Author: rdaybell

APRIL 7, 1864: IT WAS A HUGE HUMPY BEAST

Posted on by rdaybell

The first camel race in the United States was held in Sacramento, California, on April 7, 1864. The dromedaries belonged to Samuel McLeneghan who had paid $1,495 for 35 of them at an auction in Benicia, California. The camels had a curious history, one that began with an American military expedition to northern African nations along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The idea of the expedition and the importing of camels belonged to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (this is of course the Jefferson Davis who later led the Confederacy, which had no camels that we know of). Davis convinced Congress to go along with this scheme and his vision of a Camel Corps that would carry military supplies across the country from east to west, it being reasoned that camels could carry heavier loads than horses on less food and water (sort of the same idea behind today’s guest worker programs for foreigners).

Unfortunately, the Camel Corps looked better on paper than in reality. The camels did not get along with their fellow animals or people: they stampeded horses and mules, attacked and bit pedestrians and chewed laundry off clotheslines. Camel caravans were only allowed to pass through some towns at night. With the Civil War getting underway (and Jefferson Davis going to the other side), interest in the project flagged and the Camel Corps disbanded. Of the camels that didn’t go to the races with McLeneghan, some joined the circus; some were employed by private companies. Eventually, many were abandoned in the desert. And for years afterward, prospectors and drifters might come rushing into a bar, raving about the strange apparition they had seen in the desert.

APRIL 5, 1939: FIRST CAME THE WHEEL

Posted on by rdaybell

April 4 may have been a banner day for tinkerers, but April 5 was pretty impressive as well. In 1939, another important invention made its debut — Dr. Elbert Wonmug’s time machine. Oh, there had been time machines before this, but this would be the first to transport an honest-to-goodness caveman from way back in the Bone Age right into the 20th century. The caveman was none other than Alley Oop, beamed in from the kingdom of Moo where for the past seven years he had been doing typical caveman things — riding around on his pet dinosaur in a furry loincloth, brandishing his big club at his many enemies, and courting the lovely Ooola.
But once in the 20th century with a time machine to beam him about, Oop was no longer bound by prehistoric limitations. He became a roving ambassador, traveling to such destinations as ancient Egypt, Arthurian England and the American frontier, rubbing elbows with such folks as Robin Hood, Cleopatra, Ulysses, Shakespeare and Napoleon. At one point he even visited the moon. Pretty impressive for a Neanderthal.  Let’s see your Australopithecus do that.

The Big Oops

Time travel, if you will, back to this day in 1722, an Easter Sunday.  Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, sailing  with three ships —  the Arend, the Thienhoven, and Afrikaansche Galey (sort of like Columbus and his Nina, Pinta and Santa Marie, but a lot more of a tongue twister) — lands on an island in the South Pacific and names it Easter Island.  Along with several thousand inhabitants, he discovers a bunch of stone heads that look rather amazingly like Alley Oop.  Could it be that Alley Oop got here earlier in his time machine?

APRIL 4, 1914: TO BE CONTINUED

Posted on by rdaybell

The Perils of Pauline, one of the earliest American movie serials and a classic example of the damsel in distress genre, premiered in Los Angeles on April 4, 1914. Every week for twenty weeks, actress Pearl White faced imminent danger and sure death at the hands of pirates, hostile Indians, gypsies and various mustachioed villains, escaping at the last possible second through her own ingenuity, resourcefulness and pluck. Her adventures in Pauline and the follow-up Exploits of Elaine were popular movie fare through the 1920s. Neither serial was a true “cliffhanger” in which episodes end with an unresolved danger to be resolved at the beginning of the next installment.  Instead White jumped in and out of the jaws of death in each installment.

Like many other silent film stars, Pearl White performed her own stunts for the serial, at considerable risk. During one scene, the hot-air balloon she was piloting escaped and carried her across the Hudson River into a storm, before landing miles away. In another incident, she permanently injured her back in a fall.  Which probably deprived us of the Dangers of Desdemona, Jeopardy of Janet and Predicaments of Prunella.

And of course White was more than once tied to railroad tracks by a mustache-twirling villain. One such scene was filmed on a curved trestle in New Hope, Pennsylvania on the Reading Company’s New Hope Branch. Now referred to as “Pauline’s Trestle,” it is a tourist attraction offering rides from New Hope to Lahaska, Pennsylvania, across the original trestle.

cliff-hanger

[klif-hang-er]

noun

1. a melodramatic adventure serial in which each installment ends in suspense in order to interest the reader or viewer in the next installment.

