UFOs and the Butt-Head Astronomer

It has been too many years, so I no longer remember why my brother and I were driving through San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park that night.  Since we were in a ‘57 MGA with the top down, it might have been just to enjoy the fun of riding around in a convertible on a warm summer night.  

Just as we passed the zoo, we saw it:  It was impossibly long, with red, white, and green lights in front and about a hundred yards farther back, it had a mass of flashing white lights, flying way too low over the park.  It was 1966 and just like about half of the country, we were seeing a UFO.  (No—I don’t really have a picture of it, since this happened decades before everyone carried a cell phone so they could take a picture of what they had for lunch.  The photo at left was generated by AI.)

Naturally, we chased it, trying to catch up with the UFO to get a better look at the mysterious object that didn’t seem to be moving very fast, but that seemed to make impossible turns, hovering at times, then speeding up.  I’m not sure about the statute of limitations but let me say that at one point, a white convertible may have driven across Olmos Basin Park in hot pursuit.  

Eventually, we managed to catch up with the tail end of our UFO, just close enough for that mass of flickering lights to spell out the message “GRAND OPENING SALE…”. About 100 feet in front of the flashing banner was the faint outline of a small Cessna.

We felt like idiots, of course!  I don’t remember us ever discussing the event again—we were too embarrassed to admit how foolish we had been.  It wasn’t really our fault, of course—we were preconditioned to expect to see a UFO.  All over the country, people went out every night looking for them and since they were looking for them, they found them.  Newspapers and television reported these sightings daily.

The UFO hysteria of the 1950s through the 1960s was a period marked by widespread fascination, fear, and speculation about UFOs, which were believed to be alien spacecraft. This phenomenon reached its height during the Cold War, as a combination of geopolitical tension, the rise of modern media, and the human inclination to explore the unknown coalesced into a weird cultural moment.  The hysteria was fueled by reports of strange sightings, government secrecy, and a growing fear of technological advances (particularly, the potential for extraterrestrial threats).

This period was also one of intense national and international paranoia, as Americans lived under the constant threat of nuclear war.  Our government, which needed to respond to this growing paranoia, first retreated behind a shield of silence or secrecy.  By the time the government finally did respond, there was widespread distrust of the government…a distrust fueled—in part by the Vietnam War.  The more the government said there were no UFOs, the more the public was convinced the government was lying.

Actually, there were Unidentified Flying Objects (with the emphasis on “unidentified”).  The fact that you can’t identify what someone saw doesn’t mean it was extraterrestrial—it just means the government doesn’t know what it was or if you saw it.

The media played a central role in amplifying the UFO hysteria of the 1950s.  Newspapers and magazines, eager to sell stories and appeal to public interest, sensationalized UFO sightings, creating a narrative that UFOs were an imminent threat or a mysterious puzzle to be solved. This coverage often lacked skepticism and led many readers to believe in the reality of extraterrestrial visitors.

Hollywood also capitalized on the UFO craze. Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and War of the Worlds (1953) tapped into public anxieties about alien life, portraying extraterrestrials as both potential saviors and terrifying invaders. These movies reflected and reinforced the conflicting emotions of wonder and fear that characterized the era.  On one hand, UFOs represented the possibility of contact with advanced civilizations, and on the other, they symbolized the unknown dangers of space and technology.

Television, which became more widespread in the 1950s, also played a significant role in spreading the UFO phenomenon. Shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits tapped into the growing cultural interest in the supernatural and the unknown, contributing to the atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia that surrounded the UFO hysteria.

This was a period of profound social change, with the women’s liberation, the sexual revolution, civil rights protests, and the protests against the war all occurring simultaneously.  Psychologists suggest that UFO sightings may have been a projection of collective anxieties about the future, particularly the fear of nuclear war and the unknown possibilities of space exploration.  The idea of seeing actual extraterrestrial visitors may have provided a way for people to externalize their fears, making the feared unknown more “manageable” and less threatening.

As more and more sightings were reported, an ever-growing number of people began searching the sky for something they didn’t understand, and naturally, they found what they were looking for (or thought they did).  

Lots of scientists (like Carl Sagan) came out and tried to calm the public by stating that the events needed to be looked at calmly, with logic and common sense.  These scientists were generally ignored.  The ability to use common sense and logic is so rare in society that we need a law requiring the few people still capable of rational thought to wear capes in public so they can be identified and consulted during an emergency.

By the end of the 1960s, UFO sightings began to decline, and the hysteria surrounding them started to subside.  Several factors contributed to this shift.  As the U.S. government continued to deny the existence of extraterrestrial life and further studies revealed more mundane explanations for many UFO reports, public interest began to wane.  Eventually, even the hysterical calm down.

That calm recently ended with hundreds of reports of drones flying over New Jersey.   Every night, people went out looking for the mysterious drones…and found them!  It didn’t matter that every damn photo or video taken of the “mystery drones” showed the FAA-mandated aircraft lighting pattern—they just had to be drones!  Probably Chinese drones!  Somebody should shoot them down!

Between 5:00 PM and 9:00 PM on any given night in New Jersey, there are over 1600 scheduled airline flights passing overhead.  Add to this the number of light aircraft, helicopters, and military aircraft and you will realize that at any given time anywhere in New Jersey, and there are a lot things moving in the sky.  

It didn’t take long before drones were sighted in other states across the country.  Politicians briefly stopped looking down their noses at their constituents long enough to look up in the night sky and notice there were “things” moving up there!  The former governor of Maryland announced that he had taken a photo of a formation of drones hovering over his house.  (An examination of his photo revealed an amateur photo of Orion’s Belt.)

Every aspect of the current drone hysteria matches the earlier UFO mania.  The government is being criticized for not “solving” the mystery even as their explanations are being ridiculed.  This seems to be a time of social change challenging long held beliefs.  The press is reporting even the wildest claims without any investigation or review.  And the hysteria seems to be spreading.

There is however, one big difference between today’s drone hysteria and the earlier UFO mania.  My brother and I could not have launched our own UFO—we probably couldn’t have put anything bigger than a rubber band powered balsa wood toy into the air.  But today, any teenage boy can buy a $10 drone from Temu, tape a glow-stick to it, and try to terrify his neighbor.  

This drone nonsense will eventually run its course, and the press will move on to the next sensation.  In the meantime, remember:  Fantastic claims require fantastic proof.

Biphasic What?

One of the great insights I gleaned from studying history was the realization that everyone throughout history, no matter when or where they lived, was basically the same as us if you learned enough about them.  This is probably fairly basic for most people but came as a great surprise to a poor dumb ol’ country boy.

That doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally be surprised by some alarming differences, however.  I just discovered something about the people of medieval Europe that is so strange it makes you want to rethink that first paragraph.  Those weirdos.

While we take it for granted that a perfect night’s sleep is eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, until about the late seventeenth century, people engaged in something called biphasic or segmented sleep.  Depending slightly on the time of the year, people went to bed around 9:00 PM, slept until about 11:00, then woke up for two hours before going back to sleep until dawn.  

