10/03/2014 by Scheong

A Rude Awakening – The History of Alarm-Clocks

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!! BRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIINNNNGGGG!!

“…and the time now is 7:00am, on your local breakfast-radio program. Coming up next, the traffic heading into the city from the east is backed up for ten blocks because of an overturned truck transporting strawberry yogurt. Police say they’re in the midst of a very sticky situation…”

Every morning around the world, people are jolted, jostled, jerked and jumped out of bed by sounds that vary from air-raid sirens to simulated roosters, electronic beeping to breakfast radio, to the sound of Grieg’s ‘Morning Mood’ from the Peer Gynt Suite:

In the 21st Century, we have all sorts of ways to wake us up in the morning, from jangling bells to novelty sirens to our favourite musical tracks. If you search hard enough, you’ll even find an alarm-clock voiced by Stephen Fry in his famous portrayal of Reginald Jeeves.

Who wouldn’t want to be woken up in the morning by their own personal English valet?

The alarm-clock, in all its various permutations, has been around for about three hundred years. When, where, why and how did the alarm-clock come from, and how did it develop over the centuries? Let’s find out…

Before the Alarm-Clock

As much as we don’t like it, sometimes it is necessary to wake up earlier than we’d want to. But how to do this in the days before alarm-clocks were invented?

If early man wanted to wake up…early…then one simple method was just to drink. Drinking lots of water before bed will certainly get you up early so that you can go take a leak! Or, simply sleep where natural sunlight will wake you up with its own brightness. Some people relied on roosters, which would crow every morning at sun-up. These were among the methods used by ancient and medieval peoples, in order to wake up as early as possible, to make the most use of daylight with which to get tasks done. Candles and oil for lamps was expensive, and so were used as sparingly as possible.

For most people, knowing the actual ‘time’ was never necessary. Few people needed to know what the time was – they just needed the light to do their work. But as the world became more developed and more advanced, and clocks became better, more people started having clocks in their homes.

Early clocks were notoriously inaccurate. Even the best ones would be out by minutes a day, and hours a week, requiring frequent resetting. People relied on church-bells and large public clocks to wake them up, or tell them what the time was, since household clocks were rarely accurate, and were often expensive! Even pendulum clocks were not especially accurate – changing summer and winter temperatures affects the length of the pendulum (due to expanding and contracting metal), and therefore, also affects its accuracy.

For people living in town, who had to wake up early (for factory-jobs, for example), there was one main of doing this, if you didn’t have an alarm-clock (or if one had not yet been invented), and that was to employ a knocker-up.

A knocker-up/knocker-upper, was a man employed by a factory or company, to go around the streets before sunrise, and knock on people’s front doors or their bedroom windows, to wake them up each morning for work. Since some knocker-ups might do double-duty as lamplighters, they would beat their lamplighting-staffs against the windows to wake people up, as they did their rounds, extinguishing streetlamps as they went along.

In Tony Robinson’s TV series “The Worst Jobs in History“, he declared that being a knocker-up was a lousy job because there was nobody around to wake him up, to make sure that he woke everyone else up!

The First Alarm-Clocks

The first ‘alarm-clocks’ of a sort, have existed since ancient times. These were often large, public clocks, with mechanisms built in, to sound bells at specific times (for example, for monks, when they needed to pray). Most people still relied on the bells attached to large public clock-towers, or church bell-towers. Few people had need for anything more specific or accurate than that. The first real attempts at making an alarm-clock as we might know it today, did not show up until the 1700s.

The Industrial Revolution of the Georgian Era meant that people now had new work-patterns. You weren’t regulated by the sun, to work in the field. You were regulated by the clock, to work in a factory or workshop. And it now became necessary to wake up at a specific time each day.

The first alarm-clock produced during the early Industrial Revolution was built by Levi Hutchins, a man living in the newly-independent United States, in 1787. Hutchins built the clock to wake him up at 4:00am for his job, but the design was never patented, or mass-produced. It would be nearly another 100 years, before the first really modern alarm-clock was produced.

The Modern Alarm Clock

The first modern alarm-clock, one which an individual could own, which would both tell time, and set off an alarm which could be adjusted to any time at all, was not invented until the 1870s.

The pioneer was the Seth E. Thomas Clock Company, founded by Seth Thomas in 1813. Although Thomas himself died in 1859, the company bearing his name produced the first practical, mass-produced alarm-clock in 1876. This mechanical, hand-wound clock had an alarm-mechanism that could be set to any time. The first truly modern alarm-clock had arrived!

The classic, double-bell alarm-clock

Exactly when this specific style of clock came out is anyone’s guess, but it’s been around for at least 100 years, sometime probably between the 1880s-1900s. It has been manufactured by Westclox since at least the 1920s. For most people, when they imagine an alarm-clock, they picture the classic twin-bell timepiece with two keys, and two knobs, two bells, two feet, and two hands.

The classic double-bell alarm-clock has a mainspring for the time-mechanism, and a bell-spring, for the alarm. They also featured a dial at the top for the user to set the alarm to ring at whatever time they chose. These clocks ran on 36-hour springs, and had to be wound each morning (or evening). The bell-springs generally had to be wound up every two or three days, depending on how deep the sleeper happened to be!

Clocks like this came with one, or two bells on top. Or sometimes, with no bells at all!

A Westclox “Big Ben” advert from 1931

The Westclox “Big Ben” is one of the longest-lasting alarm-clock designs in the world. It came out in the early 1900s, and didn’t cease production until well into the 1960s and 70s. Its claim to fame was its neat appearance – It was easy to read, easy to operate, and without any external bells for dust to gather underneath.

Westclox Big Bens were among the first to use the patented “Bell-Back”-style of clock-case. Here, the bell-gong was actually built into the back of the clock-case, and a hammer simply struck the inside of the clock-case to sound the alarm.

Depending on the model, Big Bens came with a simple “on-off” alarm-switch, or with an additional repeater-switch, where the alarm would ring for a few seconds…stop…then ring for a few seconds…and stop…and ring for a few seconds…and stop again. Until the spring had run down. Probably the earliest ‘snooze’ function in the world!

Clocks During the War

The Second World War is almost over! Slowly, we can take things ‘off-ration’ and enjoy them as we did before the outbreak in 1939! What’s the first thing to be enjoyed en-masse once more? Chocolate? Condoms? French champagne?

Alarm-clocks.

In Britain and America during WWII, clock-companies ceased production from 1942-1945. They produced airplane parts and other important components for the war-effort. But by the end of the War, there was a surprisingly high demand for alarm-clocks! Especially in England where many homes had been bombed out, reliable, functional alarm-clocks had become rare, due to them breaking down and not being easily replaced, or being damaged in bombing-raids and not being able to be recovered or repaired.

In the United States, clockmakers couldn’t repair customers’ clocks, due to the lack of steel and brass for replacement parts (which were used for weapons and bullets in the war). The result was that more and more people missed their work-shifts, which were vital for keeping the Allies going during the War.

This appalling lack of alarm-clocks and the production-time for war-materials lost as a result, meant that alarm-clocks were one of the first things to come ‘off-ration’ in the closing months of the war. In America, the Office of Price-Administration (the OPA), a body set up to regulate prices of civilian products during the war (to prevent outrageous price-hikes by war-profiteers), allowed clock-companies to resume manufacture of civilian alarm-clocks as early as late 1944. However, Westclox produced cheap ‘Waralarm’ clocks from 1943-1944, to replace all those which had worn out during the War. Due to the severe materials-rationing, the brass and steel used to make these clocks was almost non-existent. As a result…

“…In this model the [War Production Board] specifies the use of but 7 pounds of brass for every 1000 clocks, whereas in normal production we use 300 pounds for every 1000 clocks. We have found suitable substitutes for the restricted metals.

Despite the difficulties, we believe the clock is pleasing in appearance, and will be readily acceptable by the buying public.

It has a case of moulded wood fibre, which will be lacquered. It stands 5 5/8 inches high, and is 5 1/4 inches wide, with a large, easy to read dial. It has a bell alarm, but plans call for the eventual use of a buzzer…”

– Westclox ‘Tick-Talk’ magazine, 1943.

Alarm-Clock-Radio

The clock-radio has been a popular item on peoples’ bedside tables for decades. A way to wake up to something other than the harsh buzzing, beeping or jangling that accompanies ordinary alarms. A civilised way to wake up, to your favourite radio station, with music, or news, or early-morning talk-back.

Exactly who invented the combination of the clock-radio, and even when it was invented, appears to have been lost to history. There are conflicting reports about exactly when, and by whom, this wonderful and fascinating device was created. Its date of creation varies, from the late 1920s, up to the late 1940s. The company or person that came up with the idea is equally obscure. All indications are that first rudimentary alarm-clock radios came out in the 1930s, and slowly developed from there.

The Digital Alarm-Clock

The postwar era, the ‘Long Boom’ of the 1950s, saw design embracing new technologies and materials. No more metal, no more spring-wound mechanical clocks – Now people wanted stuff made of plastic!

Plastic before the War had been in its infancy. It was used for certain products like telephones, fountain pens, and various desk-accessories, but was in general, still a wonder-material held in-awe by most manufacturers. Metal-shortages during the War forced companies to experiment and try new materials. And in the mid-1950s, the first electronic digital clock appeared.

I say the first ELECTRONIC digital clock.

Digital clocks have been around for ages.

We must understand this. Digital clocks are not new. They have been around for well over a hundred years. The word ‘digital’ has nothing to do with electricity, but everything to do with display.

A digital clock is a clock which displays time purely through numerical arrangements, and without the aid of hands or pointers. Like “09:45”.

Such clocks (and even watches) have been around since at least the Victorian era. But analogue clocks just remained more popular. One of the first serious digital clocks of the modern era is the famous ‘flip-clock’, which has white numerals on a black background of metal (later, plastic) leaves, which flip and drop along a horizontal axis, to display the time. Developed in Italy in the late 1940s, this simple, easily-read, and much less-cluttered design made it popular and more straight-forward than a conventional analogue dial-clock of the era.

The Teasmade

The lawyer in the court-room,
In the middle of an alimony plea,
Has gotta stop and help ’em pour,
When the clock strikes four!

Everything stops for tea…

A “Teasmade”

Yes indeed. One of the more interesting alarm-clocks that you could possibly find is the ‘Teasmade‘. Existing in one form or another since Victorian times, this device is typically a combination alarm-clock and automatic kettle and teapot all in one. Originally a crude, mechanical, clockwork-operated device starting in the 1890s, it took off in the early 20th century and by the 1930s, the first mass-produced ‘Teesmades‘, as they were originally spelt, came onto the market, starting in 1933.

The Teasmade became incredibly popular in the postwar era during the 1970s and 80s. It died off somewhat around the turn of the century, but is steadily being revived, and today, you can still buy brand-new teasmades, online, or at retail shops in the U.K.

Electrical and Quartz Clocks

Electromagnetic clocks have existed since the 1840s, but for a long time, these were restricted to large clocks found in public buildings, as they were often too expensive for private use. The same applied for quartz clocks, which use the regular pulses generated by a quartz-crystal (when electricity is passed through it) to keep time.

Developed in the late 1920s, quartz clocks (and by extension, quartz alarm-clocks) would not become practical and cheap until the 1970s and 80s. Before then, most people relied on mechanical alarm-clocks to continue waking them up each day.

Alarm-Clocks in the 21st Century

These days, everything has an alarm-clock on it, from your mobile-phone to your laptop computer. But alarm-clocks still grace the bedside tables of millions of people around the world. Traditional, spring-driven mechanical clocks are still produced, and can be purchased cheaply and easily online. They follow a basic and classic design that hasn’t changed in over a century.

But for people looking for something with a bit more umph, there’s everything from flying alarm-clocks, exploding alarm-clocks, alarm-clocks that play air-raid sirens, and even Ticky, Tocky and Clocky, three different types of wandering alarm-clocks, that will literally roll off the end of your bedside table and roll around on the floor, beeping incessantly, forcing you to get up and chase it around to turn off the alarm.

Everyone, meet Clocky!

More Information?

Westclox “Waralarm” clocks (1943-1945)

The History of Flip-Clocks

21/02/2014 by Scheong

The Silk Road – The Information Super-Highway

Spices. Metals. Jewels and gems. Cloth. Silk. Ideas. Stories. New technologies. New foods. New peoples. Different cultures and customs.

Today, if we wanted to find out about any of these things, we would go to the internet, the so-called “information super-highway”. We’d bring up Google, and type in whatever we wanted to know, and hit ‘Search‘. And we’d be bombarded with millions and billions of pages of everything from photographs to blogs, videos, flash-player games, webpages and porno-sites advertising midget donkey orgies.

The Ancient World had its own ‘information super-highway’. Not an electronic one, but a physical one. A network of land and sea-routes which made up the vast trading network of the Old World. It has come to be known, rather misleadingly, as “The Silk Road”.

Let’s find out more about it!

What is the ‘Old World’?

The ‘Old World‘ is defined as all landmasses occupied by European and Asian peoples before the Ages of Exploration. So, Britain, Europe, Scandinavia, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, the Indian Subcontinent, China and Asia are considered the “Old World”. The ‘New World‘ by comparison, are the lands which were discovered by Europeans during the Ages of Exploration, starting in the 1400s. Lands like New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South America and North America.

The Silk Road doesn’t concern them. So forget about them. We’re talking about the Old World today.

What is the ‘Silk Road’?

We’ve all heard of the Silk Road. We’ve studied it in history class. We’ve read about it in books. We’ve heard it mentioned in movies and documentaries.

But what the hell is it?

First, it’s not just a road, and it’s not all about silk.

The term ‘Silk Road‘ was coined by Baron Ferdinand Von Richthofen (the uncle of the famous ‘Red Baron’) in the 1870s. It’s the literal translation of the German term: “Seidenstrasse“, but it’s a misleading title at best.

The ‘Silk Road’ was not just ONE ROAD. If you have this idea in your head about this grand boulevard stretching across the world from Constantinpole to Xi’an…forget it. It never existed.

The Silk Road was the name given to a SERIES OF TRADE-ROUTES which ran from Europe, to Asia, and back. They were both land-routes, going from Europe, through the Middle East, across (or past) India, towards China, and also water-routes, sailing from the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, and then down the Red Sea, into the Indian Ocean, through the Pacific, to China.

Neither was the Silk Road exclusively about silk. Silk was just ONE of the reasons why this collection of trade-routes existed. Just ONE of several commodities traded along its length. The Silk Road wasn’t just some fancy Middle-Eastern bazaar where you went to buy a nice robe. It traded everything – metals like tin and copper, spices like pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon, it traded ideas and religions, technologies, languages, and foods which Europeans had not heard of before. Like lemons, limes and dates.

The Origins of the Silk Road

The Silk Road is believed to have started in about 206 B.C. In the West, the Roman Empire is on the rise. In the East, it is the era of the Chinese Han Dynasty. Two great and powerful civilisations separated from each other by thousands of miles of mountains, deserts, rivers, seas and oceans.

In the East, a mythical land. A country known only as ‘Cathay‘. And a city called ‘Chang’an‘, in Shaanxi Province, in the country’s inner-east. Today, ‘Cathay‘ is called ‘China’. And ‘Chang’an‘ has been renamed. Today, you know it as ‘Xi’an’. Xi’an is more than the location of the famous Terracotta Army.

For centuries, Xi’an was the Eastern Terminus of the famous Silk Road. And from Xi’an, trade-routes and road spread south and west, across the great Eurasian landmass, towards great cities and countries, such as Arabia, Turkey and its capital of Constantinople, and Italy, to ports like Naples.

The Silk Road was started by the Chinese in the Han Dynasty, as a way to trade silk, a rare and precious commodity, with eager merchants and customers in the West. The Chinese are not banned from selling silk, but by imperial decree, no Chinaman can divulge silk-making methods to the “barbarians” of the West. This means that Western traders such as the Byzantines, the Greeks and the Romans, are forced to purchase Chinese silk on Chinese terms, along the Chinese Silk Road.

Trading on the Silk Road

The Silk Road was not one road. It was a network of roads and sea-routes between the Far East and Europe. But in its most basic form, it was a pair of routes that linked three different places together – there was one route which ran from eastern Europe to the Middle East, and another route which linked the Middle East to China. This basic original route exploded into the network and web of routes which the Road is known for today.

Traders and merchants working the Silk Road rarely traveled along its entire length. A trader in Xi’an would not travel all the way to Constantinople. A wine-merchant in Naples would not travel all the way to Bombay. Most traders and merchants sold their goods to a middle-man. Who traveled to the next major trading-city, and sold it to another middle-man. Who traveled to the next major city, selling it to another middle-man.

All these nameless middle-men made up the links in the chain of the Silk Road. And these men traded everything from wine, to silk, olive-oil to ivory, cotton to pepper, cinnamon and all manner of exotic and rare spices.

From Shaanxi Province, and the city of Chang’an (near the modern city of Xi’an), a trader might travel northwest. Here, he entered Gansu Province, and the famous Hexi (‘Hey-See‘) Corridor. The corridor is the first leg in the northernmost, and earliest incarnation of what would become the Silk Road. This route was one of the few open to the Silk Road, due to mountains in the south, and the harsh Gobi Desert in China’s north. Only by stringing along, from oasis to oasis along the Hexi Corridor could a trader hope to cover any distance with safety.

While it was rare for the majority of the merchants to travel the entire length of the Silk Road, those who operated in the Middle East, India and China made the city of Chang’an their base. An enormous population-center boasting thousands of citizens, the city was the capital of China during this time. If Chang’an was the Eastern Terminus of the Silk Road, then the city’s Western Market was the baggage-claim carousel. It was here that travelers from China’s other provinces, or traders from the West and South gathered to exchange their goods and wares for sale into China, or for export out of the Central Kingdom. And it was from places such as Chang’an that all sorts of wondrous and not-so-wondrous things spread from the East to the West.

The Silk Road and the Black Death

Not everything traded on the silk road was as benign as silk, spices and tea. The Silk Road is also famous for spreading the Black Death, the infamous Bubonic Plague, that ravaged Europe, killing untold hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of just a few years.

Coming from an unknown source, somewhere in China, the Black Death spread westwards, carried by traders on the Silk Road. The rats and fleas which carried the plague bacteria hitched rides on camel-caravans, hiding inside tents, baskets, rolls of cloth, and pots and barrels of food. Civilisations once safeguarded from foreign diseases by the barrier of distance were now susceptible to all kinds of illnesses which they had never heard of, had no immunity against, and for which no cures or treatments existed.

How Long did the Road Last?

Originally an overland route started in the Pre-Christian era, the Silk Road expanded over the centuries, eventually incorporating maritime routes as well, sailing the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. In the 1100s, relatively safer maritime trading-routes begin to pop up alongside the overland routes. Free from the dangers of bandits, sandstorms, taxes and raids, and able to carry much more cargo, it’s fairly obvious why the Silk Road’s seagoing trade began to rise.

With the rise of seagoing trade, and the smuggling of silk-spinning knowledge out of China, the importance of China as the silk capital of the world began to diminish greatly as the world approached the Middle Ages. By the early Middle Ages, silk was being produced in Italy and France, and travelling such great distances to China was no-longer necessary.

The Decline of the Silk Road

The Silk Road’s decline started in the Early Modern Period, after the 1300s. Silkworms, and the technology and knowledge for silk-production had been smuggled out of China over the years, and by the 1200s, it was no-longer a Chinese state secret. It was now possible for Europeans to produce silk and to cut off the need for long trips to China. The ‘Silk Road’ still existed, but it was now smaller, shorter and less important. At any rate, changes in the political landscape of Europe and the Middle East and Asia in this time meant that it was safer to transport luxury goods by sea, rather than across potentially hostile land.

