Assassins, Executioners and the War of the Currents

The Booth brothers: John, Edwin and Junius Jr.

American actor Edwin Booth was one of the great Shakespearean performers of the nineteenth century. Waiting at a train station one day, he noticed a young man slip and fall in the space between the train and the platform’s edge. As the train began to move, Booth grabbed him by the collar and hauled him back to safety. The two men went their separate ways and never met again. A year later, Edwin’s brother, John Wilkes, also a highly regarded actor, entered a box at Ford’s Theatre and shot dead Abraham Lincoln, the father of the man Edwin had saved at the train station.

The president had seen John Booth before, on stage during one of his performances. Booth’s favourite role was Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar who is credited with the phrase ‘Sic semper tyrannis’ (‘Thus always to tyrants’) upon Caesar’s death. Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, another notable Shakespearean actor, was named after the assassin. After shooting Lincoln, Booth jumped down to the stage and cried the famous phrase before escaping from the theatre.

Booth was also present at Lincoln’s second inaugural speech and can in fact be seen in photographs of the event. A number of his co-conspirators were also present and there is some evidence that they intended to kill Lincoln on the day.

Lincoln (bottom centre (#7), partly obscured by a smudge) during his second inaugural speech. Booth is at the top right against the railing (#1). John T. Ford, owner of Ford’s Theatre is standing nearby(#3).

Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert, the man Edwin booth saved, had an unfortunate association with presidential assassinations. He declined an invitation to attend the theatre on the night his father was shot and regretted his decision for the rest of his life. Had he gone, he would have been seated at the back of the box meaning that Booth would have encountered him first. Robert felt that he may have prevented the assassination if he had been there.

While serving as Secretary of War, Lincoln was a witness to James Garfield’s assassination at a train station in Washington, D.C. He was also at the Pan-American Exposition when William McKinley was shot.

McKinley’s assassin, Leon Csogolsz, was executed and his brain autopsied by antatomist Edward Anthony Spitzka. Twenty years earlier, Spitzka’s father, Edward Charles Spitzka took a different interest in the brain of Garfield’s assassin, Charles Giteau. He testified to Giteau’s insanity during his trial, but despite his bizarre behaviour, he was sentenced to death by hanging.

If Giteau had been able to delay proceedings for a few years, he may have been a candidate for the world’s first execution by electric chair where he would have met Spitzka again as the attending physician. He would also have become a pawn in the War of the Currents, the rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse for control of the delivery of electricity.

Edison favoured direct current; Wesintghouse and many others, alternating current. As part of his efforts to discredit Westinghouse, Edison, an opponent of capital punishment, funded the development of an electric chair based on his rival’s system with the intent of creating an association between AC and lethality in the public consciousness. He also publicly electrocuted animals including Topsy the Elephant.

The first use of the device on a human subject, the unfortunate William Kemmler, was disastrous: it took two attempts and the sight and smell horrified spectators. George Westinghouse famously quipped that they would have done better using an axe.

The two men continued the strange feud, with Edison intent on demonstrating the efficiency of his rival’s system and Westinghouse denigrating it, until, eventually, the benefits of alternating current won out.

The Jeffrey Dahmer of Insects

The emerald cockroach wasp is an amazing example of evolution’s power to create complex instinctive behaviour. While other animals build nests, spin webs or perform dances that encode the location of a source of nectar, the behaviour that evolution has imprinted into the brains of emerald cockroach wasps is pure evil.

When a female wasp is ready to lay an egg, it finds a cockroach and stings it on the thorax, temporarily paralysing its front legs. This gives the wasp time to deliver a second sting to a precise point in its victim’s brain called the central complex. Neurotoxins in the venom block the action of the neurotransmitter octopamine which is involved in control of complex actions. The result is a disabling of the escape response, effectively creating a zombie roach unable to initiate its own actions. The wasp then leads the highly malleable cockroach to its burrow, dragging it by its antennae like a dog on a leash.