2. a situation or contest of which the outcome is suspensefully uncertain up to the very last moment:

Stopping for a moment, she convinced herself that she had to have a good lead over her pursuers, if they were even following her. She had to find Paul. Looking around, however, she realized that not only didn’t she know where Paul was, she didn’t know where she was. She decided to work her way back in the same general direction from which she thought she had come, keeping herself hidden. If they were chasing her, they would not be stealthy. She’d hear them before they saw her. And try to find Paul. Or someone else to help. But who?

Her foot caught the bottom of her sarong, and she fell to the ground. “This damn outfit,” she said aloud as she tried to untangle herself. “I might as well be wearing a strait jacket.”

She pulled herself up to her hands and knees and looked around. There just a few feet ahead of her, two golden eyes blazed in the dark. At first they were disembodied, hovering in the air, but as they stared at her, she began to discern an outline of whatever it was that possessed the eyes. It was big, really big, and as black as the night around it. It was a cat, at least four feet at its shoulders. And it wasn’t purring.

Excerpt from Voodoo Love Song by Richard Daybell

APRIL 3, 1667: THE LIONS ARE COMING, THE LIONS ARE COMING

Posted on by rdaybell

In addition to being a member of the British peerage, Edward, Marquis of Worcester, who died on April 3, 1667, was a bit of a dabbler, a sort of ersatz inventor, and author of an odd little book witn the catchy title A Century of the names and scantlings of such inventions as at present I can call to mind to have tried and perfected. The book, written some ten years earlier, describes, as the title suggests, a hundred speculative projects, none of them, however, detailed enough to allow a reader to actually put them into practice: secret writing with peculiar inks, explosive devices that would sink any ship, ships that would resist any explosive devices, floating gardens, a method to prevent sands from shifting, automatic assault pistols and cannons, a timer for lighting candles at any time during the night, a hundred-foot pocket ladder, flying machines.

Although many of his ideas foreshadowed later inventions, it is unclear whether he had thought through the methods by which they would work. One idea was put to work with success although unusually so. As the owner of Raglan Castle, he had constructed some hydraulic engines and wheels for bringing water from the moat to the top of the castle tower.  During the Civil War, Roundheads (supporters of Oliver Cromwell with bad haircuts) had approached the castle with not the best of intentions. The Marquis had his waterworks put into play. “There was such a roaring,” he later wrote, “that the unwelcome visitors stood transfixed, not knowing what to make of it.” On cue, one of the Marquis’ men came running toward them shouting that the lions were loose. The intruders tumbled over one another down the stairs in an effort to escape, never looking back until the castle was out sight.

Edward suggested that when he died, a model of his engine should be buried with him: “I call this a Semi Omnipotent Engine, and do intend that a model thereof be buried with me.”[

Fast Forward Four Hundred Years

And another ersatz inventor with a bad haircut.  Dean Kamen was mostly a master of hype. Among his contributions to society are an all-terrain electric wheelchair and a device that uses compressed air to launch SWAT teams to the roofs of tall buildings in a single bound.  Interestingly enough, Kamen’s father was an illustrator for Mad and Weird Science.

The most famous of his inventions by far was a closely guarded secret that he claimed would change the world when made public. Unveiled in 2001 to major drumrolls, the Segway is an electric, self-balancing human transporter. It landed pretty much with a thud.  Adding insult, Time Magazine included the Segway at the top of its list of the 50 worst inventions.

British entrepreneur Jimi Heseleden begged to differ. He bought the Segway company in 2010. Unfortunately, he died that same year when he fell off a cliff while riding his Segway.

Listen Up Roundheads

The aforementioned Time list of the worst inventions included such sure-fire ideas as Hair in a Can (you spray it on, guys), Tanning Beds,  Smell-o-Vision, Hula Chair and Venetian-Blind Sunglasses. The Almanac has visited some of these in the past and will visit others in the future.

APRIL 2, 1877: Faster Than a Speeding Cannonball

Posted on by rdaybell

Some dreamers looked to the stars and wondered what it would be like to fly through space.  Some looked to the sky and wondered what it would be like to fly like a bird.  Then there were those that looked at a cannon and wondered what it would be like to be shot through the air from that cannon.  We remember and idolize our flight pioneers and space pioneers.  Can you remember the name of a single human cannonball?

How about Zazel?  Yes, back in 1877, April 2 to be exact ,when those amazing men in their flying machines were still staring at pigeons and wondering how, 14-year-old Rossa Matilda Richter became the first in a storied line of Second Amendment enthusiasts to be shot right out of a cannon and into immortality.  The oohs and aahs of the crowd at the Royal Aquarium in London as Zazel soared overhead to a net some 70 feet away were the nascent sounds of a gun lobby to be.

