as instruments to shape and improve society. This thinking was greatly influenced by socialist principles, with many architects seeing modern architecture as the key to housing large numbers of people in an efficient and egalitarian manner. Indeed, it was while studying in Paris that Ernö Goldfinger first publicly declared himself a communist, a political stance he would maintain for the rest of his life and which would greatly inform his architectural philosophy, which he described in 1941 as:
“Cities can become centres of civilisation where men and women can live happy lives. The technical means exist to satisfy human needs. The will to plan must be aroused. There is no obstacle but ignorance and wickedness.”
Over the following decade Goldfinger remained in Paris where he worked as a designer of furniture and home interiors, both solo and in partnership with fellow Beaux-Arts student Andre Szivessy. In 1931, he met Ursula Blackwell, wealthy heiress to the British Crosse & Blackwell food brand fortune. The two married in 1933 and a year later produced a son, Peter. The birth of his son inspired Goldfinger to maintain a correspondence with British education experts Paul and Mary Abbatt, who throughout the 1920s carried out pioneering research on the role of toys in children’s mental and physical development. Based on the Abbatt’s findings, Goldfinger designed a series of toys specifically intended to foster learning – among the first of their kind in the world.
In 1934, with anti-semitism on the rise in Europe, the Goldfingers moved to London, becoming naturalized British citizens shortly thereafter. It was in London in the late 1930s that Ernö Goldfinger would accept his first architectural commission: a series of 3 modernist houses on Willow Road in Hampstead, one of which Goldfinger built for himself. Still an avowed communist, when the Soviet Union joined the Western Allies in 1941 Goldfinger engaged in a number of advocacy efforts in support of the regime, including a 1942 “Aid for Russia” fundraising party attended by several prominent artists.
After the war, Goldfinger continued to receive architecture commissions, most of which he executed in a controversial style which had recently become popular: brutalism. Named for the French term beton brut or “raw concrete”, brutalism was the most extreme manifestation of the modernist principles of functionalism and honesty of materials. Brutalist buildings typically feature rough-cast, unpainted concrete walls, harsh, geometric shapes and little or no ornamentation. Unsurprisingly, this movement attracted the ire of a great many more traditionally-minded architecture critics, including no less a figure than Charles, Prince of Wales, who in a speech before the Royal Institute of Architects in 1984 stated:
“You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe. When it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.”
Royal. Mic. Drop.
Unfortunately for Charles and other critics, in the post-war years brutalist architects like Goldfinger found a ready audience, as cities across Europe devastated by the conflict sought cost-effective ways to re-home millions of people. Among Goldfinger’s best-known projects are the Metro Central Heights housing complex, completed between 1959 and 1967; and the Balfron and Trellick Tower tower blocks, completed in 1967 and 1972 respectively. The latter are notable for their space-saving features such as sliding doors between rooms and a separate tower housing the heating plant, elevators, stairs, launderettes, and other service infrastructure. In keeping with his political beliefs, Goldfinger also designed the headquarters for the British Communist Party and the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker.
As you might have guessed by now, one of the many individuals who was not a fan of Goldfinger’s architecture was Ian Fleming. There are differing accounts as to how Goldfinger first appeared on Fleming’s radar. According to some sources, their feud began in 1934 with the construction of the houses on Willow Road. The project involved the demolition of Victorian-era cottages on the site, which an outraged Fleming and many fellow Londoners petitioned unsuccessfully to prevent. According to other sources, however, Fleming learned of Goldfinger through his golf partner, John Blackwell, who was a cousin of the architect by marriage and loathed the man. And there was much to dislike about Goldfinger besides his architecture: despite his noble goals regarding social housing, Goldfinger was by most accounts an arrogant, humorous man, prone to bullying those who got in his way and single-mindedly devoted to his vision of urban development to the exclusion of what ordinary people actually found appealing. But whatever the reason, Fleming found the name “Goldfinger” irresistible and in 1958 used the architect as the basis for Bond’s next foe, changing the character’s name from Ernö to Auric after the Latin word for gold. According to historian Henry Chancellor, Fleming likely also drew inspiration from American gold tycoon Charles Engelhard Jr., who, like the fictional Goldfinger, used his company, the Precious Metals Development Company, to circumvent export restrictions and sell gold in countries where its price was higher.
Upon learning of the title and villain of Fleming’s novel, the real Goldfinger became incensed and threatened to sue Fleming’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, claiming that as there were so few Goldfingers in Britain, the choice of name was obviously a personal attack. With the initial run of the novel already printed but not yet released, the publisher was understandably nervous and did some research on the architect, informing Fleming that:
“…[we] discovered quite a bit, none of it very pleasant and all of it made us unusually wary.”
But Fleming refused to be bullied, pointing out that there were, in fact, many Goldfingers listed in the phone book.
At this point, viewers familiar only with the 1964 film adaptation may be wondering what all the fuss was about, for while the fictional Goldfinger is dastardly and ruthless, as portrayed by German actor Gert Fröbe he is nonetheless depicted as cunning, wealthy, and charming. However, this version of Goldfinger is significantly watered-down; the original book version of the character is much, much worse. Essentially a collection of traits Fleming found despicable, book Goldfinger is depicted as a short, ugly, redheaded, teetotaling Jewish Marxist in league with the Soviets, with a penchant for cheating at cards and golf, a tacky sense of style, and a body Fleming describes as being like“he had been put together with bits of other people’s bodies.” And while movie Goldfinger’s obsession with gold is on full display, the book exaggerates this trait to a grotesque degree, with Goldfinger owning a gold-bound volume of erotic photographs and covering his lovers head-to-toe in gold paint before having sex with him. So you can see why the real Goldfinger might have been a little annoyed at Fleming.
The two parties remained deadlocked until Fleming, in a stroke of glorious pettiness, threatened to release the novel with an erratum slip changing all instances of the name “Goldfinger” to “Goldprick.” Unsurprisingly, the real Goldfinger backed down and the matter was finally settled when Jonathan Cape agreed to include an “all characters are fictional…” disclaimer in the book and sent the architect some complimentary copies. According to Goldfinger’s biographer, the architect believed that the novel – at the time considered little more than a pulpy potboiler – would soon be forgotten, little suspecting the global phenomenon the film adaptation would become. Indeed, for decades following the film’s release, Goldfinger and his family endured endless late-night crank calls in which pranksters would intone, in bad Sean Connery accents, “Goldfingah? Thish ish 007” or sing Shirley Bassey’s iconic theme tune.
In the end, it is difficult to say who had the last laugh – Goldfinger or Fleming. On the one hand, while the fictional Goldfinger has become one of the most iconic villains in cinema history, his real-life counterpart is all but forgotten outside the relatively narrow field of brutalist architecture. Furthermore, criticism by Fleming and others about the dreariness and oppressiveness of Goldfinger’s designs proved prophetic, as his Balfron and Trellick Tower blocks quickly succumbed to the blight of urban decay, becoming poorly-maintained hotbeds of poverty, drug abuse, vandalism, prostitution, and other social ills. And in an even greater irony, the Metro Central Heights complex, originally named Alexander Fleming House after the discoverer of Penicillin, became infamous for making its residents sick due to poor ventilation, forcing the Department of Health and Social Services to abandon the complex as its headquarters. On the other hand, however, in more recent years the architectural community has come around on Goldfinger’s work, recognizing it as significant to the history of architecture. Indeed, several of his creations, including Trellick Tower, Metro Central Heights, and the modernist Teesdale House in Surrey, now enjoy Grade II listing as protected historic buildings. It is the sort of recognition that would have made Ian Fleming livid, meaning that we can probably call this particular feud a draw.
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In adapting Fleming’s novel to the screen, screenwriters Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn did far more than tone down the villain’s more unsavoury traits. Indeed, the changes the pair made are considered by many critics to have resulted in a far more cohesive and compelling story. For example, in the novel, Goldfinger plans to break into Fort Knox by blowing open the vault with a tactical nuclear weapon, then steal the gold by loading it onto trucks and carting it away. However, Maibaum and Dehn found this notion ridiculous, for given the sheer volume and weight of gold in the repository it would realistically take hundreds of trucks and nearly two weeks to cart away. Instead, the pair came up with a much more elegant plot wherein Goldfinger plans to detonate the bomb inside Fort Knox itself, irradiating the U.S. gold supply and causing the value of his own gold to increase substantially. And as a sly jab at Fleming’s original plot, the film has Bond point out to Goldfinger the impracticality of robbing Fort Knox, only for Goldfinger to turn the tables and reveal his actual plan.
Another positive change from book to film concerns the characterization of Goldfinger’s main henchwoman, Pussy Galore. In the novel, Pussy is explicitly stated to be a lesbian, and heads an all-female gang of acrobats-turned-cat burglars called the Cement Mixers. Yet despite Pussy’s stated sexuality, Bond is still able to seduce and turn her to his side through his sheer masculine charisma, with Fleming explaining that Pussy isn’t really as lesbian but simply hates men on account of being raped as a child. Yikes. But while the film makes Pussy straight – avoiding that particular minefield of misogynistic pop psychology – it is still far from perfect, for Bond’s seduction and conversion of Pussy is accomplished by, shall we say, less than consensual means. Ladies and gentlemen: the 1960s.
Finally, one of the strangest differences between the book and the film is that of Auric Goldfinger’s voice. While in the book Goldfinger is explicitly stated to be British, in the film he speaks with a thick German accent. While at first glance this is readily explained by Goldfinger being portrayed by German actor Gert Fröbe, in reality Fröbe’s command of English was shaky and he was forced to learn most of his lines phonetically. The final result was deemed unacceptable by the studio, and so all of Fröbe’s lines were dubbed over by English actor Michael Collins, who chose to closely emulate Fröbe’s original accent. This disconnect between the character’s backstory and voice results in one of the film’s strangest lines, in which CIA agent Felix Leiter informs Bond: “He’s British, but he doesn’t sound like it.”
2. The film Goldfinger is packed wall-to-wall with iconic Bond moments, from the iconic theme tune sung by Shirley Bassey to Bond girl Jill Masterson covered head-to-toe in gold paint, Goldfinger threatening to cut Bond in half with a giant laser, and henchman Oddjob dispatching enemies with the toss of his razor-brimmed bowler hat. But perhaps one of the most quintessentially James Bond moments occurs in the film’s pre-title sequence, in which Bond swims up to an unnamed central American country’s shoreline and proceeds to infiltrate and blow up a large drug operation. His mission complete, Bond proceeds to strip off his wetsuit, revealing a perfectly dry – and perfectly pressed – white tuxedo complete with a red carnation on his lapel. But while this might seem like the sort of stylized, tongue-in-cheek nonsense the James Bond series has become legendary for, incredibly this particular bit was actually inspired by a real-life secret mission from the Second World War. In 1941, Dutch Resistance fighter Peter Tazelaar was tasked with investigating methods of infiltrating secret agents into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. The mission, rather unimaginatively codenamed “Contact Holland”, called for Tazelaar to be dropped by boat off the seaside resort town of Scheveningen, infiltrate a German officers’ party at the local casino, and make contact with British Intelligence using a radio dropped to him by parachute. On November 23, Tazelaar swam ashore and stripped off his dry suit – not a wetsuit as depicted in film – to reveal a full tuxedo. He then doused himself in brandy and stumbled up to the casino, pretending to be a drunken reveller who had gone for a seaside stroll. The act was so convincing that the German guards let Tazelaar pass, and he was able to enter the casino undetected. However, the mission was a failure, for Tazelaar’s radio was damaged in the drop and sea conditions around Scheveningen proved too rough to safely extract Dutch agents by boat. Nonetheless, the improbable mission helped inspire one of the most memorable moments in the history of spy cinema, though there is no evidence Tazelaar ever wore a snorkel topped with a stuffed seagull. That’s the sort of thing only Sean Connery could make look cool.
Expand for References
Wain, Natalie, He Was Immortalized as a Bond Villain by Ian Fleming, but now Architect Erno Goldfinger’s Most Revered London Tower Block Has Been Given Listed Building Status, Ideal Home, July 21, 2013, https://www.idealhome.co.uk/news/erno-goldfinger-s-metro-central-heights-given-listed-building-status-42393
Schwarcz, Joe, Did You Know: Goldfinger’s First Name was “Auric” Based on the Latin “Aurum” for Gold, McGill University, May 28, 2021, https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-did-you-know/did-you-know-goldfingers-first-name-was-auric-based-latin-aurum-gold
Passino, Carla, A Modernist House by the Architect That Inspired James Bond’s Arch-Villain, Country Life, June 15, 2021, https://www.countrylife.co.uk/property/a-modernist-house-by-the-architect-that-inspired-james-bonds-arch-villain-228234
Duncan, Michael, Fleming vs. Goldfinger: What Really Happened When the Architect Took on the Author, Footprints of London, November 12, 2015, https://footprintsoflondon.com/live/2015/11/fleming-vs-goldfinger-what-really-happened-when-the-architect-took-on-the-author/
Ezard, John, How Goldfinger Nearly Became Goldprick, The Guardian, June 2, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jun/03/film.hayfestival2005
Ernö Goldfinger, GreyScape, https://www.greyscape.com/architects/ernogoldfinger/
How Ernö Goldfinger Brutalised Both East and West, Phaidon, https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/architecture/articles/2018/september/11/how-ern-goldfinger-brutalised-both-east-and-west/
Forget, Benjamin, Prince Charles, Architecture’s Royal Pain, The Washington Post, February 22, 1990, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1990/02/22/prince-charles-architectures-royal-pain/a894629c-c0a4-41d5-be83-e4da62a9f90f/
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In today’s age of relatively stable international relations, it is hard to imagine the impact of something like the Mongol invasions. Starting in 1206, It was a trying time for those who initially witnessed them: mountains of skulls, burning cities, murder and pillaging on a wide scale. Even if Genghis Khan’ descendants became more urbane and grew closer to their conquered peoples, the initial shock of it all was massive. The conquered people struggled to make sense of the carnage and their new reality. New religious movements that promised a bright future rose to meet the new age. Some of these movements were as apocalyptic as the events recently witnessed. Out of the ashes of the old political order, new states were formed that looked to the Mongols for legitimacy, just as new religious reactions to the carnage looked to instill hope and resistance in the conquered people. A chain of events that could only arise from these conditions led to a very bizarre story of how a Persian king let a leader of a cult take the throne so apocalyptic prophecies could be fulfilled.
The Mongol invasion caused a great upheaval in the Islamic world. It saw the end of the Abbasid caliphate when the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258. The Mongols seized and consolidated the Persian speaking lands of West and Central Asia. The response by the common people was to turn inward. This inward turn was facilitated by Sufism and popular forms of devotion not associated with any one institution. Sufism is an Islamic form of mysticism. In the early days of Sufism, charismatic personalities engaging in asceticism and mystical union with the divine attracted followers who gathered around them for guidance. Sufism grew into institutionalized orders, where a shaykh leads his followers to purify themselves with rituals and guidance. Sufi orders and shaykhs authenticated themselves with official lineages going back to Muhammad through his cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib. As Mongols burned cities and stacked mountains of skulls, it is not surprising to see the masses and elites turn to Sufism. Popular religion was an important reprieve during this time, acting as an intersection between the Islamic sects, and even between religions. Muslim and non-Muslim figures like Ali Ibn Abi Talib, Alexander the Great, and legendary Persian figures like Rustam and Isfandiyar saw a massive spike in popularity as anti-Genghis heroes that stood for everything Genghis Khan and his Mongols were not. Ali was an especially popular saintly figure, as he was a common hero shared between Shiism, Sufism, and local forms of popular religion. With learned elites and unwashed masses accepting Sufism, its structure’s utility to organize devoted followers around a charismatic leader did not go unnoticed. Leaders of the era gathered around themselves a retinue of devoted Muslim and non-Muslim followers that treated their political leaders as spiritual guides responsible for their salvation. Other mystical groups began to adopt the Sufi orders’ hierarchy and organizational systems. These groups were non-orthodox Shia sects that started to see a booming popularity because of their extreme devotion to Ali, and for extreme doctrines that acted as political rebellion against Mongol elements.
One of the many groups associated with using a Sufi structure to propagate themselves is a cult called the Hurufis
The Letterists also saw a sectarian split during the lifetime of Fazl-Allah. Letterist Mahmud Pasikhani
One empire that took advantage of developing spiritual trends was the Safavid Empire in Persia, founded by Shah Ismail in 1501. The Safavids started as a Sufi order passed from father to son with a lineage stretching back to Ali. Under the leadership of Shah Ismail, the Safavids militarized and expanded into a state. It helped that Shah Ismail’s mother was a Mongol princess descended from Genghis Khan, complementing the spiritual authority of his father’s lineage with a political authority through his mother’s. The engine of Safavid militarization and politicization was the creation of a warrior dervish society of Turkmen soldiers called the Qizilbash
The Pointists were at home in this new environment. Neither Sunni nor Shia, but easily slotted into the extreme ends of Shiism encouraged by the Safavid state. They saw so much success that the Qizilbash began fraternizing with them, and even joining the Pointist order. The Pointists saw a rise in popularity thanks to the emphasis on Persian fostered by both the Safavids, and their Indian neighbors the Mughals. As the dynasty was passed down after Shah Ismail, successive Safavid emperors wished to curtail the more radical religious elements that made the Safavids successful in the first place. They wanted to slowly implement orthodox Shiism as the state religion, but that would run counter to the Sunni population and the radical Shia elements in the military. As such the Pointists saw occasional periods of repression and resurgence throughout the years.
At one point around 1571, the Pointists tried to proclaim Safavid emperor Tahmasp Shah as their messiah, but Tahmasp engaged himself with an attempt to reign in their Qizilbash allies. The Pointists’ mixing with the Qizilbash had another effect: militarization. Learning from the success the Qizilbash and similar groups had mixing extreme Shiism with Sufi organization and militarization, the Pointists began organizing militarily. This was either to find a place in the military structure of the Safavid state, or to protect themselves as their fortunes rose and dipped. They also saw more success than failure over in the Mughal Empire under the reign of Emperor Akbar. Coronated in 1556, Akbar wanted to create a civil religion that combined elements of all known faiths, with him as its spiritual guide. This is very much in line with the spiritual trends discussed post Mongol invasion. The Pointists seemed to have such a prominent place that it was thought by Safavid intelligence they converted Akbar specifically to their religion. Over in the Safavid domain, the Pointists’ fortunes were about to change during the reign of Shah Abbas, who took the throne in 1588.
There are three differing accounts to our story. One is that Shah Abbas was a shrewd follower of Shia orthodoxy who wished to completely make his domain convert by banishing the remaining forces of Sunnism, Sufism, and extreme Shiism. He schemed to dilute his military with Caucasian slave and freed forces from Armenia, Georgia, and Circassia, emulating the Ottomans in the West. Shah Abbas upset the dominance of the Turkmen Qizilbash. He sought to undo the remnants of the Safavid Sufi order and extreme Shiism that the Safavid state was built on. During the early years of Shah Abbas’ reign the Pointists had huge followings in several Safavid cities including the capital Qazvin, and a growing armed presence thanks to their militarization. They were comfortable enough to approach Shah Abbas, and he even frequented the gatherings of popular Pointist leader Dervish Khursaw. In official records it is stated that Shah Abbas was just keeping an eye on Dervish Khusraw, rather than being a sincere follower. In 1591 a Pointist rebellion broke out in the region of Fars only to be quickly suppressed and the leaders put to death. This incident and the amassed following Pointists enjoyed were used against them when an internal power struggle led a Pointist leader to inform Shah Abbas that Dervish Khusraw was planning an uprising. The Pointists were rapidly suppressed, and Dervish Khusraw was executed. In 1594, the remaining Pointists proclaimed a prophecy that one of their own would hold the throne and usher in the final Persian age in a massive calamity.
Amused by this prophecy, Shah Abbas plucked a Pointist prisoner and appointed him king; even waited on him as a royal servant. After three days it was evident no great calamity would occur. Shah Abbas proven right once and for all executed the Pointist prisoner and went on a mass slaughter of Pointists in his domain. Several fled into the arms of Akbar over in India. Alarmed at his Safavid counterpart’s actions, Akbar sent him a letter chiding him for his religious intolerance. In this narrative, wiping the Pointists out was always part of Shah Abbas’ plan to officially instate orthodox Shiism as the state religion.
A more bizarre variant of these events is that Shah Abbas was informed by his astrologer that his reign was coinciding with a conjunction of inauspicious planets. This conjunction spelled doom for a member of the royal family. The conjunction just so happens to coincide with the Pointist prophecy. Shah Abbas either took the opportunity to put to test the Pointist prophecy or was simply avoiding having his royal family be the target of bad astrological signs. He put the condemned Pointist prisoner on the throne, and when the conjunction ended, he fulfilled the astrological prophecy by putting the Pointist to death.
Yet another narrative holds that Shah Abbas was a genuine believer in the Pointist cult. He had a very close relationship with Dervish Khusraw and took the Pointist prophecies seriously. The story goes that instead of a mere prisoner, he appointed his friend and Pointist leader Dervish Yusuf as king. He waited dutifully on Dervish Yusuf until it was evident that the Pointist prophecy was never going to happen. Filled with rage at being swindled by the Pointists, Shah Abbas led his repressions against them until they were wiped from his domain. Feeling guilt over taking part in blasphemy, he embraced orthodox Shiism for himself and his people. Regardless of which story is true, the irony of the Pointist prophecy is that the orthodox Shia scholars appointed to convert the Persians were Arabs from Lebanon. With this, Shah Abbas formally put an end to the post-Mongol boom of spirituality in Persia, simmering the population down to a more sober orthodox Shiism that continues to this day. Shah Abbas even married the daughter of one of these Arab scholars, locking in the relationship of Shia Lebanese scholars to his reign.
Regardless of the details, it was clear the Pointists’ time was up in Persia. Over in India, the Pointists continued to be a part of the Akbar’s religious apparatus. According to both Safavid and Mughal sources, they may have been integral in the creation of Akbar’s new religion. He appreciated their elevation of the Persian language and cultural symbols. They enjoyed his patronage so much that they appointed him as their expected Messiah to bring about the new age of Persian dominance as they tried to do earlier with the Safavid Tahmasp. He lavished them with important appointments to his court, and even administrative roles. This relationship between Akbar and the Pointists might have included intrigue against the Safavids. Akbar employed the Pointists in Persia as spies, including those close to Dervish Khusraw, possibly Dervish Khusraw himself. One of the possible narratives for Shah Abbas’ hatred of the Pointists is his discovery of these secret communiques sent from Akbar. In this case, Shah Abbas himself put the spy to death by his own sword.
The Pointists’ level of importance to the Mughals seems to end with Akbar’s reign in 1605. From there they fade from the historical record. Their Letterist cousins fared a little better in the Ottoman empire, melting their letter mysticism with occult trends in Anatolia and the Balkans. In Persia, traces of the Letterists and Pointists could be found in the emerging religion of Baha’ism, which sees the two as predecessors, and Persian nationalists who see the Pointists as proto-nationalists. Maybe in the end, this was the whole point of the Pointists.
Expand for ReferencesAhmad, A. (2003). THE SAFAVID RULERS AND THE NUQTAWI MOVEMENT. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 64, 1238–1247.
ARJOMAND, S. A. (1981). RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM (GHULUWW), ṢŪFISM AND SUNNISM IN SAFAVID IRAN: 1501-1722. Journal of Asian History, 15(1), 1–35.
Bashir, Shahzad (2005) Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis. Oxford: One World Publications
Moin, Azhar A. (2015) The Millenial Sovereign. New York: Columbia University Press
https://iranicaonline.org/articles/astarabadi-fazlallah-sehab-al-din-b
https://iranicaonline.org/articles/horufism
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Picture in your mind a classic Old West showdown. Two gunslingers slowly advance towards each other down a deserted street, their spurs gently clinking with every step. They stop and stare each other down, hands hovering over the six-shooters slung from their hips. All goes still as the tension rises, the silence broken only by the whine of a harmonica or the hiss of a rattlesnake. A gust of wind blows across the street, throwing up a cloud of dust and sending a lone tumbleweed rolling between our antagonists. Then, in a flash, hands flash to belts, a gunshot rings out, and one man – the bad, guy, naturally – crumples to the ground.
Every detail of this scene has been burned into our collective consciousness by over a century of Western films, books, and television shows, interpreted and reinterpreted to the point of myth – or cliché. But while this archetypal scenario is mostly fiction – or happened far less often than pop culture would have us believe – at least one element is accurate: the tumbleweed. A visual staple of the Western genre, tumbleweeds poignantly evoke the desolation and ruggedness of the American frontier, and the lonely, drifting lifestyle of its mythical heroes. But what actually is a tumbleweed? Is it a specific plant, or just any dead bush rolling around in the wind? Where do they come from, and how did they come to be so emblematic of the American Old West? Well, pardner, put on your ten-gallon hat and chaps, saddle up, and let’s find out, shall we?
To answer the first question, tumbleweeds are not a single species of plant but many. Indeed, it is more accurate to think of tumbleweeds as a reproductive strategy rather than a specific type of plant. In botanical terms, a tumbleweed is a type of diaspore, a structure that helps a plant disperse its seeds. For example, the seeds of coconut palms spread by floating on water, the seeds of dandelion are scattered by the wind, while certain berries are eaten by animals and deposited far away in their droppings – which also furnish a convenient supply of fertilizer. Similarly, tumbleweeds allow plants to disperse their seeds by rolling in the wind. In some cases the entire plant above the roots forms the tumbleweed, while in others a hollow fruit or cluster of flowers breaks off and rolls away. In either case, once the plant has been fertilized and matured, the tumbleweed section dies off, leaving only a dry husk carrying a load of seeds. A special patch of cells called the abscission later then splits and the tumbleweed breaks free, allowing it to be carried away by the wind. In some species, the tumbleweed immediately starts shedding seeds as it rolls, while in others the hard casing around the seeds must be gradually worn down, ensuring that the seeds are dispersed sufficiently far from the parent plant. Given the need for wide open, windswept spaces with minimal obstacles for maximum dispersal, tumbleweeds largely grow in sparsely vegetated, arid or semi-arid environments.
Many different plant genera worldwide produce tumbleweeds, including Amaranthus in Central and South America, Ammocharis and Brunsvigia in southern Africa, Anastaticum or “Rose of Jerico” in North Africa, and the grasses Spinifex and Panicum – evocatively known as “hairy panic” – in Australia. Even non-seed-bearing plants and fungi can form tumbleweeds; for example, the moss Selaginella and the puffball fungus Bovista disperse their spores in this manner. However, the plant most of us are thinking about when we picture a tumbleweed is Salsola tragus, also known as “Russian Thistle” or “wind witch”. When first sprouting, Salsola looks fairly innocuous, with reddish-purple striped stems and thin, tender leaves which are commonly eaten by many animals, including mule deer, pronghorn, prairie dogs, and birds. As the plant matures, however, it grows into a woody, globe-shaped shrub covered in sharp thorns, which can grow up to the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. In the winter, the entire plant dies, dries out, and detaches from its root, forming the familiar tumbleweed we all know and love. Driven by the wind, these weeds can travel hundreds of kilometres, dispersing seeds as they go – around 250,000 per plant.
The seeds of Salsola are unusual in that they lack both a protective coat or endosperm – the stored energy reserves that gives most seeds a head start in germination and sprouting. Instead, they consist of a coiled, embryonic plant encased in a thin membrane. Consequently, Salsola seeds must wait until conditions are just right – around 20°C during the day and 5°C at night with adequate moisture – in order to sprout. They then quickly send up a pair of needle-like shoots, and the whole cycle begins anew.
But while Salsola has become inextricably linked with the American West, you may be surprised to learn that it is not actually native to that area. Indeed, it is a relative newcomer to the Continent. And far from being a benign part of the landscape as many Westerns would have us believe, like most invasive species the tumbleweed has proven itself to be something of an ecological menace.
As its common name “Russian Thistle” suggests, Salsola is native to the steppes of Eurasia, and is thought to have arrived in North America in 1873. In that year, Russian immigrants arrived in Bon Homme County, South Dakota, carrying bags of flax seeds contaminated with Salsola. From there, the plant quickly spread across the continent. By 1877 tumbleweeds were a common sight in South Dakota, while by 1900 they had spread as far west as Bakersfield, California. As one government botanist sent to investigate the situation in the 1890s reported:
“One almost continuous area of about 35,000 square miles has become more or less covered with the Russian thistle in the comparatively brief period of twenty years.”
The plant’s ability to thrive in hot, dry environments and its high tolerance for salt already made it ideally suited to the American West, but it was the agricultural boom of the late 19th Century that truly made it spread like wildfire. Ordinarily, Salsola cannot compete with prairie grasses because grass seeds contain endosperm, allowing them to sprout earlier in the season. Thus, by the time conditions are right for Salsola to start sprouting, the surrounding grasses have already taken over. But the large ploughed fields and overgrazed pastures of the American frontier – plus the lack of natural predators or pathogens – provided an ideal, competition-free environment for Salsola to thrive and spread. The plant is now found in every U.S. state except Alaska and Florida, and has spread as far afield as Canada, Argentina, Norway, China, South Africa, Indonesia, and Japan.
But how, you may ask, can the humble tumbleweed possibly be a menace? Well, while a single tumbleweed might be fairly harmless, a whole bunch of tumbleweeds is a different story entirely. When trapped against fences and other obstacles, accumulations of tumbleweeds can form thick, barbed-wire-like masses that can block entire highways and completely bury vehicles and homes. In 1989, the town of Mobridge, South Dakota was overwhelmed by tens of tons of tumbleweeds which had blown in from the nearby Oahe dry lake bed. So deeply was the town buried that mechanical excavators had to be brought in to clear the prickly mess. A similar disaster befell Victorville, California in April 2018 and Hanford Reservation, Washington in December 2019. In the latter incident, which locals dubbed “Tumblegeddon”, tumbleweeds piled up to six metres high, completely burying houses and cars and closing Washington State Route 240 for ten hours straight. As State Trooper Chris Thorson recalled:
“Visibility was bad, which caused cars to slow down. When they stopped, the tumbleweeds were piling so fast, they just fully engulfed in minutes. It’s kind a strange mixture of weather and circumstances, I don’t know how to really explain it. It’s just odd. It’s so odd because it doesn’t happen. Typically, 99 percent of the time, you can drive through tumbleweeds.”
And this phenomenon isn’t unique to the United States. In 2016, the town of Wangaratta in Victoria, Australia was smothered under an avalanche of the tumbleweed grass Panicum effusum – also known as “hairy panic” – with some accumulations burying houses up to roof level. It took locals with leaf blowers weeks to clear the town, while the town council proposed attaching giant vacuum cleaners to street-sweeping trucks to tackle the problem. In addition to clogging roads and houses, such bone-dry tumbleweed accumulations also pose a significant fire hazard, with pileups on fences and other obstacles resulting in hundreds of wildfires across the United States every year. Even lone tumbleweeds can be hazardous; every year dozens of unsuspecting motorists encounter large tumbleweeds rolling across the highway and swerve to avoid them, often resulting in accidents.
Tumbleweeds also present a significant threat to agriculture and local biodiversity. By quickly colonizing unused land, tumbleweeds outcompete native species, while the wildfires they promote cause more land to be cleared, further accelerating the plants’ spread. In dry-land areas, they can also compete with crops for scarce water resources. Indeed, one study conducted by Washington State University in 2009 demonstrated that a single Salsola tragus plant can suck up to 167 litres of water from the soil in a single year – an volume that can easily make the difference between a good wheat crop and a bad one. By virtue of being one of the few plants in central California that stays green in the fall, Salsola is also a major host of the beet leaf hopper, the insect which transmits the curly top virus. This virus can damage a wide variety of crops such as sugar beets, tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, peppers, squash, spinach and beans, and pesticide spraying against the beet leaf hopper costs California farmers millions of dollars every year. And in the case of Australian “hairy panic”, overconsumption of this plant by sheep and other animals can cause a debilitating disease known as “Yellow Big Head.”
For nearly a century, common methods for combatting tumbleweeds – such as spraying herbicides, uprooting young plants, and removing mature tumbleweed accumulations with pitchforks – have proven crude, labour-intensive, and largely ineffective. In the 1970s, two species of moths were introduced to the United States in the hopes their caterpillars would keep tumbleweeds in check, but this, too, was ultimately unsuccessful. However, the situation is slowly starting to improve. In 2014, the U.S. Agricultural Research Service announced the discovery of two fungal pathogens native to Salsola’s original Eurasian home which might prove effective against the plant, while research is ongoing on the use of blister mites and weevils native to Tunisia and Kazakhstan.
There are also a variety of strategies farmers can use to curb the spread of tumbleweeds. For example, the government of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan recommends that cool-season crops like winter cereals and canola be planted as early as possible to pre-empt and outcompete Salsola seeds, which require warmer conditions to germinate. For farms growing less competitive crops like flax, lentils, and chickpeas, it is recommended that more competitive plants be added to the crop rotation in order to suppress overall Salsola seed production. Indeed, studies have demonstrated that while the germination rate of Salsola seeds can be high as 76% within the first year after shedding, due to the fragile nature of the seeds this drops off dramatically with time, falling to only 31% after one year, 0.5% after two years, and 0.04% after three years. This means that early and aggressive intervention against tumbleweeds – such as herbicide burnoff prior to crop seeding – can lead to their complete eradication in an area in only a few years. Fences or shelterbelts of trees, shrubs, and other plants around agricultural fields can also serve to block the wind and catch tumbleweeds, reducing the spread of their seeds.
But while the tumbleweed is widely condemned by farmers as a noxious weed, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “What is a weed [but] a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” Indeed, despite its reputation as a botanical menace, the tumbleweed is not entirely without its virtues. During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, Salsola was one of the few edible plants that could survive in the depleted, desiccated soil of the American Midwest, providing a much-needed lifeline for cattle ranchers. In 1934, the state of Kansas alone produced over 350,000 tonnes of Salsola hay, the plant being widely credited with saving the cattle industry in the area. According to Timothy Egen’s 2006 book The Worst Hard Time, young Salsola shoots were also widely canned and eaten by people when all other food sources had run out.
And while responsible many kinds of of ecological disasters, tumbleweeds may actually help prevent others. One species of Russian Thistle, Salsola Kali, can absorb large amounts of toxic heavy metals like cadmium and technetium from the soil, meaning it could potentially be used to clean up contaminated sites. But whether burden or boon, one thing is for certain: the iconic tumbleweed is here to stay, and will continue to roll its way across the plains and deserts of the American West for centuries to come.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- Random Trivia Quiz 2
- This Day In History: July 14th
- Twilight Was Rejected Fourteen Times Before Being Accepted
Expand for ReferencesStevens, Sidney, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Tumbleweeds, Tree Hugger, February 27, 2022, https://www.treehugger.com/everything-you-ever-wanted-know-about-tumbleweeds-4864166
Tikkanen, Amy, Tumbleweed, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/plant/tumbleweed
Tumbleweed/Russian Thistle, Desert USA, https://www.desertusa.com/flowers/tumbleweed.html
Why do Tumbleweeds Tumble? PBS News Hour, May 6, 2018, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-do-tumbleweeds-tumble
Osterloff, Emily, Tumbleweeds: the Fastest Plant Invasion in the USA’s History, Natural History Museum, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/tumbleweeds-fastest-plant-invasion-in-usa-history.html
Jenkins, Nash, Tumbleweeds Have Caused a State of Emergency in Eastern Colorado, TIME, June 12, 2014, https://time.com/2863017/tumbleweeds-colorado-state-of-emergency/
Control of Tumbleweeds, Government of Saskatchewan, https://www.saskatchewan.ca/business/agriculture-natural-resources-and-industry/agribusiness-farmers-and-ranchers/crops-and-irrigation/weeds/control-of-tumbleweeds
Main, Douglas, Consider the Tumbleweed, Science Line, March 2, 2011, https://scienceline.org/2011/03/virtues-of-a-weed/
Held, Amy, ‘Houses Disappeared’ When Tumbleweeds Rolled Into This California City, NPR, April 18, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/18/603535155/houses-disappeared-when-tumbleweeds-rolled-into-this-california-city
Big Vacuums Could Combat ‘Hairy Panic’ in Australian City, BBC News, February 19, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-35609602
The post So What Actually is a Tumbleweed, Anyway, And How Did it Become Associated with the American West? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In this era of ubiquitous digital media, the idea of being unable to purchase our favourite music at a store that sells music sounds kind of ridiculous. But that was the unfortunate reality for millions of teenagers in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s wanting to listen to the coolest albums, all thanks to the introduction of the “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” warning label. While the Parental Advisory Label, or PAL, still exists today and can be found on new albums, few people take notice of it, which is a far cry from the reality of a couple decades ago when it sufficiently scared some retailers enough to make them not stock CDs marked with that scarlet letter at all. So who do we have to blame for this clumsy, ham-fisted attempt at censorship of one of our oldest forms of expression? In a word, Prince. In more words than that, Prince and Al Gore’s wife.
To explain, the genesis of the Parental Advisory sticker can be traced back to a single Prince song titled, Darling Nikki. For anyone who doesn’t have The Purple One’s discography memorised as you should, the song contains the lyrics: “I knew a girl named Nikki. I guess you could say she was a sex fiend. I met her in a hotel lobby. Masturbating with a magazine.”
An explicit line sure, but by no means the most offensive thing ever recorded, even by Prince, and millions of people listened to the song without giving the faintest whiff of a crap that they should be offended. One person who was taken aback by the line, though, was Mary “Tipper” Gore, the wife of then senator, Al Gore. According to Tipper, she was listening to the 1984 album Purple Rain with her 11 year old daughter when she heard the offending lyric. Stating: “The vulgar lyrics embarrassed both of us. At first, I was stunned — then I got mad! Millions of Americans were buying Purple Rain with no idea what to expect!”
Somehow not being named Karen, Tipper was shocked that a musician famed for his flamboyant, sexually charged performances would release a song referencing sex. Thus, she formed a group called the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in 1985 with the ultimate goal of censoring all music referencing anything the group deemed offensive. Like Tipper, the other members of the PMRC were mostly wives of notable, high-ranking politicians, leading to the coining of the nickname “The Washington Wives” by the press, with all the wives similarly shocked by lyrics in the pop songs of the era. Notably, one member, Susan Baker, the wife of then Treasury Secretary James Baker, joined after her 7-year-old daughter listened to Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and innocently asked her what a virgin was… We’re just grateful both of them got out of that situation alive.
While these stories make for amusing anecdotes today, in the 1985 they were used as fuel for the fire the PMRC wanted to light under the butts of the RIAA. The stated goals of the PMRC were to limit access of music they deemed unacceptable to minors. A noble goal admittedly, but one they wanted to tackle in an awkward and heavy-handed way. For example, the PMRC wanted to not only label music containing explicit lyrics (or lyrics referencing anything they deemed objectionable like sex, drugs, or alcohol), but also limit their sales in big stores, as well as have their covers censored and ban them from being played on the radio. Which, in an era before Napster and later streaming, would be a surefire way to kill album sales.
To this end, the PMRC released a list dubbed “The Filthy 15”, basically a list of the songs of the day containing what they felt contained the most unacceptable lyrics and themes. A list that today actually reads like a pretty kick-ass mixtape, featuring artists like, AC/DC, Cyndi Lauper, Black Sabbath, Prince, Judas Priest and Def Leppard, amongst others.
In an attempt to appease the PMRC, the RIAA agreed to self-censor some releases by including a small sticker reading “WARNING: tone of this record unsuitable for minors” and later a more firm sticker reading “Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics”. A move that was widely criticised by musicians of the era and provoked the ire of the PMRC further. Naturally, the group felt that the move wasn’t enough, so took the issue to the Senate, hoping to push for a mandatory rating system similar to the one employed for movies by the MPAA.
In the ensuing hearing that began on September 19th, 1985, the PMRC argued that, and we are going to quote them here because the inaccuracy of the latter half of their statement offends our sensibilities, their goal was “to educate and inform parents of this alarming new trend towards lyrics that are sexually explicit”.
Yes… A “new” trend concerning sexually explicit lyrics… From a group of women who mostly grew up in the 1950s and 1960s… I mean, the 1958 hit Lollipop is literally about a girl noting her man tastes sweet, she loves when he shakes his hips at her, and otherwise continually references him being her own personal lollipop… That’s not to mention, you know, a large percentage of the rest of songs since humans have been humaning. Like, don’t even get us started on songs like the 1971 international hit “Brown Sugar”, by the Rolling Stones, which includes such extremely family friendly lyrics like discussing slave woman rape:
“Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in the market down in New Orleans
Scarred old slaver knows he’s doing alright
Hear him whip the women just around midnight.
Brown sugar, how come you taste so good? Uh huh
Brown sugar, just like a black girl should, uh huh, oh (Woo)”
In any event, going back to Tipper and friends, they once again cited the Filthy 15, as well as the music videos for Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher” and the album cover of Def Leppard’s Pyromania to illustrate this “new” disturbing trend in music.
The PMRC additionally called on the testimony of a music professor who argued that heavy metal was fundamentally dangerous because it centred around “the element of hatred”, as opposed to rock and roll, which was derived from church music…
Now, it’s at this point we are going to do a brief aside to discuss the origin of the moniker “rock and roll” because it’s literally, and very explicitly in its origin, about sex.
The word “roll” has been used since the Middle Ages to refer to, among other things, having sex: “Let’s go for a roll in the hay”; “Rolling under the sheets”; etc. The word “rock”, again among other things, has been used since at least the 17th century as a term meaning “shake or disturb”. A couple hundred years later, this had also spread to black gospel singers using “rock” to refer to being shaken in a spiritual sense, as in spiritual rapture (rocked).
By the early 20th century “rock” had morphed somewhat to being used as a slang term by black Americans referring to dancing to music with a strong beat, principally rhythm and blues- at the time called “race music” or “race records”. The specific 1922 slang definition of “rock” was something to the effect of “to cause to move with musical rhythm”; it also had strong sexual overtones when used in this way.
Around this same time, these two terms, “rock” and “roll”, had naturally merged together, forming a double entendre, typically referring to very suggestive or scandalous dancing as well as simply having sex, depending on how you looked at it. One example of this is the 1922 song “My Man Rocks Me, with One Steady Roll”.
Another early reference to the term “rock and roll” was a 1935 J. Russel Robinson lyric from Henry “Red” Allen’s Get Rhythm in Your Feet and Music in Your Soul,
If Satan starts to hound you, commence to rock and roll. Get rhythm in your feet and music in your soul…
At this point, the phrase “rock and roll” was relatively well known among black Americans. This particular tune was also later covered by quite a few popular white musicians, such as Benny Goodman, which may have helped spread this phrase somewhat.
The term got its biggest global boost through a Cleveland, Ohio disk jockey named Alan Freed. Freed played early forms of rock and roll (mix of rhythm and blues and country music, primarily) on his radio show and called the mix “rock and roll”, a term he was previously familiar with from race records and songs such as “Rock and Rolling Mama” (1939) and “Rock and Roll” (there were three songs named this in the late 1940s).
Freed was encouraged to call this mix of music “rock and roll” by his sponsor, record store owner Leo Mintz, who was trying to boost sales on race records by getting white shoppers to buy them. Race records weren’t very popular at the time among white people, but by re-branding the music “rock and roll”, the music quickly became extremely popular among teenagers of all ethnicities, largely thanks to this and Freed’s radio show, The Moondog Rock & Roll House Party. (Incidentally, classic style “race records” were in the process of being re-branded around this same time to “Rhythm and Blues”, thanks to famed music journalist and producer Jerry Wexler.)
In any event, Freed’s show was also the primary reason why Cleveland was chosen for the location of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the 1980s. When deciding between cities, the selection board chose Cleveland owing to Freed having played a significant role in popularizing rock and roll music and the branding the style of music “rock and roll”, though he obviously didn’t coin the term itself, as noted previously.
In any event, once again going back to the then very obviously extremely “new” trend of songs referencing sex that occurred in the 1980s, which had at no point before in history ever been a thing, testifying on behalf of not censoring what would eventually become some of the fondest remembered artists and music of the 1980’s was none other than Frank Zappa, as well as country musician John Denver and Twisted Sister frontman, Dee Snider. All three men delivered withering take downs of the proposed censorship, passionately arguing for the right to express themselves creatively, with Snider in particular taking the opportunity to take a pot shot at Tipper for misconstruing and using the lyrics for Under the Blade as promoting “sadomasochism, bondage, and rape” in an attack article about him the previous year. All things he took exception to as a practising christian and family man who also just so happened to front a heavy metal band. In his official statement to the Senate, Snider educated the media and Tipper on the real meaning of the song, stating: “The lyrics [Gore] quoted have absolutely nothing to do with these topics. On the contrary, the words in question are about surgery and the fear that it instills in people.”
He then added, “That [Gore] could misquote me is curious, since we make it a point to print all our lyrics on the inner sleeve of every album. As the creator of “Under the Blade,” I can say categorically that the only sadomasochism, bondage, and rape in this song is in the mind of Ms. Gore.”
Snider was unable to sway Gore and the Senate and the RIAA feeling mounting pressure from the public agreed to self-censor all new releases from November 1st of that year, before the hearing had even reached a conclusion. As part of this compromise, the RIAA agreed to place large, standarised warning labels on any album containing overt references to sex, drugs and alcohol and to also audibly censor said references for the radio. This was acceptable for the PMRC who, by the way, originally wanted the offending lyrics to be clearly written on a much bigger sticker on the front of the album. For some reason, the PMRC never saw the irony in trying to stop children hearing swear words by writing them in massive letters on the front of a CD.
Curiously, although the censoring of songs for the radio is compulsory to comply with obscenity laws and ensure a record can be played at times when kids may be listening, putting a PAL sticker on an album is entirely optional. As the President of the RIAA, Cary Sherman has himself explained:
“Artists have a first amendment right to express themselves, and consumers have a right to hear what those artists say. Consumers also should be warned when they might find some of the content objectionable. By asking the artist and the label to make that determination, we avoid any appearance of censorship by a ‘board’ or some music nanny. Instead, it’s the artist and label who are advising listeners that they should be aware that some of the content may be objectionable”
As a result, artists are under no obligation to put PAL stickers on the albums if they don’t personally feel there is any objectionable content contained in it. This said, their record company might simply do this to avoid controversy. Similarly, back when they existed en masse, record stores could label any objectionable content themselves to warn parents, something that notably occurred with Frank Zappa’s, Jazz from Hell. It should be noted here that the album is entirely instrumental and contains no lyrics despite receiving a “Parental Warning: Explicit Lyrics” sticker. Thus, it is often used as an example of censorship gone mad, with some going as far as to suggest the censorship was a spiteful response from the PMRC due to Zappa’s comments during the 1985 Senate hearing. However, the truth is that while the record did receive an explicit lyrics warning, it wasn’t from the PMRC or even Zappa’s record company, but rather a regional chain of the Fred Meyer department store who took exception to the name of the song- G-Spot Tornado. Fred Meyer execs, who were presumably unaware that the album had no lyrics, stuck a generic warning label on it because of this song name and released it as usual.
One store who took the warning labels more seriously still was Wal-Mart, who famously refused to stock any album with a parental warning, along with magazines discussing rock and heavy metal. Even today, the chain will only sell “clean” versions of albums with profanity edited out, a choice that saw them refuse to stock the Green Day album, 21st Century Breakdown, when the punk rockers refused to back down to the retail giant in providing an edited version.
All of this said, it should be noted that even back when physical media reined supreme, musicians noticed that the warning label did little stop sales and, in some cases, actually seemed to help improve them. Nowhere was this effect greater than the first album ever slapped with the standardized warning label- 2 Live Crew’s Banned in the U.S.A. The album was declared obscene and one Florida district went so far as making it illegal to purchase (a record store owner was actually arrested for selling a copy to an undercover cop). Eventually these charges were quashed, but not before the band had their name splashed in newspapers across the country, resulting in millions of potential fans hearing about this album that was too spicy for their ears. Members of 2 Live Crew eventually recognised the controversy as a positive boon to the album’s sales, the exact opposite intention of PMRC.
Since then, some of the best reviewed and selling albums of all time have carried the same warning, from Dr Dre’s The Chronic to Blink 182’s Take off Pants and Jacket. The lesson to parents being, if you want to stop kids listening to music you think is inappropriate, first, please for the love of all that is holy remember that the music you listened to as a kid was just as spicy. And, also, maybe don’t ask record labels to put a massive sticker on the front of every album telegraphing to kids that it has something they totally want to hear more about in it.
The post Who’s to Blame for the Parental Advisory Stickers on Albums? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In June 2021, Southern District of California Judge Roger Benitez made headlines when he struck down the state’s 30-year ban on assault weapons, concluding that:
“Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.”
Benitez’s landmark decision was but one episode in the long-running political debate over gun rights and gun control in the United States, much of which has centred on the class of firearms known as assault rifles and in particular the popular AR-15 family. To gun-control advocates, rifles like the AR-15 are deadly weapons of war unsuited to civilian use and the favoured tools of criminals and mass shooters; while to gun rights activists they are merely highly adaptable, reliable tools, no different from any other sporting firearm. But what is the truth of the matter? What is an “assault rifle”, how did it get its name, and how does this class of firearm differ from all others. The answer may surprise you.
What we now call assault rifles can trace their origins back to the Second World War. While that conflict is remembered for introducing advanced technologies like radar, jet aircraft, and nuclear weapons, the average infantryman went into WWII armed essentially the same weapon his parents had used in the last war: a bolt-action, manually-repeating rifle firing a full-power cartridge. The only major exception was the United States, which in 1936 became the first nation to issue a semi-automatic rifle – the M1 Garand – as its standard infantry weapon. But while such weapons were well-suited to shooting across no-man’s-land during the Great War or the South African Veldt during the Boer War, in the increasingly urban, close-quarters combat troops increasingly found themselves engaged in, bolt-action rifles quickly became something of a liability. Not only were they slow and awkward to operate – severely limiting the volume of fire that could be laid down – but the full-power cartridges they fired, great for precision shots over long distances, were grossly overpowered, with Army reports indicating that few combat engagements occurred at ranges over 300 metres. Such cartridges also made fully-automatic weapons all but uncontrollable when fired from the shoulder.
Thankfully, most armies had another class of weapon at their arsenal: the submachine gun. Developed at the end of the Great War for raiding and clearing trenches, submachine guns fired lower-recoil pistol-calibre ammunition and could deliver a murderous volume of fire at close quarters, making them ideal for urban combat. This advantage was exploited to great effect by the Soviet Red Army, who equipped entire infantry companies with PPsH-41 and 43 submachine guns for house-to-house fighting in cities like Stalingrad. But submachine guns were not a perfect solution, being inaccurate at ranges beyond a few dozen metres. Both the Soviets and the Germans quickly realized that this new kind of combat required a new kind of weapon, one which combined the volume of fire and full-auto controllability of a submachine gun with the accuracy of a rifle – at least over moderate ranges.
Interestingly, both nations approached the same problem from opposite ends. Unlike most armies, the tactical structure of the German Wehrmacht was organized not around the rifleman, but rather the machine gun squad, with rifle-carrying infantry playing a supporting role. This is a major reason army planners chose to retain the Great War-era Mauser 1898-pattern bolt-action rifle rather than adopt a more modern semi-automatic infantry weapon. But while this arrangement worked well during the Blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939, 1940, and 1941, it proved less effective in 1943 as the Wehrmacht found itself in full-on retreat following the disaster at Stalingrad. Though the German MG 34 and MG 42 machine guns could lay down an impressive volume of fire, they required extensive setup before they could be brought to bear – something that was difficult to do while retreating. German industry thus set about designing a more compact, man-portable machine gun that could be more easily used on the retreat.
Fortuitously, the basic elements for such a weapon were already in development. In 1938, the Polte Ammunition Works in Magdeburg designed a new kind of ammunition, designated the 7.92x33mm Kurz or “short.” This was essentially a cut-down version of the standard full-power 7.92x 57mm Mauser cartridge used in German bolt-action rifles and machine guns, with a shorter case and lighter bullet. This provided a balance between recoil and accuracy, allowing an infantryman to lay down controllable automatic fire from the shoulder while still being able to accurately hit targets out to 300 metres. In 1940 the German government issued contracts to firms Haenel and Walther to produce prototypes of a rifle to fire the new Kurz cartridge, to be designated the Maschinenkarabiner or “Machine Carbine” 42. Both companies produced similar weapons, which looked unlike anything that had come before. Both were gas-operated, built of lightweight and inexpensive welded steel stampings, and featured an inline shoulder stock, low-slung barrel to reduce muzzle climb, and a long, curved 30-round detachable box magazine. Both companies’ prototypes were extensively tested at the Kummersdorf proving grounds in December 1940, and the results were…less than impressive, with the weapons suffering a large number of jams, burst barrels and other failures. Undaunted, Walther and Haenel continued to refine their designs, and in April 1942 the Haenel weapon was judged reliable enough for combat trials, first seeing service on the Eastern Front, south of Leningrad.
The reaction of the first troops to use the new weapon was overwhelmingly positive, and they requested that more MKb 42s be sent to the front immediately. Unfortunately, the entire program suddenly fell victim to that greatest of enemies to the German war effort: Adolf Hitler, who ordered all new rifle development programs suspended. The reason for this decision is hotly debated among historians, with some arguing that Hitler, having been a soldier in the Great War himself, was suspicious of new technology and believed that the standard KAR98K bolt-action rifle was perfectly adequate for the German infantryman’s needs. Others, however, claim that his decision was a far more pragmatic one. German forces had lost vast quantities of rifles and other weapons during the retreat from Stalingrad, greatly straining the capacity of German industry to replace them. Introducing a new pattern of rifle, which required brand-new tooling and manufacturing facilities, would only make the situation worse and result in too few new rifles being produced to have any significant impact on the war effort. Hitler thus limited research and development efforts to upgraded models of submachine guns.
Believing they had a winning weapon on their hands, Haenel made the bold decision to go behind the Führer’s back and continue development of the Mkb 42 under the designation Maschinenpistole or “Machine Pistol” 43. In order to address the issue of manufacturing capacity, Haenel attempted to develop the MP 43 into a complete replacement for the KAR98K, fitting it with a grenade launching attachment, mounts for telescopic sights, and a bayonet lug. Unfortunately, the rifle proved fundamentally unsuited to sniping, bayonet fighting, or grenade launching, and it was reluctantly decided that the MP43 could only ever supplement the KAR98K, not replace it. In March 1943, Hitler discovered Haenel’s deception and ordered the project shut down once again. However, he was eventually persuaded to allow development to continue on an evaluation basis only. But the results of early trials proved so promising that Hitler approved the weapon for mass-production, the first examples entering combat in October 1943. Once again the reaction from front-line soldiers was overwhelmingly positive- so much so that when Hitler asked his Eastern Front generals in July 1944 what they most needed, one general immediately exclaimed “more of those new rifles!” Hitler soon warmed to the MP 43 concept, and recognizing the propaganda value of this new weapon, requested that it be given a new name: Sturmgewehr, or “Assault Rifle.” Nearly 426,000 StG 44 rifles were produced by the end of the war, and while they proved extremely effective in combat, by the time they entered service the war for Germany was already lost, and the new weapon had little to no impact on the final outcome of the conflict. However, the basic concept of a select-fire rifle firing an intermediate cartridge – as well as the name “assault rifle” – was to have major impact on the future of firearms design.
Meanwhile, a similar development was taking place in the Soviet Union. Recognizing, as the Germans had, the need for a cartridge halfway between a pistol and rifle in power, in 1943 the Soviet OKB-44 design bureau developed the intermediate 7.62x39mm cartridge for use in a planned family of new infantry weapons, including a semi-automatic rifle, an automatic rifle, and a light machine gun. The cartridge, along with the semi-automatic SKS rifle designed by Sergei Simonov, first entered combat in limited numbers in 1945 during the final battles against Nazi Germany. The round performed well, and in 1949 the SKS was officially adopted as the Red Army’s standard rifle, alongside the RPD light machine gun firing the same round. However, the SKS would prove extremely short-lived in front-line service, thanks to the development of a weapon that would go on to become legendary.
In October 1941, tank commander Mikhail Kalashnikov was recovering in hospital from shoulder wounds received during the Battle of Bryansk. With plenty of time on his hands, Kalashnikov decided to solve what he saw as a major deficiency in Soviet armaments and designed a new type of submachine gun for the Red Army:
“I was in the hospital, and a soldier in the bed beside me asked: ‘Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men, when the Germans have automatics?’ So I designed one. I was a soldier, and I created a machine gun for a soldier.”
While Kalashnikov’s submachine gun was not accepted into service, his talent as a designer was recognized and he was reassigned to the Red Army’s Central Scientific Development Firing Range for Rifle Firearms of the Chief Artillery Directorate. In 1944 Kalashnikov became aware of the 7.62x39mm intermediate cartridge and redesigned his submachine gun to accommodate it. The resulting weapon looked very similar to the German StG 44, with an inline stock, low-slung barrel, and curved 30-round magazine. Whether Kalashnikov was directly influenced by the German weapon is debatable, with most historians attributing the similarities to a case of convergent design – that is, of two designers coming up with similar solutions to the same problem. Indeed, the operating mechanism of the two rifles is quite different, the StG 44 using a tipping bolt and the Kalashnikov a rotating bolt. However, it is worth noting while the Germans were trying to create a machine gun that could be used at shorter ranges, Kalashnikov was trying to create a submachine gun that could be used at longer ranges.
In 1946 Kalashnikov entered his design into a competition for a new infantry automatic rifle, which it eventually won. In 1947, the weapon was approved for service under the designation Avtomat Kalashnikova – or “Kalashnikov’s Automatic Rifle” – 1947, better known as the AK-47. Trials of the new rifle began in 1948, and in 1949 the AK-47 was adopted as the Red Army’s standard rifle, replacing the SKS after barely a year in service. The AK family of rifles would go on to become the most successful and widely-produced firearms in history, renowned for their ruggedness, reliability, and ease of use. Millions were exported around the world by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist states, and can be found in war zones worldwide to this day. It is important to note here that while the weapon is popularly referred to as the “AK-47,” this designation technically applies to the first three patterns of the rifle. While the first AK-47 featured stamped steel construction like the StG 44, this proved unreliable and was quickly replaced by machined steel construction for the Type 2 in 1951 and Type 3 in 1954. Then, in 1959, Soviet manufacturers finally perfected the stamped-steel technology and introduced the Modernized AK or AKM. This is the AK most commonly encountered around the world, the original “AK-47” patterns being extremely rare.
Yet despite the success of the StG 44 and the AK, it took several decades for the assault rifle concept to catch on in the West. American infantry doctrine had long emphasized individual marksmanship and firing accurate aimed shots over long distances over suppressing fire, and despite the lessons of urban close-combat combat during WWII, the United States was reluctant to adopt an intermediate cartridge. In 1954 the U.S. pressured the newly-formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO into adopting the full-power 7.62×51 or .308 calibre cartridge as its infantry standard. This decision forced many NATO countries to abandon advanced assault rifle projects and adopt so-called “battle rifles” firing full-power cartridges, such as the Belgian FN-FAL, German G3, and American M14, which was essentially an M1 Garand with a detachable box magazine and select-fire capability. Unfortunately, these rifles proved less than ideal, the full-power .308 cartridge making them nigh-uncontrollable in full-automatic fire. This led many countries like the UK to delete the full-automatic capability from their battle rifles altogether.
The deficiencies of the battle rifle concept became glaringly obvious as the United States entered the Vietnam War, where the bulky, wood-stocked M14 proved prone to snagging in heavy brush and warping in the tropical humidity. By contrast, the Chinese-supplied SKSs and AKs used by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army proved ideally suited to jungle warfare, being light, compact, reliable, and capable of controlled automatic fire. It quickly became clear to U.S. Commanders that an American answer to the AK was desperately needed. Thankfully, just such a weapon was already in development.
In 1954, Richard Boutelle, president of the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, created the ArmaLite division to explore the use of aluminium and other aerospace materials in firearms design. The division’s first success came that same year when it designed the lightweight folding AR-5 and AR-7 survival rifles for use by U.S. aircrew shot down behind enemy lines. In 1957, ArmaLite was invited to enter the competition for a new U.S. Forces rifle to replace the WWII-era M1 Garand, and to this end designer Eugene Stoner produced the AR-10, a lightweight aluminium-bodied rifle firing the 7.62x51mm NATO round. While the AR-10 would ultimately lose out to the M14, that same year General Willard G. Wyman, commander of the U.S. Army Continental Command, put out a request for a lightweight automatic rifle to fire the newly-developed 5.56x45mm or .223 calibre intermediate cartridge. Stoner scaled down the AR-10 design to create a new rifle called the AR-15, which after extensive trials and conversion to fully-automatic capability was adopted into U.S. service in 1964 as the M16. While the lightweight, space-age weapon was initially disparaged by troops as the “Mattel Rifle”, the M16 quickly proved its worth in the jungles of Vietnam, and Eugene Stoner’s AR system has formed the basis for all standard U.S. military service rifles to the present day. The rifle also set the trend for modern assault rifles, the 5.56x45mm cartridge being flatter-shooting and more lightweight than the Russian 7.62×54, the latter feature allowing an infantryman to carry more ammunition. As a result, in 1974 the Soviet Union replaced the AKM with the AK74 firing the broadly similar 5.45x39mm cartridge. And in 1980 NATO adopted 5.56x45mm as its infantry standard, replacing the full-power 7.62×51.
All this brings us back to our original question: just what is an assault rifle? According to the standard U.S. Army definition, to be classified as an assault rifle a firearm must have three basic characteristics embodied in the original StG 44 and AK-47: 1) it must fire an intermediate cartridge with an effective range of at least 300 metres; 2) it must have select-fire capability – that is, the ability to fire in fully-automatic mode; and 3) it must have a high-capacity detachable box magazine. By this definition, most civilian versions of the widely demonized AR-15 are not, in fact assault rifles, for while these rifles are designed to fire an intermediate cartridge and can be fitted with large capacity magazines, the AR-15 is, by definition, a semi-automatic firearm. Furthermore, “AR” does not stand for “Assault Rifle,” as is widely believed, but rather “Armalite Rifle.” Similarly, any firearm lacking one or more of the above characteristics cannot be classified as an assault rifle. For example, the original M14 has a detachable high capacity magazine and select-fire capability, but fires a full-power rifle cartridge; while the SKS, despite firing an intermediate cartridge, has only a 10-round fixed magazine and no select-fire capability.
Nor should “Assault Rifles” be confused with “Assault Weapons,” the latter being neither a technical or military term but rather a political one. The term derives from the U.S. Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which defined “Assault Weapons” as those which possess one or more of the following features, among others:
- A pistol grip or thumbhole stock
- A folding or telescoping stock
- A grenade or flare launcher
- A forward handgrip
- A threaded barrel
- A muzzle device such as a muzzle brake, flash hider, or suppressor
- A bayonet mount
- A barrel shroud that prevents burns to the operator
- A manufactured unloaded weight of over 50 ounces (1.41 kg) for pistols
As you may have noticed, few of these features in any way affect the actual mechanical operation or deadliness of a firearm, and instead merely serve to make it look “tactical” or “scary” compared to more traditional firearms used for hunting and other sporting purposes. Unsurprisingly, this purely cosmetic definition has lead to a variety of nonsensical contradictions in the application of gun-control laws. For example, the Ruger Mini-14, a scaled-down version of the M14 chambered for the 5.56x45mm cartridge, has rarely been targeted by assault weapons bans despite firing the same cartridge and having roughly the same capabilities as the AR-15. The only major difference between the AR-15 and the Mini-14 is that the latter is typically sold with a traditional wooden stock, making it look less intimidating.
None of this, of course, has any bearing on who should be able to own which firearms and why, and it is hardly the business of this channel to wade into the highly contentious gun control debate. But as with any fraught political topic, it is always best to approach the conversation from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance. For as a paragon of quality 1980s children’s television once said: knowing is half the battle.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- Has Anyone Ever Fired a Gun in Space, Space Cannons, and the Guns Designed for Astronauts?
- The Story of the Iconic ‘Tommy Gun’
- From Windmills to BB Guns- The Story of Daisy
- That Time Nevada Executed a Prisoner With a Shooting Machine
- During WWII, Lyudmila Pavlichenko Sniped a Confirmed 309 Axis Soldiers, Including 36 German Snipers
Expand for ReferencesErenfeicht, Leszek, Sturmgewehr: Hitler’s Only True Wunderwaffe, Small Arms Defense Journal, September 30, 2013, http://www.sadefensejournal.com/wp/sturmgewehr-hitlers-only-true-wunderwaffe/
Williams, Anthony, Assault Rifles and Their Ammunition: History and Prospects, June 22, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20080714163011/http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk:80/Assault.htm
Bocetta, Sam, The Complete History of the AR-15 Rifle, Small Wars Journal, December 7, 2017, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-complete-history-of-the-ar-15-rifle
Hogg, Ian, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Ammunition, Chartwell Books, NJ, 1985
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-103hr3355enr/pdf/BILLS-103hr3355enr.pdf
McCollum, Ian, Kalashnikov vs Sturmgewehr, Forgotten Weapons, September 17, 2016, https://youtube.com/watch?v=sPWJOJZQCs8
The post What Actually Defines an ‘Assault Rifle’ and Who Invented Them? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, is one of the most important and celebrated American writers and wits in history. His keen observations and biting satires of 19th Century America remain beloved classics to this day, while his pithy quips will likely continue to infest our social media feeds for decades more to come. Yet despite Twain’s legendary intelligence and observational powers, he had his blind spots, and in the 1890s he lost his entire fortune on a technological gamble that promised to change the world, but ended up ruining its inventor and backers. This is the story of the Paige Compositor, the machine that bankrupted a literary legend.
Throughout his life, Twain held a keen interest in cutting-edge science and technology. He was a close friend of patron saint of the Internet and possible real-life wizard Nikola Tesla; an early adopter of such newfangled devices as the telephone, the automobile, and air conditioning; and possibly the first author in history to write an entire manuscript on a typewriter. Which of his novels was composed in this fashion, however, is hotly debated, with the two most likely candidates being Tom Sawyer, published in 1876; and Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883. But Twain’s enthusiasm often exceeded his caution, and over the years he would lose large sums of money investing in failed inventions ranging from telegraphs and engraving machines to a miracle protein powder its inventor claimed could end famine in India. But his greatest gamble would come in 1880, when he caught wind of a sophisticated new machine that promised to completely revolutionize the world of printing and publishing.
In Twain’s day, printing technology had hardly changed in over 400 years. While modern printing presses were larger, faster, and steam-powered, the process of typesetting was still a slow, painstaking, and manual affair. Just as they had in the days of Johann Gutenberg, typesetters sat in front of a large multi-compartment frame called a typecase, which held pieces of moveable type cast from a lead-tin alloy. Capital letters were held in upper compartments and regular letters in lower compartments, giving us our modern terms Uppercase and Lowercase. One at a time, the typesetter removed pieces of type from the typecase and arranged them in a handheld frame called a composing stick, adding gaps between words using lead spacers called quadrats. Once a line of text was complete, the typesetter passed it to a justifier, who placed it in a metal printing frame and used more lead spacers used to set the gaps between lines and the margins around the page. This is why today these gaps are known as leading. Using screws built into the printing frame, the lines of type were clamped together to form a solid block of text called a forme, which was then loaded into the printing press.
An experienced typesetter and justifier could set around 3,500 to 4,000 ems or letter widths per hour. But following the explosion in popularity of newspapers, periodicals, and other mass publications in the wake of the American Civil War, human hands could no longer keep up with the sheer volume of printed media being produced. The race was thus on to develop a practical mechanical typesetting machine. Of the dozens of inventors scrambling to make this breakthrough, two frontrunners soon emerged: German Ottmar Mergenthaler and American James W. Paige.
Very little is known about Paige outside of his invention. Born in January 1842 in Rochester, New York, he likely spent his youth working with his father in the oil fields out West. In 1872, at the age of 30, Paige applied for a patent for:
“…a device, by means of its special construction, to set type more rapidly and accurately than has been before done.”
After several years of tinkering with his design, in 1877 Paige was contacted by the Farnham Typesetting Company, which operated out of a workshop at the Colt Firearms Company factory in Hartford, Connecticut. The company was developing an automatic distributor for sorting used type back into typecases, and asked Paige to combine his machine with theirs to produce a complete automatic typesetter. But on examining Farnham’s machine, Paige concluded that the two mechanisms were incompatible, and instead set about designing an entirely new machine, which he called the Paige Compositor.
Comprising some 18,000 intricately-machined parts, the Paige Compositor was a marvel of late 19th-Century engineering. Designed to exactly replicate the action of a human composer, it used a mechanical arm to lift pieces of type from a series of magazines and deposit them in a composing tray, allowing a typesetter to compose a line as fast as they could type on the integrated keyboard. Paige estimated that his invention could speed up the process of typesetting by up to three-fold, revolutionizing the publishing industry and making him and his colleagues very wealthy men. However, the complexity of the machine meant that it would take a great deal of time – and money – to perfect. Farnham thus began seeking investors to bankroll the machine’s development. One of the Company stockholders, Dwight Buell, thought he had the perfect man: his good friend Mark Twain.
While Twain may not have been intimately familiar with the other technologies he had backed over the years, he did know a thing or two about printing, having worked as a printer for much of his youth. Thus, when Buell informed him of Paige’s machine, Twain was initially skeptical, stating:
“I knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting machine was an impossibility.”
Upon seeing an early prototype in action, however, Twain quickly changed his mind, declaring:
“[Its] performance did most thoroughly amaze me.”
Having recently started collecting large royalties from the publication of Tom Sawyer, in 1880 Twain purchased $5000 in Farnham stock, convinced that Paige’s machine “…would turn up trumps eventually.”
Unfortunately, Twain had not counted on one thing: James Paige’s compulsive perfectionism. An inveterate tinkerer, Paige spent years – and tens of thousands of his investors’ dollars – redesigning and rebuilding his machine in an obsessive quest to attain mechanical perfection. On several occasions he declared the design completely unworkable and started over from scratch, resulting in numerous interminable delays. Indeed, it was not until 1887 that he finally completed a working prototype and applied for a full patent. At 218 pages and containing 850 diagrams, Paige’s patent, nicknamed “The Whale”, is the longest ever filed in U.S. history, and took an astounding eight years for the Patent Office to fully review and approve. In that time, one of the examiners died and, we can’t make this stuff up, another two went insane and were committed to insane asylums. Whether these mental breakdowns were actually related to Paige’s invention is not recorded. And so fiendishly complicated was the machine that a scale working model – a standard requirement for patent applications in those days – was impractical to build for them, so a Patent Office examiner a month in Paige’s workshop evaluating his full-scale prototype. This lengthy development process resulted in Farnham missing several opportunities to exhibit the Paige Compositor, including an 1891 American Newspaper Publishers’ Association typesetting competition and the epoch-defining Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893.
Yet despite these delays, Twain, lush with cash from the 1884 publication of Huckleberry Finn, remained optimistic, and continued to fund Paige’s venture to the tune of $4000 per month (about $125,000 per month today). His faith appeared justified when, on January 5, 1889, he witnessed a demonstration of Paige’s perfected prototype, the construction of which had been moved to the Pratt and Whitney Company – later to become a leading manufacturer of aircraft engines. To Twain’s astonishment, the machine allowed a single operator to automatically set, justify, and assemble a page of type at a rate of up to 12,000 Ems per hour and redistribute used type back into the storage magazines, leading him to exclaim in excitement:
“We only need one more thing, a phonograph on the distributor to yell, “Where in Hell is the printer’s devil [apprentice] , I want more type!”… There is no machine that could pretend rivalry to it…. Here [is] a typesetter that does not get drunk, does not join the Printers’ Union [and] does not distribute a dirty case.”
Later that day, Twain wrote to friend in London that:
“…a death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world was signed at 12:20 this afternoon.”
Twain boasted to friends and family that the Paige Compositor would make him a millionaire, and that he would need several assistants just to count the money that would soon be rolling in. But Twain’s victory celebration proved premature, for in typical fashion Paige continued to obsessively tinker with the machine, further delaying its entry onto the market. Meanwhile, Twain’s massive investments in the machine – which had been drawn not only from his own royalties but his wife Olivia’s sizeable inheritance – was beginning to take its toll. In 1890 his publishing house collapsed, plunging the family into dire financial straits. Yet Twain still continued to diligently fund Paige’s machine, assuring Olivia that:
“…a foot farther into the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold. When the machine is finished everything will be all right again.”
But still the delays dragged on, and Twain gradually lost his faith in the wonder machine. In desperate need of financial relief, in January 1890 he took his old friend John Jones to see the machine in the hopes of getting him to invest. To his dismay, Paige had completely disassembled the machine and spread it across the shop floor. Jones left unimpressed and never invested. At his wit’s end, Twain and his family left the United States for Europe, the author angrily declaring:
“I have shook the machine and never wish to see it or hear it mentioned again.”
But worse was yet to come, for in the meantime a competing machine had pulled ahead in the race: Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine. Born in 1854 in Hachtel, Kingdom of Württemberg, Mergenthaler apprenticed as a watchmaker before immigrating to Baltimore in 1872. He soon began working on his own typesetting machine, which he patented in 1884. In 1886, the first commercial Linotype machine was installed at the offices of the New York Tribune, where it was used to typeset the 500-page Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports. Though Paige and his backers were aware of these developments, they were unfazed. An inside source at the Tribune informed Twain that the Linotype was delicate and temperamental, and due to frequent breakdowns could barely match the 3,500 Ems per hour speed of a manual typesetter. The Paige typesetter, by contrast, was regularly achieving speeds of 5,000 Ems per hour. Confident in his machine’s superiority, in 1892 Paige arranged for the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association to conduct a private test of his Compositor at the Pratt & Whitney workshop. The results were stunning, with the machine achieving composing speeds two or three times that of its competitors. The ANPA committee wrote glowing reviews, and thousands of orders came flooding into Farnham’s offices for Paige Compositors.
This stunning success was enough to reignite Mark Twain’s interest in the machine, and in 1893 he and his fellow investors signed a contract with Chicago industrialist Towner K Webster to produce 3,000 units. The following year, James Scott, president of the ANPA and publisher of the Chicago Herald & Post, agreed to try out the Paige Compositor in his pressroom. At first the 60-day trial went well, an ecstatic Twain reporting that the machine:
“…delivered more corrected live matter to the imposing stone, ready for the forms, than any one of the thirty-two Linotypes in the same composing department….it seems to me that things couldn’t well be going better at Chicago.”
But it was not to last, for the machine soon began suffering from mangled type and other problems, causing significant printing delays. As the machine was too complex for the Herald’s in-house mechanic to understand – let alone repair – Paige had to be summoned personally to tend to every breakdown. While the Paige Compositor proved no less reliable than the first-generation Linotype and other competing typesetting machines, its great complexity and the extreme precision of its parts made it uneconomical to produce in commercial quantities. Meanwhile, Mergenthaler had produced a new, far more reliable version of the Linotype, causing sales to steadily pick up. By the end of 1892 there were more than 500 Linotypes in operation in more than 30 newspaper pressrooms across the country. By 1894, it was clear that Mergenthaler had won the race. Within a few months, orders for the Paige Compositor dwindled from 4,000 to zero, and shortly thereafter the investors dissolved the company. Paige’s dream was officially dead.
In all, Paige’s investors had poured nearly $2 million dollars into the venture, and all they had to show for it was six production machines built at an astronomical $15,000 apiece. Twain himself invested $180,000 – nearly $7 million in today’s money – and in 1894 was forced to declare bankruptcy. Though this declaration officially cleared him of all obligations, through book sales and speaking tours Twain was nonetheless able to repay all his creditors and regain a degree of financial stability. Still, he never fully forgave Paige, writing in his autobiography that:
“Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.”
Tell us how you really feel, Mark…
As for Paige himself, he fared significantly worse. After losing his entire life’s savings in the Panic of 1893, he died penniless and alone in a Chicago poorhouse on December 1, 1917, his sole claim to fame being the man who helped bankrupt one of the most successful and respected authors in history.
But why did Mergenthaler’s Linotype, which at first appeared no more reliable than the Paige Compositor, win out in the end? In addition to having a temperamental, perfectionist inventor, the Paige Compositor suffered from another fundamental flaw: its translation of the typesetting process from man to machine was far too literal. By exactly replicating the motions of a human typesetter, Paige created a machine that was too complicated to be economically viable. The Linotype, by contrast, worked on a completely different and far more robust principle. Instead of setting actual type, the Linotype instead set small metal moulds known as matrices, which were stored in vertical magazines in the top of the machine. Every time the operator hit a key, the corresponding matrix would drop from the magazine into a composing tray. Once an entire line was composed, it would be transferred into the machine’s casting module, where the matrices were used to cast a solid line of type or slug from a lead-tin alloy. Multiple slugs could were stacked into a forme and loaded into the printing press, while the matrices were fed back into the Linotype and sorted back into their respective magazines via an elaborate conveyor system. Once a set of slugs had been used, they would be fed back into the machine, melted down, and the whole process would start over again. In addition to being simpler, more robust, and cheaper to manufacture than the Paige Compositor, the Linotype system neatly solved another fundamental problem with automatic typesetting: the sheer volume of type required. As certain letters are used repeatedly on any given page and a certain forme of type might be used for a long time before being broken up, an automatic typesetter would require an extraordinary volume of metal type in order to work at full capacity. But since the Linotype sets matrices instead of type, works one line at a time, and recycles the matrices after every line, the total number of matrices required is significantly reduced, helping to make the machine simpler and more compact.
For these reasons, it was the Linotype and not the Paige Compositor which went on to revolutionize the publishing industry. The machines were the workhorses of newspaper pressrooms around the world for over 100 years, with the last units not being retired until the early 1980s. Indeed, so important was Mergenthaler’s innovation that no less a figure than inventor Thomas Edison declared the Linotype the “eighth wonder of the world.”
As for the six Paige Compositors manufactured by Pratt & Whitney, four were scrapped following the dissolution of Paige’s company. The remaining two were purchased by the Mergenthaler company in 1898, with one being presented to Cornell University and the other was to Columbia University. The Columbia machine is believed to have been scrapped during World War II as part of a wartime scrap metal drive, while the Cornell machine was returned to Mergenthaler and later donated to the Mark Twain Home in Hartford, Connecticut, where it remains on display to this day – the last remnant of a curious and disastrous chapter in the great author’s life.
Yet despite nearly losing everything he had, Twain chose to take the whole debacle in stride, reflecting upon the affair in his inimitably pithy style:
“I learned two things from the experience: not to invest when you can’t afford to, and not to invest when you can.”
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Expand for ReferencesLundin, Leigh, Tom Sawyer and the Diabolus Ex Machina, Criminal Brief, May 22, 2022, https://criminalbrief.com/?p=16874
Lienhard, John, No.1372: The Paige Compositor, Engines of Our Ingenuity, University of Houston, https://web.archive.org/web/20000421014607/http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1372.htm
Mark Twain, James W. Paige, and the Paige Typesetter, Twain Quotes, http://www.twainquotes.com/paige.html
The Paige Compositor, Circuitous Root, https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncastcomp/paige/index.html
The Paige Compositor, Codex 99, http://www.codex99.com/typography/124.html
The post The Machine that Bankrupted Mark Twain appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On November 28, 1787, His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty set sail from England with 46 men aboard, bound for the island of Tahiti in the South Pacific. Commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh, her mission was to collect and deliver breadfruit plants to the West Indies, where they would serve as cheap food for slaves on British plantations. After a long and grueling journey in which Bligh attempted unsuccessfully to round the storm-lashed Cape Horn at the tip of South America, Bounty finally arrived in Tahiti on 26 October, 1788. But the voyage – and the hedonistic temptations of this tropical paradise – soon began to take their toll, and over the five months Bounty spent in Tahiti morale and discipline among the crew steadily broke down. These tensions finally boiled over on April 28, 1789 when, three weeks after leaving Tahiti, the crew, led by acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, mutinied against Bligh, setting him and eighteen loyalists adrift in an open boat. The mutiny on the Bounty has since become the stuff of legend, told and retold in dozens of books, plays, and films. It is history’s most famous mutiny, a classic tale of a beleaguered crew rising up against their tyrannical and abusive captain. But as with many such stories, the narrative has become progressively distorted with each retelling, such that the most common versions of the story differ significantly from the actual events. Popular retellings also tend to leave out what happened after the mutiny, which is in many ways an even more fascinating story – and one which had consequences which continue to resonate to the present day.
Nearly all versions of the mutiny on the Bounty paint William Bligh as a cruel tyrant – vain, arrogant, and willing to mete out brutal punishments for even the most minor offences. The reality, however, is rather different. Though known to be short-tempered and sharp-tongued – traits which had cost him promotions on several occasions – Bligh was otherwise a consummate professional and a compassionate and conscientious leader. On the Bounty voyage, he did everything in his power to ensure the health and well-being of his men, from stringently enforcing cleanliness to prevent the spread of disease to switching from a two-watch to a three-watch system so his men could have eight hours of rest between four-hour periods on duty. He even organized daily dancing sessions complete with fiddler to keep the men fit and entertained. And when the Bounty spent two weeks fighting gale-force winds while attempting to round Cape Horn, Bligh opened his own cabin to let his men rest and gave them regular rations of straight rum to keep them warm. (Though note here, as we’ve covered previously, alcohol will actually lower your body temperature, not increase it as is commonly thought owing to the fact that it makes you feel warmer even while doing the opposite.)
In any event, this attempt, often attributed to Bligh’s vainglorious desire to circumnavigate the globe, was actually part of Bounty’s sailing orders from the Admiralty, and it was Bligh himself who decided to give up and reach Tahiti via the safer – but longer – route around the Cape of Good Hope. And when it came to discipline and punishment, Bligh was actually far less strict than the average Royal Navy Captain, only flogging one man – seaman Matthew Quintal – for insubordination on the entire outbound voyage. This relatively relaxed attitude continued once Bounty reached Tahiti, with Bligh tolerating his men’s rampant dalliances with the native women so long as they performed their duties efficiently.
So…what went wrong? Ironically, it was likely Bligh’s lack of authoritarianism which ultimately led to the mutiny. Over the five months Bounty remained in Tahiti waiting for the breadfruit plants to mature, the men succumbed to the varied temptations of the island and grew progressively less efficient and disciplined. Bligh blamed his junior officers as much as the men themselves and regularly lashed out at them, writing in his log:
“Such neglectful and worthless petty officers I believe never were in a ship as are in this.”
Bligh reserved the worst of his wrath for his second-in-command, Fletcher Christian, whom he constantly humiliated and denigrated as a “damned cowardly rascal.” This was in spite of Christian and Bligh being friends before the voyage and Bligh having promoted Christian as acting Lieutenant over his own sailing master, John Fryer. And in sharp contrast to his angry tirades against his officers, Bligh’s enforcement of discipline among his men was curiously lax. For example, when three sailors – Charles Churchill, William Muspratt, and John Millward – deserted the island and were subsequently recaptured, Bligh merely ordered they be given 48 lashes each when any other Captain would have seen them hanged. Such inconsistencies and contradictions only served to bewilder and agitate the rest of the crew. Further adding to the tension was the fact that Fletcher Christian, son of a well-to-do family from Cumberland, belonged to a higher social class than Bligh and chafed at having to serve and be humiliated by his social inferior. According to author Glyn Christian, a descendant of the mutineer, Christian may also have suffered from a mental illness known as brief psychotic disorder, which induces brief periods of irrational behaviour.
By the time Bounty finally left Tahiti on April 6, 1789, she was a powder keg waiting to blow, needing only a spark to set her off. That spark came on April 27 in the form of a dispute over coconuts. Discovering that his personal supply had unaccountably dwindled, Bligh angrily accused Fletcher Christian of theft. A heated argument ensued, at the end of which Bligh cut the crew’s rum ration and angrily stormed down to his cabin. For Christian, this indignity was the final straw, and he set about trying to desert the ship and head back to Tahiti. However, midshipman Edward Young convinced him to take over the ship instead, and early the next morning Christian and a small gang of armed men burst into Bligh’s cabin, tied his hands behind his back, and dragged him up on deck. The mutineers’ plan was to load Bligh, his clerk, and two midshipmen into the ship’s launch and set them adrift. However, they had misjudged the extent of the crew’s disloyalty, and over 30 men volunteered to join Bligh in the launch. This was eventually whittled down to 18, but the launch, built for 15 men, remained dangerously overloaded. The men forced to remain aboard Bounty pleaded not to be counted among the mutineers, to which Bligh responded:
“Never fear, lads, I’ll do you justice if ever I reach England.”
What followed was one of the most extraordinary sea voyages in history. The mutineers left the loyalists with 5 days’ food and water as well as the Captain’s log, a compass, a chronometer, a sextant, and navigational tables – but no charts, which Christian kept for himself. Thankfully, the loyalists could not have asked for a better man to lead them. Bligh, something of a navigational and mathematical prodigy, had been chosen in 1775 at the age of only 21 to serve as Sailing Master on Captain James Cook’s third and final voyage of exploration. During the five-year voyage Bligh had mapped much of the South Pacific himself, allowing him to navigate the Bounty’s tiny open launch largely from memory.
Bligh first made for the nearby island of Tofua, readily visible by the plume of smoke rising from its active volcano. There he hoped to secure additional provisions for the long voyage ahead. However, the loyalists were soon attacked by hostile natives, resulting in the death of quartermaster John Norton as he attempted to cast off the boat mooring line. The rest of the loyalists barely managed to escape by throwing pieces of clothing overboard to distract the pursuing natives. Wishing to avoid a repeat of this encounter, Bligh made the bold decision not to stop at any other islands and instead head straight for the island of Timor in the Dutch East Indies – a journey of more than 3,600 nautical miles across the uncharted Coral sea, through the Endeavour Straits between Australia and New Guinea, and through Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The journey was a long and harrowing one, the tiny launch, sitting dangerously low in the water, constantly threatening to sink as she was hammered by frequent and violent tropical storms. Provisions were meagre, with each man receiving a ration of only an ounce of bread and a half pint of water every day. A fishing line was trailed out, but no fish were ever caught, though several birds were caught in the launch’s sail. During the voyage the loyalists became the first Europeans to sail through the Fiji islands, though they dared not land for fear of cannibalism. Bligh, ever the inveterate navigator, managed to fix the islands’ position so accurately that his figures were later used in official Admiralty Charts.
After a month of hardship and privation, the launch finally made landfall on a speck of land in the Great Barrier Reef which Bligh dubbed Restoration Island. Over the next four days the loyalists sailed from island to island in the lagoon gathering mussels, berries, and other provisions before reaching Cape York at the northern tip of Australia and turning south-west. The following eight days were some of hardest of the entire voyage, pushing the men to the brink of collapse. But at last, on June 12, 1789 – 48 days after being cast adrift – the Bounty’s launch and her exhausted crew of 18 sailed into Kupang harbour on Timor. As Bligh later wrote:
“It is not possible for me to describe the pleasure which the blessing of the sight of this land diffused among us.”
The mood aboard the launch during her harrowing voyage is a matter of some debate. While Bligh later claimed there was no dissent among the crew and that he kept up their spirits with stories of his adventures sailing with Captain Cook, according to sailing master John Fryer:
“[Bligh] was as Tryannical in his temper in the Boat as in the Ship, and . . . his chief thought was his own comfort .”
Supporting is account is the fact that several standoffs occurred between Bligh and the other men during their crossing of the Great Barrier Reef, the two sides threatening each other with cutlasses. And despite the hardships he and his men had endured, upon reaching Kupang Bligh maintained his stubborn adherence to Navy protocol, insisting that a makeshift Union Jack be made up and hoisted and that John Fryer remain aboard the launch to guard her. Of course, none of this takes away from Bligh’s achievement – still one of the greatest feats of navigation in naval history.
Unfortunately, for many of the loyalists this epic feat was to prove all for nothing. Shortly after arriving in Kupang, botanist David Nelson succumbed to fever. He was soon followed by seaman Thomas Hall, quartermaster Peter Linkletter, master’s mate William Elphinstone, seaman Robert Lamb, and acting ship’s surgeon Thomas Ledward. In all, only twelve of the nineteen men set adrift by the mutineers – Bligh among them – made it back to England.
When Bligh landed in England on March 14, 1790, he was initially feted by the public and the press as a hero. He was formally court-martialled in October of that year, but the Admiralty court found him blameless in the mutiny and honourably acquitted him of all charges. Based on Bligh’s testimony, Fletcher Christian was stripped of his rank and discharged from the Royal Navy in absentia, and in November the frigate HMS Pandora under Captain Edward Edwards was dispatched to Tahiti to capture the mutineers and return them to England to stand trial. Pandora arrived in Tahiti on March 23, 1791, and within a few days Edwards managed to capture 14 surviving mutineers, imprisoning them in a specially-built 18x11x6 foot wooden cell on the ship’s quarterdeck dubbed – inevitably – “Pandora’s Box.” After five weeks in Tahiti trying to determine Bounty’s whereabouts, on May 8 Edwards set off to scour the thousands of South Pacific islands for signs of the renegade ship and her crew. The search turned up nothing, and on August 29, 1791, shortly after abandoning the search and setting course for the Dutch East Indies, Pandora ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. As the ship began to founder, Captain Edwards ordered three mutineers released from Pandora’s Box to help man the pumps. When it became clear Pandora was doomed and Edwards gave the order to abandon ship, Armourer’s mate Joseph Hodges and bosun’s mate William Moulter rushed to Pandora’s Box to unlock the remaining prisoners’ shackles. Before they could finish the task, however, the ship sank. Four mutineers and 31 of Pandora’s crew drowned in the disaster. Ironically, it is Captain Edwards who most closely fits the profile of the incompetent, despotic leader so often attributed to Bligh. Not only did Edwards show little regard for the welfare of his captives, imprisoning loyalist and mutineer alike and callously leaving them to drown when Pandora sank, but in his single-minded pursuit of the Bounty he ignored smoke signals coming from the island of Vanikoro. These were later determined to be from the survivors of a French Lapérouse scientific expedition which had disappeared three years prior. It was not until 1825 that the remains of the shipwrecked expedition members were discovered on the island.
The Pandora survivors piled into four open boats and, in one of history’s strange parallels, essentially retraced William Bligh’s gruelling voyage to Timor, arriving in Kupang on September 17. The ten surviving mutineers were imprisoned and transported home on a variety of ships, finally arriving in England on April 5, 1792 aboard the British warship HMS Gorgon. The court martial of the Bounty mutineers began on September 12, 1792 aboard HMS Duke in Portsmouth harbour, presided over by Vice-Admiral Lord Hood. Testimony was provided by the survivors of Bligh’s open-boat voyage, and after six days of proceedings the Admiralty court found six men – Thomas Burkett, John Millward, Thomas Ellison, William Muspratt, Peter Heywood, and James Morrison – guilty and sentenced them to death.
Heywood, Morrison, and Muspratt, however, managed to use family connections to obtain Royal aprons, leaving the less well-connected Burkett, Ellison, and Millward to be hanged from the yardarm of HMS Brunswick on October 28, 1792. And there the matter rested, the Admiralty considering the mutiny an extraordinary one-off occurrence not worthy of further concern or action.
The rest of Bounty’s crew went on to live more or less normal lives, with Peter Heywood even acquiring the patronage of Lord Hood and rising to the rank of Captain by 1803. But the fate of the Bounty herself and the mutineers who had sailed off with Fletcher Christian remained a complete mystery – one that would not be solved for nearly 35 years.
As to this, the sun, it was once said, never set on the British Empire. At the height of its power, the British Empire
covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s land area and ruled over 23 percent of its population, making it the largest empire in human history. While today the Empire per se is long gone, the United Kingdom retains enough overseas territories that the old adage still technically holds true. One key link in this globe-spanning chain of British possessions are the Pitcairn Islands, four tiny, wave-lashed specks of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. First spotted by European sailors in 1606, for nearly two centuries the four islands – Henderson, Ducie, Oeno, and Pitcairn, attracted little attention.
However, on February 6, 1808, the American sealing ship Topaz, commanded by Captain Mayhew Folger, dropped anchor off the supposedly uninhabited Pitcairn, only to discover a curious community of people living on the island. The inhabitants, mostly Polynesians and mixed-race children, spoke English but had apparently never seen a ship before. And among their number was one John Adams – the last surviving Bounty mutineer. From Adams’s testimony, Folger and the British Admiralty were at last able to piece together what had happened to them after the mutiny.
After setting Bligh and the loyalists adrift, Fletcher Christian and the mutineers set out in search of an island on which to settle. While many wished to return to Tahiti, the island had by now become a regular stopover for British ships and was, Christian knew, the first place the Royal Navy would come looking for them. Instead, the Bounty sailed to the island of Tubai, 300 nautical miles south of Tahiti. Unfortunately, the mutineers were immediately met with hostility from the native population, leading Christian to establish a fort on the north end of the island, armed with weapons from the Bounty. After two months of bloody skirmishes with the natives, the mutineers finally gave up and sailed back to Tahiti, where 16 men decided to remain ashore. 14 of these men would later, as noted, be captured by HMS Pandora.
By this time, relations between the mutineers and the Tahitians were beginning to sour, and Fletcher Christian did not intend to linger much longer on the island. Knowing, however, that he and his crew would need women for any future settlement, on the night of September 23, 1789, Christian invited a group of Tahitian women aboard the Bounty for a social event, then ordered the crew to cast off and set sail, trapping his guests aboard. After dropping off six elderly women on the nearby island of Moorea, Christian, along with eight mutineers, six Tahitian men, 12 women, and a baby, set off once more search of a remote, uninhabited island where they could escape the long arm of the Royal Navy.
Christian found an ideal candidate in the log of one Captain Philip Carteret, commander of the Royal Navy Sloop HMS Swallow. On July 3, 1767, Carteret sighted a small, uninhabited volcanic island some 1,600 nautical miles southeast of Tahiti, which he named Pitcairn’s Island after the first member of his crew to spot it. Pitcairn was perfect for Christian’s purposes: not only did the violent surf make the island dangerous to approach and land on, but Carteret had miscalculated its position by 188 nautical miles, making the island difficult for pursuing Royal Navy ships to locate. On January 15, 1790, the Bounty dropped anchor at Pitcairn, and after waiting three days for the weather to settle, Christian and six other men rowed ashore. The island proved warm and the soil fertile, exceeding Christian’s wildest hopes. The Bounty was anchored in a sheltered cove, and over the next few days all the livestock and provisions aboard were brought ashore using wooden rafts. Then, fearing that the Bounty would be spotted by passing Royal Navy vessels, on January 23 the mutineers set fire to the ship, sinking her in what is now known as Bounty Bay.
Now completely isolated, the colonists set about organizing their new lives on Pitcairn Island. They built leaf shelters and later wooden houses on a site now known as Adamstown, and planted breadfruit and sweet potatoes from seeds brought over from Tahiti. By 1793, several children had been born on the island, including Fletcher Christian’s son, Thursday October Christian. For a while the mutineers and Tahitians lived in relative harmony, but this idyllic existence was not to last. While the mutineers had divided up the land among themselves, they had left none for the Tahitians, sowing deep resentments between the two groups. Furthermore, the Tahitian women, outnumbered by the men, were treated as little more than sexual slaves, being passed around freely from husband to husband. When in the first year of the settlement the wives of mutineers John Williams and John Adams died, two women, Toofaiti and Tinafanaea, were taken from the Tahitian men to replace them. The women’s original husbands, Titahiti, Tararo, and Oha, conspired to kill the mutineers in retaliation, but the mutineers were tipped off by the women, resulting in Tararo and Oha being executed in December 1790. Eventually Fletcher Christian attempted to enslave the Tahitians, who retaliated in September 1793 by murdering five of the mutineers – including Christian. The remaining mutineers struck back, and by 1794 all the Tahitian men were dead, leaving only four mutineers – John Adams, Edward Young, William McCoy, and Matthew Quintal – ten Tahitian women, and their children on the island.
An uneasy peace held for a time, occasionally interrupted by protests from the women at their mistreatment by the men. On one occasion the women attempted to leave the island on a makeshift boat, but were unable to properly launch it. Then, William McCoy, who had previously worked in a distillery, discovered how to brew a potent and hallucinogenic spirit from the roots of the ti plant, leading to an outbreak of paranoia and violence among the mutineers. McCoy, driven mad by the drink, bound his own hands and feet and leaped off a cliff into the sea, while in 1799, a drunken and Matthew Quintal threatened Young and Adams and was killed in self defence. Finally, on December 25, 1800, Edward Young died of asthma, leaving John Adams as the last surviving Bounty mutineer on Pitcairn Island. For a time, Adams spent his days drunk on ti spirits, until, following one particularly violent hallucination, he underwent a sudden religious conversion. Assuming leadership of the colony, Adams used the Bounty’s Bible to try and build a more moral, harmonious society. He was greatly aided in this task by the Polynesian women, who used their traditional knowledge to grow crops, fish, raise livestock, cook meals, and craft boats, clothes and other essential items for the colonists.
When in September 1814 Pitcairn was rediscovered a second time by the Royal Navy ships HMS Briton and HMS Tagus, the ships’ captains took pity on Adams and convinced the Admiralty to pardon him for his role in the mutiny. News of the mutineers’ fate and the settlement on Pitcairn attracted considerable attention across the Empire, and British missionary societies began sending bibles, prayer books, and more practical items like clothes, cookware, and guns to the island. Whaling ships also began frequenting the island to trade and reprovision, greatly improving the islanders’ quality of life. In December 1823, the islander’s gene pool finally received new blood when John Buffet and John Evans, shipwrights from Bristol, arrived aboard the British Whaler Cyrus. The two quickly integrated into Pitcairn society and taught the inhabitants woodworking skills which would soon form the basis of the island’s economy.
John Adams died on March 5, 1829, followed by his wife Teio nine days later. By this time the population of Pitcairn had grown to 66 and was fast outstripping the island’s ability to sustain them. Before his death, Adams had petitioned the British government to allow his people to emigrate elsewhere, and on February 28, 1831 his request was granted and two ships arrived to transport the Pitcairners to Tahiti. While the islanders were warmly welcomed by the Tahitians and given land on which to settle, they soon began succumbing to disease and homesickness. The insular and highly-religious society on Pitcairn had made the islanders too puritanical and repressed for the sexually-liberal climate of Tahiti, and on September 3 they all chose to return home. The islanders would be evacuated again in 1856 – this time to the recently-abandoned penal colony of Norfolk Island – but once again a large contingent chose to return to Pitcairn shortly thereafter.
Following their return in 1831, the Pitcairners settled into a quiet life of subsistence, growing food and making handicrafts to trade with passing ships. Effectively leaderless following the death of John Adams, in October 1832 the community was taken over by an American adventurer named Joshua Hill, who claimed to have been sent by the British government. Hill imposed a tyrannical and puritanical regime, brutally punishing the islanders for the most minor moral infractions. This reign of terror lasted six years until, in 1838, Hill was exposed as a fraud and expelled from the island. Recognizing the need for protection from such despots, that same year the Pitcairn Islanders drew up a formal constitution establishing a democratic government consisting of a magistrate and council of two members to be elected annually. Remarkably, this constitution also enshrined universal women’s suffrage and compulsory education for children – the first in the British Empire to do so. While Pitcairn would not be formally declared a British Settlement until 1887, the Islanders celebrate November 30, 1838 as the day they were officially incorporated into the Empire.
The next century and a half were marked by alternating periods of quiet isolation, desperate privation, and occasional strife as the Pitcairners struggled to preserve their unique society and adapt to an ever- changing world. While the end of whaling in the Pacific led to a sharp decrease in ship traffic to the island, the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 brought a steady stream of ocean liners sailing to New Zealand – and with it an increased demand among passengers for the Pitcairn Islanders’ famous wood carvings and other handicrafts. But Pitcairn’s unique history and extreme isolation have taken a severe toll on its residents, and starting in the 1950s reports began emerging of a rampant culture of sexual abuse on the island. In the later 1990s, Gail Cox, a police officer on temporary assignment on the island, began uncovering dozens of allegations of rape and sexual abuse from girls as young as 12. When confronted with these allegations, many of the islanders were dismissive, arguing that the age of consent had always been 12 and that this had never caused any problems. But according to Australian Seventh-Day Adventist Neville Tosen, who spent two years on Pitcairn:
“I think the girls were conditioned to accept that it was a man’s world and once they turned 12, they were eligible…They can’t settle or form solid relationships. They did suffer, no doubt about it.”
In 1999, police officers from Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom launched Operation Unique, charging thirteen men – a third of the island’s male population – with 21 counts of rape, 41 counts of indecent assault, and 2 counts of gross indecency with a child under 14. The trials began in 2004, and on October 25 six men were convicted – including Steve Christian, the island’s mayor and a descendant of head mutineer Fletcher Christian. The British Government set up a prison on the island, where the six men served their sentences from 2006 to 2010. Yet in spite of the demons haunting their island, the 50 or so Pitcairners still carry on much as they have for the past 200 years – their tiny society in the middle of the vast Pacific a unique and unexpected legacy of the most infamous crime in naval history.
At this point you may be wondering: what happened to the other central figure in the Bounty saga, the often-vilified Lieutenant William Bligh? Despite being fêted as a hero on his return to England and cleared of all responsibility for the mutiny by the Admiralty court, by the time of the mutineers’ trial in 1792 public opinion had turned against Bligh, and the rest of his career – respectable as it was – would be marked by further trouble and mutiny. Bligh was not present for the mutineers’ trial, having been given command of HMS Providence on a mission identical to the Bounty’s.This time Bligh succeeded in delivering breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies, though in an ironic twist, the slaves on the British plantations turned out to hate the taste of breadfruit and refused to eat it – rendering the whole enterprise moot. In 1797, Bligh was given command of HMS Director, in which he surveyed and mapped large sections of the British coast. That same year Bligh once again found himself facing a mutiny, though this time it was part of a larger uprising across the Royal Navy and not specifically triggered by any of Bligh’s actions. As the Napoleonic Wars swept across Europe, Bligh was called into action and served with distinction at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797 and the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801.
Through the Bounty saga and his wartime service, Bligh acquired a reputation – deserved or not – as a strict disciplinarian, resulting in his appointment in 1805 as Governor of the Australian penal colony of New South Wales. Almost immediately, Bligh’s abrasive personality and confrontational leadership style brought him into conflict with the colonists, especially the New South Wales Corps. The Corps, a regiment of soldiers tasked with maintaining law and order, effectively ran the colony like a mafia, engaging in an illegal rum trade and other criminal activities. In response to Bligh’s fervent attempts to curb their power, on January 26, 1808, the Corps rose up in what became known as the Rum Rebellion – Australia’s first, and thus far only, coup d’état. Troops marched on Government house in Sydney to arrest Bligh, who, as popular accounts of the time claimed, they found hiding under his bed like a coward. Whether this actually happened is disputed, but a watercolour painting widely circulated at the time helped to cement the legend in the popular consciousness.
The deposed Bligh returned to England and doing what he did best: navigating and surveying, helping to chart a large portion of Dublin Bay in Ireland. In 1814 he was promoted to the senior rank of Vice Admiral of the Blue, though thereafter he was never again given an important naval command. Bligh died of cancer on December 7, 1817 at the age of 63. Despite his long years of loyal service, such was Bligh’s infamy by this point that his passing warranted only a brief mention in the local newspapers. And so William Bligh passed into memory as one of history’s great villains, a reputation greatly popularized by Charles Nordhoff and Hames Norman Hall’s 1932 novel Mutiny on the Bounty and its many stage and screen adaptations. But as we have seen, the real William Bligh was a far more complex figure than history gives him credit for, more a victim of bad luck and his own quick temper than the cruel and cartoonish villain he is often depicted as. It just goes to show that, as always, fact is more nuanced – and fascinating – than fiction.
And in case you are wondering which of the many film adaptations of the Bounty saga is the most historically accurate, well that would be 1984’s The Bounty starring Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- The Most Horrifying Nautical Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of
- What Person Has Murdered the Most People Directly By Their Own Hand, And Who Has Saved the Most Lives?
- Rum Helped Spur the American Revolution
- The First Convicted Murderer in America
- Magellan Was Not the First Person to Circumnavigate the Globe, The Man Who First Did It May Have Been Magellan’s Slave
Expand for ReferencesHerman, Arthur, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Harper Perennial, 2004
Erskine, Nigel, Reclaiming the Bounty, Archaeology, May/June 1999, https://archive.archaeology.org/9905/etc/bounty.html
History of Pitcairn Island, Pitcairn Islands Study Center, Pacific Union College, https://library.puc.edu/pitcairn/pitcairn/history.shtml
The Voyage of Bounty’s Launch, Pitcairn Islands Study Center, Pacific Union College, https://library.puc.edu/pitcairn/bounty/launch.shtml
Bounty Hero Had Mental Disorder, New Zealand Herald, June 29, 2000, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/bounty-hero-had-mental-disorder/XLAEVETBUK2QLIAU5XB4ACEXHI/
The post What Really Happened After the Mutiny on the Bounty? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
There’s an old engineer’s adage that goes: “If it moves but shouldn’t, use duct tape. If it doesn’t move but should, use WD-40.” For nearly 60 years, WD-40, the iconic “toolkit in a can,” has been helping amateurs and professionals alike out of all sorts of sticky mechanical jams. In addition to its intended purpose as a penetrating lubricant and anti-corrosion agent, thousands of other uses have been claimed for this miracle liquid, from removing chewing gum, crayon, and tape residue to repelling insects, attracting fish, and even treating arthritis. But can WD-40 really do all the things people claim? Who came up with this product, and what is even in those distinctive blue and yellow cans? And, most importantly, what does “WD-40” even stand for anyway? As it turns out, the world’s favourite multi-purpose spray has a surprisingly dark origin, one that dates back to the tensest days of the Cold War.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. In the United States, this feat was met with panic and dread. In addition to dramatically showcasing Soviet technological superiority, the little silver ball orbiting the earth represented a genuine existential threat, for the same R-7 rocket that had carried Sputnik into orbit could just as easily drop a nuclear bomb anywhere in the continental United States with almost no warning. In response, the U.S. could only field a handful of medium-range ballistic missiles like the Redstone, Thor, and Jupiter, which had to be based in foreign countries such as Britain and Turkey in order to reach targets in the Soviet Union.
Thankfully, however, a solution was in development: the SM-65 Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile. Designed by the Convair Corporation of San Diego, California, the Atlas was an advanced and innovative design, especially in the construction of its propellant tanks. In most rockets and missiles, the propellant tanks are separate components suspended within a rigid airframe. In the Atlas, however, the fuselage and tank walls were one and the same and made of extremely thin stainless steel. These so-called “balloon tanks” were kept rigid by the pressure of the propellants inside them; this made the Atlas extremely light and efficient for its size, but meant it had to be kept pressurized at all times or else it would collapse like a foil balloon.
The Atlas first entered service in 1959, eventually being deployed across 10 Air Force bases across the United States. As a strategic nuclear deterrent, these missiles spent the vast majority of their time sitting idle in their underground silos, exposing their stainless-steel skin to attack by corrosion. To ensure that the nation’s nuclear force would always remain in launch-ready condition, Convair began seeking a means of coating the Atlas’s skin and preventing the infiltration of moisture. Luckily, just such a product had recently been developed by a small local company.
In September 1953, a group of California-based engineers and chemists including Iver Norman “Norm” Lawson, Gordon Dawson, John Gregory, and Cyril “Cy” Irving came together to form the Rocket Chemical Company, initially headquartered in Chula Vista near San Diego. Shortly after the company’s founding, a U.S. Naval Commander and friend of the Lawson family asked Norm Lawson if he could develop a penetrating coating to protect machinery aboard naval ships from salt corrosion. Said coating, he explained, had to be stable and easy to store and apply. Lawson, who had a degree in mechanical engineering but not chemistry, nonetheless accepted the challenge, and – to the dismay of his family – set up a makeshift laboratory in his home garage at 1048 Myrtle Way in San Diego’s Hillcrest suburb. For months on end, Lawson experimented with dozens of mixtures of petroleum distillates, rejecting one formula after another as inadequate. Finally, on the 40th attempt, Lawson hit pay dirt: a concoction that efficiently displaced water from metal parts, lubricating them and protecting them from corrosion. Lawson turned over his formula to Rocket Chemical Company president Cy Irving, who dubbed it “WD-40” for “Water Displacement – 40th Formula.”
To test Lawson’s mixture, Irving took a sample to San Diego’s Embarcadero docks, a major repair hub for tuna fishing boats. There, he convinced Sam Crivello, owner of the tuna boat Sun Europa, to test out the new product. Crivello and Irving lifted the engine out of the Sun Europa, lowered it into the salt water, and left it overnight. The next morning, they doused the engine in WD-40 and – to their utter surprise and delight – it started up without issue. So impressed was Crivello by WD-40’s abilities that he offered to buy a 50% stake in the Rocket Chemical Company. He followed through on his promise, and was elected to the position of treasurer.
From the Embarcadero docks, word of the company’s incredible new product spread quickly throughout San Diego, eventually reaching the Convair Corporation, who began buying large quantities of WD-40 to protect the skin of their new Atlas missile from corrosion. It wasn’t long before engineers and mechanics at Convair began discovering new, unexpected uses for WD-40, from removing lipstick from collars to repelling ants. Perhaps inevitably, these employees began taking cans of WD-40 home with them to tackle all sorts of domestic tasks. Recognizing a potentially huge domestic market for their first – and thus far only – product – in 1958 the Rocket Chemical Company made WD-40 available for private purchase in San Diego. From here, business accelerated at a rapid pace, with the company moving into a 3,500-square foot plant in on Alvarado Canyon Road and expanding its distribution across the United States and even overseas to Latin America, Australia, and Japan. A large part of this success was thanks to a change of packaging. While initially WD-40 was packaged in regular metal tins, in 1958 then-company president Norman Larsen hit upon the idea of offering the product in aerosol spray cans, allowing it to be more easily applied to a wide variety of surfaces. By September of that year, the Rocket Chemical Company was turning out nearly 8,000 spray cans every day, while WD-40 was carried in over 500 hardware stores throughout San Diego.
But it was two major world events which caused WD-40’s sales to truly go through the roof. The first was Hurricane Carla, which for 14 days in September 1961 pounded southern Texas and Louisiana, causing widespread flooding. In response, the Rocket Chemical Company shipped 36,000 pounds of WD-40 to the Gulf Coast to help restore flood-damaged emergency vehicles and other vital equipment. Three years later in 1964, the United States began escalating military operations in Vietnam, sending countless tons of corrosion-prone equipment into an extremely hot and humid environment. One soldier who brought along a can of WD-40 to protect his rifle from corrosion wrote to the Rocket Chemical Company claiming that their product had saved his life. In July of that year, the company received an official government order for 233,000 aerosol cans and 300 55-gallon drums of WD-40 for use in Vietnam – their largest contract so far. By 1966, the company had moved once again to a new 6,000 square foot plant on Napa street, and sales of WD-40 had reached nearly $5 million per year – a nearly 1500-fold increase in less than a decade.
But in one of history’s unfortunate twists of fate, the man behind the endlessly versatile WD-40 formula would not share in his creation’s extraordinary success. When Norman Lawson submitted his winning 40th formula to Cy Irving, he was rewarded with a bonus of $500 – equivalent to just over $5000 today. However, he received no company stock or other benefits, and thus received no part of WD-40’s extraordinary profits. More tragically still, in official accounts of the creation WD-40, Lawson’s name was mixed up with that of company president Norman Larsen, leading to Larsen being credited with the invention of WD-40 and Lawson being effectively erased from history. Iver Norman Lawson died in 1967 at the age of 75, his historic contributions all but forgotten.
Meanwhile, the Rocket Chemical Company continued to go from strength to strength on the legendary versatility of its first – and only – product. In 1969, the company officially changed its name to “The WD-40 Company, Inc.” for the simple reason that – in the words of then-company president John Barry:
“We don’t make rockets.”
Barry, who joined the company the same year it changed its name, is a legendary figure in the history of WD-40, considered instrumental in the brand’s enduring ubiquity and success. Barry’s major contribution was to focus the company’s marketing on WD-40’s extraordinary versatility, turning it from a specialty product for the armed forces and aerospace industry into a ubiquitous household product found in nearly every toolbox and kitchen drawer around the world. To this end, Barry ensured that WD-40 was carried not only by hardware and automotive stores but grocery stores and corner stores as well, explaining:
“It is a numbers game—the more shelves we’re on, the better the chance a buyer will pick us up—whether it’s in hardware or sporting goods.”
He also encouraged customers to write in with unusual household uses for the product, which were then rolled into the company’s advertising campaigns. By the 1970s, this list of non-standard applications had grown into the thousands, and included – but were not limited to deep breath:
-Loosening stuck zippers
-Removing crayon, lipstick, and duct tape residue
-Protecting silverware from tarnishing
-Keeping pigeons off balconies
-Treating ant stings
-Polishing floors
-Untangling jewelry chains
-Cleaning stainless steel
-Hiding cracks in ceramic and marble floors
-Lubricating children’s playground slides
-Restoring leather furniture
-Lubricating artificial limbs
-Restoring flooded automotive distributor caps
-Keeping bathroom mirrors from fogging
-Stopping squirrels from climbing bird feeder poles
-Removing scuff marks from linoleum floors
-Attracting fish
-…and treating arthritis pain
Most of these uses have actually been tested and confirmed by the WD-40 Company – particularly those related to lubrication, cleaning, and preventing corrosion. Indeed, one of the largest-scale applications of the product is protecting sections of the Statue of Liberty in New York City from the elements. However, the Company strongly discourages more unusual uses of its product such as treating ant stings, attracting fish, and treating arthritis on account of WD-40’s toxicity.
…which begs the question: what is actually in the little blue and yellow can that can? Alas, Iver Lawson’s original formula was never patented, meaning that for 60 years the exact composition of WD-40 has remained a closely-guarded trade secret. Only a handful of company employees are privy to the secret, the WD-40 concentrate is only blended in four factories in California, Louisiana, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and since 2018 Lawson’s original hand-written notes have been securely locked up in a San Diego bank vault. This secrecy has inevitably led to rampant speculation as to the miracle spray’s composition, with the most commonly-circulated theory being that the main ingredient of WD-40 is fish oil. Other, more outlandish theories posit that the spray’s distinctive smell comes from the vanilla extract vanillin and that the secret formula contains – among other things – the goop from lava lamps and even sea otter semen. The truth, however, is rather more mundane, with the official Material Safety Data Sheet or MSDS for WD-40 listing the basic ingredients as:
45–50% low vapor pressure aliphatic hydrocarbons
<35% petroleum base oil
<25% high vapour pressure aliphatic hydrocarbons
2–3% carbon dioxide as a propellant
In 2009, WIRED magazine sent a sample of WD-40 to a lab for chemical analysis, and discovered that the “secret sauce” is composed mainly of petroleum distillates including decane, nonane, tridecane, undecane, tetradecane, dimethyl naphthalene, cyclohexane, mineral oil – no fish oil or otter semen in sight. These ingredients make perfect sense given WD-40’s abilities: mineral oil is a proven lubricant, nonane displaces water, and decane, tridecane, and undecane protect the mixture from freezing at low temperatures. The latter compounds are also found in the pheromones secreted by cockroaches, ants, and the red-banded stink bug, possibly accounting for WD-40’s distinctively sweet smell. However, the exact proportions of ingredients used in WD-40 remains known only to its manufacturers, ensuring WD-40’s ongoing success.
And what success it has been. In 2021 the WD-40 Company, which employs nearly 500 employees worldwide and sells its products in 176 countries, posted net earnings of $70.2 million, while over the past decade its stock has gone up nearly 200% – more than twice the growth of the benchmark Standard & Poor 500 stock index. And in recognition of the company’s major contributions to the aerospace industry, in 2014 WD-40 was inducted into the San Diego Air & Space Museum’s International Air & Space Hall of Fame. All this despite the fact that the company’s flagship product has remained virtually unchanged for nearly 60 years – with one notable exception. Ironically, due to a 2013 California Air Resourced Board ruling requiring all aerosols to contain 25% or less volatile organic compounds, WD-40 cannot be sold in the state of its creation in its original formulation. For this reason, regular cans of WD-40 sold in the remaining 49 U.S. states and around the world are labeled “not for sale in California.”
This does not mean, however, that there have been no changes at WD-40. In 2003, the company introduced the “Big Blast” nozzle to allow their product to be more efficiently applied to large areas, while in 2005 it rolled out cans with a permanently-attached flip-up “Smart Straw”, finally solving customers’ number-one complaint: losing the little red applicator straw. The company has also attempted to diversify its product line, launching a variety of products including specialty WD-40 formulations for use on machine tools and motorcycles; 3-in-One lubricating oil; Lava hand soap; Spot Shot carpet cleaner; and 2000 Flushes toilet cleaner. However, the vast majority of the company’s profits still come from Iver Lawson’s original secret formula with a thousand uses – a testament to the power of a good product marketed well.
So the next time you reach for a can of WD-40 to loosen a stuck bolt, lubricate your bike chain, get incriminating lipstick off your shirt collar or – if you are so inclined – free up an arthritic joint, remember that the miracle liquid in your hand owes its existence to the very real threat of nuclear annihilation. Now there’s a thought even WD-40 can’t unstick from your mind.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- How WD-40 Got Its Name
- Silly Putty was Invented by Accident
- The 12 Best Ways to Remove Stripped Screws
- The Real Q from James Bond and the Ingenious Inventions
- Accidental Invention Week Part Two
Expand for ReferencesPeltz, James, Q&A: WD-40 CEO Garry Ridge Explains Company’s Slick Success, Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2015, https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-qa-wd-40-20150730-story.html
Engstrand, Iris, WD-40: San Diego’s Marketing Miracle, Journal of San Diego History, http://sandiegohistory.org/sites/default/files/journal/v60-4/v60-4engstrand.pdf
Mikkelson, David, Can WD-40 Really Do All That? Snopes, January 2, 2007, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/household-uses-for-wd-40/
Fascinating Facts You Never Learned in School, WD-40, https://www.wd40.com/history/
About Us, WD-40, https://wd40.co.uk/about-us/
Di Justo, Patrick, What’s Inside WD-40? Superlube’s Secret Sauce, WIRED, April 20, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20140119014037/http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/st_whatsinside
The Story Behind WD-40, Petroleum Service Company, March 20, 2017, https://petroleumservicecompany.com/blog/story-behind-wd-40/
Buck, David, The Can That Always Can, Tedium, November 26, 2021, https://tedium.co/2021/11/26/wd-40-chemical-history/
The post Who Invented WD-40? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The line between serial killer and, say, a prolific executioner such as 17th century German executioner, Frantz Schmidt, who killed 394 people and disfigured and otherwise tortured about the same number elsewise (more on him in the Bonus Facts at the end of this video), is that one murdered and mutilated people deemed by local society to have deserved it, and the other did basically the same because they wanted to for whatever reason. Overlapping these two ends of the murderous spectrum in a ven diagram of awful is a man who, today, is celebrated by many for his actions, and currently walks the streets as a free man despite having murdered a confirmed 71 people. Here now is the story of Pedro Rodrigues Filho, aka Pedrinho Matador or Killer Petey.
While it’s often stated that Pedro only killed rapist and murderers and the like who he deemed deserved it, this isn’t exactly accurate, and the real story of the man is, in some ways, a bit more similar to many serial killers than some like to illustrate, though given he spent most of his life with nothing but criminals around did have a high density of criminal kills, and does have a bit of a redeeming arch at the end.
For starters, the first person Pedro tried to murder at the tender age of 13 in 1967 was, according to him, an older cousin he doesn’t give the name of. What did this cousin do? Apparently insulted Pedro’s mother in front of him in some way. If the prevalence of Yo Mama jokes the world over are to be accounted for, let’s just say we should all be glad Pedro wasn’t our youthful buddy. As to his method of attempted murder here, he states he pushed his cousin into a sugar cane press, which for a visual here usually consists of some rollers that pull in the cane and, well, squish it. Fortunately for his cousin, Pedro states, “I pushed him thinking his whole body would go through, but just his arm went through,” before the machine jammed up allegedly.
Pedro’s first actual murder likewise wasn’t exactly someone killing for any sort of vigilante justice, but rather murdering two people simply because he was upset his father got fired from his job as a security guard. Note to self, do not besmirch Pedro Filho’s parents in any way… Although Pedro’s father frequently beat the crap out of his mother without reprisal from Pedro up to this point so… hmmmm…
In this first instance of removing someone from our universe because he felt they deserved it, the Deputy Mayor of Alfenas fired Pedro’s father for allegedly stealing supplies from a high school kitchen, in Pedro’s view without any evidence. Whether his father actually did this or not isn’t really clear, with the then 14 year old Pedro becoming convinced a different security guard was responsible for the actual thefts.
Whatever the truth here, Pedro took it upon himself to take a shotgun that belonged to his grandfather, then directed the weapon at said Deputy Mayor until dead from the unfortunate holes in his body that resulted… For good measure, he also killed the other security guard with said weapon, because, why not? Justice!
Naturally sticking around after these murders wasn’t going to be a good idea, so Pedro absconded to the Mogi das Cruzes region of Sao Paulo, where he embraced a life of crime and murder for fun and profit, which is what he got up to for the next 5 years.
While little is generally said of the murders during this time that don’t fit the narrative of killing for vigilante justice, the ones people do like to focus on are those which followed a local gang murdering his pregnant girlfriend, Maria Aparecida Olympia, aka Botinha.
Of course, she was only killed in retribution for Pedro’s own brutal actions against the gang including allegedly a few murders, but nonetheless, his woman was dead and this is where Pedro decided to combine his self proclaimed love of murdering people (which by the way he has “I love to kill” tattooed on his body), with murdering only people he felt deserved it for what they’ve done… save, you know, all the other murders after nobody seems to want to mention such as the time he murdered someone who got his cousin pregnant but refused to marry her, and some guy because he snored too loud and it was annyong Pedro… But whatever, narrative! Or, I mean, have you ever slept next to someone who snored extremely loudly chronically? I guess we’ll give you a pass on this one Pedro…
But as for the gang who murdered his lady love in retribution for his own violent actions against them, Pedro got together a small group of his own gang of friends, showed up at a wedding some members of the rival gang were at, and killed the rival gang’s leader and six others. Also at the wedding 16 other people were severely injured, but managed to survive the ordeal. While it’s commonly reported, no doubt as it fits the narrative people put forth about Pedro, that the only people killed or injured at the wedding were the rival gang members, this strains credibility given Pedro’s little group opened fire on the large group of closely packed wedding guests… unless we are to assume only rival gang members and no family or the like were attending the wedding and that Pedro’s group were all among the world’s best sharp shooters.
On the plus side, I mean, everybody all dressed up for the wedding, if they wanted to, could just stick around for the funerals to kill two birds with one stone. Pedro was just considerate like that. A hero if anything…
All good things must come to an end, and in this case we’re discussing Pedro’s freedom, not the joyful murdering, and the 19 year old Pedro was ultimately arrested for his countless and often brutal crimes on Mary 24, 1973.
However, at one point being transported by the police, he was put in the back of a police van with two other criminals and, upon finding out one of said individuals was arrested for raping someone, went ahead and killed him, which the police only discovered when they stopped to get the criminals out.
In the end, Pedro was convicted and sentenced to 128 years in the clink, later ballooned to around 400 years when he kept on murdering away while in prison… Which was the perfect place for someone who loved him some murdering and had decided to get his kicks from murdering people who he felt deserved it. I mean, no matter who you are, or what life subjects you to, everybody needs a hobby.
Besides the snorer and another inmate whose slight against Pedro seems to have just been sneakily watching Pedro get it on with someone during a conjugal visit, perhaps the most notable killings or attempted killings he had while in prison included trying to murder a fellow serial killer, João Acásio da Costa, ironically enough with him concluding said man deserved to die for his serial killing crimes. Senor Costa was bludgeoned to near death, but survived apparently. Pedro also murdered a handful of people who’d dared try to kill him for his own murderous crimes.
Among the 47 or so murders he committed while in prison, arguably the most notable kill was killing his own father… Allegedly. Now, we should point out on this one that there are conflicting accounts of whether Pedro killed his father after Pedro was also in prison, or before, and even whether he actually killed his father at all or is just lying about that. As to those who state he killed his father before being imprisoned, these accounts state he went to the prison his father was being held at and brutally murdered him. As to the former story, Pedro was apparently also incarcerated in the same prison as his father and just did the deed there. As to him lying about the whole thing, we’ll get to that.
So which story is true? While we couldn’t find record of any death certificate or the like of his father to look at the date to determine the truth, we are inclined to go with that Pedro himself, if he killed his dad at all, was incarcerated at the time he did this. First, because if he really visited his father’s prison as a free man and then brutally killed him, we’re guessing he would have been arrested right then and there, unless the prison officials were quite literally the most incompetent of all time. Second, because, for whatever it’s worth, the man himself says he was in prison at the time he killed his father. And while trusting the word of a psychopathic serial killer on face value may seem questionable, especially concerning events that happened decades before and when the man himself has some inconsistencies in other stories he’s told after, this one seems likely enough given, again, that we just have a hard time believing he wouldn’t have been arrested immediately after if he’d been a free man at the time.
Whatever the case, why did he allegedly kill his father he previously had been so keen to defend?
Well, turns out his father had taken things up a notch on the brutal beatings of his mother and instead of just abusing her, much like his son’s favorite activities after, he murdered and mutilated her.
Pedro noted of this that, in his view his father had not previously killed his mother out of fear of Pedro, stating, “He was afraid of me. He was afraid that I would take his life… So he waited for me to go to prison to kill my mother.”
Pedro further states he was allowed to leave the prison under guard to attend his mother’s funeral, and, “I swore revenge in front of my mother’s coffin.”
On the murdering of his dear old dad, Pedro describes, “I killed my father in prison. I was already in prison then… I found a way to get to the cell where my father was.” At which point he stabbed him 22 times, and then, to quote this bastion of vigilante justice, “I cut out a piece of his heart. I chewed it…. Because I had said I was going to eat his heart. That’s what I did. It was revenge.”.
But for anyone wondering, Pedro doesn’t swallow, and instead after chewing a piece of his dad’s heart a bit, spit it out and “threw it over the body.”
Now, as alluded to, for whatever it’s worth a prison psychologist who worked with Pedro would later state none of that is true at all and Pedro’s father was actually killed by one of his former lover’s family members who was also in prison with Pedro’s father, and took issue with dear old dad’s abusive acts against said former lover.
But, I mean, if you can’t trust the word of a psychopath, who can you trust? Q.E.D.
Now, you might think this and the few dozen other murders (along with many other attempted murders) he committed while in the clink would ensure Pedro would never breathe free air again, but you’d be wrong. As we covered in our Who is the Most Prolific Serial Killer of All Time? video, several South American countries have a max number of years an individual can spend behind bars for things like murder, regardless of the number of years the courts level at them. And, in this case, at the time, the max sentence that could be leveled in Brazil was 30 years.
As such, despite all the killings on April 24, 2007 Pedro was released from prison.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you might at this point be thinking “1973 to 2007 is 4 more years than 30”. And, well, your mathematical skills are impeccable, as we are none-too surprised given you’re intelligent enough to watch our videos. Scholars and gentlemen all of you… Except, of course, all you in the audience who are not, in fact, men. Scholars though? Nailing it.
As for these approximately 4 extra years, they were tacked on separately owing to the near four dozen murders he committed while in the clink. Let that be a lesson to anyone thinking of committing crimes while incarcerated in a Brazilian prison. The Brazilian courts will absolutely put the smack down on you for it, clearly.
It maybe didn’t help that in an interview around the original time he made his first release request in 2003, that his main defense in his own words was, “[People] never seek to understand why I kill. You see, I never killed children. I love children…. I also never killed women or fathers of good families.” He also stated, “I can’t kill you for free. Why would I kill you if you have never done me or other people wrong?” Why indeed…
Interestingly here, unlike other unrepentant serial killers who found their way to freedom, Pedro seems to have decided to stop the killings despite him stating they gave him great pleasure, although did for a time wind up back in prison starting September 15 of 2011. On this one, he was given an eight year sentence for apparently rioting and depriving someone of their liberty, though he was let out a year early in 2018 owing to this time, not only not killing anyone, but also general good behavior.
Noteworthy here is that while the man himself today doesn’t appear to necessarily repent the murders, what he does have great regret for overall is his choice to enter a life of crime at all. And, indeed, even has a YouTube channel where he talks about his crimes and tries to counsel young people to not follow his former example. Stating, “Crime is no joke. Many are coming in because they see the branches [fame and money], not the root [prison and death]. [Crime] is like the devil: he gives with one hand and takes away with the other. He has a lot of young people who come in, and when they want to leave, it’s too late.”
As to whether he will ever murder again, channeling his inner Sling Bade (“I don’t reckon I got no reason to kill nobody.”), Pedro states, “No. I would only kill again if someone came to take my life or the lives of the people I love, who are my family.”. Essentially having adjusted his rubric for who deserves to be murdered from anyone who committed a heinous crime in his view, or, you know had a snoring problem, to those threatening his loved ones or himself. Which, to be fair, is an improvement, and one, to an extent, most people can probably get behind.
And, indeed Pedro states of his rehabilitation, “Even those seen and stigmatized as evil can find their light…. Nobody said it would be easy. I [accept] my mistakes, I paid my penalty, so I don’t need to be judged or defended by anyone anymore.” And “For those who believe, follow me on the journey to the light because darkness has already consumed more than two-thirds of my life.”
Today something of a minor celebrity in some ways, with many admirers who approach him to get pictures and the like with the man, Pedro doesn’t really enjoy this attention on his past crimes. Stating “I [don’t] want to be known by that name anymore. Leave Pedrinho Metador alone…. [I want to] live the rest of the life I have in peace.”
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- The “House of Horrors” Hotel and One of America’s First Serial Killers
- The Vampire of Cinkota
- Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley, Ruth Ellis and Banning the Death Penalty
Bonus Fact:
Going back to 17th century German executioner, Frantz Schmidt, over the course of his near five decade career he executed 394 people and disfiguring or otherwise tortured or flogged roughly the same number.
Schmidt was one of those thrust into the profession as his father was strong-armed into becoming an executioner, condemning Schmidt to the same life once he came of age, though Schmidt’s story has something of a happy ending.
Like many executioners, Schmidt was given a wide berth by the public in his day-to-day life, but the incredible professionalism with which he conducted his grisly duties earned him the begrudging respect of both the general public and those in power. In his later years, Schmidt was able to parlay this into a meeting with Nuremberg authorities and then was able to appeal to Emperor Ferdinand II himself, with the goal of restoring his family honor.
Swayed by not just Schmidt’s words, but also letters from city council members and other notable people extolling Schmidt’s character and dedication to his duty, the then 70 year old executioner was granted both Nuremberg citizenship and had his family name cleared, allowing his progeny to escape the bloody specter of his work.
Of course, being ultra-professional with the profession was something of a necessity for Schmidt as, at the time in Germany, there was a law stipulating that any executioner tasked with doling out death by the sword (a form of execution largely reserved for especially important individuals) who took more than three swings to behead a victim would be condemned to die themselves.
Even where such laws didn’t exist, the job of an executioner was extremely dangerous as executioners were also at risk of being killed either by vengeful relatives or the crowd witnessing an execution. In regards to the latter, if an executioner was especially cruel in their meting out of punishment, simply incompetent to the point that they caused undue suffering, or just otherwise acted in an unprofessional manner in performing their duties, it wasn’t unheard of for a crowd to retaliate by killing the executioner on the spot, generally with no consequence to anyone in the mob.
This constant danger of the job was something Schmidt himself talked about several times in his journal, though he only notes one instance where the crowd turned into a mob. This occurred during a flogging he was performing, with the person being beaten ultimately stoned to death by the crowd.
As you might imagine from this, in cases like Schmidt who was trained from childhood to take over the job from his father, a rather lengthy apprenticeship was called for, including a robust education from one’s parent, followed by assisting in executions and torture from a young age. Schmidt also notes that he practiced executions extensively on various animals before being allowed to actually execute a human himself. The end goal of all of this was to make sure he wouldn’t screw up, as raucous mobs didn’t really care if it was someone’s first day on the job or not.
