Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

"In England, during the 18th and 19th centuries, 10,000 people were imprisoned for debt each year.[13] A prison term did not alleviate a person's debt, however; an inmate was typically required to repay the creditor in-full before being released.[14] In England and Wales, debtors' prisons varied in the amount of freedom they allowed the debtor. With a little money, a debtor could pay for some freedoms; some prisons allowed inmates to conduct business and to receive visitors; others (including the Fleet and King's Bench Prisons) even allowed inmates to live a short distance outside the prison—a practice known as the 'Liberty of the Rules'—and the Fleet even tolerated clandestine 'Fleet Marriages'.

Life in these prisons, however, was far from pleasant, and the inmates were forced to pay for their keep. Samuel Byron, son of the writer and poet John Byron, was imprisoned for debt in the Fleet in 1725, and in 1729 he sent a petition to his old school friend, the Duke of Dorset, in which he raged against the injustices of the system. Some debtor prisoners were even less fortunate, being sent to prisons with a mixture of vicious criminals and petty criminals, and many more were confined to a single cell.

The father of the English author Charles Dickens was sent to one of these prisons (the Marshalsea), which were often described in Dickens's novels.[15] He became an advocate for debt prison reform, and his novel Little Dorrit dealt directly with this issue.[16]

The Debtors' Act of 1869 limited the ability of the courts to sentence debtors to prison, but it did not entirely prohibit them from doing so. Debtors who had the means to pay their debt, but did not do so, could still be incarcerated for up to six weeks, as could those who defaulted on debts to the court.[17] Initially, there was a significant reduction in the number of debtors imprisoned following the passage of the 1869 Act. By 1870, the total number of debtors imprisoned decreased by almost 2,000, dropping from 9,759 in 1869 to 6,605 in 1870.[18] However, by 1905 that number had increased to 11,427.[18]

Some of London's debtors' prisons were the Coldbath Fields Prison, Fleet Prison, Giltspur Street Compter, King's Bench Prison, Marshalsea Prison, Poultry Compter, and Wood Street Counter. The most famous was the Clink prison, which had a debtor's entrance in Stoney Street. This prison gave rise to the British slang term for being incarcerated in any prison, hence "in the clink". Its location also gave rise to the term for being financially embarrassed, "stoney broke"."---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors%27...n%20Europe.

"Thomas Edison died seventy-five years ago this fall, with “a rack of eight empty test tubes close to his bedside.” For a man whose “real love was chemistry,” recounted his son Charles, it was “not strange, but symbolic, that those test tubes were close to him at the end.” Just after Edison died, Charles asked the attending physician to seal the glass tubes with paraffin. Charles later gave one of the test tubes to Edison’s friend and admirer Henry Ford. For many years, it was on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan under the label “Edison’s Last Breath?”

A brief history of the life and deaths of Grigori Rasputin..

"Despite being widely condemned by the public as a charlatan for his drunkenness and debauchery, Rasputin wielded great power and influence over the ruling family, particularly with the Czarina, who was convinced of his mystical healing abilities and rumors swirled that the two were lovers. When Nicholas left to lead Russian forces during WWI, Rasputin effectually ruled the country through Alexandra, which only added to the perceived corruption and chaos of the Romanov regime. As the war continued, outlandish stories about the monk expanded to include a treasonous plot with Germany, an effort to start a cholera epidemic in St. Petersburg with poisoned apples, and lurid tales about Rasputin and the Czar’s young daughters.

Many within the Russian nobility and the church orthodoxy became fearful of Rasputin’s growing power and control, and there was a demand to have him removed by any means necessary. In an effort to rid the court and the country of Rasputin’s influence, a group of nobles, led by Prince Felix Yussupov, the richest man in Russia and the husband of the Czar’s only niece, and Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, the Czar’s first cousin, plotted the monk’s demise.


On the night of December 29, 1916, Yussupov and Pavlovich lured Rasputin to Moika Palace in St. Petersburg. The would-be killers first gave the monk food and wine laced with cyanide, however, when Rasputin seemingly failed to respond to the poison, they shot him at close range and left him for dead. In spite of these murderous measures, Rasputin revived shortly thereafter and made an attempt to flee the palace grounds, only to be intercepted by his assailants who shot him again and viciously beat him. They then bound Rasputin, who was remarkably still alive, and threw him into the freezing Neva River. His battered body was found several days later and it was reported that there was water in his lungs, indicating that he finally died by drowning.

Yussupov wrote the most well-known account of Rasputin’s murder in his memoir, originally published in 1928. He wrote, “This devil who was dying of poison, who had a bullet in his heart, must have been raised from the dead by the powers of evil. There was something appalling and monstrous in his diabolical refusal to die.” Before the murder, Yussupov had lived a relatively frivolous life of privilege. Plotting Rasputin’s death had given him the opportunity to reinvent himself as a patriot, determined to protect the throne and restore the reputation of the monarchy.