Zazel was the protégé of The Great Farini, the Canadian rope-walker known for performing above Niagara Falls. He invented the device that would launch Zazel and other human projectiles for years to come.

Zazel’s act was an amazing success. At the peak of her career, she was earning £200 a week, performing before crowds of 20,000 or more every day in England and the USA.  Although many others followed in her footsteps, she was the first and the level of danger she faced was the highest. Eventually it caught up with her: she missed the net, and although she survived, she broke her back.  She retired and faded into obscurity.

The Terrible Terrible Biddle Boys

Admission was ten cents. The movie lasted about an hour. There were no cartoons or newsreels. The first theater to show an actual movie was the Electric Theater in Los Angeles on April 2, 1902. The Capture of the Biddle Brothers was an adventure melodrama based on actual events.

A few months earlier, condemned prisoners Jack and Ed Biddle escaped from a Pennsylvania jail using tools and weapons supplied to them by the warden’s wife, Kate Soffel. “Our picture, which is a perfect reproduction of the capture, is realistic and exciting,” the producer exclaimed — breathlessly one might imagine. Two sheriff-filled sleighs pursue the Biddles and Soffel through the white and drifting snow. The dastardly trio turns to make a stand, shotguns and revolvers blazing. Ed Biddle is shot, falls to the ground in a snow bank. On one elbow, he continues to fire shot after shot until he collapses. The second Biddle continues to fire, and he too is shot. Mrs. Soffel seeing the hopelessness of their situation, if not the error of her ways, attempts to shoot herself. All three are captured. The brothers both die of their wounds. Mrs. Soffel survives, but a reconciliation with her warden husband is probably unlikely.

The movie itself did not survive, and the names of the actors are lost to history. Oddly enough a remake — well maybe not exactly a remake — was released in 1984.  Mrs. Soffel starring Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson once again tells the tale of the terrible, terrible Biddle brothers. But not for a dime.

 

APRIL 1, 1903: THE TENOR NOSE

Posted on by rdaybell

Fabrio Abruzzi was born in a village near Milan in 1883. The Abruzzi family was quite poor with Fabrio’s father cobbling together their existence as a shoemaker. Almost from the time Fabrio could walk, he was put to work pounding leather for his father. He was a nice boy (the villagers lovingly called him bambino brutto) and he was hard-working although his mind would wander and he frequently distracted himself by singing popular Italian folk songs.

As a child, he always had a pleasant singing voice and when, as a teenager, his voice changed, it became a magnificent tenor voice. Fate smiled on Fabrio. A LaScala impresario happened through the village and heard the young man sing as he pounded leather. He took Fabrio under his wings, coached him extensively and on April 1, 1903, scheduled his debut as the principal tenor in Puccini’s Euripedes et Copernica.

On the day of his performance, he prepared himself (as many leading singers of the day did) by forcing lumps of pancetta up each nostril of his nose to lubricate the nasal passages (he had a magnificent Roman nose). Unfortunately, the pancetta became wedged there and he was forced to go on stage with it still in place. Things looked bad. Fabrio did not sound like a magnificent tenor; his voice was stuffy and nasal. The audience was growing restless with the need to toss tomatoes (which Italians always brought with them to the opera). Fortunately, the famous aria ti amo mortadella comes early in the first act. It’s a robust piece and Fabrio gave it his all, thereby dislodging the pancetta and hurtling meaty projectiles through the air. One put a crack in the second violinist’s Stradavarius; another slammed into the conductor’s forehead, causing him to lead the orchestra off into an unrestrained allegro punctuated by several tomatoes to the back of his head.

But Fabrio was a success. He went on to have a short but illustrious career and was known throughout Italy as voce bellissima brutte facce.

Pancetta Projectiles in 3-D Perhaps

In a letter dated April 1, 1954, Edwin Eugene Mayer explained how he progressed from his early career as a pharmacist in Portland, Oregon, to head of the nation’s largest producer of photographic postcards. Somewhere along the way, Mayer had a eureka moment: updating the old-fashioned 3-D stereoscope. The result, introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair, was the View-Master (although Mayer disliked the name; he thought it sounded like some kind of kitchen appliance).

It must have been cumbersome at first, loading all those tiny people and objects into the viewer, sending the viewer back to the factory to be reloaded with new little people and objects once you got tired of the first bunch. But clever Mayer came up with a fix. Instead of loading actual little people and objects into the viewer, he developed a reel with pictures using the fancy new Kodachrome 16 mm film that had become available. The reel had seven pairs of transparencies, fooling the person looking into the viewer that he or she is seeing 3-D. The original reels were mainly scenic, but through the years, content expanded into adaptations of cartoons, movies and television. Since View-Masters introduction, there have been 25 different viewer models. The reels and the internal mechanisms have remain unchanged so that any of the more than a billion reels that have been produced will work in any viewer.

