by Phil Mason
A similar tale is told of Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz. He published the story in 1900. The origin of Oz is said to have come from Baum looking up while trying to think of a name for his fictional world and his eyes alighting on a filing cabinet draw labelled O-Z.
Another theory has it that it was drawn from his home state of New York, OZ each being the letters following on from NY. (In the same way as Arthur C. Clarke is said to have derived HAL, the name of the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey from shifting each letter one backwards from the computer manufacturer, IBM.)
One of Hollywood’s iconic attractions – the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard – where movie stars have been immortalising their handprints and footprints in the pavement, began entirely by accident when owner Sid Grauman stepped into some wet cement outside the entrance in 1927, a year after he had opened the place. He realised how unique the mark was and how permanent it could be.
Silent era star Mary Pickford was a partner in the theatre and, according to Grauman’s own account, he asked her to put her footprint down, along with his other business partner, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. The project steamrollered from there.
(Another account maintains that silent star Norma Talmadge was responsible for giving Grauman the idea by stepping into the setting concrete herself. However, she is officially recorded as registering her mark three weeks after the supposed first imprints by Pickford and Fairbanks Jnr. The truth is far from clear, and it’s entirely possible that Grauman’s partners insisted on trumping the starlet to be the first to be immortalised on the street.)
There are now nearly 250 imprints of almost every Hollywood hero’s hands or feet, as well as two horse stars – Trigger and Champion (‘the Wonder Horse’) and the imprints of the Stars Wars robots, as well as scrawled autographs. It was a supreme business move too. The theatre became the most popular place to hold movie premieres.
The Sheraton hotel chain was so-named because of a single expensive sign. In 1939, the two-man partnership of Ernest Henderson and Robert Moore bought their third hotel. All had different names – the Stonehaven in Springfield, Massachusetts, Lee House in Washington and their newest acquisition in Boston, the Sheraton.
The Sheraton had a huge neon sign advertising itself. The partners thought this would be far too expensive to replace, so the entire chain became Sheratons to save on the expense.
One of the most famous children’s books, Dr Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, was written as a result of a bet that the author could not write an entire book using only 50 different words.
The inspiration for the most famous brand of map books in Britain – the London A-Z – came to 29-year-old Phyllis Pearsall in 1935 when she found herself misdirected by the only London street map then readily available, and discovered it had been last updated in 1918.
She walked 3,000 miles over the next year, rising at 5am and working for 18 hours a day, to list all 23,000 London streets.
When published in 1936, only a sharp-eyed printer saved the first edition from a calamitous error. Owing to an ‘accident with a shoebox’, the index almost left out Trafalgar Square. The compositor asked whether it was deliberate that there were no ‘Tr-’ entries.
Our historic imperial measurement of the foot (12 inches) was decreed by the length of Henry I’s arm. The 11th century English monarch declared the foot would be one-third of his arm’s length, which was 36 inches.
Tweed got its name by a miscommunication between a Scottish weaver and a London tailor. The weaver, identified in accounts only as coming from Hawick in the Scottish border country, sent a sample of his new twilled – diagonally ribbed – cloth to the London tailor, James Locke, in 1832. He described his product in the Scotch vernacular, ‘tweeled’, which Locke misread as ‘tweed’. The name stuck.
The designer of the iconic red British telephone kiosk, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, took its squared-bodied and domed roof shape from the tomb of Sir John Soane, one of the country’s greatest architects. When trying to come up with a design for the competition run by the Post Office in 1924, he had just become a trustee of the Soane museum, which inspired the connection.
Britain’s 999 emergency telephone number was introduced because of a single letter to The Times newspaper. In November 1935, one Norman Macdonald, a resident of Wimpole Street in London, wrote complaining at the difficulty he had encountered the day before in raising the alarm for a serious fire in the house opposite his in which five people died. He had attempted to call the fire brigade through the operator, but had had no response.
The government set up a committee to ponder the idea of a dedicated telephone number for emergencies. Two years later, in June 1937, 999 was introduced in London, the first city in the world to have one.
Why 999, the longest number to complete in the days of dialling? 111 was rejected as it was thought it could easily be ‘dialled’ by mistake by wind blowing on telephone wires; 222 was already in use for a major exchange in the capital. 999 was picked simply because it did not then have a current use, and was memorable in an emergency.
The first advertising on British television did not come, as is officially recognised, on ITV’s opening night in September 1955 (Gibbs SR toothpaste) but three years earlier through an accident on the BBC.
In the early 1950s, with television almost always broadcast live, an important accessory when broadcasting theatre was to have a suitably picturesque montage to put to camera when the performance broke for the interval. According to Paddy Russell, a stage manager for the play Arrow to the Heart, being broadcast on 20 July 1952, on this occasion a satchel of props had been arranged which included, he noticed, a jar of honey. All day he had been meaning to take the maker’s label off the jar, but it was a busy production and he failed to do so.
