Category Archives: 20th century

1927: Don’t fix leaking gas tanks with blowtorches

One of the world’s largest gas explosions occurred in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in November 1927, causing catastrophic destruction. As with many similar accidents, human stupidity was chiefly to blame.

The Equitable Gas Company’s gasometer, a prominent city landmark, was billed as the largest man-made gas tank on Earth. On the morning of November 14th a team of workmen was sent to investigate a gas leak in an adjoining side tank. Thinking it safe, they began to repair the tank with acetylene blowtorches. Their flames ignited more than five million cubic feet of natural gas in the main tank, blowing it to pieces.

According to eyewitness accounts, the explosion created a fireball that reached 200 metres in height. The blast shook Pittsburgh like an earthquake and was felt in four different states. More than a square mile of the city was levelled, leaving several thousand people homeless. Metal shards, broken glass and burning debris rained down on the city for an hour. Large chunks of debris landed more than a mile from the scene.

More than 800 people were seriously injured but surprisingly, only 28 were killed, including the workmen who triggered the explosion.

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 15th 1927. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1900: Harry Potter – bully, thief, hobby horse rider

In January 1900, a Chester Castle magistrate heard a charge of theft laid against Harry Potter, described as “a respectable boy of eleven”. According to the prosecution, Harry Potter had accosted and robbed a much smaller boy named Joseph Goodwin:

“Goodwin, who was only seven years of age, was sent on Thursday by his mother to buy some groceries, and was given [three shillings and sixpence] to pay for them… Potter asked him if he had any money [and] without further parley put his hand in Goodwin’s pocket, bringing out two shillings in silver. With his plunder Potter then took his departure… spending the money upon bottles of ginger beer and trips on hobby horses, etc.”

Harry Potter pleaded guilty to the charge and the magistrate sentenced him to “six strokes of the birch rod”, expressing his hope that this would “have a salutary effect upon him.”

Source: The Cheshire Observer, January 13th 1900. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1911: Court endorses spankings for talkative wives

In 1911, a St Louis woman named Hannah Yowell sued her husband for divorce, alleging cruelty. According to her testimony, Mr Yowell had risen from bed one night to give her a “good and hard spanking”. She also claimed he attempted to rile her by calling her “redhead”. In the witness box, Mr Yowell confessed to administering the spanking, claiming “the woman needed it”.

According to a press summary of the trial, Mrs Yowell:

“…started talking at 8pm and her tongue was still moving at 2am… [Mr Yowell asked her] to kindly close the gap in her face and go to sleep, or to at least give him a chance to sleep, as he had work to do the next day. The woman kept right on talking and finally the suffering hubby crawled out of bed, lifted his wife out also, dropped her over his knee and gave her an old fashioned spanking.”

The court sided with Mr Yowell and denied his wife’s petition for divorce:

“The provocation was great; no man cares to be kept awake until nearly morning listening to his wife’s learned discourses on the neighbourhood gossip.”

Source: The Daily Ardmoreite, April 23rd 1911. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1921: Heavy fines for bare-kneed motorists on Long Island

In August 1921, police in Long Beach, New York, cracked down on people driving about in bare knees. Captain Walter Barruscale told a local newspaper that his officers had issued several fines, ranging in amounts of $10 to $25, to motorists entering Long Beach with their knees exposed:

“‘Long Beach will not countenance people coming here in automobiles and wearing bathing costumes, or without their limbs being properly covered below the knees’, Capt. Barruscale said.”

Barrascule said that the same rules applied to those who “go about the streets… bare knees must be confined within walls or restricted to the bathing beaches”. Signs have been erected on roads into Long Beach, warning motorists of the restrictions and possible penalties.

Source: The Evening World, New York, August 22nd 1921. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1909: Mrs Homer Simpson deserts husband, gets jail time

In October 1909, an Oklahoma newspaper reported an Ohio woman, Mrs M. Simpson, had been handed four months’ in the county jail after pleading guilty to a statutory offence. Also given jail time was Mrs Simpson’s nephew, Edward.