”Expand
How Exactly Did One Become an Executioner in Medieval Times?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Morgan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Rodrigues_Filho
Case 127: Killer Petey
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2018/12/maior-serial-killer-do-brasil-vira-comentarista-de-crimes-e-faz-sucesso-no-youtube.shtml
https://www.the-sun.com/news/5446733/cannibal-serial-killer-lil-pedro-ate-fathers-heart-brazil/
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/serial-killer-opens-up-how-24219740
https://www.ibtimes.com/brazils-most-notorious-serial-killer-free-man-despite-71-murders-out-prison-3335424
https://blogs.oglobo.globo.com/blog-do-acervo/post/pedrinho-matador-o-serial-killer-que-matou-mais-de-cem-e-passou-40-anos-na-cadeia.html
Pedro Rodrigues Filho: The Man Who Only Killed Criminals
The post The Truth About the Story of the Real Life Vigilante Serial Killer appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On September 13th, 2004 media powerhouse Oprah, who by the way’s real name was originally Orpah after the sister of the biblical character of Ruth, made television history when she announced that she was flexing the fact that she is, by definition, “Oprah Rich”, via giving every single member of her audience that day a rather expensive free car. Considered one of the most memorable moments in television history, the image of hysteric Oprah fans screaming and crying while the Queen of daytime TV flailed her arms in the air has become the stuff of legend in the world of marketing, as well as been the fodder for many a meme over the years since. The thing is though, nobody in the audience that day technically got a free car. So what’s the dealio? Let’s dive in, shall we?
First, some background. Exactly who came up with the idea of giving away 300 cars on Oprah that day isn’t clear and we were unable to find any single person at Pontiac (the company that donated the cars) willing to take credit for what is oft considered one of the single greatest marketing stunts in television history. In fact, the lead marketer for Pontiac at the time, Mark-Hans Richer, has gone on record as saying that “there was no creative mastermind” behind the stunt. Richer explains in a lengthy blog post detailing the events leading up to the giveaway that the idea bloomed organically out of meetings to discuss how to best market the newly introduced Pontiac G6.
You see, the G6 was designed to replace a car known as the Grand Am which, according to Richer, was incredibly popular with women. In fact, Richer notes in his blog post that 65% of Grand Ams were bought by the fairer sex around this time. The idea then was to retain this evidently loyal customer base in the highly competitive mid-size car market with a high-profile stunt to persuade women that the G6 was the new car for them. Enter Oprah.
While it’s unclear who first suggested approaching Oprah to promote the car on her show, Richer believes that this fact is unimportant due to the fact it was hardly a novel or original idea, quipping: “Just about every brand in the last quarter century has at some point said to itself, “Hey, let’s do something with Oprah!””
The problem then for Pontiac and General Motors (who owned the brand) was making such a promotion stand out, since Oprah had promoted hundreds of products on her show. This is when an unknown member of Pontiac’s marketing team suggested perhaps doing something with Oprah’s Favorite Things. For anyone unfamiliar with The Oprah Winfrey show, “Oprah’s Favourite Things” was an annual segment usually (though not exclusively) aired around Thanksgiving in which Oprah gave away thousands of dollars worth of free stuff to her guests under the guise that the items were things she liked or felt would make a great gift. In reality, whether the items were actually among her favorite things or not is a matter of debate. Either way, the items were invariably donated by companies along with potentially ample sums of money in return for gushing praise from Oprah, who at the apex of her popularity commanded an almost unheard of level of influence over her viewers’ shopping habits to the point that businesses she mentioned were often overwhelmed with orders, sometimes so much so that they couldn’t cope with the volume.
The idea then was to make television history by giving away the largest prize on Oprah to date, a brand new Pontiac G6 worth around $28,000 ($41,000 in today’s money).
However, not wanting to have the giveaway be overshadowed by any other gifts, Pontiac’s marketing team made the decision to not have the giveaway occur on the annual Oprah’s Favourite Things show, but on a random show sometime in September. This caused some friction between Pontiac’s marketing team and the company’s executives, who were also initially only willing to commit around a dozen cars to the stunt. Why? Well an internal cost analysis worked out that giving every member of the audience at a typical taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show a car would cost around $7.7 million (about $12 million today) based on estimates that each show was watched by a live audience of about 300 people. Although $7.7 million sounds like a drop in the bucket for a company like General Motors, it was actually more than the entire marketing budget GM had set aside for the car. As such, you can probably see why they were hesitant to spend every penny they’d set aside and more to market the car on a single episode of a daytime TV show.
Now, seeing as we’re talking about the stunt today, it’s evident that someone was able to convince GM executives on the benefits of working with Oprah and on a different episode of the show and the company eventually agreed to set aside the requisite 300 cars for the giveaway. This, as it turns out, wasn’t necessary as the actual show only had an audience of 267 people.
This brings us to Oprah herself who, after being approached about the cross-promotion with Pontiac, to her credit instructed her producers to find people who “desperately needed” a car to fill out the audience for the giveaway episode. This dually was just a nice thing to do, while also ensuring the audience’s reaction would be through the roof.
Oprah, in what has been called “a masterful display of showmanship”, subsequently spent the entire episode whipping the audience into a frenzy, initially giving away 11 cars to random members of the audience before revealing that she had only one more to give away. At this point, models carrying boxes filtered into the studio and began handing them out as Oprah informed guests that if their box contained a key, they’d won a car.
Oprah herself would later note that she wasn’t exactly all that clear in her instructions and the initial audience reaction was somewhat muted as, to build suspense, as alluded to, she’d lied and said only a single box contained a key. This, at least according to Oprah, is why she began screaming and pointing around “You get a car! You get a car!” at random members of the crowd.
In her own words:
“Prior to that moment, I had said, ‘Open up your boxes. One person has a key.’ So when I looked at the faces of the audience, they go, ‘But I have a key… but she has a key,’ so that’s why I said, ‘You get a car! You get a car!’ to try to clarify, because they all looked so confused. Everybody gets a car!””
What followed were scenes of hysteria as members of the crowd visibly broke down in front of camera and began weeping giant salty tears of joy at the idea of getting a brand new Pontiac G6. As marketing experts would later note, Pontiac couldn’t have made a better ad for the G6 if they’d tried.
Further, as a sort of fun fact, these G6’s given on Oprah also each had custom license plate with the word “Oprah” on it followed by the individual audience members seat number.
Almost immediately after the show ended, though, members of the audience were quickly snapped back to reality by a representative from General Motors handing them a 1099-MISC tax form. You see, technically the cars weren’t a gift at all, but a prize- an important distinction because while gifts (up to a certain value) usually aren’t taxed in the United States, or more aptly the recipient isn’t taxed, prizes are. Or to put it another way, every member of the audience had just randomly been given $28,000 worth of something they had to pay taxes on.
While what this meant for a specific individual varied, as a result, every member of the audience had to pay in the ballpark of $6,000 (about $9,000 today) if they wanted to keep the car, with, as noted, some being liable to pay more and others less depending on their individual financial situation and the state they lived in. As you can imagine, for an audience of people who were specifically chosen because they “desperately needed” a car, this wasn’t something pretty much any of them had the ability to do.
Things would have been even worse given sales tax and license fees, but General Motors had agreed to pay both of these things for each car, helpfully saving each audience member about $1,800 each.
Still, the idea of paying an additional $6,000 to keep a car they had supposedly just been given for “free” didn’t sit well with some audience members who took their grievances to the press. When a member of the press reached out to Harpo Productions Inc (the company who produced The Oprah Winfrey Show) for an explanation, a spokeswoman didn’t exactly assuage anyone’s complaints when they matter-of-factly laid out the following options for the audience members: “Keep the car and pay the tax. Sell the car and pay the tax with the profits. Or forfeit the car.”
As you might imagine given the specifically targeted demographic here, the audience members took the second option, choosing to simply sell their car the moment they got it and either pocket the profits or, in some cases, using it to buy a cheaper car.
Speaking of which, contrary to what the show implied, nobody on The Oprah Winfrey Show got a new car that day, with each member of the audience having to fill in a form and wait to have their new car delivered to a nearby Pontiac dealer.
Going back to many people selling their new car and just taking the cash difference after taxes, Pontiac themselves weren’t thrilled with this series of events, nor how well covered it was in the media, but were unable to do anything about it as they’d signed away creative control to Oprah and her producers. As a result, Pontiac had to sit and watch as an Oprah representative basically told people to sell their brand new Pontiacs to pay their taxes and buy a cheaper car if they wanted…
There was a positive for future giveaways, however. As a result of this whole snafu, for subsequent similar giveaways, producers began handing out checks to cover the estimated amount of tax audience members would be expected to pay on whatever their prize was. When asked to elaborate on this by the New York Post in 2010, an Oprah representative simply noted that the the show makes: “A good faith estimate of the tax due for each audience member and pays this on their behalf.”
In keeping with this idea, for the 25th and final season of her show, Oprah took her entire audience on an all expenses paid trip to Australia. To ensure there’d be no controversy, the Queen of daytime TV made sure a tax expert was on hand to walk every audience member through the amount they’d have to pay and had a producer cut them all a check for the relevant amount. Because that’s just how Oprah rolls. Being Oprah Rich has its perks.
Expand for References* Whose Idea Was The Oprah Car Giveaway * Oprah Winfrey revisits famous 2004 car giveaway * Looking back at Oprah’s free-car giveaway 10 years later * Oprah car winners hit with hefty tax * No thanks, Oprah, you can keep the new car * On This Day – 2004 Oprah gives away nearly 300 new cars * A Look Back At Oprah’s Ultimate Car Giveaway The post Did Oprah Really Give Away 300 Cars for Free on an Episode of Her Show? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On Christmas Eve, 1968, nearly a billion people sat glued to their radios and television sets as the crew of Apollo 8 entered orbit around the moon. For three days the world had followed the pioneering mission three live television broadcasts, and they now waited eagerly to hear the historic words of the first humans to reach another world. Then, as the spacecraft emerged from the shadow of the moon, the voice of astronaut Bill Anders crackled over the airwaves:
“We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters…”
Over the next few minutes, Anders and his crewmates Jim Lovell and Frank Borman took turns reading verses 1-10 of the Book of Genesis, signing off with the words:
“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
The Apollo 8 Genesis reading immediately became an iconic episode of the Space Race, and a much-needed moment of catharsis and hope at the end of a year rocked by violence and unrest – including the escalation of the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. But not everyone was pleased with the broadcast. In 1969, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, founder and president of American Atheists, filed a lawsuit against the United States Government alleging that the open reading of religious texts by astronauts – who are Federal employees – was a violation of the First Amendment right to the separation of Church and State. But despite O’Hair’s best efforts, her suit was dismissed by the Supreme Court in 1971.
In retrospect, Madalyn O’Hair’s failure should come as little surprise, for religion has been an integral part of the U.S. Space Program from the very beginning. As with the United States population at large in the 1960s, a large proportion of early NASA personnel were practicing Christians. Indeed, in the case of the first astronauts, this was all but mandated. In addition to their skills as test pilots, the “Mercury Seven” were selected based on how well they conformed to the American ideal of clean-cut, church-attending family men – to the extent that astronaut Leroy Gordon Cooper was pressured into reuniting with his estranged wife Trudy in order to complete his public image – and for more on the absolute badass that was “Gordo” Cooper, please check out our previous video “I’ll Do It Myself” – The Greatest Feat of Piloting in Space.
The religious community at large also broadly embraced the space program. Pope Paul IV reportedly followed the Apollo program with avid interest, while in a 1969 interview Cardinal Terrence Cook of New York commented on the religious significance of the upcoming Apollo 11 mission, stating:
“From the viewpoint of the moon, it will immediately become apparent to man that we on Earth are really only one family; and I think if this only sinks in, it will have tremendous spiritual significance in terms of lasting peace, understanding and brotherhood.”
Similarly, New York Rabbi Aryeh Lev described the lunar mission as another example of God revealing new things about his creation, while John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth and an ordained Presbyterian Elder, stated:
“To look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible.”
Consequently, at Cape Canaveral abundant resources were made available to cater to the spiritual needs of NASA personnel. For Catholic parishioners, the main spiritual hub was the Church of Our Saviour in nearby Cocoa Beach, overseen by Father Richard Walsh. Particularly faithful parishioners were Walter Kapyran, director of launch operations for manned missions, and Robert Gray, director of launch operations – both of whom made that Walsh and other parish priests always had prime seats to watch any launch they wanted. Astronauts were also frequent visitors to the Church of Our Saviour, including Jack Swigert, Command Module Pilot on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission:
“[Swigert] wasn’t supposed to fly, he just took [Ken Mattingly’s] place at the last moment. Three days before the actual launch he showed up at the church and wanted to go to Confession and Communion before he went up into space.”
But perhaps the most famous – and controversial – act of faith by an astronaut took place shortly after touchdown on the historic Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Lunar Module Pilot and second man to walk on the moon, was a devout Presbyterian, and in the lead-up to the mission he and Dean Woodruff, pastor of Webster Presbyterian Church outside Houston, struggled to find an appropriate way to express and affirm their faith and what the mission meant for all mankind:
“We wanted to express our feeling that what man was doing in this mission transcended electronics and computers and rockets.
“One of the principal symbols,” Dean says, “is that God reveals Himself in the common elements of everyday life.” Traditionally, these elements are bread and wine—common foods in Bible days and typical products of man’s labor.
One day while I was at Cape Kennedy working with the sophisticated tools of the space effort, it occurred to me that these tools were the typical elements of life today.
I wondered if it might be possible to take communion on the moon, symbolizing the thought that God was revealing Himself there too, as man reached out into the universe. For there are many of us in the NASA program who do trust that what we are doing is part of God’s eternal plan for man.”
Woodruff was enthusiastic about the idea, so both men set about sorting out the peculiar logistics of taking communion on the moon. Consulting with NASA engineers, Aldrin confirmed that the wine and communion wafers could be easily packaged in sealed plastic wrappers like the rest of the astronauts’ food, and that there was enough gravity on the moon to pour the wine normally. To hold the wine, Woodruff provided a tiny silver chalice light and compact enough to fit in Aldrin’s personal-preference kit – the small bag of personal items every astronaut was allowed to bring on a mission. Woodruff also confirmed with the Clerk of the Presbyterian General Assembly that, given the circumstances, a layman serving themselves communion was permissible, and provided Aldrin with a two hand-written cards of scripture from John 15:5, to be read aloud during the ceremony.
Aldrin originally planned to broadcast his lunar communion ceremony to the world, but as Madalyn O’Hair’s lawsuit over the Apollo 8 Genesis reading was still ongoing, Chief of the Astronaut Office Donald “Deke” Slayton advised him against it. Instead, Aldrin and Woodruff scheduled a communion service at Webster Presbyterian for the evening of Saturday, July 12 – the day before the Apollo 11 crew were to depart Houston for Cape Canaveral. But once again they ran into problems. As exposure to a cold or flu virus could potentially ruin the mission, in the last few days leading up to the launch the Apollo 11 astronauts were made to wear surgical masks during press conferences and avoid contact with others as much as possible. Thus, when the mission flight surgeon learned about the planned ceremony, he was less than pleased. As Aldrin later recalled:
“I called Dean with the news late Saturday night. “It doesn’t look real good, Dean.”
“What about a private service? Without the whole congregation?”
It was a possibility. I called the doctor about the smaller service, and he agreed, provided there were only a handful of people present.
So the next day, Sunday, shortly after the end of the 11 o’clock service my wife, Joan, and our oldest boy, Mike (the only one of our three children who was as yet a communicant), went to the church. There we met Dean, his wife, Floy, and our close family friend Tom Manison, elder of the church, and his wife.”
The following morning Aldrin and his crewmates Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins departed for Cape Canaveral, and on July 16, 1969, they blasted off on their historic mission. Four days later on July 20 at 3:17 Eastern Standard Time, Aldrin and Armstrong touched down on the lunar surface near the Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong announcing their success with the iconic words “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” Shortly thereafter, Aldrin appeared on the radio and made his own broadcast to the world:
“Houston, this is Eagle. This is the LM pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, whoever or wherever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the last few hours, and to give thanks in his own individual way.”
Then, as Armstrong looked respectfully on, Aldrin performed his private communion ceremony:
“In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, [John 15:5]‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit.’ [and Psalm 8: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the Son of Man, that thou visitest Him?” ] Eagle’s metal body creaked. I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.”
While it is often reported that Aldrin and NASA kept the lunar communion secret for decades, in reality Aldrin openly spoke about the ceremony on numerous occasions, including in an August 1969 interview in LIFE magazine and his 1973 autobiography Return to Earth. But while by this time Madalyn O’Hair’s lawsuit had been dismissed and the controversy over open displays of faith in space had died down, Aldrin soon came to regret his choice of commemoration for the first moon landing:
“Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion. Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind – be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists.”
Yet Aldrin’s historic ceremony lives on at Webster Presbyterian, which celebrates Lunar Communion Sunday every July on the anniversary of Apollo 11. During the ceremony, parishioners listen to a recording of Aldrin’s words broadcast from the moon and decide Psalm 8, just as Aldrin did. The church even holds the small silver chalice that Aldrin used on the moon.
But Aldrin’s lunar communion was far from the strangest intersection of religion and space travel to occur during Apollo 11, for the mission had another, rather unexpected effect: it inadvertently created a Bishop of the Moon. Created in 1968, the diocese of Orlando encompasses nine counties and over 24,000 square kilometres of Central Florida and serves nearly 401,000 Catholic residents. The first appointed Bishop of Orlando was William Donald Borders, who held the position until 1974. Borders took an active interest in the Space Program, and along with Cardinal Cook toured the launch site at Cape Canaveral on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch. Later that evening at a prelaunch banquet honouring the Apollo astronauts, Bishop Borders jokingly claimed that according to official Catholic doctrine, he was about to become Bishop of the Moon. The doctrine he was referring to was the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which stated that any newly discovered territory fell under the jurisdiction of the diocese from which the expedition had left. As Brevard County, where Cape Canaveral is located, falls within the Diocese of Orlando, a successful lunar landing would make the moon an extension of that diocese and Borders its Bishop. At 14.5 million square kilometres, this added territory would make the Diocese of Orlando the largest in the world – or, technically off of it – by a sizeable margin.
Later that year, during his quinquennial ad limina meeting with Pope Paul IV in Rome, Bishop Borders could not help but repeat his claim about being Bishop of the Moon. Reportedly the Pope was initially baffled until Borders explained his reasoning. There is no record as to whether the Pontiff affirmed Borders’s claim. However, Father John Giel, Chancellor for Canonical Affairs for the Diocese of Orlando, points out that while amusing, Borders’ claim was ultimately meaningless, as:
“[it]means nothing if there is no one to have jurisdiction over.”
Still, Father Giel commends Borders for his entertaining reading of Catholic Canon Law, stating:
“Since we have yet to find any life on the moon, the story only emphasizes Bishop Border’s good and humorous nature that allowed him to be such a good first bishop for central Florida.”
Sadly, in 1983 Catholic Canon Law was amended so that newly-discovered territory now falls under the jurisdiction of the Pope himself, meaning there is no longer a Bishop of the Moon. But if humans eventually colonize the moon and there are any Catholics among the colonists, they can rest easy knowing their new home is officially covered by the Holy See.
But moon bishop or no, Buzz Aldrin would be far from the last astronaut to perform a religious ritual in space. In 1994, Catholic astronauts Thomas Jones, Sid Gutierrez and Kevin Chilton received holy communion aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, as Jones later recalled:
“I thanked God each night before falling asleep for these glorious views of Earth and for the success of our mission thus far. I asked for the continued safety of our crew and a joyful reunion with our families. I was conscious of the special gift of each day in space, aware of the unique privilege I had been granted. And I remembered Father Tom Bevan’s words on the beach back in Florida. When Sunday rolled around again, two weeks after Easter, it seemed particularly appropriate to share our thanks and thoughts on what we had seen. Sid, Kevin, and I — all Catholics — gathered on the flight deck one orbital night for a short Communion service.
Kevin, a Eucharistic minister, carried the Blessed Sacrament with him, the hosts protected within a simple golden pyx. The three of us thanked God for the views of His universe, for good companions, and for the success granted our crew so far. Then Kevin shared the Body of Christ with Sid and me, and we floated weightless on the flight deck, silently reflecting on this moment of peace and true communion with Christ.
As we meditated quietly in the darkened cockpit, a dazzling white light burst through space and into the cabin. Pure radiance from the risen sun streamed through Endeavour’s forward cockpit windows and bathed us in its warmth. What else could this be but a sign? — God’s gentle affirmation of our union with Him. Drifting parallel to the floor, I rolled away from my crewmates, embarrassed at my reaction to that singular sunrise. Through tears I looked instead through the overhead windows at the Pacific below, the dawn painting its surface with a rich, limitless blue.
“Look at that,” I called out almost unconsciously to my friends. From the living water below, we drank in hues unmatched by the palette of any human artist. After a moment, Kevin said simply, “It’s the blue of the Virgin’s veil, Tom.” He was right. He had found the perfect way to express the vision we were seeing out the window.”
Further, in 2003, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon recited the Jewish Shabbat Kiddush prayer aboard the space shuttle Columbia shortly before its fatal reentry, while in 2017 Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryzhikov took a relic of Saint Serafim of Sarov with him to the International Space Station in 2016.
And as astronauts of increasingly diverse faiths make their way into space, ever-more unique challenges to performing one’s religious duties are likely to arise. For example, in 2007, Malaysia launched its first astronaut, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, to the International Space Station. As a devout Muslim, Shukor announced his intention to adhere to the tenets of his faith even while in orbit, including praying five times a day and fasting during Ramadan. However, there was a bit of a problem: in Islam, prayer is typically performed facing the Qibla, the direction of the holy city of Mecca. But in orbit, circling the world at 8 kilometres per second, the Qibla changes from second to second, making this a potentially impossible exercise. Furthermore, the Quran instructs the faithful to:
“Prostrate yourselves not to the sun nor to the moon, but prostrate yourselves to Allah Who created them, if you (really) worship Him.”
…the idea being to avoid worshiping these celestial objects as a pagan might. However, from 350 kilometres above the earth’s surface, it is possible for the straightest line to Mecca to intersect with the sun and the moon, potentially rendering a prayer invalid.
Thankfully, in 2006 the Malaysian Space Agency, Angkasa, convened a conference of 150 islamic scholars to tackle this very question. Their report, titled A Guideline [for] Performing Ibadah at the International Space Station, granted Shukor and future muslim astronauts a great deal of leniency in the performance of acts of devotion, arguing that the focus should be on the prayers themselves and not the minutiae of orientation. In other words, the faithful are to do the best they can given their unique circumstances. For example, while prayer is typically performed while kneeling on a prayer rug, this is all but impossible in microgravity. Thus, the guide advises that prayer can be performed in any convenient position. Indeed, in the Islamic world such exceptions are often made for those with disabilities or other mobility issues, with prayer while sitting in a chair, for example, being acceptable if kneeling is not possible.
So, will future astronauts face even more unexpected challenges to accommodating their faith in the heavens? Will space Scientologists struggle with performing Thetan audits in orbits, or Pastafarians with fitting collanders into their personal preference bags? Well, as residents of the 30th Century might say: Is the Space Pope Reptilian?
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Expand for ReferencesPeters, Bosco, Bishop of the Moon, Liturgy, July 24, 2019, https://liturgy.co.nz/bishop-of-the-moon
Peters, Bosco, First Communion on the Moon, Liturgy, July 16, 2009, https://liturgy.co.nz/first-communion-moon
Was Orlando’s Founding Bishop the Bishop of the Moon? The Message. July 26, 2019, https://evdiomessage.org/was-orlandos-founding-bishop-the-bishop-of-the-moon/
Mena, Adelaide, Does the Church Have Jurisdiction Over the Moon? EWTN, https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/does-the-church-have-jurisdiction-over-the-moon-13348
Smart, Simon, As the Moon Landing Unfolded, Buzz Aldrin Took Communion. Here’s Why, ABC News, July 18, 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-19/moon-landing-anniversary-astronauts-turned-religion-spirituality/11301606
Aldrin, Buzz, Guideposts Classics: When Buzz Aldrin Took Communion on the Moon, Guideposts, https://guideposts.org/positive-living/health-and-wellness/life-advice/finding-life-purpose/guideposts-classics-when-buzz-aldrin-took-communion-on-the-moon/
Cresswell, Matthew, How Buzz Aldrin’s Communion on the Moon Was Hushed Up, The Guardian, September 13, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/13/buzz-aldrin-communion-moon
Mikkelson, David, Did Buzz Aldrin Take Communion on the Moon? Snopes, March 7, 2010, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/communion-moon/
Di Justo, Patrick, A Muslim Astronaut’s Dilemma: How to Face Mecca From Space, WIRED, September 26, 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/09/mecca-in-orbit/
The post Space Religion appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Football is undoubtedly the most beloved sport around the world. And for American viewers – who associate football with big shoulder pads and helmets – we mean soccer, where the ball is… a ball and the main medium with which is used to play with it are feet. For more on how soccer got that name, stick around for the Bonus Facts at the end. But for now, we are not going to stick on this etymological issue of how the sport is named. Definitely, not going to war over football… But you know who would? El Salvador and Honduras in 1969! Well, in truth the whole event was much more complicated than a single set of football matches, but this didn’t stop the war from being dubbed “The Football War”. So what actually happened?
In 1961, a little known extremely obscure and largely forgotten footnote to history called the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. While little is known about the event today or what led up to it, after weeks of research, as far as we can dig up, we think it had something to do with cigars.
Whatever the case, after the success of Charles Xavier in ensuring Cuban cigars would still be available to most of the world, the area remained the focus of the Cold War, despite being decidedly tropical.
In this environment, Oswaldo Lopez Arellano overthrew the Hondurian government, becoming a dictator in 1963. Neighbouring countries such as Mexico and the US under Kennedy protested by removing embassies and ceasing military cooperation. But soon, under the looming shadow of various threats linked with Cuba, the US government under Lyndon B. Johnson recognised the Arellano government. Besides, amongst other things, the new dictator had done his part to soothe his relationships with the US by introducing and establishing agrarian reforms that benefited major banana companies. Yes, the quickest way to assured global peace is, as ever, big businesses all depending on their revenues and supply chains from all corners of the globe to keep on keeping on.
The main backlash from this was, of course, that farmers were not exactly happy that their bananas were given to foreigners cheap, so they went… well… bananas!
To help endear the people to him more, their dear dictator organised ‘free’ elections in 1965… that did not seem to convince anybody.
Enter the conflict with El Salvador. The machiavellian plan of Arellano was to accuse the neighbors of his own misdeeds. El Salvador is a country enjoying the breeze of the Pacific Ocean. Although theoretically rich and blessed – it was after all named to honor Jesus the Savior, or ‘salvador’ in Spanish – the country had an overpopulation problem. If one were to compare Honduras and El Salvador, El Salvador would come out much smaller, but at the same time, in the 1960s, it was far more densely populated than its neighbor.
So in previous decades – egged on by the land-owning elite – a quiet wave of immigrant farmers had begun using and farming land in Honduras. Their number, estimated around 300.000, constituted one fifth of the total Honduran population. It was at this point that the dictator Arellano went propaganda 101 on the people, and tried to solve his problems by finding a scapegoat to all the country’s ills. Taking a page out of basically every political leader ever, he chose to blame the foreigners living and working on Hondurian soil.
And so it was that the land reform implemented in 1967 redistributed land used by the immigrants to Hondurans. Often, however, these lands belonged to people who had been living there for decades, and who in some cases had integrated with Honduran families by marriage.
Despite this, many Hondurans did not care, and – supported by the government propaganda – took matters into their own hands, which inevitably led to many human rights violations and major suffering on the immigrant’s parts.
Humans are just the worst…
While the dictator was happy, his neighbors weren’t, with El Salvador demanding official intervention from the Honduran government to resolve the issue and protect its people on Honduran soil. Beyond ethical factors, the smaller country was also not prepared to receive hundreds of thousands of immigrants given the boot or fleeing Honduras for their safety.
This brings us to football. From 12 countries of Central and North America, there was only one ticket for the 1970 World Cup finals. The winners of the four groups of the first round would play off against each other. The winners of Group 1 and 2 were USA and Haiti, the winners of Group 3 and 4 were Honduras and El Salvador respectively. They would play three matches against each other, and the first to have two victories would qualify.
The first match was played in the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, on June 8, 1969. The night before the match was marked by street violence and clashes between supporters of the two teams. Some of the violence occurred near the hotel where the team of El Salvador was staying, and may have been targeted towards them. In the match, Honduras won in the most football of football ways- a show stopping 1-0.
The week after, on the 15th of June, the two teams met again in San Salvador. The El Salvadorians were not in the mood for a warm welcome and vengeful chaos and violence was observed in the streets. In this hostile environment, the Honduran team, probably fearing for their lives, lost 3-0, with one Hondurian team member noting it was a very good thing they ended up losing.
This defeat in turn aggravated the Hondurans back at home so much that reportedly 11.000 El Salvadorians were expelled from Honduras in the ten days between the second and the final match. How this compared to normal numbers isn’t clear as far as we can find, but one thing for sure was the El Salvadorian media wasn’t shy about pointing these numbers out at the time.
On the day of this tie-breaker match, El Salvador broke relations with Honduras in protest to the Honduran government, which did little to stop the violence. In this hellish atmosphere, the third match was thankfully played in the neutral stadium of Mexico City under guard of nearly 2,000 Mexican police stationed to attempt to keep the peace, all the while reportedly Salvadorian’s chanting “murderers!” at their counterparts.
And it was a nail biter. El Salvador took the lead in the 8th minute with a goal, only for Honduras to score 10 minutes later. But El Salvador scored again with in the 28th minute! The second half was calmer, with the only goal being scored by Honduras, with the match regulation time ending in another most football of football ways- 2-2, a complete waste of time!
So yes, the best possible outcome in this whole tense situation was the need for overtime!
And in the 103rd minute, El Salvador scored, giving them the ticket to the next round and disqualifying the Hondurans.
It was on! Tensions continued to mount between the two countries following the match with the outcome used by both sides in propaganda. As noted by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski who was in the region covering events in the aftermath, reporting seeing graffiti around saying things like “Nobody beats Honduras…” which we’re just going to point out here is very clearly false as El Salvador just did, so suck it Honduras! After the false statement, however, illustrating the tension, Kapuscinski notes the graffiti went on, “We shall avenge…!”
Journalist Ricardo Otero succinctly summed up the situation- “There were much bigger political matters. But there was this coincidence of three games to qualify for the 1970 World Cup. It didn’t help. Football here is very, very passionate – for good and for bad.”
Within a couple weeks political back and forth, continued violence against the immigrant populace, and occasional skirmishes finally escalated to open war and, on July 14th 1969, major military action began with El Salvador utilising their air force to invade. Of course, in the absence of proper bombers – they instead used passenger planes with explosives strapped to their sides! They managed to incapacitate the Honduran air force for a while by targeting the airports, thus gaining the initiative in the military action. Additionally, they began a land invasion, almost making it to the capital.
However, their advantage did not last for long, as the Nicaraguan dictator came to the Hondurans’ aid with provisions and their air force struck back. By morning of July 16th, their bombers were attacking both El Salvadoran air bases and – more devastatingly – oil depots along the coast.
As the Honduran government also got the Organization of American States (OAS) involved, the war was not a long one. In fact, overall, it was so brief, beyond being called the “Football War”, it also bears the moniker ‘100 Hour War’.
On July 18th, after an emergency session, the OAS called for a cease-fire and for the El Salvadorian invasion to stop immediately. While the cease-fire was put into effect by July 20th, El Salvador would not withdraw its forces completely from near the Honduran capital until August 2nd, demanding reparations be paid and protection be granted to Salvadoran immigrants living in Honduras.
In the aftermath, continued pressure enacted by the OAS ended the conflict for good. And though peace was still more than a decade away – a treaty only being signed on October 30th 1980 – the active threat ceased with the El Salvadoran troops returning to their country. In the meantime, the OAS kept a closer eye on how the immigrants in Honduras were treated, and the Honduran government also agreed to stop their persecution of said individuals.
As for other consequences, Honduras lost 250 soldiers and over 2000 civilians, additionally suffering a surge of homelessness as the fighting had caused significant destruction on Honduran soil. On the other side, 900 Salvadorans died.
Even worse, however, was the fact that the conflict caused over 300.000 Salvadorans to flee Honduras with most of them attempting to return to their native country, which was economically and socially unable to accept this many newcomers at once. Overpopulation and poverty surged, helping to lay the foundation for the military’s increased power, counteracting previous democratic movements, as well as ultimately leading to the Salvadoran Civil War raging from 1979 to 1992.
Furthermore, both economies plummeted, as trade between the two countries ceased and the border was closed. And despite the peace treaty and several attempts to sort out territory disputes, the countries remain at odds even today.
As for the football aspect, El Salvador also won against Haiti and in so doing qualified for the World Cup. Unfortunately for them, three defeats in three matches saw their country’s World Cup dreams dashed, losing 3-0 to Belgium, 4-0 to Mexico and 2-0 to the Soviet Union. Not even scoring a single goal.
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- The Origin of Nachos and How Football Helped Popularize Them Surprisingly Recently
Bonus Fact:
For all you out there who love to complain when Americans, and certain others, call “Football”, “Soccer”, you should know that it was the British that invented the word and it was also one of the first names of what we now primarily know of as “Football”.
In fact, in the early days of the sport among the upper echelons of British society, the proper term for the sport was “Soccer”. Not only that, but the sport being referred to as “Soccer” preceded the first recorded instance of it being called by the singular word “Football” by about 18 years, with the latter happening when it became more popular with the middle and lower class. When that happened, the term “Football” gradually began dominating over “Soccer” and the then official name “Association Football”.
As to why the need for a less generic name than “football”, it turns out in the 1860s, as in most of history- with records as far back as 1004 B.C.- there were quite a lot of “football” sports in existence being played popularly throughout the world and of course, England. Many of these sports had similar rules and eventually, on October 26th, 1863, a group of teams in England decided to get together and create a standard set of rules which would be used at all their matches. They formed the rules for “Association Football”, with the “Association” distinguishing it from the many other types of football sports in existence in England, such as “Rugby Football”.
Now British school boys of the day liked to nickname everything.They also liked to add the ending “er” to these nicknames. Thus Rugby was, at that time, popularly called “Rugger”. Association Football was then much better known as “Assoccer”, which quickly just became “Soccer” and sometimes “Soccer Football”.
In the beginning, the newly standardized Rugby and Soccer were football sports for “gentlemen”, primarily being played by the upper echelons of society. However, these two forms of football gradually spread to the masses, particularly Soccer as Rugby didn’t really catch on too well with the lower classes. This resulted in the name switching from “Soccer” and “Association Football”, to just “Football”; with the first documented case of the sport being called by the singular term “Football” coming in 1881, 18 years after it was first called “Soccer” or, officially, “Association Football”.
The game gradually spread throughout the world under the lower class name of “Football”, rather than “Soccer” as the “gentlemen” called it. The problem was, though, that a lot of other countries of the world already had popular sports of their own they called “Football”, such as the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, to name a few. In these countries, the name “Soccer” was and, in some, still is preferred for this reason.
Expand for Referenceshttps://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswaldo_L%C3%B3pez_Arellano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_War
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-48673853
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/29624259
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On the first of September, 1939, nearly 1.5 million troops, 2,750 tanks, and 2,300 aircraft of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich stormed over the border into Poland. That same day, Britain and France, bound by treaty to defend Polish sovereignty, issued an ultimatum calling for the immediate withdrawal of German forces. The ultimatum was ignored, and on September 3 the Allied powers declared war on Germany. The Second World War in Europe had begun. While Hitler’s true goal was plain for all to see, the Führer justified the invasion as a response to growing Polish aggression, pointing to a series of attacks against German citizens both within Poland and just across the border. But while many of these attacks did indeed take place, they were carried out not by Poles but rather German agents in a carefully-coordinated false flag operation designed to give Hitler the justification he needed to launch his war of conquest. This is the shadowy story of Operation Himmler.
Poland had been high on Adolf Hitler list of grievances since taking power in Germany in 1933. On June 28, 1919, in the wake of the First World War, the victorious Entente powers forced a defeated Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles, which saddled the country with the sole responsibility for starting the war and a series of harsh concession. The country was forced to pay the modern equivalent of $33 billion in reparations, forbidden from having an air force or a standing army larger than 100,000 men, and stripped on 65,000 square kilometres of territory and all its overseas colonies. Among these territorial concessions was the creation of the Danzig Corridor, a 50-kilometre-wide strip of land which connected the newly restored Polish Republic to the Baltic coast and completely cut Germany off from its territory of East Prussia.
A popular narrative holds that the terms of the Treaty of Versailles – particularly the monetary reparations – were excessively harsh, and led directly to the hyperinflation of the 1920s, the rise of the Nazis, and the outbreak of the Second World War. Indeed, following the signing of the treaty, Allied Supreme Commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch prophetically declared:
“This is not a peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.”
In reality, reparations played only a partial role in Germany’s post-war economic troubles, while the reparation payments themselves were cancelled in 1932 after Germany had paid only 5 billion of its $33 billion obligation. Nonetheless, for many Germans the Treaty of Versailles was a national humiliation, and Adolf Hitler ruthlessly exploited this resentment to carry himself and his National Socialist Party to power. Hitler wasted no time reclaiming the territory lost to the Treaty of Versailles. On March 7, 1936, German troops re-occupied the Rhineland, which had been de-militarized since 1919, while on March 12, 1938, the Anschluss unified Germany and Austria into “Greater Germany.” Hitler next laid claim to the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, home to a large minority of ethnic Germans. These claims precipitated an international crisis and brought Europe to the edge of war. In desperation, in September 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich and negotiated the handover of the Sudetenland in return for the cessation of German territorial expansion. This compromise infamously backfired, for Hitler, emboldened by the Allied policy of appeasement, proceeded to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. However, as there were hardly any ethnic Germans in this part of Czechoslovakia, the invasion laid bare Hitler’s true intentions. Thus, when he next demanded the return of the Danzig corridor to Germany, the Allied powers were far less willing to negotiate. Hitler therefore turned to the infamous Schutzstaffel or SS – his bodyguard-turned-political paramilitary force – to engineer a series of supposedly Polish attacks along the border to justify the outright invasion and occupation of Poland, scheduled for August 26, 1939. On August 22, as troops were massing at the border, Hitler told his generals:
“I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.”
The task of planning these false-flag operations -codenamed Undernehemen Himmler after Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS – fell to Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo secret police, and Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, the SS intelligence service. Operation Himmler would consist of a series of 21 staged attacks by SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms, carried out against various targets just across the German border, including the railway at the Jablunka [“Ya-bloonk-ah”] Pass, the German customs station at Hochlinden [“Hock-lihn-den”], the railway station at Alt-Eiche [“Ahlt-ike”], and the forest service station at Pitschen. The most elaborate operation, however, would be directed at the radio station at Gleiwitz [Glaye-vits”] in Upper Silesia. Built in 1935 by German electronics firm Lorenz, the complex’s 33-metre-tall antenna mast remains the tallest wooden structure in Europe. Upon seizing control of the station, the SS troops would use the transmitter to broadcast a pro-Polish message across Germany, providing indisputable proof of Polish aggression. And to make this and the other operations look even more convincing, inmates from the Dachau concentration camp would be dressed in Polish uniforms, drugged, shot in the face to prevent identification, and left behind at the scene of the attacks. In a classic example of dark Nazi euphemism, these planted bodies were referred to as konserve or “canned meat,” leading to the common but false claim that the whole operation was code-named Unternehemen Konserve.
The man tasked with leading the attack on the Gleiwitz radio station was 29-year-old SS-Stürmbannführer Alfred Naujocks [“Naw-yocks”], an accomplished amateur boxer and street brawler from the Nazi Party’s earliest days. By 1939 he had become one of Reinhard Heydrich’s most trusted agents and placed in charge of the SD’s foreign section, forging passports, identity cards, money, and other documents for SD agents operating abroad. As Naujocks told a reporter in 1960, Heydrich summoned him to his office and explained:
“Within a month we shall be at war with Poland. The Führer is determined. But first we have to have something to go to war about. We’ve organised incidents in Danzig, along the East Prussian border with Poland, and along the German frontier. But there has to be something big and obvious.”
In mid-August 1939, Naujocks and a squad of six Polish-speaking SS soldiers travelled to Gleiwitz and checked into Oberschlesischer [“Oh-burr-shlay-sick-er”] Hotel, claiming to be mining engineers prospecting for minerals in the area. They then went about assembling the Polish uniforms, documents, weapons, cigarettes and other items they would need to carry out the staged attack. Intimately involved in this procurement process was an unexpected figure: none other than Oskar Schindler, the industrialist who would later go on to save the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. In 1939, however, Schindler had yet to have his change of heart, and still actively supported the Nazi war effort. Indeed, this was not even his first collaboration with German intelligence. In 1936 Schindler, broke and desperate following a series of failed business ventures, joined the Abwehr [“Ab-vayr”], the German military intelligence agency, and was assigned to spy on Czech military defences near the town of Ostrava. Unfortunately, Schindler proved an even worse spy than he was a businessman, and was soon arrested, charged with treason, and sentenced to death in August 1938. But before he could be executed, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and Schindler was freed. He was then promoted by the Abwehr and made deputy commander of intelligence in Ostrava, which was less than 20 kilometres from Gleiwitz. Uniforms and other materials for the Glewitz operation were stored in Schindler’s apartment, while a network of Abwehr agents under his command helped smuggle SS agents across the border into Poland.
By August 25, everything was ready, and Naujocks and his squad awaited the codeword “Grossmutter gestorben” – or “Grandmother has died” – that would set the operation in motion. However, Hitler, sensing that Poland and its allies might soon capitulate to his demands, postponed the invasion to September 1, leaving Naujocks and his men waiting for nearly two weeks. Finally, on the evening of August 31, a phone call bearing the codeword arrived at Oberschlesischer Hotel, and the squad piled into two cars and drove to the Gleiwitz radio station. Also in one of the cars, dressed in a Polish uniform and drugged into unconsciousness, was Fasciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old Upper Silesian farmer who had been arrested by the Gestapo for collaborating with Polish saboteurs.
The squad reached the station around 8 PM and stormed up the stairs and through the front door. They met no resistance from the guards and quickly overpowered both them and the engineers on duty, binding and locking them up in the basement. Fasciszek Honiok’s unconscious body was then dragged from the car, shot through the back of the head, and draped over the front stairs as “proof” of Polish involvement in the raid. But as one of Naujock’s men, Karl Hornack, prepared to make the staged pro-Polish broadcast, he realized he had made a crucial error. The building the squad had raided contained no broadcast studios, only transmitting equipment designed to broadcast signals received via cable from the city of Breslau. After a desperate 10-minute search of the building, Hornack resorted to using emergency storm microphone, designed to warn radio listeners of inclement weather. In perfect Polish, Hornack barked over the airwaves:
“Attention! This is Gliwice. The broadcasting station is in Polish hands.”
Hornack had intended to end the broadcast with a statement about Polish territorial claims in the region, but this part of the message was cut off – either due to technical problems or a Polish technician who managed to shut off the transmitter. But it was enough, and as Naujock’s squad withdrew from the complex, radio stations in Germany rebroadcast the transmission across the country as proof of Polish aggression. The other 20 Operation Himmler attacks were similarly successful – with one major exception. The squad tasked with raiding the Hochlinden customs post was not informed of the delay in the invasion plans and attacked before the post could be cleared, resulting in the deaths of several German citizens. But it hardly mattered: Hitler had his pretext for invasion. The next morning, the Führer gave a speech before the German Parliament or Reichstag, declaring:
“I can no longer find any willingness on the part of the Polish Government to conduct serious negotiations with us. These proposals for mediation have failed because in the meanwhile there, first of all, came as an answer to the sudden Polish general mobilization, followed by more Polish atrocities. These were again repeated last night. Recently in one night, there were as many as twenty-one frontier incidents: last night there were fourteen, of which three were quite serious. I have, therefore, resolved to speak to Poland in the same language that Poland for months past has used toward us… This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45 a. m., we have been returning the fire… I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.”
As Hitler spoke these words, the combined might of the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe was already storming across the border into Poland. While the Allied powers were not fooled for long, the confusion sown by the Operation Himmler attacks bought Hitler valuable time to complete his invasion unopposed. On September 17, the Soviet Union, with whom Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact, invaded Poland from the east. By October 6, Poland’s fate was sealed, and the stage was set for the most destructive conflict in modern history.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- If Hitler’s Regime was the Third Riech, Who Were the First and Second?
- How Close Did the Nazis Actually Come to Building an Atomic Bomb?
- The Connection Between Saddam’s and Hitler’s Bunkers, Why Your Friends are Likely to Have More Friends Than You, and More, in Yet Another 10 Quick Facts
- The Women Who were Used for Breeding by the Nazis
Expand for ReferencesGraham, Bob, World War II’s First Victim, The Telegraph, August 29, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20120314190818/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/6106566/World-War-IIs-first-victim.html
Gliwice Radio Status, Museum on Radio History and Visual Arts, https://web.archive.org/web/20061104063227/http://www.muzeum.gliwice.pl/en/radiostacja/
Lebovic, Matt, 80 Years Ago, How a Very Different Schindler’s ‘List’ Helped Ignite WWII, The Times of Israel, August 30, 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/80-years-ago-how-a-very-different-schindlers-list-helped-ignite-wwii/
Pope, Cassie, How a False Flag Sparked World War Two: the Gleiwitz Incident Explained, History Hit, August 31, 2018, https://www.historyhit.com/gleiwitz-incident-explained/
Carlson, Cody, This Week in History: Nazis Stage Fake Attack at the Start of WWII, Deseret News, September 3, 2014, https://www.deseret.com/2014/9/3/20547775/this-week-in-history-nazis-stage-fake-attack-at-the-start-of-wwii
Dowell, Stuart, How the Death of a Farmer and a Bungled Siege of a Radio Tower Gave Hitler His Justification to Unleash WWII, The First News, September 1, 2020, https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/how-the-death-of-a-farmer-and-a-bungled-siege-of-a-radio-tower-gave-hitler-his-justification-to-unleash-wwii-15345
The post Forgotten History- That Time Hitler had His Agents Secretly Attack Germany in Order to Justify Starting WWII appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Paul A. asks: Is there really such a thing as human pheromones?Insects, such as the male silk worm using the pheromone Bombykol have long been known to attract mates through pheromones.
Moving over to the one humped camel, also known as the Arabian camel and dromedary, of all their adaptations, the grossest is probably the male dromedary’s proclivity to blow up a portion of his soft palate with air to the point that it protrudes up to a foot out of his mouth – as a sign to the ladies that he is hot to trot. With large, repugnant sacks hanging out of their mouths, male dromedaries begin the courtship. Using their spit to make a low gurgling sound that results in foaming at the mouth, they also mark their territory by rubbing their necks (where they have poll glands that produce a foul, brown goo) anywhere they can, and even pee on their own tails to attract a lady with their urine’s “female-attracting pheromones”.
Speaking of golden shower seeming pheromonel attraction, moving on from there, female giraffes also like to do the same to get male giraffes to stop going to town on each other and go to town on them instead. (Fun fact, 75% to 94% of male giraffe lovin’ is with other male giraffes instead of females.) If the female is particularly interested in a certain male, almost always the male with the longest neck around, she may even pursue him, rubbing her neck against him to try to get him to rub her rump so she can pee in his mouth. In these cases, she will rarely play hard to get and usually will let him mount fairly quickly if her urine is to his liking. Once the female stands still long enough to allow the male, again usually the one with the longest neck around, to mount, coitus is extremely brief, lasting only a few seconds at most, once again proving it’s not the size of the neck, but how you use it.
This all brings us to alleged human pheromones. Unfortunately for the makers of love-potions, there has been no scientific proof that humans have the same capability, though this point is hotly debated, particularly as it’s relatively prevalent in many other creatures, sometimes not just for mating purposes, but to illicit other behaviors. On this note, that doesn’t mean we don’t have such pheromones, just that there has never been any 100% conclusive proof that we do. In fact, many researchers believe there are human pheromones positively affecting the mood of a prospective mate, but the exact molecule or molecules responsible haven’t been located. To better understand the topic, let’s explore pheromones and how our bodies respond, as well as what pubic, armpit, and facial hair potentially have to do with any of this.
To begin with, how do you define a pheromone? That definition is still the topic of hot debate. The most widely accepted definition, originally penned by the coiners of the term, Peter Karlson and Martin Luscher, in 1959 in their article Pheromones: A New Term for a Class of Biologically Active Substances, is “substances which are secreted to the outside by an individual and received by a second individual of the same species, in which they cause a specific reaction.”
If your definition is that broad, then it would appear humans do release pheromones; there have been countless studies showing certain odors, along with music and some types of lighting, can alter mood and physiological stimulation. And, in fact, as we’ll get to shortly when discussing pubic, armpit, and facial hair, there’s some evidence that these odors also help us determine subconsciously who we might be best suited to mate with to produce the healthiest offspring.
But first, as for the question- Can the way a person smells affect other people’s mood? The answer is absolutely, yes. But as for the more pertinent question- Is there a molecule that humans release that can specifically influence human endocrinology to illicit lustful desire? That answer is much more elusive.
Humans produce several different compounds in our urine, stool, breath, genitals, saliva, and glands within the skin. Proponents of the idea that humans do indeed have pheromones generally suspect skin glands are the source of said compounds. In fact, there are three types of skin glands- apocrine, eccrine, and sebaceous glands, and all of these can produce compounds that can become odorous and sensed by your nose, sinuses, in your oral cavity and then lungs.
As for the first on this list, apocrine glands are found in your armpits, nipples, ear canals, nostrils and some parts of your genitalia. They intermittently produce sweat containing cholesterol, triglycerides, fatty acids and other lipids. Those molecules are generally odorless until bacteria on your skin begin to break them down. Puberty is when apocrine glands typically become active, and they release secretions during times you’re experiencing anxiety, fear, pain or sexual arousal.
Eccrine sweat glands primary function is to control your body’s temperature through sweat. That sweat mostly contains electrolytes like sodium and calcium. It can contain lesser amounts of magnesium, phosphate, sulphate, and some proteins involved with your immune system (immunoglobulins and interleukins). The sweat is also generally odorless, except in certain cases like when you eat garlic.
On this one as a brief aside, this has to do with the fact that some of these sulfuric compounds in garlic get metabolized, eventually making their way into your blood stream. The primary smelly culprit here has been found to be allyl methyl sulfide, which is passed into the blood during the digestive process. Once it’s in your blood, it eventually gets passed out of your body through various bodily excretions, which includes being exuded through your pores and also passed into the air that fills your lungs. So as you breathe, the air goes into your lungs and is contaminated by the allyl methyl sulfide; this in turn causes your breath to continue to smell even if you’ve cleaned your mouth out. On top of that, this will also be exuded from your pores. This ends up causing your whole body to smell, not just your breath. As you are excreting this sulfide, you essentially are wearing a stinky perfume. This effect lasts as long as it takes for your body to get rid of the smelly sulfuric compounds, which can be anywhere from a few hours to as much as a day after eating the garlic.
Going back to pheromones, sebaceous glands are found almost everywhere on the body, except the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. They produce Sebum containing triglycerides, waxes, squalene, and fatty acids. The primary purpose of Sebum is to lubricate hair and skin. It can also have antibacterial properties, and is said to have a pleasant odor until various bacteria get involved. Like Apocrine glands, Sebaceous glands become active during puberty and, when they become clogged, produce the zits teenagers everywhere flaunt with disdain.
The question then becomes do any of these three glands, or their subsequent molecules, affect the opposite sex in an attractive way?
The molecules most researchers seem to look at when studying pheromones are steroids, such as Androstadienone, Estratetaenal, Androstanol, and Androstenone. All three sweat glands can, in some way, affect or be effected by, steroids.
Why do researchers focus on these in their search for human pheromones? Steroids fit the concept of an externally secreted hormone; they’re one of the compounds linked to reproductive behavior; they’re commonly present in the sweat from your armpits, while also found in saliva, urine and semen; men tend to have higher concentrations than women, and women are more sensitive to them than men; many humans have been shown to be able to distinguish the difference between male and female sweat, with the differences in steroid concentration being proposed as one potential reasons; and, finally, one steroid (androstanol) seems to have no known function in humans.
As for how humans detect pheromones, if they do exist, the organ involved here is the vomeronasal, or Jacobson’s, organ (VNO). This little libido-detector is what gives animals the ability to communicate via pheromones. Many perfume manufacturers, and those who wholeheartedly believe in human pheromone communication, point out that humans have this organ at the base of their nasal septum. They also tend to say, when stimulated, it will communicate with the hypothalamus. This portion of the brain is responsible for many of the autonomic processes involved with your nervous system, including potentially affecting mood.
Unfortunately for proponents of this idea, the VNO appears to be nonoperational in humans. After a specific step in fetal development, providing for the secretion of sex hormones by the anterior hypophysis, the VNO’s neural connections go away. In fact, the genes responsible for making the ion channels that allow for communication between the brain and the VNO are nonfunctional in humans. The adult brain has no way to detect the information even if there was a connection in the form of an accessory olfactory bulb.
Nevertheless, countless studies have attempted to prove pheromone communication does occur in humans. Going back to armpit and pubic hair and the potential connection there, as with many things in nature, the leading theory as to why we still have pubic and underarm hair is to increase the chances of getting lucky. This is perhaps backed up by the fact that unlike hair on the top of your head, armpit, thick pubic hair, and potentially facial hair tend to show up during puberty, around the same time your apocrine sweat glands become active and begin secreting an oily substance containing a variety of proteins and the like. These apocrine glands are, among a few other places, concentrated in your armpits and genitals, unlike your other main type of sweat gland, eccrine glands, which are distributed pretty well throughout your body. Pubic and armpit hair also usually begins to thin out significantly starting around when people hit their fifties, perhaps another indicator it’s all about finding a compatible mate.
More specifically, it is theorized by some that the hair exists for the purpose of getting soaked in potent mate-attracting pheromones. This initially odorless secretion turns into a musky smell after various microbes have their way with it; a potential mate picks up the scent and their body uses it as an indicator that you are ready to make the beast with two backs.
Further, whether consciously detected or not, each individual gives off a slightly different scent thanks to something known as the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC). Studies, such as one having women smell the armpits of t-shirts previously worn by various men who in turn wore no deodorant or the like, have shown that people with dissimilar MHC feel more attracted to each other (and, in fact often become aroused when catching a whiff of such a person). While the research is not yet wholly conclusive, there is even some evidence that when these two with such differing MHC make a baby, they can expect a lower than average rate of miscarriage. It is also thought that greater genetic diversity results in offspring being less susceptible to disease, both suggesting an evolutionary benefit to heading what your nose is telling your brain about a person based on apocrine secretions.
Thus, the theory goes that because the hair naturally wicks these secretions away from the skin, it allows for better ventilation and a more prominent smell than you’d achieve without it.
Further adding fuel to the fire is beard and pubic hair growth rates and when they peak. While if it was for warming purposes, you’d think winter would see the highest growth rates in these areas, in fact, it’s the opposite- studies show summer is king here, and winter sees the lowest.
This actually makes sense when you look at the underlying mechanisms behind beard hair growth and its hypothesized connection to mating.
Specifically, in the study, Seasonal Changes in Human Hair Growth, published in 1991, looking at a group of British men aged 18-39, it tracks their beard growth and activities for 18 months. Incidentally, the researchers also confirmed what others have likewise shown- that scalp hair, used more for warming purposes, for example, has a peak amount of hair in the anogen (growth phase) in the winter, around February/March at approximately 90%, then falling steadily from there until September then climbing back up. They also directly measuring about 60 hairs lost per day from the scalp at peak telogen phase time (in the summer) and about half that rate during the winter.
As for beards, this is almost the exact opposite. They observed that the growth rate of beard hair actually peaked in June and July and was at its lowest in January and February. Not a subtle difference, the peak growth rate in the summer months was 38% faster than in the lowest growth rate months of January and February.
Given other studies have shown sperm count, semen volume, and sperm mobility also peaks in the summer for many men, and pubic hair also more or less seems to track with beard hair cycle timelines, once again, it’s hypothesized that pubic hair has remained on humans (along with armpit hair) to help attract the opposite sex via certain pheromones.
Further, beards have likewise been connected to mating via a surprising number of studies looking into the connection with beards and attractiveness. On this, studies pretty consistently show that, while there are of course exceptions, women en masse find men with stubble to short beards the most attractive. However, there is another element that may favor men with long, full beards in terms of actual desire to mate with said man. For example, in the 2013 study The role of facial hair in women’s perceptions of men’s attractiveness, health, masculinity and parenting abilities the researchers found that while the majority of women perceive men with long, thick beards as more masculine then men with closely trimmed beards or clean shaven, when women are most fertile in their cycle, their ratings of the masculinity of men with full beards increased even more. Further, the women in the study also consistently rated men with long, full beards as more likely to be better fathers and more socially mature. As the researchers sum up of their research, this “suggest[s] that an intermediate level of beardedness is most attractive while full-bearded men may be perceived as better fathers who could protect and invest in offspring.”
Further, this and other studies have likewise shown that women consistently rate bearded men of all levels as healthier than their bald-faced compatriots. Thus, all combining to potentially give a benefit to faster beard growth at times when male sperm counts and motility are the highest- the warmer months when historically resources for baby making are at their peak.
On a related note, many studies show that the body’s chemistry changes from within as we get older producing a certain scent. Some may describe it as musty. Some may call it stale. Maybe a bit medicinal. Whatever the case, a recent research study done by Johan Lundström of the Monell Chemical Senses Center published in PLOS ONE tested the odors from the underarms of middle-aged adults and the elderly. The result? Middle-aged men smelled the worst, according to those surveyed. The good news? Grandpa was considered second-best, and actually pleasant smelling. Middle-aged women came out on top of the list of most-enjoyable body odors.
The study was conducted by attaching absorbent pads to the lining of the armpits of shirts. The shirts were then worn by volunteers of various ages for five consecutive nights while they slept. In order for other smells not to seep when the shirts weren’t being worn, they were stored in sealed plastic bags during the day. The volunteers were also required to use scentless soaps and shampoos during the experiment and not to eat or expose themselves to strong smelling external things like perfume or cigarette smoke.
After the five days were up, the pads were collected and placed in sealed jars ready to be opened and sniffed by other volunteers to judge the smelliness and to see if people could correctly identify the general age of the person who wore the pad (young, middle-age, and old-age).
The results? The volunteers were able to correctly identify which pads were worn by old people most of the time, though that was about the extent of the accuracy. While they did also detect a distinct difference between the middle-aged and young, they were not able to accurately identify which was which in most cases.
So what exactly is thought to be causing this change in smell as we age? It’s still somewhat up for debate, but it is thought that there are many factors involved. One factor, according to physician, Eric Shapira, is simple dehydration. Older people tend to be less thirsty, which results in them being predominately more dehydrated and shedding more dry skin. Dead skin cells can carry a musty smell. In addition, Shapira notes that older people see a decline in oral hygiene over the years due to less efficient brushing. Oral hygiene, of course, can also affect one’s scent.
A more scientific approach to this question was taken by a team of Japanese researchers in 2000. They discovered that a concentration of the chemical 2-nonenal, which is an odoriferous substance found in sweat and on your skin, increased as people aged, with people in their 70s having as much as three times as much of it as middle-aged individuals. It’s thought that the extra 2-nonenal is coming from the breakdown of more prevalent omega-7 fatty acids on our skin as we age. (Interestingly, besides being perhaps a major culprit in the smell of an elderly individual, 2-nonenal is also a key component in the smell of beer.)
An elderly person’s living environment is also thought to be a factor. How many of us know a relative who keeps, or hoards, everything from years gone by? Brenda Thompson of Tri-Country Home Nursing says, “All those old books and papers, old linens and clothes — they all harbor dust and dampness and give off a musty odor that can pervade the whole house. If you moved into that house in 1945, those books may have been there for 60 years. I’ve seen drapes that have been there that long, too.”
Here’s another odd thing about the changing of how we smell as we age: as we grow older, nearing age 80, males tend to smell more and more like women, with this change thought by some to be hormonal based, though exactly what’s going on isn’t yet perfectly clear.
Going back to potential pheromones, once again, despite a slew of studies on our ability to sniff things out about each other from potential genetic compatibility to if we are old or young, as well as the potential role certain post-pubescent hairs on our body might aid in this and mating, finding definitive proof that any of this has to do with our sexual attraction to one another, has been elusive to date. But adding more wood to the potential fire is that there are also studies that show people with higher levels of specific hormones are more attractive than others, BUT, once again, none have definitively shown specific cause and effect.
What does science say will make someone more attractive? Studies suggest long distance runners have an advantage. Possibly due to having higher testosterone levels than the average person. Facial symmetry has also been shown to be important. Most likely because it signals prospective mates that the individual has good genes. Finger length, specifically your ring finger, because it has been shown to relate to testosterone levels within the womb. Thus, those with longer ring fingers tend to have higher sperm counts, increased fertility, and better cardiovascular health, and interestingly, more symmetrical faces. (Also interestingly, ratio of finger size in men, rather than overall length, is strongly correlated with penis size, as we’ll get to in the bonus facts in a bit.) Lastly, body shape and the specific way you smell have been shown to be contributing factors in attractiveness.
In the end, humans can release molecules that affect the mood of the opposite sex. Fortunately for candle makers, and Barry White album sales, no known molecule has been definitively found to induce sexually ravenous behavior. But don’t worry, since showering before a date is always a good idea, and many of us shave our naughty bits at least to some extent, you’ll probably wash off any sex-molecule anyway, and will have to simply rely on your charm and physical appeal, or for some of the men among us, the size of your… bank account. With successful men in this way, generally shown to be more attractive to an extent to many women, though hilariously studies show factors like height, or rather in this case in the diminutive sense, can strongly over power the ability to be a phenomenal provider in how attractive women rate men. So… sorry short guys… Maybe just get in phenomenal shape, grow a beard, rock that personality, and develop a great sense of humor.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- Can Humans Breathe Liquid Like in The Abyss?
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Bonus Fact:
Speaking of size of things potentially mattering, contrary to popular belief, studies have consistently shown that the size of a guy’s feet or the overall size of their hands is not related to their member’s erect measurement. However, a man’s fingers do give a strong clue as to their probable penis size- but the overall length of the fingers is not what’s important here.
For instance, a study published in the Asian Journal of Andrology in 2011 found that the ratio between the 2nd and 4th digits on the hands strongly correlates with the overall length of an individual’s penis. Specifically, Dr. Ho Choi and et al. state;
Univariate and multivariate analysis using linear regression models showed that…. only digit ratio was a significant predictive factor for stretched penile length…
In a nutshell, the lower the ratio- how much shorter the index finger is than the ring finger- the longer the penis will probably be when erect. (And if you’re wondering, flaccid penis length is not an accurate predictor of erect penis length.) More specifically, you can calculate your ratio by taking the length of your index finger (measured from the crease where it meets your hand, to the tip) and divide it by the length of your ring finger. The shorter your index finger is compared to the ring finger, the lower the ratio will be and, if you’re a man, the longer your penis probably is.
So why does the ratio of the index and ring finger lengths correlate to erect penis length? In the beginning, female and male genitals are pretty much the same. This is because they develop from the same cluster of tissues (gonads). In males, somewhere around weeks 7-9 of gestation, the gonads begin secreting two hormones- Anti-müllerian hormone (AMH) and testosterone. AMH prevents the development of the ducts that eventually turn into the fallopian tubes, the uterus, and upper vagina.
Once the gonads begin secreting testosterone, some if it (around 5-10%) gets transformed into another hormone called dihydrotestosterone. Both testosterone and dihydrotestosterone will attach to androgen receptors, which affect the growth and development of many different body systems.
Notable here, dihydrotestosterone attaches to androgen receptors on tissues that eventually develop and combine into the penis and scrotum. Low levels of this within the womb, or later during puberty, may result in an underdeveloped or malformed penis.
So to sum up here, penile growth in the womb is stimulated and affected by testosterone, dihydrotestosterone, and androgen receptors. Circulating amounts of the two hormones, combined with the associated androgen receptor stimulation, will determine penis size.
So what about fingers? Circulating testosterone in the womb will affect other body parts as well- pertinent to the topic at hand, including the ratio between the 2nd and 4th digits (index and ring fingers).
Why does testosterone affect digits differently? For that, I’ll have to get a little more technical, but essentially the activity mediated by androgen receptors, and estrogen receptor-a, is higher in your ring finger compared to your index finger. This is regulated by the structure of genes controlling the process for the bone growth of your fingers, called endochondral ossification. The spread of chondrocytes will determine the length of your finger, and this expansion is higher in the ring finger compared to the index finger.
When you decrease the activation of androgen receptors during the narrow window of digit development (usually completed by week 13 of gestation), you will decrease the length of your ring finger. This activation is attributed to amount of testosterone and DHT circulating throughout the tiny fetus. Conversely, if you decrease the activity of the receptor estrogen-a (the ones being stimulated more when you’re female), you will get a longer ring finger.
Based on this physiology, it has been long known that you can predict prenatal hormone exposure based on the ratio of these two fingers. Since both penile length and the ratio of the ring and index finger is basically a result of the amount of testosterone and DHT circulating in utero, there is a correlation between that ratio and the length of a man’s favorite appendage.
As you might have guessed from all this, the ratio between the lengths of one’s index and ring fingers is usually quite different in men and women- men tend to have shorter index fingers than ring fingers; women tend to have their index fingers either the same length or longer than their ring fingers.
Expand for References* Human pheromones * Silk worm pheromone * Context-dependent effects of steroid chemosignals on human physiology and mood. * Human pheromones do not affect gender perception * Vomeronasal organ and human pheromones * androstadienone increases attention to emotional information when passively inhaled * Are human pheromones real * Evidence for pheromones * Sebaceous glands * eccrine sweat glands * The science of sexiness The post Do Humans Have Pheromones? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On February 14, 1960, Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb arrived at the sprawling Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and prepared to make history. At age 30, Cobb was already one of the world’s most accomplished female pilots, having been the first woman to fly the Paris Air Show and holding three world records for speed, distance, and absolute altitude for light aircraft. But all these accomplishments paled next to the challenge that now lay before her, for Cobb was about to brave the same battery of medical tests that had been used to select the Mercury Seven, America’s first astronauts.
On December 17, 1958, more than a year after the launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, the newly-formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced the creation of Project Mercury, America’s first manned space program. The goals of Project Mercury were to place a man in orbit, evaluate whether he could effectively live and work there, and return him safely to the earth. Yet despite these relatively modest aims, the technological challenge was immense, with much of the required technology – from rockets and spacecraft to guidance and life support systems to a worldwide orbital tracking system – having to be adapted from existing military equipment or developed from scratch. Yet the greatest unknown was the human who would occupy the spacecraft itself – the astronaut.
In the late 1950s, little was known about the effects of spaceflight on the human body, with doctors variously speculating that microgravity might disorient and incapacitate an astronaut, cause their eyeballs to deform, or make swallowing food impossible. Given these unknowns, at first NASA struggled to decide just who to send into space. While a variety of candidates were initially put forth including circus performers, race car drivers, mountaineers, deep-sea divers, and other adventurers, in the end the selection committee narrowed their focus to an altogether rarer breed: military test pilots. Test pilots, NASA reasoned, were already tough, resourceful, cool under pressure, and accustomed to handling experimental vehicles under extreme conditions. Based on this decision the committee produced a set of selection criteria which were distributed to all military test flying establishments. According to these requirements, the ideal astronaut candidate was under 40 years old and 5 feet 11 inches in height, married, in peak physical condition, a qualified jet test pilot with at least 1500 hours flying time, and possessed a bachelor’s degree in engineering.
Of 508 total submissions 32 pilots were selected for final evaluation, being subjected to a gruelling series of physical and psychological tests intended to push their bodies and minds to their absolute limits. Finally, on April 9, 1959, NASA unveiled America’s first group of astronauts, who would forever be known as the “Mercury Seven.” They were Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Leroy Gordon Cooper, and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton of the U.S. Air Force; Alab B. Shepard, Malcolm Scott Carpenter, and Walter M. “Wally” Schirra of the U.S. Navy; and John H. Glenn of the U.S. Marine Corps. All were chosen for their unique combination of skill, intuition, and nerve that in test pilot circles became known simply as “The Right Stuff.”
But while most agreed the Mercury Seven were the absolute best that could have been chosen under the circumstances, many wondered whether others might also have the Right Stuff – including women. Among these were Air Force Brigadier General Donald Flickinger and Dr. William R. Lovelace, who had designed many of the medical tests used to select the astronauts. At the time medical knowledge of female physiology was limited in extreme scenarios, but it was known that on average women were lighter and more compact than men, consumed less food, oxygen, and water, and were better able to withstand long periods of tedium – ideal qualities for an astronaut. But Flickinger and Lovelace knew that without hard data NASA would never consider making women astronauts, so the two conceived of a research program wherein female pilots would be run through the same evaluation tests as the male astronauts. Phase I testing would take place at Lovelace’s research clinic in Albuquerque , and Phase II at Wright-Paterson Air Force Base in Ohio. All that was needed was the right test subject.
They didn’t have long to wait. On meeting Dr. Lovelace at an aviation conference, Jerrie Cobb immediately agreed to take part in the research program. A testing date was set for February, and Cobb began training to get herself in peak physical condition. Cobb arrived in Albuquerque on Valentine’s day 1960, and the next morning her ordeal began. And we do mean ordeal: over the course of a week Cobb was subjected to nearly every test in the medical arsenal, including endless blood and urine tests, x-rays, tilt-table blood pressure tests, whole-body radiation counts, eye exams, endurance tests on stationary bicycles, EKGs and EEGs, and nightly Barium enemas.
There was also the dreaded reflex test in which an electrified needle was inserted into the ulnar nerve, and a vertigo test wherein cold water was injected into the ear to induce dizziness. But for the extremely shy Cobb the most challenging test proved to be an enunciation exercise meant to gauge the clarity of a pilot’s voice over the radio. Yet despite these hardships Cobb passed the tests with flying colours, scoring in the top 2% of all astronaut candidates. Encouraged by these results, Dr. Lovelace asked Cobb to recommend other female pilots to follow her into the test program. Poring through the records of the FAA and the Ninety-Nines – the women’s aviation association – Cobb slowly pieced together a list of twenty-four candidates. And in August 1960, Dr. Lovelace announced the results of the preliminary tests at an aeromedical conference in Stockholm, thrusting Jerrie Cobb into the media spotlight.
Despite her shyness, Cobb used her newfound fame to advocate for the inclusion of women in the U.S. space program, arguing:
“The race for space will not be a short one – nor an easy one – but it is one in which we must all participate. Out us go forward, then – there IS space for women!
Her campaigning grew even more intense in the wake of Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagrin becoming the first man in space on April 12, 1961, with Cobb stating:
“Russia may have put the first man in orbit, but the United States can now put the first woman in space – and here’s one who’d like to be riding that Redstone [rocket] tomorrow!”
Meanwhile, female pilots from around the country began arriving at the Lovelace Clinic to begin their testing. Of the initial 24 women Cobb had invited, six had declined for various reasons. The project also gained an extra candidate not originally on Cobb’s list. Upon reading an article in LIFE magazine about Jerrie Cobb’s tests, 21-year-old Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk, a flight instructor from Taos, New Mexico, called the Lovelace Clinic and volunteered for the testing program. With nearly 3000 flight hours under her belt, she was immediately accepted. Funk proved to be among the most determined of the female astronaut candidates; on learning that the stationary bike endurance record was 10 minutes, Funk pedalled for 11 before collapsing from exhaustion. While she would later claim that she had beaten John Glenn – the previous record holder – this was not the case, as endurance was only one factor in determining the test subject’s overall performance. It was one of many misconceptions that would dog the test program throughout its history and beyond.
Of the 18 women tested, 12 passed Phase I. These were Myrtle Cagle, twins Janet and Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane Hart, Jean Hixson, Rhea Hurrle, Gene Stumbough, Irene Leverton, Jerri Sloan, and Bernice Steadman. While Jerrie Cobb had coined the name “First Lady Astronaut Trainees” or FLATs for the group, it failed to stick, and the women would eventually become known simply as “The Mercury 13.” But while the 13 had reason to be optimistic about the future of the program, its trajectory had already been irrevocably altered by the involvement of a formidable figure.
Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran was a legend in the world of aviation, having broken more flying records and won more air races than any woman before or since. During the Second World War she headed the Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots, or WASPs – an all-female group that ferried aircraft from factories to air bases – while on May 18, 1953, she became the first woman to break the sound barrier. In 1936 she had married wealthy industrialist Floyd Odlum, chair of such companies as RCA and General dynamics – a union which granted her considerable political power. Though her accomplishments did much to advance the cause of women in aviation, Cochran was singularly disinterested in the issues of other women, opening doors simply so she could be the first to walk through them. According to Glennis Yeager, wife of legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager:
“Jackie would get annoyed if any women’s groups invited her to talk. “What do I have in common with a bunch of damned housewives?” she’d say.”
On learning of the FLATs program in August 1960, Cochran immediately contacted Dr. Lovelace and offered to lend her support and over $18,000 ($157,000 today) of her husband’s money to the project. But not content merely to participate and consult, Cochran immediately began rewriting the project in her image. Eighteen tests subjects, she argued, were too few to draw any scientifically useful conclusions; the project should instead involve hundreds of women, not least because many would be expected to drop out due to marriage or pregnancy. Cochran also made abundantly clear her dislike for Jerrie Cobb and her status as de facto leader of the FLATs, and in a series of press conferences attempted to sideline Cobb and position herself as the official head of the project.
And there was more bad news. Despite the best efforts of General Flickinger, Wright-Paterson Air Force Base refused to host the second phase of testing, forcing Flickinger and Lovelace to make alternate arrangements. Instead, Cobb travelled to NASA’s Lewis Research Centre in Cleveland to try out the MASTIF, a giant gyroscope-like contraption used to train astronauts how to stabilize a tumbling spacecraft. She then went to the Veteran’s Hospital in Oklahoma City to brave the “Lilly Pond”, a sensory deprivation chamber in which she was made to float in complete silence and darkness in a tank of body-temperature salt water. So complete was the isolation that most subjects began to eventually hallucinate. Despite six hours being thought the maximum a person could endure, Cobb lasted an incredible 9 hours, 40 minutes. Wally Funk would later exceed this figure by over an hour. The last phase of testing took place in May 1962 at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, where Cobb endured violent aerobatics while wired to an EEG to monitor her brainwaves and trained on the “Dilbert Dunker”, a device for training pilots how to escape from a ditched aircraft.
But this was to be the last triumph of the FLATs program. On September 12, 1961, six days before they were to arrive in Pensacola, the other 12 women received letters from the Navy informing them that Phase III testing was cancelled. Shocked and confused by this sudden reversal, Jerrie Cobb called every government official she could get a hold of, but was only able to learn that NASA saw “no requirement” for women in the space program at that time. Not helping matters was Jacqueline Cochran, who, upon being told by Dr. Lovelace that she was too old to be considered for astronaut testing, began trying to dismantle the project entirely, stating in a letter to Jerrie Cobb that:
“Women for one reason or another have always come into each phase of aviation a little behind their brothers. They should, I believe accept this delay and not get into the hair of the public authorities about it. Their time will come and pushing too hard just now could possibly retard rather than speed that date. It is better to be sound than quick.”
Unconvinced, Cobb decided to take her case directly to the Government, enlisting the help of fellow FLAT Jane Hart, wife of Senator Philip Hart of Michigan. Using her Washington connections, Hart managed not only to arrange a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Science and Astronautics, but also a private meeting with vice President Lyndon Johnson, a fierce advocate for space exploration. But while Johnson appeared sympathetic to Cobb and Hart’s cause, he explained that many other minorities also wanted to become astronauts but that there were insufficient time and resources to accommodate such requests. After the women left his office, Johnson pulled out their petition and scrawled across it “Let’s stop this now!” Though they didn’t know it yet, the fate of the Mercury 13 had already been sealed.
The first day of hearings began on July 17, 1962 with Cobb and Hart delivering their testimony. The women summarized the results of the medical tests, argued that women were just as physiologically and psychologically fit as men, and emphasized that women had always been at the forefront of every era of human exploration. Cobb concluded her testimony by stating:
“We seek only a place in our nation’s space future without discrimination. We ask as citizens of this nation to be allowed to participate with seriousness and sincerity in the making of history now. We offer you 13 women pilot volunteers.”
The committee’s response was mixed. One senator, siding with the women, wondered aloud whether the testing had been cancelled “…because men thought the women were too successful.” Another, referring to Cobb’s complaint that NASA was training chimpanzees instead of women for spaceflight, snidely asked if she was jealous of the female apes. Things only got worse as the next witness, Jackie Cochran, was called to testify. Displaying a complete lack of self-awareness regarding her considerable political connections, Cochran stated:
“I do not believe there has been any intentional or actual discrimination against women in the astronaut program to date. As one who has had much experience in high speed precision flying …and also as one who would like exceedingly to go into space, I do not feel I have been the subject of discrimination.”
Cochran went on to reiterate her arguments about not interfering with the Space Program and the need for a more comprehensive female testing program before the day’s hearings came to an end.
The next day, the committee heard testimony from astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. While both made a token effort to acknowledge that women might indeed make good astronauts, in his closing statement Glenn neatly summarized the prevailing attitude of the time:
“I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized, really. It is just a fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”
And just like that, it was all over. Despite the fact that three days of testimony had been planned, after barely a day and a half the hearings were abruptly adjourned. The House Subcommittee’s final report confirmed all the Mercury 13’s worst fears, drawing decidedly dismissive and ambivalent conclusions:
“After hearing witnesses, both Government and Non-Government, including astronauts Glenn and Carpenter, the subcommittee concluded that NASA’s program of selection was basically sound and properly directed, that the highest possible standards should continue to be maintained, and that some time in the future consideration should be given to inaugurating a program of research to determine the advantages to be gained by utilizing women as astronauts.”
Following the hearings, the Mercury 13 all went their separate ways, most going on to have long and successful careers in aviation. Jerrie Cobb, the only one of the 13 to complete all three phases of testing, moved to South America and spent over 30 years flying supplies and missionaries to remote Amazonian villages before dying of natural causes on March 18, 2019.
In the end, the first woman in space was not an American but Soviet textile worker Valentina Tereskhova, who on July 16, 1963 orbited the earth 48 times aboard the Vostok 6 capsule. However, the mission was largely a propaganda exercise; as the capsule was fully automated, Tereshkova was not required to possess any piloting skills like the American astronauts or the Mercury 13. A women would not fly into space again until 1982, when cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya launched aboard Soyuz T-7. She was followed a year later by the first American female astronaut, Sally Ride.
Over the years, a number of myths have grown up around the Mercury 13, including that they were part of an official NASA program and were denied the chance to fly in space purely out of sexism. In fact, the FLATs program was an entirely private venture, unaffiliated with NASA. And even if the 13 had been men they still would not have passed NASA’s selection criteria, as none were military test pilots or had ever flown a jet. Of course, this does not entirely absolve the Government of sexism, as women were barred from military test flying schools and would not be allowed in until 1988. Nonetheless, the Mercury 13’s test results did much to dispel longstanding myths about women’s physiological suitability for space flight, and their tireless advocacy paved the way for all female astronauts to come. The Mercury 13 may not have made it into space, but they did prove that women really did have The Right Stuff.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- TIFO Quick Fact- A Day Vs a Year on Mercury fact
- Tang was Not Invented for the Space Program
- The Large Number of Human Remains Found In Ben Franklin’s Basement
- “Don Draper in a Spacesuit” – The Life of Alan Shepard
Expand for ReferencesAckmann, Martha, The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight, Random House, 2003
Burgess, Colin, Selecting the Mercury Seven: The Search for America’s First Astronauts, Springer-Praxis Books, 2011
Carpenter, M. Scott et al, We Seven, Simon and Schuster, 1962
Bartels, Meghan, Jerrie Cobb, Record-Breaking Pilot and Advocate for Female Spaceflight, Has Died, space.com, April 19, 2019, https://www.space.com/jerrie-cobb-died-mercury-13-women-in-space.html
Qualifications for Astronauts: Hearings Before the Special Subcommittee on the Selection of Astronauts of the Committee on Science and Astronauts, U.S. House of Representatives; Eighty-seventh Congress, Second Session, July 17 and 18, 1962, Volume 2, https://books.google.ca/books/about/Qualifications_for_Astronauts.html?id=xGIVAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y
Day, Dwayne, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby! The Space Review, July 15, 2013, https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2331/1
The post The Mercury 13 appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Every morning around 7 o’clock, a small army descends upon the Indian port city of Mumbai. Dressed in distinctive white uniforms and topi or Gandhi caps, they fan out across the city’s sprawling suburbs to collect their wares before regrouping at local train stations and streaming down a network of rail lines into Mumbai’s commercial heart. There, on bicycles or on foot, they race towards their final destinations in factories and office blocks, making their deliveries with clockwork precision. By one o’clock sharp their work is complete and the army returns home, only for the whole process to start over again the next morning. And what vital commodity, what economic lifeblood to these men carry with such punctuality and reliability? Hot homemade lunches. They are the Dabbawala, a unique Mumbai institution that has kept the city’s workers fed for over 130 years – and which, without computers or an educated workforce, has managed to become one of the most phenomenally efficient and accurate delivery services in the world.
The dabbawala get their name from the dabba or ‘tiffin’, a three-tiered cylindrical metal tin commonly used to carry hot meals in India. In Hindi, wala means “worker” or “carrier”, so dabbawala literally means “tiffin tin carrier.” The practice of deliverymen carrying lunches from workers’ homes to their offices originated in the 1890s during Mumbai’s greatest period of economic expansion. Mumbai – then Bombay – first rose to prominence in the British Empire in 1861 when the American Civil War prompted the British to move their centre of cotton and textile production to what was then a backwater fishing village. The war’s end and the resulting crash in cotton prices brought this newfound prosperity to a screeching halt, but in 1869 the economy swiftly recovered as the newly-opened Suez Canal brought Indian textiles within easy reach of the global market. This boom brought with it a massive wave of migration as Indians from across the subcontinent flooded into Bombay seeking jobs in the city’s factories and offices. This influx placed a great strain upon the city’s services – particularly when it came to food. Most workers had to leave for work early in the morning, before their wives could prepare a hot meal for them. In the early days canteens and other sources of cheap fast food were virtually nonexistent, meaning most workers were forced to go hungry. Those who did manage to pack a lunch found it difficult to carry their bulky tiffins while travelling on densely-packed commuter trains. Compounding the issue was the fact that these workers came from wildly different regions and culinary traditions that only a traditional home-cooked meal would truly satisfy their palate. Bombay faced a major gastronomic crisis desperately in need of a creative solution.
Among the hundreds of thousands of workers who migrated to Bombay in the late 19th Century was Mahadu Havaji Bachuche, a Marathi from Pune district who started out loading and unloading cargo at the docks. According to legend, one day in 1890 Bachuche was commissioned by a Parsi banker to collect his lunch tiffin at his house and deliver it to his office downtown. Bachuche soon began receiving more and more requests for such deliveries, and when he was unable to keep up with demand he organized his own delivery company employing a team of 100 men. Over the years the service steadily grew, eventually becoming an integral part of the city’s commercial infrastructure. In addition to providing homemade meals from upper and middle-class employees, the dabbawala expanded their services to delivering meals from Khanawals – downtown canteens specializing in cheap fast food – to lower-class workers. In 1930 Bachuche informally unionized the dabbawala, forming the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Supplier’s Trust to standardize work conditions and wages and provide social services to his workers. This was officially registered as a charitable trust in 1956 and finally incorporated in 1968 as the Mumbai Tiffin Box Supplier’s Association – the name under which it still operates to this day.
Today, around 5,000 dabbawala work in the city of Mumbai, delivering anywhere between 175,000 and 200,000 tiffins every single day. Like Mahadu Bachuche, the founder of the organization, most belong to the Warkari sect from Maharashtra in western India. Their delivery process, honed over 130 years, runs like a well-oiled machine. Every morning between 7 and 9 AM, the dabbawala collect the tiffins from their customers’ homes in the suburbs and deliver them to special sorting centres at local railway stations. Each station is manned by four groups of dabbawala of 20 men each; each man can carry up to 35-40 tiffins – around 75kg total – meaning one station can handle up to 3200 tiffins per day. At the station, the tiffins are sorted according to region and the men split up and reassigned based on how many tiffins must be delivered to a particular area. This sorting process takes around 10-15 minutes before the special “Dabbawala Special” trains – with dedicated compartments for the tiffins and their deliverymen – arrive at 10AM. As the trains stream towards the heart of the city, the various subgroups disembark at various stations along the line and hand off the tiffins to waiting delivery crews, who complete the rest of the journey on foot or by bicycle and deliver their tiffins directly to the customers’ workplaces by 12PM. So integrated is the service into Mumbai’s daily life that most office buildings keep one elevator free at lunch to accommodate the dabbawalas. By 1PM all deliveries are complete, and the dabbawala carry out the entire process in reverse, collecting the empty tiffins and delivering them back to their original homes.
Amazingly, the entire operation is run without the help of computers or other modern technology, with one veteran dabawalla stating:
“Our computer is our head and our Gandhi Cap is the cover to protect it from the sun or rain.”
Yet despite the fact that a single tiffin might change hands up to 5 times during its journey from home to office, the organization has achieved a reliability and accuracy nearly unmatched by any delivery service in the world, making at most 1-2 mistakes every month. This translates to around one error every 8 million deliveries – or 16 million if one accounts for the fact that each tiffin is returned to its original home.
Naturally from all of this, the dabbawala have become legendary for their absolute commitment to punctuality and reliability, as Raghunath Medge, current president of the Mumbai Dabbawala Association, explains:
“People trust the dabbawala so much that they put money, train tickets, a pen the husband may have forgotten, eyeglasses, medicines, all sorts in the tiffin. Sometimes, if there’s been a quarrel, the wives may send a note that says ‘sorry.’ We pass on so many messages.”
Unsurprisingly, this reliability has caught the attention of economists and business managers around the world, with the organizational structure and methods of the dabbawala being taught in business schools as far afield as UC Berkeley. But just how is such a low-tech operation staffed by largely uneducated workers able to achieve such high standards of accuracy? Part of the answer lies in the structure of the distribution network, a hub-and-spoke system based around a limited number of central distribution points and dedicated dabbawala teams intimately familiar with specific regions of the city. This model has been compared to the data packet-switching technology that underpins the functioning of the internet. Another factor is the unique coding system used to mark and trace the tiffins. As most dabbawala are at best semi-literate, they use a system of coloured markings and alphanumeric codes painted on the tiffins to trace their origins and destinations. For example, the colour red might indicate a particular district of the city, while a series of letters and numbers might be used to denote a street, office building, and floor.
Yet another factor is the srtructure of the dabbawala organization itself. Despite its size and sophistication, the Mumbai Tiffin Box Supplier’s Association has a remarkably flat hierarchy composed of only three levels. At the top is the Governing Council, composed of a President, Vice President, General Secretary, Treasurer, and 9 directors. Below them are the Mukadams, veteran dabbawala who manage the sorting centres at the train stations. In addition to sorting tiffins for distribution, Mukadams also help resolve disputes between dabbawala and mentor new hires. Finally, there are the dabbawalas themselves, who are not employees but rather independent contractors who pay a 30,000 rupee initiation fee and 150 monthly membership fee to the Association. This in turn guarantees each dabawalla at least six days of work per week and a minimum 5000 rupee monthly income – around $70 USD – for life – an extremely reasonable wage by Indian standards:
“This system accommodates those who didn’t or couldn’t finish their studies. It’s obvious that those who score good marks go for higher education and not to do this job, but we have people who have studied up to standard twelve who couldn’t find respectable jobs. [Some of us] earn more than many padha-likha (educated) graduates.”But these guarantees come with other costs. Like all business partners, dabbawala are expected to front around 5000 rupees in capital to cover the cost of two bicycles, a wooden crate for carrying tiffins, and the signature white uniform and topi hat. Dabbawala are also strictly penalized by the Association for infractions such as absenteeism, delivery mistakes, theft, being out of uniform, and smoking or drinking while on duty. According to Association rules, no dabbawala is allowed to undercut another on delivery fees, and customers are allowed to deduct charges in the case of theft or carelessness.
Yet despite all this, dabbawala are given a great deal of leeway in their routes and methods, further increasing punctuality and reliability by encouraging a spirit of friendly competition. This freedom also instils a sense of pride, independence, and ownership:
“Farming earns a pittance, compelling us to move to the city. And the tiffin service is a business of repute since we are not working under anyone. It’s our own business, we are partners, it confers a higher status in society.”
It is a system that has stood the test of time, allowing the dabbawala to survive and thrive despite more than a century of riots, cyclones, and economic upheavals – the only serious disruption to the service occurring in 1974 due to a railway workers’ strike. According to the New York Times, the 130-year-old dabbawala industry continues to grow at a rate of 5-10% per year, and in recent years has even embraced modern technology, launching a website – www.mydabbawala.com – and an SMS-based ordering service. The effects of this modernization have been immediate and impressive; whereas in the past dabbawala relied on networks of personal contacts to find and maintain customers, the SMS system has allowed the acquisition of up to 15 new customers every day, fuelling unparalleled growth for the industry. The website has also allowed the Association to collect donations and establish a social security fund to may for members’ medical care and life insurance.
And so the ever-reliable dabbawala and their brightly-painted tiffins continue to train, cycle, and walk forward into the 21st Century, proving that while you might not be able to get a free lunch, you can at least get a hot one.
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Expand for ReferencesIn Pictures: Tiffin Time in Mumbai, BBC News, February 16, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-26128597
Bombay Dabbawallas Go High-Tech, phys.org, June 27, 2006, https://phys.org/news/2006-06-bombay-dabbawalas-high-tech.html
Roncaglia, Sara, Feeding the City: Work and Food Culture of the Mumbai Dabbawalas, OpenBook Publishers, 2013, https://archive.org/details/Feeding_the_City/page/n59/mode/2up
Nair, Supriya, The Tiffin History of Mumbai, Mint, September 27, 2011, https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/zCjPfpkfjnDtIHyjJoSNoK/The-Tiffin-History-of-Mumbai.html
Thakker, Pradip, Mumbai’s Amazing Dabbawalas, Rediff News, November 11, 2005, http://specials.rediff.com/money/2005/nov/11spec.htm
Kadri, Meena, Dabbawalas: Delivering Excellence, Works That Work, Winter 2013, https://worksthatwork.com/1/dabbawallas
Hart, Jeremy, The Mumbai Working Lunch, The Independent, March 19, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20070325193216/http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article352265.ece
‘Our Computer is Our Head and our Gadhi Cap is the Cover to Protect it from the Sun or Rain’, Indian Express, January 25, 2005, http://archive.indianexpress.com/oldStory/63369/
The post The Original Uber Eats India’s Amazing Near Century and a Half Old Dabbawala appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Ever wonder when a hill becomes a mountain? Well, it turns out that language, like the universe, likes to resist simplicity… So the answer is- it’s complicated. But that’s not very interesting, so let’s dive into it shall we?
To begin with, turning to our trusty Merriam-Webster Dictionary we have the following definition of a mountain: “a landmass that projects conspicuously above its surroundings and is higher than a hill”
Helpful…
Maybe the Oxford English Dictionary can do better? According to this bastion of English awesome, mountains are “a natural elevation of the earth surface rising more or less abruptly from the surrounding level and attaining an altitude which, relative to the adjacent elevation, is impressive or notable”
As you can see, the dictionaries of the world are slightly less than helpful at nailing down precise specifications of what constitutes a mountain vs a hill. And, it turns out, science and various countries and institutions are equally unhelpful, coming up with a variety of ways to define this in a specific case, though there are some general things to consider when trying to classify a given bump in the ground.
Now, as will come as a shock to absolutely no one, in all such cases, one of the main parameters for distinguishing hills and mountains is size. Tall enough, it’s a mountain and falling short it’s a hill. This would make the problem simple enough if that’s really the only defining attribute accounted for: Find a threshold above which you are atop a mountain and below which you are on a hill.
This is exactly what many countries, including merry old England used to do until the 1920s. Perhaps the most well-known discourse about the subject is the 1990s movie “The Englishman who Went up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain” where some Welsh villagers are appalled with Hugh Grant’s notion that their village’s mountain is – in the eyes of the Central English Bureaucratic Geographic Association – only a hill, but barely.
Moving on from size, another common idea is that a hill is a smooth rounded mound of earth, a bump in the natural landscapes, often remaining unnamed. A mountain, on the other hand, must have a steep inclination. It thus dominates the landscape, messes with the path of clouds and, of course, has a name.
But this description only pertains to the extreme examples of ragged and spikey terrain. These, however, are merely a characteristic of geologically younger mountains, such as the Andes, the Alps or the Rocky Mountains. Geological grand-dad mountains can have a more smooth surface, such as the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania.
Thus, to clarify things a bit, in 1936, Roderick Peattie, publisher of “Mountain Geography”, gave mountains three defining characteristics: They should be impressive, they “should enter into the imagination of the people that live in their shadows”, and they should have “individual character” and play a symbolic role in the local area.
If that still sounds vague to you… well, it is. But surely, there must be some harder rules? The answer is… no, not precisely.
As alluded to, until the 1920s, the British Ordnance Survey defined a mountain as a geographic feature rising higher than 1,000 feet (304 meters) from surrounding ground level. This arbitrary line is behind the plot of that Hugh Grant movie, as the villagers had to build up the additional distance needed to reach the threshold. America followed the same trend until the 1970s.
Nowadays, however, as Mr. Peattie suggested, local tradition plays a major role: Generally, a mountain should have a minimum height of 610 metres (2000 feet), but if the locals have always considered their hill a mountain, well, let’s not anger them just for the sake of size. It is, after all, not always about size, but presence and reputation. This is particularly the case if the subject observed is a single elevation in otherwise flat areas, so relativity should also be considered. Similarly, you may be a male the size of a stereotypical jacked up truck owner, but if there are no other men anywhere in a geographical area, we’re sure the ladies will still sing your praises anyway.
Today, the leaders in geography, like the United States Geological Survey (USGS), also do not have an exact definition of “mountain” and “hill”. Instead, the organization’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) tries to follow some of the aforementioned few generally accepted characteristics, again, things like climbability, is it characteristic in the landscape, what do the locals consider it, and so on and so forth.
Moving on from hills and mountains, perhaps we can better have clarity with regards to seas and lakes?
To begin with, simply put, if it has a significant amount of salt it is a sea and if it is surrounded by land then it is a lake. Of course, sometimes bodies of water fit both bills, such as the Dead Sea and the Caspian Sea, in which case people just call it as they see it, although sometimes this can have major political ramifications.
For example with the Caspian Sea, its classification is, in fact, a very political issue, as international waters have different legislative status depending if it is a sea or a lake. Adding pressure to the situation is the fact that the Caspian Sea is an area rich in oil and the countries sharing the borders – among others Russia and Iran – are not exactly known as meek in their political stances. So the status of the Caspian… waters has been an ongoing issue for decades. Before the fall of the Soviet Union. The problems were solved with bilateral treaties, as it bordered only the USSR and Iran. But after 1990, the Caspian liquid mass was surrounded by five countries: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia and Iran.
So the definition of lake or sea made a big difference: A lake would be divided equally among bordering countries. Therefore Azerbaijan, which does not have a very long coastline, would prefer this solution. For seas, on the other hand, according to the UN’s Law of the Sea, the surface and bed are allotted, nearer to shore, according to the length of relevant coastline. So Kazakhstan, which has a long front of the Caspian waters, prefered the solution of calling it “sea”.
In 2018, a convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea was held. Each neighboring country was granted jurisdiction over 24 km (15 mi) of territorial waters, plus an additional 16 km (10 mi) of exclusive fishing rights on the surface. This doesn’t add up to the full extent of the Caspian Sea, so the rest is considered international waters. The seabed, however, was not defined within the convention and remains subject to bilateral agreements between countries. Ultimately, the Caspian Sea therefore still isn’t a sea or a lake completely, but something in between.
And that’s still not where the controversy ends. When does meandering water become a river vs. a stream? Continents: What’s up with those guys? Are there five? Are there seven? Once more, it depends on the definition and it isn’t unilateral at all.
And when do landmasses stop being islands? Is Australia an island? One definition is that an island is a land mass surrounded by water and smaller than a continent. But for this we go back to the disputed definition of a continent. Oceania, for example, is defined either by its tectonic plate or by the landmasses that reach out of the water.
And so it is that, in our description of the environment, many of the words we use contain all these vague language notions that fail under the scrutiny of precise definition. Feel free to use this information to spark up a heated debate over whether the landmass you’re currently gazing upon constitutes a humble hill, or a mighty mountain!
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Bonus Fact:
The highest “mountain” of the Dutch nation is a mere 322 m, and it is located at their southern border, down at the Ardenne… There is a reason we call them the Netherlands.
But never you fear, there is a proposal for a change. A plan in the works that might elevate the Netherlands. In 2011, Thijs Zonneveld proposed the idea for a mountain. Because, sure, why not? To clarify, this would not be like the Dubai buildings, which are in essence tall sticks held up by clever static engineering. The plan was to build an actual mountain, 2 km tall and 5 km wide to dominate all of the Netherlands… Why? Well, you know… for tourism …and so that Dutch athletes have somewhere to train for the Winter Olympics without leaving the country… Tickets to the Alps are expensive apparently?
Unfortunately, with an estimated cost of more than five trillion dollars, it would probably literally be cheaper to build moon colonies than this training facility for Dutch athletes! But you know what they say: National pride is beyond cost…
A counter proposal for the costs is to fill the side of the mountains not needed for ski pistes with solar panels and wind turbines etc, so that you have a “green” mountain that also generates income or at least saves money through generating electricity. Of course, given the sky high costs, let’s just say the view from the Netherlands isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
Expand for Referenceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Englishman_who_Went_up_a_Hill_but_Came_down_a_Mountain
https://www.thoughtco.com/difference-between-hill-and-mountain-4071583
https://www.geographyrealm.com/mountain/
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/there-a-list-mountain-peak-elevations-united-states?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/08/16/is-the-caspian-a-sea-or-a-lake
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An army, Napoleon Bonaparte once noted, marches on its stomach. No matter how vast its ranks, advanced its weaponry, or brilliant its commanders, a military force full of hungry, malnourished troops is unlikely to be an effective one. The central role of food in combat effectiveness goes beyond merely supplying calories; there is no quicker way to sow demoralization or even outright mutiny than to supply one’s troops with low-quality food. Few countries have understood this better than the United States, which over the years has gone to great lengths to provide its fighting men and women with the best possible food no matter where they are deployed. Despite severe shortages of staple foodstuffs such as sugar, during the Second World War the U.S. Government made such comforts as chewing gum, coffee, chocolate, and tobacco an essential part of every serviceman’s rations. But few treats could match the morale-boosting power of ice cream. U.S. forces were addicted to the stuff, consuming nearly 135 million pounds of it in 1943 alone. So great was demand, in fact, that the U.S. Army even built miniature ice cream factories just behind the front lines, while the U.S. Navy spent $1 million dollars on a floating ice cream factory capable of churning out over 500 gallons of cold, creamy goodness every single day.
America’s obsession with ice cream goes all the way back to its founding. George Washington spent the modern equivalent of $5,000 on ice cream in a single summer, while Thomas Jefferson returned from his time as U.S. ambassador to France with a hand-cranked churn and a handwritten recipe for vanilla ice cream. Over the next 100 years, ice cream became intimately associated with childhood, seaside vacations, and other comforting experiences – so much so that ice cream became standard fare for patients convalescing in hospitals while, starting in 1921, immigrants arriving at New York’s Ellis Island were fed ice cream as part of their introduction to American life. But what really established ice cream as a cornerstone of the American experience was the 1919 passage of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the country. Prohibition forced brewers such as Anheuser-Busch, Yuengling, and Stroh’s to switch to ice cream making in order to stay afloat, while those citizens uninterested or unwilling to seek out speakeasies and other sources of illegal liquor turned to soda fountains and ice cream parlours to fill the social need previously provided by bars and saloons. The Navy had been hit even earlier in 1914, when General Order 99 banned liquor aboard all naval vessels. As a result, between 1916 and 1925, ice cream consumption in the United States skyrocketed by 55%; by the end of the decade, Americans were consuming nearly one million gallons every single day. Curiously, the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the onset of the Great Depression only drove up consumption, as ice cream was among the few comforting luxuries almost anyone could afford to indulge in. Indeed, the popular ice cream flavour Rocky Road, consisting of chocolate mixed with nuts and chunks of marshmallow, was introduced by ice cream manufacturer William Dreyer in 1929 as a metaphor for the hard times he and his fellow countrymen were experiencing.
When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, shortages of sugar, milk, vanilla, and other raw ingredients forced most Allied nations to ban or severely restrict the manufacture of ice cream and other sweet treats, with the British Government even going so far as to recommend carrots on sticks as a patriotic alternative – and for more on that, please check out our previous video How World War II Made Everybody Think Carrots Were Good for Their Eyes. When the United States joined the war in December 1941, it initially followed suit and declared ice cream a non-essential food. However, faced with vigorous lobbying by the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers and the National Dairy Council lobbied, the Government reversed its decision, even going so far as to place ice cream on its official chart of Seven Basic Foods – the precursor to the modern and hilariously bad for you “food pyramid” (as previously discussed in our video The Preposterous Pyramid). Meanwhile, the armed forces doubled down on America’s national obsession, adopting a morale-boosting policy of supplying its troops, whenever possible, with as much ice cream as they could eat.
The Navy was particularly keen on ice cream, with Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal assigning the dessert top priority after one of his assistants reported that:
“…ice cream in my opinion has been the most neglected of all the important morale factors.”
Nearly every ship in the fleet larger than a destroyer was fitted with refrigeration and ice-cream making equipment, the sweet treat being served at all hours in the “gedunk bar” or canteen. The origin of the naval slang “gedunk” is disputed, with some historians theorizing that it is an onomatopoeia derived from the sound of food falling out of a vending machine. Others posit that it comes from the popular comic strip Harold Teen, or from a Chinese word meaning “place of idleness.” Whatever the case, the gedunk bar and the ice cream it served became a revered fixture of Navy life and an unlikely source of equality in an otherwise rigidly-structured system. According to one likely-apocryphal story, one day two newly-promoted ensigns aboard the battleship USS New Jersey, flagship of the Third Fleet, went down to the ship’s gedunk bar to get some ice cream. Finding the line unacceptably long, the ensigns decided to pull rank and skip ahead past all the ordinary sailors. The moment they reached the ice cream bar, a voice barked out demanding they get back in line. The ensigns wheeled around to reprimand the insubordinate sailor, only to find their challenger to be none other than Admiral William Halsey, commander of the fleet – waiting his turn in line like everyone else.
But perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the Navy’s obsession with ice cream came on May 8, 1942 during the Battle of the Coral Sea. At around 11:30 AM, the aircraft carrier USS Lexington was hit by multiple bombs and torpedoes dropped by Japanese aircraft, setting off a series of explosions and fires and completely crippling the ship. At 5PM the ship’s captain, Frederick Sherman, gave the order to abandon ship. The crew obeyed – but not before breaking into and consuming the ship’s entire supply of ice cream, with some sailors filling their helmets and licking them clean before lowering themselves into the Pacific Ocean.
By 1945, demand for ice cream had reached such proportions that the Navy spent $1 million converting a concrete barge into a floating ice cream factory in order to supply the needs of ships too small to carry their own ice cream making equipment. Due to a shortage of metal, early in the war the Navy had contracted Pennsylvania-based firm McClosky & Company to build twenty-four 6,000-ton concrete barges to transport supplies. The barges, which had no engines and had to be towed by tugboats, were unpopular with Navy crews, and most were fobbed off to the Army’s Transportation Corps. The unnamed ice cream barge, however, quickly became one of the most popular ships in the fleet. A marvel of wartime engineering, the barge could churn out 500 gallons of ice cream every day and had refrigerated storage capacity for nearly 2,000 gallons.
But the Navy was not the only service with a sweet tooth. Throughout the war, the Army’s Quartermaster Corps provided American troops with the machinery and ingredients to manufacture some 80 million gallons of ice cream every year; in 1943 alone it shipped out 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream mix to the front lines. Given a sufficient source of refrigeration, any soldier could combine the mix with water and standard-issue powdered milk to whip up a tasty frozen treat right on the firing line. But this was apparently not good enough for the Quartermaster Corps, who, in early 1945 as Allied troops were advancing through Germany, built dozens of miniature ice cream factories just behind the lines, allowing half-pint cartons to be brought right to the troops in their foxholes.
Even those without access to standard-issue ice cream found ingenious ways of improvising their own, with some soldiers reportedly mixing snow and melted chocolate bars in their helmets to create makeshift sorbet. But the undisputed masters of battlefield ice cream were pilots. In November 1944, after three months of savage fighting, American forces finally captured the South Pacific island of Peleliu from the Japanese. This was followed by a brief lull in the fighting which left the Marine Corps aviators stationed on the island with little to do. Hoping to raise the morale of his men, J. Hunter Reinburg, commander of a squadron of Vought F4U Corsair fighter-bombers, decided to turn his aircraft into a flying ice cream machine. Under his direction, maintenance crews cut an access hatch in the side of the aircraft’s fuel drop tank and suspended a metal ammunition can inside. Reinburg then filled the can with canned milk and cocoa powder and flew his aircraft to an altitude of 33,000 feet, where the freezing temperatures and the vibration of his engine would, he hoped, churn the mixture into ice cream. But when he landed 35 minutes later, the mixture was still a sticky liquid mess. Realizing that the drop tanks were too close to the aircraft’s hot engine, Reinburg moved the ammunition cans further outboard and tried again. While this time the milk-and-cocoa mixture froze, it still did not have the creamy consistency he was seeking. Reinburg eventually solved the problem by rigging the cans with small wind-driven propellers to churn the ice cream mixture directly as it froze. Army Air Force crews flying bombers like the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator over Europe independently came up with the same technique, though like Reinburg they, too, initially placed the ice cream mixture too close to the engines. Eventually the perfect location for ice cream making was found to be the tail gunner’s turret, which was simultaneously cold and turbulent enough to produce a perfectly smooth, frozen treat – provided, of course, the aircraft and her crew returned in one piece.
The American military policy of providing its troops with ice cream endured well past the end of the Second World War. The only time it was seriously challenged was during the Korean War, when legendary Marine General Lewis “Chesty” Puller complained that ice cream was “sissy food” and that American troops would be tougher if supplied with beer and whiskey instead. The Pentagon disagreed, and issued an official statement guaranteeing that soldiers would be served ice cream a minimum of three times a week.
While many factors contributed to final Allied victory during the Second World War, ice cream played a small but crucial role in maintaining the morale of American troops and reminding them of the home they were fighting for. So the next time you dig into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, remember to take a moment and thank it for its valiant service.
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Expand for ReferencesSiegel, Matt, How Ice Cream Helped America at War, The Atlantic, August 6, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/ice-cream-military/535980/
Funderburg, Anne, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla: A History of American Ice Cream, Popular Press, University of Wisconsin, https://books.google.ca/books?id=rLVa2zMvCiUC&lpg=PA143&ots=lZQQeniaJo&dq=floating+ice+cream+barge+%241+million&pg=PA143&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=floating%20ice%20cream%20barge%20%241%20million&f=false
Hegranes, Emily, We All Scream for Ice Cream: World War II and America’s Sweet Tooth, U.S. Naval Institute, July 25, 2019, https://www.navalhistory.org/2019/07/25/we-all-scream-for-ice-cream-world-war-ii-and-americas-sweet-tooth
Stilwell, Blake, This is How WW2 Marines Made Ice Cream at 30,000 Feet, We Are the Mighty, June 12, 2021, https://www.wearethemighty.com/popular/ww2-marines-made-ice-cream/
WWII Builders of Concrete Ships and Barges, March 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20180924224714/http://shipbuildinghistory.com/shipyards/emergencylarge/wwtwoconcrete.htm
O’Brien Caitlin, That Time the Navy Spent a Million Dollars on an Ice Cream Barge, Observation Post, July 21, 2021, https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2021/07/21/that-time-the-navy-spent-a-million-dollars-on-an-ice-cream-barge/
Meija, Paula, Why the U.S. Navy Once Had a Concrete Ice Cream Barge, Atlas Obscura, July 5, 2018, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-did-navy-sailors-eat
Dunnigan, James & Nofi, Albert, Dirty Little Secrets of World War II, Perennial, New York, 1994
The post Forgotten History- The U.S. Military’s Obsessive WWII Ice Cream Crusade appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Somewhere deep in the Amazon, a monkey leaps nimbly through the rainforest canopy, blissfully unaware that it is being hunted. Down below on the forest floor, the hunter lurks patiently in the shadows, stalking its prey, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. When the moment comes, the hunter raises his long bamboo blowgun, places it to his lips, and blows hard, launching a small poison-tipped dart into the canopy. The dart strikes home, causing the monkey to flee in panic. But it lasts only a few minutes before collapsing and plummeting to the ground, dead. The hunter returns to his village with his prey slung over his shoulder, having once again exploited the deadly power of the Amazon’s most infamous poison. Once the source of countless myths and legends among early European explorers, in more recent years this substance has made a surprising transformation from deadly arrow poison to miracle drug, helping to unlock many of the mysteries of the human nervous system and make modern surgery safer and more effective. This is the fascinating story of curare [“Koo-rah-ree”].
Curare is manufactured and used by dozens of indigenous tribes across Central and South America and the Caribbean, from the Island Caribs of the Lesser Antilles to the Macusi of Guyana and the Yagua of Columbia and Peru. The term “curare” refers not to a single substance but rather a whole family of similar arrow poisons, and is derived from the Macusi word uirary meaning “it kills birds.” Over the centuries there have been numerous attempts by Western researchers to transliterate this word, leading to the substance being variously dubbed “Woorari”, “Woorara”, “Woorali”, “Ourari,” and finally “Curare”. In its traditional form, curare consist of a dark brown, sticky, resin-like paste which can easily adhere to the tips of arrows and blowgun darts. Due to the relative rarity of its ingredients and the significant time involved in its manufacture, curare is largely considered too valuable for use in warfare and is employed almost exclusively in the hunting of game. As most of the animals hunted using curare live high up in the dense rainforest canopy, great care is taken to maximize the potency of the poison so that prey animals cannot flee out of visual range before dropping to the ground. This potency is typically evaluated using animal tests – for example, by pricking a frog with a poison-tipped dark and counting the number of hops it makes before dying. For the most potent curare recipes, time to death ranges from 1-2 minutes for birds, 10 minutes for small mammals like monkeys, and up to 20 minutes for large mammals like Tapirs. As you might imagine, the process for making curare is very complex and often a closely-guarded secret, allowing certain tribes to establish local monopolies and grow wealthy on its manufacture and trade.
While it is not known exactly when curare was first discovered – or by whom – the poison first came to the attention of the Western world in the 16th Century as European explorers began pushing deeper into the South American continent. One of the first descriptions of curare comes from Pietro Martir d’Anghiera – better known as Peter Martyr – an Italian-Spanish historian who in 1530 compiled numerous accounts of South American exploration in a book titled On the New World. In the book, d’Anghiera describes battles between Spanish conquistadores and indigenous tribes in which soldiers and horses were struck by poisoned arrows and appeared to become paralyzed before eventually dying. This detail would be the first hint as to how this mysterious poison actually worked. d’Anghiera goes on to describe how curare was exclusively manufactured by “old criminal women” who were locked up in cramped huts and forced to produce the poison from various toxic plants. When these women were overcome by the toxic fumes and passed out, the poison was deemed to be ready for use. In reality, however, this account turned out to be a complete fabrication, for as later explorers and anthropologists would discover, most South American tribes believe women to be too ritually unclean to participate in the sacred rite of curare production. Indeed, allowing a woman anywhere near the manufacturing process would diminish the magical powers and thus the potency of the poison.
Another early description of curare comes courtesy of English adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh, who in 1595 travelled up the Orinoco River in modern-day Guyana in search of El Dorado, the legendary lost city of gold. But Raleigh’s account is no less fanciful than d’Anghiera’s. In his 1596 chronicle of the expedition, The Discovery of the Large Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, claims that garlic, salt, sugar, or tobacco are effective antidotes to curare poisoning – claims which are known to be laughably false.
Thanks to such rampant exaggeration and confabulation – not to mention extreme secrecy on the part of indigenous tribes – for nearly two centuries the true nature of curare remained a total mystery, the substance passing into myth and legend as one of the many exotic dangers that lurked in the Amazon jungle. It would not be until the 18th century that explorers and scientists began to shed some light on this mysterious poison.
One of the first Westerners to acquire and study a sample of curare was French explorer and mathematician Charles Marie de la Condamine. Perhaps most famous for teaming up with philosopher Voltaire to exploit a loophole in the French National Lottery in 1729, in 1735 Condamine was sent to South America on a surveying mission to measure the length of one degree of latitude. However, Condamine was more interested in finding and bringing back examples of the Cinchona tree, whose bark was the source of the antimalarial drug Quinine. To this end, he travelled widely across the continent for nearly a decade, making many valuable discoveries along the way. For example, he was the first European to encounter and describe caoutchouc or natural latex rubber, identified valuable platinum ores, and brought back seeds of several exotic plants including cacao, vanilla, and sarsaparilla. During his travels he also encountered an indigenous tribe called the Yameos, from whom he acquired a large sample of black curare resin. Upon returning to Europe, Condamine teamed up with Dutch physicians Herman Boerhaave and Gerard van Swieten and anatomist Bernhardus Albinus at the University of Leyden in the Netherlands to investigate the properties of this legendary poison. By injecting various doses into a cat, the four scientists were able to confirm that curare works by paralyzing the muscles. To their surprise, however, they discovered that the cat’s heart continued beating for up to two hours following its apparent death.
Today, we know that curare works by interfering with the function of motor neurons – that is, nerves which command the muscles to contract. At the junction between two nerves or between a nerve and a muscle or organ lies a tiny gap known as a synapse. When a nerve impulse reaches a synapse, it triggers the release of special signalling chemicals known as neurotransmitters, which cross the gap and bind to receptors on the other side, transmitting the impulse across the synapse. In motor neurons, the primary neurotransmitter is acetylcholine. Curare works by binding to the acetylcholine receptor sites, preventing the neurotransmitter molecules from transmitting nerve impulses across the synapse and resulting in the flaccid paralysis of the victim’s entire body. The first muscles to be affected are usually those of the eyes, meaning that the first signs of curare poisoning are fatigue, double vision, and difficulty keeping your eyes open. Next to go are your tongue and throat muscles, making it difficult for you to swallow or speak, followed by your limbs and all other voluntary muscles. But while this in itself sounds bad enough, unfortunately it gets worse. For you see, curare only works on the voluntary and semi-voluntary muscles, meaning that your heart will be unaffected and continue to beat. However, curare does paralyze the diaphragm and intercostal muscles responsible for breathing, meaning your death will be a slow and agonizing one by asphyxiation. Even more horrifying, curare has no effect on human consciousness, meaning you will be fully awake – but unable to move or even call out for help – as you slowly suffocate. Lovely. About the only good news is that, as we shall see, it is now possible to survive curare poisoning thanks to advances in medical technology.
In addition to discovering that curare does not affect the heart, Condamine and his colleagues also found that the poison is harmless when swallowed and must be injected through the skin in order to take effect. Indeed, Western explorers reported that Amazonian tribes readily ate the meat of animals killed with curare with no special preparation. In the 1850s, famous French physiologist Claude Bernard would conduct even more detailed experiments on curare’s effects and mechanism of action, establishing much of what we now know about the poison.
The Leyden team’s research was next taken up by English botanist Edward Bancroft, who in his travels throughout South America became the first European to discover the botanical source of curare and witness its manufacture. This process was also recorded by German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who travelled widely throughout the Americas between 1799 and 1804. While recipes vary from region to region, the main ingredient in curare is typically the vine Strychnos toxifera, first identified and classified by German explorers and brothers Robert and Richard Schomburgk in the 1850s. This, along with other plants including Chondrodendron tomentosum and Sciadotenia toxifera – and sometimes even ant or snake venom – are crushed and boiled in water for up to two days, until the residue boils down to a black, sticky substance resembling pitch or molasses. Then, slivers of the Cokarito palm are dipped into the mixture and used to smear it on the tips of arrows and blowgun darts. While the alkaloids responsible for curare’s toxicity mainly come from the Strychnos toxifera vine, the other ingredients act as adjuvants to increase its effectiveness – for example, by accelerating its absorption into the bloodstream or preventing the blood around the arrow or dart wound from clotting. In 1895, German Pharmacologist Rudolf Böhm attempted to classify the different types of curare by the type of container they were stored in, identifying three main categories: tube curare, stored in sections of bamboo, pot curare, stored in terracotta pots, and calabash curare, stored in hollow gourds. This system, however, was later found to have little factual basis. In reality, different tribes simply have different recipes for curare and different containers in which they typically store the finished product, the two being unrelated to one another.
In 1811, English surgeon Benjamin Brodie repeated Condamine, Boerhaave, van Swieten, and Albinus’s experiments, confirming that curare paralyzes the breathing muscles while leaving the heart unaffected. Crucially, however, he postulated that if the victim’s lungs could be kept mechanically ventilated using bellows, then life could be sustained until the poison wore off, allowing them to make a complete recovery. This hypothesis was confirmed in 1825 by fellow Englishman Charles Waterton, in a series of now-classic experiments conducted on a female donkey. Waterton, who had made his name as a South American explorer by – among other things – wrestling an alligator and a boa constrictor, first applied a tourniquet to one of the donkey’s legs to cut off blood flow before injecting the leg with curare. The donkey suffered no ill effects. But when Waterton removed the tourniquet, allowing blood from the leg to recirculate into the donkey’s body, the animal collapsed and stopped breathing within minutes, confirming that curare does not act locally and must be carried throughout the body to be effective. Once the donkey had collapsed, Waterton proceeded to insert bellows into its windpipe and artificially ventilate the animal for two hours until the poison wore off. The donkey made a full recovery with no lingering effects and lived for another 25 years, having been put to pasture as reward for her medical contributions. Waterton might not have known it at the time, but a century later this remarkable achievement would form the basis of a revolution in surgical science.
Based on these experiments, Waterton began to wonder whether curare might have medical applications. Observing that the action of curare appeared to be the exact opposite of tetanus, rabies, and strychnine poisoning, he suggested it be used in the treatment of these afflictions. Waterton had a particular interest in rabies, having been bitten by a dog as a child. Unfortunately, he never had the chance to test these theories. The closest he got was in 1839 when one Mr. Isaac Phelps, a police inspector for the city of Nottingham, was bitten by a rabid dog he was attempting to rescue from a deep hole. The wound healed and for a while Phelps appeared well, but seven weeks later he began displaying the classic symptoms of rabies – then known as hydrophobia – and was admitted to hospital. One doctor, who had read of Waterton’s theories, called for him at his home 80 kilometres away. Unfortunately, by the time Waterton arrived with his curare preparation, Phelps had already died. While Scottish physician George Harley would later prove that Waterton was correct about curare’s usefulness in treating tetanus and strychnine poisoning, the poison is unfortunately useless against rabies, which directly attacks the central nervous system.
It would be another 100 years before curare finally found a place in the pharmacopeia. In the meantime, however, the poison would play a vital role in solving a medical mystery and expanding our understanding of the human nervous system. In 1900, Austrian physiologist Jacob Pal was conducting experiments on digestive function using dogs. By this time, curare was commonly used to paralyze laboratory animals so that their automatic physiological responses to various drugs and treatments could be more easily observed. On one occasion, Pal injected a paralyzed dog with the toxin physostigmine, extracted from Physostigma venenosum – better known as the Calabar Bean. To his shock, the dog suddenly resumed breathing on its own. Pal had accidentally discovered the first known substance which could counter the effects of curare, unearthing a vital clue as to how the poison actually worked. This discovery in turn led to another dramatic medical breakthrough 35 years later. In 1935, Dr. Mary Walker at St. Alfege’s Hospital in Greenwich, England was studying a rare neurological disorder known as Myasthenia gravis, which causes profound and sustained muscle weakness and fatigue. After observing that patients with the disease were uniquely sensitive to small doses of curare, Walker hypothesized that the affliction was caused by a curare-like substance produced by the patient’s own body. Having read about Jacob Pal’s discovery three decades before, Walker decided to try injecting her patients with physostigmine. The results were dramatic – so dramatic, in fact, that the sudden and seemingly complete recovery of her patients is now widely known as the “Miracle at St. Alfeges.” It is now known that Myasthenia gravis is not, in fact, caused by a natural curare-like substance but rather by an auto-immune disorder that attacks the acetylcholine receptors in the motor neuron synapses. Physostigmine, meanwhile, acts as a cholinesterase inhibitor, interfering with the enzymes that break down acetylcholine molecules after a nerve impulse is sent, effectively resetting the nerve for the next impulse. This increases the amount of neurotransmitters in the synapses, allowing the nerves to overcome the effects of the disease.
Nonetheless, Walker’s discovery led to the discovery of acetylcholine’s role in motor nerve transmission, which had been hypothesized by English pharmacologist Sir Henry Dale in 1914. After two decades of research, Dale, along with German psychobiologist Otto Lowei, finally confirmed the function of acetylcholine, the two men sharing the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their groundbreaking discoveries.
A year earlier, the composition of curare was finally worked out by English chemist Harold King, who determined that the most active toxins in the sticky mixture were the alkaloids curarine and tubocurarine. This attracted the attention of pharmaceutical company E.R. Squibb & Sons, who, intrigued by the potential medical uses for the poison, began purifying and selling small amounts of d-tubocurarine to medical researchers under the brand name intocostrin.
In 1939, curare finally saw its first medical application when American psychiatrist Abram Elting Bennett used it to paralyze patients undergoing metrazol-induced convulsive therapy. The precursor to electroconvulsive or shock therapy, this procedure was used to treat various psychiatric disorders including depression and schizophrenia and involved inducing seizures using a drug called Metrazol or Cardiazol. The problem was, the convulsions induced by this drug were so severe that patients often ended up injuring themselves. By paralyzing the patient with curare first, the procedure was rendered much safer – and for more on how this bizarre treatment came to be, please check out our previous video Who Invented Shock Therapy and Does it Actually Work?
But it was not until 1942 that curare would finally find its most prominent medical application. It was in that year that anesthesiologist Dr. Harold R. Griffith and resident Enid Johnson of Montreal’s Homeopathic Hospital, first experimented with the use of intocostrin in surgery. While surgical anaesthesia had been around since 1946 and was well-established a century later, it still wasn’t a perfect technology. While early general anaesthetics like ether, chloroform, and cyclopropane quickly and efficiently rendered patients unconscious, they did not completely inhibit their automatic responses, meaning patients could still twitch and move about on the operating table, with sometimes tragic results. And while such movements could be eliminated by administering more anaesthetic, this risked inducing respiratory arrest and other deadly side effects – especially in patients with severe medical conditions or bad hearts. Griffith and Johnson’s solution was to administer intocostrin in combination with the anaesthetic, inducing complete paralysis with none of the side effects and allowing less anaesthetic to be used. As he later recalled in 1944:
In June, 1939, Dr. L.H. Wright, of E.R. Squibb & Sons of New York, told me of this new work with curare and remarked how nice it would be if we could use some of it in anaesthesia to relax the muscles of our patients when they got a little too tense. I agreed that such an effect is often to be desired but was too horrified at the old poisonous reputation of curare to be seriously interested. I met Dr. Wright again in October, 1941, and asked him how he was getting on with curare in anaesthesia. He said he still thought the idea was sound, but that so far as he knew no one had tried it. I thought I had better not pass up a good thing any longer, so Dr. Wright kindly sent me some ampoules of intocostrin and in January, 1942, we began using it in the operating room of the Homeopathic Hospital in Montreal. We administered the drug intravenously to patients under general anaesthesia, and found that it acts quickly, producing in less than a minute a dramatic and complete relaxation of the skeletal muscles. Even under the most favourable circumstances, and with every general anaesthetic agent, occasions do arise when it seems impossible to get the patient sufficiently relaxed to make abdominal exploration or to close a friable peritoneum. To have a drug at hand which will give the patient at these critical moments complete relaxation, uniformly, quickly and harmlessly, has seemed to us a blessing to both surgeon and anaesthetist.”
So groundbreaking was this development that anesthesiologists often divide the history of surgery into “before Griffith” and “after Griffith”. Of course, the use of curare and its derivatives in this fashion also paralyses the patient’s lungs, requiring them to be artificially ventilated throughout the surgery. While this was initially done using a hand-pumped rubber bulb, in the late 1940s and early 1950s inventors like John Emerson and Forrest Bird developed mechanical ventilators which used electric or pneumatic motors to automatically breathe for the patient. These twin developments revolutionized surgery, allowing increasingly complex procedures to be performed more safely and with fewer side effects and postoperative complications. While curare derivatives like intocostrin have since been supplanted by safer but related paralytics like pancuronium, the basic procedure remains relatively unchanged since Griffith’s pioneering experiments. Like botox, digitalis, and other poisons-turned-medicines, curare has certainly come a long way from its deadly Amazonian origins.
Of course, as you might expect from a deadly poison, curare also has its darker uses. Indeed, pancuronium bromide is one of three drugs used combination for medical euthanasia and lethal injection – the official method of execution in 28 U.S. states. The other two drugs are sodium thiopental to induce unconsciousness and potassium chloride to stop the heart. While this method is intended to be quick and painless, as previously mentioned, paralytics like pancuronium have no effect on consciousness, meaning that it is impossible to tell whether a person is conscious during the procedure. This has led to speculation that many prisoners may actually experience severe pain during their executions, especially if an inadequate dosage of barbiturates is administered. Such fears have led eleven U.S. states to switch to a single-drug lethal injection method wherein death is induced via an overdose of sodium thiopental.
And if any murder mystery fans in the audience are wondering if curare has even been used in a crime, it most certainly has. Pancuronium was the lethal agent of choice of Efren Saldivar, a serial killer who is estimated to have killed up to 200 patients between 1988 and 1998 while working as a respiratory therapist at Adventist Medical Centre in Glendale, California. The drug was also used by four paramedics nicknamed the “Skin Hunters” to kill five elderly hospital patients in the Polish city of Lodz- the personal details of whom the killers sold to competing funeral homes. And finally, more than a century ago, curare was at the centre of a now long-forgotten assassination attempt. In 1916, a group of socialists and pacifists known as the Adullamites plotted to assassinate British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Paymaster General Arthur Henderson in the hopes of ending the First World War. At the heart of the conspiracy was Alice Wheeldon, a women’s suffrage and anti-war activist who ran a chemist’s shop in Southampton – along with her two daughters and son-in-law. But before the plot could be carried out, Wheeldon’s group was infiltrated by one ‘Alex Gordon’, an agent for British Military Intelligence. When Gordon informed his handlers of the plot, they sent another agent, Herbert Booth, to gather more information. Booth must have been one hell of an actor, for he soon ingratiated himself to the conspirators to the point that they selected him as Lloyd George’s assassin! Given an air pistol and pellets dipped in curare, Booth was instructed to hide out on Walton Heath Golf Course in Surrey, and there ambush the Prime Minister. Instead, Booth betrayed the plot to his handlers and the conspirators were arrested and charged with treason. Five were put on trial and three found guilty, with Alice Wheeldon being sentenced to ten years in prison and her daughter and son-in-law seven and five years, respectively. A potentially disastrous wartime assassination was thwarted, and Lloyd George doubtless breathed a great – and thankfully non-paralyzed – sigh of relief.
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Expand for ReferencesCurare (n.), Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/curare
Curare, a South American Arrow Poison, https://web.archive.org/web/20120728084632/http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbotany/Curare/
Lee, M.R, Curare: the South American Arrow Poison, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh, 2005, https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/curare.pdf
Birmingham, A.T, Waterton and Wouralia, British Journal of Pharmacology, April 1999, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1565951/\
Gray, T. Cecil, The Use of D-Tubocurarine Chloride in Anaesthesia, Royal College of Surgeons of England, April 17, 1947, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1940167/?page=1
From Arrow Poison to Surgical Muscle Relaxant, Ye Olde Log, https://web.archive.org/web/20080509154855/http://www.yeoldelog.com/medicinal/curare.shtml
Milner, Daniel, From the Rainforests of South America to the Operating Room: a History of Curare, Summer 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20110730143213/http://www.med.uottawa.ca/historyofmedicine/hetenyi/milner.html
The post The Amazonian Arrow Poison that Revolutionized Medicine appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In late 1961, Drs. Philip Vogel and Joseph Bogen, neurosurgeons at the California College of Medicine in Los Angeles, were preparing to carry out a radical new procedure. The patients under their care suffered from severe epilepsy, which despite their doctors’ best efforts had resisted all attempts at conventional treatment. One such patient, a 48-year-old former paratrooper identified in medical records as W.J, had suffered a head injury during a combat jump in WWII and soon began experiencing frequent blackouts and convulsions, with one particularly severe episode in 1953 lasting three full days. Vogel and Bogen suspected that these seizures were amplified by rogue neural signals spreading from one side of the brain to the other, and hoped that their severity might be reduced by interrupting communication between the two. This procedure, known as a corpus callosotomy, involved severing the corpus callosum, the bundle of white matter that bridges the two hemispheres and allows signals to cross from one to the other.
Vogel and Bogen had every reason to believe the procedure would work, as experimental corpus callosotomies performed on cats and monkeys had produced few observable side effects. Psychologist Karl Lashley had even speculated that the corpus callosum served no greater purpose than to “keep the hemispheres from sagging.” And indeed, upon waking from their surgeries the epileptic patients seemed entirely normal, with one even quipping that he had a “splitting headache.” But as they recovered, it soon became apparent that something wasn’t quite right. The patients began to favour the right side of their bodies in everyday activities, and seemed oblivious to any stimulation coming from the left side. For example, if they bumped their left arm they would not notice, and if an object was placed in their left hand they would deny its existence. Intrigued by this strange behaviour, in 1962 psychologists Roger Sperry and his graduate student Michael Gazzaniga of the California Institute of Technology began a series of groundbreaking experiments to find out just what was going on inside the split-brain patients’ heads. What they discovered would change our understanding of the human brain forever.
It has long been known that the brain’s functions are not evenly distributed, with each hemisphere specializing in different tasks. For example, in 1861 French physician Paul Broca discovered that damage to a specific region of the left frontal lobe – a region now known as Broca’s Area – resulted in various forms of aphasia – the inability to speak or understand words. This and other observations lead to the left hemisphere being recognized as the primary language centre of the brain. But until the experiments of Sperry and Gazzaniga, neurologists did not truly understand the full extent of this specialization. The split-brain patients provided a golden opportunity to study hemispheric specialization, for the surgery had essentially left them with two, nearly-independent brains. Contrary to Karl Lashley’s dismissive appraisal, the corpus callosum is in fact a highly sophisticated and essential part of the brain, containing some 200 million neural fibres capable of transmitting one billion bits of information per second. This is vital to normal functioning of the brain, for due to a quirk of vertebrate evolution our nervous systems are contralateral, meaning that each hemisphere receives information largely from the opposite side of the body. For example, the optic nerves, which convey visual information from our eyes to our occipital lobes, cross over at a junction called the optic chiasm, meaning that information from the right eye is transmitted to the left hemisphere and vice-versa. Ordinarily this counter-intuitive arrangement works just fine as the information is immediately transmitted to the correct hemisphere via the corpus callosum. But in split-brain patients this channel of communication no longer exists, meaning that information transmitted to a particular hemisphere stays in that hemisphere. And this is where things start to get weird.
Sperry and Gazzaniga probed the patients’ hemispheres individually by stimulating the opposite side of the body – for example, by presenting an image to the right eye to stimulate the left hemisphere. In one early experiment, they flashed a series of lights across the patients’ field of view. When asked to report when they had seen a light, the patients only reported seeing lights flashing on the right. But when asked to point whenever they saw a light, they successfully reported seeing lights on both sides. Next, Sperry and Gazzaniga projected the word HEART such that the letters HE appeared in the patient’s left-hand field of vision and ART in their right-hand field of vision. When asked to report what they saw, the patients verbally responded “ART”; but when asked to point to the word they saw using their left hand, they pointed to HE. Similarly, if an object was placed in the patient’s right hand, they were easily able to name it, though when asked to point to an image of the same object using their right hand, were unable to do so. When the sides were reversed, the patients could easily point to the object, but, much to their confusion, were unable to name it. This and similar experiments indicated that language processing abilities are almost entirely localized in the left hemisphere, while the right hemisphere specializes in visual perception tasks such as recognizing faces and emotions and spotting differences between objects. This verbal-perceptual divide is even baked in from birth, with most infants favouring the left side of their mouths when smiling and the right side when babbling.