At the interval, no one noticed the broadcast of the montage until halfway through when Russell passed a monitor. Recounting the incident in Coming To You Live, an oral history of early British television, he recalled, ‘There was this jar of Gale’s honey, straight-on to camera, right in the foreground. And that’s how it stayed for five minutes! Five minutes! The first TV commercial in this country, and I suspect it’s still the longest.’
One of British advertising’s most enduring icons, the Andrex puppy, which has been selling toilet tissue to the nation since 1972, was a replacement concept for the company’s original plan to have a child pull the toilet roll around the house. The authorities objected that it might encourage naughtiness in children, so the cute puppy was born instead.
Coca-Cola’s most famous advertisement, launched in 1971 and featuring a multinational crowd on a hilltop singing ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’, was inspired by an enforced overnight stay at an Irish airport.
Bill Backer, the creative director for the advertising company that had the Coca-Cola account, was flying to London to work on songs for the new campaign when his plane was diverted to Shannon airport due to fog at Heathrow. He was forced to spend the night in the departure lounge where some of the passengers became angry at the disruption. By the morning, Backer later recalled, he saw many of the same people now smiling and laughing, and sharing stories over bottles of Coke.
He later described how in that moment ‘I began to see a bottle of Coca-Cola as more than a drink. . . . [I] began to see the familiar words, “Let’s have a Coke,” as. . .actually a subtle way of saying, “Let’s keep each other company for a little while.” So that was the basic idea: to see Coke… as a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples, a universally liked formula that would help to keep them company for a few minutes.’
In writing the song, he told his lyricists, he did not know how it should start but he knew how it should end. That night he had scribbled down on an airline napkin the line that encapsulated his experience, ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.’
The ad ran unchanged for a phenomenal six years.
The popular belief that spinach has ingr
edients that particularly help to make people strong, propagated by the Popeye cartoons in the 1930s, developed because a German scientist investigating the iron content of vegetables in 1870 put a decimal point in the wrong place in his paper. His results suggested that spinach contained 10 times the amount of iron than it actually does. The mistake was not uncovered until 1937, by which time Popeye’s popularity had made it impossible to overturn the myth.
The croissant, the archetypal symbol of French culinary fare, is, in fact, of Austrian origin, and began its life as a propaganda tool to mark the deliverance of the Austrian empire from the hands of the Muslim Turks.
It takes its crescent shape from the moon depicted on the Turkish flag, and is said to date from the siege of Vienna in 1683 when it was the local bakers who, while working through the night, heard the sounds of Turks tunnelling into the city and raised the alarm, thus saving the city and the empire. It was the furthest advance Muslim forces have ever made into Europe. The bakers created the special bun in the now familiar crescent design to celebrate victory over their religious rivals.
The first documented reference, incidentally, in French to the croissant dates only from 1853.
The strength of the modern Canadian economy can be traced back to the consequences of a rogue fox pestering a country blacksmith in 1903.
In the small hamlet of Cobalt in northern Ontario, Fred La Rose was being irritated by a red fox, which was sniffing round his workshop. According to tradition, he threw a hammer at the fox, which missed but struck a nearby outcrop of rock. It gleamed brightly and La Rose had discovered Canada’s (and the world’s) richest seam of silver.
The Cobalt silver mines, which produced until the 1950s, eventually produced over 460 million ounces of silver, depositing the modern equivalent of $2 billion into the young economy.
If the American Wild West had not been so crime-ridden, the electronic computer might not have developed as rapidly as it did.
The revolutionary method of managing data by machine – cards with holes punched in them that could be read automatically – was inspired by an elaborate and ultimately unworkable crime reduction scheme on long-distance railways. The scheme failed, but the method it tried to use caught the imagination of an inventor who recognised it was the way he had been looking for, for his mechanical tabulating device that was to be the foundation of the modern computer.
The original problem to be solved was the frequent robberies on cross-country trains. Robbers masqueraded as passengers until the train was out in the wilds, and then held up their fellow passengers. An ingenious scheme was proposed to gain identification of the thieves by coding every rail ticket purchased with the physical characteristics of the passenger buying it. After a robbery, the details of all the remaining passengers would be matched against the master record, and those missing would have identified themselves as the culprits and the authorities would have physical descriptions.
The identifying marks – shape of features, colour of hair, eyes, etc. – would be marked on the ticket by the punching of holes next to each descriptor printed on the ticket.
The scheme was never widely practised, but the marking method was an inspiration to an inventor looking for a way to develop a machine that could count, and count quickly – for the American national census of 1890.
Herman Hollerith, a Census Bureau statistician and technician, came across the defunct scheme and realised the hole-punching approach could be used for transferring information from census forms on to cards that could then be read electronically and counted by machine.
