Category: History Blog

History is chock-full of odd and amazing coincidences. It’s not entirely surprising. After all, if you examine the history of millions of people over thousands of years, you’re certainly going to find some coincidences here and there. But that doesn’t make them any less amazing when they actually happen. Here are a few good examples:

– Late one night in 1863, a group of passengers gathered on a platform at a train station in Jersey City, New Jersey. A conductor walked up to sell tickets for the sleeping berths, and since it was late and everyone was tired, the crowd became quite excited. Few noticed a well-dressed young man in his twenties at the edge of the crowd, and even fewer noticed when the crowd accidentally pushed the man into the gap between the train and the platform. The man fell, and just at that moment the train started moving. The young man tried to lift himself back up to the platform, but found his arms pinned to his side. Just as the young man started to panic, he felt hands on either side of his collar. A pair of strong arms lifted the young man out of the gap and gently put him down on the platform. It took the young man a few seconds to recover, but when he did he noticed that the man who saved him was one of the most famous actors in the country (think Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt level famous). The young man was Robert Todd Lincoln, son of President Abraham Lincoln. The famous actor who saved his life was Edwin Booth, older brother of John Wilkes Booth. More incredibly, Booth was traveling to Richmond, Virginia with… John T. Ford, owner of Ford’s Theatre… where Booth’s younger brother would shoot Lincoln’s father a couple of years in the future.

– Speaking of the Civil War, at the start of the conflict, both sides expected the war to be over in a matter of months. The Battle of First Manassas changed everyone’s mind. It was a huge victory for the Confederate Army, in large part due to the military acumen of Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard. At the start of the battle, Beauregard needed a building for his headquarters, and staff members found the house of Wilmer McLean perfect for the job. This, of course, made McLean’s house a giant target for Union gunners, and soon the Federals began shelling the house without mercy. After the battle, McLean decided that living directly between the US capital (Washington DC) and the Confederate capital (Richmond, Virginia) probably wasn’t the smartest place to be, so he decided to move somewhere out of the way. He couldn’t, however, make up his mind where to move, and in the meantime, The Battle of Second Manassas broke out in his back yard. McLean finally decided that enough was enough, so he moved his family to a small town called Clover Hill, Virginia. But guess what the town is known as today? Appomattox Court House. Yep, the place where the Battle of Appomattox Court House was fought on April 9, 1865. It was the last battle between the armies of Lee and Grant… and Lee signed his surrender in the parlor of the home belonging to… Wilmer McLean. McLean said that “the war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor.” And he was right!

Continue reading “Amazing Coincidences”

The history of television advertising – and especially product placement – is kind of interesting.

In the 1940s, shows were often sponsored by companies, so viewers could tune in to The Philco TV Playhouse or The Texaco Star Theater or The Voice of Firestone. Full sponsorship fell out of favor in the 1950s, to be replaced by “in-show” commercials, where actors would suddenly break out of character to endorse a product. For instance, two neighbors might go to the backyard to start a grill for a cookout, and one character would observe how fast and evenly the charcoal fired up. The other character would agree, then turn to the camera and tell the audience it was because he used Kingsford Charcoal, “the very best money could buy”. He’d pitch the product for 20-30 seconds, and then return to character.

This, too, had fallen out of fashion by the 1960s, when the standard 30 second commercial we know (and hate?) became the norm. But this put prop masters in a pickle: advertising often wouldn’t be sold until after a show had been filmed. Prop masters had no idea if Coke or Pepsi would end up buying ads for the show, so it didn’t make sense for a character to prominently use either drink. After all, if Beaver Cleaver was seen enjoying a Pepsi, Coke probably wouldn’t want to advertise on the show, right?

The solution was fictional brands. Since these fake products only existed in films and TV, there was no need to worry about irritating potential advertisers. Fake products also, in a way, liberated creators of movies and TV: although in most cases companies didn’t mind having their products used in the media, negative portrayals of their product could trigger a legal case over trademark use. For example, a TV show about a serial rapist and killer who loves Pepsi might anger Pepsi executives enough to sue for making their product look bad. So, by using fake products, this issue is avoided completely. And, in some locales, “product placement” might be banned completely. Until recently, Canada and the UK prohibited the practice on television, so fake products weren’t an option; they were the only option.