But as is often the case in biology, Sperry and Gazzaniga soon discovered that things weren’t quite so clear-cut, and that the right hemisphere was a far more capable communicator than previously believed. For example, one patient, when presented with a picture of his girlfriend in his left eye, was unable to speak her name, but was able to spell it out using Scrabble tiles. Sperry and Gazzaniga also found that while the left hemisphere excels at making straightforward word associations, the right hemisphere is better at recognizing subtler relationships and insinuations. For example, when the left hemisphere was presented with the word foot, it was better at picking out a related term like heel from a list of words. But when the right hemisphere was presented with two additional words, cry and glass, it more easily picked out the connecting word – in this case, cut.
But as strange as these discrepancies are, the experience of living with a split brain can sometimes be even more bizarre, with patients feeling as though they literally have two separate brains – brains which are often at odds with one another. For example, patients have reported doing up their shirt buttons with one hand only to have the other hand spontaneously unbutton them, or placing items in a shopping cart with one hand only for the other to place them back on the shelf. Many patients are even able to copy two different images using each of their hands, though given the right hemisphere’s greater spacial reasoning capabilities, the left hand is generally superior at this task than the right. In rare cases this phenomenon can even take the form of “alien hand syndrome,” in which a patient’s hand appears to have a mind of its own and sometimes attempts to strangle its owner or others. This is also sometimes known as “Dr. Strangelove Syndrome” after Peter Sellers’ character in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film who exhibits similar symptoms. Unfortunately there is no cure for the condition other than keeping the offending hand occupied with other tasks and restraining it at night to prevent injuries.
In such cases of independent limb movement, the offending limb is almost always the left one. This reflects what is perhaps Sperry and Gazzaniga’s greatest discovery: the executive dominance of the left hemisphere. Their and later experiments revealed that much of the right hemisphere’s reasoning and decision-making processes are entirely unconscious and must be mediated and interpreted by the dominant left hemisphere for us to become aware of them. When the connection between the hemispheres is severed, this mediation and interpretation function is lost, hence why the left-hand limbs – controlled by the right hemisphere – are able to act without their owner’s conscious knowledge. This effect also applies to logical reasoning. For example, when one split-brain patient was shown a picture of a chicken foot in their right-hand visual field and a snowy field in their left-hand visual field and asked to choose the closest association from a list of words, they paired a chicken with the chicken foot and a shovel with the snowy field. However, when asked to rationalize why they had chosen the shovel, the patient responded “to clean out the chicken coop.” This indicated that the image presented to the left hemisphere – the chicken coop – had overridden that presented to the right hemisphere in the patient’s mind.
This extreme divide between the functions, capabilities, and even the “personalities” of the two hemispheres stunned the psychology community, and lead Roger Sperry to conclude in 1974 that:
“…[each hemisphere is] indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and … both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”
Sperry and Gazzaniga’s experiments revolutionized our understanding of how the brain organizes different perceptual and conceptual tasks, and for this work Sperry, along with David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, were awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology. Sperry continued to study split-brain patients until his death in 1994, while Gazzaniga still pursues this line of research to this day.
If all this talk of hemispheric specialization sounds a bit familiar, it may be due to the popular belief that people are predominantly “left” or “right-brained” depending on their particular cognitive strengths. The reasoning goes that since the left hemisphere specializes in language and logical reasoning and the right hemisphere in visual and spacial reasoning, those with a mathematical or scientific bent are predominantly “left-brained” while those with a more creative, artistic temperament are “right-brained.” But just like the notion that we only use 10% of our brains, the whole “left-brained”/“right-brained” dichotomy is nothing but a load of bunkum. Numerous studies using functional MRI have shown that both sides of the brain are used more or less equally regardless of the cognitive task being performed. And this makes sense, as supposedly “left-brain” fields like mathematics and science are also profoundly creative activities, while supposedly “right-brain” activities like art often require a great deal of analytical precision. So, sorry, but all those online quizzes promising to reveal your cognitive style are about as scientific as a horoscope.
As for the split-brain patients themselves, the vast majority reported a significant reduction in the frequency and severity of their seizures. While this improvement came at the cost of living with a pair of often uncooperative brains, most eventually learned to cope with this strange existence in a variety of fascinating ways. Sperry and Gazzaniga even observed one of these adaptations, which they called “cross-cuing,” in one of their experiments. This experiment involved flashing either a red or green light in the patient’s left-hand visual field and asking them to report which colour they had seen. If the patient answered correctly more than half the time – as would be expected if they were just guessing – this would indicate that the right hemisphere had at least some spoken language ability. Strangely, when the experimenters allowed the patient to make a second guess, their scores improved dramatically. After a while, Sperry and Gazzaniga realized that when the patient’s right hemisphere saw one colour but heard the patient say the other, it unconsciously caused the patient to frown. The patient’s left hemisphere then detected this frown and deduced that it had guessed wrong. In this manner, split-brain patients are able to use subtle physical cues to allow their right and left hemispheres to communicate to a limited extent. Studies of children born without a corpus callosum also indicate that the hemispheres also communicate via other means, meaning that split-brained patients’ brains may not be as disconnected as we once thought. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: the brain, uh, finds a way.
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Expand for ReferencesMyers, David, Psychology, Worth Publishers, NY, 2004
Experiment Module: What Split Brains Tell Us About Language, McGill University, https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/experience_bleu06.html
Gazzaniga, Michael, The Split Brain in Man, Scientific American 217(2), 1967, https://people.psych.ucsb.edu/gazzaniga/michael/PDF/The%20Split%20Brain%20in%20Man.pdf
Metcalfe, Janet; Funnell, Margaret & Gazzaniga, Michael, Right-Hemisphere Memory Superiority: Studies of a Split-Brain Patient, University of California Davis, May 1995, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/metcalfe/PDFs/Metcalfe%20Funnell%20et%20al%201995.pdf
No, You’re Not Left-Brained or Right-Brained, Psychology Today, February 15, 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/consciousness-self-organization-and-neuroscience/201802/no-you-re-not-left-brained-or-right
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On April 6, 1945, the Imperial Japan launched Operation Ten-Go, a desperate last-ditch naval attack against the Allied fleet supporting the invasion of Okinawa. Supported by the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers, the charge was led by the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy, the mighty battleship Yamato. A quarter-kilometre long, displacing 65,000 tons, and armed with no fewer than nine 46-centimetre guns firing one-and-a-half-ton shells, Yamato was the largest and most powerful battleship ever built and considered by Japanese high command to be a nigh-unstoppable weapon. But the glorious last ride of the Imperial Navy was not to be; before the task force could even reach Okinawa, it was set upon by over 400 warplanes launched from American aircraft carriers. Less than five hours after first contact, Yahagi, four destroyers, and even the mighty Yamato had been sent to the bottom. More than 4,000 Japanese sailors died in the engagement, for the loss of only 12 U.S. airmen. It was Japan’s last major naval operation of the war, and marked the end of an era. The battleship, once the last word in naval firepower, no longer ruled the seas. In retrospect, the Japanese should have seen this coming, for they themselves had taught the British Royal Navy this same lesson nearly four years before. This is the tragic story of the sinking of Force Z.
After the First World War, the British Empire reached its greatest extent, encompassing more than 26% of the world’s land area and 23% of its population. However, by the 1930s what had long been Britain’s greatest strength was fast becoming its greatest liability. The Empire’s far-flung colonies could only be protected and held together by the Royal Navy, and with post-war budget cuts and the onset of the Great Depression even this mighty force found itself stretched dangerously thin. This made Britain’s overseas territories tempting targets for other up-and-coming imperial powers – including the Empire of Japan. Following their stunning victory over the Russian Empire in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese had come to see themselves as the natural masters of Asia and had pursued a policy of aggressive territorial expansion known euphemistically as the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. In 1910 the Japan annexed the Korean Peninsula, while in 1931 Japanese troops annexed the Chinese province of Manchuria and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. This was followed by a full-scale invasion of southern China in July 1937, while in September 1940 the Japanese captured the French colony of Indochina – today Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
The latter development particularly rattled the British, for it placed Japanese forces within easy striking distance of Hong Kong, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies – colonies rich in the rubber, tin, and oil the Japanese needed to feed their imperial war machine. Anticipating such an invasion, in 1919 the British had established a large naval base at Singapore and developed the so-called “Singapore Strategy” to deter Japanese aggression. This strategy, developed from a series of war plans over 20 years, was to be carried out in three phases. At the onset of a Japanese attack, the British garrison would man and defend “Fortress Singapore”, holding out while the British Home fleet sailed for the Far East via the Mediterranean, Suez Canal, and Ceylon – today Sri Lanka. On arrival, the fleet would retake Hong Kong and relieve Singapore before sailing on to blockade the Japanese Home Islands. Since the Royal Navy was still the most powerful naval force in the world, the British were confident the Japanese would not risk a direct confrontation and would quickly capitulate. The Singapore Strategy became the cornerstone of British defence strategy in the Far East, its effectiveness considered so assured that, as Royal Navy Captain Stephen Roskill wrote in 1937:
“…the concept of the ‘Main Fleet to Singapore’ had, perhaps through constant repetition, assumed something of the inviolability of Holy Writ”.
But while the Singapore Strategy was impressive on paper, a combination of poor planning, budgetary limitations, political interference, and plain hubris led the British to make a series of major strategic blunders. For example, planners believed that the monsoon season would prevent Japanese forces from crossing the Gulf of Thailand from Indochina to Malaya until at least February 1942. Consequently, most of the aircraft defending the peninsula were diverted for service in the Middle East and Russia. Racist attitudes towards the Japanese also led the British to underestimate the capability of their armed forces, leaving Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaya poorly garrisoned. As we shall see, this was to have disastrous consequences for the British Empire in the Far East.
There was also another major complicating factor: Nazi Germany. On September 3, 1939, the same day Britain declared war on Germany, the German navy launched a campaign of unrestricted submarine and surface warfare against British and Allied merchant shipping, hoping to starve the island nation into submission. Suddenly, nearly the entire Royal Navy was called upon to counter the Nazi threat, leaving few ships available to defend the Far East. In desperation, Britain called upon the U.S. Navy to contribute ships from its Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. But the United States, which was still officially neutral in the conflict, was hesitant to deploy its ships in defence of British colonial interests, and decided instead to focus its efforts on the Atlantic theatre once it entered the war. The British therefore developed a strategy of replacement, whereby American ships deployed into the Atlantic would free up British ships for deployment to the Far East. The full build-up of this Eastern Squadron was to be completed within 80 days after the entry of Japan and the United States into the war, which was anticipated to occur sometime in late 1941 or early 1942.
Thankfully, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt chose not to wait until the United States had officially entered the war to intervene in the Atlantic, meaning that by August 1941 there was sufficient U.S. Naval presence in the Atlantic for an Eastern Squadron to be deployed ahead of the anticipated Japanese invasion. The question now became: which ships to send? While Prime Minister Winston Churchill favoured sending the most advanced King George V-class battleships, First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound and Admiral of the Home Fleet Sir John Tovey disagreed, arguing that the class’s design made it unsuitable for operations in tropical climates. They also wished to keep the more powerful vessels in home waters to counter the German warships Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau. In the end, however, circumstances decided the matter, for there were only six capital ships in a fit enough state to reach the Far East before the spring of 1942: the King George V-Class battleship HMS Prince of Wales, the Renown-class battlecruiser HMS Repulse, and the four Revenge-class battleships HMS Revenge, Resolution, Royal Sovereign, and Ramillies.
HMS Prince of Wales was the Royal Navy’s newest and most advanced battleship. Launched in May 1939, she was still being fitted out when on May 24, 1940 she was called out to face the German battleship Bismarck. With workmen from the Vickers engineering firm still aboard scrambling to get her radar and gun-laying systems online, she steamed into the Battle of the Denmark Strait, receiving seven direct hits including a 15 shell that ricocheted through her compass platform killing everyone except the Captain and a signalman. But she gave as good as she got, and managed to land two crippling hits that contributed to the Bismarck’s eventual destruction three days later. After being repaired, in August 1940 Prince Of Wales carried Prime Minister Churchill across the Atlantic to a secret conference with President Roosevelt, then in September was assigned to Force H, escorting supply convoys to the Mediterranean island of Malta.
HMS Repulse, on the other hand, was a much older ship. Launched in January 1916, she participated in the 1917 Battle of Heligoland Bight – her only action of the First World War – and in the 1930s escorted merchant ships during the Spanish Civil War. Due to lessons learned during the war her armour and guns were upgraded in 1918 and again in 1934 and 1940. She was scheduled to receive a further upgrade to her antiaircraft batteries, but her assignment to the Far East task force resulted in this plan being abandoned, leaving Repulse vulnerable to air attack.
The Revenge-class battleships were even older, having been launched between 1913 and 1914. Considered obsolete and no match for the latest Imperial Japanese Navy vessels, the battleships were instead assigned to the 3rd Battle Squadron based in Ceylon, arriving in September 1941.
Meanwhile, Prince of Wales, Repulse, and the escorting destroyers HMS Electra, Express, and Hesperus were organized into Force G, under the command of Admiral Sir Thomas Phillips. Prime Minister Churchill and his naval advisors continued to argue over the composition of the squadron, so in the end a compromise solution was reached. Force G was ordered to sail for Cape Town, South Africa, where it would anchor and await instructions. The Admiralty would then review the strategic situation and decide whether to send the ships on to Singapore or retain them for use in home waters. Repulse, which had just finished escorting a supply convoy around the Cape of Good Hope, was ordered to Ceylon to rendezvous with the rest of the force. While Churchill had recommended the force be escorted by an aircraft carrier, the only available ship, HMS Indomitable, had run aground in Jamaica and would not be ready to sail until November. So, with time of the essence, Force G set off for Singapore without air cover, sailing from Greenock in Scotland on October 25, 1941. Though a far cry from the massive fleet called for by the original Singapore Strategy, Churchill was confident that the “smallest number of the best ships” would be more than enough to deter the Japanese.
Force G arrived in Cape Town on November 16. Admiral Phillips expected to remain in South Africa for at least seven days, a week of social events and media coverage having been planned for propaganda and morale-boosting purposes. But before the Prince of Wales even reached Cape Town, Phillips received orders to depart as soon as possible and rendezvous with Repulse in Ceylon. The anticipated review of Force G’s mission was, in fact, a ruse meant to deceive Winston Churchill; the Admiralty had already committed to carrying out the Singapore Strategy in full.
Meanwhile, Repulse was in Durban, South Africa, preparing to sail to Ceylon. There, her crew received a disturbing portent of things to come as South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts came aboard and delivered an address. While no official record of this speech survives, Able Seaman Ted Matthews later recalled the sobering tone:
“From the onset he shattered our conceptions of the Japanese military stating in clear terms that if hostilities erupted we weren’t going to be confronted by a race of inferiors. To the contrary he felt the Japs weren’t in the least concerned by the possibility of conflict with Britain. He also made it clear despite what we’d been told in the past that they possessed a fully modern airforce. Though the one comment that’s never left me were the fatalistic words he feared many of us wouldn’t be returning from this mission and he’d pray for our safety during the troubled times ahead. None of us could possibly have imagined the accuracy of this prophecy.”
Prince of Wales and her escorts remained in Cape Town for only two days, departing on the afternoon of November 18. On November 29, Force G reached Ceylon, where it was joined by Repulse and the destroyers HMS Encounter and HMS Jupiter. Hesperus had already departed before the force reached Cape Town. Admiral Phillips disembarked and flew on to Singapore and the Philippines to meet with Allied commanders, while the fleet sailed on without him, finally reaching Singapore on December 2. On arrival, the destroyers Encounter and Jupiter were found to be suffering from mechanical faults and were replaced by the First World War-vintage destroyers HMAS Vampire and HMS Tenedos. Prince of Wales then entered the dry dock at the Singapore naval base and underwent a thorough cleaning of her hull and boilers.
Then, less than a week later, the long-expected attack finally came.
The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbour on the morning of December 7, 1941 was merely the opening move in a massive, coordinated series of invasions all across Southeast Asia. Indeed, even before the Imperial Navy’s aircraft had even reached Hawaii, Japanese troops landed in Malaya, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island. As these locations were across the International Date Line from Hawaii, the attacks were recorded as taking place on December 8. That same day, Japanese aircraft based in Indochina bombed Singapore. Force G – now redesigned Force Z – fired at the attacking aircraft while sitting at anchor, but made and received no hits. Once news of the attack reached Britain, Admiral Phillips was ordered to weigh anchor and intercept Japanese invasion convoys steaming across the Gulf of Thailand. Phillips hesitated, for the only Allied aircraft available to protect the fleet were the 10 slow and outdated Brewster Buffalo fighters of No. 453 Squadron RAAF stationed at Sembawang. Admiral Tovey’s misgivings about the ship had also proven correct: the hot, humid climate of Singapore had rendered Prince of Wales’s gun control radars inoperative and degraded her anti-aircraft ammunition, while the ship’s lack of air conditioning had led to increased crew fatigue. Nonetheless, Phillips elected to proceed, believing that Japanese aircraft could not operate so far from land and that Prince of Wales was all but impervious to aerial attack. After all, at that point no capital ship had ever been sunk by aircraft on the open sea. It was a gamble which was to cost him dearly.
Force Z departed Singapore at 17:00 hours on December 8 and sailed north to intercept Japanese forces landing at Khota Bahru on the northeast coast of Malaya. The following day at around 14:00, they were spotted by the Japanese submarine I-65, which shadowed the squadron for 5 hours, reporting their positions. This report soon reached the headquarters of the Japanese Navy’s 22nd Air Flotilla, which had just arrived at airfields in Indochina. At the time, 22nd’s aircraft were loading up with bombs for an attack on Singapore, but upon receiving news of Force Z’s sailing they immediately switched over to torpedoes. However, by the time the aircraft were ready, the sun was beginning to set, and the attack was postponed until the following morning. Meanwhile the Japanese 2nd Fleet was dispatched south from Indochina to intercept Force Z. While the two fleets never spotted each other, just before sunset Force Z was spotted by three seaplanes launched by Japanese convoy escorts. Realizing he had lost the element of surprise, Phillips abandoned his attack on Khota Bharu and turned back towards Singapore.
Just before 1:00 the following morning, Phillips received a radio message indicating that Japanese troops were landing at Kuantan on the east coast of Malaya. At around 7:00 hours Force Z reached the area and Prince of Wales launched a reconnaissance aircraft to investigate. When neither it nor the destroyer Express found anything, Phillips carried on towards Singapore. Little did he know, however, that he had been spotted by the submarine I-58, and that 34 Mitsubishi G3M “Nell” torpedo bombers and 51 G4M “Betty” high-level bombers of the 22nd Air Flotilla were on their way to intercept him.
The first ship the bombers spotted was not, however, the Prince of Wales or the Repulse, but the destroyer Tenedos, which had sailed for Singapore the day before refuel and was now 300 kilometres south of Force Z. Mistaking the destroyer for a battleship, at 10:00 the aircraft dropped several armour piercing bombs on the ship before realizing their mistake and breaking off. Minutes later a Japanese scout aircraft spotted Force Z and called in the rest of the bomber force on its position. The attack had begun.
The first wave of eight bombers attacked around 11:15, focusing exclusively on Repulse. The old battlecruiser proved surprisingly nimble, however, and managed to dodge most of the bombs, suffering only one minor hit to her seaplane hangar. In return, her anti-aircraft gunners damaged five of the attacking aircraft. The next wave arrived at 11:40, dropping eight torpedoes at the two ships. Only one struck home, hitting Prince of Wales’s outer port propeller shaft. The shaft, rotating at full speed, twisted and ripped through the bulkheads, sending 2,400 tons of water pouring into the ship’s engineering compartments. The explosion set off a chain of failures, jamming the ship’s steering, shorting out her electric generators, knocking out her bilge pumps, and preventing her electrically-driven antiaircraft guns from being trained. Fatally crippled, Prince of Wales steamed helplessly northwards and was struck by four more torpedoes and one bomb. Around 13:00, Phillips gave the order to abandon ship.
Meanwhile, Repulse fought on, successfully dodging 19 torpedoes and shooting down three aircraft. At 12:23, however, she, too, was struck by four torpedoes. The ship listed 65 degrees to port, hung on for several moments, then rolled over and sank. Less than an hour later at 13:18, Prince of Wales, pride of the Royal Navy, also capsized and slipped beneath the waves. From start to finish, the attack had taken little more than two hours.
Electra, Vampire, and Express moved in to rescue the survivors. In all, 840 British sailors lost their lives that day – 327 aboard Prince of Wales and 513 aboard Repulse, which had capsized before the order to abandon ship could be given. Of the senior officers, Admiral Phillips and Captain John Leach of the Prince of Wales chose to go down with their ship, while Captain William Tennant of the Repulse was among the survivors. Ironically, while it was Admiral Phillips’s brash decision to sail from Singapore which placed Force Z in the path of the Japanese bombers, it was his caution which sealed the squadron’s fate, for throughout the operation Phillips maintained complete radio silence so as not to give up his position. Indeed, it was not until an hour into the Japanese attack that the first radio signal was sent calling for air support. By this time, however, it was far too late, the aircraft of No. 453 Squadron arriving on the scene just as the Prince of Wales went under. As the squadron’s commander, Flight Lieutenant Tim Vigors later lamented:
“I reckon this must have been the last battle in which the Navy reckoned they could get along without the RAF. A pretty damned costly way of learning. Phillips had known that he was being shadowed the night before, and also at dawn that day. He did not call for air support. He was attacked and still did not call for help.”
Back in Britain, Prime Minister Churchill was woken in the middle of the night by news of the sinking, later writing:
“In all the war, I never received a more direct shock… As I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me. There were no British or American ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific except the American survivors of Pearl Harbor, who were hastening back to California. Across this vast expanse of waters, Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.”
But the worst was yet to come. Hong Kong fell on December 25 after 17 days of fighting. In Malaya, invading Japanese troops moved with terrifying speed, aided by excellent British-built roads, the inexperience and disorganization of the defending garrison, and an deceptively simple piece of technology: the bicycle – and for more on that, please check out our previous video How Bicycles Caused the Downfall of the British Empire. By January 31, 1942, the defending Commonwealth troops had been pushed off the peninsula and retreated to the island of Singapore, blowing up the Johore causeway behind them. The 85,000-strong garrison fought on for another two weeks, finally surrendering on February 15. Some 140,000 British, Australian, New Zealand, and Indian troops marched into Japanese captivity – the single greatest defeat in British military history. Within months the Japanese Empire controlled a huge swath of Asia and the Pacific stretching from northern Manchuria to the Solomon Islands. It would not be until the Battle of Midway in June 1942 that the tide finally turned and the Allies began the long, bloody island-hopping campaign that would take them from the island of Guadalcanal to Japan’s very doorstep.
By that time, however, the Allies had learned the hard lesson taught them by the tragic loss of Repulse and Prince of Wales. Never again would an allied capital ship operate without a protective screen of aircraft. For as the sinking of the Yamato proved beyond a doubt, the age of the battleship was over. The seas now belonged to the aeroplane.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- The Slinky was Originally Intended to be Used as a Tension Spring in a Battleship Engine Horsepower Meter
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- A Worthy Opponent: the Glorious Death of Hampton Gray, the Last Canadian Victoria Cross
- What’s the Deal with T-shirts with Random, Gibberish Japanese Writing on Them?
Expand for ReferencesKeegan, John (ed.), World War II: a Visual Encyclopedia, PRC Publishing Ltd, 1999
Klemen, L, “Seventy Minutes Before Pearl Harbor” – The Landing at Kota Bahru, Malaya, on December 7, 1941, The Netherlands East Indies 1941-1942, https://warfare.gq/dutcheastindies/kota_bharu.html
Garzke et al, Death of a Battleship: The Loss of HMS Prince of Wales, December 10, 1941, https://pacificwrecks.com/ships/hms/prince_of_wales/death-of-a-battleship-2012-update.pdf
Sinking of the HMS Repulse, History of Diving Museum, https://divingmuseum.org/indepth/repulse/
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Drones. Whether raining down death and destruction on the battlefield, capturing sweet snowboarding and mountain bike moves for YouTube, helping farmers inspect their fields, or driving aviation authorities mad by wandering into controlled airspace, drones seem to be just about everywhere these days. Using the latest in remote control and automatic guidance technology, drones – more properly known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or UAVs – are able to perform tasks that are otherwise too dangerous, exhausting, or expensive for manned aircraft. But whether you think drones are a boon or a menace to society, you have a surprising institution to thank for their existence: none other than that greatest of all dream machines: Hollywood. This is the surprising story of how Tinseltown led to the rise of the drone – and how drones gave us one of the silver screen’s most enduring legends.
The first public demonstration of a remotely-controlled vehicle took place in 1898 when inventor extraordinaire – and internet heartthrob – Nikola Tesla stunned onlookers at the Madison Square Garden Electrical Exhibition by piloting a small electrically-powered boat in a tank of water using only invisible radio waves. Demonstrating the remarkable foresight for which he was famous, Tesla predicted that remote-controlled boats, submarines, torpedoes, and even aircraft would one day play a key role in warfare – though, like many inventors before and since, he incorrectly assumed that such terrible weapons would eventually make war obsolete. However, it would be another 20 years before Tesla’s predictions would begin to be realized.
The first aerial “drone” as we know appeared near the end of the First World War, the brainchild of one of the great unsung aviation pioneers: Elmer Sperry. Born in 1860, Sperry was a prolific inventor, developing, among other things, self-propelled mining equipment that greatly improved the efficiency of coal extraction. After becoming violently seasick on a transatlantic voyage in 1898, Sperry began investigating the use of large gyroscopes to mitigate the effect of waves on a ship’s hull. Though the stabilization system was never implemented due to its high cost, this work led directly to the development of Sperry’s most important invention: the gyrocompass. Magnetic compasses aboard large ships had always been unreliable due to interference from the ship’s steel hull, variations in the earth’s magnetic field, and other factors. By operating independently of magnetic fields, the gyrocompass allowed for accurate navigation over large distances and proved highly successful, being installed aboard the warships of nearly every seagoing nation by the outbreak of the First World War. Sperry later developed a lightweight version that could be installed in an aircraft, revolutionizing aerial navigation. In 1914, Sperry and his son Lawrence developed a system which used two gyroscopes and a series of electrical servos to stabilize an aircraft in roll and yaw. First demonstrated in June of that year before stunned judges from the Aero Club of France, the Sperry’s “no-hands” flying system was the world’s first effective autopilot. While intended to improve navigation and reduce pilot fatigue on long-duration flights, the Sperrys immediately recognized its potential to create pilotless aircraft. Thus, in 1916 the Sperrys joined forces with fellow inventor Peter Hewitt to create the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane.
The ancestor of modern cruise missiles, the Hewitt-Sperry was a small pilotless aircraft designed to be launched from a ship by a steam catapult. A pair of gyroscopes linked to the rudder and ailerons kept the vehicle on course towards its target, while an aneroid barometer maintained its altitude. At a pre-set range, the aircraft would automatically dive onto its target or release a load of bombs. While the U.S. Navy showered some interest in the system, it declined to further pursue the project. However, after the United States entered the First World War in 1917, the Sperrys succeeded in convincing the Navy to reevaluate their “aerial torpedo” for use against German U-boats. But while testing revealed that the weapon was too inaccurate for use against ships at sea, the Navy realized the concept might just work over land. And so in November 1917 the U.S. Army assembled a team to develop its own aerial torpedo, which was given the absurdly American codename of Project Liberty Eagle.
The Army’s team was a veritable who’s-who of contemporary inventors, and included the likes of Orville Wright, Henry Ford, and Thomas Midgely – the infamous creator of leaded gasoline and the ozone-destroying refrigerant Freon. And heading this dream team was a now-forgotten but equally prolific inventor named Charles Kettering, perhaps best-known for developing the electric automobile starter motor. The team’s task was to develop an inexpensive unmanned aircraft which could travel at least 60 kilometres and deliver 100 kilograms of explosives onto an enemy target. Dubbed the “Kettering Bug,” the weapon they came up with resembled a conventional biplane with a length of 3.8 metres and a wingspan of 4.5 metres powered by a 40-horsepower 4-cylinder engine. To minimize cost, the wings and fuselage were made of wood covered in cardboard and papier-mâché while the engine, produced by Ford, was optimized for mass-production and cost only $40. In total, each Bug cost only $400, could cruise at 80 kilometres per hour, and weighed 240 kilograms – including 90 kilograms of explosives. The weapon was designed to be launched from a small catapult, whereupon the Sperrys’ gyroscope and barometer system would guide it to its target. Prior to launch, the operators would determine how many engine revolutions it would take for the Bug to reach its target, and program this into an onboard odometer. When that number was reached, the engine would automatically shut off and the wings would detach, allowing the explosive-laden fuselage to plummet towards its target.
The complexity of the Kettering Bug meant that development was slow, with the first test flight not taking place until September 14, 1918. It was an inauspicious start; after flying only 100 metres, the Bug experienced engine trouble and crashed to the ground. The next test on October 2 was even less successful, with the Bug suddenly pulling up, stalling, and crashing immediately after launch. Further tests were more successful, though by this time the First World War had already ended. Nonetheless, testing continued into the 1920s, with 45 Kettering Bugs being built in total. However, the technology of the time was inadequate to make the Bug a reliable and effective weapon of war, and the project was eventually abandoned.
Meanwhile, the first practical advances in military UAV technology were being made across the Atlantic. Starting in 1917, the British Royal Flying Corps and de Havilland aircraft company began developing a series of experimental radio-controlled aircraft using a control system invented by RFC engineer Archibald Low. On March 21, 1917, one of these aircraft, codenamed the “Aerial Target” or AT, became the first powered, unmanned aircraft to fly under radio control. The RFC hoped to develop the AT into an aerial torpedo capable of delivering explosives onto a target with pinpoint accuracy, the War ended before the system could see combat. Nonetheless, de Havilland carried on its radio-control research into the 1920s and 30s, though by this time the goal had shifted from producing weapons to producing targets. In the interwar years, trainee fighter pilots practiced aerial gunnery by shooting at long target banners or drogues towed behind another aircraft. This system had numerous disadvantages. For one thing, the towplane and drogue flew relatively slowly and in a straight line, making them a poor representation of an enemy aircraft. The attacking fighter pilots also could not tell whether they had hit the target until the towplane had landed, while – most concerning of all – the crew of the towplane were vulnerable to being hit by stray gunfire. Thus, in 1935, de Havilland introduced the DH.82 Queen Bee, a radio-controlled target based on the Tiger Moth training aircraft. While the aircraft’s front cockpit and controls were retained to allow for manned test flights and ferrying between airfields, the rear cockpit was closed off and fitted with radio control equipment. The servos that transmitted radio commands to the control surfaces were powered by air, supplied by a small propeller-powered pump mounted to the side of the fuselage. Interestingly, it is the Queen Bee which originated the modern term “drone” for unmanned aircraft. Just as male bees or drones mate once with the Queen before dying, target drones like the Queen Bee were designed to be used once before being blown out of the sky. Produced in both land and sea-based variants, the Queen Bee was highly successful, with over 400 being built before the outbreak of the Second World War. Several other aircraft, including the Fairey III, Airspeed Wasp, and Miles Martinet, would also be converted into target drones until 1952, when the Royal Air Force adopted the GAF Jindivik, a purpose-built jet-powered target drone developed by Australia’s Government Air Factories.
But while the British pioneered the use of target drones, it was the Americans who would first produce and use them on a massive scale. Enter the Hollywood connection.
Our story begins in the mid-1930s with a British film actor named Reginald Denny. While largely forgotten today, in his day Denny was a prolific actor, appearing in more than 200 films and television episodes over his early 50-year career. Born in 1891 into an acting family, Denny began acting onstage at the age of 6 and appeared in his first silent film in 1912. He was also an amateur boxing champion. On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Denny suspended his acting career to join the Royal Flying Corps, becoming an observer and air gunner in a Home Defense Night Fighter Squadron. Denny was wounded by friendly fire during a training exercise and spent several months in hospital. While he recovered sufficiently to complete his flight training, the War ended before he could see action.
After the war, Denny moved to California, where he flew with the “13 Black Cats” stunt flying troupe and continued to act in silent films. In the late 1920s, the advent of talking pictures caused a shift in Denny’s career. Due to his English accent and advancing age, he became increasingly in demand for supporting character roles, and was often cast as the quintessential English gentleman or military officer. It is also during this period that Denny discovered a new obsession. Sometime in the early 1930s, Denny agreed to help a neighbour’s son fly a model aircraft. When the model crashed, Denny set about building a new one. He soon became hooked, and in 1934 he opened a hobby shop in Los Angeles, selling flying model aircraft of his own design under the brand name “Denny Plane.” These aircraft were powered by miniature “Dennymite”-brand gasoline engines, developed by California Institute of Technology graduate Walter Righter and considered the very best in the field.
Soon after, Denny learned of the problems the U.S. Army Air Corps was having training its fighter pilots in aerial gunnery. Not only was the traditional target drogue method inaccurate and dangerous to the towplane crews, but it cost nearest $300 per flight to tow a target – a lot of money in the cash-strapped 1930s. Realizing that one of his Dennyplane flying models would make a more realistic – and cheaper – target, in 1936 Denny, along with financier Paul Whittier, founded the Radioplane Company and began developing a target drone to present to the Army.
Radioplane’s first prototype, the RP-1, had a wingspan of 4 metres, was powered by a 3 horsepower 2-cylinder Righter engine, and featured radio control gear developed by inventor Kenneth Case. In February 1938, Denny demonstrated the RP-1 for the Army, who were impressed enough to greenlight further development. Denny continued to refine the design, and in May 1939 his fourth prototype – imaginatively dubbed the RP-4 – was officially adopted by the Army under the designation OQ-1. The OQ-1 would remain in service until 1941, when it was replaced the OQ-2, which featured a more powerful 7 horsepower engine, twin counter-rotating propellers, a higher top speed of 136 kilometres per hour, and a parachute for recovery at the end of its mission. In addition to the Army Air Force, the OQ-2 was also used by the U.S. Navy under the designation TDD-1 for “Target Drone, Denny.” Finally, in 1943, Radioplane introduced its most successful model yet: the OQ-3, which was cheaper and even faster than predecessor, with a top speed of 163 kilometres per hour. While this was still far slower than most contemporary fighter aircraft, the OQ-3’s small size made it appear faster, making it difficult for fighter pilots and anti-aircraft gunners to hit. In total Radioplane would build 9,403 OQ-3s and 14,891 drones of all kinds during the War. Wartime demand turned the fledgling company into a major defence contractor almost overnight, with a 6,500 square-metre factory in Van Nuys, California capable of turning out 50 drones per day.
After the war, Reginald Denny supervised the conversion of four Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters into radio-controlled drones. These drones, launched from the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Shangri-la, were used to penetrate and collect samples from the radioactive mushroom cloud during the 1946 Operation Crossroads atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. But with wartime demand for target drones rapidly dwindling, in 1948 Denny sold his stake in the Radioplane company and returned to acting, making his final film appearance as Commodore Schmidlapp in 1966’s Batman: the Movie. Reginald Denny died of a stroke at the age of 75 on June 16, 1967, and was buried at Forest Lawn – Los Angeles Hills Cemetery.
Meanwhile, the company Denny founded continued to prosper. Shortly after the war, the Radioplane company introduced its most successful product: the OQ-19 Shelduck, also known as the Basic Training Target or BTT. Four metres long and with a wingspan of 3.5 metres, the OQ-19 was powered by a 72 horsepower four-cylinder engine and had a top speed of 324 kilometres per hour. Launched using a bungee-powered catapult or a small solid-rocket booster, it was guided by radio from the ground and returned to earth using a parachute. Though like earlier Radioplane drones the OQ-19 was designed to be expendable, in practice it was usually used to tow a traditional target drone, allowing the same drone to be reused multiple time. When used to train the crews of radar-guided antiaircraft guns, the drone could be fitted with wingtip radar reflectors to give it the radar cross-section of a larger aircraft. Over 63,000 OQ-19s were built, being used by multiple counties worldwide well into the 1980s. However, in 1952 the Radioplane Company was acquired by the Northrop Corporation, becoming the Radioplane Division and later the Ventura Division. Northrop, which merged with Grumman in 1994, continues to produce drones to this day, including the highly-successful RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance UAV.
Radioplane was certainly not the first or only group to produce unmanned aerial vehicles during the War. In 1944, the U.S. Army Air Force launched Operation Aphrodite, an attempt to use radio-controlled, explosives-laden B-17 bombers to destroy German secret weapons installations on the French Coast. The operation was unsuccessful, with one notable accident resulting in the death of Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, elder brother of future U.S. president John F. Kennedy. Infamously, the Germans also deployed the V-1 flying bomb, whose control and guidance system was remarkably similar to the 1910s-era Kettering Bug, while both sides developed a variety of remote-controlled rocket and glide bombs for use against shipping and precision targets, including the German Henschel Hs-293 and Fritz X and the American Azon and Razon. However, Radioplane and its founder Reginald Denny were the first to turn military drones into a viable, large-scale industry.
As a coda of sorts to this story, just as Hollywood gave birth to the drone, the drone in turn gave birth to one of Hollywood’s greatest legends. In June 1944, Sargent David Conover, a photographer and Public Relations Officer with the U.S. Army’s 1st Motion Picture Unit, was sent to the Radioplane factory in Van Nuys to shoot morale-boosting pictures of female war production workers. While touring the factory, Conover came across a 19-year old woman assembling engines for OQ-3 target drones. Struck by her beauty, Conover arranged for the woman to book a modelling audition. In August 1945, she was hired by the Blue Book Model Agency, and the rest is history. That woman’s name was Norma Jeane Dougherty; you may know her better as Marilyn Monroe.
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Expand for ReferencesGuttman, Robert, Hollywood and Drones: the Forgotten Connection, History Net, June 23, 2017, https://www.historynet.com/drones-hollywood-connection/
Beckett, Jesse, The Kettering Bug: America’s First Foray Into Unmanned Drone Technology Started During WWI, War History Online, October 6, 2021, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/kettering-bug-first-unmanned-drone-technology.html
Holzwarth, Larry, The Story of the Kettering Bug, the World’s First Aerial Drone, March 4, 2020, https://historycollection.com/the-story-of-the-kettering-bug-the-worlds-first-aerial-drone/
Turi, J, Tesla’s Toy Boat: a Drone Before its Time, Engadget, January 19, 2014, https://www.engadget.com/2014-01-19-nikola-teslas-remote-control-boat.html
Braithwaite, Robin, The Queen of Bees, Light Aviation Magazine, June 2012, http://www.lightaircraftassociation.co.uk/2012/Magazine/June/QueenBee.pdf
The post Tesla, Hollywood, and Inventing the Drone appeared first on Today I Found Out.
It was July 16, 1970, and Mario Escamilla was furious. The 33-year-old native of Santa Barbara, California, had just learned that a coworker, Donald “Porky” Leavitt, had broken into his trailer and stolen his most prized possession: a 15-gallon jug of homemade raisin wine. Determined to put an end to such theft, Escamilla grabbed a rifle and stormed off to confront Leavitt. He found the thief with his boss, Bennie Lightsy, getting roaring drunk on a potent mixture of 190-proof grain alcohol, grape juice, and Escamilla’s wine. Escamilla waved his rifle in the men’s faces, warned them to keep their hands off his property, and grabbed what remained of his wine and stormed back to his trailer. Some minutes later, Escamilla heard a knock on the door. Expecting it to be Leavitt out for revenge, Escamilla cocked his rifle and aimed it at the door. But the man who entered the trailer was not Leavitt, but Bennie Lightsy, who had come to reason with Escamilla. Though the two men were longtime friends, they soon began to argue and a fistfight broke out. Unknown to Escamilla, the rifle he had chosen was faulty, and in the midst of the struggle the weapon went off, hitting Lightsy square in the chest. Lightsy collapsed to the floor and bled out within minutes.
While at first glance this might seem like a clear-cut case of homicide – or, at least, involuntary manslaughter – there was one big catch: this deadly incident took place not in some American trailer park but on a massive iceberg floating in the Arctic Ocean. Mario Escamilla didn’t know it yet, but he had just unleashed one of the most tangled and confusing legal cases in United States history – one whose consequences still resonate to this day.
Fletcher’s Ice Island – also known as T-3 – was an 11 kilometre-long, 5 kilometre-wide iceberg discovered by the United States Air Force in the early 1950s. Thought to have calved off a glacier on the eastern side of Canada’s Ellesmere Island, the iceberg was named after Air Force Colonel Joseph Fletcher, the first person to land an aircraft on its surface. Caught in a current known as the Beaufort Gyre, T-3 slowly drifted through the waters north of Canada and Alaska, completing a clockwise circuit every 2 years. From March 1952 onwards, the Air Force and the U.S. Navy established a series of research stations on T-3 to monitor arctic weather conditions and conduct geophysical and oceanographic research. These stations were a direct response to the Soviet Union, who had maintained meteorological drift stations on arctic ice floes since 1937. The iceberg was periodically occupied until 1979, when the last research station was abandoned. T-3 then slowly drifted through the Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard, entering the Atlantic Ocean and finally melting away in 1983.
But while built and maintained by the U.S. military, the outposts on T-3 were largely staffed by civilian contractors. Mario Escamilla, for instance, was an electronics technician from the General Motors Defense Research Laboratory, Porky Leavitt a meteorologist from the U.S. Navy Arctic Research Laboratory, and Bennie Lightsy an employee of the United States Weather Bureau and the appointed director of the station.
Conditions on T-3 were…primitive, to put it mildly. Even by 1970, the station where Escamilla and his 18 colleagues lived and worked consisted of little more than a diesel power plant and cluster of prefabricated wooden Jamesway huts and trailers which served as laboratories and living quarters. In the winter the sun did not rise for six months, with temperatures dipping below -50º Celsius and winds reaching speeds of 250 kilometres an hour. Radio and satellite communications were spotty at best, and during the summer the ice runway turned to slush, meaning no aircraft could land and the station could only be resupplied by parachute drop.
But the greatest danger facing the station’s inhabitants was boredom. Outside of work, there was very little to do, and for entertainment the station had only a handful of books, a few 16mm film reels, and two eight-track cassettes, all of which the technicians and scientists had read, watched, or listened to dozens of times over. In such an environment, alcoholism was rife, with many inhabitants spending their off hours going on raging benders with homemade wine or high-proof alcohol brought in by resupply flights. One particularly mean drunk was Porky Leavitt who, after guzzling his way through his own liquor supply, armed himself with a meat cleaver and went on a rampage through the station stealing his colleagues’ stashes. It was this history of violence, Escamilla later claimed, that drove him to grab a rifle from the station’s common store before confronting Leavitt.
Following Bennie Lightsy’s shooting, the incident was reported to the mainland by radio and an investigative team dispatched to T-3. The team, composed of Navy and Coast Guard intelligence officers and an assistant District Attorney, took two days to reach the iceberg via Thule Air Force Base in Greenland – a harrowing journey through brutal arctic storms. The team then grabbed Escamilla, the rifle, and Lightsy’s frozen body and whisked them back to the United States. And here, dear viewer, is where things start to get very, very complicated.
At first, the whole case seemed fairly cut-and-dry; after all, Escamilla freely admitted to shooting Lightsy. He really could not have done otherwise; there wasn’t any room in the tiny trailer for another assailant, and the incident was partially witnessed by Charles Parodi, Escamilla’s roommate and the man who had informed him of Leavitt’s theft; and Richard Scattolini, who was standing outside the trailer when the rifle went off. And the case might very well have been a simple one, were it not for one thorny issue: that of jurisdiction. For what no legal expert seemed able to determine was who exactly had legal authority over Ice Island T-3, and thus who – if anyone – had the right to try Mario Escamilla.
While T-3 was administered by the U.S. Air Force, as a civilian contractor Escamilla could not be subjected to a military court martial. And while Escamilla was a U.S. citizen, the crime had not been committed on sovereign U.S. territory. Theoretically, the U.S. could have made a territorial claim to T-3, as it had with dozens of uninhabited, fertilizer-rich guano islands in the 19th Century. Unlike those islands, however, T-3 was temporary and would eventually melt away, meaning no nation could claim the iceberg as its own. Furthermore, in 1909, the U.S. State Department had rejected a proposal by Admiral Robert Peary to annex the North Pole, officially endorsing the view that no nation could claim sovereignty over frozen Arctic waters. So who, then, had jurisdiction over T-3? The country with the strongest claim to the region was Canada, which has long claimed sovereignty over a large swath of the Arctic Ocean. In 1907, Canadian senator Pascal Poirier proposed what he called sector theory, in which sovereignty over arctic waters was determined by drawing straight lines from a country’s borders to the north pole; whatever land or water lay between those lines was that country’s sovereign territory. Conveniently, this system gave Canada control of the entire Arctic Archipelago and the surrounding waters. However, sector theory was never formally adopted by the Canadian government, and Canadian sovereignty over its arctic waters has been actively contested by several nations – particularly Russia. At the time of Bennie Lightsy’s killing, T-3 was located 84 degrees North, and 106 degrees West – far outside the then three-mile limit of Canada’s official territorial waters. Furthermore, while international convention recognizes bodies of ice like glaciers as sovereign territory while they are still attached to the land, once they become detached they become res nullius – no man’s land.
Not that Canada wanted to get involved anyway. Upon learning of the case, the Canadian Department for External Affairs informed the U.S. State Department that it wished to avoid interfering with a criminal trial simply to resolve a complex point of international law. The country thus waived any jurisdiction it might have had, while making it clear that the outcome of the case would have no bearing on its territorial claims to the arctic. The T-3 murder case was entirely a United States matter. Or was it? Even if T-3 was not sovereign territory, the first place Escamilla landed after leaving the iceberg was: Greenland. Thus, as some legal experts argued at the time, the case officially fell under the jurisdiction of Denmark, which administers the island nation. However, like Canada, Denmark also waived its jurisdiction over the case.
These decisions left the T-3 case in an unprecedented state of legal limbo, with many lawyers doubting any country had the legal authority to try Escamilla. As one legal expert noted:
“It may shock the layman to learn that there may be parts of the world in which possible murders may go untried.”
One proposed solution to this conundrum was to treat T-3 as a seagoing vessel and prosecute the case according to the 1958 Convention on the High Seas. But as you have probably guessed by now, this solution was not entirely satisfactory either. While the Arctic Ocean certainly counted as the High Seas, maritime law as written only applies to navigable waters – which the dense ice floes surrounding T-3 most certainly were not. Then again, rapid advances in technology were quickly changing what it meant for a body of water to be “navigable”. In the same year as the Convention on the High Seas was written, the world’s first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus, completed a crossing of the arctic while submerged under the polar ice sheet, a feat that would have been impossible for a conventional surface vessel. Furthermore, the practice of lodging a ship in pack ice and letting it drift with the currents – a method pioneered by polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen in 1893 – technically made even the densest ice pack “navigable.”
In the end, the U.S. State Department turned to another principle of maritime law known as the State of The Flag Rule. This rule states that the primary legal authority aboard a vessel at sea – whether made of ice or not – is the state under whose flag said vessel flies. So entrenched is this principle in international maritime trade that even if a vessel is sailing through a state’s territorial waters, said state has no authority to prosecute crimes committed aboard the vessel unless those crimes directly affect the state’s own territory and citizens. Thus, as Escamilla was a U.S. citizen serving at an outpost flying the U.S. flag, the United States had personal if not territorial jurisdiction over the case.
But even this breakthrough raised still further questions, namely: which U.S. state should Escamilla be tried in? While Escamilla was a resident of California, he was ultimately arraigned and tried in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia – for the simple and expedient reason that this was the state in which he had first landed after departing Greenland. The trial was presided over by Judge Oren Lewis, who indicated that in the absence of a clear precedent, his judgment would not be final, and that he expected the matter to be resolved on appeal.
But even with the trial finally underway, there was still no end to the thorny legal questions. Escamilla’s defence team questioned whether their client could be fairly judged by a jury of his peers in Virginia, arguing that the only people fit to judge his actions in context were back on Ice Island T-3. The research station, they claimed, was a uniquely harsh environment which placed its inhabitants under extreme stress. The station had no law enforcement presence, and doors were left unlocked due to the risk of fire. Under such circumstances, property rights were protected using weapons or not at all. Given Porky Leavitt’s previous drunken rampage with a meat cleaver, it was therefore argued that Escamilla was fully justified in bringing a rifle when confronting him. The defence also called on character witnesses to testify as to Escamilla’s usually docile nature, as well as a firearms expert who confirmed that the rifle Escamilla had used was faulty and could easily be set off without pulling the trigger.
But Judge Lewis was having none of it, instructing the jury to ignore the supposedly unique conditions on T-3 and limiting the number of character witnesses the defence could call. In the end, the jury found Mario Escamilla not guilty of second-degree murder on the high seas, but did find him guilty of involuntary manslaughter on the high seas. Escamilla was sentenced to three years imprisonment, but released on bail pending the outcome of an appeal. Said appeal was made on two grounds: first, the lingering doubts about ultimate jurisdiction over the case; and second, errors in the conduct of the trial itself – particularly the limiting of character witnesses. The appeal was brought before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which heard the case on August 17, 1970. The panel of six judges was divided on the issue of jurisdiction, and thus upheld the original provisional ruling that the case could be tried by an American court on the basis of maritime law. However, they also upheld the appeal on the basis of procedure and ordered a retrial, instructing the judge and jury to consider the unique conditions on T-3 and the testimony of character witnesses. With these new provisions in place, a second jury acquitted Mario Escamilla of all charges and he was set free.
The Escamilla case caused a stir among U.S. legal experts, who pointed out that had Escamilla, Leavitt, and Lightsy been citizens of Canada or another country, the viability of a trial would have been even more in doubt and may very well have led to an international incident. In 1984, however, the legal loophole responsible for this ambiguity was closed – in the U.S, at least – by Amendment 7 to Title 18 of the United States Criminal Code, which extended Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction to:
“Any place outside the jurisdiction of any nation with respect to an offence by or against a national of the United States.” While the Escamilla case might seem like a freak, one-off occurrence, the incident is of direct relevance to another no-man’s-land: outer space. Currently, the only body of law governing human activities beyond earth’s atmosphere is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. However, this treaty only regulates the overt actions of nations, prohibiting, for example, the seizing territory or the building of military bases on the moon or planets and the stationing of nuclear weapons in orbit. Also, spacecraft have generally been considered the sovereign territory of whichever nation launched them, meaning that the same earth-bound rules concerning territory and jurisdiction apply in outer space as well. Thus, if an American astronaut murders a German astronaut in the Japanese module of the International Space Station, then the case would most likely fall under Japanese jurisdiction. This neat legal arrangement, however, will rapidly fall apart as the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin introduce more and more private spacecraft and astronauts to the final frontier. Though registered to their country of origin, such private craft are not currently considered sovereign territory, and thus lie in a murky legal grey area. Without a body of law to regulate the behaviour of private citizens in space, it is only a matter of time before we get a repeat of the 1970 Escamilla case – in space.
Even the closest earthbound analogue to space – Antarctica – is of little help in this case. While the 1959 Antarctic Treaty prohibits any nation from stationing military forces on Antarctica, seven main signatory nations – Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom – maintain territorial claims on the continent for use in peaceful scientific research. These territorial claims have no permanent residents, so the inhabitants of the various scientific research stations on the continent remain citizens of their respective sovereign nations. Therefore, any crimes committed in any of these territories fall under the jurisdiction of the administering nation. And there have been a lot of crimes – including a 1984 case where a stir-crazy doctor burned down Argentina’s Almirante Brown Station after being forced to stay another winter, and a 2018 case where an engineer at the Russian Bellinghausen Station stabbed a welder for spoiling the endings of the books he was reading. While these cases exposed the difficulty of dealing with crime in such remote locations – for instance, for lack of a proper jail cell the stab-happy Russian engineer had to be locked up in the station’s Orthodox chapel – all were relatively uncomplicated from a legal standpoint, involving citizens of a single nation on territory belonging to said nation. But in the wild west of outer space, with hundreds of spacecraft and astronauts from dozens of nations flying around, the legal situation is likely to get very complicated, very fast.
So if you’re looking for a promising new career that looks impressive on a business card and sounds sexy at a cocktail party, might we recommend “space lawyer”? After all: in space, no-one can hear you testify.
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Expand for ReferencesKean, Sam, How Not to Deal With Murder in Space, Slate, July 15, 2020, https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/arctic-t3-murder-space.html
The Law: Murder in Legal Limbo, TIME, September 28, 1970, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,909646-1,00.html
Haskins, Caroline, An Attempted Murder at a Research Station Show How Crimes are Prosecuted in Antarctica, Vice, October 25, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en/article/xw9bg3/an-attempted-murder-at-a-research-station-shows-how-crimes-are-prosecuted-in-antarctica
Chu, Jane, Someday, Someone Will Commit a Major Crime in Space, Slate, August 28, 2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/space-crime-legal-system-international-space-station.html
Sharp, Gregor, A Brief History of Lines in the Arctic, The Arctic Institute, March 20, 2018, https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/brief-history-lines-arctic/
United States of America, Appellee, v. Mario Jaime Escamilla, Appellant, 467 F.2d 341 (4th Cir. 1972), Justia US Law, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/467/341/154348/
US Arctic Drifting Stations (1950s-1960s), Beaufort Gyre Exploration Project, https://www.whoi.edu/beaufortgyre/history/history_usdrift.html
Kovalchik, Kara, True Crime: Murder on an Arctic Ice Floe, Mental Floss, July 22, 2010, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/25261/true-crime-murder-arctic-ice-floe
Pharand, Donat, State Jurisdiction over Ice Island T-3: The Escamilla Case, https://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca//arctic/Arctic24-2-82.pdf
The post A Legal Clusterf$$k- Murder on Ice appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Looking at a small dog like a Chihuahua or a Pomeranian, it can be hard to imagine that such a creature is in any way related to a wolf. Yet every modern dog breed, no matter how big, small, or cute, can trace its genetic lineage directly back to a population of wild wolves living on the steppes of Siberia some 27,000 years ago. Over the intervening millennia, these proto-dogs evolved into hundreds of different breeds bearing distinctive traits such as friendliness towards humans, floppy ears, curly tails, rounded skulls, and spotted coats – traits also present in other domesticated animals like pigs and cows and which geneticists have collectively termed domestication syndrome. But while this origin story has long been suspected, the exact details of the domestication process have baffled biologists for over a century. Then, in 1952, a groundbreaking experiment in fox breeding by a maverick Soviet scientist began to shed some light on how wolves went from wild predators to man’s best friend.
In his epoch-making 1859 work On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin used the selective breeding of domesticated animals like pigeons to explain natural evolution in the wild. In so doing, Darwin suggested that the selective breeding of certain animals, including dogs, could have taken place unconsciously, with the breeder being unaware that the process was even taking place. But what specific traits did Ice Age humans unconsciously select for which lead to wolves evolving into dogs? A number of theories have emerged over the years. The pedomorphosis hypothesis posits that humans adopted and raised wolf puppies with cuter, more child-like features such as round heads, short snouts, large eyes, and floppy ears, and that these traits were unconsciously selected for and passed down through the generations. In contrast, the neural crest hypothesis suggests that the change in skull shape came about as a result of increased interaction between wolves and humans, which lead to a less hostile and demanding living environment for the wolves and thus a gradual decrease in required brain size. Yet another hypothesis holds that the physical traits characteristic to dogs are genetically linked to metabolic changes which emerged as wolves began scavenging garbage from human campsites and had to adapt to a diet richer in starches. Finally, the behavioural hypothesis posits that wolves who were less frightened and aggressive around humans were more successful, and that these more agreeable behavioural traits were genetically linked to – and evolved alongside with – physical traits like floppy ears and curly tails. It was this latter hypothesis which Dmitry Belyayev set out to test in the early 1950s.
Belyayev was born on July 17, 1917 in the town of Protasovo, and graduated from the Ivanovo Agricultural Institute in 1940. After a brief stint at the Central Research Laboratory’s Department of Fur Animal Breeding in Moscow, in 1941 Belyayev was drafted into the Red Army and served as an infantryman until the end of the Second World War, returning to the institute in 1946. In 1952, while working at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Siberia, Belyayev and graduate student Lyudmila Trut set up an experimental farm for breeding silver foxes in order to investigate the process of canine domestication.
Belyayev’s choice of foxes as research subjects was deliberate and strategic: not only are foxes social creatures like wolves, but they have been hunted and bred in Russia for their pelts for centuries, allowing Belyayev to disguise his experiments as an economic venture. This was vital to longevity of his work, for under the regime of Josef Stalin it was illegal in the Soviet Union to practice genetics. In the 1930s, an intense rivalry developed between two of the USSR’s leading agronomists, Nikolai Vavilov and Trofim Lysenko. While Vavilov upheld the widely-accepted principles of Mendelian genetics, Lysenko championed an alternate philosophy known as vernalization, which he claimed could increase the yield of Soviet crops manyfold. But vernalization was simply a rehashing of the long-discredited pre-Darwinian theory of Lamarckism, which held that attributes acquired by an organism during its lifetime could be passed on to its offspring. For example, according to this theory a bodybuilder’s children would inherit their large muscles. While Lysenko’s ideas were pseudoscientific nonsense, they won the support of Soviet Politburo, who saw vernalization as being more in line with Communist ideology than Mendelian genetics, which they associated with Social Darwinism and Capitalism. As a result, Lysenko rose rapidly through the ranks of the Soviet government and in 1941 denounced Vavilov as a traitor. Vavilov was duly arrested and imprisoned, dying of starvation in prison in 1943. Meanwhile, Lysenko’s ideas were implemented across the Soviet Union, leading to widespread crop failure and famines that killed millions of Soviet citizens. After the war, the eugenics policies of the Nazis cast further suspicion on Mendelian genetics, and in 1948 it was officially declared pseudoscience. Hundreds of geneticists were fired from their jobs, with many being arrested, imprisoned, or even executed without trial – including Dmitri Belyayev’s own brother. Belyayev himself managed to escape the purge, but it would not be until 1959 under the administration of Premier Nikita Khrushchev that the ban on genetics research would finally be lifted. Meanwhile, Belyalev and Trut carried on discreetly with their fox experiments.
Belyayev believed that the evolution of dogs was driven by a single characteristic: tameness. According to this theory, wolves who behaved less aggressively around humans were evolutionarily selected for, with all the physical traits characteristic to dogs developing as a mere side effect of this single selection pressure. In order to test this hypothesis, Belyayev and Trut acquired 30 male foxes and 100 vixens from Russian commercial fur farms and selected only the tamest and friendliest kits for breeding. As Trut later explained, tameness was determined according to a strict procedure:
“When a pup is one month old, an experimenter offers it food from his hand while trying to stroke and handle the pup. The pups are tested twice, once in a cage and once while moving freely with other pups in an enclosure, where they can choose to make contact either with the human experimenter or with another pup. The test is repeated monthly until the pups are six or seven months old.”
Each kit was classified according to one of three categories. Class III were the wildest foxes, who behaved aggressively towards humans, Class II were foxes who allowed humans to pet and handle them but did not actively seek out human contact, while Class I were the friendliest foxes. Eventually, Belyayev and Trut added a fourth category, IE or “domesticated elite,” for foxes who actively sought out human contact and sniffed, licked, and played with the experimenters just like dogs. In order to ensure that the foxes’ tameness was solely the result of genetics and not prolonged contact with humans, experimenters were allowed only a minimal amount of interaction with the animals.
The results were dramatic. By the tenth generation, 18% of the foxes were classified as IE or “elite”; by the 20th generation this figure had risen to almost 35%. At the same time, the foxes underwent pronounced physical and physiological changes, becoming more and more doglike with each generation:
“[The foxes] displayed behavioural, physiological, and anatomical characteristics that were not found in the wild population, or were found in wild foxes but with much lower frequency….Many of the domesticated foxes had floppy ears, short or curly tails, extended reproductive seasons, changes in fur coloration, and changes in the shape of their skulls, jaws, and teeth. They also lost their ‘musky fox smell.’
By the 20th generation, certain foxes even began developing shorter tails and legs, pronounced overbites and underbites, and piebald coats, while by the 30th generation nearly 80% were classified as “elite”
In 1978 Belyayev presented his initial findings at the 14th International Congress of Genetics in Moscow. In his lecture, Belyayev hypothesized that a reduction in aggression corresponded to changes in an animal’s endocrine system, such as decreased production of adrenaline and other stress hormones. The genes controlling these processes were in turn located on the same chromosomes as those controlling various physical traits like skull shape and fur colouration, meaning that as the former changed, the others followed. This process went against accepted theories of dog domestication as it did not necessarily require direct intervention by humans. Wolves who were less afraid and acted less aggressively towards humans were less likely to be killed and more likely to gain access to leftover food, meaning that – at least initially – dogs could have effectively domesticated themselves. But having only bred 20 generations of foxes over 26 years, Belyayev admitted that the experiment was not yet complete and that there was still much work to be done.
But Belyayev would not live to see the conclusion of his experiments, dying of cancer in 1985. In his absence Lyudmila Trut took over the project and ran it for another 40 years, breeding some 45,000 foxes over 35 generations. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 caused government funds to dry up, nearly spelling the end of the project, but after a 1999 article in Scientific American brought Trut’s research to the world’s attention, Anna Kukenova, a postdoctoral student in molecular genetics at Cornell University, managed to secure funding from the National Institutes of Health to keep the project going. In 2010, the lab attempted to raise funds by selling some of its domesticated foxes as pets at $6000 apiece. However, few animals were ordered, and those that were ended up being confiscated at the US border and sent to animal sanctuaries. In the end the scheme lasted barely two years, with all sales ending in 2012. And perhaps this is for the best, for according to Amy Bassett, founder of the Canid Conservation Center – the current home of Belyayev’s foxes – even domesticated foxes make terrible pets:
“You can easily train and manage behavioural problems in dogs, but there are a lot of behaviours in foxes, regardless of if they’re Russian or U.S., that you will never be able to manage. You can be sitting there drinking your cup of coffee and turning your head for a second, and then taking a swig and realizing, ‘Yeah, Boris [the fox] came up here and peed in my coffee cup.’”
Nonetheless, the nearly seven-decades-long Fox Farm Experiment has become one of the most famous and widely-cited studies in the field of evolutionary biology, providing compelling evidence for the behavioural theory of canine evolution.
…or has it? Despite the seemingly conclusive nature of Belyayev and Trut’s results, recently-uncovered evidence has cast serious doubt on the validity of their experiments.
In 2015, canine researcher Raymond Coppinger visited the Summerside International Fox Museum and Hall of Fame in Prince Edward Island, Canada. What he found there stunned him. Prince Edward Island had been a global centre of fox pelt production since 1887, when Charles Dalton and Robert Oulton established Canada’s first commercial fox farm. Foxes are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity, being monogamous and reluctant to mate in cages, but by making the animals’ enclosures larger and more natural Dalton and Oulton managed to crack the secret of fox breeding and quickly came to dominate the market, their pelts selling for nearly $1400 apiece by 1910. While touring the Summerside Museum, Coppinger stumbled across photos of commercially-bred foxes from the 1920s and 1930s which exhibited many of the traits Belyayev had reported in his own foxes, including floppy ears, curly tails, piebald coats, and friendliness around humans. This indicated that the process of domestication had started long before the Russian experiments. Then, while combing through old sales records, Coppinger landed on another bombshell: the original 65 breeding pairs which founded the Russian fox fur industry had been purchased from Prince Edward Island in the 1920s. And it was from their descendants that Belyayev acquired the initial batch of animals for his famous experiments.
According to Coppinger, these revelations throw the validity of Belyayev’s theories – and the entire concept of domestication syndrome – into serious doubt. Not only was the process of selecting for the friendliest foxes well underway before Belyayev started his experiments, but the double events of foxes being imported into Russia and being selected by Belyayev likely further contaminated his results via a phenomenon known as the founder effect. The founder effect occurs when a small segment of a population is transplanted to a new location and allowed to breed. Traits which are rare in the original population – such as reduced aggression – may by random chance be proportionally overrepresented in the smaller sub-population, and will thus become increasingly common as that population breeds and grows. This is, for example, why certain genetic diseases are more prevalent in isolated religious groups like the Amish or Ashkenazi Jews who only marry within their communities: breeding within a limited gene pool can cause certain harmful genes which are normally rare in the larger population to accumulate within the group. In the case of foxes, the already high incidence of dog-like traits caused by selective breeding was amplified by the transplantation of a small population to Russia, and further still by Belyayev selecting only the tamest foxes from their descendants for his experiments. Further experiments using DNA analysis support this hypothesis, indicating that the significance of the Fox Farm Experiment was overstated and that the dog-like traits Belyayev observed were largely brought about not by selective breeding for tameness but rather by a simple genetic accident. According to Elinor Karlsson, a colleague of Coppinger’s:
“Not only did the Prince Edward Island story really bring into question exactly what had happened in terms of the Russian project, but once you took foxes out of the picture there really wasn’t a whole lot of evidence for domestication syndrome anywhere else either…P.E.I. farmers were actually kind of doing already the experiment that Belyaev thought he was starting in Russia – breeding for the friendliest foxes. It kind of disrupts that basic idea that we selected on the behaviour and we got changes in the way (foxes) looked, because (P.E.I. farmers) were actually doing both at the same time.So where does this leave us regarding the evolution of dogs?
While the specifics of Belyayev’s theories may be in question, according to scientists like Dr. Brian Hare of Duke University’s Canine Cognition Centre, the overall theory that dogs essentially domesticated themselves – at least initially – still holds up – especially against older theories of humans adopting wolf pups and raising them to be hunting companions. This is because Ice Age humans were already efficient hunters and intolerant of competing predators, and by 43,000 years ago had essentially wiped out all the other carnivorous megafauna in Europe, including sabre-toothed cats and hyenas. Indeed, throughout history humans have exterminated wolves wherever they went; the last wolf in England was killed in the 16th Century on the orders of King Henry VII, while by 1930 there was not a single wolf left in the contiguous 48 states of America. Thus, according to Dr. Hare, only the friendliest wolves – and those who learned to read human expressions and gestures – would have been tolerated enough to scavenge garbage from human campsites. Only once these traits had already been established would humans have started to adopt these porto-dogs and use them as hunting assistants or – in dire circumstances – as walking reservoirs of emergency meat.
Yet despite these advances, no-one has yet come up with a definitive theory of dog domestication, and research carries on worldwide.
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Bonus Fact
While it is commonly known that a female fox is called a vixen, what about male foxes? While the most common answer is simply “a fox”, in fox breeding the most commonly-used term is “reynard,” and indeed in French “renard” without the Y is the basic term for a fox. But strangely, it wasn’t always this way. Until around 900 years ago the French word for fox was goupil, from the Latin vulpecula, which also gave us the scientific name for foxes, Vulpes vulpes, and the adjective vulpine, meaning “foxlike.” However, in the 12th Century folk tales starring a trickster character named Reynard the Fox became extremely popular – so popular, in fact, that “reynard” soon replaced “goupil” as the French word for fox, and this has remained in the language ever since. This would be equivalent to us referring to mice as “mickeys,” all while having no idea they were called something else prior to the introduction of the Walt Disney character.
Expand for ReferencesMacLean, Colin: A Discovery at a Small P.E.I. Museum is Challenging Decades-old Scientific Research About Domesticated Foxes, Saltwire, February 19, 2020, https://www.saltwire.com/atlantic-canada/news/canada/how-a-sleepy-summerside-museum-sparked-an-international-argument-about-domesticated-foxes-405489/
Gorman, James, Why are these Foxes Tame? Maybe They Weren’t So Wild to Begin With, The New York Times, December 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/science/foxes-tame-belyaev.html
Zuk, Marlene, How Do You Make a Fox Your Friend? Fast-Forward Evolution, The New York Times, May 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/books/review/how-to-tame-a-fox-and-build-a-dog-lee-alan-dugatkin-lyudmila-trut.html
Lord, Kathryn et al, The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, December 3, 2019, https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(19)30302-7?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0169534719303027%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Goldman, Jason, Man’s New Best Friend? A Forgotten Russian Experiment in Fox Domestication, Scientific American, September 6, 2010, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mans-new-best-friend-a-forgotten-russian-experiment-in-fox-domestication/
Hare, Brian, Darwin’s Dark Knight: Scientist Risked Execution for Fox Study, Live Science, July 17, 2013, https://www.livescience.com/38241-how-wolf-turned-to-dog.html
Bidau, Claudio, Domestication Through the Centuries: Darwin’s Ideas and Dmitry Belyaev’s Long-Term Experiment in Silver Foxes, Gayana Vol.73, 2009, https://scielo.conicyt.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0717-65382009000300006&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en
Wagner, Andrew, Why Domesticated Foxes are Genetically Fascinating (and Terrible Pets), PBS News Hour, March 31, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/domesticated-foxes-genetically-fascinating-terrible-pets
Hare, Brian, Opinion: We Didn’t Domesticate Dogs. They Domesticated Us, National Geographic, Marc 3, 2013, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/130302-dog-domestic-evolution-science-wolf-wolves-human
The post Where Did Dogs Really Come From? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On January 23, 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit research and education organization based in Chicago, moved the hands on its Doomsday Clock forward to 100 seconds to midnight – the closest in its 74-year history. According the Bulletin, this change reflects the growing threat posed by climate change, nuclear proliferation, and misinformation, and the increasing unwillingness of world leaders to respond to said threats. But just what is the Doomsday Clock, anyway? Where did it come from, how its it updated, and what can it tell us about the ever-changing risk of global catastrophe in the 20th and 21st Centuries?
The Doomsday Clock traces its origins back to 1945 and the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that year, a group of Chicago scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, including metallurgist Hyman Goldsmith and biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch, founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, a monthly newsletter aimed at keeping the public informed of the emerging danger of nuclear weapons. Two years later, when Rabinowitch and Goldsmith decided to expand the newsletter into a proper magazine, they asked artist Martyl Langsdorf, wife of physicist and Bulletin member Alexander Langsdorf, to design the cover. At first Martyl considered drawing a giant letter “U” to represent Uranium, but after listening to conversations between other Bulletin scientists, she realized that essence of the publication was not nuclear weapons themselves but the dire risk of global catastrophe they posed. Thus, according to the Bulletin’s website:
“She drew the hands of a clock ticking down to midnight. Like the countdown to an atomic bomb explosion, it suggested the destruction that awaited if no one took action to stop it.”
The Doomsday Clock debuted on the cover of the June 1947 issue of the Bulletin, with the hands set at seven minutes to midnight. Though this position originally had no particular meaning – Martyl admitting that she placed the hands for “aesthetic reasons” – it would nonetheless form the baseline for all future adjustments. The decision whether to move the hands – and how far – is made every January based on changes in technology and geopolitics over the previous year. Originally this decision was made by founding editor Eugene Rabinowitch himself, but after his death in 1973 the responsibility passed to the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which currently includes 13 Nobel laureates.
In the 74 years since its creation, the Doomsday Clock has been changed 24 times. The first change was made in 1949 in response to the Soviet Union detonating its first atomic bomb, an event which drastically changed the climate of the Cold War and lead the bulletin to move the clock to three minutes to midnight. Other events which pushed the clock closer to midnight include France and China developing nuclear weapons in the early 1960s, the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1968, and President Ronald Reagan pulling out of disarmament talks in 1980; while events which pulled back the clock include the world’s scientists collaborating during the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, the United States and Soviet Union signing the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Prior to 2020, the closest the clock has come to midnight is 2 minutes in 1953, when the United States and the Soviet Union tested their first thermonuclear weapons within six months of each other, while the furthest it has been is 17 minutes following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Strangely, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis – the closest the world has ever come to all-out nuclear war – had no effect on the clock, as the crisis was resolved long before the Bulletin could meet to discuss it. Furthermore, the crisis resulted in major global policy changes – such as the creation of the famous Moscow-Washington Hotline – which made the world a significantly safer place.
Due to its simplicity and visceral immediacy, the Doomsday Clock quickly became an icon and an enduring symbol of the Cold War, inspiring countless works of popular art such the Iron Maiden song “Two Minutes to Midnight” and the Alan Moore graphic novel Watchmen. And as the times have changed, so too has the Doomsday Clock. In 2007, designer Michael Beirut updated the Clock’s design to give it a more contemporary feel, while in 2009, when the Bulletin retired its print edition and became a digital-only publication, the Clock also made the transition, and now appears as a regularly-updated logo on the Bulletin’s website. In 2016 the Bulletin also commissioned a physical Doomsday Clock to hang in the lobby its Chicago office, which attracts thousands of tourists every year.
Other changes have been more fundamental. While the Clock has long been associated with the threat of nuclear war, in more recent years the Bulletin has kept its eye on more current and emerging threats to civilization, including climate change, biotechnology, cyberwarfare, and even artificial intelligence. Indeed, the Bulletin’s rationale for moving the Clock to 100 seconds to midnight in 2020 – the closest in its entire history – was as follows:
“Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.”
Nonetheless, the threat of nuclear war continues to factor heavily into the Clock’s setting, as evidenced by its being set forward to 5 minutes in 2007 following nuclear weapons tests in North Korea and the resumption Uranium enrichment in Iran.
Yet despite the Doomsday Clock’s iconic status, it has faced considerable criticism over the years, with many questioning the validity of the Bulletin’s process for setting its hands and even the clock’s very value as an indicator of global risk. Much of this criticism has centred on the clock’s representation of risk, which some like Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University view as inherently flawed. According to Sandberg, the various risk factors measured by the Clock are fundamentally different and thus cannot be easily compared. They are also all manmade, meaning that:
“…the normal forms of probability estimate are not just inadequate, they are actively misleading. [The Clock is] not an exact measure and it’s also combining several things. It was perhaps much easier when they started, when it was just nuclear war, but since then we have gained other existential risks.”
But even when applied to nuclear warfare alone, says Sandberg, the Clock’s very design makes it less than useful as an indicator of risk, as its inexorable “countdown” model implies that global catastrophe is inevitable rather than something we can actively avoid. Furthermore, Sandberg argues that the clock’s fundamental mission – to remind humanity of how close it is to disasters- may in fact be counterproductive, stating:
“You can’t live your life at 3 minutes to midnight.”
This view is shared by Katherine Pandora, a history of science researcher at the University of Oklahoma, who argues:
“Having authorities state that an emergency is at hand is an effective way to gain someone’s attention and have them primed to take immediate action, which is the logic behind the clock’s minutes-to-midnight gambit. Asking successive generations of people to sustain a constant sense of emergency is a contradiction in terms. The unintended effects of this directive can impede a successful resolution of the issue at hand and undermine the working relationship between experts and nonexperts. I don’t think that using apocalyptic rhetoric helps us to do the hard work of discussing difficult and complicated issues in a democracy.”
Nonetheless, Pandora praises the efforts of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to keep the public informed about emerging global threats, stating:
“It is the prodigious amount of research and analysis that ground the conclusions in the reports that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists issues that are the real tools for mobilizing discussion among all of us on critical issues.”
The Doomsday Clock has also received criticism from right-wing commentators, who accuse it of being, in the words of journalist John Merline, “little more than a Liberal angst meter.” These critics argue that despite founding editor Eugene Rabinowitz’s assertion that:
“The Bulletin’s clock is not a gauge to register the ups and downs of the international power struggle; it is intended to reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age.”
… the clock’s movements are motivated merely by political ideology, moving closer to midnight during Republican administrations and farther away during Democratic ones. However, a cursory look at the clock’s history reveals this to be untrue, as the clock was backed off significantly under Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, and moved forward under Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Other right-wing criticism has centred on the Bulletin’s 2017 Doomsday Clock statement in which it argued:
“Information monocultures, fake news, and the hacking and release of politically sensitive emails may have had an illegitimate impact on the US presidential election, threatening the fabric of democracy.”
This has led commenters to accuse the Bulletin of equating “fake news” with nuclear warfare as an existential risk to civilizations.
But most criticisms, whether liberal or conservative, appear to miss the fundamental point of the Doomsday Clock. As the Bulletin states on its website:
The Doomsday Clock is not a forecasting tool, and we are not predicting the future. Rather, we study events that have already occurred and existing trends. Our Science and Security Board tracks numbers and statistics—looking, for example, at the number and kinds of nuclear weapons in the world, the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the degree of acidity in our oceans, and the rate of sea level rise. The board also takes account of leaders’ and citizens’ efforts to reduce dangers, and efforts by institutions—whether of governments, markets, or civil society organizations—to follow through on negotiated agreements.
The Bulletin is a bit like a doctor making a diagnosis. We look at data, as physicians look at lab tests and x-rays, and also take harder-to-quantify factors into account, as physicians do when talking with patients and family members. We consider as many symptoms, measurements, and circumstances as we can. Then we come to a judgment that sums up what could happen if leaders and citizens don’t take action to treat the conditions.
The Bulletin acknowledges that at its heart, the Doomsday Clock is – and has always been – a symbol, an easily digestible representation of global risk intended to spark discussion and spur action. And in response to accusations of political partisanship, the Bulletin offers a sobering reminder:
“Ensuring the survival of our societies and the human species is not a political agenda. Cooperating with other countries to achieve control of extremely dangerous technologies should not involve partisan politics. If scientists involved with the Bulletin are critical of current policies on nuclear weapons and climate change, it is because those policies increase the possibility of self-destruction.”
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Expand for ReferencesWhat is the Doomsday Clock? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/
Mecklin, John, This is Your COVID Wake-Up Call: It is 100 Seconds to Midnight, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
Doomsday Clock Moves Closest to Midnight in its 73-Year History, ABC News, January 23, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-24/doomsday-clock-moves-closest-to-midnight-in-73-year-history/11896294
Huffstutter, P.J, Doomsday Clock Moving Closer to Midnight? The Spokesman-Review, October 16, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=20061016&id=tGdWAAAAIBAJ&pg=5932,54244942006
Criss, Doug, Running the “Doomsday Clock” is a Full-Time Job. Really, CNN, January 26, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/26/world/doomsday-clock-scientists-trnd/index.html
Benedict, Kennette, Science, Art, and the Legacy of Martyl, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 9, 2013, https://thebulletin.org/2013/04/science-art-and-the-legacy-of-martyl
Ukman, Jason, Doomsday Clock Ticks Closer to Midnight, The Washington Post, January 10, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/doomsday-clock-ticks-closer-to-midnight/2012/01/10/gIQAXpKfoP_blog.html
Barasch, Alex, What the Doomsday Clock Doesn’t Tell Us, Slate, January 26, 2018, https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/what-the-doomsday-clock-doesnt-tell-us.html
Ghose, Tia, Is the Doomsday Clock Still Relevant? Live Science, 2016, https://www.livescience.com/53801-doomsday-clock-relevance.html
Hopper, Tristin, Why the Doomsday Clock is an Idiotic Indicator the World’s Media Should Ignore, National Post, January 25, 2018, https://nationalpost.com/news/world/why-the-doomsday-clock-is-an-idiotic-indicator-the-worlds-media-should-ignore
Merline, John, The Famed ‘Doomsday Clock” is Little More Than a Liberal Angst Meter, January 25, 2019, https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/the-doomsday-clock-measures-liberal-angst-not-global-risk/
The post What’s Up With the Very Real ‘Doomsday Clock’? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The tongue map. If you’ve ever taken an elementary or high school science class, chances are you’ve encountered this classic of scientific illustration: a diagram of the human tongue, neatly divided into zones showing the locations of receptors for the four basic tastes: sweet at the tip, salty and sour along the sides, and bitter at the back. You may even have been asked to reproduce this map by dripping various substances such as salt water, sugar water, and lemon juice onto different parts of your tongue – and gotten frustrated and even failed the assignment when the results of this experiment failed to match up with the diagram, making you forever bitter and causing you to turn your back on the entire institution of science and miss out on a potentially brilliant career and the prospect of a Nobel Prize….
…If so, then good news: you were right all along, for the tongue map – a fixture of science textbooks for nearly 100 years – is in fact total nonsense. Not only are the tongue’s taste receptors not divided into neat zones, but we now know that there are, in fact, more than just four basic tastes. Furthermore, scientists have known all this for nearly 50 years. So how, then, has this patently false map persisted for so long? Well, it all has to do with an unfortunate scientific misunderstanding.
In 1901, German scientist David P. Hänig [“Hay-nig”] published a paper titled The Psychophysics of Taste. In it, he described an experiment wherein he applied substances representing the four basic tastes – sucrose for sweet; quinine sulphate for bitter; dilute hydrochloric acid for sour; and salt for, well, salty – to different regions of his subjects’ tongues in order to determine the stimulus threshold – that is, the minimum amount of substance required for the subject to perceive the taste – for each region. This experiment revealed that the stimulus threshold varied slightly but significantly across the tongue’s surface, being lower on the outer edges of the tongue and increasing towards the centre. The threshold variation was also different for each of the four basic tastes; for instance, the threshold for sweet was lowest at the tip of the tongue and increased moving rearward. Hänig published these results in a handy graph showing the change in sensitivity – that is, the inverse of the stimulus threshold – to each taste across different regions of the tongue. And there it remained for more than four decades, unknown to all but a few specialists in the field of psychophysics.
Fast forward to 1942 and the publication of the textbook Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology by American psychologist Edwin G. Boring. Despite his name, Boring enjoyed a long and fascinating career in the field of experimental psychology. Among his many achievements, in 1930 Boring popularized a cartoon by cartoonist W.E. Hills that could either be perceived as an old or a young woman, with the viewer’s brain constantly switching between the two interpretations. Boring used the cartoon and others like it to study the brain’s response to ambiguous stimuli, leading to such illustrations becoming known as “Boring figures.” Boring also conducted experimental studies on the moon illusion – the common perception that the moon is larger when it is close to the horizon than when it is higher in the sky – as well as an amusing 1917 experiment in which he woke up sleeping subjects and asked them to guess what time it was. Amazingly, while Boring found that many people could not carry out this task at all, those that could often guessed within 15 minutes of the correct time.
In Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology, Boring reproduced and reinterpreted the taste sensitivity graphs from David Hänig’s 1901 paper. Unfortunately for Boring – and millions of schoolchildren over the following century – Hänig had committed a cardinal sin of data presentation: he didn’t label his graph axes properly. This led Boring to misinterpret Hänig’s data in two fundamental ways. First, he assumed that the lowest values on the graph represented zero sensitivity to that particular taste; and second, he assumed that Hänig had measured the change in sensitivity of each taste relative to other tastes. Boring’s reinterpreted graphs thus gave the impression that the receptors for each of the four basic tastes were concentrated in distinct regions of the tongue, and that each of these regions could perceive only one taste and not others. This seemed to confirm the findings of another German researcher, A. Hoffmann, who in 1875 observed that the centre of the tongue has almost no fungiform papillae – the little bumps that cover the tongue – and thus concluded that it must also have no taste buds. This flawed perception eventually led to the creation of the now-familiar tongue map, with one of the earliest versions appearing in a 1952 article in Scientific American by A.J. Haagen-Smit.
However, it did not take long for scientists to confirm what generations of exasperated students have long suspected. As early as 1974, experiments conducted by American researcher Virginia Collings revealed that while sensitivity to different tastes do indeed vary across the surface of the tongue, these differences are minor and every part of the tongue is in fact capable of detecting every taste. Indeed, David Häning had drawn conclusions nearly a century before; not included in his widely-misinterpreted graphs was the tongue’s sensitivity to the taste of salt, which was found not to vary significantly across the tongue’s surface. In addition to debunking Edwin Boring’s conclusions, Collings also discovered that taste receptors are not confined to the papillae and are instead found all across the tongue, on the soft palate at the back of the throat, and even the epiglottis – the flap of tissue that blocks food from entering the windpipe. Other researchers have also discovered taste receptors throughout the digestive tract, though these are not capable of producing a conscious sensation of taste and are likely used to regulate the digestive process.
There are plenty of other findings which similarly debunk the traditional tongue map. Signals from the taste buds are transmitted to the brain via two cranial nerves: the glossopharyngeal nerve, which connects to the back of the tongue, and the chorda tympani, which connects to the front. If taste receptors were actually arranged as the tongue map suggests, it would follow that damage to the chorda tympani would eliminate one’s ability to taste sweetness. However, in 1965, experiments by surgeon T.R. Bull revealed that this was not the case. Likewise, in 1993, researcher Linda Bartoshuk of the University of Florida discovered that anaesthetizing the chorda tympani did not interfere with subjects’ ability to taste sweetness. In fact, it actually caused them to perceive the taste even more intensely.
And as if this wasn’t definitive enough, both Boring and Hänig were wrong on yet another count: there are, in fact, more than just four basic tastes. One day in 1907, Kikunae Ikeda, a professor of chemistry at Tokyo Imperial University, was eating dinner with his family when he noticed something odd: the dashi broth in his soup tasted richer and more flavourful than usual. After stirring his soup for a few moments, Ikeda realized that flavour enhancement was caused by the addition of kombu, a type of seaweed, and katsuobushi, dried fish flakes. This led Ikeda to theorize that there was a fifth basic taste in addition to sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, which he dubbed umami. Within a year, he succeeded in isolating from kombu the chemical responsible for imparting the umami flavour: monosodium L-glutamate – better known as MSG. In 1909 Ikeda developed and patented a process for mass-producing MSG from wheat and soy and founded Ajnomoto Co. Inc – the name being derived from the Japanese for “essence of flavour.” Today, Ajnomoto is a multinational empire that employs over 32,000 people and generates nearly $10 billion in annual revenue, while MSG is one of the world’s most popular flavour enhancers alongside salt and pepper.
In addition to pioneering the mass-production of MSG, Ikeda also studied other foods to determine if they also contained glutamate, and discovered high concentrations in meat, seaweed, and tomatoes. This led him to theorize that humans evolved taste receptors for glutamates because they often signal the presence of proteins – a vital component of an omnivore’s diet. While for many years the existence of umami has been hotly debated – especially in western circles – it had since come to be accepted as the fifth basic taste, with its perception acting as a signal for the digestive tract to produce protein-digesting enzymes. More recently, researchers have also posited the existence of a sixth basic taste, stimulated by pure fats. However, the receptor for this hypothetical taste has yet to be identified, while laboratory tests have revealed that while test subjects can identify the presence of fat under conditions of forced choice, most cannot consciously perceive it as a distinct taste. This suggests that, like with the taste buds in the lower digestive tract, our perception of fat may be a case of so-called “blind taste”.
Today, the anatomy of the tongue is far better understood than in Hänig and Boring’s day. Most taste buds are clustered on bump-like structures known as papillae, of which there are three basic types: button-shaped fungiform papillae, found mainly on the tip and outer edges of the tongue; ridge-like circumvallate papillae, found mainly on the rear of the tongue, and foliate papillae found in trenches along the rear sides of the tongue. These papillae typically hold around 4, 200, and 120 taste buds, respectively, with the average human’s mouth containing around 8,000 taste buds. Each taste bud, in turn, holds between 50-100 taste receptors, with each of the five basic tastes – or six, as the case may be – being detected by a different type of receptor. As previously mentioned, individual taste buds and receptors are not confined to the papillae and are found all over the tongue and mouth, while the receptors for the five basic tastes are distributed more or less evenly over the surface of the tongue, meaning that you can perceive sweetness and bitterness just as easily on the back of your tongue as on the tip, and saltiness and sourness in the middle of the tongue as on the edges. Indeed, from an evolutionary standpoint, this makes good sense. For example, bitterness often signals the presence of toxins; if only the back of the tongue were able to perceive it, it would have placed our evolutionary ancestors at a much higher risk of being poisoned.
It is now also known that not all animals perceive taste in the same way. Humans, for example, evolved to taste and seek out sweetness because sweet food like ripe fruit provided a concentrated source of calories. Obligate carnivores like cats, by contrast, do not eat fruit, and thus did not evolve to taste sweetness. This means that while Mr. Whiskers may love to lick your ice cream cone when you’re not looking, he’s probably in it for the protein in the cream, not the sugar.
So in light of all this contradictory evidence, why, then, has the tongue map persisted for so long? The most likely explanation is that we humans like order and organization, and the elegant simplicity of the tongue map appeals to these innate preferences – especially when it comes to the sometimes difficult task of teaching science to children. As Linda Bartoshuk noted in 1993:
“The apparent simplicity of the tongue map has made it a popular laboratory demonstration in children’s biology classes. The popularity of this laboratory demonstration is particularly amazing considering that it must fail to produce the expected results quite regularly.”
However, there may still be a grain of truth behind the discredited tongue map, for more recent research has revealed a small but significant variation in sensitivity to different tastes across the surface of the tongue. For example, bitter and umami tastes as well as the heat generated by capsaicin – the active ingredient in child peppers – is more easily perceived at the back of the tongue than the front. But again, this difference is so small as to be all but insignificant in everyday life.
So in conclusion, should you happen to run into your eighth-grade science teacher in the grocery store produce aisle, you can now loudly inform them and the rest of the shoppers carefully testing the ripeness of avocados that you were right and they were wrong and that your failing grade was an affront to the integrity of the scientific method, damn it! You can then watch smugly as, their expression growing progressively sour, they slowly lay down their umami-laden fruit and begin to cry salty and bitter tears of defeat, all the while revelling in the old adage: revenge is sweet.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- How to Tell if You are a Supertaster
- What Causes Aftertaste
- Why Toothpaste Makes Things Like Orange Juice Taste So Awful
- Why Salt Enhances Flavor
Expand for ReferencesMunger, Steven, The Taste Map of the Tongue You Learned in School is All Wrong, Smithsonian Magazine, May 23, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/neat-and-tidy-map-tastes-tongue-you-learned-school-all-wrong-180963407/
Wanjek, Christopher, The Tongue Map: Tasteless Myth Debunked, Live Science, August 29, 2006, https://www.livescience.com/7113-tongue-map-tasteless-myth-debunked.html
Hammond, Claudia, The Real Truth About Whether Our Tongues Have ‘Taste Zones’, BBC Future, October 12, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171012-do-our-tongues-have-different-taste-zones
Simon, Matt, The Deliciously Surprising Science of Taste, WIRED, April 6, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/science-of-taste/
Reevaluating the Tongue Map, Bridging the Gap, Penn State University, February 24, 2016, https://sites.psu.edu/psychedaboutfoodscience/2016/02/24/reevaluating-the-tongue-map/
Spence, Charles, The Tongue Map and the Spacial Modulation of Taste Perception, Current Research in Food Science, Volume 5, 2022, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2665927122000314
Edwin G. Boring, Absolute Astronomy, http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Edwin_G._Boring
The post Yet Another Thing You Learned in School That is Wrong appeared first on Today I Found Out.
At 10:30 AM on February 14, 1929, a rattle of gunfire echoed through Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. Seven men, Irish members of Chicago’s North Side Gang, had been gunned down in a garage at 2122 North Clark Street by assailants dressed in police uniforms. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre would go down as one of the most brutal chapters in the city’s Prohibition-Era gang wars, and though the perpetrators were never definitively identified, suspicion immediately fell on the North Side Gang’s greatest rival, the Chicago Outfit, headed by legendary mob boss Al Capone. In addition to damaging the reputation of Capone – who until that point had been seen by many as a philanthropist and even a modern-day Robin Hood, the massacre brought notoriety to one of the instruments used in its commission, a weapon which has come to define the “Roaring 20s” and remains one of the most recognizable firearms in history. This is the story of the iconic Thompson Submachine Gun – AKA the “Tommy Gun.”
In 1884, modern warfare changed forever when American inventor Hiram Maxim patented the first reliable, self-loading machine gun. With a rate of fire of 600 rounds per minute, the Maxim Gun allowed its operator to deliver an unprecedented volume of fire, especially compared to the single-shot and bolt-action infantry rifles of the era. This firepower allowed the various European colonial powers to cut swath through native populations during the late 19th-Century “Scramble for Africa,” leading writer Hillaire Belloc to famously quip in his 1898 poem The Modern Traveller:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not
Unfortunately, Maxim’s invention proved equally effective against modern armies, as military planners would quickly learn to their dismay as the world marched off to war in August 1914. Along with artillery – the true killer of the Great War – the Maxim and other heavy machine-guns helped turn the Western Front into a bloody stalemate of trench warfare, in which thousands of men at a time were cut down in futile assaults to capture just a few dozen metres of ground. Almost from the moment the front lines began to stagnate, military planners on all sides began searching for “wonder weapons” that could help break the deadlock. This search produced a variety of technologies still used in warfare today, including tanks, aerial bombardment, and flamethrowers But a fundamental problem still remained: the average infantryman, armed only with a bolt-action rifle, lacked sufficient firepower to adequately exploit a breakthrough.
One proposed solution was the combat shotgun, introduced to the Western Front by the American Expeditionary Force in 1917. Unlike regular combat rifles, pump-action shotguns like the Winchester 1897 or 1912 could easily be maneuvered in the confines of a trench and deliver a withering volume of fire, theoretically allowing an assaulting soldier to jump down into an enemy trench and “hose it down” within seconds. The American deployment of shotguns famously elicited diplomatic protests from the Imperial German government, who declared their use a war crime and threatened to summarily execute any soldier caught carrying one. The Americans, finding this rather rich coming from the nation that had introduced flamethrowers, unrestricted submarine warfare, and chemical warfare, called the Germans’ bluff and threatened reprisals should they ever make good on their threat and nothing ever came of the incident. In the end, however, shotguns proved far less effective in combat than anticipated, largely due to problems with ammunition. WWI-era shotshells had paper hulls, which tended to absorb moisture and swell, preventing them from effectively feeding in the shotgun mechanism. For this reason, combat shotguns saw only limited use on the Western Front and had no major impact on the course of the war.
Another proposed solution to the individual firepower problem was to arm infantrymen with a faster-firing self-loading rifle. Only one belligerent nation, France, managed to successfully deploy such a weapon, fielding around 86,000 RSC M1917 rifles during the last year of the war. However, the rifle was expensive to produce and unpopular with French troops, being somewhat unreliable and difficult to maintain under trench warfare conditions. It would not be until the introduction of the American M1 Garand in 1936 that an army would be equipped with a self-loading rifle as its standard infantry weapon – and for more on the evolution of infantry rifles, please check out our previous video What Actually Defines an Assault Rifle, and Who Invented Them?
In the end, most nations elected to produce lighter machine guns that could be carried into combat by a single infantryman – attempts which met with varying degrees of success. For example, the German light machine gun, the MG.08/15, was produced by removing a standard MG.08 Maxim gun from its heavy tripod, lightening a few components, and fitting it with a shoulder stock, pistol grip, and bipod. Despite these modifications, the 08/15 still weighed a whopping 18 kilograms, making it difficult to use and extremely unpopular with German troops. Indeed, in modern German, the idiom “Oh-eight-fifteen” is still used to describe something unremarkable or uninspired. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the French Chauchat light machine gun, also introduced in 1915, weighed only 9 kilograms. Though it was the most widely-produced and deployed automatic weapon of the war, the Chauchat’s effectiveness was somewhat hampered by design flaws like its open-sided magazine that tended to accumulate dirt and mud. Perhaps the most effective of the Great War light machine guns was the British Lewis Gun, which weighed 13 kilograms and could deliver effective sustained fire from a 97-round pan magazine. A close runner-up was the American 7-kilogram Browning Automatic Rifle or BAR, which unlike its contemporaries was designed to be fired from the shoulder or the hip. A contemporary doctrine known as “walking fire” called for light machine guns like the BAR to be fired from the hip while marching, keeping the enemy’s head’s down as a unit advanced. A special belt with a cup to support the BAR’s shoulder stock was even issued for this purpose, though none are known to have been used in combat.
But whatever their relative advantages, all these weapons suffered from the same flaw: they fired full-power rifle cartridges, which were heavy to carry, overpowered for the short distances over which combat typically took place, and made light machine guns difficult to control in fully-automatic fire. In the end, it was the Germans who came up with the most practical solution by creating an automatic weapon chambered in a lighter pistol-calibre cartridge – the world’s first submachine gun. While the first pistol-calibre automatic weapon to see combat was the Italian Model 1915 Villar-Perosa, this was largely used as an aircraft machine gun and squad support weapon and did not fit the modern definition of a submachine gun. At first, the Germans attempted to modify existing pistols such as the Mauser C-96, and Luger P.08 to fire fully-automatically, but these weapons were unsuccessful, as their high rates of fire – 1200 rounds per minute for the Luger – made them uncontrollable and drained their magazines in seconds. It was thus decided to design a suitable weapon from scratch. The result was the Bergmann MP 18, designed by pioneering weapons engineers Theodor Bergmann and Hugo Schmeisser. 83 centimetres long and weighing only 4 kilograms, the MP 18 was chambered in the 9mm Parabellum cartridge, had a rate of fire of 400 rounds per minute, and was fed from a 32-round drum magazine mounted on the left side of the weapon. Introduced in early 1918, the MP 18 was used to great effect by German Sturmtruppen or “stormtroopers”, specialized groups of elite troops who used speed, maneuver, and advanced light weapons to break through enemy lines and create breaches through which regular troops could advance. But the weapon was not perfect, the heavy side-mounted drum magazine making it unbalanced and awkward to handle. Later versions would use lighter stick magazines.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another pioneering weapons designer was thinking along similar lines. Born in 1860, Brigadier General John Tolliver Thompson was a career U.S. Army officer who from 1890 to 1914 served as Director of Arsenals for the Army’s Ordnance Department. During his tenure, he was responsible for the testing and adoption of the 1903 Springfield rifle and the selection of .45 ACP as the Army’s standard pistol cartridge. Disturbed by the deadlocked trench warfare taking place overseas and sensing the United States’ impending entry into the Great War, Thompson came up with what he called a “trench broom”: a portable automatic weapon that would allow troops to quickly clear out enemy defensive positions. With the backing of tobacco magnate and financier Thomas Ryan, in 1916 Thompson formed the Auto Ordnance Company and set about developing two different weapons: an automatic rifle chambered in the Army’s standard .306 [“Thirty-ought-six”] cartridge and a smaller handheld machine gun chambered in .45 ACP. A major design challenge facing Thompson was what kind of delay mechanism to use in his new weapons. All self-loading firearms – that is, those which use the energy from one round to load and fire the next – require some kind of mechanism to delay the opening of the action, otherwise hot propellant gas will leak back into the shooter’s face, the bullet will exit at a lower velocity, and the bolt will shoot backwards so violently it may damage the firearm. One common solution is to use the recoil of the firearm’s barrel or propellant gas tapped off from the barrel to unlock the bolt, but Thompson rejected both designs as too heavy, bulky, and unreliable. Instead, he selected a mechanism based on an unusual physical phenomenon discovered by U.S. Navy Commander John Blish. While serving aboard the warships USS Niagara and USS Vicksburg, Blish noticed that naval guns with interrupted-screw breeches stayed closed when fired with a heavier charge but tended to unscrew when fired with lighter charges. This led Blish to conclude that dissimilar metals had a higher tendency to stick together when subjected to high pressure – a phenomenon he dubbed the Blish Effect. The Thompson gun’s action exploited this effect using a brass block sliding in an angled channel on the weapon’s steel bolt. When the weapon was fired, the rearward pressure exerted by the cartridge caused the brass and steel to stick together, delaying the opening of the bolt. Once the chamber pressure had dropped to safe levels, the brass block slid out of the way and released the bolt, allowing the action to cycle. The initial version of the weapon, dubbed the “Persuader” or “Annihilator”, did not have a shoulder stock and was designed to be belt-fed like a heavy machine gun. However, this development went nowhere and the weapon was modified to take conventional box magazines. It was also given the less sensational name “Thompson Submachine Gun.” Interestingly, this now-universal term was coined by Thompson himself; previously such weapons were known by variations of the term “machine pistol.”
Though a few prototype guns had been completed by late 1918, unfortunately for Thompson – but fortunately for the rest of the world – the Great War suddenly came to an end, dashing Auto Ordnance’s hopes of obtaining large government contracts. Undeterred, Thompson decided to try his luck on the civilian market, and in March 1920 contracted the Colt Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut to produce an initial batch of 15,000 weapons, which was completed in 15 months. As it turned out, these would be both the first and the last Thompsons to be manufactured for nearly two decades.
First released onto the market in 1921, the first model Thompson Submachine Gun was 86 centimetres long, weighed 5 kilograms, and featured a distinctive ribbed barrel and forward vertical grip. Chambered in .45 ACP, it had a rate of fire of 800 rounds per minute and could feed either from 30-round box magazines or from 50 and 100-round drum magazines. Later versions of the Thompson were fitted with a device called a Cutts Compensator, which deflected propellant gases upward to prevent the muzzle from rising and make the weapon more controllable in automatic fire.
Yet to Thompson’s disappointment, his supposedly world-beating weapon failed to find any customers. For year after year, most of the 15,000 Thompson submachine guns lay gathering dust on warehouse shelves, slowly eating away at the Auto Ordnance Company’s remaining capital. Part of the problem was timing. With the Great War over, armies around the world were demobilizing, with few purchasing any weapons in quantity – let alone fancy new ones like the Thompson. But the Thompson’s main flaw was its cost. The Thompson was a complex design to manufacture, requiring dozens of machining operations which, in the era before computer-controlled manufacturing, each had to be made using a separate piece of complex machinery. This resulted in a manufacturing cost of $44 per gun – equivalent to nearly $600 today. Auto Ordnance in turn sold the guns to its distributors for around $150 apiece, while the final retail price was an eye-watering $200. For comparison, the average worker at the time made around 90 cents per hour, while a brand-new automobile could be purchased for between $400-500. This made the Thompson a difficult investment to justify, particularly with so many other, cheaper firearms on the market. Nonetheless, Auto Ordnance embarked on an extensive European marketing tour, searching high and low for anyone to purchase their fancy new guns. Special military versions of the Thompson were proposed, including models chambered in more powerful cartridges and fitted with bipods for use as light machine guns. The German Junkers aircraft company even came up with a version of their F.13 transport plane armed with no fewer than 30 downward-firing Thompsons for use as a ground-attack platform – because even in the 1920s, there was no kill like overkill. But most of these efforts came to nothing, with European militaries showing little interest in the gun. One client Auto Ordnance tried particularly hard to court was the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which at the time was engaged in a bitter struggle against insurgents fighting for Irish independence. But while the RUC was not interested, their rivals, the Irish Republican Army, most definitely were, and purchased and smuggled several hundred Thompson guns into Ireland for use in the Irish Civil War of 1922-1923. Back home, the US Air Service and Cavalry tested the gun but rejected it, while private sales continued at a slow trickle – the main purchasers being banks, police departments, and large corporations, the latter of which found Thompsons particularly useful as, shall we say, labour negotiation tools.
Meanwhile, Auto Ordnance’s attempts to develop and sell its second product, the Thompson Auto Rifle, were also going poorly. Though the company managed to get the weapon into trials for the US Army’s new service rifle, its performance was less than stellar. The bolt recoiled so quickly and ejected spent cartridge cases so violently that in testing the cases embedded themselves in a wooden block held beside the rifle. The rifle also required lubricated cartridges to operate reliably, ultimately leading to its rejection by the Ordnance Department. Alarmingly, these trials revealed that the heart of the Thompson system, the Blish Lock, did not actually work as designed. Indeed, the Blish Effect itself was found to not even exist, meaning that the Thompson’s sliding brass block did almost nothing to delay the recoil of the bolt. That the submachine gun worked at all was due to the bolt being heavy enough for its sheer inertia to delay its recoil, in reality making the Thompson mechanism a simple straight-blowback action. With the Thompson Auto Rifle out of contention for US Army’s adoption, Auto Ordnance abandoned the project and turned its attention to its more effective – but still commercially unsuccessful – submachine gun.
The company’s first big break came in 1926, when, following a series of robberies, the US Postal Inspection Service purchased a batch of 200 Thompsons to arm United States Marine Corps troops assigned to guard mail trains. The Marines fell in love with the Thompson, and in 1928 ordered another large batch, specially modified to have a slower rate of fire to improve controllability and ammunition consumption. The guns, designated the model 1928, saw extensive use in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, and other countries during the so-called “Banana Wars” – a series of military interventions in Central America and the Caribbean intended to secure American political and business interests in the region. The Marines later carried Thompsons into China as part of the U.S’s policy of “gunboat diplomacy.” Chinese warlords were impressed by the weapon, and many locally-manufactured copies were produced. Small numbers of Thompsons were also purchased by the Coast Guard for use against rum runners, while in 1928, the US Cavalry, which had previously rejected the Thompson, bought a batch for use by armoured car crews. But while this uptick in sales was a welcome development, by 1928 Auto Ordnance had only succeeded in selling 6,000 of its initial batch of 15,000 guns.
At this point, you might be asking yourself: “but what about the gangsters?” Alas, while popular culture would have us believe that every Prohibition-era bootlegger had a trusty “Chicago Typewriter” hidden in his violin case, the reality was considerably less dramatic. As mentioned before, for most people the Thompson was a prohibitively expensive weapon, so much so that only 10% – that is, around 150 guns total – of the initial 1921 batch were ever sold to private individuals. This meant that while several gangs did indeed purchase and use Thompsons, they were nowhere near as prevalent as is commonly believed. But Hollywood has never been one to let the truth get in the way of a good story, and the popular gangster films of the era such as Scarface, G Men, and Angels with Dirty Faces placed the iconic “Tommy Gun” front and centre, cementing its mystique as the “gun that made the twenties roar.” Such media depictions skewed popular perceptions of the prevalence of violent crime, spurring many police departments to purchase their own Thompsons in order to counter this perceived threat. Sales further increased following the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the 1933 Kansas City Massacre, in which a group of gangsters including Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd gunned down four policemen. The latter incident prompted the FBI to purchase its own batch of 115 Thompsons in 1935. Other gangsters and bandits of the era known to have favoured the Thompson included “Public Enemy No.1” John Dillinger, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and George “Bay Face” Nelson, who himself met his end in a hail of FBI Thompson bullets on November 28, 1934.
The year 1928 was a pivotal one for the Auto Ordnance Company, for it was in that year that Brigadier General John Thompson retired and stepped down as head of the company. That same year, the company’s main financier and majority stockholder, Thomas Ryan, died at the age of 77. His estate, seeing Auto Ordnance as a money-losing boondoggle, immediately attempted to liquidate the company. The remaining shareholders succeeded in delaying the sale by more than a decade and in selling most of the company’s remaining inventory, but in 1939 Auto Ordnance was finally sold to one Russell Maguire, a notorious corporate raider.
Those viewers familiar with 20th Century history might recognize 1939 as the year the Second World War broke out, meaning that much to the chagrin of Thomas Ryan’s estate, the previously unsuccessful Auto Ordnance Company was about to experience a major reversal of fortune. With the worldwide demand for firearms suddenly soaring, in December 1939 Maguire signed a contract with the Savage Arms Company of Westfield Massachusetts to produce Thompson guns for foreign export. As part of their previous contract with Colt, Auto Ordnance owned all the manufacturing tools for the Thompson gun, meaning that by May 1940 the first new batch of guns in nearly two decades was already rolling off the production line. The first major purchasers of the new Thompson were France and Great Britain, who were scrambling to rearm in the face of an imminent Nazi invasion. The latter purchase was particularly ironic as for decades the British had dismissed submachine guns as “gangster guns” with no place in honourable warfare. But with insufficient arms manufacturing capacity at home, Great Britain had no choice but to import hundreds of thousands of American Thompson guns to arm the British Expeditionary Force and Home Guard. Despite its weight, the gun was well-liked by British troops, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill was famously photographed shooting one during an inspection of coastal defences. Propagandists on both sides had a field day with this photo op, with Allied propaganda emphasizing Churchill’s status as a “fighting leader” while Nazi propaganda painted him as a dangerous “gangster.” In the end, however, a combination of limited cash reserves and the loss of thousands of weapons on the beaches of Dunkirk meant that the British were never able to acquire enough Thompsons, and were forced to turn to a much cheaper – and cruder – alternative to make up the shortfall: the much-maligned “plumber’s nightmare” – the Sten Gun – and for more on this, please check out our previous video The Pivotal WWII Gun Nobody Wanted to Put Down.
Meanwhile, in December 1941 the United States entered the war, further driving up demand for Thompsons. However, the original 1921 and 1928 models were far too expensive for mass adoption, forcing Auto Ordnance to make a series of cost-saving modifications. The rear sight was greatly simplified, the ribbed barrel smoothed down, the iconic vertical grip replaced with a simpler horizontal version, and the Cutts Compensator eliminated, creating the model 1928A1. With a final purchase price of only $70, around one million 1928A1s were produced between January and June 1942, when production switched to the even simpler and cheaper M1 variant. The M1 did away with previous versions’ complex – and useless – Blish Lock, allowing the receiver and bolt to be greatly simplified and the bolt handle to be moved from the top to the side of the weapon. Barely four months into the first production run, the M1 itself was replaced by the even simpler M1A1, whose design cut 10 hours off the production of each gun and dropped the government purchase price down to $43 per unit. The M1A1 would go on to become the iconic American submachine gun of WWII, with nearly 1.3 million being manufactured by Savage as well as Auto Ordnance in its own factory in Bridgeport Connecticut.
But even in its cheapest, most simplified form, the Thompson was still too complex and expensive to keep up with the insatiable demands of the US war machine. So, in 1942, the U.S. Army Ordnance Board took a page from the British and began developing a new submachine gun that could be produced far more cheaply and in greater numbers than the Thompson. The resulting weapon, designed by engineers George Hyde and Frederick Sampson of General Motors’ Inland division, was, like the British Sten Gun, built mainly of welded steel stampings, bringing its manufacturing cost down to only $20.94 – less than half of the M1A1 Thompson. Furthermore, its manufacture did not require specialized machine tools, allowing the gun to be produced in a wide variety of factories. Indeed, most of the guns produced during the war were manufactured by GM’s Guide Lamp division, which had previously made car headlamps. Formally adopted in December 1942, the new weapon was officially designated the M3 Submachine Gun, though due to its resemblance to a certain mechanic’s tool it was universally known to the troops as the “Grease Gun.” Though the Grease Gun was intended to replace the Thompson, problems with tooling up the M3 production line meant that production of the M1A1 Thompson continued until February 1944, with the gun continuing to serve until the end of the war. While the M3 was cruder and slightly less accurate than the Thompson, it was nonetheless an effective weapon and well-liked by U.S. soldiers. 655,000 were produced before the war ended, and while the M3 was officially dropped as a standard service weapon in 1957, a handful remained in service as personal defence weapons for tank crews until as late as 1992.
As for the Thompson, the end of WWII brought its 20 years of military service to a close. While certainly an iconic weapon, the Thompson was a design from an earlier era whose complex and expensive manufacturing process made it ill-suited to the modern era of industrialized warfare. Yet its legend lives on in movies, TV shows, and other pieces of popular media, where the “Chicago Typewriter”, in the hands of fictional gangsters and lawmen, continues to make the 1920s roar.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- The Lawrence Massacre of 1863
- The Largely Forgotten Los Angeles’ Chinese Massacre
- This Day In History: September 24th- The Murder of Neil LaFave
- The “House of Horrors” Hotel and One of America’s First Serial Killers
Expand for ReferencesMcCollum, Ian, Thompson 1921: The Original Chicago Typewriter, Forgotten Weapons, October 6, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN1uUfMCQ0Y&t=982s
McCollum, Ian, The Marines’ First SMG: 1921/28 Thompson Gun, Forgotten Weapons, October 9, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4jo8csYpg0
McCollum, Ian, World War Two Heats Up: the M1928A1 Thompson SMG, Forgotten Weapons, October 11, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTY_DQ0mllU
McCollum, Ian, The Iconic WW2 Thompson: the M1A1, Forgotten Weapons, October 15, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_8qLFoMzl4
Smith, Charles, John Thompson and the Thompson Submachine Gun, Auto Ordnance, https://www.auto-ordnance.com/history-of-an-icon/
The Thompson Submachine Gun Story, NFA Toys, http://www.nfatoys.com/tsmg/
Moss, Matthew, The Tale of the Tommy Gun, Popular Mechanics, February 27, 2017, https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a25414/tommy-gun-thompson-submachine/
The post The Story of the Iconic ‘Tommy Gun’ appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Space: the final frontier – or, if science fiction is to be believed – the final battlefield. In the land of sci-fi, no self-respecting Starfleet officer on an away mission or scruffy-looking nerf-herding smuggler would dare leave their spacecraft without a trusty phaser or blaster at their side. Even in universes where directed-energy weapons have not yet been invented – such as those of Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and Alien – everyone, it seems, is armed to the teeth with a variety of pistols, rifles, shotguns, and machine guns. But that is fiction; what about real life? Has anyone ever blasted into the wild blue yonder packing heat? As it turns out, yes – though not for the reasons you might think.
Though today space travel is associated with peaceful exploration and scientific research, in the early days the conquest of outer space was a decidedly military affair, with the Space Race serving as a more peaceful proxy to the Cold War smouldering down on the surface. The Soviet R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, was also the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, designed to carry a nuclear warhead from the Soviet Union to the United States. Indeed, most of the United States’ early space rockets, such as the Redstone and the Atlas, were modified nuclear missiles, while no sooner had the Space Race begun than both sides set out to militarize the final frontier. In 1958, for example, the United States Air Force authorized Project A119, a top-secret project to detonate a nuclear warhead on the surface of the moon. The project, which included among its research team a young Carl Sagan, was justified as a scientific experiment to study lunar geology. Its main aim, however, was to intimidate the Soviets and boost the morale of the American people in the wake of the Sputnik crisis. While A119 and its Soviet equivalent, Project E-4, were never carried out, between 1958 and 1962 both superpowers set off a series of 22 nuclear explosions in space and the upper atmosphere as part of research into anti-ballistic missile systems – and for more on these tests and their unexpected effects, please check out our previous videos That Time the US Accidentally Nuked Britain’s First Satellite, and Do Real EMP Weapons Exist, or Are They Only a Thing in Movies?
Throughout the early Cold War, the drawing boards of both American and Soviet designers overflowed with increasingly fanciful designs for orbital weapons platforms, nuclear-armed space planes, and lunar military bases. But the potential escalation of the Cold War into Outer Space made many back on earth extremely nervous, and on January 27, 1967, the Soviet Union, United States, and United Kingdom signed the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and other Celestial Bodies – better known as the “Outer Space Treaty.” Among other provisions, the treaty declared space to be open and free for peaceful exploration by all states, prohibited states from claiming sovereign territory or building military installations on the moon and other celestial bodies, and banned the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space.
While the United States and most other spacefaring nations have so far largely adhered to the terms of the treaty, the Soviet Union – and later Russian Federation – have been, shall we say, rather more relaxed in their interpretation, with cosmonauts regularly carrying firearms into orbit. But these weapons were not, however, intended for use against waves of attacking U.S. Space Marines, but for a far more practical purpose – inspired by one particularly eventful space mission.
On March 18, 1965, 30-year-old cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made history by becoming the first human to perform an extravehicular activity or “spacewalk”, floating outside his Voskhod II spacecraft for 12 minutes. His triumph, however, was short-lived, for almost immediately the mission began to go horribly wrong. When Leonov tried to crawl back through the capsule’s inflatable airlock, he discovered that his space suit had ballooned in the vacuum of space and he could no longer fit through the hatch. After several minutes of fruitless struggling, Leonov – knowing full well that his pilot Pavel Belyayev’s orders should he fail to return were to cut him and the airlock free, proceeded to bleed air from his suit, risking decompression sickness -AKA “the bends” – in the process. In the end, Leonov managed to get back aboard the spacecraft, but he and Belyayev’s problems were far from over. As the cosmonauts prepared for reentry, their automatic guidance system failed, forcing them to switch to manual override. The equipment module then failed to fully separate from the orbital module, causing the spacecraft to tumble violently end-over-end as it plunged through the atmosphere. Finally, at an altitude of 100 kilometres, the cables connecting the two modules burned through, and the remainder of the reentry and parachute deployment proceeded uneventfully.
However, the failure of the automatic guidance system resulted in the spacecraft overshooting its intended landing site by nearly 400 kilometres and touching down in the remote, heavily-forested Perm region of the Ural Mountains. Upon landing, the capsule’s hatch automatically blew off, exposing the cosmonauts – who had not been provided with winter clothing – to the extremely frigid elements. And as if to add insult to injury, the cabin heater failed while the cooling fans remained jammed on, blasting the Leonov and Belyayev with cold air through the night. Even worse, the Siberian forests, the cosmonauts knew, was crawling with dangerous predators including wolves, eurasian brown bears, and even Siberian tigers – made even more aggressive by the advent of mating season. The capsule’s survival kit did include a Makarov PM semi-automatic pistol for foraging and defence against predators, but its rather anemic 9x18mm cartridge would have been next to useless against an angry bear or tiger.
Thankfully, Leonov and Belyayev encountered no local wildlife, and the next morning their capsule was spotted by a search-and-rescue helicopter. However, the landing site was too densely forested for the helicopter to land, so the crew instead dropped warm clothing, water, food, and other supplies to the cosmonauts before landing a team of ski-equipped rescue troops in a clearing 9 kilometres away. With the help of their new supplies, Leonov and Belyayev built a crude log cabin and a fire and sat tight awaiting rescue. Finally, after three nights in the Siberian wilderness, they were reached by the recovery forces and skied the 9 kilometres back to the helicopter landing site, from where they were flown to Perm and finally to Moscow.
Though Leonov and Belyayev, both experienced hunters and outdoorsmen, were never in any real danger, their ordeal nonetheless prompted Leonov to request a more powerful and versatile survival weapon be developed for future space missions. The result was the TP-82 Cosmonaut Survival Pistol, designed in 1981 by Igor Aleksandrovich Skrylev of the Tula Arms Plant. 36 centimetres long and weighing only 2.4 kilograms, the TP-82 features not one barrel but three: two smoothbore shotgun barrels chambered in the proprietary 12.5 x 70mm shell – roughly equivalent to 40 gauge – and a lower rifled barrel chambered for the same 5.45x39mm cartridge as the Soviet military’s standard-issue AK-74 rifle – and for more on how the confusing “gauge” measurement system works, please check out our previous video What’s Up With Measuring So Many Things in “Gauge”? The single-shot weapon, which is reloaded by tipping the barrels forward like regular break-action sporting shotgun, has two external hammers: the one on the right fires the right-hand shotgun barrel, while the one on the left can be switched to fire either the left-hand shotgun barrel or the lower rifle barrel. For more accurate shooting, the weapon is provided with a
a detachable shoulder stock that doubles as a machete for clearing brush or chopping firewood. Stored in a special survival kit compartment beneath the crew couches of the Soyuz spacecraft, the TP-82 is issued with a special Granat-6 canvas belt incorporating holsters for the weapon and its machete-stock and ammunition pouches holding 10 shotgun shells loaded with birdshot, 10 flares for signalling rescue aircraft, and 11 rounds of 5.45 rifle ammunition. Unlike military ammunition, however, the TP-82 rifle cartridges feature expanding soft-point bullets for maximum effect against large predators. Such bullets have been illegal for use in warfare since the signing of the Hague Convention of 1899.
In testing the TP-82 proved remarkably rugged and accurate, with the final evaluation report stating:
“… [the weapon] underwent comprehensive tests in different climatic zones of the countries, which confirmed its high reliability and effectiveness under extreme conditions. In testing the weapon was fired at a variety of animals and birds. Using the rifled barrel evaluators successfully brought down moose, wolverines, loitered gazelles, saiga, and foxes with body weights of up to 200 kilograms from distances up to 200 metres. Using the shotgun barrels they took down hares, foxes, geese, partridges, doves, pheasants, and seagulls.”
In parallel with the TP-82, Tula also developed the more advanced TOZ-81 ‘Mars’ pistol. Unlike the single-shot TP-82, the TOZ-81 was a double-action revolver with a five-shot cylinder. Two versions were designed: one with a rifled barrel chambered for the 5.45x39mm cartridge and one with a smoothbore barrel for .410 bore shotgun shells filled with buckshot or dart-like flechettes. A true Swiss army knife of a gun, the TOZ-81 featured a flip-out survival knife mounted above the barrel and a compact radio transmitter built into its detachable aluminium shoulder stock.
In the end, however, the rugged simplicity of the TP-82 won out over the more complex TOZ-81, and in 1982 the former was officially adopted as part of the Soyuz survival kit, first flying into space aboard the Soyuz T-6 mission on June 24 of that year. The total number of TP-82s manufactured is not known, but production at Tula ceased around 1987 once enough guns and ammunition had been made to last the space program and the Soviet Air Force several decades.
In keeping with the infamously secretive nature of the Soviet space program, for many years the TP-82 remained something of an open secret, the weapon rarely glimpsed by western eyes. But as more and more western astronauts began flying aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, the unique “cosmonaut pistol” came to be more widely known. Training on the TP-82 is considered the highlight of the standard cosmonaut survival course, carried out on the shores of the Black Sea. After learning how to safely exit a capsule which has landed in water, trainees are invited to fire a few shots off the deck of the training vessel. As U.S. astronaut James Voss recalled:
“It was amazing how many wine, beer, and vodka bottles the crew of the ship could come up with for us to shoot at. The TP-82 was very accurate. We threw the bottles as far as possible, probably 20 or 30 meters, then shot them. It was trivial to hit the bottles with the shotgun shells, and relatively easy to hit them with the rifle bullets on the first shot.”
Yet despite the very practical reasons for the TP-82’s creation and adoption, the idea of cosmonauts carrying guns into space makes some people more than a little nervous. Among these is American journalist James Oberg, who for decades has doggedly lobbied to have all firearms removed from Russian space missions. For while we might think of astronauts as morally upright, hyper-competent ‘steely-eyed missile men,’ in the end, Oberg argues, they are merely humans with very human failings. For example, in February 2007, NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak was arrested after attempting to kidnap Colleen Shipman, the lover of her husband, fellow astronaut William Oefelein. Wearing adult diapers to avoid making stops, Nowak drove over 1,400 kilometres from Houston, Texas, to Orlando, Florida, where she tracked Shipman down to the Orlando Airport parking lot and pepper-sprayed her through her open car window. Nowak later pleaded guilty to felony burglary and misdemeanour battery and was sentenced to one year’s probation, while she and Oefelein became the first astronauts ever to be dismissed from NASA. That same year on April 20th, 60-year old engineer William Phillips smuggled a revolver into the Johnson Spaceflight centre in Houston and used it to kill electronics specialist David Beverley. Phillips then held contract worker Fran Crenshaw hostage and, after a tense three-hour standoff with police, turned the gun on himself. A later investigation determined that Phillips was likely motivated by fears of being fired due to poor work performance.
Given the potential for even highly-trained spaceflight personnel to suffer severe mental breakdowns, the presence of readily-available firearms aboard the Soyuz and the International Space Station is, James Oberg argues, a disaster waiting to happen. He has thus tirelessly lobbied Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to implement stricter security measures, such as storing survival weapons in a locked compartment with a key controlled by capsule commander or – even better – in an exterior compartment accessible only once the capsule has safely returned to earth. Oberg has even questioned the necessity of carrying weapons in the first place, as vastly improved spacecraft tracking and recovery procedures have rendered a Voskhod II – style survival scenario highly unlikely.
Thankfully, whether due to Oberg’s efforts or not, significant progress has been made in this area. In 2006, Roscosmos announced that the TP-82 survival pistol had been retired, stocks of its proprietary 12.5 x 70mm shotgun shells having become unusable due to age. It was replaced in the Soyuz survival kit by a regular semi-automatic pistol, most likely the standard Russian forced issue MP-443 Grach. But even this, it turns out, is not always carried into orbit. Just prior to her record-breaking 199-day stay aboard the International Space Station, Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti approached James Oberg with what she called “a really good story about the gun.” During training at Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre outside Moscow – better known as “Star City” – Cristoforetti and her fellow trainees were asked to list the contents of the standard Soyuz survival kit:
“Then, to show off I knew even more, I added that a pistol had once been on this list but had recently been removed. [After congratulating me on a perfect score], the instructor corrected me: ‘The pistol is still on the official list of kit contents, but before every mission we meet to review that list and vote to remove it for this specific flight.’”
Thus, the odds of a gunfight breaking out aboard the International Space Station are -for now, at least – mercifully low. Should a dispute between astronauts ever reach the point of physical violence, their only recourse will be to old-fashioned fisticuffs. Captain Kirk would be proud.
But the story doesn’t quite end there, for while the TP-82s, Makarovs, and other pistols carried by cosmonauts were never intended for use in orbit, another – much larger – Soviet weapon most definitely was, and holds the distinction of being the only gun ever to be fired in space.
In the late 1960s, the United States Air Force began work on a project known as Manned Orbiting Laboratory or MOL, a manned space station based on NASA’s Gemini space capsule. Manned by two astronauts and travelling in a polar orbit, MOL would be equipped with powerful surveillance cameras, allowing it to take detailed photographs of Soviet military installations and other targets. When the Soviets learned of MOL, they immediately began developing their own reconnaissance space stations, codenamed Almaz or “diamond”. To conceal the military nature of the project, the Almaz stations were flown under the cover of the civilian Salyut space station project. The first Almaz station, designated OPS-1 or Salyut 2, was launched on April 3, 1973. Three days after reaching orbit, however, one of the fuel tanks of the Proton rocket that launched Salyut 2 exploded, showering the station with debris and leaving it severely damaged and unusable. The station reentered the atmosphere and burned up on May 28, having never been visited by any crews.
The next Almaz station to be launched was Salyut 3 on June 25, 1974. In addition to powerful surveillance cameras and radars and signals intelligence gear, Salyut 3 carried a nasty surprise: a Nudelman-Rihkter R-23M automatic cannon. Developed in 1959 by the KB Tochmash design bureau as a radar-guided defensive weapon for the Tupolev Tu-22 Blinder jet bomber, the R-23M could fire specialized 23 mm shells at a rate of 950-5,000 rounds per minute, allowing Salut 3 to engage and destroy targets up to 2 kilometres away. The cannon, intended for self-defence against American spacecraft seeking to inspect, board, or destroy the station, was mounted rigidly to Salyut 3’s hull, meaning the entire 20-ton station had to be reoriented in order to aim the gun. Maneuvering thrusters were used to counter the recoil of the weapon and prevent the station from drifting during firing.
Salyut 3’s cannon was test-fired for the first – and only – time on January 24, 1975. Though the weapon was eventually intended to be operated by the station’s crew, concerns over excessive noise and vibration led to the test being conducted after the last crew had departed, the station and gun being controlled remotely from the ground. While the results of the test are still classified, unconfirmed reports indicate that it was a success, with the gun firing three short bursts, expending a total of 20 rounds, and successfully destroying a target satellite. Sadly, any existing footage of the test was lost when the station was deorbited and burned up mere hours later. The third and final Almaz station to be launched, Salyut 5, dispensed with the gun, though the planned – but never flown – OPS-4 station was to have carried a pair of interceptor missiles instead. By this time, however, the concept of manned reconnaissance space stations had fallen out of favour, unmanned spy satellites being capable of performing the same mission far more cheaply and efficiently. Consequently, in 1978 the Almaz program – like the MOL project which first inspired it – was declared obsolete and cancelled.
The cannon aboard Salyut 3 remains the only offensive weapon known to have deliberately tested in space – though this was not for lack of trying. Though the 1967 Outer Space Treaty expressly forbids the stationing of weapons in orbit, treaties, as history has shown us, are made to be broken, and throughout the late 20th Century both the United States and Soviet Union carried right along trying to militarize the final frontier. The most famous of these attempts was the American Strategic Defense Initiative – better known as ‘Star Wars’ – a proposed system of orbital and ground-based lasers, interceptor missiles, and other weapons designed to shoot down Soviet ballistic missiles and render the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal useless. But while many components of the system were tested throughout the 1980s, no operational weapons ever reached orbit. Similarly, on May 15, 1987, the Soviets attempted to launch Polyus, an orbital weapons platform with a megawatt-power carbon dioxide laser designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missile warheads. However, a programming error caused the spacecraft to become misaligned during launch, and it never reached orbit. Since then, the United States, Russia, France, and other countries have announced various designs for orbital weapons designed to disable or destroy enemy warheads or satellites, but so far as is known, none of these has ever left the drawing board. May it always remain that way.
And now one final note before we end the video, since by now most of you are probably wondering: yes, regular firearms will indeed work in outer space. The propellant powder in firearm cartridges contains its own source of oxygen, meaning that it will ignite and burn even in a total vacuum. The rest of a typical firearm’s mechanism is similarly space-proof, with one major exception: grease and lubricating oil, which may evaporate, congeal, or otherwise stop working properly in the vacuum of space. This is, however, easily mitigated through the use of specialized lubricants designed for use in space or – in a pinch – by dispensing with lubricants entirely. Indeed, this was the solution favoured by German troops fighting on the Russian Front during the Second World War, when freezing temperatures caused ordinary lubricating oil to congeal and guns to jam. In desperation, German armorers soaked soldiers’ weapons in gasoline to remove all traces of oil. While these unlubricated weapons wore out very quickly, under the circumstances they were better than nothing. Another potential issue with using regular firearms in space is the dark finish on the metal, which will readily absorb the intense solar radiation – causing the weapon to overheat and ammunition to prematurely ignite or “cook off”. However, this too is easily mitigated through the use of reflective white or metallic coatings – meaning the absurdly shiny ray guns in old sci-fi movies served a practical purpose after all. But perhaps the greatest challenge to using guns in space is Newton’s Third Law, for unless a wannabe space cowboy is firmly anchored to the hull of a spacecraft or equipped with maneuvering thrusters, in a microgravity environment the recoil from even a regular handgun is enough to send them drifting and tumbling uncontrollably. But perhaps this is for the best. After all, we have enough violence and warfare down here on earth; let’s leave our weapons at the launch pad, shall we?
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- How Dangerous are Rubber Bullets and Stun Guns?
- Is There a Proper Way to Fire Two Guns at Once?
- The Final Frontier Part 2: How Astronauts Go to the Bathroom in Space and How Women Can Safely Pee Standing Up
- How Do We Actually Know We Landed on the Moon?
Expand for ReferencesJohnson, Steve, TP-82: Russian Space Pistol / Shotgun / Carbine / Flare Gun No Longer Being Carried Into Space, The Firearms Blog, October 13, 2007, https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2007/10/13/tp-82-russian-space-pistol-shotgun-carbine-flare-gun-no-longer-being-carried-into-space/
Pike, Travis, TP-82 Cosmonaut Survival Pistol: Russia’s Space Gun, Sandboxx, January 19, 2022, https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/tp-82-cosmonaut-survival-pistol-russias-space-gun/
Hollings, Alex, The Untold History of Russian Weapons Testing in Space, Sandboxx, March 11, 2022, https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/the-soviet-unions-space-cannon-that-actually-fired-in-orbit/
Newdick, Thomas, The TOZ-81 ‘Mars’ Gun Was the Soviet Union’s Ultimate Space Revolver, The Warzone, October 2, 2020, https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36876/the-toz-81-mars-gun-was-the-soviet-unions-ultimate-space-revolver
Oberg, James, Russia Has the Corner on Guns in Space, NBC News, February 12, 2008, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna23131359#.X3co-JMzbhY
NASA Fires Astronaut Lisa Nowak, NBC News, March 7, 2007, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna17502655
NASA Shooter Feared Being Fired, Police Say, NBC News, April 21, 2007, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna18248153
NASA Responds to Claims of Drinking Problem, NBC News, July 27, 2007, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19996640
Oberg, James, How I Stopped Cosmonauts From Carrying Guns, IEEE Spectrum, November 13, 2014, https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-i-stop-cosmonauts-carrying-guns
Simpson, James, Soviet Cosmonauts Carried a Shotgun Into Space, Medium, February 3, 2015, https://medium.com/war-is-boring/soviet-cosmonauts-carried-a-shotgun-into-space-a9e7852c6da5
Trevithick, Joseph, Here’s Our Best Look Yet at Russia’s Secretive Space Cannon, the Only Gun Ever Fired In Space, The Warzone, February 16, 2021, https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39277/heres-our-best-look-yet-at-russias-secretive-space-cannon-the-only-gun-ever-fired-in-space
The post Has Anyone Ever Fired a Gun in Space, Space Cannons, and the Guns Designed for Astronauts? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the world of modern weaponry, a good name can go a long way when it comes to the intimidation factor. Names like “Hellfire”, “Sidewinder”, “Stinger”, and “Javelin” convey menace and devastating firepower, making it abundantly clear that you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of these weapons. But what if you were confronted by a weapon named “Blue Peacock, or “Green Bamboo,” or “Orange Poodle”? While such oddly-named weapons with such names might seem more likely to make the enemy die of laughter, these are in fact real codenames used by the British Military during the early days of the Cold War. And though they may seem outwardly laughable, these names served a deadly serious purpose. This is the strange tale of the Rainbow Codes.