The two periods of rest were commonly called first and second sleep.  During those two waking hours, people might finish chores, talk with their family, or—if they listened to the urgings of the church—engage in prayer.  And I suppose for some people, that holy suggestion was actually true.  For most married couples the most obvious activity was engaging in sex, particularly since it was widely believed that the healthiest children were conceived after first sleep.

People worked hard and usually came home too exhausted to make love, so a brief nap first made sense.  It also explains the high birth rate of Medieval Europe.   (Thirty-five years ago, when I was doing research in Tegucigalpa, the city turned off the water supply for more than twenty hours a day.   The water was turned back on at 4:00 AM, the air escaping from the pipes created a moaning sound all over town.  Locals said this resulted in an incredibly high birth rate because it was too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep.)

This segmented sleep pattern was not just a social convention, it occurred naturally.  Long term experimental studies where people lived in environments without clocks and no access to natural lighting have been conducted.  The subjects slept or worked when they wanted to and were free to set their own schedules.  Over time, they developed a form of polyphasic schedule with some of the subjects developed a midday siesta and others developed the segmented schedule described above.  They also slowly evolved into a 25-hour day, a phenomenon for which I have no explanation.

While there are sufficient references to first and second sleep in medieval records for us to be certain about their sleeping patterns, whether this pattern extends to other cultures is still not clear.  When people set down to record the events of their daily lives, there is a tendency to only record the unique events, not the prosaic.  As an inveterate journal writer, I’ve filled countless Moleskin notebooks, but I doubt that I have ever described how I sleep at night.  We tend to only record the out of the ordinary, and nothing is more routine or boring than our bedtimes.

Pliny left us hints, so it is likely that the Romans had similar biphasic sleep patterns.  About the earlier Greeks—we don’t have a clue.  As for other cultures and times, it seems that some pattern of segmented sleep periods, such as divided nocturnal sleep or a daily siesta seems to be the norm.  Much more research is needed and I expect we will hear more about this in the years to come.

The biphasic sleep patterns of Medieval Europe came to end with the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of artificial lighting.  The invention and increasing availability of affordable candles, oil lamps, and later gas and electric lights allowed people to extend their evening activities, allowing people to stay up later and to slowly consolidate the first and second sleep periods into a single uninterrupted period.

Urbanization and industrial schedules required a more regimented approach to time, with fixed work hours making consolidated nighttime sleep more practical and necessary.  At the same time, the industrial revolution made clocks cheaper, which regimented daily routines further, eroding the natural segmented sleep habits.

The Industrial Revolution also changed society.  Evening activities such as theater, social gatherings, and reading gained popularity, leading people to stay awake later and skip the earlier phase of segmented sleep.  Over time, society came to believe that an interrupted eight-hour sleep period was the healthiest.  Even today, most people believe the single long period of sleep is the best choice, despite the lack of conclusive medical studies supporting that view.

This was all new information to me, and the evidence for biphasic sleeping during medieval times still seems to be making its way through the various academic disciplines.  This made me wonder if this relatively new information would made any changes in art history.  Have we interpreted medieval depictions of sleeping people correctly?  Should certain paintings be reinterpreted?

The painting at right is The Land of Cockaigne, by Pieter Bruegel, the Elder.  The painting shows a peasant, a soldier, and a clerk asleep under a tree.  I won’t bore you with all the competing—and totally contradictory—interpretations of the painting, but I can assure you that none of the competing theories take in the possibility that these are people in their first sleep period.  This was just the first medieval painting depicting sleep that occurred to me, there are countless others.

How will this realization change our interpretations of paintings like this?  How many paintings will need to be reexamined?  I’m looking forward to reading some new interpretations.

The Sinking of the San Telmo

A few weeks ago, I told half of the story about the loss of the Spanish ship San Telmo.  Now, I want to recount the other half of the story.

When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, it set off a chain reaction across Europe and the Americas.  The resulting Peninsular War lasted for six long years leading to the abdication of Napoleon and start of wars for independence for most of the Spanish colonies in the Americas.  Thought Spain would not formally admit the loss of their colonies for years, by the time the Spanish monarchy was restored to the throne, it was almost impossible for Spain to stop the revolutions in Venezuela, Argentina, and Mexico, but Spain was desperate to retain Peru and the silver mines that furnished a third of the royal Spanish income.

By 1819, the Spanish situation was critical.  In a desperate last-ditch effort to squash the revolutions in Chile and Peru, Spain sent a fleet of warships under Brigadier Rosendo Porlier to Peru with the mission of holding on to the mines and the important seaports in Chile and Peru.  While the flagship of the squadron was the San Fernando, among the ships of the convoy was the ill-fated San Telmo, a second-rate ship of the line.

This was the golden age of sailing ships, when warships were rated primarily by their size, how many gundecks, and the total number of cannons on those decks.  Large scale sea battles, like the Battle of Trafalgar were carried out by the largest ships, usually first and second rate ships of the line.  A first-rate ship of the line had three decks and might carry as many as 130 large cannons.  A second-rate ship of the line, the true workhorses of a navy, had two decks and carried 70-80 cannons.

If you are familiar with the movie Master and Commander, the ship used was the HMS Surprise, a frigate and 5th rate ship of the line.  If such a ship was to do battle with either a first- or second-rate ship, it would be roughly equivalent to a nine-year-old having a fist fight with the heavy weight champion of the world.  The child might be able to outmaneuver the boxer for a while, but the fight would be over as soon as soon as the boxer successfully landed his first blow.  Similarly, a single broadside from a second-rate ship of the line would destroy a smaller frigate.

Sailing southwestward from Spain, the ships had to sail around the southern tip of South America, the dreaded Drake Passage, where some of the most violent storms imaginable occur frequently, particularly in winter.  Even today, with modern steel ships and weather forecasts supplied by satellites, ships still suffer accidents in these water, though thankfully they are usually minor.

The San Telmo, a second-rate ship with 74 large guns on two decks was an older ship and was a poor choice to make the difficult voyage.  Launched in 1788, the San Telmo was reaching the end of her useful life.  While the ship had never been involved in a major fleet action, she had been sent several times to the ‘Spanish Main’, the Caribbean, where wooden ships quickly became damaged due to the warm humid climate and the sea worms that burrowed into the hull.  

The fleet arrived in the Drake Passage on September 1, just barely out of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.  In good weather, the San Telmo could have made it through the Drake Passage in nine days.  Unfortunately, the small fleet of ships found anything but good weather.  While ships of the early 19th century carried a weather glass (a crude form of barometer), they had no way of recording accurate weather conditions.  From the descriptions later given by sailors on the surviving ships, it is likely that the fleet sailed directly into full hurricane conditions.  

