Picture This….Or Not

Art as a tool for propaganda has been recognized by rulers since the earliest times.  Pharaohs, Alexander the Great, and Roman leaders erected statues bearing their likenesses to constantly remind their subjects of their majestic form, their dignified nature, and their larger than life—at least their larger than the lives of their subjects—nature.

As soon as kingdoms created coins, leaders started stamping their images on them.  Roman generals, not politically powerful enough to warrant stamping coins depicting their own images, would stamp their names on the coins they used to pay their troops.  

It was Napoleon* who was the first to fully understand the potential of using the arts as a tool for propaganda, particularly via newspapers, paintings, and the theater.  Napoleon not only followed the examples of previous effective leaders, but took advantage of new technology such as etchings and improved printing presses to maximize his efforts to sculpt exactly the message he wanted.

As Napoleon wrote, “To attach no importance to public opinion is a proof you do not merit its suffrage”.

From his earliest military victories, Napoleon carefully crafted his reports not only to cast himself in the best possible light with the powers that were, but to mold public opinion by publishing them in the newspapers, too.  When several newspapers cast his exploits more factually than the general desired, Napoleon wrote the Directorate suggesting that the offending newspaper have its presses destroyed.  When the Directorate proved slow to implement this suggestion, Napoleon used his troops to accomplish the task himself.

To more effectively ensure that he received good press, Napoleon started his own newspaper and after seeing how effective the tool was for shaping public morale, eventually founded and ran six such newspapers.  Occasionally, the general even wrote the articles himself.   (A century later, Porfirio Diaz, the most successful of the Mexican dictators, not only copied Napoleon’s idea of owning newspapers to control the press, but took the idea a step further by secretly owing the underground opposition papers.)

Napoleon was very careful of the power of French theaters, a traditional source of dissent disguised as comedy.  During the years of Napoleon, the number of theaters decreased and those remaining had to be licensed, with strict limits on the number of days a performance could run.  In addition, any new material had to be read by the Minister of Justice before it could be performed.  

Napoleon took full advantage of such tried and true methods such as commissioning statues, placing his image on gold coins, on letterheads, and on a wide assortment of official documents.  He also introduced the concept of medals commemorating military victories, to be sold to the public.  Napoleon eventually even controlled architecture and art, implementing an offshoot of the classical style, that was known as Empire and was named after the Napoleon’s First Empire.

For centuries, the paintings political leaders commissioned could be seen only by those fortunate enough to be allowed to tour royal palaces.  Artists so famous that their very names are synonymous with their countries today, were almost unknown while they were alive because there was no effective method of reproducing and disseminating their art.  At best, small collections of their art could be painstakingly copied by apprentices and loosely bound together, to be sold as expensive ‘copy books’ for other artists.  

With the advent of copper plate engravings, artwork could be more easily copied and the metal engraved plates could be used countless times to make enough copies of the art that far more artists and patrons could see images of important paintings.  Napoleon was quick to take advantage of this medium, supporting multiple artists, the most influential of whom was Jacques-Louis David.

David had been very politically active during the Revolution, including voting for the death of the royal family (even though Louis XVI had been a generous patron of the arts).   Like many other supporters of the revolution, David changed his mind after his own arrest.  After a lengthy prison sentence, during which he only narrowly missed being sent to the guillotine with his friend Robespierre, David lost his revolutionary zeal and accepted many commissions from Napoleon, eagerly crafting images that supported an image that while not historically accurate, was exactly what Napoleon wanted to convey.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the painting, Napoleon at the Saint Bernard Pass.   The original painting by David was commissioned by Carlos IV, the King of Spain, who was trying desperately to reestablish relations with his militarily stronger neighbor to the north.  When Napoleon learned of the painting, he commissioned David to make four more copies of it, each slightly different (most noticeably in the colors of the horses).  Those five paintings have traveled extensively due to various wars, the original being seized by Napoleon’s brother Joseph when he was (briefly) the King of Spain.  With the fall of Emperor Napoleon, Joseph fled to the United States, taking the painting with him.  Today, the original and two of the copies are back in France, while the remaining two paintings are on display in Vienna and Berlin.

The paintings depict the 1800 crossing of the Alps by Napoleon to reinforce the French Armies in Italy.  Undertaken during the winter, Napoleon is obviously trying to portray a heroic leader, inspired by the spirit of Hannibal’s feat two millennia earlier, leading his troops to glory.  