Yussupov and his co-conspirators hoped the removal of Rasputin would make Nicholas II more open to the advice of the nobility and the Duma, giving him a final chance to save the monarchy. However, the monk’s murder did not lead to any radical changes of the Czar and Czarina’s politics, leading up to the start of the Russian Revolution in March 1917. To the Bolsheviks, Rasputin symbolized the corruption at the heart of imperial rule and they viewed his murder as an attempt by the nobility to stay in power at the expense of the proletariat.


Years later, in 1934, Yussupov coldly recounted how he helped slay Rasputin when he testified in the suit of his wife against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which charged she was libeled in a film in which one of the characters representing her was seduced by Rasputin."

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
― Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of It

Newfound footage of Amelia Earhart (before she vanished)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7TM-G0EoVA

"It might seem like an obvious piece of any numerical system, but the zero is a surprisingly recent development in human history. In fact, this ubiquitous symbol for “nothing” didn’t even find its way to Europe until as late as the 12th century.

Zero’s origins most likely date back to the “fertile crescent” of ancient Mesopotamia. Sumerian scribes used spaces to denote absences in number columns as early as 4,000 years ago, but the first recorded use of a zero-like symbol dates to sometime around the third century B.C. in ancient Babylon. The Babylonians employed a number system based around values of 60, and they developed a specific sign—two small wedges—to differentiate between magnitudes in the same way that modern decimal-based systems use zeros to distinguish between tenths, hundreds and thousandths. A similar type of symbol cropped up independently in the Americas sometime around A.D. 350, when the Mayans began using a zero marker in their calendars.

These early counting systems only saw the zero as a placeholder—not a number with its own unique value or properties. A full grasp of zero’s importance would not arrive until the seventh century A.D. in India. There, the mathematician Brahmagupta and others used small dots under numbers to show a zero placeholder, but they also viewed the zero as having a null value, called “sunya.” Brahmagupta was also the first to show that subtracting a number from itself results in zero.

From India, the zero made its way to China and back to the Middle East, where it was taken up by the mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi around 773. He studied and synthesized Indian arithmetic and showed how zero functioned in the system of formulas he called ‘al-jabr’—today known as algebra. By the 10th century, the zero had entered the Arabic numeral system in a form resembling the oval shape we use today.

The zero continued to migrate for another few centuries before finally reaching Europe sometime around the 1100s. Thinkers like the Italian mathematician Fibonacci helped introduce zero to the mainstream, and it later figured prominently in the work of Rene Descartes along with Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz’s invention of calculus. Since then, the concept of “nothing” has continued to play a role in the development of everything from physics and economics to engineering and computing."


https://www.history.com/news/who-invented-the-zero

"During the Great Depression, people made clothes out of food sacks. People used flour bags, potato sacks, and anything made out of burlap. Because of this trend, food distributors started to make their sacks more colorful to help people remain a little bit fashionable."

Early book clubs and womens' salons

"Booze may be a running theme in book clubs, but historically, the main constant in these groups hasn't been wine; it's women. While men certainly participate in book clubs, women dominate the demographics; according to the literary website BookBrowse, which surveyed 15 years' worth of data on book club attendance, 93 percent of book club participants are women.

They have for over five centuries. Ladies have been gathering to discuss literature and other issues of the day since at least the 1630s, when one woman was booted from her colony due to her popular post-sermon meetings. Later, women moved to decadent Parisian homes to debate Robespierre as the French Revolution loomed. They would also form book clubs to deal with professional and educational discrimination in the 19th century, much of which was racially motivated. But no matter the venue or topic, women have historically clung to book clubs as a space for reading, learning, and making their voices heard—even if all they wanted to do was complain about bratty Amy March in Little Women.

Blasphemy and Banishment

Some of the earliest "book clubs" were simply Bible study groups, and few are more famous than Anne Hutchinson's. In 1634, she and her husband William arrived with their children in Massachusetts Bay Colony, where she quickly made herself indispensable to the local women as a midwife. But Hutchinson also knew her Leviticus, so she began holding meetings for those ladies in her home to discuss the minister's sermons. This wasn't unusual—Puritan women in both America and England had done it before—but Hutchinson's group grew incredibly popular. Soon men were coming, too, and the conversation grew a little too exploratory for the church leaders' liking. Fearing a theological schism (and a woman as a leader), they put Hutchinson on trial and quickly banished her to (horror of all horrors) Rhode Island.