The San Telmo, fifty feet wide and two-thirds the length of a football field, carried a crew of 644 men.  On September 2, 1819, another ship in the convoy observed that a powerful wave had knocked out the tiller of the San Telmo, rendering the ship impossible to steer.   While the sails could have been set to compensate for the loss of the tiller in calmer seas, in the rough waters of the Drake Passage, the ship was doomed.  The ship was thus presumed to have sunk with her entire crew.

I asked AI to generate a picture of the San Telmo in the Drake Passage and the best I could get was the incorrect image at right.  (AI flatly refused to do any better, falsely claiming that to do so would violate community standards!). There are several things wrong with the image, particularly that no sailing ship in a storm would have this much canvas flying.  Not only would steering the ship be impossible, but the high winds would have destroyed both the rigging and the sails, probably demasting the ship in the process, leaving the ship helpless and doomed.

More likely, the ship would have hauled in her main sails and unfurled smaller triangular storm staysails.  These sails were just large enough to enable the ship to head into the crashing waves, reported by other ships to be as high as 65 feet.  If the ship couldn’t maneuver and turned sideways to the waves, the ship would quickly founder.  At left, is an image of a ship with storm staysails set.

Though explorers would later find evidence that a few survivors might have made their way to Livingston Island, there is no proof that any of crew survived the storm.  Even if a few of the crew managed to land on the island, they either eventually starved to death or died of exposure.

Meanwhile, in Peru, when word of loss of the ship reached Peru, the revolutionaries quickly took advantage of the situation.  Lord Thomas Cochrane, the daring British sailor who would become the model for the Horatio Hornblower series of books and movies as well as the Jack Aubrey novels, had left England to offer his services to the revolutionaries of Chile and Peru.  (Actually, Cochrane was in disgrace, falsely accused of crimes that he would later, in a typically courageous style, receive a pardon and return to England as a hero.)

Valdivia was one of the most fortified locations in South America, with a series of heavily armed forts guarding its approach by sea.  Known as the "Key to the Pacific," it was vital for Spain's control of the region.  The fortress was considered impregnable, with strong natural defenses and a heavily armed garrison.  The long-range guns of the fort were capable of destroying an approaching vessel long before an enemy ship could enter the harbor and turn to fire a broadside.  If troops were landed on shore, there were a series of small defensive forts surrounding the fortress.  Any attacking forces, denied a dock to unload, would only be able to land small cannons, no match for the powerful cannons in both the forts and the main fortress.

Cochrane, leading the newly formed Chilean Navy, devised a bold plan to surprise the Spanish defenders, one that relied on stealth, speed, and deception.  With only 300 marines aboard his flagship, the O'Higgins, and a small support vessel, he decided to use the loss of the San Telmo to his advantage.

Cochrane approached the port in darkness, using captured Spanish flags to disguise his ships as friendly.  Using signal flags, Cochrane claimed his ship contained reinforcements from the San Telmo.   Under cover of night, he landed his small force of marines far from the main fortress, marching them overland to launch a surprise assault on the least-defended positions.

Cochrane's men attacked the outermost forts one by one, moving swiftly to overwhelm the defenders.  Their element of surprise and disciplined aggression allowed Marines to capture each of the small forts before the Spanish could organize a counterattack.  Once all the outer defenses fell, Cochrane’s forces moved on the central fortress, which surrendered after realizing resistance was futile.

The loss of Valdivia was a major loss to the Spanish government and helped pave the way for Chilean Independence, after which the forces in Chile moved northward to help secure Peruvian Independence.  Linking up with the army of Simon Bolivar as he moved southward from Columbia and Venezuela, Spain eventually would lose Peru, too.

Like dominoes falling one by one, the loss of the San Telmo led to the loss of the Valdivia, which led to the loss of Chile and later Peru.  With the loss of the silver mines of South America, Spain, once the most powerful nation in Europe, was no longer even a second-rate power.  Though it would take another 80 years for the United States to deliver the final blow, the Spanish Empire was over.

How Did They Come Up with That?

Quick, what role did Pauline Wayne play in the Taft Administration?  And what did President Theodore Roosevelt think of Emily Spinach?  And long before Dwight Eisenhower became president, who was the “Old Ike” who lived at the White House?

Pauline Wayne held the position of First Cow from 1910 to 1913.  This was back when pasteurized milk was not commercially available, and President Taft liked fresh cream in his coffee, so Pauline grazed on the White House Lawn until the next president (the arrogant stuffed shirt, Woodrow Wilson) decided that live-in livestock was not in keeping with the dignity of the Presidency.  

Wilson, who kept canaries, promptly changed his mind about keeping exotic animals during World War I, when there was a national labor shortage.  Wilson used sheep instead of groundskeepers to maintain the White House Lawn.  One of the sheep, Old Ike, was a notoriously bad-tempered Shropshire Ram, who routinely threatened the staff until he was given tobacco to chew.

And, of course, Emily Spinach was a garter snake that Alice Roosevelt, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, carried around in her purse and occasionally produced at formal White House dinners to shock the guests.  Alice named the snake after an Aunt Emily, whom Alice claimed had an equally flexible spine, and after spinach because the snake was green.  When complaints about Alice’s outrageous public behavior reached the president, he replied, "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both."

The strange names of pets came to mind this morning while Charlie was sitting in my lap.  (Charlie is a black cat, not to be confused with Charli, my granddaughter, or Charlie, my friend and bridge partner, or even, Charles, his son.)  I’m allergic to cats, so we have five of them.  Charlie (The cat who is named after the 15th century Burgundian Duke, Charles the Bold) loves to climb into my lap and rub his wet nose up and down my arms, producing burning red welts that last for about an hour.  Obviously, a better name for an acid-dripping black monster would be “Alien”.

Once you start thinking about the pets of prominent people, it is almost impossible to stop.  For example, when Lord Byron was at Oxford, he was forbidden to keep a dog—so he kept a bear.  The bear was nameless (probably because you don’t need a name for something until you have two of them and whoever heard of someone with two pet bears?).

Pablo Picasso was fascinated by the Diego Velazquez painting, Las Meninas.  (So am I, see the blog about it here.). In total, Picasso painted forty-four different versions of the Velasquez paintings, fifteen of which included his pet dachshund, Lump.  Picasso painted a portrait of the dog on a dinner plate that was used to feed the dachshund.  That plate recently sold at auction for an undisclosed price (between $20,000 and $90,000).  (I’ll sell you Charlie’s dish for $20 and will paint anything you like on it.)

In 1960, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 5, the first spacecraft to orbit the Earth and safely return with two live dogs.  One of the dogs was Strelka, who later gave birth to a litter of puppies.  When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the While House, First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, inquired about the dogs, so Khrushchev sent one of the puppies, Pushinka (Russian for Fluffy) to the president’s wife.  The dog was extensively x-rayed and examined with a magnetometer by the CIA before being given a home at the White House.  When Pushinka became pregnant by the President’s dog Charlie—no relation to my cat—the President dubbed the resulting litter “pupniks”.  As of this writing, Pushinka’s descendants are still alive.