Trade by sea was potentially, longer and more dangerous, but the trade-off was being able to carry much larger loads of cargo, and thereby, earn larger profits. Furthermore, changes in Chinese foreign policy, set up by dynasties such as the Ming, meant that the whole concept of Chinese ‘Foreign Policy’ basically ceased to exist. They shut off communications with the West, and western traders, merchants and travelers were no-longer welcome within the bounds of the “Central Kingdom”.

For centuries the Silk Road was vitally important. But not always for the reasons you might suppose. While it transported everything from gold to ivory to silk, spices, tea, cotton and other rare or otherwise sought-after commodities, it also transported religions, ideas, technologies and social customs around the then-known world. And they’ll probably last a lot longer than your best silk boxer-shorts.

The Road to Knowledge?

“The Silk Road” (12pt documentary series).

A Timeline of the Silk Road

The Silk Road – Article from the University of California, Irvine

The Silk Road – The Ancient History Encyclopedia

30/01/2014 by Scheong

China – A Century of Revolutions

“…Let China sleep, for when she wakes, the World shall tremble…” – Napoleon Bonaparte

This quotation by the French emperor regarding the great bastion of the orient, is one of the most famous in history. It’s simply said, simply understood, and simply true. China has awoken in the 21st century, and the world trembles from the impact of what it has done, and what it continues to do.

In the 21st Century, China is one of the fastest-growing countries on earth. It has one of the largest populations, it has a skyrocketing middle-class, an educated youth, and a gigantic manufacturing industry, producing everything from radios to TVs, fridges, to those annoying little bobble-head things that people use to adorn their desks and the dashboards of their automobiles.

China’s growth and change has not only been large, but also fast. It’s the end-result of over a century of political and cultural turmoil, of wars, revolutions, more wars, more revolutions and still more wars and revolutions. This posting will look at how various events in Chinese history gave us the China we have today.

Taming the Dragon – The Opening of China

China. Zhong Guo. The ‘Central Kingdom‘. Land of wonder, mysteries, ancient traditions, fascinating culture, marvelous inventions…and fried rice.

For centuries, China was intensely isolationist. Its very name in Chinese, ‘Zhong Guo‘, means the ‘Central Kingdom’, or ‘Central Country’. In the eyes of the Chinese, the world revolved around China and China was the center of it. China not only had enormous land and wealth, but an enormous population, and at one time, the largest seagoing navy in the entire world.

The Chinese mastered such arts as the manufacturing of paper and gunpowder. They created the first seismographs, they invented wheelbarrows, the compass, porcelain, silk, astronomical clocks, and repeating crossbows, as quick to fire as any bolt-, or lever-action rifle, provided the magazine was full. Its claim to being the ‘Central Kingdom’ seemed well-founded.

Despite all these technologies, discoveries, advancements and skills, China remained closed to the world. The Qing Dynasty, the first dynasty which most Westerners were likely to have made contact with, and the last dynasty of Imperial China, upheld a strict policy of national isolationism. ‘Barbarian‘ Westerners are not allowed into China, and they are not allowed to trade with China. And China is not interested in anything outside of its own borders. And if it is interested, it is only to improve China’s lot, and not to improve that of any other nation.

One example of this extreme isolationism is the trade of silk.

Europeans loved silk. It’s soft, it’s smooth, it’s light, it breathes, and it comes in so many pretty colours!

But they had no idea what it was, how it was made, or where it came from! They could purchase it, they could trade for it, but they could not see how it was made. This was because the manufacture of silk was a state secret in Imperial China. Sharing this knowledge with outsiders, especially WHITE outsiders, was punishable by death! China relied on its silk-monopoly to keep the Westerners begging for more, and to keep foreign money coming into the Empire.

Westerners were desperate to trade with China, but China did not want to trade with the West. It saw no need to trade with the west. The West had wooden bowls and plates, or plates made of brass or copper or pewter or clay. The Chinese had pure white porcelain!

The Westerners had cotton and wool, weaving-looms and spinning-wheels. The Chinese had soft silks and satins, spun from the cocoons of silk-worms. They saw no need for Western fabrics!

Everything the West tried to ply the Chinese with, the Chinese turned up their noses at. But the West never gave up. And in the mid-1700s, the first cracks in old Imperial China began to appear.

The Canton System (1757-1844)

The persistence of the West to trade with China finally culminated in the creation of the ‘Canton System’, in the 1750s. Under the ‘Canton System’, Western ships (mostly British and American) could trade with the Chinese, in China.

But only at one port. And at one port only.

Canton, in southern China.

And in Canton, only out of certain buildings. And with certain merchants.

This stifling arrangement was China’s way of controlling Western activity in China, and of preventing the Westerners from bringing their filthy, barbarian ways into the serenity of the Central Kingdom. And the Westerners had better be damn grateful for it! The Chinese were letting them into their glorious Central Kingdom! Previously, this had not been allowed – During the 1600s, Western ships wishing to trade with the Chinese were confined to doing so on the island of Macau. But when this proved unsatisfactory to the British and other Western nations, the Canton System was developed.

A ship docking in Canton from a country in the West (such as the United States), could purchase wares from one of thirteen warehouses or ‘factories’. Certain merchants in Canton were given permission by the Chinese government to trade with the West. These merchants, called ‘Hongs’ (‘Profession‘ in Chinese), set themselves up near Canton Harbour, establishing warehouses, shops and places of business to do trade with the growing number of Western ships which visited Canton each year. Each factory or ‘Hong’ catered to a specific nationality. So the British would have one Hong, the Americans would have another, the French or Spanish might use another Hong, and so on. All thirteen hongs or traders operated under the ‘Cohong’. The Cohong was like the guild or trade-union, that supervised and regulated the trade conducted by the Thirteen Factories. And up until the First Opium War of the early 1840s, they held a monopoly on all trade in the Canton System.

The Port of Canton, in 1820. Flags, L-R: Denmark, Spain, U.S.A., Sweden, Great Britain, and Holland. The warehouses and buildings fronting onto the port held the goods which foreign sailors wished to purchase from the Chinese

The Canton System and trading with the merchants under the control of the Cohong was a stifling arrangement at best. But for the Western powers, it was an even more frustrating arrangement because of one thing.

Silver.

The Chinese insisted on only trading in silver. Not gold. Silver. And only silver. The problem with this was that the Western powers didn’t have any silver! Or at least, not enough to sustain trade with China. Western powers held stores of wealth in gold! Silver was used for pocket-change, teapots, trays, candleholders and cutlery. Not for buying silk!

The Chinese insistence on silver was a huge strain for the Western powers, especially Britain, which loved Chinese tea and porcelain. Struggling to find an answer, they stopped trading using silver, and switched to something else – Opium. This was going to be a disaster.

The Opium Wars (1839-1842 & 1856-1860)

Starting in the late 1700s, the British started trading in Canton using opium. Small amounts at first, but gradually, they grew. Opium was easily accessible to the British – they shipped it in from India and Bengal, and a suitable alternative to paying for Chinese goods using silver (of which the British government was rapidly running out). The Chinese government was extremely critical of this corruption of their people, and made several diplomatic attempts to stop the opium-trade. Letters and laws were written and passed, inspectors and enforcers were appointed to arrest Chinese drug-dealers, to seize shipments of opium and to have them destroyed, and to try and prevent the spread of the drug which was rapidly poisoning the health of China.

The Opium Wars (especially the first one) was not just a war on drugs, however. And there were other factors involved. Most of them linked to trade and foreign relations.

It had been the desire of the British to establish diplomatic relations with China, as far back as the 1700s. Something that the Chinese refused to do. Partially because the British wanted to set up a British Embassy in Peking. Peking being the Imperial City, was of course, off-limits to foreign barbarians! The Chinese refused, and the British were forced to postpone their dreams for proper diplomatic relations with China for another day.

If there were no proper diplomatic relations, how did all these trade-agreements, such as the Canton System, come about?

The Chinese believed that their emperor was the Son of Heaven, appointed by God to rule on earth as his representative, under the Mandate of Heaven. A similar concept in Western society is the Divine Right of Kings. The only difference is that, as a king is divinely appointed, he cannot be questioned, and his actions cannot be questioned. The actions of an emperor could be questioned, however. If an emperor’s reign was marred by disasters and misfortune, this was seen as his having lost the Mandate of Heaven (the blessing of God, basically), and that he should step down and let someone else take the reins of power.

Being that the emperor was the Son of Heaven, all other national leaders were therefore seen as subjects or tributaries of the Chinese Emperor. This included all foreign heads of state.

You can imagine how well that went over at Windsor Castle, or the White House.

A foreign government paid China a tribute. In return, the Chinese government gave a reward for this tribute, and allowed foreign powers the privilege of trading with China, as a tributary state. Foreign powers put up with this because the riches they could get from China were considered to be worth the expense. But it was a stifling system at the best of times. And when issues sprang up regarding payment and trade using silver and opium, an already uncomfortable situation got even more tense.

Starting in the 1780s and 90s, the British started smuggling opium into China. This was technically illegal, but it didn’t stop them – they did not have enough silver to trade with the Chinese, and the trade was too good to stop, simply because they didn’t have the right kind of metal! They had to find something else which the Chinese would accept as payment for their precious commodities, and opium was it.

The Chinese government fought back with opium bans, and the situation deteriorated rapidly from there. By 1839, despite trying to placate British merchants, and Chinese officials and sailors boarding British ships and destroying their shipments of opium, and everything else that had happened, China and Britain went to war.

The first Opium War (1839-1842) was what finally cracked the nut of China open. Suffering humiliating losses and defeats at the hands of the British, in 1842, the Chinese government sued for peace. There’s more about the Opium Wars in another one of my posts.

The Treaty of Nanking

The First Opium War was a key event in Chinese history, and in producing the China that we have today. Without the opium war, China would never have opened its borders. And without that, it would never have been exposed to Western science, technologies and ways of thinking, which would produce effects on China that shaped it into the nation it is today.

But first, there is the Treaty of Nanking.

The Treaty of Nanking is what finished the First Opium War, in 1842. It was signed on the H.M.S. Cornwallis, anchored in the Yangtze River, off of the ancient city of Nanking, giving the treaty its name. It was the first of the “Unequal Treaties” which the Chinese were forced to sign. Called ‘Unequal’ because by the terms of the treaty, China was expected to allow the British to do certain things in China, but the British had no obligations to do anything in return for China. The Treaty mostly dealt with issues of trade, foreign relations and foreign movement within China. Specifically…

– The Canton System of the Hongs and the 13 Factories is Abolished.

– The British will continue to trade at Canton. In addition, four other port-cities will be opened for trade. These were Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and the most famous one of all…Shanghai.

– The British expected to be paid reparations for the war, as well as reparations for all the opium they had lost before the war. In total, a sum of $21,000,000!

– Until all reparations are paid (over a period of three years), British troops will be stationed in China. As more reparations are paid, the number of troops will accordingly decrease.

– All British P.O.Ws would be released at once. All Chinese collaborators with the British would be given a pardon by the Chinese government.

– The island of Hong Kong will be given to the British, for the purposes of establishing a British Colony.

The conditions of the Treaty of Nanking directly contributed to many changes in China which can still be felt and seen, even today, over 150 years later. Thanks to the Treaty, Shanghai is the largest city in China. Thanks to the treaty, Hong Kong became a British colony, and thanks to the Treaty, China was finally opened to outside influences and ideas.

The International Settlement of Shanghai (ca. 1842/3-1943/9)

These new ideas and influences, methods of government, styles of dress, western architecture, education and technology entered China through the Treaty Ports. The ports of Canton (Guangzhou today), Amoy (Xiamen today), Foochow (Fuzhou today), Ningpo (Ningbo today), and Shanghai were opened up to provide the British with avenues with which to trade with China. The most famous treaty port was Shanghai.

The original city of Shanghai was a small, walled settlement built on the bank of the Huangpu River, a tributary of the mighty Yangtze. The British established a foreign concession-zone to the north of the city, to the southern bank of Suzhou Creek. This was in 1843.

It was in this zone that the British conducted the business of trade. It was originally meant to be a purely business settlement, but as merchants and traders and businessmen arrived, so did their families. And their friends. And their friends’ families. And their friends and families met and mingled, and married, and created more families. And all these people wanted the comforts of Old Blighty. They wanted churches, houses, schools, shops, and everything else that a city like London or Paris might have. So the British Concession spread from being a purely business zone into being a town in its own right.

Soon after the British, the Americans showed up in 1844. They established a zone on the north bank of the Suzhou Creek. The French arrived in 1848, establishing a zone to the south of the British concession, and to the west of the original walled city. Over time, the British and American zones expanded and grew along the banks of the creek, and spread north and west and east along the bank of the Huangpu River.

Deciding that it was silly for each country to have its own zone, in 1863, three years after the end of the Second Opium War, the British and Americans unified their respective settlements in Shanghai, creating the famous International Settlement of Shanghai. The International Settlement of Shanghai (referred to simply as ‘The Settlement’ by most people) became an island of Westerners in the middle of China, and by far the largest and most famous of all Western expatriate zones in China. This was due to a number of reasons:

Shanghai was located close to the mouth of the Yangtze, the most important river in China.

As the ‘Gateway City’ to China’s interior, Shanghai received a lot of river-traffic. And this meant that more merchants stopped in Shanghai than almost any other city in China, apart perhaps, from Peking.

The residents of Shanghai (who creatively called themselves ‘Shanghailanders‘), enjoyed immunity from Chinese laws. As Western expats, they could not be prosecuted by the Chinese legal-system. This was another condition extracted from the Chinese by the British after another unequal treaty, after the second Opium War (another condition was the right to send Christian missionaries deep into the Chinese interior. This would have disastrous consequences, which I’ll mention later).

The Bund, International Settlement of Shanghai, China, 1928. Looking North. On the right is the Huangpu River. Across the road and to the west, beyond the line of buildings, the British Concession of the Settlement

The International Settlement was called the Whore of the Orient. The Paris of the East, and many other things besides, reflecting its growing reputation as a city of loose morals, drugs, gambling, prostitution, gangland violence, high-society living, jazz-bands, nightclubs, betting and racing, and of course, being a passage through which opium could continue to be shipped to China. The firm of Jardine, Matheson & Co, an import-export business (still around today), shipped all kinds of things into, and out of China. Most of its money was made through the opium-trade. They had their headquarters on the famous ‘Bund’, the waterfront promenade that ran along the shore of the Huangpu River. Also located on the Bund, and established there in 1865, was the Shanghai office of a small company called the Hong Kong-Shanghai Banking Corporation. At the same time in Hong Kong, another office of the same company was established. Today, it’s called H.S.B.C.

The Legation Quarter of Peking (1861-1959)

While the International Settlement of Shanghai was the most famous of the Western expat-zones in China, the Legation Quarter of Peking was also high on the list of importance.

At the end of the Second Opium War in 1860, the victorious foreign powers extracted yet another humiliating treaty from the Chinese. Called the Treaties of Tientsin (Tianjin today), they allowed the foreign powers to establish legations in Peking, they allowed for foreign ships to navigate the Yangtze River, the opening of even more treaty-ports, and the right for no restriction of travel through China, of all foreigners.

These conditions were all kicks to the crotch for the Chinese. Especially the establishment of foreign legations in Peking! As the Imperial City, Peking, the capital of China, was reserved for the Emperor, the Empress and the Imperial Court! It was the location of the famous Forbidden City! How DARE the Barbarians insist that they could establish a concession-zone there! But the Chinese could do nothing to fight back.

Legation Street, within the Peking Legation Quarter

The Legation Quarter was a collection of houses, shops, buildings and foreign legations, which housed foreign diplomats, their families, diplomatic staff, and western expats living in Peking. The Quarter only made up a small area of Peking, but it was small in the same way a needle in your ass is small. You’ll never forget that it’s there.

The Boxer Rebellion and the Siege of the Legations (1900)

The Boxer Rebellion, culminating in the famous Siege of the Legations in 1900, was another major event in Chinese history that led to its current position in the world. This is covered in greater detail in another one of my posts.

Infuriated and insulted by European (mostly French, but also American) Christian missionaries invading Chinese villages and destroying their ancient belief-systems, an extremely anti-Western organisation which was dubbed ‘The Boxers’ by the Western press, started attacking, killing and laying waste to anything Western and Christian. This eventually led to the famous Siege of the Legation Quarter, an almost two-month long assault on the Legation Quarter in Peking.

Messages smuggled out of the Quarter, fortified against the Chinese, made it to Tientsin, the nearest major city, and port, to Peking. Relief-efforts were organised and the Eight Nation Alliance (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, Austria-Hungary and Italy) sent troops to Peking to lift the siege.

The Siege of the Legations traumatised the West and the East. It showcased the weaknesses and inabilities of the Qing Government, it showed the military weakness of China, it infuriated the Western powers, and hastened the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, already on its last legs. It fanned the flames of Chinese republicanism, and made the foreigners in China feel extremely unsafe. But it did not have the desired effect of removing them from China’s shores. Instead, one of the responses was to build protective walls and gates around the entire Legation Quarter, to safeguard against potential future attacks, as well as to house soldiers within the compound!

China at the Turn of the 20th Century

By the year 1901, China is a country in turmoil. It has lost war after war, it has had to sign humiliating treaties that do nothing to improve its lot, the Qing Government is trampling all efforts to modernise and improve China, and on the 1st of July, 1898, one of the most famous events in Chinese and British history takes place – the British sign a 99-year lease with China, allowing them to take possession of the island of Hong Kong and the surrounding land of Kowloon, until the 1st of July, 1997 – the date of the famous Handover of Hong Kong.

As much as China struggled to resist change, it was being dragged, kicking, screaming and spewing obscenities, into the dawn of the 20th century.

The First Chinese Revolution (1911)

Nanking Road, International Settlement, Shanghai. Ca. December, 1911. “Five Races Unity” flags hang from the buildings of Shanghai, celebrating the success of the Shanghai Uprising

Humiliated and weakened by defeat after defeat, the Qing Government was on its last legs in the early 20th century. The First Opium War, the Taiping Rebellion, the Second Opium War, the Sino-French War, the First Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Rebellion all served to showcase its weaknesses in protecting the people of China, and seriously challenging its assertion as the legitimate ruler of China.

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894 was especially humiliating – losing against a fellow Asian nation! Japan, a modern, Western-influenced Asian empire with an up-to-date army and navy, swept the Chinese out of the Korean Peninsula in a matter of six months and in the space of a year, Korea went from being a Chinese vassal state to being a colony of the Japanese Empire. A status it would hold until 1945, when the Second World War ended.

These continual defeats and the inability and corruption of the Qing dynasty caused many Chinese to lose all trust in their government. And in 1911, the ‘Xinhai Revolution’ took place, finally removing the Qing, a pseudo-Chinese Manchurian dynasty to begin with, from power.

The removal of the Qing from power was seen as the only way for China to improve its lot on the world stage. Chinese citizens, exposed to new ideas and modes of thought and governance, were furious that their own government was so completely impotent. The Qing government blocked reforms, attempts at modernisation, attempts at bringing Western technologies to China, upgrading the Chinese armed forces for the 20th century, and its continual failure to ward off foreign aggression or to do anything significant about the opium-trade.

These many grievances finally came to a head, and on the 10th of October, 1911, the revolution started with the Wuchang Uprising.

China, a vast country with many provinces and important cities, all located many miles from each other, was seen as the ideal place to build railroads by many of the Western powers. These railroads, linking the various cities and ports of China, were all privately owned and operated. To pay back the Western powers for the damage done during the Boxer Rebellion, the Qing Government wanted to put the railways under state-control. This infuriated many of the Chinese investors in these privately-run railroads. They’d lose millions! The Qing Government tried to pay compensation, but investors were unsatisfied. Riots and protests broke out, which culminated in the start of the Xinhai Revolution. This final misjudged move by the Qing court was the last straw.

The Revolution ended on the 12th of February, 1912 with the abdication of the last Qing Emperor, Puyi. The revolutionary government, the new Republic of China, was initially friendly towards Puyi. The emperor was very young (he ascended the throne in 1908, aged just three!), and was just six years old when he lost his throne! He had reigned for barely three years.

