Lenore in Indiana

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_Whitcomb_Riley,_1913.jpg

Convinced that the public would accept anything from an established author, James Whitcomb Riley bet his friends that he could prove it. He composed a poem entitled “Leonanie” in the style of Edgar Allan Poe and published it in the Kokomo, Ind., Despatch on Aug. 2, 1877:

Leonanie–angels named her;
And they took the light
Of the laughing stars and framed her
In a smile of white;
And they made her hair of gloomy
Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy
Moonshine, and they brought her to me
In the solemn night.

And so on. An accompanying article explained that the poem had been discovered on the blank flyleaf of an old book, and the conspirators scribbled it into a dictionary in case anyone asked to see it.

After the poem was published, Riley wrote a critique in the Anderson Democrat casting doubt on Poe’s authorship. But to his horror his poem was championed by critics and picked up in newspapers nationwide, and soon a Boston publishing house began asking for the original manuscript. The group finally confessed when a rival paper threatened to expose the hoax.

Riley won his bet, but ironically he went on to become a bestselling poet himself, writing in an Indiana dialect distinctive enough to invite lampoons of its own. Whether any of these has been passed off as real is unknown — but it would be poetic justice.

| Hoaxes · Literature

Big Love

This is the first screen kiss, shared in 1896 by May Irwin and John C. Rice in a scene from the play The Widow Jones.

Accustomed to stage dramas, many viewers were shocked at the closeup. “Neither participant is physically attractive,” wrote reviewer John Sloan, “and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was hard to bear. When only life-size it was pronounced beastly. But that was nothing to the present sight. Magnified to Gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.”

Only 30 years later, John Barrymore would bestow 127 kisses on Mary Astor and Estelle Taylor in Don Juan.

| Entertainment · Society

Who’s On First?

Stigler’s Law of Eponymy states that “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Examples:

  • Arabic numerals were invented in India.
  • Darwin lists 18 predecessors who had advanced the idea of evolution by natural selection.
  • Freeman Dyson credited the idea of the Dyson sphere to Olaf Stapledon.
  • Salmonella was discovered by Theobald Smith but named after Daniel Elmer Salmon.
  • Copernicus propounded Gresham’s Law.
  • Pell’s equation was first solved by William Brouncker.
  • Euler’s number was discovered by Jacob Bernoulli.
  • The Gaussian distribution was introduced by Abraham de Moivre.
  • The Mandelbrot set was discovered by Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia.

University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler advanced the idea in 1980.

Delightfully, he attributes it to Robert Merton.

| History · Science & Math

Infallible

[Bertrand] Russell is reputed at a dinner party once to have said, ‘Oh, it is useless talking about inconsistent things, from an inconsistent proposition you can prove anything you like.’ Well, it is very easy to show this by mathematical means. But, as usual, Russell was much cleverer than this. Somebody at the dinner table said, ‘Oh, come on!’ He said, ‘Well, name an inconsistent proposition,’ and the man said, ‘Well, what shall we say, 2 = 1.’ ‘All right,’ said Russell, ‘what do you want me to prove?’ The man said, ‘I want you to prove that you are the pope.’ ‘Why,’ said Russell, ‘the pope and I are two, but two equals one, therefore the pope and I are one.’

— Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, 1979

| Science & Math

Moonshine?

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/601286

In 1954, a Chilean lawyer named Jenaro Gajardo Vera tried to join a local club but was rejected because he owned no real property. He was pondering how to overcome this problem when he looked into the night sky and found his solution.

He claimed the moon.

The local notary acknowleded that Gajardo’s claim met the technical requirements for real property, and no prior owner objected when he published a notice in Chile’s Diario Oficial. Gajardo was granted a deed, returned to the club, and received his membership.

This story is popular in Chile, but most of the sources are in Spanish, so I’m finding it hard to tell where the truth ends and the romance begins. It does appear that a lawyer named Jenaro Gajardo Vera was born in Chile and lived in Talca, as the story says. But you’ll have to decide how much of the rest to believe. It’s commonly said that:

  • In 1969, Gajardo received a dispatch from Richard Nixon asking permission for American astronauts to land on his property.
  • Gajardo failed to list the moon on his real property tax return, which led to trouble with the Chilean revenue office. When agents confronted him, he asked them to survey the property themselves, as the law required, and they dropped the action.
  • Minister of the Supreme Court Galecio Ruben Gomez once asked why, if Gajardo could register the moon, he could not register Mars using the same argument. Gajardo pointed out that Mars does not belong to the earth, and thus is not open to a civil law property claim.
  • In 2000, two years after Gajardo’s death, two strangers approached his family saying that NASA wanted to establish bases on the moon, which could bring them substantial revenue. The family paid them a large fee to “regularize Gajardo’s legacy,” and the strangers disappeared.

I’d be grateful to hear from anyone who can substantiate or debunk any of this. I’ll post any updates here. It’s certainly a wonderful story. (Thanks, Benito.)

03/17/2010 Update: Doubtful but intriguingly murky. It appears that Gajardo did publish a deed to the moon three times in Chile’s official record in 1953, but that in itself doesn’t carry much weight. Today the matter would be governed by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, but (a) that appeared 14 years after Gajardo’s claim, and we don’t know whether it’s retroactive, (b) we don’t know whether Chile is a signatory, and (c) ironically, the very fact that the treaty denies nations jurisdiction over celestial objects may mean that no court would have jurisdiction to hear the case. Gajardo’s is one of at least four such claims made between 1950 and 1970 alone, including one by the “Elves, Gnomes and Little Men’s Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society” of Berkeley, Calif., who claimed part of the Sea of Tranquility in 1952. It will certainly be an interesting war.

Particular thanks to Kirk and John for help in researching this.

| Oddities