Lots of writers have kept pets whose names tell us more about the writers than their pets.  Mark Twain had a cat named Sour Mash.  Dorothy Parker’s cat was name Cliché.  Ernest Hemingway had several six-toed cats, one of which was named Marilyn Monroe.  Beatrix Potter wrote stories about Peter Rabbit, but called her own pet bunny, Benjamin Bouncer.

Equally revealing are the names singers have given their pets.  Frank Sinatra had a dog named Ringo, while David Bowie kept a cat named Elvis.  One of my favorite tunes is the song, Martha, My Dear from the Beatles’ White Album.  Part of the lyrics include:

Martha my love,
Don't forget me,
Martha my dear.
Hold your head up,
You silly girl,
Look what you've done.

When you find yourself in the thick of it,

Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you, silly girl.

I only recently learned that Martha was Paul McCartney’s English sheepdog.  

Sometimes, the pets of the famous are just inexplicable.  Boris Karloff was famous for portraying several frightening monsters including Frankenstein or the Mummy, so you would expect that he kept vampire bats or a jar full of spiders.  Actually, Karloff kept a penguin named Oscar in his backyard pool, personally feeding Oscar fish.  (To be fair, Karloff also kept a pet leopard.)

Since it’s that time of the year, I should probably end with the story of Abraham Lincoln’s first Thanksgiving.  On October 3, 1863, Lincoln signed a proclamation making the last Thursday of November a national “day of Thanksgiving and Praise.”  A citizen sent Lincoln a live turkey to be used for the holiday feast, but Lincoln’s ten-year-old son, Tad, taught the bird to follow him around the White House lawn and named him Jack.  When Tad learned that the bird was to be slaughtered, he interrupted a cabinet meeting, demanding the bird be spared.  Lincoln hastily wrote out a note granting the bird a stay of execution—thus starting an annual tradition that is still honored.  

City Founding

The Consul of Rome was worried.  The recent attempted coup by Cataline had been suppressed by the Roman Army, but had exposed that in the countryside—particularly to the north—there was widespread discontent among the landless poor, to whom Cataline had promised land reform in his failed bid to be elected consul.

The Consul decided to shoot two hares with one arrow.  He would strengthen the security of The Po Valley while co-opting Cataline’s policy, by creating a little land reform of his own:  He would create a new city.

Sending a cohort of soldiers to secure the area along the Roman road, Via Cassia, and within the Valley of the River Arno, a site was chosen close to a narrow point in the river, where fording the river was easy.  A short distance from the river, a level site was chosen for the camp.  After an auger from Rome carefully examined the livers of a pheasant and a rabbit from the area and certified that the area was suitable, the gods were thanked, and construction was begun.

The cohort quickly erected a castrum, a rectangular military camp.  A ditch was dug and a wooden stockade was erected within the ditch.  Within the stockade two broad streets, one running north and south and the other, east and west, were created.  At the northern end, a large open area—the forum—was erected and the commandant’s tent placed at the end.  The rest of the rectangle was filled with orderly rows of tents for the soldiers and slaves who would erect the city.  Slowly, over the coming weeks and months, these tents would be replaced with more permanent structures.

The engineers carefully planned the city.  After calculating the amount of water that could eventually be brought to the city by an aqueduct and measuring the amount of arable farmland in the vicinity, the engineers determined that the maximum population for the city would be 50,000.  The city would be designed to accommodate that many inhabitants and would not be allowed to grow past that number for fear of polluting the water supply.  When the population grew to that number, a new city in a different location would be created.

The engineers carefully enlarged the rectangular camp to enclose an area 720 yards by 620 yards, with the castrum forming the center of the new city.  The wide north/south road was called the Cordo, with the equally broad east/west road called the Decumanus.   The remaining area was subdivided with six more roads running north/south and four roads running east/west.  This meant the city was laid out in a grid pattern with each block, called an insula, of roughly the same size.

Surrounding the new city, a large double wall began construction, with the stone coming from a government quarry.  The long rectangle of walls, roughly a mile and a half in length, were broken only at the four points where the two main roads crossed.  Just within the walls there was a thirty-yard-wide open space called the pomerian separating the city from the walls.  In times of warfare, this open space could be used by the military or the civilians from nearby farms seeking safety.

Each insula was divided by a narrower back street running east/west, creating two large rectangular areas that could be filled with a double row of buildings facing either a main street or a back street.  These rows of double buildings could be further divided by alleys as necessary.  Each street was paved, with a drainage ditch on both sides and lined with a stone sidewalks.  Roman law required buildings along major street to have a protective cover over the sidewalks and limited the height of buildings to no more than twice the width of the street so that sunlight could reach the street.

The engineers designed a new and larger forum at the center of the city, large enough to be the civic center of the city.  Nearby, they established a public market, created a public fountain to be fed by the aqueduct, and set aside spaces for bath houses, toilets, an amphitheater, and a coliseum to be located just outside the walls.  The rest of the space inside the walls was set aside for private owners to build in as they liked.

To help settle the area, the Consul gave some of the interior land to 2,000 retired soldiers.  This seemingly generous gift actually solved several problems for the Roman government.  The new residents of the city were fiercely loyal to a government that they had fought for and would serve as the leading citizens of the new city.  The soldiers would be loyal and grateful to the Consul who had rewarded them, and most important—at least in the mind of the Consul—it safely removed from Rome large numbers of unemployed men who knew how to fight.

Besides the soldiers, many more workers were needed to build the city, most of whom  were slaves, belonging either to individuals who wished to build in the city or to  the government.  Many of the slaves were from the recently conquered Gaul, but others came from Greece, Egypt, and every corner of the Roman Republic.  Other workers were poor farmers who lived near the new city and were eager to find work to supplement their income.

By now, the interior of the city was beginning to fill up.  While it would take years to complete the walls, the theater, and the coliseum, the signs of growth were everywhere.  Workshops, forges, and the huts of the workers were scattered across the city.  While a stone bridge across the Arno was planned, a makeshift bridge of wooden planks across wooden boats already bore the weight of wagons bringing building material and food for the workers.  The market, though not yet under a stone roof, was already busy every day with merchants selling their wares to the inhabitants.

Eventually, both the forum and market would be in large stone buildings.  The water wells within the city would be replaced by the stone aqueduct that brought water the thirty miles from the mountains to the north.  A bridge high enough to allow for boat traffic was to be built, and the roads of the Via Cassia would be paved with stone all the way to Rome.  

Though it would take much longer for the city population to reach 50,000 than expected, the town was firmly established.  It would quickly become a center for textile production, the remains of which were just recently discovered by archaeologists.  Today, the city that Julius Caesar founded—Florence—is far more famous for being the birthplace of the Renaissance.  

The Pencil

Sixty-six years ago, an economist named Lawrence Read published a tidy little essay about all of the different companies from around the world that contributed the materials to make a simple common pencil.  Written to show the folly of a centrally planned economy and how a free market is the most efficient method of production, Read’s very short story called I, Pencil is just as readable and enjoyable today as it was when it was written.  You can read it here for free.

