History

The Old Gods of England

17 January 2022
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Woden, the Wanderer

Before their conversion, the Anglo-Saxons had no written language, so we know little about Anglo-Saxon paganism. Yes, they worshipped the Germanic goods, the names of Tiu (Tuesday), Woden (Wednesday), Thunor (Thursday) and Freia (Friday) being preserved in four days of the week while Easter keeps alive the memory of a goddess, Eostre, whose cult is otherwise completely lost, but the tales they told of these gods were forgotten and we can only piece together a little of how they were worshipped.

Paganism was a religion of ritual rather than faith. No one doubted the existence of gods and other powers; religion was there to get the gods onside. Through sacrifice, generally animal although there are some intimations of occasional human sacrifice, the gods’ blessing might be gained, thus ensuring the supplicant’s hál, an Old English word meaning fortune or divine blessing from which derive the words ‘hale’ and ‘healthy’. Pagan sanctuaries were generally woodlands groves or glades – in one such, Penda displayed the severed head and arms of Oswald after the battle of Maserfield. Such places were often named hearg, which becomes Harrow (‘Harrow-on-the-Hill’) in later English. Pagan priesthood appears to have been inherited, and the priests themselves were marked out from the rest of the elite by the taboo against them using weapons or riding stallions.

Once and Future King

22 December 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Arthur receiving Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake

The legendary image of Arthur, the once and future king, who will return in England’s direst need to deliver her from her enemies, is somewhat undercut by the fact that, if he existed at all, Arthur actually fought against the English as a champion of the native Britons, the people who would become the Welsh. But Arthur’s very existence is a moot point.

The earliest definite reference to him is in the Historia Brittonum (History of the Britons), which was written in Wales around 830, so at least three centuries later. In the Historia, Arthur is the dux bellorum (duke of battles) rather than a king, who leads the Britons to 12 victories over the Anglo-Saxons, the last of which at Mount Badon. This is interesting because Gildas also talks about a victory for the Britons at Mount Badon, the battle taking place in the year of his birth, as well as naming the man who rallied the Britons after the shock of the initial Saxon invasion. Unfortunately, for Arthurian apologists, Gildas names this war leader as Ambrosius Aurelianus, rather than Arthur. That the Britons had war leaders who rallied them against the invaders seems certain: whether the greatest of these was really called Arthur, we simply cannot say.

The Strange Case of Dr Haugh

15 December 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Things You Never Knew
Oliver Haugh became addicted to cocaine infused toothache medicine.

The young Wilbur Wright, a brilliant scholar and athlete, seemed destined to leave his little home town, go to Yale University and embark on a famous career. Then, when playing an ice hockey match, a player from the opposing team smashed Wilbur in the face with his hockey stick, knocking out most of his upper front teeth. Wilbur suffered months of pain, followed by bouts of depression and withdrawal. Yale was out of the question. What’s more, their mother, Katharine, was ill with tuberculosis. Wilbur became her carer and, having retreated to the confines of the house, he read and read and read.

The 15-year-old boy who smashed Wilbur Wright’s face and changed the history of aviation grew up to become one of Ohio’s most notorious serial killers. Oliver Crook Haugh was three years younger than Wilbur and lived a couple of blocks away, but was known as the neighbourhood bully. It’s not clear whether he meant to hit Wilbur, but the course of his later life suggests it was a premeditated strike. While a bully, Haugh was not a steretypical oaf: he qualified as a doctor and began practising in Dayton, Ohio (presumably Wilbur was not among his patients).

Obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Haugh began experimenting on himself, seeking to prove that “two beings can exist in one body”. He also experimented with marriages – he had at least nine, many simultaneously, and four of his wives did not survive the union – and, as there were unexplained deaths among his patients, started to move around, opening up new practices, then moving on when the questions became too pressing. Haugh returned to Dayton in 1905, moving in with his parents and brother.

