A Photographic Memory of Art

1914: The Arrest of Gavrilo Princip

Gavrilo Princip is unintentionally one of the most influential people of the 20th century. The 19-year-old Serbian student started World War I by pulling the trigger on Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. After shooting Franz Ferdinand and his Duchess Sophie von Chotkovato, Princip–the member of the Black Hand organization, tried to shoot himself. A man behind him saw what he was doing, and seized Princip’s right arm. A couple of policeman joined the struggle and Princip was arrested. The above photo, one of the biggest photodocumentary scoops of the century was born as Princip was being led to a police station. After a 12-day murder trial in Sarajevo in October 1914, Princip was sentenced to 20 years, the maximum penalty since he was younger than 20 when he committed his crime. Probably tubercular before his imprisonment, he had an arm amputated because the disease spread to the bone. He died in hospital in April 1918.

1933: Migrant Mother

Dorothea Lange was one of the photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the social condition as a result of the Depression. Exhausted from photographing farms in Nipomo, California, Lange turned down a dirt road to investigate a migrant camp of pea pickers. In less than fifteen minutes, Lange was back on the road after making five exposures of a woman (Florence Thompson) and her children in the camp. She submitted one of these images (titled Migrant Mother) to her agency. The image put a face to the Great Depression, and became its symbol as well as one of the most iconic and important photographs in the history of photography.

1944: Cartier-Bresson’s Matisse

Henry Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of Henri Matisse is fully of ironies. The great French painter, known for his use of color and called Fauve (wild beast) is depicted in black and white, surrounded by birds. Moreover, the photograph does not show energetic, vivid Matisse remembered by many of his contemporaries. Although it is taken in 1944, ten years before the master’s death, Matisse was already a broken man. In 1939, he and his wife of 41 years separated. In 1941, he underwent a colostomy, which confined him to a wheelchair. His daughter is a captive in a Nazi concentration camp. The photograph showed all these ravages. Cartier-Bresson and Matisse remained good friends–when Cartier-Bresson published his seminal book, The Decisive Moment, Matisse drew the cover for him. 

1945: Potsdam Conference

When the Great Powers assembled in the conference room at Potsdam’s Cecilienhof palace in July 1945, it was without doubt that a Quadripartition of Germany was imminent. The conference’s progress had been hindered by the change in the British government and by Stalin’s illness, but the end result was certain on everyone’s mind. The U.S. Army photographer Frank Gatteri’s picture of the council room at Potsdam reflected this atmosphere. Unlike any other photograph of the event, Gatteri took this picture from a high vantage point, revealing all parties’ cards and reminding the viewers the earlier cartoons of partitioning nations. Josef Stalin is the only figure distinctly recognizable in this figure–it is as if Gatteri foresaw that the shadow of Uncle Joe would be upon Eastern Europe even after the other people around the table (Truman, Attlee, Eden, Byrnes) were gone. 

1949: Picasso in Madoura

“Why not have him draw in the dark, with a light instead of a pencil?”  mused the photographer Gjon Mili as he was on his way to the Riviera to photograph the painter Pablo Picasso. At Madoura Pottery, Mill accomplished just that; he showed Picasso some of his photographs of light patterns formed by a skater’s leaps – obtained by affixing tiny lights on the points of the skates. Picasso reacted instantly and this photo of Pablo Picasso drawing a centaur in the air,  taken in the dark with a flashlight, was born. ‘This spectacular “space drawing” is a momentary happening inscribed in thin air with a flashlight in the dark – an illumination of Picasso’s brilliance set off by the spur of the moment,’ wrote Mill in “Picasso’s Third Dimension”.  

1954: A Man of Mercy

W. Eugene Smith took a magnificent photoessay for LIFE in 1954. A Man of Mercy, which chronicled Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s humanitarian work in French Equatorial Africa is at times controversial because Smith used his darkroom prowess to manipulate and composite negatives. [See Schweitzer's famous portrait, where a second negative of the hand and saw is superimposed on the first] However, in the above photo, the photography plays a second fiddle to the documentary–Schweitzer tired after a hard-day’s work is seen working back to his quarters. In the foreground play the Africans who contrast sharply with the white-washed tents Schweitzer set up in Lambaréné. It is a documentary of what a true Christian Empire looks like.    

1959: Eisenhower at the Lincoln Centre

During Robert Moses’ program of urban renewal in the early 1960s, a consortium of New Yorker led by John D. Rockefeller III started ”Lincoln Square Renewal Project” to transform the place into New York’s new cultural centre. Thus, Lincoln Center was born. On May 14, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower thrust a shovel into the ground on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to signal the start of construction. The occasion was lavishly commemorated. Leonard Bernstein was the master of ceremonies; the New York Philharmonic (which Rockefeller lured away from its old venues at the Carnegie Hall) and Juilliard Chorus performed the national anthem. The baritone Leonard Warren sang the prologue to Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.” The mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens sang the “Habanera” from Bizet’s “Carmen.” 

1966: Chagall at the Lincoln Centre

In this photo of Sept. 8, 1966, the painter Marc Chagall poses by his mural “Le Triumphe de la Musique,” The Triumph of Music, during the unveiling ceremonies in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, in New York. Through the transparent windowpanes of the building, The Sources of Music in yellow (right) and The Triumph of Music in red (left) dominate the frontal view of the opera house. Although specifically created for the opera house, there were various autobiographical elements by Chagall in those paintings. Only at night, the murals are on view. During the day they are covered with white sheets in order to protect them from the sun. 

1974: Nixon in the Knesset

Richard Nixon disliked Jews and may even have been anti-Semitic. However, in Israel, Nixon is fondly remembered for his role in saving Israel in the dark days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. When Israel had run dangerously low on ammunition during the war, Nixon sent planeload after planeload to resupply the depleted Israeli military stocks. The relations between Nixon and Golda Meir remained strong throughout their administrations. In June 1974, Nixon visited Prime Minister Rabin–the first visit by an American President to Israel. Under central tapestry which depicts the history of the Israelites from Moses to the Holocaust in the Chagall Hall, the President spoke to the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset. The picture by Harry Benson shows the president being upstaged and propped simultaneously by Moses who is seemingly preaching the Law to the beleaguered President, who will resign a few months later.

 

Three Photos, Three Wars

The Death of A Loyalist Militiaman

This picture of the Loyalist Militiaman is a photo taken by Robert Capa for the French magazine Vu. Although it is taken during the height of the Spanish Civil War, the photo is not about the Civil War itself. The vacant spaces make up the majority of the picture. The main focus is on the man-one Federico Borreli Garcia-but his identity or those of his executioners matter a little in this deeply impersonal photo . He is fighting against the forces he neither control nor see-a war that is so removed from his everyday life, and one that is so removed for the viewers too. 

The picture is not about the war’s destructiveness-the face of the falling soldier is almost relieved. Even the ravaged countryside of Spain is not showing in the picture. The picture is not about the physical warfare-amazingly absent from the picture are mortars, armies or other accessories of war. The picture is about the void it creates, the catharsis it provides from life and especially its mysterious presence (or lack thereof). War is vilified in the picture, not through visual blood or gore, but through its absence and the silent and subtle nob to man’s nature to fear the Great Unknown.

The Execution of A Vietcong Guerilla

There were a lot of pictures taken during the Vietnam War-those of burning monks, fallen soldiers and whirling helicopters. But this picture by Eddie Adams is the one that defined the conflict and changed history. In the sharp contrast with Capa’s Falling Solider, personalities and identities did matter a lot in this picture. Amazingly, the picture that polarized the American public and shown the personal nature of the Vietnam War did not involved any Americans. It was the gunshot heard all over the world.

It is almost dehumanizing to personally witness the execution, no matter what the victim had done. It mattered a little that the person about to be executed was a Viet Cong Guerrilla responsible for killing twelve only that fateful morning. America–a nation that still supports death penalty by overwhelming numbers (for various reasons)–was shocked to its core.  In the picture, its framing, its lighting and its depth mattered little. For instance, picture was cropped again and again just to display the general and his victim. However, the act, ‘the thing itself’ spoke directly–the general is the personification of America’s hidden hand and her dirty involvement in the Vietnam Quagmire. Within two months, President Johnson would be announcing his desire not to pursue a second time. 

Exposing of A Gestapo Informer

Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the greatest photographers of our time. He himself was a German prisoner-of-war and successfully escaped to France only on his third attempt. His photograph from inside Dessau exposed the society’s collective anguish in the aftermath of a war. It was a deeply personal photograph for him, and he ensured that it is a personal photograph for every viewer. 

In a camp of displaced persons waiting for repatriation, a Gestapo informer who had pretended to be a refugee is discovered and exposed by a camp inmate. The faces are the most striking part of this photo. On them are the judge’s aplomb, the denouncer’s rage, the Gestapo informer’s resignation, and faces of apathy and anger that frame the picture. The picture draws the audience into that anguished circle of the wronged. Had Cartier-Bresson been a painter, these would have been the allegories of Rage and Shame standing before Justice with a Greek chorus in the background. And we are that Greek Chorus. The intimate circle ensured that we share not only Agony, but also Shame and Responsibilities in the Aftermath of a War.

 

It is alive! It is a LIFE!

This morning, I received a wonderful email (but its wonderfulness didn’t prevent it from being deleted from my increasingly cluttered email account). The email said, “LIFE and Getty Images have joined forces to provide instant access to millions of breathtaking photographs … with more than 3,000 new photos added every day.” So, LIFE, thrice-defunct magazine, is reborn again as of this morning. 

To commemorate this occasion, I selected a few less-famous, but notable photographs that defined 20th century in this blog:

Kings of Hollywood

In the above picture (left to right) Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper and James Stewart enjoy a joke at 1957 New Year’s party held at the Crown Room in Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. A photo in the series of four made by Hollywood’s premier photographer, Slim Aarons, the photo-op came almost unexpectedly when Clark Gable cracked a joke at the photographer’s expense. The conspiratorial laugher invited many into the rarified lives of Hollywood’s elite, in the picture Smithsonian magazine termed “a Mount Rushmore of stardom” and the novelist Louis Auchincloss ”the very image of American he-men.”

Khurschev at the Lincoln Memorial

Burt Glinn took many notable pictures in his life—he is the right man at the right place for Magnum, a photo agency he co-founded. (He captured Fidel Castro’s triumphant entrance to Havana in ‘59.) So, it seems ironic that the picture for which he is best remembered for today was the result of his tardiness. On the famous picture showing the back of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s head in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Glinn recounted: “I was late and I couldn’t get to where everybody else was, in front of Khrushchev …. If I’d been on time I would have gotten a very ordinary picture of Khrushchev and Henry Cabot Lodge looking at this statue of Lincoln but you couldn’t see the statue.”

Exposing a Gestapo Informer

If Death of a Loyalist militiaman exposed the pain afflicted on the individuals in the face of the unknown, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Dessau photograph exposed the society’s collective anguish in the aftermath of a war. “Dessau, Germany, 1945. In a camp of displaced persons waiting for repatriation, a Gestapo informer who had pretended to be a refugee is discovered and exposed by a camp inmate whose face is illuminated by the strong, sharp light of rage.” — that was how the photograph was described, but the words fail to convey the emotions seeping out of the picture. Like many a master with paintbrush centuries before him, Cartier-Bresson paints allegorical embodiments of Rage and Shame standing before Justice with a Greek chorus in the background. Cartier-Bresson himself spent three years in German prisoner-of-war camps, successfully escaping to France only on his third attempt.

