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Old Print Article: Leonard Darwin Promotes Eugenics, New York Times (1912)

February 5, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

During his lifetime, Leonard Darwin never intended to be a monster.

A son of Charles, Leonard was a staunch supporter of eugenics whose ideas about race, class, criminology, etc., were not just morally reprehensible but also scientifically ignorant. He was really a one-man cautionary tale for how highly respectable people can spout dumb and dangerous hogwash. A 1912 New York Times article reported on a speech he delivered, in which the eugenicist proposed experimenting with X-ray sterilizations and segregating the indolent and anyone else he deemed an enemy of moral progress. The opening:

Practical measures advocated by some students to improve races, such as the sterilization of criminals by the X-ray, the promotion of larger families among those of good stock and limitation among others, were discussed at yesterday’s session of the International Congress of Eugenics in the American Museum of Natural History.

Major Leonard Darwin, a son of the author of The Descent of Man, urged the experimental use of the X-ray, with the consent of the subject, to prevent descendants from the feeble-minded and habitual criminals. He suggested segregation for the wastrel, the habitual drunkard and “the work-shy” to prevent the transmission of their traits to future generations.

Major Darwin also urged that the sound and fit and superior people should, by a campaign of patriotism, be induced to raise larger families. Racial deterioration seems evident among all highly civilized peoples, he said, because of the thinning out of the descendants of highly endowed stock and the multiplication of those inferior endowment.

“The result is anticipated,” he said, “that in comparison with the ill-endowed, the naturally well-endowed will, as time goes on, take a smaller and smaller part in the production of the coming generations, with a tendency to progressive racial deterioration s an inevitable consequence. And if we ask whether existing facts confirm or refute this dismal forecast, what do we find? Statistical inquiries, at all events, prove conclusively that, where good incomes are being earned, there the families are on the average small.”

History taught, he said, that races in the past had fallen from high estate because of the progressive elimination of their best types.

“I can find no facts,” he continued, “which refute the theoretical conclusion the the inborn qualities of civilized communities are deteriorating, and the process will inevitably lead in time to an all-around downward movement.”

The only efficient corrective which Major Darwin could think of, he said, was an appeal to patriotism.

Unpatriot to Limit Some Families

“What is necessary is to make it deeply and widely felt that it is both immoral and unpatriotic for couples sound in mind and body to unduly limit the size of their families,” he added.

Major Darwin read this sentence slowly, and at the request of two or three in the audience, read it over again. He said that he believed such a campaign would succeed, when persons of character and good endowment were awakened to the danger threatening their race.

“The nation that wins in this moral campaign,” he said, “will have gone half-way toward gaining a great racial victory.”•

Tags: Leonard Darwin

A Note From 1912 About A Fresh Set Of Eyes

February 4, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 24, 1912 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Old Print Article: Edward Sheriff Curtis Becomes A Pueblo Priest, New York Times (1911)

February 2, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Curtis, self-portrait, 1889.

Western photographer and ethnologist Edward Sheriff Curtis did for Native Americans what Mathew Brady had done for Civil War soldiers: He gave them a face. When Curtis began documenting indigenous peoples, it seemed an especially pressing mission since the popular belief then was that they were a “vanishing race.” Thankfully, that hasn’t occurred, though Curtis’ photographs are an amazing history lesson nonetheless. From a 1911 New York Times article, “Lives 22 Years With Indians To Get Their Secrets,” in which Curtis discusses becoming an Indian priest:

“Do you mean that you are a Pueblo priest in good order?” asked the reporter.

“Yes,” said Mr. Curtis, “and I am a priest in other nations. If I went back there to-day I could officiate as a priest in the snake-dance, that is, in the order to which I belonged.”

“Then you were adopted into the tribe?”

“No,” he said. “That isn’t necessary. Being adopted into a tribe is nothing–nothing. The thing is to become a member of a secret order. That is the only way to learn their secrets, and to do that it is not necessary to be adopted into the tribe.

“Every ceremonial group you get into makes it easy to get into others. Belonging to the Snake Order in that village wouldn’t necessarily let me into an order in another village, but it would give me a good ground to make an argument.

