STOP

The first arrest by telegraph took place in 1845. John Tawell poisoned his mistress at her home at Salt Hill and fled by train to London, but police sent the following memorable message ahead to Paddington Station:

A MURDER HAD JUST BEEN COMMITTED AT SALT HILL AND THE SUSPECTED MURDERER WAS SEEN TO TAKE A FIRST CLASS TICKET TO LONDON BY THE TRAIN THAT LEFT SLOUGH AT 7.42 PM. HE IS IN THE GARB OF A KWAKER [the instrument lacked a Q] WITH A BROWN GREAT COAT ON WHICH REACHES HIS FEET. HE IS IN THE LAST COMPARTMENT OF THE SECOND FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGE.

In a London coffee tavern Tawell was confronted by a detective who asked, no doubt triumphantly, “Haven’t you just come from Slough?” He was jailed, tried, convicted, and hanged.

“Who Can Read Franklin’s Cipher?”

Benjamin Franklin wrote from Passy, in 1781, a letter to M. Dumas. He said:— ‘I have just received a 14, 5, 3, 10, 28, 2, 76, 203, 66, 11, 12, 273, 50, 14, joining 76, 5, 42, 45, 16, 15, 424, 235, 19, 20, 69, 580, 11, 150, 27, 56, 35, 104, 652, 20, 675, 85, 79, 50, 63, 44, 22, 219, 17, 60, 29, 147, 136, 41, but this is not likely to afford 202, 55, 580, 10, 227, 613, 176, 373, 309, 4, 108, 40, 19, 97, 309, 17, 35, 90, 201, 100, 677.’ This has never been deciphered. The state department at Washington has no key to it. I submit it for the consideration of the whole world.

— Elliott Sandford, New York World, cited in Henry Williams, A Book of Curious Facts, 1903

04/09/2014 Now solved!

12/30/2014 Oops, that link seems to have gone bad. Here’s another one. The numbers are keyed to the text of a book that Franklin’s correspondent Charles Dumas had sent to him. The message reads, “I have just received a neuu comiissjon joining me uuith m adams in negodiaions for peace but this is not likely to afford me much employ at present.”

Inclement Weather

In The Atmosphere (1873), Camille Flammarion reports that in the latter part of October 1844, during a hurricane in the south of France, hailstones fell weighing 11 pounds. On May 8, 1802, a piece of ice fell “which measured more than three feet both in length and in width, with a thickness of two and a quarter feet.”

Nature (Aug. 30, 1894) reports that a gopher turtle, measuring 6 by 8 inches and entirely encased in ice, fell at Bovina, Miss., during a severe hailstorm there in 1893. Meteorologist Cleveland Abbe suggested that some “special local whirls or gusts” had carried it aloft. The turtle, evidently, had no comment.

Autodidact

In Curiosities of Human Nature (1852), Samuel Griswold Goodrich records that the duke of Argyle discovered a Latin copy of Newton’s Principia on the grass one day during a walk on his grounds. The book was claimed by Edmund Stone, the 18-year-old son of a gardener, and the astonished duke discovered that the young man was conversant with geometry, Latin, and Newton.

Argyle asked how he had come to know these things, and the youth replied that a servant had taught him to read 10 years earlier, and that he had taught himself arithmetic and geometry from textbooks, and Latin and French from dictionaries.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that we may learn everything when we know the 26 letters of the alphabet.”

Vroom!

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winkel-tripel-projection.jpg

The trouble with rocket-powered roller skates is that you can’t steer.

To remain on land as long as possible, we suggest you start in northern Siberia (99°1’30E 76°13’6N) and point yourself due south. That’ll take you through 4,717 miles of Russia, Mongolia, China, Burma, and Thailand before you splash into the South China Sea.

Or start at 48°24’53N 4°47’44W in northern France and head east. An unswerving course will take you through Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, and Russia, covering 6,665 miles before you hit the Sea of Okhotsk. Good luck.

See also Point Nemo.

Rimshot

A lady, some time back, on a visit to the British Museum, asked the person in attendance if they had a skull of Oliver Cromwell? Being answered in the negative, ‘Dear me,’ said she, ‘that’s very strange; they have one at Oxford.’

— T. Wallis, The Nic-Nac; or, Oracle of Knowledge, 1823