Warschauer Kniefall

A picture can speak a thousand words, and that is what Willy Brandt had expected when he silently knelt down at the monument to Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The gesture of humility and penance was not favorably viewed by West Germans at that time. 48% thought the “Kniefall” was exaggerated. The opposition tried to use the Kniefall against Brandt with a vote of No Confidence in April 1972 which he survived by only two votes. However, Brandt’s Ostpolitik and Kniefall helped his reelection, as his reformist policies helped Germany gain international reputation, and he went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.

Alfred Krupp by Arnold Newman

“By exaggerating or minimizing his subjects’ surroundings, [Arnold Newman] crafted impressionistic gems… that suggested his sitters’ personalities,” wrote TIME magazine. He did, taking pictures of Igor Stravinsky under the piano which suggested a musical note or of Andy Warhol, whose photograph is a reflection of the latter’s paintings. In 1959, Newman cast master builder Robert Moses as a giant against the Manhattan skyline that he helped to shape. The above photo, although not notable in itself, was at the centre of a minor controversy in Newman’s life; the intentionally demonic portrait was that of German industrialist and alleged Nazi collaborator Alfred Krupp. “As a Jew, it’s my own little moment of revenge,” Newman later admitted.

The Red Flag over the Reichstag

Directly inspired by Joe Rosenthal’s photo of raising the flag on Iwo Jima, Stalin ordered the Ukrainian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei take a similar photo that would symbolize the Soviet victory over Germany. Taking a Soviet flag with him, Khaldei flew to Berlin where he sadly found out that the Soviet soldiers had already succeeded in raising a flag over the Reichstag a few days earlier. Yet, Khaldei recruited a small group of soldiers and, on May 2, 1945, proceeded to recreate the scene. On close examination, the censors noticed that one of the soldiers had a wristwatch on each arm, indicating he had been looting. Khaldei not removed the watches from the photo, but also darkened the smoke in the background (right) to make his picture more dramatic. The resulting picture(left) was published soon after in the magazine Ogonjok to achieved worldwide fame.

Lady Diana At the Taj Mahal

During her trip to India with Prince Charles in 1992, Lady Diana is pictured alone at the Taj Mahal. On a bench (now affectionately known as Lady Di’s Chair) in front of the greatest monument to love, Lady Diana was photographed alone. A statement on her solitude and a symbol of her failing marriage, the photograph shifted the public sympathy from the stoic prince to seemingly vulnerable princess.

12 Most Exclusive and Influential Societies

1. Freemasonry

Possibly the most easiest to gain access to in the groups on this page, Freemasonry allegedly extends its roots back to the Biblical times, linking the society with the building of the Temple of Solomon. Its members call it “The Craft”  and the society is split into various subgroups and orders, all of which consider God as the Grand Architect of the Universe no matter what their religious afflictions are. The Masons have various greeting gestures “Modes of Recognition”, which renders the society cultish; its square and compass logo is famous for being on the Cadillacs. Entire treatises were written about their secret handshakes and passwords. Its members are easily recognizable by their signature rings; originally more secretive, the membership is now open for everyone who is over 21 and who has the recommendation of a member. [Above: Insignia of The Regular Grand Lodge of England]

2. Bilderberg Group

Originally formed in Arnhem, the Netherlands in 1954 (and taking its name from the name of the hotel where the first meeting was held, Bilderberg Group still retains its headquarters in Leiden, the Netherlands. The Bilderberg Group annually meets for an invitation-only conference of around 130 guests, most of whom are persons of influence in the fields of politics, business and banking. As Jonathan Duffy for BBC reports, “No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted… In the void created by such aloofness, an extraordinary conspiracy theory has grown up around the group that alleges the fate of the world is largely decided by Bilderberg.”

3. The Bohemian Club

Named for the bohemian life longed by many of its journalist founders, the Bohemian Club (estb. 1872) is a prominent private club in San Francisco, California, USA. The original group of artistic talent was soon replaced by those with major financial resources. Every year the club hosts an annual three week camp at Bohemian Grove, which is notable for its illustrious guest list and its eclectic Cremation of Care ceremony involving human sacrifice imagery at the base of a forty-foot stone owl. In addition to that ritual, there are also two outdoor performances, often with elaborate set design and orchestral accompaniment. The more elaborate of the two is called High Jinks, the more ribald is called Low Jinks. Members have included many Republican politicians, and CEOs of financial institutions, military and oil companies. Some prominent figures are given honorary membership, for instance, Richard Nixon and William Randolph Hearst.

4. Club of Rome

 

Originally comprised of only six member, this greatest of all independent political think tanks was formed in 1968 by an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist. The original small group met at a villa in Rome, Italy, hence the name. Its website states that the Club of Rome is composed of “scientists, economists, businessmen, international high civil servants, heads of state and former heads of state from all five continents who are convinced that the future of humankind is not determined once and for all and that each human being can contribute to the improvement of our societies.” However, it is frequently criticized for its strongly elite membership. [Above, the founders of Club of Rome in a rare photo: Peccei, King. Thiemann and Okita, from L. to R.]

5. Council on Foreign Relations

From its daunting limestone headquarters at 58 East 68th Street (at Park Avenue) in New York City [above], the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the most powerful private organization to influence United States foreign policy. Formed as a working fellowship to brief Woodrow Wilson, the group has expended its scope and aims largely under the endowments of J.P.Morgan and J.D.Rockefeller. The membership is available only to US citizens, but very selective. Expensive corporate memberships exists as well, and many distinguished speakers, ranging from foreign leaders to American businessmen speak and share their views in the Council’s frequent luncheons.

6. Chatham House

The CFR is modeled on Chatham House (now called the Royal Institute of International Affairs) an English think-tank, founded in 1920. Its well-known headquarters are at 10 St. James’s Square, London (once home to three British Prime Ministers). Although anyone can apply to be a member, the House has a range of different types of membership, which differs greatly in access to the House and its exclusive seminars. To maintain the confidentiality of those seminars, the House promulgated now famous rule known as the Chatham House Rule, which provides that members attending a seminar may discuss the results of the seminar in the outside world, but may not discuss who attended or identify what a specific individual said. The Rule facilitates frank and honest discussion on controversial or unpopular issues by speakers who may not have otherwise had the appropriate forum to speak freely. [Above: Reagan speaks to Chantam House]

7. The Round Table/Society of the Elect

The Round Table movement was founded in 1909 through a large endowment from Cecil Rhodes to promote closer union between Britain and her colonies. It was affiliated with major lobbying groups in every major capital city of the world coordinated by a headquarters in London. Some believe that the Round Table Groups were connected to a society called the Society of the Elect, whose existence itself is doubtful. Although Rhodes planned the Round Table as the Association of Helpers for the inner sanctum, ‘Society of the Elect’, and much of the hierarchical structure of the organization wasn’t carried out. Instead, Rhodes abandoned the idea for creation of a scholarship program to Oxford, which still bears his name.

8. Trilateral Commission

Founded by the members of Bilderberg Group and the CFR, the Trilateral Commission is established to foster closer cooperation between United States, Europe and Japan. Founded in July 1973, at the initiative of David Rockefeller, the Commission received much attention and criticism when it became known that President Jimmy Carter (a former Trilateral member) appointed 26 former Commission members to senior positions in his Administration: 107 Americans, 150 Europeans and 85 Japanese members. Although the membership included corporate CEOs, politicians, distinguished academics, university presidents, union leaders and philanthropist, it is stipulated that members who gain a position in their respective country’s government must resign from the Commission. [The first Trilateral meeting was at Rockefeller's Pocantico compound in New York's Hudson Valley, above.]

9. The Immortals

Unlike their English counterpart, the Royal Academy, the Académie française in France, and Real Academia Española in Spain has limited number of seats. (Forty in the former and forty six in the latter.) In the Académie française, each seat is assigned a separate number, while in the Spanish one, each academician holds a seat labeled with a letter from the Spanish alphabet; upper- and lower case letters are separate seats. Because of the extreme prestige of the seats and imminence of the holders, the members of two academies are known as the Immortals—the inspiration being Cardinal Richelieu’s quote, À l’immortalité (“To immortality”). Candidatures are made to a seat, not to the Académie: if several seats are vacant, a candidate may apply separately for each. When elected, the new member must have an eulogy to the previous holder of the seat, an event sometimes controversial in the past.

10. The Rand Corporation

In 1970, a rumor was spread that Richard Nixon had commissioned RAND to study the feasibility of canceling the 1972 election. Thus, the RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development)–the think tank originally formed by the U.S. Military in 1946—was thrust into spotlight. Accused as militarist, RAND works with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations to recommendation military policy through quantitative analyses. Over the last 60 years, more than 30 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the RAND Corporation. [Above: its HQs in Santa Monica]

11. The Sacred College of Cardinals

Although they are the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church serving the Pope and has no actual ruling power, the College of Cardinals plays two prominent roles in the church by participating in papal elections and the Pope in a consistory. The cardinals are elevated by the Pope from the bishops and the archbishops all over the world to make up the upper echelons of this Catholic hierarchy. The rules of the Conclave state that the Pope need not be chosen from among the ranks of the Cardinals (any unmarried Catholic male may be elected Pope), this has been the consistent practice since the election of Pope Urban VI in 1378. Now, many cardinals take on lead roles in tackling global problems and engage in diplomacy.

12. The Alfalfa Club

The Alfalfa Club is an exclusive Washington D.C. social organization, that exists only to hold an annual banquet on the last Saturday of January–the group’s name is a reference to the plant’s supposed willingness to do anything for a drink. The Alfalfa Club was started by four Southerners in Washington’s Willard Hotel in 1913 to celebrate the birthday of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Its sole purpose was an annual night out for the boys, but it didn’t admit blacks until the 1970s, and women until 1994. The club’s membership, which numbers about 200, is composed primarily of American politicians and influential members of the business community, and has included several U.S. Presidents. 

Unknown people….famous deeds

Forgotten censor causes the Russian Revolution

In 1867, Karl Marx published Das Kapital, a monumental work of 25 years, most of which he spent researching in the Reading Room of the British Museum. The first translation of his biting critique of the capitalism was into Russian. In early April 1872, the book was released in St. Petersburg. Giving his imprimatur to the book, the censor of Das Kapital noted: “Few people in Russia will read it, and still fewer will understand it.” The censor, whose name was Skuratov (sadly, this is the only thing we know about him) was wrong. The edition of three thousand sold out quickly—the feat that alarmed the Romanovs so much that they banned the second edition. However, they were too late. In 1880, Marx wrote: “Our success is still greater in Russia, where Kapital is read and appreciated more than anywhere else.” A revolution 37 years proved him correct.

 

Unknown native kills Magellan

The world today remembers Ferdinand Magellan as the man who circumnavigated the globe. Well, he didn’t. Of the 237 men who set out on the five ships, only 18 completed the circumnavigation of the globe. Magellan was not one of them. In 1519, Magellan proposed his plan to circumnavigate the world to King Charles V of Spain, who put five ships Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria, and Santiago under his command to achieve this feat. However, the circumnavigation almost never happened. Spanish authorities distrusted Portuguese-born Magellan, and agreed to let him sail away with the ships only after he switched his crew from Portuguese men to Spaniards. On the course of his voyage, Magellan became the first European to enter the Pacific from the strait now called the Strait of Magellan, and the first European to reach the Philippines. In the Philippines, during a fight, Magellan was killed by a poison arrow shot from a native from a group which he was trying to Christianize. His body was never recovered.