The Flag of China from 1912-1928. “Five Races – One Union“. Each race or ethnicity of China is represented by one colour on the flag

Initially, the government drew up the “Articles of Favourable Treatment” for the Emperor. Among these, included the conditions that…

…the Emperor could hold his title for life, but was not the ruler of China.

…He would be accorded all courtesies given to a FOREIGN head-of-state.

…For the foreseeable future, he could continue to live in the Forbidden City, but must agree to move to the Summer Palace once the new government had been fully established.

…He would receive a government subsidy of $4,000,000 Chinese dollars a year.

…The Emperor and his property will be protected by the State.

…and one which must’ve made men all around China very happy – the Court could not employ any more eunuchs!

The Emperor of China was devastated by the news of his dethronement. It became almost his lifelong ambition (at least, until the 1950s) to regain his throne, something which never happened. Or at least, not for very long.

Most people have probably heard of Lady Jane Grey, the “Nine Day Queen” of England, successor to Edward VI, who was son to Henry VIII. But how many people know of the 12-day Emperor? In 1917, Puyi was, for a very brief period, Emperor of China again, when one of the Chinese warlords restored him to power. However, this move was so extremely unpopular that before the end of two weeks, Puyi was once more forced to abdicate!

The Republic of China (1911-1949)

After the fall of the Manchu ‘Qing’ Dynasty, the Forbidden City was turned into the Palace Museum…which it still is, today. EVERYTHING inside the Museum was bookmarked and cataloged – even unfinished meals! And for the first time in hundreds of years, the Forbidden City and the Imperial Palace was opened to the general public.

The Republic of China, established by Dr. SUN Yat-Sen, would rule China from now on! Or so everyone hoped.

Dr. Sun was the first president of the Republic of China, and the founding father of the Republic. But much like the Weimar Republic in Germany around roughly the same time, the Nationalist Chinese Party, the Kuomintang (modern Chinese: ‘Guo-min-dang‘) and the Republic of China, were built on shaky foundations.

The KMT had an impossible task ahead of it. They wanted to modernise China, shake off the conservatism and restrictions of the Qing Dynasty and bring China into the 20th Century. They wanted medicine, electricity, railroads, telephones, radio and motor-cars. They wanted to be like the great democracies of the West, like the United States and Great Britain, where Dr. Sun had grown up, and had lived as a young man. There, he studied, lived and even became fluent in the English Language.

But they were fighting against centuries of entrenched traditions and superstitions. And getting people to change was very difficult. The ancient custom of binding womens’ feet had to be stopped, but enforcing the new foot-binding ban was difficult. Similarly was the change to get Chinese men to remove the humiliating, stereotypical long ponytails or ‘Cues’, which they had been forced to grow, and wear for centuries, under the rule of the Qing Dynasty. China’s intellectuals and politicians might’ve wanted a modern nation, but they would have to fight long and hard to get it.

The Warlord Period (1916-1928)

China is a HUGE bloody country. It’s bigger than the United States. And for centuries, one of the biggest challenges facing the rulers of China was…HOW do you rule, HOW do you govern, HOW do you control a population in a country that is THIS GIGANTIC!?

In an age before most of China had railroad, telephones, telegraph and radio, communications and the enforcement of law and the recognition of the new nationalist government was extremely difficult. As a result, the country fell under the grip of the Warlords.

The collapse of the Qing Dynasty caused a huge power-struggle within China, between the new Nationalist Government and the Warlords.

The Warlords were men who controlled the rural provinces of China (and there are several of them), using private armies. Between them, the Warlords and their respective armies controlled Sichuan, Shanxi, Guandong, Qinghai, Ningxia, Guangxi, Gansu, Yunnan, and Xinjiang provinces, encompassing much of the Chinese coast and the eastern and central parts of the country. By comparison, while the Nationalists theoretically governed all of China, their actual power was limited to the large population-centers, such as Canton, Shanghai, Nanking, Tientsin and Peking.

China in the Interwar Period (1919-1939)

China in the first half of the 20th century was rocked by conflict. In 1922, the Kuomintang and the newly-formed (1921) Communist Party of China joined forces in the “First United Front”, to tackle the issue of the Chinese Warlords. And while this was successful, the defeat of the warlords (in 1928) had only removed one problem from China, which was swiftly replaced by another – The Chinese Civil War.

In the foreign enclaves of China, such as the Legation Quarter, the International Settlement, and the other such quarters in Nanking, Tientsin and so-forth, Westerners took little notice of outside events. They still enjoyed extraterritoriality (damn, that’s a long word…) and were exempt from Chinese prosecution. The treaties signed with China in the 19th century were still in-effect, and within the foreign expat-zones, life went on as normal, even though, away from the bright lights of Nanking Road or the elegance of the Peking Legation Quarter, China was tearing itself apart.

The Nanking Decade (1927-1937)

In 1927, the decision was made to move the capital of China. From now on, Nanking would be the capital city, not Peking. But in actuality, Peking and Nanking had been chopping and changing as the capital city of China for centuries. In fact, their very names reflect this. “Beijing” just means “Northern Capital“. “Nanjing” just means “Southern Capital“. The official move was made in 1928, and Beijing was renamed Beiping, or “Peiping” (‘Northern Peace‘).

This move of the capital started what was called the “Nanking Decade”; the ten-year period when Nanking was the capital of China, and when, it seemed, for once, China was just…China. But the glitz of Shanghai and the calm of Peking, the bustling ports of Canton, Amoy and Tientsin were all a facade. Because in 1927, more than just the capital city was changed in China.

The Chinese Civil War (1927-1936, 1946-1949)

From the late 1920s until almost the 1950s, China was continuously at war. There was in-fighting in the Kuomintang, there was the Northern Expedition to eradicate the warlords, there was inter-party fighting between the KMT and the CCP, and there was even more fighting between the Chinese and the Japanese. Untold millions of Chinese died in what was nearly two dozen years of nonstop combat. And for half of that time, it was Chinese fighting other Chinese – the Chinese Civil War.

The origins of the Chinese Civil War go back to the Warlord Era. The Kuomintang and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) were supposed to put their differences aside, and work together, to destroy warlords in China. This was the “First United Front”. But it was hardly any sort of unity. The KMT and the CCP were uneasy allies at best. At worst, they spent more time fighting each other, than the warlords. Chiang Kai-Shek, the-then President of China, was fearful of the communists, distrustful of their motives, and worried about the stability of his own government constantly.

After the ousting of the warlords and the final victory in Shanghai, the two rival parties, the KMT and the CCP, turned on each other, full-time and hardcore. While the rest of China got on with their lives, the CCP and the KMT, and their followers and supporters, waged bloody warfare with each other.

In Roaring Twenties Shanghai, the affluent residents of the International Settlement celebrated the opening of the Canidrome greyhound racing-track, and the adjoining Canidrome Ballroom. The year was 1928. Outside the cities of China, Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong fought battle after battle.

Despite a numerical advantage that, for most of the war, far outnumbered the communists, Chiang’s forces were unable to win. This has been attributed to corruption, and an increasing lack of foreign interest and empathy. Military and tactical blunders weakened the Nationalists, and Chiang’s own intense, anti-communist stance made him many enemies.

By contrast, the communists won support (and manpower) by making promises to the millions of peasants, whose lives had hardly changed in thousands of years. The promises of a new, modern China, and that if they followed the Chinese Communist Party into battle, their lives and living conditions would improve.

While the Nationalist forces decreased in number, these inspirational speeches caused the ranks of the Communists to swell, reaching up to four million soldiers by the time the war ended. But apart from eventually winning the war of numbers, the Communists also had more fighting-experience. They were experts in guerrilla warfare – they’d been fighting the Japanese for years using such methods. The Nationalists by contrast, had been too busy fighting the Communists.

The Long March

One of the most famous events of the Chinese Civil War is the “Long March”. This was a march undertaken by the members of the Chinese Red Army (the predecessor to the modern Peoples’ Liberation Army), while trying to evade capture by Nationalist KMT forces during the early years of the War.

The Long March was not ONE march. If you’re imagining some great procession like Moses leading the Jews from Egypt…forget it.

The Long March was actually a series of marches, stretching from 1933-1935. It was during this period, when the KMT was actively seeking out the communists in the southern provinces of China, that the members of the Red Army evaded capture, and snaked their way north and west, further inland, and further north, away from the KMT. This was the period when the KMT stood the greatest chance of winning, and the CCP had the greatest chance of losing the Chinese Civil War.

So why didn’t they?

In a word, ‘Cohesion’, or the lack thereof.

The Communists survived due to their cohesion, their determination to stick together and to fight and grow and escape to bring forth what they hoped would be a better China. The Nationalists suffered from corruption, a lack of cohesion and cooperation, and an inability to “win the hearts and minds of the people”, as we might say today.

To understand how the war affected each party, you have to understand something about China – it is GIGANTIC. It has millions of people. And far from the bright lights and jazz of the coastal cities, these millions of people lived lives which had gone almost unchanged for thousands of years. They clung to belief-systems centuries old. They lived in villages and farmed and cooked and cleaned and traded and worked in ways which had not changed in living memory. These MILLIONS of peasants were the workforce of China.

Controlling these peasants were the aforementioned warlords with their private armies. The peasants saw these warlords as their leaders, or at least their rulers. They had no interest in the KMT or in Chiang Kai-Shek. Their interest was local. Local meant their village. And their interests were what their interests had always been – farming, feeding and staying alive – an incredibly hard thing to do, with China’s notoriously unpredictable weather. Chiang Kai-Shek coming to power did not change ANYTHING about how these people lived, and Chiang was not interested in changing them. He wanted to keep China as it was. So it’s unsurprising that the peasants just…ignored him.

By contrast, the communists vowed to destroy the landlords and give the land equally to the peasants of China. Suddenly, these powerless serfs would have land for farming, for raising cattle, for building homes and lives. This made them far more interested in the communists, who would surely improve their lot! If you were a poor Chinese peasant, interested in nothing more than your farm, your crops and your animals, who would you be more inclined to follow? A man who wanted to keep the status quo, so that the wealthy and powerful could enjoy everything, or a man who promised to give you land and livestock to improve your life?

Now you might think that appeasing the peasants might not be a big deal. But there you’d be wrong. In appeasing the peasants of China, you would be drawing millions of people to your side. Whereas appeasing to the wealthy, a small minority in China, would get you precious little in terms of manpower, essential for fighting a war.

The result was that the peasants were not interested in the KMT or Chiang Kai-Shek, and they certainly had little to no interest in joining an army that would not fight to improve their lives. This meant that the communists grew powerful and the nationalists weakened.

Back to the Long March.

Surrounded by the nationalist armies and facing complete annihilation in the communist stronghold of Jiangxi Province in southern China, the communists beat a hasty retreat. The four communist armies, over the course of years, backed away, heading west, and eventually, north. Tens of thousands of men marched, on foot, through China, to escape their enemies. No roads, no railways, no motor-cars. Just a pair of shoes.

This show of determination must have impressed the peasants, who might’ve seen the communists as downtrodden nobodies, like themselves. Which might’ve inspired them to join up. The result was that the communists grew in strength as they marched. And they marched alright – 6,000 miles. That’s across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to London…and back!

So while the Long March was a retreat, it was not necessarily a failure. Because the communists were growing all the time, building strength as they stepped back.

Eventually, the four weak, but numerically-boosted communist armies arrived in Shaanxi Province, northwest of Jiangxi, and here, they could recuperate and strengthen for the struggles ahead.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)

A major contributing factor to why the Nationalists lost the war is a small event called the Second Sino-Japanese War. Japan, following in the footsteps of its ally, Germany, wanted what the Germans called “Liebensraum” – ‘Living room’, or ‘living-space’. Space to grow and expand.

To this end, they invaded China. Not once. Not twice. But three times.

First, in 1931. Here, they launched an attack from Korea into Manchuria, in northern China. This attack claimed Manchuria for Japan, and forced Chiang Kai-Shek to break up his army to have some troops on standby, should the Japanese decide to invade China-Proper. But the Japanese seemed satisfied, for now. They even put up a new emperor in Manchuria – the Last Emperor of China himself! Puyi, by now, a young man and former royal, eager to reclaim his throne. He’d thrown in his lot with the Japanese, hoping that they would lead him to victory.

The Shanghai Incident

The second attempt at invading China was what became known as the “First Shanghai Incident”, in 1932.

Wanting to try and claim more of China, the Japanese became increasingly interested in one city – Shanghai.

The International Settlement of Shanghai was the jewel in the crown of China. Here, Westerners poured in all their money, wealthy Chinese mingled with diplomats, businessmen, newspaper-reporters, jazz-musicians and gangsters. Absolutely anything you wanted could be got for you – at a price, of course. Drugs, sex, alcohol and gambling. All fueled by money brought in by rich Westerners eager for a slice of the Orient from the comfort of their own little corner of transplanted, reproduction Europe.

The Shanghai International Settlement in 1935. The area to the north of Huangpu River (with the curve in the northern bank) is the District of Hongkew, and the Japanese Concession. To its west are the German and American concessions (north of Suzhou Creek). South of the creek for the width of the Bund, is the British Concession. South of the British Concession is the French Concession, and the original walled city of Shanghai. Click on the map for an extremely high-resolution image!

The Japanese wanted all that.

To try and get it, they turned a series of riots, anti-Japanese attacks, and possible Chinese-Japanese racial attacks into a pretext for waging war on China. And sent in the troops. Literally.

But…how to get so many troops to Shanghai without raising suspicions? Especially after what the Japanese had done in Manchuria?

Ah!

The soldiers, the tanks, the battleships in the Huangpu River were not there to attack CHINA! No…

They were there to protect the Japanese Concession of Shanghai! Yeah, that was it! Yeah…nothing else. Absolutely nothing else.

On the 28th of January, 1932, the situation hit boiling-point. The Japanese launched an all-out attack on Shanghai. And the Nationalists and the people of Shanghai were quick to respond.

Nobody wanted to lose Shanghai. Not the Chinese, not the Japanese, and certainly not the Western expats. And for little over a month, full-scale fighting erupted in the streets of the International Settlement.

The Japanese approached the Shanghai Municipal Council, the governing body of the Settlement, demanding that they demand that the Chinese Government take responsibility for the racial-attacks against the Japanese in the Settlement. After some umming and ah-ing, the Council agreed. And it was hoped that after this, the Chinese and Japanese Armies, massed on the borders of the Settlment, and Huangpu River respectively, would back off.

And so they might have, if a Japanese plane had not carried out the first bombing ever made on Shanghai.

The Japanese poured into the Settlement, entering through the Japanese Concession in Hongkew (Hongkou District, in modern Shanghai), in the easternmost sector of the Settlement. Their grievance being against the Chinese, the fighting was largely contained to this area, and thereafter spilt out into Chinese Shanghai. The Western concessions, controlled by the Germans, Americans, British and French, remained largely untouched. In fact, some expats would even go out onto the tops of tall buildings to watch the fighting.

On the Third of March, the Chinese drove the Japanese back, reclaiming Shanghai for China! Huzzah! But it was not to last.

The third and final invasion of China happened in 1937, when Japanese troops poured into China from their new Manchurian colony. The Nationalist Armies, still fighting the Communists, were not prepared, and in a matter of months, most of the great cities of China were taken – Peking, Tientsin, Nanking, and even Shanghai.

The Battle of Shanghai was one of the strangest events in the history of China. It was taken, but not taken. Invaded, but spared. Touched but untouched.

The Battle of Shanghai in 1937 was a three-month assault on the city which saw Chinese Shanghai fall to the Japanese after weeks of brutal, door-to-door fighting. Due to Shanghai’s importance as a trade and business-capital of China, resistance and defense was stubborn and determined. But while the Japanese ravaged Chinese Shanghai, they left the famous International Settlement alone.

Policed and governed by an international force of British, French, American, German and Japanese soldiers and diplomats, the Japanese were fearful of backlash from the Western powers, should they invade the Settlement. As such, they did their best to avoid aggravating its inhabitants. In fact, the Settlement’s governing body declared its neutrality during the Sino-Japanese War, and refused to take sides.

While China collapsed around them, life in the International Settlement went on almost as it had done for nearly a hundred years before.

The Second United Front

The First United Front of the 1920s was formed between the KMT and the CCP, to drive out the Chinese warlords which held sway over much of China during the years after the fall of the Qing Empire.

In the 1930s, the KMT and the CCP formed the second “United Front”, to drive out the Japanese! But, like the First United Front, the Second United Front was united in name-only. The armies of Chiang Kai-Shek spent more time harassing the communists than attacking the Japanese, and the communists attacked the Japanese using guerrilla tactics, which both the Nationalists and the Japanese were unfamiliar with. This supposed ‘unity’ was meant to protect China and its people. But as with everything else, it simply fell apart.

Cities along China’s coast and main rivers were swept up by the Japanese and demoralised and exhausted Chinese soldiers were decimated by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. During the famous “Rape of Nanking” in late 1937, thousands of surrendered Chinese soldiers were bayoneted, shot, or beheaded, under the justification that the Japanese did not have anywhere to keep them prisoner, nor the resources to imprison them and feed them.

As before, the Second United Front collapsed due to Chiang’s paranoia regarding the communists. In fact, he never wanted a Second United Front. It only happened because he was KIDNAPPED by OTHER NATIONALISTS, who forced him to see sense, that the Japanese were a bigger threat than the communists. But even then, it still didn’t work, and the KMT spent more time attacking the communists than the Japanese. By 1941, the ‘United Front’ had completely collapsed, destroying any further chances for both the KMT and the CCP to work together to rid the country of the Japanese.

The Day of Infamy

December 7th, 1941.

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. They also attacked Guam, Malaya, Wake Island, the Philippines and Hong Kong. But one location not mentioned in President Roosevelt’s famous speech, is the Japanese assault on the Shanghai International Settlement.

Commenced just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the world-famous Settlement, for years already living on borrowed time, was finally invaded by the Japanese. Extraterritoriality be damned. The treaties that had protected Westerners in China were now useless, and overnight, the Settlement was dragged into the war that it had tried, for nearly five years, to avoid.

The residents of the Settlement panicked and fled for the Port of Shanghai. Here, those with money, passports, and other necessities for travel, managed to book or bribe passage on an evacuation-ship out of China. For any Chinese who had sought refuge under the cloak of the Settlement’s neutrality status, their last vestige of protection was blasted to pieces by Japanese artillery-fire. Facing overwhelming odds, the Chinese defenders were swept aside and the Japanese formally occupied ALL of Shanghai.

From 1941-1943, the Settlement existed in a sort of limbo-status. Not in Western control, not in Chinese control. In 1943, the British formally signed the land of the Settlement back to the Nationalists, ending 100 years of Western residence in Shanghai, and returning the city center to the people of China.

The result of this was that any Westerners in Shanghai who had not been lucky enough to escape on a ship during the invasion, was now a ‘stateless refugee’, to use the terminology of the time. They were Shanghailanders no-more. And as such, were rounded up and sent to prison-camps, where they would have to wait for the end of the war.

The Continuation of the Civil War

In 1945, the Second World War ended. The Chinese were driving the Japanese out of their homeland, and on all fronts, the Japanese were being beaten back to their home-islands. The United States Army Air-Force rained bombs on Shanghai to try and force the Japanese to evacuate the city. But while the World War was over, the Civil War was not.

In 1946, it started again in earnest. And this time, the Nationalists were on the losing side.

Weakened by seven years of war with the Japanese, the Nationalist force was a fraction of what it once was. The Communists, strengthened and more experienced after using guerrilla tactics against the Japanese, now outnumbered the Nationalists. Defeat after defeat saw the Nationalists fall back, eventually evacuating to the island of Formosa, formerly a Japanese colony, where the Republic of China was then established in what is known today as “Taiwan”.

