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The Four Great Chinese Inventions

The Chinese are famous for all kinds of things. Kicking butt, cooking weird and wonderful food (fried grasshopper, sir?) and the One Child Policy. But for centuries, the Chinese have also been famous as a country of inventors, bringing us such wonderful things as pasta, fortune-cookies and mahjong.

Okay I lied. Only one of those inventions are actually Chinese. Pasta was invented in Italy and fortune-cookies were invented in California, USA. Neither of them is actually Chinese. Mahjong, the famous Chinese tabletop game with a reputation for gambling, was invented by a Chinese empress to play with her servants when they were bored, with the distinctive rectangular blocks first being made out of ivory.

But of all the things that the Chinese gave the world, the four most famous and probably, most important ones, are paper, gunpowder, the compass and woodblock printing. These four things are traditionally called the “Four Great Inventions of Ancient China”. In Chinese, they’re called the ‘Si Da Ming‘ (literally “four big inventions”). Without them, the modern world as we know it today, probably wouldn’t exist. How could we have our printers and scanners without paper? Or how would a German guy named Gutenberg have gotten the idea for the moveable-type printing-press if he hadn’t known that the Chinese could print first? How would all our ships and planes and boy-scouts have found their way around without compasses and most importantly, how could we have produced better weapons without the invention of gunpowder?

China’s a massive country. It really is. See if you can find it on a map, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It seemed fairly obvious that with so many people crammed into one tiny place, the Chinese were bound to invent something sooner or later, to improve their hectic lives. Which of the four inventions came first?

Papermaking

Paper. So simple. So wonderful. So versatile. Used to wrap parcels, cover walls, write on, fold intricate cutesy shapes out of and the answer to the prayers of millions of people on the millions of toilets all over the world. What is paper and how did the Chinese invent it?

As any tree-hugger will tell you, paper is made from wood. The first kind of ‘paper’ was called ‘papyrus’ and it was invented in Ancient Egypt. It was made from the reeds of the papyrus tree, which grew near the River Nile. Of course…papyrus trees don’t just grow anywhere, so people needed a better material than papyrus. Vellum (calfskin leather) was excellent quality for writing, but it would be like writing on silk. Very pretty, but damned expensive. The world needed something better. Something easier to make. Something cheaper. Something like…paper.

Enter a guy named Cai Lun (pronounced ‘Chai Lunn’). Cai Lun was a smart guy. He lived from 50-121AD, allowing the Mortal Coil to springboard him up to the Cloudy Place at the ripe old age of 71. He had to be smart to live that long! And he had to be smart to get his job, too! What was his job? Cai Lun was doing very nicely for himself as a courtier to Emperor He, fourth emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty. Of course, being a courtier to the Chinese emperor meant that Cai Lun wasn’t a complete man…ahem. Chinese law dictated that the only men living in the Imperial Household were the Emperor and his male family members. Cai Lun was a eunuch.

Although he had no physical ones to speak of, Cai Lun had a lot of stones. This guy invented paper! Prior to Cai Lun’s existence, most documents were written on bamboo. A bamboo shaft was chopped up and the characters of the text were written on it in vertical shafts and these shafts were then sewn together. Completed, a bamboo-text looked like this:

Although it looks pretty darn cool, can you imagine having an entire bookcase of this stuff? The damn thing would collapse! The Chinese wanted something that was easier to make, faster to make and of course…lighter! Lighter than the huge fagots of text that they were carrying around!…And a fagot is a bundle of sticks, if you’re wondering…go ahead, look it up in the dictionary.

Traditional Chinese paper, as invented by Cai Lun in the year AD105, was made up of…junk. Basically. He used plant-fibres, particularly, the fibres of the mullberry tree (favourite diet of the silkworm) and the fibres that come from hemp, along with other junk, like old rags and fishnets. Ground up, mixed up, pounded out and left to dry on a flat surface, Cai Lun was able to make paper out of all this trash. Of course…these days paper isn’t quite made the same way, but Cai Lun showed us all that it was possible. Over the years, he and others like him, refined the papermaking process until we have what we have today.

