The Butcher, the Baker the Candlestick Maker

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Candlestick makers–or tallow chandlers as they were once called–led a wretched existence. I thought I’d make today’s blog about candle making, because I’m still without power.

Thanks to the freakishly violent October snowstorm we had over the weekend, and because I, along with 800,000 other CT residents, am on day God-knows-what without power, I have been doing a lot of reading by candlelight. Trust me: it’s overrated. I have wax drips in my bed and I think my eyeglass prescription has gone up a notch due to eyestrain. Thank goodness for the library, which blessedly has power, and heat.

For centuries candles could be made from beeswax, but beeswax was expensive. Candles used by ordinary people were made from tallow. Tallow is cattle and sheep fat—often rancid cattle and sheep fat. When melted, it smells unimaginably vile. The job of the candle maker—called a “tallow chandler”—was to hack the fat into chunks, melt it down, and dip a twisted wick into it. The result was known as “tallow dip.”

According to Emily Cockayne’s fascinating book, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, chandlers’ melting houses were often forbidden near residential areas. These laws were ignored, of course. Cockayne quotes a 17th-century writer who says “the smell was thought to be sufficiently potent to induce hysteria.” And  17th century noses were probably pretty tolerant of bad smells. It must have smelled quite horrible.

Haydn portrait by Thomas Hardy, 1792

On a lighter note (sorry)—candles were also used as clocks, burning at specific rates to measure the passage of time. Many classical symphonies last only as long as it took for candle chandeliers to be lowered and fresh candles installed.

Franz Josef Haydn wrote his Farewell Symphony to send a message to his patron, Prince Esterhazy. Evidently Haydn and his orchestra colleagues were eager to go on vacation, but the prince had detained them at his remote palace of Eszterhaza. In the final movement, Haydn instructs musicians to stop playing, one by one. Each part includes the instruction nicht mehr–“no more.”  The player finishes his part, blows out the candle lighting his music stand, and then departs the stage, until only the conductor and a couple of violins are left.

Evidently the prince got the message, and the musicians were permitted to leave for vacation soon after the piece premiered.

UPDATE: I wrote this yesterday, and our power came back on last night! Hooray!!

Above image: “Workmen hand-dipping candles at the Saint Louis Candle and Wax Company,” 1927, National Archive/Department of Agriculture

 

Nero Death Experiences

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Emperor Nero tried to poison his mother three times. When that didn’t work, he rigged up a contraption over her bed designed to fall on her. When that didn’t work, he had a collapsible boat built. It sank, but she swam ashore safely. Finally he had her killed and then claimed it was a suicide.

A Cut Above

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During the early 1800s, fashionable men’s collars were so high that wearers sometimes cut their ears if they moved their heads too quickly.

Still Enslaving

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By the year 1861 only three countries in the Western world still practiced slavery: Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.

Arsenic and Gold Lace

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Anne Turner on her way to the gallows; source unclear, but from a contemporary print (wikimedia commons)

During Tudor times, huge starched collars called ruffs were all the rage. They must have been miserable to wear. Special elongated spoons had to be invented to allow ruff-wearers to eat. During the reign of James I (who succeeded Elizabeth in 1613), Mrs. Anne Turner, a widow and somewhat shady character on the fringe of respectability, invented a lovely yellow-tinted starch. She made herself famous among court ladies for her yellow-starched ruffs. A few years later, Anne was hanged for murder.

It’s a complicated and somewhat sordid tale, but here’s the upshot: a scheming couple wanted to get a certain lord by the name of Thomas Overbury out of the way.  They managed to get him thrown into the Tower of London on trumped-up charges of treason against the king. Not content to see him imprisoned, the couple enlisted Mrs. Turner to carry out Overbury’s murder by slow poison. Arsenic and sublimate of mercury, procured by Mrs. Turner, were sprinkled on tasty-looking tarts and pies and delivered to the prisoner by a complicit servant, disguised as a guard. But Overbury didn’t die; he kept giving himself purgatives and enemas, which seemed to counteract the poison. So Mrs. Turner was told to prepare a poisoned enema. It contained a lethal dose of sublimate of mercury. This did the trick, and poor Overbury died a prolonged and agonizing death. His death was ruled accidental.

Two years later, public suspicions were aroused and investigations were made. Because they were friends and courtiers, the king pardoned the couple who had masterminded the murder. But Mrs. Turner and her lower-born accomplices were not so lucky. They were condemned to death.

As a somewhat bizarre detail in an already-bizarre story, the judge ordered Mrs. Turner to wear her yellow ruff to her execution. She duly arrived dressed in her finest gown, complete with rouged cheeks and stiffened yellow ruff, and was hanged. After that court ladies abruptly stopped wearing yellow ruffs.

Stay Cool

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The ancient Greeks and Romans knew how to refrigerate food. Snow was transported from mountain tops and packed into a “snow cellar,” which compressed it into ice blocks. It remained frozen for months.

source: Don Wulffson, The Kid Who Invented the Popsicle

Big Red Barns

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Why are barns usually red? Early 19th century farmers believed the color absorbed sunlight and kept barns warmer in winter. They made red paint by mixing milk with rust shavings from metal fences and nails.

 

Source: Shenkman and Reiger: One-Night Stands with American History

Reel Bugs: The Hellstrom Chronicle

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Today’s featured insect movie is The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), which I watched at the recommendation of my friend, Michael Maren. Michael knows pretty much everything there is to know about movies, and he thought I’d appreciate it. He was right.

As many reviewers have described it, the movie is part-documentary, part science-fiction. Dr. Hellstrom is a fictional entomologist, played with unctuous creepiness by the actor Lawrence Pressman. He reminds me a little of Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; like Wilder, Pressman darts his eyes back and forth and has that tight little smile that seems to hint that he is dangerously insane.

The script was written by David Seltzer (who would go on to write The Omen) and is full of portentous pronouncements and apocalyptic warnings about how insects are going to outlast us, and that the Day of Reckoning is coming any time now.

What especially surprised me was the music. It’s a huge sound track with a full orchestra—and it stood out as so unusual that I remembered to note the composer in the credits. Wouldn’t you know, it’s Lalo Schifrin. He wrote sound tracks for a bunch of movies and TV shows, among them, the theme from Mission: Impossible. (Side note: Like so many forty-something-year-olds, I grew up watching the show. I happen to think the opening music to Mission: Impossible is one of the best theme songs ever written. And I wanted to marry Barney and BE Casey.)

Despite its somewhat bizarre story frame, the movie is totally, completely worth watching if you have even a passing interest in insects. The camerawork is incredible. We can watch in time-lapse photography the stages of metamorphosis of a butterfly, battles to the death between ant species, the grotesquely-swollen body of a termite queen belting out eggs, and the brief life of a Mayfly. And thanks to the use of hyper-sensitive microphones, we can hear caterpillars munching leaves as easily as we can a kid chomping Cap’n Crunch.

All right, so I could have done without watching Dr. H deliberately make a bee sting a living mouse so that we could witness how quickly the venom killed the mouse. No question, it’s a weird movie. But the insect footage really is remarkable.

Is There a Problem, Officer?

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President Ulysses S. Grant was arrested for speeding in his horse and carriage. He was fined $20.

Chew On This

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For centuries, the Mayans chewed chicle, dried sap of the sapodilla tree. Then in 1845, inventor Charles Adams thought to add flavoring to the chicle, and shortly after that opened the first chewing gum factory. Doctors warned that chewing gum would “exhaust the salivary glands and cause the intestines to stick together.”

source: Don Wulffson, The Kid Who Invented the Popsicle