In military security, codenames serve to obscure the purpose of an operation, person, or piece of equipment while providing an easy-to-remember designation for everyday use. Therefore, for maximum security, a codename should be completely random and have nothing to do with what it is protecting. However, one group that doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo are the Nazis. Throughout the Second World War, German military administrators, seemingly unable to help themselves, indulged in the unfortunate habit of bestowing secret weapons and operations with meaningful, symbolic names, often drawn from Germanic mythology. Consequently, Allied intelligence agencies were often able to work out the meaning of codenames from context alone.
For example, early in the War, the German Luftwaffe and British Royal Air Force were engaged in a shadowy arms race known as the “Battle of the Beams.” In September 1940, as part of the larger campaign now commonly known as the “Blitz”, the Luftwaffe began round-the-clock strategic bombardment of London and other major English cities in the hopes of forcing Britain to sue for peace. While bombing at night made the German bombers less vulnerable to British fighter aircraft and antiaircraft guns, it also made it much harder for them to find their targets. Consequently, the Germans developed an electronic navigation aid known as Knickebein [“kuh-nick-uh-bye-n”] or “crooked leg”. The system used a pair of transmitters based in mainland Europe to project a pair of overlapping radio beams over the intended target. If the bomber pilot flew straight along the beam, he heard a continuous tone; if he strayed to the left or to the right, he head a string of Morse code letters. Knickebein was used successfully for several months until the British learned of its existence and developed countermeasures to jam the system – whereupon the Germans switched to a more sophisticated system known as X-Gerät, [“Gerr-ate”], which used multiple beams that intersected over the target. This, too, proved highly effective at first, and was largely responsible for the success of the November 14, 1940 raid that devastated the city of Coventry. Eventually, however, the British worked out how X-Gerät worked and once again succeeded in jamming the signal.
Wary that the Germans would try again, R.V. Jones, Britain’s Assistant Director of Scientific Intelligence, set out to identify the next electronic navigation system and develop countermeasures before the Germans could even field the new device. Combing through German Enigma messages – which British codebreakers had recently cracked – Jones discovered references to a mysterious device codenamed “Wotan.” Consulting with an expert on German culture, Jones discovered that “Wotan” or “Odin” was the one-eyed king of the Gods in Norse and Germanic mythology. Knowing of the German’s love of meaningful codenames, Jones deduced that “Wotan” was likely a single-beam navigation system. He turned out to be correct: Wotan, also known as Y-Gerät, worked by transmitting a signal from a ground station to a receiver aboard the bomber aircraft, which then transmitted its own signal back. In this manner, the position of the aircraft could be accurately determined. Armed with this educated guess, Jones sent out aircraft equipped with radio receivers to track down the beams. Unfortunately for the Germans, their choice of 45 MegaHertz for Y-Gerät turned out to be a poor one, for it just so happened to match the transmitting frequency of the dormant pre-war BBC television transmitter at Alexandra Palace. Using this transmitter, Jones was able to send false, distorted signals back to the German bombers, causing them to drift off-course and drop their bombs over empty countryside. When the Germans eventually discovered the jamming, they abandoned the radio navigation concept entirely – a defeat brought about in part by a poorly-chosen codename.
Later, in August 1944, German navy Sub-Lieutenant Hans-Joachim Förster, commanding the Type VII U-boat U-408, achieved a remarkable feat by sinking two warships and two merchant ships in the English Channel in the span of five days. Though Allied submarine hunters scoured the area mercilessly, strangely none were able to detect U-408, and none of the 92 depth charges they dropped came anywhere close to the submarine. Shortly thereafter, other ships began reporting encounters with similarly undetectable “phantom U-boats”, baffling Allied military analysts. Soon, however, interrogations of captured U-boat crewmen revealed that the Germans had begun experimentally covering U-boats with a strange coating composed of thick rubber tiles covered in small dimples. At first, the purpose of this coating eluded Allied scientists, who theorized that it offered protection against depth charges or greater underwater speed – similar in principle to the dimples on a golf ball. However, experiments quickly discredited both theories. It wasn’t until prisoner interrogations and decrypted Enigma intercepts revealed the name of the coating – Alberich [“Ahl-burr-rick”] – that the Allies realized its true purpose. In Norse and Germanic folklore, Alberich is the magical king of the Dwarves who possesses the ability to become invisible. The Allies thus deduced that the coating was intended to absorb sound waves and make U-boats invisible to ASDIC, an early form of sonar. However, only a handful of U-boats were ever fitted with Alberich – too few and too late to have any significant impact on the course of the war.
This is not to say that the Allies weren’t above employing meaningful codenames for their own amusement. For example, in 1943, British Intelligence launched Operation Mincemeat, an elaborate deception meant to divert German troops away from Operation Husky – the planned Allied invasion of Sicily. The operation involved dressing up a dead body as a fictitious military officer, packing its briefcase and pockets with fake documents, and dumping it off the coast of neutral Spain. It was hoped that the documents – which indicated that the Allies would land in Greece, not Sicily – would eventually find their way into German hands. Though the mastermind of the operation, Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, was offered a selection of randomly-generated codenames, he chose “Mincemeat” largely so he could announce the success of the operation with the thematically appropriate message “Mincemeat Swallowed Whole” – and for more on this strangest of deceptions, please check out our previous video The Bizarre World War II Plan to Score a Major Victory for the Allies.
Having learned a valuable lesson from the Germans, at the end of the war the British Ministry of Supply developed a foolproof scheme for generating truly random codenames, known as the Rainbow Codes. The system worked by pairing a random colour with a random noun, creating easy-to-remember codenames that were by design completely unrelated to the project they were meant to conceal. While effective, the system resulted in some truly bizarre and decidedly un-intimidating combinations, such as “Green Cheese” – a nuclear-tipped anti-ship missile; “Orange Poodle” – an early-warning radar; and “Yellow Duckling” – an infrared-based submarine detector. Others were slightly more intimidating, such as “Black Knight” – a rocket test vehicle; “Blue Steel” – a nuclear air-launched standoff missile; and “Red Rapier” – an air-launched cruise missile. Occasionally, these random combinations actually resulted in meaningful names, such as “Black Maria” – slang for a police van; “Red Duster” – a nickname for the Red Ensign, the flag flown by British merchant ships; “Blue Danube,” “Blue Moon”, “Blue Streak”, and “Yellow Sun.” And in case you are wondering, these codenames refer to, respectively: an aircraft Identification Friend or Foe or IFF device; an antiaircraft missile; a nuclear warhead; two intercontinental ballistic missiles; and a nuclear weapon casing, meant to house the “Green Grass” and “Red Snow” warheads.
But the weapon with perhaps the most deceptive Rainbow Code name was “Blue Peacock”, also known as “Blue Bunny” or “Brown Bunny.” Despite the cuddly image conjured by those names, Blue Peacock was truly horrific in concept. Essentially a nuclear land mine, the weapon consisted of a ten-kiloton “Blue Danube” warhead meant to be buried along the European border with the Soviet Union. In the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, the mines would be detonated by remote control, obliterating large numbers of Soviet troops and heavily irradiating the border, rendering it impassable to further waves of invaders. To protect the warhead against the elements, it was housed in a 7-ton steel casing, internally pressurized to prevent water from leaking inside and fitted with anti-tampering switches that would detonate the weapon if it was moved. However, the design suffered from one major flaw: in the winter, the weapon could potentially get so cold that its detonating mechanism would be rendered inoperative. Several conventional solutions were suggested, such as wrapping the weapon in insulating blankets, but one proposal was so out of the box that it has gone down in history as one of the most bizarre and outlandish plans in the history of warfare. The plan called for – and we can’t make this stuff up – live chickens to be placed inside the weapon’s protective case and provided with a supply of food, water, and air. This would keep the chickens alive for about a week, during which time their body heat would keep the detonating mechanism at a functional temperature. Thankfully for PETA members everywhere, this bonkers plan was never implemented; indeed, the whole Blue Peacock project soon eventually abandoned as it was realized that intentionally nuking an allied nation’s territory was perhaps taking things a bit too far. Being top-secret, all records of Blue Peacock were sealed in the archives and the whole scheme forgotten until April 1, 2004, when the documents were finally declassified. Given the date, the media naturally assumed that the whole “Chicken Powered Bomb” proposal was some sort of elaborate practical joke, forcing Tom O’Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, to appear before the press and solemnly assure them that:
“It does seem like an April fool but it most certainly is not. The Civil Service does not do jokes.”
The Rainbow Codes system was used until 1958, when the Ministry of Supply was broken up and its duties divided between the War Office, the Air Ministry, and the civilian Ministry of Aviation. In its place, the various services adopted an alphanumeric code system consisting of two random letters paired with three random digits – such as the WE.177 series of air-dropped tactical nuclear bombs. But while such codes arguably do an even better job of concealing their true purpose, one has to admit they lack the quaint charm of the Rainbow Codes, a relic of a more innocent time when one could officially name a world-ending nuclear weapon “Brown Bunny” and still keep a straight face.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesJohnson, Brian, The Secret War, The Anchor Press, Ltd, Tiptree, England, 1978
“Stealth” U-Boats, Deutsches U-Boot Museum, http://dubm.de/en/stealth-u-boats/
U-Boat U-480: the Hunt for Nazi Germany’s Rubber Stealth Submarine, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMByX0xKILg
The Real Meaning of the Words: a Pedantic Glossary of British Nuclear Weapons, https://web.archive.org/web/20120314120957/http://www.mcis.soton.ac.uk/Site_Files/pdf/nuclear_history/glossary.pdf
Gibson, Christopher, United Kingdom Aerospace and Weapons Projects, https://web.archive.org/web/20121024123107/http://www.skomer.u-net.com/projects/start.htm
Cold War Bomb Warmed by Chickens, BBC News, April 1, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3588465.stm
Edwards, Rob, British Army Planned Nuclear Landmines, New Scientist, July 16, 2003, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3943-british-army-planned-nuclear-landmines/
The post Death by Blue Peacock Britain’s Bizarre and Deadly Cold War “Rainbow Codes” appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Space travel is a pricey business. Even today, the average cost of launching a satellite or other payload into orbit hovers around $10,000 per kilogram. Much of this cost stems from the great complexity of space launch vehicles, which require a great deal of time, money, skilled personnel, and other resources to design, test, and launch. Further complicating matters, different payloads and mission types require different types of launch vehicles, each of which must be individually developed – further driving launch costs into the stratosphere and beyond. While recent developments like SpaceX’s reusable Falcon rockets have succeeded in reducing launch costs somewhat, for the builders of smaller satellites like universities or poorer countries, attaining orbit remains exorbitantly expensive. However, nearly 50 years ago, an obscure German company nearly succeeded where even SpaceX has failed, developing an innovative modular rocket system that promised to reduce launch costs by tenfold and bring outer space within reach of just about anyone. But sadly the system never came to be, killed by a combination of Cold War paranoia, international rivalry, and corporate greed. This is the fascinating and tragic story of OTRAG, the dirt-cheap “LEGO rocket” that never was.
Our story begins in 1950s West Germany with 25-year-old student Lutz Thilo Kayser. Born in 1939, Kayser was fascinated by space travel from an early age. During the Second World War, he wrote a letter to Dr. Wernher von Braun – developer of the wartime V2 ballistic missile and later the Saturn V moon rocket – expressing his desire to become an astronaut. Ever the pragmatist, von Braun explained that for space travel to be practical, astronauts would have to be small, light, and few in number, and advised Kayser to become an engineer instead. Kayser obliged, enrolling in aerospace technology at the University of Stuttgart in 1954. While studying in Stuttgart, Kayser founded the Student Association of Space Enthusiasts, which, under the supervision of rocketry pioneer Irene Sänger-Bredt, developed Germany’s first post-war liquid-fuelled rocket engine.
In 1963, when Kayser was a graduate student, he was awarded a consulting contract to investigate the failure of the first launch Europa II, a satellite launch vehicle being developed by multi-nation European Launcher Development Organization or ELDO. While Kayser succeeded in identifying the cause of the failure, the system experienced a further 6 launch failures in a row and was ultimately cancelled in 1971. The dream of a pan-European launch vehicle would not be realized until 1979 with the launch of Ariane I, the first of a highly successful family of rockets still in use today.
While analyzing the failure of Europa II, Kayser became aware of fundamental flaws in the way launch vehicles were developed and built – flaws which kept the cost of launching payloads into space exorbitantly high. As he later explained in a 1978 interview for Popular Science magazine:
“The trouble up to now was that space has been a matter of prestige or military requirements, so no one gave a damn about its costs. Scientists, engineers, and technicians were literally encouraged to think in complicated and expensive terms, not simple and cost-cutting ones. Did you know, for example, that NASA allocated about half a million dollars developing a ball-point pen for the Apollo missions that would work under conditions of weightlessness when, after all, an ordinary pencil would have done the trick just as well?”
It is worth noting here that Kayser was perpetuating a commonly-held myth, which we have a deep dive video on if you want to know the entire fascinating story. But in a nutshell, while NASA did indeed adopt specially-designed space pens in 1965, these were developed not by NASA themselves but rather the Fisher Pen Company at their own expense. Furthermore, while both NASA and the Soviets initially used pencils on manned space missions, the former eventually found them unsuitable for a variety of reasons. For example, in zero gravity, pencil shavings, broken pencil tips, and graphite dust pose an irritation hazard to astronauts’ eyes and lungs and can potentially float behind instrument panels and short out delicate electronics. Furthermore, in the pure-oxygen environment of American spacecraft, the wood of conventional pencils posed a fire hazard. Nonetheless, Kayser’s analysis of the space-launch industry’s shortcomings was accurate, and in 1971 he formed Orbital Transport und Raketen AG or OTRAG with the goal of turning the industry on its head and reducing satellite launch costs by an order of magnitude. This was the first private space launch firm in history, predating SpaceX by 31 years.
Kayser’s ideas were groundbreaking for their time and remain highly innovative today, emphasizing simplicity, mass-production, and modularity. Rather than build a different launch vehicle for every type of payload, Kayser instead developed a system of standard, modular rocket units which could be bundled or “clustered” into whatever size of launch vehicle was required. The core of the OTRAG system was the Common Rocket Propulsion Unit or CRPU. This consisted of a steel tube 27 centimetres in diameter and six metres long, with a combustion chamber and nozzle at one end. Each CRPU produced 3,000 kilograms of thrust and was fuelled by a combination of kerosene and a 50/50 mixture of nitric acid and dinitrogen tetroxide, stored in separate compartments within the tubular propellant tank. Instead of using complex and expensive turbopumps, the tanks were only filled to 66% capacity, the remaining space being filled with compressed air that forced the propellants into the combustion chamber – what is known in rocketry as a blow-down system. Emblematic of the dirt-simple, cost-effective nature of the system, the flow of propellants into the engine was controlled by commercial ball valves driven by the same motors used in automobile windshield wipers. The nozzle was also ablatively cooled by coating it with a material that would char and flake off as the rocket flew, carrying the heat with it and preventing the engine from overheating. Each CRPU also contained its own battery and microcomputer to operate the propellant valves, and could be cheaply mass-produced at a rate of 10 per day using a special automatic machine.
As noted before, multiple CRPUs could be bundled together to produce a near-infinite variety of launch vehicles. For example, a sounding rocket for studying the upper atmosphere could be assembled from one or three CRPUs, while launching a satellite into geostationary orbit required a cluster of nearly 600 units. For the sake of simplicity, the nozzles on the CRPUs did not gimbal as in conventional rocket; rather, directional control was achieved by differentially throttling the outer engines of the cluster using the propellant control valves. And while the various stages of a conventional rocket are stacked on top of one another, in the OTRAG system the stages were nested concentrically one inside the other. Thus, at launch, all the CRPUs would fire in parallel, while during staging the outer CRPUs would detach and fall away, allowing the next stage to emerge from within the cluster. This gave the OTRAG Rocket an unusually squat, boxy appearance which one critic compared to a “bundle of asparagus.” Kayser used a rather different metaphor, explaining in 2015:
“My rocket system is like Lego. You can easily explain it – everyone knows what Lego is. You always use the same bricks to put together…[using regular rockets] is like transporting potatoes with Rolls-Royce. You can try to reduce the cost a little bit of Rolls-Royce but you’ll never get down to the cost of a small truck.”
Though highly unorthodox and outwardly crude compared to nearly all launch systems before or since, the economic logic behind the OTRAG system was fundamentally sound, achieving low operating costs through economies of scale. As Kayser explained in 1978:
“All previous systems were either developed for military purposes and adapted to peaceful uses, or they were built for manned missions and required a whole arsenal of safety-oriented redundancy. This launcher is designed purely for freight. I haven’t invented any new laws of nature or new mechanical principles, but I had to keep turning the screw and looking for cheaper solutions. So I glanced around at other systems and asked two basic questions. What do they have and what don’t they need? Well, they have complicated technologies such as rotating machinery, hydraulic and pneumatic systems, seals, pumps, and electronics which are not only expensive but contribute to high failure rates. To avoid the failures, even more technology is built into them – redundancy. If you eliminate all that, you can reduce the failure rate.”
Kayser’s ultimate goal was to make the CRPUs so inexpensive and easy to mass-produce that it would be cheaper to just produce new units than to recover and refurbish the spent rocket stages. This system, he calculated, would allow a typical communications satellite to be placed in geostationary orbit for around $4 million – equivalent to around $1000 per kilogram. If all went according to plan, Kayser predicted that OTRAG would be launching around 12 satellites a year between 1981 and 1990, and that all development costs would be recouped after the 25th launch.
Though OTRAG received around $1.8 million dollars from the city of Bonn between 1971 and 1974, the majority of the company’s $26 million of startup capital came from private investors. However, rather than only seeking out a handful of extremely wealthy backers, Kayser solicited funds from nearly 600 people of various means in one of the earliest examples of crowdfunding. And befitting his utilitarian approach to rocket design, Kayser ran the company as a stripped-down, ultra-efficient organization, its employees never numbering more than 50. Equally impressive, OTRAG boasted among its technical advisors none other than Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus, the fist director of NASA’s Launch Operations Centre at Cape Canaveral.
In 1974, OTRAG began static engine testing at the government-run German Aerospace Centre or DLR in Lampoldshausen, 60 kilometres north of Stuttgart. The company would conduct 2,600 static firings at Lampoldshausen, perfecting the CRPU design. As a private company, however, OTRAG was soon forced to vacate the DLR and go elsewhere to pursue its development program. In any case, Germany had no large, sparsely-inhabited areas that could support full-scale rocket tests. And since the United Nations Outer Space Treaty forbade the private exploration of space without the sponsorship of a recognized sovereign state, OTRAG began shopping around for a government to host their launch test facility. After investigating various locations including Indonesia and Brazil, the company finally accepted an offer from President Mobutu Sese Seko, dictator of the African nation of Zaire – today the Democratic Republic of Congo. Recognizing the economic benefits such an innovative space program could bring to his nation, in December 1975 Seko granted OTRAG a 25-year lease on a 99,000 square kilometre tract of land in Shaba – today Katanga Province – on a high plateau overlooking the Luvua River. By 1977 the company had established its own private launch facility, complete with launch pad, workshops, staff quarters, and a dirt airstrip for resupply.
The first launch of a four-CRPU cluster took place on May 17, 1977, the rocket reaching an altitude of 20 kilometres. This was followed by a second launch on May 20, 1978, which reached 30 kilometres. But the third launch on June 5, 1978 – attended by President Seko – failed only a few seconds after launch.
Yet despite its technical successes, by now OTRAG was facing problems of an entirely different kind. For reasons that should be rather obvious, the rest of Europe was none too keen on the idea of Germany developing its own home-grown rocket and missile technology. Turns out trying to take over the world tends to make people a bit suspicious of you – who knew? Furthermore, American aerospace companies, who for decades enjoyed a near monopoly on lucrative government space launch contracts, were less than enthusiastic at the prospect of an upstart German company undercutting their business. And so, various world leaders including West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, French president Giscard d’Estaing, and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev began pressuring President Seko to expel OTRAG from his territory. Soviet intelligence even spread rumours that OTRAG was in fact a front for the development of West German and South African nuclear missiles, eliciting protests from many of Zaire’s neighbours including Soviet-aligned Angola. Western media outlets picked up and repeated these claims, further ratcheting up the pressure on Seko. Lutz Kayser roundly dismissed these accusations, stating:
“Obviously you could carry an atomic bomb in an oxcart, too, but there is really no way our vehicle could have military value. We’re much too exposed and vulnerable to be a credible threat to anybody.”
Nonetheless, in 1979 Seko bowed to international pressure and agreed to expel OTRAG in exchange for 100 million Deutsch Marks in aid from West Germany, which also shut down the company’s German production facilities. But OTRAG did not have to wait long to find another sponsor, for soon after they received an invitation from Libyan dictator Muhammar Gaddafi to set up new production and launch facilities in Tawiwa, 600 kilometres south of Tripoli in the Sahara desert. The first launch from the site took place on March 3, 1981, with a number of Libyan military personnel in attendance. 13 more successful launches took place over the following year, definitively proving the reliability and cost-effectiveness of the system. Kayser and his wife Susi were apparently unbothered by the abuses of their host’s regime, with Susi stating in a 2015 interview:
“I’m sure there were nasty things, but now show me a country that has not nasty things and does not violate any human rights. I have never in my whole life encountered any such country…We had so much fun. Gadaffi was such a wonderful man…a master of diplomacy in internal politics…it would be much better if he made a kingdom. Then he could’ve been happy like the Saudis.”
Aaaaalrighty then, Susi…
But this idyll would not last for long, for in 1982 Germany became a party to the Missile Control Regime, which prohibited the development of rocket technology in developing countries. Under continued pressure from the United States Government – who wished to prevent Gaddafi from acquiring missiles and protect its own aerospace industry – in 1983 OTRAG was forced once again to pack up and leave the country. At the same time, Libyan forces unlawfully seized all of OTRAG’s rocket manufacturing and test equipment, none of which Kayser was able to retrieve or receive compensation for. For ten years the Libyans attempted to develop OTRAG’s technology into a viable missile, but lacking Kayser’s expertise they were unsuccessful and the project was eventually abandoned.
Meanwhile, in a final desperate bid to save his company, Kayser moved operations to the Esrange Space Centre in Kiruna, Norway. A single launch took place from the site on September 19, 1983. However, 10 seconds into the flight, the rocket suddenly broke apart and exploded. The failure was traced to a rectangular hole cut for a television camera, which acted like an organ pipe and caused the rocket to shake itself apart. It was to be OTRAG’s swan song. Having been run out of every friendly country and lost most of its capital and investments in Libya, by now the company was in ruins. Kayser made a few last attempts to find new sponsors, but it soon became clear that every candidate – including one Saddam Hussein – was only interested in one thing: acquiring cheap missile technology. And so in 1982 Kayser made the difficult decision to leave the OTRAG, which finally ceased operations in 1986. As Kayser recalled in 2015:
“As a scientist you wanna have a certain legacy, and it would be nice to see it applied. But to see the technology in ballistic missiles would be sad so it’s a very, very difficult decision. I will probably not live to see it.”
Indeed, Kayser would eventually leave the cutthroat world of aerospace far behind, moving to the Marshall Islands and establishing a boutique resort known as Bikendrik Island Hideaway. Lutz Kaiser passed away on November 19, 2017 at the age of 78, his dream of truly affordable spaceflight unfulfilled. While American companies like Interorbital Systems and Armadillo Aerospace have experimented with OTRAG-style modular launch systems, none have yet reached the commercial stage. As of this recording, the future of affordable spaceflight appears to be in reusable launch systems like SpaceX’s Falcon series. Yet even this highly sophisticated system cannot hope in its current iteration to achieve the reliability and cost-effectiveness of a brilliantly simple idea dreamed up by an eccentric German engineer nearly half a century ago – a system doomed by the politics and rivalries of a deeply flawed industry. This is why we can’t have nice things…
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- Where the Word “Lego” Comes From
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Expand for ReferencesSerra, Jean-Jacques, OTRAG Rockets, Sat-Net, http://www.sat-net.com/serra/otrag_e.htm
Grahn, Sven, The Last OTRAG Rocket – Launched From Esrange, http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/Swefirst/Soundingrocketdetails/OTRAG/OTRAGEsrange.htm
OTRAG LV, http://www.b14643.de/Spacerockets_1/West_Europe/OTRAG/Description/Frame.htm
Kerr, Joachim, OTRAG – A Low Cost Rocket, Journal of Space Operations & Communications, February 2021, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349669204_OTRAG_-_A_Low_Cost_Rocket
Dornberg, John, Bargain Basement Rocket – a Low-Technology “Truck” for Cheap Shots in Space, Popular Science, March 1978, https://books.google.ca/books?id=kgAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq=OTRAG&source=bl&ots=tCDddL_wZu&sig=ACfU3U30qAcjUH0m1C7yPSrwAgmUZnQmoA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjW_tPWnOr5AhVerIkEHQDJDrg4ChDoAXoECAQQAw#v=onepage&q=OTRAG&f=false
Torchinsky, Jason, SpaceX Was Not the First Private Rocket Company, Jalopnik, May 29, 2012, https://jalopnik.com/spacex-was-not-the-first-private-rocket-company-5913964
Wall, Kim; Hinzel, Jan; and Jose, Coleen, Naked in an Island Idyll: Eccentric Couple Recall a Life of Rockets and Dictators, The Guardian, June 13, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/jun/13/naked-island-idyll-eccentric-couple-recall-life-rockets-dictators
The post The Tragic Saga of the Real Life Amazing “LEGO Rocket” appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Take a moment to ask yourself: would you ever play a round of Russian roulette? As we’ve covered previously in our video Who Invented Russian Roulette and Has Anyone Ever Actually Played It? while partaking in this extreme pastime is, to put it mildly, ill advised, real-life cases, though tragic, are thankfully rare. Yet every year, thousands of people willingly engage in the culinary equivalent of Russian roulette, shelling out good money for a meal that may very well leave them dead before dessert. Enter the fascinating world of Fugu, Japan’s tantalizingly deadly delicacy.
Fugu, Japanese for “river pig”, refers to the flesh of pufferfish and all manner of dishes prepared from it. Pufferfish, also known as blowfish or globefish, belong to the family tetradontidae. There are 193 known species found in oceans around the world, though the most commonly consumed in Japanese cuisine belong to the genera Takifugu, Lagocephalus, Sphoeroides, and Diodon – better known as porcupine fish. Unlike most fish, pufferfish do not swim by flexing their entire bodies lengthwise but instead propel themselves entirely with their pectoral, dorsal, anal, and caudal fins. While this makes them extremely maneuverable, it also makes them slow and unable to evade predators except through short, powerful bursts of speed. To compensate for this lack of mobility, pufferfish have evolved a number of unique defences. When attacked, they quickly fill their highly-elastic stomachs with water, inflating themselves into a large, nearly-spherical shape that is much harder for predators to bite into and swallow. In addition, all pufferfish are covered in small, extremely sharp spines that normally lie flat against their bodies and only deploy when the fish inflates, meaning that even if a predator manages to grab hold of the pufferfish, it will likely find itself choking to death on what scientists technically refer to as a ‘spiny ball of NOPE.’ And if somehow the predator manages to swallow its prey, the pufferfish has yet another nasty surprise in store, for its tissues – particularly the liver, intestines, and ovaries – are saturated in a lethal poison known as tetrodotoxin or TTX.
TTX is a powerful neurotoxin 1,200 times deadlier than cyanide, and works by blocking the sodium channels of nerve cells. This blocks sodium ions from entering the cell and thus prevents the nerve from firing. Symptoms of TTX poisoning begin with tingling and numbness of the lips and tongue, followed by dizziness, vomiting, rapid heart rate, falling blood pressure, and eventually muscle paralysis. The toxin kills by paralyzing the diaphragm, leading to respiratory paralysis and suffocation. Terrifyingly, TTX does not cross the blood-brain barrier, meaning that victims remain fully awake as they suffocate to death. Nor is there an antidote, the only known treatment being to support the victim’s breathing with a ventilator until the toxin is metabolized and the effects wear off. Typically victims who survive past 24 hours go on to make full recoveries, though comas lasting several days are not uncommon. Untreated, however, TTX poisoning can kill in as little as 45 minutes, and the average pufferfish contains enough TTX to kill 30 adult humans.
TTX is closely related to other, even deadlier marine toxins including conotoxin, found in the venomous cone snail, and saxitoxin or STX, the agent responsible for breakouts of paralytic shellfish poisoning. With a lethal dose 60 times smaller than TTX, STX is the only marine toxin ever to be developed into a chemical weapon, with large amounts being stockpiled by the U.S. military in the 1950s and 60s. An STX-tipped needle hidden in a silver dollar was even issued to pilots of the Lockheed U-2 spy plane so they could commit suicide if shot down and captured. Such a coin was carried by pilot Francis Gary Powers when he was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, though he opted not to use it. In addition to TTX, many pufferfish also contain high levels of STX, though in both cases the toxin is not produced by the animal itself but by bacteria eaten by the fish and which live symbiotically in its gut. Similarly, paralytic shellfish poisoning is caused not by shellfish themselves, but by blooms of toxic algae which contaminate the surrounding sea life. Pufferfish raised in captivity or native to areas without these microorganisms, such as the Atlantic Northern Puffer and Pacific Oblong Blowfish, do not have toxins in their tissues.
Despite the extreme risks involved, fugu has been consumed in Japan for 2,000 years, though at various times during the Edo and Meiji periods of 1603-1912 its sale and preparation were banned by the authorities. The Japanese emperor has also traditionally been banned from eating fugu, an unofficial prohibition which persists to this day. Yet in more remote areas where government regulation was weaker, the preparation and consumption of fugu persisted, eventually evolving into an elaborate and highly-specialized art form.
The full fugu meal experience can cost upwards of ¥51,000 or $450 USD, and features multiple courses with the fish prepared in various ways. The first course is usually fugu sashimi, in which the raw flesh is sliced into paper-thin, almost transparent slices – a technique known as usuzukuri. These slices are typically arranged into elaborate images such as chrysanthemum blossoms or cranes – symbols of good fortune and longevity in Japanese culture – and served with a spicy dipping sauce made of soy sauce, scallions, daikon radish, red pepper, and lemon. The sashimi course is followed by a variety of dishes, including fugu-chiri, a stew of fish and vegetables boiled in broth; shabu-shabu, a casserole of fish, grilled bean curd, mushrooms, and leeks; and finally hire-zake, grilled fugu fins dipped in hot sake. The testes of the male fugu are also highly prized, believed by many Japanese men to enhance virility. In order to ensure they get repeat customers, fugu chefs take great care to cut out every trace of the fugu’s deadly organs and serve only the flesh and skin. But sometimes a very small amount of toxin – up to one part in 5,000 – remains, imparting a mild tingling sensation in the diner’s lips which fugu connoisseurs consider an essential part of the experience. However, in many cases this is merely the effect of the spicy dipping sauce and not the fish itself.
But this flirtation with tetrodotoxin comes at a cost, and well into the Twentieth Century hundreds of people died each year from improperly prepared fugu. One of the dish’s most famous victims was legendary Kabuki actor Bando Mitsugoro, who on January 16, 1975, went to a restaurant with friend and ordered four portions fugu liver – the deadliest part of the animal. Despite his friends’ and the chef’s best efforts to dissuade him, Mitsugoro claimed he had developed a natural resistance to the toxin and eagerly downed his meal. To the surprise of absolutely no-one, he died four hours later in his hotel room – but not before, we like to imagine, someone in his entourage had the chance to tell him I told you so.
By the time of Matsugoro’s death, however, yearly fugu deaths had already declined significantly, having reached a peak of 176 in 1958. That was the year the fugu industry was finally regulated by the Japanese government. Since then, chefs must earn a license in order to prepare and serve fugu – a rigorous process which involves serving a 2-3 year apprenticeship and a three-part licensing examination consisting of a written test, a fish identification test, and finally a practical test in which the prospective chef must prepare and – in the ultimate test of confidence – eat their own meal of fugu. Slip-ups are rewarded with failure – or, in rare cases, death. So demanding are these examinations that only 35% of applicants pass. But those who do are highly skilled, able to prepare and serve a fish according to the 30 government-mandated steps in as little as 20 minutes.
In addition to mandating the licensing of chefs, the Government also bans the sale of whole fugu fish to the public, while markets selling prepared fugu must prominently display their license documents and properly dispose of discarded fugu organs. Fugu fishing is also tightly controlled to protect populations from depletion, with most fish being harvested in the winter non-mating season when they are fattest and their organs the least toxic.Thus regulated, the fugu trade has grown into a sizeable industry, with tens of thousands of licensed fugu chefs across Japan serving around 10,000 tons of the fish each year. Much of the fugu trade is centred in the city of Shimonoseki, where, depending on the season, the fish sells for up to ¥5,000 or $45 USD a kilogram. The number of fugu poisonings has also significantly dropped since 1958, hovering at around 50 per year. However, almost none of these deaths involve fugu prepared by licensed chefs, and are instead related to deliberate suicide or fugu improperly prepared by fishermen and other inexperienced people. More often than not the culprit is bootleg fugu-churi stew made from toxic – and illegal – livers, ovaries, and other discarded organs. Fugu poisoning is also not unique to Japan, with cases being reported wherever pufferfish are found, including Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and even several eastern U.S. states like Florida, Virginia, New York, and New Jersey.
But for all its danger and mystique, what does fugu actually taste like? Well, as it turns out, not much. As Noel Vietmeyer, a reporter for National Geographic, wrote in 1984:
“Strangely I feel no danger, but with every bite I sense the thrill. The meat has no fiber; it’s almost like gelatin. It is very light in taste, there is only the slightest hint that it is a seafood.”
So what, then, explains the irresistible cachet of fugu? For some, the mild, nonexistent taste is irrelevant, the appeal lying entirely in the sense of danger. As one Japanese news correspondent explains:
“It is an addiction to danger, pushing to the edge of death. They want to enjoy it a little more, and a little more. The lure of fugu is the sensation that though you know it won’t happen, it just might be you this time.”
Nobuyoshi Kuraoka, owner of the celebrated Nippon restaurant on East 52nd Street in New York City, puts it rather more poetically, stating:
“The taste is elusive. It is like the flowering cherry, the symbol of Japanese idealism, the Japanese mind. “Fugu comes from the Japanese code, from the samurai. People are more concerned how to die than how to live.”
For others, the appeal lies somewhere else entirely, as Kuraoka further explains:
“That trace [of toxin] will just stimulate the blood circulation. That will make you feel happy a little bit. Through my experience it is a strong aphrodisiac. We’ll probably be asking the husbands’ permission before we let their wives order it.”
But while strict regulations have ironically rendered fugu one of the safest fish products, its deadly reputation precedes it wherever attempts are made to import it, and the fish has been banned in the United States since 1980. But in September 2008, Nobuyoshi Kuraoka succeeded in convincing the Japanese regulatory authorities and U.S. customs to allow him to import several boxes of fugu and fly in fugu chef Sakae Hata to prepare them. The meal was served to a select group of diners including Japan’s Consul General Hidetoshi Ukawa and several New York reporters. However, the sensational headlines that followed, such as“Aren’t You Dying to Try Japanese Fugu?” and “They Lived to Talk About It” caught the attention of the FDA, who promptly seized and quarantined the remainder of Kuraoka’s shipment. Despite Kuraoka and other chefs’ insistence that there hasn’t been a death from properly-prepared fugu in decades and that they would only import Tiger Fugu – the least toxic of the commonly-consumed species – the FDA continues to stand firm on its decision, with Raymond Newberry of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition stating that the ban will remain in effect:
“…until they can prove it is safe, and they can’t do that. There is no way to prove every fish is free of the toxin. It is not uniform, there could be a contaminant, and there is no analytic method to detect a contaminant.”
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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- That Time a Flying Pig Grounded Every Plane at London’s Heathrow Airport
Expand for ReferencesCromley, Marian, There’s No Fooling With the Fugu, The Washington Post, May 11, 1986, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1986/05/11/theres-no-fooling-with-the-fugu/74d7b8e1-13f9-4119-aed4-eb07bd84ed5d/
Japan’s Fugu is a Delicacy – But Is It Poisson or Poison? People, January 22, 1990, https://people.com/archive/japans-fugu-is-a-delicacy-but-is-it-poisson-or-poison-vol-33-no-3/
Saxitoxin Puffer Fish Poisoning in the United States, With The First Report of Pyrodinium bahamese as the Putative Toxin Source, Environmental Health Perspectives, October 2006, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626430/
Lohr, Steve, One Man’s Fugu is Another’s Poison, The New York Times, November 29, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/29/travel/one-man-s-fugu-is-another-s-poison.html
Glionna, John, Blowfish’s Bad Rap is Killing Him, Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2009, https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-japan-blowfish1-2009apr01-story.html
Neurologic Illness Associated With Eating Florida Pufferfish, 2002,
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5115a1.htm
Heller, Jill, Japan Underwater ‘Crop Circles’ Mystery Finally Solved, International Business Times, September 21, 2012, https://www.ibtimes.com/japan-underwater-crop-circles-mystery-finally-solved-794461
Nuwer, Rachel, Dolphins Seem to Use Toxic Pufferfish to Get High, Smithsonian Magazine, December 30, 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dolphins-seem-to-use-toxic-pufferfish-to-get-high-180948219/
The post The Russian Roulette of Food- Japan’s Deadly Delicacy appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Crispy and golden-brown on the outside, pillowy soft on the inside, with just the right amount of salt and the perfect hearty finish. McDonald’s French fries are one of the world’s favourite snacks, with an astonishing 4 million kilograms being sold every single day. A full quarter of these are sold in the United States alone, accounting for nearly 33% of all French fries sold and 7% of all potatoes grown in the country. With over 37,000 restaurants worldwide, McDonald’s is by far the largest fast food company in the world, serving its world-famous fries, burgers, and other items in more than 120 countries. However, as we have previously covered in our video When Did McDonald’s Start Super-Sizing Meals? this sheer ubiquity has become something of achilles heel, turning McDonald’s into a global symbol of – and scapegoat for – issues as diverse as global capitalism, abuse of workers, American imperialism, environmental degradation, and the obesity pandemic. McDonald’s restaurants are often the target of violent protests, and the chain is banned in over 90 countries. But perhaps the greatest single controversy the fast food giant has been involved in centres not on its global business practices or the treatment of its workers, but the contents of its most popular and seemingly innocuous product.
At first glance it might be difficult to see how French fries could possibly be controversial. After all, aren’t they simply sticks of potato fried in oil? But in today’s processed food landscape things are never as simple as they seem, and according to official McDonald’s sources their famous French fries actually contain a whopping 19 different ingredients. They are:
- Potatoes
- Canola Oil
- Soybean Oil
- Hydrogenated Soybean Oil
- Hydrolized Wheat
- Hydrolized Milk
- Citric Acid
- Dimethylpolysiloxane
- Dextrose
- Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate
- Salt
- Canola Oil (note to Simon, some listed twice for a reason)*
- Corn oil
- Soybean Oil
- Hydrogenated Soybean Oil
- Tert-Butylhydroquinone
- Citric Acid,
- Dimethylpolysiloxane
- Natural Flavour
While this list might seem alarmingly excessive for a simple French fry, you probably noticed right away that many ingredients are listed twice. This is because the fries are fried twice in the same oil mixture – once before being frozen and shipped to restaurants and again before being served to customers – and FDA rules require both mixtures to be listed separately. Eliminating these repetitions reduces the list to a shorter but still eyebrow-raising 14 ingredients. Yet despite their intimidating names, most of these additives are simply meant to ensure the stringent location-to-location uniformity McDonald’s food is famous for. For example, dextrose gives the fries their distinctive golden-brown colour, sodium acid pyrophosphate prevents discolouration during freezing, citric acid and tert-butylhydroquinone prevent the fries from oxidizing and turning grey, and dimethylpolysiloxane is an anti-foaming agent that prevent the frying oil from splattering. But while these ingredients may raise some eyebrows, none have generated as much controversy as the last item on the list: “natural flavour.” And the source of this controversy? Whether this seemingly nondescript ingredient contains any beef.
Beef has always been the key to the distinctive flavour of McDonald’s fries. From the chain’s founding in 1955, the potato sticks were fried in a mixture of beef tallow known as “Formula 47”, giving the fries their unique crispiness and subtle meaty taste. However, this all changed in 1990 thanks to a man named Phil Sokolof. After surviving a heart attack, Sokolof became concerned about the amount of saturated fats in fast food and launched a $14 million ad campaign against McDonald’s and other chains aimed at pressuring them into changing their recipes. Eventually McDonald’s caved in and announced that it would no longer be cooking their fries in beef tallow, switching instead to a mixture of canola, corn, and soybean oil.
While intended as a means of improving the healthiness of the McDonald’s menu, the switch from tallow to vegetable oil convinced many that the chain’s fries were now vegetarian. This attracted a whole new demographic of customers who had previously shied away from the chain. But then, on April 9, 2001, an article by Viji Sundaram appeared in the newspaper India-West titled Where’s the Beef? It’s in Your French Fries. In the article, Sundaram tells the story of Anand Kulkarni and Hitesh Shah, software engineers from Los Angeles who regularly ate at McDonald’s. Kulkarni was a devout Hindu and thus forbidden from eating beef while Shah was a follower of the Jain Dharma, a Hindu sect that opposes all forms of killing. So extreme is this aversion that certain devout Jains refuse to wash any part of their bodies except their hands to avoid killing bacteria and sweep the sidewalk before them with a broom so as not to step on any insects. Due to their religious beliefs the men’s typical McDonald’s order consisted of a veggie burger, a soda, and an order of fries, all of which were vegetarian – or so they thought. But then Shah read an article revealing that the supposedly vegetarian fries actually contained beef, hidden behind the innocuous ingredient label “natural flavour.” Enraged at being deceived into violating his religious beliefs, Shah called McDonald’s customer service and demanded to know whether the fries did indeed contain beef and, if so, why this was not listed as an ingredient. The McDonald’s representative, Megan Magee, replied that the fries did indeed contain a “minuscule amount” of beef flavouring, but that this was not listed because FDA regulations did not require the ingredients of natural flavourings to be broken down. Sundaram’s article set off a storm of controversy, especially in India where 84% of the population is Hindu. Violent protests erupted across the country, with protestors smashing restaurant windows and smearing statues of Ronald McDonald with cow dung while nationalist politicians like prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee called for the immediate shutdown of McDonalds’ 27 Indian locations. Of the scandal, Shanka Gankar of the ultra-nationalist Bajrang Dal party stated”
“They have betrayed the faith of millions of our countrymen by serving food cooked in beef fat. It is unpardonable. If they don’t close the outlets with immediate effect, we will be forced to take extreme steps.”
Meanwhile, in early May, Harish Bharti, a Hindu lawyer from Seattle, launched a class-action lawsuit against McDonald’s, quipping that:
“They say billions and billions served. I say billions and billions deceived.”
The suit was filed on behalf of law students from George Washington University, fellow concerned Hindus, and secular vegetarian advocacy groups like the Vegetarian Legal Action Network. This group, which represents nearly 15 million vegetarians across the United States, had previously petitioned McDonald’s to fully disclose its products’ ingredients, but to no avail. As James Pizzirusso, the VLAN’s founder, stated:
“Corporate America needs to pay attention to consumers who avoid certain food products for religious or health reasons, or because they have allergies.They say they are complying with the law in terms of disclosing their ingredients, but they should go beyond the law.”
Meanwhile, the Hindu case against McDonald’s was passionately stated by Brij Sharma, a Seattle electrical engineer and one of the defendants named in the class-action suit:
“I feel sick in the morning every day, like I want to vomit. Now it is always there in my mind that I have done this sin.”
Bharthi and his clients were soon joined by six Hindus from British Columbia, Canada, including Harjinder Kainth, who claimed that a McDonald’s employee assured him that the restaurant’s fries were indeed vegetarian. A second lawsuit against McDonald’s Canada was filed later that month.
In response, McDonald’s Canada denied ever claiming that its fries were vegetarian, stating:
“In fact, at McDonald’s Canada, we have always prepared our french fries in a blend of beef and vegetable oil. Furthermore, this information has always been readily available to our Canadian customers through our Food Facts brochure…the lawsuit filed in British Columbia is totally misguided and based on completely unfounded and incorrect information.”
Furthermore, the parent company revealed that while beef flavouring was included in fries prepared in North America, these ingredients were omitted in markets like India with religious or moral restrictions against eating beef and other meat products.
Nonetheless, in June of 2002 McDonalds agreed to pay out a $10 million settlement to the 11 named defendants, and issued the following official apology:
“We regret we did not provide these customers with complete information, and we sincerely apologize for any hardship that these miscommunications have caused among Hindus, vegetarians and others. We should have done a better job in these areas, and we’re committed to doing a better job in the future.”
But do McDonald’s fries – at least the ones served in North America – actually contain beef? Well, it depends on how you define “beef.” The “natural flavouring” used in McDonald’s fries is made by hydrolyzing beef proteins into their constituent amino acids and adding various sugars and citric acid, producing a rich, meaty umami flavour. Whether or not this actually counts as beef is thus a matter of semantic and religious interpretation. Such ambiguity is common in the field of food science. For example, the molecule which gives bananas their distinctive flavour is called Isoamyl Acetate. According to FDA rules, if this molecule is extracted from actual bananas, then food manufacturers are allowed to refer to it as “natural flavouring.” If, however, it is synthesized from other chemicals, it must be labeled as “artificial flavouring” – even though in both cases the molecule is exactly the same. But while McDonald’s fries may in fact be vegetarian, one thing they are definitely not is vegan, for included among the 14 official ingredients is hydrolyzed milk.
The debacle over beef in fries would not be the last time McDonald’s faced the wrath of Indian Hindus. In August 2019, McDonald’s India announced on Twitter that all its restaurants were now certified Halal, the code of animal slaughter and food preparation followed by devout Muslims. Once again violent protests erupted across the country, with protestors inflicting more than $60,000 in damage against McDonald’s property. Activists complained that the move alienated the country’s Hindu majority, and that McDonald’s should also offer meat prepared according to jahtka, a Hindu slaughtering method that involves beheading an animal in one stroke. As Vishnu Gupta, president of the right-wing Hindu Sena party, stated:
“McDonald’s can’t force halal meat upon a vast section of Hindus who eat jhatka. Their sensitivities can’t be ignored. If McDonald’s can keep in consideration the sensitivities of a particular group, why is it ignoring the others? If Mcdonald’s doesn’t change its policy, and start serving both halal and jhatka in its outlets across India, soon our men will protest against the food chain on streets.”
However, according critics like activist Shabham Hashmi, these protests had less to do with McDonald’s itself and more with islamophobia and Hindu Nationalism, with the restaurant chain serving, as ever, as a lightning rod and convenient scapegoat for pre-existing tensions:
“It is an absolutely Islamophobic atmosphere which is existing in India now and each and every occasion is used by right-wing Hindus to attack Muslims. It’s the extreme right asserting themselves to convert India into a Hindu nation.”
But such controversies are part and parcel of being a giant multinational corporation, and McDonald’s will likely weather this storm as it has others and continue serving burgers, shakes – and yes, fries – to its billions and billions of customers around the globe.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- The Da Vinci of Fast-Food: The One Guy Behind a Huge Number of Staple Fast-Food Items Everyone Loves
- Who Invented the Food Pyramid?
- The History of French Fries
- What Causes Green Potato Chips and are They Really Poisonous?
Bonus Fact
While rioting and vandalizing restaurants over beef flavouring in fries may seem like an extreme reaction, fears of beef contamination once triggered a nationwide uprising. From the mid 1700s onward the British East India Company and later the British Colonia Government recruited large numbers of native Indian troops known as sepoys to police their colonial holdings. Over the next century, resentment to British colonial rule steadily grew among the Indian population, fueled by punitive taxes, unfair economic policies, and other abuses. This simmering tension finally came to a boil in May 1857, triggered by, of all things, the issuing of a new pattern of rifle to the sepoys. Like previous smoothbore muskets, the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle was loaded from the muzzle using a paper cartridge, consisting of a bullet and gunpowder charge wrapped in a paper cylinder. To load the rifle, a soldier tore the cartridge open with his teeth, poured the powder down the barrel, crumpled the paper around the bullet, and rammed both down the barrel with a ramrod. Unfortunately, to help it slide down the barrel, the bullet for the 1853 Enfield was greased with a mixture of beef and pork tallow, meaning that soldiers risked ingesting this grease every time they loaded the rifle. This was abhorrent to Hindu and Muslim troops alike, and proved the last straw for the disgruntled sepoys. On March 29, 1857, sepoys at Barrackpore near Calcutta rose up against their British officers, sparking a rebellion that quickly spread across the subcontinent. What followed was a brutal year-and-a-half-long conflict that resulted in the deaths of 6000 British and 800,000 Indian troops and civilians, the dissolution of the East India Company, and the consolidation of British colonial rule in India. British reprisals against the rebellious sepoys was infamously brutal, with thousands being hanged or strapped to the mouths of cannons and blown apart. While generally referred to in the West as the Sepoy Mutiny, Indian Mutiny, or Indian Rebellion, the events of 1857-1858 are known in India as the First War of Independence, and proved a watershed moment in British-Indian relations and the first in a long line of rebellious acts that eventually resulted in India winning her independence less than 100 years later.
Expand for ReferencesRoberts, Anna, Truth Is, No Millennials Have Tried McDonald’s Original French Fries, Popsugar, October 30, 2017, https://www.popsugar.com/food/McDonald-French-Fries-History-43864417
Miner, Karen, The Untold Truth of McDonald’s Fries, Mashed, August 14, 2018, https://www.mashed.com/131249/the-untold-truth-of-mcdonalds-fries/
Sundaram, Viji, Where’s the Beef? It’s in Your French Fries, McSpotlight, April 9, 2001, https://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/mcds/indiawest090401.html
McDonald’s Sued Over Beef in Fries, ABC News, January 7, 2006, https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93386&page=1
McDonald’s Raided in Hindu Protest, Chicago Tribune, May 6, 2001, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-05-06-0105060383-story.html
Harding, Luke, Indian McAnger, May 7, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/07/globalisation.lukeharding
Kuchay, Bilay, McDonald’s Faces Boycott Threats in India for Serving Halal Meat, Al Jazeera, August 26, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2019/8/26/mcdonalds-faces-boycott-threats-in-india-for-serving-halal-meat
Goodstein, Laurie, For Hindus and Vegetarians, Surprise in McDonald’s Fries, The New York Times, May 20, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/us/for-hindus-and-vegetarians-surprise-in-mcdonald-s-fries.html
McDonald’s Apologizes for Beefy Fries, CBC News, May 25, 2001, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/mcdonald-s-apologizes-for-beefy-fries-1.275449
McDonald’s Settles Beef Over Fries, CBS News, June 5, 2002, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcdonalds-settles-beef-over-fries/
Countries Without McDonalds 2021, World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-without-mcdonalds
How Many McDonald’s Fries Are Sold Each Day? Asking Lot, January 23, 2020, https://askinglot.com/how-many-mcdonalds-fries-are-sold-each-day
The post The Surprisingly Bitter and Occasionally Deadly Fight Over McDonalds’ Fries appeared first on Today I Found Out.
While many a historic leader can be credited with sometimes even millions of deaths via their orders, with perhaps the poster children of this in modern times being the likes of Hitler and Stalin, these individuals themselves only killed in a somewhat abstract way- not by their own hand directly. Which brings us to the topic of the day- who killed the most people directly by their own hand? And, on the more positive side of things, what bastion of awesome saved the most lives directly by their own hand?
As for the negative side of this lively coin, one could argue that Brigadier General Paul Tibbets and Major General Charles Sweeny (or their respective bombardiers, Colonel Thomas Ferebee and Captain Kermit Beahan) hold the record here with their respective bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing somewhere in the vicinity of 70,000-140,000 people in the former, and 60,000-80,000 in the latter. However, arguably a more darkly impressive spree of mass murder, and fitting slightly more firmly in the “directly by their own hand” classification would be the man who is, according to Guinness World Records, the “Most Prolific Executioner” of all time- Stalin’s own Vasili Blokhin.
Born to a Russian peasant family in 1895, as a young man Vasili quickly earned a reputation for “chernaya rabota”, or “black work”, while serving in the Tsarist army during World War I- gaining recognition from Stalin himself for his covert assassinations, torture, and executions. Blokhin quickly rose through the ranks of Russia’s secret police at the time—the NKVD—eventually becoming the head of the Kommandatura department, members of which were all approved by Stalin and took orders directly from him, carrying out black work missions specific to furthering Stalin’s cause.
Among other things in this role, Blokhin oversaw many mass executions and executed several high-profile individuals himself, including Mikhail Tukachevsky, Marshal of the Soviet Union, and two of the former NKVD chiefs under whom he had previously served.
But Blokhin’s most infamous deed was performed at the bloody Katyn Massacre. In 1939, just over two weeks after Germany invaded Poland, Soviet forces entered the eastern side of Poland. Though they didn’t officially declare war, they captured over 20,000 Polish officers and detained them in Soviet prison camps.
But what to do with them? Well, Stalin being Stalin, on March 5, 1940, Stalin ordered the executions of all Polish officers being held…
This brings us to why Vasili Blokhin is arguably the biggest direct mass murdered in human history. Helping out in killing off these 20,000 or so officers, over a twenty-eight day period, Vasili personally performed over 7000 of these Polish executions at Katyn, averaging killing almost 300 people a night by his own hand…
On this note, usually, the executions would take place from dusk til dawn, with Blokhin working nearly uninterrupted each night. As to how he managed so many murders in such a short span by his own hand, the system setup was extremely efficient. The executions would go like this: after signing identification papers, officers were led with their arms bound into a small room that was equipped with soundproofed walls, a drain, and a hose. Forced to their knees, a single shot was delivered to the back of the prisoners’ heads, killing them instantly. Their bodies would then be dragged through a second door away, the room would be hosed down, and the next prisoner would be brought in.
As for what he used for this, Blokhin favoured the 7.65 mm Walther PPK pistol. For Blokhin, it didn’t have as much of a kickback as other guns, which meant less pain in his wrist after performing hundreds of executions every night. The pistols also rarely misfired, which meant the victims could be killed with one shot nearly every time someone pulled the trigger.
This gun was also favored for these executions because the pistols were the make carried by German officers. Thus, in the event that the mass graves were discovered, the bodies would contain bullets from a German-style pistol and the Soviets could deny responsibility for the deaths.
Going back to Vasili, on April 27, 1940, Blokhin was awarded with the Order of the Red Banner for carrying out this amazingly bloody organized mass killing. The Order was traditionally given to military personnel who displayed “exceptional courage, self-denial, and valour during combat”. That said, given the Soviets didn’t exactly want to advertise what Vasili had done, he was given the Order secretly.
On that note, in 1941, Stalin found himself in an alliance with the Polish government after the Germans invaded Russia. At this point, he released hundreds of thousands of Poles from prison camps, and was pressed on several occasions to account for the many thousands of missing POWs. Stalin pled ignorance on this, but in 1943 the truth began to emerge with the discovery of the mass graves at Katyn. As was the plan from the beginning if discovered, the Soviet government denied all responsibility and blamed the Germans. It wasn’t until 1990 and Mikhail Gorbachev’s institution of openness that the truth was revealed through a series of documents highlighting the country’s role in the massacre.
As for the man himself, Blokhin didn’t live to see his deeds publicly recognized. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, he was forced to retire. During the deStalinization campaign that followed, Blokhin was stripped of his rank and turned to alcoholism. A combination of drink and insanity reportedly led to his death in 1955, the cause of which is officially listed as suicide. If true, and not simply suicided, this means he can add his own life to his record murder tally.
As for that tally, along with the approximately 7000 prisoners of war Blokhin personally executed at Katyn, he is reportedly directly responsible for the deaths of many thousands of other people in prison camps during the Second World War, aptly earning him that title of “Most Prolific Executioner” in the Guinness Book of World Records and, as far as we can find, caveats about pushing a button to drop a nuke aside, also the human in history who has the notorious distinction of killing the most people directly by his own hand.
So what about the other side of this coin? The person who has directly saved the most lives? Once again various arguments could be made about world leaders, such as Teddy Roosevelt who, among other things, negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese War, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize, and then followed this up more significantly by preventing what would end up being WWI, at least for several years.
On this one, in 1905 tensions were mounting between the somewhat allied France and Britain, with Germany on the other side, thanks to the First Moroccan crisis. In a nutshell, this was on its face an issue of which European power should hold sway over Morocco. But more deeply, this was about Germany getting a little nervous over Britain and France buddying up to one another during the crisis, French expansion of influence, and how this all shifted power in Europe.
As tensions rose, Germany attempted to get an official position from the U.S. and Roosevelt, but the general contention at this time in the U.S. was that the country should stay out of the conflict. So Roosevelt stayed more or less neutral publicly.
Eventually Germany considered simply going to war with France, but were concerned that the British would ally with the French in retaliation. In part thanks to Roosevelt’s previous good work helping to mediate the Russo-Japanese War conflict resolution (which, again, earned him the Nobel Peace Prize), Roosevelt was turned to to help convince France to agree to the conference between the different countries in this conflict (13 in total attended).
After securing a promise from Germany that it would back the Roosevelt’s decisions during the conference- at this time, Germany was under the impression Roosevelt would favor them, rather than be neutral- Roosevelt agreed to help and was able to convince France to attend.
This was a key point because the conference almost devolved completely at one point, at the same time France was beginning to march troops towards the German border, with Germany in turn mobilizing its own forces in response.
But once Roosevelt joined in the conference, after securing Frances’ attendance, he then put forward a proposal to resolve the conflict, which heavily favored France. Naturally, Germany rejected it. However, with little support outside of Austria-Hungary, and the U.S. not backing them as they’d thought, along with their previous promise to Roosevelt to back the U.S.’ decisions, Germany finally gave in.
Ultimately the conference had a peaceful ending, with France’s position more or less winning out, though there were a few face saving provisions thrown the German’s way.
Without Roosevelt helping to convince the French to attend the conference and his work in it, or had the conference broken off, the conflict would have likely escalated to war, which given many of the treatise that led to the escalation of WWI and the two sides involved here, this may well have seen some version of WWI happen almost a decade sooner than it eventually did.
Granted, given that many millions ultimately died anyway when the war did eventually kick off about a decade later, one could argue that Roosevelt did not save millions by his efforts in this peace conference, but simply delayed some people’s deaths who ultimately fought in WWI and were old enough in 1905 to have fought in that one too, had it come to be.
Other arguments for the individual who saved the most lives directly could be made about various scientists, particularly in the medical end of things, such as Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine, among countless other scientists and inventors out there who have saved millions of lives by their direct actions.
A perhaps more obscure individual who has saved millions to date is one James Harrison of Australia- the man with the golden arm. As to how he’s saved so many, Harrison’s blood contains an antibody called Rho(D) Immune Globulin that is used to treat Rhesus disease, a severe form of anemia where antibodies in a pregnant woman’s blood destroy her baby’s blood cells.
James Harrison may never have discovered this quirk in his bloody if it were not for the fact that when he was 13 in 1949, Harrison had major chest surgery. The surgery required transfusions of almost three-and-a-half gallons of blood. During the three months he spent recovering in the hospital, grateful for the donated blood that had saved his life, he pledged to start donating his own as soon as he was legally old enough as a way to pay back the kindness of the strangers who donated the blood he used. (At the time, one needed to be 18 to donate blood.)
In 1954, when Harrison turned 18 and started giving blood, it was quickly discovered that his blood contained a rare, very valuable lifesaving antibody that could be used to treat Rhesus disease.
At that time, Rhesus disease was killing tens of thousands of babies per year (around 10,000 annually in the U.S. alone), as well as causing major birth defects such as brain damage. Most people (about 85%) have a special protein in their blood cells called the Rh factor, which makes them Rh positive (positive blood type); the remainder, who lack Rh factor, are called Rh negative (and have a negative blood type).
Women who’ve been pregnant may remember the Rh blood test, which screens to detect any incompatibility. As to why this is important, as noted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, “If [mother] is Rh-negative and . . . baby is Rh-positive, [mother’s] body will react to the baby’s blood as a foreign substance. [Mother’s] body will create antibodies (proteins) against the baby’s Rh-positive blood . . . . Rh incompatibility is more likely to cause problems in second or later pregnancies [when] Rh antibodies can cross the placenta and attack the baby’s red blood cells . . . lead[ing] to hemolytic anemia in the baby.”
Luckily, if an incompatibility is found early on, there is a prenatal treatment (Rh immune globulin) that will prevent any problems before they start. This works by introducing antibodies that will attach to Rh-positive red blood cells. This effectively makes it so the mother’s immune system won’t detect and then try to destroy them.
Going back to Harrison, when the discovery was made about Harrison’s blood, he agreed to undergo extensive tests and experiments that eventually led to the development of a vaccine called Anti-D. Harrison said he was eager to help but some precautions were taken in case something happened to him during the testing. “They insured me for a million dollars so I knew my wife Barbara would be taken care of. I wasn’t scared. I was glad to help,” Harrison said in a 2010 interview.
Besides letting himself be used as a guinea-pig in the development of the Anti-D vaccine, Harrison has donated an extreme amount of plasma. Plasma can be given every two to three weeks, unlike whole blood, which is only recommended to be donated every six weeks. This allowed Harrison to donate 1,173 times in the around six decades he did it, only stopping in 2018 because Australian policy does not allow people over 81 to donate.
In all, it is estimated Harrison has helped save about 2-2.5 million people so far through his actions. Among that number, his own daughter, Tracey, had to have the Anti-D injection after the birth of her son.
But all of these individuals, while their direct actions may have saved even upwards of millions cannot compete with yet another individual who bears the name Vasili, in this case one Vasili Arkhipov, the man who quite literally saved the world.
For reference here, when he did this, there were approximately 3.2 billion people on Earth, a rather large percentage of which arguably would have perished without his actions, and humanity and Earth forever changed after.
So how did Vasili save the world?
In 1962, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were on the brink of possible mutual destruction- the world as a whole was facing a possible nuclear winter and all the devastation that would come with it. The Cold War had been escalated to “tepid” and was close to becoming hot with the failure of the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis.
In May 1962, Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban President Fidel Castro reached a “secret” agreement that allowed the Soviets to start building missile sites in Cuba, including stocking them with nuclear missiles- 42 of them.
It should be noted here that the U.S. at this time had nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy that could hit Moscow within 16 minutes of being launched. On the flip-side, the Soviets had plenty of nukes pointed at and perfectly capable of destroying the U.S.’ allies throughout Europe. However, the Soviets did not have nearly the capability to destroy targets in the U.S. itself. Certainly, they had enough nukes to destroy all the major cities in the U.S. and more, but they were lacking in reliable intercontinental ballistic missiles to adequately function as a “mutual destruction” deterrent. Indeed, there were some among the U.S. brass that felt the loss of allies throughout Europe and the lesser direct causalities from long range nukes that managed hit their targets in the U.S. were acceptable losses given the payoff would be the annihilation of the Soviet Union and the end of that threat to the United States. So if the Soviet Union had nukes in Cuba, that tipped the balance in the Cold War back to near even, rather than in the U.S.’s favor as before.
In the fall of 1962, the United States sent a US U-2 aircraft to fly over Cuba to attempt to confirm the rumors that they had heard about the Soviet missile sites in Cuba. On October 14th, 1962, the U-2 arrived back with pictures of these missiles sites. A day later, the pictures were presented to President Kennedy. Tensions rose and alarms were sounded. And, thus, on October 15th, 1962 the 13-day ordeal that became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis began.
This brings us to the man of the hour Vasili Arkhipov.
Arkhipov was born on January 30th, 1926 to a poor, peasant family near Moscow in the town of Staraya Kupavna. At the age of 16, he began his education at the Pacific Higher Naval School. Vasili saw his first military action as a minesweeper in the Pacific Theater at the tail end of World War II. In 1947, he graduated from the Caspian Higher Naval School and served on submarines in the Soviet Black Sea, Northern, and Baltic fleets. In 1961, Vasili got his first taste of crisis management in an incident that, while extremely momentous, wasn’t even close to what he’d help with later.
This first incident happened when Vasili was appointed deputy commander of the new K-19 sub (known today as “the Widowmaker” thanks to the 2002 movie K-19: The Widowmaker, but in its day nicknamed by the Russians “Hiroshima”). This sub was one of the first Soviet nuclear submarines, which was also equipped with a nuclear ballistic missile. On July 4th, 1961, as the sub was conducting exercises near Greenland, a major leak was discovered in the radiant cooling system. Since no backup cooling system was installed pre-sail, the reactor on the sub was in real danger of a nuclear meltdown. In order to prevent a nuclear accident unlike any the world had ever seen before, the captain of the sub sent workers into high-radiation areas to build a cooling system on the spot. Every member of the sub did what they could to prevent disaster, including Vasili, lending his engineering expertise to help contain the overheating reactor. The crew succeeded, but not before these workers and many on the crew developed radiation sickness. Every worker that was sent as first responders into the high-radiation areas died within days. Due to this, a mutiny nearly erupted on board the K-19 sub. Vasili backed his captain in continuing the work and was, eventually, awarded a medal for his bravery in a time of crisis and loyalty to the Soviet Union. All of this was a precursor to the day Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.
After his time on the K-19 sub, Vasili was made second in command on the B-59, one of four attack submarines that was ordered to travel to Cuba on October 1st, 1962. The sub contained 22 torpedoes, one of which was nuclear, holding approximately the same yield as the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. The captains of each of the four subs were given permission to fire their nuclear torpedoes at their own discretion, so long as they had the backing of the political officer on board. Unknown to the crew of the B-59, the United States began their naval blockade of Cuba on October 24th and informed the Soviets that they would be dropping practice depth charges (think warning shots) to force subs to surface and be identified.
Moscow could not communicate this information to the B-59 due to it being too deep underwater to receive radio transmissions.
And so it was that on October 27th, 1962, US destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph located the sub, trapped it, and began dropping depth charges to force it to surface. The sub’s crew, which had been traveling for nearly 4 weeks with very little communication with Moscow, was very tired and not aware of the circumstances. The sub’s captain, Valentin Savitsky, believed that nuclear war had already broken out between the Soviet Union and the US and wanted to fire the nuclear torpedo. The political officer concurred. All that was normally needed to launch.
Fortunately, particularly given the heightened tensions at the time, in this case, one other person had veto power over firing besides the captain and the political officer- the second in command Vasili Arkhipov. You see, Vasili, despite being second in command on the B-59, was the leader of the fleet of the four Soviet subs sent. Had Vasili not been present, nuclear war would have likely happened as both the captain and the political officer wanted to launch the nuclear torpedo and would otherwise have been able to.
However, Vasili vehemently disagreed, arguing that since no orders had come from Moscow for many days, such a drastic action was ill-advised and the sub should surface to contact Moscow to assess the situation. A heated argument broke out- legend, probably false- says punches were thrown. Eventually, though, Vasili won the day (his reputation as a hero in the K-19 mutiny reportedly helped in the debate) and the sub surfaced. Upon surfacing, they were met by their American enemies and instructed to head back to Russia. They obliged, (additionally, they began to have mechanical issues on board the sub) and headed east. Nuclear war was averted. Vasili Arkhipov was a hero… again.
When the sub arrived back in Russia, the crew of the B-59 were met with trepidation, however. After all, they had pretty much surrendered to the Americans. Said one Russian admiral to the submariners, “‘It would have been better if you’d gone down with your ship.”
Despite the not-so-hero’s welcome he originally received from the Soviets upon his return, Vasili continued serving in the Soviet Navy and ultimately in 1975 was promoted to rear admiral. Later, he would become the head of the Kirov Naval Academy. He retired in the mid-1980s, and passed away in 1999 at the age of 73 as the result of complications due to radiation poisoning from back aboard the K-19.
Despite few in the wider world having heard of him or ever giving him credit, at least one person recognized the significance of what Vasili had done that 27th of October, 1962- his wife, Olga, Vasili, who always recognized him as the man who saved the world, stating,
“The man who prevented a nuclear war was a Russian submariner. His name was Vasili Arkhipov. I was proud and I am proud of my husband, always.”
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The Great War of 1914-1918 is often remembered as one of the first truly modern, fully-industrialized conflicts, with many now-ubiquitous military technologies such as the aeroplane, the submarine, the tank, and poison gas making their combat debut on its battlefields. But the Great War was also a time of transition, with many older technologies and tactics like cavalry serving alongside the new – often with disastrous results. But every once in a while, old technology proved more than capable of holding its own in this modern conflict, and none more so than SMS Seeadler, a 19th-century sailing ship that managed to become one of the War’s greatest commerce raiders, sinking 15 ships in 225 days.
SMS Seeadler began life as the Pass of Balmaha, a three-masted iron-hulled windjammer launched on August 9, 1888 by Robert Duncan & Company of Glasgow. Windjammers were the very last development in commercial sailing technology, built in a desperate attempt to compete with steamships. In this they proved moderately successful; not only could they keep pace with steamers in a good wind, but on long-haul voyages such as to Australia they were actually more economical as they did not have to bunker coal or fuel oil and could thus carry larger cargoes. Over the next 26 years Pass of Balmaha changed hands several times, eventually coming under the ownership of the Harby Steamship Company of New York, where, upon declaration of war in Europe August 1914, she was registered under a neutral American flag.
On June 23, 1915, Pass of Balmaha departed New York Harbour under the command of Captain Scott, carrying a cargo of Texas cotton bound for Arkhangelsk in Russia. As soon as war was declared, the Entente powers had established a naval blockade of Germany, with the Royal Navy establishing two lines of patrol ships in the North Sea to enforce it. On July 21, while Pass of Balmaha was off the coast of Norway, she was accosted by the British Auxiliary Cruiser Victorian, who sent over a boarding party to search her for contraband. While nothing suspicious was found, the captain of the Victorian nonetheless ordered the Pass of Balmaha to sail to Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands for further inspection, and placed a prize crew and six marines aboard to ensure compliance. Against the protestations of Captain Scott, he also ordered the Pass’s American Flag struck and replaced with the British Red Ensign. Understandably this made the crew of the Pass rather nervous, as it marked the ship as a belligerent vessel and made it more likely to be attacked. And indeed, two days later while en route to Orkney the Pass of Balmaha was intercepted by the German submarine SMS U-36. At the time, submarines and surface raiders still operated under the so-called Cruiser or Prize Rules, which dictated that a merchant ship could not be attacked and sunk without warning. Instead, the attacker had to make their presence known, board the merchantman to search for contraband, and allow the crew to safely escape before capturing or sinking the vessel. This gave Captain Scott enough time to hide the British prize crew belowdecks and swap out the Red Ensign for the Stars and Stripes. However, the Captain of the U-36, Ernst Gräf, was unconvinced, and ordered Pass of Balmaha to sail to Cuxhaven with a German prize crew aboard. More than a little annoyed at having been made a target, out of spite Captain Scott kept the British sailors locked below for the entire voyage to Germany. On arrival in Cuxhaven the American crew were allowed safe passage to a neutral country while the British sailors were interned and the Pass of Balmaha retained in German custody.
Meanwhile, U-36 continued on her war patrol. Less than 12 hours after stopping the Pass of Balmaha, she stopped and boarded the Danish steamer Louise. But while the boarding party were busy throwing the ship’s cargo overboard, Captain Gräf spotted another ship on the horizon: the 274-tonne collier Prince Charles. Realizing this was a much greater prize, Gräf ordered his crew to let the Louise go and made for the Prince Charles instead. As U-36 closed at 14 knots, she could see the collier’s crew scurrying across the deck, scrambling to lower the lifeboats. But when she was within 600 yards, the crew suddenly pulled down a set of painted canvas screens, revealing 6-pounder guns hidden beneath. Before U-36 could take evasive action, Prince Charles opened fire, scoring four direct hits. As the submarine began to flood, Captain Gräf ordered his crew to abandon ship, and U-36 slipped beneath the waves. She was the first victim of the so-called “Q Ships”, decoy antisubmarine vessels used extensively by the British throughout the Great War.
Given the success of the Q ships, it was only a matter of time before someone in Germany thought to copy the concept, and that someone was Captain Felix Graf von Luckner. A sailor through and through, von Luckner had run away from home at age 12 to serve aboard the Russian full-rigger Niobe. Over the next twenty years he would serve aboard a number of sailing vessels before joining the German Imperial Navy, commanding a gun turret aboard the battleship Kronprinz Wilhelm during the June 1, 1916 Battle of Jutland – the largest and only major engagement between dreadnought battleships. Following Jutland neither the Royal Navy Grand Fleet nor the German High Seas Fleet dared engage in that type of open combat with each other again, and von Luckner, growing restless and impatient, began casting about for a method to bring the fight to the enemy. On a visit to Hamburg he spotted the captured Pass of Balmaha sitting in the harbour and was struck by the idea of converting her into an armed merchant raider. Luckily for von Luckner, his legendary storytelling abilities had made him a favourite of Kaiser Wilhelm II, leading to him being selected for the assignment over a number of more qualified officers.
Germany deployed a number of armed merchant raiders during the Great War, including SMS Möwe and SMS Wolf, which over their careers sank or captured 40 and 27 enemy ships, respectively. However, these vessels were greatly hampered by Germany’s lack of worldwide refuelling capacity. The German Empire had been relatively late to the scramble for colonies, only managing to acquire a handful of possessions in what are now Namibia, Cameroon, Tanzania, Micronesia, Palau, and Tsingtao – among others. Furthermore, most of these colonies had been captured by Entente forces early in the war, which – combined international strict laws prohibiting the fuelling of combatant ships in neutral ports – left Germany with virtually no overseas coaling stations. Being powered by the wind, however, a ship like the Pass of Balmaha would not be subject to such limitations, and could cruise the seas almost indefinitely.
The preparations for the voyage were meticulous, the Pass of Balmaha being fitted with a 1200 horsepower diesel engine allowing her to steam at 10 knots, a hidden wireless hut, and an armament consisting of two hidden 105mm guns, two heavy machine guns, two torpedo tubes, and various rifles, pistols, and scuttling charges for boarding parties. To allow her to slip past the British blockade, it was decided to disguise the ship as one of the many Norwegian lumber carriers which frequented the North Sea waters. To this end von Luckner, who had previously served aboard a Norwegian ship, hand-picked his crew of 64 based on Nordic appearance and their ability to speak or at least understand Norwegian. The ship was furnished with registration papers and a log captured from the Norwegian vessel Malella, and all German buttons and tabs on the crew’s clothing were swapped for Norwegian ones. But the most elaborate and bizarre of these deceptions was the crew saloon, which was decorated with Norwegian cushion covers, portraits of King Haakon VII and Queen Maud, and even a gramophone playing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. In a move straight out of the Bond villain playbook, this entire room was mounted on a hydraulic lift so that if the ship was boarded, at the press of a button the enemy prize crew would be sent plunging into the cargo hold.
Acting on intelligence from German spies, von Luckner decided to disguise the ship as the Irma, bound for Melbourne in Australia. On December 21, 1916, the shortest day of the year, the rechristened Pass of Balmaha set sail from Hamburg and slipped into the North Sea. The stormy December weather worked in her favour, allowing her to slip past most of the British blockade lines, but at 9:30 AM on Christmas Day the Irma was intercepted and boarded by the auxiliary cruiser HMS Avenger. Playing his cover story to the hilt, von Luckner ordered the five best Norwegian speakers among his crew to remain on-deck and made a show of wishing the boarding party a merry Christmas. As he led the inspectors into the saloon, they came upon a crew member disguised as a woman reclining in one of the armchairs, whom von Luckner identified as his wife suffering from a toothache. Not wishing to disturb this “invalid”, the boarding party made a minimum of fuss, and after inspecting the ship’s papers and log decided she was genuine and let her go on her way. The only close call came when the boarding party were returning to their launch, and von Luckner realized that the Irma’s auxiliary propeller was plainly visible. Thinking quickly, he tossed a line to the launch, sufficiently distracting the crew to prevent them from noticing the propeller.
Once the Avenger was out of sight, the crew tossed the dummy cargo of lumber overboard, readied the guns, and rechristened the ship SMS Seeadler or “Sea Eagle.” The hunt was now on.
Seeadler’s first victim was the British steam collier Gladys Royle bound from Cardiff to Buenos Aires, which she intercepted on January 9, 1917 120 miles south of the Azores. As would become her standard operating procedure, Seeadler used her signal lamp to ask the Gladys Royle for a time signal, a common practice used by ships at sea to fix their position. When her target was close enough she then revealed her guns and ordered the ship to stop. The crew was then transferred aboard Seeadler while a boarding party placed scuttling charges in the hold and sank the ship.
The next day Seeadler came upon the American steamer Lundy Island, which upon being ordered to heave-to, ignored the signal and made to flee, turning into the wind in an attempt to outrun the sail-powered Seeadler. In response Luckner opened fire, and by sheer chance one shell shattered the Lundy Island ’s rudder chain, leaving her dead in the water. While the prisoners were being transferred aboard the Seeadler, the Lundy Island’s Captain explained that he had previously been captured by the merchant raider SMS Möwe, and had been none too keen to be made a prisoner of war once again.
Seeadler’s next victory came on January 21 when she captured and sank the French barque Charles Gounod. Using her logbook, von Luckner discovered the shipping route used by sailing vessels in the area, and with this information managed to track down and sink the French Schooner Perce, the French Barque Antonin, and the Italian ship Buenos Ayres over the next 20 days.
This was followed by an unusual incident on February 19 when Seeadler captured the British Barque Pinmore. While leading the boarding party, von Luckner found the ship strangely familiar and headed aft to inspect the helm. There, scratched into the brass, he found his own initials – it was the same ship he had served aboard at the age of 17. Other captures were even stranger. On being ordered to stop, the captain of the French barque Dupleix, believing the Seeadler to be a fellow French vessel playing a practical joke, rowed over in a lifeboat only to suddenly find himself in German captivity. When the Horngarth failed to acknowledge Seeadler’s time signal request, von Luckner ordered smoke generators to be lit, making it seem as if the ship had caught fire. Horngarth immediately drew alongside to render assistance and was duly captured and sunk.
By late February Seeadler was running low on provisions, prompting Luckner to place his second in command, Lt. Kling, in charge and sail the recently-captured Pinmore to Rio de Janeiro. After picking up provisions, he rejoined the Seeadler three days later, transferred over the cargo, and sank the Pinmore with scuttling charges. But von Luckner now had another problem: the 286 prisoners locked up in the hold. So on March 17, von Luckner captured the French Barque Cambronne and transferred the prisoners aboard her, placing the ship in command of Captain J. Mullen of the Pinmore. To prevent the Pinmore from reaching shore too quickly and betraying the Seeadler’s position, von Luckner ordered her topgallant masts sawed off and all her spare sails and spars thrown overboard. Pinmore and the prisoners arrived in Rio two weeks later, by which time Seeadler was long gone.
Seeadler’s activities in the South Atlantic had not gone unnoticed, and the British duly dispatched the Cruisers HMS Ortrano, Lancaster, and Orbita to intercept her as she rounded Cape Horn. Waiting for bad weather to cover his passage, von Luckner bided his time and instead headed for the Falkland Islands, where he threw overboard a large memorial cross in honour of Admiral Maximilian von Spee, who had been killed there in December 1914. Then, on April 18, Seeadler plunged into the hurricane-force winds of the Roaring Forties, successfully rounded Cape Horn, and slipped into the Pacific. Ever crafty, von Luckner ordered the former prisoners’ possessions to be marked with the Seeadler’s name and thrown overboard, hoping to fool his pursuers into thinking he had been sunk.
Moving on from there, in June of 1917, as Seeadler approached Christmas Island in the South Pacific, von Luckner learned via the wireless that the United States had entered the war. On June 14, Seeadler sunk its first American ship, the schooner A.B. Johnson, which was followed by the R.C. Slade on June 18 and the Manila on July 8. By this time Seeadler had been at sea for seven months, and von Luckner decided to find a quiet anchorage where the ship could be careened – or tipped over – so its hull could be cleaned of barnacles. He found it on Mopelia, one of the Society Islands in French Polynesia, but as Seeadler was too large to sail into the lagoon he instead beached her on the outside reef. Then, on August 2, 1917, disaster struck. According to von Luckner’s own account:
“At about 0930 he had noticed a strange bulge on the eastern rim of the sea…. at first we thought it was a mirage. But it kept growing larger. It came towards us. Then we at last recognized it… A TIDAL WAVE, such as is caused by a submarine earthquake and volcanic disturbances.
The danger was only too clear. We lay between the Island and the wave. We dared not raise sail, for the wind would drive us onto the reef. So, our only hope of getting clear of the Island was on our motor. The huge swell of the tidal wave was rushing towards us with breakneck speed. The motor did not stir. The mechanics worked frantically. They pumped compressed air into the engine. We waited in vain for the sound of ignition…. by this time the oncoming tidal wave was only a few hundred yards away. We were lost.”
The tsunami dashed the ship against the reef, breaking all three masts and opening a massive gash in her hull. After 225 days at sea and sinking an incredible 15 enemy vessels without a single loss of life, SMS Seeadler had finally met her end. But Captain von Luckner nothing if not tenacious, and using spare sails, masts, and guns from the ship he converted one of the 32-foot motor launches into a cutter, which he ironically christened the Kronpinzessin Cecile after a former Ocean Liner of the same name. On August 21, von Luckner, Navigator Lt. Kirscheiss, Chief Engineer Kraise, and 3 seamen sailed off into the open sea. Their goal was to reach the Cook Islands or Fiji, where they would capture another ship and return to Mopelia to pick up the rest of the crew. Despite foul weather, they reached the island of Wakaya in Fiji four days later. Stepping ashore, von Luckner arranged for their vessel to be towed to the capital, Suva, by the American cutter Sunbeam, but upon seeing the British steamer Amra enter the harbour he and his men attempted to flee. They were quickly run down and captured by the Fiji police and transported to an internment camp in Auckland, New Zealand.
But von Luckner still wasn’t finished. On December 13, 1917, he and Lt. Kirscheiss stole the camp commander’s motor boat, the Pearl, and after fitting it with a dummy machine gun, used it to capture the New Zealand timber carrier Moa. They then made for the Kermadec island south of New Zealand to raid a storage depot before heading back to Mopelia. Unfortunately, the boarding of the Moa had been noticed, and an armed cable layer, the Iris, dispatched to hunt her down. Iris caught up to Moa on December 21st, and after firing several shots across her bow, finally forced von Luckner to surrender. While being lead back into captivity, the plucky Captain reportedly declared:
” You left the door open, you cannot blame me for walking out!”
Back on Mopelia, the rest of the Seeadler’s crew had a slightly better go of it. On September 5, two weeks after von Luckner set off in the Cecile, they managed to capture the French schooner Lutece, which had stopped by the island to hunt turtles. Renaming her the Fortuna, they sailed East for South America, eventually reaching Easter island where they were arrested and interned by the Chilean government. Meanwhile, four American prisoners left behind on Mopelia repaired the last of the Seeadler’s lifeboats and set sail on September 19, eventually reaching the American coaling station at Pago Pago in Samoa.
After the war, the owners of the former Pass of Balmaha inspected the wreck to determine if she could be refloated, but she was found to be beyond salvage and left where she lay on the reef. Over the years the waves and local salvagers have taken their toll, and little remains of the Seeadler save for some anchors and other fittings scattered about the Mopelia lagoon. As for the intrepid Captain von Luckner, he spent the war in various prison camps in New Zealand before being repatriated to Germany in 1919. After retiring from the Navy, he sailed the world in his private yacht Vaterland and eventually moved to Sweden, where he died in 1966 at the age of 85. While in the end his legendary exploits did little to change Germany’s fortunes in the Great War, like his contemporary General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who waged a masterful guerrilla campaign in German East Africa, von Luckner epitomized just what a determined and resourceful officer could accomplish with extremely limited resources. It’s not for nothing that history remembers him as ‘The Sea Devil.’
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- Forgotten History- The Battleship Built in Union Square
- The Origin of “Port” and “Starboard”
- The Top Secret Navy Mission that Accidentally Rediscovered the Titanic
Expand for ReferencesThe Fortunes of War, Shipping Wonders of the World, https://www.shippingwondersoftheworld.com/fortunes-war.html
Ships – Seeadler, Walter, Pass of Balmaha, SMSMoew.com, https://web.archive.org/web/20190209124216/http://www.smsmoewe.com/ships/smsms78.htm
Mackenzie, J Gregory, Seeadler, Ahoy – Mac’s Web Blog, http://www.ahoy.tk-jk.net/MaraudersWW1/Seeadler.html
SMS Seeadler, Teleport Blog, http://blog.mailasail.com/beezneez/posts/2013/10/8/2129-sms-seeadler
The post The Obscenely Successful Obsolete Sailing Ship and Its Daring Captain Who Terrorized the High Seas During WWI appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Sable Island lies 300 kilometres off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, near the edge of the eastern continental shelf. A windswept, crescent-shaped sandbar 43 kilometres long and barely one kilometre wide, it has long been known as the graveyard of the Atlantic, with over 350 ships having foundered on its shores since 1583. The treacherous waters around the island prompted the establishment of a rescue station in 1801, which over the following 150 years saved the lives of thousands of shipwrecked sailors.
Today Sable Island hosts a weather station run by the Canadian government, manned year-round by a small group of researchers. An important wildlife preserve, the island is home to a population of 550 wild Sable Island Horses – descendants of livestock released onto the island in the late 18th Century – and large breeding colonies of seabirds as well as Grey, Harp, Hooded, Ring, and Harbour Seals. But in 1993, Sable Island became the site of a gruesome murder mystery, prompting a decades-long hunt for the strange and elusive killer.
In January 1993 Canadian researcher Zoe Lucas was conducting regular patrols of the island’s beaches, searching for oil-covered birds and other signs of environmental damage, when she stumbled across a number of seal carcasses washed up on the beach. The seals had been horribly mutilated, with bizarre corkscrew wounds spiralling head-to-tail. The edges of the wounds were clean, as if they had been cut with a sharp instrument, and cut right through the seal’s skin and blubber while leaving the muscle beneath untouched. Lucas had never seen anything like it.
While at first this gruesome discovery seemed to be an isolated incident, soon more and more carcasses began turning up. By 1996 over 400 had been discovered on the island, while by 2011 the total had reached over 4,000. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, dead seals began washing ashore near Norwich, England, St. Andrews, Scotland, and Strangford Loch, Northern Ireland, all bearing the same distinctive corkscrew wounds. These discoveries corresponded with a sharp decline in the birthrates of Grey and Harbour seals, as the victims were nearly all young pups or pregnant mothers.
But what on earth could be inflicting such strange injuries? As in any good murder mystery, Zoe Lucas began by rounding up the usual suspects: human action, pack ice, boat propeller strikes, and attacks by Orcas. But all these culprits were quickly ruled out. As a Federally-controlled territory, access to Sable Island is strictly controlled, making it highly unlikely that a human assailant could have snuck ashore and mutilated the seals. Pack ice also does not form within 200 kilometres of Sable Island, and most of the Harbour Seal deaths had occurred in June and July. While at first ship propellers appeared to be the most plausible culprit, the corkscrew wounds bore little resemblance to the propeller-strike injuries found on other sea creatures like manatees; nor did they resemble injuries from entanglement in fishing lines or nets. Furthermore, many of the seals were still warm or even alive when discovered, indicating they had been attacked just offshore, in water too shallow for most ships to travel. Finally, attacks by Orcas were ruled out as the wounds were inconsistent with the tooth shape and hunting behaviour of those particular predators. Lucas quickly found herself back at square one.
But soon two tantalizing pieces of evidence turned up. The first was the carcass of a seal which had been fitted with a time-depth monitor as part of an environmental study. To Lucas’ surprise, the corkscrew wound ran beneath the webbing used to secure the monitor to the seal’s skin, but the webbing itself had not been damaged. This seemed to indicate that the skin and blubber had not been sliced, but rather torn. The second piece of evidence was the fact that while 98% of the examined carcasses exhibited the distinctive corkscrew wounds, a small fraction bore markedly different injuries such as missing heads and flippers, linear slash marks, and crescent-shaped bites. To Lucas this could only mean one thing: the seals were the victims of shark attack. But what kind of shark? To find out, Lucas wrote letters to shark experts in South Africa, Australia, and California, enclosing photos of the unusual spiral wounds. While none of the experts she contacted had ever seen anything like it, in 2002 Lisa Natanson, a scientist with the United States’ National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Apex Predators Program, agreed to help Lucas track down the culprit.
Natanson drew up a list of six large shark species commonly found in the waters off Sable Island, but once again the peculiar circumstances of the seal slayings seemed to rule out most of them. The Bluntnose Sixgill Shark and the Tiger Shark had only ever been reported in the area as juveniles, and these were too small to prey upon adult seals. Ditto for the Blue Shark, while the needle-like teeth of the Shortfin Mako Shark did not match the spiral wounds. The Great White Shark was known to frequent the area and was likely responsible for at least some of the killings, but this did not account for the large number of Grey Seal deaths in January and February, when the waters off Sable Island are too cold for Great Whites. This left only one, highly unusual candidate: the Greenland shark.
The Greenland shark is a mysterious and elusive creature. A member of the Somniosidae or “sleeper sharks,” they typically inhabit the cold, dark depths of the Arctic Ocean, where the temperature rarely rises above freezing. As a result, the Greenland shark lives life in the slow lane, with one of the slowest metabolisms of any shark. This, in turn, gives it exceptional longevity, with certain individuals estimated to have lived for nearly 500 years. The Greenland shark is a generalist predator and scavenger, feeding on a variety of sealife like fish, squid, crabs, jellyfish, and the carcasses of any land animals that happen to sink to the seafloor. Indeed, one specimen was discovered with an entire reindeer in its stomach. Strangely, nearly all Greenland sharks are infected with a type of crustacean called a copepod, which anchors itself in the cornea the shark’s eyes, effectively rendering them blind.
At first glance the Greenland shark’s slow, scavenging lifestyle would seem to make it an unlikely culprit in the Sable Island seal killings, but the closer Lucas and Natanson looked, the more the facts seemed to fit together. While commonly associated with arctic waters, Greenland sharks actually migrate widely and have been found as far south as North Carolina. Indeed, they are known frequent the waters around Sable Island in the winter and even to come into shallower waters to feed. While at first it seemed unlikely that such a slow-moving shark could catch a fast and agile seal, Lucas and Natanson speculated that the Greenland sharks hunted by ambush, attacking inexperienced pups in murky water or while they were sleeping. But the key piece of evidence was the shark’s particular anatomy and feeding style. The teeth of the Greenland shark differ dramatically between its upper and lower jaw, with the upper teeth being needle-like for gripping and the lower teeth blade-like for slicing. Though capable of brief bursts of speed, when ambushing fast prey the Greenland typically feed by suction, quickly opening its buccal cavity to draw the prey in its mouth. With the prey firmly clamped in its jaws, the shark then shakes its head violently side-to-side to further slice it up before swallowing it. According to Lucas and Natanson, this combination of gripping and shaking would cause the seal’s skin and blubber to split and tear, the unusual corkscrew pattern being accounted for by two factors. First, the collagen fibres in the seal’s skin wind around its body in a spiral fashion, and it is along these lines that the skin splits; and second, a seal’s instinctive reaction when grabbed is to spin around its body axis in a bid to free itself – a reflex which, ironically, worsens the damage inflicted.
Lucas and Natanson’s findings, published in 2010, were picked up by dozens of scientific journals and formed the basis of a National Geographic documentary on the case. The pair were widely celebrated as having finally solved the mystery of the Corkscrew Killer.
…or had they? According to Jeffrey Gallant of the St. Lawrence Shark Observatory, Lucas and Natanson’s theory just doesn’t add up. Firstly, most of the seal carcasses found in the UK washed up in July, when the waters around the British Isles are a full 20 degrees warmer than Greenland sharks typically prefer, making them unlikely culprits in those killings. Secondly, the Greenland shark theory failed to account for the sudden appearance of the corkscrew corpses, which had never been reported prior to 1993. But most damningly, the seals’ injuries were entirely inconsistent with Greenland shark behaviour. As Gallant explains:
“There is no doubt that the Greenland shark does occasionally predate live seals. However, the victim would probably be an inexperienced pup or be asleep, distracted, asleep, injured, in an ice hole, or the visibility would have to be so poor as to offer the seal no warning of the incoming shark’s presence. The Greenland shark is much more likely to feed on an already dead seal, which requires no energy output and that offers no risk of injury, for even small seals have sizeable teeth with which to defend themselves.
[Furthermore] photo analysis reveals that many seal carcasses found with the corkscrew wound appear otherwise intact; no parts are missing. It makes no sense whatsoever for a Greenland shark to needlessly expend the fuel it needs to survive if it isn’t going to feed.”
So if not sharks, then what else could have inflicted such strange, spiral wounds? This was the question plaguing David Thompson of the St. Andrews University Marine Mammal Research Unit in Scotland, one of the first researchers to investigate the UK seal carcasses. Like Lucas and Natanson, at first Thompson dismissed boat propellers as the culprit as the seals’ wounds did not match known boat-strike injuries. But one day it occurred to him that if some structure held the seals against a propeller, it would create a corkscrew-shaped wound instead of the typical series of straight gashes. And as luck would have it, certain ships featured just such a structure. Known as positional thrusters or Kort Nozzles, these devices consist of a propeller housed in a short, swivelling duct. They are typically found on tugboats, oil rigs, and drill ships and are used to maintain the vessel’s position over the seafloor. Unlike a regular propeller, positional thrusters are only operated intermittently in short bursts, meaning that an inquisitive seal could easily swim up to one only to be sucked in when the propeller is activated. Poring through shipping records for the areas where seal carcasses were found, Thompson discovered that in nearly every case, a vessel with positional thrusters had been nearby. Experiments conducted by Thompson’s research assistant, Joseph Onoufriou, seemed to confirm the theory. Onoufriou constructed small wax models of seals and fed them into a scale model of a positional thruster. The models emerged bearing the same corkscrew wounds as the real seals, cut at the same 35-degree angle. These findings, published at the same time as Lucas and Natanson’s, prompted politicians to take action to prevent further seal deaths. In April 2012, the UK government issued official advice to the shipping industry to avoid using positional thrusters near seal conservation areas and during seal breeding season.
According to Jeffrey Gallant, Thompson and Onoufriou’s discovery turned the case of the Sable Island Seals from a curious natural mystery to a tragedy of environmental degradation:
“Human activity is yet again the likely cause for these needless deaths. Who knows how many lifeless bodies didn’t actually make it to shore? Life is dangerous enough for seals without having to deal with giant underwater food processors. If I were a seal, I’d choose the shark. I would at least have a fighting chance to survive, and if I were killed, my death would serve to sustain a fellow creature of the sea.”
But just as the mystery appeared to have been solved, once again a new discovery came along and blew the case wide open. In December 2014, Amanda Bishop, a doctoral candidate at Durham University in Scotland, was observing a colony of Grey seals on the Isle of May when she witnessed a shocking incident. As she watched, a male seal grabbed a newly-weaned pup, dragged it to a nearby freshwater pool, and drowned it. Once the pup was dead, the male began tearing into it, ripping up and eating pieces of skin and blubber. Such behaviour is common in many animals as a means of reducing genetic competition, but what caught Bishop’s eye was the manner in which the male seal attacked the pup’s carcass. As the male worked his way along the pup’s body, the skin tore along the spiral collagen lines, creating a distinctive corkscrew wound. Over the following week, Bishop, along with Joseph Onoufriou, watched the male commit infanticide three more times, in every case inflicting wounds nearly identical to the Sable Island carcasses. In a 2016 paper, Bishop, Onoufriou, and their colleagues posited that cannibalistic infanticide by male seals, and not sharks or positional thrusters, was the true cause of the corkscrew deaths. As for why this kind of spiral wound had never been reported prior to 1993, the team speculated that most seal colonies are located far from shore or on ice, making carcasses unlikely to wash up on inhabited beaches; or that the wounds had previously been misattributed to other causes like entanglement fishing lines and nets. In particular, they pointed to an incident in 1998 where a large number of mutilated seal corpses washed up on the beaches of Prince Edward Island, resulting in widespread speculation that they had been deliberately mutilated by fishermen or sealers or become trapped and torn up by sea ice. According to Onoufriou, the discovery of infanticide among Grey Seals presents an valuable lesson in the power of preconception in science:
“I firmly believe that if grey seals had been witnessed attacking grey seal pups or harbor seals, killing them and creating corkscrew lesions before any of these other seals had washed up, nobody would have thought of ship propellers.”
However, this discovery has done little to bring the case of the Corkscrew Killer to a satisfying conclusion, and many researchers remain convinced that the true culprit is still Greenland sharks or positional thrusters or even something completely different like tidal turbines used to generate electricity. Some even argue that all four could be responsible, each accounting for a portion of the total deaths. But one thing is certain: when dealing with nature, nothing is ever simple as it seems.
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Expand for ReferencesGallant, Jeffrey, Who is the Corkscrew Killer? St. Lawrence Shark Observatory, October 6, 2010, https://geerg.ca/en/who-is-the-corkscrew-killer/
Bodin, Madeline, Mystery of the Corkscrew Seals, bioGraphic, May 24, 2016, https://www.biographic.com/mystery-of-the-corkscrew-seals/si
Lucas, Zoe & Natanson, Lisa, Two Shark Species Involved in Predation on Seals at Sable Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, Proceedings of the Nova Scotian Institute of Science, Volume 45, Part 2, 2014, https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/71006/3987-6096-1-SM.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Fitzgerald, Joe, Sable Island’s Headless Seals, Chasing Pisces Press, June 27, 2016, https://chasingpisces.com/2016/06/27/sable-islands-headless-seals/
Andrew, Louise, Clue to Mysterious ‘Corkscrew’ Seal Deaths, BBC News, August 25, 2010, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-11062330
A Brief History of Sable Island, https://www.sableislandfriends.ca/abriefhistoryofsableisland/
Brownlow, Andrew et al, Corkscrew Seals: Grey Seal (Halichoerus grypus) Infanticide and Cannibalism May Indicate Cause of Spiral Lacerations in Seals, Plos One, June 2, 2016, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0156464
The post The Curious Case of the Sable Island Seal Killer appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If I were to ask you which 20th Century recording artist had the most top-ten hits in their lifetime, you might be tempted to guess Elvis Presley, or maybe a member of the Beatles. But no: that honour belongs to Glenn Miller, the trombonist and band leader whose recordings of such classics as “In the Mood,” “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” and “Moonlight Serenade” defined the 40s Big-Band era. In addition to scoring an incredible 16 number one records and 69 top-ten hits in only four years, Miller is notable for being the first in a long line of musical superstars to die tragically in a plane crash, a list that includes such greats as Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Jim Croce, John Denver, and Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines from Lynyrd Skynyrd. But while the circumstances of these artists’ deaths are largely known, the cause of Miller’s disappearance over the English Channel in December 1944 remains a mystery, and has inspired endless speculation and conspiracy theories.
When the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941, Miller and his orchestra were at the height of their popularity, with Miller earning the modern equivalent of $300,000 per week. But Miller, an ardent patriot, decided to give all this up in order to serve his country. Though at 38 Miller was too old to be drafted, he nonetheless offered his services to the Navy, who promptly turned him down. Undeterred, he wrote to Army Brigadier General Charles Young and proposed the formation a modernized Army band to raise civilian and troop morale. Young accepted his offer, and on September 27, 1942, the Glenn Miller Orchestra played its last civilian concert in Passaic, New Jersey. A week later Miller reported to the headquarters of the Seventh Service Command in Omaha, Nebraska, where he was commissioned as a Captain in the Army Specialist Corps. After being transferred to the Army Air Corps, Miller was posted to Maxwell Field outside Montgomery, Alabama, where he was placed in charge of the base’s band, the Rhythmaires. Over the next two years Miller and his Army Air Force Band performed hundreds of morale-concerts for both servicemen and civilians and made dozens of recordings with some of the era’s top musical talents. Though some purists balked at Miller’s blending of swing rhythms into traditional martial music, his orchestra’s effect on morale was undeniable, leading Army Air Force General Jimmy Doolittle to declare:
“Next to a letter from home, that organization was the greatest morale builder in the European Theatre of Operations.”
By 1944 Miller had been promoted to the rank of Major, and he and his orchestra had crossed the Atlantic to England. There they set up shop in the BBC radio office at Sloane Court in London, performing in radio broadcasts to entertain Allied troops fighting in mainland Europe. During this time, Miller narrowly escaped death twice, the first time when a German V-1 flying bomb struck three blocks away, prompting Miller to decamp to Bedford. The day after he left, another V-1 destroyed the BBC radio office, killing 70 of his former colleagues.
Following the Allied capture of Paris in August 1944, the BBC planned for Miller and his orchestra to travel to the newly-liberated city to perform a special concert on Christmas day. Miller was anxious to fly over to finalize travel arrangements for his bandmates, but unfortunately thick fog and cloud cover made travel inadvisable. As luck would have it, American Lieutenant Colonel Norman Baessell was also in a hurry to get to Paris and offered Miller a ride in his chartered UC-64 Norseman light aircraft. Miller accepted, and on December 15, 1944 he, Baessell, and pilot Flight Officer John Morgan took off from RAF Trinwood Farm outside Bedford and headed out over the English Channel. They were never seen again.
Strangely, it took some time for Miller’s absence to be noticed. Because of the foggy conditions Baessell’s flight had been unauthorized, and few in Allied headquarters even knew that Miller was aboard. It was not until December 24th that Miller’s disappearance was publicly announced, his role in the planned Christmas concert being filled by deputy bandleader Sergeant Jerry Gray. But even this tragic news was soon overshadowed by the launching of a massive German offensive in the Ardennes in Belgium, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge.
Almost immediately, Miller’s mysterious disappearance inspired all manner of wild conspiracy theories. Some claimed that Miller had been sent by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower on a secret mission to negotiate peace with the Nazis, and had been assassinated in the process. This theory was apparently supported by Miller’s collaboration at the BBC with film star David Niven, who as a Colonel in the British Army was involved in several top-secret military operations. Other stories claimed that Miller had been found dead in a Paris brothel, and that the plane crash had been invented to cover up his indiscretion. None of these rumours has ever been substantiated, the latter likely being a black propaganda story concocted by the Germans. The official Army Air Force report on the incident concluded that Miller’s aircraft had most likely suffered engine failure and plunged into the English Channel. For his contributions to the war effort, Miller was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star, presented to his widow, Helen, on March 24, 1945.
And there the matter rested for more than a decade, until in 1956 a shocking new theory emerged as the to true cause of Miller’s demise. Upon watching the 1954 film The Glenn Miller Story starring Jimmy Stewart, former RAF navigator Fred Shaw recalled a strange detail from one of his wartime bombing missions. In December 1944, Shaw’s flight of 138 Lancaster heavy bombers took off from RAF Methwold on a raid over Siegen in Germany. However, their fighter escorts failed to get airborne, and the flight was forced to turn back. As it was too dangerous for the aircraft to land fully laden with bombs, the flight headed for a ten-mile wide area of the English Channel known as the South Jettison Zone in order to dump their bomb loads. As Shaw later recalled in an interview:
“I had never seen a bombing before, so I crawled from my navigator seat and put my head in the observation blister. I saw a small high-wing monoplane, a Noorduyn Norseman, underneath. It was obvious to me that the aeroplane below was in trouble, so I watched intently. Then, just before it went out of sight under the leading edge of the wing, I saw it flick over to port in what looked like an incipient spin. And eventually I saw it disappear into the English Channel.
‘There’s a kite down there’, I told the rear gunner. ‘There’s a kite gone in’.
He said, ‘Yes, I saw it’.”
As the raid was aborted, the crews were not debriefed and no official report was filed, so Shaw’s sighting went unreported for more than a decade. After making the connection between the aircraft he saw and Miller’s flight, Shaw checked his old logbooks and confirmed the date of the mission: December 15, 1944. To Shaw, there was only one, chilling conclusion: Glenn Miller had been the tragic victim of friendly fire, his plane knocked out of the sky by a hail of British bombs.
At first Shaw was dismissed as a mere attention-seeker, and critics pointed to several holes in his story. First, there was a one-hour difference between the takeoff time logged by Miller’s pilot and the time of the sighting noted in Shaw’s logbook. And second, it seemed unlikely that Shaw would have recognized the Canadian-built Norseman aircraft, of which there were only a dozen or so in the UK at the time. Nonetheless, the theory was compelling enough to warrant further investigation. One of the first to look into Shaw’s story was Alan Ross, a member of the Glenn Miller Appreciation Society, who tracked down Victor Gregory, the Commander of Shaw’s Lancaster on that particular mission. Gregory confirmed the incident, explaining that while he did not see the aircraft himself, he recalled hearing the bombardier and navigator spot it over the intercom. When asked why he had not come forward before, Gregory replied:
“When we got back from that raid, it was an aborted raid, so we didn’t go in for our normal debriefing. Don’t think me unsympathetic or callous, but when I heard of the plane going down, I would have said that he shouldn’t have been there – forget him. My own concern was getting my own aeroplane home safely. We were fighting a war, and we lost thousands of planes. We had some pretty grim raids after that, and they didn’t announce Miller’s death until later. It had gone completely from my mind.”
The sighting was further corroborated by the logbook of the Lancaster’s flight engineer, Derek Thurman, which surfaced in 2000.
The next person to investigate Shaw’s claims was aviation historian Roy Nesbit, working on behalf the British Defence Ministry’s Air Historical Branch. Looking through official RAF records, Nesbit confirmed that Miller’s plane would have had no option but to fly along the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force or SHAEF Shuttle Route, a flight corridor to France specially cleared of antiaircraft guns. This route ran perilously close to the South Jettison Zone, into which Miller’s pilot could have easily strayed given the foggy conditions. Furthermore, the combination of low cloud cover and Flight Officer Morgan’s inexperience with instrument flying would have forced him to follow Visual Flight Rules and fly at only 1,500 feet over the water, placing him under the RAF’s standard bomb-jettison altitude. The one-hour time discrepancy was also easily accounted for by the fact that American pilots navigated according to local time while RAF navigators used Greenwich Mean Time. And as for being able to recognize a rare aircraft, Fred Shaw answered this himself: he had undergone navigation training in Canada, where the Norseman was in common use. All these overlapping factors seemed to confirm Shaw’s suspicions about Miller’s unfortunate demise.
But some experts aren’t buying it. Among these is Howard Roth, a former B-17 bomber pilot who in 2003 pointed out numerous flaws in Shaw and Nesbit’s theory. To begin with, Shaw’s story seemed to change over time in order to fit the theory, with the navigator initially claiming that the plane merely “looked like a Norseman” but later explicitly confirming the plane’s identity. Furthermore, various accounts claiming the plane was knocked down as the jettisoned bombs exploded do not line up with reality, as standard RAF bombs were not designed to explode on contact with water. Furthermore, according to Roth’s calculations, Flight Officer Morgan would have had to have been more than 20 degrees off-course in order to stray into the Jettison Zone – an unlikely occurrence for even an inexperienced pilot.
Another major skeptic of the bombing theory is Dennis Spragg of the University of Colorado Boulder’s American Music Research Centre, who in 2009 was hired by the Miller family to put an end to the wild speculation surrounding Glenn Miller’s death. Spragg not only confirmed Howard Roth’s conclusion that Miller’s plane would have had to have strayed 20 degrees off course, but discovered that a flight of Stinson L-1 Vigilant observation aircraft had also been in the area at the same time, and had reported having bombs dropped on them by a flight of Lancasters.
So, what caused Glenn Miller’s disappearance? According to Spragg, the culprit is disappointingly mundane: the weather. Miller’s plane had been recalled on account of carburetor icing, but was placed at the end of the maintenance queue behind more vital combat aircraft. In the cold, foggy conditions on that fatal day, it would have taken mere minutes for the carburetor to ice up and the engine fail, as Spragg vividly describes:
“The airplane got out over the water, the cloud ceiling was dropping, the temperature was at freezing, the engine ices up, and all of a sudden, as they’re flying along, more than halfway across the Channel, there’s a loud noise, like a bang, like a backfire. The engine stops, the airplane turns nose down, and in eight seconds it’s in the water. That’s exactly what the United States Army Air Force concluded three weeks after the accident. You have a perfect storm of human error, mechanical failure, and weather. Not independent of one another – all three. And the plane goes down.”
Even if the three occupants survived the crash, in the freezing waters of the English Channel they would have lasted barely 20 minutes before succumbing to hypothermia. Indeed, when Orville Anderson of the U.S. Eighth Air Force – coincidentally Miller’s cousin by marriage – was informed of the disappearance, he grimly replied:
“They’ve had it. I can mount a search but it won’t matter.”
But all this is mere speculation unless the remains of Miller’s aircraft can be found and examined. Tantalizingly, such a discovery may actually be close at hand. In 1987, a UK squid fisherman was trawling off the coast of Dorset when his net dragged up the remains of a small aircraft. Though the fisherman eventually cut the wreckage loose to preserve his net, he did take a few moments to note his position and sketch the aircraft, which he described as a high-wing strut-braced monoplane painted silver, with American star insignia on the wings and a bent, three-bladed propeller. In 2014, when the story of Glenn Miller’s disappearance resurfaced in the UK press, the fisherman realized that the aircraft he had dredged up exactly matched that of the famous bandleader. The fisherman’s story eventually came to the attention of Ric Gillespie, director of Philadelphia-based organization The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery or TIGHAR, a group most well-known for their investigations into the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. In 2017 Gillespie flew to Dorset to confirm the fisherman’s story and plan a potential search expedition. As of yet no physical search of the seafloor has taken place, as TIGHAR is still conducting preliminary research. Among the questions that must first be answered is whether the fisherman’s reported position – determined using an outdated navigation system called ‘Decca’ – can be trusted – and whether the Norseman could have survived four decades in the condition the fisherman reported finding it. More than likely the aircraft’s fabric-covered aluminium structure would have rotted and been broken up by currents, leaving only the heavy engine block behind – a tiny needle in a gigantic haystack. But if against all odds TIGHAR succeeds in locating the wreck, it may finally lay to rest the enduring mystery of one of the greats of American music.
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Bonus Fact
Glenn Miller was not the only superstar to die tragically in the air during the Second World War. At 7 AM on June 1, 1943, actor Leslie Howard – most famous for his role as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind – boarded BOAC Flight 777 bound from Lisbon, Portugal, to Bristol, England. Three hours into the flight, the Douglas DC-3 was attacked by eight German Junkers Ju-88 night fighters. The aircraft burst into flames and plunged into the Bay of Biscay, killing all 17 passengers and crews aboard. Over the years various theories have emerged to explain the attack. At the time, neutral Portugal was a hotbed of Allied and Axis spies, and the Germans may have suspected the Allies of smuggling out secret agents or escaped prisoners of war using the supposedly peaceful civilian flights. Another theory posits that German military intelligence believed that Prime Minister Winston Churchill was aboard Flight 777. Yet another possibility is that the airliner was simply mistaken for a military aircraft. However, the case remains unsolved to this day.
Expand for ReferencesReich, Howard, ‘History Detectives’ Explains by Bandleader Glenn Miller Vanished, Chicago Tribune, July 7, 2014, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-glenn-miller-tv-review-20140708-column.html
Lennon, Peter, Glenn Miller “Died Under a Hail of British Bombs,” The Guardian, December 15, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/dec/15/humanities.research
Glenn Miller: Possible Crash Site Investigated by US Team, BBC, January 14, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-46863606
Revealed: What really Happened When Glenn Miller Disappeared in 1944, University of Colorado Boulder, July 8, 2014, https://www.colorado.edu/music/2014/07/08/revealed-what-really-happened-when-glenn-miller-disappeared-1944
Glenn Miller 1904-1944: The Mysterious Disappearance, Methwold History Group, http://www.methwoldhistorygroup.org.uk/mhg_raf_miller.html
The Glenn Miller Project, TIGHAR, https://tighar.org/Projects/GlennMiller/glennmiller.html
The post The Mysterious Disappearance of One of the Most Successful Recording Artists of All Time appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On July 20, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon and uttered the immortal words “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” bringing to a close the decade-long Space Race between the US and USSR. While the Americans beating the Soviets to the moon might seem inevitable in hindsight, this was not always the case. Indeed, the early days of the Space Race were marked by a seemingly endless string of spectacular Soviet achievements, including the first earth-orbiting satellite, the first animal in space, the first spacecraft to reach the moon, the first spacecraft to photograph the far side of the moon, the first man in space, the first woman in space, and the first “space walk.” Meanwhile, the American space program struggled to keep pace, resulting in a series of embarrassing, high-profile failures – and for more on that, please check out our previous video ‘Kaputnik’: America’s Largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite. But this seemingly unstoppable Soviet success hid a dark reality. While NASA operated in the full light of public scrutiny, the Soviet space program was cloaked in military secrecy, concealing a deeply flawed system rife with corruption, incompetence, and government officials more than willing to place political and ideological goals above the safety of cosmonauts. And never did these fatal flaws become more apparent than on April 24, 1967 when cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die on a space mission. This is the story of the ill-fated flight of Soyuz 1.
Following the final mission of Project Mercury in May 1963, NASA announced it would be moving on to the more sophisticated 2-man Gemini and 3-man Apollo programs. In an attempt to one-up the Americans and score another propaganda victory, the Soviets hastily modified the Vostok spacecraft which had carried Yuri Gagarin and five other cosmonauts into orbit, deleting the ejection seat and other equipment to allow three cosmonauts to squeeze inside. The resulting spacecraft, named Voskhod, or “sunrise”, first flew on October 12, 1964 with cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feokistov, and Boris Yegorov aboard. This was the first spaceflight in history with a multi-person crew. Five months later, Voskhod 2 achieved another milestone when cosmonaut Alexei Leonov performed the world’s first “space walk”, floating outside the spacecraft for a brief 12 minutes. Yet despite these accomplishments, both missions were plagued with problems. The crew of Voskhod 1 had to diet in order to fit into their spacecraft, and without ejection seats, spacesuits, or other safety equipment, had no way of surviving a major emergency. Meanwhile, Leonov’s space suit ballooned in the vacuum of space, nearly preventing him from fitting back through the airlock. The spacecraft also tumbled violently on reentry and landed 400 kilometres off-target in the Ural Mountains, forcing Leonov and crewmate Pavel Belayev to spend a long, cold night in the capsule surrounded by hungry wolves before being rescued. In light of these difficulties, Soviet designers decided they had pushed the Vostok capsule technology as far as it could go and switched their focus to a far more sophisticated spacecraft design called Soyuz, or “union.”
Soyuz was the Soviet answer to the American Apollo spacecraft. A significant improvement over the crude Vostok and Voskhod capsules, Soyuz featured engines, thrusters, and automated guidance systems that allowed it to change its orbit and altitude, rendezvous and dock with other spacecraft, and perform a variety of other sophisticated maneuvers. Launched atop the massive N-1 rocket – the Soviet equivalent of the American Saturn V – the Soyuz was designed carry two cosmonauts on a lunar orbit rendezvous mission broadly similar to that used by Apollo. However, as with most Russian hardware, the design philosophy of Soyuz – and indeed the Soviet Lunar Program as a whole – was considerably different from its American counterpart. As the N-1 rocket was less powerful and efficient than the Saturn V, the LK Lander – the Soviet equivalent of the Apollo Lunar Module – had to be significantly smaller, and could only carry a single cosmonaut to the lunar surface. And since the Soyuz and LK lacked an Apollo-style docking hatch, said cosmonaut was forced to transfer from one spacecraft to another by performing a brief spacewalk. But the Soyuz did have certain advantages over Apollo. While Apollo had only a single crew compartment, Soyuz had two: a bell-shaped descent module in which the crew launched and returned to earth, and a spherical orbital module for use in space, giving the crew significantly more leg room. Also, unlike Apollo, which was powered by hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells, Soyuz featured a pair of solar panels, giving it much greater endurance.
However, these enhanced capabilities came at the cost of greater complexity and a longer development cycle, and the Soviet space program soon entered something of a lull, with no manned missions being flown for a full two years. Meanwhile, the first three unmanned tests of Soyuz ended in disaster, with Soyuz 7K-OK No.1 blowing up shortly after launch and Kosmos 133 and 140 suffering catastrophic guidance system failures and tumbling violently to earth. These setbacks made it unlikely that a manned mission could be flown before 1968. At least, that would have been the case had it not been for that great bugbear of Soviet technological development: politics. In the two years since Voskhod 2, the Americans had flown no fewer than 10 Project Gemini missions, accomplishing many important firsts including the first American spacewalk, the first two-week-long space flight, the first controlled rendezvous of two spacecraft, and the first docking of two spacecraft. In the process NASA had mastered all the skills it needed for a trip to the moon and was ready to move forward with Project Apollo, the first flight of which was scheduled for later February 1967. The government of Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Alexei Kosygin was thus anxious to launch a new manned mission and regain some of the momentum lost over the past two years. There were also other, more ideological factors. 1967 marked not only the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution but also the 97th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s birth. Furthermore, Brezhnev was scheduled to attend a summit of Soviet Bloc leaders in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia in May of that year. A successful manned mission, it was argued, would not only commemorate the revolution and demonstrate what the Soviet system was capable of, but would also give Brezhnev something to boast about at the summit. Not content with a mere shakedown cruise, the Politburo instead planned a spectacular demonstration whereby two Soyuz spacecraft – one carrying a single cosmonaut and the other three – would be launched within a day of one another and dock in orbit. Two cosmonauts would then don spacesuits and spacewalk from one spacecraft to another. With this ambitious plan in hand, Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov ordered Space Program chief Vasily Mishin to prepare the Soyuz for launch no later than May 1 – International Workers’ Day.
Mishin was horrified by the order. Not only had the spectacular failures of Kosmos 133 and 140 clearly demonstrated that the Soyuz design was nowhere ready for manned flight, but inspectors at the OKB-1 design bureau had uncovered no fewer than 203 potentially fatal flaws in the spacecraft. Nonetheless, under intense political pressure from Ustinov and the Politburo Mishin began preparing the prototype vehicles for flight and a crew was duly selected for the historic mission. Vladimir Komarov, veteran of Voskhod 1, would pilot Soyuz 1, while Alexsei Yeliseyev, Tevgeni Khrunov, and Valeri Bykovsky would crew Soyuz 2, with Yeliseyev and Khrunov being chosen to spacewalk over to Komarov’s ship. Komarov’s backup pilot would be none other than his close friend Yuri Gagarin, national hero and the first man in space. Like Mishin, Komarov and Gagarin were apprehensive about the safety of the new spacecraft. However, their concerns were met with great hostility from the Politburo, with Ustinov even threatening to strip Komorov of his military honours if he refused to fly the mission. In a desperate bid to save his friend from what he believed to be a suicide mission, Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his friend Venyamin Russayev in the KGB to pass up the chain of command. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union was a society that tended to punish the bearers of bad news, and everyone who came into contact with the memo was either demoted, fired, or reassigned – including Russayev himself, who was banned from ever associating with the Soviet space program. Meanwhile, Gagarin’s memo disappeared into the vast Soviet bureaucracy and never reached the higher authorities.
According to author Piers Bizony, shortly before the scheduled launch date Komarov met with Russayev, who asked him why he didn’t simply refuse the assignment. According to this account, Komarov burst into tears and explained:
“If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead. That’s Yura, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.”
In reality, it was highly unlikely that Gagarin would ever be called to fly, being too much of a national asset and propaganda symbol to risk on such a dangerous mission. There was thus nothing more either man could do; one way or another, Komarov would fly the mission.
On the morning of May 23, 1967, Komarov arrived at Launch Complex 1 at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and climbed aboard his spacecraft. According to a widely-circulated account by Russian journalist Yaroslav Golavanov, Yuri Gagarin made one last effort to save his friend, storming onto the launch pad and demanding to be put in a spacesuit. Whether Gagarin was attempting to replace Komarov on the flight or simply disrupt the launch process and force the mission to be scrubbed is unknown, but no corroborating accounts have ever been found and the whole incident is believed to be nothing more than an urban legend. Whatever the case, Soyuz 1 lifted off successfully at 3:35 AM Moscow time with Komarov aboard and soon attained its planned orbit.
Almost immediately, however, the mission ran into trouble as one of the spacecraft’s two solar panels failed to deploy. This not only starved onboard systems of vital electrical power, but the stuck panel blocked the vital solar and ion-flow sensors used by the guidance system to maintain the spacecraft’s orientation. This in turn caused the spacecraft to tumble, preventing the one good solar panel from being aimed at the sun and causing further power shortages.The lopsided panels also unbalanced the spacecraft, making it difficult for Komarov to control his attitude manually. Komorov tried desperately to correct these issues, even kicking on the wall of the spacecraft in an attempt to free the stuck panel, but these efforts proved fruitless. Komarov’s problems were made even worse by an unfortunate quirk of the Soviet space program. Whereas NASA was able to establish a global network of tracking stations based in friendly nations or on picket ships in the ocean, allowing continuous communication with orbiting spacecraft, Soviet stations could only be placed within the Soviet Union and certain regions of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, meaning that for nearly half of every orbit, Komarov was on his own.
For nearly 20 hours Komarov and the mission control team lead by Boris Chertok tried valiantly to correct the spacecraft’s problems and save the mission. However, the attitude control problems soon caused Komarov’s maneuvering thruster fuel and batteries to become depleted, and on the 13th orbit the decision was made to bring Komarov home. This in turn led to the cancellation of Soyuz 2, which was scheduled to launch early the next morning. With Soyuz 1 down to only its backup battery, Mission Control planned to bring Komarov down on his 17th, 18th, or 19th orbits, when it would be daytime over the Soviet Union. With the automatic attitude control systems still out of commission, Komorov would have to align the spacecraft manually for retrofire and maintain his attitude throughout the burn. However, as the burn would have to be performed on the night side of the planet, Komarov was unable to use the special vzor optical sight designed for precisely this purpose. Instead, a technique was developed whereby Komarov would sight the moon through the spacecraft’s periscope, echoing the dramatic manual reentry of American astronaut Gordo Cooper during the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission on May 15, 1963 – and for more on that, please check out our video “I’ll Do it Myself”: The Greatest Feat of Piloting in Space on our sister channel Highlight History.
At 6:20 AM Moscow time on April 24, Komarov fired his engine to begin his reentry burn. However, Komarov was unable to maintain his attitude and the onboard computer shut off the engine prematurely. Komarov had not slowed down sufficiently to reenter the atmosphere, so another attempt was scheduled for his 19th orbit. With his backup battery running dangerously low, it would be his last chance to return home. While the computer again shut off the engine ahead of schedule, the burn was nonetheless successful and Komarov jettisoned the spacecraft’s instrument and orbital modules. Due to the asymmetry of the spacecraft and the imperfect burn the reentry was rougher than usual, the spacecraft spinning wildly and subjecting Komarov to intense G-forces. But the spacecraft held together, and as the atmosphere thickened and the capsule began to slow down it appeared as though Komarov might actually survive the harrowing mission. But when, at an altitude of 10 kilometres, the capsule deployed its drogue parachute, the main chute failed to deploy. Komarov immediately deployed his reserve chute, but this became tangled around the first drogue, preventing it, too, from deploying. In that moment, Vladimir Komarov’s fate was sealed. With nothing to slow it down, the capsule plunged to earth like a meteorite at a speed of 140 km/hr, slamming into the ground in Orenburg Oblast, south Russia, around 7AM. The tremendous impact flattened the 2-metre-tall spacecraft down to 70 centimetres and ignited the landing rockets designed to further slow Komarov’s fall, causing the spacecraft to explode into flames. A recovery team circling in a helicopter landed and rushed into action, attacking the inferno with fire extinguishers and shovelfuls of dirt. But it was already too late; by the time the crew extinguished the blaze and opened the crumpled hatch, all that remained of Vladimir Komarov was a charred lump 30 cm wide and 80 cm long, the only recognizable feature being a single heel bone. Bizarrely, an official autopsy report authoritatively listed the cause of death as severe injuries to the skull, spinal cord, and bones.
Despite a thorough investigation by the Soviet authorities, the cause of the fatal parachute failure has never been definitively established. Some sources state that the parachute design was changed at the last minute, such that they could no longer fit in the original containers. With no time to change the design before the launch deadline, the parachutes were instead packed into the undersized containers with wooden mallets, preventing them from deploying properly. Other sources ascribe the failure to faulty pressure sensors, while still others, including mission controller Boris Chertok, blame a glue-like thermal protective coating applied to the surface of the spacecraft. This coating was cured by placing the spacecraft in a large oven called an autoclave. When Soyuz 1 was treated, the covers for the parachute containers were not yet available, meaning that the coating could easily have seeped into the containers, gluing the parachutes in place. Test versions of the spacecraft were not subjected to the autoclave treatment, preventing the problem from being spotted earlier. If this theory is correct, then the same flaw would also have affected Soyuz 2, meaning that Komarov’s death inadvertently saved the lives of his three comrades.
Vladimir Komarov received a state funeral in Moscow’s Red Square on April 26, 1967, his charred remains lying in state before being interred in the Kremlin walls. It was the second fatal space accident that year after the Apollo 1 fire of January 27, prompting a group of American astronauts to send a message of sympathy to the Soviet National Academy of Sciences:
“We are very saddened by the loss of Col. Komarov. We feel comradeship for this test pilot because we have met several of his fellow cosmonauts and we know that we are all involved in a pioneering flight effort that is not without hazard. We particularly want to express our deep sense of sympathy to Mrs. Komarov, their children and his fellow cosmonauts.”
The secretive and mysterious nature of the Soviet space program has long provided fertile ground for speculation and conspiracy theories, and the tragic flight of Soyuz 1 is no exception. Over the years a number of myths have grown up around the ill-fated mission, including that Premier Kosygin and Komarovs wife called the doomed cosmonaut via video phone to tell him he was a hero, and that American listening stations in Turkey picked up radio transmissions of Komarov angrily cursing the Soviet government as he plummeted to his death. Both these claims are easily disproven, however, as Soyuz 1 did not have videophone equipment installed and mission transcripts reveal that Komarov was calm, collected, and professional until the very end, his actual last words being recorded as:
“I feel excellent, everything is in order. Thank you to everyone. The separation- ”
The tragedy of Soyuz 1 had a profound effect on the Soviet space program comparable to that of the Apollo 1 fire on NASA. The Soyuz spacecraft would not fly again until October 26, 1968, piloted by cosmonaut Georgi Beregovo, while the docking and crew transfer planned for Soyuz 1 and 2 would not be accomplished until the dual flights of Soyuz 4 and 5 on January 14, 1969. By this time, however, the Americans had pulled far ahead in the Space Race, with Apollo 8 successfully orbiting the moon and Apollo 9 successfully testing the Lunar Module in orbit. Meanwhile, all four test launches of the N-1 rocket ended in massive explosions, dashing any hopes of the Soviets reaching the moon. The successful July 20 landing of Apollo 11 was merely the final nail in the coffin.
Yet in spite of its early teething problems, the Soyuz spacecraft would go on to become the indispensable workhorse of the Soviet and later Russian space programs. With only 4 fatalities over 54 years and 150 crewed launches, it is the most successful and reliable manned spacecraft in history, and for a 9-year period between the last Space Shuttle launch in 2011 and the first crewed SpaceX Dragon spacecraft mission in 2020, the only means of getting astronauts to and from the International Space Station. With the basic design being continuously upgraded, the rugged Soyuz will likely continue to serve Russia and the world’s space transport needs for many decades to come. Thus, while the tragedy of Vladimir Komarov and Soyuz 1 serves as a tragic reminder of the failings of the Soviet system, it is also a perfect encapsulation of that great motto of space exploration: Per Ardua Ad Astra – “through adversity to the stars”.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- Where Did the NASA Expression Steely-Eyed Missile Man Come From?
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Expand for ReferencesKrulwich, Robert, Cosmonaut Crashed to Earth ‘Crying in Rage,’ NPR, March 18, 2011, https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage
Soyuz 1, Space Safety Magazine, http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-disasters/soyuz-1/
Newitz, Annalee, What Really Happened to Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, Who Died Crashing to Earth in 1967? Gizmodo, December 4, 2011, https://gizmodo.com/what-really-happened-to-cosmonaut-vladimir-komarov-who-5791437
Soyuz 1, Encyclopedia Astronautica, http://www.astronautix.com/s/soyuz1.html
The Hero of Soyuz 1, Between Myth and Reality, BBVA OpenMind, April 24, 2019, https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/the-hero-of-soyuz-1-between-myth-and-reality/
Teitel, Amy, How Vladimir Komarov Died on Soyuz 1, The Vintage Space, October 21, 2020, https://medium.com/the-vintage-space/how-vladimir-komarov-died-on-soyuz-1-4c695f77f278
Soyuz 1 Flight Planning, Russian Space Web, http://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz1-planning.html
The post The Most Disastrous Space Mission Ever appeared first on Today I Found Out.
At 8:20 AM on August 6, 2016, 66-year-old veteran pilot Scotty Wilson opened the throttle and roared down the runway at Clinton-Sherman Industrial Air Park near Burns Flat, Oklahoma. Moments later he was airborne, and began climbing into a clear blue sky. But almost immediately things started to go wrong as the aircraft banked sharply left, then right, before suddenly rolling over and ploughing into the ground. The aircraft burst into flames on impact, killing Wilson instantly. While any fatal aircraft accident is a tragedy, this particular crash hit the aviation community particularly hard, for the aircraft in question was a one-of-a-kind replica of a historic design, painstakingly assembled over seven years by a dedicated team of volunteers. Conceived in the late 1930s, the aircraft was one of the most daring and technologically- advanced designs of its time, and, had it flown, might have been one of the fastest propeller-driven aircraft ever built. This is the fascinating story of the Bugatti Model 100 Racer.
During the 1920s and 30s, aviation technology advanced by leaps and bounds. The First World War had turned the aeroplane from a rickety and dangerous toy for the wealthy into a viable weapon of war, and governments, aircraft designers, and businessmen were keen to unlock the full military and commercial potential of aviation and push aircraft performance to the limit. To stimulate innovation, wealthy benefactors such as British newspaper magnate Gordon Bennett, French financier Jacques Schneider, Australian confectioner Sir Macpherson Robertson, and American hotelier Raymond Orteig sponsored a variety of aviation challenges and races, with designers and pilots from around the globe competing to see who could fly the fastest, highest, and farthest.
Among the most illustrious of these races was the Coupe Deutsch de a Meurthe, established in 1909 by French oil magnate Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe. As covered in our previous video Alberto Santos-Dumont: Pioneering Dandy of the Air, prior to the First World War, de la Meurthe’s prizes did much to advance the state of the art of both lighter- and heavier-than-air flight. The eponymous cup was a contest of pure speed, with competitors flying an outward-and-back straight-line circuit along a 100 kilometre timed course. This was intended to negate the effects of headwinds and tailwinds, and is still standard practice in both aviation and automotive speed trials to this day. The competition flights had to take place between March 1 and October 31, with performance being recognized only if it exceeded the closest competitor by at least 10%. A bonus of 20,000 francs was awarded to competitors whose record went unsurpassed for eight months, while the first competitor to win three races in a row received an ornate solid-silver trophy valued at 10,000 francs.
The race was held nine times between 1912 and 1936, the competition being resurrected three times by the Aéro Club de France and Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe’s daughter Suzanne following his death in 1919. Though the competition was open to all nations, all nine races were won by French pilots flying French-designed aircraft. By the late 1930s, however, France was fast being overtaken as a leader in aviation technology by its old rival Germany, who in 1937 set a world landplane speed record of 379 miles per hours or 610 kilometres per hour and were heavily favoured to win the 1939 cup. It was this desire to beat the Germans and secure another French aviation victory which in 1937 inspired Italian-born engine and automobile designer Ettorre Bugatti to try his hand at designing the ultimate racing plane.
Born in 1881 in Milan, by the 1930s Ettore Bugatti was a legend in the automotive community. His sleek and powerful engines and race car designs dominated at major European auto races such as the Monaco Grand Prix and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, while his luxurious touring cars were considered the height of quality and sophistication. His factory in Molsheim in Alsace, France, also produced a variety of other products, including aircraft engines for the French Air Force and motorized rail cars. By the mid-1930s, however, the global Great Depression had severely impacted sales, and Bugatti’s automotive empire was in decline. Thus, his interest in competing in the Coupe Deutsche de a Meurthe was not exclusively motivated by nationalistic zeal. The French Air Force closely followed the air races in order to choose its next generation of combat aircraft, and indeed would develop the winners of the 1935 and 1936 races – the Caudron C.450 and C.460 – into the Caudron C.714 fighter. Bugatti was thus keen to get his hands on lucrative government contracts for his aircraft and its engine.
