If you’re ever chased by a swarm of Africanized bees, do not jump into a body of water. They will hover over the water and wait for you to come up for air–for as long as 24 hours.
Wash Up, Doc
Up to a quarter of women who gave birth in hospitals in Europe and America in the 17th through the 19th centuries died of puerperal fever. It’s an infection that could most likely have been prevented by doctors and nurses washing their hands.
Chick Flicks
Fewer than 20% of scientists portrayed in movies between 1929 and 2003 have been women.
The Barbary Pirates and The War You’ve Never Heard Of
Howard Pyle, via wikimedia commons
I’ve always loved pirate stories, ever since I read Treasure Island as a kid. That book more than any other created the image we all have of a pirate—the one-legged, swearing ruffian with an eye patch and a parrot on his shoulder. Remember the name of the tavern that Jim Hawkins’ family owns? Stevenson named it “The Admiral Benbow Inn,” a reference totally lost on me. I had no idea that John Benbow had been an actual person, until I started researching the Barbary Pirates. Benbow was a famous fighter of the Barbary pirates.
John Benbow
After Ferdinand and Isabella kicked the last of the Moors out of Spain, in the late 1400s, many of the Moors joined forces with the Barbary states—Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers—all parts of the Ottoman Empire. These understandably-disgruntled Moors became pirates who preyed on Christian ships. Piracy in the southern Mediterranean became a huge problem from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
The pirates and their government sponsors created a huge extortion racket; they demanded bribes from the big European powers (England, France, Spain, and Holland) in exchange for not attacking their ships. The European powers got sick of having their ships plundered and their citizens kidnapped. And they got very sick of having to pay enormous ransoms in order to secure their citizens’ release. So they agreed to pay this protection money to the state-sanctioned pirates, in exchange for having their ships left alone. (Meanwhile, most of these European powers had their own pirates working for them. Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh were pirates who reported to Queen Elizabeth.)
The American colonists had enjoyed the protection of the British prior to the American Revolution. The British had been paying the bribes to the Barbary states to protect colonial ships from being attacked by pirates. But after the Revolution, that protection went away (for obvious reasons). When Thomas Jefferson became president and found out that he was expected to pay huge sums to the Barbary pirates, he was deeply unhappy about it. He refused to pay, and the Barbary states declared war.
It’s the American war you’ve never heard of. It happened between the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of the War of 1812–from 1801 to 1805.
The Barbary pirates started attacking American ships and taking hostages, forcing the prisoners to work as slaves. Jefferson sent the fledgling American navy to the Mediterranean to fight the pirates. And the Americans prevailed, kind of. This impressed many of the European powers, who also began standing up to the pirates, and eventually everyone banded together and the era of Barbary pirates came to an end.
French Ship under attack by Barbary Pirates by Aert Anthonisz. (1579/1580–1620) c. 1615
Occupational Hazard
Florentine navigator Giovanni da Verrazano (ca. 1485-ca. 1528), after whom the bridge is named, met a grisly end: he was eaten by cannibals.
Devilishly Good
Update 5/27/13: An alert reader of this blog has told me that the image below is a late 19th-century fake. Thank you for this info! Evidently it does bear a resemblance to Paganini, but, among other reasons, daguerreotypes were very recently invented and would not have been this reliable in 1840.
I’ve been kind of haunted by this image. It’s a daguerreotype of the violinist Nicolo Paganini (1782 – 1840), taken around 1840. The year of his death. Look at the man’s chin. And look at the size of his hands. No, really look at them. Are you getting as freaked out as I am?
Nicolo Paganini was one of six children, born into a poor family. His father was a dock worker, but he had musical ability, and began giving young Nicolo lessons. As a young boy, Nicolo was locked in his room by his father and forced to practice his violin for up to fifteen hours at a time. He was a virtuoso by the time he was 13. Famous teachers turned him down as a student, saying there was nothing further they could teach him. At 23, he composed the 24 Caprices, which are the most difficult violin pieces ever written. No other violinists could play them.
He had no bottom teeth, and with his pale skin and rail-thin frame, appeared cadaverous. He suffered from a disorder that gave him extra joint mobility in his freakishly-long fingers, and it’s been conjectured that he had Marfan syndrome. He died of what was probably cancer.
He was pretty much the rock star of the early nineteenth century, performing crazy stunts before rapt audiences. Once a string snapped during a performance, and he continued playing the piece anyway, on three strings. People began whispering that he was the son of the devil himself, and crossed themselves during his performances. He was even asked to publish letters from his mother to prove that he was the son of a human father, and not the spawn of Satan.
Here’s Jascha Heifetz playing Paganini’s Caprice Number 24. If you only have ten seconds, scroll up to the 5:19 mark and listen until 5:29. If you have twenty seconds more, scroll back to 3:48-4:10. I played violin for eighteen years and I have no idea what he is doing with what hand. (Pizzicato with the left while ricochet bowing with the right?) And then at 4:12 he seems to be playing the E-string in front of the bridge?? Kind of horribly lovely, like a melodious dentist drill.
Now that I’m a mother, I have sort of changed my perspective on the kind of parent who locks a kid in his room to practice for fifteen hours. I mean, it’s not like he whipped the kid. Um, like Mozart’s dad did.
A few years ago, I discovered one of my kids has perfect pitch. I accidentally hit a key on the piano when he had his back to it, and heard him mutter “B-flat.” We took this test online and wouldn’t you know, he really does have it. I guess I’ve been a little Tiger-Motherish toward him, not letting him give up piano lessons even though he’s thirteen.
Excuse me while I go unlock him from his room.
Too Darn Hot
Marie Curie, who with her husband won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work with radioactivity, left behind papers which are so radioactive they are kept in a lead-lined box. Researchers must wear protective clothing to see them.
Bill Bryson, A Really Short History of Nearly Everything
The Adams Family
President John Quincy Adams (son of President John Adams) enjoyed swimming naked in the Potomac.
Swarmed
My friend, Jim, who happens to be the head of the science department at a prestigious New England boarding school, sent me this awesome youtube video from National Geographic about locusts. I’ve been fascinated and horrified by locusts ever since my girlhood days, when I read From the Banks of Plum Creek, and specifically this passage:
A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before. It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each flickering particle.
There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came across the sky faster than the wind. The hair stood up on Jack’s neck. All at once he made a frightful sound up at that cloud, a growl and a whine.
Plunk! Something hit Laura’s head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen…
The Cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.
The video Jim sent me shows scientists trying to figure out what triggers a harmless green grasshopper to change, Incredible-Hulk-style, into a voracious brown flying locust. The researchers have figured out—by painstakingly tickling grasshoppers on the leg with a tiny paintbrush—that there’s a nerve in the insect’s leg that, when the leg bumps into something (usually other insects), triggers something in the insect’s brain that signals it to morph.
The swarming Rocky Mountain locust that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about appears to be extinct. But desert locusts still ravage parts of Africa and Asia, just as they’ve done since Biblical times.
Picture credits:
Nymph of Locust – Project Gutenberg eText 16410 From Project Gutenberg’s The Life-Story of Insects, by Geo. H. Carpenter
Locust and grasshopper campaign in the Philippines, illustration #11 from Scenes taken in the Philippines, China, Japan, and on the Pacific, relating to soldiers by James David Givens, published by Hicks-Judd Co. in 1912
Quite a Leap
Famous people born on Leap Day include composer Gioacchino Rossini (1792), jazz performer Jimmy Dorsey (1902), Randy Jackson, the American Idol judge (1952), and Frederic, from Pirates of Penzance.