 

Unknown kid kills Richard the Lion-hearted

Richard the Lionheart (1157 – 1199) was one of England’s greatest kings. He started commending his own army at 16, and gloriously fought against Saladin during the Third Crusade. However, his latter years were far from glorious. On his return from the Holy Land, Richard was captured by his personal enemy, Leopold V, Duke of Austria, and had to be ransomed. In March 1199, Richard was in the Limousin suppressing a revolt by a viscount. He besieged an unarmed castle of Chalus-Chabrol, which capitulated quickly. Richard was admiring the last defender of the castle, a teenager with a crossbow who was using a frying pan as a shield. The teenager shot two arrow at the king, who was without his chainmail. Richard died from gangrene of the wound. Although Richard forgave his slainer (who was confusingly recorded as John, Brandon, Harold, Dudo and Bertrand), the boy was later skinned and killed by Richard’s soldiers.

 

Unknown prostitute indirectly causes the Holocaust

In Mein Kampf, volume 1, Adolf Hitler wrote extensively on syphilis and prostitution. Fourteen paged litany on what he called a “Jewish disease” caused some historians to speculate whether Hitler himself had the disease. Hitler reportedly had sex with a Jewish prostitute in Vienna in 1908. His possible discovery later that year that he had the disease may have been responsible for his demeanor; while his life course may have been influenced by his anger at being a syphilitic, as well as his belief that he had acquired the disease from undesirable societal elements which he intended to eliminate. A psychiatry team studied diary entries made by Hitler’s personal doctor, Theo Morrell, and concluded that there is “ample circumstantial evidence” for the theory. (Some, however, dispute that Dr Morrell deliberately poisoned his patient).

 

Unknown sniper kills Lord Nelson

Horatio Nelson was one of the most iconic and heroic Englishmen. His strategy and (unconventional) tactics produced a number of decisive victories and doomed the French hopes of conquering the British fleet. He was wounded several times in combat, he lost most of one arm and the sight in one eye. However, on 21^st October 1805, Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar, gained his eternal place in the Pantheon of British heroes and lost his life. Although fanciful Victorian retellings of the story noted Nelson was killed by a cannon fire from a ship that had already surrendered, what exactly happened during the Battle of Trafalgar is a mystery. Nelson’s flagship the Victory came under fire from three French ships Bucentaure, Redoutable, and Santísima Trinidad. A sniper from the enemy ships fired onto Victory’s deck as Nelson was walking on there. Nelson, who died shortly afterwards from wounds to his backbone, was given a state funeral and the subsequent interment in the St. Paul’s Cathedral. A sniper was never identified—Nelson’s deputy claimed that they killed the sniper, while a French fuselier, Robert Guillemard later claimed he fatally shot Nelson. This hidden identity was the plot device behind Dumas’ Le Chevalier de Saint Hermine.

 

Anonymous letter brings down a government

Many famous British political criticisms are anonymously authored, and so were the Federalist Papers. However, the most famous and damaging political missive in English history came in 1922. In September 1922, the British and French troops guarding the Dardanelles neutral zone near Chanak were threatened by Turkish troops. The British cabinet led by Prime Minister David Lloyd George issued a communiqué threatening Turkey with a declaration of war. The public, however, was alarmed by the possibility of going to war again. After the Commonwealth prime ministers explicitly stated that they didn’t want to go to war either, an anonymous letter appeared in “The Times” by “A Colonial” supporting the government but stating that Britain could not “act as the policeman for the world”. Beleaguered at home and aboard, Lloyd George resigned. The identity of this “Colonial” was never discovered by many believed he was Andrew Bonar Law (above) who succeeded Lloyd George as the Prime Minister.

 

Unknown Solider lights the first match to WWI

 

WWI started with the high-profile assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Serbia, but WWII’s first shots were fired by an unknown solider in Manchuria. Tensions between the Empire of Japan and China had been inflamed since the Invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In June 1937, Japanese troops were carrying out military training at the western end of the Marco Polo Bridge using the cover of the night. One night, the local Chinese, thinking an attack was underway, fired a few ineffectual rifle shots which resulted in a Japanese soldier being missing in action. Although the missing Japanese soldier—whose identity remains a mystery—had turned up unharmed afterwards, the border security on the both sides was tightened after the incident. Shortly after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Japan began a full invasion of China.

 

Unknown Serial Killer reforms London

His victims were women earning income as casual prostitutes. Their throats were cut, their cadavers mutilated. His murders were carried out in a public or semi-public places. In the second half of 1888, the person known only by the pseudonym ‘Jack the Ripper’ became active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area of London. The name is taken from a letter to the Central News Agency by someone claiming to be the murderer. Although many theories have been advanced, Jack the Ripper’s identity was never determined. While not the first serial killer, Jack the Ripper was the first to create a worldwide media frenzy around his killings. Mass-circulation newspapers of late Victoria era helped his publicity. On the flipside, the nature of the killings exposed the dark underbelly of London. For centuries, the poor of the East End had long been ignored by the affluent society. Jack the Ripper unintentionally drew attention to these wretched living conditions, and exposed the fact that the poor couldn’t be ignored much longer.

 

Unknown Father of Music Theory

Anonymous IV is the name given to the writer of an important treatise of medieval music theory. We know him as an English student studying at Notre Dame University in Paris in the 1270s or 1280s. Nothing else is known about his life, not even his name. His writings, which survive in two partial copies from Bury St Edmunds, are extremely important to the development of polyphony. The anonymous author also recorded the works of Léonin and Pérotin, the earliest European composers, and recorded Pérotin’s the four-part organa quadrupla Viderunt and Sederunt, and music-theorist Franco of Cologne’s treatises. His lasting legacy, however, is in his thorough descriptions of the musical instruments, rhythmic modes, musical notation, and genres of his day.

 

The Most Dangerous Unknowns

CrimethInc. (Ex-Workers Collective) is an underground anarchist group, which has published numerous articles and magazines widely read within and without the anarchist movement. First formed in the mid-1990s, CrimethInc. mainstreamed the American anarchist movement by publishing books, releasing records and organizing large-scale national campaigns against globalization and representative democracy, as well as by taking traditional controversial actions like arson and hacking. CrimethInc.’s activities and its philosophies are controversial even among the anarchists. CrimethInc. also has a long association with the North American anarcho-punk scene.

 

 

The Proverbial Unknown Soldier

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier At the Westminster Abbey 

Small Things That Changed History

11. Thirst

The Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620 because the ship ran out of beer. In August 1620, the Pilgrims left Southampton, England on two ships the Speedwell and the Mayflower. Later, the former sprang a leak and the pilgrims consolidated themselves on the Mayflower. After 64 days, on November 9, 1620, the Mayflower sighted Cape Cod. Their patent from the Virginia Company of London authorized them to establish a plantation between 38 and 41 degrees north latitude but Cape Cod was just north of 42 degrees. However, the terrible weather and depleting supply of beer dissuaded the pilgrims from traveling southwards.  The colonists headed to a nearby shelter, then called “Thievish Harbor,” and settled there.

10. A sneeze

According to some historians the massacre of the boulevards after the coup d’état of Napoleon III   resulted from a mistaken command. Napoleon III is said to have been suffering from a severe cold, and to have exclaimed “Ma sacré toux!“—”My wretched cough”—which was misinterpreted by a zealous officer as “Massacrez tous,” or “Kill everybody.” There were some 1,200 prisoners of war incarcerated by the State, and they too were accordingly killed.

9. A comma

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads: A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. Or does it? The Library of Congress’ ratified version reads thus, but the document held in the National Archives has two additional and unusual commas, one between “Militia” and “being” and another between “Arms” and “shall” –thus syntactically relating “A well regulated Militia” to “shall not be infringed”. Whether this mean the goal of the Amendment is to protect the militia against federal interference is the million-dollar question asked by the Constitutional scholars since, leading to many heated debates and even many more heated criminal court cases.
Trivia: Wife of Russian Tsar Alexander III, Princess Dagmar of Denmark once changed a place of a comma and saved a life. Her husband personally wrote the death sentences with the following words: “Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.” The princess changed the sentence to “Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia.”

8. A nail

When Richard was preparing for a war at Bosworth Field in 1485 with Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, he sent a groom to make sure his favourite horse was ready. The groom asked the blacksmith to shoe the horse quickly with the available materials. After he had fastened three shoes, the blacksmith found he did not have enough nails for the fourth. The impatient groom took the horse anyway. However, in the thick of the battle, as Richard charged to prevent some of his men breaking line and  falling back, one of the horse’s shoes flew off. The horse stumbled and fell, and Richard was thrown to the ground and the horse galloped away. As Henry’s troops closing around him, Richard shouted futilely: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”– the lines since  immortalized by Shakespeare. But there would be no horse for him, and Richard perished on the Bosworth Field.

7. Bad Design

In 2000, Florida voters who were confused by Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot cost Al Gore the presidency. Unlike regular ballots, the butterfly ballot uses two pages to put the presidential candidates’ name so that the county’s many elderly voters can read the print size. However the contention came when many  voters assumed that Gore and Bush are the first two choices as Florida law requires. Instead, they found Buchanan, on the opposite page, between them. In nearly 7,000 votes, voters marked more than one name on the county’s now-infamous “butterfly ballot,”–the number which is more than 10 times the winning margin George Bush received to claim Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the White House.

6. A Photo-Op

During 1988 elections in the U.S., the Republican nominee George H. W. Bush criticized the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for his liberal positions, especially his ’softness’ on defense policy. Dukakis has also been under fire  for his vocal criticism of “Star Wars” defense initiative.  To refute the facts that he was soft on defense, Dukakis orchestrated what would become the key image of his campaign—a publicity shoot that went terribly wrong. In September 1988, he visited the General Dynamics plant in Michigan to take part in a photo op in an M1 Abrams tank. Dukakis’ ridiculous “tank moment” was used in television ads by the Bush campaign, as evidence that Dukakis would not make a good commander-in-chief, and “Dukakis in the tank” remains shorthand for backfired public relations outings. Bush handily beat Dukakis in the election.

5.  Haemorrhoids (Piles)

On the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was too exhausted and distracted by pain from his haemorrhoids to focus or to ride out. Two days earlier, his doctors had lost the leeches used to relieve the pain of his piles and accidentally overdosed him with laudanum, from whose ill-effects he was still suffering on the morning of the battle. Napoleon rescheduled launching his assault, originally planned for 6am, to 9am and then again to midday. Marshal Ney took command in Napoleon’s absence and made some poor decisions that altered the battle’s outcome.

4. A stamp

In the late 1800s, the United States government negotiated with Nicaraguan President Jose Santos Zelaya to build a canal through Nicaragua. President McKinley nearly signed the authorization to build Nicaragua Canal before he was assassinated. However, one Philipe Bunau-Varilla was lobbying Congress to suppport a French company constructing a similar canal across Panama. In the spring of 1902, Mt. Momotombo, a volcano in Nicaragua, erupted. Bunau-Varilla sent a copy of Nicaraguan stamp depicitng the volcano to all 45 U.S. Senators, with a note saying the menacing volcano would threaten the canal route. Although the volcano is far away from the planned route, the Senate voted in the favor of the Panama route.