Despite his versatility, however, Bugatti had never designed an aircraft before, and instead turned to Belgian designer Louis de Monge to turn his dream into reality. Born in 1890, de Monge had come to prominence during the First World War for designing and manufacturing metal aircraft propellers. After the war he produced designs for a variety of advanced aircraft including flying wings, heavy bombers, and long-range transatlantic airliners, but none of these ever left the drawing board. By the time he was approached by Ettore Bugatti, de Monge had long since left aviation for the more reliable and lucrative field of automotive engineering. However, he kept abreast of the latest developments in aviation, and after much persuasion by Bugatti, agreed to design his racing aircraft.
What de Monge came up with was nothing short of revolutionary. While most racing aircraft of the time achieved high performance by bolting the largest possible engine to the smallest possible airframe, de Monge took a more elegant and scientific approach, relying on aerodynamics and efficiency over raw power. His design, which still looks futuristic today, featured a sleek, teardrop-shaped fuselage, forward-swept wings, and a streamlined Y-shaped butterfly tail. To make the fuselage as slim and aerodynamic as possible, the pilot sat semi-reclined under a bubble canopy – an arrangement later famously used in the F-16 Fighting Falcon jet to protect the pilot from high G-forces – while to minimize weight while retaining strength, the airframe was constructed from a sandwich of tulipwood and balsa wood covered in doped aircraft fabric. The aircraft was powered by a pair of Bugatti-designed 50P straight-8 inline engines, each producing 450 horsepower. In order to fit inside the slim fuselage, the engines – built largely of magnesium for further weight savings – were mounted at offset angles behind the pilot, with the twin crankshafts passing along either side of the cockpit to a special gearbox in the nose, through which they drove a pair of contra-rotating propellers. These propellers cancelled out each other’s torque, eliminating the control issues that plagued most other racing planes and allowing the Model 100 to use smaller, less drag-inducing control surfaces.
While these features were already advanced for the time, it was in the details that de Monge’s genius truly shone through. Unusually, the air intakes for the engines and radiators were mounted in the leading edges of the Y-tail. Air travelled forward to the engines through a carefully-designed series of ducts before being expelled through slots in the trailing edges of the wings. This is an area of naturally low pressure, meaning air naturally circulated through the system without the need for heavy fans or blowers. Even more clever, the design of the ducts caused the air to expand and accelerate as it absorbed waste heat from the engine, producing a small amount of thrust that cancelled out the drag produced by the radiators. This technique, known as the Meredith Effect after the British engineer who discovered it in 1936, was later famously used in the North American P-51 Mustang fighter. Even more cutting-edge was the Model 100’s automatic control system, which, using airspeed and engine manifold pressure sensors and an analogue computer, allowed the pilot to optimize the aircraft for a number of flight conditions by simply pulling a lever. For example, at high manifold pressure and low airspeed, the flaps automatically dropped for takeoff, while at low manifold pressure and low airspeed the landing gear automatically dropped for landing. In a high-speed dash the flaps and landing gear retracted, while in a dive the upper and lower flaps deployed to form dive brakes. A further testament to de Monge’s attention to detail were the landing gear covers, which were shaped like wings such that when the pilot unlocked the wheel struts, they would automatically lift themselves up into the wings. About the only things on the Model 100 that were not cutting edge were the propellers, whose pitch or angle could only be adjusted on the ground. However, Bugatti and de Monge had plans to install continuously variable-pitch propellers at a later date. De Monge estimated that his sleek design would be capable of attaining 500 miles per hour or 800 kilometres per hour – making it the fastest aircraft of its day and one of the fastest propeller-driven aircraft in history.
With the design finalized, construction of the Model 100 began in 1938 in a furniture factory in Paris. However, the Nazi invasion of Poland the following year led to the planned 1939 Coupe Deutsch de la Meurthe race being cancelled. Nonetheless, construction carried on, helped along by a healthy injection of cash from the French Government. Facing imminent invasion, the French Air Force wanted to develop the Model 100 into a lightweight high-speed fighter known as the 110P, armed with a 7.5mm machine gun in each wing and a 37mm canon firing through the propeller hub. However, these plans went nowhere, and the Model 100 was just nearing completion when the Nazis invaded France in June 1940. With German troops marching on Paris, Bugatti had the aircraft disassembled and hidden in a barn on his estate outside the capital. There the sleek aircraft remained for the duration of the war, its enormous potential untested.
Alas, it was to remain untested. During the war, Bugatti’s factory in Molsheim was completely destroyed by Allied bombing, while following the liberation of France, the French government, suspicious of Bugatti’s Italian background, seized all his remaining assets. Soon afterward Bugatti suffered a severe mental decline and slipped into delirium, dying in a Paris hospital in 1947 at the age of 66. Meanwhile, Louis de Monge moved to the United States where he died in 1977, having never designed another aircraft. Work on the Model 100 never resumed, and the aircraft lay forgotten in Bugatti’s barn until the 1960s, when the aircraft was discovered and acquired by one Mr. Pazzoli. The aircraft passed through several hands until 1970, when it came into the possession of American auto aficionado Ray Jones. Jones removed the twin 50P engines for use in restoring vintage Bugatti automobiles and sold the airframe to Dr. Peter Williamson. Williamson, along with several other volunteers, painstakingly restored the aircraft before donating it to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. There it remained in storage for nearly 15 years before finally being donated to the Experimental Aircraft Association, which displayed the aircraft in its EAA AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, the Bugatti’s projected performance had been exceeded by several aircraft – though not by much. As of this recording, the fastest piston-powered aircraft is in the world is the heavily-modified Grumman Bearcat Rare Bear, which on August 21, 1989 set a world speed record of 528 miles per hour or 850 kilometres per hour. The fastest propeller-driven aircraft of all time, however, was the Soviet Tupolev Tu-114, an airliner based on the iconic Tu-95 Bear nuclear bomber. Powered by four 15,000 horsepower Kuznetsov NK-12 turboprop engines driving twin eight-bladed contra-rotating propellers, the Tu-114 had a maximum speed of 650 miles per hour or 878 kilometres per hour – nearly three quarters of the speed of sound at normal cruising altitude. This is about as fast as a propeller-driven aircraft can fly, for the faster an aircraft flies, the faster the propellers are pushed through the air. At a certain point, the propeller tips start to go supersonic, creating shockwaves that disrupt airflow over the blades and reduce their effectiveness. The higher the speed, the worse the effect, creating an upper speed limit for propeller-powered flight.
Still, there were those who wondered if Bugatti and de Monge’s futuristic design would actually have worked – and, if so, how fast it actually could have flown. Among them was U.S. Air Force pilot Scotty Wilson, who by the time he retired after 25 years of military service had accumulated nearly 11,000 flying hours in aircraft ranging from Piper Cubs to business jets to F-16s. While training to be a fighter pilot in the 1970s, Wilson read an article about the Bugatti Model 100, and a lifelong obsession was born. In the early 2000s, Wilson, freshly-retired and looking for a challenge, decided to take on the monumental task of building an authentic flying replica of the Bugatti and vindicating Louis de Monge – 80 years after the fact. There was only one tiny problem: though certified as an aircraft mechanic, Wilson was, self-admittedly, not much of a handyman:
“When my friends see me with a wrench, they call the police…I’d never built anything. I’d never even built a birdcage. But I didn’t care how long it was going to take or how much it was going to cost because, one way or another, I was going to build this airplane…I knew that I didn’t know enough to finish the project, but all I needed was enough to start.”
In order to realize his dream, Wilson put together a team of experts including Jaap Horst, founder of the Bugatti Aircraft Association, Frederic Gasson, who had previously built a flying remote-controlled model of the aircraft, and even Louis de Monge’s grand-nephew Ladislas. Starting in 2008, over seven years the team spent 10,000 man hours and $400,000 – much of the money being raised through Kickstarter – to painstakingly resurrect the Bugatti. While Wilson insisted that the replica be as faithful to the original as possible, due to issues of safety and practicality several changes be made to the design. For example, instead of replicating the original’s balsa and tulipwood sandwich construction, the team used a modern wood-based composite called DuraKore, bonded and coated in epoxy resin. Magnesium, used by de Monge throughout the original design to save weight, was also eliminated due to its high flammability. And finally, the original’s twin 50P straight-eight engines, which had long since disappeared – were replaced with a pair of Suzuki Hayabusa inline-4 motorcycle engines. Still, de Monge’s design presented the team with plenty of surprises and challenges. With no original blueprints known to exist, decoding the function of certain components and systems was often an exercise in frustration, as Wilson later recalled:
“There have been times when I looked at photos of the original airplane and said to myself, ‘Louis, what were you thinking?’ But whenever I had a question, I did it the way de Monge did, and I’ve always been rewarded, because a couple of months later, I understood his reasoning. This airplane is a perfect engineering solution to the challenge of flying fast.”
Finally, on July 4, 2015, the completed replica, christened Blue Dream, carried out its first taxi tests on a runway in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A month and a half later on August 19, it completed its first successful test flight with Scotty Wilson at the controls. According to Wilson, the aircraft’s handling was “as expected.” As de Monge designed the Bugatti to fly at high speed in a straight line, it was only marginally stable in pitch and yaw and required great care when maneuvering. The aircraft also floated more than expected on landing, causing it to touch down further down the runway than anticipated. But whenWilson applied the wheel brakes to prevent the aircraft running off the end of the runway, one of the brakes failed, causing the aircraft to careen off onto the muddy airfield, tip over onto its nose, and damage its propellers. Thankfully, the damage was quickly repaired and Wilson carried out a second, uneventful test flight on October 20. A third flight was planned for the following summer, after which Wilson planned to retire the aircraft and donate it to an undisclosed museum in the UK. According to Wilson, it was never the team’s intention to test the Bugatti’s maximum speed; rather, the goal of the project was simply to prove that de Monge’s advanced design could indeed fly. But perhaps the team should have called it a day after the successful second flight, for it was the third flight on August 6, 2016 which ended in the death of Scotty Wilson and the complete destruction of the team’s seven-year labour of love. A subsequent National Transportation Safety Board to NTSB investigation failed to find any obvious cause for the crash, ultimately pinning the accident on:
“…the pilot’s failure to maintain airspeed following an engine anomaly during the initial climb after takeoff, which resulted in the airplane exceeding its critical angle of attack and experiencing an aerodynamic stall. Contributing to the accident was an engine anomaly, the reason for which could not be identified during postaccident examination.”
Though the Blue Dream replica never flew anywhere near its maximum speed, only reaching 125 miles per hour or 200 kilometres per hour, wind tunnel testing of models and computer simulation have revealed that despite Bugatti and de Monge’s hopes and claims, the Model 100 would likely only have been able to reach a top speed of around 450 miles per hour or 720 kilometres per hour – a speed exceeded by the German Heinkel He 100 in 1939 while the Bugatti was still under construction. Still, the Bugatti’s many innovative design features – especially its automatic control system – were years ahead of their time – a testament to Bugatti and de Monge’s technical genius and the furious pace of innovation during the Golden Age of Flight.
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Expand for ReferencesWhat is the Fastest Propeller Plane? Quora, https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-fastest-propeller-plane
Bugatti 100P Project, https://web.archive.org/web/20151208205614/http://bugatti100p.aero/
National Transportation Safety Board – Aircraft Accident/Incident Database, https://web.archive.org/web/20171201040119/http://airsafety.info/wp-content/uploads/xas160815.pdf
Pope, Stephen, Pilot Killed in Crash of Bugatti 100P Replica, Flying Magazine, August 9, 2016, https://www.flyingmag.com/pilot-killed-in-crash-bugatti-100p-replica/
ASN Wikibase Occurrence #189123, Aviation Safety Network, https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=189123
Bugatti Flies, But Damaged on Landing, AVWeb, August 19, 2015, https://www.avweb.com/news/bugatti-flies-but-damaged-on-landing/
1938 Bugatti Model 100 Racer, EAA AirVenture Museum, https://www.eaa.org/en/eaa-museum/museum-collection/aircraft-collection-folder/1938-bugatti-model-100-racer
Resurrecting the Bugatti Racer, EAA AirVenture, October 22, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20110808170014/http://www.eaa.org/news/2009/2009-10-23_bugatti.asp
Lerner, Preston, Aviation’s Sexiest Racer, Smithsonian Magazine, September 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/Aviations-Sexiest-Racer-180952406/
The post The Fastest Aircraft You’ve Never Heard Of appeared first on Today I Found Out.
During the Second World War, more than 260,000 Allied personnel were captured by the Western Axis powers and held in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, Italy, and their occupied territories. Their bold and often ingenious escape attempts have become the stuff of legend, including the famous “Great Escape” from the Stalag Luft III camp in March 1944 and countless outlandish breakouts from the infamous Colditz Castle – and for more on this please check out our video That Time Allied POWs Secretly Built an Airplane From Scratch to Escape a Nazi Compound.
Less well-remembered are the some 400,000 German and Italian prisoners-of-war interned in Britain, Canada, and the United States. Their ingenuity and will to escape was no less than that of their Allied counterparts, but while some 1,500 Allied POWs succeeded in making the ‘home run’ back to friendly or neutral territory, over the entire course of the war only one Axis prisoner managed to escape Canadian Allied captivity and make it all the way back home to Germany. This is the extraordinary story of Lieutenant Franz von Werra.
Franz von Werra was born on July 13, 1914 in the Swiss village of Leuk to Rosalie and Leo Freiherr von Werrra, destitute German aristocrats. Franz Von Werra joined the German Air Force, or Luftwaffe, in 1936 and was commissioned as a Lieutenant in 1938. He was by all accounts the epitome of the Aryan superman celebrated by Nazi propaganda, with blue eyes and wavy blond hair – though Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Göring would later note his unusually short stature. He played up the image of a dashing fighter pilot, driving fast sports cars and keeping a pet lion cub named Simba as a squadron mascot, while his habit of wearing a red jacket into combat lead German tabloids to dub him “The Red Devil – Terror of the British Air Force.” Though many of his colleagues saw him as arrogant and a braggart, fellow POW Heinz Cramer would later describe him as:
“…an honest and pleasant young man; a bit of a showman with a wonderful imagination, but a reliable and honest chap.”
Von Werra first saw combat during the Battle of France as part of Jagdgeschwader 3, shooting down his first aircraft – a British Hawker Hurricane – on May 20, 1940. He followed this two days later by shooting down three French bombers. During the subsequent Battle of Britain, on a single day – August 25, 1940 – von Werra claimed to have shot down one Spitfire and three Hurricanes and destroyed a further five aircraft on the ground – bringing his total kills to 13 and officially making him an ace. While only a few of these victories were ever officially confirmed, the German state media saw the propaganda value of von Werra’s exploits and his claims were never contested.
On September 5, 1940 von Werra was escorting a bomber squadron over Kent when his Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter was shot down by Spitfires flown by Flight Lieutenant Paterson Hughes and Pilot Officer Gerald Stapleton of 234 Squadron RAF. Von Werra managed to crash-land his stricken aircraft in a field on Loves Farm near Winchet Hill and was quickly arrested by a cook from a nearby army unit. He was taken to the nearby village of Maidstone and held overnight in the local constabulary before being transferred to Maidstone Barracks under the guard of the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment. It is here that he made his first escape attempt, overpowering his guard while digging in the garden with a pickaxe. He was quickly recaptured and sent to the infamous “Cockfosters Cage,” an MI9 interrogation centre at Trent Park in Hertfordshire. Here he was held and interrogated for 18 days, but failed to divulge any useful information. At one point, in typical cocksure fashion, von Werra bet his interrogator, one Squadron Leader Hawkes, that the British wouldn’t be able to hold him for six months. Neither man could have known at the time how right von Werra was.
Following his stay at the Cage von Werra was transferred to POW Camp No.1 in Furness Fells, Lancashire, where he immediately set about planning his next escape attempt. On the afternoon of October 7, 1940, while the prisoners were out on a guarded walk in the countryside, von Werra took advantage of a distraction created by an approaching fruit cart to roll over a low stone wall and slip away. His absence was not noticed until later that evening, whereupon local police forces and the Home Guard were alerted to the presence of an escaped German officer in the area. Von Werra, travelling mainly by night, managed to evade capture for three days, until on the night of October 10 he was discovered by the Home Guard sheltering from the rain in a Hoggarth, a small stone structure used to store animal feed. The Guardsmen bound von Werra’s hands behind his back and began leading him back to the nearest town, but von Werra managed to slip his bonds, break the Guardmen’s lantern, and escape into the darkness. It was another two days before he was finally recaptured while attempting to hide in a bog, submerged up to his neck.
After serving 21 days solitary confinement at Furness Falls, on November 3 von Werra was transferred to Camp No.13 at Swanwick, Derbyshire. Here he befriended a group of prisoners including Lieutenant Walter Manhard and Major Heinz Cramer, who formed an escape committee they jokingly named Swanwick Tiefbau A.G, or “Swanwick Digging Company Inc.” While progress on their escape tunnel was swift due to the sturdy clay soil, the group soon began running out of room to hide all the excavated spoil. This stalled construction for weeks until Manhard discovered a large rainwater cistern beneath the garden house, which could hold double the expected volume of spoil. On December 17, 1940, the tunnel was at last complete. On the night of the 20th, under the cover of a nearby air raid and the camp choir, von Werra, Manhard, and Cramer crawled through the tunnel and out into the surrounding countryside. Amusingly, the song chosen to cover their escape was titled “I must away into the great wide world.”
While the men’s absence was not noticed until the following afternoon, Cramer and Manhard were quickly spotted and recaptured, leaving von Werra on his own. Thankfully, he had prepared a convincing disguise. Thousands of aircrew from occupied allied nations such as Poland, Norway, and the Netherlands served in the RAF, so a man in British uniform with a foreign accent did not attract undue suspicion. Dressed in a homemade RAF uniform with forged identity papers, von Werra planned to pass himself off as Captain von Lott, a Dutch bomber pilot whose aircraft had crashed returning from a mission. Knowing that bombers flew at night, he waited until 3AM before approaching a friendly locomotive driver and asking to be taken to the nearest RAF airfield. At Codnor Park railway station Von Werra came under the suspicion of the local railway clerk and police constable, but he managed to convince them of his identity and they secured his passage to RAF Hucknall in Nottingham.
At Hucknall, when the Squadron Leader asked for his credentials, Von Werra claimed to be based at Dyce near Aberdeen in Scotland. While the Squadron Leader rang Dyce to confirm this story, he asked von Werra for his identity disc. To his horror, von Werra realized that his fake disk had melted due to his body heat and hastily excused himself to use the lavatory. Running across the airfield, he spotted a Hawker Hurricane fighter being readied and informed the mechanic that he was taking it on a test flight. Von Werra was already strapped into the cockpit, trying to figure out the controls, when the Squadron Leader ran up with his service revolver to arrest him. Amazingly, this would not be the closest a German prisoner would come to escaping Britain by aircraft. On November 24, 1941 Lieutenants Hans Schnabel and Harry Wappler escaped from a POW camp in Penrith, Cumbria and made their way to the nearby RAF Kingstown airfield, where they managed to commandeer a Miles Magister training aircraft and get airborne. However, lack of fuel and freezing temperatures forced them to turn back and land near the coast, where they were soon recaptured.
In von Werra’s case it had become clear that the British Isles could no longer contain the slippery pilot, so on January 10, 1941 von Werra and a thousand other German prisoners were placed aboard the ocean liner SS Duchess of York to be sent to internment camps in Canada. Von Werra, who was by now a known escape risk, was placed in his own cabin under special guard. Yet he still continued to plot his escape. During the crossing von Werra managed to befriend the ship’s galley crew, offering to peel potatoes and carry out other menial tasks. Slowly but surely he gained the trust of more and more of the crew and began to penetrate normally forbidden areas of the ship, getting as far as the engine room without being stopped. Knowing that the convoy they were sailing with was bound for North Africa and would soon depart, von Werra and his fellow prisoners plotted to take over the ship and sail her back to an occupied French port. Unfortunately for them, on the day the convoy departed, the Germans discovered to their dismay that one escort – the British battleship HMS Ramillies – had remained to shepherd them all the way to Canada.
Duchess of York arrived safely in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the prisoners were transferred to a train bound for a POW camp on the north shore of Lake Superior. After the abortive mutiny, von Werra had decided to escape to the United States, which at the time was still neutral. While the nearest border crossing was between New Brunswick and Maine, von Werra decided to save his attempt until late in the train journey, when it would least be expected. This would take place between Montreal and Ottawa, where the rail line came closest to the St. Lawrence River on the US-Canada Border. On January 21, 1941, near Smiths Falls, Ontario, von Werra put his plan into action. The train windows had all frozen shut in the winter cold, forcing the prisoners to turn up the car heaters to free them. At a prearranged signal a fellow prisoner raised a blanket as if folding it, shielding von Werra and 7 other prisoners from view as they crawled through the open windows and plunged headfirst into the snow below. Amazingly, none of the guards noticed the escape and the windows quickly frosted over again, blocking the escapees from view. The train was nearly a hundred miles away by the time their absence was noticed.
Once again, all of von Werra’s fellow escapees were quickly recaptured, leaving him on his own. Freezing due to a lack of proper winter clothes, von Werra stumbled along a nearby road hoping to bum a ride to the border. A car soon appeared, but as it drew closer von Werra realized it was a police car and quickly dropped his hand. But it was too late: the car came to a stop. Believing he had been caught, von Werra grudgingly approached the car, only to be informed that hitchhiking had recently been outlawed in Canada and that he had barely avoided being arrested. Nonetheless, the policeman offered him a ride and dropped him off in Johnstown, just across the St. Lawrence from Ogdensburg, New York. Seeing that the river was frozen, von Werra attempted to cross on foot, but found a wide ice-free channel blocking his path. Doubling back, he wandered through the night until he stumbled upon an abandoned summer camp near the town of Prescott, where he found an overturned wooden boat. Despite his hands being nearly frozen, using a fence paling as a shovel he managed to dig the boat out of the snow, drag it across the ice, and cross the river.
Once in Ogdensburg, von Werra turned himself in to the police, who passed him off to the Board of Immigration. Charged with illegally entering the country, von Werra contacted the German Consul in New York City, who paid his bail and arranged for local attorney James Davies to represent him. Von Werra was released and instructed to appear before a grand jury in Albany a week later.
Von Werra’s arrival in the United States caused a sensation, and he was treated like a celebrity by the media, and otherwise saw the sights and lived the high life in New York City.
He also took to writing “Wish You Were Here” postcards to old friends and comrades, including Squadron Leader Boniface from Hucknall airfield and Squadron Leader Hawke from the Cockfosters Cage interrogation centre. During this time he also learned that Adolf Hitler had awarded him the prestigious Knight’s Cross for his August 25 attack on an RAF airfield – an attack most historians now agree never took place.
But von Werra did not have long to relax, for the Commonwealth authorities were hot on his tail. Soon after his border crossing the Ontario Provincial Police delivered a summons to the Ogdensburg police charging von Werra with the theft of a rowboat worth $35. This tiny sum was widely mocked in the German press, the German embassy even issuing a statement reading:
“In view of the great importance Canada appears to attach to the boat, Franz von Werra will gladly place at the disposal of the American authorities the sum of $35 … so that the warrant against him may be withdrawn.”
However, given the criminal nature of the charge, it could not be tried in an American court and could have led to von Werra’s extradition back to Canada. The German consul therefore decided to get von Werra out of the United States as quickly as possible. In April 1941, while negotiations between the American and Canadian governments raged on, von Werra boarded a train out of New York and slipped across the border into Mexico. From here, the various German consuls in South America shuttled von Werra along a circuitous route through Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru and finally across the Atlantic to Barcelona and Rome. Franz von Werra finally reached Germany on April 18, 1941 – 225 days after he had been captured.
In Germany von Werra was hailed as a hero, with Hitler personally congratulating him for his courage, ingenuity, and
“ …ability to turn a tactically unfavourable situation to his own advantage.”
But even more valuable than von Werra’s heroic status were his unique insights into British interrogation techniques. Drawing from his experiences at the Cockfosters Cage, von Werra wrote a pamphlet titled “How to Behave if Taken Prisoner,” which remained in use until 1944 and effectively cut off one of MI9’s most valuable sources of intelligence. He also consulted on improvements to German interrogation techniques and contradicted the portrayal of British POW camps in Nazi propaganda, stating:
“Generally speaking, British treatment of German war prisoners is unexceptionable. Such isolated instances of maltreatment as have occurred have resulted from wrong behaviour on the part of the prisoners concerned in the first, decisive moments of captivity.’’
In any event, in recognition for his daring escape, von Werra was promoted to Hauptmann and made commander of the squadron JG 52 on the Eastern Front. In July 1941 he scored 13 more victories against Russian aircraft, bringing his total kills to 21. In August his squadron was recalled to Germany to be equipped with new aircraft and reposted to Katwijk in the Netherlands. Then, a mere 8 months after arriving back in Germany, Franz von Werra’s luck finally ran out. On October 25, 1941, von Werra was on a routine training flight off the Dutch coast when he experienced engine failure and crashed into the sea north of Vlissingen. His body was never recovered.
Franz von Werra’s extraordinary globe-spanning odyssey from captivity to freedom is emblematic of the determination and fighting spirit displayed by all servicemen during the Second World War – and of the effectiveness of interning Axis prisoners in Canada. Indeed, with the possible exception of U-boat sailor Walter Reich, who claimed to have escaped from a troopship in the St. Lawrence in July 1940, von Werra remains the only German POW to make it all the way from Canada to Germany during the entirety of the war. His story was popularized in a 1956 book by Kendall Burt and James Leasor and a 1957 film starring Hardy Kruger, both titled after von Werra’s now-immortal nickname: “The One That Got Away.”
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesBaron Von Werra Begins Tour of “Sights” After Arrival in New York City, January 27, 1941, http://www.animatedsoftware.com/misc/theworld/vonwerra/fw4101nw.gif
Burt, Kendal & Leasor, James, The Only Man The Allies Didn’t Beat, Maclean’s, October 27, 1956, https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1956/10/27/the-only-man-the-allies-didnt-beat
Franz von Werra, http://www.luftwaffe.cz/werra.html
Oberleutnant Franz von Werra, https://www.pegasusarchive.org/pow/franz_von_werra.htm
The post The Red Devil: The Only Axis Prisoner to Escape from Canada And Make It Back to Germany appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If you are the sort of person who spends a lot of time staring at old buildings, you may have noticed a strange symbol cropping up again and again: a bundle of rods bound together with criss-crossing straps, often topped by an axe head. This motif shows up just about everywhere, from theatres, universities, courthouses, and government buildings to the flags, seals, and coats of arms of countries like Ecuador, Cameroon, France, and Cuba and organizations like the Knights of Columbus. Yet for all its ubiquity, this seemingly innocuous symbol actually has a dark and controversial past. Known as the fasces [“Fass-ease”], it is the symbol which gave us the name of the authoritarian political ideology known as fascism, and from the 1920s through the 1940s was the primary symbol of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party and several other groups who emulated his regime. So why is such a symbol still prominently displayed on flags and public buildings the world over, and why did it not gain the same notoriety as that other prominent fascist symbol, the swastika?
The fasces, more correctly pronounced “fass-kiss,” means “bundle” in Latin, and is thought to have originated with the Etruscan civilization which occupied the Italian Peninsula from around 900 to 27 BCE. The earliest known example is a miniature iron version dating from the 7th Century BCE, excavated from an Etruscan tomb at Vetulonia. The fasces is believed to have been used as a symbol of power and authority by Etruscan kings, with the bundle of rods symbolizing the concept of strength through unity – for while a single rod can easily be broken, a bundle of rods bound together cannot. Like many aspects of Estruscan civilization, the fasces was later adopted by the Romans, who called it the bipennis and refined it into a powerful political symbol with its own elaborate set meanings and rules.
The classic Roman fasces lictoriae measured around 1.5 metres in length and consisted of 13 birch or elm rods or vergae bound together with criss-crossing red leather straps. A single-headed axe was bound in among the rods, with the blade protruding either out the top or side of the bundle, while a central handle protruded out the bottom to make the whole affair easier to carry. In this form fasces served as symbols of a Roman magistrate’s power and jurisdiction, and were carried by an attending corps of subordinate officials known as lictors, the number of lictors and fasces corresponding to the rank of the magistrate. The lowest-ranking officials, curule aediles, were allowed two, propraetors five, praetors six, proconsuls eleven, consuls twelve, and the highest rank of magistrate, the dictator, a full twenty-four. Roman generals and emperors also often decorated their fasces with a laurel wreath, especially during triumphs, ceremonial processions celebrating military victories. And according to Roman scholar Cicero, lesser regional magistrates were not even permitted to display a full fasces, making due instead with the bacilli, a smaller version with only two rods and no axe.
While on official duty magistrates would be preceded by their lictors, who would announce his arrival and remind those present of his authority. When one magistrate met another of a different rank, the lictors of the lesser magistrate would lower their fasces as a form of salute or deference, and when a magistrate died, he had the exclusive right to include fasces on his tomb. Conversely, if a magistrate was convicted of a criminal offence, his fasces would be ceremonially broken to symbolize his disgrace and loss of authority.
By the time of the Roman Republic from 509-31 BCE, the fasces’s meaning had expanded beyond the original Etruscan concept of strength through unity and came to symbolize its bearer’s judicial power or imperium via their ability to mete out corporal and capital punishment. This often went beyond mere symbolism, as magistrates could and often did physically use the birch vergae rods of their fasces to flog petty criminals and the axe to behead more serious offenders. As the Roman Empire expanded across the classical world, the fasces became a feared symbol of conquest, with Julius Caesar carrying one through the streets of Alexandria in Egypt after defeating his rival Pompey. Closer to home, fasces displayed in public areas were often primary targets for vandalism by angry mobs during periods of civil unrest.
But there were limits to the power of magistrates, and when carried within the Pomerium – the traditional boundary of the sacred inner city of Rome – all fasces had their axe heads removed. This was to symbolize that within the cities, the power over life and death rested not with the magistrates but rather the Roman people and their assemblies, and that every citizen had the right to launch an appeal or provocatio against a sentence of death. During times of emergency, however, the Republic could choose to elect a dictator, who held absolute authority and whose lictors could carry bladed fasces even within the sacred Pomerium.
Long after the fall of Rome, the fasces persisted as a symbol of state authority and imperial power. Over time, however, the symbol became more closely associated with the Roman Republic and the concept of justice, and was widely used by nations and other groups seeking to emulate the Republic and its ideals. Following the French Revolution, the First French Republic adopted an official seal bearing the figure of Liberty holding the fasces and a coat of arms displaying the fasces topped by the Phrygian cap or Pileus, the brimless hat worn by freed Roman slaves and a traditional symbol of liberty. This same image appears in the modern-day coat of arms of Cuba. The First Republic coat of arms was redesigned in 1905 by painter-engraver Maurice de Meyere and features the fasces surrounded by olive and oak leaves representing peace and justice and a scroll bearing the Republican motto Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité. While never officially adopted by the French government, a modified version of this coat of arms bearing the letters RF for République Française still appears on modern French passports.
Another country which aspired to emulate Roman Republican values was the United States of America, and as a result the fasces – along with many other neoclassical motifs – appears everywhere in American government architecture and iconography. Among other places, the symbol can be found above the doors of the Oval Office, flanking the podium in the United States House of Representatives, atop the dome of the United States Capitol Building, and on the official seal of the United States Senate and the United States Tax Court. The symbol is also widely associated with President Abraham Lincoln and his 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, and is prominently featured on the armrests of the Lincoln Memorial and on the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.
In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, however, the fasces began to take on a more radical meaning, especially in Italy, where the derived term fascio, also meaning “bundle,” came to be used by various revolutionary movements to mean “group,” “union,” or “league.” This use of the term first appeared in Sicily, where in the 1880s a number of revolutionary democratic and socialist movements known as Fasci Siciliani sprung up across the island. Composed mainly of poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers, for five years from 1889-1894 the Fasci fought for higher wages, fairer rents, and land redistribution until the movement was put down by the mainland Italian government. But the revolutionary connotations of the fasces stuck, and the symbol was widely used by various independent nationalist groups both in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the First World War. Among these scattered groups was the Fasci D’azione Rivoluzionaria or “Revolutionary Action League”, founded in Milan in 1914 by a young journalist named Benito Mussolini. In 1915 the leaders of the various fasci met in Milan and agreed to join forces, creating a national organization which in 1919 became known as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, or “Italian League of Combatants” and in 1921 the Partito Nazionale Fascista, or “National Fascist Party”. In 1922, following his infamous March on Rome, Benito Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III. Within five years Mussolini established an absolute autocracy and declared himself “Duce” or dictator of Italy, and the terms “fascist” and “fascism” became indelibly linked with right-wing authoritarianism.
Mussolini saw his new fascist Italy as a spiritual successor to the Roman Empire, and thus appropriated a great deal of Roman iconography including the Aquila or legionary eagle, the Capitoline Wolf, the Senatus Populusque Romanus or ‘SPQR’ motto, the raised-arm Roman Salute, and – of course – the Fasces. The flag of fascist Italy comprised the traditional Italian tricolour with the fasces superimposed over the white centre stripe, while the flag of the National Fascist Party featured a black background. The colour black was widely used in Fascist iconography, most famously by Mussolini’s paramilitary blackshirts who participated in the 1922 March on Rome. This was in turn inspired by the elite WWI Italian shock troops known as Arditi, who wore black uniforms to symbolize death. The fasces was also prominently featured on aircraft of the Italian Regia Aeronautica Air Force, on Mussolini’s personal monogram and tomb, and dozens of public buildings constructed during the fascist era including the Foro Mussolini – now the Foro Italico – in Rome. Several other groups who sought to emulate Mussolini also adopted the symbol, including Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, which used the fasces as their primary symbol before switching to their more iconic flash and circle. Following the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, the collaborationist Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain also made use of the fasces, with a double-headed axe or fransisca derived from Petain’s personal banner.
Mussolini’s fascist regime began to crumble in 1943 as Allied forces steadily pushed their way up the Italian peninsula. On July 24, the Fascist Grand Council dismissed Mussolini as Prime Minister, replacing him with Marshal Pietro Bagdolio. Mussolini was arrested and shuffled between various secret locations before being rescued by the Germans and installed as leader of the Italian Social Republic, a Nazi puppet state in the north of the country. The end finally came for Il Duce on April 28, 1945 when he and his mistress Clara Petacci were captured and shot by leftist partisans in the town of Giulino.
Yet despite its intimate association with Mussolini’s 23-year reign, the fasces never acquired the notoriety of its more infamous cousin, the Nazi swastika or hakenkreuz. The symbol continues to be prominently displayed on public buildings, flags, and crests around the world, with few being aware of its dark past. The most common explanation for this is that the symbol has simply too long been associated with republican and democratic values to be tainted by its brief association with Mussolini. However, the swastika was also a widespread and innocuous symbol long before its appropriation by the Nazis. Originating in Indian Hinduism and Buddhism as a religious icon, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the swastika became a popular symbol of good luck, being widely used in clothing, jewelry, architecture, and as a company trademark. Several sports teams and even two towns in New York State and Ontario, Canada were even named after the symbol. A more plausible explanation for the fasces’ lack of notoriety is that Allied propaganda during the Second World War tended to focus far more on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, with Mussolini’s Italy often being depicted as the ineffectual third wheel of the Axis tripartite pact. The average Allied citizen was thus likely far more familiar with the swastika than the fasces as a symbol of hate and tyranny.
Unfortunately, the fasces as a hate symbol appears to be making something of a comeback. In many western nations, the open display of nazi flags and symbols is banned, forcing many neo-nazi and white supremacist groups to use more obscure symbols such as the flag of pre-Nazi imperial Germany and the fasces. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Youth for Western Civilization, Southern White Alliance, Vanguard America, Patriot Front, and the National Socialist Movement are among the many American ultra-white-wing-group which have used the fasces as part of their iconography. This all goes to show that symbols are mutable, ambiguous things, and whether a given symbol represents justice and democracy or hate and authoritarianism very much depends on who you ask.
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Expand for ReferencesCartwright, Mark, Fasces, World History Encyclopedia, May 8, 2016, https://www.worldhistory.org/Fasces/
Fasces on Flags, CRW Flags, March 15, 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20030224184139/http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/fasces.html
The Fasces, Legion XXIV, http://www.legionxxiv.org/fasces%20page/
Fasces, Anti-Defamation League, https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/fasces
Fasces, Livius, August 6, 2020, https://www.livius.org/articles/concept/fasces/
Bond, Sarah, Fasces, Fascism, and How the Alt-Right Continues to Appropriate Ancient Roman Symbols, Hyperallergic, September 13, 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/459504/fasces-fascism-and-how-the-alt-right-continues-to-appropriate-ancient-roman-symbols/
Kontorovich, Eugene, When Fasces Aren’t Fascist, City Journal, Spring 2014, https://www.city-journal.org/html/when-fasces-aren’t-fascist-13651.html
The post The O.G. Fascist Symbol That is Still Found Everywhere appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, appeared on bookstore shelves on April 13, 1953. Its author, Ian Fleming, had served in British Naval Intelligence during WWII, and based much of his famous super-spy’s world on his own personal experiences. For example, Bond himself was inspired by Fleming’s own personality and tastes as well as numerous wartime intelligence operatives including Canadian spymaster William Stephenson and Serbian triple agent Dusko Popov; while “M,” Bond’s boss and head of MI6, was based on Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming’s superior in Naval Intelligence – as well as Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the first director of the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, who signed his name on official documents as “C.” But one character whose inspiration has never been firmly established is “Q”, Bond’s long-suffering purveyor of spy gadgets. Short for “Quartermaster,” a naval officer responsible for provisioning ships, the character as portrayed in the Bond films never appears in Fleming’s novels, though “Q Branch” and its inventions are referred to throughout. Nonetheless, two men are believed to be the inspiration for the fictional department, both of whom helped create some of the Second World War’s most offbeat and unusual clandestine equipment.
The first possible candidate is Christopher Clayton Hutton, known to his friends as “Clutty.” Born in 1893 in Birmingham, during the First World War, Hutton fought as an infantryman on the Western front before joining the Royal Flying Corps, completing his flight training in 1918 but serving barely a year before being demobilized. In the 1920s and 30s Hutton worked as a journalist and film publicist, but when war broke out again in 1939 he volunteered to re-join the RAF only to be rejected on account of his age. Not a man to give up easily, he began pestering various Government departments with telegrams urging them to make use of his talents in any way they deemed fit.
To Hutton’s surprise, he was soon approached by Colonel Norman Crockatt, head of the newly-formed organization MI9. During his interview Hutton revealed his lifelong obsession with illusionists and escapologists, revealing that in 1912 he had challenged the great Harry Houdini that he could not escape from a crate built by the workers from his uncle’s factory. Houdini simply bribed the workmen to build the crate with dummy nails, and easily won the bet. This was apparently enough to convince Crockatt of Hutton’s usefulness, for as he later stated:
“This officer is eccentric. He cannot be expected to comply with ordinary service discipline, but he is far too valuable for his services to be lost to this Department.”
Hutton was duly placed in charge of developing equipment to help Allied airmen shot down over occupied Europe evade capture. Though the RAF impressed upon every man that it was his duty to escape and re-join the war effort, this was easier said than done. With most of Western Europe under Nazi control, a downed airman’s only option was to make his way to a neutral country like Spain or Switzerland or make contact with local resistance networks who could hopefully spirit him back to England. This involved walking hundreds of kilometres across territory patrolled by German troops and the Gestapo, and risking betrayal by civilians and militia groups sympathetic to the Nazi regime.
In order to determine the bare minimum an airman needed to make a successful escape, Hutton met with MI9 technical officer Lieutenant Johnnie Evans, one of the few POWs to escape German captivity during the First World War. Evans revealed to Hutton that there were three things an escaping pilot needed: a map to find his way across the country, a compass, and – most importantly – food. Hunger, Evans explained, was an escapee’s worst enemy, as it made him take risks like as trying to steal or beg food from civilians, making him likelier to be captured. Hutton thus developed an emergency food pack housed in a small metal box like a cigarette case, which contained high-energy foods like chocolate powder and condensed milk, stimulant tablets, and a rubber water-bag. While better than nothing, pilots downed over the North Sea soon reported that the box was insufficiently waterproof and that seawater quickly leaked inside and ruined the food. Hutton thus designed a new ration pack in the form of a cylindrical clear-plastic bottle with a wide mouth and waterproof cap.
To provide pilots with a robust and easily-concealable map, Hutton hit upon the idea printing the image onto silk handkerchiefs, which required the development of special printing techniques to prevent the ink from smudging. Hutton also printed escape maps on Japanese mulberry paper, which could be soaked in water, rolled into a small, easily concealable ball, then unfolded and spread smooth without wrinkling. More ingenious still was a map printed on a set of playing cards, which had to be soaked in water, peeled apart, and taped together to reveal the whole design.
Completing Evans’ trio of essentials was a miniature compass hidden inside an airman’s tunic button. In a testament to Hutton’s attention to detail, the button compasses were manufactured with a left-hand thread, such that if a German tried to unscrew it the regular way, it would not open. Hutton also produced a variety of regular-looking objects which could be used as compasses, including magnetized pencil clips which could be balanced on a pencil-point, magnetized razor blades which could be floated on water or suspended from a string, and fountain pens with magnetized nibs and filling levers.
Such was Hutton’s genius that many of his creations solved problems few of his colleagues had ever considered. For example, while the heavy fleece-lined boots worn by airmen protected them from the freezing temperatures at high altitudes, on the ground they quickly became a liability, becoming hot and sweaty, inflicting blisters, and making the airman extremely conspicuous to passers-by. Hutton thus designed “escape boots” in which the upper and lower portions were connected by a thin strip of webbing. Using a folding knife stored in a special pocket, an airman could cut away the upper portion of the boot, leaving a pair of more comfortable and ordinary-looking civilian shoes. Another footwear-related innovation was the Gigli saw, a wire-like device used by surgeons for delicate bone-cutting operations. Hutton covered the saw in felt to disguise it as an ordinary shoelace, thus providing downed airmen with a handy means of cutting through bars, fences, and other obstacles.
Hutton’s department also produced equipment designed to be smuggled into Prisoner-of-War camps via care packages, sent by various fictitious charitable organizations set up by MI9. This included maps, foreign currency, and identity documents pressed into phonograph records and even Monopoly boards, specially prepared by the game’s British license-holder. But especially vital to a successful escape was convincing-looking civilian clothing or military uniforms, and in providing these Hutton came up with some of his most ingenious ideas. One provision of the Geneva Convention entitled prisoners to receive new uniforms as they became available, so Hutton created a new, fictitious pattern designed to resemble German uniforms as closely as possible. To allow the prisoners to recreate the distinctive gold and silver braid particular to German uniforms, the packages were wrapped in fine metal wire. Upon learning that POWs had become skilled at creating their own false Iron Crosses, Hutton began sending packages wrapped in the same red, white and red-striped ribbons used with the actual medals. Hutton even created blankets bearing sewing patterns for coats, trousers, and other items of clothing, printed in a special invisible ink that was only revealed once the blankets were washed. These could then be turned into suitable escape clothing by the camp tailor. And in a final stroke of genius, Hutton invented a fountain pen with a secret compartment containing ink packs which could be used to dye the cloth various colours.
Hutton’s escape devices were highly valued by Allied airmen, many of whom admitted they would not have gotten far without them. By the end of the war 35,000 Allied personnel managed to evade capture or break out from POW camps, with around 1,500 succeeding in making the “home run” back to England. But the efforts of the rest were not in vain, for guarding and hunting down escaping prisoners tied up massive amounts of German manpower and resources more urgently needed elsewhere, helping to hasten the end of the war.
As for Clutty Hutton, however, his creations would bring him nothing but trouble. After the war, Hutton attempted to recount his wartime exploits in a memoir titled “A Journey Has Been Arranged.” But while he was careful to include only those facts which had already been revealed in other public sources and would be of no strategic value in the Cold War, the British Government nonetheless blocked the book’s publication on the grounds that it violated the Official Secrets Act. What followed was a nearly decade-long legal struggle in which Hutton was subjected to a number of indignities, including the unauthorized publication of his book in heavily-redacted form under a different author. Adding insult to injury, the publisher redacted Hutton’s name in the text and added copious statements disparaging his work and judgement throughout the war. But Hutton prevailed in the end, and his memoir, now titled Official Secret, was finally published in 1960.
But while Hutton certainly fits the profile of James Bond’s “Q,” an even better match is Charles Fraser-Smith, who at one point even worked with Ian Fleming. Born in 1904 in Hertfordshire, Fraser-Smith worked a variety of odd jobs throughout his early adulthood, eventually ending up as a Christian missionary in Morocco. An inveterate tinkerer, in 1939 he gave a sermon at a church in Leeds about the art and virtues of scrounging, which happened to be attended by two officials from the Ministry of Supply. Soon after, Fraser-Smith was approached and offered a job in the Ministry’s Clothing and Textiles Department.
This was, of course, a cover story, with Fraser-Smith’s real job being to design equipment for the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. Created soon after the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, SOE’s mission was, in the words of Winston Churchill, to “set Europe ablaze” and take the fight to the Germans by carrying out espionage, sabotage, and subversion operations behind enemy lines. Among Fraser-Smith’s first assignments was to create forged Spanish Army uniforms for an SOE plan to infiltrate Spain and prevent the then-neutral country from entering the war on the Axis side. Demonstrating his talent for logistics, Fraser-Smith managed to contract some 300 firms around the country to produce the uniforms without any of them discovering just what they were producing or why. In the end, however, the planned operation was never carried out.
Fraser-Smith’s penchant for gadgetry soon led him to develop a variety of exotic devices for both SOE agents and downed Allied airmen. Independently of Clutty Hutton he invented the reverse-threaded button compass and the Gigli saw disguised as a shoelace, as well as a variety of ordinary objects such as pens, flasks, shaving-brushes, and pipes with hidden compartments for concealing camera film, secret messages, and escape maps. Even more James Bond-esque were a pen that fired a tear-gas cartridge and a miniature camera hidden in a cigarette lighter. Further making the case that he was the true inspiration for Q, Fraser-Smith called his creations “Q devices,” after the “Q” ships of WWI – civilian vessels with hidden guns used to ambush German U-boats.
At one point in 1943, Fraser-Smith was instructed to construct an aluminium canister large enough to contain a human body and a load of dry ice with which to keep it preserves. After the war this was revealed to be part of Operation Mincemeat, a plot to dump a body carrying secret documents off the coast of Spain to fool the Germans into thinking the Allies would invade Greece instead of Sicily. And for more on this, please see our video The Bizarre World War II Plan to Score a Major Victory for the Allies.
Closely fitting the mould of Q branch itself was Station IX in The Frythe, Hertfordshire, which produced various pieces of exotic weaponry and equipment for SOE. Station IX was also known as the Welwyn Experimental Laboratory, and thus many of its creations bore a “wel-” prefix. This included the Welrod, a 9mm silenced pistol; the Welman, a one-man submarine for attacking ships in harbour; the Welfreighter, another miniature submarine for sneaking agents and equipment into enemy territory; the Welbike, a folding motorcycle designed to be dropped by parachute; and the Welpen, Welpipe, and Welfag, single-shot .22-calibre pistols concealed in a pen, smoking-pipe, and cigarette, respectively. The station also produced a variety of other clandestine weapons such as the “footshooter” – which as the name suggests was a booby trap that shot its victim in the foot when stepped on – as well as a dizzying assortment of explosives, fuzes, and detonators for blowing up ships, railroad tracks, electrical substations, and nearly everything else under the sun. A more subtle sabotage weapon was “Caccolube,” a small rubber bag filled with abrasive carbide powder designed to be slipped into a vehicle’s oil tank. When the oil got hot enough the bag would dissolve, causing the engine to seize within 20 minutes. Slightly more overt was the “Firefly”, a small explosive charge designed to be dropped into the fuel tank; after a certain amount of time immersion in gasoline would cause a pair of rubber washers to swell, triggering the detonator and blowing up the vehicle.
However, for various reasons including supply chain issues, the changing strategic situation on the ground, and fear of German reprisals against civilians, the vast majority of these exotic gadgets never reached the field, with most sabotage operations being carried out using regular weapons and explosives. But the legacy of Station IX and the real ‘Q’s of SOE and MI9 lives on in the iconic spy gadgets of the James Bond movies and the many classic scenes of an exasperated Desmond Llewelyn exclaiming “oh, grow up, 007!”
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Bonus Facts:
On several occasions in the James Bond films, Q is referred to by his real name, Major Boothroyd. This, too, is based on a real person: Geoffrey Boothroyd, a British firearms expert who in May 1956 sent Ian Fleming a letter criticizing his super-spy’s choice of weaponry:
I have, by now, got rather fond of Mr. James Bond. I like most of the things about him, with the exception of his rather deplorable taste in firearms. In particular, I dislike a man who comes into contact with all sorts of formidable people using a .25 Beretta. This sort of gun is really a lady’s gun, and not a really nice lady at that. If Mr. Bond has to use a light gun he would be better off with a .22 rim fire; the lead billet would cause more shocking effect than the jacketed type of the .25.
May I suggest that Mr. Bond be armed with a revolver?
While enthusiastic about Boothroyd’s suggestions, Fleming preferred automatic pistols, so the two settled on a compromise: the .32 calibre Walther PPK, a gun which has become synonymous with James Bond. In recognition of this contribution, in his 1958 novel Dr. No, Fleming named the armorer who presents Bond with his new pistol after Boothroyd. While this was not intended to be the “Q” of Q branch, the two were merged for the film series, with the character being played by Peter Burton in the 1962 adaptation of Dr. No and by Desmond Llewelyn in 17 of the 18 official James Bond films produced between 1963 and 1999.
Expand for ReferencesDear, Ian, Escape and Evasion: POW Breakouts in World War II, Rigel Publications, 1997
Dear, Ian, Sabotage and Subversion: The SOE and OSS at War, Cassell Military Paperbacks, 1996
Charles Fraser-Smith, Croxley Green History Project, https://www.croxleygreenhistory.co.uk/charles-fraser-smith.html
Charles Fraser-Smith, The Legend of Q, https://www.thelegendofq.co.uk/charles-fraser-smith.html
The Secret War of Charles Fraser-Smith, Tangmere Military Aviation Museum, http://www.tangmere-museum.org.uk/artefact-month/the-secret-war-of-charles-fraser-smith
May I Suggest that Mr. Bond be Armed with a Revolver? Letters of Note, June 1, 2011, https://lettersofnote.com/2011/06/01/may-i-suggest-that-mr-bond-be-armed-with-a-revolver/
The post The Real Q from James Bond and the Ingenious Inventions appeared first on Today I Found Out.
It was a rainy afternoon in July 1974 when the Royal Canadian Army Cadets of D Company filed into a classroom at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier [“Val-cart-yay”], Quebec. The Cadets, all boys aged 13 to 18, were glad for the chance to sit down and relax, having just undergone a rigorous inspection of their barracks and hours of marching drill in the rain. They were about to receive a lecture on explosives safety, delivered by guest presenter Captain Jean-Claude Giroux [“Zhee-roo”]. To help with his lecture, Captain Giroux had brought along some visual aids: dummies of various explosive ordnance including land mines, rocket projectiles, and hand grenades. All were painted bright colours to indicate that they were inert and safe. But as the lecture began and the visual aids were passed around the room, Captain Giroux noticed something odd: among the brightly-coloured dummies was one item – an M-61 fragmentation hand grenade – painted olive green, just like a live munition. However, he thought little of it, for the dummies had been handled by dependable weapons technicians who would have ensured that everything was safe. But then, at 2:17 PM, an explosion ripped through the packed classroom, shattering the windows and splattering the walls with blood. When the smoke cleared six Cadets lay dead and 54 were wounded. The Valcartier Grenade incident of July 30, 1974 was the worst tragedy in the history of the Army Cadets, yet within days it would be all but forgotten, swept under the rug by a military establishment unprepared to deal with the psychological fallout. But while the Army and the nation quickly moved on, for the survivors the aftereffects of that terrible day would linger for far longer.
Formed in 1861, the Royal Canadian Army Cadets are Canada’s oldest youth organization. Funded and administered by the Canadian Department of National Defense, the Cadets serve much the same function as the Boy Scouts, teaching practical skills in leadership, teamwork, and self-reliance but in a more overtly military setting, with greater emphasis on command, drill, cleanliness, uniform maintenance, weapons training, and other aspects of military life. However, the organization is not directly affiliated with the armed forces, and participation carries no obligation of later military service. Every year, 250 Cadets are selected every year to undergo advanced Non-Commissioned Officer or NCO training as part of the Cadet Leader Program. This program is intended to train and prepare the cadets to return to their home units as the next generation of leaders. For those posted to Valcartier in the 1970s, activities included leadership courses, drill, athletics, canoeing, orienteering, survival bushcraft, cultural excursions to Quebec City, and weapons safety and handling. Though the Cadets would not be handling any weapons heavier than a regular service rifle, given that they were training on an active army base it was reasonably assumed they might at some point come across unexploded ordnance. Consequently, in the summer of 1974 Captain Jean-Claude Giroux, commanding officer of the Ammunition Section at CFB Valcartier, organized a series of safety lectures to make sure the Cadets could identify the most common types of explosive weapons and knew what to do should they find one – namely, not touch it and report it to a superior officer.
The lectures took place throughout the month of July, with the final lecture for D Company scheduled for the afternoon of July 30. Cadet-Officer Gerry Fostaty, 18 at the time, was in an adjacent room typing up a report when the explosion occurred. He later described the scene in his 2011 memoir As You Were:
“The noise sounded like a thunderclap without the rolling echo afterward, almost as if we were at the centre of it. The sound took me by surprise and shook the whole building – no, the whole company – with a shock wave. I could hear glass shatter as a window blew out, and there was a moment when everything went silent. Then, as if on cue, there were cries, and people began screaming and streaming out of the barrack through the side door – at least one person went through a window.
…Lieutenant Katzko [was] in the hallway, bent over clutching at his stomach as though he was hugging himself. He was moving slowly with uneven, wavering steps, and a few people bumped him as they passed on either side of us. Their hands, faces and clothing were spattered with blood. Some had torn clothing and their eyes were filled with terror.
I leapt up the three steps into the room and looked around, getting my eyes adjusted to the dim light and the smoke. I was completely unprepared for what I saw. Through the dense, acrid smoke, I could make out a large black burn hole in the floor, and people laying all around. Some were moving, others were not…blood was spattered and smeared on the walls…one cadet stared at me as I moved toward him. I could see through the rip in his pants that he had a leg injury, but I didn’t think it would keep him from walking with assistance. As I bent over to help him up, I saw the cadet just behind him, about a metre away. I felt my stomach jump. His face was gone. There was no way I could have said who he was, because the front of his head was a mass of red pulp.”
The next hour flew past in a chaotic blur as Fostaty and others on the scene – mostly fellow cadets – scrambled to evacuate the building and administer first aid. It being only four years since the October Crisis of 1970, many feared that the explosion had been due to a terrorist attack. As ambulances rushed away the dead and severely wounded, those with only minor injuries were loaded onto trucks and driven to the base movie theatre, where they watched a swords-and-sandals epic while medics tended to their wounds. As D Company headquarters would have to be sealed off for investigation, the survivors were temporarily lodged in the base chapel, where they spent a long, uneasy night. Meanwhile, Fostaty and other Officer Cadets were taken to the base hospital to carry out the identification of the dead. In all, six Cadets were killed in the explosion, all 14 or 15 years old: Yves Langlois [“Eve Long-wah”] 15; Pierre Leroux [“Leh-roo”] Eric Lloyd, Othon Mangos, Mario Provencher [“Pro-vaunch-ay”], and Michel Voisard [“Vwah-sar”]. 54 others were wounded, with injuries ranging from minor cuts to hearing and vision loss to paralysis and brain damage.
Yet despite the shocking and tragic nature of the accident, it made barely a ripple in the press. One of the few papers to report the tragedy was the Quebec tabloid Le Journal de Montreal, whose headline described it as the “Massacre at Valcartier.” A few other papers would pick up the story, but only as brief articles buried in the back pages, many with wildly varying numbers for the dead and wounded. This suited the Army just fine, for it was ill-equipped to deal with such a tragedy – especially one involving so many children. So rather than confronting the incident, the Army chose instead to forget it. While a brief memorial service for the dead was held a week later, otherwise training and activities carried on as before. The Cadets were never debriefed on the accident, nor were they provided with counselling or mental health services. In fact, all the Cadets – even those who had been present at the blast – were instructed not to discuss the incident with anyone. And in this more innocent age, they all obeyed. Such was the desire to move on that D Company even had its group photograph re-taken with the dead and wounded absent – as if they had never existed.
Meanwhile, the Army began its investigation into the cause of the explosion. While forensics teams scrutinized the blast site, dozens of witnesses were brought in and interrogated. In move described by many witnesses as strangely sinister, these interrogations were carried out deep in the bowels of Valcartier’s government fallout shelter or “Diefenbunker” – and for more on those, please check out our previous video “That Time Toilets Gave Away a Big Cold War Secret.” In reality, the air-conditioned bunker was chosen to provide both investigators and witnesses relief from the summer heat.
Slowly the investigators pieced together the convoluted chain of events that lead to a live grenade making its way into the classroom.. Nearly a month before the accident, Captain Giroux was asked to deliver a lecture on explosives safety to the Cadets. Giroux duly appointed a subordinate, Warrant Officer Gaetan Campeau [“Gay-tah Camp-oh”], to gather the needed visual aids and deliver the lecture. On the morning of July 15, 1974, Campeau made the rounds of the base, gathering up various pieces of dummy ordnance. Campeau placed these items in the back of a truck and drove to the headquarters of F company, where he proceeded to deliver his first lecture early that afternoon. He then stored the dummies overnight at the base ammunition depot before retrieving them and delivering a lecture to A company the next morning. After this second lecture, Campeau returned the truck to the depot and asked an employee there, Gerard Drolet [“Droh-lay”], to empty the truck and put the dummies back in storage. For reasons that have never been determined, this request was never fulfilled, and the dummies remained in the parked truck for another two days.
On July 18, Corporal Claude Daoust [“Dah-oo”] of the Combat Arms School was sent to the ammunition depot to pick up a batch of 160 M61 hand grenades for use in grenade-throwing practice. Commonly known as the “lemon grenade”, the M61 was introduced in the 1950s to replace the classic M2 “pineapple” grenade of WWII vintage. It featured a number of improvements over the older M2, including a fuze that didn’t spark or smoke, a more stable 164-gram Composition B explosive filling, and an internal coil of notched wire that produced more consistent and lethal fragments than the M2’s ridged body. A highly effective anti-personnel weapon, the M61 could kill and wound soldiers up to 15 metres away.
The grenades were waiting for Corporal Daoust when he arrived, 150 packed in wooden crates of 30 grenades each and the remaining 10 in a cardboard box. Corporal Daoust signed out the weapons and transported them to the Combat Arms School, where he handed them off to the weapons instructor, Sergeant Albert Doucet [“Doo-say”]. During training that morning all but 19 of the grenades were used. All 160 should have been expended, but one grenade failed to explode and had to be safely detonated by an ordnance disposal team. By the time this was completed, no time remained to finish the training session. Sergent Doucet duly packed up the remaining 19 grenades in a wooden box and drove them to the Ammunition Depot, where he met up with Corporal Daoust. As it was nearly noon, Doucet instructed Daoust to place the box of grenades in the back of a nearby truck, intending to deal with them after lunch. Unknown to Doucet and Daoust, this was the exact same truck Warrant Officer Campeau had used two days prior, the dummy ordnance still scattered about the truck bed. For unknown reasons, Drolet proceeded to forget about the grenades until 4 o’clock that afternoon, when Warrant Officer Campeau overheard him mention the crate and ordering him to remove it from the truck. Quickly inspecting the back of the truck, Drolet discovered, to his surprise, that the live grenades had somehow been transferred from their original wooden crate to a cardboard box. As Drolet began carrying this box back to the depot, Campeau arrived and quickly inspected the back of the truck, where he found a single live grenade which had fallen out of the box and lay among the dummies. Campeau performed a more thorough search of the truck but turned up nothing, and after returning the missing grenade to the box asked Drolet if all the grenades were accounted for. Drolet confirmed that they were. But he was mistaken, for another live grenade had fallen out and now lay among the dummies scattered in the back of the truck. Unaware of the discrepancy, Drolet took the box inside only to discover he had forgotten his keys to the storage room. Instead, he locked the box in a cleaning closet inside the guardhouse, where they would be forgotten until several days after the explosion.
The next day, Campeau asked two ammunition depot employees to remove the dummies from the truck because he wanted to use the vehicle the next day. The employees duly gathered up all the dummies – and the one live grenade – and placed them in a cardboard box. That they did not double-check all the items was attributed to the fact that it was raining heavily at the time. They placed the box in one of the depot buildings, where it would remain until July 23. On that day, with Warrant Officer Campeau on vacation, Captain Giroux delivered the safety lecture to C company himself. During the lecture, his assistant, Corporal Jacques Cadieux, noticed an unusual item circulating amongst the Cadets: an olive-green grenade, still in its green fibreboard storage tube. Corporal Cadieux quickly snatched the grenade away from the Cadet who was holding it and returned it to the cardboard box. However, he took no further action, later testifying that while the unusual colour of the grenade had caught his attention, he had taken it from the Cadet because he believed there was already enough dummy ordnance circulating amongst the class.
The next lecture, for D Company, was scheduled for the afternoon of July 30. While all the previous lectures had been conducted outside, due to rain it was instead moved indoors to the D Company barracks. 137 Cadets filed into the room, and at 1:30 PM the lecture began. Captain Giroux began by giving a general overview of the capabilities and inherent dangers of explosives, while his assistant, an ammunition technician, pulled the dummy explosives out of the box and passed them around to the Cadets. Once again, the unusual presence of a green-coloured grenade was noted, but as the items had all ostensibly been handled and inspected by Captain Giroux, the ammo tech assured the Cadets that they were all inert dummies. As the green grenade made its way around the room, several Cadets pulled out the safety pin, only to discover that it was extremely difficult to put back in. This occurred many times before the grenade reached 14-year-old Eric Lloyd, who also proceeded to pull out the pin. This time, however, he also released the spoon, the curved handle that serves as the last safety feature preventing the grenade from arming. Around four seconds later, the grenade detonated in his hands, killing him and neighbour Othon Mangos instantly. The four others would die of their wounds within the hour.
The whole sequence of events was a tragic comedy of errors, filled with dozens of minor errors, oversights, and coincidences – any of which, if avoided, could have single-handedly prevented the tragedy. The Army investigation and the subsequent civilian Coroner’s inquest blamed the incident on Captain Giroux and his subordinates, the Coroner’s report stating:
“Giroux, 30, neglected his duties as instructor by not checking of dummy grenades to ascertain there were no live grenades among them…I [also] do not hesitate to blame the high authorities of the base for their apathy and disinterest which seemed to have lead to a climate of negligence and thoughtlessness.”
Two months later, Giroux was formally charged with criminal negligence and brought before a civil court, only to be judged not guilty in June of 1977. No other formal charges were ever laid regarding the incident. One key piece of the puzzle which was never solved was how the live grenades ended up being moved from their original wooden crate to the cardboard box, allowing two of them to fall out into the bed of the truck. Investigators could only speculate that someone on the base had need of a wooden box, and had appropriated the grenade crate for this purpose.
But whoever or whatever was responsible, the damage was done – both physical and psychological. As the summer came to a close, the Cadets dispersed to their home units across Canada, carrying their unaddressed trauma with them. In As You Were, Gerry Fostaty describes the feeling of alienation many of them felt:
“I held out the childish hope that, eventually, someone would rescue me from that day. I waited for the longest time, but rescue never came. I think the administrative officers at the base were expecting, or hoping, that someone else would take care of it, while the officers at our home units wouldn’t understand what we had gone through. Our families didn’t know either, mistakingly thinking that what had happened, had happened near us not to us. We dispersed throughout the province soon afterward, and we had been conditioned to accept that what had happened was not important, so we believed our residual feelings were abnormal and no one talked about it.”
For more than 4 decades this trauma, suppressed by a Cold War ethos of secrecy and denial, would haunt the Cadets of D Company. It was not until 2017 that Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan formally apologized for the incident and agreed to award up to $310,000 in compensation to each of the survivors and their families for pain, suffering, and medical expenses.
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Expand for ReferencesFostaty, Gerry, As You Were: the Tragedy at Valcartier, Goose Lane Editions, Frederickton, New Brunswick, 2011
An Investigation Into the 1974 Valcartier Cadets Grenade Incident, Government of Canada, http://www.ombudsman.forces.gc.ca/en/ombudsman-reports-stats-investigations-valcartier/valcartier-report.page#testimonies
Fontaine, Hugo, La Grenade Verte, Les Éditions La Presse, Montreal, 2011
Government Settles With Cadets in Deadly 1974 Grenade Blast in Valcartier, CBC News, March 9, 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/valcartier-grenade-cadets-1.4017327
Morello, Vicenzo, Survivors of Valcartier Grenade Incident Still Struggling to Heal 45 Years Later, CBC News, August 3, 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/valcartier-grenade-incident-survivors-1.5235226
The post Intentionally Swept Under the Rug- The Forgotten and Extremely Tragic Valcartier Grenade Incident appeared first on Today I Found Out.
It can be found in the toolbox of every craftsman and mechanic, and in the pocket of every hiker, camper, and adventurer. It has appeared in countless books, movies, and television shows; travelled across scorching deserts, frozen tundra, and steaming jungles; plunged to the bottom of the ocean; and even rocketed into outer space. It is the Swiss Army Knife, a tool so iconic that its very name has become a byword for utility in any situation. But while these endlessly useful pocket knives have been wielded by nearly everyone from NASA astronauts to TV’s Angus MacGyver, have they ever been issued by the real Swiss Army? While it is tempting to assume that the name is just a clever marketing ploy, the Swiss Army does in fact use Swiss Army Knives, and the story of how these ubiquitous tools came to be is as fascinating as the endless uses to which they can be put.
The story of the Swiss Army Knife begins in 1889, when two technological developments led the Swiss Armed Forces to developed a specialized standard-issue pocket knife for its soldiers. The first was the adoption off the 1889 Schmidt-Rubin infantry rifle, which required a screwdriver to disassemble and clean; while the second was the increased use of tinned food for soldiers’ rations. In 1891 the Swiss Military standardized what became known as the Model 1890 Soldier’s Knife. A far humbler design than its modern descendants, the Model 1890 featured only four tools: a 100mm spear-point knife, a reamer, a flat-blade screwdriver, and a can opener. It also lacked the iconic red plastic grips, its panels instead being made of dark oak.
At the time, no Swiss manufacturer had the production capacity to meet the Army’s needs, so the Swiss Government placed an initial order of 15,000 knives with the German firm Wester & Company, which was completed in October 1891. However, Swiss surgical equipment manufacturer Karl Elsener was not pleased with this arrangement, and in 1891 his firm, based in the town of Ibach, began manufacturing the Model 1890 in the hopes of stealing the government contract back from the Germans. Unable to compete with Wester’s more cost-effective manufacturing process, Elsener produced the knives at a loss, and despite introducing various civilian pocket knife models such as the Student, the Cadet, and the Farmer, by 1896 his company was nearly bankrupt. It was then that Elsener made a breakthrough. While the Model 1890 was practical for the average soldier, it was also clunky and heavy, so in 1897 Elsener patented a more elegant version for officers, adding a small “eraser” blade for scraping ink off paperwork and a corkscrew to assist with officers’ busy social lives.
Further, perhaps the biggest breakthrough came when he figured out a way to put blades on both sides of the handle using a shared spring to hold both sides in place. This allowed him to put twice as many features into the multi-tool as was previously possible in this case allowing six tools locked by only two communal springs – a system that would become standard in all subsequent Swiss Army Knives. While never officially adopted by the army, the knife, marketed as the Schweizer Offiziers und Sportmesser – or Swiss Officers’ and Sports Knife – proved extremely popular among Army officers as a private-purchase item, and almost single-handedly saved Karl Elsener & Company from financial ruin.
In 1893, another firm, Boéchat & Company – later renamed Wenger SA – also began manufacturing the Model 1890 for the Swiss Military. In 1908, the Swiss Government withdrew its contract from Wester & Company and awarded it to Elsener and Wenger, the two companies splitting manufacturing duties 50-50. The following year, Elsener introduced its now-iconic logo based on the Swiss coat of arms and its distinctive red grips, the colour being chosen to make the knives easier to spot if dropped in the snow. Wenger soon followed suit with a similar rebranding, the two companies’s products being easily distinguished by the fact that in the Elsener logo the Swiss Cross is surrounded by a shield, while in the Wenger logo it is enclosed in a round-cornered square. Also in 1909, Elsener renamed his company “Victoria” in honour of his recently-deceased mother; in 1921 this would be further changed to “Victorinox” after“acier inoxidable,” the French word for stainless steel. The companies’ knives, however, would not acquire their famous name until the end of WWII in 1945, when American soldiers posted in Europe began encountering Model 1890 and 1908 Officers’ Knives in their post exchange or PX stores. Unable to pronounce the original German name, the soldiers simply called them “Swiss Army Knives.” The name stuck, and ever since both Victorinox and Wenger have marketed their products as “Original Swiss Army Knives.”
Over the decades, both companies have produced hundreds of models of knives and multitools for both military and civilian use, featuring an ever-expanding roster of tools and features including screwdrivers, wrenches, saws, fish hook removers, magnifying glasses, ballpoint pens, golf divot removers, tire tread gauges, butane lighters, clocks, altimeters, laser pointers, USB drives, and of course, knives. The largest practical Swiss Army Knife currently offered is the Victorinox Swisschamp, which features eight layers of tools performing 33 different functions. But even this is dwarfed by the Wenger 16999 Giant, a gargantuan promotional multitool measuring nearly a foot wide and featuring a whopping 87 tools and 181 functions – every single one the company offers. These are deep breath:
- 5-inch 60% serrated locking blade
- Nail file
- Nail cleaner
- Corkscrew
- Adjustable pliers with wire crimper and cutter
- Removable screwdriver bit adapter
- 5-inch regular blade
- Locking needle-nose pliers with wire cutter
- Removable screwdiver bit holder
- Magnetized recessed bit holder
- Double-cut wood saw with ruler
- Chain rivet setter
- Removable 5mm
- Allen wrench
- Screwdriver for slotted and Phillips head screws
- Removable tool for adjusting spokes
- 10mm Hexagonal key for nuts
- Removable 4mm curved allen wrench with Phillips head screwdriver
- Locking screwdriver
- Universal wrench
- 4-inch springless scissors
- 65-inch clip point utility blade
- Phillips head screwdriver
- 5-inch clip-point blade
- Club face cleaner
- 4-inch round tip blade
- Patented locking screwdriver
- Cap lifter
- Can opener
- Shoe spike wrench
- Divot repair tool
- 4mm Allen wrench
- 5-inch blade
- Fine metal file with precision screwdriver
- Double-cut wood saw with ruler
- Cupped cigar cutter with double honed edges
- 12/20-gauge choke tube tool
- Watch case back opening tool
- Snap shackle
- Mineral crystal magnifier
- Compass
- Straight edge, ruler (in./cm)
- Telescopic pointer
- Fish scaler
- Hook dis-gorger
- Line guide
- Shortix laboratory key
- Micro tool holder
- Micro tool adapter
- Straight micro scraper
- Curved micro scraper
- Laser pointer
- Metal file
- Metal saw
- Flashlight
- Micro tool holder
- 5mm Phillips head screwdriver
- 2mm Phillips head screwdriver
- 8mm Phillips head screwdriver
- Fine fork for watch spring bars
- Reamer
- 3mm pin punch
- 8mm pin pinch
- Round needle file
- Removable tool holder
- Self-centering screwdriver for gunsights
- Flat Phillips head screwdriver
- Chisel-point reamer
- Mineral crystal magnifier
- Small ruler
- Extension tool
- Locking flat nose needle-nose pliers
- Removable screwdriver bit holder
- Magnetized recessed bit holder
- Tire tread gauge
- Fiber optic tool holder
- Can opener
- Patented locking screwdriver
- Cap lifter
- Wire stripper
- Reamer
- Awl
- Toothpick
- Tweezers
- Key ring
Not all proposed tools have proven successful, however. At one point Victorinox experimented with a knife incorporating a pencil sharpener, which was rejected as it produced an ugly bulge at the end of the blade. Also unsuccessful was a special knife for cutting cheese into precise, consistent slices, which, incredibly, failed to find a market even in Switzerland.
On the more practical end of things, since the debut of the Model 1890 the Swiss Military has officially adopted four standard-issue Soldiers’ Knives. In 1908 the Model 1890 was replaced with a slightly modified version featuring a clip point blade in place of the original spear point blade. This in turn was replaced by the Model 1951, which for the first time featured stainless steel blades as well as a scraper on one edge of the screwdriver. The first all-new standard issue knife was the model of 1961, which replaced the oak grip panels with more rugged knurled aluminium stamped with the Swiss coat of arms. In addition to the regular blade, this knife featured a reamer; combination bottle opener, flat-head screwdriver, and wire stripper; combination can opener and screwdriver; and a small brass spacer for holding open the mechanism of the SIG 510 combat rifle during disassembly and cleaning. The knife could also be suspended from a length of string to form a makeshift plumb-bob which, combined with a curved scale on the SIG 510’s bipod, could be used to gauge the angle of the weapon when launching rifle grenades.
The most recent knife in the Swiss arsenal is the Model 2008. A radical departure from previous Swiss Army Knives, the Model 2008 replaces the traditional elliptical wood, plastic, or metal grip with a more
ergonomically-shaped green polymer frame and features a serrated, one-handed opening blade; a wood saw; a combination bottle opener, screwdriver, and wire-bender; a combination can opener and flat-head screwdriver; a reamer; and a Phillips screwdriver.
Going back to the original question, since 1961, Victorinox and Wenger have been the sole official suppliers of pocket knives to the Swiss Armed Forces, and have also produced standard-issue knives for the militaries of many other nations, including Germany, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Malaysia, and the United States. However, the vast majority of Swiss Army Knives are sold on the civilian market, with Victorinox alone producing some 34,000 knives per year, generating annual sales of nearly $500 million. The distinctive red knives have become a cultural icon of Switzerland, gaining an enthusiastic following among a wide range of users from hikers, fishermen, and Scouts to golfers, auto mechanics, and even astronauts, with NASA officially adopting the Master Craftsman model in 1978 for use aboard the Space Shuttle. A Victorinox SwissChamp is even on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as an example of classic industrial design. Swiss Army Knives have appeared everywhere in pop culture, most famously as the tool of choice for problem-solving ‘80s television hero Angus MacGyver. Indeed, the term “Swiss Army Knife” has become such a byword for practical utility that the title of 2016’s Swiss Army Man – a film about Paul Dano using Daniel Radcliffe’s rotting, farting corpse as a multi-tool to escape a desert island (no, really) – was instantly understandable to general audiences.
But after nearly a century of success, in 2001 Victorinox and Wenger nearly faced disaster when the September 11 attacks caused their products to be pulled from airport duty-free shops and in-flight catalogs worldwide. This eliminated two enormous sales channels virtually overnight, causing Victorinox and Wenger to lose nearly one-third of their revenue. In response, the companies chose to diversify, releasing a line of Swiss Army-branded water bottles, backpacks and other products. Victorinox also focused on winning the Swiss Army’s contract for a replacement for the Model 1961 knife, which despite a half-century of exclusivity had been put up for public bidding. Despite fears that they would be underbid by a Chinese manufacturer, Victorinox eventually won the contract and became the sole supplier of the Model 2008 Soldier Knife to the Swiss Military. Wenger was not so lucky, and in 2005 the firm went bankrupt and was acquired by Victorinox. Victorinox continued to market knives under both the Victorinox and Wenger brands until 2013, when they decided to abandon the Wenger brand and sell all its knives under the Victorinox banner. Wenger’s line of wristwatches and licensed products were in turn rebranded under the name SwissGear. Further trouble came in 2018 when the Swiss Federal Office For Defence Procurement or ArmaSuisse challenged Victorinox’s right to use the terms “Swiss Army” and “Swiss Military” in its marketing. After lengthy negotiations, Victorinox agreed to relinquish its claim to the words “Swiss Military” in exchange for retaining its iconic “Swiss Army” trademark.
Despite these dramatic shifts in fortune, more than a century after its founding Victorinox continues to manufacture a wide range of Swiss Army Knives to the same exacting standards. Timeless classics of practical design and utility, it is likely the trusty red knives will continue to be found in backpacks, back pockets, and tool boxes around the globe for decades to come.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- Swiss Army Knife Facts
- Hollow Mountains and Exploding Bridges, How Switzerland Remained Neutral With WWI and WWII Raging Around It
- Swiss Army Knives were Renamed Such in English as U.S. Soldiers in WWII Found the Original Name “Schweizer Offiziersmesser” Difficult to Pronounce
- The History of Spoons, Forks, and Knives
Expand for ReferencesVictorinox Swiss Army Knives Info, https://www.pizzini.at/info_sak_engl.htm
Foulkes, Imogen, From Humble Tool to Global Icon, BBC News, July 30, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8172917.stm
Press Release: Victorinox Joins Forces and Integrates Wenger Knife Business, Victorinox, January 30, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20131112024548/http://www.wengerna.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/6/0a82f37ec9ef875e15b019e83ff52ead/pdf/vx_wenger_mediainformation_e_130130.pdf
Victorinox and Swiss Government Reach Deal on Use of ‘Swiss Military,’ Swiss Info, October 19, 2018, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/trademark-dispute_victorinox-in-court-over-exclusive-use-of–swiss-military–in-the-us/44484428
Subramanian, Samanth, The Swiss Army Knife Returns to the Battlefield, Live Mint, February 16, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20100218091900/http://www.livemint.com/2010/02/16210058/The-Swiss-Army-Knife-returns-t.html
Victorinox Wins Contract for New Army Knife, Swiss Info, September 8, 2008, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/victorinox-wins-contract-for-new-army-knife/993870
Victorinox AG History, Funding Universe, http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/victorinox-ag-history/
SOSAKOnline FAQ’s, March 27, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20110716105747/http://www.sosakonline.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=93
Wenger 16999 Swiss Army Knife Giant, Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001DZTJRQ/ref=ask_ql_qh_dp_hza
The post Does the Swiss Army Actually Use Swiss Army Knives? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and it will immediately jump out. But put that same frog in a pot of cold water and raise the temperature gradually enough, and it will be boiled alive. This evocative story has long served as a useful metaphor for complacency in the face of gradual change, being used in discussions of phenomena as diverse as climate change, abusive relationships, and encroaching government surveillance. And while the original experiment that established the principle is rarely mentioned, the science behind it is commonly accepted as fact. But…is it? Has anyone actually boiled a frog alive – and if so, did the frog really not try to escape?
To begin with, the origins of the boiled-frog fable lay in the work of 19th Century German physiologist Friedrich Goltz, who in the 1870s set out to determine whether animals have a soul – and, if so, where in the body it is located. Goltz was particularly interested in fellow physiologist Eduard Pflüger’s concept of the “spinal cord soul,” a second seat of consciousness thought to exist separately from the brain. To this end, in 1872 Goltz placed frogs in cold water and slowly raised the temperature. According to contemporary British philosopher George Lewes, death occurred at around 40 degrees, while:
“…quietly the animal [sat] through all successions of temperature, never once manifesting uneasiness or pain, never once attempting to escape the impending death.”
This remarkable result was duplicated by German scientists Albert Heinzmann in 1872 and Carl Fratcher in 1875. So, case closed then? Well, not quite, for this account leaves out one critical fact: that all the frogs in question had been pithed.
Pithing is a laboratory technique which involves destroying a frog or other lab animal’s cerebrum, usually performed by inserting a needle into the back of the skull and sweeping it side-to-side. This destroys the animal’s higher brain functions while leaving the brainstem intact, meaning that while the animal is no longer conscious all its involuntary functions such as heartbeat and breathing carry on, allowing the function of these organs to be studied during dissection. Goltz pithed his frogs to determine whether the supposed “spinal cord soul” could produce the same conscious response as the brain. As it could not, he deduced that the soul resided entirely within the brain. In reality, without the brain a frog’s nervous system is only capable of simple reflex, which a gradual enough increase in temperature does not trigger. However, when Goltz tried the same experiment with an intact frog:
“Goltz observed that a frog, when placed in water the temperature of which is slowly raised towards boiling, manifests uneasiness as soon as the temperature reaches 25° C., and becomes more and more agitated as the heat increases, vainly struggling to get out, and finally at 42° C., dies in a state of rigid tetanus.”
While this would seem to indicate that the myth holds true only under extremely specific conditions, other scientists including Heinzmann, Fratscher, and Englishman William Sedgewick also observed this phenomenon in normal, unpithed frogs. In Sedgewick’s 1888 paper On the Variation of Reflex Excitability in the Frog Induced by Changes of Temperature, this apparent contradiction is explained by the fact that a frog’s thermal response is highly dependent upon the specific heating rate. According to Sedgewick, Goltz heated the water from 17.5 degrees Celsius to 56 degrees over the span of 10 minutes – a rate of around 3.8 degrees per minute – while Heinzmann raised the temperature from 21 to 31.7 degrees over 90 minutes – a rate of only 0.2 degrees per minute. Thus, according to Sedgewick:
“The truth appears to be that if the heating is sufficiently gradual, no reflex movements will be produced even in the normal frog; if it be more rapid, yet take place at such a rate as to be fairly called ‘gradual’, it will not secure the response of the normal frog under any circumstances.”
Aside from the lethal temperature for most frogs being 40 degrees Celsius – nowhere near “boiling alive” – the myth of the boiling frog would thus appear to be confirmed. However, most modern biologists dispute the reality of the phenomenon, citing both the scarcity of credible experiments and the everyday observable behaviour of frogs. Indeed, William Sedgewick himself admitted that many contemporary scientists, including M. Foster and J. Tarchanow, observed that frogs still tried to escape from 25-degree water no matter how slowly it was heated. More recently, scientists like University of Oklahoma Zoology Professor Dr. Victor Hutchison and Dr. George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History, have openly refuted the notion, Zug stating that regardless of the heating rate, once an uncomfortable temperature is reached:
“…if a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out.”
Scientists even refute the seemingly logical first premise of the myth – that a frog dropped in boiling water will jump out – with Harvard Biology Professor Douglas Melton stating:
“If you put a frog in boiling water, it won’t jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot—they don’t sit still for you.”
According to Melton, when exposed to extremely high temperatures, a frog’s muscles tend to immediately seize up. Thus paralyzed and unable to escape, death follows soon after.
Of course, none of these contemporary scientists have attempted to replicate the experiments of Goltz, Sedgewick, and others, for the simple reason that the boiling of frogs alive is rather frowned upon these days, despite mass killing of frogs for dissection of students being the gold standard of high schools the world over. Nevertheless, the general consensus is that, from more ethically-observable frog behaviour and experiments that do exist, it would seem to be the case that that the whole slow boiling frog thing so often touted as a thing is pure bunkum.
Bonus Fact:
Speaking of frogs in liquid, for centuries, before refrigeration, an old Russian practice was to drop a frog into a bucket of milk. Why? As Dr. Albert Lebedev of Moscow State University notes: “[For] small portions of milk to drink, they used to put [a] frog inside… A small frog over there could prevent the milk from being spoiled.”
But does this actually work?
Well, kind of ya.
As to why, in 2010, scientists from United Arab Emirates University made an announcement that the secretions from certain frogs’ skins have antibacterial and antifungal properties. Using species native to African countries, they studied the compounds coming from the frogs, which are known as antimicrobial peptides and are a string of amino acids.
After isolating these compounds, they began testing them against various bacterial infections. For example, the dreaded “Iraqibacter,” a drug-resistant bacterial infection that has been known to hit wounded soldiers in Iraq could potentially be fought with a compound found in the skin of a mink frog that are native to North America. Secretions from a foothill four-legged frog may have the potential to fight the well-known resistant MRSA staph skin infection.
In 2012, scientists from Moscow State University decided to take this a step further by breaking down the compounds and studying the individual peptides. In a study entitled “Composition and Antimicrobial Activity of Skin Peptidome of Russian Brown Frogs” published in the Journal of Proteome Research in November 2012, and using Russian brown frogs (which are edible and considered a delicacy), they extracted secretions by applying electrodes.
What came out was a cocktail of 76 different peptides that all had different properties. Michael Zasloff, now a professor at Georgetown University, but formerly a researcher with the National Institutes of Health said in an interview that, “What is amazing is that no two frogs have the same cocktail. They’re all different, and all beautifully tuned to deal with the microbes that these animals face.”
While this all may or may not ultimately be medicinally helpful for humans, beginning centuries ago certain Russians seem to have been on to something with putting frogs in milk to delay it spoiling. Although, I think we can all agree that putting a frog in one’s milk takes a back seat to the other age-old way to store milk without refrigeration- making it into delicious cheese.
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Expand for ReferencesFrog Syndrome – Metaphor, Ocean Plastic Cleanup, http://www.oceansplasticleanup.com/Politics_Plastics_Oceans_Cleanup/Frog_Boiling_Water_Syndrome_Experiment_Jump_In_out_Metaphor.htm
Boiling Frog, http://www.relevancetoday.com/pdf/Boiling%20frog.pdf
A Treatise About Frogs: On the Boiling, Swallowing, Eating, and Metaphorizing of Such, Clearing Customs, https://clearingcustoms.net/2019/01/19/a-treatise-about-frogs-on-the-boiling-swallowing-eating-and-metaphorizing-of-such/
Goltz, Friedrich Leopold, encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/goltz-friedrich-leopold
The Boiling Frog Tale is Not a Myth, INTP Things, November 16, 2017, https://asianintp.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/the-boiling-frog-tale-is-not-a-myth/
The post Will a Frog Actually Allow Itself to be Boiled Alive if You Raise the Temperature Slowly? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In today’s world of high-tech medicine, it is easy to take for granted the ease, regularity, and relative safety with which modern surgery is performed. For most of human history surgery was a bloody, painful, and dangerous affair. Without the benefit of antiseptic techniques or anaesthesia, surgeons had to work fast, racing against the clock to amputate a limb or excise a tumour before their patient bled out on the operating table. And even if a patient survived the procedure this was no guarantee of success, with the vast majority succumbing within days to infection or other postoperative complications. But with advances in medical science surgery became progressively safer and more effective, and today procedures that would have seemed unthinkable just a few decades before – like heart transplants and major brain surgeries – are performed by the thousands every year. But as with most scientific advances, this revolution in surgery came with its fair share of quackery and abuses, and in the early 20th Century the medical profession was swept by a bizarre and disturbing fad as surgeons, drunk on their newfound operating abilities, began relieving patients of all manner of perfectly healthy organs – from teeth to tonsils to their entire colons – in a fanatical quest to rid humanity of disease once and for all.
This fad for preventatively excising healthy organs had its origins in one of humanity’s oldest medical obsessions: constipation. In 1914, Russian biologist Ilya Metchnikoff, winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering work in immunology, developed a theory of chronic disease which he dubbed “auto-intoxication.” According to Metchnikoff, the colon – the 4.5-foot length of large intestine connecting the small intestine to the rectum – was little more than a festering cesspool where bodily wastes accumulated, stagnated, and putrefied. Based on the observation that injecting faeces into rats and mice inevitably resulted in death, Metchnikoff concluded that the same process was taking place in the colon, and that the longer waste stagnated and putrefied in the gut, the more toxins leached through the intestinal wall into the body. Metchnikoff attributed a whole host of chronic ailments to these toxins, including ulcers, bladder cancer, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, and even psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. He further theorized that old waste adhered to the intestinal wall and hardened, preventing the absorption of vital nutrients. In short, almost every disease under the sun could in some way be linked to chronic constipation.
While Metchnikoff was among the first to frame this theory in modern scientific terms, the idea that waste piling up in the intestines is the root of chronic disease is actually a very old one, first appearing in the Sushruta Samhita, an ancient Sanskrit medical text written around 1000 B.C.E. In addition to listing the various afflictions allegedly caused by chronic constipation, the text also prescribes a variety of purgatives and cleansing enemas for treating the underlying condition. The use of purgatives and enemas to treat disease gained further popularity in ancient Greece with the development of the Four Humours theory of medicine, which held that the human body was governed by four fundamental fluids or “humours”: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. An imbalance of these humours was thought to be at the root of all diseases, which could be cured by restoring said balance. For example, an excess of blood could be relieved by bloodletting – and for more on this, please check out our previous video What’s Up With the Increasingly Popular Practice of Modern Medical Leeches? Constipation was thought to cause a buildup of Black Bile, leading to melancholy or depression, and once again the prescribed treatments were mainly oral purgatives and enemas, also known as clysters after an ancient Greek word meaning “to wash out.”
Clysters remained a popular cure-all for nearly two millennia, reaching the peak of popularity during the reign of the French “Sun King” Louis XIV. To the fashionable 17th Century French nobleman, keeping a clean colon was as vital to a healthy lifestyle as regular exercise, good diet, and vitamin supplements are to us today. Enemas – up to four a day – were administered by specialized doctors known as limonadiers des postérieurs [“Lee-moh-nahd-ee-ay Deh Pohst-ee-ree-uhr”] – literally “backside lemonade applicators” – either at home or in special facilities known as restaurants, from the French meaning “to restore” or “to rejuvenate.” Only later did this term come to refer to establishments which serve food. Depending on the size of his pocketbook, the discerning nobleman could choose from a bewildering variety of enema options, from nozzles made of tortoiseshell, mother of pearl, and even gold, to cleansing mixtures containing ingredients such as orange blossom, angelica, thyme, rosemary, bergamot, and damask rose – each of which was claimed to have its own specific therapeutic properties. Certain popular concoctions even contained coffee and tobacco, producing an immediate rejuvenating rush and, in certain cases, long term addiction. At first tobacco was infused and administered in liquid form, but the development of the rectal smoking pipe allowed tobacco smoke to be blown directly into the rectum. Tobacco enemas were later developed into a method for resuscitating drowning victims, and in 18th Century special kits were installed along the river Thames for this purpose – and for more on this, please check out our previous video When Doctors Literally Blew Smoke Up Your Arse.
So indispensable were enemas to 17th Century French society that not even criminals in prisons were denied their daily cleansing. And when it came to maintaining the health of the King, there was no such thing as too many enemas. When the Sun King’s father, Louis XIII, fell gravely ill in 1643, over the course of six months his doctors administered no less than 47 bloodlettings, 215 oral purgatives, and 312 enemas – 2 per day except on holidays. Louis XIV was equally indulgent, subjecting himself to 38 bloodlettings, hundreds of enemas, and thousands or oral purgatives in order to sustain his legendary gluttony. This mania for enemas attracted the mockery of contemporary commentators such as English writer Jonathan Swift and French playwright Molière, who parodied the practice in his 1673 production Le Malade Imaginaire [Luh Mah-lad Ee-majh-ee-nay-r”] or The Hypochondriac. Ironically, Molière suffered a brain haemorrhage while playing the lead role onstage, and found himself at the mercy of the very doctors he had so thoroughly skewered. Unsurprisingly their swift intervention with bleedings, purgatives, and enemas proved ineffective, and the great playwright died later that day.
While the mania for enemas never again reached the absurd heights of the 17th Century, the medical obsession with constipation never really went away, with laxatives and purgatives remaining the best-selling pharmaceuticals for over 300 years. And while the Four Humours eventually gave way to more modern medical paradigms like Germ Theory, ironically this did little to quell anxieties about bowel regularity and auto-intoxication. Following the publication of Charles Darwin’s seminal 1859 work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, anatomists began to realize that the human body was not in fact a perfect creation made in God’s image but a messy and imperfect machine containing all manner of vestigial features left over from its evolutionary past, from the tailbone and appendix to the uvula and tonsils. In these seemingly leftover and useless organs doctors began to see the roots of all human disease, and no single organ attracted more scrutiny and scorn than that old enemy: the colon. Thanks to theorists like Ilya Metchnikoff and health guru John Harvey Kellogg – yes, the inventor of Corn Flakes – the colon came to be seen as a venomous snake coiled up in the abdomen of every person, slowly poisoning them and robbing them of a long, healthy life. But while surgeons may long have dreamed of excising the troublesome organ altogether, it was not until the development of antiseptic techniques and anaesthesia in the late 19th Century that such a procedure became a viable reality. And when it did, surgeons jumped upon it with fanatical zeal, and none more so than Dr. William Arbuthnot Lane.
The celebrated chief of surgery at Guy’s Hospital in London, Lane was a surgical powerhouse, pioneering techniques for setting of fractures with metal plates and screws, repairing harelips and cleft palates, clearing intestinal obstructions, and reducing postoperative infection through the use of specially-designed sterile instruments. Such were his eccentricities and prodigious powers of deduction that he is believed to be one of the real-life inspirations for the character of Sherlock Holmes. In the early 20th Century, Lane directed his considerable talents and energies towards a new enemy: the dreaded colon. At first the good doctor recommended his patients consume large quantities of heavy cream and liquid paraffin to purge their colons of harmful, putrefying bacteria, but for Lane this was merely a stop-gap measure. He soon developed the procedure that would make him infamous: the radical colectomy, in which the entire colon is excised and the end of the small intestine attached directly to the rectum. In this manner, Lane claimed, waste would be expelled as soon as its nutrients were absorbed, giving it no time to build up in the colon and putrefy. The radical colectomy caused a sensation, with patients flocking in their hundreds to Lane’s surgery to undergo the new cutting-edge procedure. From the 1910s to the 1930s thousands of Britons and Americans had their perfectly healthy colons snipped out as a preventative measure, with Lane himself performing over a thousand such procedures over the course of his career. The mania for colectomies reached such heights that the procedure was regularly prescribed for ailments as minor as a sore throat or stomach ulcer. On one occasion a young boy scheduled for a tonsillectomy was accidentally wheeled into Lane’s surgery and emerged without his colon but with his tonsils intact. The colectomy craze was parodied in George Bernard Shaw’s 1906 play The Doctor’s Dilemma, in which the character of Dr. Cutler Walpole – clearly modelled on Lane – exhorts the medical wisdom of the day:
“Ninety-five per cent of the human race suffer from chronic blood poisoning and die of it. It’s as simple as ABC. Your unciform sac is full of decaying matter – undigested food and waste products – rank ptomaines. Now you take my advice, Ridgeon. Let me cut it out for you. You’ll be another man afterwards.”
But despite the medical miracles promised by the radical colectomy – such as delaying the onset of aging and warding off depression – the actual results of Lane’s procedure were predictably disappointing. Few colectomy patients experienced the promised benefits of the procedure, and while Lane was a far better surgeon than most, up to 30% of his patients later died of infections and other postoperative complications. Gradually medical opinion began to turn against the radical colectomy, though the procedure continued to be regularly performed as late as the 1930s. Lane would later abandon his faith in surgical intervention and instead found a movement known as New Health, which promoted more practical, holistic lifestyle choices such as fresh air; whole foods, fruits, and vegetables; exercise; and vitamin supplements as a path to good health and longevity. But Lane was hardly alone in his advocacy of surgical intervention, and even his considerable zeal was far surpassed by one of his contemporaries, Dr. Henry Andrews Cotton.
In 1907, Cotton became the superintendent of the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum in Trenton, New Jersey, and immediately imposed a series of progressive reforms including eliminating physical restraints, hiring social workers, and organizing daily staff meetings to coordinate patient care. However, around 1915 Cotton learned of a new theory proposed by Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Dr. Adolf Meyer, which held that all mental illness was caused by latent bacterial infections. Like putrefying food in the colon, Meyer argued, these hidden infections produced toxins that slowly poisoned the mind. This idea, which Meyer called the Theory of Focal Infection, was based on two key pieces of evidence: first, the observation that those with severe bacterial infections often became delirious; and second, the discovery in 1913 that Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes Syphilis, was also responsible for a form of dementia known as the General Paresis of the Insane – and for more on this, please see our previous video That Time a Dude Was Given a Nobel Prize for Intentionally Infecting People with Malaria.
To Dr. Cotton, the upshot of Meyer’s theory was simple: eliminate all sites of infection, and mental illness could be cured. He thus set about removing any of his patient’s body parts which could potentially harbour harmful bacteria, starting with all their teeth. So enthusiastic was Cotton that he even removed his own children’s teeth as a precaution as well as his own when he believed himself to be going insane. When pulling teeth did not achieve the desired results, Cotton moved on to other organs, gleefully excising his patients’ testicles, ovaries, spleens, stomachs, gall bladders, cervixes, and, of course, colons. Cotton reported a phenomenal success rate of 85%, winning him widespread acclaim among his fellow psychiatrists.
While horrifically misguided and reckless by today’s standards, Dr. Cotton’s methods were actually remarkably progressive for their day. The psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud had not yet caught on with the mainstream psychiatric community, and the eugenics-based theories of the time held that mental illness was the result of inferior genes, and could only be eliminated from society by sterilizing the mentally ill. Meyer and Cotton’s theories, by contrast, framed mental illness as a physical affliction like any other, curable via physical intervention. Cotton’s methods proved especially attractive among the upper classes, who flocked to New Jersey to experience his miracle cure. Among his highest-profile clients was Margaret Fisher, daughter of famed Yale economist Irving Fisher, who in 1919 was diagnosed with schizophrenia and transferred to Trenton to undergo treatment. Cotton attributed her condition to – what else? – chronic constipation, and proceeded to remove her colon. Tragically, Fisher suffered a fate which befell up to 45% of Cotton’s patients, succumbing to a massive streptococcus infection. Yet despite these high mortality rates Cotton’s crusade carried on for unimpeded for decades, the medical community making only a minimal effort to investigate the validity his claims. Indeed, following a 1925 investigation into Trenton State Hospital by the New Jersey State Senate, the New York Times reported that:
“…eminent physicians and surgeons testified that the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane was the most progressive institution in the world for the care of the insane, and that the newer method of treating the insane by the removal of focal infection placed the institution in a unique position with respect to hospitals for the mentally ill.”
However, that same year Cotton left Trenton State and established his own private clinic, which was less subject to government oversight and regulation. There he carried on performing his radical surgeries for wealthy clients until his retirement in 1930. By this time, advances in medical technology had begun to undermine the assumptions which had underpinned the radical methods of William Lane, Henry Cotton, and others. X-rays dispelled the notion that wastes stagnate and putrefy in the colon for days on end, while blood tests revealed that even the most chronic constipation produces no significant rise in toxins in the bloodstream. Indeed, doctors began to realize that humanity’s hysterical obsession with constipation, regularity, and intestinal cleanliness was grossly misinformed and overblown, with British gastroenterologist Sir Arthur Hurst stating in 1935 that:
“Constipation should be defined as any condition that causes the patient to complain that his bowels are not moving often enough. One man’s constipation is another man’s diarrhea…. [People have become] a vast army of hypochondriacs, who are never happy unless their stools conform to an ideal which they have invented for themselves.”
Furthermore, doctors discovered that far from being a useless, vestigial organ, the colon in fact plays a vital role in reabsorbing water and minerals from solid wastes and contains beneficial bacteria that promote good digestion and produce Vitamin K, essential for blood clotting. Yet despite these revelations this oldest of obsessions has really never gone away, and to this day countless fad diets, alternative medicine gurus, and high-fibre breakfast cereals continue to extol the dubious virtues of regularity and flushing the colon of harmful “toxins.”
Nor, until recently, did we fully abandon our obsession with removing perfectly healthy body parts. For nearly a century, few British or American children made it through grade school with their tonsils intact – regardless of whether said organs were diseased in the first place. A 1934 study of 1,000 New York schoolchildren found that 61% had received tonsillectomies, and that doctors had recommended surgery for all but 65 of the remaining 390 children. Tonsillectomy soon became the third most commonly-performed surgery in the English-speaking world, being performed on 80,000 British schoolchildren every year. This crusade against tonsils was initially inspired by the same focal infection theory which had driven the radical surgeries of Dr. Henry Cotton, with the tonsils being seen by leading surgeons like Dr. George Waugh as particularly pernicious sites of chronic infection. However, the practice persisted long after the abandonment of such theories and the development of antibiotics, and came to be seen – along with vaccination against measles and polio – as merely another necessary preventative measure against childhood disease. It was not until 1978 that the National Institutes of Health examined the statistical evidence and concluded that not only was tonsillectomy far less effective at preventing throat infections than previously believed, but that the risk of postoperative complications far outweighed any perceived benefits of the surgery. Mass preventative tonsillectomy of schoolchildren was soon abandoned, and today the surgery is only performed in cases of chronic and persistent tonsil infection. It just goes to show that while medical science eventually advances and learns from its mistakes, sometimes much of what we think we know about the human body is, like our colons, completely full of shit.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesPanati, Charles, Panati’s Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody, Harper and Row Publishers, NY, 1989
Barrett, Stephen, Gastrointestinal Quackery: Colonics, Laxatives, and More, Quackwatch, August 4, 2010, https://quackwatch.org/related/gastro/
Khazan, Olga, Pulling Teeth to Treat Mental Illness, The Atlantic, October 22, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-tragic-sadistic-mental-illness-treatment-from-the-knick-is-real/381751/
Wessley, Simon, Surgery for the Treatment of Psychiatric Illness: the Need to Test Untested Theories, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, October 1, 2009, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755332/
Scull, Andrew, Desperate Remedies: Embrace of a Deadly Cure, Princeton University, May 11, 2005, http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_new/PAW04-05/14-0511/features1.html
Sir William Srbuthnot Lane (1856-1943), Historic Hospital Admissions Records Project, https://hharp.org/library/gosh/doctors/william-arbuthnot-lane.html
Dwyer-Hemmings, Louis, ’A Wicked Operation’? Tonsillectomy in Twentieth-century Britain, Journal of Medical History, April 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5883156/
The post Pulling Teeth and Cutting Colons: the Weird Early 20th Century Obsession With Surgically Removing Perfectly Healthy Body Parts appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Beneath the gothic arches and towers of Phoebe Hearst Hall at Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University lies a truly extraordinary room. Measuring 20 x 10 x 10 feet and carved into solid Appalachian granite, the room is packed with a dizzying collection of artefacts from the late 1930s, from phonograph records and typewriters to Lincoln Logs, Donald Duck toys and small mannequins modelling 1930s fashion. But this miniature museum of mid-20th Century technology and culture is not open to visitors. Its walls are hermetically sealed, its heavy steel door welded shut. You will never set eyes upon its contents, and neither will your children, grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren. Only your most distant descendants 187 generations hence will have any chance of witnessing its re-opening. For this room, known as the Crypt of Civilization, is not to be disturbed until the year 8113, 6,177 years from now – a future so distant that our civilization, if it survives at all, will have changed beyond all recognition.
While recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the first modern time capsule, the Crypt of Civilization is hardly humanity’s first attempt to preserve cultural artefacts and information for posterity. But how far back does this practice actually go? While Egyptian tombs and other ancient burials might seem like plausible candidates for the first time capsules, these were never intended to be opened, their ornate grave goods meant to accompany their owners to the afterlife. However, one of the earliest known literary texts, The Epic of Gilgamesh, opens with instructions on how to find a copper box buried within the walls of the city of Uruk, near Samawah in modern-day Iraq. This box supposedly contained a full copy of the Gilgamesh story. Thus the practice of burying a message for future generations dates back to at least 2100 B.C.E. The Behistun Inscription, a giant relief carved into the side of a mountain
Near Kermanshah in Iran, was similarly intended to last for thousands of years. Carved on the orders of Persian emperor Darius the Great around 500 B.C.E, the inscription tells of numerous rebellions violently put down by Darius during his 36-year reign. But for most of history such messages to the future spoke only of the exploits of kings and other powerful people; it would not be until the early modern period that objects of everyday life would start to be preserved.
One of the oldest time capsules on record was placed in the grasshopper-shaped wind vane atop Boston’s Faneuil Hall in 1761, and contained coins, newspapers, and messages from various mayors of Boston. 34 years later in 1795, Revolutionary War heroes Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and Colonel William Scollay placed a small metal box in the cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House. After being rediscovered and added to in 1855 during emergency repairs, it remained in place until 2014. Its contents were similar to the Faneuil Hall capsule, including coins, newspaper clippings, a small copper medal depicting George Washington, and a small silver plate thought to have been engraved by Revere.
The popularity of time capsules grew throughout the 19th century, especially as a means of commemorating city centennials, world’s fairs, and other important events. One of the first commemorative capsules was assembled by New York magazine publisher Anna Deihm in 1876 to celebrate the U.S. Centennial. Known as the “Century Safe,” or “Centennial Vault,” the velvet-lined iron box was packed with artefacts like a gold pen and inkstand, photographs of President Ulysses S. Grant and other politicians, and albums of signatures from ordinary citizens. Sealed in 1879, the safe languished in the basement of the U.S. Capitol for 100 years before being opened by President Gerald Ford on July 4, 1976. At the same time, Chicago photographer Charles Mosher built his own broadly-similar time capsule known as the “Memorial Time Vault,” which he filled with hundreds of photographs of well-known and ordinary Chicagoans. This time capsule did not fare nearly as well, being placed in the basement of Chicago’s City Hall and promptly forgotten. Then, in 1908, workers demolishing the building stumbled across the vault and, not knowing what it was, opened it – 68 years ahead of schedule.
None of these early time capsules, however, represented a systematic attempt to preserve contemporary knowledge and culture for future generations. The first such endeavour was the Crypt of Civilization at Ogelthorpe University. The Crypt was the brainchild of Thornwell Jacobs, a Presbyterian minister, author, and educator who served as President of Ogelthorpe from 1915 to 1944. Jacobs was inspired by the opening of ancient Egyptian tombs like that of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922, and sought to:
“…make available to some civilization now unthought of, and still far in the future, the running story of the life, manners of customs of the present civilization.”
To make his vision a reality, Jacobs hired movie producer, photographer, and inventor Thomas Kimmwood Peters to curate the crypt’s contents and supervise its construction. The crypt itself was constructed in a former swimming pool beneath Phoebe Hearst Hall, which had been dug into stable granite bedrock in a seismically-inactive area. This was lined with enamel panels and sealed with pitch, creating an airtight chamber with a volume of approximately 2,000 square feet. Into this space Peters packed an extraordinary variety of objects representing everyday life and culture in the 1930s as well as the sum total of human scientific and technical knowledge from the past 6,000 years. These objects included technology like a typewriter, radio, telephone, and television; items from everyday life like a woman’s purse, baby pacifier, and dental floss; and examples of common arts and entertainment like phonograph records and a plastic figurine of the Lone Ranger. Producer David O. Selznick even contributed an original draft of the script for the film Gone With the Wind. Also included were phonograph recordings of world leaders like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt, and acetate microfilms containing more than 600,000 pages of literature including the Bible, the Qur’an, the Iliad, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. These were placed in sealed, glass-lined metal canisters filled with inert Nitrogen with projectors and microfilm readers provided with which to view them. Leaving nothing to chance, Peters even included a small windmill generator to power all the electrical devices, in case for some reason electricity was not available in the distant future.
But the most daunting problem Peters had to contend with was that the English language might one day become extinct or evolve beyond recognition. To address this, Peters invented a device he called the “Language Integrator,” a sort of hand-cranked Rosetta Stone that matched the most common 1,500 words in the English language with a corresponding image and a recording of each word being spoken. The walls of the crypt were also decorated with pictographs by artists George L. Carlson depicting the history of intelligence and human development – which, along with the piles of artifacts arranged on the floor or on shelves, gave the space the appearance of a latter-day Egyptian tomb. However, no gold, silver, gems or other valuable materials were included in an effort to deter looters.
Work on the Crypt began in August 1937 and continued for nearly three years. The Crypt was officially dedicated by David Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America, on May 27, 1940, while on May 28, the air in the vault was replaced with Nitrogen and the heavy steel door welded shut – not to be opened until the year 8113. This date was chosen due to the common belief that the earliest recorded date in history was 4241 B.C.E. – 6,177 years in the past. According to Thornwell Jacobs:
“Adding this figure to 1936 brings us to AD 8113. The probability is that by that year the record of the present generation of the citizens of the United States of America – except for what is sealed in our crypt – will have been as completely destroyed as the record of the contemporary of Menes.”
To get around the problem of the Crypt being forgotten and lost after more than 6 millennia, Jacobs printed a special Book of Record and distributed copies to 3600 libraries, archives, monasteries, and other safe repositories around the world. The book, printed in 14 European and Asian languages, included instructions on how to locate the Crypt, based on nearby geological features expected to survive for thousands of years. Jacobs also distributed 3000 engraved metal admission tickets to attendees of the dedication ceremonies, which were to be passed down through the generations. Each ticket read:
“Any descendant of the above named contributor, of the 187th generation, upon presentation of this card, will be admitted to the opening of the crypt on Thursday, May 28, AD 8113 Noon.”
While the Crypt of Civilization was conceived in the spirit of optimism, its dedication and sealing was a somber occasion due to the looming shadow of WWII. Indeed, at the last minute Jacobs added to the Crypt’s contents engraved printing plates from the Atlanta Journal announcing the outbreak of war and a personal message reading:
“The world is engaged in burying our civilization forever, and here in this crypt we leave it to you.”
Though the Crypt of Civilization is widely recognized as the first of its kind, the term “time capsule” would not emerge until a year after its construction began. In 1938, Westinghouse PR manager George Edward Pendray was tasked with coming up with an exhibit for the company’s pavilion at the upcoming 1939 New York World’s Fair. Inspired by the Crypt of Civilization, Pendray decided to create a similar record of late-1930s civilization – albeit on a much smaller scale. Pendray’s miniature vault took the form of a 7-foot long, 9-inch diameter torpedo-shaped container made of a corrosion-resistant copper alloy called Cupaloy. Inside was a sealed, Nitrogen-filled Pyrex liner into which were packed 35 everyday items including a camera, light bulb, lady’s hat, cigarettes, newsreel, and microfilms containing millions of words including messages from notable personalities like Albert Einstein, full issues of popular magazines, and – in what is becoming a theme at this point – Gone With the Wind. At first Pendray called the container a “time bomb,” but given the looming threat of war he changed this to “time capsule” – and the name stuck.
At noon on September 23, 1938 – the exact moment of the autumnal equinox – the Westinghouse Time Capsule was lowered into a 50-foot-deep concrete-lined shaft beneath the fairgrounds in Queens. For the duration of the Fair’s two seasons the top of the shaft was left open with a viewing window so visitors could peer inside, while a nearby cutaway replica and display cabinets displayed the contents and packing arrangement of the capsule. As with the Crypt of Civilization, a Book of Record was created for the capsule and distributed around the world. In addition to listing the capsule’s precise location, planetary positions and other astronomical data from when it was buried, and methods for locating it, the book also includes instructions that it be translated into new languages as they emerge was well as a guide to the pronunciation of modern English – including a map showing where various sounds are produced in the human mouth.
Once again, the optimism represented by the Westinghouse capsule and the Fair as a whole would be overshadowed by the looming shadow of war, but Pendray remained optimistic, including in the capsule a message reading:
“We choose to believe that men will solve the problems of the worlds, that the human race will triumph over its limitations, and its adversaries, that the future will be glorious. To the people of that future, we leave this legacy.”
25 years later, Westinghouse would create a second, similar time capsule for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Both capsules still lie beneath Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, not to be opened until the year 6939.
But despite their popularity, many have questioned the historical value of time capsules. In his 2002 book Time Capsules: a Cultural History, author William Jarvis argues that the vast majority of time capsules are worthless from a historical perspective, containing “useless junk” that reveals little about the society that created them. Most objects placed in time capsules, Jarvis explains, are in pristine condition, while it is used items which yield the most information. Time capsule contents also tend to be highly curated to reflect only the high-brow aspects of society, excluding the experiences of ordinary people. As an example, Jarvis cites political graffiti unearthed at Pompeii – itself a giant, unintentional time capsule – reading “All the sleepyheads are voting for Petronius.”
Others argue that time capsules are less reflective of society of a whole than of their creators’ particular political and social views – including views which are now considered highly suspect. University of Iowa history expert Dr. Nick Yablon cites the example of Memorial Time Vault creator Charles Mosher, who was a prominent early advocate of eugenics. Along with photographs, the Vault also contained literature which:
“…vaguely expressed hopes that the ‘healthy’ could be encouraged to reproduce … and the ‘unfit’ discouraged. [In the vault] Mosher gave physical form to his racial visions, rendering his eugenicist utopia concrete through the vessel.”
According to Dr. Yablon,
“The time capsule was definitely a kind of riposte to the museum. Museums were seen as inadequate memorializations of the present. They tended to be full of relics of other civilizations or they were collections that were massed haphazardly without any sense of how they illuminated the present. So the time capsule would be a narrower selection for future audiences or future historians to view.”
Nearly all subsequent time capsules have been similarly biased. While the Crypt of Civilization at least attempted to acknowledge the existence of other cultures through the inclusion of the Qu’ran and other texts, the worldview it and the later Westinghouse time capsules present is a distinctly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant one. Indeed, the Crypt of Civilization contains an abundance of religious material provided by the Rosicrucian christian sect, which partially funded the Crypt’s construction.
Yet such criticism has done little to dim people’s enthusiasm for time capsules, or dissuade them from coming up with creative variations on the theme. In 1977 a team headed by astronomer Carl Sagan created a cosmic time capsule in the form of the Voyager Golden Record. Two of these gold-plated phonograph records filled with images, sounds, and music from earth were launched into interstellar space aboard the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 interplanetary probes, in the distant hope they will one day be discovered by extraterrestrial civilizations – and for more on this see our video “The Cosmic Message in a Bottle.”
Other time capsules are more lighthearted in nature. In 1957 the people of Tulsa, Oklahoma buried a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere in a sealed concrete vault beneath the courthouse to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their state. The car, nicknamed “Miss Belvedere” was to be unearthed in 2007 and awarded to whoever most closely predicted Tulsa’s population in that year. The closest guess was made by one Raymond Humbertson, but as both he and his wife died long before 2007 and had no children, Miss Belvedere was awarded to his surviving sisters and nephew. Unfortunately, in the intervening 50 years the vault sprung a leak and completely submerged the car, causing extensive damage. Efforts are currently underway to restore the vehicle and find a permanent home where it can be placed on display.
A more recent twist on the time capsule concept is Scottish artist’s Katie Paterson’s Future Library. In 2014 Paterson planted 1000 spruce trees in a forest outside Oslo, Norway; if all goes according to plan, in 100 years’ time these trees will be cut down and turned into paper, which will be used to print 100 previously-unpublished manuscripts by authors like Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, and Karl Knausgard. According to Paterson:
“When I looked at the tree rings, I saw books and chapters and paper and then imagined very quickly these trees growing, a whole forest of trees growing to become a book over time.”
Whether or not the world’s time capsules survive the coming millennia or prove archival useful appears to be something of a moot point, for the history of time capsules illustrates that their creation is less about communicating with future generations and more about how we interpret and commemorate the times in which we live. And so seldom are ordinary objects preserved for thousands of years that anything that does survive is bound to be of at least some value to future historians. As Paul Hudson, co-founder of Oglethorpe University’s International Time Capsule Society, explains:
“[The Crypt of civilization is] pulsating with life. It’s a living, breathing, thing. It’s older than I am and it’s bigger than all of us. Can you imagine a cultural anthropologist in the year 8113 opening the Crypt? It would be a treasure trove. Even things like dental floss would be fascinating.”
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesTime Capsules Leave Behind Remnants of Our Lives, Quad City Times, July 29, 1993, https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=69847755&fcfToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjMwNjc5MzcxMiwiaWF0IjoxNjE0MDk4OTc1LCJleHAiOjE2MTQxODUzNzV9.i4yXhbUb_fAJkM3vsWwXnkrH8Pqb18z0ntfcaFVG8Z8
Standford, Duane, College Historic Areas Make National Register, The Atlanta Constitution, September 29, 1994, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/69449733/the-atlanta-constitution/
Crypt of Civilization, Public Opinion, Chambersburg, Penn, March 29, 1940, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/69834240/public-opinion/
Time Keepers, The Atlanta Constitution, December 26, 2017, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/69521830/the-atlanta-constitution/
Thornwell Jacobs: the Father of the Modern Time Capsule, Ogelthorpe University, https://crypt.oglethorpe.edu/history/
The Crypt of Civilization, The Warrenton Banner, December 17, 1953, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/69756188/warrenton-banner/
The Crypt of Civilization, Unknown World, https://www.unknownworld.co.uk/the-crypt-of-civilization/
The Book of Record of the Time Capsule, Westinghouse 1939, https://archive.org/details/timecapsulecups00westrich/page/34/mode/2up
Bellows, Alan, The Crypt of Civilization, Damn Interesting, February 17, 2006, https://www.damninteresting.com/the-crypt-of-civilization/
Stutchbury, Erin & Correy, Stan, The History of Time Capsule Has a Dark Side Linked to Eugenics. But Their Future is Brighter, ABC Radio National, February 29, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-01/time-capsules-history-eugenics-brighter-future/11966610
The History of Time Capsules, Cornerstones and Time Capsules of Early Victoria, https://web.uvic.ca/vv/student/edges_of_time/timecapsules.html
Enwemeka, Zeninjor, A Lion, A Grasshopper, and Other Boston Time Capsules, WBUR News, October 9, 2014, https://www.wbur.org/news/2014/10/09/boston-time-capsules
Inside the Box: Massachusetts State House Time Capsule Revealed, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2015, https://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/inside-the-box-massachusetts-state-house-time-capsule
Andrews, Evan, America’s Oldest Known Time Capsule Was Made by Paul Revere and Samuel Adams, History, August 22, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/8-famous-time-capsules
Lenhart, Gloria, Time Capsule in Washington Square Park, FoundSF, Fall 2013, https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Time_Capsule_In_Washington_Square_Park
Will Jarvis: Time Capsule Behaviour, The Long Now Foundation, May 13, 2005, https://longnow.org/seminars/02005/may/13/time-capsule-behavior/
The post The Curious Case of the Crypt of Civilization appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If you regularly visit the dentist, chances are you have sat at least once for a set of dental x-rays. The procedure is usually straightforward: first, the dentist will drape a protective lead vest over your chest and abdomen, then place x-ray film in a plastic holder in your mouth and the x-ray machine against the side of your head. Finally, they will retreat behind a shielded wall to activate the machine, the actual exposure typically taking no more than one second. But as you are sitting there, waiting for the process to end, several questions may have crossed your mind. Why, if the x-rays are dangerous enough to warrant a lead vest, is your head left unshielded? And if a simple lead vest is enough to block the x-rays, why does the dentist need to hide behind a shielded wall? How powerful are the x-rays anyway? How dangerous are they? And just how much radiation can the human body absorb without risking cancer – or worse? By now you are probably tired of me telling you that the answer to these questions is “it’s complicated,” but alas: it’s complicated.
In order to answer the question “how much radiation is too much radiation?”, we must first define what exactly we mean by “radiation.” In physics, the term “radiation” typically refers to electromagnetic radiation – that is, forms of energy which propagate by means of electric and magnetic fields. Electromagnetic radiation lies on a spectrum, with lower-energy, longer-wavelength microwaves on one end, and higher-energy, shorter-wavelength Gamma rays on the other. The visible spectrum – that is, the electromagnetic wavelengths which are detectable by the human eye – lie somewhere in the middle, between 380 and 750 nanometers. For our purposes, however, we are interested only in so-called ionizing radiation – that is, electromagnetic waves with enough energy to ionize or strip electrons off atoms and damage the DNA of living cells. This includes all the wavelengths past the visible spectrum – that is, ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and Gamma Rays, with the boundary between non-ionizing and ionizing radiation typically being defined as 124 nanometers. Thus, despite the claims of certain conspiracy theorists, our cell phones and microwave ovens cannot give us cancer as these devices operate at energies too low to produce serious genetic damage. Still, there are plenty of other reasons not to stick your head in a microwave.
Another source of ionizing radiation is from high-energy subatomic particles, the three types most commonly encountered being alpha particles, beta particles, and neutrons. Both alpha and beta particles are produced by the natural decay of radioactive elements like Uranium, the former being composed of two protons and two neutrons and the latter being identical to electrons. Neutrons, while occasionally produced via the spontaneous fission of radioactive elements, are typically encountered as a byproduct of nuclear fission chain reactions in reactors and nuclear weapons. Occasionally, other kinds of ionizing particles like protons are also encountered at densities and energies high enough to damage living tissue – for example, in scientific or medical particle accelerators.
But regardless of the type of ionizing radiation encountered, the mechanism of action is the same: the radiation damages the DNA within the exposed cells, resulting in one of two outcomes. In most cases, the cell detects the genetic damage and either repairs it or undergoes a process known as apoptosis or “cell suicide,” preventing the damaged DNA from being replicated. Thanks to these defence mechanisms the body can safely absorb mild doses of radiation such as those produced by cosmic rays from space, radioactive elements in the earth, and medical x-rays. However, if the dose is large enough and enough cells are damaged at once, a nasty chain of symptoms known collectively as Acute Radiation Syndrome or ARS may result. First observed in survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ARS typically first presents as severe nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Skin directly exposed to radiation may initially redden like a sunburn and later swell up, depending on how deeply the radiation has penetrated into the tissue. From here the symptoms only get worse, and may include weakness, fatigue, headache, bloody vomit and stools, hair loss, and cataracts – the latter three resulting from severe damage to the cells of the digestive tract, hair follicles, and lenses of the eye. However, around 24 hours following exposure some victims may seem to spontaneously recover, their symptoms appearing to disappear for several days. This is known as the “walking ghost” phase, and results from certain tissues being more sensitive to radiation than others. Cells undergoing rapid division – such as those of the stomach, sexual organs, and bone marrow – are the most sensitive – hence why one of the first symptoms of ARS is nausea and vomiting. Massive exposure to radiation causes the bone marrow to stop producing blood cells, resulting in a condition known as aplastic anemia. This not only cripples the immune system, leaving the body vulnerable to infection, but also significantly hinders the healing of burns, cuts, and other injuries. However, the cells already in the blood – which are less affected by radiation – remain in circulation for around a month, and thus the immune system initially continues to operate normally. After a few days, however, these cells become depleted, and the victim’s condition rapidly begins to deteriorate. As organs shut down, blood vessels collapse, and tissues literally liquefy, the victim will experience delirium, coma, excruciating pain which even the most powerful opioids cannot touch, and, inevitably, death.
But even relatively mild doses of radiation can still have serious health effects. While in the vast majority of cases the combination of natural genetic repair mechanisms and apoptosis prevents cells from propagating radiation-damaged DNA, once in a while a cell’s DNA becomes mutated in such a way that it starts dividing and multiplying out of control – a condition better known as cancer. And since rapidly-dividing sex cells are particularly sensitive to radiation damage, exposure of the gonads or a developing embryo to even moderate amounts of radiation can result in birth defects.
But exactly how much radiation constitutes a mild, moderate, or severe dose? Well, this is where things gets complicated, for radiation exposure is a stochastic process, meaning it is highly probabilistic and there is no linear, predictable relationship between radiation exposure and negative health effects. Thus, while it is generally the case that a higher radiation dose will result in more severe health effects, there is no way of predicting the precise effects a particular dose will have on a particular person. This is true of all carcinogenic processes. For example, while smoking more cigarettes certainly increases one’s risk of cancer, it is on one hand entirely possible for someone to smoke a pack a day for 80 years and never develop cancer – or, on the other hand, to smoke a single cigarette and immediately develop cancer. It is even possible that mild doses of radiation may actually be beneficial by stimulating the body’s DNA repair mechanisms – an effect known as radiation hormesis – and for more on that, please check out our previous video The Curious Case of the Widespread Radioactive Apartments. Yet despite the complex, unpredictable nature of radiation exposure, health physicists have nonetheless developed a complex system of units, measures, and recommended doses in an attempt to keep workers in nuclear power plants, research laboratories, medical imaging departments, and other high-radiation environments safe and healthy. So buckle up and take a deep breath, because yes: there will be math involved.
Radiation exposure is typically measured in terms of energy absorbed by a given volume or mass of matter. The first standard unit for radiation exposure was the Röntgen, adopted in 1928. Named after German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, the discoverer of X-rays, one Röntgen was initially defined as the amount of ionizing radiation capable of inducing one statcoulomb of electric charge in one cubic centimetre of dry air. But while an important milestone in quantifying radiation exposure, the Röntgen was only applicable to air and not other materials like human tissue. Thus, in 1945 American medical physicist Herbert Parker introduced the Röntgen Equivalent Physical or Rep, equivalent to 93 ergs of energy absorbed by one gram of matter. In 1953 the Rep was replaced by a new unit known as the Rad. Initially defined in the centimetre-gram-second or CGS system as 100 ergs of energy absorbed by one gram of matter, the Rad is now defined in the Systeme Internationale or SI system as 0.01 Joules of energy per kilogram of matter. The Rad itself was subsequently replaced in 1975 by a new SI unit known as the Gray. Named after British nuclear physics pioneer Louis Robert Gray, the Gray is defined as one Joule of energy absorbed by one kilogram of matter. While the Gray is the de facto standard unit of radiation absorption in much of the world, certain laboratories and industries – especially in the United States – still continue to use the Rad and even sometimes the Röntgen.
However, both the Rad and the Gray measure radiation absorption in any kind of material – be it air, water, plastic, concrete, or anything else – and do not account for the particular effects of radiation on human tissue. As mentioned before, certain tissues are more sensitive than others to radiation, with the gonads, stomach, and bone marrow being among the most sensitive and the brain, skin, and liver among the least sensitive. Tissue damage also varies greatly depending on the type of radiation and the manner in which it is absorbed. For example, X-rays and Gamma rays can penetrate more deeply into tissue but are proportionally less ionizing than neutrons, protons, and alpha particles. Conversely, while alpha particles can deposit large amounts of energy and inflict massive cellular damage, they are easily blocked by most tissues including the skin. Thus, while alpha-emitting materials like Uranium are relatively harmless outside the human body, if they are somehow absorbed into the body they can be extremely dangerous. This is especially true of elements like Radium, which the body mistakes for Calcium and incorporates into the bones, allowing radiation to be deposited directly into the marrow. Furthermore, few instances of radiation exposure involve the victim absorbing a full-body dose, meaning that in order to predict the effects of a particular dose with any degree of accuracy, it is necessary to account for both what type of radiation was absorbed and where it was absorbed.
The first standard unit of radiation absorption was the Röntgen Equivalent Man or Rem, an adaptation of the Rep first introduced in 1947. However, since 1979 the standard SI unit for biological radiation dose has been the Sievert, named after Swedish medical physicist Rolf Sievert. The Sievert is a measure of equivalent dose, which is calculated by multiplying the absorbed dose in Grays by a pair of weighing factors accounting for the type of radiation absorbed and the specific tissues affected. For example, the radiation weighing factor ranges from 1 for X-rays and Gamma rays to 20 for alpha particles; while the tissue weighing factor ranges from 0.01 for the brain and skin to 0.12 for the bone marrow. So, let’s say you are poking around in Dr. Bruce Banner’s laboratory one day and accidentally receive a one-Gray dose of Gamma rays spread 50/50 between your liver and colon. To calculate your total equivalent dose, you must first multiply the absorbed dose by the radiation weighing factor, the proportion absorbed by each tissue, and the weighing factor for each tissue – in this case 1 Gray x 0.5 x 1 for Gamma rays x 0.12 for the colon and 1 Gray x 0.5 x 1 for Gamma rays and 0.04 for the liver. These calculations give you the effective doses for each particular tissue, which when added together yield your total equivalent dose – in this case 0.31 Sieverts. Alright, you can relax now; that’s the last of the math in this video.
But what exactly does this number mean? In practical terms, one Sievert represents a 5.5% increase in the probability of developing cancer over one’s lifetime. Thus, your little incident in Dr. Banner’s lab would have made you 1.7% more likely to develop cancer…or possibly turned you into the Hulk. This relationship is based on the linear no threshold model which relates radiation exposure linearly to cancer risk and assumes that there is no safe dose of radiation. Although, as previously mentioned, the body is naturally able to handle small doses of natural background radiation, the linear no threshold model ignores this and the potential effects of radiation hormesis out of a desire to set conservative limits for acceptable radiation exposure. To give an idea of what constitutes a regular or acceptable radiation dose, 98 nanosieverts is equivalent to the so-called Banana Equivalent Dose, the amount of radiation absorbed by eating a typical banana, which contains small quantities of the radioactive isotope Potassium-40. 5-10 microsieverts is equivalent to a set of dental x-rays, 10-30 millisieverts a full-body CT scan, 250 millisieverts the annual dose for flight attendants, who are exposed to more cosmic rays at high altitudes; and 1 sievert the maximum allowed radiation exposure for NASA astronauts over their entire career. Exposure in radiation-intensive environments is typically measured using a dosimeter, a small badge-like device that continually monitors one’s cumulative radiation dose.
At doses higher than 1 Sievert, the danger shifts sharply from cancer to acute radiation syndrome and rapid death. For example, victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings standing 1.2 kilometres from ground zero received doses of around 5 Sieverts, while Manhattan Project scientist Louis Slotin, killed by a plutonium bomb core accident 1946, absorbed a massive dose of 21 Sieverts – see our previous video Tickling the Dragon’s Tail: The Horrible Heart of a Nuclear Bomb. Based on these and other radiation accidents, the upper limit for acute radiation exposure is typically set at 4-5 Sieverts, a dose which has a 50% chance of killing the average person within 30 days. The maximum allowable annual dose for industrial workers in the United States is considerably lower, at only 0.05 Sieverts. However, even a massive radiation dose is not necessarily fatal if absorbed over a long enough period. In May 1945, 58-year house painter Albert Stevens, who had been diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, was unknowingly injected with what should have been a lethal dose of Plutonium as part of a top-secret U.C. Berkely experiment. As it turned out, however, Stevens did not have cancer but rather a benign stomach ulcer, and despite the massive amounts of Plutonium in his system he suffered few ill effects and lived a further two decades, dying of heart disease in 1966 at the age of 79. Over the intervening 21 years he had cumulatively absorbed a whopping 65 Sieverts of Alpha radiation – the highest dose any human has been recorded as surviving.
So, going back to our original dental x-ray scenario, we can start to answer some of those burning questions. The reason the dentist shields your body while leaving your head unprotected is because the brain and other tissues in the head are significantly less sensitive to radiation than those in the rest of the body, like the gonads, bone marrow, and intestines. This is also why the dentist retreats behind a wall while taking the x-ray. Since the x-ray machine is pressed right up against your head, your absorbed dose will be highly concentrated. However, if the dentist were standing in the same room, they would receive that dose over a greater percentage of their body, exposing more sensitive organs to the radiation beam. As for how dangerous that beam is, as previously noted the average equivalent dose from a set of dental x-rays is around 5-10 microsieverts, meaning you would need to receive more than 100,000 such x-rays to raise your chances of developing cancer by only 5.5%. So while ionizing radiation is everywhere and its effects on the body are complex and unpredictable, unless you work in a nuclear power plant, medical imaging department, or other, similar environment, you are highly unlikely to be exposed to anywhere near a dangerous dose of radiation. In fact, you should be far more concerned about gum disease, which, according to a five-year study conducted between 1993 and 1998, carries a 12% higher risk of early death. So listen to your dentist and start flossing. It may save your life.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- The History of Dentistry
- The Curious Case of the Isdal Woman
- Is Water Fluoridation Bad for You?
- Does Anything Radioactive Actually Glow Bright Green?