On the 1st of October, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the creation of the People’s Republic of China, in Beijing. Chiang Kai-Shek and his nationalists evacuate the mainland and set themselves up in Taiwan. The war ends in May, 1950.

The Great Leap Forward

When you think of events that have shaped or influenced modern China, you can’t go past the Great Leap Forward. Probably better named as the Great Stumbling-Block.

After winning the Civil War, the communists had to legitimise their rule of China. To do this, they had to prove that they could do things that would improve the lives of ordinary Chinese people. And to do that, they started what they hoped would be a powerful and nation-changing industrialisation and agricultural revolution. They called it the Great Leap Forward.

Started in 1958, the Leap Forward ended in 1961 as an unmitigated disaster and is one of the worst chapters in modern Chinese history. Its catastrophic failure saw tens of millions of ordinary Chinese peasants, who had originally supported the Communists, die of starvation. But what was the Great Leap Forward and what happened to it?

Even in the 1950s, China was still a largely medieval society. Away from the bright lights and bustle of the major coast-or-river-hugging cities, life for millions of Chinese carried on as it had for centuries. The Communists hoped to improve the lives of people by mass farming, large-scale agriculture, high-volume steel-production and vast collectivisation. To this end, Chairman Mao started the Great Leap Forward.

Despite the good intentions and results that the Great Leap Forward had, and had hoped to achieve, everything was against it.

Experiments in agriculture, irrigation, crop-planting, plowing and harvesting were disastrous. Carried out on such a large scale across China, all it took was one hiccup to destroy everything. And everything was indeed, destroyed. Although propaganda films showed enormous crops and bumper harvests of rice and other grains, the truth was that these quotas and harvests were all bogus. And because private farming and land-ownership was now forbidden, the peasants, who now had to rely on the State, could not revert to their traditional ways of farming or land-management, which had been their safety-net in earlier times.

Collectivisation and communes, the methods with which Mao Zedong hoped to move China forward worked well in theory, but not always in practice. They relied on teamwork – Communes were communities made up of several dozen families. And they would work together, collectively, to feed, farm, clothe and support each other. This might have worked to some extent, but the failure of the government-enforced farming-practices doomed these efforts to failure.

Under the Great Leap Forward and the commune and collectivisation systems, the skills of the peasants, who had been living rural, farming lives for countless generations, were now ignored. Government officials in Beijing decided how the land would be farmed. They decided everything. And I do mean EVERYTHING. What crops would be planted. Where they would be planted. How they would be planted. What fertiliser was to be used, how they would be irrigated, and everything else. The skills of peasants who had been doing this kind of work for centuries was ignored. Instead, their work was dictated by politicians who had absolutely no practical experience of farming. The result was an absolute disaster, as crops failed and harvests dwindled into insignificance.

How it was supposed to work was simple: Every commune, through collective efforts, was supposed to produce food and reach a certain quota. Of this, a percentage was taken as tax, to feed people in the cities, and party members. The rest was distributed amongst the peasants in the commune. But the agricultural quotas set out by the Chinese Communist Party were outrageously high. And the amounts of grain ‘supposedly’ produced by each commune were all falsified, in an attempt to show just how effective the Great Leap Forward had been. This meant that when grain-taxes were collected, the peasants were left with absolutely nothing to eat! The Party’s already bungled farming-practices had robbed the peasants of their skills and their land. And now, giving up crops that they didn’t have to show how “bountiful” their land was, also robbed them of what little food they had been able to grow.

The result was the Great Chinese Famine, in which, depending on what you read, 15-55 MILLION PEOPLE died, from starvation. Due to large-scale crop-disasters.

This was partially due to the misguided farming practices, partially due to the weather, but also partially due to another goal of the Great Leap Forward, which was the large-scale production of steel. To this end, ordinary Chinese people had been encouraged to build blast-furnaces in their backyards. Or in their fields. And produce steel.

You.

Yeah you. Reading this.

Go out. Right now. Into your back yard. Build a furnace.

Make steel.

What happened?

Just like you, the millions of Chinese forced to do this as part of the government’s official scheme, had not the faintest idea how the hell to make steel. Let alone steel of any decent quality, or great quantity. It was brittle, it cracked, it was useless for anything!

And worst of all, it meant that there were now even fewer people around to tend to what few crops had actually been grown and tended to successfully, which meant that they died due to neglect, which meant there was even less food than the already dismal amounts produced, which contributed greatly to the Great Chinese Famine of the period 1959-1961.

The Great Chinese Famine was a famine in the truest sense of the word. With absolutely nothing to eat, with all their grains taken by the government after the monumental screw-up of the farm-quotas, or sent to Russia to pay off China’s massive debt to the Soviet Government, the peasants of China, millions of them, had nothing to eat. They lived on literally whatever they could put into their mouths. Grass. Leaves. Tree-bark. Even soil or mud. Anything at all that they could persuade themselves to swallow was to be considered food, in the place of their actual food-staples, none of which now existed.

As much as they tried not to admit it, even the Chinese Communist Party had to accept that the Great Leap Forward, despite all its good intentions, had been a disaster of unprecedented and horrific scale. It was officially ended in 1961, and was followed by another of China’s great revolutions.

The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)

Or, as my old highschool Chinese teacher used to say: “The ‘So-Called‘ Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution”.

My Chinese teacher was not a fan of the Cultural Revolution. Probably because it involved his father being arrested as a political enemy and thrown in prison. A fact he shared with us, bright-eyed teenagers when we were studying history in school.

The Cultural Revolution was started by Mao Zedong in 1966 after losing face in the eyes of his fellow Communists, due to the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward. It was designed to reinvigorate the nation, remind it of the great communist struggle to improve China, and to cleanse the country of the years of darkness and depression that had plagued it since the Civil War.

To try and reinvigorate the nation, Mao opened the floor of the country to anyone who wished to criticise. He wanted the youth of China to speak freely, vent their feelings, and attack anything that they felt was anti-communist or against the Party. Writers, journalists, artists, school-teachers, politicians and government officials were all denounced.

The youth of China were encouraged to become “Red Guards”, ideological protectors of communism and socialism, who lived their lives according to the quotations in contained in the famous ‘Xiao Hong Shu‘ – the Little Red Book. Or more properly: “The Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung“.

The book, written by Mao himself, was a series of quotations of his own, from speeches and other writings, designed to inspire and give the youth of China something to follow and aspire to. The book received its nickname because of its pocket-sized format, and bright red cover, designed to be easily carried, stored, and immediately recognisable to anyone in China. Considering the population of China, it’s unsurprising that the Little Red Book is one of the most widely-printed books in the history of the world!

The Cultural Revolution was not just an attack on structure and politics, it was also an attack on the traditions and culture of China. Anything old, or to do with old China was attacked. These were considered detrimental and unhealthy, and did not improve the country. Ancient practices related to funerals, marriages, religion were systematically banned. Even the works of China’s most famous philosopher, Confucius, were placed under direct attack. The playing of mahjong, the most famous Chinese game in the world, was banned during the Revolution, due to it being an “old custom”.

For a period of ten years, the youth of China, boys and girls who were of an age attending highschool, or who were university students (broadly ranged from young teenagers to those in their mid-twenties), wreaked havoc on China. The desire to prove loyalty and to rid the country of “closet capitalists” and other people who might be ‘anti-revolutionary’, caused a complete breakdown in social order. By 1976, things were totally out of hand. It was only the death of Chairman Mow in that same year, and the change of government, that finally stopped the movement.

The Opening of New China

Just as China in the mid-1700s was being opened up to the West, so was China in the mid-1900s being re-opened to the West. After the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had left the country weak, shaken and exhausted, reforms swept across China, in a desperate and concentrated effort to haul the country back from the brink, and to return some sort of sensibility and normality, stability and security to the lives of ordinary Chinese people.

Led by reformist politician, Deng Xiaoping, China was to become a more stable and open country. The Open Door Policy of 1978 encouraged trade and foreign investment in China. Barred from entry and scared away by decades of instability, foreigners, who had largely never set foot in China since the end of the Civil War, slowly returned. In 1950, on the 25th of April, the American Consulate in Shanghai closed its doors. Almost exactly 30 years later, on the 28th of April, 1980, the American Consulate in Shanghai was re-established, hoisting the American flag and opening its doors to business. The flag raised over the consulate in 1980 was the exact same flag which was lowered from the consulate roof when it was shut down in 1950, kept in storage for 30 years!

To restore the people’s confidence in the government, and to show the people that they actually knew what they were doing, reforms based on tried and tested methods were introduced. One of the most famous ones was a reaction against the Great Leap Forward. It was called the Household Responsibility System.

Under this system, rural Chinese living in communes were given large plots of land. This land was divided up among them, with each family or household owning one plot. The family was responsible for the upkeep and farming of this plot of land.

Unlike in the past, where families and farmers had to try and meet ridiculous quota-systems that left them with nothing to eat, under the new system, farmers could now work their own land as they saw fit, to get the highest yield. They kept whatever they could eat, and sold the surplus to the state, to feed the masses in the cities. They were responsible for the land’s upkeep, its use, and its cultivation and harvesting. The State took a back seat to agriculture, unlike in the 1960s. This new system, established in the 1980s, has allowed many farmers in China to improve their standards of living, by embracing the growing market economy of China.

Reforms in China during the 1970s and 80s have gradually opened the country up to the world once more. Although some would argue that China still has a long way to go, in the past thirty-odd years, it has made dramatic changes. In the 21st century, China is once more a world power, much as it was in times of ancient history.

More Information?

“The Long March” (U.S.) 2-Part documentary-film

“Nanking” (documentary film)

http://www.jianshixue.com/ – “A Short History of China” (1900-1949)

http://www.jianshixue.com/1939-1945-the-resistance-w/1936-1941-the-second-united-front.html – “The Second United Front”

“Mao’s Great Famine” (documentary film)

“The Cultural Revolution”

Shanghailander.net – This is one of the biggest blogs on the internet about the Shanghai International Settlement, and pre-revolution China in general.

The Chinese Household Responsibility System

26/01/2014 by Scheong

A Singer Model 27/28 Puzzle-Box!

A box without hinges, key, or lid,
A golden treasure, inside, is hid.
What is it?

A Singer “Puzzle Box”!!:

The top reads: “PATENTED FEBRUARY 19, 1889”

My father and I went out antiquing today. Today being Australia Day, we did what all red-blooded Aussie blokes do!

We went to the annual Fryerstown Antiques Fair.

Nine hours of father-son bonding. And in the 30’c heat, we almost bonded permanently! Phoof! It was hot!

The Finding of the Box of Power

I’ve been mesmerised by these things ever since I saw pictures of them on the International Sewing-Machine Collector’s Society (ISMACS) website. And I figured I’d like one for my own long-bobbin Singer 128 sewing machine. I remembered seeing such a box at the previous year’s antiques fair, and went off today in hopes of finding one.

I knew that my chances were slim. Such things are rare in Australia. We never made this stuff, we only ever imported it. Whatever exists today is whatever hasn’t been thrown out, smashed, trashed, lost in floods, fires or tornadoes, and which has been lovingly stored in someone’s attic or basement.

We perused the market and saw many interesting things, took pictures and bought a couple of trinkets. But nothing was there that made us go “oooh…”. Or at least, not for the prices they were asking! I don’t go ‘ooh’ unless I get a good return on my investment!

Chugging home, we passed through a small-town antiques shop. We stopped and went inside. And, laid out on the table like some ancient tapestry was the puzzle-box…

The box completely unfolded, showing everything inside. I’ve examined pictures from old manuals, and I think mine is about 95-98% complete. There are one or two small pieces missing. Hell, it’s 100+ years old. You can’t expect everything…

I was enthralled and I almost did a wild little skip of joy. But then I saw the price and the skip of joy might’ve led to me twisting my ankle as I came crashing back down to earth again. But, I was lucky enough that the owner let me knock off a third of the price. So, I rolled it up and trotted it back home.

What is a Singer ‘Puzzle Box’?

Collectors call these whimsical little containers ‘Puzzle Boxes’. Probably because the only way the box folds up properly is when EVERYTHING is in its correct position (otherwise the lid won’t close). But, when these were introduced in 1889, they caused a sensation. The design was so ingenious that the designer, John M. Griest, a Singer Manufacturing Co. employee, was granted a patent for it.

The Puzzle-Box all folded up

They were originally called “Style Boxes”. And they were designed to hold a complement of attachments and other accessories (bobbins, screwdrivers, needles, thimbles etc), which would be used with the new, improved Singer vibrating-shuttle line of sewing machines. In all, 14 variations of the ‘Style Box’ was created. And they were accordingly named sequentially. There are no markings on my box to tell me which of these fourteen variations mine is. If anyone can work it out based on the photographs, please let me know!

The box with one side dropped open

The puzzle-boxes came with all kinds of attachments and bits and pieces. Bobbins, screwdrivers, hemmers, binders of varying sizes, seam-guides (an essential attachment if you can’t hold your fabric straight to save your life), and all other manner of nick-nacks. They are without a doubt, one of the greatest things ever invented for a sewing machine after the point-eye needle.

My four long bobbins for my 128 now have a home of their own! Don’t they look cute all tucked up in bed?

Puzzle boxes were manufactured for both Singer round-bobbin No. 15 domestic machines, and for Singer, long-bobbin No. 27 & 28-class domestic machines. The puzzle-boxes catering to each style of machine varied slightly, due to the size and style of the bobbins used in each respective machine.

I love the ingenuity of design with this box. But one thing I love even more is just how solidly its built. Steel parts, purple felt, and solid wood sides. These days, we’d get something like this made of plastic parts in a plastic box that cracks and warps and melts. This has held its shape and integrity for at least 100 years.

We Interrupt this Program to Bring you some Breaking News…

Here are some of the antique sewing machines which I saw for sale, while I was out antiquing today:

A Singer 27 “Coffin-top”, probably from the turn of the century

Then I saw this, next to it…

Singer 27 with an early-style bentwood case, which would eventually become a trademark of Singer

And then I saw this cute little number…

Jah, das ist ein Frister und Rossmann transverse shuttle nahmaschine, mein herr. Gemacht im Deutschland!

This was a cute little thing I saw in an antique shop on the way home…

An antique “NATIONAL” machine. Cute, huh?

10/01/2014 by Scheong

A History of the House-Call

Mommy had a baby,
His name was Tiny Tim!
She put him in the bathtub,
To see if he could swim!

He drank up all the water,
He ate up all the soap!
He tried to eat the bath-tub,
But it got stuck in his throat!

Mommy called the doctor,
The doctor called his nurse,
His nurse called the lady,
With the alligator purse!

‘Measles!’ said the doctor,
‘Mumps!’ said the nurse,
‘Nothing!’ said the lady,
With the alligator purse!

Mommy punched the doctor,
Mommy slapped the nurse,
Mommy thanked the lady,
With the alligator purse!

This kids’ song (usually with the last verse removed!) which dates back to the 1950s is one I fondly remember from my own childhood. It’s funny and it makes you laugh. But it also made me think. It made me think of a facet of social life and history which has almost vanished from modern life.

When is the last time you saw a doctor make a house-call?

In days gone by, if someone was sick, a runner-message, a telegram, or a jingle on the pipe summoned your friendly family physician to your front door. Armed with a smile, a hat and his leather ‘Gladstone‘ bag, he’d treat you for everything from a broken arm to a case of influenza. When’s the last time you remember seeing a doctor walk along a residential street and head into a patient’s house?

Armed with his trusty Gladstone bag, Dr. Ernest Ceriani makes a house-call in the small Colorado town of Kremmling. Photograph taken in 1948

Once upon a time, it was normal for a doctor, a general practitioner, a family physician, to make house-calls. Nowadays, this ancient practice has almost ceased to exist in certain countries. Whatever happened to all that?

This posting will look at the history of house-calls. Why they happened, what for, what happened when you got one, and why they’ve almost disappeared in modern society.

Why Did Doctors Make House-Calls?

From the earliest days of professional medicine, until fairly recently, it was common for doctors to make house-calls. I still remember my family physician making house-calls when I was a child, which was not that long ago. It was perfectly normal to call him on the telephone in an emergency, and he’d drive out to see you. It was well-known that you couldn’t reach him at home, or at the office, on certain days of the week (usually the weekend), because he dedicated one day a week to visiting patients at home.

Why?

Why is it that doctors made house-calls? Why were they famous for such attention to their patients? Let’s consider the context…

For much of human history, travel was slow. Most people walked. Owning a horse and carriage, or any other horse-drawn vehicle, was expensive, like owning a car today. Only with much higher maintenance costs. Going to a doctor was not always possible.

If the patient was too ill to walk and no convenient transport could be found, it was completely impossible. Would you chance a ride on a horse in the middle of the night, when you’ve got a brain-splitting fever so bad you can hardly drag yourself to the bathroom?

I’ve had one of those. It’s so bad you can’t even stand up, let alone get on a horse. You’re so dizzy you’d break an ankle falling down the steps just trying to get to the damn stables.

Don’t forget folks…this is before the days of telephones. Before the days of ambulances and 911 and Triple-0, before the days of 999. There was no quick and simple solution back then.

In an emergency, a doctor had to be sent for. And he would have to come. In a hurry! Because a doctor had to treat all sorts of things, most of them were general practitioners, meaning that they studied everything from minor operations and surgeries, to how to deliver babies, how to take your temperature, or how to prescribe medicines for that head-cold you’ve had for four days.

It was this lack of a ‘middle-man’, the emergency-response system, that meant that house-calls were necessary. And doctors training and education, covering a wide range of areas of medicine, reflected this. Even the vehicles the doctors used to get to their patients were specially-made.

The Doctor’s Buggy

Victorian-era Physician’s Buggy

In an age when doctors did a lot of travelling around making house-calls, some of them extremely serious, they had to have reliable and safe transportation. It wasn’t safe to ride on horseback to every appointment, especially if you were transporting fragile medical equipment with you. You needed a wheeled vehicle of some kind, which was suitably designed for your purpose.

This is a Victorian-era doctor’s buggy, and it was designed for use by visiting physicians. You’ll notice a few things about it. To begin with, it’s surprisingly large for a vehicle that would carry two people at most. It’s got a wide base and a low center of gravity, and storage in the foot-well behind the dashboard. This is so that the doctor could load his equipment into the front of the buggy, and drive it at high speeds, and take corners with minimal slowing. The low center of gravity prevented rollover accidents while on the way to a medical emergency.

The buggy is simply constructed. It doesn’t have the heavy glass and wood body of a larger carriage or coach. Such extra weight was unnecessary, and only slowed the doctor down in an emergency. These buggies were made to be fast and safe.

The Gladstone Bag

My antique Gladstone bag in crocodile leather. Purchased for $25 at a local antiques shop!

It’s been decades since most physicians ever carried one of these things. But they’re still called ‘doctor’s bags’ to this day. Invented in the mid-1800s by an English bag-manufacturer known only to history as “J. G. Beard”, these leather-sided, gate-mouthed bags were named ‘Gladstones’, after the four-time British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and of whom Mr. Beard was a supporter.

Gladstone bags were carried by everyone. Tradesmen, businessmen, carpenters and laypeople of all kinds. They were used as weekend-bags and overnight bags by travelers going by train, carriage or ocean-liner, and even as equipment-bags by adventurers and archaeologists. Such a bag wouldn’t be out-of-place in one of Indiana Jones’ adventures through the deserts of Egypt or the wilds of Arabia.

Despite the Gladstone bag’s long history and numerous, numerous uses, in popular culture, it is, has, and always will be, firstly and most commonly associated with physicians. To this day, they’re still called ‘doctor’s bags’. The reason for this probably dates back to the days when they still made house-calls.