But then he learned that his parents had cut him out of their will. On the night of 5 November 1905, the Haugh family home caught fire. Oliver Haugh escaped, but his parents and brother did not. In the subsequent trial, Haugh pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity but he was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was executed by electric chair on 19 April 1907. At the time of Haugh’s death, Wilbur was in Europe, negotiating with interested governments over the sale of the brothers’ technology.

5 Facts About the Wright Brothers

8 December 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: History

“I like scrapping with Orv,” said Wilbur, “he’s such a good scrapper.” Spirited disagreements drove the brothers towards the solutions of the many engineering problems they faced.

Katharine Wright, the brothers’ younger sister, was the only member of the family to get a degree. She became a teacher at Dayton High School.

The Wright brothers, having patented their designs, sued other manufacturers for stealing their ideas. However, all patents were pooled when the United States joined World War I.

The brothers had promised their father never to fly together, to ensure that a crash wouldn’t claim the lives of both his sons. They kept their word.

On 25 May 1910, Orville Wright took his father, by then 82, for his one and only flight. The plane rose to over 100 metres, with Milton telling his son, “Higher, Orville, higher!”

The Current War

29 November 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Things You Never Knew
The electrocution of Western Union Lineman John Feeks became part of the propaganda during the Current War.

Edison had invented the light bulb, but he needed to devise a system to distribute electricity to houses and businesses so that they could use his light bulbs. The system he developed used DC (direct current), a low voltage, high current system. George Westinghouse, using ideas developed by Nikola Tesla, came up with a competing system that used AC (alternating current), which used high voltages and low currents.

The battle was on. Tesla had first worked for Edison, but Edison had dismissed his ideas as impractical. However, it soon became clear that the AC system was superior, particularly over longer distances, allowing electricity to be run to remote and rural districts. To fight back, Edison started a campaign highlighting the safety implications of a high-voltage system, going so far as to demonstrate its dangers by inviting journalists to watch when he got a stray dog to stand on a sheet of tin attached to an AC generator. The switch was flipped and the dog yelped and died.

Further support for Edison’s view that AC was a lethal technology was provided when it was used in the first execution of a prisoner by the electric chair. On 6 August 1890, William Kemmler, who had been convicted of murdering his common-law wife, was strapped to a chair and electrocuted. But the first shock did not kill him; it required a second, higher voltage burst to finish Kemmler off, although this set his hair and coat on fire.

Despite Edison’s attempts to tie AC to Kemmler’s execution and brand it dangerous, the system’s superiority prevailed, and in one of Edison’s few failures, the world today runs on AC.

The Space Race

25 November 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Things You Never Knew
Buzz Aldrin working outside the Gemini 12 spacecraft in Earth orbit

On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union stunned the world, and in particular the United States, by launching Sputnik 1 into orbit. On 12 April 1961, the Soviet Union sent Yuri Gagarin into space and brought him safely back to earth. The space race had begun and the Soviet Union had a clear lead. In a time when the world was locked into a confrontation between the communist Soviet bloc and the West, the propaganda advantage in leading the race into space was immense.

In response, on 25 May 1961 President John F. Kennedy asked Congress to commit the nation to, “before this decade is out, […] landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”. Following Kennedy’s assassination, this pledge became sacrosanct. To catch up with the Soviet lead, the Americans planned a series of manned spacecraft, beginning with the Mercury rockets crewed by a single astronaut, going on to the two-man Gemini missions that pioneered many of the technologies and techniques necessary for a flight to the Moon, and culminating with the three-man Apollo programme designed to take men to the Moon. Despite the Apollo 1 disaster, when three astronauts were killed in the Command Module during testing on the launch pad when a fire broke out, by the late 1960s the American space programme had overtaken the Soviets. Now all that remained was to fulfil Kennedy’s pledge.