Expand for ReferencesLittle, John, Principal Cellular and Tissue Effects of Radiation, Holland-Frei Cancer Medicine, 6th Edition, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK12344/
Murphy, Andrew, Sievert (SI Unit), Radiopaedia, March 29, 2020, https://radiopaedia.org/articles/sievert-si-unit
Radiation: Risks and Realities, United States Environmental Protection Agency, August 1993, https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/000003JH.txt?ZyActionD=ZyDocument&Client=EPA&Index=1991%20Thru%201994&Docs=&Query=&Time=&EndTime=&SearchMethod=1&TocRestrict=n&Toc=&TocEntry=&QField=&QFieldYear=&QFieldMonth=&QFieldDay=&UseQField=&IntQFieldOp=0&ExtQFieldOp=0&XmlQuery=&File=D%3A%5CZYFILES%5CINDEX%20DATA%5C91THRU94%5CTXT%5C00000002%5C000003JH.txt&User=ANONYMOUS&Password=anonymous&SortMethod=h%7C-&MaximumDocuments=1&FuzzyDegree=0&ImageQuality=r75g8/r75g8/x150y150g16/i425&Display=hpfr&DefSeekPage=x&SearchBack=ZyActionL&Back=ZyActionS&BackDesc=Results%20page&MaximumPages=1&ZyEntry=1
Anderson, Elda, Units of Radiation and Radioactivity, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2030726/pdf/pubhealthreporig01075-0073.pdf
Moss, William & Eckhardt, Roger, The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments, https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326640.pdf
Peck, Donald & Samei, Ehasam, How to Understand and Communicate Radiation Risk, Image Wisely, https://web.archive.org/web/20101208060102/http://www.imagewisely.org/Imaging-Professionals/Medical-Physicists/Articles/How-to-Understand-and-Communicate-Radiation-Risk.aspx
Ionizing Radiation Dose Ranges (Rem), US Department of Energy, https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120970113.pdf
LaMonte, Michael et al, History of Periodontitis Diagnosis and Edentulism as Predictors of Cardiovascular Disease, Stroke, and Mortality in Postmenopausal Women, Journal of the American Heart Association, March 29, 2017, https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/jaha.116.004518
The post How Much Radiation Can the Human Body Take and are Dental X-Rays Actually Safe appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Fanta is among of the world’s most popular and beloved soft drinks, being sold in over 188 countries and over 150 flavours, including Lime, Pineapple, Elderflower, Peach-Apricot, Watermelon, Blackcurrant, and – the most popular by far – orange. For over 75 years the brand has dominated the soft drink market in countries like Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Japan, only slightly underselling the absolute juggernaut that is Coca-Cola. But in 2015 the Coca-Cola company – which owns the Fanta brand – ignited a storm of controversy when it ran a television ad in celebration of Fanta’s 75th anniversary. The ad, which retells the history of Fanta using stop-motion animated bottles, concludes with the words:
“To celebrate, we are bringing back the feeling of the Good Old Times with the new Fanta Classic…good like before…just today.”
The ad was met with horror, especially in Germany, for – as many critics were quick to point out – the so-called “Good Old Times” of Fanta’s creation just so happened to coincide with the Third Reich. For many, Fanta has since become inextricably linked with the Nazi regime, along with such brands as Volkswagen, Hugo Boss, and IBM – and for more on that, please check out our previous video That Time the Nazis Teamed Up With IBM For Mass Murder. But are these allegations true? Was Fanta actually invented by the Nazis? Well, as with many things, the answer is: it’s complicated.
The story of Fanta begins with the story of Coca-Cola. Invented by Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton in 1886 as a nerve and digestive tonic, by the early 1930s Coca-Cola had come to dominate the domestic soft-drink market, the company generating some 30 million gallons of drink syrup and $40 million in sales per year. With the brand firmly established in the United States, Coca-Cola was keen to expand internationally, and one of its early success stories was the new National Socialist regime of German chancellor Adolf Hitler. Through its German subsidiary Coca-Cola GMbH based in the city of Essen, the company strove hard to associate itself with the Nazi regime and win over the German people. Under the leadership of American-born CEO Ray Powers, Coca-Cola GMbH advertised in Nazi Party magazines, erected billboards at stadiums in Berlin and Nuremberg where party rallies were held, and sponsored the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In 1937, at the Reich Working People’s Exhibition in Düsseldorf, a Coca-Cola photographer snapped a picture of Reichsmarschall Herman Göring enjoying the company’s product. This image was widely used in the company’s advertising, much like a similar picture of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev drinking Pepsi would be used 22 years later – and for more on that, please check out our previous video That Time a Soviet General Invented Clear Coke and Pepsi Had One of the World’s Largest Navies.
Coca-Cola GMbH also engaged in some rather more…suspect advertising. Following Hitler’s annexation of Austria in May 1938, Ray Powers’s right-hand-man, German-born Max Keith [“Kite”], convened the ninth annual German concessionaires convention, where the Coca-Cola company displayed a giant banner bearing three prominent swastikas. And when Hitler annexed the Czech Sudetenland in October of that year, Keith ran a magazine ad showing a hand holding a bottle of Coke over a map of Europe, with the slogan “Yes, we have an international reputation.” These campaigns proved incredibly successful, and by 1939 Coca-Cola GMbH had 43 bottling plants and more than 600 distributors in Germany, and was selling more than 4.5 million cases of bottles per year. Even the Führer himself was reported to be an avid Coke drinker, though unlike with Göring no photographic evidence of this survives.
But alas, these “Good Times” were not to last. As Hitler’s thirst for conquest became increasingly apparent, country after country began to publicly condemn the Nazi regime. In response, Reichsmarschall Göring launched a campaign of economic self-sufficiency, banning or discouraging the import of a wide variety of foreign goods. Göring targeted Coca-Cola in particular after discovering that bottles of Coke sold in America bore Hebrew lettering indicating that the drink was kosher. As German Coca-Cola sales began to plummet, Powers and Keith accused their parent company of being run by Jewish board member Harold Hirsch, and pressured American company president Robert Woodruff to fire him. When Woodruff refused, Keith then lobbied Göring for an exception to the import ban. However, following Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941, the American government imposed a full trade embargo against Germany. This not only severed communications between Coca-Cola GMbH and company headquarters in Atlanta, but cut off all supplies of vital syrup ingredients. Max Keith, who had taken over as CEO following the death of Ray Powers in 1938, contacted Robert Woodruff via neutral Switzerland and informed him that he would do everything in his power to keep the subsidiary afloat until the end of the war.
No longer able to produce the company’s flagship product, Keith asked his chief chemist Dr. Wolfgang Schetelig to come up with an alternative drink using only ingredients readily available in Germany. Schetelig blended together various industrial byproducts including whey from cheesemaking, apple pressings from cider production, and whatever surplus citrus fruit could be sourced from fascist ally Italy to produce a clear, slightly bitter, yet surprisingly refreshing concoction. In an incident that has become legendary in advertising circles, when Keith asked his marketing department to come up with a name for the new drink, he encouraged them to use their imaginations – or “fantasie” in German. In response, veteran salesman Joseph Knipp immediately blurted out “Fanta!” – and an icon was born.
Fanta was an immediate success in wartime Germany, selling nearly 3 million cases in 1943 alone and allowing Coca-Cola GMbH to continue operating at near-pre-war capacity. At first the drink was sweetened using the artificial sweetener saccharin, but in 1941 the government allowed the use of 3.5% beet sugar. This led to Fanta being widely used by German housewives as an alternate source of highly-rationed sugar for sweetening soups, stews, and desserts. Meanwhile, Max Keith fought off numerous attempts by the Nazi Regime to take over and nationalize Coca Cola GMbH, even taking a bureaucratic position in the Office of Foreign Property to keep the company out of the government’s hands. All the while, Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta had no idea whether Keith was working for them or the Nazis. When Germany surrendered in May 1945, they were surprised to discover that Keith had kept the company’s factories and labour force intact, allowing Coca-Cola production in Germany to resume almost immediately. Keith even handed over all the subsidiary’s wartime profits to the parent company, as well as the recipe for Fanta. However, Coca-Cola saw no further need or market for what they viewed as a cheap wartime expedient and immediately discontinued the brand.
But by the early 1950s Coca-Cola was facing major competition from its main rival Pepsi-Cola, and in a bid to diversify its product line the company resurrected the Fanta brand in 1954. This new Fanta was developed in Naples, Italy and based on locally-sourced oranges rather than apples as in the original Nazi-era formulation. Packaged in a distinctive ring-necked bottle created by legendary industrial designer Raymond Loewy, orange Fanta hit the European market in 1955 and proved a massive hit. Sales soon expanded to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and by the 1960s Fanta was being bottled in 36 countries – often in unique regional flavours. And like Pepsi and Coke before it, Fanta also managed to penetrate into the Communist bloc, reaching the Soviet Union in 1979 and China in 1984. But the one market Fanta seemingly failed to conquer was the United States. This was a deliberate policy on the part of Coca-Cola, who refused to market Fanta domestically for fear it would cut into strong sales of its flagship product. Fanta thus limped along in the United States until the mid-1980s, when Coca-Cola discontinued the brand domestically altogether. It was not until 2001 that Fanta was relaunched in the US, and with a concerted marketing push the brand quickly grew from negligible sales to its current place in the top 10 most popular American soft drinks.
All this brings us back to our original question: was Fanta created by the Nazis? And the answer appears to be: no, not really. While the Nazis were responsible for the ingredients shortage that directly inspired the creation of Fanta, from beginning to end the production and distribution of the drink was an entirely private affair, conceived by Max Keith as a means of keeping Coca-Cola GMbH afloat and saving his workforce from military conscription. And though he prominently displayed Nazi symbols at company events and publicly celebrated Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday in 1939, Keith himself refused to join the Nazi Party, allow his company to be nationalized, or even even pocket his factories’ profits for himself – despite immense government pressure to do so. In 1945 a government official even threatened Keith with charges of treason if he did not hand over the company, but the official was killed in an air raid before any charges could be laid. For this reason, while Coca Cola quickly pulled its controversial 2015 ad, a spokesperson was quick to assure consumers:
“The 75-year-old brand had no association with Hitler or the Nazi Party. We wanted to remind our consumers of their childhoods. For example, the design we used of the classic annulated bottle comes from the 1960s.”
This is not to say, however, that Max Keith and Coca Cola GMbH did not engage in unethical practices during the war. Throughout the conflict, some 9 million zwangsarbeiter, or forced foreign labourers captured from conquered territories, were used by the Nazi regime in a wide variety of industries, accounting for nearly a fifth of the German labour force by 1944. Though records are spotty, according to Mark Pendergast, author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola GMbH was almost certainly among these companies:
“Later in the war, Keith used Chinese labor and ‘people who would come from anywhere in Europe-the war brought them from everywhere.’”
Confronted with such accusations, over the years the Coca-Cola company has paid millions of dollars into a compensation fund for those forced to work in German industry during the war. Then there is the matter of Robert Woodruff and the Coca-Cola company continuing to do business with Nazi Germany right up until the 1941 embargo, when the war in Europe had already been raging for two years. As Pendergast points, out, this phenomenon was far from unique to Coca-Cola:
“Some [industrialists], like Henry Ford, were in fact Nazi sympathizers, while others, such as Walter Teagle of Standard Oil, avoided taking sides but saw nothing wrong with doing business with the Nazis. Like his friend and hunting companion Teagle, Woodruff practiced expediency.”
So in conclusion: go ahead and enjoy your Fanta with a clear conscience. But always remember that history is complicated, and that such was the evil of the Nazi regime that not even the best of intentions could prevent it from tainting every single thing it touched.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesSnyder, Benjamin, Coke Pulls Fanta Ad Over Nazi Controversy, Fortune, March 3, 2015, https://fortune.com/2015/03/03/coke-fanta-ad/
Palmer, Brian, Why do Foreigners Like Fanta so Much? Slate, August 5, 2010, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/08/why-is-fanta-so-much-more-popular-abroad-than-in-the-united-states.html
Fanta and the Nazis, Snopes, September 13, 2004, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-reich-stuff/
Oord, Christian, Was Fanta Really Invented in Germany? War History Online, February 6, 2019, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/was-the-soda-drink-fanta.html
Coca Cola at War, Digger History, http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-food/coca_cola.htm
The Coca-Cola Company: 1930-1934, Guru Focus, https://www.gurufocus.com/news/170243/the-cocacola-company-19301934
Coca-Cola Collaborated with the Nazis in the 1930s, and Fanta is the Proof, Timeline, August 2, 2017, https://timeline.com/fanta-coca-cola-nazi-845ee7e513af
The post How WWII Created One of the World’s Most Popular Soft Drinks appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On the morning of March 23, 1976, the peace of Tokyo’s Satagawa neighbourhood was shattered as a small aircraft came screaming out of the sky and slammed into the side of a large two-story house. The plane burst into a giant fireball on impact, setting the house ablaze and injuring two of its occupants, though miraculously no-one but the pilot was killed. But as firefighters and police arrived on the scene, it soon became clear that this was not some tragic accident but rather a deliberate attempt at assassination – kamikaze style. The intended victim? Japan’s most notorious crime boss. The assassin? A troubled porn actor obsessed with the bushido samurai code. And the motive? One of the greatest political scandals in Japanese history.
To understand the events that led to the March 23 attack, it is important to understand the political and social climate of Japan in the 1970s. For many Japanese people, Japan’s unconditional surrender to the United States on September 2, 1945 was a national disgrace. In the immediate post-war years, Japan effectively became an Allied puppet state, with American general Douglas MacArthur as the new Emperor in all but name. During this period, the Allies disarmed the Japanese military forces, banned the nationalist religion of State Shinto, arrested and tried Japanese leaders for war crimes, extracted over $1 billion in reparations for countries ravaged by Japan’s war of conquest, and forcibly replaced Japan’s military government with a western-style parliamentary democracy. Eventually, however, the Allies realized Japan’s value as a bulwark against communism in Asia and, in April 1952, ended their occupation and restored the nation’s independence. But this was independence with a catch, for the 1951 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty granted the United States the exclusive right to station more than a quarter of a million troops on Japanese soil, while the U.S. government and American corporations continued to exert massive influence over Japanese politics and industry. These measures proved deeply unpopular with the Japanese people, leading to a string of violent protests throughout the 1950s.
Amid this ongoing national humiliation emerged a powerful Right-Wing Nationalist movement, which rejected both capitalism and communism and yearned to restore Japan’s lost honour and return the nation to its militaristic glory days of the 1930s and 40s. At their peak in the 1970s, the Nationalists numbered in the hundreds of thousands, divided among dozens of militia groups scattered across the country. Among these was the Tatenokai, or “Shield Society,” led by celebrated poet, playwright, and actor Yukio Mishima. On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four of his followers infiltrated the central Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, took the commandant hostage, and barricaded themselves inside the building. Then, wearing a traditional hachimachi headband bearing the rising sun emblem and the motto “To be reborn seven times to serve the country,” Mishima appeared on a balcony and delivered a passionate speech to the soldiers gathered below, calling on them up against the government and restore control of the military – and all of Japan – to the Emperor. Unfortunately, Mishima’s speech inspired only jeers and heckling, and when it became clear that no uprising was forthcoming, the poet-turned-revolutionary committed seppuku or ritual suicide, disemboweling himself with a knife while a follower decapitated him with a sword.
While Mishima’s attempted coup d’état was a dismal failure, his example inspired a whole generation of young romantic nationalists, including our soon-to-be kamikaze assassin, one Mitsuyasu Maeno. Little is known about Maeno’s early life. Born in Tokyo in 1946 or 1947, Maeno took to acting at a young age, joining various theatrical groups as a teenager and appearing in his first film in 1959. He later took acting classes at the University of California in 1967 before returning to Japan to start his acting career. Unfortunately, Maeno found film roles hard to come by, and was forced to appear in low-budget exploitation films like 1970’s Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo and a popular style of Japanese soft-core pornography known as pink film. In the 1970s, pink films made up nearly 2/3 of all films made in Japan, with the most popular being the “Roman Porno” series made by Studio Nikkatsu. Maeno appeared in 20 of Nikkatsu’s Roman Pornos, the highest-profile of which being 1975’s Tokyo Emmanuelle, in which Maenos’s character makes love to actress Kumi Taguchi while flying a plane.
Maeno’s personal life was equally troubled. He was married twice, first to Japanese actress Noriko Kurosawa and later to an American woman, but both marriages quickly ended in divorce. Distraught, in February 1976 Maeno attempted suicide by overdosing on suicide pills. He was found lying in the snow outside the hot springs resort town of Yuzawa and rushed to hospital, where he soon recovered. Sometime after Yukio Mishima’s attempted coup in 1970, Maeno became fanatically devoted to the Nationalist cause, and yearned for an opportunity to prove his courage and redeem his country’s lost honour. That opportunity would soon come in the form of a scandal that rocked Japanese society to its very core.
In February 1976, a U.S. Senate sub-committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church revealed that the California-based Lockheed Aircraft Corporation had paid out more than $22 million in illegal bribes to foreign governments as enticement to purchase their products. Recipients of these bribes included Japan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and West Germany, whose purchase of 916 F-104 Starfighters was trumpeted was “The Sale of the Century.” According to testimony by Lockheed executives, despite securing $250 million in government loans, by the early 1970s the company was on the edge of bankruptcy. Delays in the release of its new L-1011 [“Ell-Ten-Eleven”] Tristar airliner had resulted in disappointing sales, with most airlines opting instead for the competing Douglas DC-10. Sales of other aircraft were equally disappointing. The F-104 Starfighter, introduced in 1958 as a high-speed, high altitude interceptor for shooting down Soviet nuclear bombers, was short-lived in U.S. Air Force service, being replaced after only 11 years by more versatile aircraft. In desperation, Lockheed marketed the Starfighter as a low-level ground-attack aircraft, exporting the type to 14 friendly nations including Canada, Germany, Denmark, Turkey, and Taiwan. However, the F-104 proved ill-suited to this new role, resulting in dozens of pilots dying in training accidents and the aircraft acquiring the nickname “The Widowmaker.” Indeed, the Japanese Defense Forces had already selected the Grumman F11 Super Tiger as its primary fighter aircraft before Lockheed bribes convinced them to switch to the F-104. In addition to the Starfighter, Lockheed also bribed Japanese airline All Nippon Airways to adopt the L1011 over the DC-10 and the Italian Air Force to purchase C-130 Hercules transports.
News of the Lockheed Bribery Scandal caused many key figures to resign in disgrace, including Italian President Giovanni Leone and several top Lockheed executives. In the Netherlands, Prince Bernhard, who had received $1.1 million to ensure the F-104 won out over France’s Dassault Mirage 5, was forced to step down from public positions and forbidden from wearing his military uniforms. But nowhere was the impact of the scandal more keenly felt than in Japan, for it laid bare what had long been an open secret in Japanese politics. While the United States had attempted to impose upon Japan a western-style parliamentary democracy, this foreign import failed to stick, and Japanese politics quickly devolved into what New York Times reporter Jerome Cohen described in 1976 as:
“…[a] loose oligarchy of conservative politicians that goes by the name of the Liberal Democratic Party. Power derives from factions, and factions coalesce around leaders picked less for ideological considerations than for political talent —particularly ability to raise money. The money is used by the leader and his cohorts to win elections and solidify ties with constituents…. Each faction strives to place its members in ministerial and other high posts. Its ultimate goal is to elect its leader to the party presidency, thus assuring his selection as Prime Minister, assuming the Liberal Democrats remain in the majority in Parliament. Faction leaders are constantly contending, negotiating and conspiring in teahouses, geisha restaurants and hot‐spring resorts, and every Cabinet reshuffle reflects the latest temporary coalition of forces. Occasionally one faction leader will give a large sum of money to other leaders to win favour with them and their followers.”
Indeed, with the exception of five years from 1993 to 1994 and from 2009 to 2012, the Liberal Democratic Party has ruled Japan almost continuously since its founding in 1955. In Japanese politics of the 1970s, bribery was a fact of life, with Cohen going on to state:
“Japanese law makes it a crime for any public official…Between a legal political contribution and an illegal bribe lies a murky area no legislation has yet succeeded in regulating. In a society where giftgiving is a traditional, widely practiced and subtle art, the law is applied only against those who give and receive financial benefits plainly outside the bounds of customary gift‐giving. Bribe givers frequently resort to ingenious subterfuge. “Stuffing cash in biscuit boxes or whisky cartons, preferably wrapped in the paper of major department stores, has become an accepted way of making an inconspicuous bribe,” notes The Far Eastern Economic Review. “Cartons of Old Parr whisky are said to be especially popular, as 10,000‐yen notes fit inside perfectly.”
In the case of the Lockheed Scandal, this ingrained culture of bribery had an even shadier dimension, for one of the key players in the affair was one Yoshio Kodama, a high-ranking figure in the Yakuza, or Japanese mafia. Born in Nihonmatsu in 1911, Kodama joined the Yakuza at age 12, serving as an enforcer and beating up trade unionists. In the 1920s and 30s, he became involved with various right-wing ultranationalist groups, which sought to fulfill what they saw as Japan’s manifest destiny to dominate all of Asia. To this end, Kodama organized the murder of several Japanese politicians advocating for peaceful relations between Japan, Korea, and China, and planned the assassination of Prime Minister Saito Makoto. The latter plot was unsuccessful, resulting in Kodama being arrested and imprisoned. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Kodama was released at the behest of Imperial Japanese Army General Kenji Doihara and sent to Japanese-occupied Manchuria. There he served as a spy and fixer for Chinese collaborationist forces, helping to root out and suppress resistance to the Japanese occupation. During this period, Kodama also engaged in the violent and large-scale plunder of the Chinese countryside, confiscating whatever valuables he could get his hands on and selling them for a large profit back in Japan. Thanks to these activities, by 1945 Kodama had become one of the wealthiest men in Japan, with assets worth some $175 million USD. After the war, Kodama was arrested and investigated by the United States as a suspected Class-A war criminal, but was soon released and recruited by U.S. Military Intelligence to fight the rise of socialism and communism in Japan. At the same time, Kodama returned to his underworld roots, helping to unite several Yakuza clans and amassing an even greater fortune through opium smuggling. By the early 1950s he had become one of Japan’s most successful and infamous kuromaku or behind-the-scenes power brokers, helping to found the Liberal Democratic Party and launching the careers of several Japanese politicians including Nobusuke Kishi and Kakuei Tanaka, the Prime Minister at the time of the Lockheed Scandals.
In 1969, Kodama was approached by Lockheed to be the middleman for its bribery payments. Over the next 5 years, Kodama received and funnelled more than $12 million in Lockheed bribes to various officials including Prime Minister Tanaka, Finance Minister Eisaku Sato, Japanese Self-Defense Forces Chief of Staff Minoru Genda, top executives of the Marubeni Corporation and All Nippon Airways, and, of course, himself. When the scandal broke in 1976, many of Kodama’s fellow ultranationalists were aghast, seeing his collaboration with a company whose aircraft had devastated Japan during the War as a betrayal of everything the claimed to stand for. Many even called for Kodama to commit seppuku to atone for his disgrace. Particularly incensed was Mitsuyasu Maeno, who upon learning of the scandal declared Kodama to be without honour and vowed to kill him in the most heroic fashion possible: by crashing an aircraft into his house in the style of the wartime kamikaze suicide pilots.
At the time, Maeno held a private pilot’s license and was registered at the Taiyo Flying Club on the outskirts of Tokyo. In early March 1976, Maeno rehearsed for his attack by making several flights over Kodama’s home in Tokyo’s Satagawa Ward. While Kodama had been indicted for his role in the Lockheed Scandal on March 13, the 65-year-old Yakuza boss had recently suffered a stroke and was declared too ill to appear in court. Maeno was therefore confident that Kodama would be home when he finally launched his attack.
On the morning of March 23, Maeno rented a kamikaze pilot costume complete with fur-trimmed flight suit and hachimachi headband and arrived at the Taiyo airport with two friends. Maeno told the airport that he was appearing in a movie about the kamikaze and wanted to shoot a publicity reel to help promote the film. After posing for a photograph, at 9AM Maeno and his friends took off in two Piper Cherokee aircraft and headed out over Tokyo. They flew around aimlessly for around an hour until Maeno declared over the radio that he had business in Satagawa – the secret signal for the attack to begin. As Maeno banked towards Kodama’s neighbourhood, his friends in the other plane followed, filming the attack with a home movie camera. Maeno circled the house twice before switching on his radio and announcing:
“JA3551 – Sorry I haven’t replied for a long time. Tenno Heika Banzai! [Long live the emperor!]”
Then, at 9:50 AM, Mitsuyasu Maeno dove his aircraft and slammed it into the side of Kodama’s house, dying instantly in a blaze of glory. One local resident later described the scene:
“There wasn’t a big sound of an explosion but the smell of fuel filled the air. Someone told me a small plane had crashed into Kodama’s house and I rushed to the roof to look. The property was surrounded by high, thick walls that muffled the sound and made it hard to see what was going on. Policemen soon swarmed the site. None of us understood what it was all about.”
Miraculously, while two servants were injured by the fireball, nobody but Maeno was killed. Kodama, the intended target, was resting in another part of the house and was unharmed. As Kodama’s servants carried him to safety in a blanket, his Yakuza bodyguards rushed into the house to fight the flames. The fire department soon arrived, and within 20 minutes the blaze was brought under control. Word of the attack spread quickly, drawing a group of around 70 ultranationalists who surrounded Kodama’s property and clashed with police attempting to enter the house.
Reactions to Maeno’s brazen assassination attempt were mixed. While his fellow ultranationalists praised him for embodying the spirit of the samurai, others were less impressed, with an editorial in the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun asking:
“Is it imaginable that a young German, not a wartime officer, would commit suicide in a Nazi uniform, shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’? Coming more than 30 years after the end of World War II, Maeno’s kamikaze flight revived the ghost the Japanese wanted to forget.”
Keiichi Ito, the director-general for training of the Japan Self-Defense Forces and a former kamikaze pilot, dismissed Maeno’s supposed heroism, declaring:
“Maeno was performing an egotistical, grandstand play to win publicity, not unlike Mishima’s suicide. Both were showing off to the world.”
However, in an amusing case of “game recognizing game,” Ito went on to praise Maeno’s technique in carrying out the attack, calling his piloting:
“…very skillful. I give him the highest marks on that score
But in the end, Japan’s last kamikaze attack would have no impact on the scandal which inspired it. On July 27, 1976, Prime Minister Tanaka was arrested and formally charged with taking $1.6 million in bribe money. His trial ended in conviction on October 12, 1983, with Tanaka being sentenced to 4 years in jail and a ¥500 million or $4.3 million USD fine. Tanaka immediately launched an appeal, which lingered in the courts for years. During this time, Tanaka managed to retain his grip on power, winning the December 1983 election by an unprecedented margin. However, on February 7, 1985, Tanaka suffered a stroke and spent the next decade in and out of hospitals as his political power gradually waned, He died of pneumonia on December 16, 1993, having not served not one day of his mandated jail sentence.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific, Lockheed chairman Daniel Haughton and president Carl Kotchtian were forced to resign their positions, while the scandal prompted the drafting of the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibited American corporations making payments to foreign governments to advance their business interests. Lockheed was also forced to cancel all its contracts with Japan and several other nations, leaving the company in an even worse financial position than before. Lockheed was only saved from bankruptcy or hostile takeover by a 1994 merger with Martin-Marietta Corporation, creating the company now known as Lockheed-Martin.
But what of the central figure in our story, Yoshio Kodama? Kodama’s trial officially began in June 1977, but had to be postponed on account of the Yakuza boss’ poor health. But before the trial could be concluded, Kodama suffered another stroke and died on January 17, 1984, escaping justice just like his client Kakuei Tanaka. But one has to wonder: had Mitsuyasu Maeno’s attack been successful, would an old ultranationalist like Kodama have seen it as the more honourable way to go? We shall never know. All we do know is that this story of corruption, scandal, attempted coups, and a kamikaze porn star is one of the wildest we have ever covered on this channel.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- The Story Behind Marilyn Monroe’s Nude Calendar
- How a French Political Scandal Created the World’s Greatest Bicycle Race
- Japan’s Forgotten Kamikaze Diver Unit
- Why Japan is Called the Land of the Rising Sun
Expand for ReferencesHalloran, Richard, A Japanese Dives Plane Into House of Lockheed Agent, The New York Times, March 23, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/03/23/archives/a-japanese-dives-plane-into-house-of-lockheed-agent-kodama-home-hit.html
Nambi, Karthick, When a Porn Star Crashed His Plane Into a Crime Boss’s Home in Japan, Medium, December 21, 2021,
Hornyak, Tim, Japan Rewind: 40 Years Since the Porn Star’s Kamikaze Attack in Tokyo, Tokyo Reporter, June 10, 2016, https://www.tokyoreporter.com/japan-news/national/japan-rewind-40-years-since-the-porn-stars-kamikaze-attack-in-tokyo/
Cohen, Jerome, Japan’s Watergate: Made in U.S.A, The New York Times, November 21, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/11/21/archives/japans-watergate-made-in-usa-japan.html?_r=0
Jones, William & Berry, John, Lockheed Paid $38 Million in Bribes Abroad, The Washington Post, May 27, 1977, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1977/05/27/lockheed-paid-38-million-in-bribes-abroad/800c355c-ddc2-4145-b430-0ae24afd6648/
Saxon, Wolfgang, Yoshio Kodama; Was Rightist, The New York Times, January 18, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/18/obituaries/yoshio-kodama-was-rightist.html
Weiner, Tim, CIA Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50’s and 60’s, The New York Times, October 9, 1994, https://web.archive.org/web/20211106094248/https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-to-support-japanese-right-in-50-s-and-60-s.html
The post The Insane Story of the Kamikaze Porn Star and the Scandal that Rocked Japan appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the opening sequence of the 1965’s Thunderball, James Bond, having just dispatched the villainous SPECTRE agent Colonel Jacques Bouvar, flees to the rooftop of Bouvar’s French chateau, dons a futuristic-looking jetpack, and makes his dramatic escape. Given its fantastical, over-the-top nature, this scene was obviously accomplished via the magic of Hollywood special effects, right? Well, no, actually. As incredible as it might seem, the vehicle featured onscreen was a real-life working jet pack, developed by Bell Aircraft and flown for the cameras by Bell test pilot Bill Suitor. But if working jet packs existed back in the 1960s, why, then, don’t we see them in every garage alongside flying cars? Well, as the long and frustrating history of jetpack development shows, it is certainly not for lack of trying.
The idea of the jet or rocket pack has existed in popular culture for a long time, appearing in fiction as early as the 1890s. However, it was not until the development of jet and rocket technology in the 1920s and 30s that man-sized flying machines became a practical reality. One oft-cited candidate for the first working jet pack is the Himmelstürmer or “Heaven Stormer,” a device supposedly tested by the Nazis in 1944 to allow combat engineers and assault troops to jump over trenches, barbed wire, and other obstacles. The Himmelstürmer was based on pulse jet technology, most famously used in the Fieseler F.103 or V-1 cruise missile, some 12,000 of which were launched by the Germans against targets in Britain and the Low Countries between1944 and 1945. Unlike regular jet engines, pulse jets have no rotating compressor or turbine blades and instead use a set of spring-loaded shutters or vanes to burn fuel and air in a series of high-frequency pulses, generating thrust. This simple construction makes pulse jets cheap to manufacture, but also loud and inefficient compared to other jet engines. The Himmelstürmer incorporated two pulse jets: one strapped to the soldier’s back to provide vertical lift, and one mounted to his chest on a swivel, allowing him to steer. In testing, the device allowed soldiers to cover distances of 50 metres at a height of 15 metres.
…only no, it didn’t, for despite being widely covered on the internet, the Himmelstürmer never actually existed. This fanciful piece of Nazi tech was in fact invented out of whole cloth by Canadian author Ernst Zündel, first appearing in his 1976 book German Secret Weapons and Wonder Weapons of World War Two. An ardent conspiracy theorist and holocaust denier, Zündel’s extensive bibliography includes such choice titles as Secret Nazi Polar Explorations; Hitler at the South Pole; The Hitler We Loved & Why, UFOs – Nazi Secret Weapons?; Auschwitz, Dauchau, Buchenwald: the Greatest Fraud in History; and Did Six Million Really Die? – which should give a good idea of the credibility that ought to be attached to his claims. In any case, the Himmelstürmer as commonly described would likely never have worked. The Argus As-014 pulse jet used in the V-1 cruise missile measured 4 metres long and produced only around 270 kilograms of thrust; a pulse jet small enough to strap to a man’s back would not only be too weak to lift him off the ground, but would also become far too hot and inflict serious burns. This, combined with the inherent difficulty of controlling such a device, would have made the Himmelstürmer an impractical death trap. So despite what The Rocketeer, Captain America, and Iron Sky would have you believe, Nazi stormtroopers flying around in jetpacks were never actually a thing.
It was not until after the Second World War that practical jetpack development began in earnest. One early candidate for the inventor of the jetpack is Romanian inventor Justin Capra, who claimed to have built and flown a working “flying rucksack” in 1956. Capra approached both the Romanian military and the American Embassy in Bucharest with his invention, but neither expressed any interest, and Capra was imprisoned by the communist government for approaching the Americans. Capra later claimed that the Americans stole his idea, but was unable to provide any credible evidence that he ever actually built or flew his invention. The invention of the first practical jetpack is thus commonly attributed to Wendell Moore, an engineer at Bell Aircraft of Buffalo, New York. In 1953, Moore began experimenting with a vehicle called the Small Rocket Lift Device or SRLD, a backpack-like contraption designed to carry a single person over a short distance. The technical challenges facing Moore – and, indeed, all jetpack designers to the present day – were daunting. To be practical, a jet pack must be lightweight enough to comfortably wear, produce enough thrust to lift a man off the ground, carry enough fuel to cover a useful distance, and be stable, safe, and easy to fly – requirements that are frequently at odds with one another. While the ideal power source for jet pack is a turbojet engine, which can provide constant thrust over an extended period and operate at reasonable temperatures, in the early 1950s no turbojet engine was simultaneously compact and powerful enough to fit on a man’s back and lift him into the air. The only alternative was to use rocket engines, which presented problems of their own. Rocket engines are notoriously thirsty, severely limiting their endurance, and produce dangerously hot exhaust gases that can potentially injure the pilot.
Moore’s initial SRLD prototype used cold compressed nitrogen gas stored in tanks and vented through a pair of flexible nozzles controlled by twin joysticks. Intended as a testbed for evaluating stability, control, and other technical issues, for initial testing the SRLD was flown tethered to a special rig. While much safer than future iterations, the SRLD nonetheless had its fair share of teething problems. For example, on one occasion the nozzles were found to be mounted too close to the operator, causing the rocket blast to tear his shirtsleeves clean off. These early experiments soon caught the attention of the U.S. Army’s Transportation, Research, and Engineering Command, who in 1958 launched Project Grasshopper, a concerted effort to develop a practical rocket pack to allow combat engineers and assault troops to jump over minefields and other obstacles. Rival companies Aerojet and Thiokol submitted nitrogen-powered “jump belts” very similar to Bell’s SRLD, but Bell eventually won the Government contract to build a combat-ready “rocket belt.”
As compressed nitrogen had insufficient energy density to meet the Army’s requirements, Wendell Moore switched to a more potent propellant: High-Test Hydrogen Peroxide, or HTP. Ten times more concentrated than the peroxide used to bleach hair, when passed over a suitable catalyst, HTP decomposes violently into hot, high-pressure steam and oxygen. It is also highly corrosive, capable of stripping flesh from bone in seconds. Nonetheless, throughout the 1940s HTP was widely used in torpedoes and a variety of rocket-powered vehicles, including the German V-2 ballistic missile and Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet interceptor – and for more on this, please check out our previous video, The German Rocket Fighter That Dissolved its Pilots Alive.
Weighing 57 kilograms fully-fuelled, the Bell Rocket belt was built around a fibreglass frame moulded to fit the operator’s body. To this was mounted two tanks holding 19 litres of HTP plus a tank of compressed nitrogen to push the propellant through the system. HTP passed from the tanks over a platinum catalyst, converting it to high-pressure steam and oxygen, which exited through a pair of flexible nozzles mounted on either side of the pack, producing 127 kilograms of thrust. The angle of these nozzles was controlled by a pair of joysticks, allowing the pack to be directed forward, backward, left, and right. Thrust was controlled by twisting the throttle on the right-hand joystick. Tethered test flights began in early 1961, mostly flown by Moore himself. Once more the pack and its control system proved temperamental, with one flight on February 17 nearly ending in disaster when the Rocket Belt ran away and snapped its tether, causing Moore to crash to the ground and break his kneecap. Eventually, however, most of the kinks were ironed out, and on April 20, 1961 the Bell Rocket belt made its first free flight at Niagara Falls Municipal Airport with engineer Harold Graham at the controls. While this flight lasted only 13 seconds, subsequent tests further expanded the device’s flight envelope, with Graham ultimately achieving distances of 262 metres, altitudes of 60 metres, and speeds of 96 kilometres per hour. Once satisfied with its reliability, the Bell team began demonstrating the Rocket Belt before military officials across the United States and around the world. Some of these displays were more successful than others. While demonstrating the Rocket Belt as a potential means for NASA personnel to escape a rocket launch tower in an emergency, Harold Graham plummeted 6 metres onto his head and knocked himself unconscious. More encouraging was an October 11, 1961 flight in which Graham took off from a landing craft anchored off Fort Bragg, North Carolina, flew across the water, and landed in front of an astonished President John F. Kennedy.
But while outwardly futuristic and impressive, the Rocket Belt was hardly the safest or most practical vehicle. For one thing, despite the greater energy density of hydrogen peroxide compared to nitrogen, the Rocket Belt only carried enough fuel for 21 seconds of operation. This, along with the fact that the Rocket Belt flew at altitudes too low to use a parachute, meant that running out of fuel was almost inevitably fatal, forcing operators to carefully monitor their fuel consumption throughout each flight. To help avoid mishaps, the Rocket belt incorporated a special timer with a buzzer mounted in the operator’s helmet, which sounded every second as soon as the throttle was opened. After 15 seconds the intermittent buzz became a continuous tone, warning the pilot that he had just 6 seconds to land. The Rocket Belt was also deafeningly loud – exceeding 130 decibels – and while cooler-running than most rocket engines, the hot peroxide exhaust could still inflict severe burns, forcing operators to wear special heat-resistant Nomex clothing. These limitations made the Rocket Belt impractical for use in combat, and in 1962 the Army, having spent nearly $150,000 on what was essentially an expensive toy, pulled the plug on the project. But the Rocket Belt had already captured the public’s imagination, and the Bell Rocket Belt Flying Team enjoyed a long career as a novelty act for special events, making dramatic appearances at the 1964 World’s Fair, the first Super Bowl in 1967, the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles and 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, and – of course – in the James Bond film Thunderball. Today, a handful of qualified pilots, including stunt performer Dan Schlund – AKA “Rocketman” – continue to fly updated versions of the Bell Rocket Belt for movies, TV, and special events.
Despite the commercial failure of the Rocket Belt, Bell Aircraft continued to develop personal flying machines for the military. Their next attempt was the POGO, a small rocket-powered flying platform designed to carry two people. Originally intended for use by Apollo astronauts on the moon, POGO was also pitched to the Army as a “flying jeep” for carrying soldiers over rough or dangerous terrain. While Bell managed to make the POGO extremely reliable, stable, and easy to fly, NASA turned it down in favour of the more conventional Lunar Roving Vehicle, while the Army decided the POGO was insufficiently “GI proof” for combat use and the project, like the Rocket Belt, was eventually cancelled. Undaunted, Bell abandoned the use of hydrogen peroxide and teamed up with the Williams Research Corporation of Walled Lake, Michigan, to develop a turbojet engine compact and powerful enough for individual manned flight. The result was the WR19, which weighed only 31 kilograms and could produce over 193 kilograms of thrust. Bell incorporated the WR19 into a single-man flying machine, imaginatively named the “Jet Belt”, which, like the earlier Rocket Belt, was steered by moving a pair of flexible jet nozzles using joysticks. The Jet Belt first flew on April 7, 1969 at Niagara Falls, piloted by Robert Courter. Subsequent flights revealed the device to be capable of flying for up to 25 minutes at speeds of up to 135 kilometres per hour – making it far more practical for military use. Despite this, however, the U.S. Army saw the Jet Belt as too heavy, complex, and temperamental, and like all its predecessors the device never entered service.
After the 1960s, military research into jetpacks effectively stopped, but over the following decades various inventors have attempted to push the technology forward. In 1992, insurance salesman Brad Barker, businessman Joe Wright, engineer Larry Stanley, and professional inventor Doug Malewicki formed a company to develop an updated version of the original Bell Rocket Belt using lightweight alloys and composite materials. The resulting design, dubbed the RB 2000, was first flown on June 12, 1995 by Bell test pilot Bill Suitor, and succeeded in increasing the design’s maximum endurance from 21 to 30 seconds. Unfortunately, like the rocket pack’s hydrogen peroxide fuel, the four men’s business partnership proved dangerously volatile, and the whole venture collapsed into a bizarre maelstrom of paranoia, intrigue, and lawsuits, culminating in Barker being kidnapped by Stanley for eight days and Wright being murdered by an unknown assailant. But the allure of the Rocket Belt survived even this outlandish soap opera, and today modernized examples are sold commercially by both Mexico’s Tecnological Aeroespacial Mexicana or TAM and Colorado’s Jet Pack H2O2. So if you have access to hydrogen peroxide, a quarter million dollars burning a hole in your pocket, and a death wish, you too can experience the thrill of untethered human flight for 30 seconds at a time.
Far safer and more practical are the wide array of turbojet-powered jetpacks made possible by recent advancements in gas turbine technology. Among the most famous of these are the jet packs designed and flown by Swiss pilot Yves Rossy, known around the world as “Jetman.” His packs, consisting of 2-metre-wide carbon fibre wings strapped to his back and powered by four Jetcat P400 compact turbojet engines, have reached speeds of up to 304 kilometres per hour and carried Rossy across the Grand Canyon, the Alps, the English Channel, and other landmarks. As impressive as they are, however, Rossy’s creations do not quite fit the classic image of a jetpack, being incapable of taking off under their own power. Instead, Rossy must be carried aloft by a separate aircraft and jump free before igniting his engines. He also cannot land while wearing the wing and must instead jettison it and parachute separately to earth.
More in keeping with the popular conception of a jet pack is JetPack Aviation’s JB-9, which made its public debut in November 2015 by flying around the Statue of Liberty. Developed by Australian businessman David Mayman and American engineer and inventor Nelson Tyler, the JB-9 is powered by two AMT Nike jet engines producing 160 kilograms of thrust and can achieve speeds of 100 kilometres an hour for around 10 minutes. Even more science-fiction is the Daedalus Flight Pack developed by British inventor Richard Browning. More real-life Iron Man suit than jet pack, the Daedalus consists of a metal exoskeleton fitted with six 22-kilogram-thrust micro turbojet engines – two on the back and two on each arm, allowing the wearer to maneuver the suit by simply moving their arms. On November 9, 2017, Browning set a Guinness World Record for jet engine powered flying suits, reaching a speed of 51.5 kilometres per hour over Lagoona Park in Reading [“Redd-ing”], England. On the more accessible end of things, in 2008 Canadian inventor Raymond Li patented the JetLev, a rocket pack that uses jet-ski technology to levitate the wearer on jets of water pumped from a lake or ocean below. JetLevs are available for rental at dozens of tourist resorts around the world and, in possibly the first practical deployment of jetpacks in history, have recently been adopted by the Dubai fire department to avoid traffic congestion and access hard-to-reach fires.
So, contrary to popular belief, real-life jet packs have been around for a long time, are surprisingly common, and are rapidly catching up to their fictional counterparts. Why then, isn’t everyone flying one to work? Well, aside from the obscene cost, the simple answer is that despite nearly 60 years of development, jetpacks are still too difficult and dangerous for the average person to fly without extensive training. Automobiles, which only drive in two dimensions on constrained roads, are relatively simple to operate, and are highly regulated, still cause millions of serious accidents each year; add in the third dimension, tricky flight controls, and a limited fuel supply, and the risk of a deadly mishap increases exponentially. So the next time you bemoan the current state of technology by asking “where’s my jet pack?”, take a step back and ask yourself: if you don’t even trust your neighbours with a car, why on earth would you trust them with a jet pack?
If you like this article, you might also enjoy:
- A Harrier Jet, Pepsi, and John Leonard
- That Time a Luftwaffe Pilot Risked His Own Life to Save an American Bomber
- Falling From the Edge of Space: Chuck Yeager’s Wild Ride
- The Badass WWII Squadron of Female Pilots Known as the Night Witches
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Burnett, Dean, Jetpacks: Here’s Why You Don’t Have One, The Guardian, September 23, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/sep/23/jetpacks-science-scientists
Taylor, Michael, The World’s Strangest Aircraft, Grange Books, London, 1996
Negyesi, Pal, From Jetpack to Electric Bikes – Life of Justin Capra, CE Auto Classic, February 5, 2021, https://ceautoclassic.eu/from-jetpack-to-electric-bikes-life-of-justin-capra/
Dan Schlund – Biography, IMDB, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1146230/bio
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Yves Rossy: the First Jetman, https://yvesrossy.com
Sofge, Erik, Jet Packs Finally On Sale: How to Buy Your Rocket Belt, Popular Mechanics, July 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20070930023905/http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/4217989.html
Blain, Loz, JB-9 Jetpack Makes Spectacular Debut Flying Around Statue of Liberty, New Atlas, November 9, 2015, https://newatlas.com/jetpack-aviation-new-york-flight/40286/
Lang, Cady, Firefighters are Using Water Jetpacks to Put Out Fires Because the Future is Now, TIME, January 23, 2017, https://time.com/4644097/dubai-firefighters-jetpacks/
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The post The Race to Create Working, Practical Personal Jetpacks appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Among a truly mind boggling number of atrocities the Nazis and their cohorts committed, that even closing in on a century later still have us all collectively occasionally surprised by their extent, is a little talked about program that saw hundreds of thousands of children kidnapped and many thousands more bred by the Nazis for the sole purpose of expanding the so-called ideal Aryan race. While the methods for encouraging such reproduction were numerous, perhaps one of the oddest was the use of thousands of young volunteer women called to do their duty for their country by living in special facilities dedicated to human breeding. Here now is the little told, sad story of the Lebensborn children.
After WWI, let’s just say conditions in Germany weren’t exactly ideal for a variety of reasons. Most pertinent to the topic at hand, birth rates had plummeted some 43% in the decade following the war. Contributing factors included the simple fact that well over 2 million young German men, most of whom were otherwise in the ballpark of prime age for starting families, died as a result of the war to end all wars. Needless to say, this was a problem, especially when combined with the mass and very extreme social stigma surrounding having a child out of wedlock. On this note, it was estimated by the German brass that around this time approximately 800,000 abortions were being performed within the country every year. While most of those weren’t too much of a concern for them, about 100,000 of these abortions were done on women carrying what the Nazis considered “biologically valuable” racial stock- children they wanted to see born, regardless of their parent’s marital status.
To attempt to begin to solve this baby making issue, Hitler and his cronies strongly encouraged the women of the country who fit a certain profile to get hitched and get busy letting their men shampoo the wookiee until the woman attached to said wookiee contained a Nazi fetal parasite. To encourage this, on August 12, 1938, Hitler instituted the Mutterehrenkreuz, which we’re pretty sure, as ever along with the Dutch, is just the Germans all poking fun at us by randomly mashing their fingers on the keyboard and then claiming to the non-German speaking world said combination of letters is actually a word… In this case meaning “Mother’s Cross of Honour”. We’re on to you my German and Dutch speaking friends.
But in any event, the point of this award was to encourage married German women of proper background to get busy between the sheets and pop out babies like some sort of human MG-3 Machine Gun. Towards this end, there were three well known classes of awards, bronze, silver, and gold. There also are references to a fourth level here that included diamonds placed on the swastika of the medal, but what the qualifications to get this one were isn’t known. Other than there is one woman who received it who had managed to give birth to an astounding 16 babies. As for the gold, this was for women who had at least 7 children. Women who gave birth to 6 got a silver, and the bronze went to women who had five babies.
As for the other general requirements, both parents had to be German and otherwise deemed of good Aryan stock. The mother had to be deemed “worthy” of the award via exemplifying various traits they deemed made a good mother and woman. And finally, all the babies had to have survived being born.
Beyond the medal itself, recipients of it were also given various privileges and honors, in some ways very much akin to honoring the country’s soldiers. For example, any member of the Hitler Youth organization was trained to salute any recipient of the Mother’s Cross. On top of this, one account from the book Youth-Glossary National Socialism- Terminology from the era of dictatorship 1933-1945 notes, “…they were always given the best of everything: housing, food, clothing, and schooling for their children. Old people even had to give up their seats on the bus or streetcar. They were treated like royalty with the greatest respect. No standing in line for them. At the butcher’s shop the best cuts of meat would go into their baskets.”
Noteworthy here is that a recipient of the award could also lose it later if they were found to have neglected their children in some way, cheated on their husbands, or otherwise stopped exhibiting the traits of the then ideal of a mid-20th century German woman and mother.
But this was just one piece of a multi-faceted plan to increase birth rates within the country among those the Nazis wanted breeding. Enter head of the SS Heinrich Himmler who, besides being one of the principal architects of the holocaust, in his spare time came up with the idea of encouraging young women to be used as breeding stock for his SS soldiers then take their babies from them and give them to good Aryan homes… He also thought it would be just a smashing idea to kidnap other peoples babies with the ones deemed racially valuable sent to good German homes and the rest murdered or experimented on brutally. Because, Himmler’s gotta Himmler.
As to the breeding side and why he chose SS members, Himmler had cultivated people in the SS who, in his view, were only of ideal Aryan stock. He stated of this, “like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased; we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the build-up of the SS.”
Ironically, the man at the top, Himmler, did not actually meet his own qualifications here, but we digress…
Towards this end, in 1931 he even required any SS wishing to marry and start a family to produce documents proving their family tree going all the way back to 1800, with every member on that tree needing to be of Aryan descent. If they could not produce proof of this, they were given the boot from the SS. Those and their prospective spouses who fit the bill were then encouraged to have a minimum of four children.
But in any event, after such vetting, Himmler had his stock of their view of the ideal men. Now he just needed the women and babies… Enter the Lebensborn e.V (essentially “Fount of Life Association”), which was founded on December 12, 1935.
Outlining what the organization was all about, on September 13, 1936, Himmler penned the following to his SS concerning the Lebensborn and its goals, to “support racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable families with many children. Placement and care of racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable pregnant women, who, after thorough examination of their and the progenitor’s families by the Race and Settlement Central Bureau of the SS, can be expected to produce equally valuable children. Care for the children. Care for the children’s mothers.” He also noted, “It is the honorable duty of all leaders of the central bureau to become members of the organisation ‘Lebensborn e.V.’.
As a perk of all this, wives of the SS could use the Lebensborn for its birthing facilities and other such pregnancy aid, but it was also open to any women who were pregnant, whether out of wedlock or not, so long as they were of good racial stock and their baby would likewise be likely to be. As previously alluded to, this was seen as a way to help put a stop to the common practice of aborting babies born out of wedlock, at least, so long as they were of proper racial background. On this note, approximately 60% of the women who took advantage of the Lebensborn were unmarried.
But all that wasn’t producing the birth rates the brass desired, so they decided to become a little more proactive in two ways. First, to attempt to begin recruiting young women willing to breed with members of the SS more or less anonymously. And, later, also to kidnap children of conquered lands who fit what they were looking for.
We’ll get to the mass child kidnappings and murder, as well as Kinder KZ, the concentration camp for children, in a bit. But, for now, let’s talk specifically about the breeding program. Enter Hildegard Trutz to tell us all about it from her personal experience.
Trutz was a dyed in the wool Nazi supporter and a product of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (Band of German Maidens). She states, much like many of her countrymen, “I was mad about Adolf Hitler and our new better Germany.”
It’s noteworthy here that Trutz was also a picture of the blond hair, blue eyed Aryan ideal. She also states, “I was pointed out as the perfect example of the Nordic woman, for besides my long legs and my long trunk, I had the broad hips and pelvis built for child-bearing.”
And so it was that in 1936, freshly out of school and ready to face the world, Trutz didn’t really know what to do with herself. It was at this point her Bund Deutscher Mädel leader suggested, “Why not give the Führer a child? What Germany needs more than anything is racially valuable stock.”
The Lebensborn program was then outlined to her and that once her background was thoroughly vetted, she could be used as a breeding partner for SS Officers. And that during the program her needs would be taken care of and she’d otherwise be contributing to her country in a significant way.
She later stated of this, “It sounded wonderful.” So as not to concern her parents, she told them she would be going to take a course in National Socialism and be living at the facility. That facility, as it turns out, was located in a castle in Bavaria where she resided with a few dozen other girls who had likewise been thoroughly vetted. As for this process, she states it was mostly just showing proof of Aryan ancestry through to your great-grandparents on both sides of your family. She also stated, “The whole place was in the charge of a professor, a high-up SS doctor, who examined each of us very thoroughly as soon as we arrived. We had to make a statutory declaration that there had never been any cases of hereditary diseases, dipsomania or imbecility in our family.” Also noteworthy here is that the girls were made to sign an agreement that any children they had during their time in the program would be property of the state, and sent to institutions to be taught Nazi ideaology before being given to suitable families.
The girls were kept in relative luxury with facilities for basically anything they wanted, even a movie theater. Trutz stated of this, “The food was the best I have ever tasted; we didn’t have to work and there were masses of servants.” As to the men they were made to socialize with, she states, “They were all very tall and strong with blue eyes and blond hair…. We were given about a week to pick the man we liked and we were told to see to it that his hair and eyes corresponded exactly to ours… When we had made our choice, we had to wait until the tenth day after the beginning of the last period.”
Noteworthy here is that neither side was to ever know the real names of each other for total anonymity. Also noteworthy is that the SS officers involved were not just single men, but a mix of married and not, chosen for their supposed ideal attributes to be the male half of breeding stock for the nation and race. Once the assigned tenth day after the woman’s period came, they were examined medically and then told to invite the future father of their child to their room for some spicy time.
She states of that, “As both the father of my child and I believed completely in the importance of what we were doing, we had no shame or inhibitions of any kind.” She also noted her boytoy was incredibly attractive, but seemed remarkably dumb. But nevertheless, for three nights running they got it on, and he also got it on with other girls in the castle who chose him as well, intermixed in there at the same time. And so it was that Trutz soon found herself knocked up.
Once it was confirmed she was pregnant, she was taken to a maternity home to bake her baby. As to the actual birthing, she states, “It was not an easy birth, for no good German woman would think of having any artificial aids, such as injections to deaden the pain, like they had in the degenerate Western democracies.”
She was then allowed to keep her baby for two whole weeks before he was taken and she never saw him again.
Apparently not at all traumatized by this, after, she considered signing up for another go, but soon met an officer in the real world and married him instead. She states of telling him of what she had done for her country, she was “rather surprised to find that he was not as pleased about it as he might have been…” Nevertheless, he did acknowledge that she had just been doing her duty, so let it go.
Unfortunately for her baby and the approximately 8,000-20,000 others produced this way (by the way about 30 million short of the overall program’s original one generation goal), while she never found out what happened to him, if like pretty much all other known Lebensborn children, after the war his life was probably not super awesome as we’ll get into shortly.
In any event, while all of this seems morally questionable enough, at the least, it appears for the most part the adults involved were all there of their own volition. While maybe not ideal for some, and certainly not for the babies produced, the adults, at least, don’t appear to have been forced into anything in most cases. Caveats like that plenty of SS men and the like did have babies with foreign women in conquered lands, which sometimes were considered of good enough stock and in some cases also taken, which brings us to another facet of the Lebensborn program.
As mentioned, as the breeding facilities just weren’t churning out enough babies, it was deemed advisable to simply kidnap children from lands the Germans had conquered who seemed to fit the bill of good Aryan stock.
As Himmler would state of this, “Obviously in such a mixture of peoples, there will always be some racially good types. Therefore, I think that it is our duty to take their children with us, to remove them from their environment, if necessary by robbing, or stealing them. Either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves and give it a place in our people… or we destroy that blood.”
He also noted of the whole thing, they should “raise [the children]… in proper educational facilities or in German family care. The children must not be older than eight or ten years, because only till this age we can truly change their national identification, that is “final Germanization”. A condition for this is complete separation from any… relatives. Children will be given German names, their ancestry will be led by special office.”
While these children could come from just about anywhere, Poland, as happened in many aspects of the war both at the hands of the Nazis and later the Soviets, got the short end of the stick, with an astounding estimate of upwards of 200,000 children taken there, eclipsing that of anywhere else.
These kids were put en masse on trains to various locations for processing, with it noted that providing sustenance to the children wasn’t exactly a high priority and thousands died before arriving at their destination.
Besides sometimes being sent to more remembered today places like Auschwitz, there was also a camp called Kinder KZ- a concentration camp built for the littles, specifically Polish littles, where the children were variously made to work as child labourers, some as young as just 2 years old by the way, and others experimented on or otherwise murdered.
As to the exact processing of the children taken, those who seemed like they might be of good stock were sent to Kindererziehungslager (“children’s education camps”) where a process of “quality selection” was utilized, examining not just the children’s apparent racial background, but also the littles being subjected to various medical and psychological exams, and then assigned an overall score for their desirability, with even things like the shape of their skull or the presence of and size of birthmarks considered. They were then ultimately divided into three groups, desired, acceptable, and undesired.
From here, depending on their score they were then sent off to anywhere from an SS family to a boarding school or orphanage to a concentration camp. As for the “biologically valuable” children, they were subsequently indoctrinated with the Nazi ideology, given a new German name and made to learn and speak German, with rather harsh penalties if they failed or resisted too much in any of this, even to the point of shipping them off to a concentration camp if they didn’t toe the line. For the lucky ones, it also appears the story given to the children about why they were now living with a new family was simply that their parents had died.
As for those undesirables, an account from Auschwitz on a few hundred of their fate notes that they were given lethal phenol injections, and that, “…they did not wait until the doomed… really died. During his agony, he was taken from both sides under the armpits and thrown into a pile of corpses in another room… And the next victim took his place on the stool.”
Going back to the aftermath of the war and what happened the Lebensborn children, as the war was winding down and the Nazi defeat imminent, records of where many of these children came from and, indeed, just general information about the program itself were largely destroyed before the Allies could get their hands on them.
This, unfortunately, meant that many of the hundreds of thousands of children who were kidnapped or the product of the state breeding program had no real way to be reconnected to their real families, with only about 10% ultimately doing so. On top of that, even for those who could be reunited, this was often yet another traumatic thing in their young lives, as many had spent several years with their new families and sometimes had little, if any, memory of their former lives and parents or relatives. Thus, ripped from their homes yet again against their wills.
That said, some did have somewhat happy endings, such as one Gisela Heidenriech, whose mother was a secretary for the Lebensborn program and had an affair with an SS Officer while there, ultimately giving birth within the program, but allowed to keep her daughter. While Gisela endured people calling her an “SS bastard” after the war, she was eventually able to reunite with her father, and for her part compartmentalized who he was and what he had done, simply stating, “When I first met him it was on a station platform. I ran into his arms and all I thought was “I’ve got a father.”
As previously alluded to, just as bad were the children of the breeding programs, particularly in places like Norway and Germany itself, were largely shunned and they and their parents stigmatized, with reports of the women variously being occasionally beaten, having their hair shaved off forcibly, and otherwise communities doing everything possible to run them out of town. Beyond this program, really any child of a German soldier to a foreign mother during their respective occupations were painted in the same negative light.
In Norway where there were an estimated 12,000 such children born, with some of the children placed in mental institutions after the war, along with attempts to forcibly ship them off to other countries. Being bullied and abused also seems to have been the order of the day, much like often happened to their mothers. Some escaped this oppression by leaving Norway. perhaps most famously a little girl by the name of Anni-Frid Lyngstad.
Her mother, Synni Lyngstad, was just 19 when she had a child with a German sergeant, Aldred Haase. At the closing of the war, Haase fled home to Germany and the teen Synni was seen as a collaborator for having had a child with a German soldier. To escape their treatment in Norway, Anni-Frid’s grandmother, Arntine, took her to Sweden, with Synni joining them not long after, though dying of kidney failure at the tender age of just 21. Fast-forward just under two decades later and that little girl grew up to be one of the lead singers of the band Abba.
Noteworthy here in the early 2000s, some of the Lebensborn children took their case against the Norwegian government to the European Courts of Human Rights for the government’s alleged part in their mistreatment, and, while losing the case, in the end were nonetheless offered money in settlement.
”Expandhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_Mother
https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/woman-birth-hitler-lebensborn-aryan-child-hildegard-trutz-germany/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder_KZ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Himmler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Himmler
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lebensborn-program
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15548608
https://www.magellantv.com/articles/lebensborn-the-nazis-secret-sex-program-to-conceive-a-master-race
http://countrystudies.us/germany/84.htm
Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) (1935-1945)
https://timeline.com/the-nazi-breeding-and-infanticide-program-you-probably-never-knew-about-cc5cc7b82fdc
https://timeline.com/the-nazi-breeding-and-infanticide-program-you-probably-never-knew-about-cc5cc7b82fdc
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/central-european-history/article/abs/lebensborn-and-the-eugenics-policy-of-the-reichsfuhrerss/45858920D4BF64CAD2DC33A5D8DB8655
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https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545592
Lebensborn Program
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_children_by_Nazi_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anni-Frid_Lyngstad
The post The Women Who were Used for Breeding by the Nazis appeared first on Today I Found Out.
For just over 2 decades the people of Mexico were thrilled by the antics of a dashing masked lucha libre wrestler known only as Fray Tormenta. Styling himself as a priest fighting the forces of evil, Tormenta travelled the globe elbow dropping large men from low orbit. For much of his career, few people knew that the man beneath the mask was a former streetwise drug addict turned priest who was wrestling solely for the benefit of the orphans in his congregation he had pledged to take care of.
Fray Tormenta was born Sergio Gutiérrez Benítez in 1945 in a small town of Cieneguillas in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico. The second youngest of 18 children, Tormenta’s youth was an unhappy one with his family moving around for several years after the murder of one of his uncles before eventually settling in Mexico city- a place where the young Tormenta fell in with a series of ever worsening crowds. Already a member of a gang and abusing drugs before age 10, Tormenta’s formative years were spent getting into fights and working a series of odd jobs, doing everything from making chairs to performing on street corners, to fund his numerous substance abuse vices. If all that doesn’t sound like fun enough, we should also point out that during his youth Tormenta was stabbed multiple times, smashed over the face with a beer bottle, and once even shrugged off being shot, earning him a reputation as a tenacious and seasoned street fighter.
This all changed when, at around 20 years old, Tormenta found himself facing down a murder charge after a friend from his gang turned up dead with a drunken Tormenta the prime suspect. After narrowly avoiding life in prison when it turned out he was passed out drunk in a bar at the time the murder occurred, Tormenta sought solace in religion and walked into a local church. What happened next isn’t entirely clear as Tormenta has recounted multiple versions of the same story with various layers of embellishment over the years; all we know for sure is that it turned the 20 year old drug addict into a man of god.
One version of the story tells of Tormenta being roughed up by the church’s priest after asking for help, while another explains that Tormenta had a vision of himself in full priest regalia giving a sermon. Either way, Tormenta’s experience inside the church profoundly changed him as a person after he came to the conclusion that if there were “cool priests” who understood the pressures young, impoverished people were facing, maybe fewer of those youths would turn to crime and substance abuse.
Before he could walk the path of a holy man though, Tormenta had to rid himself of his addiction to drugs and alcohol. Showing the same kind of grit and determination that would later make him famous in the ring, Tormenta opted to shake the hold substances had over him the hard way- entering a rehab clinic where they basically strapped him to a bed for a week and let the drugs work their own way out of his system. It was just the beginning, however. As a nurse at the clinic told him: “Here you don’t get cured; you get detoxed. Curing you have to do for yourself.”
After leaving the rehab clinic, Tormenta did just that, as well as travelled to Toluca where he was thrown out of the first seminary he joined owing to punching someone in the face. When later asked about this in an interview with Vice, Tormenta quipped: “How are you going to break a wild colt from night to morning?”
Tormenta was able to control himself better in the second seminary and travelled Europe as a priest-in-training, learning about philosophy, theology and child psychology. After completing his training, he returned to Mexico and was sent to a run-down parish in Veracruz to spread the word of God. Of course, Tormenta being Tormenta, he almost immediately made an impression on locals by getting into a fist-fight with a local drug addict.
The fight which occurred basically moments after Tormenta set up shop in Veracruz was a calculated move to earn the respect of locals. Dutifully, Tormenta prayed for forgiveness from God and then threw down… in the process getting his butt kicked. Nevertheless, covered in blood, Tormenta stood up after the fight and merely asked “Who’s next?”- a move that instantly endeared him to his new flock.
Soon after, he began helping the people of Veracruz, feeding the hungry, clothing the poor and forming multiple mariachi bands. That last one isn’t a joke by the way. A keen musician, Tormenta taught down-on-their-luck drug addicts, prostitutes, and petty criminals to play various instruments and helped them secure band bookings at local events to give their life structure and help them earn an honest living. It’s noted that it was a member of one of these bands, a young man called Pinguino, that pushed Tormenta to become an officially ordained minister, owing to Pinguino’s death.
A drug addict just like Tormenta had once been, Pinguino unfortunately relapsed and went on a binge at which point he was found by Tormenta. Fearing for his life, Tormenta put him into his car and began speeding towards a nearby hospital. On the way, Pinguino began pleading with Tormenta to hear his confession and read him the last rites- a request Tormenta could not honor as he hadn’t yet been officially ordained. After taking a visible turn for the worse, Tormenta pulled over and read the boy his last rites anyway, reasoning that God would forgive him for breaking the rules to provide comfort to the sick and weary. Pinguino ended up dying in Tormenta’s arms right there on the side of the road, just moments after he absolved him. Shaken, he asked to be ordained just a few days later, a request which was granted on May 26, 1973 at his own church surrounded by his faithful parishioners, instead of the more stately local cathedral as the bishop suggested.
Now officially a priest, Tormenta began taking in young boys, turning his small church into a makeshift orphanage. Tormenta’s commitment to the orphans was such that when he was transferred to another church 150 miles away, he paid for them to come with him at considerable expense to himself. A short while later, he was transferred yet again, this time at his behest to another church in Texcoco after his new church requested he stop taking in orphans. A request you can probably guess, he didn’t pay any attention to. Although the diocese of this new church allowed Tormenta to continue housing orphans, it was decided that he would have to pay for their upkeep.
Unfortunately for him, priests of his ilk aren’t exactly known for being flush with cash or material goods to sell. Thus, while carrying out his priestly duties and pondering how to best provide for the many children under his care, Tormenta fondly recalled a film he’d seen a decade earlier called El Señor Tormenta. A fairly obscure film released in 1963, the movie details the adventures of a priest who inexplicably decides to become a lucha libre wrestler to earn money for some orphans in his care. For most, it was a fantastical film with no basis in reality. For Tormenta, it was a sign from God.
Inspired by the film and the reported astronomical per-fight earnings of boxer Muhammad Ali, Tormenta began training in secret and creating his now iconic alter-ego, Fray Tormenta – literally “Friar Storm”. Yes, Tormenta’s wrestling alter ego was also a priest.
To sell crowds on his priestly-ness Tormenta would walk to the ring in his priest robes, pray mid-bout and even had a finishing move called La Confesora – literally the confessor – which involved putting his opponent into a crushing leg-lock and making them beg for forgiveness from God. For much of his earlier career, many assumed that Tormenta was simply incredibly committed to his priest gimmick and nobody realised that the humble local priest padre Sergio Benítez and the high-flying wrestler Fray Tormenta were one in the same. This was fine by Tormenta who knew that if his bishop learned that he was secretly going out at night and drop-kicking people for money, he could get in trouble.
As for masking his identity, Tormenta’s wrestling attire consisted of a simple yellow and red mask of his own design. When asked what the colors represented, Tormenta explained that yellow stood for life whereas the red stood for the blood he had to spill in the ring in God’s name. From here, Tormenta faced off against countless wrestlers, most of whom he humbled with holy elbow drops and crushing backhands. On one occasion, he even put a wrestler called Judas into La Confesora, much to the delight of the gathered crowd.
Juggling his secret life eventually became second nature to Tormenta and he would casually recall in a later interview the feeling of stepping into the ring at 9am to suplex someone in the name of god knowing he had to give mass at 12, then again at 3.
Despite making efforts to conceal his secret identity from the masses while he was, well, giving mass, a fellow wrestler called Huracen Ramirez noticed Tormenta at a wedding in full priest attire and put two and two together and his secret identity was revealed.
Initially, Tormenta’s bishop was furious and ordered the priest to stop wrestling as it was felt that word of his actions could damage the church’s reputation. The problem, of course, was the orphans. Working it out, Tormenta agreed to stop moonlighting as a wrestler if the local diocese would match the money made from his winnings so that he could continue funding his makeshift orphanage. At the time, Tormenta wasn’t earning a huge sum. For example, he reportedly earned the equivalent of just $10 for his first fight, which he won. But he banked on the bishop assuming he was earning much, much more. It worked, and the bishop begrudgingly told Tormenta they couldn’t match the funds, so he could keep doing what he was doing on a singular condition- “be careful”.
With the implicit blessing of the church and his identity revealed, Fray Tormenta’s popularity exploded and Tormenta soon found himself wrestling on both the Japanese and American circuit, earning him enough to build a proper orphanage for the children under his care in 1975. As a knowing nod to the invaluable contribution his wrestling persona had made to the existence of the orphanage, the priest decided to name it: Casa Hogar de los Cachorros Fray Tormenta, or in English, “Shelter for Fray Tormenta’s Cubs”.
Despite his growing fame, Tormenta continued to live a simple, spartan life devoid of luxury, funneling just about every penny he earned back into his church and orphanage and thumbing his nose at fame, as he would tell The Guardian in 2006: “I wasn’t after glory, I was after money for the kids.”
Still, Tormenta wasn’t completely adverse to fame, as long as he could capitalise on the fortune that often comes with it for the good of his orphans. To this end, he appeared in films, recorded albums and lent his likeness to toys and comic books.
Within a few years, the fame of mask had eclipsed the man beneath it, with Tormenta’s own parishioners taking to calling him Padre Tormenta, or in some cases simply, El Fray. In response, Tormenta began going about his priestly duties while wearing his wrestling attire, sometimes saying mass from his pulpit while wearing both his priest robes and mask.
A veritable legend of lucha libre, Tormenta earned the admiration of most, if not all of his fellow wrestlers who largely consider it an honor to have faced off against or fought alongside a man of such convictions. Although he retired from wrestling in the early 2000’s, Tormenta continues to occasionally don his iconic mask while giving mass, and peppers his sermons with lessons he learned in the ring and stories of his time as one of Mexico’s most famous and respected wrestlers.
Noteworthy, after retiring from wrestling, the mantle of Fray Tormenta was picked up by a former orphan who’d been trained by the original Tormenta. This would later be directly homaged by the video game Tekken 3, where the character King (who is loosely based on Tormenta) is replaced by an orphan the original King had helped raise with his wrestling earnings.
Expand for References* Addict, Priest, Luchador * ‘I didn’t want glory. I wanted money’ * The Superman Priest * Iconic Mexico: An Encyclopedia from Acapulco to Zócalo * Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal * The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity * Image Source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fray_Tormenta_en_interview_(cropped).png The post The Heartwarming Story of Mexico’s Real Life Badass Wrestling Priest appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the annals of gambling history, the name Titanic Thompson is one treated with reverence and awe. This almost mythical figure became a legend in his own time for his ability to perform seemingly superhuman feats to win outrageous bets, from driving golf balls 500 yards to hurling lemons clear over 5 story buildings. Along with being a well-known gambler. Thompson was also a highly-skilled pool player and golfer, to the point that given his propensity to beat some of the best in the world at golf, someone once suggested he go pro. A suggestion Thompson dismissed, because he couldn’t afford the pay cut.
The man who would eventually become the legendary Titanic Thompson was born with the decidedly less memorable name Alvin Clarence Thomas in rural Missouri (some sources say Arkansas as he lived on the border of the two states) in 1893 (give or take, there is some dispute about his precise birthday) . Growing up in a small cabin in Arkansas, Thomas rarely attended school and spent little time at home, instead spending much of his youth throwing coins and playing cards with other kids, becoming frighteningly adept at both. Even at a young age, he apparently quickly developed an eye for making bets, with one of his first hustles being to swindle a fisherman out of his prized pole.
The story goes that at the tender age of 11 Thomas bet a local angler that his dog was smart enough to recognise and fetch a random rock thrown into a nearby river. The fisherman, intrigued, took Thomas up on his bet and they agreed to draw a large X on the otherwise common looking rock to ensure the dog brought the correct one. The angler then stood dumbstruck as Thomas threw the rock into the river several times, with his pet pooch being able to somehow sniff it out and fetch it back every single time. As per the terms of their bet, the angler handed over his fishing rod and left in a foul mood. Thomas then took the rod and sold it to a local store for a tidy profit. So how did he do it?
Well unbeknownst to the fisherman, Thomas had spent the entire evening prior drawing large X’s on hundreds of similar looking rocks and throwing them into the water approximately around the same spot. Such shenanigans would become a hallmark of Thomas’ later bets, though he didn’t need to rely entirely on such underhanded tactics to win much of the time. Growing up in the rural backwoods of Arkansas, Thomas had countless hours to practise random skills that would become invaluable to him in later life such as throwing horseshoes, shooting targets and skimming stones, all of which gave him a near unparalleled ability to throw objects with pin-point accuracy over large distances. Thomas also dealt himself thousands of poker and blackjack hands and became adept at intuiting the probability of certain hands, and for good measure, taught himself to deal cards from the bottom of the deck for no particular reason…
Skills and moral flexibility in hand, Thomas reportedly left home at age 16, telling his mother he was going to find his father (a gambler himself) who’d skipped out on them a few years earlier, leaving them destitute. Despite being unable to read or write properly, Thomas’ mother was confident in her son’s future and wished him well, only asking him to promise to never drink or smoke- a promise he kept, being a teetotaler until the day he died.
From that point on, Thomas worked a number of odd jobs throughout the American South, ironically given his lack of formal education even selling encyclopedias door-to-door. The most lucrative part of these jobs was not so much the direct money he earned from them, but getting more or less paid to travel and meet people.
As for paying for hotels, it is noted that, a lover of the finer things in life, Thompson often scored himself free nights in the finest hotels by betting he could throw the key to his room into the room’s accompanying pigeonhole, offering to pay double if he missed. Thanks to his excellent hand-eye coordination and throwing abilities, Thompson apparently generally did not have to pay for his lodging.
Also while traveling, he naturally took the opportunity to fleece the residents of any town or city he visited as well, using his impressive repertoire of skills, along with a fair amount of trickery when the situation warranted. It’s also noted that Thomas would announce his arrival to every town he visited by walking into the first saloon he found and loudly asking “Does anyone know of a gambler named Lee Thomas?” in the hopes of finding his father.
On this one, we should point out that Thomas actually did get to randomly meet his estranged father in 1910 in Oil City, finding him dealing cards in the corner of a smokey bar. Thomas then proceeded to win $3600 (about $92,000 today) from his father, before announcing himself as his son, handing the money back and telling the old man he never had a chance. Thomas never saw his father again after this encounter.
After this, Thomas once again hit the road, honing his craft before being called up for military service in 1918. Already a crackshot from his youth firing endless rounds at targets (Thomas could reportedly fire a shot through a silver dollar at a remarkable distance and often displayed this skill to win bets), he was ultimately promoted to the rank of sergeant and was tasked with training recruits in marksmanship. A few months later when the war ended, he was discharged and decided to return home to visit his mother. During the brief visit, Thomas bought his mother a house with cash he reportedly recently won from card games with other soldiers.
While you might think this would put a dent in his net worth, it didn’t in the slightest at the time. In fact, at just 26 years old, Thomas had so much money that before he hit the road again, he had to warn the bank he was going to be making a rather large withdrawal because he had more money in his account than they usually kept on hand.
After extracting the funds, Thomas once again hit the road, becoming a legend among gamblers for his impossible apparent luck, skill, and sheer bravado.
As to some more specific examples, a physically imposing figure, one of Thomas’ favourite bets was that he could throw a random object, usually a small walnut or piece of fruit, over a several story high building.
You, like so many people he won this bet off, might be thinking such a light object could never be thrown that far, and you’d probably be right. Except, Thomas’ trick was to weigh the item down with lead shot beforehand, allowing him to send it sailing over the building in question.
Perhaps the most famous example of this trick was used by Thomas against Al Capone (yes, that Al Capone). After a night of cards with the gangster, Thomas bet him that he could throw a lemon over a 5 story building. Capone, being well aware of Thomas’s tricks, picked a lemon himself from a nearby cart and squeezed all of the juice out of it and bade him use that one. Thomas took the lemon from Capone and ultimately agreed to toss it. He subsequently hurled it into the lower stratosphere, earning him a $500 (about $6500 today) payday from the feared gangland figure. Capone told Thomas in no uncertain terms that the feat had earned his respect, completely unaware that the lemon had been subtly switched by one of Thomas’ associates and the one he actually threw had been filled with some buckshot.
However, Thomas’ real skill was golf, something he became frighteningly adept at while staying in San Francisco in the 1920’s. Hustling being the name of his game, naturally left-handed, Thomas taught himself to play right-handed and was effectively ambidextrous at the sport, and would thus frequently win bets at golf right handed then offer to go double or nothing playing with his supposed bad side, left-handed.
His skill eventually saw him being challenged even by future golf hall of famers, who generally walked away humbled and with a terminal injury to the wallet. Perhaps the most famous golfer to lose to Thomas was Bobby Jones, a man generally agreed to be one of the finest golfers in history.
As a testament to his skill, Thomas would frequently beat his opponents by only one or two strokes, in some cases deliberately handicapping himself, thus making it easier to goad them into another round for money. When this didn’t work, Thomas would sometimes volunteer to physically handicap himself to lure in potential marks, reportedly beating opponents wearing everything from a sling to a blindfold, with perhaps his most brazen example of skill being the time he turned up and won playing in a wheelchair.
On one occasion, as references previously, Thomas was asked why on Earth he hadn’t yet gone pro, to which he infamously replied “I could not afford the cut in pay”.
Though undeniably cocky, Thomas’ statement was fairly accurate. At a time when pro golfers could possibly earn somewhere in the region of $30,000 (about $450,000 today) a year, Thomas could earn that in a month hustling rich golfers.
On this note, along with winning in straight matches, he was a fan of challenging individuals with entirely too much money in their pockets to driving contests. The most famous example of which is the time on one wintry morning that he bet an entire group of golfers $500 each (about $7000 today) he could drive a ball 500 yards (a near impossible feat even by today’s standards).
As soon as the bet was struck, Thomas turned around and drove his ball onto a nearby frozen lake and watched as the ball bounced across it an estimated mile. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Noteworthy in all this was that it was during the height of his golfing career in the 1930’s and 40’s that the papers accidentally misprinted the hustler’s name as “Thompson” in an article about his prowess at the sport. Liking that it gave him a degree of anonymity, Thomas began referring to himself as Thompson from that point on. This name would later become Titanic Thompson after he bet a group of pool players he could leap all the way over the table. After doing just that, one gambler quipped that Thompson should call himself Titanic given how hard he’d sunk them all. The nickname stuck and became the name he’d be known by for the rest of his life.
With money, however, came enemies and throughout his life Thompson had to kill a reported 5 men in self-defence. With these, he shot 4, and killed one with a hammer when the assailant threatened his girlfriend at the time with a knife.
In the case of the first 4 killings, each one was either a known criminal trying to rob Titanic, or a mugger and thus Thompson was allowed to walk free. In the case of the latter, though, Thompson was given a choice- go to jail or hand over the deed to his boat to the state to make the case go away… Thompson chose the latter.
Speaking of murder, Thompson also played a part in the highly publicised murder-case of Arnold Rothstein (the kingpin of the so-called Jewish Mafia) in the late 1920’s, taking part in the fixed card game that prompted the debt that directly resulted in Rothstein’s assassination. At the subsequent trial, Thompson famously answered the question of what he did for a living by stating: “I play a little golf for money.”
Despite his knack for skill-based games and the fact that he made tens of millions of dollars throughout his life, Thompson’s rather high spending lifestyle, penchant for gambling on horse racing with much less success, and with little regard to saving ultimately left him penniless in his final years, when traveling around was no longer quite as feasible. As a result, he lived out his last years in a rest home, though he never let his spark for proposition bets die, and could reportedly be found at a local mini-golf courses hustling people over 2 dollar games well into his 70’s.
Nobody can live forever, however, and Thompson died in 1974 at the age of around 80. According to local legend, upon hearing the news, some old pros at a nearby golf club are said to have had the following exchange with their caddy:
“You ever know Titanic Thompson, boy?”
“Can’t say that I did sir.”
“But you say he’s dead?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“Well son, likely he is dead. But take my advice and don’t go betting any money on it.”
Expand for ReferencesTitanic Thompson: Introducing America’s Greatest Ever Gambler
All Bets Are On
‘Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything’ by Kevin Cook
Titanic Thompson Profile
The man who hustled Al Capone
Review: Titanic Thompson – The Man Who Bet On Everything
The post The King of Hustlers appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On July 6, 1947, foreman William Brazel was patrolling the Foster cattle ranch, 50 kilometres outside the town of Roswell, New Mexico, when he noticed some strange debris strewn across the ground. The debris was composed of a strange, silvery metallic substance, parts of which were covered in strings of mysterious symbols resembling Egyptian hieroglyphs. The following day, Brazel contacted the nearby Roswell Army Air Field, who immediately dispatched a team to inspect and recover the debris. On July 8, Walter Haut, the airfield’s public information officer, issued a press release announcing that the Army Air Force had recovered a “flying disc” from a nearby ranch. This statement was quickly retracted and replaced with another explaining that the debris was merely the remains of a weather balloon. But it was too late. The first announcement was quickly picked up by multiple news outlets and spread like wildfire around the country, touching off a cultural obsession with flying saucers, alien visitations, and government coverups that persists to this day. But while UFO skeptics are quick to point out that the Roswell “flying saucer” was merely a weather balloon, the truth of the matter is actually far more interesting. For the debris that fell on Foster ranch that July day in 1947 was, in fact, part of a top-secret Air Force effort to spy on the Soviet Union using high-altitude balloons.
As we have covered in our previous video The Aerostatic Corps: the World’s First Military Air Force, balloons have a long and illustrious military history stretching back to the wars of the French Revolution, when they were used to direct the movement of soldiers and artillery on the battlefield. Balloons continued to be used for battlefield reconnaissance until the end of the First World War, when this role was taken over by more capable aircraft. However, balloons saw limited use during the Second World War as offensive weapons, particularly by Imperial Japan. Lacking long-range bomber aircraft with which to attack the mainland United States, the Japanese instead turned to unmanned high-altitude balloons. Known as Fu-Go, these weapons consisted of a 10-metre-diameter mulberry paper envelope filled with hydrogen, below which were suspended various high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Launched from Japan, the Fu-Go rose to an altitude of 9,100 metres and were carried 8,000 kilometres across the Pacific Ocean by the high-altitude Jet Stream. After three days, a timer ignited a flash bomb to destroy the envelope, dropping the payload onto the target. As the hydrogen in the envelope would expand during the day and contract at night, causing the balloon’s altitude to fluctuate, the weapons carried a simple but effective altitude control system that automatically released ballast if the balloon sank too low and vented hydrogen from the envelope if it rose too high. Though aiming at specific targets was impossible, the balloons were intended to spread terror and ignite forest fires in the Pacific Northwest, depleting strategically-vital stocks of timber. Over 9,000 Fu-Go were launched between November 1944 and April 1945, but due to unpredictable weather over the Pacific only around 10% made it to North America, causing negligible damage and killing six picnickers near Bly, Oregon on May 5, 1945. But while the Fu-Go offensive was a dismal strategic failure, the balloons’ ability to maintain their altitude over great distances was noted with great interest by U.S. Intelligence, and would prove very useful in the immediate post-war years.
In the late 1940s the United States and the western world faced an ever-escalating series of international crises. In 1946 and 1947 communist governments took over Hungary and Poland, in 1948 the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin, and in 1949 Mao Zedong’s communists won the Chinese Civil War and the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb years ahead of western predictions. To counter this mounting communist threat, the U.S. Government needed reliable intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain. This was easier said than done. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were closed societies, making the infiltration of human spies almost impossible. And while U.S. Air Force aircraft regularly flew reconnaissance missions along the borders of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, none dared cross into Soviet territory for fear of being shot down and setting off an international crisis. Faced with a veritable black hole of information regarding Soviet military and nuclear capabilities, the U.S. Army Air Force, like the Japanese before them, turned to high-altitude balloons as a possible solution. Unmanned balloons could rise to altitudes of up to 30,500 metres – far beyond the range of Soviet interceptor aircraft and missiles – and if fitted with the same altitude-control systems as the Japanese Fu-Go, could theoretically ride the jet stream across the entire length of the Soviet Union, taking pictures as they went. Fortuitously, the technology that could make this possible had just recently been developed – by a rather unexpected organization.
Though best known as the manufacturer of breakfast cereals like Cheerios, Cocoa Puffs, and Lucky Charms, the General Mills Corporation of Minneapolis, Minnesota was at one point a major innovator in aerospace technology – especially high-altitude scientific balloons. The Aeronautical Research Division of General Mills was established in 1946 and placed under the direction of emigré German engineer Otto Winzen. The division soon began working closely with the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research or ONR, which was seeking a means of sending scientific payloads to extremely high altitudes to study high-altitude winds, cosmic rays, and other natural phenomena. At first the ONR used long chains of traditional latex weather balloons, but these proved prone to leaking and bursting at high altitudes. Seeking a superior alternative, Winzen and his team at General Mills soon hit upon polyethylene, the same plastic used in sandwich bags. Lightweight, strong, and resistant to ultraviolet light, polyethylene could be fashioned into balloons only 0.025 millimetres thick and up to 30 metres in diameter that would not leak or tear and could maintain a constant altitude for weeks on end. The first of these balloons, codenamed Skyhook, was launched on September 25, 1947 carrying a cosmic ray detector to an altitude of 30,000 metres. The Skyhook balloons proved extremely successful, and over the following decade more than 1,500 would be launched by the ONR from locations in the US and Canada and ships in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans, carrying a wide range of scientific payloads including automatic cameras for photographing solar eclipses and sunspots, film-based and Cherenkov detectors for studying cosmic rays, and even balloon-launched sounding rockets called “rockoons”. In 1949 Winzen left General Mills to found his own company, Winzen Research Inc, which continued to produce a range of successful scientific balloons until Winzen’s death by suicide in 1979.
Winzen’s Skyhook balloons were exactly what the U.S. Army Air Force needed for its planned reconnaissance overflights, codenamed Project MOGUL. MOGUL was based on a curious scientific phenomenon discovered during the Second World War. In 1944, American geophysicist Maurice Ewing realized that at a certain depth below the ocean, the effects of pressure and temperature combine to create a zone of water in which the speed of sound is at a minimum. Any sound produced in this zone will thus bounce off the layers of water above and below, allowing it to propagate over long distances. Indeed, whales and other marine creatures are now known to use this zone – which Ewing dubbed the SOund Fixing And Ranging or SOFAR channel – to communicate across entire oceans. Ewing used this discovery to create a device called a SOFAR bomb to allow Navy pilots downed at sea to secretly communicate their position without alerting the enemy. Consisting of a small hollow metal sphere packed in a pilot’s survival kit, when dropped in the water the bomb would sink down to the SOFAR channel and implode, creating a signal that could be detected and triangulated by shore-based hydrophones. After the war, it was realized that a similar sound channel existed in the upper atmosphere, and that by flying balloons equipped with instruments into this channel the sounds of distant enemy nuclear tests and missile launches could be detected. To this end MOGUL balloons were fitted with ultra-sensitive microphones, telemetry systems for transmitting recorded data to ground stations, and automatic systems for maintaining the balloons’ altitude.
To disguise the true nature of the project, during testing the MOGUL equipment was fitted to unclassified weather balloons designed and launched by a research team from New York University. MOGUL flight No.4, launched on June 4, 1947, is almost certainly the object which fell onto Foster ranch outside Roswell one month later. To allow these balloons to be tracked, NYU researchers fitted them with a chain of kite-shaped radar reflectors consisting of lightweight balsa wood frames covered in metal foil. According to Charles B. Moore, a General Mills engineer attached to Project MOGUL, the foil was fixed to the frames using metallic tape purchased from a New York City toy factory. This tape was stamped with decorative patterns including hearts and flowers intended to appeal to children, and it was these figures which UFOlogists later mistook for alien hieroglyphics.
But MOGUL No.4 would not be the last weather balloon to be mistaken for an alien spacecraft. On January 7, 1948, Godman Army Airfield at Fort Knox, Kentucky received a report from a highway patrolman of an unusual object floating in the sky over the town of Madisonville. The object, described as round, bright white, and with a red border around its base, was soon spotted several kilometres west, travelling at an estimated altitude of 3,000 metres and a speed of 800 kilometres per hour. A flight of four F-51D Mustang fighters of the Kentucky National Guard were ordered to intercept. One pilot, already low on fuel, immediately returned to base, but the three others pursued the object to an altitude of 6,900 metres. Not having oxygen masks, two more pilots soon abandoned the chase, but the third, 25-year-old Captain Thomas F. Mantell, continued to climb after the object until, at an altitude of 7,600 feet, he blacked out from lack of oxygen. Mantell’s aircraft spiralled to the ground, killing him on impact. Ten months later on October 1st, 1948, Lieutenant George F. Gorman of the North Dakota National Guard reported intercepting a similar fast-moving glowing sphere while flying an F-51D over Fargo. In both cases, the objects were later revealed to be Skyhook research balloons. These encounters are considered to be among the first “classic” UFO sightings that cemented the idea of alien encounters in the American consciousness, though in both cases the mysterious objects were later revealed to be Skyhook balloons.
In the end, Project MOGUL was never operationally deployed, but it laid the groundwork for future, more sophisticated Air Force balloon projects. In July 1950, General Mills conducted a series of four Skyhook demonstration flights carrying aerial observation cameras, prompting the Air Force to launch an official balloon reconnaissance program under the codename GOPHER. As with MOGUL, GOPHER was conducted under the cover of an unclassified atmospheric research project – in this case, Project MOBY DICK. The GOPHER gondola carried a 225 kilogram payload consisting of a narrow-angle camera that took pictures every 6.5 minutes and a wide-angle panoramic camera to determine the general geographic location of the balloon. The balloons could remain at an altitude of 21,000 metres for up to 16 days, whereupon the gondola would detach and deploy a parachute. On test flights the payloads parachuted to the ground, but on operational flights they were snatched midair by specially-equipped Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar transport aircraft before they could fall into enemy hands.
While GOPHER was intended to become operational by the end of 1951, the project suffered a number of delays due to issues with the camera payload and the midair recovery system. These problems lead to many test balloons drifting wildly off course and being lost in remote, unpopulated areas. Once such balloon launched in 1955 from Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado came down in a forest in New Brunswick, Canada, where it was discovered by a woodsman in 1962. The highly-classified payload was quickly snapped up by the Canadian military, leaving an enduring local mystery that was not solved until the U.S. Air Force files were declassified in 2016.
As a result of extensive delays, Project GOPHER went through a series of upgrades and re-designations, being renamed Project GRANDSON, Project GRAYBACK, and finally Project GENETRIX. Finally, in late 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower gave the go-ahead for the Air Force to begin overflights of the Soviet Union in January of the following year – provided the balloons were limited to altitudes below 16,800 metres. This was because Lockheed’s U-2 spy plane was then currently in development, and Eisenhower did not wish to give the Soviets any excuse to develop fighter aircraft and missiles capable of intercepting this higher-flying aircraft.
To provide a cover story for the GENETRIX launches, the Air Force created an unclassified atmospheric research project called Operation White Cloud. Between January 10 and February 6, 1956, 338 GENETRIX balloons were launched from sites in Scotland, Norway, Germany, and Turkey, while 30 White Cloud balloons were launched from Hawaii, Okinawa, and Alaska. Of these, more than 300 came down prematurely over Soviet territory due to equipment malfunctions or were shot down by Soviet pilots, who quickly learned to intercept the balloons in the early morning when, due to lower night temperatures, they descended to lower altitudes. Many balloons successfully reached their recovery zones, but could not be retrieved due to bad weather and other factors. In the end, only 44 payloads were successfully recovered, their photos covering only around 8% of the Soviet and Chinese landmass. Furthermore, as the balloons could not be steered towards targets of interest, the vast majority of these photos were of limited strategic value. Worse still, GENTRIX proved a public relations disaster, with the Soviet Union and its client states angrily protesting the flagrant violation of their airspace. The Air Force therefore swiftly cancelled GENETRIX in favour of the CIA’s new, more capable U-2 spy plane.
However, GENETRIX was not a complete failure. The cameras developed for the project would form the basis for later, more sophisticated photo reconnaissance systems, while the midair recovery system would later be used to great success to retrieve film capsules from CORONA spy satellites. The balloon flights also generated data on high-altitude winds that proved useful to the U-2 overflight program. A more unexpected benefit of the program was that the steel bar that secured the gondola ballasting system happened to measure 91 centimetres – exactly the wavelength of a Soviet radar system codenamed TOKEN. This caused the bar to resonate when hit by TOKEN radar pulses, allowing the CIA to locate previously unknown radar installations and divert U2 flights around them. But perhaps the strangest legacy of GENETRIX stemmed from the fact that so many of the balloons and their payloads were captured by the Soviets. Soviet scientists quickly realized that the temperature and radiation-resistant film developed for the balloon cameras was ideal for use in outer space, and on October 7, 1959, captured GENETRIX film aboard the Soviet Luna 3 probe was used to take the first-ever pictures of the far side of the moon.
In addition to GENETRIX, the Air Force also ran Project ASHCAN, which used Skyhook balloons to sample the air above the Soviet Union for fallout from nuclear weapons tests and nuclear reactors, the latter of which allowed U.S. Intelligence to estimate how much plutonium the Soviets were producing. The Air Force even developed the balloon-based WS-124A Flying Cloud platform as a means of delivering nuclear and biological weapons to targets within the Soviet Union. However, by the 1960s all such projects had been cancelled as manned aircraft, missiles, and satellites proved far more effective than balloons in nearly every military role.
The heyday of projects like MOGUL and GENETRIX was a unique period in military history, when surveillance technology had not yet caught up to the complex strategic realities of the Cold War. It was also a time of extreme secrecy and paranoia, which furnished a fertile breeding ground for wild speculation and conspiracy theories that endure to this day. While the early UFO sightings of the 1940s and 1950s were almost certainly the product of top-secret Air Force spy balloons, the jury remains out on whether we are, in fact, alone in the Universe. But as a wise man once said: the truth is out there.
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- How One Man’s Attempt to Create the Philosopher’s Stone Out of Human Urine Led to the First Element Discovered Since Ancient Times
Expand for ReferencesOtto C. Winzen, U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission, https://web.archive.org/web/20121007025634/http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Dictionary/Winzen/DI67.htm
Winzen, Otto C. (1917-1979), Stratopedia, https://stratocat.com.ar/stratopedia/1.htm
Teitel, Amy, How Otto Winzen Took Men Into the Stratosphere, Popular Science, December 12, 2015, https://www.popsci.com/how-otto-winzen-took-men-into-stratosphere/
Ridge, Francis, The Mantell Incident: Anatomy of a Re-Investigation, 2010, http://www.nicap.org/books/Mantell_Incident/The_Mantell_Incident.pdf
Sunday Ship History: Skyhooked, EagleSpeak, January 21, 2008, https://www.eaglespeak.us/2008/01/sunday-ship-history-skyhooked.html
Fowler, Shane, Mystery Solved: “Thing in the Woods” Revealed as CIA Spy Camera, 55 Years Later, CBC News, July 25, 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/thing-in-the-woods-cia-spy-camera-1.4221705
Blank, Steve, Balloon Wars, January 28, 2010, https://steveblank.com/2010/01/28/balloon-wars/
Pedlow, Gregory & Welzenbach, Donald, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance, https://web.archive.org/web/20130817020101/http://www.gwu.edu/sites/www.gwu.edu/files/downloads/U2%20%20history%20complete.pdf
Frazier, Kendrick, The Roswell Incident at 70: Facts, Not Myths, Skeptical Inquirer, December 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20180720182643/https://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_roswell_incident_at_70_facts_not_myths
The post The Secret Cold War Project Behind the Roswell UFO Incident appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. First conceived by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1735, this system for classifying life on earth, known as Linnaean Taxonomy, has been in use for nearly 300 years and is taught in every high school biology class. In recent years, however, a better understanding of genetics and evolution has resulted in Linnaean Taxonomy being largely replaced by a system known as Cladistics, which is based on organisms’ evolutionary ancestry rather than just physical characteristics. Nonetheless, many truths of the old system still hold true in the new. For example, the six Kingdoms of life – the second-highest classification level – are generally considered to be entirely separate, with no interbreeding or genetic transfer being possible between them. In other words, animals are animals, plants are plants, fungi are fungi, protists are protists, bacteria are bacteria, and archaea are archaea – and never the twain shall meet. Yet one organism seems not to have gotten the memo, and appears to have achieved a level of plant-animal symbiosis previously thought impossible. This is the strange story of the solar-powered sea slug.
Elysia chlorotica is an unassuming-looking creature. Native to the tide pools and salt marshes of the American east coast, this sea slug rarely grows more than 2 inches long, its flat, bright green body making it look like a tiny swimming leaf. But its small size and nondescript appearance belie an extraordinary ability. E. chlorotica feeds exclusively on Vaucheria litorea, a single-celled algae, using its sharp radula or tongue to puncture the algae’s cell wall and suck out its cytoplasm and organelles. But unlike other organisms, the slug doesn’t just digest its meal and call it a day. Instead E. chlorotica saves the algae’s chloroplasts, the tiny organelles responsible for carrying out photosynthesis, and stores them inside special cells lining its extensive, branching gut. Here, the chloroplasts remain active for up to a year, carrying on with their original task of converting sunlight into sugar. In this manner the slug can survive for months without eating, deriving all its energy from photosynthesis just like a plant.
Since its discovery in the 1970s, the “solar-powered sea slug” has amazed and baffled biologists. Not only is its ability to incorporate foreign cell parts into itself shared by only a handful of other organisms, but by all known rules of biology this process – known as kleptoplasty – shouldn’t even be possible. In order to carry out photosynthesis, chloroplasts require some 3,500 different proteins, including enzymes needed to repair damage caused by exposure to sunlight. 10% of these proteins can be made by the chloroplast itself using its own supply of DNA – a holdover from the distant past when chloroplasts were independent organisms, absorbed by other cells and hijacked to supply their hosts with energy. The other 90% of the required proteins, however, must be supplied by the host cell’s nucleus – which the slug digests and discards. Thus, the chloroplasts shouldn’t be able to function inside the slug’s cells – and yet somehow they do. Other mysteries abound. For example, scientists don’t know how E. chlorotica manages to digest the rest of the algae cells but not the chloroplasts, or why the slug’s immune system doesn’t react to the presence of foreign DNA. Furthermore, photosynthesis produces dangerous charged atoms called oxygen free radicals at levels animal cells shouldn’t be able to survive.
One leading theory as to how E. chlorotica accomplishes all this involves horizontal gene transfer. According to this theory, the slug extracts DNA from V. Litorea’ cell nucleus and incorporates it into its own genome, allowing it to produce all the proteins needed to keep its stolen chloroplasts functioning. While horizontal gene transfer is common among bacteria – being, for example, the main mechanism behind antibiotic resistance – it is almost unheard of in plants and animals. The incorporation of plant genetic material into an animal genome would be unprecedented. Yet when a team from the University of Maine analyzed E. chlorotica’s genome in 2008, it discovered a gene called psbO that codes for a vital photosynthetic protein – a gene identical to one found in the V. Litorea prey algae. Further research by a team from Rutgers university discovered genes that the slug uses to suppress its immune system and neutralize dangerous free radicals, allowing it to keep its stolen chloroplasts operating for months on end.
Yet, as is often the case in biology, things aren’t nearly as clear-cut as they might seem. A 2013 study by the same Rutgers team that discovered the immunosuppressing genes failed to find any evidence in E. chlorotica’s genome of the other 3,000-plus genes needed to maintain photosynthesis. Subsequent studies also failed to find the required genes, casting doubt on the theory that E. chlorotica maintains its chloroplasts using stolen algae genes. This discovery in turn lead other researchers to reevaluate other assumptions about this unusual creature – including the notion that it is solar-powered at all. In 2014, graduate student Gregor Christa at the University of Bonn divided slugs into two groups – one exposed to sunlight, the other kept in darkness – deprived them of food, and monitored their weight loss over the course of several weeks. To his surprise, the two groups lost weight at around the same rate, the light-exposed slugs showing little sign that they were surviving on photosynthesis. Experiments on related species P. ocellatus and E. timide carried out by Sven Gould at Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf yielded similar results, with the slugs surviving up to 88 days in complete darkness. Christa and Gould also observed that the slugs grew increasingly paler and brownish-yellow in yellow as they starved, indicating that they were digesting their stored chloroplasts.
To Christa and Gould, these experiments suggest that the amazing “solar-powered slug” isn’t actually solar-powered at all:
“We know that we were hitting a wasp’s nest. It’s like covering a beautiful piece of sushi in wasabi—it becomes hard to digest and swallow.”
Instead, they suggest, the chloroplasts are simply a form of emergency energy reserve, the organelles being rich in proteins, fats, and sugars. This would account for the lack of photosynthetic proteins in the slug’s genome and the fact that the slugs starve at the same rate in light or darkness. Furthermore, according to Gould:
“In winter, E.chlorotica digs itself into the mud and survives for months. If it’s in the mud, how does it get enough light? We need to check this. Maybe we’ll be surprised and they really do die, but I doubt it.”
However, not everyone is ready to give up on E. chlorotica just yet. According to biology professor Sydney Pierce of the University of Florida:
“The notion of the slugs storing chloroplasts as some sort of a food hoard seems a bit gratuitous. The plastids are only in a relatively few cells and would not seem to be much of an energy source on their own. If their [Christa and Gould’s] results are correct, they are very likely just species differences and the authors may be over-generalizing.”
Indeed, even if E. chlorotica is not carrying out full photosynthesis, it is clear that it is doing something with its stolen chloroplasts besides simply storing them as emergency food. In a 2014 study, Gregor Christa discovered that the slug is able to “fix” CO2 – that is, convert it into organic compounds – 23 times faster when exposed to light than in darkness. Furthermore, in addition to producing sugar from sunlight, chloroplasts carry out a number of other metabolic functions including generating fatty acids, amino acids, and iron-sulfur clusters. Thus, E. chlorotica’s stolen chloroplasts likely give it at least a small metabolic advantage – and in nature, even a small advantage can mean the difference between life and death.
Many mysteries still surround this unusual organism – mysteries made all the harder to answer by the creature’s elusiveness. Already difficult to find on account of its shy nature and natural camouflage, E. chlorotica is becoming increasingly scarce as climate change and human development continue to erode its delicate habitat. And even when researchers manage to capture a specimen, the slugs are extremely difficult to raise and breed in captivity – not least because they consume their preferred food, the algae V. litoria, far faster than it can be grown in a lab. So this bizarre plant-animal hybrid will likely hold on to its secrets for a little while longer, a unique reminder that, in the words of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, “life finds a way.”
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Expand for ReferencesMain, Douglas, Solar-Powered Slugs Hide Wild Secrets – But They’re Vanishing, National Geographic, July 22, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/solar-powered-photosynthetic-sea-slugs-in-decline-newsHauvurinne, Vesa & Tyystjärvi, Photosynthetic Sea Slugs Induce Protective Changes to the Light Reactions of the Chloroplasts They Steal From Algae, University of Turku, Finland, October 20, 2020, https://elifesciences.org/articles/57389
Bhattacharya, Debashish et al, Genome Analysis of Elysia chlorotica Egg DNA Provides No Evidence for Horizontal Gene Transfer Into the Germ Line of this Kleptoplastic Mollusc, Molecular Biological Evolution, May 2, 2013, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3708498/
Rumpho, Mary et al, Horizontal Gene Transfer of the Algal Nuclear Gene psbO to the Photosynthetic Sea Slug Elysia chlorotica, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 18, 2008, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2584685/
Christa, Gregor et al, Plastid-Bearing Sea Slugs Fix CO2 in the Light But Do Not Require Photosynthesis to Survive, Proceedings in Biological Science, January 7, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843837/#
Yong, Ed, Solar-Powered Slugs are Not Solar-Powered, National Geographic, November 19, 2013, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/solar-powered-slugs-are-not-solar-powered
Brahic, Catherine, Solar-Powered Sea Slug Harnesses Stolen Plant Genes, NewScientist, November 24, 2008, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16124-solar-powered-sea-slug-harnesses-stolen-plant-genes/
Christa, Gergor et al, Switching Off Photosynthesis: The Dark Side of Sacoglossan Slugs, Communicative & Integrative Biology, February 6, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3995730/
The post The Curious Case of the Solar Powered Sea-Slug appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If you suddenly decided to travel around the world, what sort of vehicle would you choose? Likely a sailboat, or – of you’re feeling particularly ambitious – an aeroplane. Well if so, then you’re a far more reasonable person than Ben Carlin. When this former Australian mining engineer began planning his own round-the-world trip in the early 1950s, he decided that all the usual modes of transportation were just a bit, well, boring. Instead, he chose an awkward and temperamental WWII amphibious jeep that even the U.S. Army had rejected as impractical. Over the next ten years, Carlin, his wife, and a rotating cast of travelling companions would drive this unlikeliest of vehicles 80,000 kilometres across land and sea, circumnavigating the globe. This is the story of the incredible journey of Half-Safe.
Frederick Benjamin or “Ben” Carlin was born on July 27, 1912, in the farming town of Northam, Western Australia. His mother, Charlotte, died when he was four, leaving him to be raised by his father Frederick, an electrical engineer for the Western Australian Government Railways. At the age of 10 Carlin was sent away to attend Guildford Grammar School in Perth. Upon graduation in 1929, he studied to be a mining engineer at the Kalgoorlie School of Mines. After qualifying as an engineer, Carlin worked briefly in the Australian Goldfields region before moving to China to work in a British-owned coal mine. On the outbreak of war in 1939, Carlin enlisted in the British Indian Army and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Madras Sappers. During the war, Carlin served in Italy, Iraq, Persia, Syria, and Palestine, attaining the rank of Major before being posted back to Kalaikunda Air Force Station in India. It was here that the seeds of a mad venture would be planted. One day in March 1946, Carlin and his friend, Squadron Leader Mac Bunting, were wandering around a U.S. Army Air Force surplus when they spotted a vehicle unlike anything either man had ever seen.
Officially designated GPA but nicknamed the “Seep” by GIs, the vehicle was an amphibious version of the Ford GPW light truck, better known as the “Jeep.” Based on a standard Jeep chassis, the Seep was fitted with a large wrap-around sheet metal float and a propeller geared to the rear drivetrain to allow it to cross rivers, lakes, and other small bodies of water. However, unlike the larger DUKW or “Duck” amphibious truck it was based on, the Seep proved a disappointment. Slow, heavy, and unwieldy, it could barely manage 3 kilometres per hour and was extremely difficult to steer in even the calmest water. Production was cancelled after only a year, with barely 13,000 units being completed by war’s end. Yet despite this abysmal performance, Carlin immediately saw the potential in the oddball vehicle, declaring:
“With a bit of titivation, you could go around the world in one of those things.”
While Mac Bunting scoffed at the notion, Carlin grew more and more enamoured with the idea of driving the amphibious jeep around the world, later writing:
“The more I thought about the idea—and within a few days I was thinking of little else—the more I liked it. Quite reasonably possible, it would be difficult enough to be interesting, a nice exercise in technology, masochism, and chance—a form of sport—and it might earn me a few bob.”
But to complete such a journey, Carlin would need a travelling companion. Thankfully, near the end of the war Carlin had met Elinore Arone, an American Red Cross Nurse from Boston. Hungry for adventure, Elinore was immediately entranced by Carlin’s plan to drive and sail around the world, and insisted on joining him. Upon Ben’s discharge from the Army the pair emigrated to Maryland and moved in together. Carlin had previously been married Gertrude Plath, a German expatriate living in China, but the two had separated before the war’s end.
After struggling to scrape together the necessary funds, on January 30, 1947 the Carlins finally managed to purchase a 1942 Ford GPA from a government auction in Aberdeen, Maryland for $901, the equivalent of $10,500 today. The Carlins had initially tried to convince the Ford Motor Company to sponsor the trip, but the company refused, believing the craft was incapable of making the journey. And they had good reason to be skeptical. The Carlins’ surplus GPA was barely functioning, its engine bodywork and engine riddled with dozens of leaks and cracks. It would require extensive modification to make it seaworthy enough for a round-the-world trip. While Elinore stayed with her parents in Boston and worked odd jobs to save money, Ben got to work. After plugging all the leaks in the hull, he modified the bow to make it more streamlined, coated the hull in waterproof neoprene, and added two new fuel tanks, increasing the vehicle’s fuel capacity from 45 to 750 litres. He then built a cramped, box-like cabin over the driver’s compartment, into which he installed a small sleeping cot, aircraft-style navigational instruments, and a two-way radio. The upgraded vehicle, which now weighed a full three tons, was christened Half-Safe, after an advertisement for Arrid brand deodorant which read “Don’t be half-safe – use Arrid to be sure.”
In October 1947, Ben, down to his last $300 and anxious to get started on his voyage, decided to take Half-Safe on a test run from Annapolis to New York City. The results were less than encouraging. Half-Safe proved almost impossible to steer, and for three days strong winds reduced her speed to barely two miles per hour. Worse still, on the fourth day a cracked exhaust pipe nearly caused Ben to pass out from Carbon Monoxide poisoning. As he lay on the cabin roof, half-paralyzed, the vehicle drifted in wide circles around Delaware bay before impaling itself on a metal piling. In an amazing stroke of luck, had the piling struck just a few inches lower, the hull would have flooded, sending Half-Safe – and Ben Carlin – to the bottom.
Now completely broke and without prospect of employment, Ben took to skipping meals and living in cheap hotels while he badgered the British consulate for back-pay owed him for his wartime service. After four months of living hand-to-mouth the $1,800 cheque finally arrived, and Ben and Elinore began preparing for a transatlantic crossing. On the advice of their publicist, in May 1947 the couple were married at New York City Hall. Two newlyweds honeymooning by crossing the Atlantic, he claimed, would be an easy story to sell.
The Carlins made their first attempt at a transatlantic crossing on June 16, 1948, sailing from New York Harbour. After an inauspicious start in which Half-Safe was washed up the Hudson River by strong tides, the Carlins finally managed to sail out into the Atlantic at a speed of five knots. However, they failed to maintain radio contact, prompting a search by the Coast Guard, and were forced by strong currents to land only 64 kilometres away in New Jersey. Two more attempts followed in July, but mechanical troubles, seasickness, and carbon monoxide leaks forced the Carlins to turn back. A fourth attempt in early August started off well, but some 480 kilometres from New York a propeller bearing failed and could not be repaired. The Carlins drifted for nearly a week before being rescued by the oil tanker New Jersey, which carried them to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
At this point the Carlins were nearly ready to give up their mad venture, but at the encouragement of the New Jersey’s captain they decided to keep trying. Elinore returned to Boston and Ben took a position at a marine salvage firm while he repaired and upgraded Half-Safe for the next attempt. In September 1949 the Carlins set out again from Halifax, but only 56 kilometres from shore a rogue wave broke away the auxiliary fuel tanks, forcing the attempt to be abandoned. Ben further modified Half-Safe by adding a 2000 litre tank towed behind the vehicle and on July 19, 1950, he and Elinore sailed from Halifax for one last attempt at the crossing. The 32-day voyage was a gruelling ordeal. Despite the addition of extra rudders, Half-Safe was still extremely difficult to steer, requiring the wheel to be manned at all times. Sleep deprivation, hallucinations, and seasickness were constant companions. The engine failed on several occasions, forcing Ben to make repairs at sea, while halfway through crossing the auxiliary fuel tank broke away and the radio antenna snapped, cutting the Carlins off from the outside world and forcing them to sail at full speed in a desperate bid to reach land. Worse still, near the end of the crossing the Carlins drifted into the path of Hurricane Charlie, which nearly sank their tiny vessel. But finally, on August 20, 1950, Half-Safe arrived on Flores, the westernmost island in the Azores. From here the Carlins sailed to Cape Juby in Morocco via the islands of Faial and Madeira, then drove up the Moroccan coast to the straits of Gibraltar. In desperate need of a vacation, they spent several months sightseeing through Europe before finally ending the first leg of their journey in Birmingham on January 1, 1951. A contemporary Life magazine article described their achievement as:
“…certainly the most foolhardy and possibly the most difficult transatlantic voyage ever made.”
Despite this, however, the world’s reaction to the crossing was not what the Carlins had expected. Though their arrival had been celebrated by locals everywhere they went, major newspapers showed little interest in covering or sponsoring their journey. Months trapped together in a space larger than a closet had also begun to strain the Carlins’ marriage. As Ben Carlin wrote in August 1951:
“Now aged 39, I had lived from suitcase or kit-bag for 13 years; the travel urge was long satisfied and I yearned for a permanent hat-peg; a lawnmower, the pit-a-pat of footsies. If beforehand I had been persuaded that the trip would take longer than a year, I would have dropped it; now 5 years later I had barely started.”
But the show would go on. While the Carlins recuperated from their gruelling Atlantic crossing, Half-Safe was exhibited in department stores across Europe to raise money for the rest of the journey. Ben also completed an account of the crossing titled Half Safe: Across the Atlantic by Jeep, which sold 32,000 copies and was translated into five languages. Finally, three years after arriving in England, the Carlins were at last ready to continue their journey. Departing on April 22, 1955, the Carlins crossed the English Channel to France, the drove across Europe and the Middle East through Switzerland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, finally arriving in Calcutta, India. At this point the Carlins had once again run out of money, and Ben was forced to take Half-Safe on a tour of Australia and New Zealand to raise further funds. The trip was a disaster. Most of the bookstores throughout the country never received their shipment, and reviews of Carlin’s book were mediocre at best. Even worse, when Carlin finally returned to Calcutta in January 1956 to resume the journey, his wife was no longer there to accompany him. Tired of endless travel and seasickness, Elinore had returned home to Boston. Shortly thereafter, she filed for divorce.
Carrying on alone, Ben sailed across the Bay of Bengal to Burma, where he was joined by a new travelling companion, fellow Australian Barry Hanley. Together, Carlin and Hanley drove from Burma through Thailand and Vietnam before sailing across the South China Sea to Japan via Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Okinawa. Along the way they were mobbed by adoring fans, the voyage having by now become international news.
On arrival in Japan Hanley returned to Australia and a new travelling companion appeared: Boyé Lafayette de Mente, an American journalist for The Japan Times. After resting and completing much-needed repairs to Half-Safe, Carlin and de Mente set off from Tokyo on May 1, 1957, bound for Shemya Island in Aleutians northwest of Alaska. The pair expected their Pacific crossing to last 21 days, but did not make landfall on Shemya island until July 8, prompting yet another search by the Coast Guard. From Shemya Carlin and de Mente made their way along the Aleutians to the Alaskan mainland and finally to Anchorage, where de Mente departed and returned to his hometown of Phoenix. While de Mente had only agreed to accompany Carlin on the Pacific leg of his journey, his departure was likely further hastened by Carlin’s erratic behaviour before and during the crossing. According to de Mente, in Carlin had accepted an offer from the Standard-Vacuum Oil Company to fuel his Pacific crossing in exchange for completing an 18-day promotional tour of Japan. Carlin, resentful of being ordered around by the oil company, proceeded to go on drunken rampages through every Japanese town they visited.
Alone once more, Carlin drove south through Alaska and Canada and along the U.S. East Coast to San Fransisco. Along the way, Carlin passed the Peace River Bridge near Taylor, British Columbia, which had collapsed on October 16, 1957. In front of a stunned crowd waiting for the nearby ferry, Carlin simply drove Half-Safe into the river and crossed over to the other side. In San Fransisco Carlin reunited with Elinore for the first time in two years before heading north to Canada, arriving back at his starting point on May 13, 1958. Against all odds, Carlin and his strange little vehicle had accomplished the impossible. Over the span of 10 years, Half-Safe had travelled over 17,000 kilometres by sea and 62,000 kilometres by land, crossing five continents and 38 countries in the process. Ben Carlin remains the only person to have circumnavigated the globe in an amphibious vehicle.
Tragically, however, Carlin never reaped the rewards of his epic feat. Stubborn, volatile, and unwilling to engage in promotion, Carlin completed his journey only to find that the public had completely lost interest. Many critics even claimed that the whole venture was a hoax. After touring the lecture circuit for several years, a forgotten and dejected Ben Carlin returned home to Perth, where he lived until his death from a heart attack in 1981. For many years Half-Safe remained in the United States, where it was occasionally exhibited by Carlin’s friend George Calimer. Upon Carlin’s death, however, the vehicle was acquired by Carlin’s old school, Guildford Grammar, where it is still on display. While the unlikely voyage of Half-Safe did not bring Ben Carlin the fame and fortune he had hoped for, it remains a remarkable achievement, and a testament to what can be accomplished with ingenuity, determination, and just a little madness.
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Expand for ReferencesNestor, James, Half-Safe, The Atavist Magazine, No.20, https://magazine.atavist.com/half-safe/
Blackbourn, Rob, ‘Half-Safe’ Amphibious Jeep, Trade Antique Cars, August 27, 2020, https://www.tradeuniquecars.com.au/features/2008/half-safe-amphibious-jeep-blackbourn-439
Feltman, Rachel, A Madman, an Amphibious Jeep, and a Trip Around the World, Popular Mechanics, January 10, 2013, https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a8599/a-madman-an-amphibious-jeep-and-a-trip-around-the-world-14962549/
Strohl, Daniel, Ambitious Amphibious: Ben Carlin’s Round-the-World Trek in a Ford GPA, Gemmings, March 2, 2011, https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2011/03/02/ambitious-amphibious-ben-carlins-round-the-world-trek-in-a-ford-gpa
School Remembers Perth Adventurer Who Circumnavigated Glove in Half Safe, World War II Amphibious Jeep, ABC News, June 22, 2015, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-22/ben-carlin-and-his-half-safe-amphibious-vehicle-adventure-/6563962
The post The Largely Forgotten Entirely Mad Adventure of Half Safe The Amphibious Car That Could appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest single campaign of the Second World War. Lasting from the very first day of the war in Europe to the very last, the battle pit German U-boats against Allied merchant shipping in a struggle for control of the Atlantic sea lanes, essential to keeping the British Isles supplied with food, fuel, and other raw materials. So vital was this lifeline to Britain’s survival that Winston Churchill would later write:
“The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called The Battle of Britain.”
Throughout the conflict both sides suffered dramatic reversals of fortune, until late 1943 when the Allies finally wrested control of the Atlantic from the Germans. While this success is often attributed to the introduction of superior weaponry such as escort carriers, long-range patrol aircraft, and radar, the real key to victory was doctrinal, with the Allies learning through trial and error how best to use tactics and technology to counter and neutralize the U-boat menace. And pivotal to this learning process was a unique unit of young women who, for three years, spent nearly every day holed up in an attic in Liverpool playing out elaborate combat scenarios with model ships on the floor. They were the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, or WATU, the war gamers who helped win a real war.
Almost the moment war was declared on September 3, 1939, the German Navy or Kriegsmarine launched a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare against Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic. Its goal was to starve Britain into submission and bring its leaders to the negotiating table, and early on it seemed as though the Germans might just succeed. Between July and October 1940 U-boats sank nearly 1.5 million tons of Allied shipping, and by 1941 had reduced Britain’s yearly imports from a pre-war total of 68 million tons to a mere 26 million tons. In 1942, Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the U-boat arm, calculated that if he could inflict sustained losses of 700,000 tons per month, Germany would win the war.
What makes these losses even more staggering is the fact that unrestricted submarine warfare was nothing new, the Imperial German Navy having employed the exact same strategy some 20 years before. However, a number of factors resulted in the lessons of the Great War falling by the wayside. Among these was the British Admiralty’s inherent disdain for submarines, which First Sea Lord Sir Arthur Wilson had infamously dismissed as “underhanded, unfair, and damned un-English.” Consequently, Royal Navy doctrine in the interwar years barely mentioned submarines at all, and the strategy of grouping merchant shipping into convoys – which had proven so effective against U-boats during the First World War – had largely been abandoned by the start of the Second. Adding to the Admiralty’s woes was the loss of their naval bases in Ireland in April 1938 and the German occupation of France in May 1940, which simultaneously limited British access and increased German access to Britain’s vital Western Approaches. It was also hamstrung by its rigid command structure wherein warship commanders were given very little individual initiative, leading to convoy escorts being lead on frequent wild goose chases on orders from shore.
But even after the Royal Navy managed to reorganize itself into a more effective anti-submarine force, it still faced the problem that although British naval doctrine had not moved on since 1918, German doctrine had. During the First World War, German U-boats had operated alone, with each commander seeking out and sinking targets on his own initiative. This approach, however, had been rendered ineffective by the introduction of the convoy, so between the wars the German Navy developed the rotte, or “wolf pack” tactic. In this system, U-boats patrolled in extended lines across known convoy routes. When a U-boat located a convoy, it would radio in its position to headquarters, which would then order the whole pack to converge on the convoy and attack as a group, overwhelming the escorts. While the Allies were aware of this overall strategy, they did not know exactly how U-boat wolf packs approached and attacked convoys. And aside from a few enterprising individuals like Frederic “Johnny” Walker and Clarence Howard-Johnson, few escort commanders possessed effective tactics for protecting their convoys and sinking U-boats when attacked.
To help solve this problem, in January 1942 Admiral Cecil Usborne formed the Western Approaches Tactical Unit or WATU, a dedicated war gaming and analysis organization under the command of Commander Gilbert Roberts. A career officer who had joined the Navy as a cadet at the age of 13, from 1935 to 1937 Roberts studied at the Portsmouth Tactical School where he became an avid practitioner of war games, especially those developed by Frederick T. Jane, founding editor of the famous Jane’s military reference guides. In 1937 Roberts was given command of the destroyer HMS Fearless, which was sent to patrol the Iberian coast during the Spanish Civil War. In October 1938, however, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, declared medically unfit to serve at sea, and forced to retire from the Navy.
Roberts’s posting to the WATU proved fortuitous. Not only was he an avid war gamer and a skilled communicator, but according to author Terence Robertson:
“It seemed that by design or accident all the misfits of the navy had congregated at Liverpool Among his brother officers were many of his own kind—“passed overs”— who at some stage or other had become red-tape rebels But the vast majority were officers of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, week-end sailors churned out by the recruiting machine often with inadequate training The Royal Naval Reserve, those independent merchant men who would become sore boils in big ship wardrooms, somehow fitted in here by providing their expert seamanship to balance the ignorance of the willing, but the lamentably “green.”
However, Roberts’s colleagues and staffers described him as a difficult man to work with – stubborn, demanding, and argumentative. But whatever his faults, his work with the WATU would prove decisive in securing Allied victory in the Atlantic.
Housed on the top floor of the Western Approaches Command Headquarters in Derby House, Liverpool, the WATU was mainly staffed by members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, or “Wrens,” many of whom were as young as 17 at the time of the unit’s founding. Some, Like Laura Howes and Janet Okell, were hired for their mathematical or tactical skills; others, like Nancy Wales, for their proficiency in team sports – in Wales’s case, hockey. 66 Wrens in total would serve in the unit between 1942 and 1945.
The WATU’s task was to play through both actual and hypothetical encounters between convoys and U-boat wolf packs in order to work out the tactics used by the Germans and develop potential countermeasures. This was done on a large playing surface laid out on the floor in the largest room in the building, which was divided into ten-inch squares each representing a nautical mile. Merchant ships, escorts, and U-boats were represented by small wooden models, each of which was given precise attributes based on their real-life counterparts, such as maximum speed, minimum turning radius, and sonar, radio, and weapons range. Wrens playing as escorts stood behind cloth screens and could only view the board through small peepholes, while those playing as U-boats were given an unrestricted view. To further complicate matters, lines representing the courses of U-boats were traced in green chalk, nearly invisible against the brown floor, while the courses of the merchantmen and escorts were traced in white. Each team was given two minutes to confer and issue their orders, which were conveyed using slips of paper to prevent the other team from overhearing. The Wrens quickly became ruthlessly efficient at their jobs, with 19-year-old Janet Okell defeating Western Approaches Commander and WWI submarine veteran Admiral Max Horton no less than five times in simulated combat.
One of the first problems solved by WATU was how U-boats were managing to sink merchantmen in the interior of convoys. At first, naval planners assumed that the U-boats were attacking from the outside of the convoy as they had during the First World War, but given that escorts operated up to five thousand yards out from the convoy and German torpedoes only had a range of 5,400 yards, this seemed unlikely. By replaying past convoy battles, WATU determined that the U-boats were actually attacking the convoy from within, approaching from behind while surfaced and using their superior speed and the cover of darkness to slip past the escorts unnoticed. In response, the WATU developed a counter-strategy known as Raspberry, whereby upon a ship being torpedoed, the escorts to the sides and rear of the convoy would fall astern into a line abreast and drive forward blasting their sonar, while the forward escorts would zig-zag ahead of the convoy. This would effectively trap the infiltrating U-boat, all but guaranteeing its destruction. The tactic’s name came from Wren Jean Laidlaw, who likened the maneuver to “blowing a raspberry at Hitler.”
Another tactic developed by WATU, code-named Pineapple, was intended for use against U-boats lying in wait ahead of the convoy. Upon detection of the U-boat, the escorts were to steam ahead at full speed for 15 minutes, blasting their sonar and firing star shells, before falling back into their regular positions. This would in theory scare off the U-boat and prevent it from observing and reporting other escort tactics like Raspberry. When this tactic was first demonstrated to a visiting Royal Canadian Navy officer, he pointed out that the diagram looked rather like a pineapple, and the name stuck.
Another tactic called Beta Search used the opposite approach. Once the U-boat was detected, one escort ship was to advance towards it without using its sonar, firing star shells, or dropping depth charges. If, as predicted, the U-boat submerged, the escort would sail over it, tricking the U-boat Captain into thinking he hadn’t been spotted. But a submerged U-boat was far slower than a surfaced one, making it vulnerable to the rest of the escorts, who, under the cover of the convoy, would advance and drop depth charges on the U-boat’s predicted position.
In late 1943, Roberts began receiving reports that U-boats had begun targeting the escorts themselves. These attacks, however, were highly unusual; though in every case the escort spotted the U-boat and turned towards it, they were somehow always torpedoed from behind. Roberts realized that the Germans had developed an acoustic torpedo, which homed in on the sound of a ship’s propellers. This torpedo, which the Germans called the T5 Zaunkönig the Allies the German Navy Acoustic Torpedo or GNAT, was first deployed in August 1943 and threatened to tip the balance of power in the Atlantic in favour of the U-boats. However, in an inspired bit of deduction Roberts predicted that the torpedo’s acoustic could only track targets inside a 60-degree cone directly ahead of it, and developed a tactic known as Step-Aside to exploit this weakness. Upon spotting a surfaced U-boat, an escort was to fire a star shell, announcing to the U-boat that it had been spotted and forcing it to submerge and fire its torpedo. The escort would then make a hard 150-degree turn and accelerate to full speed, placing it outside of the torpedo’s acoustic cone, before homing in on and attacking the submerged U-boat. Along with decoy noisemakers called Foxer and CAT which were towed behind escorts to deflect acoustic torpedoes, Step-Aside effectively negated any advantage granted by the new technology.
In addition to developing new antisubmarine tactics, the WATU also ran regular training courses to teach these tactics to naval officers. Starting in February 1942, these courses ran six days a week every week until July 1945. In total over 5000 personnel participated in these courses, including officers from RAF Coastal Command and allied nations such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, Poland, Norway, and Free France. WATU also compiled regular memos known as Atlantic Convoy Instructions which were distributed to every escort ship operating in the Atlantic. In this manner Western Approaches Command was able to keep pace with changes in German doctrine and stay one step ahead of the U-boats. The results were dramatic: from 120 ships sunk in October 1942, by December losses had fallen to only 76 and continued to decline steadily thereafter. The success of WACU inspired the creation of sister organizations in Londonderry and Belfast, Northern Ireland; Irwell and Osprey in Scotland; Halifax in Canada; Freetown in Sierra Leone; and Bombay in India. But perhaps the greatest testament to the unit’s effectiveness was the fact that in U-boat headquarters in Flensburg, Germany, Admiral Dönitz hung up a photograph of Commander Gilbert Roberts with the caption:
“This is your enemy, Captain Roberts, Director of Anti U-boat Tactics.”
By May 1943, a combination of new tactics, larger numbers of escort carriers and long-range patrol aircraft, radar and direction-finding technology, and the reading of German Naval Enigma traffic had made U-boat losses unsustainable, forcing Admiral Dönitz to largely withdraw his fleet from the North Atlantic. Though submarine operations would continue until the bitter end, the U-boat arm would never again be the formidable force it once was in the first three years of the war.
Following the end of major U-boat operations in the Atlantic, WATU switched to developing anti-submarine tactics in support of the D-day landings in June 1944. Once again they were highly successful, with relatively few Allied ships being sunk by U-boats in the English Channel before the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. The Western Approaches Tactical Unit officially ceased operations two months later, having played a pivotal role in keeping the Atlantic sea lanes open and the Allied war machine marching towards victory. In recognition of their efforts, in July 1945 Admiral Horton sent the following message:
“On the closing down of WATU I wish to express my gratitude and high appreciation of the magnificent work of Captain Roberts and his staff, which contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of Germany. You had a great deal to do in winning the war because if we hadn’t won the Battle of the Atlantic we should undoubtedly have lost the war!”
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Expand for ReferencesStrong, Paul, Wargaming in the Atlantic War, MORS Wargaming, October 2017, https://paxsims.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/2017-12-10-watu-mors.pdf
Sloan, Geoffrey, The Royal Navy and Organizational Learning – The Western Approaches Tactical Unit and the Battle of the Atlantic, Naval War College Review, Autumn 2019, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8066&context=nwc-review
Western Approaches Tactical Policy, April 1943, Juno Beach Centre, https://www.junobeach.org/canada-in-wwii/articles/submarines-attack-in-the-st-lawrence/western-approaches-tactical-policy-april-1943/
The post The Young War Gamers Who Changed the Course of WWII appeared first on Today I Found Out.
2700 years ago or so, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal was initiating a program to gather copies of all books in his empire to his library. ‘Bookworm’ would be an apt description for him, had books not been made out of clay making them slightly undesirable to worms… Anyway, back to good old Ashurbanipal, he liked to boast about having the complete mastery of all scribal arts. In his own words:
“I, Ashurbanipal, within the palace, understood the wisdom of Nabu [the god of learning]. All the art of writing of every kind. I made myself the master of them all. I read the cunning tablets of Sumer and the dark Akkadian language which is difficult to rightly use; I took my pleasure in reading stones inscribed before the flood… such works as none of the kings who went before me had ever learnt, remedies … clever teachings … I wrote on tablets, checked and collated, and deposited within my palace for perusing and reading.”
So lets’ say he was not shy about being a nerd. That said, if you are picturing him wearing thick glasses and a bow tie… remember that he liked hunting lions for sport. That said, he used his prodigious learning and nerdery to good end, ruling what according to many scholars constitutes one of the first true empires in the world due to its administrative innovations. Its dominion reached Egypt to the west and Iran to the East, and dear nerdy Ashurbanipal was heralded by his subjects as equal to the gods.
Of course, in our time, overly obsessing over knowledge and intellectual things is often associated with social awkwardness and introvertness – and the culmination of all is the very definition of what we would call a nerd. Or is it?
To being with, what exactly makes a nerd a nerd? Is it the obsession with a certain theme? Like knowing everything about a specific genre, such as all spaceship types in Star Trek or the stats of the already alarming and still growing number of Pokémon, or perhaps religiously going to Comicon dressed up accordingly.
But a sports fan might know everything about his favourite sport, talk about the last match all week long and go to the stadium dressed up as his favourite football player. He is not generally considered a nerd. But at its core, is there really any difference? In the public consciousness, probably, as his interests are not categorized as “nerdy”. But how did this come to be?
Emerging in a Dr. Seuss’ book in 1950, the word ‘nerd’ found its way into slang language. More specifically, the first documented case of “nerd” was in Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo. The specific text was: “a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too”. It was just one year after the Dr. Seuss book, in 1951 in a Newsweek magazine article, that we find the first documented case of “nerd” being used similarly to how we use it today, as as being synonymous with someone who was a “drip” or a “square”.
There are two popular hypotheses as to where the word derived from. The first is that it was perhaps derived from “drunk” spelled backwards, “knurd”. This was fitting to describe people who studied instead of going out with friends and partying. A somewhat more popular hypothesis suggests that it came from a modification of “nut”, specifically “nert”, which meant “stupid or crazy person” and was common in the 1940s, directly before the term “nerd” showed up. Whatever the case, the word nerd ended up becoming relatively popular in the 1960s and by the 1970s was hugely popularized by the TV show Happy Days, where it was used frequently.
