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A Look Ahead

In 1888 New York journalist David Goodman Croly published Glimpses of the Future, a collection of predictions “to be read now and judged in the year 2000.” Excerpts:

  • “The accumulation of wealth in a few hands, which is steadily going on, will unquestionably lead to a grave agitation which may have vital consequences on the future of the country. I am quite sure that the American of the twentieth century will not consent to live under a merely selfish plutocracy.”
  • “Exclusive lawyer rule will yet create violent disturbance. Our whole machinery of justice is out of gear, for it is becoming more costly and inefficient. … The legal machinery grows yearly more inefficient and wasteful of time and money. Vigilance committees will exist in every part of the country if this state of things continues.”
  • “Marriage is no longer a religious rite even in Catholic countries, but a civil contract, and the logical result would seem to be a state of public opinion which would justify a change of partners whenever the contracting couple mutually agreed to separate.”
  • “If the aërostat should become as cheap for travellers as the sailing vessel, why may not man become migratory, like the birds, occupying the more mountainous regions and sea-coast in summer and more tropical climes in winter? Of course all this seems very wild, but we live in an age of scientific marvels, and the navigation of the air, if accomplished, would be the most momentous event of all the ages.”
  • “There will be a sub-city [in New York] under the surface of the ground for conveying people, not only from the Battery to the City Hall Park, but also from the East to the North River.”
  • “True, the [chromolithograph] of to-day is looked upon as crude and inartistic; but I venture to predict that it will be so far perfected as to allow any well-to-do family to have art galleries of their own, in which will be found reproductions of all the great paintings of the ancient and modern world. The crowning glory of our age will be when the highest art is brought within the reach of the poorest purse.”
  • “[In the novel of the future,] Robert Elsmere, Catherine Langham, and the other individuals, would all be reproduced pictorially. This would dispense with a great deal of description, and much of the verbiage could be cut out. Then the reader’s conception of the characters would necessarily be much more vivid. Nor is this all. Why should not a number of graphophones be made use of, giving the words of the various conversations in the tones they would naturally use? An author then would employ a number of men and women of various ages to personate his characters. They would be like the models of an artist.”

“I have no notion of being able to tell what the future has in store for us,” he wrote. “I propose simply to take up such matters as are of everyday importance, and try to think out the future with regard to them.”

| History

Senior Citizen

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Li_chingYuen.jpeg

When Chinese herbalist Li Ching-Yun died in 1933, newspapers were hard pressed to write his obituary. Li had contended that he had been born in 1736, which would have made him 197 years old.

In 1930, Wu Chung-Chien of Minkuo University had reported finding records showing that Li had been even older, born in 1677 and congratulated by the imperial Chinese government on his 150th and 200th birthdays.

In 1928 a correspondent to the New York Times had reported that the oldest men in Li’s neighborhood insisted that their grandfathers had known Li when they were children and that he was then a grown man.

Tales told in his province held that Li had traveled widely during his first century, gathering herbs to sell, but then had switched to selling herbs gathered by others. He told one pupil that the secret of living to 250 was to “keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon, and sleep like a dog.” He was credited with either 14 or 23 wives; one 1928 account said that he had 180 living descendants.

He was certainly well preserved. The New York Times noted drily that, according to its 1928 report, “many who have seen him recently declare that his facial appearance is no different from that of persons two centuries his junior.”

(Thanks, Francisco.)

| Oddities

More Amusing Indexes

From Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, 1872:

Act to make the poor rich by making the rich poorer, 3
Ankle, wonderful effects of breaking a bone in the, 114
Batrachian reservoir (frog-pond in vulgar speech), the palladium of our city, 369
Biography, penalties of being its subject, 191 et seq.
Common virtues of humanity not to be confiscated to the use of any one creed, 360
House-flies mysterious creatures, 288
Ideas often improve by transplantation, 171
Intellects, one story, two story, three story, 50
Jests distress some people, 289
Justice, an algebraic x, 317
Life a fatal complaint, and contagious, 395
Limitations, human, not to be transferred to the Infinite, 319
Millionaires cannot be exterminated, 5
Non-clerical minds, hopeful for the future of the race, 302
Old people almost wish to lose their blessings for the pleasure of remembering them, 385
Poem, is it hard work to write one?, 111
Power, we have no respect for as such, 317
Private property in thought hard to get and keep, 356
Ribbon in button-hole pleases the author, 322
Rigorists, mellowing, better than tightening liberals, 19
Tattooing with the belief of our tribe while we are in our cradles, 384
Traditionalists eliminate cause and effect from the domain of morals, 265

And from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621:

Atheists described, 705
Baseness of birth no disparagement, 509
Beer censured, 145
Black eyes best, 519
Blow on the head cause of melancholy, 247
Confidence in his physician half a cure, 392
Crocodiles jealous, 629
Eunuchs why kept, and where, 642
Fishes in love, 493
Great men most part dishonest, 636
Guts described, 96
Hell where, 318
How oft ’tis fit to eat in a day, 307
Ignorance the mother of devotion, 678
Man the greatest enemy to man, 84
Old folks apt to be jealous, 632
Poets why poor, 203
Salads censured, 145
Step-mother, her mischiefs, 241
Venison a melancholy meat, 142
Why good men are often rejected, 415
Why fools beget wise children, wise men fools, 139, 140

The New York Times Book Review called Burton’s index “a readerly pleasure in itself.”

See Memorable Indexes.

| Literature

Leg Room

bel geddes flying boat

Norman Bel Geddes announced big plans in 1932: Air Liner Number 4, a gigantic V-winged flying boat with a wingspan of 528 feet, more than twice that of today’s 777. Twenty 1900-horsepower engines would carry it through the air at 100 mph and an altitude of only 5,000 feet while 451 passengers ranged over nine decks containing 180 apartments, three kitchens, three private dining rooms, an orchestra platform, a gym, six shuffleboard courts, a dance floor, a library, separate solaria for men and women, a writing room, and a promenade deck. The 155-person crew included two telephone operators, 24 waiters, two masseuses, a manicurist, and a gymnast.

The plane was “not ‘big’ for the sake of being big,” Bel Geddes insisted, but he pointed out that

if it were possible to stand her upon one wing tip against the Washington Monument, she would lack only 23 feet of reaching the top. Or imagine that the Public Library was removed from its site in Bryant Park at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, New York. The plane could then settle comfortably in the park with a clearance of about 35 feet all around.

The craft had a range of 7,500 miles, and it would be supported on the water by two enormous pontoons, 60 feet high and designed “substantially as the hull of a yacht, in order to withstand tremendous pounding when the plane rests on a rough sea.” In the end it was never built, but it may have helped inspire Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose.”

| Oddities · Technology

A Social Invention

Thomas Edison popularized the word hello. Working in AT&T’s Manhattan archives in 1987, Brooklyn College classics professor Allen Koenigsberg unearthed a letter that Edison had written in August 1877 to the president of a telegraph company that was planning to introduce the telephone in Pittsburgh. Edison wrote:

Friend David, I don’t think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think? EDISON

At the time it was thought that the line would remain open permanently, so a caller needed a way to get the other party’s attention. Apparently hello was a variation on the traditional hound call “Halloo!”

What should the answerer reply? Alexander Graham Bell pressed for Hoy! Hoy!, but Edison equipped the first exchanges, so hello gained the ascendancy there too.

That’s all it took — by 1880 the word was everywhere. “The phone overnight cut right through the 19th-century etiquette that you don’t speak to anyone unless you’ve been introduced,” Koenigsberg told the New York Times. “If you think about it, why didn’t Stanley say hello to Livingston? The word didn’t exist.”

| Society · Technology

Never Mind

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F-106_unmanned_landing.jpg

During an Air Force training mission over Montana on Feb. 2, 1970, Gary Foust’s F-106 entered an uncontrollable flat spin at 35,000 feet.

