“I’m not good-looking. … What I have got is I have character in my face. It’s taken an awful lot of late nights and drinking to put it there.” — Humphrey Bogart
“If a face like Ingrid Bergman’s looks at you as though you’re adorable, everybody does. You don’t have to act very much.” — Humphrey Bogart
“All I do to look evil is to let my beard grow for two days.” — Humphrey Bogart
In 1914, Canadian Army veterinarian Harry Colebourn was traveling to the Western Front when he met an orphaned bear cub in an Ontario railway station. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the adventures of Winnie the bear, including her fateful meeting with A.A. Milne and his son, Christopher Robin.
We’ll also marvel at some impressive finger counting and puzzle over an impassable bridge.
Chess boxing has evolved from a performance art piece to a serious worldwide professional sport. Two competitors engage in six rounds of chess and five rounds of boxing, switching between the two every three minutes. A player can win by knockout, technical knockout, or checkmate, or if his opponent resigns, exceeds the time limit, or is disqualified. If both the contests end in a draw, the player of the black pieces wins.
In football tennis (below), you have to return the ball over the net without using your hands. Up to three players can play on each side, with corresponding rules regarding the number of touches and bounces allowed on each return. This sport is growing too — the first rules were written in 1940, and it held its 11th world championship in 2014. Now we need a way to combine all four of these.
Samuel Morse’s original plan for Morse code was to assign numbers to words; the operator would have to look up each number in a codebook as it was received in order to find its meaning. Morse’s New Jersey collaborator Alfred Vail thought this was tedious and expanded the code to a system of dots and dashes, where each letter of the alphabet was represented by a series of symbols.
To keep this simple he needed to work out the relative frequency of English letters, so that the most commonly used letters could get the shortest sequences of symbols. And “a happy idea enabled him to save his time. He went to the office of the local newspaper in Morristown and found the result he wanted in the type-cases of the compositors. The code was then arranged so that the most commonly used letters were indicated by the shortest symbols — a single dot for an E, a single dash for T and so on.”
Despite such breakthroughs, Vail finally left the telegraph business because he felt it didn’t value his contributions — even as superintendent of the Washington and New Orleans Telegraph Company he received only $900 a year. He wrote to Morse in 1848, “I have made up my mind to leave the Telegraph to take care of itself, since it cannot take care of me. I shall, in a few months, leave Washington for New Jersey, … and bid adieu to the subject of the Telegraph for some more profitable business.”
(From Russell W. Burns, Communications: An International History of the Formative Years, 2004.)
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound was shot in black and white, but the conclusion contains two frames of red when a gun is fired (1:54:40 above).
(This involves a big spoiler, so don’t click if you haven’t seen the movie.)
Is it possible for someone who has had no musical training whatsoever, and who has never learned the names of the notes, to be known by others to have absolute pitch? The answer is YES! I knew a police officer who was totally unmusical, and never knew the names of the notes, who nevertheless was known to have absolute pitch. How? Well, this was eighty-five years ago, when police stations emitted radio signals, each station having its own individual frequency. The police officer in question was the only one among his fellow officers who upon hearing the radio signal could identify the police station!
— Raymond Smullyan, Reflections, 2015
French artist Georges Rousse photographs anamorphic images in abandoned and derelict buildings.
When the scene above is viewed from the right vantage point, it looks like this:
This video shows him at work on a project in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, in 2013:
At a 1931 costume ball, seven New York architects appeared as their own buildings. Left to right: A. Stewart Walker as the Fuller Building; Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf-Astoria; Ely Jacques Kahn as the Squibb Building; William Van Alen as the Chrysler Building; Ralph Walker as One Wall Street; D.E. Ward as the Metropolitan Tower; and Joseph H. Freedlander as the Museum of the City of New York.
That’s from Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, 1994. Some compromises: Freedlander had never designed a skyscraper, so he put the museum on his head. Schultze had to represent the twin-towered Waldorf Astoria with a single headdress. And “The elegant top of A. Stewart Walker’s Fuller Building has so few openings that faithfulness to its design now condemns its designer to temporary blindness.”
William Van Alen, in the center, went bananas with the Chrysler Building: The headpiece is an exact facsimile of the top of the building; the cape, puttees, and cuffs are made of flexible wood selected from trees in India, Australia, the Philippines, South America, Africa, Honduras, and North America; the cape matches the design of the first floor elevator doors, using the correct woods; the front is a replica of the elevator doors on the upper floors of the building; and the shoulder ornaments are the eagles’ heads that appear at the building’s 61st-floor setback.
One marvel I couldn’t find a photo of: Thomas Gillespie “dressed as a void to represent an unnamed subway station.”
Here’s a lost art: “Ceiling walking” was a popular form of American entertainment as early as 1806, when “Sanches, the Wonderful Antipodean” wore iron shoes that were “fitted in grooves in a board fastened to the top of the stage.”
Spectacles such as this were drawing crowds right through the 19th century. In New Orleans in the 1880s a young “human fly” named Mademoiselle Aimee was carried by her teeth to a trapeze 50 feet in the air, from which she affixed her feet to the ceiling by some indistinct means. “Many such exclamations as ‘My God!’ ‘Oh My!’ and so on follow, and as she puts one foot before the other, walking in a forward direction, the situation is most thrilling,” marveled the Daily Picayune. “Often ladies have fainted at the sight of the almost child’s peril, and men have trembled while looking up at her. Many refuse to look up at all and those who do continue to look are in constant apprehension of a terrible accident. There is no question in the world but that the feat is without parallel in the matter of tempting fate.”
How was this done? There seem to be a range of answers. V. Waid’s “Theatrical Device” of 1905 used vacuum cups attached to the fly’s feet, but both E.I. George’s “Electric Aerial Ambulating System” of 1909 (above) and C.H. Newman and W. Berrigan’s “Electrical Device to Enable Showmen to Walk on the Ceiling” of 1885 used electromagnets.
How would this have evolved if it had remained popular? What would we be using today?
(From Jacob Smith, The Thrill Makers, 2012.)
