Prohibiting Booze, Goldfish in the News: 1900–1950
Easily the most puzzling, tragic human act of the first half of the twentieth century was to send around ten million young people to their deaths to fight in World War I – including many who were shot by their own side for simply not being brave enough to hurl themselves into battle and face certain death. Then we did almost the same thing two decades later but on a far greater scale: 25 million military personnel and 47 million civilians failed to see in the New Year in 1946. The United Nations was established in an attempt to prevent anything so terrible ever happening again, but it didn’t stop tension rising between the East and West for decades to come (see Planning your Escape from Nuclear Fallout).
A personal transport revolution began with the mass production of the motor car, although it took several decades and a few thousand deaths on the roads before it was deemed a good idea to make people pass a test before being allowed to drive one. We saw a flu pandemic, the arrival of the Jazz Age and the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties, followed by the depression of the Thirties. We could suddenly toast our bread in a pop-up machine, zip up our trousers with a revolutionary new fastener, and pop down to a new-fangled movie theatre for the latest in public entertainment. But what wasn’t such a good idea?
Transporting the Public in Aircraft with Large Balloons Full of Flammable Gas
When the Montgolfier brothers sent two vastly braver but subsequently far less famous men up in their new hot-air balloon over Paris in 1783, the race to conquer the skies was underway. Jean Pierre Blanchard invented a basic means of propulsion and steering with which he managed to float across the English Channel in 1785, while scientist Jacques Charles had the bright idea of filling balloons with lovely, buoyant hydrogen rather than hot air. As successive airship designs were built, flown and crashed throughout the nineteenth century, hydrogen was generally adopted for having the best “lift”, despite being highly flammable and causing a number of catastrophic fires.
Airship fever began in 1900 with the construction of the first airship by the Zeppelin company, the LZ1 (also filled with hydrogen). Any safety improvements tended to concentrate on keeping fire away from the hydrogen rather than finding a way round using thousands of cubic metres of flammable gas, so when German forces attempted to use airships to drop bombs on Britain during World War I, they were effortlessly repelled by incendiary bullets. But at the time, the only effective alternative was helium; the only significant natural resources were beneath the American Great Plains; and the US government was reluctant to let other countries have it – particularly the Germans. So the Hindenburg, the last Zeppelin to be built, was filled with hydrogen. And its much-publicized crash-and-burn in New Jersey on May 6, 1937 trashed any confidence the flying public had in airships, no matter what gas they might have been filled with.
Writing “Kilroy was Here” on Walls in Unexpected Places
It would be wrong to pretend that graffiti is something that has only blighted inner cities since the invention of hip hop and the aerosol can. Prostitutes in Ancient Greece would scratch their contact details onto walls, while the Romans preferred to etch a bit of political rhetoric. But the first mass wave of graffiti was kick-started by an in-joke among US servicemen.
When newly built ships left one particular shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, an inspector by the name of James Kilroy would write “Kilroy was here” on riveted sections of the vessel so he could keep track of how many rivets had been put in by his workers during each shift. Unpainted and often hard-to-reach sections of the ship would thus retain his signature, and as servicemen went overseas, they would idly write “Kilroy Was Here” in similarly unexpected places in the hope of raising a laugh from their colleagues. At some point, the public joined in with the game – without having a clue what it all meant – and the long-nosed chap peeping over a wall become the standard accompanying sketch; he became known as Chad in the UK, El Fisgon in Mexico, Józef Tkaczuk in Poland, and Mr Foo in Australia. Kilroy himself never achieved much fame as a result of the graffiti explosion – but slightly more than if he’d merely chalked the word “rivet” instead.
Taking up the Clarinet in Order to Appear More Sexually Attractive
Performing is about showing off, and by putting yourself on a stage and managing to not be completely awful you instantly become more beguiling, enigmatic and sexually enticing than the person who is working the safety curtain. In fact, the importance of making an audience faintly aroused has seen the music business slide towards a scenario where the music is of marginal importance compared to the shade of lip-gloss worn by the pouting lead vocalist.
But this causes rivalry and tension between the musicians onstage, because none of them want to be loading the equipment out of the venue; they’d rather be exchanging glances, telephone numbers or bodily fluids with someone who’d been staring at them from the front row. And during the swing era of the 1930s, the clarinet player was, albeit briefly, the central focus of that attention. He was the band leader, the equivalent of Elvis, Tom Jones or Bono. It was a fleeting moment in the spotlight for an instrument that Mozart had first championed (in an “OK, you can sit in the back of the orchestra” kind of way) and is now only softly heard in adverts for milk chocolate or feather-soft mattresses. But for a few years, girls wanted clarinettists, and boys wanted to be clarinettists. Come the rock’n’roll era, however, its limitations as a rock posturing instrument became horribly evident, and today clarinettists are no more inherently sexy than upholsterers.
Bouncing up and Down Repeatedly on Pogo Sticks
Some fads that involve moderate amounts of exercise such as inline skating (see Going for a Ride on a Penny Farthing) or riding a penny farthing (see Rollerblading Rapidly through City Centres) have the additional benefit of transporting you from A to B in a shorter time than if you were walking. The pogo stick, however, replaced our carefully evolved bipedal system with a single stick with two foot pads, purely for the purposes of bouncing up and down. You could engineer a certain amount of forward and backward movement (mainly forward) but it was never going to get you to work on time and without injury.
