Category: History Blog

Ever wonder why maple syrup bottles often have that tiny, useless handle?

Ever wonder why station wagons from the 1960s through the 1980s had that awful fake wood paneling?

Both are examples of skeuomorphs, design features once practical elements of an object’s design that have been retained, even after the original element has disappeared. Maple syrup used to come in large earthenware jugs, and the handle was helpful in carrying it. Cars – especially trucks and station wagons – were once made with real wood paneling before car makers switched to more expensive steel.

The thing is, once you know about skeuomorphs, you’ll see them everywhere. There must be millions of plastic objects made to look like wood. Spokes are a necessary design feature for wagons or bicycles, but not cars. Yet it’s still at least somewhat common to see spokes on car wheels. Even the giant concrete pylons of Sydney Harbour Bridge are skeuomorphs: the bridge is actually supported by abutments at the base of the pylons. The pylons were added to make the bridge look prettier, and to assure the public of its structural integrity.

There are thousands of computer programs and smartphone apps that look like their physical equivalents – especially note-taking and calendar apps – even though there really isn’t a need for an app to look like a legal pad or a paper calendar. Steve Jobs was a huge fan of skeuomorphism: when he was alive, Apple software was chock-full of interfaces that looked like address books, notepads and bookshelves. Skeuomorphs need not even be physical objects: most phones make a clicking sound when taking a picture, even though they don’t have mechanical shutters!

Something especially interesting about skeuomorphs is that they are by no means a modern thing. Skeuomorphs go back thousands of years. Many design features of classic Greek temples – guttae, modillions, triglyphs and mutules – originated in construction of wooden temples. When the Greeks switched to stone construction, such things were no longer structurally necessary but they liked the look, so kept the design. Wealthy Minoans had elaborate metal cups, which potters made painstaking copies of for everyday folk, even down to little “nubs” of clay to mimic the rivets used in the metal cups. A little closer to our time, Fredrick the Great, ruler of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, hated that his soldiers wiped their noses on their uniform sleeves. He decreed that a row of buttons be sewn on the sleeves to prevent the men from wiping their noses on his uniforms. Three hundred years later, the buttons might have moved to the other side of the sleeve… but they’re still there.

So think about skeuomorphs the next time you click the floppy disk icon to save a file to your SSD, or tap an icon with a 1930s-era microphone to record a memo on your smartphone!

Here’s something you might not know… France has two official flags! You’re probably familiar with this flag, often called the Tricolour or Tricolore in French:

But you might have seen this flag and not even noticed it:

What’s going on here? Why is one flag slightly different?

It all comes down to history, of course. The French Monarchy used a variety of flags over the centuries, but most had some form of blue shield and gold fleur-de-lis on a white background. The traditional colors of the city of Paris are blue and red, and during the French Revolution local militias wore red and blue cockades. Since white is a more “national” color, the Marquis de Lafayette suggested that white be added to the red and blue cockades, and the tricolor motif was born.

The flag of Paris:

Just move the stripes over and add a white one in the middle to create the new French flag.

But not really. The first post-Revolution flag actually had the stripes reversed:

This flag was adopted on October 24, 1790, and the colors reversed to the current design on February 15, 1794. Despite this, the Tricolor wasn’t used often. Most commonly, the red flag of the Jacobin Club was flown as a national flag. But one guy really dug the Tricolor, and his name was Napoleon. Throughout his reign, the Tricolor was the official flag of France. But then, in 1815, the Bourbons were restored to power, and they went back to the white flag of old. Or rather, they did, until the July Revolution of 1830. It’s been the official flag of France ever since. In fact, after the overthrow of Napoleon III, the French elected a royalist majority to the National Assembly. The Assembly, in turn, offered the crown to Henri, Count of Chambord. But Henri demanded that the nation switch back to the white Bourbon flag. The French people – given the choice of the flag or a king – chose the flag. And that was the last of the monarchy in France.

But what about the weird flag at the top of this post, the one with the skewed proportions? That’s the naval ensign. Unlike the official flag, with three equal blue, white and red stripes, the naval ensign uses proportions of 30:33:37. Why? When seen at a distance, the proportions look normal, especially if the flag is flapping in the wind. But the thing is, the flags are so similar that they’re often used interchangeably. I’ve heard, for example, that the ensign is often placed behind government officials at press conferences, because the red is more prominent, and looks more like a “French flag” than the regular flag. When standing still, like at an indoor press conference, the red bits sometimes get lost in the folds of the flag, or are below camera level. Using the ensign fixes this.

