John Jacob Astor (1763 – 1848) was the first multi-millionaire in the U.S. He made much of his fortune as an opium smuggler.
Founding Father Fare
As a young man, Benjamin Franklin tried to be a vegetarian along with his employer at his printing shop, Samuel Keimer. Franklin claimed to adjust to the new diet easily, but after about three months, his boss had had enough. As Franklin wrote in his autobiography:
I went on pleasantly, but poor Keimer suffered grievously, tired of the project, longed for the flesh-pots of Egypt, and ordered a roast pig. He invited me and two women friends to dine with him; but, it being brought too soon upon table he could not resist the temptation, and ate the whole before we came.
Eventually, though, Franklin began supplementing his vegetarian fare with the occasional dish of fried cod.
source: http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page18.htm
art: Benjamin Franklin by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis 1785, via Wikimedia Commons
Sickeningly Fast
Robert Louis Stevenson, while sick and bedridden, wrote the first draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in six days.
Swearing a Blue Streak
Pious King Louis IX of France (1214-1270) forbade swearing in his court. To avoid having their tongues branded with a red-hot iron, his courtiers took to swearing by the king’s dog, Bleu. Hence the origin of “Sacré Bleu!”
source: Richard Zacks, An Underground Education, page 170-1
When the Saints Went Marching Out
Before Henry VIII converted England to Protestantism, it had been fashionable to swear by Catholic saints (“By Saint George!” “By Saint Louis!”) After Catholicism was banned, people started saying “By George” instead.
source: Richard Zacks, An Underground Education, page 169
The Sky is Falling
Last Friday, a meteor hurtling through the Earth’s atmosphere at 10 to 12 miles per second exploded thirty miles over the Chelyabinsk region in the Russian Urals. People saw the flash of light and rushed to the windows to look—which was exactly the wrong place to be when the shock waves that followed shattered windows, injuring about a thousand people. The meteor was estimated to be about the size of a minivan.
The last time an object from space caused such mayhem was in 1908, but it’s not a very well-known event. More on that later.
A meteor, by the way, is a space rock that enters the Earth’s atmosphere and burns up. A meteorite is a piece of meteor that actually hits the Earth. If you visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York, go see theirs. They have some cool ones. Here’s a famous meteorite from Denmark:
The How Stuff Works website has a good explanation of shock waves and sonic booms and how they work. Think of standing on the shore of a smooth lake when a motorboat zooms by. At first there is no disturbance, but soon after (depending on how far away you’re standing), the wake from the boat rolls onto the shore. It’s similar with a plane flying past, and if an object is going faster than the speed of sound, you get a sonic boom.
How big does the meteor have to be to cause planetary mayhem? Much depends on the area of impact. (But note that when scientists use the word “impact,” they don’t mean it has to hit the Earth. It just has to explode close to the Earth’s surface.) The one that caused the Cretaceous Extinction 65 million years ago was probably seven miles across. That’s, um, a biggie. But there was a more recent near-disaster.
On the morning of June 30, 1908, a meteor about 120 feet across (one scientist described it as “about the size of the White House”) entered the atmosphere over Tunguska, in Siberia, and then detonated in the sky. Over eight hundred square miles of trees were destroyed, along with a lot of reindeer. But as “Siberia” has often been interchangeable with “the middle of nowhere,” there were very few eyewitnesses. Here’s where it happened:
Scientists estimated that the space rock was traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour. At a height of about 28,000 feet, the combination of pressure and heat caused the rock to explode, producing a fireball and releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, if the collision had occurred just 4 hours 47 minutes later, it would have destroyed the city of St. Petersburg.
Why do so few people know about this massive meteor event? Russia was a fading, ill-run country; it had recently lost to Japan in the Russo Japanese war in 1904-5, and the power of the Romanovs was in serious decline. The Trans Siberian railroad wouldn’t be completed until 1917, so travel to the site was nearly impossible. At the time, there were few to no roads to that region, so in summer travel was limited to rivers, and in winter, to sleighs. Then there was World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent Civil War, and a major flu pandemic, so it wasn’t until 1921 that a scientific expedition visited the site.
So should we all be worried it could happen again? Well, yeah, it’s certainly possible. But I think in the scheme of things, we have more urgent problems for our planet to be concerned about. As for me, I don’t plan to watch any Hollywood disaster movies on the topic anytime soon.
Images:
Top: Meteorite outside the Geological museum in Copenhagen, 2009 by FunkMonk via Wikimedia
middle: area map of impact, via Wikimedia
bottom: public domain image via the Leonid Kulik Expedition, 1921, Wikimedia
The Writer Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up, his typewriter at chest level.
Plant of Plenty
The agave plant has been used to make bullets, tequila, surgical thread, and heavy twines like sisal. It’s also used as a sugar substitute and to poison arrows.
source: Fifty plants that Changed the Course of History
Not Even a Parsley Garnish
A dinner party thrown by Samuel Pepys in 1663 included not a single vegetable. The fare consisted of: “a fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie…” and “a dish of anchovies.”
http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1663/04/04/
What Ailed Them
I can’t be the only history geek that spends way too much of her time reading Bills of Mortality. When you’re researching a book that involves a lot of different diseases (and I’m on my third book of that kind), you tend to come across them frequently. And they’re pretty fascinating.
The custom of recording deaths is an ancient one. The Romans kept registries in their temples, and in medieval times, registries seem to have been kept from at least the fourteenth century in many European countries. Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas Cromwell (the star of Hilary Mantel’s incredible Bring Up the Bodies), ordered registries to be kept in every parish starting in 1538.
But John Graunt (1620 – 1672) wins the prize for death-and-disease record-keeping. He was the Freakonomics genius of the seventeenth century.
He was a prosperous merchant who lost everything in the Great Fire of London of 1666. Four years before the fire, he published a short book called Natural and Political Observations made upon the Bills of Mortality, where he summed up his observations from years of cataloguing the patterns of illnesses and deaths. (You can, amazingly, read his scanned book here.)
Graunt counted and organized people by gender, age, religion, occupation, rank, how and where they died, and what sickened them. Here are some of Graunt’s cause-of-death categories:
cancer
dog bytes
drowning
plague
fryght
childbirth
fever
head-mould
rupture
scurvy
spotted feaver
stone
stopping of the stomach
stangury
teeth
ulcer
wormes
French pox (syphilis)
small pox
burnt in his bed
I think “stangury” might be kidney stones. Surgery for the stone was very dangerous–surgery for anything was very dangerous. Even if patients managed to survive the surgery itself, they usually died soon after from shock or sepsis. Note the incidence of death from “dog bytes.” I don’t know if this means rabies, or just getting mauled by packs of roving dogs. Both were certainly a danger in many cities. I blogged here about walking sticks and canes and why otherwise able-bodied gentlemen took to carrying them. Good for thwacking away mad dogs.
One of these days I plan to research head-mould…