Once inside, the wasp lays an egg on the cockroach and then leaves, blocking the entrance with pebbles. The lobotomised cockroach, meanwhile, stays obediently put. Three days later, the egg hatches and the larva eats its way into the roach’s body. Over the following week, it feeds on the internal organs, leaving the most vital till last to ensure the cockroach stays alive as long as possible. It then forms a cocoon (still inside the roach), eventually emerging fully grown.

There are disturbing parallels here to Jeffrey Dahmer’s modus operandi: Dahmer temporarily disabled his victims with drugs, attempted crude lobotomies by injecting hydrochloric acid into the frontal lobe, and cannibalised various organs. However, lacking the precision derived from millions of years of evolution, Dahmer’s lobotomy attempts were dismal failures resulting in death.

Morphine, Heroin and Grog

By the early nineteenth century, opium addiction was a minor but growing problem in the West. In 1827, the German drug company Merck began marketing a drug to treat opium addiction. The drug, derived from the opium poppy, was named morphine after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus. Ironically, morphine turned out to be more addictive than opium itself.

By 1895, morphine was the world’s most commonly abused narcotic. The German drug company Bayer began marketing a drug to treat morphine addiction. The drug, derived from the opium poppy, was named heroin after the supposedly heroic effects it imbued in its users. Ironically, heroin turned out to be more addictive than morphine itself.

Edward Vernon by Thomas Gainsborough

Vice Admiral Edward Vernon had a distinguished naval career. He was instrumental in Britain’s defeat of Spain in history’s most amusingly named war, the War of Jenkin’s Ear. However, his most enduring influence is due to the combination of his choice of coat and a dislike of drunken sailors.

Vernon was known for wearing a coat made of grogram (from gros grain, coarse grain), a mixed fabric of silk and wool, and was nicknamed Old Grog.

For hundreds of years (until Black Tot Day on July 31, 1970), the British navy issued daily rations of beer or rum to its sailors. Fresh water stowed on board a ship quickly turned stagnant and rum helped make the slimy water palatable. Not surprisingly, it was a popular tradition amongst the crew but it could also lead to disciplinary problems especially when a few days’ rations were hoarded before being drunk.

Vernon’s idea, adopted in 1740, was to dilute the rum with water. This reduced its potency and made it spoil more quickly, preventing hoarding. The change was not appreciated by the sailors who gave the diluted drink the epithet grog based on Vernon’s nickname.

Monks, Apes and Coffee

Two Capuchin monks and a Franciscan with a laden mule at ford by Alessandro Magnasco.

The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, founded in 1520, was intended as a more pure following of St Francis’ teachings than that practiced by the Franciscans of the time. Monks were required to live austere lives, wear a beard and remain barefoot. The brown robes with a hood, or capuccio, worn by members became strongly associated with the order.

When European explorers in South America came across a small monkey with a brown coat resembling a monk’s habit, they named them capuchin monkeys after the order. The stereotypical organ-grinder’s monkey, capuchins are remarkably intelligent animals, displaying tool use, planning and self-awareness. Captive capuchins have even learnt to carry out transactions using money (and may have independently invented prostitution).

The travelling organ grinder by Edouard Klieber

In the early twentieth century, a beverage of espresso coffee, milk and milk froth became popular in Italy. By 1950, it had acquired the name cappuccino, reputedly in reference to the similarity in colour of the coffee to the robes of the Capuchin order.

Vampyres, Volcanoes and Byron

The current spate of vampire fiction is a continuation of the almost unabated popularity of the genre over recent decades. Much of the blame for this can be attributed to Lord Byron and a volcanic eruption in Indonesia almost two hundred years ago.

On April 10, 1815, on the Indonesian island of Sambawa, Mount Tambora erupted, ejecting 160 cubic kilometres of material into the atmosphere. It was the biggest eruption in 1,600 years, killing 11,000 people directly and another 60,000 through impacts on crop survival.

The Mount Tambora event combined with four other large volcanic eruptions in the previous three years and low solar activity to produce a period of low temperatures in the Northern hemisphere. The effect was so severe that 1816 became known as the year without a summer.

It was in July of that year that Mary and Percy Shelley visited Lord Byron in Switzerland. Expecting pleasant mid-summer weather, it was instead cold and wet and the visitors and their host were, for much of the time, confined to Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva. It was there one night that Byron challenged his guests to write a ghost story.