“My belonging to the Snake Order in Arizona helped me greatly when I tried to get into a ceremonial order in Alaska.”

“You were a priest in Alaska, too?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, in a matter of fact way.

“But what could the Alaska Indians know about what was done so far off as Arizona?”

“Oh, when they saw my photographs of the snake dance and heard the phonograph records–“

“Do you mean to say that you photographed and phonographed these ceremonies while you were officiating as a priest?”

“Yes.”

“How did you make them agree to such a thing?”

“It was not easy,” said Mr. Curtis, “but I finally convinced them of the advantages of getting in the record.”•

A Brief Note From 1955 About Criminal Fans

January 31, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the January 18, 1955 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Tags: Jim Konstanty, Maurice Dobson

Old Print Article: “Football In 1909 Caused 26 Deaths,” New York Times (1909)

January 29, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

The rule changes spearheaded by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 to make football a safer game didn’t have the desired impact immediately, and in the long run seem to have done more harm than good. In fact, it’s essentially the gridiron version of the “Drunken Stagger.”

The game’s first existential crisis, with players regularly dying and incurring serious injuries, led to calls for its abolition. Roosevelt, a fan of the rough pastime among other macho endeavors that ran counter to his genteel upbringing, stepped in to reform the sport, imploring influential college officials to reduce brutality and institute the forward pass. No short-range benefit was observed, however, as deaths actually spiked by the end of the decade.

A combination of continued tweaking of rules and improved equipment did eventually make football largely free of fatality, ending the cries for its ban. That, of course, allowed for its continuance and enabled the quiet devastation of brain injuries, something only recently began receiving the necessary attention.

An article in the November 21, 1909 New York Times addressed the carnage. An excerpt:

CHICAGO — Twenty-six killed, seventy seriously injured, and scores of others painfully hurt has been the cost of football to the United States thus far this year, according to figures collected by the Chicago Tribune. The list of the dead seems to be a decisive answer, the Chicago paper says, to the assertion of the football experts that the development of the open game would lead to the lessening of the perils of the gridiron.

The number of deaths is the highest it has been in years, and is almost double that of either of the two seasons recently passed. In 1907 there were only fourteen deaths, and in 1908 only thirteen.

It should be noted that The Tribune’s total includes a number of players hurt in games played during the past year or even earlier, who have died during the current twelvemonth.

The facts also seem to disprove the claim of the game’s supporters that it is the games of untrained boys and the athletic clubs that cause the fatalities. Of this year’s dead the majority were college players, supposed to have been hardened and made fit for the contests on the gridiron by expert coaches and long preparation.

As a result of the numerous fatalities and the agitation which they have stirred up, several colleges have disbanded their teams, and many of the city High Schools in various parts of the country have been forced to give up the sport.

…

Virginia May Forbid the Game

The State of Virginia will probably be the one which will give the heaviest blow to football. Following the death of one of the State University players and the injury of several of her youths within the State, a bill will be introduced into the Legislature at the next session to forbid such contests in the future. It is expected that this bill will be passed. Already the City Council of Norfolk and Portsmouth have forbidden all the contests within the city limits.

The death which attracted the most attention throughout the country, and which revived to a large extent the movement for the suppression of football, was that of Cadet Byrne, a West Point cadet. Byrne was an upper classman, 22 years old, when he was fatally injured during the contest with Harvard University. His neck was broken during a mass play, and despite the fact that every attempt was made to save his life, he died soon after.•

A Brief Note From 1885 About A Swedish Witch

January 28, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 12, 1885 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Old Print Article: Auto Polo Thrills New York City, New York Times (1913)

January 27, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

The odd game of Auto Polo was popularized in the summer of 1912 because of a marketing ploy by a Kansas Ford dealer trying to sell Model T’s. It soon become a craze in New York City, headlining at Madison Square Garden for most of December. Although the activity had initially been devised a decade earlier, it was this moment when the game got (relatively) big.

