Ellet had one really big problem that was keeping him from building the bridge. Since he was proposing a suspension bridge, someone had to figure out a way to get the first cable across the eight-hundred-foot gorge. This was not an easy task. No boat at the time was strong enough to cross the torrential Whirlpool Rapids. Ellet proposed that a rocket be shot across the gorge with a rope attached to it. (Did they even have rockets back then?) Others suggested that a cannon launch a bombshell.
Hmmm. This was a perplexing problem for them.
But as 1 always tell my students, the best answer is usually the simplest one. Ellet offered a cash prize to the first boy who could fly a kite across the gorge. In no time, kites with very long strings could be seen filling the area sky. No one had any success, however, until a fifteen-year-old boy named Homan Walsh showed up on the scene.
Walsh took a ferry from the American to the Canadian side of the river and then walked two miles to the point above where the bridge was to be built. His first attempt did get his kite, The Union, across the gorge, but the string broke on the jagged rocks. He was determined to try again, but his attempt to rescue his kite from the other side was delayed when ice jams put a halt to ferry service for eight days. Walsh succeeded on his second try and took home the cash prize.
With Walsh’s string successfully across the gorge, the bridge builders were able to attach a heavier line to the kite string and pull it across. They repeated this procedure back and forth, increasing the line’s diameter with each pass until the necessary cable was in place. A service bridge was finished in July 1848. It proved to be so popular that it forced the famous Maid of the Mist to transform its role from a ferry service to a sightseeing venture. However, politics then entered the picture and Ellet’s firm never completed the project. Just seven years later, John Roebling would build the first bridge capable of carrying the weight of railway traffic across the gorge.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
the al-kamait
how donald duck helped save the day
As you are probably well aware, the ocean bottom is filled with the wrecks of ships that never made it to where they had intended. Some of these ships contained gold and precious jewels. Others went down in battle. Yet the ship that 1 am about to discuss would have never been even a footnote in history if it were not for the genius of that fictitious cartoon character Donald Duck.
So, let’s zoom back to December 1964 where we will find the freighter AlKuwait sitting on the floor of the Persian Gulf at an eighty-seven-degree list to port.
Big deal, you say.
Well, it was a really big deal to the residents of Kuwait. You see, the ship went down with approximately six thousand sheep on board right in the middle of Kuwait’s main source of water. The desalinization plants used to make the seawater drinkable were designed specifically to remove salt. They were not designed to remove the effects of thousands of rotting carcasses. It was obvious that they had to raise the ship to save the water supply, but no one was quite sure how to do it.
The solution actually came from Danish engineer Karl Kroyer, who was working in Kuwait at the time. He remembered reading a May 1949 Walt Disney comic in which Donald Duck was faced with a similar problem-how to raise his uncle Scrooge’s sunken yacht. Donald and his three nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie, just in case you forgot) came up with a great solution: they filled the yacht up with Ping-Pong balls and floated it to the surface.
Kroyer decided to try a similar approach. Clearly, getting your hands on enough Ping-Pong balls to raise a two thousandgross-ton cargo ship has never been an easy task. Instead, Kroyer developed a system in which powdered polystyrene was boiled to form pearl-sized air-filled balls. Essentially, he was making his own small Ping-Pong balls right there on the site. Once the bubbles were formed, he intended to pump them down into the ship’s hull.
Kroyer arranged for all of the boilers, pumps, and chemicals to be flown from Denmark to Kuwait. We can be quite sure that the machines pumped and pumped and pumped.
So, did this crazy scheme work?
You bet. It took 150 tons of foam, which translates into roughly 27 million polystyrene balls, and three months, but the AlKuwait was successfully brought back to the surface and towed safely away. The Kuwaiti water supply was saved. The total cost to save the ship was $435,000. Since the ship was insured for $2 million, the insurance company made out very well. What a bargain!