He rode it down to 12,000 feet, ejected — and watched as the plane righted itself, descended into a snowy field, and made a gentle belly landing. Its engine was still running when the police arrived.

After repairs, the fighter was returned to service in California and New York. Today it’s on display in a museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

| Oddities

Second-Story Man

http://books.google.com/books?id=-1YEAAAAMBAJ

The world’s greatest jewel thief rarely carried a weapon and never indulged in violence, yet in the 1920s he managed to steal between $5 and $10 million from wealthy victims, whom he called “clients.”

Born in Massachusetts in 1896, Arthur Barry committed his first burglary at 15, creeping in through the window of a merchant’s home to plan the job and then returning to steal his receipts. The value of preparation struck him, and after a stint in the Army he went to New York and began his career in earnest. He would scan the society columns for a wedding party on Long Island, crash it wearing formal wear, then enter the house, wander upstairs, memorize the floor plan, and unlock windows. He’d return later to commit the robbery.

Working in this meticulous way he managed to steal half a million dollars a year in the mid-1920s, including $750,000 in jewels in broad daylight from the suite of F.W. Woolworth’s daughter. “Whoever took those pearls really knew what he was doing,” marveled a police captain at the time. “There were five ropes in the drawer, four imitations and the real one. The imitations were good enough to fool an oyster.”

Ironically, by the time Barry was finally caught and sent to prison in 1927, he had discovered that some of his victims were criminals themselves. “On the day after a job I’d read stories which listed all kinds of things I hadn’t stolen at all,” he told Life in 1956. “The clients would hide them and get the money from the insurance company. Sure, I was a thief and I’m sorry now, but you’ll find a lot of people in the Social Register who are also thieves and aren’t one bit sorry.”

| Crime

Inksmanship

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Max_Eastman.jpg

In 1937, Max Eastman and Ernest Hemingway found themselves together in Max Perkins’ office at Scribner’s. On Perkins’ desk was Eastman’s Art and the Life of Action, which contained an essay critical of Hemingway. They began to argue. Hemingway bared his chest. Eastman bared his. Hemingway slapped him.

What happened next is unclear. “The trouble with these literary bouts,” opined the New York Times, “is that there is never an official referee on hand. Both sides can claim a decision and a foul at the same time, and usually do.”

But in 1947 the House of Books catalog offered for sale a damaged copy of Art and the Life of Action. On page 95, it said, was a spot caused by contact “with Mr. Eastman’s nose when Mr. Hemingway struck him with it in a gesture of disapproval.” The spot was witnessed by Maxwell Perkins.

| Literature

A Strolling Musician

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Professor_Otto_Funk_003.jpg

Otto Funk left New York City on June 28, 1928. He arrived in San Francisco on July 25, 1929. In the interval he walked 4,165 miles, fiddling every step of the way.

Oh, and defying death. “While traveling through Arizona Funk was struck by a rattlesnake,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Unperturbed, the aged fiddler slew the snake, snipped off the rattles as souvenirs, cut open the wound and sucked out the blood and poison. He continued walking until he came to a doctor’s office.”

“I have seen God’s country, every foot of it that I walked over,” Funk said afterward. “You can’t see it right from a car or a train. Sole leather express is the only way.”

| Oddities

Earwitness

Mike and Tobye Madison of Baytown, Texas, had two odd experiences in January 1984: Their house was burglarized, and Baby, their exotic talking bird, began saying “Come here, Robert. Come here, Ronnie.”

“When the lady told me about it I almost broke up,” Baytown police detective Reggie Harper told the Associated Press. “I almost didn’t write it down.”

Apparently Baby, a female yellow-headed Amazon, was repeating the words of the intruders. This helped police identify two men and a 16-year-old boy and charge them with a series of house burglaries involving the loss of $50,000 in property.

Forty years earlier, the same thing had happened in New York.

| Crime