The "Pretentious Young Ladies" of Paris

Meanwhile, across the pond, others were multiplying at a rapid rate. Salons married intelligent political discourse with hot gossip, so naturally they were all the rage in France from about 1610 all the way through the Jazz Age, when Gertrude Stein assembled her famous, formidable crew. Although salons were well-attended by both upper-class men and women, you could count on a grand society lady to be the host for the evening. Catherine de Vivonne, aka the Marquise de Rambouillet, is credited with starting one of the first major salons in Paris around 1620, after she became bored with the gossip of the French court. In her famed "Blue Room," she guided young nobles in the art of conversation, and apparently encouraged the ladies to follow her lead. "Women would decide matters of manners, language, taste, and loisirs—the array of noble pastimes that included reading, conversation, theater and the arts, games, and dancing," Benedetta Craveri wrote of the marquise's operation in The Age of Conversation. "High society women took it upon themselves to educate the men."

There was also a healthy amount of flirting and frivolity going on at this salon, the kind which Moliére parodied in his play Les précieuses ridicules, or The Pretentious Young Ladies. But the tradition carried on into the 18th century with figures like Madame Dupin, who was closely aligned with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Madame Roland, whose salon frequently featured Maximilien Robespierre… before both of them got the guillotine during the French Revolution.

The Revolution dramatically changed the country's salons, but they didn't go away. They simply relocated and morphed to include different classes, until they lost any lingering relevance..."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/nejbvk/a...book-clubs

"Robert Sherwood, reviewing cowboy hero Tom Mix: “They say he rides as if he’s part of the horse, but they don’t say which part.”

Dorothy Parker: “That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them.”

George S. Kaufman: Once when asked by a press agent, “How do I get my leading lady’s name into your newspaper?” Kaufman replied, “Shoot her.”

The period that followed the end of World War I was one of gaiety and optimism, and it sparked a new era of creativity in American culture. Surely one of the most profound — and outrageous — influences on the times was the group of a dozen or so tastemakers who lunched together at New York City’s Algonquin Hotel. For more than a decade they met daily and came to be known as the Algonquin Round Table. With members such as writers Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross (founder of THE NEW YORKER) and Robert Benchley; columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun, and Broun’s wife Ruth Hale; critic Alexander Woollcott; comedian Harpo Marx; and playwrights George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, and Robert Sherwood, the Round Table embodied an era and changed forever the face of American humor.

It all began with an afternoon roast of the NEW YORK TIMES drama critic, Alexander Wollcott. A number of writers met up at the Algonquin Hotel on 44th street and had such a good time that the event was repeated the next day, and the day after that, until the lunch table at the Algonquin was established as a ritual. The core group of friends was sometimes joined by others who attended for short periods or drifted about the periphery of the group, including such notables as actress Tallulah Bankhead and playwright Noel Coward. The Round Table was made up of people with a shared admiration for each other’s work. Outspoken and outrageous, they would often quote each other freely in their daily columns.

Round Tabler Edna Ferber, who called them “The Poison Squad,” wrote, “They were actually merciless if they disapproved. I have never encountered a more hard-bitten crew. But if they liked what you had done, they did say so publicly and whole-heartedly.” Their standards were high, their vocabulary fluent, fresh, astringent, and very, very tough. Both casual and incisive, they had a certain terrible integrity about their work and boundless ambition. Some of the most notable members of the Round Table came together to work on significant collaborative projects. George Kaufman teamed up with Edna Ferber and Marc Connelly on some of his best stage comedies, including DULCY and THE ROYAL FAMILY. Harold Ross of THE NEW YORKER hired both Dorothy Parker as a book reviewer and Robert Benchley as a drama critic.

By 1925, the Round Table was famous. What had started as a private clique became a public amusement. The country-at-large was now attentive to their every word—people often coming to stare at them during lunch. Some began to tire of the constant publicity. The time they spent entertaining and being entertained took its toll on several of the Algonquin members. Robert Sherwood and Robert Benchley moved out of the hotel in order to concentrate on and accomplish their work. In 1927, the controversial execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, whose case had divided the country and the Round Table for six years, seemed to cast a pall over the group’s unchecked antics. Dorothy Parker believed strongly in the pair’s innocence, and upon their deaths she remarked “I had heard someone say and so I said too, that ridicule is the most effective weapon. Well, now I know that there are things that never have been funny and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield but it is not a weapon.”

As America entered the Depression and the more somber decade of the 1930s, the bonds that had held the group together loosened; many members moved to Hollywood or on to other interests. “It didn’t end, it just sort of faded,” recalled Marc Connelly. A decade after it began, the Algonquin Round Table was over. Not forgotten, the Round Table remains one of the great examples of an American artists’ community and the effects it can have on its time."---
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters...nquin/527/