Brave New World

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A Canadian notice to new telephone users, 1896:

To Listen: Place the telephone fairly against the ear, with an upward motion, so that the lower extremity or lobe of the ear is gathered in, into the cavity of the telephone; in this position it will be found to fit snugly and comfortably — the lobe of the ear acting as a cushion and at the same time closing out all ulterior sounds, thus enabling the voice to be heard with clearness and precision.

One California instruction read, “Speak directly into the mouthpiece keeping mustache out of the opening.”

With no social conventions to follow, users had to be taught propriety. AT&T promoted a “Telephone Pledge” that read, “I believe in the Golden Rule and will try to be Courteous and Considerate over the Telephone as if Face to Face.” The winner of a 1910 Bell essay contest wrote, “Would you rush into an office or up to the door of a residence and blurt out ‘Hello! Hello! Who am I talking to?’ No, one should open conversations with phrases such as ‘Mr. Wood, of Curtis and Sons, wishes to talk with Mr. White …’ without any unnecessary and undignified ‘Hello’s.'”

In America Calling (1992), Claude S. Fischer notes, “Companies cut off service to abusers and obtained legislation that fined or even jailed profane customers.”

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Missed Connections

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Nineteenth-century personal ads from the New York Herald:

WILL THE YOUNG LADY WHO ACCIDENTALLY fell while dancing at Barnum’s Museum, on Monday evening, address a note to Interested, Herald office, as a gentleman would like to make her acquaintance, if perfectly agreeable to her? (Jan. 22, 1862)

NIBLO’S, MONDAY EVENING — OCCUPIED adjoining seats in parquet; repeated pressure of arm and foot and hands met when separating. If agreeable, address Bruno, box 211 Herald office. (July 17, 1867)

“WON’T YOU LOOK IN THE HERALD TO-MORROW?” — Will the young lady to whom the above was addressed appoint an interview with the gentleman wearing eyeglasses? Address A.B., Station D. (Dec. 17, 1867)

WILL THE YOUNG LADY, WITH CURLS, WEARING a straw bonnet, and I think plaid shawl, and who carried a Herald in her hand, and who came down Park row to Broadway, and down Broadway to Dey street, turning into Dey street about 11 o’clock yesterday, and who in Dey street met and spoke to a gentleman and then went into a fur store in Dey street, near Greenwich, oblige the gentleman who stood on the opposite side of Dey street, as he very much desires an acquaintance? Address T., Herald office. (Feb. 18, 1862)

AN INTRODUCTION IS EARNESTLY SOLICITED OF the young lady or her friends or family, by the gentleman and his mother who stopped their carriage Friday morning to assist a young lady who had jumped from a stage she had just entered, corner 5th av. and 39th st., to rescue the old gentleman who had fallen in the roadway. The young lady is about 20 years of age and very beautiful; wears her hair in large brown waves; has rosy complexion and soft blue eyes; wore Persian gilt walking coat and muff. We desire her acquaintance and to present her in our family. Address MOTHER AND SON, Herald Uptown office. (Feb. 8, 1880)

(From Sara Bader, Strange Red Cow: And Other Curious Classified Ads From the Past, 2005.)

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Propriety

In 1913, as festivities were planned for the wedding of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s daughter, Berlin’s Hotel Adlon had to move the Kaiser’s brother-in-law from the fourth floor to the second because the tsar could not ride the elevator:

Russian court protocol governed every step the tsar took and nowhere did it mention an elevator. Thus there were no instructions for how the tsar and his retinue were to behave in such a situation. Should he enter the cab first? Was he permitted to keep his hat on? Who should operate the elevator’s crank? and God knows what else.

The protocol had survived unchanged from the days of Catherine the Great. Catherine, of course, had never ridden an elevator for the simple reason that there weren’t any back then, and that’s why the protocol contained not one word about this means of vertical transportation. … At any rate, an apartment on the second floor was prepared for Duke Ernst Gunther zu Schleswig-Holstein.

From Andreas Bernard, Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator, 2014.

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The Size of It

This just caught my eye — in Beyond Dance, her 2001 account of Hungarian choreographer Rudolf Laban’s late career in industrial consulting, Eden Davies quotes a “traditional Spanish proverb”:

High intelligence + high action = leaders of the world
High intelligence + low action = the academics
Low intelligence + low action = those needed to do humble jobs
Low intelligence + high action = these people menace world stability

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“The Connection”

A thought-provoking piece of nonsense by Russian absurdist poet Daniil Kharms:

Philosopher!