Unfortunately, like many such stories, it’s total nonsense.  Oh, Napoleon certainly led his troops over the Alps in winter, and it was certainly a brilliant strategic move, but it was nothing like the scene David painted.  A more accurate version, but one not nearly so stirring, is Bonaparte crossing the Alps by Paul Delaroche in 1848.  

Painted 27 years after Napoleon’s death, Delaroche was safe to paint a more accurate version.  Though the artist admired the late emperor, he portrayed Napoleon in a plain wool coat, obviously suffering.  His face is unmistakably downcast and visibly sad from the cold, miserable journey and he’s leading his men across the snow-covered mountains while riding a mule led by a peasant.

Today, after decades of television and movies, a more sophisticated audience instantly recognizes the theatrical artificiality of David’s version of the crossing and that it is Delaroche’s painting that conveys a sense of who Napoleon really was.

*Yes—I’ve written yet another blog about Napoleon…and I’ll probably write more.

UFO, UAP, or AWB

When Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 to force the Tokugawa shogunate to open their ports to American trade, the news rocketed across Japan.  After being almost completely isolated from the outside world for over two centuries, Japan was visited by the ‘Black Ships’ of the United States, a steam powered fleet that displayed obvious technological advantages.

Within two weeks, nearly everyone on the island nation of Japan had learned of the visit, knew of the technological and military advantages of the visitors, and even had an idea of who was aboard the strange ships.  The sudden arrival had profound effects on the culture of Japan, eventually bringing about the downfall of the shogunate, the restoration of the Emperor, and the nation’s rapid adoption of modern technology.

Within a month of Perry’s arrival, there was not a soul on the island who was not completely aware of the American fleet’s arrival.

Currently, news programs on multiple networks are carrying stories about the possible existence of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs.  Wait, excuse me:  the military no longer wants to use that term, they currently prefer Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP.  Presumably, the Pentagon wanted a less pejorative term so that people over the age of fourteen (known as lieutenants) could discuss the phenomena without giggling.

Since the end of the Second World War, every decade or so there has been a new wave of hysteria over saucer sightings.  From 1952 to 1969, the U.S. Air Force even had a task force to investigate such sightings, Project Blue Book, which eventually concluded that all of the sightings had earthly explanations.  Naturally, no one believed this, since a silver foil-covered weather balloon illuminated by a setting sun was wildly improbably compared to the likelihood that extraterrestrials that were smart enough to develop the technology that would enable them to travel lightyears across space, were nevertheless still dumb enough to decide that Roswell, New Mexico, as the intellectual center of Earth, was the visitor’s center. 

Note.  I really admire Roswell, a place that only has two things going for it.  First, they have the remains of two World War II bomber training bases with truly impressive runways, one of which was converted into a couple of nice golf courses.  But, what do you do with the other huge airport, with big, wide runways in the middle of an arid desert?  You charge rent for airlines that want to store airplanes they don’t currently need.  The only other asset the

town has is a wild myth about aliens.  The town has gone to tremendous lengths to accommodate the gullible tourists: there are UFO museums, there is a saucer-shaped McDonalds, and even the town’s streetlights are made to resemble little space aliens.  If life gives you lemons, make dilithium crystal flavored lemonade.  

I can understand the mania.  Unidentified flying objects are real, but the emphasis should be on the word unidentified, which is not a synonym for alien.  Newspapers seldom report the sightings of Identified Flying Objects.

During the craze of the sixties, my brother and I were caught up in the hysteria.  While driving across the north side of San Antonio, suddenly we spotted an oblong dark shape flashing strange white lights in a random pattern.  Convinced that we had spotted a UFO, we attempted to follow it.  The shape seemed to accelerate while turning, and it was extremely difficult to catch up with the object as it circled around the town.  My brother and I were absolutely convinced that what we were chasing was not of this earth.  

I won’t go into all the traffic laws my brother broke that night, but we may have left tire tracks from a small British sports car across a popular local golf course as we chased those lights.  Eventually, we could see that the letters did have a pattern:  if you were directly under the shape, the mysterious lights suddenly arranged themselves into an advertisement for a wrestling match at the downtown arena.  The sign was being pulled by a small plane.  And just like that, our mystery UFO became an IFO.  

Which, I am sure is what will happen to all of the strange reports currently filling the news.  That strange object that can travel 13,000 mph and turn 90 degrees mid-flight will turn out to be a bug in the radar system or something similar.  If this planet were actually being visited by visitors from another planet, it would make at least as big an impact as and be noticed by the locals at least as much as did Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan.

