A New Start

The Spanish village of Bérchules celebrates New Year’s Day in August. In 1994 a power failure left the villagers unable to join the traditional countdown on Dec. 31, so they moved it to the first Saturday in August.

It’s all arbitrary anyway. “New Year’s is a harmless annual institution,” wrote Mark Twain in the Territorial Enterprise, “of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.”

| Oddities

“Singular Occurrence”

On Thursday morning one of those extraordinary beings who gain a precarious subsistence by penetrating into the sewers in search of coin or other valuables that may be washed into them from the drains was taken out of the main-sewer in Broad-street, Golden-square, in a very exhausted state, having been 36 hours and upwards endeavouring to find his way out, which, from having advanced further than was his custom to recover some silver that had been accidentally dropped down a grating near the Seven Dials, he was unable to accomplish. Fortunately, the poor fellow’s cries were heard by Mr. Tickle, cheesemonger, at the corner of Berwick-street, Broad-street, opposite whose door there is a manhole, which he had contrived to ascend, and, assistance being procured, he was liberated. Some compassionate persons supplied him with soup, &c., which speedily restored him.

— Globe, reprinted in the Times, April 1, 1848

| Oddities

Gray Area

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A legal conundrum from Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope’s Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741): Sir John Swale bequeaths to Matthew Stradling “all my black and white Horses.” Sir John has six black, six white, and six pied horses. Should Stradling get the pied ones?

On the one hand, “Whatever is Black and White, is Pyed, and whatever is Pyed is Black and White; ergo, Black and White is Pyed, and, vice versa, Pyed is Black and White.”

On the other, “A pyed Horse is not a white Horse, neither is a pyed a black Horse; how then can pyed Horses come under the Words of black and white Horses?”

Perhaps this will help — a proof that all horses are the same color, condensed from Joel E. Cohen, “On the Nature of Mathematical Proofs,” Opus, May 1961, from A Random Walk in Science:

It is obvious that one horse is the same colour. Let us assume the proposition P(k) that k horses are the same colour and use this to imply that k+1 horses are the same colour. Given the set of k+1 horses, we remove one horse; then the remaining k horses are the same colour, by hypothesis. We remove another horse and replace the first; the k horses, by hypothesis, are again the same colour. We repeat this until by exhaustion the k+1 sets of k horses have each been shown to be the same color. It follows then that since every horse is the same colour as every other horse, P(k) entails P(k+1). But since we have shown P(1) to be true, P is true for all succeeding values of k, that is, all horses are the same colour.

| Language · Science & Math

It’s a Living

In the nightly programme of performances at Sanger’s Circus, in the Agricultural-hall, is set down ‘The renowned Professor Palmer, as the Fly Man, performing marvellous feats of walking a glass ceiling.’ The professor has invariably walked the ceiling after fly-fashion successfully, but on Monday night he met with an accident which for the moment appalled the audience. The glass ceiling is composed of a piece of plate glass about 50ft. long by 20ft. wide, enclosed in a wooden framework. It is fixed at a distance of about 80ft. or 90ft. from the ground, and some 30ft. below it a net is spread to receive the professor in case of accident. On Monday evening the professor had taken his place on the ceiling, his feet being bound up in what appeared to be india-rubber, and commenced to walk, head downwards, on the glass, leaving on the latter as he lifted each foot a mark as if some glutinous substance had been applied to it. The utmost silence prevailed in the hall as he continued his perilous walk along the narrow glass, and all went well with him until within a couple of feet of the end of his journey, when by mistake he placed a portion of his foot upon the wooden frame instead of on the glass. His body immediately trembled violently, as if suction was the power which held him to the glass, and he struggled hard to keep up the weight of his body, which was now suspended from the glass by only one foot. His face, which up to this moment was very red, became pale, and in an instant the audience was shocked at seeing him fall head foremost towards the ground. The women turned their heads, and were afraid to look again at the spot, until a cheer reassured them. Palmer fell just on the border of the netting, which might well be of greater width. He came upon the back of his head, and having coiled his body into the shape of a ball, wriggled himself out of the net, and reached the ground by means of a rope ladder. Several gentlemen rushed from the front and second seats into the arena and shook hands with the professor, who then retired. He was called out again, and warmly applauded when he appeared in the circus, but he did not finish the performance.