View-Master has been inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame.

Still More 3-D

Somewhere between the stereoscope and the View-Master, another inventor was beguiled by the wonders of 3-D.  Mervin Ipod spent several years in an attempt to develop a working 3-D radio.  Unfortunately those years were spent in vain, although Mervin Ipod did go on to a bit more success with the invention that bears his name — the Mervinator.

MARCH 31, 1889:What Hath Iron Wrought

Posted on by rdaybell

On March 31, 1889, the structure that would forever change the Paris skyline opened to the public.  The French were understandably proud of the Tour Eiffel, “La dame de fer” (“Iron Lady”).  They enthused:

“We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection … of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower … To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years … we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.”

Well, maybe not everyone.

The Tower was the centerpiece of the 1889 World’s Fair, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.  At a height of 1,083 feet, it surpassed the Washington Monument as the tallest freestanding structure in the world.  Continuing the game of one-upmanship, Americans struck back with the Chrysler Building in 1930.  In 1957, the French regained the title by adding an aerial to the top of the tower.

The tower has three levels open to the public.  The top level, 906 feet above the ground, has an observation deck and a private pied à terre built for Gustave Eiffel.  Some six million people make the climb every year.  As far as we know, none have ever been invited into the pied à terre.

Fooling Around with Father Time

We’ve been enjoying the benefits of daylight saving time for a couple of weeks now – something most of us have always known. But it wasn’t always so. We saved no daylight before March 31 in 1918, when daylight saving time went into effect in the United States for the first time. It was abandoned after World War I and had an off an on again existence for the next half-century.

Strangely enough, the concept was fairly controversial. In a government hearing on daylight saving time back in the late 40s, Senators brought up several unusual points.

The Senator from Louisiana wondered what effect the change would have on his milk supply since “the flow of milk is not governed by any act of Congress.” The Senator from Rhode Island answered: “I am not an authority on milk – I use it once in a while – but I am sure there will not be any trouble with the delivery of milk to the Senator’s door merely because of the variation of one hour in time.”

But the Senator from Louisiana was just getting started: “Daylight savings time or no daylight savings time, the birds are going to their nests according to standard time, and the squirrels will go to their rest in the same way; and the cows will want to go to the barns and get their food at that time, and they are entitled to do so. But the Senate bids the sun and the moon to stand still – why? To accommodate some of these ambitious people who like to get to work early and like to get away from work early and get out in the sun and play golf, and, after a few rounds of golf, retire for proper refreshments.

“Even love would be affected. A boy calls a young lady up and . . . they make a date for the evening and fix an hour. She has standard time and he has daylight savings time and they do not get together at all. It merely makes for confusion all around.”

Nevertheless, fifty-six senators voted for the daylight saving time bill. Calculations indicate that since that time we’ve saved 8,402 hours of daylight per person.

 

 

March 30, 1921: On the Corner of Sodom and Gomorrah

Posted on by rdaybell

The town of Zion, Illinois, banned all jazz performances on this musicless day, labeling them sinful, right up there with tobacco and alcohol and sexting as things its citizens could well do without. The very word jazz was thought (correctly) to have a sexual connotation. The decadent rhythms and wild dancing it elicited were feared (correctly) to be leading young people down the road to sexual abandon (remember Footloose, barely a degree of Kevin Bacon from Satan himself), degeneracy, and bad manners. “Oh, you got trouble right here in Zion city.”

Zion, Illinois is a bunch of degrees from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz with its Bourbon Street, bordellos and sin, sin, sin. Zion was founded in 1901 by John Alexander Dowie as a place where people of faith could come together and live in a moral environment, reading the Good Book from  Fri ’til Monday. The population was 24,655 as of the 2020 census. Zion is one of only a few cities in the world to have been completely planned out before building. And Dowie thought of just about everything. The north-south roads in the original plan were all named from the Bible –Ezekiel Place; Gabriel, Galilee, and Gideon Avenues; Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but no John. And no Duke Ellington Circle or Thelonious Monk Boulevard.

During the same year that Zion proscribed jazz, the town nixed evil alcohol,  In what can only be described as a binge, the citizens poured 80,000 pints of beer into Zion sewers.  Did they actually have 80,000 pints on hand?  Or did they have to borrow from nearby towns?  Perhaps Gabriel and Galilee Avenues harbored a lot of closet imbibers.  And maybe even a Louis Armstrong record or two.