3. A boardgame

During World War II, the British secret service smuggled escape kits to prisoners of war inside Germany through monopoly boxes. The secret service asked the British manufacturer of Monopoly, John Waddington Ltd. , to manufacture a “special edition” Monopoly set. The manufacturing was done is a secret room in the factory, where small niches in the games’ cardboard boxes were carved. Inside the playing pieces, metal files, magnetic compasses, and maps made of silk were included. Real money was substituted in the place of monopoly money. Departing allied soldiers and pilots were told that if they were captured they should look out for the special editions, identified by a red dot in the Free Parking space. By the end of the war, it’s estimated that more than 35,000 Allied POWs had escaped from German prison camps.

2. A key

Just before HMS Titanic’s departure from England in April 1912, Second Officer David Blair was removed from the ship’s roster. In the haste of being replaced, Blair failed to pass to his replacement the key to the crow’s nest locker, which held the binoculars. After the disaster, one of the surviving lookouts, Fred Fleet, giving evidence to the US inquiry, confirmed that they did not have any binoculars. Had they done so, he testified, they could have seen the iceberg earlier. When the inquiry chairman asked, “How much earlier?” the lookout replied, “Well, enough to get out of the way.” The key was later auctioned off.

1. A Translation

At the end of the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allies issued an ultimatum demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan. Although she was nearing the breaking point, Japan wanted to negotiate for peace, rather than to unconditionally surrender. So, the Japanese Council of War issued a press statement saying it offer “no comment” on the ultimatum. The Japanese word used – mokusatsu – has several meaning: to ignore or to refrain from comment, its literally meaning being ‘to kill by silence’. The Japanese and American interpreters used “ignore”. The national pride and diplomacy prevented the Council of War from recanting the statement or correcting it. With the Japanese ‘refusal’ in mind, the Americans continued to fight in the Pacific until two atom bombs were dropped in August 1945 and Japan unconditionally surrendered.

10 Most Famous Submarines

9. U-boats

The Treaty of Versailles limited the number of a German surface navy. Therefore, the rebuilding of the German navy involved mainly the building of Unterseeboot (undersea boat) which is anglicized into U-boat. The newly created U-boat navy was one of the least politically Nazi in all German army. Before and during the World War II, more than a thousand U-boats were built with the sole purpose of defeating the Royal Navy through underwater warfare and commerce raiding. Despite the esteemed leadership of the Fleet Admiral Karl Döenitz (above), mass attacks (Rudeltaktik) and the coded communications through Enigma machine, U-boats failed to cut off Britain’s trade supply routes.

 

 8. Turtle

Although there were no substantiated accounts of its role in Battle of Kip’s Bay, Turtle was considered the first submarine used in battle. Designed in Connecticut in 1775 by American David Bushell, Turtle was funded by George Washington (although he doubted its military importance). Unlike the modern submarines, unshapely Turtle was to drill into another ship’s hull and plant a gunpowder keg there. About 8 feet long, 6 feet tall, and 3 feet wide, it is only big enough to contain a person (and contained air only for thirty minutes) who also has to propel it with hand-cranked propellers-the first recorded use of the screw propeller for ships. On September 7, 1776, Turtle attacked British Admiral Howe’s flagship HMS Eagle, but failed because of Eagle’s think copper-sheet hull and of the stability issues.

 

7. Plongeur

Designed by Captain Siméon Bourgeois, Plongeur (Diver) was the first submarine to be propelled by mechanical (rather than human) power. Between its launching in April 1863 and its eventual sinking a decade later, Plongeur was involved in many underwater experiments that greatly improved the later submarine designs especially concerning the stability of the vessels.  Plongeur dove to a maximum depth of 10 metres.

 

6. Drebbel’s submarine

The world’s first submarine was designed by a Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel. The court inventor for England’s James I, Drebbel was trying to convince the Royal Navy that this was the vessel of the future, and this he demonstrated in 1602 up the Thames River. Drebbel took a fishing boat, built a wooden roof over it, and covered everything with greased leather. It was powered by twelve oarsmen, who breathed air that came through a snorkel tube. King James himself even took a ride inside one of Drebbel’s later submarines. However, the Royal Navy wasn’t convinced that a vessel that traveled underwater could have any military use, and Drebbel died in poverty. It would take three hundred more years for the Royal Navy to change their minds.

 

5. U-96, Das Boot

Based on a novel by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, 1981 Wolfgang Petersen movie Das Boot made U-96-the title U-boat-almost synonymous with submarine warfare. The movie follows a single mission of the U-boat through the eyes of a war correspondent Lt. Werner. Juxtaposing claustrophobic interior of the vessel, monotony of day-to-day life in a submarine and the exciting alternative a battle offers to that monotony, Petersen paints a strong anti-war message through this “journey to the edge of the mind” (in German, Eine Reise ans Ende des Verstandes).

 

4. Red October

 

Based on two real-life deflection-related incidents, Tom Clancy’s highly successful debut novel The Hunt for Red October is about the deflection plans of a submarine captain Marko Ramius. The eponymous Red October is an experimental Typhoon class nuclear submarine equipped with a stealth propulsion system that renders sonar detection near-impossible. The propulsion system, nicknamed “Caterpillar Drive”, utilized a pumpjet system. Unlike its real-life counterparts, Ramius’ defection plans were successful, and Red October was delivered into American hands at the end of the novel. 

 

3. USS Nautilus

In 1951, the US Congress authorized the construction of a nuclear-powered submarine and three years later, USS Nautilus-the word’s first nuclear-powered submarine-was launched by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. On 9 June 1958, departing the Pacific coast, she began her history-making voyage-Operation Sunshine. After a long await at Pearl Harbor for better Arctic weather, Nautilus became the first vessel to reach the geographic North Pole on 3 August and the first to voyage across the North Pole submerged on 7 August. Because gyro- and magnetic compasses become inaccurate above 85 degrees N, a special gyrocompass was built, and the captain was authorized to use torpedos to blow a hole in the ice if the submarine needed to surface. In later years, Nautilus became ineffective as it generated more noise through vibrations of the hull. The Navy retired the ship and it is now a museum of submarine history.

 

2. USS Triton

 

In the dramatic age of nuclear submarine, USS Triton set numerous records. At the time of her commissioning in 1959, Triton was the largest, most powerful, and most expensive submarine ever built, costing over 100 million dollars. Also, it is the only non-Soviet submarine to be powered by two nuclear reactors, and also the first U.S. nuclear submarine to be taken out of service. However, every record pales in comparison with her monumental Operation Sandblast-a submerged circumnavigation of the Earth. On 16^th February 1960, Triton began its voyage patterned after the first circumnavigation led by Magellan.  It arrived back on 10 May 1960, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced its successful voyage at the White House. However, by this time, because of the public uproar over the U-2 Incident, most of the official celebrations for its circumnavigation were already canceled. Antigua and Barbuda issued a stamp commemorating its circumnavigation (above).

 

1. Nautilus

Named after Robert Fulton’s Nautilus, (the first practical submarine, invented in 1800), Nautilus is more than a plot device is Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Double hulled and separated into water-tight compartments, Nautilus can travel 50 knots and displaces 1500 cubic meters of water-a feat undreamt of when Verne published his novel in 1870. Nautilus uses a technique called “hydroplaning” to dive down in warped angles and powerful pumps that produce large jets of water when the vessel emerges rapidly from the surface of the water. It is driven by electricity through sodium-mercury batteries and was built piecemeal on a deserted island by its crew commandeered by one Captain Nemo, of indeterminate age and nationality.   

 

 

Bonus: Yellow Submarine

“Yellow Submarine” is a 1966 song by The Beatles (credited to Lennon/McCartney). It also became the title song for the 1968 animated United Artists film, also named Yellow Submarine, and the film’s soundtrack. The film is about Pepperland, a cheerful music-loving paradise under the sea, protected by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which falls under a surprise attack by the music-hating Blue Meanies. The film was based on many musical pieces by The Beatles. Paul McCartney was inspired by the Rime of the Ancient Mariner,  and originally conceived it as being about differently coloured submarines, but evolved to include only a yellow one. In 2005, a 51-foot long yellow submarine metal sculpture was placed outside Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport.

10 Forgotten People who made a Profound difference

10. John Fielding introduces law and order, crafts modern police force

With his brother Henry, Sir John Fielding (above left as seen in TV series City of Vice) established the Bow Street Runners, the world’s  first professional police force in 1750. John Fielding was blinded in a navy accident at the age of 19 but he served as his brother’s personal assistant from 1750 until Henry’s death four years later. Known as the “Blind Beak of Bow Street”, John Fielding expended the runners (which originally numbered eight) into the first truly effective organization, later even adding horseback patrols, street lighting and a maritime police force. He divided London into six areas with their own patrols and police stations, and introduced highways patrols which ended highway robberies.  His patrol, equipped with truncheon, cutlass and pistol, and dressed in leather hats, blue coats with brass buttons, blue trousers and boots, became a precursor for the modern police force. John Fielding also introduced a newssheet, Hue and Cry, which collected and disseminated information about crimes, suspected criminals, and convictions, placing Bow Street at the centre of a national criminal intelligence network. It is a feat worthy of a man who could reputedly tell 3000 criminals apart by the sounds of their voices.

9. Kankan Musa spends lavishly, invites greed

Mansa (Emperor) Kankan Musa, who ruled the Mali Empire in the 14^th century, was best known for his  hajj to Mecca. In the 14th year of his reign (1324), he set out on his famous pilgrimage to Mecca-the pilgrimage that revealed Mali’s wealth the world to the stupendous wealth of Mali. Traveling to Cairo, his retinue consisted of 60,000 men, 12,000 slaves (all of whom wore brocade and Persian silk), 80 to 100 camels loaded with 300 pounds of gold each. The emperor rode on horseback and was directly preceded by 500 slaves, each of whom carried a four-pound staff of solid gold. So lavish was the emperor’s spending in Cairo that he devalued gold prices there. He invited back Islamic scholars from Mecca to Mali. He embarked on large building projects in Timbuktu, which has since become synonymous with exoticism in Europe. His brazen statements of Mali’s wealth had but one result: it made Africa’s interior a more desirable target for the European conquest.

8. Jan Coen reforms trade, creates the modern colonialism

In 1619, Jan Pieterszoon Coen was appointed Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). A major problem in the European trade with Asia at the time was that the Europeans could offer few goods that Asians wanted, except silver and gold. By starting intra-Asiatic trade system between various colonies, Coen stopped the need for exports of gold and silver from Europe, making colonial ventures more profitable. By reinvesting the profits, the VOC became not only an economic but also a political power-something very different from the previous colonial models under the Spanish and the Portuguese. Coen also pioneered the introduction of Christian missionaries and modern technology to the East, and his trade post on Dejima was for more than two hundred years the only place where Europeans were permitted to trade with Japan. In one of the first examples of outsourcing, the VOC closed its shipyard in 1649, realizing it would be more profitable to hire others’ ships than to build its own. By 1669, the VOC was already the richest private company the world had ever seen, with over 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, a private army of 10,000 soldiers, and a dividend payment of 40% on the original investment, with only 4% of the ships imperiled. (In 2003, Microsoft’s dividend was .03 percent.)

