The Marquis de Lafayette had served under George Washington during the American Revolution, and when the French political prison fell in 1790 he sent the key to his former commander.
“Give me leave, my dear General,” he wrote, “to present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few days after I had ordered its demolition,–with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a tribute, which I owe, as a son to my adoptive father, as an Aide-de-Camp to my General, as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.”
On May 27, 1896, an F4 tornado walked through St. Louis, leaving a mile-wide path of devastation and playing some violent pranks along the way.
Above, wheat straws were forced half an inch into the body of one tree.
Below, a gardener’s shovel was driven 6 inches into another tree, and a 2×4 pine scantling was shot through 5/8″ of solid iron on the Eads Bridge, “the pine stick protruding several feet through the iron side of the roadway, exemplifying the old principle of shooting a candle through a board.”
George Washington University meteorologist Willis Moore also saw “a six by eight piece of timber driven four feet almost straight down into the hard compact soil.” The confirmed death toll is 255, but additional bodies may have floated off down the Mississippi.
Until 1999, Abe Lincoln was the only person to appear on both the front and back of the same United States coin (he’s just barely visible on the back of the penny, sitting in his memorial):
Now George Washington can claim the same honor with the release of New Jersey state quarter, whose reverse shows him crossing the Delaware River:
James Madison was the half first cousin twice removed of George Washington.
Zachary Taylor was the second cousin of James Madison.
Grover Cleveland was the sixth cousin once removed of Ulysses S. Grant.
Theodore Roosevelt was the third cousin twice removed of Martin Van Buren.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the fourth cousin once removed of Ulysses S. Grant, the fourth cousin three times removed of Zachary Taylor, and the fifth cousin of Theodore Roosevelt (although his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, was a niece of Theodore).
Harry S. Truman was the great-great-great nephew of John Tyler.
Richard Nixon was the seventh cousin twice removed of William Howard Taft and the eighth cousin once removed of Herbert Hoover.
George H.W. Bush was the fifth cousin four times removed of Franklin Pierce, the seventh cousin three times removed of Theodore Roosevelt, the seventh cousin four times removed of Abraham Lincoln, and the eleventh cousin once removed of Gerald Ford.
George Washington really did wear dentures, made of hippopotamus ivory, seahorse ivory, and lead. “Other sets used the teeth of pigs, cows, elks, and humans.”
A dentist once broke off part of Lincoln’s jawbone while pulling a tooth — without anesthesia.
JFK was diagnosed with Addison’s disease in 1947 and given less than a year to live. In October he was actually given last rites.
Reagan quit smoking easily, which can be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease.
George W. Bush has creases in his earlobes, which may be a marker for increased cardiovascular risk. No one knows why.
The Constitution explains what to do if the president dies, but not if he’s incapacitated by illness. “Note the heavy burden of disease that has afflicted our presidents,” writes the anonymous doctor. “We have been very lucky indeed.”
For decades, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. kept a record of the books he read. Pleasingly, the last entry is Thornton Wilder’s 1935 novel Heaven’s My Destination.
In Winter Rules, George Gardner Herrick claims that the book was not to be found in Holmes’ library in Washington or Massachusetts. I can’t confirm that, though.
Sort of related: The definition of confection in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language contains this quotation:
Of best things then, what world shall yield confection
To liken her?
Shakespeare.
In 1893 a correspondent to Notes and Queries pointed out that this passage appears nowhere in Shakespeare. “I have just now found it in [Sir Philip Sidney’s] ‘Arcadia,’ book i, the eclogue of Thyrsis and Dorus. Clearly he quoted from memory. What a memory the man had! — and how careless he sometimes was in trusting it.”
Harvard’s Museum of Natural History owns a unique collection of botanical models made of glass, more than 800 startlingly realistic plants produced by the German father-and-son glassworking team Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. They were commissioned by Professor George Lincoln Goodale to serve as aids in the teaching of botany, but their strikingly accurate detail leads many to regard them as works of art in themselves.
The modern naturalist Donald Schnell, who painstakingly deduced the mechanism by which the butterwort Pinguicula is pollinated, was astonished in 1997 to see the glass butterwort that the Blaschkas had prepared a century earlier: “One sculpture showed a bee entering the flower and a second showed the bee exiting, lifting the stigma apron as it did so,” just as he had hypothesized. “As far as I know Professor Goodale never published this information, nor did it seem to have been published by anyone back then, but the process was faithfully executed.”
This raises a question in aesthetics. If we find, say, the Blaschkas’ glass chicory flower beautiful, shouldn’t we find a live chicory flower equally beautiful? For the two are practically indistinguishable. Some will say yes, but others will insist that “there is an important difference … between perceiving a set of characteristics in an object and perceiving that same set of characteristics as natural to that object,” writes University of Washington philosopher Ronald Moore. “To perceive something as a product of nature is not to perceive one more thing about it; it is to change the way we perceive everything about it.”
(Ronald Moore, “Appreciating Natural Beauty as Natural,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 33:3 [Autumn 1999], 42-60.) (See Perspective.)