A couple thousand years ago, the Greek historian Plutarch posed an interesting question. Ships were made of wood at the time, and wood rots when exposed to water. So sailors were forever replacing bits of wood on a ship. What Plutarch wanted to know was, as the wood was replaced, at what point was it the same ship, and at what point was it a different ship?

It’s an intriguing question. If the sailors replaced a single piece of wood – one of the masts, say – almost everyone would agree that it was still the same ship. But what if the sailors replaced 51% of the wood? Would it still be the same ship then? What if that 51% was replaced over a long period of time? What if they replaced 49% of the wood and 10 years later they replaced the remaining 2%: would the 49% have been “grandfathered” as part of the original ship? If there was only a single piece of wood from the original ship left, but they built an entirely new ship around it, isn’t it still the same vessel as before? After all, a car enthusiast might buy a beat-up classic car and replace almost every single part as part of the restoration process. Is it not the same car?

Americans might recognize Plutarch’s thought experiment as “George Washington’s ax”.

In 1800, American author Parson Weems released his most famous work, a hilariously inaccurate biography of the nation’s first president called The Life of Washington. The book contained a completely fabricated tale about a young Washington being given an ax by his father; little George then went about chopping down anything he could find, including his father’s favorite cherry tree. When confronted, Washington reportedly said that he “could not tell a lie” and admitted his misdeeds.

The likelihood that this actually happened is near zero: Weems held Washington as a god, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to hear that Weems claimed Washington single-handedly defeated the British, found the lost city of Atlantis, and dug the Grand Canyon all by himself, too.

Still, Weems’ book was required reading in American schools for much of the 19th century, and teachers used the ax to illustrate Plutarch’s riddle: if you replaced the handle of George Washington’s ax, was it the same tool? What if you replaced the ax head a few years later? What if Washington’s family used the ax for a 100 years, and both the head and the handle had been repeatedly replaced… was it still the same ax?

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One thing that is true is that various parts of ships were reclaimed over the centuries. Hemp ropes that outlived their usefulness were tweezed apart into individual strands called oakum, a type of caulking often used on ships. People who lived near ports often bought cheap reclaimed wood and used it to build stuff, or bought it to resell to other people who used it to build stuff. Like this barn in Buckinghamshire:

The barn was built by Thomas Russell in 1624, using timbers from a ship named… Mayflower. In the 1920s, English historian J. Rendel Harris confidently declared that the wood came from the Mayflower, the ship that transported the Pilgrims from Plymouth to New England. For decades, the barn was a tourist attraction, especially with Americans (it’s privately-owned and now closed to the public). Coincidentally, the barn is a stone’s throw from the grave of William Penn, founder and namesake of Pennsylvania.

Thing is, though, there were at least 37 other ships called the Mayflower at the time. So chances are slim that the wood is from the Mayflower. But it’s always a possibility. It is said that the wood was from a shipbreaker’s yard in Rotherhithe, which most certainly did exist, and likely was the final resting place of the Mayflower. But we’ll never really know for sure.

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It’s thought that the Mediterranean was the birthplace of the sea trade, between Phoenicians, Greeks, Egyptians and others. And one of the first things those intrepid sailors would have learned about was weight.

If you put too much “stuff” on a ship, it rides low in the water, which makes it prone to sinking. Such ships are less maneuverable in the water, and if a few waves crash over the sides and into the cargo hold, the ship can lose buoyancy and sink. On the other hand, if you don’t put enough “stuff” on a ship, the opposite happens: it tends to ride high in the water, making it prone to tip over and sink.

Of course, this was easy to deal with on the voyage out: just make sure the ship isn’t too full, and she won’t ride low and sink. But it was a big problem on the way home, when cargo holds were often empty. So sailors started adding weight, or ballast, to empty ships to make them more stable in the water. Ballast could be anything at all, so long as it was heavy. They could have used lead balls or iron bars. But the cheapest option, by far, were plain old rocks. So a ship would arrive in port and empty its hold of goods. Most traders preferred to fill the hold with goods to take home to sell; if not, the crew would replace the missing weight with same amount of rocks.

For centuries, rocks from all over the world ended up on opposite sides of the globe. A little bit of Egypt ended up in Greece. A little bit of Fiji ended up in France. Little bits of India ended in up in England. That this happened isn’t in the least bit remarkable. In fact, marine archaeologists look for ship-sized piles of ballast rock when looking for shipwrecks.