He patented the world’s first electronic tabulator in 1889 and used it for the following year’s census which enabled the count to be completed in six weeks, compared with the previous census in 1880 which had taken three times as long, even though the population of the country was then only 50 million and had since increased to 60 million.
So successful was Hollerith’s machine that he set up his own Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 that, in 1911, became one of the firms that formed International Business Machines – IBM, the modern computer giant. Until floppy disks arrived in the 1980s, all computer data inputting was done by Hollerith’s method of punched cards – the railway crime prevention scheme that failed.
The introduction of the news magazine programme on early evening British television came about because of the abolition of a bizarre practice that was followed by the BBC and ITV from the inception of daily broadcasting. Both shut down at 6pm to allow parents to get their children off to bed more easily. The stations recommenced for the evening at 7pm.
The ending of the ‘toddlers truce’ in 1957 meant stations suddenly had a long gap to fill. It heralded the onset of a tradition of British television that lasted well into the era of satellite TV. Beginning with Tonight and later Nationwide in the 1970s, it introduced some of television’s most famous faces to the screen, the likes of Alan Whicker, Cliff Michelmore, Frank Bough and Sue Lawley.
Even today, the theme of a features-style, human interest programme to follow the main evening news endures, but few would know the curious origins that go back to a time when television exercised a degree of social responsibility that looks positively antique today.
7
Artistic Strokes (of Luck)
One of the greatest works of early English literature, Sir Thomas Malory’s tale of the Arthurian legends, Morte D’Arthur, was written largely or entirely while Malory was in prison between 1468 and 1470 for plotting against the king.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most famous poem, Kubla Khan (‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree’) is only 54 lines long. It should have been over 300, but a knock at the door ruined it.
The poem was conceived by Coleridge in a medicine-induced dream while he was recovering from illness in the summer of 1797, in a lonely farmhouse on Exmoor. He had fallen into a deep sleep of over three hours from which he woke with a vivid sense of a complete composition in his head. Taking pen and paper, according to his own account, he was confident that he ‘could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines.’
He rapidly produced what is now the poem, but was then interrupted by a visitor from the neighbouring village who detained him in conversation for over an hour. Unfortunately, when he returned to his room and tried to take up where he had left off, he found that he had forgotten the rest of poem.
Charles Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’) did not intend to write out his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Oxford college lecturer had told it as a story to amuse the three young sisters he took on a three-mile boat ride on the Thames near the university on a summer afternoon in 1862. One of them, Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Dodgson’s college, implored him to write it down. He spent the whole of a night writing what he could remember of the tale. He presented a handwritten and handillustrated version of the book to Alice, naming her as the central figure, as a Christmas present two years later. Those who saw it pressured him to have it published. It came out to wide acclaim the following year. So successful was it that he followed it up with Through the Looking Glass in 1872.
Henry Rider Haggard only wrote his classic and best-selling novel, King Solomon’s Mines, in response to a bet from his brother. The 29-year-old bored lawyer, who had just one book to his name – for which he had had to pay £50 to be published and only sold 150 copies – was asked in 1885 for his opinion of Robert Louis Stevenson’s recently published adventure, Treasure Island. Haggard said he could produce a better story, and completed his riposte in just six weeks. It was published in the same year as Treasure Island, was an instant success and those six weeks transformed Rider Haggard’s life.
He nearly did not benefit from the remarkable success. As a novice who needed the money, he initially accepted the publisher’s offer of a flat fee of £100 for the copyright. While the editor was out of the room, his clerk suggested Haggard should take the alternative of a percentage royalty. He changed his mind, to his everlasti
ng good fortune.
Agatha Christie had no plans to become a writer. She had had no schooling as a child – her mother had an idiosyncratic belief that no child should look at a book before the age of eight – and even into her 20s harboured no desire to become an author. In her autobiography, she declared, ‘It never even entered my head.’
It was her work as an assistant in a chemist’s dispensary in Torquay in her mid-20s that changed her career. There, she began to nurture her fascination with poison, which would inspire many of her plots. Her first attempt at writing, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was rejected by six publishers. It was eventually brought out in 1920, to little notice, when she was already 30 years old.
Ironically, although she was excruciatingly shy and detested publicity, it was her famed disappearance for 10 days in 1926 (now believed to have been a nervous breakdown on discovering her husband was having an affair) that brought her the national attention that elevated her to celebrity status.
At least one novel a year appeared from the 1930s through to the 1950s. She would end up writing 78 crime novels, 150 short stories, 6 non-fiction works and 20 plays. Her estimated sales throughout the world are some 2 billion copies, in over 100 languages.
Thirty years after her death, she was still selling a million paperback copies in Britain every year.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, one of Russian literature’s greatest figures, was nearly executed when he was 28 after he had written just two, now forgotten, novels. The author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, which he produced between 1861 and 1880 (between his 40s and 60s), was a political activist in St Petersburg in his younger days and found himself arrested with five others in 1849.