Dangerous as all fuck, the sport squared off an equal number of teams of vehicles holding two players–the driver and the mallet-wielder–trying to propel a ball between two posts. It thrived in New York and Chicago for most of the 1920s but disappeared before the arrival of the Great Depression. By then, cars were largely stable enough to sell themselves, even if most Americans couldn’t afford them. The photographs above are not from the MSG contests, but an article in the December 8, 1912 New York Times recalls that particular series. An excerpt:

Not a few of the dwellers or toilers along Automobile Row have been predicting a popular future for auto polo, the game from the South and West which gave the public a number of thrills as a game and furnished food for thought for the motor enthusiast at Madison Square Garden for the week that just ended. There had been rumors of the game from time to time, and people heard that the four-wheel “ponies” on which it was played provided as many sensational moments as the four-legged ones of the horse-polo match. But no one was quite prepared for the exhibition which took place in the arena still covered, oddly enough, with the tanbark of the Horse Show.

As in regulation polo, the mallet is only a factor in the newer game. The horse, or in this case the car, is quite as important to success, if not more so. It was on the performance of the cars that the interest of automobile men naturally centered. Occasionally there was a bit of of engine trouble, but for the most part the little machines, stripped to the bare frames and lacking even bonnets, stood up manfully under conditions that were grueling to say the least. Every canon of good motor car driving, from the viewpoint of the car, was broken time and again as the drivers sought to block the bounding leather ball or fed gas to their motors until the pop of explosions became an almost continuous roar in an effort to be the first “on” the elusive prize. Turns so short that they resulted in turnovers were made several times, but still the motors remained operable, to the surprise of the onlookers.

…

Whether the game can ever become general–even as general as polo pony–is a moot question. It involves, in the first place, a deal of expense, for, played in earnest and in the heat of the desire to win, a big repair bill would be inevitable. In other words, it would be an expensive thing to promote in a professional way.

…

It would be hard to devise a game in which the players took bigger chances of mishap. The factor of danger may prove either a damper or a stimulus. At any rate the game has definitely taken its place as a circus stunt crowded with thrills, and a demonstration of car ability which is a revelation even to the man who has driven his hundreds of miles at a mile-a-minute clip.•

A Brief Note From 1913 About a Brain Transplant

January 25, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the February 6, 1913 New York Times:

ANN ARBOR, Mich.–The brain of a dog was transferred to a man’s skull at University Hospital here to-day. W.A. Smith of Kalamazoo had been suffering from abscess on the brain, and in a last effort to save his life this remarkable operation was performed.

Opening his skull, the surgeons removed the diseased part of his brain, and in its place substituted the brain of a dog.

Smith was resting comfortably to-night, and the surgeons say he has a good chance to recover.•

A Brief Note From 1894 About Naked Fruitarians

January 22, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 11, 1894 New York Times:

A new society of cranks has been started by a former Lieutenant in the German Army. His name is Wäthe. He is the leader of a new ‘ism,’ and as such has sailed from San Francisco to Honolulu. The ‘Fruitarians’ is the name of the new society he represents, and their belief–or rather notion–is, that modern civilization is full of vanities and strange motions, and greatly needs reforming. The members eat nothing but ripe fruit, eschew cooked food of any kind, and drink only water. They are to live in huts, bare of the comforts of civilization, and go naked. Ex-Lient. Wäthe intends to buy a large tract of land in the Sandwich Islands, or perhaps, a small island outright, for the purpose of founding a colony.•

Old Print Article: Barnum Brown, Fossil Hunter, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1930)

January 20, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Paleontologist Barnum Brown was born in 1873 in a small Kansas town on a day the circus was passing through town, so he was named for the famed huckstering impresario. It proved fitting, as the colorful explorer presented humankind time and again with the greatest show on Earth.