Read’s little essay is wonderful—despite its failing to include any mention of the history of the pencil (And as we all know, history is the tail that wags the dog of all knowledge…Or something like that).

It will surprise no one that the history of pencils—and damn near everything else—starts with the Romans, who used a stylus to carve letters into wet clay or wax tablets.  Historians are still arguing whether they also used silverpoint or leadpoint techniques—in which a soft metal is used to leave soft marks on papyrus.  (No, the stylus the Sumerians used to create cuneiform is not a precursor to the pencil because it wasn't used to draw or write, since it pressed a shape into the clay, it is the precursor to the rubber stamp.)

Paper did not become widely available in Europe until the 11th century and the only methods of writing or drawing employed either charcoal or ink.  By the Renaissance, artists could use charcoal sticks, which were an improvement over lumps of charcoal, but the pencil as we know it still did not exist.

In 1565, a large deposit of fine solid graphite was discovered in the British hamlet of Seathwaite.  The properties of graphite were already known, but the mines in the Cumbria region of England produced solid graphite that could be sawn into solid sticks suitable for drawing.  The resulting sticks were brittle, so the graphite was wrapped in either string or long strips of sheepskin.  To this day, no other source of natural graphite that is pure enough to use for writing—but hard enough to be sawn into usable sticks—has been located. 

At this point, pencils were almost lost to the world because someone realized that graphite was soft enough to be carved and that it remained stable at very high temperatures, all while remaining slippery.  Those three traits combined meant that graphite was perfectly suited to make cannonball molds.  The graphite mines were quickly made a royal monopoly and to ensure that none of the precious material was smuggled out of the country, the mines were flooded when not needed for military production.

Smaller blocks of graphite could be smuggled out and sawn into thin sticks suitable for use in drawing.  Almost immediately, a two-piece rectangular or square wooden encasement for the graphite stick was invented.  The groove was sawn in the wood—which was usually a soft wood such as red ash or juniper—to prevent splintering—so the lead in the center of the pencil was also square or rectangular.  The picture at right shows one of those early pencils (this one was made in 1630).

Note.  There is no real “lead” in that lead.  In the 16th century, alchemists believed that everything was made up from four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water.  At the time, graphite was believed to be a form of lead ore.  Half a millennium later, the mistake is still with us.  In most European languages, the word for pencil translates to “lead pen”.  Consider the irony that slippery graphite is composed of the same element as practically indestructible diamonds:  pure carbon.

A century later, Germany began making a usable (but somewhat inferior) pencil, using powdered graphite treated with antimony and sulfur.  When the mixture was allowed to dry out, it formed a usable graphite stick that could be encased in wood.  While the higher quality British pencil was preferable, the German pencils were a practical compromise.

Which brings us (as faithful readers have probably already guessed) to Napoleon.  Great Britain went to war with France in 1793, establishing a naval blockade of French ports.  At the same time, English merchants were forbidden to trade with France.  French artists and writers were used to pencils and were loath to return to the days of using charcoal, and, unfortunately, France was also at war with Germany.  (Well, more accurately, France was at war with the German-speaking States within the Holy Roman Empire, but let’s not quibble.)

France needed an alternative, not only for convenience, but by this point, using a pencil was a military necessity.  Military officers routinely drew maps, scribbled written orders, and had to solve the complicated math problems required for accurately firing artillery.  Napoleon urged the French government, technically the National Convention, to find a solution.  The Convention asked Nicolas-Jacques Conté, a scientist and French army officer, to find a solution to the problem.  Conté worked on the process for several days and came up with a brilliant solution:  By mixing powdered graphite with a fine clay, the mixture could be extruded into whatever shape was desired and then baked in a kiln.  By varying both the proportion of graphite in the mixture and the baking time, pencil leads of varying hardness could be made, producing not only cheaper and more practical pencils, but production of pencils in a variety of diameters and hardnesses heralded the invention of the art pencil.  (A few years later, in his spare time, Conté also invented the colored crayon.)

The new French-style pencil was easy to produce and was quickly copied all over the world.  Within a few years, inventors had substituted colored pigments for the graphite, added wax as a binder and were producing colored pencils.  The new pencil industry quickly put the hard graphite mines of England out of business, though if you go to Cumbria, where the mines were located, you can see the world’s largest pencil at the Derwent Pencil Museum.

I guess that’s enough history lecturing for now.  I could tell you why England banned the use of the mechanical pencil sharpener during World War II, but I think I’ll save that story for another day.

My Annual Bitch about Daylight Savings Time

Quick quiz:  Are we currently on Standard Time or DST (Dumb as Shit Time)?  Now ask the same question of a couple of friends.  When I tried this, the answers were pretty evenly split.  I’ll give you the correct answer farther down.

There is an awful lot of misinformation about DST floating around out there.  No, the Romans didn’t use DST.  I don’t know who started this silly internet myth, but the Romans did not have accurate mechanical clocks and depended on either sundials or water clocks.  The Romans divided the daylight into twelve parts, and since the length of the day varied with the season, so did the times.  If you had tried to explain the concept of DST to a Roman, he would have just asked why you didn’t get up either earlier or later, as you saw fit.  

Nor was DST invented by Benjamin Franklin.  While serving as the American Ambassador to France in 1784, Franklin wrote a letter to The Journal of Paris, a daily newspaper, suggesting that Parisians could save a small fortune spent on candles if they would just shift their clocks an hour, to use more daylight.  Since then, proponents of screwing around with our clocks have suggested that if a man as wise as Franklin supported DST, we should adopt it.

What these morons fail to notice however is that Franklin’s letter was satire.  It was a joke.  Franklin didn’t really want to make the blanket longer by cutting off a foot at the top and then sewing it back onto the bottom.

And no—periodically messing around with our clocks doesn’t save either energy or money.  Two different government studies concluded that DST either saves negligible amounts of energy or actually increases the cost of lighting our homes.  Think about it for a second:  do businesses and schools routinely turn off the lights indoors during the day and get by on just the light from windows?  Do you have lights on during the day in your house?  

Careful computer modeling of energy costs by the hour suggests that the farther north you live, the more likely that DST might save you an insignificant amount of energy costs.  If you live in North Dakota, you might see 0.5% reduction on your heating and lighting costs.  If you live somewhere warmer, say in the high deserts of New Mexico, messing around with your clocks probably sends your energy bills up an equal amount.  

There are other costs associated with time switching.  The disruption in sleep patterns caused by the shift to DST has been linked to various health issues.  Studies show increases in heart attacks, strokes, and depression immediately following the clock changes, especially in the spring.  The hour lost in March can worsen sleep deprivation and increase stress levels, with some research suggesting that this impacts long-term health and well-being.

Adjusting to DST leads to a temporary drop in productivity.  Sleep-deprived workers are less efficient, and studies have shown that in the week after the clocks shift forward in spring, they suffer an increase in workplace injuries and make more mistakes.  This downtime from inefficiency and injuries adds hidden economic costs.