But, how can we be sure that the government isn’t hiding other worldly material at a secret research laboratory in a remote corner of Area 51?  How do we know the government doesn’t  already know for certain that we are being visited by life from another solar system?  There is a very easy and sure-fire test that will answer the question reliably.

Is NASA still having to fight for its meager annual budget?  Do our astronauts still hitch rides on Russian rockets and rent capsule space from Elon Musk?  Has the Space Force started drafting people?  Has the Congressional Committee on Space removed as a member the moronic Congresswoman from Houston who asked for the Mars Rover to drive over and take a photo of the flag Neil Armstrong left on the moon?  Does Congress fight to give an ever-increasing amount of money to research space flight?

If the answer to any of those questions is still ‘no’, then you can rest assured that any UFO is probably just another AWB.  (A weather balloon.)

A Question of Taste

Two cannibals are eating a clown when one turns to the other and says. “Hey.  Does this taste funny?”

Forgive me, but I’ve earned the right to stoop that low—I just finished an Art History course on cannibalism in art, a subject that probably doesn’t mean what you think it does (It, in fact, being concerned with cultural transfers of power more than any given dinner menu).  Still, the course did frequently touch on the subject of anthropophagy—the technical term for ‘Sam:  he’s what’s for dinner’.

The class was interesting and I enjoyed it, but the course never definitively answered the obvious question:  What do we taste like?  (The answer to this question must not be confused with whether humans have good taste.)

After extensive research, I can definitely say that it is not the obvious answer:  humans don’t taste like chicken.  Of the dozens of first-hand accounts I was able to track down, not one single person thought human flesh tasted like any form of poultry—a surprising answer since everything from rattlesnake meat to fried armadillo has been described as similar to what you would find at KFC.    

Archaeologists have confirmed that human cannibalism has probably always existed, in that since Homo Neanderthalensis engaged in the practice, it probably predates the arrival of Homo Sapiens.  At a minimum, people have been chowing down on people for at least 100,000 years, so by now, you would think that not much about the practice would remain a mystery.

There are a few hints.

In Polynesia, the native word for human flesh traditionally translates out as ‘long pork’, suggesting that humans taste a little like ham.  Though there is a long list of Protestant missionaries who perished trying to give the islanders a taste of religion—a few as recently as 20 years ago—there are few accurate reviews from verified diners.  I checked on Yelp and was unable to find a single review.

There is even a little medical evidence to back this up; the anatomy and tissue of pigs is so similar to that of humans that surgeons ‘practice’ some new procedures on (anesthetized) pigs.  When ‘The Doc’ went off to learn new laparoscopic surgical techniques, she returned with a video tape of her operating on a pig that so fascinated the boys that for a whole week it replaced the ‘The Lizard of Oz’ as the obligatory video of the day.

There should be lots of accounts from people who have eaten human flesh, giving their opinions as to what it tastes like, since there is no shortage of people who have tried it.  Contrary to what you might think, it is not against the law to chow down on human flesh in most countries:  the legality of the culinary event is generally limited to how you obtained the main course.

There are a number of artists who have tried cannibalism.  The Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, while an art student in Paris, bought various body parts from a medical supply house and cooked and ate them.  The Peruvian artist Marco Evaristti hosted a dinner party at which the main course was agnolotti pasta that was topped with a meatball made from his own fat, removed earlier in the year in a liposuction operation.  The sculptor Rick Gibson has on several occasions eaten man meat, usually as a form of performance art.  The last such display was in Toronto in 1988 when he devoured a slice of testicle.  

In 2012, a Japanese illustrator named Mao Sugiyama, decided that he was asexual and had his penis and testicles removed surgically.  Sugiyama then invited four friends over for dinner.  Afterwards, everyone agreed that the penis tasted hard and rubbery, though that could have been due to the method of preparation.  As Sugiyama confessed, “I’m an artist, not a chef.”

William Seabrook, an author who traveled through Africa in the 1920’s, described his dinner with cannibals in great detail in his book, Jungle Ways:  

It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal.  It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.

Issei Sagawa, who having served his prison time is now a free man, spent two days eating a 25-year-old woman he had killed while a student in Paris. According to Sagawa, the buttocks melted on his tongue like raw tuna but his favorite were the thighs, which he described as “wonderful.” However, he also said that he didn’t like the breasts because they were too greasy.  In a very real sense, Sagawa was a leg man.