 

Pencil Me In

Hymen J. Lipman one of the Philadelphia’s leading stationers, founded the first ever envelope company in the United States. Lipman didn’t just content himself with envelopes. His vision took him to pencils as well. And on March 30, 1858, the forward-looking Lipman earned himself a patent for a pencil with an eraser built right into one end of it. This was a giant step for the pencil industry.

Joseph Reckendorfer looked at Lipman’s pencil and saw dollar signs. He also saw himself as a titan of the pencil industry. He would be to pencils what Rockefeller was to oil, what Vanderbilt was to railroads. He bought the pencil patent from Lipman for $100,000 (the equivalent of a couple million today).

But alas it wasn’t to be. Pencil manufacturer A. W. Faber began producing eraser-tipped pencils without paying a penny in royalties to Reckendorfer. Reckendorfer sued Faber.  In 1875, the lawsuit made its way to the Supreme Court which declared the patent invalid, reasoning that Lipman’s design combined a known technology, the pencil, with another known technology, the eraser, not creating a new use. Bad news for Reckendorfer.

March 29, 1974: Can’t Someone Give Us an At Ease

Posted on by rdaybell

One can imagine the look on the faces of Chinese peasants digging a well on their rural farm when, on March 29, 1974, they discovered not water but a huge subterranean chamber in which an 8,000-man army of fully-armed soldiers with horses and chariots stood ready for battle.  The life-sized figures were all individually crafted from terra cotta and they had stood at attention for more than 2,000 years.

The great chamber was the final resting place of Qin Shi Huang Di (“first emperor of Qin”), who unified various warring states to create a Chinese empire in 221 B.C.

Along with the terra cotta G.I. Joes, were enough bronze and iron farm implements, spears, swords, jade, and silk to keep grins on archaeologists’ faces for years to come.

Dash It All

This day in 1990 marked the beginning of the Hyphen War in Czechoslovakia. Although the USSR had fallen a year earlier, the official name of the country was still the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. President Václav Havel proposed merely dropping the word Socialist from the name, but Slovak politicians wanted another change – the spelling of the name with a hyphen (i.e., Republic or Federation of Czecho-Slovakia ), as it was spelled from Czechoslovak independence in 1918 until 1920, and again in 1938 and 1939. President Havel agreed to the change, but the Czechoslovak parliament in typical political fashion resolved that the country’s long name was to be spelled without a hyphen in Czech and with a hyphen in Slovak.

This solution was found to be not only dumb but unsatisfactory, and less than a month later, the parliament reversed itself. Problem not solved. Although the Slovaks were demanding a hyphen, the Czechs called it a dash. The Czechs usually use the same term for both; Slovaks use different terms. Thus the Hyphen War began. Oddly enough, the Czechs did not call it the Dash War.

While the Hyphen War was not really a hot war (nor a cold war), it demonstrated differences between Czechs and Slovaks about their identity, that perhaps they really weren’t meant for each other. The slippery slope: the frequent bickering over minor issues, the trial separation, and in 1992, both sides said yes to splitsville. The country was split into two states – the Czech Republic and Slovakia – in what is called the Velvet Divorce (or for some, the Vel-vet Divorce).

MARCH 28, 1910: Not with the Mouse Again

Posted on by rdaybell

Jimmie Dodd, who was born on March 28, 1910, was an American actor who had small parts in movies during the early 50s. His specialty seemed to be playing taxi drivers (You can check him out in Easter Parade.) His big break came in 1955 when he became the fearless leader of a gang of young teenagers who all performed on TV five times weekly sporting mouse ears.

Dodd was, of course, the head mouseketeer on the Mickey Mouse Club. Dodd also penned the infamous “Mickey Mouse Club March” as well as other songs which he performed on the program accompanying himself on his “mouse-guitar.” It must have been embarrassing enough for teenagers, wearing those mouse ears, but for a guy in his forties — well, chances are he drank heavily.

Kingdoms Can Be Magic or They Can Be Wild

Herding teenagers in mouse ears is one thing, but being chased by wild animals week after week was quite another. It was, however bread and butter for Marlin Perkins, born on this date in 1905. For 35 years beginning in 1950, Perkins was insulted, chased, bitten and stung, first on Zoo Parade and then on Wild Kingdom. Perkins eventually got smart and let his sidekick Jim Fowler interact with the animals while he narrated from a safe distance.

The Nays of Texas

On March 28, 1845, Mexico had a diplomatic temper tantrum over the territory of Texas and broke off relations with the United States. (Either both countries wanted Texas or neither country wanted Texas.)  Said the Mexican president: “We’re going to build a big, beautiful wall, and the United States is going to pay for it.”