Before their journey westward in America in 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were advised by Thomas Jefferson to “observe the animals” and especially “the remains and accounts of any which may be deemed rare or extinct.” One of the animal fossils that the expedition sent back is believed to have been of a dinosaur, dating from the Cretaceous Period.
Archive
Miscellany
New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson wrote in 1912 that he had heard the Philadelphia Athletics “had a spy” who stole signs and “tipped the batters by raising and lowering an awning a trifle.” In Philadelphia for the World Series the year before, Mathewson had looked for the culprit. “In the enemy’s camp, I kept watching the windows of the houses just outside the park for suspicious movements,” he wrote. “But I never discovered anything wrong.”
A French tale from 1615 contains a rare early modern mention of a married woman considering birth control. Her method: pressing a bead of perfume on “that artery that the vulgar calls the pulse” during intercourse. The procedure fails—not due to its own inadequacies, the reader is told, but because the woman, so taken by her activity, neglects to apply the perfume.
In 1903, Mark Twain comforted Helen Keller, who had been accused of plagiarizing her story “The Frost King,” telling her in a letter, “All ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” He took a harder line on his own intellectual property, however, campaigning so vigorously for stringent copyright laws that the American Bar Association later recognized him for his efforts.
Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan reported on a pink blazer and black V-neck shirt worn on the Senate floor in 2007. “There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2,” Givhan wrote. “It belonged to Senator Hillary Clinton.”
“The movements of the air and water,” wrote French mathematician Joseph Fourier in 1824, “the extent of the oceans, the elevation and form of the surface, the effects of human industry, and all the accidental changes of the earth’s surface modify the temperature of each climate.”
Irving Berlin composed most of his songs in F-sharp major; the six sharp notes in the scale meant he could play the black keys of the piano almost exclusively. Eventually, for purposes of technical variety, he had a lever mechanism installed that allowed him to modulate into other keys without changing his playing.
In 1980 seven members of Congress were caught up in the Abscam bribery scandal after an FBI sting. Florida congressman Richard Kelly was caught on surveillance camera stuffing $25,000 in cash into his pockets. “Does it show?” Kelly asked an undercover FBI agent dressed as a sheikh. Only one congressman refused the proffered bribe. “Wait a minute,” said Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota. “What you are suggesting may be illegal.”
In 1890 Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky was commissioned to study a disease destroying tobacco plants in Crimea. Filtering the sap from affected plants, Ivanovsky discovered in 1892 the presence of a small parasitic microorganism invisible under great magnification—a virus—which he thought was a minuscule bacterium. In 1898 Dutch microbiologist Martinus W. Beijerinck became the first person to recognize viruses as reproducing entities distinct from other organisms.
In the late eighteenth century, yellow fever was widespread in the Caribbean; case-fatality rates among British troops there were as high as 70 percent. The fate of French troops sent to Saint-Domingue to suppress a slave rebellion was even worse. “Evidence suggests the troops were actually an expeditionary force with intentions to invade North America through New Orleans and to establish a major holding in the Mississippi valley,” wrote the authors of a 2013 scholarly paper. Mortality from the disease thwarted Napoleon’s “secret ambition to colonize and hold French-held lands, which later became better known as the Louisiana Purchase.”
William Gladstone, prime minister of England four times between 1868 and 1894, walked the streets of London at night hoping to rescue prostitutes from their lives of vice. In 1848 he cofounded the Church Penitentiary Society Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women; he would, it is said, offer streetwalkers a place to sleep, protection from their procurers, and a chance to give up their way of life.
In his eponymous saga, Icelandic outlaw Grettir swims through icy waters to a friend’s farm. That night, while he sleeps on a bench inside the longhouse, his clothes fall off. He wakes the next morning to a servant woman laughing at him. “He’s out of proportion,” she says. “He’s big but small between the legs.” This episode, according to a scholar of saga-era Icelandic life, “illustrates the openness of the life in the hall.”
A thirteenth-century Song dynasty text about commerce describes dangers faced by pearl divers, who sometimes fell prey to “huge fishes, dragons, and other sea monsters” that would rip open their stomachs or bite off their feet. A pearl was considered most valuable if perfectly round; the test was “that it will not cease rolling about all day when put on a plate.” To avoid heavy export duties, foreign traders sometimes concealed pearls in canes or umbrella handles.
A letter dated to the eighteenth century BC sent by a servant to Zimri-Lim, the king of Mari, details a system of long-distance signal fires, thought to be the first ever in use.
“Were it possible that the sea could be drained of its waters and emptied by some extraordinary accident, what incredible numbers, what infinite variety of uncommon and amazing sea monsters would exhibit themselves to our view, which are now entirely unknown!” wrote Reverend Erich Pontoppidan in his Natural History of Norway, published in 1753. Ninety-five percent of the ocean remains unseen by humankind, and it is believed that up to sixty-five percent of its plant and animal life has not yet been undiscovered.