Physicians who made house-calls had to be prepared for absolutely anything. Anything. From childbirth to mumps, boils to appendicitis, influenza to rampant diphtheria. Because of this, they had to carry a wide array of equipment in their bags. Not just measuring-tapes, a thermometer and a stethoscope, but most things that doctors today wouldn’t normally carry around – surgical and amputation-kits, bottles of medicine, swabs, measuring-cups, needles, syringes, tourniquets and other nasty and potentially deadly items.

Doctors required a bag to store all these important items in. The bag had to be large, easily-opened, securely locked to prevent tampering and theft, and with an easy grab-and-carry design. The upright, gate-mouthed opening of the Gladstone Bag made it ideally suited for this purpose. Not having to fumble around with a saggy, soft-mouthed bag (for example, a haversack or a duffel-bag) made the doctor’s job easier when he had to reach inside his bag in an emergency, to find some vital piece of equipment.

Being able to open the bag, have it stay open, close the bag, lock it, pick it up and walk with it without the contents inside (which could be sharp, fragile or poisonous) shifting and breaking, was the deciding factor in why physicians carried Gladstone bags. They were simply safer to transport their dangerous equipment around, than other bag-designs of the era.

Don’t forget that until fairly recently, thermometers were still fragile glass tubes filled with mercury. Or that doctors used to carry poisonous drugs like chloroform or ether with them, if they had to sedate a patient during an operation. You wouldn’t put stuff like that in a briefcase, close the lid, lock it, pick it up, tip the contents sideways all over each other in the process, only to have the lock fail and suddenly have everything spill out onto the floor and shatter into a million pieces! The design of the Gladstone bag made such an occurrence impossible.

What Was Involved in a House-Call?

Absolutely anything, short of a heart-transplant.

In the days when it was not practical for most people to visit a doctor, and when the doctor came to the patient, the physician had to be prepared for absolutely anything that his training covered. It’s one reason why he carried his Gladstone bag with him – it was one of the few practical luggage-types of the era that could hold so many different and dangerous objects with relative safety.

Physicians called out to a patient’s home could be expected to do anything from listening to a heart-beat, taking temperatures, prescribing medicines, and checking pulses, to more serious stuff, like childbirth, re-setting broken bones, stitching up wounds, or even minor surgery, like removing a patient’s appendix!

I’m old enough that I still remember a time when doctors made house-calls. Three house-calls I remember my family physician making when I was a child, tackled everything from broken bones, to stitching up a gash to the head, and one particularly memorable house-call which involved the removal of a fish-bone from my throat…to this day I can’t stand eating fish with bones in it.

The Golden Age of the House-Call

House-calls were common throughout history, but peaked during the 19th and 20th centuries. Advances in medicine, communications and transportation made it easier and safer for physicians to make house-calls. Telephones, bicycles and motor-cars made calling a doctor faster and safer.

“Say ‘Aaah!'”

House-calls began to fall steadily as a medical priority, after the end of the Second World War. This is matched by a steady decline in the number of general practitioners, among other contributing factors.

The End of the House-Call?

In an age when medicine was far more hands-on and personal, a physician had to cover a wide range of skills, since he had no idea what he might be called out to attend to, at any hour of the day, or night. Such physicians were called ‘general practitioners’ because they did not specialise in one particular area; they covered a ‘general’ field of medicine, learning the basics of every field, to serve them in their profession.

These days, there is a much higher number of specialists than general practitioners – physicians who will concentrate on one part of the human body. Eye-doctors, hearing specialists, Ear-Nose-&-Throat doctors, cardiologists who look into heart-conditions, podiatrists, who handle your feet, dermatologists who handle skin-issues and so-forth.

This spreading-out of knowledge means that there are fewer and fewer doctors who can handle a wider range of diseases and illnesses. And this means, fewer doctors who can handle house-calls, with their unpredictable natures.

In the 1920s in the United States, three-quarters of physicians were general practitioners. By the 1980s, that had dropped to less than 1%! With so few general practitioners around, it’s hardly surprising that house-calls are rapidly becoming a thing of the past! In the 1930s, 40% of patient-physician interactions happened through house-calls. In the 2010s, that’s dropped to less than 1%.

By the 21st century, the house-call is something almost consigned to history. When’s the last time you remember a doctor making a house-call? Most physicians work in their clinics or surgeries, most specialise in one area or another, of medicine. Not all of them have the skills necessary to carry out varied demands required of an unexpected house-call. With modern emergency services and improved communications and transportation, there’s less need for physicians to make house-calls. In our increasingly litigious society, some physicians have stopped giving house-calls over fears of being sued! And yet…

The Future of House-Calls?

House-calls have never really gone away. While it’s true a smaller number of doctors still carry out house-calls, there are some physicians, such as in the United States, who are trying to revive the practice. They believe it’s beneficial for a number of reasons. It gives reassurance to the elderly, or those living alone, or who can’t travel easily. For parents, it gives them comfort to know that their family doctor can check on their children if they should fall ill in the middle of the night. Doctors enjoy the personal time spent with patients. Not being slotted into an appointment-gap means that the physician can take his time with the patient and discuss their condition in detail, without the pressure of another patient waiting for treatment.

House-calls are being carried out these days, by more people than just doctors. Nurses and some paramedics also conduct house-calls, or conduct regular house-visits to elderly, infirm or otherwise house-bound patients. It provides comfort as well as medical care, and professional treatment for non-emergency medical conditions. In the United States, there’s even the Visiting Physicians Association, providing house-calls to the elderly and infirm.

Some doctors think that making house-calls is actually more cost-effective. Not having to maintain a professional premises and being able to work out of their own home (or the homes of others, in the case of house-calls!) makes reviving this ancient practice more attractive in the 21st century. On top of that, easier access to medical care in the home makes things more comfortable for those who have transport issues. Non-emergency medical problems can be treated at home, before they deteriorate and an ambulance has to be called, instead of a doctor!

Want to know more about the history of house-calls?

History of Medicine – House-Calls

‘Healthy Debate’ article about House-Calls (2011)

Doctors Reviving House-Calls

The Benefits of House-Calls

Modern Technology and the House-Call

15/12/2013 by Scheong

Buying a Vintage Sewing Machine – What You Need To Know

I’ve done one for TYPEWRITERS. I’m not sure why I haven’t yet done one for sewing machines. Anyway, here goes.

Modern sewing machines have all kinds of advantages and features which make them desirable. But they also have numerous disadvantages which make them undesirable. You can perform a wider variety of stitches and functions, at the expense of poorer quality workmanship, disposable parts, and lack of portability. Unless you can physically carry it ANYWHERE and sew with it, without being tied to a power-outlet, it ain’t truly portable.

People are attracted to antique and vintage sewing machines for a number of reasons. Strength, power, durability, classic designs, and a quality of workmanship and construction which literally cannot be found today in modern machines. So, why might you want to buy a vintage or antique sewing machine?

Reasons for Buying a Vintage or Antique Sewing Machine

It Looks Nice.

First-Impressions are everything. Would you rather use a glossy black and gold, wood-cased classic, or a cheap, flimsy, cloud-white modern machine? Even when your classic Singer, Jones, Wheeler-&-Wilson, Domestic, Butterfly, Stowa, or Frister & Rossman isn’t being used, you can put it on a shelf, or on a side-table, and it can sit there as a beautiful piece of industrial art.

Can your modern sewing machine do that? I don’t think so. The problem with more modern machines is that they’re more about function and feature, rather than style and longevity. They’re meant to do something, and once it’s done, you chuck it away into the cupboard.

Antique sewing machines were designed to appeal to people’s sense of style – Don’t forget that buying a sewing machine was a HUGE investment in the second half of the 1800s – they were so expensive, Singer had to come up with a whole new way of paying for them, just so that folks could own one! Few folks could just PAY for one. So Singer allowed for trade-ins in return for discounts, or organised installment-plans and lay-by for customers.

Considering that the machines cost so much, folks weren’t willing to spend the money on something unless what they received in return was ABSOLUTELY SPECTACULAR. And that is just one reason why vintage and antique machines look so much damn nicer than modern ones.

It Has Better Construction.

In my mind, this is not even debatable. Sorry. No. It isn’t.

Vintage and antique machines have better construction, better quality of parts and materials, full-stop. Everything on them is steel or cast iron. Nothing is going to break, snap, wear out, warp in the heat, crack in the cold, melt under desert sun or split in arctic winter.

Old sewing machines are workhorses which will run forever, provided they are maintained properly. Your latest machine, which you paid hundreds of dollars for, is history the moment the electronics crap-out. Now, you have a white, plastic doorstop.

Vintage and antique machines were designed to last until doomsday. Breaking down was not an option, and throwing the machine away and buying another one was UNTHINKABLE! As a result, they had to be made of the very best materials, and made to work forever!

It’s Fun!

I don’t do that much sewing. I repair clothes, I make bags, pouches, the occasional cover or slip for a pillow or cushion, the odd alteration to a pair of trousers, but I enjoy it because it’s fun.

It is. It’s fun to make stuff. But it’s more fun to use something that’s been around for ages, and which will continue to be around for ages. It’s fun to turn that crank, pump the treadle or force the lever, to get those old machines going. The mechanical beauty, the synchronisation of parts, is what makes it fun.

They Work Better

Vintage and antique sewing machines may only do a single, straight lockstitch. But they do it incredibly well. Everything about these machines was designed to work, and to be as durable as possible. Everything was made of steel or iron. And compromising on quality was never even considered. Unlike today.

Why?

Like I mentioned before, it’s because they were so damn expensive. If the machines even DARED to suggest that they weren’t absolutely the BEST that you could buy, then nobody would buy them, because nobody was prepared to spend their hard-earned dollars and pounds on junk!

On top of that, vintage sewing machines had to do a lot more than just repair a torn sleeve. In an age when most people made their own clothes, even domestic sewing machines had to be incredibly tough and rugged. They had to chew through everything from silk, to denim, to cowhide leather. And they were expected to do it without complaint or fault. And they did!

Most people only owned a few sets of clothes, and keeping them repaired and neat meant that a sewing machine had to be able to cope with absolutely anything that was passed under the presser-foot. As a result, they were made to last! Singer even used to do a gimmick where they would sew together two sheets of aluminium metal together, to prove that their machines were powerful enough to punch through solid metal, too!

How to Buy a Vintage Sewing Machine?

So. After reading that whole marketing spiel, you’ve decided that you might like a nice vintage sewing machine. Perhaps you like making your own patchwork quilts. Perhaps you like making clothes? Or maybe like me, you like making pouches and bags and covers, with the odd bit of repair-work thrown in? What do you need to know about buying a vintage sewing machine?

Makes and Models

You need to know what make or model you want to buy. The most popular brand in the world is Singer, of course. But there are others. Wheeler and Wilson, Jones, New Home, White Rotary, and a whole heap of others were American machines. However, Germany was another sewing-machine mecca – brands like Sidel & Naumann, Pfaff, Frister & Rossman, Stowa, Wertheim, and Vesta (among countless others) dominated the European market.

What type of machine you can get your hands on will depend on where you live in the world. If you live in America, Canada, or a country that was part of the former British Empire, chances are, Singer will be the machine of choice. If you live in Europe, then a German machine will be the most common. If you live in Asia, Butterfly (a Singer knockoff-brand based in Shanghai), or one of the numerous Japanese knockoff-brands, will be most prevalent.

Age Before Beauty

When buying a vintage sewing machine, no matter where it was made, or by what company, keep in mind the old adage of Age before Beauty. By that, I mean, pay more attention, first-off, to how OLD a machine is, before anything else.

Why? A number of reasons.

While older machines are certainly very beautiful, and many will still create an excellent stitch, they come with drawbacks. Chief among these are:

Needles

What I shall term ‘1st Generation’ (transverse-shuttle) sewing machines used Singer 12-type needles. These needles are perfectly cylindrical and are unlike any other needle in the world.

Which makes them extremely rare. They’re not manufactured anywhere, anymore. Not even in a reproduction manner. Transverse-shuttle machines are therefore almost useless for sewing with in the 21st century. Unless you have a huge stockpile of these old-fashioned needles lying around – you simply can’t use these anymore. Some later-model transverse-shuttle machines were modified to take modern needles (back in the 1920s and 30s), and you might get lucky using one of those. For more information, see further down).

A German transverse-shuttle sewing machine. Transverse-shuttle machines are easily distinguished by their cross-shaped needle-and-slide-plates underneath the machine-head

Sticking with needles for the time-being (ouch!), keep in mind the following: Some sewing-machine manufacturers actually produced machines which would ONLY take the needles made BY that company FOR their machines. This was prevalent in the United States. This means that, once the company stopped, so did the needles. And while sewing machines will live forever, needles don’t. And once they break or blunt or bend out of alignment, you’ll have to get another one. And if you can’t get another one, your machine is useless.

Bobbins and Shuttles

Another BIG issue is bobbins and shuttles. Early sewing machines, from the 1850s up until the turn of the 20th century, used what are called ‘long bobbins’, and operated on a flying-shuttle stitch-mechanism. 1st gen. sewing machines used transverse-shuttle (‘T.S.’) mechanisms (see above), where the shuttle (with the bobbin inside) sat in a carriage, and ran back and forth across the machine, catching the top thread on every forward pass, to form one lockstitch with every backwards pass.

Then, came the vibrating-shuttle (‘V.S.’) mechanism. This used a shuttle, mounted in a side-swinging carriage that pivoted back and forth under the machine, to form stitches with every forward swing.

Both these stitch-forming mechanisms are extremely old. REALLY old. They date back to at least a decade before the American Civil War. The result is that transverse and vibrating shuttles (and the bobbins stored within them) are no-longer manufactured. This can make them tricky to use. I’ll talk about this more, soon.

Where To Find Them?

Search online. Ebay or Gumtree, or sewing forums. Or try flea-markets, antiques shops or charity shops. I’ve seen plenty of antique sewing machines work their way through charity thrift-shops. Flea-markets, antiques shops and sewing-forums are also great ways to get your hands on things like original attachments and add-ons, missing parts and other accessories for your vintage machine. Stuff like shears, measuring tapes, extra feet, bobbins, oil-cans, original instruction-manuals and spare parts.

My grandmother’s Singer 99k. Complete with extra bobbins, motor-grease, sewing-oil, accessories box, attachments, original manuals, knee-lever, and bed-extension-table. Not shown are the buttonholer, the zigzagger, all the other bobbins, spare winder-tires, case-lid and key, and extra needles in original packaging.

Finding missing parts for your machine is a real adventure, and a great exercise in patience. In a pinch, you can sometimes find substitutes. The replacement slide-plate for my Singer 128 isn’t for a Singer machine. It actually belongs to a German-made Frister & Rossmann machine, but I found it in a box of old bits and pieces, sans machine.

What Price to Pay?

Sewing machine prices vary WILDLY depending on where you live. But keep in mind that antique machines are extremely tough. They can be over a century old, and still work PERFECTLY. These things were NOT designed to break down, and they were NOT designed to be thrown out. They were designed to last for centuries. And they do!

That being the case, they are not as rare as you might think. And since they’re not that rare, they are also not that valuable, and should not be very expensive. A vintage sewing machine in working, functional condition can be purchased for $100 or less in many, many cases. In some instances, even less than $50, or $25, depending on how lucky you are. You may even get one for free! You might even have inherited one! The key is not to spend more than is necessary.

Sewing machines were VERY common. There was a time when EVERY HOUSEHOLD HAD to have one! I don’t mean because it was some sort of fashion-accessory, I mean that they HAD to have one, or else, the whole family would be ass-naked. There was simply no other way to get clothing! The result is that there are still billions of them out there. Don’t be bought in by all that crap about “It’s old”, “it’s antique”, “It’s rare”.

It’s NOT. Old it may be. Rare? No. Expensive? Certainly not. Valuable? I wish. The vast majority of old sewing machines can be bought for a pittance. You needn’t spend the earth.

What to Buy?

As with anything, the older it is, the harder it is to find replacement parts. Keep that firmly in mind when buying any old sewing machine. As much as possible, stick to big, well-known brands. Market-leaders. And buy wisely.

These are all things that you must keep in mind when you go shopping for an old sewing machine. Now, let’s move onto actually buying a sewing machine…

Buying Your Machine – T.S. Machines

Purchasing a transverse-shuttle machine is bit of a mixed bag. And care should be taken when purchasing one.

Originally, several countries made T.S. machines. The U.K, Germany and America, to name a few. And these used old-fashioned, round-shank Singer-12 type needles, which are almost impossible to find today. If you have a machine which takes these needles, it’s basically an ornament now.

However, in Germany, sewing-machine manufacturers held onto transverse shuttle technology for a lot longer than in other countries, which had moved onto vibrating-shuttle and round-bobbin, rotary-hook machines. They were still producing transverse-shuttle machines well into the 1920s and 30s.

To compete with more modern machines, these old German designs had to be updated. And to do this, they had to swap out the old round-shank needle-bars with modern needle-bars which take conventional, modern-style machine-needles. If you DO buy an old T.S. machine, make sure that it is a later model which is capable of taking modern needles.

(Thanks to Lizzie Lenard for this titbit!)

Buying Your Machine – V.S. Machines

Vibrating-Shuttle machines are very popular. They’re whimsical, cute, they work very well…and they’re extremely old. The vibrating-shuttle mechanism was invented before the American Civil War! So, how do you buy one?

Let’s use my V.S. machine as an example:

My hand-cranked Singer 128k V.S. sewing machine. Manufactured in 1936

I purchased this at the Camden Lock Market in London about a year ago, for fifteen pounds. When I bought it, it didn’t have a base-lid, it didn’t have a key, and it didn’t have a front slide-plate (all of which it now DOES have!). But what do you need to keep in mind?

Vibrating-shuttle machines are the oldest machines which you can still use today. The reason for this is because the vast majority of them will use modern machine-needles, despite the fact that some of them can be over a century old! The style of needle used in most domestic sewing-machines has not changed greatly since the 1880s. As a result, the machine-needles that you buy today will, in most cases, still fit into an antique vibrating-shuttle machine. But there are still a couple of shortfalls.

Further up, I said I’d come back to the issue of vibrating-shuttle bobbins and shuttles. Well, here’s when that happens.

Vibrating shuttles are no-longer manufactured. They haven’t been manufactured since at least the 1960s. But the bobbins which they contain are manufactured as reproductions, on a small scale. And you can buy these online. Try eBay. They follow the generic, Singer-style long bobbin, so they should work with Singer vibrating-shuttle machines like the 27 and 28 series.

Here are a few things to keep an eye out with vibrating-shuttle machines, if you wish to buy one.

Check for Bobbins and Shuttles

Make sure that the machine has at least one shuttle, and at least two bobbins, before you buy it, and that these shuttles and bobbins MATCH THE MACHINE! Shuttles and bobbins are NOT generic, and they are NOT interchangeable!

A Jones shuttle will NOT fit a Singer machine, a Singer bobbin will not fit into a Wheeler & Wilson shuttle. Do not buy a machine with mismatched shuttles and bobbins, hoping that you can just marry them off and everything will work fine – it WILL NOT work fine. Shuttles will jam inside the machine, or bobbins will fall out and tangle up. And you’ll be in all kinds of strife, using language your grandmother would whip you for!

Check the Needle

Most antique vibrating-shuttle machines use modern-style needles, but just to be safe, always check the needle. A modern needle has a thicker shank than it has a tip, and one side of the shank is flattened, so that it looks like a ‘D’. In most cases, you won’t have any problems, but it’s best to be sure.

Check the bobbin-race

The thread’s in the bobbin, in the shuttle, in the carrier, in the race, in the bed of the sewing-machine…in the bed, in the bed, in the bed of the sewing-machine. All together, now…

The race is the little channel underneath the sewing-machine base where the shuttle lives. Open the slide-plates and rotate the balance-wheel until the little steel carriage appears. Press down on the shuttle-tip, and the shuttle should just pop out. Check inside to make sure that the shuttle has a bobbin in it. The machine is useless without these components. You do not need extra shuttles, but it pays to have at least two bobbins, so that you can have at least one choice of thread. Most old vibrating-shuttle machines came with sets of between four, five and six bobbins. Singer 27s came with a standard set of five.

