From the October 28, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
You are currently browsing the archive for the Old Print Articles category.
Tags: William Howard Taft
These classic 1901 photographs show the Budapest offices of Telefon Hirmondo (or Telephone Herald), a newspaper service read via telephone to subscribers all over that city. Begun in 1893 by Transylvanian inventor Theodore Puskas–who died just a month after the service was launched–the Herald featured updated news all day and live music at night. It cost about two cents a day at the outset. At its height, the company had more than 15,000 subscribers and licensed similar setups in Italy and America. Local department stores, hotels and restaurants purchased several lines so that their customers could be hooked into flowing news and entertainment almost a century before wi-fi. The popularity of radio in the 1920s, however, made the telephone newspaper superfluous. An article in the November 17, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the service. The “Bellamy” it refers to is Edward Bellamy, whose utopian novel Looking Backward had been published to much acclaim in 1897.
The schedule for the U.S. version (stationed in Newark) which started nearly 20 years after the initial Budapest service:
- 8:00: Exact astronomical time.
- 8:00-9:00: Weather, late telegrams, London exchange quotations; chief items of interest from the morning papers.
- 9:00-9:45: Special sales at the various stores; social programs for the day.
- 9:45-10:00: Local personals and small items.
- 10:00-11:30: New York Stock Exchange quotations and market letter.
- 11:30-12:00: New York miscellaneous items.
- Noon: Exact astronomical time.
- 12:00-12:30: Latest general news;naval, military and congressional notes.
- 12:30-1:00: Midday New York Stock Exchange quotations.
- 1:00-2:00: Repetition of the half day’s most interesting news.
- 2:00-2:15: Foreign cable dispatches.
- 2:15-2:30: Trenton and Washington items.
- 2:30-2:45: Fashion notes and household hints.
- 2:45-3:15: Sporting news; theatrical news.
- 3:15-3:30: New York Stock Exchange closing quotations.
- 3:30-5:00: Music, readings, lectures.
- 5:00-6:00: Stories and talks for the children.
- 8:00-10:30: Vaudeville, concert, opera.
Tags: Flaubert Marcy
That the early 20th-century demonstrations of Waterland, an insane boat-on-wheels by French inventor Jules Reveillier (alternately spelled “Ravaillier” or “Raviller”), were a great success didn’t much matter because there really wasn’t a market for an amphibious automobile. But that doesn’t diminish the wow factor of it all. On November 13, 1907, the New York Times and Brooklyn Daily Eagle filed reports about the outlandish test run in (and around) the Hudson. The Eagle report is attached below.
In 1752, according to Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania newspaper, a woman wed while naked, and though the details make the whole thing sound like an extended New Jersey joke, it apparently occurred. The topic was dear to the Founding Father’s heart since he was a devout nudist himself, given to a half hour of clothesless writing or reading each morning. I also recall reading (I believe in one version of The Book of Lists) that he participated in orgies in which the men dressed as priests and the women nuns. I can neither confirm nor deny such a thing. The following article from the July 7, 1934 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalls the naughty nuptials.
Tags: Benjamin Franklin\
Tags: Jacob George
Tags: Robert Colwell
A giant bullet shot through the sky is one way to describe British scientist W.D. Verschoyle’s early-20th-century plan to propel goods and people through sealed tubes. As described in an article in the September 14, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the inventor envisioned oxygen supplies keeping passengers alive as they were blasted at nearly 1000 mph, enabling them to circle the globe in 24 hours.
Tags: W.D. Verschoyle
Announcing God’s death probably wasn’t a real consensus-builder back in the 19th century, so Friedrich Nietzsche was crucified in effigy by some newspapers when he died. This postmortem, originally published in the Springfield Republican and reprinted in the November 4, 1900 edition Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was a merciless takedown of the extremist philosopher.
Tags: C.J. Preston, Mrs. Anetta Preston
Tags: Ray Bradbury
Mollie Fancher didn’t exactly sleep through history, but she certainly reclined as it passed by.
