Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

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Storytime Tapestry is proud to present:  History at a Glance by Dean Perchik

deanperchik@earthlink.net

December, Part One

Issue No.:  36

© 2007 Dean Perchik                                                                             deanperchik@earthlink.net

In an election held on November 28, 1919, Nancy Witcher Astor, Viscountess Astor, was elected to the British House of Commons.  Lady Astor was the first woman elected to serve in that august body.  She assumed her seat on the 1^st in 1919.   Whatever her contributions to the political life of Britain, and there were many, she should also be remembered for having observed, “The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you.”[i][i]

John Breckinridge was born on the 2^nd in 1760 in Staunton, Virginia.  At the time, Staunton was considered to be a frontier town, which could have held him apart from great opportunities.  He was however a bit of a whiz kid and managed to attend the prestigious William and Mary College.  Further evidence of Breckenridge’s remarkable capabilities may be found in his election to the Virginia legislature when he was only 19 years old[ii][ii].  One explanation might be that he got a bunch of very good genes from his parents.  In his later years, he would serve in the United States Senate, develop a prosperous law practice, and found Castleton Farm, one of the more notable farms in American thoroughbred racing history.  His remarkable talents would follow down in his family line.  Breckenridge’s great-great-grandson, Bunny Breckinridge[iii][iii] (pictured) would achieve a similar level of success when, in 1958, he appeared as ‘The Ruler’ in Ed Wood’s masterpiece Plan 9 From Outer Space, arguably the worst movie ever made.

 I don’t really follow sports and know very little about any of the many sporting events that seem to be so popular.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  I am a big fan of curling, which I only have to deal with every four years during the Winter Olympics.  The following must be a sporting event that I am unaware of.  Are there really father and son Nobel Prize tag teams? Perhaps.  Karl Manne Georg  Siegbahn was born on the 3^rd in 1886.  He was a Swedish physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1924.  It seems that I have stumbled across a bunch of folks born in December seemingly possessed of more than their fair share of good genes.  Siegbahn’s son Kai Manne Borje Siegbahn, would also go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1981.

Pyrrhus may have had a point when he made the observation “one more victory like this, and we are undone.”  On the 4^th in 1864, during the American Civil War, Union General Judson Kilpatrick[iv][iv] at Waynesboro, Georgia, intercepted the Confederate forces under the command of General Joseph Wheeler[v][v] as Wheeler attempted to stop Sherman’s March to the Sea.  Wheeler was stopped and Sherman continued on, unimpeded, to burn Georgia to a crisp.  However, Kilpatrick’s troops suffered more than three times the casualties that Wheeler’s troops did.

Niccol? Sfondrati, was born on February 11, 1535.  Born into a rather prosperous family he early on achieved a reputation for modesty and piety.  He entered the priesthood and in 1560 was made a cardinal by Pope Gregory XIII.  On the 5^th in 1590, at the conclave held upon the death of Pope Urban, Sfondrati was elevated to the papacy and assumed the name Pope Gregory XIV[vi][vi].  When informed of his election he purportedly burst into tears and responded to the cardinals who informed him by stating “God forgive you! What have you done?” 

On the 6^th in 1768 Scotsmen Colin Macfarquhar, a printer, and Andrew Bell[vii][vii], an engraver, began publishing the first edition of the Encyclop?dia Britannica[viii][viii].  The editor was William Smellie[ix][ix] (what a horrid last name).  When completed in 1771 the first full edition consisted of 2,391 pages divided into three volumes.  Time has been kind to the Britannica and today there are, in addition to the print edition, online and CD versions.  The CD version contains over 55 million words.  In spite of the dramatic digital expansion of the books, for collectors the 1911 edition is the one to have.  For some reason the 1911 is the 1957 Fender Stratocaster of books.

On the 7^th in 1972, onboard the Apollo 17[x][x] spacecraft, the last manned mission to the moon, Jack ‘Harrison’ Schmitt, the lunar module pilot, snapped what has come to be known as ‘The Blue Marble’ photograph.  His comment upon taking the picture was “Ah! You see one Earth, you’ve seen them all.”

It often takes a while for the effects of a spectacular invention to be felt.  Movable type may have been perfected in Korea in the 13^th century but it was not introduced to Europe until the middle of the fifteenth century when Johannes Gutenberg perfected a printing press with movable type that would send ripples through the world. Gutenberg’s press allowed books to be produced with greater speed and at remarkably lower cost.  Steadily rising literacy rates in Europe established a strong market for books of all sorts, though it would take several more centuries for scandal sheets to be perfected.  The first public library was the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, which opened in 1602 with Thomas Bodley’s collection of 2000 books as its centerpiece. A few years later, in Milan, Italy, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the second public library in Europe opened its reading room on the 8^th in 1609.