Buying Your Machine – Treadle-Power!

Treadle machines, the old, foot-operated ones which sit on those cute, wooden tables with the wrought-iron frames, are great. But they come with their own issues. Chief among these is weight.

Treadle-operated machines are extremely heavy. If you buy one, you must keep in mind how you’re going to cart the machine and the treadle-table back home. On top of that, treadle-machines require more maintenance – the treadle mechanism must be oiled regularly to prevent jamming. And the drive-belt has to be in good condition, with no knots or frays. And operating a treadle-machine requires quite a bit of hand-foot-eye coordination! To prevent snapping threads, the balance-wheel (and by extension, the drive-wheel on the treadle) must be running anti-clockwise (so that the wheel spins up, over and forwards, TOWARDS you). If it spins the other way, the sewing-mechanism fouls up and the thread snaps.

Buying Your Machine – Hand-Cranked Wonders

Most antique machines are crank-operated. Like my 1936 Singer:

Round and around and around it shall go. Where does it stop? Nobody knows…

Crank-operated machines are extremely handy if you intend to take your sewing machine to places where electricity isn’t available, or where it’s too cumbersome to take your treadle-machine (not that treadle-machines are designed to be moved from place to place!). These are the ultimate in portable sewing-machines.

Crank-operated machines are prized because of their extreme portability. They don’t have any cables or motors or levers or foot-pedals to lug around, they aren’t bolted to a huge, wooden table. They’re just what they are, and that’s what they do. And people love them, because of it!

Crank-operated machines come with advantages of reduced weight, extreme portability, but they deprive you of one hand in the process, to operate the machine. If you’re willing to put up with that, a cranked machine could be for you!

One of the beauties about hand-cranked machines is that they’re surprisingly easy to convert, should you wish to do so. This is yet another reason why they’re extremely popular.

Let’s say you have a vintage electric sewing machine with a dead motor. It doesn’t work, it’s not gonna work, and it’s a waste of time to try and get it working.

But you really like the machine.

Easy. Get out a big screwdriver, unscrew the sewing-motor from the machine (save the bolt that comes off the machine), and chuck it out, along with all the cables and leads and lights and other crap that comes along with it.

Now, get your crank-assembly (either an original antique one, or a modern reproduction, either are available on eBay), and bolt it onto the machine, using the same bolt that held your machine-motor in place. Screw it in tightly with the screwdriver, and then run the crank-arm through the spokes of your sewing-machine’s balance-wheel.

Keep in mind that, although extremely easy a conversion to do, this only works with older sewing-machines with spoked balance-wheels, such as my Singer 128. It will work with solid, non-spoked balance-wheels as well, but it will require you to mutilate your machine by cutting a notch in the wheel, for the crank-arm. You may, or may not wish to do that, depending on how much you love the machine. Alternatively, you can remove the solid balance-wheel, and fit on a spoked wheel, instead.

Buying Your Machine – The Marvel of Electricity

Vintage and antique sewing-machines worked very simply. As a result, it’s surprisingly easy to convert them so that they run off electricity. And a number of machines underwent this conversion in the early 20th century.

Having an electrically-powered machine has many advantages – it’s extremely fast, you have both hands free, you have a sewing-machine lamp to see what you’re doing, and it’s very powerful. The downside is always having to plug the machine in, and having to check the cables. Another potential downside is having to ensure that the electronics on your machine (which can be up to 90 years old, in the case of Singer’s earliest electric machines) are functioning properly. This can be assessed by a sewing-machine repairman, or by you, if you have the necessary skills.

Buying Your Machine – Tips, Tricks, Hints. Dos, Don’ts, Etc.

Here are some things to consider when you buy your machine, whether it’s cranked, treadled, or electrically powered. Keep the following details in mind when you’re out machine-hunting, and consider them, before you actually pay for any machine that you might be interested in:

– Ensure that it takes modern-style needles. This is especially important if it’s an antique vibrating-shuttle machine. In most cases you won’t have to worry, but there are the odd ones out there, where you do.

– Ensure that the machine comes with at least two bobbins. You can usually buy more at sewing-shops, or online, but if it’s an older, V.S. machine, it’s not always so easy. Ensure that the bobbins that DO come with the machine fit the machine and work properly!

– Ensure that the bobbin-winder mechanism works! Fewer things are more frustrating than trying to wind a bobbin by hand!

– Ensure that the clutch-wheel (the smaller knob inside the balance-wheel) engages and disengages smoothly. This switches the machine between sewing-mode, and bobbin-winding mode!

– Ensure that the machine-body is affixed FIRMLY to the machine-base/case/treadle-table, and that the case-handle is affixed FIRMLY to the lid! Old wooden cases can rot and crack, and bolts and screws can work themselves loose. If possible, tighten them before you buy the machine! Or tighten them the moment you get it home! The average antique sewing-machine can weigh up to, and over, 30lbs! You do NOT want that falling on the ground, or even worse, landing on your feet! Damage to the machine or case will likely be irreparable!

– Ensure that all electronics function properly. Lights turn on. Pedals and leads work. They’re not frayed, bent or cut, melted or cracked! You don’t want to zap yourself when you get home!

– DO buy your machine from a market-leader! Replacement-parts for machines (reproduction or otherwise) are usually only made to fit antique machines which are extremely common. If you are buying a machine with a view to getting these missing pieces later on, buy a machine that was POPULAR!

There ARE people out there who manufacture replacement slide-plates, replacement keys, replacement bobbins. But these are usually for Singer machines! Unless you’re very lucky, chances are, they will not work on your obscure little American machine that you found at a country junk-sale. The older, or more obscure your machine is, the harder it is to fix, and the harder it is to find missing parts!

– DO check bobbin-winder tires. These things can wear out or dry up and crack. In some cases, they can even MELT into puddles of ugly black goo! Replacements are manufactured, and you can buy them online. If you’re unwilling to do that, existing bobbin-winder tires can be resurrected or have their working lives prolonged by wrapping them around tightly with adhesive tape, to protect the rubber from further deterioration.

– DO, if possible, sew with the machine before you buy it. You don’t want to find out when you get it home, that it’s defective and keeps dropping stitches!

– DO fiddle around with the machine before you buy it. Turn the crank at high speed, get the wheel spinning and pump the treadle. You want to be sure that there’s nothing that jams up, or breaks or rattles around.

– DO open the machine-bed, and have a peek inside. You never know what might be hiding in the basement.

Underneath my Singer 99k.

– DON’T worry if the vintage machine you’ve bought (or want to buy) is stiff and doesn’t move! This is an EXTREMELY common problem. And the way to fix it is extremely easy!…and fun! These old machines drink oil. If you don’t lubricate them at least every now and then, the oil dries up and they will eventually jam. And I mean REALLY jam – my grandmother’s 60-year-old Singer 99 was so stiff you couldn’t get it going even if you smashed it with a sledgehammer! If you DO have a machine that’s jammed up, follow my restoration-guide, to get it running again!

– DON’T panic if you’ve bought a Singer sewing machine in a bentwood case, and it’s locked…and you can’t get the damn thing open! Yeek!

A 3mm flat-head screwdriver (and maybe, a couple of squirts of oil into the lock) will easily open the case for you. Simply push the screwdriver into the key-slot, and turn it clockwise. This releases the lock. Now, lift up the left side of the case, slide the case to the left (to disengage the lock on the right side), and then lift up, and away! Then, say hello to your machine.

– DO make sure that your machine-lid is placed correctly onto the base, and is LOCKED before lifting the machine up by the lid-handle to take it anywhere! You don’t want the machine parting company with the lid and smashing on the ground!

– DO oil your machine every now and then, if you use it regularly (regularly means at least once every month). Although very robust, a lack of oil will cause the moving parts to seize up and jam. And then you’ll have a bugger of a time unjamming them again with even more oil.

– DO check to see if your machine comes with any attachments! Most machines came with a wide variety of attachments and add-ons. Buttonholers, zigzaggers, seam-guides, hemmers, tuckers, and all other bits and pieces. They’re usually stored somewhere inside the machine-bed, or inside the case-lid.

In most electric machines, boxes of attachments are stored inside the machine-lid (the green cardboard-box on the left).

On most handcranked machines, attachments are stored in compartments underneath the balance-wheel and crank-assembly (green box, on the right). The black steel panel on the left is the cover that goes over the top of the storage-compartment.

– DON’T be misled by people who try to sell old sewing machines as “semi-industrial” or “industrial”, and ask an inflated price, just because they can sew through multiple layers of leather or denim. There is a HUGE difference between a domestic sewing machine, and an industrial sewing machine.

This is a domestic sewing-machine

This is an industrial sewing-machine!

Sewing Machines – Care & Feeding

You bought a beautiful antique or vintage sewing machine. Or maybe you inherited one. I inherited my grandmother’s Singer. That’s what got me interested in these things. However you got it, here’s a few things to keep in mind…

Before using your machine, clean it thoroughly and oil it liberally. You don’t want the machine operating with any unnecessary stress or friction. Consult my restoration-guide (see link, further up) about how to do this in detail. Use high-grade machine-oil to lubricate the sewing machine.

Make sure that you put your machine on a sturdy surface! Antique and vintage machines had cases made of wood, and machines made of cast iron and steel. This makes them MUCH heavier than most modern machines made of plastic – it’s a tradeoff that you get with better quality.

That being the case, you do not want to put your sewing machine on a table or bench-top that is going to shake and vibrate when you operate the machine. Not only is it extremely annoying, it could be dangerous!

When not in use, keep your machine covered and locked. This will prevent sun-damage, and will stop things from getting dusty or from components getting lost. But also keep the machine (case and all) out of direct sunlight when not in use. Otherwise, the sun’s rays will damage the finish on the case. Best to keep the machine in a cupboard when it’s not being used.

Sewing-machines are not toys. And antique ones can be surprisingly powerful. Keep them away from kids! If you want to let them fiddle around with it, then at least remove the needle, first! Don’t worry, they’re unlikely to actually break the machine – these things were extremely tough – but they do stand a chance of stabbing themselves with the needle!

Although, you might want to buy a Singer Model 20, if your son or daughter wants a machine all for themselves:

A Singer Model 20. Cute, huh?

These are REAL machines, in the sense that they will sew. They do a simple chainstitch, but the needle never rises up high enough for a child to get his or her finger stuck underneath it. For size-comparison, here’s the Singer 20 with my Singer 128:

Singer 128 (behind), and Singer 20 (front). All Singer 20 machines came with a little clamp, to bolt the machine securely to a table during use.

Conclusion

This concludes my guide in what to look for and how to buy a good vintage or antique sewing machine. Questions or comments are welcome, and feel free to leave them below.

14/12/2013 by Scheong

The Night the World Exploded – The Eruption of Krakatoa

In the South Pacific, between the islands of Java and Sumatra, in the midst of the old Dutch East Indies, is a small island called Krakatoa. The name doesn’t mean much today, but during the last quarter of the 19th Century, Krakatoa was the site of an event which rocked the world, figuratively and literally, and which was on the front page of every newspaper within hours. It was an event heard around the world, it was THE news sensation of 1883, it was the Victorian equivalent of the Kobe Earthquake or Hurricane Katrina, or the Indian Seaquake Tsunamis of 2004.

It was the catastrophic eruption of Mount Krakatoa.

This posting looks into the history of one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in the world, and the effect it had on the surrounding populations.

What and Where is Krakatoa?

Krakatoa is a tiny volcanic island between Sumatra and Java in the Dutch East Indies, as they were called back in 1883 when our story takes place. Today, they’re called Indonesia, instead. Its existence, and its volcanic eruptions had been recorded by mankind as far back at least, as the 17th century. The fact that Krakatoa was active again was no surprise to anybody. Legends and fables from the Javanese people, and Dutch colonial records held since the 1600s proved that Krakatoa was a very active volcano. As a result, not many people were that concerned about the fact that the volcano was acting up. It was doing what it did, and that was just how it was. This was normal, and there was nothing to worry about.

How wrong they were.

In May, 1883, Krakatoa was a bubbling, belching, restless monster; but a monster that seemed to be satisfied enough to keep itself to itself. Or so the locals believed. This changed in August of that year, when, on the 27th of that month, one of the largest and most violent, the most destructive, and one of the loudest ever volcanic eruptions in recorded history blew the island to pieces and wiped Krakatoa off the map. It sent shockwaves around the world, literally and figuratively. News of this monumental catastrophe was flashed across newspapers from Shanghai to San Francisco, London to Los Angeles, as fast as electric cable-telegraphy, the quickest means of communications at the time, could send it.

The eruption was one of the deadliest in human history. 36,417 people were killed. How many died in the 79A.D. eruption of Vesuvius? Just 3,000. Just as impressive as the death-toll was the sheer power of the explosion produced by the eruption. The noise and the shockwaves from the event were so loud that they could be heard and felt up to 3,000 miles away!

Just how far is 3,000 miles?

Within that radius, you have…

– Australia.
– Siam.
– Singapore.
– Malaysia.
– Japan.
– China.
– India.
– New Zealand.
– Burma.

And most famously, the tiny island of Rodrigues. Rodrigues is part of the chain of islands that make up the Republic of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. At a distance of 3,000 miles from the explosion, Rodrigues holds the record as being the furthest distance that the sound of the 1883 explosion of Krakatoa had reached. This, by the way, also makes the August 27th, 1883 eruption the LOUDEST SOUND IN RECORDED HISTORY!!!!!

Now that’s impressive!

What Happened in 1883?

In 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa, in what was then the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia), was busy erupting. This was nothing new. It had erupted plenty of times in the past. In 416 A.D., and again in 535 A.D. It erupted again in 1530, and yet again in May, 1680. The 1680 eruption was recorded by Dutch sailors based in the Indies. When the eruption was over, they’d even collected chunks of floating pumice to keep as souvenirs!

The eruption of August 26-27, 1883, stands out, however, as being the most destructive eruption of Krakatoa in recorded history, as well as producing the loudest sound recorded in human history.

20-21, May, 1883

The volcano had been erupting steadily for several months during 1883. Small-scale explosions happened all the time, and this was considered normal activity. Life continued as it always had in the Dutch East Indies. As far back as May, there had been earthquakes and minor eruptions, which continued, on and off for several weeks. The most significant earthquakes and eruptions, though small in size, happened in mid-May, continuing, on and off, until June. But then for a while, the island was quiet. For three months, nothing happened. Everyone thought the Krakatoan volcanic eruption season for 1883 had come to an end. People grew complacent and life returned to normal. The only people who paid Krakatoa any interest were the local geologists and pioneering volcanologists, who visited Krakatoa to examine the island. They recorded the atmosphere and the conditions on the ground, making special note of the scalded, scorched, ashy landscape, and the plumes of gas and smoke belching out of the crater. The air was thick, sulfurous, and almost impossible to breathe.

The August 26-27 Eruption of Krakatoa

On the 11th of August, 1883, a Dutchman, Capt. Ferzenaar, stopped at Krakatoa to study the destruction wrought by the May and June eruptions. He noticed great damage and signs of ongoing activity, such as smoke and steam columns issuing from the mouth of the volcano. He advised colonial authorities in Jakarta to suspend any visits to the island in the near future, as a precautionary measure. The authorities would’ve been foolish to ignore his advice.

Capt. Ferzenaar’s warning came in the nick of time. Just over two weeks after his visit, Krakatoa started acting up again. At first, the volcano let off a few, small-scale eruptions on the 25th. Little notice was taken by the locals; this stuff had been going on for years. But the next day, at 1:00pm on the 26th of August, the island exploded!

The blast was mindboggling. All three craters on the island of Krakatoa were firing out tons of built-up rock, solidified magma and ash which had been causing dangerous pressure-buildups inside the volcano for centuries. Ships in the South Pacific area were being pelted by rocks and chunks of pumice up to four inches in size, hitting their decks and bouncing off their deck-house roofs! The earthquakes that followed triggered small-scale tidal-waves that hit the surrounding islands and coastlines that evening. The Dutch East Indies were suddenly not as peaceful and relaxing as they seemed to be!

And the worst was yet to come.

The eruptions continued throughout the day, into the night, and into the next day. Another eruption was recorded at 4:25pm, and still they continued. Ash and smoke blocked out the sun and thick haze coated the entire East Indies region.

On the 27th, the most destructive eruptions took place. At 5:30am, 6:44am, 10:02 and 10:41am, four massive eruptions blew the island of Krakatoa to pieces! The explosions could be heard thousands of miles away and earthquakes rocked the entire Pacific region. Powerful pyroclastic flows, huge landslides of rock, soil, ash, gas and scalding air, devastated the region, obliterating everything in their path: Trees, houses, wildlife and people. Entire communities on the islands closest to the volcano were completely wiped out in a matter of minutes! Huge waves rocked the world as far away as South America, the east coast of Africa, the West Coast of the United States, and even as far north as the English Channel!

This 1888 lithograph print is one of the most famous images of the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883.

The massive shock-waves generated by the volcano rocked the world. Sailors on ships in the Sunda Strait were deafened by the blasts of the explosions. The barometers at the Batavia Gasworks, which supplied the town with gas-lighting, recorded a pressure-jump of 8,500pa, a deviation so extreme, that it went off the scale! The 10:02 eruption produced a sound-wave so powerful and so far-reaching that to this day, it remains the loudest sound ever recorded.

The eruptions that happened on the 27th of August, 1883, were so powerful that they were heard on the remote island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean. The sounds were so loud, locals thought they were cannon-blasts being fired by some unseen ship beyond the horizon. Local officials grew so alarmed, they even sent warships out to intercept this mysterious ‘ship’, but it was never found.

Cities and towns all around Java and Sumatra were affected. Ports were wiped out. Ships were thrown inland by the powerful waves. Entire towns were obliterated by powerful tsunamis and pyroclastic flows. There was so much ash in the sky, lights were turned on before midday, as morning turned to night when the sun was blocked out by the tons of ejected ash and soil that were fired into the atmosphere.

The Story of the S.S. Governor-General Loudon

What could be worse than being in Ketimbang, a town on the southern shores of Sumatra, or in Java across the Sunda Strait, and watching the volcano Krakatoa explode before your eyes, blasting millions of tons of rock, soil and ash into the sky? What could be more terrifying than watching gigantic tsunamis surging towards you due to the mountainous landslides and powerful shock-waves generated by the blasts? What could be more unnerving than being in the lantern-room of a lighthouse and watching a towering, 40ft wall of water surge towards you, knowing that you couldn’t possibly escape?

How about being on a tiny little steamship in the Sunda Strait, and getting a front-row seat to the destruction?

This is the remarkable story of the S.S. Governor General Loudon.

The S.S. Loudon was a small ship. Lanched in 1875, it was used for delivering passengers and cargo around the Dutch East Indies. Its captain, Johan Lindemann, was due, on Sunday, the 26th of August, 1883, to steam from Anjer in Java, to Telok Betong, on the southern coast of Sumatra in Lampong Bay. On-board were 100 passengers – Chinese coolies going to Sumatra for work, and curious colonial day-trippers hoping to get a close look at Krakatoa.

Ever since it had started becoming more active, day-trips and sightseeing voyages to, or around Krakatoa, provided by small, local steamships, had become extremely popular. Passengers onboard Capt. Lindemann’s ship paid 25 Guilders apiece, for a ticket, and a chance to see the volcano up close and personal. It was one way for struggling local sailors to scrape together a few more coins on each voyage. The passengers on the Loudon were expecting something amazing – real bang for their buck!

And they wouldn’t be disappointed – The voyage from Anjer to Telok Betong took the S.S. Loudon right across the Sunda Strait. If the passengers onboard stared off the port side of the ship, they would get the view of a lifetime of the most terrifying explosion on earth.

They just didn’t know it yet.