— Times, Jan. 31, 1868

| Oddities

A Look Ahead

In 1763 an anonymous Londoner published The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925, a forecast of the remote 20th century. Among other things, the author predicted that George’s greatest military victory would come before the gates of Vienna in May 1918, the actual date of Germany’s Spring Offensive of World War I:

Peter immediately raised the siege, and, drawing up his forces in the plains of Vienna, prepared to fight the King of England, who was also engaged in the same employment. The Russian army had a superiority of above sixty thousand men, consequently their numbers were two to one; but no dangers could depress the heart of George. Having, with moving batteries, secured the rear and wings of his army from being surrounded, he placed his artillery in the most advantageous manner; and dividing his front into two lines, at the head of the first he began the attack, after his artillery had played on the enemy an hour, with great success. The Russian infantry, animated by the presence of their Czar, under whom they had so often conquered, repulsed him with some loss. The King hereupon made a second and still more furious attack, but yet without success. At that critical moment the Duke of Devonshire, who commanded his left wing, sent for immediate assistance, as he was hard pressed by the superior numbers of the enemy. George flew like lightning to his weakened troops, and placing himself at the head of six regiments of dragoons, made such a furious attack on the eager Russians as threw them into disorder, and following his advantage, pushed them with great success.

Properly speaking this isn’t science fiction, as the author envisions no technological advances: Sail warships still fight naval battles; East Indiamen travel to India and Indonesia; and European nations communicate by roads and trade using river barges.

But here’s an interesting detail: “By the year 1920 there were 11,000,000 of souls in the British-American dominions [of North America]: they were in possession of perhaps the finest country in the world, and yet had never made the least attempt to shake off the authority of Great-Britain.” Writing in 1763, the author had considered the possibility of a revolt in the colonies, but rejected it: “The constitutions of the several divisions of this vast monarchy were admirably designed to keep the whole in continual dependence on the mother country. … The multiplicity of governments which prevailed over the whole country rendered the execution of such a scheme [combined rebellion] absolutely impossible.”

| History

Cold Case

In 1629, Joan Norkot of Hertfordshire died in a singularly impossible way:

  1. “She lay in a composed manner in her bed, the bed cloaths nothing at all disturbed, and her child by her in the bed.”
  2. “Her throat was cut from ear to ear and her neck broken, and if she first cut her throat she could not break her neck in the bed, nor e contra.”
  3. “There was no blood in the bed saving that there was a tincture of blood upon the bolster whereupon her head lay, but no other substance of blood at all.”
  4. “From the bed’s head there was a stream of blood on the floor, till it ponded on the bending of the floor to a very great quantity, and there was also another stream of blood on the floor at the bed’s feet, which ponded also on the floor to another great quantity, but no continuance or communication of blood of either of these two places, the one from the other, neither upon the bed, so that she bled in two places severally, and it was deposed that turning up the matte of the bed there were clotts of congealed blood in the straw of the matte underneath.”
  5. “The bloody knife in the morning was found sticking in the floor a good distance from the bed, but the point of the knife as it stuck in the floor was towards the bed and the haft towards the door.”
  6. “Lastly, there was the print of a thumb and four fingers of a left hand on the dead person’s left hand.”

No one had entered the house since she had gone to bed, and Joan’s sister Agnes and her husband, John Okeman, had lain in the outer room together with John’s mother, Mary. John was acquitted and his pregnant wife permitted to live, but Joan’s husband Arthur and her mother-in-law, each protesting their innocence, were hanged.

This account was found among the papers of Sir John Maynard, who died in 1690. When it was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in July 1851, it made a sensation chiefly because it reported that Joan’s month-old corpse had been exhumed and itself accused the killers. “The appellers did touch the dead body, whereupon the brow of the dead, which was of a livid or carrion colour (that was the verbal expression in the terms of the witness) began to have a dew or gentle sweat [which] ran down in drops on the face, and the brow turned and changed to a lively and fresh colour, and the dead opened one of her eyes and shut it again, and this opening the eye was done three several times. She likewise thrust out the ring or marriage finger three times and pulled it in again, and the finger dropt blood from it on the grass.” But setting that aside, it’s hard to understand what happened to Joan. No motive was adduced in the murder, and no one has explained how it was accomplished. Who killed her, and how?

| Crime

Inspiration

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There once were some learned M.D.’s,
Who captured some germs of disease
And infected a train,
Which, without causing pain,
Allowed one to catch it with ease.

— Oliver Herford

| Poems