It was Brown who first discovered the remains of a Tyrannosaurus Rex while fossil hunting in Montana in 1902. That may have been his biggest find, literally and figuratively, but he filled train cars with bones that allowed us to reconstruct deep history, to paint a picture of the past. Along with a few others, Brown is thought to be the model for Indiana Jones, which isn’t surprising. Following the completion of a 1930 expedition in which he believed he had unearthed a pre-dinosaur reptilian creature, Brown was profiled in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Tags: Barnum Brown

A Brief Note From 1909 About Flying Bicycles

January 19, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 26, 1909 New York Times:

Paris–Jules Bois believes that motor cars will in a hundred years be things of the past, and that a kind of flying bicycle will have been invented which will enable everybody to traverse the air at will, far above the earth. Hardly any one will remain in the cities at night. They will be places of business only. People of every class will reside in the country or in garden towns at considerable distances from the populous centres. Pneumatic railways and flying cars and many other means of quick transit will be so developed that the question of time will enter but little into one’s choice of a home. Transportation will be immensely cheaper than it is at present. As there will be less crowding, realty values and rentals will less exorbitant.•

Old Print Article: Film Star Mabel Normand Dead At 37, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1930)

January 18, 2016 in Film, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Mabel Normand was a Silent Era triple threat (writer-director-actor) who collaborated with Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett, Laurel & Hardy, Boris Karloff and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, so it would have taken a lot for personal life to overwhelm her career. Somehow, she managed.

Despite starring across Chaplin the first time he performed as the Little Tramp and becoming a big box-office draw, Normand’s star was dimmed by a cocaine addiction and scandal, most notably by being named the other woman in a divorce trial and by her close proximity to two mysterious shootings, one of which resulted in the death of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor. Her career had slowed considerably before tuberculosis killed her at age 37 in 1930. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle announced the end of her tumultuous life in the February 24, 1930 edition.

From 1914’s “Mabel’s Strange Predicament,” which introduced the Little Tramp.

Tags: Mabel Normand

A Note From 1929 About A Champion Bigamist

January 15, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 1, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Tags: Adrienne Guyout

Old Print Article: “Warns Machines May Some Day Take Over The World,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1948)

January 14, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Even by the oft-eccentric standards of mid-century cyberneticists, Warren Sturgis McCulloch was something of an outlier. Known for his diet of cigarettes, whiskey and ice cream, the MIT genius was the proud father of 17 adopted children. More than six decades ago he was extrapolating the power of then-rudimentary machines, concerned that eventually AI might rule humankind, a topic of much concern in these increasingly automated times. The below article from the September 22, 1948 Brooklyn Daily Eagle records his clarion call about the future.

_______________________

In 1969, the year before McCulloch died, his opinions on the Singularity had modified.

A Note From 1852 About Monkey Entertainers

January 12, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 7, 1852 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Old Print Article: Enigmarelle The Automaton, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1904)

January 10, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I don’t know if the 1904 “automaton” known as Enigmarelle qualifies, in retrospect, for the Uncanny Valley Effect, but one look at this creepbot will make you want to hide under a porch. Jesus H. Christ!

Frederick J. Ireland’s supposedly motorized brainchild didn’t talk, but it could simulate the way a human writes, dances, rides a bicycle, etc. The catch? It apparently wasn’t a robot at all but a fauxbot, a convincing hoax in which a human was made to look like an intelligent machine. Nonetheless, it was a longtime hit at the Hippodrome in London and at vaudeville halls in the U.S. The writer of an article in the August 28, 1904 Brooklyn Daily Eagle was taken in by the ruse.

Tags: Enigmarelle, Frederick J. Ireland

A Brief Note From 1893 About Heavyweights

January 8, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 30, 1893 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

A Brief Note From 1902 About Webbed Toes

December 30, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 1, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Tags: John Bowers, William Bowers

Old Print Article: “Parachute Leap Off Statue Of Liberty,” New York Times (1912)

December 28, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1912, daredevil Frederick R. Law, who delighted in heights, ascended to the peak of the Statue of Liberty and parachuted from the raised hand of the American icon. It was more than six decades before aerialist Philippe Petit would top him–and every other urban adventurer–with his World Trade Center high-wire stunt. The full story of the Liberty leap as told in the New York Times that year:

Frederick R. Law, listed in the telephone directory as an aerial contractor, with offices at 50 Church Street, growing tired of monotonously swaying to and fro on lofty flagpoles and of being conventionally referred to in the newspapers as a daring steeplejack, decided yesterday to startle the world with an entirely original feat.