7. Rhodopis sells her body, builds a pyramid, becomes Cinderella

According to the legends, in the 6th century B.C., a Greek slave Rhodopis worked in the same household as the slave Aesop. She was eventually taken to Egypt to work as a prostitute, where she was freed by an enamored Greek wine merchant Charaxus. Charaxus was the brother of the famous poetess Sappho, who wrote a poem chastising him for this deed. Charaxus eventually returned to Greece, while Rhodopis resumed her work as a high-class prostitute in Egypt. According to Herodotus, she became so famous and so rich that she singlehandedly financed the construction of her own pyramid. Another tale contradicts that a Pharaoh built a pyramid in her honor. Herodotus also claimed that Rhodopis donated a great number of “iron beef spits”–an impressive gift in those days–to the shrine at Delphi. In addition, Rhodopis inspired an early Egyptian story, which later became the basic of “Cinderella”, where she became the Queen of Egypt.

6. Sidney Smith spies, saves Britain

Sir Percy Blakeney, a.k.a. Scarlet Pimpernel, is the English spy who rescued the French aristocracy from the clutches of Madame Guillotine after the French Revolution. He is also entirely fictional-a literary creation on Baroness Orczy. Blakeney’s closest real-time counterpart is Sir Sidney Smith, a first cousin of Prime Minister William Pitt. Smith thwarted Napoleon’s planned invasion of Britain by burning down the entire French fleet at Toulon with eighteen small boats manned by the French royalists. Arrested, he  continued to lead his spy network from behind the bars at the Temple Prison, and later escaped to Constantinople. There, dressed in Turkish garb and enormous mustache, he scuttled Napoleon’s Egyptian fleet as well.  Years later, Napoleon commented: “That man made me miss my destiny.” In private life, arrogant and much disliked, Smith conducted an infamous affair with the Princess of Wales.

5. Stetson Kennedy recruits Superman, defeats KKK

After World War II, Ku Klux Klan experienced a huge resurgence. A young writer and activist named Stetson Kennedy decided to expose the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan and went undercover to infiltrate the group. By regularly attending meetings, he became privy to the organization’s secrets. However, when he tried to expose the organization, the local authorities themselves were intimidated by the Klan.  In his dilemma, Kennedy went to the writers of the Superman radio series which has become recently popular. With the Nazism finally defeated, the producers were also looking for a new villain. So serial “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” was conceived. The serial ultimately exposed many of the KKK’s most guarded secrets, thus stripping the Klan of its mystique. The Klan denounced the show and called for a boycott of the sponsor Kellogg’s products. In the 1950s, Kennedy wrote a bestseller which further damaged the Klan.

4. Robert Houdin magicks, saves an empire

In September 1856, the French Government asked a retired magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, ”the father of modern magic,” to help suppress tribal revolutions in the French Algeria. The revolts were led by local fakirs, marabouts, who used magic tricks to appear supernatural as prophets of Allah. Houdin was asked to outmagick the marabouts. On October 28, 60 tribal chiefs were invited to see Houdin, who subsequently vanished strength from one man, caught bullets, and made a wall bleed. After the show, Houbin explained his tricks and the tricks of the marabouts. Three days after the performance, the chieftains presented Houdin with an illuminated manuscript praising his art and pledging their allegiance to France. The French Algiers was saved. For a time being.

3. Doña Marina interprets, ends an empire

Doña Marina acted as an interpreter, advisor, intermediary and mistress of Hernán Cortés during the latter’s Conquest of Mexico. Ambiguously viewed either as a traitor or a victim, she played a decisive role in bringing down the Aztec Empire. History doesn’t remember her precise origins, but she was one of the slave girls presented to the Spaniards when they landed in the New World. Cortes proclaimed that he had come in peace but Aztec Emperor Montezuma ordered an attack on the invaders before they forged alliances with non-Aztec Indians. Without the help of Marina, Montezuma would have been successful; her negotiations with the native tribes rallied those tribes behind Cortes, thus dooming the tyrannical Aztec Empire. Cortes himself later wrote: “After God we owe this conquest of New Spain to Doña Marina.” After the Conquest, she introduced Christianity to the New World and attempted to end human sacrifice and cannibalism, before disappearing from history.

2. Stanislav Petrov does nothing, saves the world

In 1983, a Soviet ballistics officer Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet Union’s early-warning satellite system. One night, the alarm bells went off shortly after midnight. One of the satellites signaled Moscow that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia. The alarm coincided with the beginning of provocative NATO military exercises and it barely three weeks after the Russians shot down a South Korean airliner that had wandered into Soviet air space. However, Petrov was less sure; he realized that an American attack would come from more than five ICBMs. Therefore, he concluded correctly that it is a false alarm — thereby averting a potential nuclear holocaust. It was later found out that the malfunctioning satellite picked up the sun’s reflection off the cloud tops and interpreted that as a missile launch.

1. A Prostitute has sex with Hitler, causes the Holocaust

In Mein Kampf, volume 1, Adolf Hitler wrote extensively on syphilis and prostitution. Fourteen paged litany on what he called a “Jewish disease” caused some historians to speculate whether Hitler himself had the disease. Hitler reportedly had sex with a Jewish prostitute in Vienna in 1908. His possible discovery later that year that he had the disease may have been responsible for his demeanor; while his life course may have been influenced by his anger at being a syphilitic, as well as his belief that he had acquired the disease from undesirable societal elements which he intended to eliminate. A psychiatry team studied diary entries made by Hitler’s personal doctor, Theo Morrell, and concluded that there is “ample circumstantial evidence” for the theory. (Some, however, dispute that  Dr Morrell deliberately poisoned his patient).

Bonus: Urian bites the Pope, separates the Church and the State

In the late 1520s, Henry VIII of England wanted to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon because  she had not produced a male heir. Catherine was his late brother’s wife, and Henry tried to annul the marriage on such grounds. In 1527 Henry asked Pope Clement VII to annul the marriage. Although  Clement has good relations with Henry, the Pope feared the wrath of Catherine’s nephew, powerful Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Henry sent Cardinal Wolsey to Rome to persuade the pope. As was the custom, the cardinal bent down to kiss the pope’s toe. However, Wolsey’s greyhound, Urian, thought his master was being attacked, and it lunged forward to bite the pope’s bare foot. Enraged, the pope called off the negotiations; the Catholic Church refused to grant the annulment. Henry went on with his divorce and established the Church of England.

12 Most Famous Stairs

12. The stairs of the House of Slaves

Slave exports from Goree Island off the coast of Senegal began about 1670. Despite its notoriety as the final exit point of the slaves from Africa, only an estimated 26,000 of the 12 million slaves that were abducted from Africa are thought to have passed through the island. The surviving House of Slaves on Goree was built by the Dutch in 1776, by which time the slave-trade from Africa was finally winding down. It was on the stairs of this house that the last sales in Africa took place. The house was the home of a wealthy trader (dealing with gold and ivory) of mixed descent, Signare Anna Colas Pépin.

 

11. Nu descendant un escalier n° 2

A famed mixture of Cubism and Futurism, 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, was almost renamed by the sensitivities of the time. Although the depiction is neither explicit nor mundane (Duchamp used the notion of superimposing images), jurists at the Salon des Indépendants asked him to rename the painting. Duchamp chose the alternative: he voluntarily withdrew the painting. He submitted it a year later to Armory Show in New York, where it was again satirized against. However, it is now considered one of the best artworks of the age.

 

10. The Spiral Stairs of Round Tower

Connected to the Trinity Church in the old Latin quarter of Copenhagen is the Round Tower, commissioned by King Christian IV of Denmark in 1637 as an observatory. The tower, which is the oldest functioning observatory in Europe, has an unique architectural feat: a 209m long spiral walkway that winds 7.5 turns around the hollow core of the tower forming the only connection between the individual parts of the building complex. In 1716, the visiting Russian Tsar Peter the Great, on horseback, drove the horse carriage with his Empress Katharina inside up the rump to the top. In 1902, his footsteps were followed by a Beaufort car, which became the first motorised vehicle to ascend this tower.

 

9. Penrose Stairs

Best exemplified by sketches of M.C.Escher (most notable of which is Ascending and Descending, above), the Penrose Stairs are a visual paradox created by a two-dimensional figure in three dimensions  by distorting perspective. Envisioned by Lionel Penrose and his son Roger Penrose, it is a further variation on the Penrose triangle. It is a two-dimensional depiction of a staircase in which the stairs make four 90-degree turns as they ascend or descend yet form a continuous loop, so that a person (in Escher’s case above, monks) could climb them forever and never get any higher.

 

8. The Spanish Steps

The Spanish Steps (Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti) is the longest and widest staircase in Europe. The grand 138-stepped stairway connects the Bourbon Spanish Embassy to the Holy See (it still occupies the same spot in Palazzo Monaldeschi) to the church, Trinità dei Monti, which was under the patronage of the Bourbon kings of France. The project was envisioned since the 1580s, but debates over the style and execution (the proposed French plan once included an equestrian monument to Louis XIV) delayed the construction. Finally, compromise between a Bourbon fleur-de-lys and Papal Crown was reach and it was finally constructed in 1723. Today, in Christmas time, a crib is displayed on the first landing of the staircase, a tradition dating back to the 19^th century.

 

7. Double Spiral of Chateau Chambord

In Loire Valley lies the Chateau of Chambord, one of the most romantic castles ever built. It was begun by Francois I in 1519 (and would not be completed until 1547) but the archives offer no information as to the name of the architect. Some said an Italian Domenico da Cartona designed the building, but Leonardo da Vinci himself was consulted over its plans, and left his indelible mark on at least one of the chateau’s 13 grand staircases. The famed spiral staircase has two separate flights (with no connection between them) with numerous openings on the arms of the corridors. Leonardo’s notebooks show that he conceived a staircase comprised of not two but four distinct superimposed flights of stairs. Although it was devised for the king to have a better defense and escape means, the staircase was only used to prevent the king’s several mistresses from seeing one other.  

 

6. The Spiral Stairs of Vatican Museum

Even great museums like Musei Vaticani start with one single art work-that of the Trojan priest Laocoon, unearthed in 1506. On Michelangelo’s recommendation, Pope Julius II purchased it and put it on public display at the Vatican. The pope also founded the museums, which attract four million people annually. When these people exit, they exit via a huge spiral staircase, designed by Bramante, and emblazoned with papal crests and tiaras. Throughout the 17^th century, Bramante’s design was copied and expanded upon extensive, but the original is a staircase that even the people who haven’t been to the Vatican recognize-because it featured prominently on covers of many mathematic textbooks, like one above.

 

5. Tulip Staircase

 

The elegant spiral staircase at the Queen’s House of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England is world-famous. In 1966, it was made even more famous by a photograph. Rev. Ralph Hardy, a retired clergyman from White Rock, British Columbia, took a photograph of the stairs. However, upon development, he found a shrouded figure climbing the stairs. The figure, although hold the railing with both hands, is ethereal. Experts, including those from Kodak, who examined the original negative concluded that it had not been tampered with. The Queen’s House custodians say that unexplained figures have been sometimes seen near the staircase, and that unexplained footsteps have also been heard.

