The Tsavo Man-Eaters

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tsavo_Maneaters_Field_Museum.jpg

If you wanted a sucky job in 1898, you couldn’t do much worse than the Tsavo River project in Kenya. The work crew was assembled to build a railway bridge, but it quickly turned into a lion smorgasbord.

Men were regularly dragged out of their tents at night and devoured. The predators evaded traps, ambushes and even thorn fences, but after 10 months engineer John Henry Patterson managed to kill these two enormous maneless lions. By that time they had killed nearly 140 men between them.

And why? Apparently the flesh of railroad workers has a particular savor. The pair had got a taste for it in raiding shallow graves; when they ran out of graves they started going after live game.

Airmail Before Airplanes

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Great_Barrier_Island_Pigeon-Gram_stamp_1899.jpg

The world’s first airmail stamps were issued for the Great Barrier Pigeon-Gram Service, which carried messages from New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island to the mainland between 1898 and 1908.

It was pretty good: The fastest pigeon, aptly named Velocity, made the trip to Auckland in only 50 minutes, averaging an astounding 125 kph. That’s only 40 per cent slower than modern aircraft.

It Was Ever Thus

Insulting nicknames of U.S. presidents:

  • John Adams: His Rotundity
  • Martin Van Buren: Martin Van Ruin
  • William Henry Harrison: Granny Harrison
  • John Tyler: His Accidency
  • James Buchanan: Old Public Functionary
  • Ulysses S. Grant: Useless
  • Rutherford B. Hayes: His Fraudulency
  • Grover Cleveland: The Beast of Buffalo
  • Woodrow Wilson: Coiner of Weasel Words
  • Warren G. Harding: President Hardly

Japanese War Tuba

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wartuba.jpg

Before World War II, this photo emerged from Japan — Emperor Hirohito inspecting a fleet of giant tubas, with anti-aircraft guns in the background.

They’re actually acoustic locators, designed to listen for plane engines. Radar made the whole project obsolete.

El Comandante

When Fidel Castro was 12 years old, he sent the following letter to Franklin Roosevelt:

Colegio de Dolores
Apartado 1
Santiago de Cuba

Santiago de Cuba.

Nov 6, 1946
Mr. Franklin Roosvelt,
President of the United States

My good friend Roosvelt:

I don’t know very English, but I know as much as write to you. I like to hear the radio, and I am very happy because I heard in it that you will be President for a new (período)

I am twelve years old. I am a boy but I think very much but I do not think that I am writing to the President of the United States.

If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american, in the letter, because never I have not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them.

My address is:
Sr. Fidel Castro
Colegio de Dolores
Santiago de Cuba
Oriente, Cuba.

I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.

Thanks you very much.

Good by, Your friend,

Fidel Castro

He added a postscript:

“If you want iron to make your ships I will show you to you the bigest (minas) of iron of the land. They are in Mayari, Oriente, Cuba.”

Worse Than High Heels

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bound_feet_(X-ray).jpg

The Chinese practice of footbinding, popular since medieval times, was banned only in 1911. Young girls’ feet were wrapped in bandages to prevent them from growing longer than 4 inches. By age 3, four toes on each foot would break, often leading to infection, paralysis and atrophy. Some elderly Chinese women today still show disabilities.

Extra Credit

On Sept. 15, 1963, at the height of the racial violence in Little Rock, a Miami schoolteacher forwarded the following essay to Dwight Eisenhower. Russell is blind.

How to Stop Trouble
By Leah Russell, age 12

If I were president, I would have all the children blindfolded and send them to school. I would also send some of the colored children and have them blindfolded. I think that all of them would have a lot of fun and there wouldn’t be any fights. Probably after they got to know each other there wouldn’t be any more fights or anything like that.

Eisenhower wrote back, asking the teacher to tell Leah that “she has already grasped one of the great moral principles by which we all should live.”

No Man’s Land

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:WorldWarINomansLandStereo1.jpg

Stereocard of no man’s land near Lens, France, during World War I.

Just as I was beginning to forget there were such things as trenches and shrapnel and snipers, they told me a horrible story of two Camerons who got stuck in the mud and sucked down to their shoulders. They took an hour and a half getting one out, and just as they said to the other, “All right, Jock, we’ll have you out in a minute,” he threw back his head and laughed, and in doing so got sucked right under, and is there still. They said there was no sort of possibility of getting him out; it was like a quicksand. …

They told me another story of a man in the Royal Scots who was sunk in mud up to his shoulders, and the officer offered a canteen of rum and a sovereign to the first man who could get him out. For five hours thirteen men were digging for him, but it filled up always as they dug, and when they got him out he died.

— Anonymous, Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915