Inspired by a dream, Mary Shelley wrote a tale about a scientist’s attempts to reanimate a dead body. She later developed the idea into the novel Frankenstein.

Byron wrote the apocalypse-themed poem, Darkness. He also began a story based on a vampire character. Byron’s physician, John Polidori, used it as inspiration for his own work, The Vampyre, the tale of the mysterious Lord Ruthven who seduces women and drains them of their blood. Basing the character in part on Byron, Polidori’s stroke of genius was to transform the vampire from the mindless, zombie-like monster of Eastern Europe into a seductive, aristocratic predator – like Byron, the vampire was mad, bad and dangerous to know.

An illustration from Le Fanu's Carmilla.

The next two most influential contributors to the genre lived a few kilometres apart, attended the same university and worked for the same newspaper. In the 1870s, a young Bram Stoker began work as a theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. One of his employers, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, achieved some fame in 1872 after the publication of his novella, Carmilla, a disturbing vampire story with lesbian overtones. Strongly influenced by both this and Polidori’s short story, and incorporating the historical figure of Vlad Dracula, Stoker wrote the definitive work of the genre, Dracula.

Vlad Dracula was known as the Impaler.

Gamut, Ampersand, Dollar, At

Gamut

In a review of the play The Lake, Dorothy Parker once wrote:

“Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and see Katharine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

Gamut, meaning a full range or scale, comes from musical theory. In the eleventh century, Guido of Arezzo devised a system of musical notation in which the notes were named after the first syllable from each line of the Latin hymn Ut Queant Laxis:

Ut queant laxis
Resonare fibris
Mira gestorum
Famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti
Labii reatum, Sancte Iohannes.

The lowest note in the range was gamma ut (gamma – the Greek letter G; ut was changed to do in 1600). The contracted form, gamut, was used to refer to the complete musical scale.

Ampersand

The same process of word concatenation was at play in the formation of ampersand, the name for the & character. The symbol is an abbreviated form of et, the Roman word for and. Since medieval times, it had been the convention when reciting the alphabet to append the Latin phrase per se, meaning in itself, to the letters that could also stand alone as words. Therefore, the first letter of the alphabet was recited as A per se A.

Until the mid eighteenth century, the ampersand was the last element of the alphabet recited by school children, so they would finish with the phrase and per se and. This slowly morphed into the word ampersand. At one time, the word apersey, a contraction of A per se A, was in use as an adjective meaning the first or most important.

Dollar

It’s difficult to imagine how a letter S bisected by a vertical line could come to represent the dollar. There are many stories as to where it came from but the most likely is that it derived from the shorthand symbol for peso, p^S. In eighteenth century North America, the Spanish American peso was known as the Spanish dollar, and by the 1770s, the S had been enlarged and the p reduced to a single line. The symbol was adopted for the American dollar in 1785.

The word dollar comes from the German thal, meaning valley (which also appears in the word Neanderthal; the first remains discovered were from the Neander Valley in Germany). Beginning in 1520, coins made from the silver mined at Joachimsthal in the Czech Republic (St Joachim’s Valley; St Joachim being the grandfather of Jesus Christ and husband of St Ann) were known as Joachimsthalers. This was shortened to thaler and transposed into various European languages, Ethiopian and Persian.

In the early twentieth century, Joachimsthal was also prominent for being the only known source of radium in the world. Marie Curie first extracted it from pitchblende ore from the silver mines there.

Strangely, Neandertal could also have easily been called Joachimstal as it was named after Joachim Neander, a German pastor who used the valley as a site for his sermons. Neander is perhaps more fitting as it means new man.

At

The @ symbol is known in English as the ‘at sign’. Since it became more widespread with its use in email addresses, many non-English speaking countries have given it more imaginative names.:

Danish: snabel-a (elephant’s trunk-a)

Finnish: kissanhäntä (cat’s tail)

Polish: małpa (monkey’s tail)

Italian: chiocciola (snail)

Turkish: kulak (ear)

Slovak: zavinac (rollmop)

Hebrew: shtrudl (strudel)