Having picked up its passengers, the S.S. Loudon set a course northwest. It would cut through the Strait and steam directly towards Telok Betong, hugging the coastline as it went. At 1:00pm, the first eruptions started.

Rumbling away for months before, Krakatoa was now ready to explode. And the passengers and crew of the S.S. Loudon were right in the blast-zone.

All afternoon on the 26th of August, the volcano blasted rocks and ash into the air. When the second eruption on the 26th happened, at 4:25 in the afternoon, the S.S. Loudon, its passengers and crew, were among the closest living beings to the volcano. A mere 12 miles (19km) away! Amazingly, there was one ship which was even closer to Krakatoa – The Charles Bal from Ireland – just 9 miles (16km) away. The Charles Bal went down in history as the ship which was the closest to the volcano during its most violent eruptions.

That evening, the Loudon reached Lampong Bay, outside of the port town of Telok Betong. Radio-contact between the port and the ship indicated that it was impossible to dock. The sea was far too rough and dangerous, and the ash and smoke so thick that navigation was almost impossible.

Deciding that it would be suicidal to stay where he was, Captain Lindemann ordered the ship about. At 7:30am on the 27th, after two eruptions had already rocked the ship that day, Lindemann ordered that the Loudon be turned around. It was to make all speed for Anjer. There, they would drop anchor and report their experiences and sightings to the colonial authorities. Lindemann knew that to stay in Lampong Bay was almost certain death. The shallow sea-floor would force waves upwards to incredible heights that could swamp the ship in seconds. They had to get away.

On the 27th of August, the volcano started early. From 5:30 in the morning, there were four gigantic explosions that blotted out the sun, all before midday. Ash poured down like black snow, and the air was charged with electricity. The landslides and shock-waves from Krakatoa set off massive waves that slammed into coastlines as far away as Western Australia and India. And the S.S. Loudon was right in the middle of it!

This is a map of the Sunda Strait. The S.S. Loudon was sailing from ANYER (on the west coast of Java), to TELUK BETUNG, in Sumatra. The ship’s route towards its destination hugged the southern Sumatran coastline. It’s route away from Telok Betong was southeast, hugging the coast, then west to Legundi, then south-southwest, heading for the Indian Ocean, before eventually returning to Anjer. Unfortunately, this escape-route took them perilously close to the volcano of Krakatoa

Ash and rocks pelted the ship. If the ash-buildup on the deck became too heavy and the weight shifted, the entire ship could tip over. The captain ordered all passengers into the hold to redistribute the ship’s weight, and ordered all hands not part of the ship’s essential operations, to immediately start shoveling the ash over the sides.

The continuing eruptions blacked out the sky. It was so dark, the ship could’ve been sailing at midnight. Despite the fact that it was only 10:30 in the morning, Captain Lindemann ordered the ship’s navigation-lamps to be fired up. He wouldn’t risk slamming into another ship in this ashy blackout. They had to get out of here. But trying to send your ship through a volcanic storm to safety is perilous work, and the Loudon faced constant danger from gigantic waves, vicious lighting-strikes and tons of falling ash, which all threatened to sink the ship.

Remember that scene in “The Perfect Storm“, where the fishing boat ‘Andrea Gail‘ tries to ride over a gigantic wall of water?

Imagine doing that with a steam-powered, coal-fired passenger-ship, loaded with passengers, in the middle of a volcanic eruption. Because that’s what the Loudon was doing.

Keep in mind that the Loudon is now sailing south, out of Lampong Bay, hugging the Sumatran coast. With every mile, it must tackle enormous tsunamis generated by the shallow, narrow walls and floor of the Bay. The water is forced upwards to create gigantic swells and waves. To stabilize the ship and lower its center of gravity, Captain Lindemann ordered the port and starboard anchors to be let loose. The extra weight pulling on the ship would hopefully prevent it from being knocked over as it encountered each wave as it left the Bay. Lindemann turned his ship directly towards any waves headed in their direction and ordered the engines All Ahead. Full, to hit the waves with the bow of the ship and not lose precious momentum, which would leave them at the mercy of the sea.

Even as they tried to escape, conditions grew even worse. The powerful volcanic storm blasted hatch-covers off the deck. Anything not bolted down or securely tied to the ship was thrown off in the storm. The mainmast was afflicted with the electrical discharge called St. Elmo’s Fire. The electrically-charged ash which Krakatoa blasted into the atmosphere also caused powerful lighting-bolts to form.

While St. Elmo’s Fire is relatively harmless, lightning bolts are not. In his logbook, Lindemann wrote that he witnessed the ship’s mainmast being struck at least seven times by powerful lightning strikes. Fortunately, the lightning-rod fixed to the top of the mast prevented the ship from catching fire. While the ship was safe from fire, there were still other concerns.

The ash, rocks and thick, gooey, ashy rain that was splattering down all over the ship was making it top-heavy, and the thick, low-lying ash-clouds were making it hard to navigate. Ash was falling so thickly that the crew couldn’t see where the ship was going. And it was rising so fast on the deck that within ten minutes, they were shoveling piles of ash off the ship that were six inches deep!

Twelve inches of ash, rock and mud would be enough to throw the ship off-balance. After that, all it would take was one wave to hit the side of the Loudon, and it would be capsized in an instant.

Deciding that hugging the coast was too dangerous, Lindemann instead ordered the ship out to sea. Tsunamis have less power in deeper water – when they’re near the coast, it’s the sloping shelves of land that force the waves up into the air. Sailing southwest towards the Indian Ocean and safer waters saved their lives.

At least one passenger onboard the Loudon, N.H. Van Sandick, a public-works engineer and day-tripper, recorded his experiences that day. The following are excerpts from his book “In the Realm of Vulcan” (published 1890), detailing what he saw from the deck of the Loudon in 1883.

Describing the morning of the 26th of August…

Clearly the lighthouses of Java’s Fourth Point silhouetted itself against the sky. The Dutch flag on the grounds of the Assistant Resident flapped happily; every house could be distinguished and subconsciously the thoughts wander back to the first arrival in the Indies from Europe. Anjer is then the first place which brings welcome greetings from a distance. If we, who were aboard the Loudon in the roads of Anjer, would have declared that the last day of Anjer’s existence had already begun, we definitely would have been considered deranged…

Describing the volcano, Krakatoa…

When our coolies were aboard, the Loudon set course past Dwars-in-Weg and Varkenshoek into the Bay of Lampong toward Telok Betong. To portside we saw in the distance the island of Krakatau, known for its first volcanic eruption several months ago [May 1883]. Krakatau is an old acquaintance of the Loudon. When, after the first eruption, a pleasure trip was made to see the volcano, the Loudon brought passengers to the island for 25 guilders each. Many landed that time and climbed the volcano; and all experienced a festive and pleasant day.

The volcano on Krakatau gave us a free performance. Although we were far away from the island, we saw a high column of black smoke rise above the island; the column widened toward the top to a cloud. Also there was a continual ash fall. Toward evening, at 7 o’clock, we were in the Bay of Lampong, in the roads of Telok Betong, where anchor was dropped and it soon became night.

Van Sandick goes on to describe how the ship’s crew tried to make contact with the port at Telok Betong, so that they could dock the ship and offload passengers, but no reply was received from the Harbor. The ship lowered one of its lifeboats and sent sailors ashore to examine the situation. They eventually rowed back to the ship, saying that it was impossible to fight the currents, and that the smoke and ash were too thick to see anything.

Deciding that they couldn’t stay where they were, Lindemann ordered the ship about, to return to Anjer in Java. Van Sandick writes of the moment the ship changed course and headed back into the teeth of the volcanic storm:

Suddenly, at about 7 a.m., a tremendous wave came moving in from the sea, which literally blocked the view and moved with tremendous speed. The Loudon steamed forward in such a way that she headed right into the wave. One moment… the wave had reached us. The ship made a tremendous tumbling; however, the wave was passed and the Loudon was saved.

Another ship, the P.S. Berouw, was not so lucky. The tsunami that wiped out the harbour at Telok Betong hoisted the paddle-steamer and its 28 crew-members into the air, and threw it inland. This sketch of the ship was made after the waves receded. The ship is wedged across a river…two miles up from the coast!

Steaming away from Telok Betong, and watching the harbour behind them being smashed to pieces, Van Sandick then described what happened when the ship sailed once more past the volcano, attempting to reach Anjer:

Meanwhile we steamed forward and soon the roads of Telok Betong were lost from view, and we hoped soon to be out of the Bay of Lampong. But we would not get away that easily. It became darker and darker, so that already at 10 a.m. there was almost Egyptian darkness. This darkness was complete. Usually even on a dark night one can still distinguish some outlines of, for instance, white objects. However, here a complete absence of light prevailed. The sun climbed higher and higher, but none of her rays reached us. Even on the horizon not the faintest light could be seen and not a star appeared in the sky.

This darkness continued for 18 hours. It is self-evident that the Loudon during this pole-night had to “winter over” in the bay. Meanwhile a dense mud rain fell, covering the deck more than half a meter thick and penetrating everywhere, which was especially bothersome to the crew, whose eyes, ears, and noses were liberally filled with a material which made breathing difficult. Off and on again, ash and pumice fell. The compass showed the strangest deviations. Fierce sea currents were observed in diverging directions. The barometer meanwhile read very high, which certainly was difficult to explain. Breathing, however, was not only made difficult by ash, mud, and pumice particles, but the atmosphere itself had also changed. A devilish smell of sulphurous acid spread. Some felt buzzing in the ears, others a feeling of pressing on the chest and sleepiness. In short, the circumstances left something to be desired, since it would have been quite natural if we all had choked to death.

Captain Lindemann’s actions on the 27th of August, 1883, saved the lives of everyone onboard. Staying away from land and powerful tidal-waves, attacking waves head-on and redistributing the ship’s weight to lower its center of gravity to prevent capsizing had all contributed to the eventual safe deliverance of everyone onboard the S.S. Governor-General Loudon.

Sailing out to sea into deeper water ensured the ship’s survival. Once the Loudon made landfall, everyone was offloaded safely. Capt. Johan Lindemann was eventually awarded by the Dutch colonial authorities, and given a medal for his bravery and courage in the face of incredible dangers. He died in 1885.

Remember the unfortunate P.S. Berouw? This is all that remains of it:

This is the Berouw’s mooring-buoy. When the Telok Betong Tsunami hit, the ship was ripped from its buoy and thrown inland. The buoy itself was carried with it. It remains where it was found, and was later used as a sculpture in a memorial to the Krakatoa dead.

…It’s now in the middle of a traffic roundabout.

Effects of the Eruption

The official death-toll, as recorded by Dutch authorities in Indonesia, was 36,417. This was due to a mixture of tsunamis, pyroclastic flows, shockwaves, and falling volcanic debris. The eruptions sent debris charging up into the sky, to a height of 20,000ft (to put this into perspective, commercial aircraft fly at around 30,000ft). Ships all around the world were rocked by powerful waves caused by the earthquakes and shockwaves generated by the eruptions. 11,000,000 cubic miles of ash, rock, soil and magma had been blown into the sky, blocking out the sun around the Dutch East Indies for three days.

165 villages, towns and settlements were destroyed, including Telok Betong, a town in southern Sumatra called Ketimbang, and the Fourth Point Lighthouse, on the west coast of Java (mentioned in Van Sandick’s book). Here, despite the fact that the lighthouse was ripped off its foundations by a colossal chunk of coral weighing several tons, the lighthouse-keeper somehow survived. Today, the only thing that remains of the original Fourth Point Lighthouse is its foundations, but another lighthouse, built just a few yards away, was opened just a couple of years later.

Photographed in 1883, this massive chunk of coral was scraped off the seabed and dumped on the western coastline of Java during the eruptions of Krakatoa. It’s believed a chunk similar in size to this, smashed into the Fourth Point Lighthouse, ripping it off its foundations.

The shock-waves from the eruptions circled the globe, bouncing off coastline and mountains and reverberating and reflecting and intensifying and returning. The tsunamis and sound-waves rippled around the globe seven times, before they died down.

For weeks and months after the eruptions, bodies and skeletons washed up on beaches throughout the Pacific area. Some even floated across the Indian Ocean, ending up in Africa!

Rogier Diederik Marius Verbeek

Rogier Verbeek (1845-1926) was a Dutch geologist, scientist, and a pioneer in the field of volcanology – the study of volcanoes and their effects. In the 1880s, Rogier was living in the Dutch East Indies. As one of the most volcanically active places on earth, where better to study volcanoes?

As an active volcano, Krakatoa was naturally of great interest to Verbeek. He set himself up in the Javanese town of Buitenzorg (today, Bogor, Indonesia), a good 100 miles from the volcano. He considered this to be a safe-enough distance from danger, but still close enough to watch the volcano.

His accounts of the volcano, and of its legendary 1883 eruptions became bestselling books in the scientific community of the late-19th century. His journal on the subject made him a celebrity, and brought volcanology into mainstream scientific studies for the first time. His records of the disaster gave scientists all over the world rare, valuable, first-hand insights into the power and the various stages of volcanic eruptions.

The Strange Story of Edward Samson

One of the most famous stories about Krakatoa is not about how many people died, or how loud it was, or how big the eruption happened to be. It’s about a man. A man named Edward Samson.

Whether or not this story is even true is uncertain. It’s been repeated ad nausea throughout the internet, in history-books, and even on TV shows about unexplained events, for at least thirty years. I’ve searched throughout the internet and through documentary films and books…is it real? Maybe. At any rate, it makes a hell of a story. And it goes like this…

Edward Samson was a journalist. He was the news editor of the Boston Globe, an American newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. One night, Samson, bored, a bit drunk, sleepy, and without a story, passed out in his office. In the midst of his slumbers, he had a fantastic dream: He imagined a tropical island paradise; an equatorial dreamland named ‘Pralapae’. He dreamed of a powerful volcanic eruption, that in the space of a few hours, had decimated the entire island. Suddenly, Paradise had been transformed into a hell of raining fire and ash, choking smoke, powerful earthquakes and rocks and lava all around. He imagined thousands of people dead, all of them variously scalded, drowned, buried alive, or blown to pieces in the disaster.

When Samson awoke, he wrote the whole thing down. His dream…for what else could it possibly be?…was so vivid that he felt that he had to record the whole thing. He didn’t know what else to do! Perhaps he could sell it to a magazine as a short story? Or put it in the newspaper and publish it as a piece of fantasy? He punched out the whole account of his vivid volcano vision on his typewriter, rang the thing off, ripped it out, stacked it up on his desk, and then staggered home to sleep.

When he awoke, fresh and sober the next morning, he picked up a copy of the Boston Globe. He was horrified to find that his work of fiction had been taken as fact! The Editor of the Globe had plastered it right across the front page!

Panicking, Samson ran to his office to explain that the story on his desk was merely meant as a piece of fiction, but the ball was already rolling. The story was going to be retracted, and an apology printed to readers of the Globe, when telegrams flooded in from around the world – Singapore, Shanghai, Melbourne, San Francisco…a catastrophic series of eruptions in the Sunda Strait in the Dutch East Indies had devastated the region, wreaking havoc and obliterating an island volcano called Krakatoa.

That night when Samson had passed out and had his dream, was the 25th of August, 1883. Had he really had a premonition of the most famous volcanic eruption in history?

Whether or not this story is true is up for debate. The eruption is certainly true. And the Boston Globe is a real American newspaper – it was first published in 1872, and certainly existed at the time of the 1883 eruption. But was there ever a famous, premonition-fueled front-page volcanic sensation?

Unless anyone ever manages to go through the Globe’s archives and checks the headlines for the 25th-31st of August, 1883, for mentions of a volcanic eruption on Krakatoa, or Pralapae, we may never know.

More Information?

Mr. Van Sandick’s book, “In the Realm of Vulcan” (pub. 1890). Chapter detailing the voyage of the Loudon

Van Sandick’s book was originally published in Dutch, and has been transcribed onto the internet in that language. Use Google Translate to translate it into English if necessary.

Eyewitness Accounts of Krakatoa. Capt. J. Lindemann, and Mr. Van Standick’s report and book-chapters are accounts No. 2 & 3.

Documentary: Krakatoa – The Last Days (AKA Krakatoa – Volcano of Destruction).

Documentary: Krakatoa

The Volcanic Nightmare

The Day the World Exploded – This link provides some interesting information about the ships in the Sunda Strait at the time of the 26-27th August eruptions.

29/11/2013 by Scheong

All A Flutter – A History of the Folding Fan

On a recent trip to Singapore I purchased a very nice folding sandalwood fan. It was partially a souvenir, partially a survival-aid. Any chance to use it and cool off in the 80% humidity and 32-degree heat was exploited. While waiting to cross streets, sitting while watching outdoor performances, stopping for a drink at a cafe, or simply using it to block, or at least filter, the direct glare of the sun, it was used.

While furiously trying to prevent death from heat-stroke, it crossed my mind, the absurd simplicity of the folding fan, and the sheer endurance of such a simple and effective design. So simple and effective that they’re still manufactured in their thousands today. It made me wonder about their history.

If you’ve ever been to Chinatown, gone to a Chinese restaurant, visited any Chinese friends, or looked at old Chinese photographs, you’ve probably seen these:

Folding fan made of Sandalwood. From Australianweddingshop.com

The folding fan, also called a hand-fan or a Chinese fan, is one of the most iconic items ever to be associated with the Far East, the tropics, or hot, summer days. But where do they come from?

Surprisingly, folding fans are not actually Chinese at all. They originated in Japan! Called Ogi, the folding fan was developed in Japan ca. 670A.D., not reaching China until the 900s. The earliest folding fans were made of thin slats of wood, or bamboo, riveted together at a point, and tied together at their far ends with thread, so that they could be opened and shut, used or stored, with ease. They were said to be inspired by the folding wings of bats.

Fans were originally expensive items. They were fiddly and time-consuming to make, and could only be afforded by royalty, aristocracy, or by the well-heeled samurai warrior-classes of Feudal Japan. As fans rose in popularity due to Japan’s sometimes humid summers, professional fan-makers set up shop, and prices began to fall. By the 1400s, fans were being made, carved, painted, or otherwise decorated by dedicated craftsmen, and they started spreading around Asia.

Fans spread to Europe through the famous “Silk Road“, the trading network that ran between Europe and Asia during the Ancient and Medieval periods. Traders on the Silk Road brought fans from Asia back to Europe, where they quickly became fashionable accessories among the well-dressed about town.

By the Georgian era, fans were becoming more commonplace and even more popular. Really nice fans could be made of Mother-of-Pearl, ivory, fine woods and silk. They could be exquisitely decorated, carved or painted. Some fans even had poems written on them. Cheaper fans were made of paper glued onto a frame of wooden slats. It was now possible for people from almost all walks of life to own a fan.

Fans were used mostly by women, but that didn’t stop men from carrying them around as well. Fans were handy for keeping cool in summer, but they were also used to drive away foul odors – in an age when few people bathed regularly, and masked appalling body-odor with perfume and scent, having a fan around to stop you from passing out due to unrestrained armpit-stench was almost mandatory.

Fan Language

Starting in the 1700s, and dying out by the end of the Victorian era, ‘fan language’ was a popular, but secretive method of communication used by young ladies during the Georgian era.

In an age when decorum, manners, etiquette and strict, strict rules of protocol were expected to be followed by EVERYONE who was considered ANYONE, it could be incredibly hard for young women to hang out with young men. Especially when parents or chaperones were around. What to do?

Just like young people today, the kids back in the 1700s used a common, everyday object to send coded messages. Today, it’s internet shorthand. Back then, it was fan-language.

Imagine two sets of parents at dinner, with their son and daughter, seated around the table. How on earth could the girl tell that cute guy sitting across from her just how much she liked him, when such open displays of affection were considered strictly taboo in front of others?

Use the fan.

Opening and closing the fan, waving it in a certain position or speed, or holding it in a certain place in relation to one’s body, or handling it in a certain way, all sent messages from one person to another, usually of an amorous nature, which would probably have shocked their parents.

