On Aug. 6, 1945, Mitsubishi engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima visiting the company shipyard when the Enola Gay‘s atomic bomb exploded overhead.
Badly burned, he spent the night in an air raid shelter and then returned to his hometown.
He was explaining the ordeal to his supervisor there when “at that moment, outside the window, I saw another flash and the whole office, everything in it, was blown over.”
He lived in Nagasaki.
William Gladstone was cursed with a well-balanced name, one that his political enemies found well suited to anagrams. The conservative-minded Lewis Carroll found that WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE can be rearranged to spell both WILD AGITATOR! MEANS WELL and WILT TEAR DOWN ALL IMAGES?
The prime minister might have shrugged this off as a coincidence — “wild agitator” might mean anything, after all — but a more painstaking student found that RIGHT HONOURABLE WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE spells I’M A WHIG WHO’LL BE A TRAITOR TO ENGLAND’S RULE.
Which is rather too specific to disown.
Visiting Rome in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain reflects on “the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame.” He imagines how the people of 5868 A.D. will remember Ulysses S. Grant:
URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT — popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ‘Rock me to Sleep, Mother.’
“These thoughts sadden me. I will to bed.”
You don’t hear much about the smallest Hawaiian island, Ni’ihau — it’s been privately owned since 1864, and it’s inhabited almost entirely by native Hawaiians.
So everyone was largely unprepared when a Japanese fighter plane crashed on the island on Dec. 7, 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
What followed would make a gripping screenplay. The natives took the pilot’s pistol and papers, and then endured a week’s terror as he roamed the island trying to retrieve them. Ni’ihau had no electricity or telephones, so the desperate natives tried signalling Kauai with lanterns and a bonfire and finally sent a party to row the laborious 10 hours for help. By the time they returned, their friends had killed the pilot in a climactic battle.
The pilot’s Japanese hometown has erected a stone column in his honor. It claims that he died in battle, and says “his meritorious deed will live forever.”
On Sept. 3, 1967, every car in Sweden came to a stop at 4:50 a.m., carefully switched from the left side of the road to the right, and proceeded at 5 a.m.
The whole nation switched to right-hand traffic overnight. And to the planners’ immense credit, no fatal accidents were associated with the change, and accident rates went down in the year that followed.
This is the only confirmed photo of Abe Lincoln at Gettysburg, taken about three hours before he gave his address. Not everyone loved the speech:
Lincoln delivered the 10-sentence, 3-minute speech only after a 2-hour, 13,607-word oration by former secretary of state Edward Everett. When Everett sent Lincoln his compliments the next day, the president replied, “I am pleased to know that, in your judgment, the little I did say was not entirely a failure.”
If you catch a sturgeon in the United Kingdom, it belongs to the queen.
It’s part of her royal prerogative — the sturgeon’s excellence makes it a “royal fish.”
The same goes for whales: The king gets the head and the queen the tail. Sorry.
Full names of Portuguese monarchs, 1828-1910:
In 1910 the monarchy was abolished, perhaps because of a shortage of ink.
On Feb. 5, 1958, during a simulated combat mission near Savannah, Ga., a B-47 bomber collided with an F-86 fighter. The fighter crashed; the bomber, barely airworthy, needed to reduce weight to avoid an emergency landing.
So it dropped a 7,600-pound nuclear bomb.
The bomb contained 400 pounds of conventional explosives and highly enriched uranium. There’s some disagreement as to whether it included the plutonium capsule needed to start a nuclear reaction.
That’s rather important, because in 50 years of searching the Air Force still hasn’t found the bomb. It hit the water near Tybee Island off the Georgia coast and is presumably buried in 10 feet of silt somewhere in Wassaw Sound. But exactly where it is, and how dangerous it is, remain unknown.