Note that I type ‘years’. Not months. Not weeks. Years. Chinese paper, though easy in theory, was notoriously difficult to make. Although the Chinese had mastered the art of papermaking, they were exceedingly adverse to anyone trying to pinch their ideas. Other countries such as Korea, Siam and Japan all tried to copy the Chinese, but without the proper instructions, they failed. One possible reason for this was because Chinese paper was incredibly thin. So thin that it was only possible to write on one side of it. This delicacy added to the difficulty experienced in making it.

It took centuries, but eventually, paper spread around the world, appearing in Europe at the close of the 1300s, where it was being produced in places such as Germany, Spain and Italy.

And so Cai Lun had changed the world. Emperor He was suitably impressed by this…paper…stuff, that he rewarded Cai Lun handsomely, with the usual corporate bonuses of the day – Lots of money, a chunk of land…and an aristocratic title! Fancy, huh? Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Emperor An, the sixth emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty was not happy with all the riches that his uncle, Emperor He, had given Cai Lun, and attempted to arrest him. Cai Lun wasn’t about to be sent to jail, so he had a bath, put on his very best clothes and committed suicide by poison in AD121. Although Cai Lun wasn’t able to live out his natural life, his invention, paper, continues to live on to this day.

Woodblock Printing

Woodblock printing comes along next during the 9th Century (the 800s). It is unclear who invented woodblock printing and likely, no one person was responsible. It was, however, the next logical step. You had paper. Now you needed a printer. And sooner or later…a computer with Windows Vista on it, as well. But for now, mankind needed a printer. Woodblock printing originated in Asia around the mid 800s. It was a tricky and delicate way to print stuff, but it did work. First, you needed a flat slab or board of wood. Then, it was necessary to carve a relief-matrix in the piece of wood. This meant carving out every single little stroke of each Chinese character so that when the block was inked and the paper was pressed, the characters would show up nice and dark and black, and everything else was white. Hard enough to do in English, almost impossible in Chinese! And then don’t forget…you had to do it in reverse, or else the text would come out in mirror-fashion! Unless you were Leonardo from Vinci, they would be completely useless!

Woodblock printing took a lot of skill and time and patience, so whatever it was you wanted to print, you had to be damn sure of, first! Once the matrix had been carved and inked, it was necessary to lay down some of Cai Lun’s beautiful paper, and then press or roll it firmly over the inked matrix. The result looked something like this:

It wouldn’t be another five or six centuries until Gutenberg invented his moveable-type printing-press, but the Chinese had shown us that printing was possible. It was very difficult and expensive, but yes, it could be done.

Gunpowder

Probably everybody’s favourite classical Chinese invention is the stuff that goes ‘Boom!’. Also known as ‘gunpowder’.

Like woodblock printing, Chinese gunpowder (known today as ‘blackpowder’) was invented sometime in the 800s. It is generally believed that Chinese alchemists (an old-fashioned term for a scientist or a chemist) accidently created gunpowder while mucking around in their labs one day. It’s unclear exactly how this happened, but what is known is that the alchemists were trying to make the Elixer of Immortality. Without any philosophers stones, magical mirrors or wise, homosexual wizards around to help them, they were doing it largely by trial and error. And then, they discovered it. The Elixer of Immortality. Or at least, it did grant immortality in the sense that when you detonated enough of this stuff, it released your immortal soul to the heavens. So they did get there in the end.

The ingredients to classical Chinese gunpowder were startlingly simple. Hell, you could probably make it in your kitchen right now. Sooner or later it might show up on MasterChef (“And here’s one we prepared earlier!…”). How simple was Chinese gunpowder? It had only four ingredients! Charcoal (which you can get from your fireplace) potassium-nitrate (‘saltpetre’, which can be extracted from human urine), realgar (a form of sulphur) and…honey.

