Bizarre History (23 page)

“It’s a great invention but who would want to use it anyway?”—Rutherford B. Hayes, after a demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, 1876

“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.”
—The New York Times,
1936

“The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.”—Charlie Chaplin, 1916

“The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.”—
The New York Times,
1939

“So many centuries after the Creation it is unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value.”—Committee advising King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella regarding proposal by Christopher Columbus, 1486

“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”—Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

Nearly anyone who thinks about Abraham Lincoln pictures him with a beard, which is interesting since he went beardless nearly all his life. However, while campaigning as the Republican nominee for president in 1860, Lincoln received some fashion advice in a letter from an eleven-year-old girl named Grace Bedell. She wrote, “I have got 4 brothers, and part of them will vote for you any way and if you will let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you. You would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.” Lincoln took her advice and won the presidency. During his trip to the White House in 1861, he met up with the young letter writer and said, “You see, Grace, I let my whiskers grow for you.” Who knows what would have happened if Grace had never written to Lincoln?

On April 14, 1865, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, attended the play
Our American Cousin
at Ford’s Theatre. Mary had complained of a headache and was thinking of not going. Lincoln, feeling a little tired himself, decided they should go because he said he needed a laugh. Before leaving for the theater, he had pronounced it the happiest day in his life. The Civil War was over, and he had just given Secretary Stanton the order to end the draft. During the play, actor Edward Sothern appeared onstage with the heroine, who had a shawl over her shoulder. She said, “Me lord, will you kindly throw my shawl over my shoulders—there appears to be a draft here?” Sothern, glancing directly at Lincoln gave this impromptu line: “You are mistaken, Miss Mary, the draft has already been stopped by order of the President!” Lincoln joined the audience in what ended up being his last laugh.

During the Civil War, on September 13, 1862, General George McClellan and his Union troops were moving to intercept Robert E. Lee’s forces in Maryland. They stopped at a campsite where Lee’s army had stayed a few days earlier. Two soldiers relaxing on the ground found three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper. Right before tossing the paper and sharing the cigars, Corporal Barton W. Mitchell decided to take a look at the wrapping. And good thing he did, for on it was written Lee’s battle plans, including the fact that Lee had divided his army in order to attack near Antietam Creek. It turned into a bad day for the Confederates as they were beaten at the Battle of Sharpsburg in what was the single bloodiest day of combat in American history. Incredibly, even though McClellan said, “Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip Bobby Lee I will be willing to go home,” things would have gone even worse for Lee if McClellan hadn’t waited
nearly a full day
before deciding to take advantage of the found information.

NOTE:
McClellan wasn’t known as the most aggressive general of the Civil War. In fact, at times “Young Napoleon” was criticized for being downright passive. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln said of McClellan, “If General McClellan isn’t going to use his army, I’d like to borrow it for a time.”

Henry VIII, he of the six wives, didn’t set out to start his own church. In fact, when he wanted to annul his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, he sent Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, one of his most important government ministers, to appeal to the Pope. All was going well, and Wolsey had the annulment in hand, when he kneeled to kiss the Pope’s toe. Unfortunately, Wolsey’s greyhound,

Urian, who for some reason was in attendance, ran up and bit the Pope’s foot. The Pope ended negotiations and refused to grant the annulment. The English Reformation soon followed.

Henry Brown was a slave in Virginia who, despondent over his wife and children being sold to a slave trader, decided to seek freedom any way he could. Along with the help of Samuel Smith, a white shopkeeper sympathetic to his cause, Brown devised an ingenious escape. He mailed his way to freedom. Brown paid $86 to have himself shipped to Philadelphia abolitionist James Miller McKim. On March 23, 1849, Brown had himself packed into a 3 x 2 x 2.6 box (hopefully labeled “This Side Up/Handle with Care”) with a bottle of water. He was loaded onto a wagon, and then a train … a steamboat … another wagon … another train … and finally, the delivery wagon, which dropped him off at McKim’s residence approximately twenty-seven hours later.

Brown went on to have a successful career as a speaker for the Anti-Slavery Society and was given the not-so-clever nickname “Box” at a Boston antislavery convention in 1849. Outrage over his and other slaves’ escape stories led to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which declared that all runaway slaves must be brought back to their owners. This forced Brown to move to England, where he toured an antislavery panorama he called “Mirror of Slavery” for ten years. He returned to the United States after the Civil War in 1875 with a family magic act. (He had remarried while in England.)

SIDE NOTE:
In 1914, four-year-old May Pierstorff of Grangeville, Idaho, was to visit her grandmother in Lewiston. Her parents, figuring it was cheaper to mail her than to put her on a train, pinned fifty-three cents to the young girl’s coat (they were charged the chicken rate—it was legal to mail chickens back then) and handed her to the mailman. May traveled the entire distance in the train’s mail compartment and was delivered safely to her grandmother by the mail clerk on duty. It took another six years after this for mailing your kid to be considered illegal.

Here’s one for the “What in the world were they thinking?” category. Sure, scientists are supposed to be objective, and you can forgive them for not being superstitious about black cats and knocking on wood. However,
Apollo 13,
the ill-fated lunar launch, was the thirteenth scheduled lunar space exploration mission, scheduled for liftoff at the thirteenth minute after the thirteenth hour, with the lunar landing scheduled for the thirteenth day of April. Come on! That’s just asking for trouble. When did things go all to hell? On the thirteenth.

The Latin phrase
E pluribus unum
(out of many, one) was adopted by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson as the motto for the Second Continental Congress. It was also later chosen to grace the Seal of the United States. At the time of the American Revolution, this exact phrase appeared on the title page of a popular magazine,
The Gentleman’s Magazine.
The phrase is attributed to Virgil, the Roman poet. The poem in which the phrase appeared was about … salad, and the phrase describes the blending of colors into one.

President Lincoln was the first president to be photographed at his inauguration. The photo was taken at his second inauguration in 1865. In the photo, John Wilkes Booth can be seen standing close to Lincoln.