The odd woman, known as the “Brooklyn Enigma,” reportedly suffered a pair of accidents in the 1860s while on the cusp of adulthood and repaired to her bedroom where she spent the rest of her life, saying that she could no longer walk. It’s not something you’d normally question, but doctors could never precisely figure out her condition, and Fancher became known for her strange claims that she could go years without solid food (a “fasting girl,” she was called) and that she was a clairvoyant. (It’s also possible she had multiple personalities.) Over the next 50 years (or 438,000 hours), some of which she shared with her parrot, Joe, the Brooklyn Bridge was built, streetcars and automobiles began replacing horses and the telephone was patented and proliferated. All the while, Fancher clung to her pillow.
One month before her death, she celebrated five decades of being bedridden with a party of sorts, as was recorded in an article the January 30, 1916 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Tags: Mollie Fancher
Tags: Alfred G. Moore
There was something rotten inside Robert Louis Stevenson, as there is in all of us, but he had a name for it: Mr. Hyde. Not to suggest the author’s voluminous and varied output can be reduced to one novella–I’m talking about the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, of course–but it’s rare that something can be written about the human mind, in this case the subconscious, that will be true as long there are people.
The following article from the December 17, 1894 Brooklyn Daily Eagle announced the sickly author’s death, which occurred two weeks earlier from a cerebral hemorrhage he experienced while living on the Samoan Islands.
Tags: Robert Louis Stevenson
From the November 5, 1912 New York Times:
ST. LOUIS -– Tight lacing caused the death last night of Joseph Hennella, a female impersonator, at the City Hospital, after collapsing on the stage of a South Side vaudeville theatre late on Sunday night.
In order to add to the illusion when he appeared in a woman’s role he wore a corset tightly laced, to give the effect of a small waist.
Hannella fell unconscious on the stage in the course of his act. He died three hours later. The hospital physicians said the tight lacing had caused a kidney trouble and induced a tendency to apoplexy. Hennella was of medium height, and inclined to be stout. He was 40 years old. In his younger days it was easy for him to get the feminine lines, but lately his increasing girth made it necessary for him to lace extremely tight to create the illusion. Usually he made several changes of costume in the course of an act, and the constriction caused by the corset rendered this a fatiguing and laborious process.•
From the April 20, 1930 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Tags: Li-Fen Shan
French aviation pioneer Robert Esnault-Pelterie, inventor of the joystick flight control, knew 41 years before “the giant leap” that a manned trip to the moon and back was theoretically possible. He believed we were “actually becoming birdmen” and thought atomic energy might aid us in reaching not only the moon but also Mars and Venus, a plan Project Orion scientists worked on in earnest in the 1950s. Below is an article from the February 12, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Tags: Robert Esnault-Pelterie
From the March 10, 1876 New York Times:
Louisville, March 9--The Bath County (Ky.) News of this date says: ‘On last Friday a shower of meat fell near the house of Allen Crouch, who lives some two or three miles from the Olympian Springs in the southern portion of the county, covering a strip of ground about one hundred yards in length and fifty wide. Mrs. Crouch was out in the yard at the time, engaged in making soap, when meat which looked like beef began to fall around her. The sky was perfectly clear at the time, and she said it fell like large snow flakes, the pieces as a general thing not being much larger. One piece fell near her which was three or four inches square. Mr. Harrison Gill, whose veracity is unquestionable, and from whom we obtained the above facts, hearing of the occurrence visited the locality the next day, and says he saw particles of meat sticking to the fences and scattered over the ground. The meat when it first fell appeared to be perfectly fresh.
The correspondent of the Louisville Commercial, writing from Mount Sterling, corroborates the above, and says the pieces of flesh were of various sizes and shapes, some of them being two inches square. Two gentlemen, who tasted the meat, express the opinion that it was either mutton or venison.•
People in Brooklyn in the late-nineteenth century apparently stunk to the high heavens, and everyone was close to fainting from the funk. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle offered a solution for the cleansing of filthy citizens in the most demeaning, insulting terms in an August 13, 1897 article: Build some public baths, so the miserable scumbags could be less stanky.
Camels are mostly associated with other parts of the world, but they originated in what we today call the United States of America. In the 1850s, Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, thought the desert animals might be useful for military purposes, scouting expeditions and as beasts of burden transporting goods and water across the Southwest, so he ordered a couple shiploads of camels to be purchased abroad and delivered to Texas. An article in the October 17, 1920 recalled the effort, which ultimately failed for several reasons, including that little thing called the Civil War.
Tags: Jefferson Davis, Samuel McLaughlin