Mixed in the correct ratios and baked at 200 degrees for two hours…okay I kid…you could make gunpowder. Gunpowder was predictably, very unstable and it didn’t take much to set it off. As one text states, after mixing up those ingredients, the unfortunate alchemists could have burnt…

    “…their hands and faces…and even the whole house where they were working…”

So as you can see, pretty powerful stuff. That excerpt was taken from a 9th century Chinese religious text.

Gunpowder changed the world. With it, mankind could produce all kinds of scary weapons. Pistols, muskets, musketoons, blunderbusses, cannons, artillery-pieces, grenades and fireworks (another awesome Chinese invention). Before the invention of dynamite, gunpowder was also used in construction to blast holes in rocks!

The Compass

The compass is a tricky thing to date. Like the needle that we know it for today, its date of invention swivels and wobbles and spins around like a toddler who just discovered a revolving computer-chair. The first mentions of magnetism in Chinese texts date back to before Christ. The first practical compasses which were used for navigation, however, date from the 11th and 12th centuries, between about 1040-1120.

The traditional Chinese compass was the “ladle and bowl” or “spoon and bowl” style of compass. They looked like this:

Like all great inventors, the Chinese made things to be multifunctional. You could use the compass to find your way to the restaurant and then eat dinner with it at the same time.

Chinese studies with magnetism and its affect on metals (well, iron, really) date back to the 4th century BCE, but the compasses that we know today were born in the 1100s. The Chinese were quick to see the benefits of the compass. With a constant North-Bearing, navigation was now possible. Chinese navigational compasses had the ‘bowl’ part of the compass filled with water, with the lodestone, compass-needle or ‘spoon’ floating on top. With the lubrication of the water, the lodestone could move around freely, giving navigators a clear sense of their direction. It’s partially thanks to the compass that in ancient times, the Chinese had one of the biggest navys in the world! With such a big navy, it was necessary for the Chinese to know where they were going. So a form of the now-famous compass-rose was created. Unlike the modern one (which has 32 points), the Chinese rose had 48 different reference-points! Imperial eunuch and famous Chinese sailor, Zheng He, made frequent mention of compass-bearings during his oceanic travels.

And so there you have it. The four great inventions of Ancient China. And probably the biggest irony is…the title of the Four Great Inventions was a term coined by the ENGLISH…not the Chinese…who found out about it, and decided to pinch it for their own publicity purposes.

 
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‘The Underland Route’ or the History of the Subway

In the 1860s in the years during and after the American Civil War, two railroad companies completed America’s first transcontinental railroad, colloquially called the “Overland Route”. This cut down the travel-time from cities such as Chicago in the East, to Los Angeles and San Francisco in the West, from several weeks or even months by wagon-train…to a few days by steam-powered locomotive. Instead of stocking up on rifles and muskets, provisions and supplies…a person could pack his steamer-trunk or suitcase, buy a ticket and ride the rails in what was then a fast, comfortable and convenient way to travel.

Around the same time that the Americans completed their “overland route”, a hop across the pond called the Atlantic Ocean to England would see the British people’s first…”underland route”…and the birth of the modern subway system.

The London Underground: The World’s First Subway

The London Underground (more commonly called ‘The Underground’ or ‘The Tube’ today), is the world’s oldest and is one of the world’s largest subway systems. It’s famous all over the world for its stations, its red, white and blue logo or ’roundel’ and the similiarly-coloured, tubular railway carriages. It’s famous for being used as air-raid shelters during the Second World War and for appearing in a James Bond movie where an invisible Aston Martin is delivered to Bond on a flatbed railway carriage.

Beneath all this fame and glory and fortune, people tend to forget that the London Underground is the world’s first and oldest underground railroad and is now nearly a hundred and fifty years old and still running. The story of the London Underground is the story of the development of the modern subway system and the story of one is generally entwined with the other.