Some of these fake products were totally original, and looked different from any actual product on the market. Usually, however, the products looked a lot like a popular product. And no fake product ever looked more like its real-world counterpart, and was used in more productions, than Morley cigarettes.

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Philip Morris introduced the Marlboro brand in 1924 as a cigarette for women. Like most women’s cigarettes of the day, Marlboros had filters. In fact, Marlboros originally came with red filters to disguise lipstick marks! Since only women’s cigarettes had filters, men shunned them. So, for a long time, men only smoked unfiltered cigarettes and women mostly smoked filtered cigarettes.

Continue reading “Morley and Me”

Back when I was a political science major in college, I fell in love with a quote attributed to Aristotle that went something like “politics is the most important of all the sciences, since it’s through politics that we define ourselves”. I haven’t been able to find a source for the quote, and am pretty sure that Aristotle never said any such thing. But the quote has always stuck with me, because it’s totally right, yet totally wrong, too.

It’s right because we put our values into our laws, laws that prevent children from being sent to sweatshops, or debtors from being sent to prison, or the elderly from being swindled, or pets from being beaten and abandoned. Laws that say that those who have more income should pay a higher share of their income in taxes. Laws that say that discriminating against someone for their race or religion are wrong. In fact, our entire legal system is built on the notion of right and wrong.

But it’s wrong because, well… our laws can sometimes go horribly wrong. Slavery, Jim Crow, anti-immigration or anti-Catholic laws are just a few examples of that.

And it’s not just the laws that can go wrong. The political process itself can sometimes go off the rails. Sure, it sometimes shows human behavior at its best (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”) and at its worst (the recent budget impasse). But fewer incidents show human political behavior at its silliest than the time that Georgia had not one, not two, but three governors.

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Eugene Talmadge was the perfect old-school Southern politician. Born in the small town of Forsyth, Georgia on September 23, 1884, Talmadge attended, and received a law degree from, the University [sic] of Georgia in 1907. After graduating, Talmadge moved to Atlanta, where he practiced law with little success. He then moved to the small town of Aisley, in Montgomery County in southeast Georgia. His law practice did a little better there, but Talmadge had to become a part-time livestock trader to make ends meet.

In Aisley, Talmadge lived in a boarding house owned by a widow named Matilda Peterson. Peterson was fairly well off, as she also owned a large farm, and was the town’s railroad agent and telegraph operator. She also sold livestock, which gave the two something in common. Talmadge began courting her, and the couple soon married. They then moved to Telfair County, where they bought a large farm on Sugar Creek. Matilda then purchased another large farm, leaving Eugene in charge of the first one.

Continue reading “The Three Governors”

Human beings have known about the uniqueness of fingerprints for a long time. Ancient Babylonians used fingerprints for signatures. The famous Code of Hammurabi (1700 BC) authorized authorities to record the fingerprints of those who were arrested. The ancient Egyptians, Minoans, Greeks and Chinese used fingerprints as a form of identification, usually on legal documents, but sometimes as a “maker’s mark” on pottery items. By 702 AD, the Japanese had adopted the Chinese fingerprint method to authenticate loans.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe seemed to forget about fingerprints for a long time. It wasn’t until 1684 that English physician Nehemiah Grew published the first scientific paper about fingerprints. Just over a century later, in 1788, German anatomist Johann Christoph Andreas Mayer published a paper in which it was recognized that each fingerprint is unique.

Fingerprinting got a big boost in 1858. And that’s because of Sir William James Herschel, grandson of William Herschel, the German-born English astronomer who discovered Uranus, and son of John Herschel, who named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus.

William James Herschel was an officer in the Indian Civil Service in Bengal. Herschel became a big proponent of fingerprinting after becoming fed up with the rampant forging of contracts and legal papers that was going on in India at the time. Herschel’s decision to  require fingerprints on most legal documents not only made forging them much more difficult, it almost eliminated fraud in pensions, in which family members continued to cash checks long after their relative had died. This was, of course, costing the English authorities a massive sum of money. Shortly thereafter, Herschel also began fingerprinting prisoners as soon as they were sentenced, as it was somewhat common for Indians to pay someone else to serve their prison sentences.

