The Machine

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Machine_de_Madame_du_Coudray-Mus%C3%A9e_de_l%27Homme.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The first life-size obstetrical mannequin was invented by French midwife Angélique du Coudray, who was using it to demonstrate the process of childbirth as early as 1756:

I announced that I would gladly give my advice to poor women who needed it. … I took the tack of making my lessons palpable by having them maneuver in front of me on a machine I constructed for this purpose, and which represented the pelvis of a woman, the womb, its opening, its ligaments, the conduit called the vagina, the bladder and rectum intestine.

The upholstered model included a womb and an extractable baby doll with which her students could practice. The skin and soft organs were made of flesh-colored linen and leather stuffed with padding, and some of the bones were assembled from real skeletons, though wood and wicker later took their place.

“The model is meant mostly for maneuvers that, as others confirm, allow her students to gain confidence, be ‘encouraged, and succeed perfectly,'” writes Nina Rattner Gelbart in The King’s Midwife (1998). “Delivering babies from every conceivable position and presentation will prepare her students for all eventualities. … This machine, as the midwife’s followers will continue to testify, makes an ‘impression that can never be erased,’ ‘an advantage all the more essential because this class of surgeons and these women [of the countryside] do not have the resource of reading … [so] these daily continual maneuvers … [must be] vividly impressed on their senses.'”

| History · Science & Math · Technology

Squaring Words

In his 1864 autobiography Passages From the Life of a Philosopher, Charles Babbage describes an “amusing puzzle.” The task is to write a given word in the first rank and file of a square and then fill the remaining blanks with letters so that the same four words appear in order both horizontally and vertically. He gives this example with the word DEAN:

D E A N
E A S E
A S K S
N E S T

“The various ranks of the church are easily squared,” he writes, “but it is stated, I know not on what authority, that no one has yet succeeded in squaring the word bishop.”

By an unlikely coincidence I’ve just found that Eureka put this problem to its readers in 1961, and they found three solutions:

B I S H O P    B I S H O P    B I S H O P
I L L U M E    I N H E R E    I M P A L E
S L I D E S    S H A R P S    S P I N E T
H U D D L E    H E R M I T    H A N G A R
O M E L E T    O R P I N E    O L E A T E
P E S E T A    P E S T E R    P E T R E L

The first was found by A.L. Cooil and J.M. Dagnese; the second by A.R.B. Thomas; and the third by R.W. Payne, J.D.E. Konhauser, and M. Rumney.

12/10/2023 UPDATE: Reader Giorgos Kalogeropoulos has enlisted a database of 235,000 words to produce more than 100 bishop squares (click to enlarge):

Kalogeropoulos bishop squares

This is pleasing, because it’s a road that Babbage himself was trying to follow in the 19th century, laboriously cataloging the contents of physical dictionaries after an algorithm of his own devising — see page 238 in the book linked above. (Thanks, Giorgos.)

| Puzzles

Limericks

There was a brave girl of Connecticut
Who signaled the train with her pecticut,
Which the papers defined
As presence of mind
But deplorable absence of ecticut.

— Ogden Nash

Said a pupil of Einstein: “It’s rotten
To find I’d completely forgotten
That by living so fast
All my future’s my past,
And I’m buried before I’m begotten.”

— C.F. Best

A maiden at college called Breeze,
Weighed down by B.A.s and Litt.D.s,
Collapsed from the strain
Alas! It was plain
She was killing herself by degrees.

— Mrs. Warren

12/05/2023 UPDATE: Reader E. Norfolk-Ingway sent this — the author is unknown:

There was a young fellow named Cholmondeley,
Whose bride was so mellow and colmondeley
That the best man, Colquhoun,
An inane young bolqufoun,
Could only stand still and stare dolmondeley.

| Poems

Brown Study

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In 2016, after three months of study, a team of academics and market researchers determined that the most unattractive color in the world is this one, Pantone 448 C.