The Need to go Under

Subway systems are not built for their novelty aspect or because “they can”. In each particular city where a subway exists, there are reasons for their construction. But what was it that led to the whole idea of the “under ground” railroad to begin with?

To understand this, we must flashback to London in the 1850s and 60s. Here, we meet a city which is the center of an empire, which is increasing in population every day due to the vast changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution and which is suffering the consequences of such rapid population-growth…traffic congestion.

By the 1850s, railroads were fast becoming the most popular way to move around. It was quick, comfortable and convenient. While cities had several large railroad stations for big, main train-lines, the problem was that once passengers arrived in town, they clogged up the roads with horse-drawn carriages and taxi-cabs. It was reasoned that if there were trains right in the heart of town, they would be able to move people around more effectively and cut down on congestion. This wasn’t easy in a city as old as London, though. Railroad lines took up a lot of space and with congestion as bad as it was, threading railroad lines all over the road was hardly the best solution. Instead, it was decided that the best method of getting trains into the city was to go underground. It would be relatively easy to follow the roads, stops and stations could be easily planned and it would provide valuable employment to the thousands of unemployed people living in London in the second half of the 19th Century.

The First Subway

The first part of the first subway, the London Underground, was born in 1863 as the Metropolitan Railway and stretched from Paddington Station north to Farringdon Station, via King’s Cross. The man responsible for this new, quite literally groundbreaking task of an ‘under ground’ railroad was Charles Pearson, a London lawyer and Member of Parliament. Throughout the 1830s, 40s and 50s, Pearson had campaigned for an ‘underground railroad’ to help ease the increasing traffic congestion in central London during the mid-19th century. After numerous government meetings, debates and discussions, an act of Parliament was passed for the construction of the first stage of what would become the world’s first subway system.


The Metropolitan Railway under construction near King’s Cross Station; February, 1861

To make things easy, the Metropolitan Railway was constructed using the ‘cut-and-cover’ method of tunnel-construction. This involves digging a huge trench in the middle of the street, right down to the level where the railroad lines would go. The rail-lines would be laid and the tunnel walls and roof would be built above it. Once the roof was completed, the excavated rubble and soil was dumped back over the top to reform the original roadway, giving the process its name of ‘cut and cover’. While relatively easy, safe and quick to carry out, Pearson probably won himself a great deal of enemies by building his railroad this way – the Cut and Cover method meant that entire roads and city blocks had to be shut down for construction-purposes. Building the railroad took nearly three years, from February, 1860 – January, 1863. Unfortunately, Pearson wouldn’t live to see his masterpiece open for operation; he would die on the 14th of September, 1862, of dropsy. He was 68 years old.

Underground Trains

Having built the subway, it was now necessary to get trains into it. Obviously, conventional steam-trains were out of the question. They were huge, bulky, noisy digusting things, far too unsuitable for subway tunnels. Instead, an entirely new form of railroad locomotive had to be invented. While still coal-fired, steam-powered engines, these new machines were significantly smaller than their above-ground counterparts.


Metropolitan Railway A-Class subway locomotive. Engine #23 was made in 1864

The steam-engines developed for the London Underground were compact, fat, low-profiled tank-engines. Despite the obvious problems of smoke and steam from these newly designed machines, the London Underground proved popular with Victorians. Nearly 27,000 passengers were using the Metropolitan Railway within the first few months of its opening in January of 1863.

Electrification of Subways

It’s hard to imagine that from the 1860s until the early 1900s, the world’s first, oldest and at the time, biggest subway system, was pulled along using nothing but steam-power. In the crowded, cramped and claustrophobic environment of the London Underground, steam-power was hardly ideal. In fact, it was very uncomfortable riding in the Underground during this period and adequate ventilation had to be installed if the Underground was to maintain a practical, working public service for the people of London. Electrification of the Underground was proposed as early as 1880, but it wasn’t until about 1905 that electrical technology and understanding had progressed far enough to make this a practicality. Starting in the early 20th century, many of the original steam-trains that pulled carriages through the Undergorund were scrapped and replaced by modern, electrically-powered locomotives. Very few of the original Underground steam-locomotives from the 1860s and 70s survive today.