Wherever it derived from exactly, it was used as a sort of shorthand to refer to students in schools or other people who were socially awkward and obnoxiously intelligent, mostly in the fields of math and science.
But the meaning quickly changed into a type of slur that could apply to someone even if they didn’t have the social characteristics of a nerd, but was, for example, super interested in books and learning.
For middle-school children, ultimately being dubbed a ‘geek’ or a ‘nerd’ is still not always welcome. In fact, evidence indicates that such epithets lead children to underachieve purposely to avoid these labels, especially the case with girls.
As to why the stigma, the obvious explanation is that this is related to the teenage psychology of rebellion against authority figures, which include teachers and the school systems in general. Those good at the subjects taught and those who become the favorite of the teachers are therefore regarded as uncool, particularly if, to a wide range of students, a subject seems not very applicable in real life and therefore causes utter confusion and subsequent rejection in order to avoid feeling stupid.
Of course, the number of reasons why ‘nerds’ are sometimes unpopular is decidedly large and can be easily linked to things like anti-intellectualism, as well as simple stereotypical social awkwardness at times, but our interest here lies primarily in the evolution of the implied theme from king’s associated with Gods for their intellectual prowess, to the modern day stereotypical physically and socially fragile intellectuals.
On this note, the drastic stereotype is especially strange, since for most of history, the “bullies” – i.e. the various warlords in history – predominately loved to be or be thought of as what essentially boils down to… nerds.
If we look to history’s champion of the nerds, Plato, founder of the academy and promoter of philosophy, music and mathematics, we can read that he was an accomplished wrestler. Actually – and prepare for your mind to be blown – the name ‘Plato’ is just a nickname allegedly given by his wrestling coach, meaning ‘broad’ because of his stature, as commented by Diogenes Laertius.
One of his ideas – prolifically described in his work ‘The Republic’ – was that the perfect ruler should be a philosopher king. So, not surprisingly, the nerd wanted the world to be ruled by nerds! But this type of role model should be also strong and have a built body, since it was believed that the outer image reflects the mind controlling it. Plato’s teacher, the philosopher Socrates, is also portrayed as having shown great bravery and valour as a soldier in the battle of Potidaea in 432 BCE, balancing his spiritual greatness as a thinker. This mentality has survived in various axioms such as “a healthy mind in a healthy body”.
So it is not that surprising that in the movie ‘Man of Steel’, young Clark Kent reads “The Republic” while being bullied by kids from school.
Okay, but all that concerns people with a tendency towards knowledge. What about the bullies? How did they manifest in the old days, those warlords and rulers? And were they actually the same people we might classify as nerds? A strange concept, that of the nerdy bully, but nonetheless apt in this case.
Well, the tendency to show off and shout one’s prowess to everyone is probably as old as humanity. Today, this is done with instagram photos, then, with statues and spectacles. Within the literary civilizations, this would sometimes be transposed in an effort to show one’s intellectual prowess as well.
To see how this works, let’s look to the land of Sumer. The ruler would build large temples and the like, and of course would show himself doing so in carvings etc., so that his contemporaries and we in the future would admire him for designing and building such a magnificent structure. Even if the depiction is of course symbolic and he did not lift a finger himself. For example, here is an example from around 2500 BCE, where the king Urnanshe let himself be portrayed on the upper left corner, carrying a funny basket used by workers to transport bricks.
As the building procedure became more complex, the rulers funding the projects were more admired for it, but at the same time, all knew who was really deserving of that respect. And that was not so much the big guy with the money, but rather the architect. The guy doing all the math and planning. So much so that one sees some of these early Bronze Age engineers being deified, such as Imhotep – no, not the ‘Mummy’ guy – the architect of the Giza pyramid.
As another example, 300 years after Urnanshe, one of his successors, Gudea, shows himself participating in the building of the temple, but this time he is holding a plan, fancying himself an architect.
In the same vein, another well known ruler followed this path, and that was the Roman emperor Hadrian, personally overtaking the design of many works, such as the temple of Venus in Rome.
Furthermore, kings fancied themselves as king-priests. A priest had access to the divine powers and the respect and often fear of the people. Ancient kings would try and combine the positions of head of religion and head of state in the same person… themselves.
So for example in Egypt, the pharaoh was the consort of the gods, depicted in relevant size to them in wall carvings. In Rome, ever since Augustus the Roman emperors, besides being the head of state, would also serve as the ‘pontifex’, the head of the priesthood, something that the consuls, the heads of state in the Roman Republic, had not previously done.
Of course, for simple very direct practical reasons, gathering books and knowledge would help expand research in areas such as war technology or medicine. So naturally, the seeking of knowledge in itself became a prestigious affair. Knowledge, as ever, was power.
Remember Ashurbanipal from the intro, the king who prided himself on all the books he had gathered? He was not the only one. Ptolemey in Alexandria, Harun-al Rashid in Baghdad, the Medici in Florence – all kings and dukes who liked to appear refined and civil – would sponsor the gathering of books, not only supporting intellectuals, but also trying to be intellectuals, with some known epic fails, such as the Roman emperor Nero…
Moving on from then, since the clash between the bishop Ambrosius and the Emperor Theodosius in the late 400s AD and continuing to medieval times, the responsibility over divine things and also about keeping and expressing opinions about anything concerning knowledge was in the priests’ hands again, with books being copied and studied by monks etc.
The king would still seek the connection with the divine, but now, with exceptions, not usually as directly as in the past, where claiming descendancy from a god or being head of the priests himself was all the rage. In slightly more modern times, simply gaining the blessing of the pope or priests was sufficient. The ruler himself would instead tend to focus on building up the image of the capable warrior.
So the ideal of Plato (and Clark Kent) to combine wisdom and strength and appreciate both equally, was eventually left behind. Priests would prompt asceticism and focus on the divine. Caring for the appearance of the body was regarded as vanity and generally frowned upon in what we could call the academic world of the day, which was mainly priesthood. This type of the isolated academic, immersed the whole day in his books and never seeing sunshine and exercise, would continue and slowly start to fit the more nerdy stereotype we think of today- the sort of absent minded, socially awkward professor.
With the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the torch of knowledge was transferred to new bearers: the scientists, around which the stereotype of the isolated obsessive types àl Dr Frankenstein developed. Although appreciated as the force behind progress, and in cases such as Einstein even becoming celebrities, scientists were even regarded with some arrogance, as isolated from the rest of the working class as the type that “does not get their hands dirty”, or even is inept at more practical matters of life, whether that was actually true or not.
To the disappointment of ancient philosophers like Plato and Seneca, the search for knowledge was disconnected from the concept of striving to become a complete being and the effort to build oneself physically as well as intellectually. Rather, it became about entering the best, most prestigious university, studying for exams until the best grades were near inevitable, and publishing papers bi-annually. And let’s not forget the time constraints that come with this sort of pressure. With the competitive nature of this academic world, even since school, it therefore seems like the best idea for the so-inclined students to leave behind potentially rich social lives in hopes of accomplishment in academia… or so goes the stereotype…
This all has ultimately culminated in the idea of the book-worm, or nerd generally being skinny, physically weak, glasses wearing, and socially awkward. Among countless other reasons related to the ridiculous shenanigans that occur among school aged individuals, this has resulted in the label not always a sought after one, and often even more socially stigmatized among females. This also often sees girls unfortunately abandon the sciences and fields like engineering at an early age even if they have a particularly strong aptitude and interest in it. But that’s a major topic for another day.
All of this said- all is not lost for the one time rulers of Earth and now lowly bullied nerds the world over.
With the advent of, frankly, kick-ass advanced technologies and other such practical and extremely prevalent applications of engineering, math, and science literally staring us all in the face right now as you watch this- as well as the widespread popularity of comic book heroes, and sci-fi, and fantasy at an all-time high- being openly nerdy in the modern world is slowly starting to shift back from being a label one would want to avoid as much as possible in order to keep your lunch money, to something worn as a badge of pride.
That’s not even to mention the number of nerds who’ve retaken the mantle of Kings of the World via starting various tech and other companies. Sometimes within a few years vaulting themselves by their brains and ultra nerdy focus into being among the richest people in history. Much like their kingly forbears, superiority complex occasionally included.
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Bonus Fact:
The first documented case of “geek” dates all the way back to 1916. At the time, the term was used to describe sideshow freaks in circuses. Specifically, it was typically attributed to those circus performers who were known for doing crazy things like biting the heads of various small live animals or eating live insects and the like. These performances were often called “geek shows”. The word itself, “geek”, came from the word “geck”, which was originally a Low German word which meant someone who is a “fool/freak/simpleton”.
Before “geek”, “nerd”, “dork”, etc, the proper terms for these same ragamuffins were “Dewdroppers”, “Waldos”, and “Slackers”. Other common old slang words that were somewhat similar in meaning: pantywaist, oil can, drip, stinkeroo, mullet, roach, schnookle, kook, dimp, dorf, squid, auger, square, Joe Zilch, and dudd.
Expand for Referenceshttps://www.ancient.eu/Ashurbanipal/
https://www.reddit.com/r/superman/comments/1ixq81/plato_the_republic_and_man_of_steel/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism
Chamberlin, J. (2010, February). Why did ‘nerd’ become a dirty word? Monitor on Psychology, 41(2). http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/02/nerd
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/how-stranger-things-3-gave-girls-permission-to-be-nerds
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Considering the near total market-dominance and unparalleled level of brand recognition Netflix enjoys in today’s entertainment landscape, it’s hard to believe that at one point in time the company was considered a “niche” service. In fact, it is in part for this reason that in 2000 the then CEO of Blockbuster almost literally laughed in the face of Netflix’s co-founders when given the option to buy the fledgling company for $50 million (about $81 million today). While this decision has been called everything from “one of the worst in business history” to simply an “epic fail”, at the time, the decision to not buy Netflix was lauded as a shrewd display of business acumen and, indeed, was one given the original terms of the deal. From this, you may be unsurprised to learn that the mockery today doesn’t really paint the picture of what happened accurately at all, nor likely what would have been the return on that investment had Blockbuster pulled what would have at the time been a rather stupid trigger. On top of that, six years later Blockbuster proved that they could crush Netflix anytime they wanted, and were on the path to doing it before one of their investors seemingly did everything in his power to put the brakes on that right quick, and more or less saved Netflix by accidentally torpedoing Blockbuster… During which, we might add, another less talked about Netflix and Blockbuster deal was proposed by Netflix’s CEO who was seeing the writing on the wall at the time. Also fascinating to note in all of this was that Blockbuster themselves, despite being the undisputed king of their industry at that time of the notorious rejected offer in 2000, with revenues in the $5 billion range, were only 12 years older a company than Netflix.
So what’s the real story here?
Going back a little ways, in the early 1980s, video rental stores were small-time operations that offered a very limited selection of titles. At a time when buying pre-recorded VHS movies was prohibitively expensive for many people, renting them was the perfect solution for the dedicated movie fan or couch potato. Unfortunately, not just new releases, but pretty much all movies, were very difficult to come by given how expensive it was to purchase a copy to be used for renting out to people. (Later revenue sharing deals as pioneered by Blockbuster would help resolve this issue.) But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. At the time, supplies of individual titles were limited in most rental stores. Waiting lists were common – and often seemingly endless.
Enter Blockbuster, mainly the brainchild of David and Sandy Cook, who ran a company that provided computer software services to the Texas oil and gas industries. When that started to go south in the 1980s, the couple began searching for new opportunities.
Cook and ex-wife Sandy saw the hole in the market left by small, local video rental stores. A little research proved more and more households were investing in VCRs, and the number was expected to double by 1990. VCR technology wasn’t about to be rendered obsolete any time soon (relatively speaking).
And so it was that Sandy Cook came up with the concept of a video rental superstore, reasoning that if a small store could thrive, a larger one with a much better selection could do even better and beat out all the competition with their available selection.
A location with great visibility situated near several upscale apartment buildings was chosen as the site for the first Blockbuster store. When Blockbuster opened for its first day of business on October 19, 1985, there was a long line of eager customers waiting outside. The $800,000 invested (about $1.8 million today) on that first store paid off.
Within a year, Cook had purchased a $6 million warehouse to house and serve as a distribution center for his enormous library of VHS tapes to the now four Blockbuster locations. One year later, in 1987, Cook sold to several investors, including the founder of Waste Management Inc., Wayne Huizenga, for a whopping $18.5 million (about $36 million today). By the end of the year, Huizenga assumed full control of Blockbuster and moved operations to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Huizenga then embarked upon an aggressive expansion plan for the company, snapping up existing small video rental stores and opening countless new ones. Within a year, Blockbuster was America’s top video rental chain with over 400 hundred stores nationwide.
By the 1990s, Blockbuster had gone international and was bought up by the media powerhouse Viacom. But technology was changing by the late 1990s with the switch to DVDs, and the rising star of Netflix was on the horizon.
This brings us back to one of the most often mocked business decisions in history. A noted piece of information often left out of discussing the proposed sale of Netflix to Blockbuster is that when Netflix made this offer, they were losing money hand over fist and seemed destined themselves to go in the dustbin of history. On this note, when Blockbuster originally agreed to meet after months of being pestered by Netflix, there was some concern that the extreme last minute nature of the trip (given only about 12 hours to get there) would cost upwards of $20,000 in last minute airfare the company didn’t have. Said one of the co-founders of Netflix, Reed Hastings, of this, “We’re on track to lose at least $50 million this year. Whether we pull this off or not, another 20 grand won’t make a difference.”
It should also be noted that what we think of as Netflix today and what they offer was not the Netflix that Blockbuster was being offered. Not even close. For example, the Netflix streaming service wouldn’t even become a thing for about another 7 years after this, and even then offered extremely limited selection in the early going. And their initial idea was more that you could rent a movie from Netflix and have it download over night to be waiting for you the next day, instead of waiting on the mail. It was only after watching the streaming success of YouTube starting in 2005 that they reportedly decided to change tack. Five years before that and seven years before Netflix launched their streaming service was the Netflix that was offered to Blockbuster.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves and should probably give some background information about the whole affair so we’re all on the same page. The story goes that sometime in the year 2000, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph (the other co-founder of Netflix) agreed to a meeting with the then CEO of Blockbuster, John Antioco, and other Blockbuster executives. According to Netflix’s former chief financial officer, Barry McCarthy, who was present at the meeting, Hastings went straight for the jugular and offered Blockbuster a simple deal- Blockbuster would purchase Netflix and advertise the Netflix brand in it’s already established brick and mortar stores. In return, Netflix would be the Blockbuster brand online and otherwise just continue what they were doing with their DVD mail delivery service. Hastings summed up, “We will run the online part of the combined business. You will focus on the stores. We will find the synergies that come from the combination, and it will truly be a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.”
Now, with the inclusion of such words as “synergy” and statements like “the whole being greater than the sum of its parts”, staples of every business meeting if it’s to be considered a good meeting, you might be surprised to learn that Antioco wasn’t buying it.
As McCarthy would later state, this incredible display of, as he put it, “chutzpah” didn’t sit well with Antioco or the gathered Blockbuster executives who briefly considered the offer before asking what the price would be for this merger of sorts. To which Hastings replied matter of factly- $50 million. Randolph then stated he saw Antioco’s lip briefly twitch and, “[As] soon as I saw it, I knew what was happening: John Antioco was struggling not to laugh.”
With the gift of hindsight, this seems like an incredibly bad decision on Blockbuster’s part, but for a moment let’s look at it from the point of view of Blockbuster executives with the knowledge they had available at the time. Just a year earlier, the Blockbuster brand had been valued at around $4.8 billion and when Netflix made their offer, Blockbuster dominated the video rental market. In the year 2000, Blockbuster had thousands of physical locations, a decade and a half of public goodwill and brand recognition, and a marketing war chest higher than the GDP of some countries. Netflix, meanwhile, was nothing like the behemoth we know today, rather a relatively new company with a practically unknown brand offering DVDs by mail- a service there was little demand for at the time, and one Blockbuster could relatively easily jump into if they wanted without needing to pay $50 million for someone else’s brand name and website. All Netflix really had, beyond some crippling debt and many millions in quarterly losses, was their online presence and system already established. Something Antioco was not shy about finding little value in, owing to his relatively correct perception about the then state of the dot-com bubble, which very soon after popped, leaving many companies in a similar boat to Netflix going the way of the dodo.
In the end, as baffling as it seems given Netflix’s eventual success and the fact that it supplanted Blockbuster as one of the defacto ways the public at large consumed certain media, at this stage Blockbuster had little to gain from partnering with Netflix at that exact moment, and Antioco knew it. Netflix was absolutely getting the massively better end of that deal had they made it, since they would benefit from having their brand advertised in every physical Blockbuster location in the country. A place, remember, that millions of Americans visited with clockwork regularity every single week to rent movies. In some sense, this would just be Blockbuster advertising for a competing model which was losing money hand over fist and would have taken away from their much more lucrative store revenues.
Granted, as they would then own the Netflix brand it could have all worked out in theory overall. But, again, at the time, Netflix was losing about the same amount annually that they were offering to sell to Blockbuster for- $50 million.
It’s also worth pointing out that that Netflix made this offer multiple times (whether they valued the company at $50 million each time isn’t clear) and were similarly turned down by Blockbuster with each subsequent attempt. In short, Netflix was desperate and coming across that way to, at the time, their biggest competitor and King of the industry.
So while it’s true that Blockbuster did turn down an offer to buy Netflix in 2000, it was generally considered that Blockbuster made the right decision at the time given the value of the Blockbuster brand and position the company was in, as well as the relative lack of value in what Netflix was offering at the time for the rather steep price. The issue wasn’t that Blockbuster didn’t buy the struggling Netflix and bail them out. The issue was what Netflix did from there and what Blockbuster started to do, but then inexplicably backtracked and shot themselves, not just in the foot, but right between the eyes.
As to what happened, in two words- debt and late fees.
While analysts have concluded that Blockbuster failed for multiple reasons – some of which we’ll discuss in a moment – the fact of the matter is that, as Forbes once so eloquently put it and anyone who lived through the era (or worked for their competitor Hollywood Video as the founder of TodayIFoundOut did for many years shortly before starting TodayIFoundOut) can attest, Blockbuster’s “profits were highly dependent on penalizing its patrons”. Being so heavily reliant on the revenue made through an unpopular and blatantly piss your customers off business model put Blockbuster in a position where it was unable to offer what Netflix did without massively impacting its own immediate bottom-line, which was even more of a concern because of their rather large amount of debt.
As an example of how reliant on late fees Blockbuster was, just consider that when the company tried to eliminate them in an effort to keep step with Netflix in 2005, the decision wiped millions off the company’s valuation almost overnight, and ended up costing Blockbuster $140 million in lost revenue in the first quarter alone.
As an aside, Blockbuster was later sued for false advertising in 47 states and made to pay out about $1 million in settlements when it transpired that instead of late fees, the company would automatically charge any customer who didn’t return a DVD or video game within 7 days as if they’d bought it… If a customer happened to not like randomly having $20-40 sucked out of their bank account without their knowledge, they could always return the item to a Blockbuster store, at which point they’d have to pay a $1.25 “restocking fee” for the privilege of having their money refunded. On all of this, a fee Blockbuster was very keen to point out wasn’t technically a late fee… For some mysterious reason this whole thing was wildly unpopular with customers who felt like they’d been deceived by the company.
However, in a frankly heroic display of corporate hubris, Blockbuster staunchly defended the fees and rather than trying to recoup any lost goodwill by scrapping them entirely, instead endeavoured to simply “do a better job of disclosing them” in the future. 5 years later, in 2010, the then floundering company reintroduced late fees in an apparent bid to squeeze every penny they could out of their few remaining customers. Tactics like this didn’t exactly win over any die-hard Netflix users and only served to further alienate their already frustrated and rapidly dwindling customer-base.
In regards to an alternate viewing method, Blockbuster also made several ill-fated attempts to topple the new king and usurp Netflix over the years. The first came in 2000. Yes, 2000, the same year Netflix tried to sell, and 7 years before they offered streaming. It was at this point Blockbuster signed a landmark 20 year deal to provide on-demand content via a partnership with Enron. Yes, that Enron… Within months the deal fell apart and the millions Blockbuster invested in advertising the partnership were written off as a loss. It wouldn’t be for another 7 years that Blockbuster would try again on this sort of digital alternate distribution model.
But it arguably wasn’t streaming that killed Blockbuster. At least, not directly. It was something that happened before this.
You see, in 2004, Blockbuster decided to finally take Netflix seriously and simply copy their model with resounding success. In fact, they looked poised to crush Netflix in their efforts, within two years up to 2 million subscribers and gaining steam fast. For reference here, at the time Netflix had taken 9 years to reach about 6 million subscribers. Then came 2006 when Blockbuster launched Total Access, giving people the ability to return a mailed DVD to a brick and mortar location and get another movie for free right on the spot for doing it. Something that was a loss for Blockbuster, but also saw subscriber numbers shoot up even faster, while Netflix shortly after even saw a loss of 55,000 subscribers in one quarter of 2007 alone, reversing their previous upward trend.
In short, Total Access was more convenient than Netflix’s purely mail-based service and, briefly, was a much better deal. So what happened?
Well, a lot of bad decisions, but mostly one that led to all the others- namely a Carl Icahn led effort to see Antioco ousted, ultimately in favor of James Keyes of 7-11. In short, Antioco was pushing hard to dominate in the online realm where Netflix was playing regardless of losses. He also wanted late fees gone everywhere (noting that stores that did this eventually outperformed those that had late fees). However, Icahn felt given how massively in debt the company already was, they should abandon what was seen by Icahn as a money sink in their Total Access service. Icahn also felt they should reinstate the highly lucrative late fee model everywhere…
But before Icahn did his thing, in a hilarious-in-retrospect display of corporate rivalry, after Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings told an interviewer that Blockbuster was throwing everything but the kitchen sink at them in 2006 to try and steal away their customers, a Blockbuster executive sent Hastings a kitchen sink in the mail…
In any event, joking around aside, seeing their competition gunning for them so successfully and being legitimately scared for what it might mean for Netflix very soon, Netflix CEO Hastings attempted to make a deal with Antioco once again. While details of that deal aren’t fully clear, it seems to have been a merger of sorts that would have allowed Netflix users to also return their movies to Blockbuster stores. But, alas, it wasn’t to be as Icahn had Antioco ousted before the deal could be completed.
Antioco out, and Keyes in, while Keyes shortly thereafter did see to purchasing Movielink for $6.6 million, which had over 6,000 films available for streaming, he also executed the plan of more or less killing off Total Access via raising the price to more than what Netflix cost, restricting it in various ways to severely limit selection, and also killed the free movie deal if you returned the mail order dvd to a Blockbuster physical location. Changes, by the way, which put an immediate stop to Total Access’s former rocketing growth, and saw Netflix once again surging instead.
As Antioco would later state of all of this in 2011, “I firmly believe that if our online strategy had not been essentially abandoned, Blockbuster Online would have 10 million subscribers today (in 2011), and we’d be rivaling Netflix for the leadership position in the internet [streaming] business.”
Hastings himself more or less concurred, noting, “If it hadn’t been for their debt, they could have killed us.” Randolph also rang in noting Blockbuster’s Icahn really bailed Netflix out at this point by his various actions while on the Blockbuster board, just as Blockbuster had, as Randolph said, “finally mounted a truly legitimate and sustainable challenge.”
Fast-forward to 2010 where Blockbuster made a final bid to hoover crumbs off of Netflix’s table by launching an app that allowed customers to watch movies on their phone… The thing was, the app only allowed customers to download movies, rather than stream in the more typical way, although at the time given cell networks and 3G speeds, data plans, and coverage at the time, this wasn’t quite as stupid as it seems to slightly more modern eyes. But, nonetheless, as with all their other attempts at adapting, this too was a little behind the times and ultimately failed.
These decisions coupled with a seeming general lack of vision on behalf of many Blockbuster executives saw the company’s market share rapidly dwindle until they were forced to finally confront their massive debt and file Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in 2010. A truly rapid and massive rise and fall of a company at that point still only 25 years old.
And so it was that an even younger Netflix (now 25 years old by the way) came to dominate, while Blockbuster is today mostly only remembered in memes about the olden times.
There is one happy little side story we’d like to conclude with, however. This one for the man who seemingly correctly originally rejected the $50 million Netflix buyout opportunity in 2000, and then later was on the path to crushing Netflix before being unceremoniously ousted for his efforts. You see, after being given the boot from Blockbuster, Antioco sold his shares in the company and invested heavily in Netflix instead. He states of this, “I could see that Netflix was going to have the whole DVD-by-mail market handed to it, along with a direct path to streaming movies into homes—which is exactly what Netflix has done.” He did lament, however, he didn’t hang onto his Netflix stock for longer. Because while he did very quickly almost double his investment when he sold his Netflix shares, had he waited just a few more years to sell, the shares would have been worth about ten times what he originally paid.
Expand for References* Blockbuster’s CEO once passed up a chance to buy Netflix for only $50 million * How Blockbuster Could Have Owned Netflix * How Technology and Lack of Vision Took Down Blockbuster * Blockbuster laughed at Netflix partnership offer * A Look Back At Why Blockbuster Really Failed And Why It Didn’t Have To * Blockbuster: We Can Beat Bankruptcy and Netflix * Blockbuster Brings Back Late Fees * Netflix vs. Blockbuster * Classic Strategic Failures: Blockbuster
https://hbr.org/2011/04/how-i-did-it-blockbusters-former-ceo-on-sparring-with-an-activist-shareholder
The post The Truth About Blockbuster Turning Down Purchasing Netflix and What Seemingly Everyone Gets Wrong appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The world of alcoholic cocktails is dizzyingly diverse, with as many potential drink combinations as there are varieties of alcohol and mixers. Some, like the Cuba Libre – rum mixed with Coca-Cola – are very simple, while others, like the Commonwealth – a monstrous, record-braking concoction boasting an astounding 71 ingredients sourced from every nation in the British Commonwealth – are more complex. Over the years, countless adventurous mixologists have attempted to put their own twist on these classic recipes, swapping in exotic ingredients and engaging in the strange alchemy of “molecular gastronomy” in the quest for the ultimate beverage experience. But when it comes to unique mixed drinks, it is hard to beat the Sourtoe Cocktail, the signature speciality of the Sourdough Saloon in Dawson City, Canada. The recipe is simple: one ounce of whiskey…and a dehydrated human toe.
To understand how this bizarrely macabre drink came to be, it is important to understand the history and character of Dawson City. Located in Canada’s northern Yukon Territory on the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, the city was founded in 1897 by Joseph Ladue and named after famous Canadian Geologist George Mercer Dawson. The town came to prominence in 1896 when large gold deposits were discovered in the region, triggering the Klondike Gold Rush. The sudden influx of prospectors hoping to strike it rich turned Dawson City into the ultimate boom town. By 1898, the once-tiny settlement had become a bustling city of 17,000, with dozens of hotels, boarding houses, shops, saloons, music halls, movie theatres, brothels, and other establishments to keep the prospectors supplied and entertained. Entrepreneurs from far and wide descended upon Dawson to make their fortunes, including theatre builder Sid Grauman, Vaudeville tycoon Alexander Pantages, and future real estate mogul Fred Trump, grandfather of Donald Trump. The city soon took on a romantic reputation as the ‘Paris of the North’, immortalized in works of fiction such as Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang and Robert Service’s The Spell of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee. But the town’s heyday was tragically short-lived, for by 1899 the gold had all dried up and the prospectors moved on to greener pastures in Alaska. By the time Dawson was incorporated as a city in 1902, its population had fallen to barely 5,000. Dawson was dealt a further blow during the Second World War by the construction of the Alaska Highway, which both caused its population to plummet and the Territorial Capital to be moved from Dawson to Whitehorse. The town limped along, barely clinging to existence, until the 1970s, when the rising price of gold and new mechanized placer [“plah-sir”] mining techniques made the Klondike gold fields profitable once more. Increased tourism also brought new life to the city, which today boasts a population of around 1,300, eight national historic sites, a thriving local economy, and the same eccentric frontier spirit.
It was in the 1920s, at the start of Dawson City’s wilderness years, that the story of the Sourtoe Cocktail begins. According to legend, brothers Louie and Otto Linken, successful bootleggers in the region, were transporting a shipment of rum by dogsled when they became caught in a blizzard. While crossing a frozen river, Louie stepped through some thin ice and soaked his foot. By the time the brothers reached their cabin, Louie’s foot was frozen solid. To avoid the onset of gangrene, Otto used an axe to chop off Louie’s toe. He then placed the severed digit in a jar of alcohol to preserve it and kept it in the cabin as a souvenir. Five decades later in 1973, Dick Stevenson, a bartender at the Sourdough Saloon in Dawson City’s Downtown Hotel, allegedly discovered the preserved toe in a run-down cabin he had purchased. A well-known and eccentric local character, Stevenson – known to everyone in town as “Captain” – brought the toe back to the Sourdough and began plunking it into the drinks of adventurous patrons. And just like that, a bizarre local tradition was born.
Today, the Sourtoe Cocktail forms part of an elaborate ritual complete with detailed rules. To become a member of the exclusive Sourtoe Club, patrons must first order a shot of their choice – Yukon Jack Whiskey is the most popular – then pay $8 dollars to a “Toe Captain,” a specially-designated server in a sea captain’s hat who serves the cocktail and explains the rules – those being that the patron must touch the mummified toe with their lips without biting, chewing, or putting the toe in their mouth. Or, as the saloon’s catching slogan puts it:
“You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips must touch this gnarly toe.”
The Toe Captain then lifts the desiccated toe from the jar of salt used to preserve it, drops it in the glass, and bids the brave patron to drink up. Reviews of the taste have been mixed, to say the least, with 34-year-old Vancouver resident Lindsay Wilson describing the experience in 2018 as:
“…traumatizing … the texture of it was really disgusting, but I don’t remember a taste. The feel of it was really really gross. It was like a greasy raisin.”
Yum…
Yet despite such glowing reviews, the Sourtoe Cocktail had proven a surprising hit among tourists to the area; as of this recording, over 100,000 people from all around the world have taken the plunge and joined the Sourtoe Club. Nor has the practice of imbibing alcohol laced with human body parts run afoul of the local health authorities, with Adam Gerle, general manager of the Downtown Hotel, explaining in 2019:
“We’ve had the chief medical officer of the Yukon look at it and give it a clean bill of health as long as we keep the toes mummified, which we do by keeping them on salt and serving it in 40% alcohol. That keeps everything legal.”
However, in case you are wondering: no, the toe currently in use is not the same toe “Captain” Dick Stevenson discovered in 1973. That original toe lasted only seven years before being lost in an unfortunate accident. According to the Sourtoe Club website:
“In July 1980, a miner named Garry Younger was trying for the Sourtoe record. On his thirteenth glass of Sourtoe champagne, his chair tipped over backwards, and he swallowed the toe. Sadly, Toe #1 was not recovered.”
Since that time, seven more toes have been donated to the saloon to keep the tradition going. The first replacement toe was amputated due to an inoperable corn, the second was a victim of frostbite, the third was donated anonymously, the fourth and fifth were donated by a nursing home resident in exchange for free drinks for his nurses, the sixth was amputated due to diabetes, and the seventh arrived anonymously with a note reading “Don’t wear open-toe sandals while mowing the lawn.” But perhaps stranger than the toes’ various origins are the number of times they have been deliberately stolen. To discourage the theft of what is understandably a scarce commodity, following the loss of the original toe the Sourdough Saloon began charging a $500 fine to anyone caught swallowing or stealing the garnish. This apparently did not discourage one unnamed man, who on August 24th, 2013, ordered a Sourtoe shot, swallowed the toe, paid the fine, and left. In June 2017, another toe was stolen from the Saloon, but later returned by mail. As a result of these incidents, the fine has since been increased to $2,500.
Over the years, the Sourdough Saloon has lost around 15 toes to a combination of theft, accidental swallowing, and regular wear and tear. But new toes are donated all the time, ensuring the continued survival of this bizarre drink tradition. Today the Saloon maintains a rotation of ten toes, which are cured in salt for six months prior to being served and periodically retired as they begin to break down. Three of these were donated by former British Royal Marine and endurance athlete Nick Griffiths, who lost them to frostbite during the 2018 Yukon Arctic Ultramarathon. But the most recent additions to the Sourdough’s collection came from a truly legendary source: “Captain” Dick Stevenson himself, who died in October 2019 at the age of 89. In his will, Stevenson requested that all ten of his toes be pickled and donated to his beloved saloon, so that they might tickle the lips of adventurous patrons for years to come. It it is a bequest wholly befitting such an eccentric and beloved local character, with Stevenson’s daughter Dixie stating:
“Dad is a publicity hound and he just said he was going to be more famous after he’s dead.”
So the next time you find yourself in Dawson City, why not stop by the Sourdough Saloon and earn your place in the vaunted Sourtoe Cocktail hall of fame? It is likely the most “full bodied” drink you will ever have.
Bonus Facts
#1: The name of the Sourtoe Cocktail and its namesake saloon is a reference to the moniker “sourdough,” long used to describe residents of Alaska and the Yukon. This curious nickname originated during the Klondike and Alaska gold rushes, when the Royal Canadian Mountain Police forbade prospective gold prospectors from crossing into the Yukon or Alaska without a year’s worth of supplies. As these supplies could only be carried over the treacherous mountain passes by sledge or on the prospectors’ backs, efficiency was key. While many bread recipes required eggs, milk, and other bulky ingredients, sourdough required only flour and a sourdough starter containing lactic acid bacteria and yeast, and could produce far more food than the equivalent weight in canned goods. Sourdough starter thus became standard equipment for prospectors. There was only one problem: sourdough starter does not react well to cold temperatures, and must be kept warm to remain potent. The Gold Rush era is thus replete with stories of prospectors building shelves for their sourdough starter above the stove before furnishing the rest of their cabins, or sleeping with the sourdough jar tucked into their clothes to keep it warm through the cold nights. Over the years, sourdough became intimately associated with the Gold Rush and of the men and women who had the tenacity and ingenuity to brave the harsh Alaskan winters year after year and scrape a living out of the rugged northern frontier.
#2: In addition to its rich mining heritage, literary legacy, and the Sourtoe Cocktail, Dawson City has yet another claim to fame: one of the world’s largest collections of previously-lost silent films. In the early 20th Century, Dawson City boasted no fewer than three movie theatres: the Palace Grand, the Orpheum, and the Family Theatre. After touring through more major North American cities, popular films and newsreels would make their way to Dawson, the end of the line for the film-distribution network. As they were too expensive to ship back to the studios, these reels simply accumulated in the basement of the town’s Carnegie Library, creating something of a storage problem. At the time, movies were projected on nitro-cellulose film, which is extremely flammable and has a tendency to spontaneously burst into flames. Wishing to avoid the kind of fires that have destroyed numerous film repositories over the years, the residents of Dawson cast about for a safe place to dispose of the reels. The solution came in 1929 when the Amateur Athletics Association became unable to continue running the local swimming pool. The film reels, along with other trash, were thrown into the abandoned pool, covered over with dirt, and the site converted into an outdoor skating rink.
There the reels remained, buried and forgotten, until 1978, when construction workers building a new recreation centre accidentally stumbled upon the cache. The discovery soon came to the attention of Michael Gates, the newly arrived curator for Parks Canada, who immediately recognized the importance of the find. The permafrost at the bottom of the old pool had preserved an astonishing 533 reels of film, including period newsreels and dozens of Hollywood films by such luminaries as D.W. Griffith and Todd Browning – many of which are the only copies known to exist anywhere in the world. In the early days of cinema, films were considered as disposable as newspapers and little effort was made to preserve them, meaning that over 90% of films made before 1929 are now considered lost. The Dawson City films very nearly joined them, for as the reels were pulled up into the hot August sun, the emulsion immediately began to melt. While the film was eventually stabilized and preserved, the melting emulsion imparted on the footage a distinctive damage known to film scholars as the “Dawson Flutter.” Due to the volatile and dangerous nature of the nitrate film, the reels were flown out of Dawson by military transport and placed into climate-controlled storage at the Library and Archives Canada and the U.S. Library of Congress. The films were then transferred onto more stable safety film for future study. Thus preserved, the Dawson City Find represents an invaluable treasure trove of early cinema and a unique window into everyday life and culture in the early 20th Century.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesThe History of the Sourtoe Cocktail: a Shot of Whiskey Garnished With a Human Toe, CBC News, https://www.cbc.ca/shortdocs/features/the-story-of-the-sourtoe-cocktail-a-shot-of-whiskey-garnished-with-a-human
The Sourtoe Cocktail, Atlas Obscura, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/sourtoe-cocktail
Moniuszko, Sara, A Cocktail with a Mummified Human Toe in it?! It Exists at This Canadian Saloon, USA Today, November 1, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/2019/11/01/sourtoe-cocktail-drink-human-toe-served-yukon-canada/4081899002/
Cousins, Ben, ‘Sourtoe Cocktail’ Lives on at Yukon Bar After Creator Wills His Own Toes, CTV News, November 19, 2019, https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/sourtoe-cocktail-lives-on-at-yukon-bar-after-creator-wills-his-own-toes-1.4693551
Cecco, Leyland, Legendary Canadian Bartender’s Dying Wish Was For Toes to Garnish Cocktails, The Guardian, November 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/18/sour-toe-cocktail-canadian-bartender-captain-dick-dying-wish
Sourtoe Cocktail Club, Dawson City, https://dawsoncity.ca/sourtoe-cocktail-club/
Berg, Bailey, Why Longtime Alaska Residents are Called ‘Sourdoughs,’ Atlas Obscura, January 15, 2021, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-sourdough-alaska
Eads, Lauren, Cocktail Breaks Record With 71 Ingredients, The Drinks Business, July 18, 2014, https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2014/07/record-breaking-cocktail-boasts-71-ingredients/
Joannou, Ashley, Dawson’s Historic Film Find, Yukon News, September 28, 2016, https://www.yukon-news.com/news/dawsons-historic-film-find/
Christina Newland, Frozen in Time: the Miraculous Gold Rush Movies Buried Under the Yukon Ice, July 28, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/28/dawson-city-frozen-time-yukon-gold-rush-capital-documentary
The post The Popular Cocktail That Includes a Dehydrated Human Toe appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The space suit has become synonymous with the astronaut, defining the occupation more than any other piece of equipment. Essentially flexible, one-person spacecraft, space suits protect astronauts from the harsh environment of outer space and have been key to countless spaceflight achievements, from walking on the moon to the building the International Space Station. But while humans first reached space in 1961, the technology behind space suits was pioneered some 30 years before in the depths of the Great Depression, by a maverick one-eyed aviator from Oklahoma named Wiley Post.
Wiley Post was an unlikely aviation pioneer. Born in Grand Saline, Texas in 1898 to a large family of farmers, Post moved to Oklahoma at the age of five. Though interested in machines from an early age, Post was not cut out for formal education and dropped out of school after the eighth grade, choosing instead to work on the family farm while teaching himself science and mathematics. Like many pilots of his generation, Post was became enthralled with aviation after seeing a flying demonstration at a local county fair. As he later recalled:
“To this day I have never seen a bit of machinery that has taken my breath away as did that old [Curtiss D] pusher. The old urge to fly came over me, and straightaway I embarked on my aviation career.”
Determined to one day own and fly his own aircraft, Post began studying automobile repair and radio operation in Kansas City, then set off to work as a roughneck during the Oklahoma oil boom of the early 1920s.This work proved less steady than he hoped, and Post briefly turned to armed robbery, serving a year in jail in 1922. Following his release, Post befriended a local barnstorming troupe, Burrell Tibbs and his Texas Topnotch Fliers, and learned that their parachute jumper had been injured and could no longer perform. Figuring that this was as good an entry into aviation as any, Post volunteered to take his place on the weekends, working in the oilfields during the week. Over the next two years Post would perform nearly 100 jumps, often earning $200 a jump (about $3000 today). Then, in 1926, an accident nearly ended Post’s aviation career before it had even begun. A fellow roughneck was pounding a bolt with a hammer when a small metal sliver flew out and embedded itself in Post’s left eye. The eye soon developed a serious infection which threatened to spread, so Post gave his doctor permission to remove the eye. Thereafter he often wore an eyepatch which would soon become his signature. With his depth perception ruined, however, Post had to completely relearn how to gauge distance and altitude while flying:
“I didn’t stay discouraged. I practiced gauging depth on hills and trees. Then I would step off the distance. At first, my mental calculations were far off, but by the end of two months I was a better judge of distance than I had ever been. If they ever changed the height of a phone pole or a two-storey building, Id be in trouble. That’s how I sight myself in.”
Yet what could have been a career-ending tragedy turned out to have a silver lining, as Post was awarded $1800 in workman’s compensation benefits for the accident. He immediately used this to buy an old Curtiss Jenny biplane and went into business as a freelance pilot, flying oilmen to inspect their wells during the week and barnstorming on weekends. In 1927 Post eloped with a Texas rancher’s daughter named Mae Laine, spiriting her away in his biplane. However, the engine failed shortly into their escape, forcing them down near the town of Graham where they convinced the local parson to marry them.
Shortly thereafter, Post head that wealthy Oil Tycoon F.C. Hall was looking for a personal pilot, and camped out outside Hall’s office in Chikasa, Oklahoma in order to land the job. As Hall and his family found flying in an open-cockpit biplane uncomfortable, he sent Post to Burbank to pick up a brand-new Lockheed Vega. Introduced in 1928, the Vega was a highly-advanced design for its day, with a lightweight but durable fuselage made of moulded plywood, a strong high-mounted cantilever wing, and a streamlined NACA cowling over its powerful 450 horsepower Wasp engine. Post immediately fell in love with the aircraft, which Hall named Winnie Mae after his daughter, and began dreaming of using her to break aviation records.
But it was not to be. After barely a year, Hall decided that Post’s salary and Winnie Mae’s upkeep was too expensive, and ordered Post to return the aircraft to the Lockheed factory in Burbank. For the next year Post worked a sales representative and test pilot for Lockheed, until on June 5, 1930, Hall unexpectedly called and asked Post to return along with Winnie Mae. When Post revealed the original aircraft had been sold to Nevada Airlines, Hall simply bought another one. With Hall’s blessing, Post upgraded the aircraft with a supercharger and a larger fuel tank in order to compete in the 1930 Men’s Air Derby, a prestigious air race between Los Angeles and Chicago. Amazingly, despite losing 40 minutes due to a compass error, Post won the race by over an hour. Hall was elated, and not only allowed Post to keep the $7500 prize money, but agreed to bankroll any future flight records he wanted to attempt. Thinking big, Post set his sights on a round-the-world flight. At the time, the record was held not by a heavier-than-air aircraft but the dirigible airship Graf Zeppelin, which had accomplished the feat in 1928 in 21 days. Post was determined to change that.
In the early morning hours of May 23, 1931, Post and Navigator Harold Gatty took off from Roosevelt Field in New York in the heavily-modified Winnie Mae and headed northeast towards Harbour Grace in Newfoundland. What followed was an epic 24,903 km journey that would take Post and Gatty across the Atlantic to Liverpool and Hanover, across the vast Russian steppe from Moscow to Khabarovsk, across the Pacific Ocean to Fairbanks Alaska, and back to New York via Edmonton and Cleveland. When they landed back at Roosevelt Field, 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes after taking off, their reception rivalled that of Charles Lindbergh three years before, with Post and Gatty being honoured with lunch at the White House and a ticker tape parade through New York City.
But all was not banquets and tributes. Though Post and Gatty had collaborated closely on planning the flight, the press painted Gatty as the real brains of the operation and Post as merely a hired pilot. Stung by this snub, Post decided to repeat his round-the-world flight – but this time flying solo. To accomplish this feat, Post needed two brand-new pieces of technology. The first was an autopilot, which would help reduce fatigue on the longer legs of the journey. Though none were commercially available at the time, Post convinced the Sperry Gyroscope Company to let him install their prototype in Winnie Mae. The second piece of equipment was an automatic radio direction finder that would allow Post to navigate using civilian radio stations. This had been developed by the U.S. Army, who were more than happy to let Post to test it under actual flight conditions.
Post set off alone from Floyd Bennet Field, New York, on July 15, 1933. 26 hours later he landed at Tempelhof airport, becoming the first pilot to fly nonstop from New York to Berlin. Post had planned to make only four more refuelling stops at Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, Fairbanks, and Edmonton, but mechanical trouble with the autopilot forced him to land in Moscow to have it repaired. Over the trackless wastes of Siberia and the Pacific Ocean the autopilot proved invaluable, even allowing Post to lightly doze off. To prevent himself from falling asleep, Post tied a wrench to his finger with a string; if his grip loosened the wrench would fall out and jolt him awake. Yet despite this the flight was fraught with difficulties. On several occasions Winnie Mae became stuck in the Siberian mud and the locals had to drag her out, while just outside Fairbanks the engine failed, forcing Post to crash-land in the town of Flat, Alaska, and wait for mechanics to arrive. But when Post finally landed back at Floyd Bennet Field on July 22, his reception exceeded that of his previous flight, with 50,000 New Yorkers breaking through fences and gates to mob the famous aviator. Post’s solo journey had taken only 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes – smashing his previous record by almost an entire day.
But while Post had secured his place in the history books twice over, he was far from finished, and immediately began casting about for new challenges. The perfect opportunity came in 1934 when the Australian city of Melbourne organized an epic transcontinental air race to celebrate its 100th Anniversary. Sponsored by the MacRobertson Confectionary Company, the MacRobertson Air Race challenged pilots to fly from RAF Mildenhall in England to Flemington Race Course outside Melbourne – a distance of some 18,000 kilometres – with mandatory refuelling stops at Baghdad, Allahabad, Singapore, Darwin, and Charleville. The thrill of the race and the £15,000 prize money proved irresistible to Post, and he immediately began preparations to enter the race. Unfortunately, by this time Winnie Mae was beginning to show her age, and would be seriously outclassed by the advanced aircraft types flown by the other competitors. But Post had a plan: he would fly at an altitude of 9,000 metres, where the air was thinner and he could fly faster. Furthermore, his research indicated that there were powerful high-altitude winds at these altitudes that would help him on his way. Today these winds are known as Jet Streams.
But Post faced a major problem: how to breathe and remain conscious at such altitudes. The ability of the lungs to absorb oxygen from a gas mixture like air is dependent not on its proportion but rather its partial pressure – the contribution that the oxygen makes to the overall pressure of the mixture. As altitude increases, the proportion of oxygen in the air remains steady at around 21%, but its partial pressure decreases along with the overall air pressure, meaning that above 3,000 metres humans not acclimatized to high altitudes begin to suffer from hypoxia or oxygen starvation. But such altitudes are not inherently fatal, and over time the body acclimatizes by producing more oxygen-carrying hemoglobin in the blood. In this manner residents of mountainous regions like the Himalayas and the Andes are able function normally at altitudes up to 5,000 metres. But there is a limit to such acclimatization: above 8,000 metres – an altitude known to mountaineers as the death zone, sustaining life for any useful period becomes all but impossible.
Thankfully, this barrier is easily overcome by breathing pure oxygen. While the overall pressure of the oxygen remains low, the fact that its proportion in the gas mixture is now 100% brings its partial pressure up to breathable levels. Breathing oxygen is effective up to altitudes of around 12,000 metres, above which atmospheric pressure is so low that even pure oxygen has insufficient partial pressure to sustain life. While it is possible to breathe pressurized oxygen, this introduces a new problem: the difference in pressure between the outside atmosphere and the inside of the lungs makes it very difficult for a pilot to exhale. Fighter pilots are trained to exhale forcefully or “pressure breathe” at high altitudes, but this quickly becomes exhausting and is only used in emergencies for short periods to allow the pilot to descend to a safer altitude.
But hypoxia and difficulty exhaling are not the only dangers pilots face at high altitudes. Above 12,000 metres low pressure can cause nitrogen bubbles to escape from the tissues, leading to decompression sickness – AKA the Bends. Expansion of gas in the inner ear and digestive tract can also cause extreme pain and tissue damage. Above 19,000 m the pressure is so low that any exposed moisture – including that in the mouth and lungs – will start to boil away, destroying the lungs’ ability to absorb oxygen. This is known as the Armstrong Limit, after Major General Harry Armstrong, the U.S. Air Force flight surgeon who first described this phenomenon.
For these reasons, aircraft flying at altitudes above 3,000 metres typically feature pressurized cabins. To prevent unnecessary stress to the aircraft structure, most aircraft are pressurized not to sea level but a higher but tolerable altitude – typically 2,100 for most commercial airliners. Unfortunately, however, the Winnie Mae’s plywood fuselage could not be made airtight, and installing a pressurized capsule around the would have made the aircraft far too heavy. For Post, there was only one solution: he would pressurize his own body instead.
The idea of the pressure suit was not an entirely new one. In the late 1920s and early 1930s researchers like Oxford professor Dr. John Haldane and American adventurer Mark Ridge had experimented with modified diving suits to allow pilots to make high-altitude balloon flights. However, none of these early suits ever made it past the prototype stage. To help build his suit, Post partnered with engineer Russel S. Colley of the B.F. Goodrich Company. Together, Post and Colley constructed a serious of three prototype pressure suits, each more sophisticated than the last. The first was constructed from an airtight rubber bladder covered in a rubberized-canvas outer later to protect the bladder from damage and prevent it from ballooning under pressure. The suit was split into upper and lower halves connected and sealed by a metal clamp at the waist. This was topped with a cylindrical aluminium helmet with two bulges to accommodate headphones, a rectangular glass viewing port, and a small door over Post’s mouth to allow him to eat and drink. Unfortunately, this prototype ruptured while being pressure-tested at Wright Field in Ohio. The second prototype fared little better, as it proved so tight that Post could not get it off, forcing the suit to be cut away from his body.
The third prototype, however, would form the template for nearly every pressure suit to come. Like the previous two it was made of rubber covered in canvas, though it was constructed in one piece, with Post entering through the rubberized collar like a diving suit. Pigskin boots and gloves protected the hands and feet from damage, and the suit was topped by a cylindrical aluminium helmet with a circular viewport. The suit was pressurized using air bled off Winnie Mae’s engine supercharger and heated by a coil wrapped around the exhaust manifold, enriched from a portable bottle of liquid oxygen. The whole affair was custom-made for Post, the helmet’s viewport being offset to the right to align with Post’s good eye and the oxygen inlet positioned to vent the cold oxygen onto his eyepatch.
Though more advanced than any suit that had come before, Post and Colley’s creation suffered from a problem that has dogged pressure suit designers ever since: when the suit was inflated, the joints became stiff and immovable, limiting Post’s range of motion. The helmet also tended to ride up atop the suit, obscuring his vision. Though modern pressure address this issue using accordion-like convolutes at the joints and a system of restraining cables, the best solutions Post and Colley could come up with were aluminium hinges to help the knees and elbows bend and bandolier-like straps to hold the helmet down. The suit was also tailored to fit Post in the sitting position, which made walking to and from the aircraft extremely awkward.
Yet despite these problems, the suit worked. Following preliminary testing in an altitude chamber, on September 5, 1934, Post made the world’s first flight using a pressure suit, reaching an altitude of 12,800 metres over Chicago. Post reported that the suit was reasonably comfortable and did not interfere with his ability to pilot the aircraft. Later that year Post made eight flights over Bartlesville, Oklahoma in an attempt to break the world altitude record. Though he reported reaching an altitude of 15,200 metres (about 50,000 feet), on every attempt the official altitude recording equipment installed by the National Aeronautic Association and National Bureau of Standards failed, and Post was denied an official record. On the bright side, these flights did allow Post confirm the existence of the high-altitude winds he was so eager to exploit.
By this time, however, Post had missed out on competing in the MacRoberston Air Race due to a broken supercharger, and instead he turned his attention to breaking the transcontinental speed record between Los Angeles and New York. Once again his plan was to fly in the stratosphere, using the high-altitude jet stream to speed his progress. Sponsored by Phillips Petroleum and TWA Airlines, Post modified Winnie Mae for the attempt by fitting her with detachable landing gear that could be jettisoned after takeoff to reduce drag, and a wooden skid under the fuselage for landing. After making five flights over Burbank to test the aircraft and his pressure suit, on February 22, 1935, Post took off on his first transcontinental attempt. Unfortunately, his engine began leaking oil barely 30 minutes into the flight, forcing Post to land on Muroc Dry Lake Bed in the Mojave desert only 90 kilometres away. Unable to remove his pressure suit, Post walked to the nearest house for assistance, reportedly causing the occupant to faint at the sight of him. Later, Post’s mechanics determined that the leak was caused by emery powder poured into the engine; someone had deliberately tampered with the aircraft.
Undaunted, Post repaired his aircraft and on March 5 he tried again. This time he made it as far as Cleveland before his oxygen supply ran out. Encouragingly, his calculations revealed that flying in the jet stream had given him an average ground speed of 446 km/h – nearly 160 km/h faster than Winnie Mae’s regular top speed. Post tried again on April 14 and June 15, but was brought down by engine failure both times. Post decided that Winnie Mae was too old and tired for future attempts and sold her to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, where she remains on display to this day.
Wiley Post’s record-breaking days were also at an end. On August 15, 1935, Post and humorist Will Rogers had just taken off from Point Barrow, Alaska in a Lockheed Orion-Explorer floatplane when the engine suddenly failed, sending the aircraft plunging into the lake and killing both men. Post was only 36. But in his short time on earth, he left an indelible mark on the world of aviation and pioneered technologies that would help mankind explore beyond the confines of planet earth. Nearly every modern space suit – from the A7L suits the Apollo astronauts wore on the moon to the EMUs used by the crew of the International Space Stations – can trace their origins to a rubber-and-canvas contraption built by a one-eyed barnstormer from Oklahoma.
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Expand for ReferencesNevin, David, The Pathfinders, The Epic of Flight, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1980
Young, Amanda, Spacesuits – The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum Collection, Powerhouse Books, New York, 2009
Jenkins, Dennis, Dressing for Altitude, NASA, Washington DC, 2012
The post The One-Eyed Barnstormer Who Invented the Space Suit in the 1930s appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In his Aphorisms, written around 380 B.C.E, Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates describes a truly horrifying case of disease:
“The master of a large ship mashed the index finger of his right hand with the anchor. Seven days later a somewhat foul discharge appeared; then trouble with his tongue – he complained he could not speak properly. His jaws became pressed together, his teeth were locked, then symptoms appeared in his neck; on the third day opisthotonos appeared with sweating. Six days after the diagnosis was made he died.”
The ship’s master was suffering from tetanus – better known as lockjaw – a disease that still infects 209,000 people and kills 59,000 worldwide every year. If you have ever heard of tetanus, it is probably through being vaccinated against it before attending school. Or perhaps you have heard that you can contract the disease from stepping on or scratching yourself on a rusty nail. But is this really true? Can such a seemingly minor injury really lead to such dramatic symptoms? Well…yes – but not for the reasons you might think.
Tetanus has been humanity’s constant companion since the dawn of known history. The first description of the disease appears in the Ebers Papyrus, an Ancient Egyptian medical treatise written around 1500 B.C.E – though this is thought to have been copied from an earlier source dating back as far back as 3,000 B.C.E. The disease gets its name from the Ancient Greek word tetanos, meaning ‘taut’ or ‘to stretch’ – a reference to the stiffness and violent muscle spasms characteristic of the affliction. In severe cases these spasms can be so violent as to cause the sufferer to fully arch their back and neck – what Hippocrates refers to in his description as opisthotonos – or even tear muscles and break bones. While for thousands of years the cause of tetanus remained a mystery, as with most diseases there was no shortage of attempts to develop a cure. The Ancient Chinese, for instance, used acupuncture above the patient’s ears, while the Ancient Greeks and Romans, working from the Four Humours model of medicine, attempted to induce sweating by placing patients near fires, wrapping them in oil-soaked cloths, or making them drink copious amounts of wine – and for more on the Four Humours theory and its massive impact on the history of medicine, please check out our previous video What’s Up with the Increasingly Popular Practice of Modern Medical Leeches?
Later Medieval and Renaissance doctors recommended even more unpleasant treatments, such as covering the patient in manure – which, as we shall see, likely made the situation even more shitty beyond the obvious ways. Still, even in ancient times it was well-understood that tetanus had something to do with open wounds and that symptoms typically appeared within a week or so of the inciting injury, with Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia writing in the First Century C.E.:
“The causes of these complaints are many; for some are apt to supervene on the wound of a membrane, or of muscles…and women also suffer from this spasm after abortion; and in this case they seldom recover.”
While Hippocrates concludes his description of the disease with:
“Such persons as are seized with tetanus either die within four days, or if they pass these they recover.”
With the advent of modern weaponry such as explosive artillery shells capable of inflicting large numbers of deep, soil-contaminated wounds, tetanus became a leading cause of deaths for soldiers on the battlefield. During the American Civil War, for example, one in 500 men died of tetanus from infected wounds. The disease was also a common and feared post-operative complication even after the adoption of antiseptic surgical techniques, and even became associated with – of all things – American Fourth of July celebrations. Indeed, in the years before the widespread availability of vaccines, the holiday was commonly known as “the Bloody Fourth” due to the high number of tetanus deaths resulting from accidents involving fireworks and firecrackers.
However, it was not until the late 19th Century and the development of the Germ Theory of Disease that the true cause of tetanus was at last discovered. The first breakthrough came in 1884 when Antonio Carle and Giorgo Rattone, pathologists at the University of Turin, injected pus from human tetanus victims into rabbits. The animals proceeded to contract tetanus, demonstrating that the disease was transmissible and likely caused by a microorganism. That same year, German researcher Arthur Nicolaier discovered that certain bacteria commonly found in the soil produced powerful neurotoxins which, when injected into lab animals, produced the same symptoms as tetanus. This link was confirmed by Japanese researcher Kitasato Shibasaburo, who in 1891 isolated the causative pathogen from a human tetanus victim: the anaerobic soil bacterium Clostridium tetani.
Shibasaburo’s breakthrough, however, went far beyond discovering the cause of tetanus. While working at the University of Berlin, Shibasaburo and German researcher Emil von Behring discovered that when rats and other lab animals were injected with tetanus toxin, their bodies produced a substance capable of neutralizing said toxin as well as the tetanus bacterium. When this substance, which Shibasaburo and von Behring called antitoxin, was extracted from one animal’s blood serum and injected into another, it both cured existing tetanus infections and provided protection against future infections. This technique, known as serum therapy or antitoxin therapy, was among the most important breakthroughs in the history of medicine. Indeed, such was the impact of tetanus antitoxin that during the First World War, the Entente powers suffered only one case of tetanus per 5,000 wounded soldiers. Antitoxins were later developed for more dangerous and infectious diseases such as diphtheria and scarlet fever, saving millions of lives and winning Emil von Behring the 1901 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
In the early years, antitoxin was produced commercially by injecting horses with bacteria, extracting their blood, and purifying the serum. While effective at producing large quantities of serum, this technique did suffer from a number of drawbacks. One of these was serum sickness, a cluster of symptoms such as rashes, joint pain, fever, and swollen lymph glands that arose 5-10 days after being injected with antitoxin. This effect was first noted in 1906 by Austrian paediatrician Clemens von Pirquet and Hungarian-American paediatrician Béla Schick, who determined that it was caused by the victim’s immune system reacting to foreign horse proteins in the serum. To describe this effect, von Pirquet and Schick combined the Greek words allos, meaning “other” and ergon, meaning “work”, to coin a now-familiar word: allergy. The discovery of serum sickness and other allergic reactions allowed Béla Schick to develop a simple and effective test to determine if someone was immune to diphtheria, which became known as the Schick Test. In this procedure, a small dose of diphtheria toxin was injected into one arm and heat-inactivated toxin into the other arm as a control. If the skin around the first injection became red and swollen, then the person did not have sufficient antitoxins – better known today as antibodies – to fight off a diphtheria infection. If little or no swelling occurred, then the person was immune. French physician Charles Mantoux later adapted the Schick Test to the bacterial protein tuberculin, creating the eponymous Mantoux test – still the standard diagnostic test for tuberculosis infection in many parts of the world.
Another major downside of horse-produced antitoxin was the risk of contamination. On October 2, 1901, an American horse named Jim, who had produced nearly 30 litres of diphtheria serum over his lifetime, was found to have contracted tetanus and had to the euthanized. 17 days later, four young children in St. Louis, Missouri – Veronica Keenan and Bessie, Viola, and Frankie Baker – were given diphtheria antitoxin manufactured from Jim’s serum. Within four days, Veronica, Bessie, and Viola were dead of tetanus. This incident and others spurred research into safer alternatives to traditional antitoxin. In 1924, French biologist Gaston Ramon came up with a solution: toxoid or anatoxin, a version of the tetanus or diphtheria toxin treated with heat and formaldehyde such that it was no longer toxic to humans but still retained its immunologic properties. A perfected version of tetanus toxoid was used to protect U.S. troops during WWII, and in 1948 was combined with the vaccines for diphtheria and pertussis – AKA whooping cough – to create the DPT vaccine still given to schoolchildren around the world today. Yet traditional tetanus antitoxin never really went away, and survives to this day in the form of tetanus immunoglobulin or TIG. Unlike the first antitoxins, however, TIG is manufactured not from the blood of horses but volunteer human donors, who are injected with a small dose of bacterial toxin prior to donating blood.
Moving away from that diversion into the fascinating world of immunology, let’s get back to tetanus, about which much has been learned since the late 19th Century. As previously mentioned, tetanus is caused by Clostridium Tetani, a rod-shaped bacterium around 2.5 microns in length. An anaerobic bacterium that thrives in oxygen-free environments, C. tetani commonly found in the soil as well as in the intestinal tracts and faeces of many animals including cats, dogs, cattle, sheep, chickens, horses, mice, and rats. While the bacterium itself is heat-sensitive and cannot survive in the presence of oxygen for long, outside the body of an animal C. tetani transforms itself into a dormant spore, which is a different beast altogether. Tetanus spores are extremely resilient, impervious to most antiseptics and capable of surviving typical sterilization temperatures of 120º Celsius for up to 10-15 minutes. This makes tetanus extremely difficult to eradicate, even in an otherwise sterile hospital environment.
C. tetani typically enters the body via a puncture wound, and once in the anaerobic environment beneath the skin begins to multiply. As it does so, it produces two toxins as waste products: tetanolysin and tetanospasmin, which slowly spread throughout the victim’s nervous system. Tetanospasmin, more generally known as tetanus toxin, is one of the most potent poisons known to science. With an LD50 – that is, the dose that kills 50% of a test sample of lab animals – of 2.5 nanograms per kilogram of body weight, it is second only to botulinum toxin, produced by C. tetani’s cousin Clostridium Botulinum, the bacterium that causes botulism food poisoning. Tetanospasmin inhibits the function of inhibitory neurons, which prevent motor neurons from firing and allow muscles to relax after contraction. This inhibition causes the uncontrollable muscle spasms or tetany characteristic of tetanus. The incubation period of tetanus – that is, the time between initial infection and the onset of symptoms – can be up to several weeks or even months, but is usually on the order of around 10 days. Typically, the farther away the injury site from the central nervous system, the longer the incubation period. Initial symptoms include stiffness and pain in the muscles of the shoulders, back, neck, and jaw. Speaking and swallowing become increasingly difficult, until the jaw muscles tighten so much that it becomes difficult or impossible to open the mouth – the symptom known as trismus which gives tetanus its more common name of “lockjaw.” This is followed by fever, sweating, high blood pressure, rapid heart rate, and increasingly severe muscle spasms throughout the body. Without treatment these symptoms can last up to three or four weeks, with around 25% of untreated patients dying, and even with proper treatment around 10% of cases are fatal. In the absence of vaccines, the only treatment is supportive care, such as the use of muscle relaxants to relieve muscle spasms and ventilators to support breathing. Worse still, due to the extreme potency of tetanospasmin, a dose large enough to cause symptoms is typically insufficient to trigger an immune response, meaning that being infected with tetanus typically does not confer lasting immunity to the disease.
Thankfully, however, in much of the developed world tetanus toxoid or immunoglobulin is readily available, and can be administered either preventatively as a vaccine or reactively within 48 hours of initial infection for those who are unvaccinated or whose vaccines are out of date. In the form of the DTP vaccine, tetanus toxoid is typically administered in six doses throughout childhood and adolescence, with booster shots being required every 10 years in order to maintain immunity. Rare among vaccines, tetanus toxoid is considered to be nearly 100% effectives, and thanks to widespread vaccination efforts, annual tetanus deaths worldwide have fallen from 333,000 in 1990 to around 39,000 today. In North America and Europe the death toll is only around 70 people per year – nearly all among unvaccinated individuals – with the vast majority of tetanus deaths occurring in the developing world.
All this brings us back to our initial question: can you actually get tetanus from stepping on a rusty nail? As with many old wives’ tales, there is a small grain of truth to this myth – albeit one that neatly demonstrates the classic error of conflating correlation with causation. For while you can indeed catch tetanus from a rusty nail, you can just as easily catch it from a seemingly clean nail, for the causative agent is not the rust itself but the Clostridium tetani spores that might be lurking on the nail’s surface. The supposed causal link between tetanus and rust stems merely from the fact that a nail or other metal object left outside to rust is likely also to have been exposed to soil, animal faeces, and other sources of tetanus spores, while the rough rusty surface of the nail provides an ideal hiding place for bacteria – and the perfect vehicle to enter the body if stepped on. Thus the better advice would be to avoid sharp metal objects embedded in – or even located close to – the soil. But even then, you may not be 100% safe. Due to their extreme resilience, tetanus spores can lurk on all manner of seemingly clean objects – including your own skin – and can easily cause infection unless special precautions are taken. For example, a handful of people every year are infected with tetanus through contaminated surgical and dental instruments, compound bone fractures, and bites from infected animals. Users of heroin and other intravenous drugs are also at high risk of contracting the disease. In the past, a major killer of newborn babies was neonatal tetanus, usually transmitted through the cutting of the umbilical cord with a non-sterile instrument. If the mother has been vaccinated against tetanus, then passive immunity is transferred to her child, meaning that today neonatal tetanus is encountered mainly in developing countries where vaccination rates are low. Thankfully, as with other forms of tetanus, thanks to concerted vaccination efforts this disease has been largely eradicated in all but 25 countries.
So in conclusion: while thanks to the wonders of modern immunology you are unlikely to contract tetanus from a rusty nail, it’s probably still a good idea to avoid stepping on rusty nails and other sharp metal objects. Unless you’re into that sort of thing; who are we to judge?
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Expand for ReferencesCarter, Karley, Medicine and Disease in History: Tetanus, Miami University, Spring 2019, https://sites.miamioh.edu/hst-journeys/2019/05/medicine-and-disease-in-history-tetanus/
Moloney, P.J, The Preparation and Testing of Diphtheria Toxoid (Anatoxine-Ramon), American Journal of Public Health, 1927, https://web.archive.org/web/20210516202110/https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.16.12.1208
Tetanus Immune Globulin (Human), September 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20160304091829/http://www.talecris-pi.info/inserts/hypertet.pdf
Tetanus: Symptoms and Causative Agent, The History of Vaccines, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, https://www.historyofvaccines.org/index.php/content/articles/tetanus
S.P. Towari et al, Tetanus, Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases, Centers for Disease Control, https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/tetanus.html
Tetanus and Neonatal Tetanus, World Health organization, Western Pacific Region, https://web.archive.org/web/20140503223407/http://www.wpro.who.int/immunization/factsheets/tetanus_nt/en/
Edmonds, Molly, If You Step on a Rusty Nail, Will You Really Get Tetanus? HowStuffWorks, April 7, 2021, https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/rusty-nail-tetanus.htm#pt1
Pearce, J.M, Notes on Tetanus (Lockjaw), Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry, March 1996, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1073859/?page=1
The post Can You Actually Get Tetanus From Stepping on a Rusty Nail? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Ever watched professional wrestling on TV and asked: how did we get here? How did we get to sword wielding Scottish warriors on one channel, and a jungle boy and his dinosaur friend on the other? Love it or hate it, the scripted nature of professional wrestling is a medium unto itself, with few sports like it. Boxing may get accused of being rigged from time to time and mixed martial arts can give us larger than life characters with legitimate skills, but seemingly no other genre of sport intentionally marries drama and its athletes the way professional wrestling does.
While wrestling has been a thing seemingly as long as humans have been humaning, our story today starts in America. Coinciding with the American Civil War, three styles of wrestling became dominant and proved important to the formation of modern pro wrestling. The first was introduced by Irish immigrants and quickly soared in popularity across the country, with a particularly firm base in New England: Irish Collar and Elbow wrestling. Collar and Elbow wrestling starts in a hold position where opponents grappled the collar and elbow. Unlike a lot of team sports, the barrier of entry to wrestling is easy: all you need are two people and a little space. Irish Collar and Elbow wrestling was popular amongst immigrants for just that reason. Further, matches actually favored smaller wrestlers, so the malnourished small frames of the era found it easy to compete. This style of wrestling was so popular that it was used by the Union during the Civil War to blow off steam and give them a place to settle scores without fighting. Its reign as the most popular style ended in the 1890’s. It has, however, survived in modern pro-wrestling in the lock ups.
The Civil War saw another emerging style: what we call today Greco-Roman. Unlike Collar and Elbow, Greco-Roman favored larger physiques with a higher center of gravity. This style of wrestling focused on the upper half of the body, with most grappling being forbidden below the midsection. Wrestlers with bigger and larger physiques gained popularity over the smaller Collar and Elbow wrestlers, but at a trade off. Greco-Roman matches could last for hours. As a result, its slow pace spelled its end in the early 1900s. As sports writer Joe Jares once said of it, it is “as exciting as watching two sleepy elephants leaning on each other”.
The third style of wrestling was both an import and had American roots. Catch-as-Catch-Can Wrestling, better known as Catch Wrestling had roots in Lancashire wrestling in England. The American style of the sport also had roots in an outlawed American folk style called Rough and Tumble wrestling. Both had a freer set of rules than Collar and Elbow or Greco-Roman which allowed for holds below the belt, and limited strikes. Rough and Tumble was, however, banned because the strikes usually maimed opponents, and most wrestlers in that style had missing eyes as a result. Catch Wrestling was the safer of the two, and more dynamic than Collar and Elbow or Greco-Roman. With its freer move set, it also adapted holds and maneuvers from other styles of grappling including freestyle wrestling, Jiujitsu, and Indian wrestling. Unlike the other styles, catch wrestling was here to stay until the sport became more what it would be today during the 1920s. Modern pro wrestling is still built on a catch wrestling foundation that allows for flashy but harmless moves during the later eras.
Important to the story of the evolution of wrestling from legitimate matches to fixed ones is where people commonly wrestled. Namely, mostly in one of two places: in the city inside bars and theaters, and in the country as part of touring carnivals. Wrestling in cities got the attention of the sports press, and that helped popularize the sport. This helped wrestling become a nationwide phenomenon, and even an international one. Sports press helped broaden the reach by popularizing certain wrestlers, funding championships, promoting matches, and allowing wrestlers to post challenges, called cards.
No bigger luminaries watched wrestling in bars and theaters than Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, and PT Barnum. All three men did their part to popularize wrestling with Thomas Edison lighting up the venues he frequented with the some of the first electric lights. Theodore Roosevelt promoted wrestling as a way for the nation to stay healthy and was a major enthusiast wrestler himself, often challenging people visiting the whitehouse to matches as we’ve previously covered. Significantly, PT Barnum included wrestling in touring circus and carnival acts.
On this note, if you want to trace when wrestling started becoming “fake” the best place to start is the carnival. Carnivals hosted wrestling competitions between established wrestlers, but also hosted challenges between wrestlers and the public. In these challenges, a wrestler would take on challengers from the audience and if a challenger either won or lasted a certain amount of time in the bout, he was awarded money. The “fakeness” came in during these challenges where a plant would volunteer first and either make the wrestler look weak or lose in such a way that it encouraged the locals to think they can do better.
In any event, boxing and wrestling were quite close at the time, with a shared audience that dipped and bounced based on sports scandals and regulations. The two sports also had more in common thanks to the London ruleset of boxing. Under London rules, boxers did not wear gloves. Unlike boxing of today, boxers did not punch each other in the face, as that would lead to broken fingers. Instead, London rules relied on body shots, and leaned on grappling techniques such as holds and throws to open up an opponent to body shots. Like wrestling, there were no time limits on London rules matches, and they could often go on for hours as well. Boxing saw a reformation with the introduction of Marquis of Queensbury Rules. The new ruleset introduced boxing gloves, time limits, and banned grappling altogether, bringing boxing more in line with the sport we know today. The new rules were published in 1867, but were not widely accepted in America until around 1889. The introduction of the new rules divorced wrestling and boxing for good, though also ultimately saw time limits added to wrestling.
While reactions were mixed, some fans were not pleased and were worried new time limits would open wrestling up to more opportunities for hippodroming or “fixing”. Beyond gambling incentives, if you fix a match for a predetermined winner, or fix the match for a certain finish, the crowd can potentially be better entertained if done well, and thus more enticed to come back for further matches. Rematches were big money at the time and could double or even triple the gates of the first bout.
On this entertainment value, the new time limits came at the right time because the emerging catch wrestling was faster and more action packed than Greco-Roman. Catch wrestling also focused on submission holds that were considered more dangerous by the older Greco-Roman wrestlers. A new generation of catch wrestlers who specialized in these new hooks emerged, and none was bigger in America than Frank Gotch, a the poster boy for the new style and who would ultimately help popularize the sport to a level it had never been before, including at one point from 1908 to 1913 reigning as the World Heavyweight Wrestling Champion, still one of the top ten longest streaks for that in wrestling history.
Of course, having one person dominate the sport so fully for so long can be a double edged sword, both bringing fans in from their mastery, while also making things become a little boring when they simply win match after match with no one really able to compete at their level. In short, if one person dominates too long, matches are eventually not as exciting with the outcome predictable.
Fresh, competitive, talent was important to building up the sport, and oftentimes enough talent couldn’t be cultivated fast enough to take on a dominant champ. This happened with the likes of such legends as Bill Muldoon, Frank Gotch, Gotch’s European rival George Hackenschmidt, and many other champions.
And so it was that starting in the 1920’s we enter the “worked” era. At this time, promotors took control of the industry by controlling the booking of wrestlers and champions. Promoters had ties to the carnivals and adopted many of the insider terms and methods used in carnival wrestling. Most noteworthy to the topic at hand, they took the idea of hippodroming and elevated it on a national level. Wrestlers like Toots Mondt, and managers like Billy Sandow helped design and spread a way of catch wrestling that is staged or “worked” to make matches more exciting. Sandow used wrestlers like Mondt, and Ed “Strangler” Lewis to bring other wrestlers to heel into this new vision of wrestling both in the ring, and in the business practices that would define the era. By controlling the bookings of champions, they controlled the titles and kept them in territories they controlled as part of a trust. Rivals within the trust usually schemed to take control of the whole trust or break it completely. We also get in this period the first independent wrestlers who operated outside the control of the trust and resisted the trust’s influence but were targeted by enforcers like Mondt and Lewis. The trust was based in the Midwest under what is known as the Gold Dust Trio made up of Billy Sandow, Toots Mondt, and Ed “Strangler” Lewis who were often at war with other promoters like Jack Curley in New York, and Jack Pfefer who also had a major part to play in the development of worked wrestling, especially in how wrestling was promoted.
The rise of promoters not only previewed the business model of a wrestling promotion like we will have in the TV era, but also the ways in which the power in wrestling shifted away from wrestlers, and to the promoters. Promoters would eventually settle into territories with their own championships. In so doing, they could now dictate terms like who wins and loses matches, who is recruited into the business, and “gimmicks”, or personas that wrestlers take up.
While “gimmicks” were not explicitly part of the business from early on, characters and costumes played up by wrestlers eventually paved the way for the idea. Wrestlers like Muldoon and Gotch always had a foot in theater, and a lot of the famous wrestlers up to this point had acting backgrounds in theater and film. In the beginning of the worked era, the closest thing to gimmicks were ethnic backgrounds invented for wrestlers to endear them to a specific locale. For example, if the match was held in a Jewish neighborhood, the good guy, or babyface, would be played up as Jewish, even if the wrestler was not. Foreign wrestlers would play on their foreignness, even before the worked era with many Eastern Europeans and Middle Easterners adopting titles such as Terrible Turk, or Japanese wrestlers leaning on techniques derived from Sumo and Jiujitsu. The sports press played into rallying locals against foreign wrestlers or establishing rivalries between local heroes and foreign outsiders. In the worked era, gimmicks controlled by the promoters took precedence, and was a further layer of control promoters had over their wrestlers, a factor that rings true today.
With the worked era, the concept of “heel” and “babyface” were also introduced to clearly show audiences who they were supposed to boo and who they were supposed to cheer. Younger fresh faced and clean cut wrestlers were usually babyfaces, and old and disfigured wrestlers played heels.
Another trend familiar with wrestling fans is a struggle between shifting the emphasis more on entertainment over skill. On this note, as American football started gaining popularity and football stars started to emerge, as football players tended to have the type of physique appreciated in professional wrestling, many were recruited by wrestling promoters. These football players were not exactly always talented in the sport, and were generally not as thoroughly trained in catch wrestling, but this didn’t matter much. The trade off is that they would bring attention to the sport and introduce more striking techniques such as shoulder tackles. The biggest of such crossover football stars was Gus Sonnenberg who played for several NFL teams in his tenure between 1923 to 1930. This trend of recruiting football players continues to this day with the likes of Bill Goldberg, Roman Reigns, and Happy Corbin in WWE, and Moose in Impact Wrestling. Conversely, wrestlers were recruited from more technical wrestling backgrounds in catch and amateur styles to lend an air of legitimacy. This included Olympian Ed Don George and catch wrestler Lou Thesz. This trend would also continue to this day with former Olympians and amateur wrestlers like Kurt Angle, and Chad Gable, and mixed martial arts fighters like Ronda Rousey, and Cain Velasquez.
The ring as we see it today was introduced around the beginning of the worked era, as the hard wood floors of a theater or the grass of the carnival grounds took its toll on the poor wrestlers. Instead, a ring kept a limit to the action while providing wrestlers with springy floors covered by canvass which allowed for more over-the-top moves. The moves themselves were played up so people from far away could see them, leading to flashier take downs, and more over-the-top submission holds that would not really work in a legitimate catch wrestling bout. Gimmick matches were also introduced at this time from common staples of professional wrestling like tag team and women’s matches, to less common stipulations like wrestling in a ring covered with fish, mud, or even metal shavings.
Now, at this point you might be wondering, did fans know it was fake? The answer is seemingly for the most part, as with today- yes. On this note, there were plenty of very public attempts to “expose” wrestling as fake since the worked era, yet each time the message would predominantly fall on deaf ears as fans already knew and were fine with it. In fact, promoters would even sometimes inform sports press about the outcomes of rival promotions’ matches the night before to try to ruin the shows. Thanks to the work of the Gold Dust Trio, these attempts at sabotage eventually ended, and a code of silence was thereafter mostly maintained. But either way, it’s clear that even early on, fans knew and accepted the reality of what wrestling had become.
That said, with World War 2, many older and more skilled wrestlers returned to the ring while the younger wrestlers went off to fight. This return of these veteran wrestlers skewed the needle back towards a focus on wrestling skill. But things went the other way very quickly and to an even more extreme degree after the war ended thanks to TV. At this point, we see pro wrestling really settle into the form we know it today. With TV, announcers were brought in to walk the audiences through the match and contribute to the story telling and spectacle. Further, with television, the charismatic entertainment aspect of wrestling could be played up even more such as with over the top interview segments and the like which have been a part of wrestling ever since.
All of this has led to the carnival and turn of the century origins of the sport being felt to this day, as men, and now women, play larger than life characters meant to entertain as they pretend to battle in the ring. While compared to many other professional sports where such rampant outcome fixing would likely kill the leagues, in this case, all the way back to the beginning of these fixed matches, nobody seems to care and simply enjoy being entertained and watching the outcomes of the stories the promoters and athletes come up with. Perhaps the bigger question in all of this is then, why in this particular sport, even in the earliest days when things switched from legitimate to fake, does nobody seem to care the whole thing is fixed, whereas with so many other sports this transition would likely have seen the end of the professional league who tried the same in their sport?
Expand for ReferencesBeekman, Scott M. Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America. Westport: Praeger, 2006.
Morton, Gerald W. and George M. O’Brien Wrestling to Rasslin: Ancient Sport to American Spectacle. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1985.
Shoemaker, David. The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling. New York: Gotham Books, 2013.
The post How Did Professional Wrestling Become Fake? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The Medieval Period (which began at the fall of Rome in the 5th century and is generally agreed to have ended in the 15th century, dovetailing into the early renaissance) is often portrayed by pop culture as being a time when peasants
walked around with mouths filled with blackened, rotted teeth, and bodies covered in excrement and muck from lack of proper bathing habits. But is any of this actually true?
Let’s start with teeth, shall we? On this one, our understanding of Medieval dental hygiene has been rather poorly informed up until relatively recently. As one representative of the British Dental Association noted in 2004, “Our ancestors were far more aware of the value of a good smile than we have previously given them credit for.”
In fact, it turns out that Medieval doctors, surgeons, and healers were well aware of a number of dental ailments including plaque, cavities and, naturally, bad breath. On top of that, they knew how to treat these conditions. Or, at least, treat them with the tools and medicine available at the time.
That said, given their limited tools, it is noted that by far the most common treatment for a tooth gone bad was simply to have it pulled, usually by a blacksmith or barber. However, Medieval surgeons did have the ability to create rudimentary fillings to save a tooth, using materials including beeswax, grease and arsenic, because why not? The price of such procedures sometimes put them out of the reach of most common folk, which, well, wasn’t really all that big of an issue seeing as it was mostly wealthy people with bad teeth…
As we mentioned in our article on why pineapples were considered the ultimate symbol of wealth for a brief, but hilarious period in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries- so much so that renting a pineapple by the hour to show off at parties was a thing- sugary food and sugar itself was for a significant period of history, only something the most wealthy could afford. Even fruit, which is rich in natural sugar, was rarely consumed by peasants, with their diet mostly consisting of grains, vegetables, and calcium rich foodstuffs. You know, the diet that almost perfectly mirrors the recommended diet by dentists today.
This means that, for the most part, the teeth of Medieval people were likely better than those of many today, particularly those who avoid dentists like we all avoid confronting the fact that not only are we all going to die, but everything we do, good or bad, will ultimately be forgotten, as will ourselves and all our descendants, and for that matter the entire human race and all of existence…Nothing matters, including you…
In fact, archaeological research has shown that “for much of the 2000-year period between the Iron Age and the end of the Medieval period”, less than 20% of teeth appear to show any evidence of tooth decay whatsoever. For comparison’s sake, similar, albeit more robust studies of the teeth of modern Americans show that this figure sits closer to 30%. As you’ve probably surmised, this figure is near universally agreed to be higher due to the abundance of sugar present in modern diets. It’s also worth noting that this figure is better than it was at the turn of the 20th century, when sugar was more readily available, but dental care was not, nor even when available nearly up to modern standards. Around this time some sources claim that anywhere upwards of 90% of teeth of adults showed evidence of decay in some western populations.
These figures, however, aren’t representative of wealthy people during the Medieval Period, who, despite having access to better dental care, often had worse teeth because of their sugar-rich diets. King Richard III, for example, who ruled during the latter half of the 15th century reportedly had terrible teeth based on an analysis of his skeletal remains, even having several teeth removed. As you might expect, it’s thought the sorry state of his teeth was almost certainly a byproduct of his wealth and privileged position which allowed him to endlessly indulge his sweet tooth.
In addition to being less at risk of cavities due to a diet naturally low in sugar, Medieval peasants are known to have routinely cleaned and maintained their teeth. Historical documents note that peasants would clean their teeth with rough linen or twigs similar to how we use toothbrushes today and would likewise chew on pleasant smelling herbs to freshen their breath as we would use toothpaste or mouthwash. This latter fact has led historians to conclude that clean teeth and fresh breath was just as desirable a trait during Medieval times as it is today because, shocker, people had noses back then too. There’s even an Medieval recipe for whitening teeth using a combination of sage, salt and the herb, elecampane, which has been used since ancient times to “fortify” teeth. These remedies were all, of course, available to wealthy people, but the excess of sugar in their diets made them far less effective, meaning tooth decay was still more common with the rich and powerful.
Going back to chewing on twigs, the general method here was to chew one end of a twig for a time, then once it was properly mashed up, use that end as a sort of tooth brush. In fact, in some cases, while they didn’t know it at the time, the twigs or roots used actually contained antibacterial substances, perhaps why certain plants became so popular for this purpose as people observed the effects, even if they didn’t understand why they worked so well at cleaning the mouth and teeth. Turns out humans of any era we have historical record for, while they didn’t maybe have our understanding of things, were not stupid.
In addition to basic dental hygiene, peasants even had cures for ailments as serious as mouth cancer. Though these cures obviously were likely mostly ineffective, because, cancer. That said, they often made use of herbs such as sage and rosemary to mask the smell of gangrenous pus, again suggesting a particular stigma surrounding foul breath.
Speaking of bad breath, curiously enough, many early folk remedies from the Medieval period for bad breath made extensive use of mint. In fact, one folk remedy in particular tells readers that an effective cure for, as it calls it “stinking of the breath” is to gargle a mixture of mint, wine and birch before roughly scrubbing the teeth and gums. Just for a second, let the last part of that sentence soak in for a moment- peasants in Medieval times were aware of how important it is to clean your gums to keep your breath fresh. Keep in mind that dentists today still have to routinely tell patients not to forget to clean their gums when brushing their teeth.
So yeah, while we feel it is important to constantly remind people with their rose colored glasses that the past was just the worst and they sound like absolute ignorant fucking dumbasses who really should crack a history book once in a while when they say things like “I wish I lived in literally any time period but right now in history”… in this one rare case, I mean, while we’re not going to say it was better to live in the past, because we have some pretty awesome options for dental care that medieval people would have given their right molar’s for, and I think we can all agree a good Oreo Blizzard at Dairy Queen is worth the need for the occasional dentist checkup, the fact remains that Medieval peoples in the general case probably had better teeth than most of the people reading this. Just, you know, those sparkly medieval teeth had to be attached to bodies that lived in the past which was, say it with me- the worst.
Now, moving on from teeth to bathing and that side of hygiene, Medieval peoples had a rather fun way to do this that made your Saturday date night dinner with your partner look rather tame, which we’ll get into shortly. Yes, it turns out that, once again, humans during medieval times were just as keen as humans today to not stink, because, noses. Except for, of course, certain individuals… We’re looking at you Chris. Ya, take a bath dude.
First, let’s discuss washing hands, beyond doing so during a morning body scrub down from a basin (which by the way also seems to have include a good daily teeth scrub as mentioned), hands were also usually washed again before and after eating. Remember, this was a time before widespread use of utensils, and the fork at one point was actually viewed as sinful to use anyway for hilarious reasons we’ll get into in the Bonus Fact later.
Beyond eating with one’s hands, particularly those of lower classes also often ate and drank from the same containers as well. From this, it should come as no surprise that getting your hands clean before eating was considered good manners, and cleaning the fingers after was also something of a necessity to get remnants of food off.
Moving back to bathing, at least during medieval times, while some medical professionals did advise against doing it excessively, many others extolled the benefits of bathing regularly at keeping one healthy. For example, Italian physician Magninius Mediolanesis, who functioned as a court physician as well as for a time Regent master at the University of Paris, in the 14th century notes,
The bath cleans the external body parts of dirt left behind from exercise on the outside of the body… if any of the waste products of third digestion are left under the skin that were not resolved by exercise and massage, these will be resolved by the bath.
He also recommended bathing as a means to cure or ease discomfort, such as for the elderly and women who are pregnant.
Of course, when talking full body baths, only the reasonably well off at this point could actually afford to own a bath of some sort and to supply it with hot water, so most relied on bath houses, rivers, lakes, hot springs, etc. Thus, poorest of the poor who could not afford to go to a bath house are generally thought to have had extremely poor hygiene during the winter months, outside of washing using basins. But this wasn’t exactly by choice.
For the rest, bath houses were common, particularly after the 11th century when crusaders, who had become accustomed to such and the excellent hygiene habits of Muslim and Jewish peoples, popularized and regularly frequented these establishments not just for bathing purposes, but also to socialize and get spicy.
In fact, if we fast forward to the 15th century, bathing and eating at bath houses were often combined. As noted in the book: Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity, by Virginia Smith:
By the fifteenth-century, bath feasting in many town bathhouses seems to have been as common as going out to a restaurant was to become four centuries later. German bath etchings from the fifteenth century often feature the town bathhouse, with a long row of bathing couples eating a meal naked in bathtubs, often several to a tub, with other couples seen smiling in beds in the mid-distance.
While this might seem a little odd at first glance through a modern lens, consider that many people today enjoy soaking in a hot tub or pool with their friends while drinking alcoholic beverages, which is not too dissimilar to these former bath house practices, except now usually featuring skimpy bathing suits.
Going back to bath houses, given that many were connected to bakeries in order to use heat from their ovens to warm the water, let’s face it, there’s no way one could sit there in the water smelling freshly baked bread and not develop a voracious appetite.
And speaking of voracious appetites, given that many bath houses were not gender divided and featured naked, now clean people having a good time together, it should also come as no surprise that bath houses were known to be places to go to have a REALLY good time…
For those without a non-paid partner, these establishments were also frequently places to find or engage the services of exceptionally good smelling ladies of the night.
As you might have guessed from all this, many church groups looked down on bath houses for that reason. For example, consider this excerpt from an 11th century minister known as Burchard of Worms,
If thou, being a married man, hast shamed the nakedness of any woman, as, I say, her breasts and her shameful parts- if thou hast, thou shalt do penance for five days on bread and water. But if thou art not married, two days on bread and water.
Hast thou washed thyself in the bath with thy wife and other women and seen them nude, and they thee? If thou hast, thou shouldst fast for three days on bread and water.
However, contrary to popular belief, on the whole at this time, it doesn’t seem as if most church organizations had a big problem with the bathing itself, just the perceived immorality exhibited at many bath houses. For example, 6th century Pope Gregory I is known to have encouraged Christians to bathe regularly. And, as alluded to, Muslim and Jewish groups were likewise known to be even more fastidious than their Christian brethren about keeping clean.
As for the Christian church in Europe, to solve the issue of a whole lot of nakedness and lovin’ taking place at bath houses, it became relatively common for bath houses to be built by the various church groups themselves near monasteries. The difference between these bath houses and the other variety was that they were a whole lot less fun… Specifically, separating areas for men and women, instead of mixing them.
Further demonstrating that most church organizations did not really have anything against the act of bathing itself, many monasteries actually piped water into their own, sometimes elaborate baths, and even required the clergy to bathe before many events. For example, at Westminster Abbey, they required their monks to bathe for Christmas, Easter, at the end of June and at the end of September. This doesn’t mean, however, that the monks weren’t bathing elsewise, just that they were required to do so during these periods. In fact, evidence seems to indicate they bathed much more frequently than that, as they seem to have employed a bath-attendant year round at that Abbey.
So if people during medieval times actually did bathe reasonably frequently, where did the perception that they did not come from? This came about thanks to the latter end of this period and beyond where people really did start bathing less.
As to why, to begin with, around the mid-14th century about 60% of the European population died within about seven years or so- not too dissimilar to “The Snap”, but in this case because of the Black Death. This saw the former popular practice of people communing in bath houses together start to become decidedly less popular for a time, though it seems to have picked back up after.
Things went the other way again around the early 16th century when diseases like Syphilis were rearing their ugly heads in Europe. Around this same time, a popular notion arose in some regions of Europe that water could carry disease into the body through the pores in the skin, especially hot water.
It wasn’t just diseases from the water itself they were worried about. They also felt that with the pores widened after a bath, this resulted in infections of the air having easier access to the body. Hence, bathing, particularly at bathhouses, became connected with the spread of diseases.
Of course, given countless people were all bathing together in the same warm water, sharing food, and even sometimes having sex, this probably did genuinely invite the spread of disease at these establishments. Further, even in home baths water still was commonly shared with many people, as hauling it all in was no small task, and even much more work and cost if choosing to heat it up as well.
Thus, the popularity of bath houses began to significantly decline around when Syphilis was making the rounds. As noted by Dutch philosopher Erasmus in 1526,
Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths. Today there are none… the new plague has taught us to avoid them.
And to be fair, when choosing to be a little more stinky or getting the literal plague or syphilis without modern medicine available… Ya, solid choice ancestors. Checks out…
But, again, then, as now, people tended to still not like to stink if they could help it. Thus, without the bath houses around or as popular, many began mostly relying on the age old method of washing using a basin and the like as a primary means to keep clean, as well as, when weather permitted, taking dips in lakes and rivers.
To further get around the stink problem, people who could afford it took to frequently changing their linen undergarments, as well as rubbing themselves down with freshly clean linen or scented rags. Various perfumes were also used, as well as the practice of wearing small bags containing fragrant herbs. Herbs, such as salvia officinalis, bay leaves, and hyssop, were also commonly rubbed under the armpits and elsewhere for use as a deodorant.
That said, while most still bathed occasionally, just less frequently than before, it does appear that some, even among the nobility, really did forgo full body bathing at this point, or at least they’d claim such.
For example, one Russian ambassador to France noted, “His Majesty [Louis XIV] stunk like a wild animal.” Russians were not so finicky about bathing and tended to bathe regularly even after their European brethren had largely abandoned bath houses. King Louis XIV’s stench seems to have come from the fact that his physicians advised him to bathe as infrequently as possible to maintain good health. He also stated he found the act of bathing disturbing. Because of this, he is said to have only bathed in a bath twice in his lifetime.
Another in this “gruesome two-some” class among the aristocracy was Queen Isabel I of Spain who claimed that she had taken a full body bath only twice in her lifetime, when she was first born and when she got married. Of course, in both cases, they are perhaps forgetting many times servants perhaps bathed them as children. And given certain moral attitudes of the day, particularly in the case of Isabel, it may be that they were just saying they didn’t ever bathe, rather than this actually being the case.
Whatever the case, amazingly, these post-medieval time attitudes against regular full body bathing in certain pockets of Europe lingered among some groups until around the mid-19th century.
But to sum up, there doesn’t actually ever seem to be a time in recorded history that people are known to have ceased bathing in some form altogether, with the record for the least hygienic not going to our ultra distant ancestors like medieval peoples or those before, but to our more recent ones, with the abandoning of better hygiene by some groups around the 16th century and beyond thanks to widespread disease and the development of more prudish attitudes. And as for teeth? Ya, they probably had better teeth than you thanks to meticulous daily dental care, combined with diets more conducive to the health of teeth and gums than yours.
Bonus Fact:
Some of the earliest known table forks made their debut in Ancient Egypt. The Qijia culture (2400-1900 BC) that resided in part of present day China also are known to have used forks. A couple thousand years later, the fork’s popularity in the Western world spread via the Silk Road into Venice, with one of the earliest recorded instances of forks in Venice coming from an 11th century story of the wedding of a Byzantine princess, Theodora Anna Doukaina, to Domenico Selvo.She supposedly brought gold forks as part of her dowry. However, the God fearing Venetians saw these pronged monstrosities as a slight against The Lord himself who gave us perfectly good fingers to eat with. And if you’re now thinking we’re exaggerating, consider this quote from St. Peter Damian: “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks – his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them when eating.”Of course, in the Book of I Samuel (2:13)- thought to have been composed around 640-540 BC- it states that Jewish priests’ assistants used forks: “And the priests’ custom with the people was, that, when any man offered sacrifice, the priest’s servant came, while the flesh was in seething, with a fleshhook of three teeth in his hand…”Such trivial mentions as usage in the Holy scriptures by none other than the priests’ servants themselves didn’t stop many religious elite from vilifying the fork and poor Theodora. (They also didn’t like that she used napkins, among other things.)When the princess died two years later of a mysterious degenerative disease, it was considered by some to be punishment for her pride and perceived excesses.Despite being mentioned as OK to use in the Hebrew Bible, forks in the Western world continued to carry this negative stigma due to their association with Eastern decadence and being perceived as an affront to God.
The fork’s popularity began to grow, however, during the 16th century due to the infamous historical trend setter Catherine de Medici. She helped popularize the fork with the French tables after her marriage to Henry II. At this time, anything Italian was in vogue thanks to the Renaissance.
The fork also became more popular as hygiene ideals began to change, particularly as people started bathing and washing less frequently around this time, as previously noted. Naturally, the fork began to seem increasingly attractive to those who preferred their food to be free of anything on their hands.
However, many men still rejected them as they were considered too feminine. This attitude began to alter when they began to be crafted with ruffled cuffs…. This might seem strange to us, but let’s not forget that high heels were originally invented for men, who also commonly wore tights…
On that note, when forks began gaining in popularity, this resulted in less of a need for a pointed knife during meal times. As such, in 1669, Louis XIV- the same guy who loved doing up his hair, wearing tights, and high heels as was the manly fashion at the time- made these overly sharp knives illegal at the table and replaced them with blunter / wider ones.
That said, it wouldn’t be until the Industrialization period that the lower and middle classes began commonly using forks, thanks to the reduction in price. When this happened, forks quickly surpassed knives as the most popular cutlery item.
Finally, any mention of the history of cutlery would not be complete without giving a nod to the fact that ancient spoons in China also sometimes featured a pointy end to be used as a one prong fork / knife… perhaps the first known instance of the spork or spnife, depending on how you want to look at it.
Expand for References* WHAT WAS DENTAL HEALTH LIKE IN THE MIDDLE AGES? * Middle Ages Hygiene * Medieval Times and Dental Health * Medieval teeth ‘better than Baldrick’s’ * Atlantic Monthly Company, 1945 * Oral Health and Frailty in the Medieval English Cemetery of St. Mary Graces * Ancient Herbs * King Richard III’s teeth and jaw reveal monarch’s anxious life and violent death The post Did People in Medieval Times Really Have Bad Teeth? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
If you were to visit New York’s Coney Island in the early 20th Century, you would have found no shortage wonderful amusements to occupy your time. You could swim in the ocean, enjoy an ice cream or a hot dog, or brave the death-defying mechanical rides of the island’s three giant amusement parks. If you were feeling more adventurous, you could take in such spectacles as a Boer War battle reenactment starring a thousand soldiers, a burning building being extinguished by firefighters, reenactments of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the 1889 Jonestown Flood, or sideshow attractions like Lilliputia, a village inhabited entirely by little people. But amid this “anything goes” carnival atmosphere, one attraction would have seemed rather out of place. For a 25-cent admission fee, you could enter a sterile room attended by white-gowned nurses, in which dozens of tiny premature babies, weighing only a pound or two, lay swaddled inside glass-doored incubators. This strange exhibit was among the most popular on the island, drawing thousands of visitors every day to witness this miracle of modern medicine. But this was not some crass parody or even an advertisement for New York City hospitals; incredibly, for nearly half the Twentieth Century the Incubator Exhibit at Coney Island was among the only dedicated neonatal care facilities in the United States, taking in thousands of desperate cases that no other hospital could care for. This strange combination of hospital ward and carnival sideshow was the life’s work of a mysterious German immigrant named Dr. Martin Couney, who for nearly fifty years defied the Medical Establishment and helped give thousands of premature infants a fighting chance at life.
Premature births have plagued humanity since the dawn of time, but for thousands of years there was little that could be done but to swaddle infants in cloth, place them by the hearth, and hope. The first steps towards modern neonatal were taken in 1870s France, whose plummeting birth rate in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War prompted doctors to more closely examine the problem of infant mortality. In 1878, Dr. Stephane Tarnier had a chance encounter with a Monsieur Odile Martin, a zookeeper at Paris’ Jardin d’Acclimatation, who showed him the latest model of incubator for hatching bird eggs. Inspired, over the next two years Tarnier perfected a modified version of the incubator for use with premature infants. The device consisted of a wooden cabinet with a glass lid divided into two compartments, the upper one holding the infant and the lower one a pan of water heated by oil lamps to warm and humidify the air. A small chimney packed with chemically-treated cotton filtered the incoming air. Tarnier’s design was further improved by his protégé Dr. Pierre-Constant Budin, who added a mechanism to automatically regulate the internal temperature, reducing the need for the incubators to be monitored round-the-clock.
In 1896 Budin sent his apprentice, German student Martin Couney, to promote the incubators at the Great Industrial Exposition in Berlin. Born in 1869 in Krotoschen, Prussia, Couney, who had changed his name from Cohen to hide his Jewish ancestry, claimed to have studied Medicine in Leipzig before moving to Paris to study under Budin.
Budin’s incubators, billed as Kinderbrutanstalt or “child hatcheries,” proved such a hit that a promoter named Samuel Schenkein invited Couney to exhibit them at the Victorian Era Exhibition in London’s Earl’s Court the following year. There the exhibit caused a sensation, with Londoners flocking in their thousands to see infants so small few believed they could ever survive. At the time, premature births accounted for nearly 40% of infant deaths in England, leading the medical journal The Lancet to praise the exhibit and declare:
“Any successful attempt to improve the construction of incubators and to render this life-saving apparatus available to the general public must be welcomed.”
However, the exhibit’s financial success caught the attention of less scrupulous promotors, and in February 1898 the Barnum & Bailey Circus opened their own copycat exhibit in London, leading The Lancet to run an article titled Danger of Making a Public Show of Incubators for Babies:
“This success, however, has not proved an unmixed blessing. It attracted the attention and cupidity of public showmen, and all sorts of persons, who had no knowledge of the intricate scientific problem involved, started to organize baby incubator shows just as they might have exhibited marionettes, fat women, or any sort of catch-penny monstrosity.”
“But if music-hall proprietors, caterers for refreshments at exhibitions, and public showmen…are going to start baby incubator shows [then] the question arises whether the attention of the sanitary authorities should not be directed to the dangers that may result. The most obvious way to avoid all difficulties is to obtain the loan of fully developed and healthy babies. The general public would scarcely detect this fraud, and these shows might easily degenerate into a disguised form of baby farming.”
But while the medical authorities saw only the potential for baby snatching and mistreatment, Couney saw in the Earl’s Court Exhibition a workable if unorthodox model for promoting the use of incubators. Though over 400 babies were admitted to the exhibit over the run of the Exhibition, none of the mothers had been charged a single penny, admission fees from the curious public being more than sufficient to cover expenses. It was a system that would serve Couney and his tiny wards well for the next 50 years. Believing that Americans would take to the sideshow format even better than the British, in 1898 Couney emigrated to the United States and took his incubator show on the road, first setting up shop in a county fair midway in Omaha, Nebraska. While Couney’s exhibit, tucked between a Wild West Show and a Camel Ride, failed to attract the attention he had hoped for, the experience allowed him to perfect the system of care he would later become famous for. In contrast to the carnival atmosphere surrounding him, Couney ran the incubator exhibit with obsessive care and military discipline, ensuring that every surface was kept sparkling and sterile and dressing his employees in starched white hospital uniforms. A staff of nurses, physicians and wet nurses to feed the babies lived permanently onsite, with Couney even hiring a cook to make nutritious meals for the wet nurses to keep their milk as healthy as possible. If a nurse was caught smoking, drinking alcohol, or even indulging in a hot dog or soda, she would be summarily fired. Infant care was similarly regimented. Upon admission, each baby was given a bath and a small dose of brandy, swaddled with a pink or blue ribbon, then placed on display. Throughout their stay they received round-the-clock care, being fed by the wet nurses every two hours.
Despite his insistence on cleanliness and order, Couney still had something of the showman about him, instructing his staff to swaddle the infants in clothes several sizes too large to emphasize how small they were. One of his nurses, Mrs. Louise Recht, would often show off to visitors by slipping her diamond wedding ring over the infants’ wrists. Couney’s approach was unorthodox in other ways. While most physicians recommended keeping premature infants isolated for fear of infection, Couney encouraged his nurses to hug and kiss their wards, believing contact and affection would help them thrive.
Couney’s next ports of call were the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The year before he married one of his nurses, Annabelle Maye Segner, and in 1907 their first child, Hildegarde, was born prematurely and had to be nursed back to health in one of Couney’s incubators. The incident spurred Couney to continue his work, and later in life Hildegarde would train as a nurse and join her father’s business. By this time Couney’s incubator sideshows had finally caught on, and he was fast becoming a very wealthy man. Indeed, the daily cost of caring for each baby at the St. Louis fair was around $15 – equivalent to $405 dollars in today’s money – yet the exhibit never had any difficulty covering expenses. By 1903 Couney had made enough money to establish permanent exhibits at the Luna Park and Dreamland amusement parks on Coney Island, while in 1905 he built another in Atlantic City.
But while the public couldn’t get enough of Couney’s tiny babies, the medical establishment was rather more skeptical. In 1904 large numbers of infants died at a rival incubator show at the 1904 World’s Fair, while in 1911 the Dreamland amusement park burned to the ground. While the infants in the incubator exhibit were saved from the flames, the incident prompted the President of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to declare that infant care should only be performed in hospitals. While Couney wholeheartedly agreed, despite his best efforts incubators and neonatal care was slow to catch on in the United States. Part of the problem was a simple lack of resources with which to provide premature infants with round-the-clock care. As journalist A.J. Liebling wrote in 1939:
“There are not enough doctors and nurses experienced in this field to go around. Care of prematures as private patients is hideously expensive… six dollars a day for mother’s milk… rental of an incubator and hospital room, oxygen, several visits a day by a physician, and fifteen dollars a day for three shifts of nurses.”
Couney’s work was also tainted by his lack of professional qualifications. While he often styled himself as a doctor, there is little evidence that Couney actually obtained a medical degree. This led many medical professionals to dismiss him as little more than a carnival showman and a charlatan.
But there was another, more sinister reason for the lack of interest in incubators: Eugenics. The Eugenics movement, which sought to improve society through a program of selective breeding and the sterilization or extermination of those deemed genetically inferior, saw premature infants as “weaklings” and “runts” not worth saving. So pervasive was this attitude in American society that in 1917 Chicago doctor Harry Haiselden produced a film titled The Black Stork arguing for the euthanasia of “defective” children, and Better Babies contests awarding gold ribbons to the fittest-looking children were often held next door to Couney’s incubator exhibits. The Eugenics movement disgusted Couney, who when challenged by critics would often rattle off a long list of historical figures who were born prematurely but went on to accomplish great things, including Mark Twain, Napoleon Bonaparte, Victor Hugo, Charles Darwin, and Sir Isaac Newton.
While doctors and eugenicists could debate Couney’s credentials or the value of his work, what they could not argue with were his results. Over his 50-year career, Couney’s incubator exhibits enjoyed a success rate of 85%, nursing infants weighing as little as 23 ounces back to health. And Couney was not without allies. In 1914 he met Dr. Julius Hess – widely considered to be the father of American neonatology – and the two became lifelong friends. In his groundbreaking 1922 textbook Premature and Congenitally Diseased Infants, Hess became one of the first physicians to acknowledge Couney’s pioneering role in the history of infant care. He also bankrolled Couney’s exhibit at the 1933 Century of Progress exhibit in Chicago. As before the show drew massive crowds, and to celebrate his success, in 1934 Couney held a “homecoming” for the babies who had “graduated” from his incubators the year before. Of the 58 babies cared for in 1933, 41 returned with their mothers, the joyous event being broadcast live across the nation. Six years later, Couney’s decades of work finally paid off when the first dedicated neonatal unit opened at Cornell Hospital in New York. That same year, Couney exhibited his incubators at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, but unlike previous years the high operating costs nearly bankrupted him, and he was forced to start winding down his permanent exhibits. In 1943, after 40 years of operation, the incubator exhibits at Coney Island and Atlantic City closed their doors for the last time. Martin Couney died in 1950 at the age of 81.
While Martin Couney is rarely remembered today, his contributions to medicine cannot be overstated. Between 1896 and 1943 his incubator exhibits took in around 8500 premature infants and succeeded in saving nearly 7500. In the face of an apathetic and hostile medical establishment, his unorthodox mix of pioneering medicine and carnival showmanship brought hope to desperate parents and gave thousands of children abandoned by society a fighting chance at life.
But there are those who will never forget. Kathy Meyer was born eight weeks premature in 1939, and when her parents realized they couldn’t afford her hospital care, a doctor recommended she be taken to the Coney Island facility. In a 2016 interview, the now 77-year-old Meyer recalled:
“I was a sickly baby. If it wasn’t for Couney, I wouldn’t be here today. And neither would my four children and five grandchildren. We have so much to thank him for.”
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Expand for ReferencesBarry, Rebecca, Coney Island’s Incubator Babies, JSTOR Daily, August 15, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/coney-islands-incubator-babies/
Reedy, Elizabeth, Historical Perspectives: Infant Incubators Turned ‘Weaklings’ into “Fighters”, The American Journal of Nursing, September 2003, https://www.jstor.org/stable/29745365?mag=coney-islands-incubator-babies&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
The Use of Incubators for Infants, The Lancet, May 29, 2897, http://www.neonatology.org/classics/lancet.incubators.html
The Victorian Era Exhibition at Earl’s Court, The Lancet, July 17, 1897, http://www.neonatology.org/classics/lancet.earls.html
The Danger of Making a Public Show of Incubators for Babies, The Lancet, February 5, 1898, http://www.neonatology.org/classics/lancet.dangers.html
Smith, Mary, Incubator Babies, American Journal of Nursing, July 1911, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3404195?mag=coney-islands-incubator-babies&seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents
How One Man Saved a Generation of Premature Babies, BBC News, May 22, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36321692
Blakemore, Erin, Baby Incubators: From Boardwalk Sideshow to Medical Marvel, History, September 12, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/baby-incubators-boardwalk-sideshows-medical-marvels
Prentice, Claire, The Man Who Ran a Carnival Attraction That Saved Thousands of Premature Babies Wasn’t a Doctor At All, Smithsonian Magazine, August 19, 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/man-who-pretended-be-doctor-ran-worlds-fair-attraction-saved-lives-thousands-premature-babies-180960200/
The post The Forgotten Carnival Sideshow That Saved Countless Babies’ Lives appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Escape From L.A. Goldeneye. The Matrix. Ocean’s 11. The Fate of the Furious. These are but a few of the many popular films to feature electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. As depicted in these films, EMP is the ultimate weapon of the electronic age, able to destroy every electric or electronic circuit within its blast radius and plunge entire cities or even countries into the Stone Age. But is this terrifying weapon real, or is it just another pop culture fabrication, designed to provoke the same primal fear as when the wifi signal goes out? Incredibly, EMP weapons do indeed exist, though perhaps unsurprisingly their design, use, and capabilities are considerably different from what Hollywood would have us believe.
An electromagnetic pulse is a powerful burst of electromagnetic radiation, and can be generated by a variety of natural phenomena, including lightning strikes, falling meteorites, and coronal mass ejections or solar flares. Such pulses damage electrical and electronic equipment by inducing powerful electric currents, the wiring within the equipment essentially acting as a radio antenna. This current then overloads vulnerable components in the circuit. While the effects of lightning-generated EMP is typically minor and short-range, solar flares can cause significant damage to electrical infrastructure. In 1859, a large coronal mass ejection known as the Carrington Event knocked out telegraph networks around the world, causing telegraph poles to spark and giving telegraph operators electric shocks through their headphones. In certain areas telegraphs were even able to function without batteries, the power being supplied by the electromagnetic pulse itself. It is fortunate that this event took place at a time when earth’s electrical infrastructure was limited to telegraph networks; had it occurred today it would have wrought untold destruction. Thankfully, there have been no Carrington-level events since, though a 2012 solar flare of the same magnitude came very close, missing the earth by only 9 days.
In today’s digital age, the ability to instantly disable an enemy’s electrical infrastructure would give an attacking army a huge advantage on the battlefield, and so since the 1950s research into EMP weapons has been ongoing in several countries. Real EMP weapons fall into two basic categories: nuclear and non-nuclear. Nuclear EMP results from the intense burst of gamma radiation emitted by a nuclear explosion, which strips atoms in the surrounding air of electrons. These free electrons then flow along the earth’s magnetic field in what is known as a Compton Current, which in turn generates a powerful electromagnetic field. This phenomenon was anticipated by the scientists of the Manhattan Project, the WWII effort to build the first atomic bomb, and in the lead-up to the July 16, 1945 Trinity Test – the world’s first nuclear detonation – Italian physicist Enrico Fermi ordered all instruments monitoring the test double-shielded to protect them from damage. However, the EMP generated by a ground-level nuclear blast is relatively weak and short-range, and thus of limited utility as whatever electronic equipment is disabled by the EMP is immediately destroyed by the blast itself. This is because the high atmospheric density and weak magnetic field at low altitudes prevents the free electrons from travelling far before being scattered, limiting the strength of EMP that can be produced. In order to generate a truly powerful and effective EMP, nuclear weapons must be detonated at extremely high altitudes, where the atmosphere is thinner and the earth’s magnetic field stronger.
This phenomenon was first observed in 1958 during Operation Hardtack I, a series of 35 nuclear tests carried out in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. Three of these tests, codenamed Yucca, Teak, and Orange, were conducted at high altitudes. The 1.7 kiloton Yucca device, carried by a helium balloon, was detonated at an altitude of 26 kilometres on April 28, 1958, while the 3.8 megaton Teak and Orange devices were launched aboard Redstone ballistic missiles, detonating at an altitude of 76 and 41 kilometres on July 31 and August 11, respectively. These tests were intended to determine the effectiveness of high-altitude nuclear explosions as a defence against incoming enemy ballistic missiles and to gauge the effects of the resulting electromagnetic pulse on communications equipment. The results were alarming, with the EMP exceeding predictions by more than fivefold and causing extensive damage to scientific instruments.
The most dramatic demonstration of the power of EMP, however, took place four years later during Operation Fishbowl, another series of high-altitude nuclear tests carried out in the South Pacific. These tests were conducted at much higher altitudes than the Hardtack series and were intended to study the creation of an artificial radiation belt around the earth that could potentially disable enemy nuclear warheads as they reentered the atmosphere. On July 9, 1962, the 1.4 megaton Starfish Prime was carried aloft by a Thor ballistic missile, detonating 14 minutes later 1100 kilometres above Johnston Island. The flash from the detonation was so bright it could be seen through heavy cloud cover in Hawaii some 1,500 kilometres away, while the radiation emitted by the blast caused the sky to light up with bright, multicoloured aurora. But as in the Operation Hardtack tests, the power of the EMP generated by Starfish Prime exceeded all predictions, wreaking havoc on Hawaii’s electrical infrastructure. More than 300 streetlights were knocked out, burglar alarms were set off, and the microwave telephone relay links between the Hawaiian Islands were severely damaged. Many scientific instruments, ships, and aircraft monitoring the test were also damaged by the pulse. Though the United States Military never formally admitted to the incident, it did not take long for the people of Hawaii to make the connection between the sudden blackout and the recent nuclear test. Meanwhile, the artificial radiation belt generated by the explosion orbited the earth for months, damaging several spacecraft including Telstar 1, the first telecommunications satellite, and Ariel, the United Kingdom’s first satellite – and for more on this please check out our video That Time the U.S. Accidentally Nuked Britain’s First Satellite.
Two months later, the Soviet Union conducted its own series a high-altitude nuclear tests, with equally dramatic results. Known as Project K, these tests were launched from the Kapustin Yar missile development site, the warheads travelling across populated areas of central Kazakhstan to the Sary Shagan Test Range. The largest of these experiments, known simply as Test 184, was carried out on October 22, 1962, the 300 kiloton warhead detonating at an altitude of 290 kilometres. In anticipation of the test, Soviet scientists instrumented a 570 kilometre section of telephone line, which was protected from overload by dozens of fuses and gas-filled overvoltage protectors. Despite these precautions, the EMP generated by Test 184 induced massive currents of up to 3400 amperes, fusing the entire length of the cable and burning out every single fuse and overvoltage protector. The pulse also started an electrical fire that destroyed the Karaganda power plant and shut down 1,000 kilometres of underground power cables running between the cities of Astana and Almata. Though never confirmed by the Soviets, it is believed that the blast also inflicted severe damage to the nearby Baikonur Cosmodrome, since for nearly two months following the test every mission launched from the site failed. The Vostok 5 and 6 manned orbital missions, originally scheduled for November 1962, were also abruptly postponed, and would not be flown until seven months later.
The Americans managed to conduct two more high-altitude nuclear tests, codenamed Bluegill Triple Prime and Kingfish, before the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 put an end to all atmospheric nuclear testing. Nonetheless, the data collected during these tests allowed American and Soviet scientists to make a number of key discoveries regarding the effects of EMP. Among these was the fact that high-altitude nuclear detonations actually produce three distinct pulses: the E1 pulse, lasting one microsecond, the E2 pulse, lasting between one microsecond and one second, and the E3 pulse, which can last from tens to hundreds of seconds. While the E1 pulse is the most powerful of the three, the E3 pulse is the most dangerous to electrical systems, mimicking the effects of coronal mass ejections like the 1859 Carrington Event. Most fuses and surge-protection devices can withstand high voltages and currents if they are applied over a short enough period, and will thus likely survive the powerful but brief E1 pulse. The extended surge produced by the E3 pulse, however, will cause most of these devices to fail. The high-altitude nuclear tests also revealed that when it comes to EMP, bigger is not always better. While most of the American tests used thermonuclear warheads in the megaton range, Soviet tests revealed that smaller kiloton-range fission weapons are just as if not more effective at generating EMP. This is because the casings of thermonuclear weapons tend to be thicker, blocking the prompt Gamma Rays essential for EMP generation. The primary stage of thermonuclear weapons also tends to pre-ionize the surrounding air, further reducing efficiency. The ability to use simpler, cheaper pure-fission warheads theoretically makes EMP a very cost-effective weapon. Indeed, since the 1960s, nearly every nuclear-armed nation has developed some means of using its nuclear weapons to carry out an EMP attack if required. For example, when on January 25, 1995 a Russian radar station mistook a Norwegian atmospheric research rocket for an American Trident submarine-launched missile, the radar operators assumed the Americans were carrying out a preemptive high-altitude EMP attack to blind Russian defences prior to launching an all-out nuclear strike – and for more on this please check out our videos That Time the Moon Nearly Started World War III and Briefcase of Armageddon: the Exact Sequence of Actions Behind a Hypothetical US Nuclear Attack.
Yet despite their awesome destructive power, high-altitude nuclear explosions are hardly the most convenient or diplomatically desirable means of carrying out an EMP attack. This has prompted extensive research into non-nuclear EMP alternatives. From a technical perspective, generating an EMP is relatively simple, requiring little more than a powerful capacitor bank to store and discharge electricity and a specially-designed antenna to generate and direct the pulse. One of the most extraordinary examples of such a non-nuclear EMP generator is the Air Force Weapons Lab Transmission-Line Aircraft Simulator, or ATLAS I, constructed in 1975 near Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. Also known as “Trestle,” the 120-metre long, 36-metre tall platform was designed to test the resistance of military aircraft to nuclear EMP, and can support the weight of a fully-loaded B-52 Stratofortress bomber. A pair of EMP generators can bombard the test aircraft with a Doc Brown-pleasing 200 Gigawatts of electromagnetic energy, accurately simulating the effects of a nearby nuclear explosion. Incredibly, as metal would interfere with the test results, the entire platform uses no nails, screws, or bolts, being built entirely using woodworking joints and glue. Using up 6.4 million board feet of lumber, it is still the largest all-wooden structure in the world.
Unfortunately, EMP generators like those used on ATLAS I are too bulky and heavy to be feasible combat weapons. Fortunately, there is a more compact alternative: explosively-pumped flux compression generators. First conceived by Soviet nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov in the early 1950s, these devices convert the chemical energy of conventional explosives into powerful instantaneous electromagnetic pulses. At their most basic, explosively-pumped flux compression generators consist of a coil of wire surrounded by a shell of explosives. Just prior to firing, a bank of capacitors charges the coil, generating an electromagnetic field. The explosives are then detonated, compressing the coil and the magnetic flux in milliseconds and generating an electromagnetic pulse of up to 1000 Tesla – 200,000 times more powerful than an average fridge magnet. Unfortunately, the device is also destroyed in the process. Though originally designed for fusion and plasma physics research, explosively-pumped flux compression generators could theoretically be turned into EMP weapons compact enough to be delivered by a missile, air-dropped bomb, or – in the case of a terrorist-built weapon – a car. Such devices would be closer to those depicted in films like Ocean’s 11 and The Fate of the Furious. Compared to a nuclear EMP, however, the power of such weapons is extremely limited, with effective range being measured in hundreds of metres. On the other hand, such a precision weapon would allow small areas like individual buildings to be targeted, and could still knock out an entire city if detonated near a power plant, substation, or other vital piece of electrical infrastructure.
While it is unknown whether any nation currently fields an explosively-pumped EMP weapon, the United States does have at least one non-nuclear EMP weapon in its arsenal: the Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP. A joint venture by Boeing, Raytheon, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, CHAMP consists of a high-power microwave emitter mounted in an AGM-85 air-launched cruise missile, and is capable of permanently disabling conventional civilian electrical and electronic equipment at close range. On October 22, 2012, a prototype CHAMP-equipped missile carried out a highly successful demonstration at the Utah Test and Training Range, knocking out multiple banks of computers and even the remote cameras monitoring the test. As of May 2019 the United States Air Force has deployed at least 20 CHAMP missiles, and while the details of the technology are highly classified, it is believed the weapons are based on compact particle accelerator tube called a Vircator. Raytheon is also developing a ground-based version of CHAMP for use against drones.
But what kind of damage can these weapons actually inflict, and are we at risk of rogue EMP attacks? As the high-altitude nuclear tests of the 1950s and 1960s clearly demonstrate, nuclear EMP can cause serious damage to electrical systems, whose vulnerability has only gotten worse as we have moved away from vacuum tubes towards solid-state electronic technology. Indeed, as bad as the damage inflicted by the Starfish Prime test was, it could have been significantly worse had Hawaii’s electrical infrastructure not been relatively crude and robust compared to modern technology. For this reason, right to the end of the Cold War a significant amount of military equipment on both sides continued to use more EMP-resistant vacuum tube technology. Ironically, as the world’s largest manufacturer of miniature vacuum tube was – and still is – Russia, this meant that a lot of NATO equipment ran on Soviet tubes. However, while EMPs in movies are capable of disabling every electronic circuit down to a wristwatch, in reality the damage would not be so fine-grained. As noted before, much of the damage from an EMP comes from the longer-lasting E3 pulse, but this requires long conductors like power lines in order to be effective. Small electronics like wristwatches and cell phones lack these long conductors and would likely be unaffected. Cars would also likely be spared, as they, too lack long conductors and are partially shielded by their metal bodies.
But the survival of our cell phones and cars would be small comfort next to the massive destruction an EMP would wreak on the electrical grid. In addition to being controlled by EMP-sensitive electronics, most national power grids are notoriously unstable and sensitive to even minor disturbances. For example, the great Northeast Blackout of 2003, which left over 10 million people without power, was triggered by a power line shorting out on a tree in Ohio. On March 13, 1989, a relatively minor solar flare with an intensity of 480 nanoteslas per minute caused the entire electrical grid of Quebec to collapse in 92 seconds; in contrast, the 1962 Soviet Test 184 that burned down the Karaganda power plant had an intensity of 1300 natoteslas per minute. According to a recent US Government study, a weapon of similar power detonated 500 kilometres over Kansas would generate an EMP covering most of the United States and likely damage more than 300 large power transformers, leaving around 40 percent of the U.S. population without electricity. And this would not be a temporary inconvenience; given the significant time and resources needed to repair this infrastructure, the blackout could last for as long as 4 to 10 years. For many Americans, modern life as we know it would come screeching to a halt, as analyst Peter Pry vividly describes in his 2017 report Life Without Electricity:
“Some experts claim that an EMP attack that collapses the power grid would, in effect, return society to a pre-industrial condition. A February 1987 snowstorm that blacked-out the Washington, D.C. area suggested exactly this to many of its victims. According to press reports, people were reduced to using open fires for heat, cooking and, in some areas, melting snow for water. Homes with fireplaces became havens for multiple families seeking refuge from houses heated by electric, gas, or oil that no longer worked. As she “stoked a fire and began sterilizing water for her baby’s formula,” one woman told reporters, “It’s like the Colonial days.”
In response to these vulnerabilities, the United States Government has formed numerous organizations to address the EMP threat, including the aptly-named Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack. The Commission estimates it would cost between $2-4 billion to protect the most vital and vulnerable pieces of electrical infrastructure, though it also recommends redesigning electrical equipment to be EMP-resistant moving forward. However, despite the fact that nations like China and North Korea are known to be developing enhanced EMP weapons, according to analysts the threat of a conventional EMP attack remains on par with that of a regular nuclear attack – that is, relatively low. But what about a terrorist EMP attack? Thankfully, obtaining a nuclear weapon is extremely difficult, while launching it above the atmosphere is even harder, requiring rocket hardware that few nations even possess. And while a non-nuclear EMP like an explosively-pumped flux compression generator is theoretically much easier to build, many of the design details of these devices remain classified and it is considered unlikely that most terrorist groups would be able to build one. So if one day the power goes out across all across North America, don’t worry: it’s probably not the handiwork of terrorists or a slick gang of thieves. More likely it’s just some tree in Ohio.
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Expand for ReferencesFact Sheet: Operation Hardtack I, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, https://www.dtra.mil/Portals/61/Documents/NTPR/1-Fact_Sheets/20_HARDTACK_I.pdf
Operation Hardtack High Altitude Tests, Lookout Mountain Laboratory USAF, 1958, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/OperationHARDTACK_HighAltitudeTests1958
Emanuelson, Jerry, Soviet Test 184, Future Science, July 7, 2019, http://www.futurescience.com/emp/test184.html
Baum, Carl, From the Electromagnetic Pulse to High-Power Electromagnetics, Proceedings of the IEEE, June 1992, http://ece-research.unm.edu/summa/notes/SDAN/0032.pdf
Lammle, Rob, The Largest Wooden Structure in New Mexico (and the World), Mental Floss, December 8, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/60529/strange-states-largest-wooden-structure-new-mexico-and-world 2014
Gent, Edd, US Air Force is Guarding Against Electromagnetic Pulse Attacks. Should We Worry? Live Science, March 11, 2021, https://www.livescience.com/air-force-emp-attacks-protection.html
Younger, Stephen et al, Scientific Collaborations Between Los Alamos and Arzamas-16 Using Explosive-Driven Flux Compression Generators, Los Alamos Science, 1996, https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326620.pdf
DHS Combats Potential Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, Department of Homeland Security, September 3, 2020, https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/09/03/dhs-combats-potential-electromagnetic-pulse-emp-attack
C.M. Fowler et al, An Introduction to Explosive Magnetic Flux Compression Generators, Los Alamos National Laboratory, March 1975, https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00374018.pdf
Pry, Peter, Life Without Electricity: Storm-Induced Blackouts and Implications for EMP Attack, Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, July 2017, http://www.firstempcommission.org/uploads/1/1/9/5/119571849/life_without_electricity_-_final_april2018.pdf
Developing Threats: Electro-Magnetic Pulses (EMP), House of Commons Defence Committee, February 8, 2012, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmdfence/1552/1552.pdf
Longmire, Conrad, Fifty Odd Years of EMP, NBC Report, Fall/Winter 2004, http://www.futurescience.com/emp/NBC_Report_Fall_Winter04.pdf
Johnson, Robert, Boeing Now Has a Missile That Destroys Only Electronics and Leaves All Else Intact, Business Inside, October 24, 2012, https://www.businessinsider.com/beoings-counter-electronics-high-power-microwave-advanced-missile-project-2012-10?0=defense
Reed, John, Boeing’s Flying Blackout, Foreign Policy, October 22, 2012, https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/10/22/boeings-flying-blackout/
Drew, James, The U.S. Air Force Has a Computer-Killing Cruise Missile, Medium, March 30, 2015, https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-air-force-has-a-computer-killing-cruise-missile-6a0bcf481ce1
The post Do Real EMP Weapons Actually Exist or are They Only a Thing in Movies? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
On August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped a single, 4,000 kilogram uranium bomb called Little Boy. Seconds later the bomb detonated with the equivalent power of 15 thousand tons of TNT, destroying 8 square kilometres of the city and killing an estimated 90-140,000 people. Three days later the B-29 Bock’s Car dropped the 5,000 kg Fat Man plutonium bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing a further 39-80,000. The age of nuclear weapons, which would cast its shadow over the following century and beyond, had begun. But while the first atomic bombs have become inextricably linked with the war in the Pacific, they were initially intended for use not against Japan, but rather Germany. From its inception, the vast scientific and industrial undertaking known as the Manhattan Project was built around fear – fear that Nazi Germany would be the first to develop an atomic bomb, placing in the hands of Adolf Hitler the ultimate weapon of terror and mass destruction. But how close were the Germans to actually developing the bomb, and is it possible that the Second World War could have ended very, very differently?
The Allies had good reason to fear that Germany was far ahead in the race to build an atomic bomb. After all, over the course of the war German scientists would produce some of the most advanced weapons the world had ever seen, including the first jet fighters and ballistic missiles. It was also German scientists who first discovered the principle of nuclear fission. In December 1938, chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman bombarded a sample of Uranium with neutron particles, generating atoms of the much lighter element Barium. Suspecting that the neutrons had split or “fissioned” the Uranium nuclei into smaller pieces, Hahn contacted his former colleague Lise Meitner, who, as a Jew, had fled Germany for Sweden. Meitner, along with her nephew Otto Frisch, soon developed a theoretical explanation for fission and, in January 1939, conducted experiments confirming Hahn and Strassman’s results. Hahn and Strassman, however, had already submitted their findings to the scientific journal Naturwissenschaften.
The implications of this discovery were immediately obvious, and in April 1939 a secret meeting of German scientists was convened in Berlin to discuss the possible applications of nuclear energy. During this meeting the possibility was raised of building an atomic bomb, prompting chemist Paul Harteck wrote a memo to German War Office or Reichswehr stating that:
“…an explosive many orders of magnitude more powerful than the conventional ones [could give] that country which first makes use of it an unsurpassable advantage.”
The theoretical feasibility of such a weapon was further confirmed by physicist Hans Geiger, and the Reichswehr agreed to fund a formal nuclear research program. On September 1, 1939, the Second World War erupted as German forces stormed into Poland. At the end of that month a second meeting of scientists was convened by physicist Kurt Debner, attended by such luminaries as Abraham Esau, Walter Gerlach, Erich Schumann, Walter Bothe, Klaus Clusius, and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg – the most famous scientist in Germany at the time. By the end of the meeting the attendees agreed to focus their efforts on three main goals essential to the development of an atomic bomb: the construction of a functioning nuclear reactor or “uranium machine,” the separation of Uranium isotopes, and research into fast neutron fission. While officially designated the Uranprojekt or “Uranium Project,” the German nuclear program became known among its members by the less formal name of Uranverein or “Uranium Club.” And as German forces continued to storm across Europe, the Uranium Club steadily acquired the fruits of conquest: large stockpiles of Uranium from Belgium, a cyclotron particle accelerator from France, and a heavy-water production plant in Norway.
The various scientists who had fled Europe to escape Nazi persecution watched these developments with mounting apprehension. Among these were Albert Einstein and his Hungarian colleague Leo Szilard, who on August 2, 1939 – one month before the German invasion of Poland – drafted a letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the grave danger posed by the German nuclear program:
“In the course of the last four months it has been made… possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable – though much less certain – that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”
This letter, along with similar warnings from other scientists, ultimately convinced Roosevelt to approve in June 1942 what became known as the Manhattan Project, with Army Corps of Engineers General Leslie Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as its administrative and scientific directors, respectively – and for more on Einstein and Szilard’s other, more unexpected collaboration, please check out our previous video That Time Albert Einstein Decided to Try to Revolutionize Keeping Food Cold.
At the time of the Manhattan Project’s inception, many scientists despaired that the Allies were at least 1-2 years behind the Germans in nuclear research, with physicist Leona Marshall Libby recalling:
“I think everyone was terrified that we were wrong, and the Germans were ahead of us.… Germany led the civilized world of physics in every aspect, at the time war set in, when Hitler lowered the boom. It was a very frightening time.”