 

4. Copán Hieroglyphic Staircase

A major Mayan civilization thrived in Copán on Honduras-Guatemalan border from the 5th to the 9th centuries. In Copán, we find the longest hieroglyphic inscriptions left from the Maya era; the inscription on the stairs of the west side of Temple 26, details the history of Copan’s ruling dynasty:  births, accessions, important rituals, achievements, parentage statements, and deaths. When exactly the stairs were built is still a mystery, but the inscriptions tell us that the 13^th King of Copán built the Hieroglyphic Stairway to honor his predecessor and to compensate for burying Stela 63, and the Papagayo step, the previous record the dynastic history. The 15^th King, whose stela is found at the foot of the stairway, doubled the length and historical content of the stairway inscription, created the balustrades that framed it, and dedicated Temple 26.

 

3. Wienergraben Stairs of Death

Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp was a large group of Nazi concentration camps in Upper Austria, twelve miles east of the city of Linz. Prisoners sent to Mauthausen were forced to work at its Wiener-Graben granite quarry, and because of the number of people needed for quarry works, the living conditions were lower even compared to other Nazi concentration camps. Prisoners were forced to climb the 186 steps of the Wiener Graben with large blocks of granite on their backs. Often the blocks would fall, crushing limbs and bodies of those following. The SS guards would force prisoners – exhausted from hours of hard labour without sufficient food and water – to race up the stairs carrying blocks of stone. Those who survived the ordeal would often be placed in a line-up at the edge of a cliff known as “The Parachute Wall” (German: Fallschirmspringerwand). At gun-point each prisoner would have the option of being shot, or to push the prisoner in front of them off of the cliff.

 

2. Mysterious Stairs of the Loretto Chapel

When the Loretto Chapel was completed in 1878, there was no way to access the choir loft twenty-two feet above. Carpenters concluded a staircase to the loft would be impossible given with the interior space of the small Chapel. Legend says that the sisters of the Chapel made a plea to St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters. On the ninth and final day of prayer, a man appeared at the Chapel with a donkey and a toolbox looking for work. Months later, the elegant circular staircase was completed, and the carpenter disappeared without pay or thanks. The stairway’s carpenter, who didn’t even answer to an ad that ran in the local newspaper, built a structure that has two 360 degree turns and no visible means of support. Also, the staircase was built without nails-only wooden pegs.

 

1. Grand Staircase of White House

The State Floor (Entrance Hall) and the Second Floor of the White House is connected by the Grand Staircase. The original architect James Hoban envisioned two main staircases in the entrance hall, but the original ceremonial staircase at the west end of the Cross Hall was removed under Teddy Roosevelt. During the Truman White House renovation, the position of the Grand Staircase was a major headache, but an unanimous decision was reached with the current design. The staircase’s interior walls have the seals of the original 13 states, while above, it has a bas-relief American eagle. A stair carpet in a shade of red has been used since the days of Teddy Roosevelt.

 

Bonus: The Thirty-Nine Steps

In the original novel by John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps are the actual steps that lead to the shore-side house a German spy organization, the Black Stone, uses for their meetings. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1939 adapation gave the spy organization the name “The 39 Steps” but its significance was not explanied.  

9 Previous Economic Panics

1637: Tulipomania

In 1593 tulips were introduced to the Netherlands from Turkey. The novelty made it expensive. Later,   tulips contracted a virus known as mosaic, which altered some causing “flames” of color to appear upon the petals. The color patterns increased the rarity of the bulb. Everyone began to deal in bulbs, and as in all speculative bubbles, the prices became an inaccurate reflection of the value. Prices rose so fast and high that some traded their land and life savings to get more bulbs. Many Dutch believed that they would sell their vegetables to foreigners with enormous profits. Slowly, prices became lower as everyone tried to sell while not many were buying. Dealers refused to honor contracts and people began to realize they traded their homes for a piece of flower. The government tried to halt the crash by offering to honor contracts at 10% of the value, but by then, the market had plunged even lower, making such restitution impossible. A terrible depression followed.

 

1720: South Sea Bubble Bust

With the British empire vastly expending, the South Sea Company purchased the “rights” to all trade in the South Seas, with a ten-million pounds IOU with the government. SSC had no problem attracting investors because stocks of other companies (like East India Trading Company) were difficult to buy. The popular conception was that a South Sea trade would open a lucrative South Americas. With demand vastly exceeding the supply of stocks, the company became a pyramid scheme.

Meanwhile in France, an exiled Brit, John Law founded the Mississippi Company, which specialized in  exchanging gold and silver to a paper currency, and whose total stock came to worth 80 times more than all the gold and silver in France. Success of SSC and Mississippi Company fueled emergence of ludicrous ventures such as the ones that promised to reclaim sunshine from vegetables and to build floating mansions to extend Britain’s landmass-which were lampooned by Swift in his Gulliver’s Travels.

By 1720, the poor management team at SSC finally realized that the titular trading company is doing dismally. When the news leaked, the panic selling of worthless certificates of all companies ensued. The  South Sea bubble bust also killed the Mississippi Company. A complete crash was avoided alone due to the timely intervention of the British government, which outlawed the issuing of stock certificates, a law that was not repealed until a century later. 

 

1797: The Panic of 1797

Britain’s economy was hurt, as Britain was fighting France in the French Revolutionary Wars. To aid the ailing economy, the Bank of England introduced the deflationary measures in 1797. The deflation created a small panic in England, but it spread more intensively in real estate markets of the coastal United States and the Caribbean through the turn of the century. Many people in the New World were land-poor (i.e., they owned large plantations and lands but didn’t have enough hard money to pay off his creditors) and when faced with financial hardships, they absconded. Many American creditors including Senator Robert Morris the “financier of the revolution” (above) who once paid Washington’s troops from his own funds, ended up in the prison. The Panic of 1797 also changed American political landscape dramatically; Morris once contributed substantially to the Federalist cause, and his economic failure succumbed the Federalist party, and led to the election of Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson in 1800. 

 

1873: The Long Depression

It was the depression termed “the Great Depression” before the actual leviathan came along in 1929. The Long Depression (1873-1896) affected the entire world, and caused the Great Britain to lost its large industrial lead over Continental Europe. Although its main cause is the shortage of available money to facilitate the global trade, the Long Depression was triggered by 1870 Franco-Prussian War and large  reparations France owe to Germany. On May 9^th 1873, the Vienna Stock Exchange collapsed with the dramatic fall of silver. In America, the unhealthy railroad boom, rampant since the end of Civil War, busted. Many nations fell back to protectionism, but 19^th century tenets of classic liberalism (that it was not the government’s role to intervene in the economy) protracted the depression. Politically, the Long Depression revived a new wave of colonialism as the western powers sought new markets and new gold. Since this depression was caused by shortages of gold that undermined the gold standard, it was finally alleviated by Witwatersrand Gold Rush (1886) in South Africa and the Klondike (1898).

 

1926: Florida Real Estate Craze

In the gilded age of the 1920s, Americans believed that their prosperity would be infinite. Florida is a prime residence for people who don’t like the cold. The population was growing steadily and housing couldn’t match the demand, causing prices to double and triple. This increasing prices attracted speculators, and soon everyone in Florida became a real estate investor or a real estate agent. Land prices continued to increase until the moment when no one wanted to buy absurdly overpriced land. Then panic  selling, and bust ensued.

 

1929: The Great Depression

After the end of the First World War, with the industrialization of many parts of the world, stocks always went up on the Wall Street. Many speculated on the Wall Street without understanding system, and still made profits. With the flood of uneducated investors, the market was ripe for some manipulation and swindling. Investment brokers traded substantial stocks amongst one another at progressively increasing prices. When the public noticed this manufactured increase of stock values, everyone bought the stock, creating profits for the manipulators who would then sell off their shares. The herd mentality on the trading floor continued pleasantly until 1929 when the boom-bust wheel came one full circle and the ignorant investors mass-panicked. The twelve-year worldwide depression followed and ended only with the coming of WWII.

 

1987: The Crash of 1987

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was established by FDR to prevent further market crashes and fraudulent practices. However, the SEC couldn’t make the investors and public follow its advices. In the ’60s and ’70s, investors looked not at the value of the company but at the popularity of its marketed products. As it happened during 18^th century South Sea Boom, many dubious ventures thrived unabated until the ’80s. But when in early 1987, the SEC started to investigate insider tradings, investors abandoned lucrative dubious and mostly crooked ventures. This minor panic is coupled with lagging of the-then primitive NYSE’s computer system. Not knowing the actual prices on the Wall Street, people panicked and started dumping stocks. The Dow lost 22.6% and 500 billion dollars in a day.

 

1997: The Asian Financial Crisis

Between 1955 and 1990, land prices in Japan increased by 70 times and stocks increased by 100 times. Trading became a national pastime. During the eighties, large Tokyo firms worthed more individually than all their American counterparts combined, and Japanese golf courses worthed more than all the stocks combined on the Australian exchange. Investors saw a potential bubble, but believed that high level of collusion between the government and businesses could sustain the growth forever. Indeed, when the Japanese government intervened by regulation and raising interest rates, the Nikkei index plummeted 30,000 points. The bursting of the Japan bubble made a huge tsunami of credit crunches and loss capital in South and East Asia. It crippled the American economy as well.

 

2000: Dot-Com Bubble Bust

Commercially the internet became the ‘new economy’ in 1995 with an estimated 18 million users. The age-old specter is resurrected again: companies again pursued risky ventures akin to the ones that crippled 18^th century England and the 1980’s America. Investors wanted big plans instead of solid plan. Dotcom doublespeak, networking, new paradigm, information technologies, internet, consumer-driven navigation, tailored web experience, and many more, was created. Investors blindly purchased every new stock without even looking at the business plan. When many of these companies folded within months of their offering, the usual panic followed. The Nasdaq Composite lost 78% of its value. In 2001 the number of IPOs dwindled to 76 from 1999 numbers of 457 IPOs.

Britain’s Worst Prime Ministers

Arthur Balfour (1902-05)

A member of the powerful Cecil family, Arthur Balfour was given prominent government posts by his uncle, 3-time Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. Balfour excelled at those positions and when Salisbury retired, he was unanimously chosen by the conservatives to lead the country. The early days of Balfour Ministry were pleasant: reform-minded new King Edward VII is on the throne. The British had just finished a calamitous war in South Africa, and Balfour and his foreign minister narrowly averted the British participation in Russo-Japanese War. However, a disastrous debate between free traders and protectionists ensued in the Commons with both groups trying to protect “British interests” in face of German and American industrialization.  Balfour mishandled the situation. He proposed retaliatory tariffs yet called for the resignation of free-traders in his cabinet, to balance the situation. Weakened, Balfour Ministry fell in December 1905, and Labor party won a landslide election a month later. Balfour himself lost his Parliament seat.

Alec-Douglas Home (1963)

Sir Alec Douglas Home has many achievements in the office—for a trivia collector: he was the last member of the House of Lords to become Prime Minister; the last to be chosen personally by the monarch, and the only PM to have played first class cricket. (His cricket career helped him catch an egg thrown at him during a campaign) For the first three days of his ministry, he was even 14th Earl of Home, the title which he renounced to embark on the disastrous tenure in the Downing Street. His reputation already damaged for his proximity to Profumo Scandal, he spent only a year in office without, on his own admission, doing a damned thing. In 1970, he took Foreign Secretary job under Heath, establishing another record: he became the last former Prime Minister to take a Ministry in someone else’s cabinet.