Under and Outwards

With the initial success of the original Metropolitan Railway, other underground railroad companies sprang up, almost overnight. Throughout the second half of the 1800s and the early 1900s, private companies dug and developed their own subway lines throughout London. As the 20th century progressed, the subway became more and more familiar and important to London. By the end of WWI, England had over a hundred big and small railroad companies. In the end, many of these were merged together with the Railways Act of 1921. Nationalisation of the railway system was completed in 1947 with the Transport Act. By the Second World War, the London Underground had grown immensely. By the early 1940s, there were many abandoned stations and stretches of the Underground which were never completed, due to a lack of money or a lack of necessity. Stations that were too close together were considered unnecessary and were closed down. Many of these were converted to air-raid shelters during The Blitz. Many of these stations still exist today and some are set aside specifically for filming-purposes by film-production companies, so that the actual London Underground won’t be disrupted by camera-crews and actors.

The Subway Goes Global

After the success of the London Underground, the subway began to spread around the world. The next subway opened in Glasgow, Scotland in 1891. The first American subway was opened in Boston, Massachusetts in 1897! The New York City Subway system was started in 1904. Previous to this, New York City had been serviced by its famous elevated railroad (commonly called the ‘El’). A horrific blizzard in 1888 dumped several feet of snow all over New York, which brought its above-ground train-service to a screeching halt.


Manhattan’s famous elevated railroad. Started in the 1860s, it lasted until the 1960s when it was gradually destructed. This photo was taken in 1944. The affect of heavy winter snowfalls on the New York elevated railroad was what prompted the construction of the now, world-famous New York City Subway in 1904

To prevent a repeat of this, the New York City Subway was constructed. Subways continue to be popular in countries where snow can affect above-ground railroad traffic, such as in Russia, Germany and Canada. While today subways are seen as modern, bright, fast and wonderful, or at times, a pain in the ass when your train comes late or it’s cramped or overcrowded, remember that they were born in an age of steam and steel, bricks, mortar and feverish industrial revolution.

 
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Top Floor: The History of the Modern Skyscraper

These days, the challenge to build the biggest, highest, tallest, strongest buildings is everywhere. Everyone wants to build the tallest building in the city, county, state, province, country…and of course…the tallest building in the world! In our modern megacities, where we’re surrounded by towering masses of glass, steel, concrete and wood, it’s very easy to forget that the building which makes our modern lives possible…the skyscraper…is only just over a hundred years old! In the scope of construction-technology, the skyscraper is but a child, something that we probably don’t think about very much, but it’s true.

Before the Skyscraper

It’s hard to imagine our cities without skyscrapers, isn’t it? The tallest fully-inhabitable structures were usually no more than five or six storeys tall. There was no elevator, there were no big, glossy windows and there were no handsome, artistically-carved facades of stonework to drool over. Without the invention of the elevator, the only way to move between floors was through dozens of staircases. People were unwilling to go up more than a few flights of stairs and so stairs normally stopped after only a few floors. Water-pumps were unable to build up enough water-pressure to force running water up pipes and into bathrooms and other rooms where water was necessary, beyond a certain height, and this too limited how high a practical building could be.

But the biggest thing restricting the construction of tall buildings was the lack of steel.

Although steel had existed for centuries, at the time it was difficult to mass produce. The shortage of this strong wonder-metal meant that it was too expensive to use steel to build frameworks and scaffolding for buildings. Without a strong frame to hold the building up and take the strain, the weight of the buildings was transferred to the walls. To combat the crushing weight of tons of masonary, glass and metal, early buildings which were to be built to what were then considered significant heights, had to have walls that were incredibly thick. In some extreme cases, as much as six feet of solid stone and brick!

