[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

Tom Stoppard

 

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without
facts.

John Dewey

 

I'm a born-again atheist.

Gore Vidal

 

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. 

William S. Burroughs

 

Sometimes I meet people and feel bad for their dog.

Unknown

 

During labor, the pain is so great that a woman can almost imagine what a
man feels like when he has a fever.

Unknown

 

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Mad as a hatter

 

These days we associate mad as a hatter with a bit of whimsy in Lewis
Carroll's famous children's book Alice in Wonderland of 1865. Carroll didn't
invent the phrase, though. By the time he wrote the book it was already well
known.

 

The earliest example known was discovered by Stephen Goranson of Duke
University in Blackwood's Magazine; a section called Noctes Ambrosianae
featured imaginary conversations among Edinburgh wits of the time. In the
issue of June 1829 this exchange occurs: "'He's raving.' 'Dementit.' 'Mad as
a hatter. Hand me a segar.'" Although Blackwood's Magazine was published in
Edinburgh, the vocabulary (dementit and segar for cigar) suggests an attempt
at an American origin. The next known example is from a work by Thomas
Chandler Haliburton (Judge Haliburton), of Nova Scotia, who was well-known
in the 1830s for his comic writings about the character Sam Slick; in The
Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville of 1836,
he wrote: "Father he larfed out like any thing; I thought he would never
stop - and sister Sall got right up and walked out of the room, as mad as a
hatter". As the author felt no need to explain it, by then it clearly was
known in his part of North America. An early British reference is in
Pendennis by Thackeray, serialised between 1848-50: "We were talking about
it at mess, yesterday, and chaffing Derby Oaks - until he was as mad as a
hatter". Intriguingly, the character of Captain Shandon in the book was
modelled by Thackeray on William Maginn, one of the creators of the Noctes
Ambrosianae.

 

Note, by the way, that mad is being used in both these cases in the sense of
being angry rather than insane, so these examples better fit the sense of
phrases like mad as a wet hen, mad as a hornet, mad as a cut snake, mad as a
meat axe, and other wonderful similes, of which the first two are American
and the last two from Australia or New Zealand. But Thomas Hughes, in Tom
Brown's Schooldays, used it in the same way that Lewis Carroll was later to
do: "He's a very good fellow, but as mad as a hatter".

 

Few people who use the phrase today realize that there's a story of human
suffering behind it; the term derives from an early industrial occupational
disease. Felt hats were once very popular in North America and Europe; an
example is the top hat. The best sorts were made from beaver fur, but
cheaper ones used furs such as rabbit instead.

 

A complicated set of processes was needed to turn the fur into a finished
hat. With the cheaper sorts of fur, an early step was to brush a solution of
a mercury compound - usually mercurous nitrate - on to the fur to roughen
the fibers and make them mat more easily, a process called carroting because
it made the fur turn orange. Beaver fur had natural serrated edges that made
this unnecessary, one reason why it was preferred, but the cost and scarcity
of beaver meant that other furs had to be used.

 

Whatever the source of the fur, the fibers were then shaved off the skin and
turned into felt; this was later immersed in a boiling acid solution to
thicken and harden it. Finishing processes included steaming the hat to
shape and ironing it. In all these steps, hatters working in poorly
ventilated workshops would breathe in the mercury compounds and accumulate
the metal in their bodies.

 

We now know that mercury is a cumulative poison that causes kidney and brain
damage. Physical symptoms include trembling (known at the time as hatter's
shakes), loosening of teeth, loss of co-ordination, and slurred speech;
mental ones include irritability, loss of memory, depression, anxiety, and
other personality changes. This was called mad hatter syndrome.

 

It's been a very long time since mercury was used in making hats, and now
all that remains is a relic phrase that links to a nasty period in
manufacturing history. But mad hatter syndrome remains as a description of
the symptoms of mercury poisoning.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

What hand-rolled device did Marvin Chester Stone of Washington, D.C., patent
in 1888? Hint: although no longer hand rolled, it's still very much on the
scene today.

A: The wax paper drinking straw.

 

What food industry innovator invented a recoilless harpoon for whaling and a
fast process for converting sugar cane waste into paper pulp?

A: Frozen food king Clarence Birdseye.

 

In 1937, an American company built the very first auto-airplane combination.
What was it called?

A :The Arrowbile

 

Why was Sam Colt--inventor of the six-shooter--expelled from school at the
age of 16?

A: For experimenting with explosives.

 

What American city bills itself as the home of the first push-button car
radio, the first canned tomato juice, the first mechanical corn picker and
the first commercially built car?

A: Kokomo, Indiana, which calls itself the "city of firsts."

 

Who sent the next message after the historic words "What hath God wrought"
were transmitted over Samuel F. B. Morse's telegraph in 1844?

A: Dolly Madison. The words; "Message from Mrs. Madison. She sends her love
to Mrs. Wethered." Mrs. Wethered was a friend of the 76-year-old former
First Lady.

 

What famous American inventor ran twice for mayor of New York City--in 1836
and 1841-- and lost both times?

A: Samuel F. B. Morse.