DST is associated with a higher risk of traffic crashes, particularly on the Monday following the Spring shift.  The abrupt change can make people drowsier behind the wheel, leading to more crashes.  Studies have shown an increase in fatal car crashes by 6% in the days following the switch.

So why don’t we end this nonsense and just leave our clocks alone all year long, like countries around the world have already done?  Many politicians have suggested doing just that, but legislation always fails to pass because politicians can’t agree on whether to just end DST or implement it all year long.  It’s kind of like our politicians all agree that eating pizza is a great idea but can’t decide if they are hungry enough to have the pizza cut into eight slices or just six. 

As the law stands today, any state can decide to end DST—as Arizona and Hawaii have already done—but the states are forbidden to implement DST all year long (that being a right reserved for Congress).  Here’s a wild thought:  Let’s stop messing around with the clocks and just change the time that stores and schools open.  

Nah.  That will never work.  However, if we can seasonally adjust our clocks, why stop there?

Let’s seasonally adjust our scales.  Every year in the Fall, let’s adjust our scales down by ten pounds so that every American can really enjoy the holidays.  Then we can eat all the Halloween candy we want and pig out on Thanksgiving and Christmas, because all of us have received a free ten-pound reduction in our weight.  

Of course, when Spring rolls around and we adjust the scales back up, we’ll have to work off the extra weight.  But we can adjust for that and simply increase everybody’s height by six inches, which should average out the body mass index.  And what short person wouldn’t want to be taller for half the year?

My wife gave me a great little convertible for my retirement.  In the summer, it’s too hot in New Mexico to not use the air conditioner, but the rest of the year has wonderful weather to drive with the top down.  How about we seasonally raise the speed limit by twenty miles an hour in the fall and then drop them in summer?

And the holidays are expensive, let’s seasonally adjust our bank accounts.  Just add $1000 to everyone’s bank account before Thanksgiving, then take it back in February.  It’s too cold to do anything fun in February anyway….  Wait, if we added about 20 degrees to the thermometer in late fall, then dropped it 40 degrees in the summer, we could have “temperate” weather all year long!  In your face Hawaii!

Now if any of these suggestions sounds ludicrous, please tell me how they differ from screwing about with our clocks.  (And for the record, we are on Standard Time.  Temporarily.)

The Astronomer

If you go to the Louvre (which is the most famous art museum in the world), the most crowded room is always Room 38, the Salle des États.  There is always a throng of camera-wielding tourists who are trying to take the definitive photograph of the most reproduced work of art in the world, the Mona Lisa.  Most of these tourists will leave slightly disappointed, since the painting is smaller than most imagine, it is firmly secured behind several inches of bullet-proof glass, and its protective varnish coating has become so dark in the two centuries since it was last replaced that it is hard to see any details of the painting.

At right is a view of the reverse of the Mona Lisa—the view the museum rarely shows.  If you watched the recent movie, The Glass Onion, you know they mistakenly showed the painting on canvas but as you can see, it is actually painted on a poplar wood panel.

If you go there, ignore the Mona Lisa because the gift shop will sell you a postcard that gives you a much better image than you can see competing to stand in front of the painting, itself.  Instead, look around the room at some of the Louvre’s most famous paintings that are all in the same room and which are, for the most part, completely ignored.  The Virgin and Child with St. Anne is there (also by Leonardo da Vinci), along with The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David.  One painting that is hard to miss is the Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese (It’s the largest painting in the museum).

That last painting, The Wedding at Cana, really shouldn’t even be in the Louvre, since Napoleon looted it from Venice.  In the last two centuries Venice has demanded it back several times, but the Louvre says it is too fragile to survive the trip.  Recently, the Museum gave Venice a high-resolution copy of the painting and declared the matter closed.  (It costs 15 Euros to enter the museum and it won’t accept high-resolution copies of the currency.) 

When you are finished viewing the paintings in Room 38, go up to the second floor to room 837 in the Richelieu Wing.  There you will find two incredible Vermeer paintings.  The first is The Lacemaker, in which a young woman is depicted, focused intently on her lace-making.  She sits at a table with various lace-making tools and materials, illustrating Vermeer’s masterful use of light and texture.  

The second painting is The Astronomer, in which a scholar is seen who is deeply engaged in his studies.  The painting shows a man seated at a desk that is covered with books and scientific instruments, such as a globe and a book of astronomical charts.  The man wears a Japanese robe—garb that was reserved for scholars at the time.  

The Astronomer originally was part of a pendent painting—a pair of paintings with the same theme.  This painting was meant to be displayed with another Vermeer painting, The Geographer, that depicts the same man studying a globe.  Both paintings were produced during a period when scientific discoveries were sweeping through Europe.

Both works were signed by Vermeer and both works used the same model, who is believed to be Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the self-taught scientist and the founder of the field of microbiology.  

The two paintings remained together for over a century, being sold to various owners.  Such sales were usually part of estate sales after the deaths of their owners.  In 1803, at one such sale, the two paintings were finally separated.  After many sales, The Geographer was sold to the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, in 1885, where it remains today, while The Astronomer was sold to Alphonse James de Rothschild, and it stayed in the family until the Rothschilds sold it to the French Government in partial payment of estate taxes in 1983.  The little brass plaque at the Louvre explains this to the viewer.

What the brass plaque does not explain is that for a few years, the painting was part of the personal collection of Adolf Hitler.

Although it is common knowledge that the Nazis looted artwork—particularly art owned by Jewish families—from all of occupied Europe, it is less well known that both Hitler and Goring had lists of artworks of special interest that that were actively hunted for the Nazi leaders’ personal art collections.

While there is evidence that The Astronomer spent some time in Hitler’s personal residence, by the war’s end, the painting had been put in storage, awaiting the construction of the  Führermuseum, to be built in Linz, Austria, that Hitler envisioned to showcase “his” vast collection of art.  

Hitler planned on building the largest and best art museum in the world and planned to fill it with the finest art in the world.  It was not revealed until after the war that Hitler actually had compiled a list of the art works he wanted (including art from both the United States and the Soviet Union).  The fact that all of the art in his museum was to be be stolen didn’t matter to der Fuehrer.  

After the war, the Allies’ Monuments Men recovered the painting from a salt mine of Altaussee  returned the painting to the Rothschild Family.  The photo at right shows the actual recovery of the Vermeer painting.

When the Nazis took the painting, they stamped the reverse of the painting with a Swastika in black ink.  It’s still there, and while the Louvre will share a photo of the back of the Mona Lisa with the public, it won’t publish a photo of the back of The Astronomer.

And that’s okay, we don’t need to see it…It’s only the front of the painting that is important.

Weird Little Art Stories

Being a graduate student at Enema U mostly means languishing in the library for long hours, reading long articles.  While these can be interesting, most of you are unlikely to keep a scholarly article about the iconography of some painting on your nightstand for a bit of leisure reading, even though some are very effective at inducing sleep.