Stories and images of this unusual salvage appeared in print all around the world. This sounded like great publicity, but when BASF, the company that had the contract to raise the ship, applied for a patent on the new process, it was denied. It seems that Donald Duck had beaten the mighty conglomerate to the punch. Since Donald’s ingenious solution was already in print, it was considered public knowledge. If the company had never bragged to the world where it had gotten the original idea from, they probably would have received the patent.
And the Kuwaiti people can thank a fictional character named Donald Duck (and his cartoonist, Carl Barks) for saving their water supply.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
the hahg derhg
how many babies can a woman have in ten years?
Let’s hop in our time machine and set the clock back to 4:30 P.M. on October 31, 1926. On this date a wealthy Canadian lawyer named Charles Vance Millar died at age seventy-three. He was seated at his desk and just as he was about to speak, his “head fell forward and without a sound he passed away.”
Big deal, you say. People die every single day.
That is true. In fact there was nothing unusual about his death at all. His last will and testament is the thing that we are interested in.
Millar never married and did not have any children. A lack of family meant no one to leave his fortune to. Instead, Millar went to extra efforts to make his will a series of practical jokes, all designed to see how far a human being would go for his money.
One clause in his will bequeathed lucrative shares in the Ontario Jockey Club to a judge and a preacher, both of whom were fiery foes of gambling. What did they do? They accepted his gift, going against all that they preached. A third share was left to a man who owned two competing tracks and whose shady nature would have normally barred him from membership.
In another clause, Millar left one share of stock in the Kenilworth Jockey Club racetrack to every Christian minister in town who had expounded “the scripture to the sinners.” After much public debate, only a handful of clergy chose to accept the gift. They would later find out that each share was only worth one-half of 1 cent.
He also bequeathed one share of the O’Keefe Brewing Company to every Protestant minister in Toronto. It just so happened that the brewery was under Catholic ownership. This was a time when there was great hostility between the two groups, yet 91 of the 260 eligible clergy accepted the shares valued at $56 each.
The famous part of his will, however, had to do with the socalled Baby Derby.
How did the Baby Derby work?
It was actually quite simple. Millar bequeathed the remainder of his fortune “at the expiration of ten years from my death to give it and its accumulations to the Mother who has since my death given birth in Toronto to the greatest number of children as shown by the Registrations under the Vital Statistics Act.” In plain English this means that he left his fortune (estimated to be $100,000) to the woman who produced the most kids during the ten-year period following his death.
Of course, there were many who contested this clause, including his nephews and nieces. Others questioned whether his will contributed to public immorality. Then there was the question of illegitimate and stillborn children. But remember that Millar was a lawyer, so the document was well written. After twelve years of legal wrangling, the case ended up in the Canadian Supreme Court, which upheld the contents of his will.
At first, the contest was thought of as little more than a curiosity. Then, the Great Depressio
n set in and people were desperate for jobs and money. Around the same time, people became aware of the fact that Millar had purchased one hundred thousand shares in a tunnel project. The shares were basically worthless at the time of his death, valued at just $2.00 in total, but the tunnel between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, actually became a reality. The value of Millar’s estate ballooned to approximately $750,000. All of a sudden, Millar’s fortune seemed to look very attractive.
Thus began the great derby.
They’re off!
Toronto’s maternity wards were filled to the brink. The newspapers ran box scores showing which women were in the lead. Of course, special highlight was given to mothers lucky enough to have twins or triplets. The city’s department responsible for registering infants became overwhelmed with applications for “forgotten infants” and had to refuse additional requests.
We can be sure that the bookies were taking bets on this one.
Ten years to the minute after Millar’s death, the contest was over. After resolving all of the legal questions regarding the will, it was time for the judge to award the prize.
One woman, Pauline Clarke, would have won by today’s standards with ten children in ten years, but she was disqualified. Why? Because not all of her children had the same father. It seems that she had children with her new lover before the divorce from her previous husband had been completed. (A big mistake in the 1930s.)