Then World War II happened. Supply ships would leave New York with cargoes full of food and medical supplies for our English allies. Ships that safely arrived in Bristol would empty their cargo. But they needed ballast for the voyage home, and that’s when a unique situation presented itself: the Germans had bombed the hell out of Bristol, and the city had piles and piles of rubble everywhere. So the rubble was used as ballast, and when the ships arrived in New York they dumped that ballast in the exact same place. Eventually, the ballast built up so much that it formed a new piece of land:

That little triangular bit near Bellevue Hospital on the east side of FDR Drive is made up almost entirely of former bits of Bristol. While it’s not unusual to find bits of volcanic rock from Hawaii at a port in, say, Turkey, it is unusual that so much ballast from one specific place was dumped in another specific place.

I’ll let English YouTube star Tom Scott take it from here:

One of my favorite films is the 1984 “mockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap, which follows a failing English rock band on their final American tour.

But while the band is fictitious, many of the scenes in the film are said to be based on real-life events. The scene in which the band gets lost between their dressing rooms and the stage was based on something that allegedly happened to Yes (or, some say, Bob Dylan). Like Spinal Tap, Uriah Heep once played a gig on an air force base. The in-studio fight between Nigel and David was said to be inspired by an argument between members of The Troggs (hear the real-life, NSFW, argument on YouTube here).

One of the funniest moments in the film is the famous “Stonehenge scene”, in which Nigel (Christopher Guest) makes a sketch of a Stonehenge-inspired prop he wants to use on stage. Only thing is, he accidentally gives measurements in inches instead of feet. So when the prop appears on stage, it’s far less impressive than the band intended:

This was based on something that allegedly happened to Black Sabbath. So the story goes, the band’s manager, Don Arden, wanted similar Stonehenge-inspired props for the band’s stage show. There are two versions of what happened next: one is that he accidentally marked the measurements in meters instead of feet. The other is that he didn’t specify the units, and the contract was given to a French company that assumed the units were in meters. Either way, instead of a 15 foot tall replica of Stonehenge, the band ended up with a 15 meter tall replica –  around 45 feet – which was waaaayyyy too tall for most venues!

Similar confusion has happened elsewhere. Just ask the people of Wichita Falls, Texas.

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A huge oil reservoir was discovered in Wichita County back in 1912. Up to 20,000 people rushed to the boomtown, and many locals became rich, some almost overnight. The previously unremarkable town was hit with a severe shortage of office space, and many deals took place on city streets. What the town needed was a place for all this business to happen.

Enter a man named J.D. McMahon. Here’s a photo of him:

McMahon came to town and promised the people of Wichita Falls a beautiful new skyscraper that would rival anything in New York or Chicago. Naive investors lined up, and within a couple of weeks McMahon had collected $200,000 ($2.7m in 2014 dollars).

Construction soon began on this majestic building:

As you can see, it’s not quite something that would rival the Empire State Building or Willis Tower. It is, in fact, considerably shorter than Wichita Falls residents had expected. Investors filed suit against McMahon before construction had even finished.

The judge sided with McMahon, and here’s why: McMahon had never told anyone out loud how tall the building would be, and the blueprints every investor reviewed and approved clearly stated that the building was to be 480″ (inches) tall. Either no one noticed that, or folks simply assumed it was a typo and the actual building would be 480′ (feet) tall. Regardless, according to the judge a deal was a deal, and this one was legally binding.

Investors were able to get some of their money back from the elevator company. They explained the scam to the vendor, and the company backed out of the deal and refunded their money. This left a bit of a problem, though: because the building was supposed to have elevators, architects didn’t bother putting in stairs. For a while, ladders were used to go from floor to floor… although this actually wasn’t much of an issue: the building was such an embarrassment to locals that no one wanted to rent there. Throughout most of the 1920s only two firms rented space there. The Great Texas Oil Boom ended only a few years later, and the Great Depression came soon after. In 1931, the inside of the building was gutted by a fire. Retail shops came and went with alarming regularity, and the building itself changed hands several times.

A funny thing happened, though. Although some residents held the building in scorn and contempt for the rest of their lives, some took a shine to it. Back in the 20s, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! had called it “the World’s Littlest Skyscraper”, and the name stuck. Although slated for demolition several times, Wichita Falls residents protested, and eventually the property was given to the city. In 1986, the city gave it to the Wichita County Heritage Society, hoping they could restore the then-crumbling building. But the building was just too far gone for the WCHS’s meager budget. Again there was talk of demolition, but this time two local businesses got together and convinced the city to sell it to them for a mere $3,748. A storm damaged the building in 2003; the damage was repaired quickly, but a full restoration wasn’t done until 2005. The building is now an official  Texas Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

As far as I can tell from a quick Google search, McMahon was never seen in north Texas again, and no one knows what happened to him. Presumably he lived the high life, at least for a time, with the town’s money.

With the vote for Scottish independence coming very soon, I thought this little tale was timely.

