Book Two : Chapter One
HISTORICAL
PEOPLE
| Elizabeth I, Queen of England from 1558 to 1603, kept 80 wigs. |
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| Ancient Romans ate flamingo tounges. They were considered a delicacy. |
Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Abraham Lincoln's
assassin, John Wilkes Booth. His shame created the expression, "His name is Mudd." |
| Napoleon Bonaparte was afraid of cats. |
In 1709 AD, Bartolommeo Christofori from Florence, Italy
became 'displeased' with the sound of the harpsichord. He
felt the tone it generated was tinny, and that the musician
should have more control over the loudness of notes.
In trying to find a better design for the harpsichord, Chrisofori created an instrument that made notes by striking the strings with a small felt-covered wooden hammer, rather than plucking them as did the traditional harpsichord. This produced a much more pleasing tone, and allowed the player to control the loudness of each note by adding pedals that controlled the distance the hammers travelled to strike the note. He called his invention a gravicembalo col piano e forte, which literally means 'a harpsichord with loud and soft'. This was eventually shortened to 'pianoforte', and finally to just 'piano'. |
| Alexander the Great was gay. |
Rene Descartes came up with the theory of coordinate geometry by
looking at a fly walk across a tiled ceiling.
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| Hitler and Napolean each had only one testical. |
14th Century Crusaders defending the city of Caffa in
Crimea were horrified when the Tartars began catapulting
the dead bodies of plague victims over the city walls
as an attack strategy.
The Tartars themselves eventually died of plague, so the Crusaders returned to Italy - and unwittingly took the plague with them. Within two decades the bubonic plague had wiped out 25% of the population of Europe from Yugoslavia to Greenland. Four-fifths of the population of Marseilles died in this way. |
| Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous transatlantic flight. |
The Earl of Condom was a knighted personal physician
to England's King Charles II in the mid-1600's. The Earl
was requested to produce a method to protect the King from
syphillis. (Charles II's pleasure-loving nature was notorious.
at the time). Can you guess what his solution to the problem
was, and what it came to be called?
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| Czar Paul 1 of Russia banished soldiers to Siberia for marching out of step. |
Fourteenth century physicians didn't know what caused
the plague, but they knew it was contagious. Subsequently,
they developed an early kind of bioprotective suit which
included a large beaked head piece which made them look
like large birds.
The beak was filled with vinegar, sweet oils and other strong smelling compounds to counteract the stench of the dead and dying plague victims. |
| Catherine de Medici was the first woman in Europe to use tobacco. She took it in a mixture of snuff. |
Charles Dickens earned no more for his twenty novels than
he did from his lectures.
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| Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns. (Hhhmmm, and they look nothing like cigars ... ) |
Lee Harvey Oswald's cadaver toe tag was sold at auction
in 1992 for $6,600.
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| When Christopher Columbus and crew landed in the New World they observed the natives using a nose pipe to smoke a strange new herb. The pipe was called a 'tabaka' by the locals, hence our word for the herb - tobacco. |
Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, lost the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870 due wholly or in part to
kidney stones. |
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| Nero's wife, Poppaea, kept 500 milking asses exclusively to keep her bath topped up. |
The Duke of Monmouth was beheaded in England in 1685 in one of history's
messiest executions - a total of five chops of the axe!
The body and head were dispatched for burial, but at the last moment it was realized that no portrait existed of the Duke. Hey, he was the illegitimate son of King Charles II, and a Duke to boot, so it was important to have a portrait. Therefore, for the sake of posterity, the body and head were sewed back together, dressed, and painted. |
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The Italian poet Dante was inspired to write two of his finest
works, "The Divine Comedy" and "The New Life", by a fair
haired, blue-eyed maiden whom he never spoke to and whom he saw only twice.
The woman, whom he called simply Beatrice, was Beatrice Portinori. She died in 1290 at the age of 24. Dante saw her first at her parents' home in Florence in 1274, when he was only nine and she was eight. He spotted her again nine years later in a street. After her death he wrote "The New Life" in which he describes his ideal love. | |
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English pirate Edward Teach - better known to the world as "Blackbeard" -
survived being shot in the chest at least five times.
He was eventually decapitated in a battle of the Virginia coast in 1718. |
Thomas Edison helped to develop the electric chair in
order to prove the deadly dangers of Alternating Current electrical systems.
Edison was in direct competition with Westinghouse, whose AC system was becoming the preferred method of electrical production, thus threatening Edison's Direct Current (DC) system. Realizing that he was losing the war, Edison began holding demonstrations in which he would electrocute large numbers of cats and dogs by luring the animals onto a metal plate wired to a 1,000 volt AC generator. Fortunately, this act of cruelty did not work to sway the public to his side and the more economical and efficient AC became the electricity standard. However, the legacy of Edison's maneuver was the development of the electric chair. |
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You may very well have heard the name, but who exactly was
TYPHOID MARY?
Typhoid Mary Mallon was an Irish cook in New York in the early 1900's. When a cluster of Typhoid Fever outbreaks were traced to her, it was discovered that she was a Typhoid carrier - immune to the disease herself but deadly to others. Doctors suggested the removal of her gallbladder so that she could continue to live a normal life without endangering others. Mary refused and was isolated in a cottage on North Brother Island. After four years, she appealed to the authorities to release her under the condition that she never work as a cook again. They relented, but another outbreak of Typhoid was traced to her. Mary was returned to North Brother Island where she lived alone until her death in 1938. | |
| Mark Twain didn't graduate from elementary (primary) school. |
Famous Russian ruler Ivan the Terrible wasn't always so terrible.
For a few years he was a happy family man and a wise, reforming
ruler.
However, after suffering terribly during a life-threatening illness he regained consciousness to discover that his wife Anastasia and his son Dmitri were dead. From this point on, Ivan was truly Terrible... and no one was safe from his wrath. He even flailed and boiled his own followers. |
| The parachute was invented by Leonardo da Vinci in 1515. |
After Albert Einstein had been at Princeton for some months, local
news hounds discovered that a twelve-year-old girl happened to
stop by the Einstein home almost every afternoon.
Until the newspapers reported it, the girl's mother had never thought to ask Einstein about the situation. What could her daughter and Einstein have in common that they spent so much time together? Einstein replied simply, "She brings me cookies and I do her arithmetic homework." |
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Louis XV of France really was as unpleasant a fellow
as he's been depicted.
In 1674, when he was visiting a school at Clermont, he heard from the school's authorities that one of the children, a nine-year-old Irish lad named Francis Seldon, had made a pun about the king's bald head. Louis was furious. He had a secret warrant drawn up for the child's arrest, and young Seldon was thrown into solitary confinement in the Bastille. His parents, members of one of Europe's richest merchant families, were told simply that the child had disappeared. Days turned to months, months to years, and Louis himself passed away. But Francis spent sixty-nine years "in the hole" for making fun of the king's baldness. | |
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