Edward Heath(1970-74)

Sir Douglas-Home’s successor at Conservative Party, Edward Heath fared no better. His time was fraught with domestic problems in Northern Ireland and horrible industrial unrests, which culminates with the infamous ‘three-day week’, and eventual banning for free school milk. He brokered Sunningdale Agreement (1973) with the Irish, but the peace was short-lived. Mr. Heath dragooned Britain into the European Common Market, a decision which was tragic at the best and calamitous at the worst. When an early election which he called for ended with inconclusive results, and Heath promptly resigned. He never tried to stage a political comeback, for good reasons.

Harold Wilson (1964-70; 1974-76)

Edward Heath’s tenure was sandwiched by two Labor Ministries of Harold Wilson. He did preside over a period of low unemployment and economic prosperity in his first term, but his second ministry was a direct opposite and eventual reversal of everything he achieved in his first term. Wilson preoccupied himself with attempts to prevent the devaluation of the pound, and neglected to deal with the inherited problem of large external deficit. (The problem would be neglected again and again until Mrs. Thatcher came to office.) On the international scene, he fared better: he refused American President Johnson’s requests of an British intervening in Vietnam, and also refused to help minority white government of Rhodesia. However, there were even allegations that he was a Soviet spy: he withdrew the military forces from bases east of Suez, cancelled numerous defense projects (including a supersonic Harrier, a new transport aircraft American Hercules C130) and bankrupted Rolls-Royce in the process. (Rolls-Royce’s temporary nationalization began in 1971 and lasted 17 years.) He retired on his sixtieth year in 1976. He tried to enter television broadcasting, but his attempts floundered, not at least because Alzheimer was setting in.

Clement Attlee (1945-1951)

If Harold Wilson’s negligence was astounding, that of Clement Attlee was criminal. Voted Britain’s best 20th century Prime Minster (ahead of Churchill and Thatcher) by the voting public comprises mainly of the post-war generation whose fond memories of Attlee are of his universal healthcare, Attlee nonetheless lost the British Empire for which millions gave their lives. Attlee let India and various British Asian Dependencies to have independence, severely reducing British influence at the onset of the Cold War. In the task of transforming from a wartime economy to a peacetime one, he was marginally successful, but food rations continued well into next ministry. The adoring British public voted him out in the 1951 General Election, a dramatic twist for the man who was Labor’s first leader to form majority ministry.

Anthony Eden (1955-57)

In politics, the golden rule is never play second fiddle. The fine example was that of Anthony Eden, who served as a skilled diplomat, a stellar Foreign Secretary and capable deputy Prime Minister before destroying his entire reputation in his short ministry. Sir Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, aided Winston Churchill’s war ministry and was made a Knight of the Garter for his efforts. In 1953, he underwent a blotched operation to remove gallstones, which led to his permanent intake of painkillers and antidepressants. In 1956, General Nasser in Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. In Nasser, Eden saw a Mussolini and green-lighted an Anglo French invasion of Suez. Yielding to domestic and American pressure, Eden finally withdrew the troops, taking away with them the last shreds of dignity of the British Empire. (The Soviets, meanwhile, used the Suez Crisis as a diversion to invade Hungary.) He notably pardoned Nazi war criminals in the British prisons, and rejected the proposed idea of an economic and political union between France and Great Britain. After all, he should have taken that job as the Secretary-General of the newly-formed UN first offered to him in 1945.

Archibald Primrose (1894-1895)

Liberal statesman Archibald Primrose was the last Prime Minister to be chosen by the sovereign against the will of the government. Chosen because Queen Victoria detested other leading liberals, the 5th Earl of Rosebery formed a ministry which was idealistic in vision, but unsuccessful in reality. His domestic policies were defeated at the House of Lords, while his foreign policies (expansion of the fleet and expeditions to Africa) were killed by his own liberal party. He resigned, retired to write biographies, and eventually became harshest critic of ensuing ministries. By the time of his death, he not only died rich (as the richest Prime Minister England had ever had) but fulfilled his three aims in life: to breed a horse that win the Derby, to marry an heiress, and to become Prime Minister.

Andrew Bonar-Law (1922-1923)

During the Great War,  King George V asked Canadian-born Andrew Bonar-Law to lead the country. He deferred the Premiership to David Lloyd George—which is the only good decision Bonar-Law made in his career. However, when David Lloyd George tried to use armed force against Turkey in the Chanak Crisis, Andrew Bonar-Law set an anonymous letter denouncing the act. This and internal strife caused Lloyd George’s resignation and Bonar Law was given the ministry. Amid the post-war financial crisis and war debts, Bonar Law formed a new cabinet, which was referred to as “the Second Eleven” because it excluded many leaders of the Conservative Party. Stanley Baldwin, his inexperienced Chancellor of the Exchequer, agreed to repay war debt of £40 million per annum to the USA rather than feasible £25 million and announced the deal to the press before the Cabinet could review it. In poor health since 1921, Bonar Law was deprived of his speech due to a terminal throat cancer. He resigned and King George agreed to invite his handpicked successor, one-and-only Stanley Baldwin, to form the new government. When he died later that same year, Herbert Asquith famously eulogized that they had buried the Unknown Prime Minister next to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

John Stuart (1762-63)

Even the title ‘Unknown Prime Minister’ will fare better when compared to an appellation ‘stupid person’. But that is exactly what ‘Jack Boot’, the term for Earl of Bute’s ministry, meant. John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, was a close friend (and alleged lover) of Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales. When her son became George III, he was appointed Prime Minister. His manipulative reign of tyranny was so far-reaching that the king himself was once criticized from reading from an official speech written by the Earl.

The Earl of Liverpool (1812-27) and Viscount Sidmouth (1802-04)

The Earl of Bute’s manipulation of the royal family pale in comparison to Robert Jenkinson, the 2nd Earl of Liverpool’s gambit with the nation. Liverpool presided over repression and recession which accompanied Napoleonic Wars. Liverpool engaged as his Home Secretary Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth (above right) who served as Prime Minster from 1802-04. Sidmouth got his ministry in 1802, because Pitt the Younger was defeated after his failure to achieve Catholic emancipation. Sidmouth did achieve a peace (albeit unfavorable) with France in the Treaty of Amiens, which it was short-lived. His management of war was so terrible that it led to restoration of Pitt ministry within two years.
Under Liverpool, Sidmouth worked behind the scenes to direct a police state with spies, informers and coercive legislation. He brutally crushed radical opposition, was responsible for the suspension of habeas corpus (1817), the Peterloo Massacre (1819) and the repressive Six Acts later that year. For the remainder of his life, he waged war against both Catholic Emancipation and Reform Acts, and his last speech was in opposition to Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

The Other Unknown Prime Ministers

Originally, since the office of the Prime Minister is crown-appointed, people held the office for a long time. The first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole’s term lasted nearly 21 years. However, not all royal picks are as fortunate:
Walpole’s successor (and Britain’s rare celibate Prime Minister) Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington (1742-3) served as a mere titular head of so-called Carteret Ministry dominated by Lord Carteret, Earl of Grenville only for a year before succumbing to his illness.
The Earl of Bath was asked to form a government but was unable to find more than one person who would agree to serve in his cabinet. His ministry lasted for only two days: 10-12 February 1746. A satirist commented: “the minister to the astonishment of all wise men never transacted one rash thing; and, what is more marvellous, left as much money in the Treasury as he found in it.” The 2nd Earl Waldegrave was prime minister for four days, from 8 June to 12 June 1757.

10 Most Famous Doors in History

10. Christ at Heart’s Door

Many British and German religious prints from the nineteenth century depict Christ knocking at the door of a home, symbolizing Jesus Christ’s importance at both a friend and a guest. The most famous of these images are the versions of The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt, the first of which Hunt completed in 1853 and which hangs today in Keble College, Oxford. In 1947, Warner E. Sallman rendered a 21st century version called Christ at Heart’s Door, in which a barely concealed heart on the doorway made prominent by the luminance of Christ. The absence of any outside knob or latch on the door indicates that one must open one’s heart to Christ from within.

9. The Portal to Narnia

Four Pevensie Children, evacuated from London during the Blitz, found a portal to a magical kingdom called Narnia in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Norse myths and Christian allegories intertwine in seven Narnia books, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is allegorically about Christ’s crucifixion. Christ-like figure in the book, Aslan (the eponymous lion) sacrifices himself for a sinner. The cross is replaced by a Stone Table (taken from Celtic religion), both of which are pagan symbols. The splitting of the Stone Table reflects the veil of the temple splitting at the point of Christ’s death. As with the Christian Passion, it is women who tend Aslan’s body after he dies and are the first to see him after his resurrection. (The freeing of Aslan’s body from the stone table by field mice an allusion to Aesop’s fable of “The Lion and the Mouse.”)

8.Monsters Inc.

From one magical portal to multiple. In this monster-inhabited world imagined by Pixar Animations in 2001, screams of the children generate electricity. So, the city’s power company, Monsters, Inc. sends its monsters/employees to human children’s bedrooms to scare the children via teleportation doors. The movie reaffirms our childhood fears that there are monsters in the bedroom closet, especially after the lights have been put out. However, it is ingenious of Pixar to have the monsters afraid of the children likewise, and to poke fun at how much we have become desensitized to violence and horror.

7. The Columbus Door

In the  heart of the U.S. Capitol is the Rotunda, decorated with paintings, reliefs and symbols of the important events in U.S. history. At the east entrance of the Rotunda are the Columbus Doors, a grand   welcome to the nation’s collective memory. The doors are nearly 17 feet tall, and wieghs 20,000 pounds. A New Yorker, Randolph Roger, created these alto-relief bronze doors in Rome. Intitially, he had wanted to create the doors out of George Washington’s life, but instead used Columbus’ life from Irving’s Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1835), and included in his design busts of 10 historians famous for their work on Columbus, and allegorical figures of the continents. The doors were installed in 1863, and in 1871 were moved to their current position of honor at the main entrance to the Rotunda when the building was later remodeled in the mid-twentieth century.

6. The State Opening of the Parliament

In England, each year, the parliamentary session begins with the State Opening of Parliament, a ceremony in the House of Lords’ Chamber during which the Sovereign, in the presence of Members of both Houses, delivers an address on the Government’s legislative agenda. The Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod is responsible for summoning the Commons to the Lords Chamber. As part of the ritual, as Black Rod approaches the doors to the chamber of the House of Commons to make his summons, they are slammed in his face. This is to symbolise the Commons’ independence of the Sovereign. Black Rod then strikes the door three times with his staff, and in reply to the challenge “Who is there?” answers “Black Rod”. He is then admitted and issues the summons of the monarch to attend.
The ritual is derived from the attempt by Charles I of England to arrest five members in 1642, in what was seen as a breach of privilege. After that incident, the House of Commons has maintained its right to question the right of the monarch’s representative to enter their chamber, though they can not bar him from entering with lawful authority, hence the Black Rod.