Fan language could convey a surprisingly large number of messages. ‘I love you’, ‘I hate you’, ‘kiss me’, ‘you’re cute’, ‘We should talk later…hint-hint’, ‘I’m just not that into you’, ‘I’m seeing someone else’, and so-on.

Georgian and Victorian Fans

During the 18th and 19th centuries, fans became extremely popular. Women, and some men, carried them everywhere with them. To the park, to people’s houses when they went visiting, to town, when they went shopping, and especially, to the theater.

In an age when light was gas-fired, oil-burning or candle-flame, and before modern air-conditioning, public buildings which held large numbers of people in close proximity, such as restaurants, club-houses and theaters, could be surprisingly hot and stuffy. Carrying a fan to the theater (and in later years, even the cinema) was almost mandatory, to ensure that you passed out because the play was boring, and not because of the intolerable heat!

A fan fit for a Queen!

Fans were also used to help revive ladies when they fainted – a common occurrence due to the rib-crushing tightness of their corsets. While a police-constable might carry a “lady reviver” (a phial of smelling-salts) for this purpose, most women carried fans to prevent their own fainting, or to revive other friends who might’ve passed out, either due to heat or the inability to breathe.

Fighting Fans!

For such a flimsy, delicate object, you might be surprised to learn that fans were once used as weapons! Prominent in Japan, Korea and China, fans were used as throwing-weapons, shields, swimming-aids, or blunt-force weapons.

To be fair, the fans used in martial-arts were not the fancy bamboo or wood-slat fans which most of us are familiar with. These fans had ribs or slats of iron or brass, capable of dealing or taking blows, blocking spears, arrows, darts, or other missiles, and capable of withstanding punches and other attacks.

In Japan, the art of fan-fighting is called Tessenjutsu, literally “Fan Method” or “Fan Technique” (‘Tessen’ is the name for the special fans manufactured for this purpose).

Buying a Good Fan

Perhaps you want to buy a fan for a friend as a present. Perhaps you want one for yourself to carry around on hot days. Perhaps you want one as a souvenir? Or maybe, like me, you wanted one because you were visiting a tropical country and wanted to carry one around to keep yourself cool during the day, or the block out sun-glare. How do you pick a good one?

As with anything, you get what you pay for.

A good fan is not expensive. But a cheap fan will be a pain in the ass.

Avoid fans with leaves or fanning-surfaces made of paper. These cheap, crummy pieces of crap are generally not worth your money. Constant creasing and uncreasing, opening and closing will cause the paper to rip and tear over time.

Fans made of cloth and wood (or cloth and plastic) are light and comfortable. They’re also able to stand up to more rugged use. Stuff-it-in-your-bag sorts of fans.

For something more elegant, refined, or classic, you might consider an all-wood fan. These are usually made of bamboo, or sandalwood (such as the fan shown above). Sandalwood is ideal because it can be cut very thin, it can be carved inticately, and it won’t crack or break in the process. Also, sandalwood is naturally scented (and yes, it smells really nice). It’s preferable to sniff the wonderful scent of tropical wood, rather than body-sweat, on a hot day. However, there is a trade-off, sandalwood fans should be handled with care, their thin wooden slats are more prone to breakage than the cheaper, wood-and-cloth fans.

A good fan is one which opens all the way, and closes completely, with just a flick of the wrist. New fans are generally stiff from lack of use. To loosen it up, simply wave the fan open and shut several times, to try and break the hold of friction between the ribs of the fan. Fans with a looser rivet or pivot-point also tend to open and shut easier.

To open and close a fan like one of those oldschool kung-fu masters, you first need a fan which is already ‘broken in’, one that will open and shut all the way, with a flick of the wrist. A fan that jams or gets stuck is just a pain in the ass.

Hold the fan in your right hand, gripping the topmost rib, or the ‘guard’ at the end of the fan, with your thumb and the bottom third of your right index-finger.

Holding the fan entirely by this grip, flick it to the left. A good fan will allow the ribs and fan-surface to fall or flick open smoothly, all the way, by momentum or gravity alone. To close the fan, simply flick it back the other way, to the right. If you do this enough times, not only will you get really good at it, but the fan will loosen up and be easier to open and close in the future.

I Want to Know More!

The Fan Museum

Origin of the Folding Fan

Japanese Fans

Japanese War Fans

13/11/2013 by Scheong

Tiffin Time! Classic Stacked Lunch-Pails

I love writing about weird, whimsical items. Antiques, vintage oddities, nick-nacks, and things that you just don’t see every day. Typewriters, old sewing-machines, straight-razor kits, fountain pens, old furniture, household goods…anything strange, whacky, weird, whimsical, and unusual.

While on a trip around Singapore, I got my hands on just such a thing as I have described. Weird, whimsical and unusual. On the surface it sounds like nothing that anyone might be in the least bit interested. If I told you in-essence what it was, it’d be a simple case of “Meh!…”, and then you’d go back to your Facebook page…

Don’t believe me?

Okay…It’s a lunchbox.

*Tumbleweedz*

See? I told you. What’s interesting about a lunchbox? Probably not much, but how many of you have seen one like what I’m about to show you? Probably not many, unless you grew up, or live in Southeast Asia. Here it is:

With the spread of Japanese food around the world, you may be familiar with a ‘bento box’, the traditional Japanese lunchbox used to store sushi. But have you ever seen one of these?

They’re called different things depending on where you buy them and find them. To most English-speaking people, the correct term is a Tiffin-Carrier. If you went to India, in particular the city of Bombay, most people would call them Dabbas. But what is it?

What is a Tiffin-Carrier?

A Tiffin-Carrier, Tiffin-Box, Dabba, or just a ‘Tiffin’, is a compartmentalised food-storage unit. It consists of between two-to-four (usually three, or four) bowls or tins of the same, or similar sizes, stacked up on top of each other, with a lid on the top, sealed down and clamped shut with locks down the sides or top. It’s meant to act in a similar fashion to a thermos-flask, in that it keeps hot food warm, and cold food cool…but in the middle of tropical Asia, the most important aspect of the tiffin-carrier was that it kept the flies away – and therefore prevented food from being contaminated in the midday heat!

Tiffin-carriers came in various sizes and styles. From single, lidded pots, to double-stackers, triple-stackers, and even four-stackers. Sizes of the bowls range from tiny units, with each bowl only capable of holding a couple of mouthfuls , to large units capable of feeding as many people as there are bowls in the stack. How the carrier-bowls are clamped together in their familiar stacked-up formation varies from design to design. Older tiffin-carriers use friction-clamps built into the steel frame, under the carrying-handle, to produce tight seals, but most modern tiffin-carriers have pull-down clamps built into the frames, similar to those seen on glass kitchen-jars:

The History of the Tiffin-Carrier

Uuuh…hmm.

Good question.

A very good question.

And possibly, one without an answer…

Exactly where and when they were invented is not precisely known. Most people would probably say India, since that is where they are used the most, even in the 21st century, however, others contend that they were actually designed in China.

An older-style tiffin-carrier, with a swing-down friction-clamp attached to the carrying-handle that presses against the lid to seal the contents and prevent leaking

No-matter where they were invented, tiffin-carriers have been part of Southeast Asian culture for over a hundred years. Since at least 1890, they were being used by the colonising British in major cities around India, in particular, Bombay, to store and transport their lunches. In Bombay, where they are called “Dabbas”, they were, and still are, carted around town by dedicated “Dabbawallahs”, or tiffin-couriers, who shift thousands of these metal lunch-pails around town every single day, delivering hot, home-cooked meals
to thousands of office-workers for just a few dollars a month.

These unique lunch-pails followed Indian and British migrants during their travels around Southeast Asia. Use of tiffin-carriers therefore spread to Malaya, Singapore, China, Hong Kong and Indonesia (back then known as the Dutch East Indies). In these countries, just as in India, they were (and still are) used to store and transport hot food for short periods of time.

Tiffin-carrier use peaked during the mid-20th century, in the decades immediately before and after the Second World War. Changing tastes caused its decline in certain countries, but the food of southeast Asia is ideally suited for the tiffin-carrier, for which it was primarily designed to contain!

These days, brand-new tiffin-carriers are still manufactured, and you can buy them cheaply online or from kitchenware dealers who sell Asian products. They’re still widely-used in India, particularly the city of Bombay, but remain popular around Asia as general-purpose food-storage units.

What is ‘Tiffin’?

‘Tiffin’ is an Anglo-Indian word. It’s derived from the old English slang terms of ‘tiffing’, or to ‘tiff’, meaning to have a light drink – a comparable term still in use might be ‘tipple’. From ‘tiffing’ was derived ‘tiffin’, which eventually came to mean any light drink, snack, late-morning meal, morning tea or light luncheon, and even later, just lunch itself. The metal canisters used to store and transport the food which made up these meals were called ‘tiffin boxes’, ‘tiffin carriers’, or just ‘tiffins’.

‘Tiffin’ isn’t a word you hear much anymore, but from the mid-1800s until the end of British-colonisation of Asia, it was everywhere. It virtually replaced the word ‘lunch’ for the midday-meal for anyone who spoke English in the region! You didn’t go for lunch, you went for tiffin. And tiffin could be anything from soup, curry, rice, noodles, or light snacks and cakes. Something to tide you over in the moist heat of the Far-Eastern reaches of the British Empire. These days, the word ‘Tiffin’ is only ever heard in relation to India, or to tiffin-carriers. One rare exception is Raffles Hotel in Singapore, with its famous…Tiffin Room!

The famous ‘Tiffin Room’, at Raffles Hotel, Singapore. The antique tiffin-cans stored in the display-case in the background harken back to the meal which gave this restaurant its name

Using a Tiffin-Carrier

The stacked, segmented-storage bowl system of the tiffin-carrier is ideal for storing and transporting most Asian foods for on-the-go sutations. Noodles, rice, dumplings, curry, soup, and even sushi are easily stored in these handy, cylindrical bowls.

However, what kind of foods you store inside a Tiffin-Carrier is limited only by the size of the carrier, and your imagination. One compartment might hold salad, another compartment might hold rice, and another compartment might hold curry and sauce. Or noodles, or fried-rice, or sushi-rolls, soy-sauce and wasabi, or miso soup with soba noodles.

Perhaps you don’t like Asian food? Fine. Put your sandwich inside. And some cookies. Or a small packet of chips. Or some of that leftover spaghetti from last night’s dinner. Or Caesar Salad…what you put into it is limited only by its size, and your imagination!

Filling up a Tiffin-Carrier

When filling a tiffin-carrier, there are certain rules or guidelines that should be followed for successful packing, to prevent spills or leaks. Dry food at the bottom, wet food at the top. Stuff like rice and noodles can be stored in the bottommost chamber. Curry, meat and vegetables in the middle chamber/s, and soup or sauce in the topmost bowl. With its own lid, and it being the most tightly-sealed of all the bowls, this is the most leakproof of all the compartments, and thus best reserved for fluids.

And at any rate, being the compartment closest to your hand when the carrier is being…carried…soup or sauce will not slosh around so much inside the topmost compartment, as it might in the bottommost, where jolting, shaking or swaying would affect the liquid much more.

Advantages of a Tiffin-Carrier

Tiffin-carriers have certain advantages over other forms of food-storage and transport containers which have aided in their longevity as practical and useful food-containers.

– Plastic lunchboxes are prone to warping, cracking, and leeching or outgassing, where components of the plastic can contaminate the food.

– Thermos-flasks, usually lined with a sleeve of glass, are prone to breakage if accidentally dropped. The narrow openings cane make it difficult to access food easily and cleanly.

– The ability to store food components separately, unlike with a thermos, allows a greater variety of foodstuffs to be transported in a tiffin-carrier, and generally in greater quantities.

– Being made of metal, tiffin-carriers retain heat well, and last for ages. They’ll never warp, melt, crack or fade like plastic lunchboxes will. And with proper care, one good-sized, well-designed, quality-made tiffin-carrier could last in a single family for generations.

– Being able to break a tiffin-carrier down to its component parts makes it easier to eat out of. Much easier than trying to dig into a steel tube like a thermos, with a fork, or spoon, or pair of chopsticks…I’m suddenly reminded of Aesop’s Fable of the Stork and the Fox.

What are Tiffin-Carriers Made Of?

Modern tiffin-carriers, which you can buy online, in Asian countries like India, Malaysia, Singapore or Indonesia, or at Asian kitchen and homewares shops, are typically made of plastic, or more commonly, high-quality stainless steel. Older tiffin-carriers were made of brass, aluminium, or carbon-steel, with an enamelling of paint over the top, to prevent rusting.

A collection of antique, brass tiffin-carriers. Note the specially-made spoons which slot into the handles, to make eating out of them even easier

Tiffin-carriers made of brass were prized because brass conducts heat very well, meaning that the food would stay hot. At the same time, brass does not rust, so tiffin-carriers lasted a long time, especially in the humid climates of India and Southeast Asia, where tiffin-carriers were used the most.

The Tiffin-Vendors of Bombay

The city of Bombay has a longstanding tradition of using tiffin-carriers. Long? Over 120 years! From at least 1890, specialist couriers or ‘wallahs’ transported prepacked tiffin-cans, filled with home-cooked lunches, to office-workers all around Bombay in India. Originally established by the British, the ‘Dabbawallahs’ or ‘Tiffin-Wallahs’ have continued their work well into the 21st century. Tiffin-cans are collected every morning before lunch, organised, and then packed onto trains, bicycles and carts and shunted all over town, to arrive, piping-hot, in the tiffin-carrier’s office-building on-time for lunch. Once the food is consumed, the tiffin-wallahs do another round, to pick up the tiffin-carriers, and send them BACK to their homes, where grateful housewives, daughters, sisters or mothers will clean them, in preparation for the next day’s meal.

The price for this amazing service? $6.00 a month.

The accuracy of this service? 99.99% Only ONE, in every 15-20 MILLION deliveries is ever misplaced.

Buying a Tiffin-Carrier

If you’re looking for a new or different type of lunch-storage and transporting means, and you’re sick of plastic lunchboxes, recycling takeout-boxes, ‘doggy-bags’, or having to fiddle with thermos-flasks with dinky little screw-on ‘cups’, maybe a tiffin-carrier can help you out? Strong, with large storage-capacity, they come in a wide variety of sizes, and are easily washed, used, stored, and most importantly – transported!

Tiffin-carriers are easily purchased brand-new, from online dealers, or from Asian countries, like Singapore, India, Malaysia, etc., where they’re normally found in homewares, or kitchenwares shops. If you’re looking for an older one, you might try eBay, or specialist antiques shops. If you’re intending to use an older tiffin-carrier, make sure you buy one which is clean and in usable, non-leaking condition. You don’t want to get lockjaw or food-poisoning from a rusty old tiffin-box!

I hope you enjoyed reading this little posting about tiffin-carriers, as much as I’ve had, writing it. Feel free to leave comments and ratings.

Anyway…

…its tiffin time…

25/09/2013 by Scheong

Tinkering with a Typewriter – The Underwood No. 5 Standard – POST NO. 3.

The Underwood undertakings continue…

The next step in this saga is to resurface the platen. The platen is the fat, round cylinder which the paper wraps around when you feed it into the typewriter. It’s also the impact-point of all those hammer-blows when you type. So its restoration is essential to the smooth running of the machine.

The exterior diameter of the platen and rubber is 45mm.

The interior diameter of the platen, sans rubber, is 42mm.

Therefore, the thickness of rubber required on the platen is 3mm.

This is harder to achieve than you might imagine.

The first step is to remove the platen from the typewriter, explained in my previous posting on this topic.

Having removed the platen, it was then necessary to break off the old rubber. I did this quite effectively using a flathead screwdriver. I broke off the old glue which had crusted up around the edges of the platen, forced in the screwdriver-blade, and started jemmying away, levering the dried rubber up, and breaking it off as it came away from the cylinder underneath.

If you should intend to do this to your own machine, BE WARNED:

Early typewriters have platen cylinders cored with WOOD, not steel. Do NOT use anything overly sharp, that will gouge out or dig into the wood and cause it to crack or splinter. Otherwise you’re stuck doing even MORE work. That’s why I picked a blunt-point instrument like the screwdriver.

Resurfacing the Platen

To resurface the platen, you need fresh rubber tubing. If you’re lucky, you can find this at a hardware shop, a rubber-supply shop or other similar establishment.

However, specialty rubber like this is not as common in some places as once it was. Here, you must be creative.

There are two options available to most people:

1. Heat-Shrink Tubing. Easily purchased at electronic-supply shops and hardware stores, this stuff comes in a variety of widths, from a few milimeters, to several inches wide. If you have wide-diameter heat-shrink tubing on hand, buy some of that, along with the smaller sizes, to do both the platen, and the feed-rollers.

2. Bicycle Inner-Tubes. I wasn’t lucky enough to find extra-large heat-shrink tubing locally, and ordering it online was prohibitively expensive. However, there is another alternative. Not many people use and restore typewriters anymore, but fortunately for us, lots of people still go…cycling!

Every bicycle must have inner tubes which expand and hold air inside the tires. Nip down to your local bicycle-shop and ask about the largest-diameter tubing that they have available. This is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair, and it’s not nearly as neat and easy as using heat-shrink tubing, but it does work, and other restorers have gone down this path with success.

The tubes that you get need not be brand-new. If the shop is the kind that does in-house repairs for customers, chances are, they’ll have a whole bin or crate of used, punctured tubes lying around. Fish around in there until you find what you’re after.

Having found the right size/s (you may need more than one) of tubes, new or used, take them home and cut them open at the nozzle so that you have the longest length of tube available. Measure and cut the tube to the length of the platen. Also: Curl the tube inside-out. This will expose the SMOOTH inner-inner tube to the surface, which is better for the typewriter. Bicycle inner-tubes are filled with TALCUM POWDER to stop them sticking. You may have to dust or wash this off once the tube has been pulled over the platen.

Next comes the process of resurfacing the platen.

Having removed all the old rubber with care, ensure that the platen CORE or CYLINDER is free of imperfections and damage. Now, start layering heat-shrink or rubber tubing onto the platen.

If you have heat-shrink tubing, this should be much easier. If you have to do it with rubber tubing, it may be more fiddly and time-consuming, but it is possible. You may want to heat the rubber to expand it and make it more flexible while stretching it over the platen-core.

TIP: When removing the old rubber from your platen, keep the ends of the old rubber sheathing intact. This will serve as a guide about how thick to make the new platen-covering.

An Interesting Observation

During my resheathing adventures involving the feed-rollers and the platen, I noticed that the shift and shift-lock mechanisms on the typewriter seemed to be malfunctioning.

I almost had a panic-attack! I didn’t come THIS far to screw up now! What happened!? What’d I do!?

The carriage kept jumping up and sticking in shift-lock mode, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I decided to sleep on it and mull it over in the morning.

Taking a Holmesian approach, I examined all the evidence and analysed my movements, thinking about what I had done, changed or removed on the typewriter. I also examined the shift-mechanism itself to see how it operated.

As Holmes said: “Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth“.

The only truth I could think of was that I had removed the platen, and that, judging from the construction and operation of the shift-mechanism, the entire thing was weight-tensioned.

On a hunch, I dropped the platen-core back into the typewriter. Bingo!

As I suspected, the shift-mechanism works ONLY when the platen is in position. The added weight of the platen is what keeps the springs that operate the shift-mechanism in correct tension. Boy was that a relief!

Once the platen is fully resurfaced (it’s taking a while), another post will follow.

Throughout History

A blog about antiques and history!

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The Silk Road – The Information Super-Highway

China – A Century of Revolutions

A Singer Model 27/28 Puzzle-Box!

Buying a Vintage Sewing Machine – What You Need To Know

The Night the World Exploded – The Eruption of Krakatoa

Tinkering with a Typewriter – The Underwood No. 5 Standard – POST NO. 3.

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