Ever since the advent of printing presses with movable type in the 15^th century, newspapers have been offered to the reading public, though not newspapers, as we know them today. It would be a bit more accurate to say that since the introduction of these presses in the middle of the 1400s papers featuring news have been offered to the literate members of many communities.  These were broadsheets with no fixed schedule of publication and circulation was limited for the most part to bulletin boards, walls of taverns and other locations where a sheet of paper could be tacked up.  It was inevitable that the idea of publishing a proper newspaper would eventually strike someone.  I mean, they had all these words just lying around cluttering things up and somebody had to come up with some way to get rid of at least some of them.  On the 9^th in 1793, Noah Webster[xi][xi] began publication of the American Minerva, the City of New York’s first daily newspaper. 

Traffic lights are so common as to be boring.  They have always been around and most people do not consider them a big deal.  Certainly, I don’t.  I had always assumed that these lights started appearing at roughly the same time that cars began appearing – the early 20^th century.  That wasn’t the case, however.  The very first traffic light[xii][xii] began operation on the 10^th in 1868, when J. P. Knight installed a gas-powered, manually operated, traffic light outside the British Houses of Parliament in London, England. 

Do you ever get bored?  I do. A lot!  Boredom can be oppressive at times, if you let it.  However, there is a bright side to boredom, though at times it can be extremely difficult to find that aspect of it.  There is a small, unassuming crater on the Moon that is called the Cannon Crater.  This crater was named after Annie Jump Cannon who was born on the 11^th in 1863 in Dover, Delaware. While attending school at Wellesley College in Massachusetts she caught scarlet fever during one particularly harsh winter.  The effects of this illness left Cannon almost completely deaf.  Upon graduating in 1884, with a degree in physics, she returned home to Delaware.  She found herself adrift socially and personally because she was virtually without hearing, was older and better educated than the other women she encountered in Dover.  She became both bored and restless.  In 1893, Cannon wrote to one of her professors at Wellesley, to find out if there were any openings at the school.  The result of this letter, which was written out of sheer boredom, was that Sarah Frances Whiting, a professor of physics and astronomy hired Cannon to be her assistant.  The position allowed her to pursue graduate courses and Whiting nudged her into studying spectroscopy and photography.  As it developed these were areas for which Annie was particularly well suited.  During her career, Annie would discover 300 variable stars, 5 novae and a binary star.  In 1925, Oxford University in England awarded her an honorary doctorate, making her the first woman ever to be accorded such an honor.

Thomas Augustus Watson[xiii][xiii] was born on the 13^th in 1854.  He is best known for his role as Thomas Edison’s assistant in the development of the telephone.  It is has been widely stated that the first telephone conversation consisted of Edison’s saying “Mr. Watson, come here I want to see you.”  On occasion, the sentence’s ending is rendered as ‘I want you’ or ‘I need you’.  It was Watson’s personal recollection that the first sentence ended with ‘I want you’.  Neither Watson nor any other source however has been able to confirm that the second sentence ever spoken over the telephone was also Edison’s, who continued with “I’ve always wanted you.”

Roald Amundsen[xiv][xiv] and his team won the race to the South Pole when the expedition arrived there on the 14^th in 1911.  The team consisted of Olav Bjaaland[xv][xv], Helmer Hanssen[xvi][xvi], Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting[xvii][xvii]. Wisting had been part of Amundsen’s team that went to the North Pole.  Amundsen and Wisting were the first people to reach both the North and South Poles.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, died on the 15^th in 1673.  Really now, just what is the story with rich, aristocratic, British writers anyway?  Margaret’s writing aroused a great deal of controversy in her day.  She wrote and published using her own name, at a time when women’s work was generally published anonymously or pseudonyms were used.  That fact alone was enough to raise eyebrows as well as objections.  Professional busybody Samuel Pepys referred to Cavendish as ‘mad, conceited and ridiculous.’  More than a century later, Lady Caroline Lamb would describe George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron as being ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know.’  Weren’t there any members of the ruling class who wrote and were merely ordinary and boring?  It would seem not.

New York is a city filled with niche museums and even a tireless visitor would be hard pressed to visit more than a handful of them.  To name just a few, there is the American Folk Art Museum, the Fisher Landau Center, the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, The Cloisters, the American Numismatic Society, the New York Hysterical Society, and the National Museum of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History. And then there is the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.  The Brooklyn Children’s Museum[xviii][xviii] opened its doors, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on the 16^th in 1899.  Being a resident of the finest of New York’s five boroughs, Brooklyn, whose official slogan is ‘Brooklyn, where the weak are killed and eaten’, I paid a visit to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum one day recently.  Having been expanded beginning in 1930 with the aid of hundreds of artists and artisans courtesy of the Works Progress Administration; the site is really quite impressive.  There are over 27,000 items on display.  Overall, however, I must admit that I was rather disappointed with this museum.  In the entire place there is not a single child on exhibit, not even a little one.  It took a little time and a great deal of energy but I was eventually able to get the price of admission that I had paid refunded.