The project was seeking to design the most unappealing package possible for Australian cigarette packets. “We didn’t want to create attractive, aspirational packaging designed to win customers,” market researcher Victoria Parr told the Sydney Morning Herald. “Instead our role was to help our client reduce demand, with the ultimate aim to minimize use of the product.”

A thousand smokers decided that “drab dark brown” packages would have the poorest appeal, promising low-quality cigarettes that caused maximum harm. They associated the winning color with dirt, tar, and death, and assigned no positive adjectives.

In announcing the results, the Australian Department of Health referred to the color as “olive green” — until the olive industry objected.

| Science & Math

For the Record

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The most names ever held by a historical royal belonged to Don Alfonso de Borbón y Borbón (1866-1934), a great-great-grandson of Charles III of Spain, reflecting a trend favored by Spanish royalty in the 19th century.

His full name was Alfonso María Isabel Francisco Eugenio Gabriel Pedro Sebastián Pelayo Fernando Francisco de Paula Pío Miguel Rafael Juan José Joaquín Ana Zacarias Elisabeth Simeón Tereso Pedro Pablo Tadeo Santiago Simón Lucas Juan Mateo Andrés Bartolomé Ambrosio Geronimo Agustín Bernardo Candido Gerardo Luis-Gonzaga Filomeno Camilo Cayetano Andrés-Avelino Bruno Joaquín-Picolimini Felipe Luis-Rey-de-Francia Ricardo Esteban-Protomártir Genaro Nicolás Estanislao-de-Koska Lorenzo Vicente Crisostomo Cristano Darío Ignacio Francisco-Javier Francisco-de-Borja Higona Clemente Esteban-de-Hungría Ladislado Enrique Ildefonso Hermenegildo Carlos-Borromeo Eduardo Francisco-Régis Vicente-Ferrer Pascual Miguel-de-los-Santos Adriano Venancio Valentín Benito José-Oriol Domingo Florencio Alfacio Benére Domingo-de-Silos Ramón Isidro Manuel Antonio Todos-los-Santos de Borbón y Borbón.

| History · Trivia

The Female Stranger

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

This enigmatic headstone stands in in St. Paul’s Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia, over the body of an unknown woman. Nothing definite seems to be known as to the woman’s identity, apart from the year of her death, but the poignant epitaph has fueled speculation for more than two centuries. One common suggestion is that she was Theodosia Burr Alston, a daughter of Aaron Burr who disappeared at sea in 1813, but this doesn’t account for Alston’s whereabouts in the three years before the mystery woman’s interment at Alexandria. It seems unlikely now that the inscription will ever be explained.

| Death · History · Oddities

Second Thoughts

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Pleasantly red-brick Georgian in aspect like most of the others, [Harvard dormitory] Dunster House celebrates the memory of Henry Dunster, the first fully designated president of Harvard. … According to legend, the intention had been to name the original seven houses for Harvard presidents in their order of succession, a design that faltered when it came to the notable Dr. Leonard Hoar, who came to this distinguished post in 1672. … Hoar House had an indelicacy of address that, even in the service of history, Harvard could not abide.

— John Kenneth Galbraith, A Tenured Professor, 1990

| Language

“Ideas Too Are a Life and a World”

More aphorisms from German physicist G.C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799):

  • “How much depends on the way things are presented in this world can be seen from the very fact that coffee drunk out of wine glasses is really miserable stuff, as is meat cut at the table with a pair of scissors. Worst of all, as I once actually saw, is butter spread on a piece of bread with an old though very clean razor.”
  • “A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.”
  • “There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points ‘born’ and ‘died’ farther away from one another … The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.”
  • “As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn’t let it go for less than half-a-crown.”
  • “One has to do something new in order to see something new.”
  • “People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.”
  • “Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.”
  • “First we have to believe, and then we believe.”
  • “Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.”
  • “What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.”
  • “I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up.”
  • “It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.”
  • “A grave is still the best fortification against the storms of destiny.”

See The Sage of Göttingen, From the Notebooks, Diamonds and Pearls, and Insight.

| Quotations