The Development of the Modern Skyscraper

Cheap Steel

The skyscraper as we know it today was the result of several inventions and developments. Probably the first of these was the creation of a method for the mass-production of steel, which, prior to the mid 19th century, was an expensive metal and difficult and expensive to manufacture in large quantities.

Using a large, barrel-shaped device called a Bessemer Converter, English inventor Henry Bessemer was able to create a process for manufacturing steel cheaply and quickly. Molten pig-iron was poured into the open top of the Bessemer Converter and a fire which was made to burn hotter thanks to air injected into it by pipes at the bottom of the converter, allowed the pig iron to be superheated, burning or vapourising any impurities in the metal. Once the impurities had been burnt off, the huge Bessemer Converter (which, when full, could take thirty tons of pig iron!) was tipped over on the axle which attached it to a massive, secure frame built around it. When the converter was tipped over, pure steel poured out and ran into any moulds that were waiting for it. Once the metal had cooled, strong, preformed and perfect steel beams were ready for use!


A Bessemer Converter. Converters such as these lasted from the 1870s until the process was finally declared obsolete in the 1960s

The Bessemer Process was crucial for the development of the skyscraper. Without a way to quickly and cheaply manufacture steel, the skyscraper would never have existed. The thick, heavy, load-bearing walls of conventional buildings of the day would have to have been yards thick to be able to build buildings of the heights we know today. This all changed with steel.

With steel, buildings could now be built with frames first, each I-beam or girder held together by several red-hot rivets. These steel frames could be built quickly and they could be built high and they could be built strong! With the floors and the framework taking the weight of the building, the walls no longer had to be so thick. Now, walls could have more windows in them, they could have more decorative brick-and-stonework and…in the modern world…they could be made entirely of glass!

The Elevator

The modern skyscraper could not have existed without Bessemer steel. But even with Bessemer steel, it still would not have existed. In the 19th century, buildings were restricted in height due to the inconvenience of stairs! People were unwilling to go up endless flights of stairs. It was tiring, it was slow and stairwells and staircases took up an annoyiingly large amount of space inside a building. This changed when the electric safety-elevator was invented.

Elevators have been around for centuries. The Colosseum in Rome had lots of them! But these elevators were simple wood-and-rope affairs, driven by manpower or counterweights. Effective for rising up a few feet, but useless for rising up the dozens of storeys of the modern skyscraper. The electrically-powered safety-elevator allowed buildings and people to climb higher more efficiently, but these didn’t show up until the late 19th century.

An American named Elisha Otis is credited with inventing an elevator which people would feel safe on. Otis’s ‘safety elevator’ was so-called because in the event of the elevator-cable snapping, a pair of jaws and rollers at the top of the elevator-car would spring outwards and catch on the sides of the elevator shaft, thus preventing an accident. Of course, if the elevator was descending, this migh cause the safety-mechanism to trip accidently, so the elevator-brakes were speed-operated – they would only spring into action if there was a sudden drop of the elevator-car, consistent with a broken cable.

The first modern electrically-powered elevator came in the 1880s and, combined with Otis’s 1850s safety-elevator technology, the modern “lift” as we know it today, was born.

Lack of Land

People only build big and tall for two reasons: One, they can. Two, they have to. These days, skyscrapers are built because they can be built, but back in the turn of the last century, skycrapers were built because they had to be built. Cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Melbourne, London and Paris were becoming increasingly crowded due to factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution to immigration to gold-rushes. Cities were swelling up and unable to look down, city planners and architects started looking for ways to build higher. With cheap steel, elevators and a massive immigrant workforce, cities which made the skyscraper famous, such as New York, were born.

Where do we get the term ‘Skyscraper’ from?

Why ‘skyscraper’? Why not cloud-climber or sunkisser or moonhugger or man-mountain? Where did we get the term ‘skyscraper’ from?