We could turn to the testimony of Alferd Packer.  Or it might have been Alfred Packer, since there is evidence the mountain man was born Alfred, but changed it to Alferd after a tattoo artist spelled his name wrong.  In any case, Packer got caught in a blizzard while crossing the Colorado mountains in 1874, and when he emerged two and a half months later, he confessed to having devoured his five companions.  Packer served 18 years in prison for his crime and when interviewed after his parole, claimed that his companions had tasted like the sweetest beef.  Packer’s accounts however, should be ignored, for by the time he was interviewed, Packer had become a vegetarian, and thus, was suspect.

Note.  Unlike Enema U, some universities have a sense of humor.  The University of Colorado at Boulder named the student cafeteria after Alferd Packer.  An even stranger story of a restaurant named after the Colorado Cannibal is the employee dining room at the Department of Agriculture.  When the GSA prevented the Secretary of Agriculture from firing the unpopular vendor running the restaurant, he promptly renamed it the Alferd Packer Memorial Grill and invited the press to the unveiling of a brass plaque in Packer’s honor.  The embarrassed vendor promptly left.  Today, the plaque is hanging on the wall of the dining room of the National Press Club, where an angus beef burger named for the cannibal is served.

When questioned by the FBI, Jeffrey Dahmer said the taste of human meat was close to that of filet mignon.  His opinion was seconded by a neighbor who once enjoyed a sandwich prepared by the mass murderer.  I wonder if that neighbor still accepts invitations to attend neighborhood cookouts.

That people taste like beef is supported by George Scithers, the author of the human cookbook, To Serve Man, obviously named after the infamous Twilight Zone episode.  Among the recipes is one for Texas Chili that contains the following comment: 

Some argue that cowboy meat is too tough to be served any other way, especially since the spices tend to kill the taste of whatever the donor may have been smoking, drinking, or chewing. Others discount this argument, but agree that Chili is a practical, quick way to serve Man in well-disguised form.

When cooking large batches, the author suggests using at least 15 pounds of onions per Texan.  Scithers’ inclusion of kidney beans in his recipe, is a grave error, since adding beans to Chili is a felony in Texas.

Omaima Nelson killed her husband of one month in 1991 and barbecued his ribs.  Nelson, too, described the taste as very sweet, but that could be because she liberally used barbecue sauce while the ribs were cooking on her grill.  

Obviously, the taste is subjective and we need more research on the subject to reach a definitive answer.  Enema U is an ag school, so perhaps someone there should apply for a government research grant.  The administration is on record as saying it supports research.  Recent broad budget cuts could make monetary support difficult, but personnel donations may well be critical to the success of the project.

The Re-Gifted King

Ever get one of those presents that while it was nice enough, there just wasn’t a place for it in your home, but then you remember you've been invited to that wedding of people you don’t really know but still need to give a present?  With a new card and some wrapping paper, the problem is solved.

This is kind of like that fruit cake that used to make the rounds during the holidays.  I’m convinced there was actually only one of them in the country, each recipient just passed it along to the next poor victim.  If you were wondering why you haven’t seen that fruit cake in a while, that tinned monstrosity is sitting in a police evidence locker, marked Exhibit A in a Yuletide assault case.  

Our regifting story starts with King Louis XVI of France, an indecisive foolish king and a prime example of royal inbreeding, Louis had ascended to the throne at the age of fifteen, and promptly married the fourteen-year-old Marie-Antoinette, his cousin, from Austria. The king was ridiculed throughout the country because it took him seven years to consummate his marriage and France being France, this lapse damn near qualified as treason.

Adding to the general dissatisfaction among the peasants, as an ally of Austria during the Seven Years War, France had lost the war.  Quelle surprise! La France a perdu une guerre!  Forced to pay an indemnity he could not afford, the king promptly raised taxes again.  The peasants were revolting—in every sense of the word—and the king and the queen rather quickly became short with each other.  Sort of lost their heads over taxes, so to speak.

Poor Louis had spent a little money wisely, at least from the American point of view.  The king had sent money and arms to support the American Revolution.  Louis certainly wasn’t a fan of democracies, but he was wholeheartedly in favor of anybody who wanted to fight the British.  Because of this, when John Rogers Clark founded a new city in Kentucky, he named it after Louis, though a recent survey showed that most residents of the city incorrectly believe the city was named after Louis XIV a far more capable monarch.

Eventually, France tried to collect the entire set of governments, passing quickly through absolute monarchy, republic, anarchy, dictatorship, Imperial monarchy, and eventually reinstalling the same original inbred royal family back on the throne.  As we say in Texas, they went around three sides of the barn to get at the horse at the end of the rope in their hand.

