Early one morning in 1912, the residents of Villisca, Iowa, discovered a horrible scene: An entire family had been brutally murdered in their sleep. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the gruesome crime, which has baffled investigators for a hundred years.
We’ll also follow the further adventures of German sea ace Felix von Luckner and puzzle over some fickle bodyguards.
There are no known pictures of two American presidents’ wives: Martha Jefferson and Margaret Taylor.
We have one silhouette (left) of Jefferson, who was a little over 5 feet tall and had auburn hair and hazel eyes.
And one 1903 book contains a suggested likeness of Taylor (right), who was described during her life as “a fat, motherly looking woman,” “countenance rather stern but it may be the consequence of military association.”
But no portrait of either woman is known to exist. Some artists have attempted renderings based on pictures of their daughters, whom they were said to resemble, but that’s the best we can do.
On June 23, 1858, the Catholic Church removed 6-year-old Edgardo Mortara from his family in Bologna. The reason they gave was surprising: The Mortaras were Jewish, and Edgardo had been secretly baptized. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of little Edgardo and learn how his family’s plight shaped the course of Italian history.
We’ll also hear Ben Franklin’s musings on cultural bigotry and puzzle over an unexpected soccer riot.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is still paying a pension earned by a Civil War soldier.
Union infantryman Mose Triplett was 19 at the war’s end in 1865. In the 1920s he married a woman nearly 50 years his junior, and they had a daughter, Irene, in 1930, when Mose was 83 and his wife was 34.
Irene Triplett, now 85 years old and the last child of any Civil War veteran still on the VA benefits rolls, lives today in a nursing home in Wilkesboro, N.C. She collects $73.13 each month through the pension her father earned for her in 1865.
(Thanks, Tom.)
In 1895, hoping to marry sound and pictures, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson played a violin into a phonograph horn in Thomas Edison’s experimental film studio, and the sound was recorded on a wax cylinder.
The experiment went well, but the team made no attempt to unite sound and image at the time. The film portion remained well known, but the wax cylinder drifted into another archive and was rediscovered only in the 1960s. It wasn’t until 2000 that film editor Walter Murch succeeded in adding the music to the long-famous fragment, and Dickson’s violin could finally be heard.
The vignette, now the oldest known piece of sound film, shows that sound was not a late addition to moviemaking, film preservationist Rick Schmidlin told the New York Times. “This teaches that sound and film started together in the beginning.”
In 1862, slave Robert Smalls was working as a pilot aboard a Confederate transport ship in Charleston, S.C., when he siezed a unique chance to escape. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow his daring predawn journey, which rescued 17 people from slavery and changed the course of South Carolina history.
We’ll also reflect on justice for bears and puzzle over a hijacker’s surprising request.
Flying alone over France in April 1917, German flying ace Ernst Udet engaged another lone pilot in aerial combat. The other pilot, a Frenchman, was exceptionally talented, anticipating all of Udet’s moves and reacting instantly. “Sometimes we pass so closely I can clearly recognize a narrow, pale face under the leather helmet,” Udet wrote later. “On the fuselage, between the wings, there is a word in black letters. As he passes me for the fifth time, so close that his propwash shakes me back and forth, I can make it out: ‘Vieux‘ it says there — vieux — the old one. That’s Guynemer’s sign.”
Guynemer was Georges Guynemer, France’s top fighter ace, who had brought down 30 Germans in fights like this. “Slowly I realize his superiority,” Udet wrote. “His aircraft is better, he can do more than I, but I continue to fight.” For a moment he managed to get Guynemer into his sights, but he found that his gun wouldn’t fire — it was blocked.
Udet tried to clear the stoppage by hand but failed. He considered diving away but knew that Guynemer would instantly shoot him down. They circled one another for another eight minutes as Udet sought to evade the Frenchman’s guns. When Guynemer swooped overhead, Udet hammered the gun with his fists and then realized his mistake:
Guynemer has observed this from above, he must have seen it, and now he knows what gives with me. He knows I’m helpless prey.
Again he skims over me, almost on his back. Then it happens: he sticks out his hand and waves to me, waves lightly, and dives to the west in the direction of his lines.
I fly home. I’m numb.
“There are people who claim Guynemer had a stoppage himself then,” Udet wrote in Ace of the Iron Cross. “Others claim he feared I might ram him in desperation. But I don’t believe any of them. I still believe to this day that a bit of chivalry from the past has continued to survive. For this reason I lay this belated wreath on Guynemer’s unknown grave.”
The medieval Latin riddle In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (“We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire”) is a palindrome. The answer is “moths.”
A quarter million Frenchmen vanished in World War I, leaving their families no clue whether they were still alive. During these anxious years, a lone man appeared on a Lyon railway platform without memory, possessions, or identification. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the strange story of Anthelme Mangin, whose enigmatic case attracted hundreds of desperate families.
We’ll also consider some further oddities of constitutional history and puzzle over an unpopular baseball victory.
The last surviving person to witness Lincoln’s assassination died in 1956. Samuel J. Seymour, born in 1860, was 5 years old when his godmother took him to see Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.
They sat opposite the president’s box, which was draped with flags, and she lifted him up when Lincoln entered. “He was a tall, stern-looking man,” Seymour told the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1954. “I guess I just thought he looked stern because of his whiskers, because he was smiling and waving to the crowd.”
The play began and “all of a sudden a shot rang out — a shot that always will be remembered — and someone in the president’s box screamed. I saw Lincoln slumped forward in his seat.” The crowd began to stir and Seymour saw the assassin John Wilkes Booth tumble over the balcony rail and land on the stage. He called, “Hurry, hurry, let’s go help the poor man who fell down.”
Lincoln died the following morning, and the fleeing Booth was killed 12 days later. Seymour carried the memory of the experience with him for 90 years, until his death on April 12, 1956, at age 96. “That night I was shot 50 times, at least, in my dreams — and I sometimes still relive the horror of Lincoln’s assassination, dozing in my rocker as an old codger like me is bound to do.”
02/19/2016 UPDATE: In February 1956, two months before his death, Seymour appeared on the American game show I’ve Got a Secret, where contestants had to guess his claim to notability:
(Thanks, Andrew.)