Still, while reading various monographs, I keep discovering little tidbits of humor that are usually hidden away in footnotes… tiny little stories that are too weird not to be true.  I’ve been collecting them in the Moleskin notebook that is my constant companion, and this week I’ve decided to share a few.  Everyone of these is absolutely true (give or take a lie or two).

• Vincent Van Gogh, while an incredible artist, obviously had a few inner demons.  (Or as we would say in Texas, “the jalapeño had slid off the top of his nacho”.)  We’ll never know for sure, but perhaps he developed those demons at a young age.  As a child, he walked to school in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands and had to walk past the cemetery containing the grave of Vincent Van Gogh, his older brother.  After his brother died in infancy, his parents decided to recycle the name for the next child.

• Clementine Churchill wanted her tombstone to read:

Here Lies a Woman Who was Always Tired

For She Lived a Life Where Too Much was Required.

Proving that those requirements continue after death, here is what the family actually put on her tombstone:

Wife of Winston Churchill

The Life of the Nation is Secure

• There are at least two documented cases of a family mistakenly using a Ming vase as an umbrella stand.  The Duke of Wellington used a larger than life statue of a nude Napoleon to hold wet umbrellas.

• 
  In 1955, Salvador Dali borrowed a Rolls-Royce Phantom II from a friend because he needed to drive to Paris to give a lecture.  He neglected to tell the friend that he was taking with him 1100 pounds of cauliflower—enough to fill the interior of the priceless car to the ceiling. 

• Louis XVI didn’t lose his head; it is still around.  Well, kind of:  When Louis XVI was beheaded, only his body was buried.  His head was displayed but  later went missing.  At roughly the same time, the life-size statue of him was toppled and beheaded, and once again the head was seized by the mob.  After the restoration of the monarchy, the body of Louis XVI was buried at Basilica of Saint-Denis, alongside the headless remains of Marie Antoinette, while the headless remains of the statue were melted down.  Eventually, the head of the statue was recovered and today is on display at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris.

• In 1880, Édouard Manet was commissioned to paint A Bundle of Asparagus by Charles Ephrussi for 800 francs.  When the painting was delivered Ephrussi was so delighted by the work that he insisted on paying 1000 francs.  Manet then painted a smaller work, A Sprig of Asparagus depicting a single stalk of asparagus.  Along with the second painting Manet included a note:  "There was one sprig missing from your bundle."  Both valuable works are now in art museums.

• The portrait painter, John Singer Sargent, had a peculiar habit of asking his subjects to pose in uncomfortable or awkward positions, which he believed would help capture their true character and personality.  He also liked to read all the works of an author, one after the other.  He called this “reading in a wedge.”

• 
  When the avant-garde artist Cristo displayed his Package on a Wheelbarrow at the Galleria dell'Obelisco in Rome, in 1969, he left to the imagination of the viewer what the lump was under the tarpaulin.  The local bishop, who evidently possessed a vivid imagination, ordered that the exhibition be closed on the grounds of indecency.  Exactly what the bishop believed remained hidden was never explained.

• The most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, was missing for 24 hours before the Louvre realized it had been stolen.  Four different men hung the Mona Lisa in their bedrooms for their own enjoyment.  Leonardo da Vinci kept the painting for four years before gifting it to Francis I, the King of Spain, who displayed it in the royal bedchamber.  After the death of Francis, the painting was moved to the Louvre.  When Napoleon became Emperor, he moved the painting to his bedroom.  In 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, a handyman at the museum, stole the painting and kept it in his one room apartment for two years.  

• Some of the sketchbooks and notebooks of Gustav Klimt are missing.  The artist, who kept several cats in his studio, used cat urine as a fixative on his drawings.  The resulting sketch books reeked.

• Pablo Picasso famously doodled on some of his checks, often adding small sketches or drawings.  He would sometimes write a check for a relatively small amount, knowing that the recipient might never cash it.  One of those checks recently sold at auction for $10,000.

• The Two-For-One Van Gogh painting.  The Boston Museum of Fine Arts had its Van Gogh painting, Ravine, x-rayed with astounding results.  It turned out that the penniless Van Gogh depended on his brother Theo to provide the necessary funds to purchase art supplies.  In 1889, Theo was late and Van Gogh had an overpowering urge to paint, so Ravine was painted on top of a finished work, called Wild Vegetation.  

• An Andrew Wyeth painting, Braids, was incorrectly labeled at the Farnsworth Art Museum attributing the work to his father.  The mistake was not caught for thirty years.  

• The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen art museum in Germany recently admitted that a modern art piece by Piet Mondrian has been displayed upside down for 75 years.  The piece, New York City I, was discovered to be upside down after comparing the work to a photograph of Mondrian working on the painting on an easel.  Despite discovering that the work had been hung incorrectly for over seven decades, the museum plans has no plans to correct the mistake for fear of damaging the aging work.

• In the 1920s, Picasso created a fake artwork and signed it with the pseudonym "Léon," which was a name he used when he wanted to remain anonymous.  He then had a friend take this piece to a gallery and present it as a genuine work by a "new artist."  The gallery staff admired it and accepted it, unaware that it was actually Picasso's own work under a false identity.  The whereabouts of the Léon artwork is unknown today.

I don’t know of any scholarly work on the humor of art history.  Maybe I’ll work on that.

Up to Snuff

Without a doubt, my favorite movie is Secondhand Lions, a movie that could have only been made in Texas.  I like this movie so much that I have forgiven Michael Caine for imitation Texas/Cockney accent.  According to Caine, the secret to talking like a Texan was “to let the words lean on each other”.

Note.  Yes, I have a Texas accent.  I prefer to believe that after decades of education--not to mention having given over 6000 lectures--my Texas accent only comes out when I tell stories or jokes.  The reality is that I’m probably kidding myself.  A few years ago, I started the semester in one of my history classes by going over the syllabus for five minutes, then launching into the first lecture.  At the end of the lecture, I asked the class if there were any questions.  A young female exchange student from Japan politely asked in an impeccable British accent, “Will you ever be teaching in English?”

There is a scene in the movie, in which Robert Duvall gives a young Haley Joel Osment his first—and probably last—taste of a pinch of Beechnut chewing tobacco.  The rest of the scene shows a bent-over Osment imitating a wing-flapping chicken as he pukes his guts out.  

Been there, done that.

My experience wasn’t with chewing tobacco—it involved a brown glass bottle with a real cork, containing Levi Garret Scotch Snuff.  I don’t remember how old I was, but it was definitely before I started school.  Periodically, my father would take me to his grocery store where I was put to work sweeping the produce department and prying bubble gum off the floor with a single-edged razor blade.  (Yes, I know—children shouldn’t be allowed to use razor blades.  Back then, we must have been smarter than children today.  I also walked to school past a field that held a half dozen buffalo and never once felt an urge to climb the fence and try to pet one.)

