On Oct. 15, 1910, the airship America took off from Atlantic City in a bid to cross the Atlantic. The six crewmembers took along a cat, Kiddo, for luck.
The frightened tabby was still underfoot when chief engineer Melvin Vaniman tried to send a historic wireless message back to shore. So officially the first radio communication ever made from an airship in flight was:
“Roy, come and get this goddamn cat.”
You might have had trouble making change in postwar Hungary — the national currency, the pengo, was plunging so quickly in value that prices doubled every 15 hours.
To simplify calculations, the government eventually introduced a banknote worth 100 quintillion pengo. It was worth 20 American cents.
Things only got worse. By July 1946, the monthly inflation rate had reached 41,900,000,000,000,000 percent, and, unbelievably, the combined value of all Hungarian banknotes equaled one-thousandth of a U.S. dollar.
In desperation the government gave up and introduced a new currency, the forint. In the end you could get 1 new forint by trading in 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (400 octillion) pengo.
That’s the all-time record for hyperinflation — but modern Zimbabwe is not far behind. In fact, because Hungary couldn’t fit all 20 zeroes on that banknote, the 2006 Zimbabwean bill below holds the record for depicted zeroes on a national currency.
World War II ended in 1990.
When the Reich surrendered in 1945, there was no single German state for the Allies to negotiate with. So officially the war continued for 45 more years; the final treaty was signed when Germany reunified.
See also Burying the Hatchet.
In 1805, during his return from India, the Duke of Wellington stayed briefly in a house on the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic.
By an odd coincidence, when Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo 10 years later, the deposed emperor was exiled to the very same house — while Wellington occupied his former palace.
“You may tell Bony,” the duke wrote to a friend, “that I find his apartments at the Elisée Bourbon very convenient, and that I hope he likes mine at Mr. Balcom’s. It is a droll sequel enough to the affairs of Europe that we should change places of residence.”
“I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for 50 years. Two years later, we ourselves were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since distrusted myself and have refrained from all prediction.” — Wilbur Wright
In 356 B.C., Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis.
He said he did it to immortalize his name in history.
He succeeded.
I cannot help thinking that the difference which he [Matthew Arnold] makes between Washington and Lincoln is due to the fact that the one lived a century ago, and the other in our own time. A hundred years ago Englishmen would have laughed at the praise he gives to Washington. Fifty years ago they would have still considered it extravagant. To-day, they think it just. So will it be with Lincoln. Compare what was said of him in his lifetime with what is said of him even now, and we shall be able to form some idea of the verdict of the future.
— Theodore Roosevelt, commenting in Murray’s Magazine, quoted in Patrick Maxwell, Pribbles and Prabbles, 1906
Sir Walter Raleigh once made a wager with Elizabeth that he could weigh the smoke from his tobacco pipe.
When she accepted, he weighed his tobacco, smoked the pipe, and then weighed the ashes that remained.
The queen paid him. “I have seen many a man turn his gold into smoke,” she said, “but you are the first who has turned his smoke into gold.”
For stewardess Violet Jessop, bad luck came in threes. In 1911 she was working on the RMS Olympic when it collided with a British warship off the Isle of Wight.
A few months later she took a position on the Titanic, which sank famously in the North Atlantic in 1912. Her lifeboat was picked up by the Carpathia.
And in 1916 she was working as a nurse on the hospital ship Britannic when it struck a mine in the Aegean Sea and went down.
By this time she was philosophical. Though the Britannic sank in less than 50 minutes, she took care to rescue her toothbrush, “because there had always been much fun at my expense after the Titanic, when I complained of my inability to get a toothbrush on the Carpathia. I recalled [my brother’s] joking advice: ‘Never undertake another disaster without first making sure of your toothbrush.'”
After that her bad luck ceased. She lived without incident for another 55 years and died of heart failure in 1971.
In 1908, German novelist Ferdinand H. Grautoff published Banzai!, a curiously prescient account of a war between Japan and the United States. Japan deals a surprise defeat to unprepared American troops, who rally to repulse them:
Our splendid regiments could not be checked, so eager were they to push forward, and they succeeded in storming one of the enemy’s positions after the other along the mountainside. At last the enemy began to retreat, and the thunder of the cannon was again and again drowned in the frenzied cheers. General MacArthur was continually receiving at his headquarters reports of fresh victories in the front and on both wings.
Note the name of the American commander. Grautoff gives no clue to his inspiration, but in an introduction he writes, “All the incidents we had observed on the dusty highway of History, and passed by with indifference, had been sure signs of the coming catastrophe.”