During the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s, prices doubled every 49 hours.
That meant that paper currency notes were cheaper than firewood.
History
Helen Duncan
In November 1941 a U-boat torpedoed the British battleship Barham, but the Germans didn’t realize they’d hit it. The British Admiralty managed to keep the loss a secret for two months, but in the interval a Scottish spiritualist named Helen Duncan announced that the Barham had sunk. She said she’d heard the news from a dead sailor.
The British authorities arrested Duncan, hoping to discredit her story. They appealed to an old law against fraudulent “spiritual” activity … which unfortunately was called the British Witchcraft Act of 1735.
So: History records that a practicing medium who revealed an “unknowable” secret at a séance in 1941 was convicted under a witchcraft law. She served 9 months.
Modern Girl
When Cleopatra was born, the Great Pyramid was already 2,500 years old.
Comanche
It’s not quite true that Custer’s entire detachment was killed at Little Bighorn. Two days after the battle, this horse appeared, badly wounded but still alive. It had been the personal mount of one of Custer’s captains.
Nursed back to health, Comanche was named a “second commanding officer” in the 7th Cavalry. He was buried in 1890 with full military honors.
Some Things Never Change
This is magnificent — it’s a document written on birch bark in 12th-century Russia, unearthed in 1951.
A 6-year-old boy named Onfim was learning to write — and doodling on his homework.
Scrap Paper
In 1946, the inflation rate in Hungary reached 4.19 quintillion percent, a modern record.
By August, all the Hungarian banknotes in circulation would have bought one-thousandth of one U.S. cent.
The Big Fix
On May 31, 1886, tens of thousands of workers pulled the spikes from railroad lines throughout the South, shifted one rail 3 inches, and spiked them in again.
No one had standardized the gauges.
Come Out, Come Out …
That hollow column on the right is a “priest-hole,” a hiding place for Catholic priests, who were hunted with Elmer-Fudd-like tenacity when Elizabeth took the English throne around 1560. A “papist” could be hanged for saying mass; converting a Protestant was high treason.
Fortunately, the priests had a Bugs Bunny in the shape of Nicholas Owen, a Jesuit laybrother who spent his life devising secret chambers and hiding places for persecuted Catholics. “Pursuivants” could spend as much as a fortnight fruitlessly tearing down paneling and tearing up floors while the priest held his breath a wall’s thickness away.
Ickily, some of these hidden priests starved to death.
What?
A deaf observer of the American Civil War would have been deeply confused by the outcome of certain battles. That’s because the generals planned to hear the course of the struggle — and, in some cases, the sounds never arrived.
“Acoustic shadows” typically occur when an expected sound is absorbed somehow or deflected by windshear or a temperature gradient. In the Civil War it had significant effects at Fort Donelson, Five Forks, and Chancellorsville. At the Battle of Iuka, a north wind prevented Grant from hearing guns only a few miles away. At Perryville, Don Carlos Buell learned only from a messenger that his men were involved in a major battle.
At the Battle of Seven Pines, Joseph Johnston was 2.5 miles from the front but heard no guns. And certain sounds from the Battle of Gettysburg were inaudible 10 miles away but clearly heard in Pittsburgh.
(Thanks, David.)
Strange Bedfellows
In 1948, a few months before his death, Babe Ruth visited Yale to donate a copy of his autobiography. He presented it to the captain of the school’s baseball team.
The captain’s name was George Bush.