Law is about 35 years old. He was the first man to paint the flagpoles of the Pulitzer and Singer buildings, and it has been said of him that he had to be at least 300 feet in the air with a cigar in his mouth to feel absolutely comfortable. Business has been dull in the steeple rigging line, and Law saw the necessity of doing something which no one else had ever done before.

According to one of his foremen, the boss steeplejack sat in his office all yesterday morning looking over the city’s high towers. Suddenly, it was said, he announced his intention of jumping from the Singer Building with a parachute. That seemed unpractical, however, after an investigation, and the Metropolitan Tower, a few stories higher, offered the same objections. The steeplejack did not fear the jump, but impeding traffic and the risk of causing a runaway or two deterred him.

The happy alternative of the Statue of Liberty suggested itself, and at noon the aerial contractor set out for Bedlow’s Island. At 2 o’clock he was armed with a special permit, issued by Capt. Leonard D. Wildman in charge of the post on the island, and half an hour later half a dozen moving picture machines and operators and several thousand spectators were on hand to see the jump from the top of the statue.

Law dragged his 100-pound parachute into the elevator, and in company with one of his foreman went aloft to the head of the Goddess. There he dressed his ropes and started up the remaining 50 feet through the mighty biceps and forearm until he reached the hand with supports the torch. There is an observation platform at this point which, since the issue of a recent order, cannot be visited without a special permit. This platform is 151 feet from the base of the statue and about 225 feet above sea level. It is large enough to hold twelve persons, and Law and his assistant had no trouble in arranging the parachute so that on the jump it would slide easily over the edges of the railing.

Awaiting a lull in the wind Law chose the eastern side of the statue for his descent, and at exactly 2:45 P.M., with all the moving picture machines trained in his direction, he jumped from the top of the railing, clearing the edges by ten feet.

Whistles shrieked in the harbor, and every one within seeking distance held his breath while the bulky parachute followed the man over the railing. There was fear of a tragedy for a moment, for the steeplejack fell fully seventy-five feet like a dead weight, the parachute showing no inclination whatever to open at first.

When it opened the wind blew it clear of the statue. Then Law began waving his hands frantically. It was not a sign of alarm, merely a steering method which the young aeronaut had adopted to keep his craft out of the bay. It proved practical, too, for the parachute descended gracefully.

When it neared the surface it seemed to fall fast for a moment, and Law, forgetting to jump, fell heavily on the stone coping, thirty feet from the water’s edge. He limped away from the pile of canvas and ropes, but declared that he was not injured. Later he packed up his parachute and personally carried it to his office in the Hudson Terminal Building. He did not want to be interviewed, he said.•

A Brief Note From 1901 About An Amateur Doctor

December 27, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 30, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Tags: Nomee Bronson

Old Print Article: “How Harrison Found His Father’s Body,” New York Times (1910)

December 21, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Benjamin Harrison.

John Scott Harrison.

Well, this is rather macabre. In 1878, a decade prior to his Presidency, Benjamin Harrison investigated a number of Ohio medical colleges in search of the stolen corpse of a deceased family friend and was aghast to come face to face with his own freshly fallen father, John Scott Harrison. The jaw-dropping tale isn’t quite as surprising as you might think, as that state was known in those years for the brisk business conducted by so-called resurrectionists, who were often in cahoots with academics in need of cadavers. Despite the public outcry caused by the scandal, the Dean of Ohio Medical College acknowledged he would likely continue buying stiffs from grave robbers. The full story from the March 13, 1910 New York Times:

One of the strangest, and at the same time the most gruesome stories that ever reached a newspaper office was told by H.E. Krehbiel, the musical critic, the other night. Though it reached a newspaper office and has been known to a few persons in the twenty years succeeding, it was not printed when the incidents happened, because those concerned took the precaution of narrating them in confidence. Here it is, however, as Mr. Krehbiel tells it, long after those most intimately concerned are dead:

“Many years ago I was at work one afternoon in the offices of a Cincinnati newspaper when Benjamin Harrison, afterward President of the United States, and his brother came into the office and began a long conversation with the city editor. They spoke in low tones, which did not reach beyond the desk where they were sitting.