It was patented in 1919 by American George Hansburg, who based his design on an earlier German invention that was made of wood but tended to buckle in high humidity. After he taught the chorus girls of Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies how to use his new, all-metal stick, they incorporated them into a dance routine that established the pogo as the next big thing. But its functional limitations, and the annoyance of trying to speak to somebody when they were using one, saw sales eventually decline. You can still buy them, of course, but they’re a niche market – as evidenced by the current availability of a model by the name of Vuertego V3 Stealth, a snip at $349.
Going to Watch Someone Sitting at the Top of a Flagpole
When American Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly accepted a wager in 1924 that he couldn’t sit on top of a flagpole for an elongated period of time, he’d probably never heard of St Simeon Stylites the Elder, who had perched atop a column some 1500 years earlier for an astonishing 36 years. If he had, he probably wouldn’t have taken up the challenge. But he hadn’t. So he did.
St Simeon had begun his lengthy residence on high in order to get a bit of peace and tranquility and remove himself from the trials of everyday life, but Kelly’s antics started to draw substantial crowds who were eager to squint at a man doing very little at a height of around fifty feet. His first attempt only lasted thirteen hours, but over the next five years various challengers vied with him for the flagpole-sitting crown, and during his 1929 attempt, which lasted 49 days, some twenty thousand people came to have a look. This record was beaten the following year by a Mr Bill Penfield, whose 51-day stint was only interrupted by a thunderstorm – but as the Great Depression started the fad was already waning, with people more interested in getting food on the table than watching someone being a bit of a show-off. We’re still ambivalent about the motivations of people suc
h as magician David Blaine who perform public stunts of this kind, and occasionally refer to them as “pole-sitters”. Appropriately, the current world record is held by a Pole, Daniel Baraniuk.
Preserving the Morals of a Nation by Banning the Sale of Alcohol
There’s something to be said for alcohol. It’s not great for your liver, your brain, or indeed most parts of your body, but in moderation, at judicious moments, it can smooth over all kinds of social barriers. You become more interesting and amusing – or at least you think you do, and if everyone else is drinking they might think so, too. You might not normally want to dance frenetically, but after a couple of glasses of fizz at a wedding the prospect becomes delightful. And without it, most of us would utterly fail to form sexual relationships; we’d just sit at home, looking at the phone and waiting for someone sexy to accidentally call us.
But religious groups in the US, and indeed across parts of Europe, overlooked all these undoubted benefits, and, in the second decade of the twentieth century their campaigns against the corrupting, evil influence of alcohol finally met with some success. Booze was banned in some shape or form by the governments of Russia, Iceland, Hungary, Norway, Finland and the USA over various periods between the two World Wars, and those who really fancied a drink were forced to get hold of it by either illicitly making it themselves, or finding someone who’d sell it to them under the counter. In the US, mafia groups quickly moved in to fill demand; at the height of Prohibition, ten thousand “speakeasies” were operating in Chicago alone, and the battle against booze was being lost. Franklin D Roosevelt passed the first of the laws repealing the ban in 1933 with the words “I think this would be a good time for a beer”. And eventually even some anti-alcohol campaigners admitted that the main effect of Prohibition had been to make people drink more, not less.
Sending Hundreds Upon Hundreds of Postcards
The recent explosion in telecommunications technology shows that if you make it easier and quicker for people to communicate, they’ll start sending each other notes about anything and everything. Until the 1860s, postal communication was only about long-hand letters, envelopes and stamps; but then John P Charlton filed a US patent for the postcard, a more informal method of telling people what you were up to. Throughout the next few decades they slowly began to catch on, but their popularity was slightly hampered by the fact that you were only legally allowed to write on the side of the postcard which had the picture on. When this law was changed in 1907, postcard mania began. People didn’t even care if they had nothing to say, they’d send the postcard anyway. By the end of 1909, a billion postcards a year were being mailed, and in the UK it was a similar story, with millions being popped into postboxes every week.
By the end of the decade, however, some of the novelty had worn off, and German manufacturers – who had previously been exporting millions of postcards to the US – noticed a massive slump. And as alternative ways of staying in touch grew – most notably the telephone – the postcard lost some of its appeal. We loved the erotic French ones from the 1910s, and the saucy British ones from the 1930s, but we lost interest in sending a postcard purely for the sake of sending a postcard, unless we were on a boring holiday.
Attracting Attention by Swallowing a Live Goldfish
For a student fad to spread across campus requires only word of mouth, a process that students are notoriously willing to participate in. But for a student fad to spread across an entire country requires the participation of the national press. Today, newspaper reporters are far too busy documenting the lives of reality TV stars or decrying the evils of immigration, but back in 1938 the antics of a potential class president at Harvard were deemed very interesting by the media, and they reported the incident in depth. After accepting a ten-dollar bet, one Lothrop Withington Jr swallowed a live goldfish. That was all. No introductory song or subsequent dance routine. He just swallowed it. And in a classic case of ignoring the parental maxim “Just because he does something doesn’t mean that you have to”, many students copied him.