In 1707, the parliaments of England and Scotland voted to dissolve themselves and create a new parliament made up of members from both countries. “England” and “Scotland” effectively ceased to exist, and a new country was born: the “United Kingdom”.

Which is really odd if you think about it. Hadn’t they been at war with each other off and on for, like, 800 years? Why the sudden change of heart? Why would England and Scotland – two longtime foes – suddenly become friends?

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By the late 1600s, most of Europe’s maritime powers had founded colonies. Spain controlled much of South America. Portugal had Brazil, parts of India as well as a bunch of economically important islands. The Dutch had New Amsterdam in North America and most of the Spice Islands. And the English had North America and a few outposts in the Caribbean.

Many in Scotland wondered why they didn’t have a colony of their own. But it wasn’t as simple as just getting in a boat and putting up a flag somewhere. There was little point in having a colony just to have one. The Spanish made millions off South American silver, while the Dutch made money off spices and tea, and the English money from tobacco and sugar. What the Scots needed was a colony that could provide some sort of economic gain.

And gain was sorely needed in Scotland. Economically it was a pipsqueak compared to England, an advantage the English used at every level to keep Scotland subjugated. England’s Navigation Acts kept independent Scottish trade to a minimum, not that it really mattered, since Scotland’s navy was tiny compared to England’s. Most imported goods therefore had to be bought from England, and England required the use of pounds sterling, not Scottish money, which drained the economy even more. A couple of civil wars had squandered a lot of human and financial capital, and several years of crop failures pushed Scotland’s economy to the brink.

The “Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies” was created by the Scottish parliament in 1695. Capital was raised for the venture in Amsterdam, Hamburg and London. But not really. England’s East India Company complained to the crown they they, not some Scottish upstart, had been given a monopoly on trade to the Indies. And the East India Company was one company you did not mess with. At the apex of its power, the Company ruled much of India – an area much larger than the United Kingdom, with several times as many people. It ruled other places – the East India Company created modern Singapore, for instance. The Company had an army of 200,000 men, its own church, currency and government, and accounted for over half the trade in the entire world. What the East India Company wanted, the East India Company got.

Immense pressure from King William III and East India investors caused Company of Scotland investors in London, then Amsterdam, and finally Hamburg to abandon their pledges. The Company of Scotland tried looking elsewhere for money, but Europe’s other banks and investment centers got the hint from London, and no one stepped up to the plate.

So the plan to trade with Africa and India was abandoned, and a new idea was formed: a Scottish banker named William Paterson wanted to create a “gateway” between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He noticed that the land in what is now Panama was very thin. Just as people later got the idea to build the Panama Canal, Patterson’s plan was to built a seaport on the Atlantic side of the coast, another on the Pacific side, and build a road connecting the two. Goods could therefore be sent safely by land instead of ships having to navigate the treacherous waters around Cape Horn or the Strait of Magellan. This would shave weeks off shipping times for goods, and for this merchants would pay a small fee, which would earn money for Scotland. Easy, right?

Continue reading “How Britain Became Great”

When I was a small boy, I was in awe of my mother and grandmothers, particularly because they seemed to know every detail of those Old School social rules. For instance, every Mother’s Day our church offered carnations to the ladies of the congregation, and my mom knew to take a pink one (because her mother was alive), while my grandma knew to take a white one (because her mother had passed on). Both instinctively knew to wear them on their left side, just as they instinctively knew when to send thank you cards, how long they had to send them, and how much writing to actually put on the card itself… just a quick thanks? A long paragraph or two of sincere gratitude for a gift or thoughtful action? They always just… knew, somehow.

Many of these rules have fallen by the wayside, but there’s one rule they absolutely, positively keep: no white after Labor Day. I can imagine my grandmother now: “Son, I’m 94 years old. I’ve come to accept women preachers and gay marriages… but I’ll be damned if I’m going to wear white shoes in October. There are some rules you just don’t break.”

Society doesn’t seem to take the “no white after Labor Day” rule very seriously any more. I bet millennials don’t even know it is a rule: that’s the beauty of Generation X: we knew about the rules like “no white after Labor Day”, but we broke ’em anyway. But some people used to take the rule seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it caused a riot.

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Straw hats were popular with men in the early 20th century. In Europe and Asia, the tradition of wearing hats made of straw or reeds – but only in summer! – dates back to the Middle Ages. And why not? They keep the sun out of your face, and unlike felt or wool hats, they’re breathable, keeping you cool in the summer. Although hilariously unfashionable now, they were kind of dapper:

In New York City, the custom was to wear straw hats until September 1st, but no later. At some point in the early 1900s, for reasons unknown, the cut-off date shifted to September 15th. It also became something of a popular prank – not just in New York, but throughout the country – for teen boys to sneak up on people wearing such hats after the cut-off date and knock the hats to the ground and stomp on them. Don’t ask me why: these things just happen.