One of the men who worked in the produce department used snuff, taking a pinch and deeply inhaling it.  I think I was more impressed with his ability pull the cork out of the bottle with his teeth more than with the actual dipping snuff followed by the inevitable sneeze.  In any case, I just had to try snuff for myself.  As soon as he left the back room where I was sweeping, I located the forbidden brown jar and helped myself to a generous amount that I snorted deeply into my lungs.

Almost immediately, I felt like someone had just inflated a basketball inside my head.   I accomplished a minor medical miracle by simultaneously sneezing and vomiting at the same time.  Each time my head went down, my elbows went up behind my back, and I choked out what was left of my breakfast.  Finally exhausted, I just sat on the concrete floor and let the tears run down my face while, I tried to breathe again.  I’ve never, ever been tempted to try any other form of snuff or chewing tobacco since that day more than six decades ago.  There are some lessons (like peeing on an electric fence or working with a single-edged razor blade) that no boy has ever had to learn twice.

I was reminded of my brief encounter with snuff by studying art.  You would not believe the number of elaborately jeweled or hand-painted snuff boxes displayed in the world’s art museums.  If you go to the online index of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are just under 6000 entries.  It seems that every 18th and 19th century member of royalty collected, gifted, and occasionally stole elaborate snuff boxes.  And as a historian, I wanted to know how all this got started.

The indigenous people of Brazil were the first to produce snuff.  Tobacco leaves were finely ground up with a rosewood mortar and pestle to produce a fine powdered tobacco that could be inhaled.  These same people were also the first to produce a form of snuff box—actually a wood-stoppered tube made from bone—to keep the tobacco from drying out and losing the delicate rosewood aroma.  

The use of this finely ground tobacco spread across Central and South America and on the second voyage of Columbus, a Franciscan friar traded with the Taino and Carib natives for some of the tobacco, which he brought back to Spain.  The Spanish Crown, eager to make money, quickly established a monopoly on the product and established the Real Fábrica de Tabacos (Royal Tobacco Factory) in Seville.  The king’s snuff factory quickly grew in size to become the second largest building in Spain.  Obviously, tobacco quickly became popular.

By 1563, Jean Nicot, whose name was given to nicotine, a French diplomat discovered the joys of snuff while stationed in Lisbon.  The ambassador not only wrote of the great medicinal properties of ground tobacco, but he convinced Catherine de Medici that it was a wonder drug capable of curing her persistent migraines.  She was so impressed that she decreed that  (the Queen’s Herb).

The name didn’t take off, but the use of the tobacco certainly did.  With the influential blessing of Catherine, the use of powdered tobacco became a royal fad across Europe.  Part of the appeal, of course, was that it was both exotic and expensive.  By 1560, it reached Flanders where it acquired the name “snuff.”   It won’t surprise you to learn that the word comes from the Dutch “snuffen,” which means to “sniff.”

Ironically, powdered tobacco was never used by Native Americans in North America.  It was introduced to North America by John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas.  While never very popular among the ordinary colonists, like in Europe, it became popular with the wealthy and aristocrats.  It was not until the Great Plague of London (1665-6) that the use of snuff became popular with ordinary people.  The widespread belief that using snuff would provide medical relief from a host of medical ailments soon spread fromEngland across Europe.

With the popularity of snuff in both of the two great trading nations of the day, the English and the Dutch, the use of snuff quickly spread to Africa, China, and Japan.  And everywhere that snuff went, so did snuff boxes.  Once snuff has dried out, it becomes harsh and loses whatever aroma has been added to it.  By the 17th century, you could purchase snuff scented with everything from whiskey to chocolate.  

To keep the snuff from drying out, it was stored in large containers called “mulls”.  Traditionally, the best mulls were ram’s horns decorated with silver, but frequently, snuff was stored in boxes much like a cigar humidors.  An apple slice or a damp cloth kept in the container ensured the tobacco would not dry out.  Every morning a quantity of snuff sufficient for the day was transferred from the mull to a small airtight snuff box.

It did not take long for those individual snuff boxes to become highly decorated gold or silver works of art that were decorated with jewels.  The presentation of these ornate snuff boxes became a prominent display of wealth and prestige by nobility.  Denied the option of  compensating for sexual inadequacy by purchasing either an expensive sports car or a massive pickup truck, the rich could pay a small fortune for a jewel-encrusted box of snuff.

Frederic the Great, for example, became a enthusiastic snuff taker.  When a snuff box deflected a bullet during battle, he became an ardent collector of snuff boxes.  After his death, one of those fabulously expensive boxes became the property of, first the Romanovs, then of the Communist government.  When the Russians were desperate for cash, the box was sold at auction and then passed through several hands until it was purchased by Queen Mary of England, the wife of King George V.  (Yes, there were a lot of Kings named George, so let me make it easy for you, these were the grandmother and grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, the mother of the current King Charles III.)

By the beginning of the 19th century, it seemed like everyone of note was using snuff.  Pope Urban VIII was so angry at parishioners using snuff during services that he banned the use of snuff on church grounds and threatened to excommunicate users.  A century later, Pope Benedict repealed the ban and encouraged the use for medical purposes.  Queen Charlotte was such an enthusiastic user that she converted a room at Windsor Castle into her personal tobacco storeroom.  The people of England privately referred to her as “Snuffy Charlotte”.  Marie Antoinette, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were all snuff users.  And at the battle of Waterloo, both Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington dipped snuff while they observed the battle.  

By the 20th century, the use of snuff was…well…being snuffed out.  The rise in cigarette smoking all but eliminated the use of snuff.  While my father’s grocery store sold the brown bottle of snuff that I had sampled, today snuff is available only from specialty tobacco stores.  

While I was researching the history of snuff boxes, I found dozens of fascinating stories about who used them, who gifted whom a box, or how much they spent for a tiny airtight box.  I can’t end this without one more story.

After smoking became common in England, the clouds of dense smoke in the House of Commons became so annoying that smoking within the chamber was banned in 1693.  The ministers, however continued to use tobacco in the form of snuff.  A special floral-scented snuff, English Rose, was kept by the door in a communal snuff box.  During World War II, the Palace of Westminster was the target of a German bombing raid.  While Westminster Hall suffered little damage due to a strong medieval timber roof, the House of Commons was destroyed by fire.  When it was rebuilt, Winston Churchill gifted the chamber with a new communal snuff box, made from the salvaged timber of the old hall.  It is still kept full of snuff, at the personal expense of the doorkeeper, but has not been used by a member in several decades.  When a member of the Green Party recently tried to have the box removed, noting that since 2006 it has been illegal to publicly offer free tobacco, his request was denied since Westminster is still technically a royal palace, thus exempt from acts of Parliament.  

The U.S. House of Representatives, with no appreciation of tradition much less a sense of humor, got rid of both its communal snuff box and its spittoons back in 1914.  The Senate, composed of more somber members, still maintains itsp spittoons and the two snuff boxes installed by Vice-President Millard Fillmore 175 years ago, one for Democrats and one for Republicans.