As it became something of an “intercollegiate sport”, records started being set. First three, then six, then a leap to 25, thanks to a Mr Gilbert Hollandersky. By March 1939, new records were being reported in the national press on a daily basis, and students began to see it as an easy way to gain notoriety. (If you see swallowing a few dozen live goldfish as easy, of course.) When the record hit 43, the student responsible was suspended for misconduct, but the all-time record was 210, set by a chap at St Mary’s University in Minnesota. A mixture of student boredom with goldfish, objections from animal rights campaigners, and newspapers deciding to concentrate their efforts on reporting the imminent war in Europe saw the fad turn a little sour; goldfish everywhere exercised their gills in a sigh of relief.
Torture: the only limit is your imagination
The 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights stated, amongst many other laudable things, that “no one shall be subjected to torture”. As long ago as 1798 it had been established by no less a tyrant than Napoleon Bonaparte that torture basically doesn’t work; “The wretches say whatever comes into their heads,” he said, “and whatever they think one wants to believe.” The UN Declaration recognized this, along with the obvious fact that it was deeply unpleasant for those on the receiving end. How splendid it would have been if it had immediately curtailed all global torture – but unfortunately it still occurs in two-thirds of the world’s nations, and we continue to exhibit an incredible capacity for creativity when it comes to dreaming up ways of inflicting pain upon fellow human beings.
Of course, we’re a bit more squeamish than we used to be; even if we were able to attend a public hanging, drawing and quartering on the streets of London as Samuel Pepys was able to back in the 1660s, most of us would rather stay at home and watch a gentle sitcom on the TV. History is littered with devilish forms of torture that would make the modern stomach turn: the Ancient Greek method of the Brazen Bull involved placing the victim inside a hollow metal sculpture of a bull, lighting a fire underneath and roasting him to death; The Saw, as its name gently hinted, was a bloody medieval punishment consisting of hanging someone upside down and cutting them in half from the genitals to the neck (if not further – by that stage you may as well, after all); while scaphism elongated the torture for as long as two or three weeks, by simply forcing someone to sit, smeared with honey, in their own diarrhoea while they were slowly feasted upon by insects.
Various barbaric methods of impaling, piercing or skewering people to death seem to hold a particular fascination for us today, if not a keenness to give it a try: from the Iron Maiden – a cage which was designed so spikes would slowly and agonizingly drive their way into the body – to oriental variations on the same theme that depended on the quick-growing properties of sharpened bamboo to achieve a similarly gruesome effect. The Judas Cradle (allegedly used by the Spanish Inquisition in the late fifteenth century) involved being sat atop a sharpened pyramid and being forcibly lowered until you divulged any useful nuggets of information, with weights being added to ensure your death when your torturers got bored with your feeble pleading for mercy, while Ivan the Terrible and Vlad the Impaler lived up to their names by using a more straightforward approach – stick the victims at the top of a long spike in a public place and let gravity do the dirty work. This was presumably meant to act as a deterrent to others to commit crime, but people continued to be impaled, so you can only assume that they just really loved impaling. “Oh, our crazy ancestors,” we think as we queue up for a visit to Amsterdam’s torture museum, but we should remember that as recently as World War II unspeakably painful torture was meted out to Japanese prisoners of war involving bamboo shoots and fingernails. Even thinking about it makes typing this quite difficult.
Modern-day torture has relied on creating maximum emotional and psychological impact while avoiding those tell-tale physical signs that might see the torturer prosecuted. Solitary confinement, mock executions and sensory depr
ivation are particular favourites, along with the controversial practice of waterboarding; this is debated over endlessly by politicians as to whether or not it actually constitutes torture (it doesn’t drown people, it just makes them think that they’re drowning) but it’s notable that those who deny its capacity to harm haven’t actually experienced the horrific practice themselves.
You would have hoped that by the twenty-first century we’d have become civilized enough to properly adopt the UN Declaration and view all torture as a terrible idea – but when that pesky evidence doesn’t materialize, it seems that people just have an urge to make someone – and in some cases, anyone – pay horribly.
Blacking up in Order to Provide Onstage Entertainment
There’s nothing wrong with getting onstage and pretending to be someone other than yourself. Actors have been doing it for centuries. But there’s a point where your powers of impersonation can cross a line of bad taste. Pretending to be a blind person by staggering around with your arms outstretched screaming “I can’t see” isn’t very realistic, ditto a man playing the part of a woman by wearing enormous comedy breasts and speaking in a high voice. But by far the most inadvisable example from this period was white entertainers painting their faces black, putting on rotten accents and pretending to be happy-go-lucky plantation workers. They never pretended to be oppressed plantation workers whose human rights were being violated – that wouldn’t have gone down well in vaudeville – and so depictions ranged from the mocking of a crippled African in Cincinnati (“Jump Jim Crow”) to cloyingly sentimental ballads (“Swanee River”).
The Next Big Thing Page 8