“After nearly half an hour had elapsed the city editor called me over to him and introduced me to the two gentlemen, both of whom seemed to be laboring under strong emotion. Benjamin Harrison appeared to be especially affected. This did not surprise me very much, as I was aware that they had only buried their father, to whom they were both devotedly attached, a few days before. The city editor instructed me to take down their story, giving me also explicitly to understand that, whereas, I was to listen to all they had to say, I was to write no more, and the paper was to print no more than they should decide.

“Now,” continued Mr. Krehbiel, “this is what Benjamin Harrison told me. A few days before the death of his father, the husband of a dear old German woman who lived near their farm also died and was duly buried. When he came from the East to attend his own father’s obsequies this old woman went to him in great distress and told him that the grave of her husband had been opened and his body stolen. Those were the days of body snatchers or ‘resurrectionists,’ before the State had made provision for subjects for medical colleges.

“Mr Harrison went on to say that his old German friend’s distress was so intense that he and his brother had themselves undertaken a search for the body in Cincinnati. This search had occupied them two days and had just ended.

“‘We swore out a search warrant and took a constable with us,’ said Mr. Harrison. ‘One by one we have been to every medical school in the City of Cincinnati. It was a terrible ordeal for us, especially as our own grief was fresh and poignant. We kept up the search without inkling, clue or result, until we had visited every medical school in Cincinnati except one.

“‘The last one was the Ohio State Medical College. We went over there more as a formality than anything else. With search warrant and constable we were enabled there, as elsewhere, to have everything opened to us. We found nothing.

“’Just as we were about to leave the college the constable noted a shaft such as is used in apartment houses. Down this shaft hung the ropes of a hoist. The constable went up to the ropes of a hoist and took hold of the taut rope. He turned to me sharply, saying that there was a weight on the hoist. I told him to pull it up. He did so.

“’Attached to the rope by a hook was the body of my own father. They had known at the colleges whose the body was. They had taken this fiendishly ingenious method of moving it from floor to floor as we in our search had moved from one floor to another.’

“This,” said Mr. Krehbiel, “is the story in Benjamin Harrison’s own words just as he gave it to me.”•

A Brief Note From 1902 About Sheepmen

December 20, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 31, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

A Brief Note From 1899 About Wedding Crashers

December 17, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 2, 1899 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Malone, N.Y. – A fire which has been raging in the forests near Lyon Mountain recently has driven the wild animals into the farming districts on the outskirts and wild cats, bears, deer, etc. have been frequently seen near here, and at a wedding two weeks ago bear meat was served, three cubs having been trapped just before the ceremony took place.•

Old Print Article: Jacques Inaudi, “Man With Two Brains,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1901)

December 15, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jacques Inaudi had a great brain–more than one, in a sense.

He was what was known more than a century ago as a “Lightning Calculator,” a sideshow performer who solved complicated mathematical problems in his head in front of live audiences. Few had the facility for numbers displayed by Inaudi, an Italian who toured extensively with vaudeville shows demonstrating his prodigious abilities. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle profiled the math man on October 15, 1901 (and misidentified his nationality). An excerpt:

A Note From 1922 About Insect Head Transplants

December 14, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the December 1, 1922 New York Times:

Paris–Walter Finker, the Viennese biologist, has succeeded in transplanting the heads of insects. Before the Academy of Vienna yesterday he gave an account of his operation and the results, about which the Matin‘s scientific editor says “if true it means a real revolution in the science of physiology and biology.”

The Matin adds:

“This discovery is so astonishing that before discussing it we must make all possible reserves.

“Finkler took a series of insects–butterflies and caterpillars–and with fine scissors cut their heads off. He then immediately grafted these heads onto which [another] head had originally belonged. After a few weeks the insects operated on began to recover, but to the intense surprise of the professor the newly formed insects began in every case to assume the characteristics of the heads which had been grafted on to them.

“Bodies lost their original color and took the color of the insect whose head they were wearing. A female insect on to which a male head had been grafted became a male.

‘Not only did the professor succeed in changing the heads of insects and larvae of the same species, but he grafted the heads of one species on to another, an operation hitherto considered quite impossible.•

Old Print Articles