With her uncle safely on the throne, Princess Marie-Thérèse, the eldest daughter of Louis and Marie-Antoinette toured France, and while visiting Montpellier promised the city a special gift—a larger than life statue of her father.  Evidently second prize would have been two such statues.  The people of Montpellier were too polite to refuse, so in 1829, the large marble statue was erected in the center of town, where it stayed for an entire year before France had yet another revolution that overthrew the monarchy.  

The statue of Louis was crated up and placed in a military dungeon where it was promptly forgotten while France once again played musical chairs with various forms of government, eventually settling for a parliament of prostitutes and bloated plutocrats.  In 1899, a military officer doing an inventory rediscovered the crated statue and it was promptly dragged from the dungeon and gifted to the town’s mayor.

Nobody really wanted a statue of Louis—a monarch so incredibly inept that he touched off the terrors of the French Revolution.  As far as I can tell, the only other statue of the king is the memorial to Louis and Marie-Antoinette above their graves at the Basilica of St Denis.  People were not exactly lining up in Montpellier to see the statue, so the mayor gave it to the town’s university, who sent it to the university museum, who promptly sent it back to the city, where it stood in the basement of the city archives, serenely watching over dusty bookcases and bundles of slowly rotting paper.

More than half a century later, the city of Montpellier became a sister city to Louisville, Kentucky, and someone remembered the unwanted chunk of white marble littering the basement of the city archives.  If Louisville liked old Louis that much, they would just love to have his statue, which was promptly dragged out of the cellar and trucked to Marseilles, where the United States Navy obligingly stowed it in the cargo hold of an aging old freighter, the USS Aldebaran.

Unloaded at Norfolk, the statue spent a week on the pier before the city of Louisville had it trucked to the city square.  Wisely, the people of Montpellier had not told the mayor of Louisville about the present in advance.  Just before Christmas 1966, Louis was erected in the center of town, close to the statue of Thomas Jefferson. The two statues stand with their backs to each other—ironic, since in life the two were friends.

Louis, finally having found a permanent home, was left alone for more than fifty years.  Recently, when statues across the country have been attacked and destroyed to make the country safe from…. something, an angry mob once again attacked the poor king.  Paint was splashed over him, and once again, the monarch felt the sting of a cold blade.  This time, instead of his head, Louis lost a foot and his right hand.  

Currently, the city of Louisville is having the statue repaired, with the intention of once again placing the King back near his old post in the center of town.  I have a suggestion for the people of Louisville.  In the last fifty years, they have also become the sister city of Quito, Ecuador, and I would bet anything the people of Quito would just love a Christmas present.  Just don’t tell them about it advance, let it be a surprise.

Oh, and one more thing:  It is incorrect to say that Louis XVI lost his head.  He knows exactly where it is, since, when France finally buried his coffin in St Denis, his head was carefully placed between his feet.

Qwerty Who?

Like so many other everyday items of our modern world, the beginnings can be traced back to the American Civil War.  In 1860, just before the start of the war, the entire United States Army had about 16,000 men, or roughly the size of today’s Ohio National Guard.  

Everything changed in 1861, of course, after the secession of the southern states and the start of the war.  The Confederate Army grew to a peak of roughly 465,000 men, with over a million men having served at some point in the four years of fighting.  The Union army was roughly twice that, with a peak of just over a million men and a total of over two million having been in uniform during the war. 

The rapid growth in size of the armies was a logistical nightmare for both armies, but it was a windfall for manufacturers who were awarded huge contracts for the vast array of goods needed by troops in the field.  Most factories hired new workers and added shifts to meet the demand for a veritable flood of supplies.

In the manufacture of handguns, Samuel Colt’s company, Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company held a patent that prevented most manufacturers from producing a viable competitor to his revolver.  When the Colt patent expired in 1857, several companies began producing excellent revolvers.

Perhaps the best revolver manufactured during the war was the .44-caliber Remington Army revolver with an eight-inch barrel, an uncommon length today, but in the 19th century provided a barrel long enough for the slow burning black powder to completely combust while providing an excellent sight radius.  The Remington firearm had a more solid frame and because it used a cylinder pin instead of a lug like the Colt revolver, was a little easier to reload by swapping out a spent cylinder with a previously loaded cylinder.  (Watch Clint Eastwood do just this with a Remington revolver in the movie Pale Rider.)