The Marriage of Mark Twain

22 November 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Things You Never Knew
Olivia Langdon (1845-1904), wife of Mark Twain

Sailing back from Europe aboard the good ship Quaker City, a fellow traveller showed Samuel Clemens (the real name of Mark Twain) a photograph of his sister, Olivia. Of course, Twain later said it was love at first sight – it wouldn’t be nearly so good a story otherwise – but nevertheless he accepted an invitation to visit the home of his shipboard companion and there met, in the flesh, Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a wealthy merchant family which was also ardently abolitionist: her father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, the network of routes and safe houses that helped slaves escape to freedom. Clemens soon fell in love with her, but Olivia turned down his proposal. A devout Christian, she would reform the hard-drinking, hard gambling son of the Mississippi, and agreed to their corresponding. Clemens agreed, thinking that by doing so “she would unwittingly dig a matrimonial pit and end by tumbling into it”.

Olivia’s parents were hardly reassured when they sought the opinions of Clemens’ friends. He was, they reported, an unsettled rover “who got drunk oftener than was necessary”. But then, that was what Clemens had already told them. At least he was honest in his self reporting.

It was this honesty that won over Olivia’s parents, and the object of Clemens’ love herself fell into the pit of correspondence between them (over 180 letters). Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon were engaged in February 1869 and married the following year. Livy became his editor and first reader; a vital influence in his work. After Livy died, in 1904, Clemens wrote a story of the first human couple, Adam and Eve. In the story, when Eve dies, Adam says, “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.” They were words for his wife too.

Sacagawea: guide to the Lewis & Clark expedition

18 November 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Sacagawea, guide on the Lewis & Clark trans-America expedition from 1804 to 1806.

While in winter camp at Fort Mandan in 1804, Lewis and Clark hired French-Canadian trapper Toussaint Charbonneau as an interpreter, his employment facilitated by his being married to a young Soshone woman, Sacagawea. Sacagawea had been captured in a raid by the Hidatsa on the Soshone when she was 12. Charbonneau bought, or won Sacagawea through gambling, when she was about 16. Pregnant, Sacagawea gave birth to her first child, a son, on 11 February 1805. Little Jean Baptiste Charbonneau would become, by some margin, the youngest member of the expedition. Having a woman and a baby on the journey considerably eased relations with the tribes the Corps met along the way, as war parties did not travel with women and children. Sacagawea’s knowledge helped the expedition considerably along the way, but it was the encounter with her brother, when the expedition reached the land of the Soshone, that really proved her worth. The Soshone provided help, and a guide, to see them over the Rockies. Sacagawea chose to continue with the expedition rather than return to her own people. On the return journey Sacagawea, Toussaint and their son stopped at Fort Mandan, but a few years later, in 1809, they travelled to St Louis, meeting William Clark there. Clark offered to see to the education of Jean Baptiste, and Sacagawea left him with Clark. Records suggest that Sacagawea died in 1812 from illness at Fort Manuel, South Dakota. Clark became guardian to Jean Baptiste and Sacagawea’s daughter, Lisette.

Left-handed in a Right-handed World

15 November 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Media star
Jimi Hendrix – By Steve Banks – Steve Banks, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63987610

Hendrix, famously, played guitar left handed – that is he fretted notes with his right hand and strummed the strings with his left hand. But left-handed guitars were few and expensive, so Hendrix took an ordinary right-handed Fender Stratocaster, flipped it upside down, so that the tuning pegs were on the bottom, and restrung it. Doing this changed how the guitar sounded. A Fender Stratocaster has three pickups (electric microphones that produce the signal fed to the guitar’s amplifier), with the rear pickup set at an angle to the strings. Reversing the guitar meant that this pickup took its signal from the higher strings further up the fretboard, producing a sweeter tone. By reversing the guitar, Hendrix also changed the relative distance of each string from its pickup, thereby altering the mix of sound in the guitar’s signal to the amp. Another effect of reversing the stringing on his guitar was the highest strings, which on a normal Stratocaster are the longest, became the shortest on the Stratocasters Hendrix played. A shorter string requires less tension to tune it, making the string easier to bend and thus easier to play. This change also altered the amount of string between the nut at the end of the fretboard and the tuning peg. Although the nut prevents this length of string actually playing, it produces overtones when the string is plucked. Changing the length of these parts of the strings also contributed to the unique Hendrix sound.