While the report did not name Mrs Simpson’s offence, the details case suggest it may have been kidnapping or marital desertion:

“Homer Simpson, a prosperous real estate man of Cleveland, Ohio, husband of Mrs Simpson, appeared against the pair. He has been tracking his wife since she deserted him last month, taking with her their eight-year-old son.”

Source: The Daily Ardmoreite, Oklahoma, October 5th 1909. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1916: Five-ton elephant lynched in Tennessee

In September 1916, Sparks World Famous Circus set up in Kingsport, north-east Tennessee. One of the circus’s most popular exhibits was Mary, a five-ton Asian elephant.

On September 12th,Mary was being watered at a local pond when she turned on a circus employee, Red Eldridge, throwing him to the ground and stomping on his head. As might be expected, he was killed instantly.

Eldridge’s death created a firestorm of public anger, worsened by irresponsible press reporting. Newspaper accounts said that “Murderous Mary” had gored the hapless victim to death when in fact, she had no tusks. It was also falsely claimed that “Mary had slain her eighth man”.

Facing a boycott, circus owners agreed to a public lynching in Erwin, the nearest town with a crane sufficient for the task. A Kentucky newspaper described the execution:

“The showmen chose to hang the beast. A derrick car of the Carolina Clinchefield & Ohio Railway was used. Heavy chains were looped about the elephant’s neck and the steam operated crane lifted the massive form into the air. The animal struggled for quite a while before death finally resulted from strangulation.”

In reality, the first attempt to string Mary up was thwarted by a broken chain. The elephant fell, fractured its pelvis and writhed on the ground in agony while those in charge arranged a second attempt. The sordid spectacle was watched by 3,000 people, including local children who were given time off school to attend.

A post-mortem on the elephant’s body revealed a painful jaw infection that probably triggered her attack on Eldridge.

Source: Hopkinsville Kentuckian, September 30th 1916. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1917: Judge counts 2,700-plus Coca Cola fiends in Georgia

By the outbreak of World War I, the push for a nationwide ban on alcohol in the United States was in full swing. The American prohibition movement was the sum of many parts, including various religious, women’s and temperance groups.

Prohibition may also have enjoyed the financial backing of Coca Cola. During debates on the floor of the US Senate in early 1917 James Edgar Martine, the junior Senator from New Jersey, claimed the prohibition movement was being bankrolled by:

“…the splendid wealth acquired through the manufacture of the decoction known as Coca Cola… The owner [of this company] lives in a princely home in Atlanta… there is a lobby there and $50,000 has been put up for the purposes of maintaining the Coca Cola interests… to shut people off from other beverages and hence make them resort to their drinks.”

Coca Cola was itself invented to dodge Atlanta by-laws prohibiting the sale of alcoholic drinks. Despite its cocaine content and narcotic effects, Coca Cola was permitted to be sold as a medicinal tonic rather than an intoxicant. Cocaine was removed from Coca Cola around 1903 and replaced with strong levels of caffeine but many still considered it a stupefying drink with potential dangers to the welfare of those who consumed it.

According to Judge Stark, Coca Cola addiction was responsible for serious social problems in the state of Georgia:

“A half dozen reputable physicians have stated that there are over 300 girls in Atlanta that are Coca Cola fiends and nervous wrecks… Coca Cola and such drinks not only make physical wrecks out of our men but destroy the physical welfare of our women and children and make nervous wrecks of them. There are over 2,700 known Coca Cola fiends in this state, and if all could be numbered it would amount to over 5,000.”

Whether because of prohibition or canny marketing or both, Coca Cola sales boomed over the next decade. In 1920, the company churned out almost 19 million gallons of the drink and generated $US32.2 million in sales. By the end of 1921 there were more than 1,000 Coca Cola bottling plants across the US and the product was available at almost every soda bar in the country.

