In the third century BC, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth as 24,700 miles. (It’s actually 24,900 miles). But no one listened to him. For 1500 years, everyone believed Claudius Ptolemy’s calculation, which was 17,800 miles. That’s the number Columbus used when he miscalculated where India was.
According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great slept with two things under his pillow: a dagger and Homer’s Iliad.
You know how on city buses, you press a panel to tell the driver you want to get off at the next stop? When I was a kid, you pulled on the wire over your head, above the window. I’m sure I’m not the only kid who found it thrilling to be the one who got to light up the “Stop Requested” sign for the driver.
Horse-drawn omnibuses in the mid-nineteenth century were also rigged up with wires or straps that ran along either side of the roof of the bus. Each strap ended in a ring, which the driver wore around each arm. If you wanted to get off on the left, you tugged the left strap, and for the right, the right strap. As there were no lanes or traffic lights, the driver would cut across the road to stop on whatever side the passenger had asked for, which must have made for some harrowing traffic snarl ups.
The word “cuneiform” is pronounced “cu-NAY-i-form.” And zoology is pronounced “zoh-AH-luh-gee.”
I’ve been researching the fourteenth century. It’s tough going. As Barbara Tuchman describes it in her book A Distant Mirror, the fourteenth century was a “violent, bewildered, tormented, suffering and disintegrating age.” Besides wars, corruption, Church schisms, economic unrest, indifferent governments, and famines, there was also the most lethal disaster of recorded history—the Black Death of 1348 – 50.
But today’s blog is about noise and dirt. Specifically how noisy and dirty fourteenth century city streets were. Take Paris, for example.
The main streets of Paris were paved and “just wide enough to accommodate two carts or carriages.” That’s not very wide. All it took was one mule-drawn cart with baskets hanging off either side meeting a carriage going the other way to jam everything up—and those were the main streets. The rest of the streets were unpaved and full of filth—in bad neighborhoods there was a gutter running down the center of the street that often got clogged, and a pile of human waste outside every door. People were supposed to carry it away and dump it in appointed locations, but most people didn’t bother.
Because hardly anyone could read, and because there weren’t any house numbers to mark address points, shop owners advertised their wares by huge signs hung on long poles, which added to the street congestion. A tooth puller’s shop had a tooth “the size of an armchair.” A glove maker displayed a gargantuan glove “with each finger big enough to hold a baby.” (158)
So think about the noise made by the clatter of horse hooves, the rattling signs swinging back and forth, the calling of peddlars, and the cries of public criers.
The public criers rang bells multiple times a day and made announcements at crossroads and city squares. They announced “official decrees, taxes, fairs and ceremonies, houses for sale, missing children, marriages, funerals, births, and baptisms.” (159)
“Dead as a doornail,” “wild goose chase,” “a piece of work,” “break the ice,” and “knock-knock/who’s there?” are all phrases we owe to Shakespeare.
Animals have been powering machines for a long time, but not just horses and oxen and donkeys. Dogs have, too—as long ago as the sixteenth century. I blogged awhile back about turnspit dogs—those canines who toiled away in treadmills that turned the meat roasting on a spit. During the Victorian era, dogs were used to power other, smaller machines. Such as one of the most important inventions ever–the sewing machine, invented by Elias Howe in 1846. Here’s his early invention, which operated with a hand crank (but no dog).
Patents for dog-powered sewing machines cropped up during that time gap between the invention of the sewing machine and the availability of electric-powered machines (which didn’t happen until around the turn of the 20th century) .
Here’s one inventor’s dog-powered industrial sewing machine, shown in an 1882 book Popular Scientific Recreations:
The dog would move when the sewing machine operator inclined the treadmill (uphill? downhill?). Anyway, it wasn’t a constant motion on the poor dog’s part. The Richards Dog Engine was briefly used in Paris to power sewing machines in a uniform-making factory.
Isaac Singer improved on the design and was the first to use foot-power to replace the hand-cranked (or dog-cranked) model.
Then there’s the sewing machine bicycle. I don’t have permission to show the photo, but you can click on it here. It’s kind of worth it.
Mark Twain wrote: ”Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress but I repeat myself.”
I was having lunch a couple of weeks ago with my editor and her colleagues from National Geographic in Washington DC. They took me to a fantastic restaurant near their offices on K Street, and as we were walking there, the conversation turned to why there is no “J” Street in DC. I’d vaguely heard that it was because the city’s designer had a grudge against someone whose name began with J. Someone else mentioned that there was no letter J in the early-American alphabet. So I looked it up.
The reason is a bit less interesting than the city-planner-with-a-grudge story. According to most sources I consulted, the letters I and J were largely interchangeable in the 18th century. Even Thomas Jefferson swapped them around—he tended to initial his possessions with the letters “T.I.” So the city planners probably figured it would be too confusing to assign separate streets to what people perceived as interchangeable letters.
Go figure.
The ancient Roman writer Juvenal cited three major hazards of living in Rome: fires, falling buildings, and poets who recite poetry in August.