Remington tooled up to make the revolvers as fast as possible, eventually selling over a hundred thousand of them to the army.  Then, just as Remington had fully expanded its manufacturing process…the war ended.  Once again, the size of the military shrank, eventually numbering only slightly more than fifteen thousand.  Since surplus firearms were as common as ants at a picnic, it was a tough time for Remington and a lot of other firearm companies to stay afloat.

If only there were something else that those machines could make!  Take, for example, those small metal working lathes that had been turning out the eight-inch barrels for revolvers.

Remington continued to make some revolvers, but also branched out into other forms of manufacturing, such as the production of sewing machines.  The Remington Lock-Stitch sewing machine was reliable and was cheaper than a comparable model from Singer.  (In a strange reversal of events, both the Remington and Singer sewing machine factories would shift over to manufacturing firearms for the U.S. Army during World War II.)

For more than a decade, Christopher Sholes had been independently working on a mechanical typewriter, but the biggest problem he faced was that the average typist could type fast enough to jam the mechanical keys of the mechanism.  Contrary to the popular myth floating around on the internet, Sholes was not looking for the least efficient arrangement of keys in order to slow down a typist, but a layout that separated the most commonly used combinations of letters (such as ST and ON) further apart, thus lessening the chances that keys would strike each other.

Note.  It occurs to me that my generation may be the last generation to have any idea what I am talking about when I mention “typewriter keys”.  Mechanical typewriters vanished in the 1970’s, replaced by electric typewriters that couldn’t jam, which were, themselves, completely replaced by computer printers a decade later.  To anyone born after about 1980, a typewriter is as quaintly obsolete as a butter churn.  (I wonder if that old IBM Selectric stored away in our spare room closet is a valuable antique yet?)

Sholes came up with a keyboard layout that looks fairly familiar to everyone today.  When he sold what became known as the Qwerty keyboard to Remington in 1873, the layout looked like this:

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,

Q W E . T Y I U O P

Z S D F G H J K L M

A X & C V B N ? ; R

Now, Remington got interested in manufacturing typewriters when it noticed that they already possessed most of the machines necessary for production and the casing used for sewing machines could also be used for typewriters, so it purchased the patent for the keyboard layout from Sholes and the rest (as they say) is history.  Remington made a few changes—in particular, swapping the positions of the period and R, and the A and the Z.  (Of course, there were no lower-case letters then.)  

When the Remington typewriter went on the market in 1874, it was the first time a good typist could produce legible text faster than a person could write.  Four years later, Remington introduced a more robust model—complete with lower case letters—that sold at a price reasonable enough that the machines quickly took over the workplace.  (If you are curious, typewriters didn’t routinely include a numeral one until late in the sixties, just before typewriters started to be replaced with computer printers.)

To use these early typewriters, people bought the biggest piece of paper that would comfortably fit on the platen (the large rubber-coated roller that was manufactured on those old gun-making lathes that had once produced pistol barrels).  Over time, this piece of paper became a standard of eight and a half inches wide, and folders, notebooks, and filing cabinets were all manufactured to accommodate this size of paper.

Typewriters usually used either ten or twelve-point type, which allowed for a one-inch margin on each side of the paper, making an average line of monospaced print on a page about 65 to 78 characters per line. Given the average distance between the written page and the reader’s eyes, this turned out to be ideal.  

That ideal number of characters per line has long been observed by book publishers.  Select a book at random off a shelf and you will probably find that the average number of characters per line is fairly close to that number or less.  Publishers also know that sufficient margins are necessary to “rest” the eyes while reading.  If there are too many characters per line, or that margin is cut, the reader develops eye strain and will probably stop reading.  It is something of a challenge to find a book, newspaper, magazine, or even an online blog that violates this rule.

And then, the computer printer came along.  Since printers are capable of true proportional spacing, the average number of characters per line quickly increased to a more-than-uncomfortable 100.  It was too late to narrow the paper, and the paper wasn’t wide enough to allow two columns...

What was needed for the comfort of the reader was either more white space on the page, or a somewhat dramatic increase in the size of the font used.  Widening the margins to two inches per side seemed wasteful, and increasing the size of font produced an unattractive page, so the most commonly used remedy is to double space the document.  While most people believe this is done to make it easier for teachers to edit and grade students’ papers, tests show that the readers actually read faster, and remember more of what they have read on double-spaced documents.  The extra white space between lines rests the eyes of the reader—a job once done by the margins.

This means that this weekend, as I write my research paper for my final art history class, the reason that I double space the increasingly lengthy document is, in part, due to the requirements of black powder burning in the elongated barrels of Civil War pistols.  As a historian, I find that somehow comforting.