5. The Westgate Hotel Door

The Newport Chartist Rising was the last large-scale armed rebellion against authority in mainland Britain. Chartism was a movement for reform in the United Kingdom between 1838 and 1848. Its main aims of the movement included suffrage for all men age 21 and over, equal-sized electoral districts, voting by secret ballots, the end to the need for a property qualification for Parliament, etc.
On November 4, 1839, somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 Chartist sympathisers marched on the town of Newport, Monmouthshire, intent on liberating fellow Chartists who were reported to have been taken prisoner in the town’s Westgate Hotel. At the Westgate Hotel today, bullet holes from that insurrection can still be seen in pillars in the frame of the main door. The Hotel itself has since been converted into a shopping and entertainment complex.

4. Sliding Doors

In this 1998 movie, a young woman learns that she has been fired from her PR job. On the way home, two parallel story-lines unfold. For the audience, the main character (played by Gwyneth Palthrow) begins to live two lives, and it all started with the doors of a tube car closing on her, opening the “what if” floodgates. With her entire life hinging on whether she had made the train, it is the movie where the  audience can truly appreciates the deep meanings behind the axiom: “When one door closes, another opens.”

3.Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salons

In the 1930s, it was said that “there are only three American names that are known in every single corner of the globe: Singer sewing machines, Coca Cola, and Elizabeth Arden.” It is ironic because Elizabeth Arden was born in Canada in 1898. Starting in the 1910s, she expanded her international operations in 1915, by opening beauty salons across the world. All these “Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salons” graced the famous Red Door—the symbol which has become synonymous with the Elizabeth Arden brand and has become part of its logo. In 1989, the company launched Red Door Perfume with $10 million advertising campaign, one of the largest advertising campaigns for a perfume in fashion history. In May 2000, Red Door Saloons Acquired Mario Tricoci, forming the largest spa and salon business in the world.

2.Martin Luther’s 95 Theses

In 1517, a papal commissioner was sent to Germany to sell indulgences to raise money to rebuild St Peter’s Basilica, citing that dogma alone cannot justify man and that charity to the church is needed. On October 31st, a theology professor called Martin Luther wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz, protesting the sale of indulgences. His scholarly objection to the Church came to be known as The 95 Theses, of which the most famous was Thesis 86: “Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?” On the same day he wrote the letter, Luther nailed a copy of the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg (church doors are the bulletin boards in his time), an event now seen as sparking the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation spread quickly with the aid of the newly-invented printing press. Every October 31 is celebrated as the Reformation Day.

1. Number 10 Downing Street

With a stone front step and a plain black entrance door with number ten on it, it is perhaps the most famous address in London and one of the most widely recognized doorways in the world. Number Ten Downing street is the official residence of the Prime Minster of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The small, six-paneled black oak door is surrounded by cream colored casing and adorned above with an attractive semicircular fanlight window. Painted in white in the center of the door, between the top and middle sets of panels, is the number 10; between the two middle panels is a black iron knocker in the shape of a lion’s head and just below the knocker is a brass letter box with the inscription “First Lord of the Treasury”, one of the Prime Minister’s courtesy titles. A policeman always guards the door, which can only be opened from the inside. The original door installed in the 1770s was removed during the Second World War, and is currently housed in the Churchill Museum in the Cabinet War Rooms.

Bonus: The Doors

The Doors formed in 1965 in Los Angeles was a popular and influential American band. John Densmore played drums, Robby Krieger guitar, Ray Manzarek organ, piano, keyboard bass and Jim Morrison was the lead singer.

This article contains direct quotes from Wikipedia.

9 Most Famous Windows in History

9. Pitt’s Pictures

In an attempt to impose a tax relative to the prosperity of the taxpayer,  window tax was introduced in England in 1696. The bigger the house, the more windows it was likely to have, and the more tax the occupants would pay. The tax was extremely unpopular, because it was seen as a tax on “light and air”, and many people responded by bricking up their window-spaces. In Scotland, this Window Tax was imposed only a century later by William Pitt the Younger in the 1780s. It was first introduced in the financial district of Edinburgh, and to this day “Pitt’s Pictures” (blacked out windows with white painted cross-frames) can be seen in Charlotte Square. The tax was not repealed until 1851, by when it has already introduced another new word into English lexicon: “daylight robbery”.

8.Vostok’s Porthole

“I see earth, it is so beautiful.” These were the first words ever uttered by a human being in the space. Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin has become the first human in space only a few minutes earlier. At 06:07 UTC on Wednesday, 12 April 1961, Vostok I was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. Three minutes later, the payload shroud which covered the window at Gagarin’s feet was opened.  the capsule’s plexiglass window. The simple plexiglass window contained the Vzor (Eyesight) optical orientation device.

7.The Pope’s Window

It is but one of 12,523 windows in the Apostolic Palace, which, in addition, houses more than 10,000 chambers, three elevators, and 997 flights of stairs. However, it is the window. On every Sunday at noon, Pope John Paul II appeared at this window to recite the “Angelus” mass. The tradition is continued by his successor Benedict XVI. This is the  window in the papal study, one of 10 on the third floor of the building. The Pope, however, lives on the fourth floor.

6.Texas School Book Depository

On November 22nd, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine who was working as a holiday-rush temporary employee at the building, fired rifle shots from the sixth floor of the Depository into the Presidential motorcade of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was 88 yards away. Some say Oswald shot the President with three bullets within six seconds. Some say the time window can be as large as 8.3 seconds.  The Book Depository Company moved out in 1970, and the memorial museum for the assassination was opened in 1989.

5.The Window Capet

Legends said that Louis XVI was captured at Varennes because he looked out of his carriage window. However, not even that window (nor any other window in the history) is as infamous as the window of the cell Marie Antoinette occupied in the Temple Prison.
Marie Thérèse Louise de Savoie-Carignan, the Princesse de Lamballe was the Superintendent of the Queen’s Household and one of the Queen’s closest friends. When the Royal Family attempted to flee France, the Princess fled toward England. However, learning of their capture at Varennes, she returned to Paris, where she joined Marie Antoinette in the Temple Prison. In August 1792, the two women were separated when the Princesse de Lamballe was transferred to La Force Prison. A month later, the Princesse became the most prominent victim of the September Massacres when the crowd dragged her from her prison cell, killed her, and then mutilated her body. They then put her head on a pike and paraded it in triumph before the window of the terrified Queen. with the grotesque demand that she be  forced “to kiss the lips of her intimate.” The Queen however did not see the head of her friend; she fainted upon learning about the gruesome end that had befallen her former companion.

4. Lady of Shalott

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem Lady of Shalott was based on a thirteenth-century Italian novella entitled Donna di Scalotta.  In Tennyson’s Arthurian interpretation, Lady of Shalott is cursed to never look out her window. She is allowed to view the world only from her mirror, through which she sees “shadows of the world”. One day, Sir Lancelot passes by the window, and she forgets the curse and looks out her window to catch a glimpse of him. The mirror cracks, and she was cursed. The story ends tragically with her death.
In literature, there are many famous windows: Rapunzel’s bleak one, Juliet’s window-balcony, etc. In Tennyson’s poem, the window represented the divide between idealism and reality, and also the Lady’s voluntary desire to attempt to bridge these two.

3. Rear Window

If Lady of Shalott explored the divide between reality and idealism, Rear Window celebrated the identical nature of life on both sides of the window. In this 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie, James Stewart plays a photographer recuperating from a broken leg. In his boredom, Stewart’s character looks out of his rear window to spy upon his neighbours (whose personas eerily reflect and match those of Stewart’s and his girlfriend’s), only to discover not so savory details about one particular neighbour.

2. Niepce’s Heliograph

From the photographer to the photographed.  La cour du domaine du Gras is not the first photograph attempted by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, but this June 1826 photograph featuring a pigeon house and a barn roof is one of the earliest surviving ones. The View from the Window at Le Gras was captured at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes on a sheet of 20 × 25 cm oil-treated bitumen. To make what he called a “heliograph,” or sun drawing, Niépce’s camera obscura required an exposure time of more than eight hours, which made the sunlight illuminates the buildings in the pictures on both sides.

1. Defenestration of Prague

In fact, there were two defenestrations of Prague, but only the second one was more historically notable. In 1617, Bohemian aristocracy rebelled the election of Duke Ferdinand of Styria as King of Bohemia, fearing that Catholic Ferdinand would revoke more Protestant rights.
At Prague Castle on May 23, 1618, an assembly of Protestants tried two Imperial governors for violating the Letter of Majesty (Right of Freedom of Religion), found them guilty, and threw them out of the windows of the Bohemian Chancellery. They landed on a large pile of manure in a dry moat and survived.
This defenestration started the Bohemian Revolt, and the Bohemians crowned their own king. Insulted, yet powerless to stop the revolt, the duke (now Ferdinand II of Austria) called his nephew Phillip IV of Spain for help. By 1620, the revolt has advanced into a continental conflict which will later be known as Thirty Years’ War.

Bonus: Windows

This article contains direct quotes from Wikipedia.

Websites I Would Like to Share

I really, really love lists…and everyone should. TIME magazine agrees too. So, naturally, the first three websites I like to mention are:

Mental_Floss: These days, there are Mental_Floss magazines and Mental_Floss Books, but why waste fifty dollars when you can get as much (if not more) information from their website. Their cheatsheets are useful too, but I find them very limited.

Listverse: They have nearly a thousand lists (may be even more) in every subject matter. Some lists are hilarious, some socially illuminating, and some extremely practical.

Cracked.Com: Those who are easily offended shouldn’t go to this site. However, if you like politically incorrect, and sometimes risque humor, you are in for a treat.

….and some trivia….

Now things I should pass on….

Gapminder:  “Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view” That is what they say, and it is very useful, intelligent and nice to look (and procrastinate). However, since their statistics didn’t include the UK before 1950 (but have stats of Sri Lanka in 1850s), I am amused–for the lack of a better word.

BugMeNot: It is just common sense, but common sense isn’t common: hence this and this. One surreptiously ask your personal info one step at a time, while one entice you with prices–oh, I meant prizes. But this dilemma crowns itself with Swoopo. In that German shooping site, the users can bid on iPods, computers and airtickets, but the catch is that you have to pay a dollar everytime you bid on something (and sometimes there are as much as a 1000 bids on an ipod).

People Lists: here is one, here is another but it is Vox Populi, Vox Dei isn’t it? I hope not–because if it were the case, the most influential people on the planet will be a Japanese game designer, a cable news presenter and a Korean pop-star (not to mention two supermodels). Yes, seriously. But an astrophysicist has a final say in the matter; he encompassed 4,000 years of recorded history into one list of a hundred individuals. Since, the said astrophysicist is also the same one who proclaimed that we are the only intelligent life in the entire Universe, I will trust him.

Very Optimistic Future: The NYT of the future–they also distributed this on the streets. Feeling bored, I searched eBay for a real copy of this ‘historic’ edition. I didn’t find any. The NYT should have left the fake stories to the Onion. On a pessimistic flipside, the NYT is “a print newsletter for the elite and the elderly,” by 2014. One thing that made this EPIC 2014 more creepy is eeriely comforting narrative, which nonetheless sounds as reassuring as the one in dystopian movie Fatherland.

To Armchair travellers: In fact, this website is to all travelling aficionados because there is no way that we can visit all these places before we… well, you get the point….but the writers of this book don’t get the point, and even came up with a sequel (more like an expended edition).