A lack of reliable intelligence sources, however, prevented the Allies from gauging the progress of the German atomic bomb project. The Manhattan Project thus became a blind race against an unseen enemy, whose actual capabilities could only guessed at. Over the next three years some $32 billion dollars and 500,000 personnel – nearly 1% of the entire U.S. labour force – would be poured into beating the Germans to the finish line. As General Groves later wrote:
“Unless and until we had positive knowledge to the contrary, we had to assume that the most competent German scientists and engineers were working on an atomic program with the full support of their government and with the full capacity of German industry at their disposal. Any other assumption would have been unsound and dangerous.”
Indeed, the few scraps of intelligence the Allies were able to gather proved less than encouraging. In September 1941, Werner Heisenberg paid a visit to Danish physicist Niels Bohr at his home in Copenhagen. The purpose of the visit is the subject of considerable debate, with some historians claiming Heisenberg wanted to recruit Bohr into the German atomic bomb project and others that he tried to convince the Allies via Bohr to abandon their own nuclear program. What is known is that a) Bohr angrily expelled Heisenberg from his home and never spoke to him again; and b) during their meeting Heisenberg sketched for Bohr a simple diagram of a nuclear reactor. When Bohr was later evacuated from Denmark by the British he handed over this sketch to Allied intelligence, who took it as evidence that the Germans were far ahead in their nuclear research.
It was not until after the D-day landings in June 1944 that Allied intelligence finally began to pull back the curtain on the German Uranprojekt. The year before, U.S. Army Intelligence launched the ALSOS mission under the command of Lt. Colonel Boris T. Pash. Armed with a handful of jeeps and light weapons, ALSOS’s mission was to drive deep behind enemy lines and gather whatever information it could on the German nuclear project. But no matter how far they penetrated into occupied Europe and Germany itself, Colonel Pash and his men could find no evidence of the industrial-scale uranium enrichment facilities needed to produce an atomic bomb, and the few nuclear research facilities they did find were small-scale affairs run by university physics and chemistry departments. Finally, however, the ALSOS mission seemed to hit the jackpot when they discovered a full-scale nuclear reactor hidden in a beer cellar in the southern German town of Haigerloch. But when the reactor itself was examined and the scientists involved in its construction interrogated, it became clear that the Germans had never succeeded in achieving a sustained nuclear chain reaction. As the war in Europe finally came to an end and the available evidence was gathered, the ALSOS mission came to a startling conclusion: the Germans never came close to developing a working atomic bomb. None of the Uranium Club’s research on nuclear fission ever made it past the small-scale experimental stage, and the whole project was ultimately scrapped when the German High Command realized it would never contribute to the final outcome of the war. In an instant, the spectre of a German atomic bomb – the bogeyman that had kickstarted and sustained the gargantuan Manhattan Project – seemed to evaporate into thin air.
So…what happened? Why, despite having a two year head start over the Allies, did the German atomic bomb project ultimately fizzle out? There were many contributing factors, all of which illustrate the stark contrast between how scientific and technical development was carried out in Nazi Germany and the Allied nations.
The first nail in the coffin for the German atomic bomb project was the ruthless politicization of German science under the Nazi regime. By the time the Second World War broke out, the Nazis had thoroughly purged Germany’s universities and research institutes of Jews, communists, and other political undesirables – some 1,145 people or 14% of all higher educational staff. These included such superstars as Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Hans Bethe, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Otto Frisch – many of whom emigrated to the United States and became key figures in the Manhattan Project. Not even Werner Heisenberg was immune from Nazi suspicion. In 1938, Heisenberg came under attack from Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, who denounced him as a “white Jew” for his work on quantum theory and suggested he should be “made to disappear.” His reputation and career were only saved via the intervention of his mother, who happened to be old family friends with the Himmlers. As a result of this intervention Himmler realized that Germany could ill afford to lose such a great scientist and wrote Heisenberg a letter warning him to keep his physics and his politics separate. Such purges, along with the Nazi belief that atomic theory, quantum theory, and other recent scientific developments constituted degenerate “Jewish physics,” ultimately left Germany with few specialists capable of directing a successful nuclear research project. Furthermore, many of the scientists who remained in Germany were drafted into the armed forces, further reducing the scientific and technical capital available to the nation.
Another factor which ultimately sank the German atomic program was the convoluted and inefficient manner in which technical and scientific development was managed in Nazi Germany. Unlike in Allied nations like the United States where the Government decided which weapons projects were worth pursuing and assigned contracts to the companies best suited to completing them, in Germany multiple private firms, government departments, and branches of the armed forces competed with each other for limited resources and contracts. This was a deliberate divide-and-conquer tactic on the part of Hitler and his cronies, as it encouraged different government and military branches to bicker among themselves instead of conspiring against the regime. This system was also the product of the Nazis trying to square a particularly troublesome ideological circle. While the Nazis understood the advantages of free-market capitalism, they considered this an undesirable Jewish-American system and developed a strange hybrid arrangement of free enterprise and government control in an attempt to reconcile this contradiction. In practice, however, this lead to the wasteful duplication of effort and the squandering of limiting resources. For example, by the end of the war there were 86 different rocket projects in development, few of which ever reached operational status. Had the most promising of these projects been combined and assigned to a single contractor as in the Allied model, development would likely have proceeded far more efficiently. Similarly, at one point there were no less than three separate and independent nuclear research programs split up among nine research institutes in Berlin, Leipzig, and Kassel. According to German historian Klaus Hentschel:
“Compared with the British and American war research efforts united in the Manhattan Project, to this day the prime example of “big science,” the Uranverein was only a loosely knit, decentralized network of researchers with quite different research agendas. Rather than teamwork as on the American end, on the German side we find cut-throat competition, personal rivalries, and fighting over the limited resources.”
But even if the German nuclear project had been amalgamated into a single coordinated effort, it would still have been doomed by a lack of official government interest and support. While the Reichswehr saw the military potential nuclear fission early on, by mid-1940 that interest was rapidly fading as Germany’s rapid conquest of Western Europe convinced many in the High Command that the war would be won by 1942. This, along with the slow technical progress being made by the Uranium Club, convinced the Reichswehr that nuclear research would not contribute to ending the war in the short term. The project was thus handed over to the Reich Research Council in January 1942 and assigned a low priority. The goals of the project were also simplified from building an atomic bomb to building a nuclear reactor for research, energy generation, and possibly naval propulsion. The situation was not helped by the fact that Adolf Hitler, who had no background in science and technology, neither understood nor appreciated the potential of nuclear energy and gravitated instead towards less abstract “wonder weapons” like giant railway guns and ballistic missiles. The upshot of all this was that compared to the Manhattan Project, the German Uranium Club was woefully underfunded and understaffed, receiving the equivalent of only $2 million in government funds and employing a maximum of 100 researchers. Its American equivalent, by contrast, employed 5000x more personnel and received 16,000x more funding. And as the war dragged on the Uranium Club would only get smaller, its Uranium stockpiles diverted to make armour-piercing ammunition and its scientists assigned to more pressing military projects.
But the single greatest factor which ultimately sank the German atomic bomb project was, ironically, a lack of German scientific expertise. Despite Allied fears that the Germans were years ahead in nuclear research, by the time the Manhattan Project got underway in early 1942, British and American scientists had already pulled far ahead of their German counterparts. This was largely due to the aforementioned political purge of the German intelligentsia, which left the country with a shortage of experts on nuclear physics. This, in turn, lead to German scientists making a number of key errors that doomed the whole undertaking from the start. For example, to build a working nuclear reactor one needs not only Uranium as fuel, but also a material called a moderator. The moderator slows down neutrons produced by nuclear fissions to the optimum energy needed to produce additional fissions, thus sustaining the chain reaction. The world’s first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile 1, used bricks of graphite, an ultra-pure form of carbon. However, this material was ruled out early in the German program when a calculation error led physicist Walther Bothe to conclude that it absorbed too many neutrons to be a practical moderator. This left only one choice: heavy water, a form of water in which some of the hydrogen is replaced by the heavier isotope deuterium. At the time, there was only one source of heavy water in Europe: the Vermork Norsk Hydro plant in Telemark, Norway, where heavy water was generated as a byproduct of fertilizer production. The Germans invaded Norway in April 1940 and immediately began producing heavy water for their nuclear reactor project. The Allies, recognizing the strategic importance of the plant, launched a series of attacks including a February 1943 raid by Norwegian commandoes codenamed Operation Gunnerside, which succeeded in blowing up the heavy water production equipment. The Germans abandoned production and attempted to ship the remaining heavy water out of Norway, but were thwarted when the Norwegian resistance bombed and sank the ferry carrying the barrels across Lake Tinn.
As a result of this sabotage, German scientists working on reactors were left with a very limited quantity of poor-quality moderator, meaning that the original design of 664 3-inch Uranium cubes suspended on wires no longer had adequate critical mass to sustain a chain reaction. Then, in December 1942, shortly after Chicago Pile 1 first achieved criticality, air leaked into the German L-IV reactor in Leipzig and ignited the Uranium fuel, starting a fire that boiled the coolant and caused the reactor to explode. The entire facility was destroyed, forcing it to be abandoned.
There were other problems as well. Building a practical atomic bomb requires separating the rare fissile isotope Uranium-235 from the far more abundant but non-fissile isotope Uranium-238. This is a slow and highly energy-intensive process, so much so that the Manhattan Project, running three different enrichment processes simultaneously in some of the largest industrial facilities s ever constructed, only managed to enrich enough Uranium for a single bomb – and even then only after the war in Europe had ended. While the Germans experimented with various separation methods, they quickly realized that Germany simply lacked the resources and industrial might to enrich enough Uranium within a reasonable timeframe, with one scientist exclaiming upon learning of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
“It must have taken factories large as the United States to make that much uranium-235!”
The only other option for building a bomb was to breed the fissile isotope Plutonium-239 from Uranium-238 in a reactor, but the Germans seem to have been unaware of this process and in any case never managed to get even a simple reactor working. Furthermore, even the most knowledgeable German scientists like Werner Heisenberg were unfamiliar with the fast neutron fission physics fundamental to the functioning of an atomic bomb, and thus would likely have been unable to build a functioning weapon even if they had managed to enrich sufficient Uranium. In conclusion, the German project failed because, unlike the Manhattan Project, it had nowhere near enough manpower, resources, centralization, government support, and technical backing. In short, it never had a chance.
Over the years, a myth has arisen that the German nuclear program failed due to internal sabotage. According to this theory, leading project scientists like Werner Heisenberg were opposed to developing nuclear weapons on moral grounds and actively worked to stall the project and deny Hitler the bomb. However, this notion appears to have been fabricated by these scientists in order to rehabilitate their post-war reputations, with historian and author Richard Rhodes concluding that:
“There was at least one speculation that one of the German scientists deliberately falsified the measurements in graphite, hoping to stop a German bomb program. I don’t think there’s really evidence to support that. It seems to have been a mistake in the course of developing these various components of the technology.”
In the end, the German atomic bomb which had so frightened the Allies turned out to be nothing but a mirage, a half-hearted attempt mortally hobbled by the bureaucracy, ineptitude, and ideological corruption of the Nazi regime. But despite the fact that Adolf Hitler never came close to possessing nuclear weapons, the German project nonetheless had a profound impact on the post-war world order. Had the Allies known the true extent of German nuclear research, they might not have poured such vast resources into the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb would not have been developed until years or even decades later, and the world as we know it would be a very different place.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- A Bunch of ‘Wangers- The Nazi Unit Who Were so Awful, Even the Nazi SS Were Disgusted by Them
- That Time the Nazis Nearly Completed a Super-Cannon Capable of Hitting London from France
- That Time the US Military Made an Atomic Cannon
- A Less Horrific SAW- The Bizarre Tale of the Pizza Collar Bomber
Expand for ReferencesKant, Horst, Werner Heisenberg and the German Uranium Project, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2002, https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P203.PDF
Mangravite, Andrew, Magical Thinking: What Happened to Physics in Nazi Germany? Science History Institute, December 16, 2015, https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/magical-thinking
Easley, Matt, The Atomic Bomb That Never Was: Germany’s Atomic Bomb Project, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/physics/brau/H182/Term%20papers%20%2702/Matt%20E.htm
Williams, Joseph, The Secret World War II Mission to Kidnap Hitler’s A-Bomb Scientists, History, June 4, 2020, https://www.history.com/news/wwii-nazi-atomic-secrets-alsos-mission-kidnap-heisenberg
Atomic Rivals and the ALSOS Mission, The Manhattan Project: an Interactive History, U.S. department of Energy, https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1942-1945/rivals.htm
German Atomic Bomb Project, Atomic Heritage Foundation, October 18, 2016, https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/german-atomic-bomb-project
The post How Close Did the Nazis Actually Come to Building an Atomic Bomb? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The Great Depression of the 1930s brought sweeping changes to American life and culture, not least to the American vocabulary. As Americans increasingly blamed freefalling wages and skyrocketing unemployment on president Herbert Hoover, more and more common objects were derisively renamed in his honour. Sprawling “Hooverville” shanty towns popped up in nearly every city, the homeless slept under newspaper “Hoover Blankets,” mules were hitched to broken-down cars to create “Hoover Wagons,” and turned-out pockets bereft of money became known as “Hoover Flags.” As the Dust Bowl turned vast swathes of Midwest farmland into arid wasteland, millions of “Okies” or “Gasoline Gypsies” fled for greener pastures in California, and from coast to coast the country was awash with Bums, Tramps, and Hobos.
While the exact distinction between these three groups is a matter of some debate, the most common definition is that Bums are sedentary and do not work, Tramps travel but do not work unless forced to, while Hobos both travel and work. Though widely associated with the Great Depression, hobos had been a fixture of the American landscape for decades prior, their numbers swelling during periods of economic turmoil such as the Panic of 1893. Aided by the expansion of the railroads, which allowed for faster cross-country travel and access to new work opportunities, by 1911 the number of hobos in the United States had grown to an estimated 700,000. With the unprecedented hardships of the Great Depression, these numbers exploded to over 4 million – over 250,000 of whom were under the age of 18.
Immortalized by characters like George Milton and Lennie Small in John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men, Depression-era hobos roamed the country by foot or freight train in search of work, often taking temporary or seasonal jobs like construction, ranching, or crop harvesting or doing odd jobs for private households in exchange for a meal and a place to sleep. Though often romanticized as a life of total freedom, it was a hard and often dangerous existence. Many families, struggling to make ends meet themselves, did not take kindly to the appearance of strangers claiming to be hungry and offering to work for a meal. Though many were honest people down on their luck, some were con men, thieves, or dangerous criminals on the run. Hobos were often shot at by suspicious farmers, or run out of town by municipal or railroad police. To survive in such a hostile environment, hobos developed a strong sense of solidarity and brotherhood, as well as an ethical code of conduct that emphasized self-reliance, honesty, and compassion. A hobo who abided by this code and was particularly good at finding work and evading arrest was known as a “profesh,” short for “professional.” The Code itself, established at the Hobo National Convention of 1889 – and yes, there is such a thing – read, in part:
#1: Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.
#3: Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
#4: Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants.
#8: Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
#11: When traveling, ride your train respectfully
#14: Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
#15: Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.
On way of helping out fellow hobos was to pass along information on where work, food, and lodgings could be found and what areas to avoid. However, as hobos were constantly on the move, this information could not always be passed on by word of mouth, and so a complex system of symbols was devised, also known as the “Hobo Code.”
Scratched on walls, fence posts, and bridges with chalk, coal, or whatever material was available, the elaborate hieroglyphics of the Hobo Code conveyed the most essential information about a particular location, warning the “next guy” what awaited them when they wandered into town. Though varying from place to place, over time the Hobo Code coalesced into a basic alphabet of around 40 symbols, representing the most common dangers and opportunities a hobo faced on the road. Some were extremely literal, while others evolved over time to be more abstract, mirroring the development of actual logographic writing systems like Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. But whatever their origins, they were ideally suited to their purpose, allowing often illiterate hobos to communicate while appearing innocuous and meaningless to outsiders.
Some symbols, like the circle and arrow, served as directional markers, pointing hobos towards the location of work, food, and shelter. For example, an arrow outside a circle indicated a good road, while an arrow crossing a circle – or sometimes just a plain circle – indicated meant there was nothing to be gained in that direction.
Other symbols served to indicate the presence of certain amenities, such as an open-topped square for a good campsite, waves for clean drinking water, a rooster for a free telephone, a cross and face for a doctor, double shovels for available work, and a double arch and triangle for a hayloft you could sleep in. Still other symbols indicated the character of the people living at a particular address and how best to obtain money or a meal from them. Some methods were less scrupulous than others. For example, a top hat indicated the residents were rich, a cat or a caricature of a woman indicated a kind woman who could be moved by a sad story, a christian cross meant that religious conversation would get you a free meal, two intersecting rectangles meant the residents would give food or money just to get rid of you, while three circles connected by double lines meant a town or house was full of “suckers” or “easy marks” who were easy to manipulate.
The vast majority of the Hobo Code, however, was devoted to warnings. Some were mild, like an inverted triangle indicating that other hobos had gotten there first and that work or food was likely scarce. Others were far more dire. A box with an arch over it, for example, meant a dangerous neighbourhood, while a triangle with raised hands stood for a man with a gun, a four-legged stick figure in a box warned of a vicious dog, handcuffs stood for the police, a nightstick for a beating, and crossed bars a jail. A hashtag was often added to regular symbols to underscore the urgency of the warning.
Not all hobo graffiti was devoted to warnings. Many hobos adopted “monikers,” alter-egos which they scrawled on rail yard or box car walls, often with a date and an arrow indicating their direction of travel.
Carrying on a long tradition of graffiti stretching back to antiquity, monikers announced to the world “I was here” and marked the route of a hobo’s travels across the country. Some of the more colourful examples include “Connecticut Shorty”, “Slo Freight Ben,” and “Grandpa Dudley,” but by far the most famous moniker of all time was “A-No.1,” alter-ego of Leon Ray Livingston, “King of the Hobos.” Born in 1872, Livingston became a hobo not out of financial necessity but simply because he preferred the rambling life to staying in one place. Riding the rails for over 40 years, Livingston quickly became a legend in the community and briefly travelled with author Jack London, inspiring the 1907 memoir The Road. Livingston himself would pen 12 popular books on the hobo lifestyle, collecting stories and lore and helping to perfect the system of symbols that made up the Hobo Code.
So how widespread was the use of the Hobo Code? This isn’t fully clear. Outside of Livingston’s writings, unsurprisingly given the nature of the thing, there is little evidence of how commonly used it actually was. Even contemporary media accounts of the symbols’ use and meanings were pulled directly from the works of Livingston and other writers. Such is the case with much of hobo culture and lore, for as much as it was romanticized by others, nobody was better at mythologizing hobo life than hobos themselves. According to historian Bill Daniel:
“Hobos used their mythology as a kind of cover. The tall tales, the drawings, even the books were ways to project an image of themselves that both blew them up, but also kept them hidden.”
While Hobo Code was a real practice, the true extent of its use is difficult to gauge as the symbols were typically scrawled in hidden, obscure places, using temporary materials like chalk which have long since worn away. But whatever the truth of the matter, the Great Depression was to prove the last golden age of the American hobo. The outbreak of the Second World War and the sudden explosion of available jobs in the armed forces and industry lead to a sharp decline in migrant labour, and many of the subculture’s traditions – including the Hobo Code – faded into the realm of myth and legend. But one tradition did endure: hobo monikers, which continue to appear in rail yards and freight cars to this day. While most are the work of regular graffiti taggers, at least a few are left by the estimated 20,000 modern hobos who still ride the American rails. And so, even a century later, the freewheeling nomadic spirit of “A-No.1” lives on.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesOstler, Rosemarie, Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers: a Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2003
Berendsohn, Roy, The Hobo Hieroglyphs: Their Secret Symbols, Explained, Popular Mechanics, November 17, 2020, https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a25174860/hobo-code/
The Hobo Code: an Introduction to the Hieroglyphic Language of Early 1900s Train-Hoppers, Open Culture, August 22, 2018, https://www.openculture.com/2018/08/hobo-code-introduction-hieroglyphic-language-early-1900s-train-hoppers.html
The Hobo Ethical Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Living a Self-Reliant, Honest, and Compassionate Life, Open Culture, November 18, 2016, https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/the-hobo-ethical-code-of-1889.html
Delana, Hoboglyphs: Secret Transient Symbols & Modern Nomad Codes, Web Urbanist, https://weburbanist.com/2010/06/03/hoboglyphs-secret-transient-symbols-modern-nomad-codes/
Lewis, Dan, The Hobo Code, Now I Know, December 6, 2013, http://nowiknow.com/the-hobo-code/
Diffendarfer, Joel, Hobo Code: The Signs and Symbols Used by Travelers of Old, Owlcation, February 10, 2021, https://owlcation.com/humanities/All-things-HOBO-signs-and-symbols
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Ah, the science fair project: the dreaded rite of passage for many an elementary or high school student. A chance to stand for hours in front of a crudely adorned tri-fold presentation board and demonstrate to the judges one’s tenuous grasp of the scientific method. For many, these projects trend towards the basic and unambitious: building a baking soda and vinegar volcano, for instance, or observing the growth of bean sprouts, or finding out which brand of toothpaste cleans teeth the best. Rarely do they involve any sort of original or groundbreaking scientific research. But for one group of British schoolchildren in the early 1960s, extracurricular science was serious business. Using little more than second-hand radio equipment, endless patience, and a whole lot of maths, this group of teenage space enthusiasts became one of the world’s preeminent satellite-tracking organizations, helping to unlock the secrets of the secretive Soviet space program at the height of the Cold War. This is the remarkable story of the Kettering Group.
The story of this nearly forgotten chapter in space history begins in October 1957 with one Geoffrey Perry, Science Master and Head of Physics at the Kettering Grammar School for Boys in Kettering, Northamptonshire. Born in 1927, Perry’s interest in space was sparked by German V2 ballistic missiles falling around his home in Essex in 1944 and reading science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s classic 1951 nonfiction work The Exploration of Space. In 1954, shortly after becoming a physics teacher at the Kettering Grammar School, Perry learned about the International Geophysical Year or IGY, a global scientific event scheduled for 1957 in which teams from around the world would collaborate on various earth sciences research projects. As part of the IGY, both the United States and the Soviet Union announced that they would launch an earth-orbiting satellite – and for more on this and how the United States’ first satellite program went humiliatingly awry, please check out our previous video Kaputnuk: America’s Largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite.
Realizing that space science was likely to feature on his students’ Oxbridge scholarship exams, Perry decided to learn as much about the subject as he could. Thus, when the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, Perry was ready for it. But while most of the world saw Earth’s new man made moon as a portent of Soviet technological and nuclear supremacy, Perry saw it as a way to spice up his physics lessons – particularly for explaining the Doppler effect. Named after Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, the Doppler effect refers to the change in the frequency of a wave in relation to an observer moving relative to the source of that wave. This effect is commonly observed when standing next to traffic; the sound produced by a vehicle will increase in pitch as the vehicle approaches and the sound waves are compressed ahead of it, then decrease as it moves away and the waves are stretched out behind it. But Perry found such analogies rote and boring, and thought that an audio recording of Sputnik’s radio signal changing pitch as it passed overhead would be a more topical and exciting illustration of the Doppler effect in action.
Serendipitously, the new head of Chemistry, Derek Slater, just so happened to be an avid radio amateur, operating under the callsign G3FOZ. Perry approached Slater with his idea and together the two men set up a war-surplus CR-100 shortwave receiver in the back of the school physics lab to intercept Soviet satellite signals. Their first success came on May 16, 1960 when they picked up transmissions from Korabl-Sputnik 1, an unmanned test version of the Vostok capsule that less than a year later would carry cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit. By carefully measuring the Doppler shift of the signals as the satellite passed overhead and doing some basic trigonometry, Perry and Slater were able to determine the spacecraft’s altitude and inclination, allowing them to plot its orbit around the globe. This, in turn, led to the pair uncovering their first space mystery. Three days after launch, Perry and Slater noticed the satellite’s signals arriving later than usual. The only explanation, Perry deduced, was that the spacecraft had increased its altitude. Indeed, a navigation error had resulted in Korabl-Sputnik 1 firing its retrorockets in the wrong direction, so that instead of falling out of orbit and returning to earth, the spacecraft moved into a higher orbit. The satellite would eventually decay from orbit and reenter the atmosphere on September 6, 1962, with a large piece landing on a street corner in Mantiowoc, Wisconsin.
Buoyed by this success, Perry and Slater continued to accumulate radio equipment and refine their tracking techniques. The physics lessons about the Doppler effect were quickly forgotten; tracking satellites had become an obsession all its own. Part of the appeal lay in the extreme secrecy of the Soviet space program. In an order to project an image of technical superiority, the Soviets only announced launches once the spacecraft had successfully reached orbit. And what little information that was released to the West was typically vague and ambiguous – especially when it came to military spacecraft. But through careful tracking and clever deduction, Perry and Slater were able to tease out some of the secrets of these mysterious craft. For example, on April 26, 1962 the pair detected the launch of Kosmos 4, the first of the Soviet Zenit series of satellites.While at first the purpose of these spacecraft was a mystery, as more and more were launched some tantalizing patterns began to emerge. First, the satellites remained in orbit for only 8 days. As this was long before their orbits were expected to decay naturally, it meant that the Soviets were deliberately returning the spacecraft to earth at the end of their missions. Second, upon reentering and landing on the steppes of Russia, the satellites began transmitting a distinctive locator beacon, indicating they were meant to be recovered intact. And finally, orbital tracking revealed that the satellites were carefully timed to pass over the North American continent in the morning and the evening. It was this final clue which ultimately unlocked the mystery of the Kosmos satellites, for in a eureka moment Perry and Slater realized the significance of the morning and evening flyovers: shadows. At these times of day the sun is low on the horizon, causing buildings and other structures to cast long shadows ideal for orbital photography. This, combined with the short mission duration and recovery beacon, led the pair to deduce that Zenit was a photographic spy satellite. The Zenit satellites would soon become Perry and Slater’s bread and butter, the team going on to classify various different models based on their mission profiles and recovery beacons.
By 1964, however, the satellite tracking project had become too large for Perry and Slater to handle on their own, so they turned to a ready source of labour to help monitor the radios: their own pupils. As Kettering student Robert Christy later recalled:
“Satellite tracking was a lunchtime activity and occasionally out of school at weekends or maybe a little bit after school. One fortunate thing was that the spacecraft we were tracking tended to be launched in the middle of the day our time, because it was the middle of the day Russian time, and they wanted them over certain parts of the earth at certain times of the day. So in fact we could get away with most of the tracking during normal school hours without disrupting things too much. We had a regular watch for one and a half hours, which was the duration of the lunch hour, to guarantee if there was a new satellite in orbit we would receive it, because it had a one and a half hour orbital period.”
From a hobby pursued by two teachers in their spare time, the project quickly became a local institution, known as the Kettering Grammar School Satellite Tracking Group . This name unfortunately belied the fact that some of the first satellite trackers were actually female students from the Kettering High School for Girls, who were taking their A-Level science courses in the Grammar School’s newly-built science block.
In its early years, the Kettering Group was a decidedly shoestring operation. Satellites were tracked using a motley collection of scrounged, borrowed, and cobbled-together radio equipment and an antenna made from copper gas tubing. Signals were timed with an off-the-shelf electric wall clock. A globe with a circular piece of wire served as an analogue computer for calculating orbits, while more complex calculations were carried out using the computer at a nearby garment factory. Yet despite these seemingly crude methods, the Kettering Group soon became one of the world’s preeminent satellite tracking organizations, their expertise sought by governments and research groups around the globe. In 1966, the group went international when 16-year-old Swedish student Sven Grahn contacted Geoffrey Perry about signals he’d received from the Kosmos 104 satellite. The two established a regular correspondence, and Grahn quickly became one of the Kettering Group’s most reliable sources of satellite tracking data. The group soon attracted more international members, including Richard Flagg in Florida, who in 1967 intercepted transmissions between the Soyuz 1 spacecraft and a Soviet tracking ship off the coast of Cuba – and for more on that mission and its tragic ending, please check out our previous video The Most Disastrous Space Mission Ever Executed.
As the Kettering Group collected more and more data, they began to peel back the veil of secrecy surrounding the Soviet space program. As Geoffrey Perry recalled in a 1985 interview:
“In the early days of the space program, the Russians used to wait four or five orbits – which is getting on to six or seven hours – before they would announce they had men in orbit. But with announcements from Kettering…before the spacecraft had even left the Soviet Union, [we would tell] Reuters, Reuters in London would phone Reuters in Moscow, Reuters in Moscow would ask TASS [the Russian state news agency], and TASS would deny all knowledge of it. It must have been embarrassing for them.”
The group’s greatest triumph, however, came in 1966, when they managed to beat the world’s intelligence agencies in cracking a major Soviet secret. While analyzing the orbit of the Kosmos 112 satellite, launched on March 17, 1966, Geoffrey Perry realized that the spacecraft could not have originated from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the regular launch site for Soviet rockets. This indicated the existence of a second, hitherto unknown launch site. Confirmation of his theory came on October 14 with the launch of Kosmos 129, whose orbit crossed that of Kosmos 112 over a town called Plesetsk, 200 kilometres south of Arkangel within the Arctic Circle. Perry announced his findings in a letter to Flight International magazine, which was published on November 10.
At first the letter failed to attract much attention. At the same time, however, Dr. Charles Sheldon at the U.S. Library of Congress was preparing a report to the Senate on the Soviet space program. When the report was reviewed by the CIA, they requested that Sheldon remove a section on the Plesetsk launch complex since its existence was classified as “Top Secret.” To get around this, Sheldon tipped off the Washington press to Perry’s letter in Flight International. News of the Plesetsk launch site soon became public knowledge, allowing Sheldon to present his report uncensored. The Soviets would not officially confirm the existence of Plesetsk until 1983.
This achievement thrust the Kettering Group into the international spotlight, their exploits trumpeted in headlines like “Pentagon Signals a Hit,” “Schoolboys Tune In To a Space Secret”, and “School Sleuths Scoop Space Experts.” Perry, Slater, and their students were profiled in an article for FLIGHT magazine, invited to the House of Commons to take tea with Kettering Member of Parliament Sir Geoffrey de Freitas, and even received a letter of congratulations from Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. The team soon began to consult for various government agencies including the Pentagon and the Royal Air Force, while Geoffrey Perry later became space consultant for Independent Television News and helped present ITN’s coverage of the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. In 1974, he was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s prestigious Jackson-Gwilt Medal, previous recipients of which included Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto.
With increased exposure came improved capabilities as the Kettering Group received various donations of equipment such as an RA-217 radio receiver from electronics firm Racal and an advanced programmable calculator from U.S. Ambassador to the UK Walter Annenburg. Using these tools, the group went from strength to strength, gaining increasingly sophisticated insights into the inner workings of the Soviet, American, and other countries’ space programs. Among the historic missions tracked by the group included the first automatic orbital docking by Kosmos 186 and 188 in 1967, the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission in 1969; the first Chinese satellite, Dong Fang Hong 1, in 1970; the first Soviet space station, Salyut 1, in 1971; the first American space station, Skylab, in 1973; and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975. Among their many achievements, the group learned how to unscramble Soviet voice transmissions, allowing them to listen in on Soyuz and Salyut missions. Thus, in June 1971 they became the first westerners to learn that the crew of Soyuz 11 had died in a depressurization accident during reentry, while in 1985 they discovered that Vladimir Vasyutin, commander of Soyuz T-14, had fallen ill, forcing the mission to be aborted after only two of a planned six months in orbit. The group made an important contribution to global safety in 1978 when they discovered that the nuclear-powered Soviet satellite Kosmos 954 was out of control and would reenter the atmosphere somewhere over northern Canada. The spacecraft, complete with its reactor, fell to earth on January 24, spreading radioactive debris over a 600 kilometre swath of the Northwest Territories and sparking a massive cleanup effort codenamed Operation Morning Light. In January 1983 the Kettering Group tracked the failure and reentry of another Russian nuclear satellite, Kosmos 1402, though this time the spacecraft landed harmlessly in the South Atlantic Ocean. For this work, in December 1984 the group was awarded the Royal Aero Club’s Prince of Wales Cup in a ceremony at the London Science Museum.
Geoffrey Perry retired in August 1985 after more than three decades of dedicated service, with Derek Slater following him two years later. With their departure, satellite tracking activities at Kettering Grammar School came to an end. In 1993 the school itself closed and was taken over by the Tresham Institute, serving as the Kettering Technical College until finally being demolished in 2007. But the school and its famous space tracking program left a long legacy, with many of its members going on to enjoy successful careers in the space industry. Sven Grahn, for instance, became General Manager of the Swedish Space Corporation’s Science System Division and was instrumental in the development of the Viking and Freja satellites; while American member Mark Severance became a flight director for McDonnell Douglas in Houston, Texas. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Perry continued to track satellites on his own time and coordinate the Kettering Group’s international activities until his death in 2000, at which point the group ceased to exist. Reflecting on the whole endeavour, Perry saw the Kettering Group as far more than an excuse to use his students to collect data, stating:
“I think the educational value of this was that by inviting them to help me with my hobby, they were being unconsciously taught the scientific method. If you say to a British schoolboy “sit down, lad, I’ll teach you the scientific method”, he’ll say “over my dead body! I want to go and play football!” You say “come and help me track satellites”, then they come, you see, and over the years, they learn the patience of taking readings and recording that data systematically, analyzing it, formulating hypotheses to explain what they’re hearing. When they’ve got a hypothesis, they try to predict from that hypothesis what should happen. They test it. If it happens, good; if it doesn’t happen, you go back and modify it. Then, eventually, you publish it. And that is what the whole of the scientific method is about.”
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Expand for ReferencesChristy, Robert, The Kettering Group, Zarya, https://www.zarya.info/Kettering/Kettering.php
Christy, Robert, Zenit – Korolyov’s Legacy, Zarya, http://www.zarya.info/Diaries/Zenit/TK.php
Grahn, Sven, A Short History of the “Kettering Group,” http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/getstart/oldcyts.htm
Davis, Scott, The Story of the Kettering Radio Group, National Space Centre, August 31, 2016, https://spacecentre.co.uk/blog-post/kettering-radio-group/
Cawley, Laurence, Kettering Cosmos: How School Children Exposed Soviet Secret, BBC News, April 16, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-36027407
Grahn, Sven, Space Tracking Notes, http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/trackin1.htm#KEttrack
The Story of How a Group of Intrepid Kettering School Pupils Played Their Unique Part in the Space Race, Northamptonshire Telegraph, July 20, 2019, https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/story-how-group-intrepid-kettering-school-pupils-played-their-unique-part-space-race-684237
Moore, Patrick, The Kettering Connection, May 12, 1985, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mk6mSoSjBo
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The French Foreign Legion is among the most legendary fighting forces in the world. Created by French King Louis-Philippe in 1831, the Legion is unique in allowing volunteers from foreign nations to enlist and fight on behalf of the French state. Recruits may enlist under an assumed name and after three years’ service are eligible to receive French citizenship, meaning that for much of its history the Legion has been a haven for criminals, rogues, and others seeking a fresh start in life. While modern recruiting standards are considerably more restrictive, the Legion has lost little of its mystique and elite image, though this often comes at steep price. Considered an essentially expendable force, the Legion has long been dispatched to the most remote and hostile corners of the French Empire, often facing near-insurmountable odds. But time and time again the men of the Legion have proven more than up to the challenge, earning a fearsome reputation as a tough-as-nails unit ever ready to fight to fight to the last man – a martial spirit perfectly captured by their unofficial motto: “March or Die.”
Every elite military force has its one legendary battle – a single action that forever defines the unit and its men. For the French Foreign Legion, that action is the 1863 Battle of Camarón – the most badass last stand you’ve never heard of.
The Battle of Camarón was part of a conflict that is all but forgotten today: the Second French Intervention in Mexico, also known as the Mexican Adventure. In 1860, following a three-year civil war, liberal politician Benito Juarez ascended to the presidency of Mexico and began implementing reforms meant to weaken the power of Mexico’s traditional ruling classes – the Catholic Church and wealthy landowners – as well as the influence of foreign nations. This included declaring a two-year moratorium on debt repayments to France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. In response, on October 31, 1861, these three nations signed the Convention of London, threatening Mexico with invasion unless it resumed payments and opened up free trade in the region. But Emperor Napoleon III of France had ulterior motives for invading Mexico, seeking to turn the country into a client state of the French Empire with a government friendly to French political and economic interests. To this end he planned to install Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian von Hapsburg as Emperor of Mexico, an arrangement which also served as a gesture of reconciliation between France and Austria in the wake of the Second Italian War of Independence. This strategy was risky due to the American Monroe Doctrine of opposing foreign intervention in Latin America. However, the United States was embroiled in its own Civil War, and wary of foreign governments recognizing the legitimacy of the Confederacy, the American government did little to oppose the intervention.
Troops of the Tripartite Alliance landed in Veracruz on December 8, 1861 and began pushing inland towards Mexico City. Following a series of Allied victories, in early March 1862 the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs, Manuel Doblado, met with Spanish General Juan Prim to explain that the moratorium on debt repayment was only temporary. Convinced by his explanation and alarmed at France’s plans to conquer the country, Spain and the United Kingdom withdrew their forces from Mexico. On May 5, 1862, the French suffered a serious setback when their army was defeated at the Battle of Puebla, an event still celebrated in Mexico as Cinco de Mayo.
Fighting alone and with their advance halted by the defeat at Puebla, in early 1863 the French brought in fresh reinforcements – including the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the French Foreign Legion – and mounted a new advance on Mexico City. On March 16, an army of 28,000 men under General Élie Forey began laying siege to the city of Puebla, the last Mexican stronghold before the capital. As part of this operation the Foreign Legion was tasked with protecting French supply lines from attack by Mexican troops and bandits, with the 2nd Battalion protecting the road from Tejeria to Soledad, and the 1st Battalion the road onwards to Chiquihuite. It was a miserable, exhausting task, the kind the Legion was so often called upon to perform. The tropical lowlands around Vercruz were unbearably hot and humid and prone to frequent rainstorms and flash floods, making the already primitive roads even more impassable. As Legionnaire Diesbach de Torny wrote in his diary:
“These marches are terribly tiring, [with] privations of food, of clothes. We sleep for five or six days at the foot of trees in the water. Almost always torrential rain, and no change of clothes, no way to get dry. Impossible to light a fire…always sleeping in wet clothes. The next day the march resumes in the same clothes. It is an ordeal few people realize.”
Adding to the misery was the dreaded vomita or Yellow Fever, which by the end of intervention had killed off more than a third of the Legion’s strength.
In late April 1863 a convoy was dispatched from Veracruz to Puebla carrying 3 million Francs in gold bullion, siege guns, and sixty wagons of ammunition. However, native spies had informed the French that a large Mexican force was waiting to ambush the convoy near Palo Verde, and Legion foot patrols were sent out to find it.
In the early morning hours of April 30, the 3rd Company of three officers and 62 Legionnaires was en route from Chiquihuite to Palo Verde, around 50 kilometres southwest of Veracruz. The company was commanded by Captain Jean Danjou, a decorated veteran of the Crimean War who had lost his left hand in 1853 when his musket exploded, and wore a wooden prosthesis in its place. At 7AM the company reached Palo Verde and set about preparing their morning coffee. But an hour later a lookout spotted a force of 250 Mexican cavalrymen under the command of Captain Tomas Algonzanas heading south. Seeking a more defensible position, Captain Danjou ordered his men to fall back to the Hacienda La Trinidad in nearby Camarón, an abandoned 2-storey farmhouse enclosed by stone walls three metres tall and 50 metres wide. Unknown to the Legionnaires, 10 kilometres northeast of Camarón lay La Joya, headquarters of Colonel Fransico de Paula Milán and his 3,000 men. Soon after Captain Algonzanas’s patrol reported the presence of the Legionnaires, Milán dispatched a squadron of dragoons and four infantry battalions to Camarón to annihilate them before they could discover the location and size of the force preparing to attack the convoy.
Soon after reaching the Hacienda, Captain Danjou attempted to withdraw his men along the road to Paseo del Mancho, but the company was suddenly attacked by Milán’s cavalry. Danjou ordered his men to form a hollow square and unleashed volley after volley at the charging Mexicans, breaking up the attack and allowing them to retreat down a cactus-filled ditch back to the farm compound. However, 16 Legionnaires were captured during the retreat, leaving only 49 to defend the position. The Mexicans launched a second attack, but again the Legionnaires easily repelled them with concentrated gunfire.
Meanwhile, the convoy, warned of the 3rd company’s predicament, turned around and retreated back to La Soledad. At the same time, Colonel Milán arrived at Camarón with a force of 1400 men and completely surrounded the hacienda. He sent Captain Ramon Laine forward with a white flag of truce to offer surrender terms to the French, but Captain Danjou refused, stating simply:
“We have plenty of ammunition and shall continue to fight.”
Once Laine had departed, Danjou turned to his men and made them swear on his wooden hand that they would fight to the death rather than surrender. He then passed around a bottle of wine to lift their spirits. Corporal Louis Maine, one of the few French survivors of the battle, later explained the logic of Danjou’s decision:
“As the enemy had shown neither infantry nor artillery, we could defend ourselves for a long time against cavalrymen no matter how numerous. It was not with their short carbines without bayonets that they could overwhelm a company of the Legion behind walls.”
At 11 o’clock the Mexicans attacked, only to be repulsed again by disciplined fire from the Legionnaires. However, during the engagement Captain Danjou was struck in the chest by a bullet and was killed, and 2nd Lieutenant Napoleon Vilain assumed command. For a second time the Mexicans sent Captain Laine forward to offer surrender terms, only to be answered, in typical French fashion, with a single word: “Merde.”
Despite the blazing sun and being nearly out of water, the Legionnaires fought on for another 4 hours, repulsing attack after attack. But their numbers were rapidly dwindling, and by 2PM only twenty remained who could still fight. At 2:30 Lieutenant Vilain was shot and killed and command passed to 2nd Lieutenant Clement Maudet. At 5PM the roof of the farmhouse caught fire, filling the compound with choking black smoke, and Mexican soldiers managed to scale the walls and pour deadly plunging fire down onto the Legionnaires. By 5:30, only 12 Legionnaires remained. Colonel Milán ordered his men out of the compound and offered the French surrender for a third time. But once again the Legionnaires refused and the attacks continued. By 6PM the company’s ammunition was all but exhausted, and their numbers down to only five men: Lieutenant Maudet, Corporal Maine, and Legionnaires Wenzel, Catteau, and Constantin. Louis Maine later described what happened next:
“We held the enemy at a distance, but we could not hold out much longer as our bullets were almost exhausted. Soon, we had only one each, It was six o’clock and we had fought since the morning. “Ready…fire!” said the Lieutenant. We discharged our five rifles and, he in front, we jumped forward with fixed bayonets. We were met by a formidable volley. Catteau threw himself in front of his officer to make a rampart with his body and was struck by 19 bullets. Despite his devotion, the Lieutenant himself was hit by two bullets. Wenzel also fell, wounded in the shoulder, but he got up immediately. Three of us were still on our feet, Wenzel, Constantin, and I. We were about to jump over the lieutenant’s body and charge again, but the Mexicans surrounded us with their bayonets at out chests. We thought we had breathed our last, when a senior officer who was in the front rank of the assailants ordered them to stop and with a brusque movement of his saver raised their bayonets which threatened us. “Surrender!” he told us. “We will surrender,” I replied. “If you will leave us our arms and treat our Lieutenant who is wounded.” He agreed. He offered me his arm, gave the other to the wounded Wenzel and they brought a stretcher for the Lieutenant. We arrived behind a small rise where Colonel Milán was. “Is this all that is left?” He asked when he saw us. And when told yes,“These are not men. They are demons!”
In the end, the 65 Legionnaires at Camarón managed to hold out for nine hours against a force of some 3,300 Mexicans, inflicting nearly 500 casualties. Only 17 Frenchmen survived the battle, most of whom had been captured early in the battle. They were imprisoned in La Joya before being freed in a prisoner exchange on July 14.
The Battle of Camarón became the stuff of legend, the defining battle that perfectly encapsulated the Legion’s martial virtues. To this day, April 30 is celebrated by the Legion as “Camerone Day.” On that day, the preserved wooden hand of Captain Danjou is taken out of the Legion Museum of Memory and paraded down the “Sacred Way” at Legion headquarters in Aubagne, outside Marseilles. Along with the Battles of Tonkin and Tuyen-Quang during the 1884-1885 Sino-French War, Camarón is also immortalized in the Legion’s official marching song, “Le Boudin.”
While the Battle of Camarón forged the French Foreign Legion’s immortal reputation, France’s global image would not be so lucky. On June 7, 1863, French troops finally occupied Mexico City, and on April 10, 1864 Ferdinand Maximilian assumed the throne as Emperor Maximilian I. But his rule was doomed from the start. Not only did he fail to win the support of the country’s substantial indigenous population, but his liberal reforms such as abolishing child labour and land tenancy laws alienated conservative Mexicans, leaving Maximilian with few allies. Furthermore, the presence of a foreign national on the Mexican throne gave Benito Juarez’s Republicans an air of righteous patriotic legitimacy, and the country was plunged once again into civil war, with French troops fighting a brutal insurgency in the countryside. In 1865 the end of the American Civil War allowed the U.S. Government to turn their attention to the situation south of the border, and in May 1866 American pressure forced Emperor Napoleon III to withdraw his forces from Mexico. In 1867 Emperor Maximilian was captured by Republican forces, convicted of treason, and executed by firing squad on June 19. The government of Benito Juarez was reinstated soon afterwards, and Mexico has remained a republic ever since.
Meanwhile the French Foreign Legion would go from glory to glory, serving with distinction in the far corners of the French Empire such as Indochina, Algeria, Morocco, and equatorial Africa; as well as in the trenches of the First World War and as part of the Free French forces following the fall of France in 1940. And they are still going strong today, largely operating in former colonial hotspots such as Chad and Djibouti. An elite organization steeped in tradition and with a uniquely strong esprit de corps, the French Foreign Legion will likely serve as the French military’s go-to unit for tough jobs for decades to come.
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Expand for ReferencesPorch, Douglas, The French Foreign Legion, HarperCollins 1991
The Mexican Adventure or: The Phantom Crown, http://gisby.info/mindex.htm
Porch, Douglas, French Foreign Legion, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/French-Foreign-Legion
1863 Battle of Camerone, Foreign Legion Info, http://foreignlegion.info/battle-of-camerone/
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Modern commercial aviation is one of the safest possible forms of transportation, with a fatal accident rate of only one per 4.2 million flights. At this rate, an average person would have to fly every day for 16,581 years in order to have a near-100% chance of being killed in a plane crash. This exemplary safety record is thanks partly to advancements in aviation technology and high manufacturing and maintenance standards; and partly to commercial airliner crews, who are trained to deal with a wide variety of emergencies ranging from bad weather to systems failure to terrorist attack, and if any issue ever pops up, are trained to make sure that never happens again, with redundant systems put in place to stop it. But while training cannot prepare a crew for every possible eventuality, it can nonetheless mean the difference between life and death when the totally unexpected occurs – as the crew of a Boeing 747 discovered in 1982 when they came up against a destructive natural phenomenon none of them were prepared to deal with. This is the terrifying story of British Airways Flight 9.
British Airways Flight 9 – known by its callsign “Speedbird 9”- was a scheduled flight between London and Auckland, New Zealand, with stops at Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, Perth, and Melbourne. In June of 1982, the route was being flown by British Airways’ Boeing 747-200 City of Edinburgh, with 248 passengers and 15 crew aboard. On the evening of June 24, the original crew disembarked in Malaysia and were replaced by Captain Eric Moody, Senior First Officer Roger Greaves, and Senior Engineer Officer Barry Townley-Freeman, who would fly the aircraft on its final leg to Auckland. The skies over the Indian Ocean were moonless but clear with no clouds on the weather radar, and as Captain Moody and his crew lifted off from Kuala Lumpur they anticipated an uneventful 5-hour flight to Perth.
At around 8:40 PM Jakarta time, Captain Moody finished his dinner and left the cockpit to use the lavatory. Finding the crew facilities occupied, he descended the stairs from the flight deck into the passenger cabin, where he struck up a conversation with purser Sarah Delane-Lea. He was then interrupted by chief stewardess Fiona Wright, who beckoned him into the cabin, which was rather alarmingly beginning to fill with light blue smoke. At first Moody thought it was cigarette smoke, but it soon became clear that the smoke was coming not from the passengers but the air vents in the floor. Yet strangely there was no sign of a fire anywhere on the aircraft, and the smoke smelled strongly of sulfur. But an even stranger sight awaited Moody as he returned to the cockpit to find the windscreen blazing with an eerie electric-blue light. This was St. Elmo’s Fire, a type of static electrical discharge commonly encountered when flying through thin clouds. But this was far more intense than any discharge the crew had ever encountered, and seemed to be forming within the engines themselves, making them glow from within with an eerie stroboscopic flicker. Though the weather radar still showed clear skies, the crew nonetheless turned on the engine anti-icing system and the passenger fasten seatbelts sign as a precaution.
Within two minutes, the situation suddenly went from strange to alarming as engine No.4 surged and flamed out. The crew immediately performed the engine shutdown drill, cutting off the fuel supply and arming the engine fire extinguishers just as they had been trained. But less than a minute later engine two also flamed out, followed almost immediately by engines one and three. The crew could scarcely believe it: all four engines had failed almost simultaneously – something which had never happened before on a 747. The mighty airliner, with 263 people aboard, had suddenly become the world’s biggest glider.
Captain Moody immediately put the aircraft on autopilot and considered his options. Without engine thrust, the 747-200 had a glide ratio of 15:1, meaning it could travel 15 kilometres for every one kilometre of altitude it lost. Starting at an altitude of 11,300 metres, the aircraft could glide for 23 minutes and cover around 168 kilometres – just enough to make it to Jakarta. But there was a problem: tall mountains on the island of Java meant that the minimum safe approach altitude was 3,500 metres. If they could not maintain this altitude by the time they reached the Indonesian coast, the crew would turn around and attempt to ditch the aircraft in the Indian Ocean. With a plan of action in hand, First Officer Greaves declared an emergency to Jakarta air traffic control, announcing that all four engines had failed. However, Jakarta misunderstood that only engine number four had failed, and did not take the emergency seriously. It was not until later when a nearby aircraft relayed Flight 9’s distress call that they finally understood the gravity of the situation.
Meanwhile, the situation aboard Flight 9 was rapidly going from bad to worse. Despite being well outside the in-flight restart envelope of 8,500 metres, the crew desperately tried to reignite the failed engines. However, they succeeded only in making the engines belch 10-metre trails of flame, much to the alarm of passengers seated next to the wings. At the same time, without engine power many of the cockpit instruments began to fail and the cabin was unable to maintain pressurization, causing the emergency oxygen masks to drop from the ceiling. As the crew donned their own oxygen masks, First Officer Greaves discovered that his own mask was broken, the feed hose having detached from the mask itself. Taking quick action, Captain Moody descended to 4,000 metres where the crew and passengers could breathe the outside air, losing valuable altitude in the process. As the aircraft neared the 3,500 metre altitude where the crew would have to turn around and ditch in the ocean, Captain Moody got on the passenger intercom and, in a perhaps the most stereotypical British of British announcements in a deadly emergency possibly, simply stated,
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”
As the flight attendants rushed to comfort the frightened passengers, many aboard wrote final messages to loved ones on tickets or other scraps of paper. Betty Tootell, a British-born New Zealand passenger, later recalled the atmosphere aboard the aircraft:
“There were huge flames coming out of all four engines. You were plagued by questions: Are we going to burn to death? Are we going to choke to death on the smoke? What’s causing it? What are they going to do about it?”
Meanwhile, the crew made a final, desperate attempt to restart the engines. Though all had trained to perform a water landing, this had never actually been attempted with a 747, and none of the crew was particularly enthusiastic about being the first. But after several desperate minutes, engine No.4 miraculously sputtered to life, followed within 90 seconds by the other three. Though the engines surged and vibrated violently, the crew was able to climb to an altitude of 4,500 metres, where the St. Elmo’s fire effect suddenly returned. Once at altitude, Captain Moody requested clearance to land at Jakarta and began his final approach. Minutes later, engine No.2 began vibrating so badly that the crew was reluctantly forced to shut it down, forcing Moody to continue his approach on only three engines.
Strangely, despite the clear night, Moody had difficulty finding the runway, which was finally spotted out the corner of the First Officer’s window. It was only as the airport lights grew brighter that Moody realized that the entire windscreen was opaque, almost as though it had been painted over. Flying blind, Moody decided to use the airport’s instrument landing system to make his final approach. However, the vertical glide slope system at Jakarta was out of service, forcing Moody to use the lateral guidance beam while First Officer Greaves used the airport’s distance-measuring equipment or DME to call out the aircraft’s altitude throughout the approach, a process Moody later described as:
“…a bit like negotiating one’s way up a badger’s arse.”
But in a superb display of airmanship Moody and his crew managed to make a perfect landing on runway 24 at Jakarta’s Halim Perdanakusuma Airport, saving all 263 people aboard the aircraft. Disembarking onto the tarmac, the passengers and crew were stunned to find the nose and the wing leading edges of the aircraft scoured clean of paint, almost as if they’d been sandblasted. And in a sense, they had, for as it turned out, Flight 9 had inadvertently strayed into a massive cloud of ash thrown up by the eruption of Mount Galunggung, an active volcano located some 176 kilometres southeast of Jakarta. This fine, highly abrasive ash not only scoured the fuselage clean and produced the eerie St. Elmo’s fire glow, but also caused the unprecedented failure of all four engines. When drawn into the engine combustion chambers, the ash had melted and stuck to the turbine blades and other interior components, forming a thick, glassy slag that eventually choked and flamed out the engines. It was only when this slag cooled and broke away that the engines were finally able to be restarted. Unlike the water vapour in clouds, volcanic ash does not show up on ordinary weather radar, giving the crew no warning of the approaching danger. Yet despite this wholly unexpected emergency, the crew’s extensive training and experience had won the day, and all three would receive awards for their professionalism and coolness under pressure that night. In total, British Airways Flight 9 travelled nearly 20 kilometres without engines, a record for a non-purpose-built aircraft that would only be broken by Air Canada Flight 143 – AKA the “Gimli Glider” – the following year.
But Flight 9 would not be the last time a commercial flight would experience the destructive power volcanic ash. On December 15, 1989, KLM Flight 867, a Boeing 747-400 with 245 passengers and crew aboard, was en route from Amsterdam to Tokyo when it flew through an ash cloud thrown up by Mount Redoubt, a volcano in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. In an eerie replay of Flight 9, all four engines flamed out, forcing the crew to descend more than 4,200 metres before they were able to restart the engines and make an emergency landing at Anchorage. No passengers were injured, though the ash cloud caused more than $80 million in damage to the aircraft.
In light of these two incidents, it is perhaps unsurprising that when the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull [“Ay-yah-flack-lo-kut”] began erupting in March 2010, thousands of commercial flights to and from Europe were immediately grounded, stranding millions of passengers and causing the greatest disruption in air traffic in the area since the Second World War. As volcanic ash is undetectable by regular weather radar, research is currently underway to develop alternative systems for tracking ash plumes. For example, in 2016 a series of 10 Lidar stations, which use beams of light to detect ash particles, were installed across the UK at a cost of £3 million. The Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, which operates the stations, hopes that they will allow for better detection and prediction of dangerous ash plumes, allowing commercial flights to be safely routed around them. Combined with airborne Lidar units currently under development, such systems should allow airlines to avoid the massive disruption of the 2010 eruption. But if the unexpected should happen, then it is comforting to know that we can count on the skills and professionalism of pilots like Captain Eric Moody and the crew of British Airways Flight 9.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- How Commercial Airplanes Keep a Steady Supply of Fresh Air and How the Emergency Oxygen Masks Supply Oxygen Given They are Not Hooked Up to Any Air Tank
- Why aren’t the Windows Aligned with the Rows of Seats in Commercial Aircraft?
- The Curious Case of Giant Concrete Arrows That Stretched from New York to California
- “Lucky Lindy” and Advancing Medical Science
Expand for ReferencesAviation Safety, IATA, https://www.iata.org/en/youandiata/travelers/aviation-safety/
When Volcanic Ash Stopped a Jumbo at 37,000ft, BBC News Magazine, April 15, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8622099.stm
Armstrong, Paul, Explainer: Why Ash Cloud Endangers Aircraft, CNN, April 16, 2010, http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/04/15/volcanic.ash.aviation.explainer/index.html?hpt=T1
Down to a Sunless Sea: the Anatomy of an Incident, The Log, http://www.ericmoody.com/Page1.pdf
Lidar Systems Installed Across UK to Detect Volcanic Ash, Electro Optics, June 5, 2015, https://www.electrooptics.com/news/lidar-systems-installed-across-uk-detect-volcanic-ash
British Airways Flight 9: Four Engines Flame Out, AvGeeks, February 9, 2019, https://theavgeeks.com/2019/02/09/british-airways-flight-9-four-engine-flame-out/
Brennan, Zoe, The Story of BA Flight 009 and the Words Every Passenger Dreads, Dail Mail, January 29, 2007, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-431802/The-story-BA-flight-009-words-passenger-dreads-.html
The post The Jumbo Jet vs a Volcano- The Incredible Story of British Airways Flight 9 appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, Europe found itself gripped by witch mania. After centuries of denying the existence of witchcraft, Church leaders incredibly came to believe that misfortunes such as plagues and crop failures were causes not by God’s will but rather individuals acting in league with the Devil. The resulting hysteria, stoked by the political turmoil of the Protestant Reformation and European Wars of Religion, resulted in thousands of people – most of them women – being arrested, tortured, tried, and executed for witchcraft. In Britain alone, between 1560 and 1700 513 people were put on trial for witchcraft, with 112 being convicted and executed. These convictions were based on a series of Witchcraft Acts passed by Parliament, the first being introduced in 1542 under King Henry VIII and the last in 1604 by King James I, himself a noted demonologist and witch-hunting enthusiast. But by the end of the 17th Century the hysteria had mostly died down, with the last execution for witchcraft taking place in Devon in 1685 and the last conviction in Leicester in 1717. In 1735, Parliament passed the last of the Witchcraft Acts, which rather than making witchcraft itself a crime, made it unlawful to:
“…pretend to exercise or use any kind of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Inchantment [sic], or Conjuration, or undertake to tell Fortunes, or pretend, from his or her Skill or Knowledge in any occult or crafty Science, to discover where or in what manner any Goods or Chattels, supposed to have been stolen or lost, may be found…”
This Act effectively brought the era of witch hunting in Britain to a close. However, like many outdated pieces of legislation, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 remained on the books for more than 200 years, obscure and forgotten, until 1941, when, in the dark depths of the Second World War, it suddenly reemerged into the public consciousness. This is the strange tale of Helen Duncan, the last person in the UK to be jailed for witchcraft.
Victoria Helen McCrae was born on November 25, 1897 in Callander, Scotland to Archibald McFarlane, a roof slater, and Isabella Rattray. From an early age Helen proved to be a strange and difficult child, her habit of getting into fistfights earning her the nickname “Hellish Nell”. She also became known for falling into hysterical trances, uttering prophecies, and claiming to see and hear spirits, much to the dismay of her strict Presbyterian parents. At age 16, Helen became pregnant out of wedlock and was forced to leave her family home. She moved to Dundee, where she worked for a time at a jute mill. In 1914, following the outbreak of the Great War she applied for munitions work, but was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium to recover. Upon release she worked at a bleach factory and as an auxiliary at the Dundee Royal Infirmary, where in 1916 she met and married Henry Duncan, a cabinetmaker who had been invalided from the Front with rheumatic fever.
Life for the young couple was grim. Over the next 10 years Helen would become pregnant 12 times, from which only 6 children would survive. Henry soon became too ill to work, leaving Helen, racked with hypertension, diabetes, kidney trouble, and stomach pains, to provide for the family. But a potential solution to their problems soon emerged. Henry spent much of his time at home reading books on spiritualism, and eventually he convinced his wife to put her natural psychic abilities to the test. And so, in 1926, Helen Duncan set up shop as a spiritualist medium.
While individuals claiming the ability to speak to the dead have existed for all of human history, the modern spiritualist movement is a much more recent phenomenon, tracing its origins only as far back as 1848. In March of that year, two teenage sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox of Hydesville, New York State, claimed to be able to communicate with spirits via faint rapping sounds, heard in response to tapping or snapping their fingers. Connecting these rappings with letters of the alphabet, the Fox Sisters identified the spirit as belonging to one Charles B. Rosna, a travelling peddler who had been murdered by the house’s previous owner and hidden in the cellar. While a search of the cellar revealed no human remains, Margaret and Kate’s older sister, Leah, recognized the commercial potential of the girl’s abilities and became their manager, taking them on a nationwide tour financed by showman P.T. Barnum. Their act was a sensation, kickstarting a worldwide craze for psychic performances and seances. Famous mediums like Daniel Douglas Home [note: pronounced Hume] became wealthy superstars, while private seances became all the rage in parlours around the world. While in 1888 the Fox Sisters admitted that their abilities were a fraud – they had produced the rappings themselves by clicking their toe joints – it was already too late. Spiritualism had taken the world by storm, gaining such illustrious adherents as Emperor Napoleon III, H.G. Wells, T.E. Lawrence, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Two major developments helped spur the worldwide fascination with Spiritualism, the first, ironically, being recent, seemingly miraculous developments in science and technologies. If mankind could peer into the human body with x-rays or communicate long distances via telephone or radio, the spiritualists reasoned, then why not communicate with the spirit world? The other major catalyst was the Great War and the subsequent Spanish Influenza pandemic, which combined killed more than 100 million people worldwide. Spiritualism, with its promise of direct, tangible communication with deceased loved ones, offered greater comfort to millions of the bereaved than the comparatively vague doctrines of traditional religion. The practice became especially popular amongst military personnel, to the degree that in 1941 the Royal Navy recognized spiritualism as a legitimate creed and allowed sailors to perform seances while at sea. Thus, when Helen Duncan began practicing in 1926, she found a ready audience.
Duncan’s seances were typical of the movement. Seated in a darkened room, tied to a chair or enclosed in a wooden cabinet, she would slip into a trance and manifest all manner of ghostly apparitions before her stunned onlookers, including rappings, disembodied voices, music, or even full-fledged figures of people – including her recurring spirit helpers, a grown man named Albert and a little girl named Peggy. Duncan’s particular speciality was the production of ectoplasm, a mysterious white substance said to be made of psychic energy that would emanate from the mouth, nose, or ears of certain mediums, sometimes forming itself into faces or other shapes. Charging 25 Pounds a seat – a considerable sum in those days – Helen and Henry quickly found their fortunes reversed, and were soon able to afford a house in a fashionable suburb of Edinburgh.
But this early success was not to last, for Duncan soon came under the scrutiny of debunkers and the local authorities. In 1928 photographer Harvey Metcalfe took photos at one of her seances which revealed the “ectoplasm” to be nothing but cheesecloth and newspaper, while in 1931 she came to the attention of Harry Price of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, who set out to expose her as a fraud. While the NLPR had been founded to promote Spiritualism and its members adhered to its core tenets, they believed that the practice had been overrun with quacks and fraudsters and sought to separate the genuine mediums from the false. On a number of occasions Price attended Duncan’s seances to collect samples of ectoplasm, which was invariably found to consist of cheesecloth, wood pulp, or egg whites. On another occasion Price convinced her to swallow blue dye to rule out that she was simply regurgitating her ectoplasm. According to some reports she subsequently failed to produce any ectoplasm, while according to others it came out white as before. But when Price tried to X-ray Duncan’s body to discover where she was hiding her emanations, she erupted into hysterics and had to be restrained by her husband. In his final report, Price concluded that Duncan was definitely a fraud, citing the testimony of a Miss Mary McGinlay, who had served as her maid in London:
“After a sance [sic], Mrs Duncan would get me to wash out a length of muslin. It had a rotten smell. She would give it to me just as she had used it and then it would be much stained and smelly.”
Despite this, demand for Duncan’s services continued to grow, though this increasing popularity brought with it even greater scrutiny. During a seance in Edinburgh on January 6, 1933, Duncan caused an apparition of Peggy, her spirit helper, to appear. Suddenly, a sitter named Esther Maule leapt up, grabbed the figure, and turned on the lights, revealing the apparition to be nothing more than a doll sewn from a stockinette vest. The police were called, and on May 11 Duncan was convicted of fraudulent mediumship by the Edinburgh Sheriff Court and fined 10 Pounds. But this would not be Helen Duncan’s last run-in with the law, as her curious profession would soon run afoul of wartime secrecy and paranoia.
During a seance in Portsmouth in late November 1941, Duncan manifested the figure of a young sailor, who claimed to have died aboard the battleship HMS Barham when she was sunk in the Mediterranean. This pronouncement stunned two naval officers in attendance, for HMS Barham had indeed been sunk just days before on November 25, torpedoed by German submarine U-331 with the loss of 861 men. But fearing that the news would damage civilian morale, the Admiralty had decided to only inform the crew’s immediate next of kin, and would not announce the sinking to the public until two months later. The two officers reported what they had seen, and an investigation was launched to determine how this middle-aged Scottish medium had come by such classified military information.
Over the next year Military Intelligence kept a close eye on Helen Duncan. Then, on January 19, 1944 police raided one of her seances in Portsmouth, with officers attempting to prevent ectoplasm issuing from her mouth before placing her and three attendees under arrest. Initially Duncan was charged under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, section IV of which states:
“And be it further enacted, That every Person committing any of the Offences herein-before mentioned, after having been convicted as an idle and disorderly Person; every Person pretending or professing to tell Fortunes, or using any subtle Craft, Mean, or Device, by Palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose on any of His Majesty’s Subjects.”
However, the authorities soon discovered the obscure 1735 Witchcraft act, and Duncan was duly charged with two counts of conspiracy to contravene the Act, two counts of obtaining money under false pretences, and 3 counts of public mischief. Also charged were Ernest and Elizabeth Homer, who ran the Portsmouth Psychic Centre, and Frances Brown, Duncan’s agent who arranged and managed her clients. The seven-day trial at London’s Old Bailey courthouse caused a minor media sensation, with several prominent spiritualist experts being called as witnesses for the defence. But in the end the Prosecution had little trouble convincing the jury of its case, which held that:
“…the whole performance was an elaborate pretence, a fraudulent performance, a mere imposition on human credulity…[and] a pretence that so-called materialisations, which were in fact produced by means of fraudulent devices and apparatus, were of a different nature altogether.”
Arthur Charles West, the Portsmouth Chief of Police, was even harsher in his evaluation:
“This is a case where not only has she attempted and succeeded in deluding confirmed believers in Spiritualism, but she has tricked, defrauded and preyed upon the minds of a certain credulous section of the public who have gone to these meetings in search of comfort of mind in their sorrow and grief. I can only describe this woman as an unmitigated humbug who can only be regarded as a pest to a certain section of society.”
When the jury returned with a guilty verdict on the first count, the judge dismissed them without hearing verdicts on the six others. Duncan was sentenced to 9 months and Frances Brown to four months in prison, while the Homers were Bound Over – a practice equivalent to being released on bail. Strangely, Duncan was denied the customary right to appeal to the House of Lords, leading her to cry out in court: “I have done nothing! Is there a God?”
The absurdity of the conviction was not lost on Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who following the trial wrote following memo to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison
“Let me have a report on why the Witchcraft Act, 1735, was used in a modern Court of Justice. What was the cost of this trial to the State, observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded London, for a fortnight, and the Recorder kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery, to the detriment of necessary work in the Courts?”
Helen Duncan served her nine month sentence in London’s Holloway Prison, where fellow prisoners and staff reportedly lined up for seances. She was released on September 22, 1945, and despite promising the court to stop practicing spiritualism, soon resumed her old practice. In November 1956 police raided a seance in Nottingham and arrested her for fraud. While she was released soon after, five weeks later on December 6, 1956, Helen Duncan passed away at the age of 59.
To this day, controversy surrounds the reason for the courts’ decision to arrest and try Helen Duncan under the 1735 Act. What is known is that none of the authorities involved actually believed that Duncan had psychic powers. According to historian Graeme Donald, even her supposedly inexplicable knowledge of HMS Barham’s sinking was not as mysterious as it seems:
“The loss of HMS Barham… was indeed kept quiet for a while, but letters of condolence were sent out to families of the 861 dead, asking them to keep the secret until the official announcement. So, allowing for perhaps 10 people in each family, there were about 9,000 people who knew of the sinking; if each of them told only one other person, there were 20,000 people in the country aware of the sinking, and so on – hardly a closely guarded secret. In short, news of the sinking spread like wildfire; Duncan simply picked up the gossip and decided to turn it into profit.”
Furthermore, upon her arrest in 1944 Duncan was found to have in her possession a naval hat band bearing the name of HMS Barham. However, after 1939 Royal Navy hat bands bore only the letters “HMS” and not the name of the ship, further indicating that Duncan had heard gossip of the sinking around Portsmouth and prepared props for her seance beforehand.
The likeliest motivation for Duncan’s arrest was the secrecy surrounding the impending D-Day landings, with military authorities fearing that if Duncan overheard any classified information she could reveal it in one of her seances. The 1735 Witchcraft Act was therefore simply the most expedient means of locking her up until after the landings had taken place. Consequently, there have been calls in recent years for Duncan’s conviction to be overturned, with the Parliament of Scotland receiving a 200-signature petition in February 2008 calling for her to be granted a full pardon. While the petition was eventually rejected, Duncan’s advocates continued to call for justice.
While Helen Duncan was the last person to be imprisoned under the Act, she was not the last to be convicted under it. That dubious honour belongs to Jane Yorke, who was arrested on the10th of July 1944 after claiming to have contacted the non-existent dead brother of an undercover police officer. Her prosecution was delayed until the verdict of Helen Duncan’s trial was heard, whereupon she was convicted but only Bound Over for three years on account of her advanced age of 72. Seven years later, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was finally overturned by the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951. For the first time in more than 400 years, witchcraft was no longer a crime in the United Kingdom. In 1954, Pagan Witchcraft, better known as Wicca, was officially recognized as a religion by Parliament.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- Where the Word “Witch” Came From
- No Witches Were Burned During the Salem Witch Trials
- What Does Rx Mean and Where Did It Come From?
- The Curious Practice of Execution By Golden Shower
Expand for ReferencesJohnson, Ben, Helen Duncan, Scotland’s Last Witch, Historic UK, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Helen-Duncan-Scotlands-last-witch/
Sugar, Bert & The Amazing Randi, Houdini: His Life and Art, Grosset and Dunlap 1976
Witchcraft Act 1735, https://engole.info/witchcraft-act-of-1735-6/
Witchcraft, UK Parliament, https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/religion/overview/witchcraft/
An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1824/83/pdfs/ukpga_18240083_en.pdf
Hellish Nell: Witch-hunt That Led to Capture of Fake Medium, The Scotsman, February 24, 2009, https://www.scotsman.com/news/hellish-nell-witch-hunt-led-capture-fake-medium-2444143
McSmith, Andy, Toil and Trouble: the Last Witch? The Independent, February 29, 2008, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/toil-and-trouble-the-last-witch-789353.html
Mantel, Hilary, Unhappy Medium, The Guardian, May 3, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/may/03/londonreviewofbooks
MacPherson, Hamish, The Truth About the UK’s Last Witch Helen Duncan, The National, May 8, 2018, https://www.thenational.scot/news/16209915.truth-uks-last-witch-helen-duncan/
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In 1983, First Lady Nancy Reagan visited Longfellow Elementary School in Oakland, California, when a schoolgirl asked her about what to do if she was offered drugs. The First Lady responded, “just say ‘no.'” This trip was not the first foray by Mrs. Reagan to raise awareness regarding the dangers of drug use. However, this interaction was picked up by the press and resulted in an advertising campaign in her husband’s war on drugs.
While I think we can all agree that war on drugs was a spectacular failure, or at least, unless you’re on the side of the drugs, to her credit, Nancy Reagan spent her time in public life raising funds for wounded and returned Vietnam veterans as First Lady of California. She also pushed for funding for missing soldiers and soldiers believed to be still held as prisoners of war and was critical in creating the Foster Grandparents program. And through it all, she traveled over 250,000 miles visiting schools, rehabilitation centers, and other nations attempting to warn children of the dangers of drug use. To some extent, this caring and dedication made programs that sprung up around her challenging to criticize, even if they accomplished nothing of any value.
In this political environment, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was born a year later when the LAPD and the Los Angeles School District decided to take on drug use on the demand side rather than the supply side. The leadership of the LAPD drove the project to bring it to fruition and a congressional committee responsible for funding DARE cited early studies showing it was helpful in order to justify the cost. Further, the committee’s report found that fifth and sixth-grade children often had a more sophisticated understanding of drugs than their teachers did. It also found that since police officers had to deal with the effects of drugs every day, they would be more effective in teaching the curriculum and deterring students.
For those outside of the United States who weren’t put through the program, the DARE program took place over seventeen weeks, promising a reduction in vandalism, violence, and drug use. Each week a police officer provides forty-five minutes to one hour of training to students in grades five through nine. The program also suggested that teachers integrate the material into components of their regular curriculum, as well as included methods to help students improve their self-esteem, learn to resist unwanted offers, and improve their assertiveness in general. It also gave them real information about various substances and their impact on the body. A controversial side issue with the program is it also encourages kids to report any drug use they observe in school or in their home to the DARE officers…
In any event, the program is identical across the United States. The goal is that each student will see the same information in the same way, to hopefully have the same outcome everywhere. However, as you might expect, students, environments, income, and local cultures are quite different across the U.S. The authors of the program had hoped that such differences would not matter. But, let’s just say, it does. A lot.
As for funding for the program, the initial law required the Secretary of Education to set aside $15,000,000 from the Drug Free Schools and Communities Act to support the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Act. Two Republican members of the House, Bill Goodling and Tom Petri, wrote a short dissent to the committee’s findings concerning the program, stating:
“We join our colleagues in offering both encouragement and support to the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (DARE) which has been widely used in many communities and has been a compelling force in encouraging youth to resist the lure of drug use. Although we fully support the use of DARE, we do have a concern regarding the mechanism contained in H.R. 5064 to provide financial support to DARE. H.R. 5064 would provide a reservation off-the-top of the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act appropriation for grants to local education agencies to establish DARE programs. We do not believe that it is prudent to reserve funds for such a specific type of program when many effective drug abuse education curricula have been developed. Further, such a reservation will limit the funds available to local education officials to use at their discretion in determining which programs will best serve the particular needs of the youth in their communities.”
As for Goodling, he had the background to know what he was talking about- a master’s degree in English and had been a teacher as well. Representative Gooding also had served on a local school board and as its president. He brought that experience with him to Congress. But on this one, nobody really listened.
Pointing out the major issue, as alluded to, DARE set aside money for its operation independent of its effectiveness, whereas other programs have to prove their effectiveness through data and peer review. The crux of the dissent is that it is better to let those who know the children and situation in a community make those decisions, rather than national legislators who may mean well, but are often more motivated by needing to appear to be doing something useful, whether what they do is actually useful or not.
Inevitably with all of this, soon after the passage of the law, researchers began asking the question, “What does DARE do?” And whether it was actually effective at any of its goals.
Of course, one of the challenges in the sciences, especially in the social sciences, is called the “replication crisis.” Even in the best of circumstances, it can be difficult to get research on a single topic to agree when the underlying population is quite different or diverse. In its simplest form, the replication crisis happens when someone performs research and finds that something works, then someone else looks, and it does not. Part of the issue is that it takes a lot of money and work across a large sample to be sure one way or the other.
As for DARE and its effectiveness, the initial work after it was approved into law was not promising. Ironically, some of the first research found that it not only wasn’t reducing drug use, but it actually increased certain types of substance abuse. Funny enough, the effect of finding that educating people on what they should not do producing the opposite result happens more than one might expect…
This result has come up in a variety of fields. For example, some of the research on financial education has found that mandatory financial education in bankruptcy can actually increase the probability of future insolvency, rather than decrease it. In short, while people without knowledge in personal finance can make foolish choices that fail, people with education and more know-how on finance can engage in genuinely sophisticated and more spectacular failures.
That said, one thing the research on DARE shows is that it does a very good job of providing information about drugs…
From here, the next round of research found that DARE did not work in its original area, California. But in this round, it also didn’t seem to increase the rate of abuse at least.
So to sum up, there were now three sets of studies surrounding the DARE program. The initial studies showed it worked, the next round showed evidence that it had the opposite of the intended effect, and the third round found no impact at all.
Although it may be possible to engage in methodological criticism with each of the studies, the overall state of the research at this point, let’s just say, doesn’t make DARE look like a particularly worthwhile program, nor would the follow ups we’ll get into shortly.
Going back to the purpose of DARE- reducing violence in schools, vandalism, and the rate of substance abuse. Since that time, the nation has gone through school shooting after school shooting. The children that took DARE grew up to participate in the opioid crisis. Property crimes did fall. The question is how to sift out DARE’s impact on the more extensive set of social questions driving each of these phenomena. DARE would still be worthwhile if it reduced the level enough despite all the other problems.
Of course, if a different program cut substance abuse by twenty percent, while DARE reduced it five, DARE’s money should probably go to the other program. As you might expect, both of these questions have since been well studied.
The first meta-analysis studied both of these in 1994. It concluded that DARE had a very small effect on tobacco use, but no impact on alcohol or other drug use. When it was compared to another program that was studied, it was found to be comparatively ineffective.
Subsequent local studies found that either there was a small gain from using DARE or that there was a small amount of harm. Later meta-analysis concluded that DARE produced no short-term impact on substance use.
A large scale study of New Jersey schools looked at the original claims related to vandalism, violence, and substance use. It found no effect of DARE on the outcomes. Students that participated in DARE were equally likely to engage in violence, commit vandalism, or abuse substances.
From all this, in 2001, the Surgeon General classified DARE in its list of programs that were ineffective. Helpfully, the Surgeon General also created a list of programs that have been shown to work well.
One thing to remember about substance abuse is that they are often used initially to numb pain. That pain may be physical or psychological. Children in pain, like adults in pain, do not want to be in that situation. Further, children typically have fewer resources and lesser maturity than adults to cope with pain.
Of course, there is another factor to consider when looking at such programs’ effectiveness- the role supply and demand play in the problem. If schools were successful in reducing the demand for illegal drugs, then suppliers would cut their prices to bring up the quantity demanded to at least near its old level. For example, when the South Beach diet hit America, the demand for spinach skyrocketed. It takes an entire season to change the amount of spinach planted in the ground, so the prices shot through the ceiling. At least in part, the diet was choked off because the cost of the healthy foods in the diet became too expensive for most people, while the prices of unhealthy foods dropped.
Similarly, if schools are successful in changing attitudes about drugs, and thus students and later their adult selves not partaking as much, it is in the interest of suppliers to adjust the cost so that any market losses will be minimal. Needless to say, a school attempting to change transient attitudes is up against powerful forces.
But, in the end, the supplier of substances is at the end of a long chain of events that began with pain. To attack demand is to attack pain-causing issues.
For example, during the Vietnam War, the military estimated that forty percent of all infantrymen were addicted to heroin. The enemy was indistinguishable from civilians. Combat was often by ambush. As in other wars, soldiers watched their friends die and were sometimes wounded themselves. Heroin dulled the pain of life in a warzone.
When the soldiers returned to America, the level of addiction fell to the background level normal throughout society. The pain was gone; the use mostly went away outside of the national norm. This same phenomenon has been seen repeatedly by looking at wage levels and unemployment.
It has been found to be no different for children. Prevent or remove pain, and substances do not enter the picture to the same degree. Further, a child busy with activities and friends is less likely to get involved in such negative activities.
Unsurprisingly from this, programs that center around pain removal and more productive activities often have been shown to do what DARE does not. On this note and important to the overall discussion is that the Surgeon General’s office found many things that worked well at preventing drug abuse among kids.
One of the most straightforward and longest-lasting interventions may seem unrelated to drug abuse, and that is prenatal and infancy visits by nurses, which have been shown to be effective in both White and African American communities as well as both in rural and urban settings.
With this, a fifteen-year follow-up on low-income teenage mothers found a 79 percent reduction in reports of child abuse and neglect. It found a 44% decline in maternal behavioral problems and a 9% reduction in maternal arrests. A side benefit of all of this from the perspective of the goals of DARE, it found a 56% reduction in alcohol consumption versus those that did not have visiting nurses. It was also determined that the effects were diminished for those children with more than 28 incidents of child abuse.
Another model program for first and second graders is the Seattle Social Development Project. The program is designed to help early grade school children with problems of aggression, anti-social behavior, externalizing behavior, and self-destructive behaviors. Participants have lower levels of alcohol and delinquency initiation, greater attachment and commitment to school, and less involvement with anti-social peers. Follow up on students that were 18 years old found significant reductions in violent acts and heavy alcohol use. Teens who had received a full intervention were also less likely to be sexually active, have multiple partners, or have gotten someone pregnant or become pregnant themselves.
Moving on from there, the Life Skills Training program run by Cornell reduces alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco use by an average of 50-75%. Long term follow-up after six years shows that the program reduces multiple drug use by 66% and pack-a-day smoking by 25%. It also reduces inhalants, narcotics, and hallucinogen usage as well.
The Surgeon General also studied programs for children in trouble. Functional Family Therapy was found to significantly reduce the percentage of children in the juvenile justice system that reoffended. One study found that only 60% reoffended compared with 93% who did not receive it. Another study found that only 11% reoffended versus 67% that did not receive the therapy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, another study found that the programs most likely to be implemented were not the best programs, in terms of outcomes, but the best programs in terms of marketing. In a democracy, there is a strong preference for the familiar, as well as things that seem like they would more directly help, rather than programs like the nursing visits that indirectly get the results sought. There is also very sadly sometimes a strong resistance to science.
On top of this, a law once passed is very difficult to remove, as congressmen William Goodling and Tom Petri observed. Despite its ineffectiveness, especially compared to other programs with similar goals, DARE has an infrastructure in the U.S. Department of Justice. It has regional training centers. Its funds are also used to buy police equipment. In addition, a couple generations of students have gone through the program and remember it now that they are parents, perhaps without being aware that the program itself doesn’t accomplish its goals.
As for alternate, proven programs, like the nurse visits, visiting nurses are also less politically palatable to a wide swath of the American public. They want the substances and abuse to go away, but they don’t necessarily want to pay for infants or mothers’ healthcare. They are opposed to money going to others that they seemingly, at least on the surface, see nothing from directly, despite the proven benefit to society as a whole, not unlike free public education. In the latter case, ostensibly if you have no kids, free public education for all children is the government spending your tax dollars on something you don’t use or seemingly benefit from directly. But when factoring in the massive benefit to society as a whole to have the entire populace educated, not to mention ancillary benefits like a productive place to stash the kids while parents work, few have a problem with this. In a nutshell, we all live here. So it’s nice to make it nice.
But in the end, the difference between perception and reality makes it difficult for legislators to move away from funded programs that do not work to get funds for proven programs. Further, the U.S. Department of Education does not use a system of testing to determine what programs to fund. And so it is that empirically proven programs can lose out to programs shown not to work, but that are perhaps better from a marketing standpoint.
In the end, DARE is not the only program in widespread use that has been shown to fail in accomplishing its goals. It is just the best known anti-drug program.
The irony is that if Nancy Reagan could see the results side-by-side, she would likely be out advocating for the programs that work and perhaps making headway towards this given it’s political pressure that is needed to make the needed changes. A person that flies 250,000 miles visiting children, rehabilitation centers, and hospitals doesn’t want all that work to be for nothing. Nancy Reagan, in addition to being an actress, was also a nursing assistant. She is the same type of person that might have advocated for nurses to go home to home, checking on mothers and babies.
In the end, good working programs do exist to execute the goals of DARE. It’s simply that the most widely known program meant to accomplish this, DARE, isn’t one of them.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
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Expand for ReferencesSusan T. Ennet, PhD, Nancy S. Tobler, MS, PhD, Christopher L. Ringwalt, DrPH, and Robert L. Flewelling, PhD. How Effective Is Drug Abuse
Resistance Education? A Meta-Analysis of Project DARE
Outcome Evaluations. American Journal of Public Health. September 1994. Vol 84. No 9
Renzo Accursio Trapani. The Influences of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) and Law Enforcement Against Drugs (L.E.A.D) Programs on Middle, Intermediate, and Upper School Students in the State of New Jersey in the 2016-2017 Academic Year. 2019. Doctoral Dissertation. Seton Hall University.
Theodore L. Caputi & A. Thomas McLellan. Truth and D.A.R.E.: Is D.A.R.E.’s new Keepin’ it REAL curriculum suitable for American nationwide
implementation? Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy.24:1, 49-57
Bureau of Justice Assistance. Implementing Project DARE: Drug Abuse Resistence Education: Implementation Manual. June 1988. US Department of Justice.
The National First Ladies Library. First Lady Biography: Nancy Reagan. http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=41
McGrath, Michael, Nancy Reagan and the negative impact of the ‘Just Say No’ anti-drug campaign. The Guardian. March 8, 2018
Evans, Alice and Kris Bosworth –Building effective drug education programs.}}Phi Delta Kappa International Research Bulletin No 19, December, 1887.
Office of the Surgeon General (US); National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (US); National Institute of Mental Health (US); Center for Mental Health Services (US). Rockville (MD): Office of the Surgeon General (US); 2001.
Judith Lohman, Assistant Director. DRUG ABUSE RESISTANCE EDUCATION (DARE) PROGRAM. November 22, 2010. https://www.cga.ct.gov/2010/rpt/2010-R-0468.htm
West SL, O’Neal KK. Project D.A.R.E. outcome effectiveness revisited. Am J Public Health. 2004;94(6):1027-1029. doi:10.2105/ajph.94.6.1027
The post Did D.A.R.E. Actually Increase Drug Use? appeared first on Today I Found Out.
The Pavlov’s Dog experiment is among the most famous in the history of psychology. As the story goes, in 1901 Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov observed that if a dog was presented with food, it would begin to salivate in anticipation. If, however, that food was repeatedly presented alongside a separate stimulus – like the ringing of a bell – eventually the dog would begin to salivate in response to the bell alone, having come to associate that stimulus with the arrival of food. The discovery of this process, known as Pavlovian or classical conditioning, revolutionized the study of psychology and directly inspired the work of such giants as John Watson and B.F. Skinner. And so embedded are Pavlov’s experiments in our collective consciousness that the term “Pavlov’s dog” has become shorthand for anything – or anyone – that reacts unthinkingly to some stimulus. However, this widely-retold story is a grossly simplified – and sanitized – version of Pavlov’s actual experiments. In reality, Pavlov did not even set out to study animal behaviour, and his experimental methods were less The Dog Whisperer and more Frankenstein. For any animal lovers watching, a word of warning: things are going to get very, very gross.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1949 in Ryazan, central Russia. At first the young Pavlov sought to follow his father, Peter Dmitrievich, into the priesthood, studying first at the church school and then the local seminary. However, major changes sweeping the country would soon divert him from this religious path. In 1861, Tsar Alexander II emancipated Russia’s 23 million feudal serfs, unleashing a wave of progressive thought across the Empire. Among the ideas being widely discussed were the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, and it was these which in 1869 inspired Pavlov to leave the seminary and enrol in the physics and mathematics department at Saint Petersburg University. Eventually Pavlov would reject religion altogether, declaring:
“[Scientific Truth] is for me a kind of God, before whom I reveal everything, before whom I discard wretched worldly vanity. I always think to base my virtue, my pride, upon the attempt, the wish for truth, even if I cannot attain it.”
It is worth noting here that the majority of Pavlov’s denouncements of religion were nowhere near as lyrical or diplomatic. Pavlov forbade his wife, Seraphima, from attending church or praying, and upon seeing a medical student stop in front of a church and cross themselves, once exclaimed: “Think about it! A naturalist, a physician, but he prays like an old woman in an almshouse!”
Indeed, Pavlov’s colleagues described him as a difficult man to work with: punctilious, demanding, irritable, and prone to frequent fits of rage. His angry outbursts knew no bounds and were directed against any and all who crossed him, from students and assistants to colleagues, supervisors, and even – as we shall later see – Josef Stalin. He was also a terrible husband, frequently neglecting his wife and cheating on her with his female lab assistance. But for all his social flaws, Pavlov’s obsession with empirical data and his singular attention to detail would serve him well in his scientific endeavours.
While studying in St. Petersburg, Pavlov became fascinated with human physiology, in particular the work of Russian scientist Ivan Secherov. Sechenov was a proponent of reflex theory, a school of thought originated by 17th Century French philosopher Rene Descartes which saw human beings as mere machines and which posited that every human behaviour, no matter how complex, was composed of a combination of simple mechanistic reflexes. According to Secherov, if these individual responses could be picked apart and studied in isolation, then the complete function of the human body could be understood. The unspoken implication, of course, was that free will was an illusion and that, in the words of American behaviourist John Watson: “…the behavior of animals can be investigated without appeal to consciousness.”
In 1875, the year he graduated from Saint Petersburg University, Pavlov published his first scientific paper, a highly-acclaimed treatise on the physiology of the pancreatic nerves. Pavlov next enrolled at the Medical Surgical Academy, and after graduating in 1879 accepted the directorship of the Physiological Laboratory of the famous clinician Sergey Botkin. It was here that Pavlov first developed a research technique he called “chronic experimentation.” While vivisection – the dissection of live animals to study biological functions – was common practice at the time, such invasive and traumatic surgeries tended to skew experimental results and invariably resulted in the death of the animal. Instead, Pavlov trained dogs to lie still on the operating table so he could insert needles into their blood vessels and nerves and monitor their function in real time. Using these methods, Pavlov determined that the beating of the heart is regulated by four main nerves – a discovery which formed the basis of his 1883 doctoral thesis.
In 1890, Pavlov accepted the directorship of the Department of Physiology at Saint Petersburg’s Institute of Experimental Medicine – a position he would hold for the rest of his life. It was at the institute that Pavlov would carry out the most important work of his career – not on psychology or animal behaviour, but digestion. At the time, little was known about the actual physiology of digestion – about how the passage of food through the gut stimulates the release of various gastric juices. For this research, Pavlov turned once more to dogs – and to his technique of chronic experimentation.
In order to study the intricacies of the digestive process as accurately as possible, Pavlov turned his dogs into living scientific instruments. Each animal was given an operation wherein their esophagus was severed and pulled through their neck, such that no matter how much the dog ate, no food would reach its stomach. This allowed Pavlov and his colleagues to study the effects on the digestive system of the dog tasting or merely smelling or seeing food. Pavlov next cut holes in the dogs’ sides and attached short tubes to various digestive organs such as the stomach, pancreas, gallbladder, and salivary glands. These tubes were connected to small bags or vials so the precise amount of digestive juices excreted could be measured. To prevent the dogs from moving and tearing out the tubes they were kept restrained in special harnesses mounted in wooden frames.
Though gruesome and cruel by modern standards, the technique proved extremely effective – so effective, in fact, that it even provided Pavlov’s lab with a useful source of extra income. At the time, pepsin – a digestive enzyme found in gastric juice – was a popular treatment for indigestion, being mixed into all sorts of consumer products from soft drinks to chewing gum. Being free of food particles and other contamination, Pavlov’s pepsin was of higher quality than anything on the market, prompting him to create a “gastric juice factory”
“An assistant was hired and paid thirty rubles a month to oversee the facility. Five large young dogs, weighing sixty to seventy pounds and selected for their voracious appetites, stood on a long table harnessed to the wooden crossbeam directly above their heads. Each was equipped with an esophagotomy and fistula from which a tube led to the collection vessel. Each ‘factory dog’ faced a short wooden stand tilted to display a large bowl of minced meat.”
By 1904, the lab was selling more than three thousand litres of gastric juice per year, allowing it to increase its budget by nearly 70%.
Over the following two decades, Pavlov and his colleagues would carry out hundreds of experiments on the dogs, teasing out the intricate chemical and nervous connections between the organs of the digestive system. It was for this research and not his more famous behavioural studies that Pavlov was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Nevertheless, it was Pavlov’s meticulous approach to his digestion research that would lead him directly to his greatest discovery.
In 1901, while measuring the output of his dogs’ salivary glands in response to the sight and smell of food, Pavlov noticed that the mere sight of the scientists who normally brought the food would cause the dogs to salivate. This phenomenon, known as “psychic salivation,” had been observed before, and Pavlov initially dismissed it as yet another automatic reflex. However, Pavlov soon observed that different dogs associated different stimuli with food, while others made no associations at all. This flew in the face of Sergey Sechenov’s assertions that all reflexes and behaviours were hardwired and immutable; as Pavlov could plainly see, even a response as basic as salivating in the presence of food could be easily altered – or conditioned – through experience. This observation inspired Pavlov to more closely study the possibilities – and limits – of the conditioning process.
Contrary to popular belief, Pavlov never used a bell in his experiments. Indeed, Pavlov found bells particularly unsuited to his purposes, their precise tone being too difficult to consistently reproduce.
He instead used a variety of devices including tuning forks, electric buzzers, and metronomes whose consistency allowed him to determine just how specific a stimulus a dog could be trained to respond to. For example, when a dog was presented with food and a metronome, it would salivate at the sound of any metronome. But if a metronome of a certain frequency was presented several times in a row, the dog would only salivate when it heard that particular frequency. Pavlov also experimented with other sensory stimuli, such as heat, shapes, flashes of light, touching the dogs in various places, and electric shocks. So how did the image of Pavlov ringing a bell come to dominate the popular consciousness? According to Pavlov biographer Daniel P. Todes, this misconception may stem from Pavlov’s use of the word zvonok, which literally translates as “buzzer” but is often mistranslated as “bell.” Alternatively, the association may derive from the later research of psychologists Vladimir Bekhterev and John Watson, who did use bells in their experiments.
Also frequently misunderstood are Pavlov’s conclusions regarding his conditioning experiments. Though inspired by pure behaviourists like Sergey Sechenov, Pavlov himself never believed that animals and were purely mechanistic beings whose behaviour could be programmed at will. In his writings Pavlov freely acknowledged that the dogs in his experiments all had their own unique temperaments and personalities and responded to his conditioning efforts in different and unpredictable ways. In many cases the dogs failed to respond to the conditioning stimuli and simply fell asleep, while in others the conditioned responses wore off over time. Furthermore, unconditioned “hard-wired” behaviours could be extinguished through negative reinforcement. For example, in yet another ethically-dubious 1914 experiment, Pavlov applied electric shocks to certain parts of dogs’ bodies while they ate. Eventually, further shocks induced the dogs to salivate. But when the shocks were applied to other parts of the dogs’ bodies, they grew confused and aggressive:
“A hitherto quiet dog began to squeal in its stand, kept wriggling about, and bit through the tubes connecting the animal’s room with the observer’s.”
Similarly, a cat that was shocked while eating a mouse spat out its meal and became frightened and immobile at the mere sight of a mouse. Such induced neuroses were found to be largely permanent, lasting months or even years. Descending further into Dr. Frankenstein territory, Pavlov even removed dogs’ cerebral cortexes – seat of their higher mental functions – in order to turn them into purely reflexive beings. While still retaining their natural, unconditioned responses, such creatures were incapable of learning or even simple decision-making – such as whether to go around an obstacle placed in their path. As a result, Pavlov concluded that higher brain functions, no matter how limited, had a powerful mediating influence on behaviour and were essential to allowing animals to interact with and adapt to the world around them:
“It would be stupid to reject the subjective world. Our actions, all forms of social and personal life are formed on this basis. The question is how to analyze this subjective world.”
Indeed, even the term “conditioned response,” commonly applied to Pavlov’s work, is the result of yet another mistranslation. Pavlov’s original term translates to “conditional response,” acknowledging the variability and subjectivity of the conditioning process. And while many of his contemporaries feared that a greater understanding of the inner workings of the mind would eventually lead to the enslavement of mankind, Pavlov argued the opposite, declaring in 1927:
“We would have freedom of the will in proportion to our knowledge of the brain, just as we had passed from a position of slave to a lord of nature.”
Nonetheless, Pavlov’s work would be widely misinterpreted by his scientific heirs, many of whom would distort his findings to support a purely behaviourist view of human behaviour. Among these was John Watson, who in 1924 boldly claimed:
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”
But perhaps the worst culprits when it came to misinterpreting Pavlov were the Bolsheviks. When Vladimir Lenin took control of the country in 1917, Pavlov and his collaborators were treated like any other Soviet citizens, their laboratory funding being confiscated as property of the state. For three years they struggled to keep warm and fed, with many of Pavlov’s assistants dying of starvation and hypothermia. Finally, in 1920, Pavlov wrote to Lenin seeking permission to emigrate from Russia and continue his research elsewhere. Lenin immediately grasped the public relations implications of losing the country’s most celebrated scientist, and saw to it that Pavlov and his staff received unlimited funding and carte blanche to pursue their research. It didn’t hurt that the Soviet leadership saw Pavlov as psychology’s answer to Karl Marx, and his behaviourist theories as a real-world manifestation of dialectical materialism. And while Pavlov actively rejected this interpretation of his work, this misunderstanding allowed his laboratory to prosper at a time when many intellectuals were being rounded up as suspected enemies of the state.
While most scientists in Pavlov’s position would have kept their heads down and tried not to rock the boat, Pavlov was vocal in his denunciation of the Communist regime, declaring in one public speech:
“Of course, in the struggle between labor and capital the government must stand for the protection of the worker. But what have we made of this? That which constitutes the culture, the intellectual strength of the nation, has been devalued, and that which for now remains a crude force, replaceable by a machine, has been moved to the forefront. All this, of course, is doomed to destruction as a blind rejection of reality.”
This outspoken opposition carried on well into Stalin’s reign of terror, with Pavlov even writing the Soviet leader to declare that his purge of intellectuals made him “ashamed to be called a Russian.” And when Stalin sent an agent to purge his laboratory of political undesirables, Pavlov proceeded to calmly and rationally kick said agent down the stairs.Whether Pavlov was astoundingly brave or, being well into his 70s, had simply run out of fucks to give, we shall likely never know. But while a man with less Kremlin-sized balls would have been immediately arrested and shot or shipped off to the Gulag, amazingly Pavlov got away with it, with Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin’s right-hand man, grudgingly admitting:
“I know that he does not sing the ‘Internationale,’ but despite all his grumbling, ideologically (in his works, not in his speeches) he is working for us.”
Under the protection of the Soviet State, Pavlov built the Institute of Experimental Medicine into a world-renowned centre of physiology and psychology research, and continued to make important discoveries up until his death from double pneumonia on February 27, 1936. Still considered a hero of the Soviet Union despite his anti-communist rhetoric, his funeral was attended by one hundred thousand mourners.
Such was the eventful and complicated career of Ivan Pavlov, scientific genius, torturer of dogs, terrible colleague and husband, and possibly the bravest man in the Soviet Union. Yet the impact of his work on the fields of physiology and psychology is immeasurable, with Pavlov being the 24th most cited psychologist of the 20th Century. Misremembered as they are, his groundbreaking experiments live on in our collective memory, and are the reason why to most people the name “Pavlov” still rings a bell.
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Expand for ReferencesThomas, Roger, Pavlov’s Dogs “Dripped Saliva at the Sound of a Bell” – Commentary on Littman on Pavlov-Bell, Psycoloquy, Volume 5, Issue 80, 1994, http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?article=5.80
Littman, Richard, Bekhterev and Watson Rang Pavlov’s Bell: a Reply to Catania’s Query, Psycoloquy, Volume 5, Issue 49, 1994, http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?5.49
Ivan Pavlov Biographical, The Novel Prize, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1904/pavlov/biographical/
Butler-Bowdown, Tom, You have probably heard of Pavlov and his famous dogs, but who was he and what was his contribution to psychology? 50 Classics Series, http://www.butler-bowdon.com/ip-pavlov—conditioned-reflexes.html
Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), Institute of Experimental Medicine, St. Petersburg, https://web.archive.org/web/20050426171314/http://www.iemrams.spb.ru:8100/english/pavlov.htm
Specter, Michael, Drool: Ivan pavlov’s Real Quest, The New Yorker, November 17, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/drool
Grimes, A.C, The Truth About Pavlov and His Dogs, Grunge, February 11, 2020, https://www.grunge.com/188174/the-truth-about-pavlov-and-his-dogs/
Todes, Daniel, Ivan Pavlov in 22 Surprising Facts, Oxford University Press Blog, November 21, 2014, https://blog.oup.com/2014/11/ivan-pavlov-surprising-facts/
Ivan Secherov, Russia InfoCentre, http://www.russia-ic.com/people/education_science/s/150/
The post The Shocking and Gruesome Truth About Pavlov’s Dog’s and How the Results are Commonly Misinterpreted appeared first on Today I Found Out.
It is a classic parenting nightmare: you drop your tiny tot off at the grandparents’ or a friend’s birthday party, hoping to get a few hours’ reprieve from tending to their every shrill, snot-nosed demand. But alas, your plan backfires, for when you return to pick them up you discover that their hosts have filled them up with enough sugary treats to put an elephant in a diabetic coma. Coursing through their tiny veins, the sweet, sticky stuff gives them the manic energy of a hundred Gary Buseys, causing them to scream and shout and bounce off the walls like a cocaine-fuelled howler monkey – and you to start seriously questioning your decision to bring new life into this world.
At this point, you parents in the audience are probably furiously nodding your heads, having experienced this exact scenario many times. Only no… you haven’t. Not really. For while the dreaded “sugar rush” might be a staple of parenting lore and humour, this phenomenon is in fact nothing more than a persistent medical myth. Believe it or not, eating excessive amounts of sugar does not cause people to become hyperactive – not even children. In fact, it has exactly the opposite effect. “But Simon!” I hear you cry. “Of course sugar makes children hyperactive! I’ve seen it with my own eyes!” Well, please put down your torches, pitchforks, and phones set to speed-dial the neighbourhood watch, and join us as we delve into the science of sugar, energy, mood, and what’s actually going on here.
At first glance, the idea of the “sugar rush” makes perfect sense. After all, our bodies need sugar to produce energy; it follows, then, that more sugar should produce more energy. But decades of scientific research have thoroughly debunked this seemingly straightforward assumption. In a 2019 meta-study conducted by Berlin’s Humboldt University, Lancaster University, and the University of Warwick, researchers analyzed the data from 31 trials examining the short-term psychological effects of consuming large amounts of carbohydrates – including sugar – on healthy adults. The analysis examined various psychological parameters including alertness, alertness, depression, calmness, fatigue, confusion, tension, and anger at intervals of 0-30, 31-60, and 60+ minutes following carbohydrate ingestion. Contrary to popular expectation, the researchers found no significant change in the subjects’ mood due to high sugar consumption. They also found that high sugar consumption did not impart greater energy:
“In fact, [sugar] consumption was related to decreased alertness and higher levels of fatigue within the first hour post-ingestion.”
This may seem counter-intuitive, but from a biological standpoint it makes perfect sense. While sugar can indeed give you an energy boost, this only works if you are already suffering from hypoglycaemia or low blood sugar. If your blood sugar is normal, consuming more sugar or other carbohydrates will not give you more energy. Instead, your body stores the excess energy by converting into fat – process which in turn consumes a large amount of energy requires energy, leading to the increased fatigue associated with eating a heavy meal – AKA the so-called “food coma.”
“But Simon,” I hear you protest. “The 2019 study was conducted on adults! Surely sugar affects children differently?” Nope! In 1994, a study conducted by Dr. Mark Wolraich and his colleagues from the University of Oklahoma examined 50 children whose parents claimed they were especially sensitive to sugar. Each subject was assigned a diet high in either sugar, aspartame, or saccharin, the parents being unaware what their child was consuming. Yet despite two-thirds of the children being given sweeteners with absolutely no caloric value, their parents still reported hyperactive behaviour after eating sweets. Whatever was causing the children’s bad behaviour, it wasn’t the sugar. So what, then, was to blame?
Another study published in 1994 hints at a probable cause. In this study, Daniel W. Hoover and Richard Milich of the University of Kentucky videotaped interactions between 35 mothers and their five-year-old children. Half the mothers were told that their child had consumed large amounts of sugar, while the others were told they had consumed no sugar at all. In fact, all the children had received a sugar-free placebo. Nonetheless, the videotapes revealed that mothers who believed their children had consumed sugar consistently rated their behaviour as more hyperactive. They were also more protective and critical of their children, reprimanding them more often. This suggests that sugar rushes are, in fact, something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because parents believe sugar causes hyperactivity, they parent their children poorly, triggering the very hyperactive behaviour they are trying to avoid. Researchers have also put forward other potential factors: for example, perhaps hyperactivity causes children to eat more sugar and not the other way around. Also, many environments associated with high energy play – such as birthday parties – are also associated with high sugar consumption. So what we have here is yet another example of that classic scientific sin: inferring causation from correlation.
But where did the notion of the sugar rush originally come from? Most sources trace the myth back to 1973, when allergist Dr. Benjamin Feingold published his eponymous Feingold Diet. Feingold advocated a diet free of salicylates, food colouring, and artificial flavourings, arguing that these additives had severe psychological effects and that eliminating them could help treat various childhood behavioural issues including hyperactivity. While Feingold didn’t call for the elimination of sugar specifically, parents soon came to distrust all food additives – especially processed sugar, which was becoming increasingly prevalent in all kinds of food products.
The notion that sugar causes behavioural problems got a boost in 1978 with the publication of a study in the journal Food and Cosmetics Toxicology, which examined 265 children described by their parents as hyperactive and unable to concentrate. The study found that many of these children suffered from abnormally low blood sugar levels, which – as we have already covered – is paradoxically associated with high sugar consumption. The myth of the sugar rush was born.
But it did not take long for this notion to be debunked. Subsequent studies have shown that, in fact, the 265 subjects of the 1978 study had blood sugar levels well within the normal range for children their age. As early as 1982, the National Institutes of Health debunked the sugar rush myth, while in 1995, a meta-study by Dr. Mark Wolraich published in the Journal of the American Medical Association examined the findings of 16 studies on sugar and behaviour and came to same overwhelming conclusion: sugar does not cause hyperactivity. In fact, so definitive were these results that a statistician who reviewed the study told Wolraich and his colleagues that he had never seen such consistently negative results in a statistical analysis.
So, in conclusion, everything you think you know about sugar and behaviour is dead wrong, as Dr. Wolraich neatly sums up in his 2019 paper:
“Interestingly, despite researchers not having reached a consensus regarding the exact effects of sugar on mood, it seems that the public strongly believes in the idea that sugar improves mood […] and increases activity levels (especially in children). Our findings indicate that sugary drinks or snacks do not provide a quick ‘fuel refill’ to make us feel more alert.”
Thus, while there are many reasons to be wary of your children consuming too much of the sweet stuff – including childhood obesity, Type 2 Diabetes, and other metabolic disorders – hyperactivity is not among them. So if your child is bouncing off the walls, you’ll have want to consider what other factors might be at play besides excess of sweets and soda. Maybe their environment is too stimulating – or not stimulating enough. Maybe they are acting out against unfair parenting. Or, at the end of the day, maybe they are just children, simply doing what children do.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- The Accidental Discovery of Saccharin, and the Truth About Whether Saccharin is Bad for You
- Why Coke Tried to Switch to “New Coke”
- The Truth About Diamonds
- The Man on the Raft: The Story of Poon Lim
Bonus Fact:
Ever wonder why sugar doesn’t ever seem to spoil? Well, wonder no more!
Two foods are left out on the counter – fresh tomatoes and a bowl of sugar. Within a week or so, one will develop black spots and the other remains pristine, albeit perhaps a little clumpy depending on the humidity of the air. The reason? Osmosis.
While microorganisms love sugar, they also need a certain amount of water to thrive. This level of freely available water, called “water activity (aw),” for bacteria is about 0.91, for molds it is 0.8 and for fungi (yeasts), it must be at least 0.6. The aw of fresh foods is generally about 0.99, while crystalline sucrose (table sugar) is a paltry .06.
In its crystal form bone dry, sucrose (C12H22O11) loves to bind with water (H20). When present in sufficient concentrations, table sugar will suck up all of the water around it. This is why sugar is an excellent food preservative. Via osmosis, the sugar pulls the available water from within the foodstuff, reducing the food’s aw, thus making it unsuitable for microbes to grow, or even survive.
More specifically, at the outer edge of a cell is its membrane, a semi-permeable barrier that allows some substances, including nutrients and wastes, to move in and out. With a higher concentration of sugar outside the cell, the solution is hypertonic, meaning it will draw water from the cell, causing the bacteria (or whatever cell) to shrivel and die. (The reverse could potentially happen as well if the sugar concentration was higher inside the cell, hypotonic, with it drawing water in, perhaps to the point of bursting the cell.)
On a chemical level, it’s pretty interesting as well. Notice all the hydrogen and oxygen involved; between the two molecules, there are 24 hydrogen atoms and 12 oxygen. Each oxygen atom has a slight negative charge and each hydrogen atom has a slight positive charge, and in chemistry, opposites attract. Together, all of these hydrogen and oxygen atoms pull at each other – initially to form their respective molecules (table sugar or water), and then in the process that kills the microbe.
You can also observe this absorption effect simply by taking some cotton candy, which is made of pure spun sugar, and placing it in a humid environment. With just 33% relative humidity, cotton candy left out in the air will completely collapse and crystallize in just 3 days as it absorbs the moisture in the air. At 45% relative humidity, it will completely collapse in just one day. At 75% humidity, it takes just 1 hour. This is why it has only been since 1972 that non-“made on demand” cotton candy has been available. (1972 was when the first fully automated cotton candy machine was invented that could make the fluffy treat and quickly package it in water tight containers).
Speaking of Cotton Candy, while it may seem like cotton candy, which, again, is made of pure sugar (sometimes with food coloring or other flavoring added), would be pretty much the worst thing in the world for you to eat, it should be noted that it only takes about 30 grams of sugar to make a typical serving size of cotton candy, which is about 9 grams less than a 12 ounce can of Coke. Further, cotton candy has no fat, no preservatives and is only about 115 calories per serving. While certainly not a health food, nor filling in any way, there are numerous things people consume every day that are much worse for them health-wise.
Expand for ReferencesNewman, Tim, Is the ‘Sugar Rush’ a Myth? Medical News Today, April 6, 2019, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324896
Knüppel, Anika et al, Sugar Intake From Sweet Food and Beverages, Common Mental Disorder and Depression: Prospective Findings from the Whitehall II Study, Nature, July 27, 2017, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05649-7
Busting the Sugar-Hyperactivity Myth, WebMD, 1999, https://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/busting-sugar-hyperactivity-myth
Krisch, Joshua, There’s No Such Thing as Sugar Rush, According to Science, Fatherly, November 29, 2017, https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/theres-no-thing-sugar-rush-according-science
Geggel, Laura, Does Sugar Make Kids Hyper? Live Science, August 15, 2016, https://www.livescience.com/55754-does-sugar-make-kids-hyper.html
Wolraich, Mark et al, The Effect of Sugar on Behaviour or Cognition in Children: a Meta-Analysis, Journal of the American Medical Association, November 22, 1995, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/391812
Hoover, Daniel & Milich, Richard, Effects of Sugar Ingestion Expectancies on Mother-Child Interactions, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, August 1994, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02168088
The post Are Sugar Rushes and Associated Hyperactivity Actually a Thing appeared first on Today I Found Out.
In the second episode of the acclaimed television series Breaking Bad, high school chemistry teacher-turned-drug kingpin Walter White and his accomplice Jesse Pinkman find themselves in a rather sticky situation. Having just killed two drug dealers who kidnapped and forced them to cook methamphetamine at gunpoint, the pair must now find a way to dispose of the bodies. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of chemistry, Walt comes up with a cunning plan: dissolve the bodies in hydrofluoric acid. While Walt steals the requisite chemicals from his school lab, he sends Jesse to find a suitably large container to dissolve the bodies in, specifying that the container must be made out of polyethylene plastic. Unfortunately, Walt fails to explain the reasoning for this choice, and after failing to find a large enough container, Jesse simply places one of the bodies in a regular bathtub, pours the acid over it, and calls it a day. This turns out to be a mistake, for hours later the ceiling suddenly collapses in a spray of acid and gory pink chunks of flesh, the acid having dissolved not only the body but the enamelled-metal bathtub and the floor beneath it. Whoopsa-doodle…
While the show’s creators have claimed that the chemistry in the show is as accurate as they could make it, they have also admitted to fudging the truth in places to prevent viewers from trying Walt and Jesse’s chemical antics at home. So, just how realistic is the dynamic duo’s plan for dissolving a body? Can Hydrofluoric acid actually reduce 80 kilograms of flesh and bone to a pink paste within hours?
Alas for all you aspiring drug kingpins out there, the answer is no. Indeed, it is curious that an expert chemist like Walter White would choose hydrofluoric acid as his corporeal solvent – not only because this chemical is particularly ill-suited to the task of dissolving human flesh, but because it so dangerous that Walt and Jesse were lucky not to have wound up dead themselves.
Hydrofluoric acid or HF consists of a fluorine atom bonded to a hydrogen atom and, like all acids, will dissociate into its component ions when diluted in water. Because fluorine is one of the most reactive elements on the periodic table, hydrofluoric acid readily etches glass and silicon and will dissolve most metals except for nickel, gold, platinum, or silver; and most plastic except for polyethylene, teflon, natural rubber, and neoprene – so Walt was at least right on that front. Yet despite this corrosiveness, hydrofluoric acid is not, strangely enough, considered a strong acid. This is because the formal definition of a “strong acid” is one which completely dissociates when diluted in water, releasing large amounts of hydrogen ions. Indeed, the term “pH”, used to denote the strength of acids and bases, stands for “potential of hydrogen.” Because fluorine is so reactive, it holds tightly onto its hydrogen ion and dissociates only partially in water, technically making it a weak acid. The upshot of this rather confusing chemical terminology is that when it comes to acids, “strong” does not necessarily mean “corrosive,” since the corrosiveness of an acid depends not on its hydrogen but of the other, negatively-charged ion. Indeed, the strongest acids known to science, the carborane superacids, are millions of times stronger than concentrated sulphuric acid, but will not attack organic tissue.
…and, as it turns out, neither will hydrofluoric acid. In the 10th episode of the 11th season of the Discovery Channel series Mythbusters, hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman teamed up with Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan to investigate some of the show’s chemical claims, including the feasibility of dissolving a body in hydrofluoric acid. To test this myth, the Mythbusters placed the carcass of a pig in an enamelled cast-iron bathtub, poured hydrofluoric acid over it, and waited. And waited. And waited. Disappointingly, even after several hours, the pig carcass remained completely intact, with not a hint of the chunky pink goo from the television series. Nor did the enamel tub show any signs of erosion. At first glance this seems strange, given the extreme reactiveness and corrosiveness of fluorine. However, fluorine is so reactive that when dissolved in water, it tends to bond strongly with other elements, greatly reducing its corrosive power and making it all but useless for disposing of bodies. Indeed, hydrofluoric acid is far more dangerous to the living than to the dead. Readily absorbed through the skin or through the lungs as a vapour, hydrofluoric acid produces severe chemical burns that are initially painless and do not become apparent until a day or so after exposure. But as nasty as that is, it gets much, much worse, for once inside the body hydrofluoric acid becomes an insidious poison, aggressively leaching calcium out of the bones and other tissues. Unfortunately, calcium just happens to be used by the body to signal muscle cells – including those of the heart – to contract. Thus, had Walt and Jesse accidentally absorbed a large enough dose of acid through their skin or lungs, they would likely have died of cardiac arrest several hours later and the whole series would have been considerably shorter.
So, if not hydrofluoric acid, what, then, could Walt and Jesse have used to carry out their nefarious deed? Surprisingly, some of the most effective chemicals for dissolving organic tissue are conveniently some of the easiest to obtain – such as sulphuric acid, commonly found in car batteries. Sulphuric acid or H2SO4 is, unlike HF, both a strong and highly corrosive acid. A powerful hydrolyzing agent, it aggressively dehydrates organic compounds such as carbohydrates and proteins, stripping them of their hydrogen and oxygen and leaving carbon behind. In one classic classroom demonstration, concentrated sulphuric acid is added to a beaker of ordinary white sugar, unleashing a violently exothermic reaction that released hot steam and sulphur oxides and leaves behind a spongy black mass composed of nearly pure carbon. Sulphuric acid is also better at dissolving the calcium apatite in animal bones than other chemicals. For these reasons, sulphuric acid has long been a favourite tool of murderers looking to make their victims disappear without a trace. One infamous case was that of George-Alexandre Sarret, a French lawyer and con artist who in the 1920s carried out an elaborate insurance scheme with the help of two of his lovers, sisters Catherine and Philomène Schmidt. The scheme involved the sisters marrying unhealthy men, on whom Sarret would take out large life insurance policies. A third accomplice, Louis Chambon-Duverger, would pose as the husbands and undergo the requisite medical examination for the insurance policies to be approved. The husbands would then be killed with poison – their ill health preventing a criminal investigation – and the spoils divided up among the conspirators. While the scheme worked, in 1925 Sarret decided that Chambon-Duverger was getting too greedy, and murdered both him and his mistress, Noémie Ballandraux, dissolving their bodies in a vat of sulphuric acid to eliminate the evidence. The crime went unsolved for nearly six years, until in 1931 Catherine Schmidt was arrested for committing another insurance fraud and confessed to her previous crime. Sarret was arrested, tried, convicted for murder, and sentenced to death, being executed by guillotine on April 10, 1934. And for more on the sordid history of this infamous execution device, please check out our video The Last Guillotining Execution…in 1977 on our sister channel Highlight History.
Though Sarret was eventually caught and executed, the effectiveness of his chemical disappearing act would inspire another criminal across the English Channel. Born in 1909 in Stamford, Lincolnshire, John Haigh began his criminal career in the mid-1930s by posing as a solicitor and selling fraudulent stock shares – purportedly from former deceased clients – at below-market rates. However, due to a spelling error on his letterhead, he was soon caught and sentenced to four years in prison for fraud. Upon his release, Haigh vowed to never again leave a victim alive to accuse him. In 1940, Haigh ran into a former employer, William McSwan, at a pub and was soon introduced to McSwan’s parents, Donald and Amy. William collected rent from several properties owned by his parents, and Haigh soon grew envious of his wealth and lifestyle. So, on September 6, 1944, Haigh lured William McSwan into a basement, hit him over the head with a lead pipe, and – inspired by the case of George-Alexandre Sarret – dumped his body in a 45-gallon oil drum of concentrated sulphuric acid. The body took two days to dissolve, whereupon Haigh poured what remained down a manhole. Haigh then went to McSwan’s parents and informed them that William was hiding out in Scotland in order to avoid military service. Over the following year Haigh took over rent collection from William McSwan, but when the war ended and his parents began to wonder why their son had not returned, Haigh decided to kill them as well. And so, on July 2, 1945, Haigh lured Donald and Amy McSwan into a basement, clubbed them over the head, and dissolved their bodies in acid. He then stole their pension cheques, sold their rental properties for £8000, and moved into the Onslow Court Hotel in Kensington.
While Haigh should have been set for life, he was also an inveterate gambler and soon found himself back in dire financial straits. So, in 1947, he befriended the couple Archibald and Rose Henderson and on February 12 lured them into a rented workshop, shot them dead, and – I hope you’re beginning to see a pattern here – dissolved their bodies in sulphuric acid. He then forged a will with their signatures and sold their possessions for another £8000.
Haigh’s last victim was Olive Durant-Deacon, the 69-year-old widow of wealthy solicitor John Durant-Deacon, whom Haigh befriended on the pretence of being an engineer interested in Olive’s idea for artificial fingernails. On February 18, 1949, the same macabre dance repeated itself as Haigh lured Durant Deacon to his workshop, shot her dead, and dissolved her body in acid. This time, however, Haigh would fall victim to his own haste and chequered past. Two days after the murder, one of Durant-Deacon’s friends reported her missing. The police soon discovered Haigh’s long history of fraud and theft and searched the workshop, where they discovered a pile of incriminating evidence, including a dry-cleaning receipt for Durant-Deacon’s Persian wool coat, which Haigh had removed before dissolving her body. Even worse, unlike previous workshops Haigh had rented for his nefarious deeds, the one used to kill and dissolve Olive Durant-Deacon had no floor drain, so Haigh simply dumped her liquefied remains over a rubble pile behind the property. An examination of the pile revealed 28 pounds of human body fat, part of a human foot, gallstones, and part of a denture that was eventually identified as belonging to Olive Durant-Deacon. Haigh, dubbed by the press the “Acid Bath Murderer”, was arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, meeting his fate at the end of a hangman’s rope in August 10, 1949.
In more recent years, the Sicilian Mafia has become infamous for its “lupara Bianca” or “white shotgun” murders, in which victims mysteriously disappear without a trace. According to former hitman Filippo Marchese, who worked under mafia boss Vincenso Chiaracane until his own death in 1982, this is accomplished using concentrated sulphuric acid, which he claimed could completely liquefy a corpse in as little as 15 minutes. However, given the two previous examples we have covered, this claim seems rather dubious, and in 2011 a group led by researcher Massimo Grillo at the University of Palermo set out to test the former mafioso’s claims. Using pigs as an analogue for humans, the team placed various cuts of tissue and bone in different concentrations of sulphuric acid and timed how long it took for them to dissolve. Unsurprisingly, this took far longer than Marchese had claimed – on the order of two days with concentrated acid. By diluting the acid in water, the researchers were able to cut this time down to 12 hours for muscle and cartilage, but it still took two days for the bone to dissolve – and even then the process left behind large, fragile bone fragments with the consistency of shortbread which still had to be pulverized by hand. Another team at the University of Milan obtained similar results, with lead researcher Cristina Cattaneo concluding:
“…it is conceivable that a possible attempt to destroy an entire body… is a thoroughly different task from destroying small samples.”
For a more effective means of destroying evidence, you are better off moving to the other end of the pH scale and using a strong alkali – specifically sodium or potassium hydroxide – better known as lye. Lye is also a powerful hydrolyzing agent, with the added benefit that it is more effective than acids at breaking down the protein keratin that makes up hair and fingernails. Indeed, this is why it is commonly sold for clearing clogged drains. Furthermore, it is much easier to obtain lye in large quantities without arousing suspicion – for example, for making homemade soap – whereas strong acids are more heavily regulated since they can be used to manufacture explosives. Indeed, immersion in lye is the preferred body-disposal method for Mexican drug cartels, who rather darkly refer to the process as “making pozole” – a traditional Mexican meat stew – while highway departments, hospitals, and universities use lye-based “digesters” to dispose of roadkill, laboratory animals, human cadavers donated for medical research, and other biological waste. Heated to 100 degrees Celsius – the boiling point of water – a concentrated lye solution can dissolve a body in as little as 2 hours. Pressurizing the digester vessel allows the temperature to be raised even higher, further accelerating the process. In the end, all that remains is a light brown liquid composed mainly of water and amino acids and a handful of crumbling bone fragments – both of which can be safely flushed down a regular drain.
The efficiency of this process has led to its emergence as a green alternative to cremation for disposing of human corpses. Known as “aquamation,” the process consumes only one-eighth of the energy and emits one-tenth the greenhouse gasses as traditional cremation, with the added bonus of not emitting toxic heavy metals – such as mercury from dental fillings – into the environment. The bone fragments that remain can be pulverized in a machine called a cremulator, producing a fine white powder that can be placed in an urn, buried, or scattered in place of traditional ashes. First patented in 1888, aquamation was not offered commercially until the 1980s – and then only for disposing of pets. Only recently has it begun to gain traction within the human funeral industry, with Minnesota being the first US state to legalize the process in 2003. Ten more states soon followed, the most recent being California in 2020. However, the funeral industry is very resistant to change, and 11 states have passed legislation banning aquamation outright. It remains to be seen whether the process will ever catch up to or supplant burial and cremation as the dominant method of body disposal in the United States.
But while dissolution in lye is by far the easiest and most effective way of disposing of a body, it isn’t that interesting to look at. But thankfully for murderers and mafiosos with a taste for the dramatic, there is a more exciting option: piranha solution. Mainly used in analytical laboratories for cleaning traces of organic materials off glassware or silicon wafers, piranha solution is composed of concentrated hydrogen peroxide or H2O2 mixed with sulphuric acid. As covered in our previous video The German Rocket Fighter that Dissolved its Pilots Alive, concentrated hydrogen peroxide – also known as High Test Peroxide or HTP – is so reactive and corrosive it can strip flesh from bone in seconds. Mixing it with sulphuric acid combines the oxidation of the former with the hydrolization of the latter, producing a powerful one-two chemical punch. So effective is piranha solution at dissolving organic tissue that a piece of meat and bone lowered into it will disappear almost as soon as it hits the surface. This deadly efficiency was dramatically illustrated by the Mythbusters, who followed up their hydrofluoric acid test by immersing another pig carcass in piranha solution. This time the solution reacted immediately and violently, producing copious quantities of heat and steam and reducing the pig to a dark-green oily soup within minutes.
But while quick, efficient, and dramatic, piranha solution suffers from the same problem as sulphuric and other strong acids: the sale of its ingredients is tightly regulated, creating a highly-incriminating paper trail. Indeed, even in cases where a criminal managed to successfully make a body disappear, this paper trail is often enough to crack the investigation wide open. Take the case of American chemist Larissa Schuster, who in 2003 along with her lab assistant James Fagone murdered her ex-husband Tim Schuster and dissolved his body in a barrel of hydrochloric acid. Police investigators quickly uncovered receipts for the purchase of the acid and the rental of a storage unit, a search of which turned up the barrel containing Tim Schuster’s remains. In 2008, Larissa Schuster was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In conclusion, for all its chemical verisimilitude, Breaking Bad was dead wrong about dissolving bodies. Not only is hydrofluoric acid possibly the worst choice for the job, but even the most corrosive chemicals like sulphuric acid and sodium hydroxide can take hours or even days to get the job done – and even then they often leave readily-identifiable fragments – and an incriminating paper trail of suspicious purchases – behind. So if you ever find yourself looking for the best way to dispose of a body, take a moment to reflect on how you got to this place. Chances are, you have much bigger problems to deal with.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
- How Urine Can Be Used to Make Gunpowder (and Other Interesting Pee Facts)
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Expand for ReferencesPalmer, Brian, Soluble Dilemma: How Long Does it Take to Dissolve a Human Body? Slate, December 10, 2009, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/12/how-long-does-it-take-to-dissolve-a-human-body.html
Burks, Raychelle, The Acid (Bath) Test, Chemistry World, June 16, 2017, https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/can-acid-dissolve-a-body/3007496.article
Helmenstine, Anne Marie, Dissolving a Body in Hydrofluoric Acid, as on “Breaking Bad”, ThoughtCo, June 29, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/hydrofluoric-acid-breaking-bad-3976039
Helmenstine, Anne Marie, List of the Strong Acids and Key Facts, ThoughtCo, September 1, 2021, https://www.thoughtco.com/list-of-the-strong-acids-603651
Helmenstine, Anne Marie, What is the Strongest Acid? ThoughtCo, May 5, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-strongest-acid-604314
Helmenstine, Anne Marie, How to Make Chemical Piranha Solution, ThoughtCo, June 4, 2020, https://www.thoughtco.com/chemical-piranha-solution-608272
Atkin, Emily, A Green Alternative to Cremation: Dissolving Your Corpse in Water and Lye, Mother Jones, June 17, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/06/a-green-alternative-to-cremation-dissolving-your-corpse-in-water-and-lye/
Wilson, Joseph, The History of Alkaline Hydrolysis, https://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/History-of-Alkaline-Hydrolysis.pdf
Wolchover, Natalie, How Long do Mafia Victims Take to Dissolve in Acid? LiveScience, February 25, 2011, https://www.livescience.com/33074-mafia-victims-dissolve-sulfuric-acid.html
Campbell, Hayley, A New Way to Dispose of Corpses – With Chemistry! WIRED, March 27, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/alkaline-hydrolysis-liquid-biocremation/
Holohan, Meghan, How Hard is it to Dissolve a Body? Mental Floss, April 6, 2011, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/27441/how-hard-it-dissolve-body
The post Can You Really Dissolve a Human Body in Acid Like in Breaking Bad appeared first on Today I Found Out.
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Laura A. asks: What exactly do Scientologists believe? Oh boy, we can already tell that the comment section for this one is going to be a ton of fun, so let’s just get straight to it. The Church of Scientology has a reputation as an infamously secretive and litigious organisation that hides its inner workings far from the prying eyes of [...]
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On July 20, 1969, the world looked on in awe as 39-year-old astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off a ladder of the Lunar Module Eagle and onto the surface of the moon, becoming the first human to set foot on a natural celestial object. This moment, watched on television by over 650 million people worldwide, has gone down in history as [...]
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Agencies like the CIA and MI6 are tasked with collecting and processing data deemed potentially vital to their respective counties’ national interests, and then, in an ideal world, making sure those who need to know this information to inform their decisions and plans know it. In order to do this, they need people on the ground, so to speak. So [...]
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When Boris Yeltsin resigned as president of the Russian Federation, it was expected, but sudden. He resigned so his Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin could become president on January 1, 2000 – the start of the new millennium. Since then, Putin has been the most powerful man in Russia and one of the most powerful men in the world. Today that [...]
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Choking the chicken. Shaking out the curtains. Spanking the monkey. Lone Rangering. Polishing the jewel. Shaking hands with the milkman. Celebrating Palm Sunday. Romancing the stone. These are but a few of the colourful euphemisms for what is perhaps humanity’s oldest pastime: masturbation. For much of human history, the act of piloting the Millennium Falcon with Hand Solo has been [...]
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More than a century after it struck an iceberg and sank beneath the waves, the Royal Mail Ship Titanic continues to capture the popular imagination. It is a classic fable of ambition, hubris, and the tragic social divisions of the Gilded Age, and has inspired countless books, documentaries, TV programs, and one of the highest-grossing feature films of all time. [...]
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On December 14, 1979, a light aircraft of Sabourin Lake Airways disappeared while on an air ambulance flight out of Red Lake, in the Canadian province of Ontario. Aboard were pilot Ken Leishman, nurse Janet Meekus, and patient Eva Harper, an indigenous woman who had broken her hip in a snowmobile accident. So wild and remote was the crash site [...]
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When we picture the First World War, we tend to think of the mud and slaughter of the trenches in the fields of Belgium and France. But this is only a very narrow view of the conflict, for true to its name the First World War was very much a world war, with combat taking place as far afield as [...]
The post The Littlest Naval War: Britain’s Balls to the Wall Bid to End German Domination of a Single Lake appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Australia is infamous for its abundance of absurdly dangerous wildlife. From highly-venomous brown snakes and funnelweb spiders to giant saltwater crocodiles and great white sharks, nearly everything that slithers, crawls, or swims in the Land Down Under seems perfectly designed to inflict the most horrible death possible. But one Aussie creature stands above the rest, its sting so painful its [...]
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South Georgia lies 54 degrees south of the equator in the South Atlantic Ocean, some 1,900 kilometres off the coast of Argentina. A cold and inhospitable place covered in jagged snow-capped mountains, fjords, and glaciers, until its discovery by European sailors in 1675 the island had no permanent native population. For the next three hundred years the island would remain [...]
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At the heart of every nuclear weapon lies the core or pit, a sphere of plutonium the size of a baseball and weighing around 6 kilograms. When a nuclear weapon is triggered, a shell of conventional high-explosive “lenses” wrapped around the core detonates, creating a spherical shock wave that squeezes the core to criticality and sets off the nuclear chain [...]
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Over the past 70 years one woman has contributed to countless major medical and biological breakthroughs, advancing our understanding of cancer, haemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; unlocking the secrets of human ageing; and helping to develop vaccines for polio, measles, mumps, and HPV. She has travelled the globe, rocketed into space, and stood in the path of nuclear bombs – and [...]
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If you’ve ever spent any time arguing on the internet, you’ve likely come across a philosophical principle known as ‘Ockham’s Razor.’ Along with ad hominem attacks and comparing people you don’t like to Hitler, Ockham’s Razor is a favourite argument of keyboard warriors everywhere, most often understood as meaning “the simplest argument is most often the correct one.” But where [...]
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There are very many things in this world that may kill you – in fact, there is almost nothing that cannot – but can your own senses be a danger to you? Is there a noise loud enough to kill you or can you be so assaulted by a bad smell that you never recover from it? The answer to [...]
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Has this ever happened to you? You are presented with something unbearably cute – a baby, perhaps, or a puppy or a kitten – and are suddenly gripped by an overwhelming desire to pinch, squeeze, crush, or even bite the little thing. You clench your hands, grit your teeth, and maybe even let out an audible growl, so overtaken are [...]
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