On April 2, 1877, at London’s Royal Aquarium, a fourteen-year-old girl with the stage name Zazel became the first female to perform the human-cannonball trick in public. She later worked for P. T. Barnum, who, in response to the “Dangerous Performances Bill” under consideration by British Parliament, wrote defensively to the New York Times in 1880 that he paid Zazel $250 a day—“I should never have invested this large sum in any feature, however attractive, had I not known it was placed beyond the chance of accident.”
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During the rule of Charlemagne in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, the Carolingian Renaissance saw the revival of Latin studies, the creation of a royal scriptorium, Alcuin’s revision of the Vulgate Bible, and the advent of a minuscule (lowercase) writing system, which eased the labor of copying. Charlemagne himself, however, could barely write a word in any language.
A study of U.S. Supreme Court oral transcripts from 2004 to 2005 tabulated every instance the court reporter described a justice’s remarks provoking laughter. It found that Antonin Scalia had caused seventy-seven such episodes, while Clarence Thomas had caused zero.
“Even if WDW [Walt Disney World] is the HPOE [Happiest Place on Earth], it is still part of Earth,” legal scholar Lauren A. Newell wrote in a 2012 paper. “Occupants of WDW are not immune from inclement weather, technical malfunctions, hunger, fatigue, or any other source of unpleasantness that exists in life.”
While on his American speaking tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Leadville, Colorado, where he went into a saloon. There was a piano player in the corner with a sign over him that said: DON’T SHOOT THE PIANIST; HE’S DOING THE BEST HE CAN. It was, observed Wilde, “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” He also visited a nearby mine where, upon reaching the bottom, the miners implored him to stay for supper: “the first course being whiskey, the second whiskey, and the third whiskey.”
Gioachino Rossini was known to possess strong opinions about other composers. “Wagner has some fine moments,” he estimated, “but some bad quarters of an hour.” After hearing Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, he remarked, “What a good thing it isn’t music.”
“Ten dolphins are now being trained for special tasks in the Ukrainian state oceanarium, and the Ukrainian military are regularly training the animals for detecting things on the seabed,” a military official told a Russian newspaper in 2012. The source went on to say that some dolphins would be trained to combat enemy swimmers, using special knives or pistols affixed to their heads. The Ukrainian Defense Ministy later denied the program’s existence.
During a battle with Scythians in Macedonia on April 29, 1091, Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus noted the midday sun “shedding its rays,” reported his daughter Anna Comnena in the Alexiad. He dispatched local peasants to bring water in skins or jars to his troops, who “sipped a drop of water, then returned to the fray.” The newly hydrated Byzantines wiped out their enemies, and a chant began: “All because of one day the Scythians never saw May.”
A Gettysburg resident, F. W. Biesecker, won the contract in 1863 to bury the Union dead, at the rate of $1.59 per corpse, in the town’s recently dedicated national cemetery. After the war, between 1865 and 1870, there were large-scale efforts to rebury all Union soldiers in national cemeteries; to separate them from Confederate corpses, workers assessed jacket color, shoe make, and cotton-underwear quality.
Papal indulgences were brisk business for early printers, since they were single sheets and the type did not need to be reset. Between 1498 and 1500, the Benedictine monastery in Catalonia commissioned more than 200,000 indulgences from printers in the area. A total of two thousand single-sheet items survive from the whole of the fifteenth century; over one-third are indulgences.
Banished from the kingdom of Kindah, the sixth-century prince and poet Imru al-Qays spent much of his life wandering the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula developing the literary genre wuquf ala al-atlal, or “stopping by the ruins.” “The courtyards and enclosures of the old home have become desolate,” he wrote in one verse, “the dung of the wild deer lies there thick as the seeds of pepper.”
A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
At the thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1967, one second was redefined as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.” In April of this year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, unveiled a new atomic clock to act as the United States’ primary time standard; it will not gain or lose a second in 300 million years.
C. S. Lewis was sixty-four, John F. Kennedy forty-six, and Aldous Huxley sixty-nine at the times of their deaths—all within an eight-hour span on November 22, 1963.
“There are observances necessary for a healthy man to employ during a pestilence,” advised the first-century Roman medical writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus, “although in spite of them, one cannot be secure.” Best of all is “to go abroad, take a voyage. When this cannot be, to be carried in a litter, walk in the open before the heat of the day, gently, and to be anointed in like manner.”