In 1880, Dr Henry Faulds, a Scottish surgeon who had been appointed by the Church of Scotland to open a mission in Japan, published a paper in the journal Nature on how fingerprints were unique and could be used for identification purposes. Faulds’ interest in fingerprints came about thanks to an archaeological expedition he went on with an American friend, Edward S. Morse. Faulds noticed that he could see ancient fingerprints in recovered pottery shards, and he began looking at his own fingerprints. Shortly thereafter, the hospital Faulds founded was broken into. A staff member was accused of the crime, but Faulds was certain the employee was innocent. He compared fingerprints found at the scene with those of the suspect and found that they were different. This convinced Japanese police to release the man.

Continue reading “The Oddest Coincidence”

Around two-thirds of the way through the 1962 James Bond film Dr. No, the eponymous villain gives 007 a tour of his hideout. During the tour, Bond does an obvious double-take at one of Dr. No’s paintings:

For those of us born well after the film’s release, the double-take is confusing. Why is Bond interested in this painting? Why does he have such a startled reaction to it?

The scene was an inside joke for people of the era, especially British viewers. And that’s because it references one of the strangest art heists in history.

The man in the painting is Arthur Wellesley. Born on April 29, 1769 to an aristocratic English family in Ireland, Wellesley attended several top-notch schools. But the death of his father and the subsequent exhaustion of his estate required Wellesley to seek work. So, on March 7, 1787 he was accepted into the British Army as an ensign in the 73rd Regiment of Foot. After namedropping and schmoozing the right people, Wellesley was promoted to lieutenant. He was then sent to India and promoted to major general after victories at Srirangapatna and Mysore, and in the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Thereafter, he returned to England, where his services were soon needed against France in the Peninsular War, which culminated in his famous victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. Wellesley became a national hero, and a grateful George III named him “Duke of Wellington”, which is how you probably know him.

The likeness was created by famed Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Unlike many artists, Goya was popular and well-regarded in his own day. He is known for being both the last of the “Old Masters” and the first “modern” painter, in much the same way that Beethoven is considered the last great composer of the “Classical period” but also the first of the “Romantic period”.

Continue reading “The Strangest Theft”

When the Romans came to Great Britain, they built a bunch of forts called castra, which was Anglicized to chester. So, English cities whose names end in -chester, -caster and -cester were once Roman settlements, places like Manchester, Cirencester and Worcester.

When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England, they divided the land into shires, which is why so many English place names end in -shire.

Finally, the Normans invaded England in 1066, and they subdivided the land into counties, from which we get the title of “Count”.

Of course, English settlers to North America brought the county system with them. And thus, every state in America is subdivided into counties, except for Louisiana (which is divided into parishes based on an old Spanish system) and Alaska (which is divided into boroughs).

Texas, being one of the largest states in the Union, has the most counties with 254. But Georgia, inexplicably, has the second-most with 159. Texas is huge, so one can easily understand the need for so many subdivisions. But why does Georgia need so many counties?

The short answer is that it doesn’t. But how the largest state east of the Mississippi River came to have 159 counties is pretty interesting. It involves philanthropy, corruption, war, genocide, urban legends and Progressivism.

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Georgia’s history begins with an English politician named James Oglethorpe. Born on December 22, 1696 in Surrey, Oglethorpe attended Corpus Christi College at Oxford before leaving early to become aide-de-camp to Prince Eugene of Savoy during the Austro-Turkish War of 1716-1718. Afterwards, he returned to England, where he was elected to Parliament.

There Oglethorpe took an interest in the state of London’s prisons. What he found shocked him, but he became especially distressed at the plight of debtors. As hard as it might be to believe, people who owed debts were often thrown in prison back then. Oglethorpe understood how the threat of prison worked as a motivator for people to pay their debts, but he also knew that bad debts often happened to good people. It was manifestly unfair, he thought, that a hardworking, yet down-on-his-luck family man should be locked up with murderers and thieves.

This gave Oglethorpe an idea, the idea of a colony in North America where “worthy debtors” would be given farmland to grow silk or indigo. The colony’s trustees would then take the crops and sell them, paying down the colonist’s debt. Eventually, the debtor would be debt-free, and would have a productive farm to show for it.