Source: Logan Republican, Utah, March 6th 1917. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1862: Vermont captain invites colonel to kiss his “touch-hole”

William Cronan was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1838. At the age of 22 he enlisted in the Union Army as a lieutenant and quickly rose to the rank of captain. By early 1862 he was a company commander in the 7th Vermont Infantry. Cronan’s regiment was deployed to Louisiana and saw action in the Battle of Baton Rouge (August 1862). Cronan had been a good organiser but combat seemed to bring out the worst in him. He was sent for court martial for having quarrelled with superior officers, saying of one:

“The colonel can kiss my royal majestic brown military touch-hole.”

Captain Cronan was formally reprimanded but continued to serve. He later returned home to be honorably discharged. According to an obituary in Vermont, he died in August 1910.

Source: General Court Martial Orders, 1862, f.83. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1911: Public schools no place for “the sons of Pork Butchers”

In 1907, the British parliament passed the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, a significant piece of educational reform. One of the provisions of this act was to facilitate full and partly-funded scholarships so that talented working-class boys could attend prestigious but expensive private schools.

Two beneficiaries of these scholarships were Eric Blair, later George Orwell, and the Trinidadian historian and cricket writer C. L. R. James. But the state-funded admission of working-class boys to elitist public schools did not please everyone, and for years there was considerable criticism and debate.

Two examples appeared in The Guardian in March 1911, one from a writer claiming to be a public school headmaster, the other a public school student:

“The real difficulty is not the social or pecuniary inferiority of the elementary boy but his enormous moral inferiority. Most of the other boys that come to us [at public schools] have a very definite idea that certain actions and thoughts are “caddish” or “bad form” or “blackguardly”… I have been dealing with a certain proportion of elementary boys for some years and I have failed to find any parallel idea of the word.”

‘Head Master’

“I wonder whether you have ever considered the matter from the side of a gentleman forced to come into daily contact with the innate vulgarity of the lower orders. Is it not more probable that the sons of gentlemen will be levelled down, rather than the sons of Pork Butchers levelled up, by continual daily contact? The lessons of the gutter are more easily learnt than the traditions of caste.

“The fact that by keeping particular secondary and Public Schools a reserve for a particular class keeps the higher walks of life, in the professions and public services, a preserve for the same class, is surely a great argument in its favour. The lower classes never were a governing class, and why should the master sit side by side with the servant?”

‘Public School Boy’

Source: The Guardian, March 29th 1911. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1909: James Joyce can’t make it to the post office

In 1909, the Irish author James Joyce was living in Trieste with his lover, Nora Barnacle. Then both in their mid-20s, Joyce and Barnacle’s relationship was intense but sometimes variable and tempestuous.

In October, Joyce returned to Dublin on business, leaving Nora alone in Italy for three months. During this separation they agreed to send each other erotic letters. Some of these letters survive today and their contents range from passionate and erotic, to smutty and fetishistic.

Topics explored in Joyce’s letters to Nora include oral sex, self pleasuring, buggery, flatulence and defecation. He referred to her as “my little f-ckbird”, “little c-ntie” and “my sweet dirty little farter”. Joyce also confessed to masturbating, either while writing to Nora or immediately thereafter.

On December 15th, a week before starting his return journey to Trieste, Joyce wrote to Nora:

“I am sure my girlie is offended at my filthy words. Are you offended, dear, as what I said about your drawers? That is all nonsense, darling. I know they are spotless as your hearth. I know I could lick them all over, frills, legs and bottom. Only I love, in my dirty way, to think that in a certain part they are soiled. It is all nonsense too about buggering you. It is only the dirty sound of the word I like, the idea if a shy beautiful young girl like Nora pulling up her clothes behind and revealing her sweet white girlish drawers in order to excite the dirty fellow she is so fond of; and then letting him stick his dirty red lumpy pole in through the split of her drawers and up, up, up, in the darling little hole between her plump fresh buttocks.

Darling, I came off just now in my trousers so that I am utterly played out. I cannot go to the Post Office now, though I have three letters to post. [So] to bed, to bed! Goodnight, Nora mia!”

Nora responded with her own erotic letters, however, none of these survive.

Source: Letter from James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, December 15th 1909. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.