Another woman, Lillian Kenney, had twelve children in the ten years. (Wow!) In the end, she was disqualified because several of the children had died. She could not produce death certificates and, therefore, was unable to prove that the children were not stillborn.
However, for all their “effort” (and incredible pain) both women were awarded a consolation prize of $12,500 each.
After all court and attorney fees were subtracted, Millar’s fortune had been reduced to a little over $500,000. The remaining loot was split among four women: Annie Smith, Kathleen Nagle, Lucy Timleck, and Isabel MacLean. Each had given birth to nine children during the ten-year span.
This derby was better than any horse race.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
references
The references used in writing this book are listed below. Each set of references is broken down into the two categories of Web Links and Additional Resources. Please be aware that Web pages come and go and are rarely, if ever, updated. 1 would not recommend using any Web page as a primary source, especially since anyone can be an expert on the Internet. The Additional Resources, on the other hand, are typically more reliable. These include books, magazine or newspaper articles, television shows, and any other medium not mentioned.
Unlike most written works, the references are not listed in order by author or date. Instead, 1 have chosen to list them in their general order of importance. References at the top of each section are, based on my experience, the best places to start your research. Those at the bottom offer less information.
Lastly, it should be fairly obvious that 1 have chosen to use the SSS method of citation. That stands for the Steve Silverman Style of listing sources. 1 have avoided the MLA or similar citation style so that 1 could personalize each source. I’m sure that this decision will make some English teachers out there very angry, but, hey, it’s my book! After researching all of these stories over the past six years, 1 have been sorely disappointed by the citations listed in many other works. Their formal styles of citation tend to give every reference used equal importance, when we all know that this is never true. 1 cannot begin to tell you how many times 1 have spent hours hunting down a particular source only to be sorely disappointed in what it had to offer. 1 am hoping that my plain English SSS method of citing works will be of great help to those who wish to do further research on these topics.
PART 1: YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING!
M1KE. HEADLESS THE CHICKEN
Web Links:
You can find out a little more about Mike at http:// www.miketheheadlesschicken.org/, which is basically a promotional tool for the annual Fruita celebration. The site does have some basic information and some related materials.
“Mike the Headless Chicken more popular than Clinton” (http://wwl.salonmagazine.com/people/col/Teit/1999/05/12/sn/ index.html) can be found in the May 12, 1999, issue of the online magazine Salon.
Additional Resources:
The most complete reference on Mike can be found in The Official Mike the Headless Chicken Book by Teri Thomas (2000, Fruita, Colo.: Fruita Times). Written in cooperation with the Olsen’s grandson Troy Waters, this book is filled with photographs, stories, letters, and everything else that one would want to know about Miracle Mike. At nearly a hundred pages, this book is an excellent source and is well worth reading. Copies can be purchased on the book’s Web site at http:// www.miketheheadlesschickenbook.com/ or by calling the Fruita Times at 970-858-3924. They also sell a great T-shirt with Mike pictured on it. (1 bought one and love it!)
Four excellent photographs of Mike are featured in the October 22, 1945, issue of Life magazine. The article is titled “Headless Rooster-Beheaded chicken lives normally after freak decapitation by ax” and can be found on pages 53-54.
A brief overview on Mike’s life can be found on page 2 of the May 13, 1999, issue of the Edmonton Sun. The article is titled “First Light/ Something Bright to Start Your Day.”
The May 11, 1999, issue of the Denver Post features an excellent article titled “Town celebrates headless critter of the ’40s” by Nancy Lofholm. The follow-up article, “Fruita Remembers Mike” can be found in the May 17 issue. These articles were originally obtained from the paper’s Web site, but are no longer available.
FARTMAN
Web Links:
“Le Petomane: The Strange Life of a Fartiste” by Garrick H. S. Brown is a very detailed story on the man’s talent (http:// www.retroactive.com/jan98/petomane.html).