Continue reading “Georgia: Why so many counties?”

The English language comes from England, an island nation off the coast of Europe. For almost 200 years, England was the world’s premiere maritime power. Consequently, hundreds of nautical phrases have made their way into the language.

Sometimes the nautical origin of such phrases is obvious. A “shot across the bow” originally meant a warning shot fired towards another ship. It lives on today in the media any time two Goliaths go at it, such as “Google fires shot across the bow at Microsoft in lawsuit” or “Celtics fire shot across the Heat’s bow in game 1 of playoffs”.

Sometimes, though, the naval origin of phrases is somewhat less obvious. At some point in your life, you’ve probably been told to “pipe down”. This comes from an order given by a captain to a boatswain (or bosun). The boatswain usually carried a whistle-like device called a pipe or call (picture here) that was used to convey orders throughout the ship. At the end of a typical day, the captain would call “pipe down”, which was a signal to dismiss everyone not on watch. It’s the naval equivalent of the army’s “lights out”, meaning “shut up and go to sleep”.

Here’s a partial list of some other nautical phrases you might use every day without even knowing it. But before we begin, allow me to say that I know that ropes are called “lines” on ships. I’ve called them “ropes” in this post because it might be confusing to non-nautical types. So don’t email me about it, OK? 🙂

“All hands on deck” – This was an order for everyone on the ship to assemble on deck, perhaps for a Sunday church service, or to convey news to the crew. Its nautical origin should seem obvious, except that in the past few years it’s been shortened to just “all hands” by jargon-loving businesspeople. A company might hold an “all hands” meeting, which requires all employees to attend, for example.

“Press into service” – This originally concerned impressement, the practice of drafting sailors into the Royal Navy against their will. In wartime, the navy would create “press gangs” that would go to ports and round up any spare merchant sailors and force them to serve on Royal Navy ships (with compensation, of course). Contrary to popular belief, press gangs didn’t go around impressing just anyone. An inexperienced person, like a farmer or clergyman, was useless on a ship, and was very rarely (if ever) pressed into service. The term is still used today for anyone who is coerced into taking a job they don’t really want to do, as in “with Edward’s abdication, George was pressed into service as King George VI”.

“First rate” – During the age of sail, Royal Navy ships were rated based on the number of cannon they carried. A small ship carrying 20 guns or fewer was “sixth rate”, 48 guns or fewer was “fifth rate”, 60 guns or fewer was “fourth rate”, 89 guns or fewer was “third rate”, 98 guns or fewer was “second rate”… and 100 guns or more was “first rate” Serving on a such a ship was prestigious and the ships themselves were the best in the navy, so in time “first rate” came to mean something top of the line.

“Knowing the ropes” – If you’ve ever seen an old-fashioned sailing ship, you know they have miles and miles of ropes on them. One of the first things a young sailor would have to learn is which rope did what. Thus, an experienced sailor would “know his ropes”, a term expanded today to anyone knowledgeable about a certain thing, even if ropes aren’t involved.

Continue reading “What the Navy gave English”

A sinecure is a cushy, do-nothing job, often given as a reward to political supporters, or to public figures as a “retirement job”. Before there were speaking tours and book deals, most American presidents took sinecures as heads of universities or charities after leaving office, for example.

It’s probably no surprise that England was (and still is) the undisputed heavyweight champion of sinecures. Centuries of rival factions vying for the Crown led to the creation of hundreds of patronage jobs for supporters. Although most of these sinecures have been eliminated, a few – such as the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and the Constable of the Tower of London – still exist.

Few sinecures were as sought after as the post of Warden of the Royal Mint. The job only required a few public appearances a year, and the actual day-to-day job could be sublet to almost anyone. Most importantly, the job paid well: around £415 a year in the late 1600s. This was a lot of money at the time. A typical “gentleman” only made around £280/year, a high-ranking bishop would make £72/year, and a military officer could take home around £60/year. Considering that a common seaman made £20/year and a laborer made a mere £15/year, the Warden’s salary was an enormous sum of money for most.

But if the Crown thought they were they were getting a man who would just show up and collect a paycheck when Sir Isaac Newton was appointed to the job, they had another thing coming.

Continue reading “Detective and Genius”