  1. I am writing to you in answer to your letter which you are about to write to me in answer to my letter which I wrote to you.
  2. A violinist bought a magnet and was carrying it home. Along the way, hoods jumped him and knocked his cap off his head. The wind picked up the cap and carried it down the street.
  3. The violinist put the magnet down and ran after the cap. The cap fell into a puddle of nitric acid and dissolved.
  4. In the meantime, the hoods picked up the magnet and hid.
  5. The violinist returned home without a coat and without a cap, because the cap had dissolved in the nitric acid, and the violinist, upset by losing his cap, had left his coat in the streetcar.
  6. The conductor of the streetcar took the coat to a secondhand shop and exchanged it there for sour cream, groats, and tomatoes.
  7. The conductor’s father-in-law ate too many tomatoes, became sick, and died. The corpse of the conductor’s father-in-law was put in the morgue, but it got mixed up, and in place of the conductor’s father-in-law, they buried some old woman.
  8. On the grave of the old woman, they put a white post with the inscription “Anton Sergeevich Kondratev.”
  9. Eleven years later, the worms had eaten through the post, and it fell down. The cemetery watchman sawed the post into four pieces and burned it in his stove. The wife of the cemetery watchman cooked cauliflower soup over that fire.
  10. But when the soup was ready, a fly fell from the wall, directly into the pot with this soup. They gave the soup to the beggar Timofey.
  11. The beggar Timofey ate the soup and told the beggar Nikolay that the cemetery watchman was a good-natured man.
  12. The next day the beggar Nikolay went to the cemetery watchman and asked for money. But the cemetery watchman gave nothing to the beggar Nikolay and chased him away.
  13. The beggar Nikolay became very angry and set fire to the cemetery watchman’s house.
  14. The fire spread from the house to the church, and the church burned down.
  15. A long investigation was carried on but did not succeed in determining the cause of the fire.
  16. In the place where the church had stood a club was built, and on the day the club opened a concert was organized, at which the violinist who fourteen years earlier had lost his coat performed.
  17. In the audience sat the son of one of those hoods who fourteen years before had knocked the cap off that violinist.
  18. After the concert was over, they rode home in the same streetcar. In the streetcar behind theirs, the driver was the same conductor who once upon a time had sold the violinist’s coat in a secondhand shop.
  19. And so here they are, riding late at night through the city: in front, the violinist and the hood’s son; and in back, the driver, the former conductor.
  20. They ride along and don’t know what connection there is between them, and they won’t know till the day they die.
| Literature · Society

Kettle Logic

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recalls “the defensive argument of a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle to him in a damaged condition”:

In the first place, he said, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second, it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, he had never borrowed the kettle from his neighbour at all.

“But so much the better,” Freud notes. “If even one of these three methods of defence is recognised as valid, the man must be acquitted.”

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Arrogance

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In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the residents of Meryton consider Mr. Darcy arrogant, proud, and conceited because of his reactions to village people. Of Elizabeth Bennet he says, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.” Later, when she spurns his proposal, he tells her directly, “Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”

The trouble is, he’s right — Darcy is educated, intelligent, wealthy, and handsome. He is superior to the people he’s judging, even according to their own standards. University of Minnesota philosopher Valerie Tiberius asks, what then is arrogance?

“Henry Kissinger, for instance, is by all accounts a highly arrogant person, but his intellectual talents are considerable, and all philosophical accounts of the good life for human beings assign such talents an important role. … So if Darcy and Kissinger believe that they are doing pretty well by the standards of human excellence, it is not obvious that they are wrong, and their arrogance must therefore consist in something other than a false belief.”

(Valerie Tiberius and John D. Walker, “Arrogance,” American Philosophical Quarterly 35:4 [October 1998], 379-390.)

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The Little People

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In medieval chess, each of the eight pawns was associated with a commoner’s occupation. From king rook pawn to queen rook pawn:

  • Laborer (farmer)
  • Smith
  • Notary
  • Merchant
  • Physician
  • Innkeeper
  • City watchman or guard
  • Ribald or town courier

The merchant stood before the king, the doctor before the queen.

Jacopo de Cessolis used the game as the basis for a series of sermons on morality — he says that a philosopher invented the game to show his cruel king “the maners and conditicions of a kynge of the nobles and of the comun people and of theyr offices and how they shold be touchid and drawen. And how he shold amende hymself & become vertuous.”

(From Christopher Kleinhenz’s Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, 2004.)

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Primate Wanted

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The ACLU found John Scopes by running a newspaper ad seeking a teacher willing to test the law about teaching human evolution in the classrooms of Tennessee. From the May 4, 1925, edition of the Chattanooga Times:

We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts. Our lawyers think a friendly test case can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job. Distinguished counsel have volunteered their services. All we need now is a willing client.

Scopes wasn’t a biology teacher but had filled in for one using a textbook that accepted evolution, and that was enough to set the “monkey trial” moving forward.

Strangely, the disputed textbook was the one that Tennessee required its high school teachers to use that year. Clarence Darrow later quipped in his autobiography, “It seems strange that the Dayton school board did not adopt the first and second chapters of Genesis as a modern textbook on biology.”

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Hateful Patients

In a 1978 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist James E. Groves categorized the patients “whom most physicians dread”:

“Dependent clingers” escalate from normal requests for reassurance to “repeated, perfervid, incarcerating cries for explanation, affection, analgesics, sedatives and all forms of attention imaginable.” They may have severe, even life-threatening disorders, or they may have no discernible illness at all.

“Entitled demanders” use “intimidation, devaluation and guilt-induction to place the doctor in the role of the inexhaustible supply depot.” They may even try to control the doctor by withholding payment or threatening to sue.

“Manipulative help-rejecters” appear almost smugly satisfied, returning “again and again to the office or clinic to report that, once again, the regimen did not work.” When one symptom is relieved, another appears in its place.

“Self-destructive deniers” show “unconsciously self-murderous behaviors, such as the continued drinking of a patient with esophageal varices and hepatic failure.” These patients “seem to glory in their own destruction. They appear to find their main pleasure in furiously defeating the physician’s attempts to preserve their lives.”

“Admitted or not, the fact remains that a few patients kindle aversion, fear, despair or even downright malice in their doctors,” Groves wrote, noting that the medical literature had largely failed to address this problem. “Emotional reactions to patients cannot simply be wished away, nor is it good medicine to pretend that they do not exist.”

(James E. Groves, “Taking Care of the Hateful Patient,” New England Journal of Medicine, April 20, 1978.)

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