Close Call

On Sept. 26, 1983, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces received a warning that the U.S. had launched an ICBM toward the Soviet Union. He dismissed it as a false alarm. Later four additional missiles were detected, and again Petrov decided they were phantoms.

He was right, but he couldn’t have been certain, and if he’d followed protocol he might have started a full-scale nuclear exchange between the superpowers. Bruce Blair of the World Security Institute said, “I think that this is the closest we’ve come to accidental nuclear war.”

| History

The Colditz Cock

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The guards at Nazi prisoner-of-war camps were accustomed to looking for tunnels — so they never thought to look in the attic at Colditz Castle, where, astonishingly, British prisoners had constructed a 19-foot glider from scavenged materials.

They planned to launch it from the roof, using a pulley system driven by a falling bathtub full of concrete. They hoped this would send two men soaring across the River Mulde 60 meters below.

The American army liberated the camp before the glider could be launched, and it was subsequently lost, so for 55 years its designers could only wonder whether the “Colditz Cock” would really have flown. But in 1999 a British aviation company built a full-size replica, and the POWs reunited to watch the launch. It worked.

| History · Technology

Vindicated

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As a writer, W.T. Stead may have been too prescient.

In 1886 he published an article about the sinking of an ocean liner and the consequent loss of life, warning, “This is exactly what might take place and will take place if liners are sent to sea short of boats.”

Six years later he wrote a novel, From the Old World to the New, in which a ship collides with an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks; the survivors are picked up by the Majestic, a ship of the White Star Line.

An outspoken newspaper editor, Stead himself embarked for the New World in April 1912 when President Taft invited him to address a peace conference at Carnegie Hall.

Alas, he never arrived — he had booked his passage on the RMS Titanic.

| History · Oddities

Left and Right

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Three of our last four presidents have been left-handed:

Bush I: Left-handed
Clinton: Left-handed
Bush II: Right-handed
Obama: Left-handed

The same would be true if John McCain had won the last election — he’s a leftie too. Indeed, fully half of American presidents since Truman have been southpaws, though only 10 percent of the general population is left-handed.

What accounts for this? Who knows? But UCLA geneticist Daniel Geschwind says, “Six out of the past 12 presidents is statistically significant, and probably means something.”

| History · Oddities · Trivia

“Holland Conquered by a Spider”

Dubious but colorful: The Foreign Quarterly Review, January 1844, reports the case of Quatremer Disjonval, a Dutch adjutant-general whom the Prussians had incarcerated in a dungeon at Utrecht.

To pass the time he studied the prison’s spiders and noted that their behavior varied with approaching weather. When a sudden thaw threatened the advance of republican troops in January 1795, Disjonval sent a letter to the French general promising a severe frost within two weeks.

When the cold that arrived 12 days later froze Dutch canals solid enough to bear French artillery, the republicans took Utrecht and “Quatremer Disjonval, who had watched the habits of his spiders with so much intelligence and success, was, as a reward for his ingenuity, released from prison.”

See “Spider Barometers.”

| History · Oddities

Sea Legs

Commandant Louis Joseph Lahure has a singular distinction in military history — he defeated a navy on horseback.

Occupying Holland in January 1795, the French continental army learned that the mighty Dutch navy had been frozen into the ice around Texel Island. So Lahure and 128 men simply rode up to it and demanded surrender. No shots were fired.

| History

The Blitz Previewed

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E. Douglas Fawcett’s 1893 story “Hartmann the Anarchist” described an aerial bombardment of London — 47 years before World War II:

With eyes riveted now to the massacre, I saw frantic women trodden down by men; huge clearings made by the shells and instantly filled up; house-fronts crushing horses and vehicles as they fell; fires bursting out on all sides, to devour what they listed, and terrified police struggling wildly and helplessly in the heart of the press.

Hartmann rains dynamite bombs, shells, and blazing petroleum from his airship before a mutiny brings him down. “It has not been my aim to write history,” writes the narrator. “I have sought to throw light only on one of its more romantic corners.”

See also Wreck of the Titan and A Blindfold Bullseye.

| History · Literature · Oddities · Technology

Ships’ Cats

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British sailors had some furry help during World War II. Tiddles (left) spent his whole life aboard Royal Navy aircraft carriers, traveling some 30,000 miles with them. He was born at sea on HMS Argus and was later promoted to captain’s cat on HMS Victorious. He’s pictured in July 1942 at his favorite station, on the after capstan, where he could play with the bellrope.

Convoy, the ship’s cat on HMS Hermione, was so named because he often accompanied the ship on convoy escort duties. He was listed in the ship’s book and given a full kit, including his own hammock. He went down with 87 of his shipmates when the Hermione was torpedoed in 1942.

“In a cat’s eyes,” runs an English proverb, “all things belong to cats.”

| History · Oddities