Additional Resources:
A detailed story on Pujol can be found in the very unusual book RE/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids by Paul Spinrad (1994, San Francisco, Calif.: RE/Search Publications, pages 32-34.
Where did 1 first get this strange true story? (1 couldn’t make something like this up.) It’s a story called “The King of Farts” from The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader (an appropriate book for this topic) by the Bathroom Readers’ Institute (1995, Berkeley, Calif.: Bathroom Readers’ Institute, pages 147-50).
THE COLLYER BROTHERS
Web Links:
The New York Daily News offers an excellent story on the Collyer Brothers. Check out “Ghost Story: The Collyer Brothers, 1947,” by Jay Maeder at http://www.nydailynews.com/manual/news/bigtown/ chap106.htm.
Additional Resources:
There is no shortage of stories on the Collyer Brothers. The hunt for Langley was quite the media sensation in its day.
A very nice summary of all of the events can be found in the April 7, 1947, issue of Time magazine (pages 27-28).
“Homer Collyer Dies Amid Junk, Brother Langley Can’t Be Found” is an excellent story with many excerpts from an earlier interview with Langley. This story is in the Saturday, March 22, 1947, issue of the New York Herald Tribune (page 1, columns 2 and 3).
The following articles can all be found in the New York Times:
��� “Homer Collyer, Harlem Recluse, Found Dead at 70” (March 22, 1947, page 1, column 5).
��� “Hunt for Collyer Set for Tomorrow” (March 23, 1947, page 1, column 6).
��� “Thousands Gape at Collyer House” (March 24, 1947, page 44, column 1).
��� “Police Fail to Find Collyer in House” (March 25, 1947, page 27, column 1).
��� “Collyer Mansion Yields Junk, Cats” (March 26, 1947, page 27, column 5).
��� “Langley Collyer Is Dead, Police Say” (March 27, 1947, page 56, column 2).
��� “Court Fails to Act on Collyer Estate” (March 28, 1947, page 15, colum
n 4).
��� “Resort Is Searched for Langley Collyer” (March 30, 1947, page 11, column 1).
��� “3d Search Starts at Collyer House” (April 1, 1947, page 30, column 6).
��� “53 Attend Burial of Homer Collyer” (April 2, 1947, page 38, column 4).
��� “More Secrets Taken from Collyer Home” (April 4, 1947, page 25, column 3).
��� “Collyer House Hunt to Last for Week” (April 8, 1947, page 17, column 8).
��� “Body of Collyer Is Found Near Where Brother Died” (April 9, 1947, page 1, column 2).
��� “Langley Collyer Dead Near Month” (April 10, 1947, page 52, column 1).
��� “Langley Collyer Buried” (April 12, 1947, page 15, column 6).
��� “4 Pianos Auctioned in Collyer Parlor” (June 21, 1947, page 19, column 6).
��� “Collyer House to Go” (July 1, 1947, page 13, column 5).
MICHAEL MALLOY
Web Links:
The Internet is not a good source for information on Michael Malloy. The few stories that are out there are very brief and lack specific details.
if you want to save time, a condensed version of this story can be found on the page “The Story of Michael Malloy” at http:// www.twisted-helices.com/music/primus/misc/malloy.html. The author of this page has based it on an older version of the story that is contained in this book and, as a result, may not be completely accurate.
Additional Resources:
An excellent summary can be found in the book The People’s Almanac #2 by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace (1978, New York: William Morrow, pages 41-44).
In the book Where Death Delights (1967, New York: American Book-Stratford Press, pages 125-38), Marshall Houts has included an entire chapter on the death of Malloy. While his account of the murder is very detailed, it has numerous inconsistencies with all of the other sources mentioned here. The name Malloy is misspelled as Molloy, some of the nicknames for Murder Trust members are interchanged, and several story details do not agree with those told by court reporters at the time. It’s an excellent story to read, but one should be questioning the details while reading it.
Einstein's Refrigerator: And Other Stories from the Flip Side of History Page 13