In 1922, some teens decided to jump the cut-off date by two days. On September 13, a pack of teen boys in the Mulberry Bend area – one of the worst parts of Five Points, arguably the worst neighborhood in Manhattan – went around knocking off people’s hats and stomping on them, as was the custom. That is, until they tried knocking the hats off a bunch of dock workers. These guys fought back, and soon a full-scale brawl was underway between the two groups. The fight was so big that it shut down traffic on the Manhattan Bridge until police could come and break it up.

But police couldn’t arrest everyone involved. Groups of teen boys would scatter from police and start the hat stomping anew in other neighborhoods. The next day, the riots intensified. Some teens even roamed the streets carrying big sticks with nails sticking out the business end. Up to 1,000 teens caused trouble on Amsterdam Avenue, beating up some so badly that they needed medical attention. Cops didn’t take the matter seriously, partly because of “boys will be boys”, but also because if they broke up the rioters in one area, they would just splinter off into other areas. Rioters, emboldened. even snatched the hat off a police sergeant, who hilariously fell face-first into a mud puddle while chasing the lawbreakers.

The riots kind of died down by themselves by September 16th. Although “hat violence” continued for several years – one man was murdered in a hat stomping incident in 1924, and several “hat hooligans”  were arrested in 1925 – the full-scale riot of 1922 was unique: never again did groups of youthful social enforcers take to the streets. Within a few years, straw hats themselves went out of fashion altogether, taking with them the odd custom of teens knocking them off people’s heads.

I used to drive past the United States Penitentiary, Atlanta – known as “USP, Atlanta”, ‘the Federal Pen” or just “the Pen” – on a fairly regular basis. But I never gave it much thought. Oh sure… I’d sometimes wonder what the prisoners were doing at that exact moment and sometimes I’d think about how nasty the 1987 riots were.

I was surfing around a few nights ago and found some interesting stuff about USP, Atlanta.

The prison was authorized by the “Three Prisons Act” of 1891, which also created prisons in McNeil Island, Washington and a rather famous one in Leavenworth, Kansas. Construction was approved by President William McKinley in 1899, and the facility was completed in 1902. At the time, it was the largest federal prison in the United States, with a capacity for 3,000 prisoners.

And what prisoners they were!

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Ignazio Lupo was an organized crime figure who ran Manhattan’s Little Italy in the early 1900s. In 1903, Lupo married Giuseppe Morello’s half-sister (Morello ran similar gangs in East Harlem and the South Bronx). The gangs merged to form the “Morello family”, which became the basis of the Genovese family, considered by many to be the “gold standard of American crime families”. Although suspected of killing no less than 60 people, Lupo was actually convicted of running a counterfeiting ring, and spent a decade in USP, Atlanta from 1910 to 1920. Once freed, he petitioned the US government to travel to Italy, something prohibited by the terms of his parole. President Warren G. Harding approved Lupo’s request, with one amazing clause: Harding, and Harding alone, would judge whether Lupo was “law-abiding” and “not connected with any unlawful undertaking during the period of the sentence”.

By the 1930s, the National Crime Syndicate (a loose coalition of organized crime families created by Johnny “The Fox” Torrio) decided that Lupo was too wild and attracting too much law-enforcement attention. So Lupo was stripped of all of his criminal enterprises. Lupo then started a protection racket amongst Italian bakers in NYC, and by 1936 he’d grown so violent and over the top that the governor of New York asked FDR to put Lupo back in prison for the remainder of his original term. So Lupo served an additional 10 years in Atlanta, from 1936 to 1946. He died, almost forgotten, in Brooklyn in 1947.

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USP, Atlanta’s most famous resident was Al Capone.

As a young man, Johnny Torrio – the same Johnny Torrio who later created the National Crime Syndicate – worked legitimate jobs as a bouncer and porter in Manhattan. He joined a street gang, became their leader, and managed their money so well that he was soon able to buy them a pool hall as a hang out. It didn’t take long for the hall to become a hotbed of gambling and loan sharking, all of which Torrio managed well. This attracted the attention of Paolo Vaccarelli (a.k.a. Paul Kelly), founder of the Five Points Gang. Kelly invited Torrio to join. Torrio quickly drew the attention (and admiration) of several younger members, including Capone. In time, Torrio would hire Capone to tend bar at The Harvard Inn, a Coney Island dive owned by Francesco Ioele (a.k.a. Frankie Yale).

Continue reading “The Atlanta Pen”