The term ‘Skyscraper’ as we know it today, meaning a tall, thin building which is continuously inhabitable from the ground up, comes from the very lips of the men who built these massive structures. Many of the men who built skyscrapers around the turn of the century were sailors, men who spent weeks at sea climbing up and down the rigging of sailing-ships and who were therefore immune to the stomach-churning heights of hundreds of feet up in the air that skyscraper-builders had to face every day.

The sailors who made up the backbone of the skyscraper workforce named these new and fantastic buildings which they were constructing ‘skyscrapers’, which was the nickname for the very highest sail on a conventional, three-masted sailing-ship (the actual term is ‘Topgallant’). The name was amazingly appropriate, and it has stuck for the last a hundred and twenty odd years.


The main topgallant (‘E’ in the picture above) was colloquially called the ‘skyscraper’ by sailors, who made up the main workforce which constructed many famous early skyscrapers, and the name just stuck

Building a Tower Up to the Sun

By the first quarter of the 20th century, the skyscraper had changed the global cityscape forever. Skyscrapers were big business and they were shooting up all over the world. How big a business? Fat cats were so into building these massive structures that they did almost anything to entice construction-workers to work on their latest projects. The average construction-worker could earn twice what he usually did by agreeing to help build a skyscraper!

Although the pay for construction workers and general unskilled labourers who wanted to work on skyscrapers was double the usual rate, the work was easily a hundred times more dangerous. Construction-workers – riveters, crane-operators and general labourers, risked death every single day working at heights of a hundred, five hundred, a thousand feet and even higher up in the air!

But people do that today all the time so it’s no problem. Right?

Wrong.

From the 1890s-1940s, construction-safety as we know it today did not exist at all. At 900ft up in the air, a riveter or a general construction-worker was entirely on his own. He had no ropes. No cables. No harnesses. No winches. And certainly no hard-hat. Safety-nets? Forget it! One wrong step or one gust of wind while walking on a steel girder less than half a foot wide…and it was a freefall drop to certain death nearly a mile below. Working on a skyscraper was called “treading the steel” or “walking the steel”…because you literally had to walk around on those skinny steel beams to move around the building with absolutely no safety-gear. Experienced workers were called ‘roughnecks’ while new and inexperienced workers were nicknamed ‘snakes’. ‘Snakes’ because working with them was extremely dangerous. One wrong step, one distraction or one miscalculation…and the snake (and possibly other workers) were dead.


A famous photograph by Lewis Hine. It shows construction-workers on their lunch-break in the early 1930s. Note the lack of any safety-equipment. This photo isn’t staged and it hasn’t been retouched. The building they’re constructing is the Crysler Building, the building of which, Hines was commissioned to document with his camera

Even in the days before welding, skyscrapers were built phenomenally fast. The Empire State Building, the tallest building in New York City could rise up two or three floors a day (with a total of 102 floors!), which was amazingly fast when you consider that all the positioning, bolting, screwing and riveting was done entirely by hand! Due to the restricted size of the Manhattan streetgrid, girders which arrived at the Empire State Building would leave their delivery trucks still hot from the forge and would be winched up right away. There was nowhere on the ground to let the hot steel cool off before it was used, so instead the construction workers just hauled it up the moment it arrived and let the wind blow on it to cool it down as it rose.

The Skyscraper Today

These days, the skyscraper is a symbol of the modern world, the modern city, it’s a staple of our lives. To have a 21st century without the skyscraper is to have one without telephones, automobiles, the computer or the iPhone. And yet, while we may sometimes think of the skyscraper as a modern invention, one should also remember that it both is, and isn’t. Is it modern? Certainly. A hundred years is an eye-blink in the pages of history, but is it also old? Yes. To think that this icon of the modern city had its roots in the crowded, noisy, congested and choked streets of the late 19th century and that it has survived for so long.

 
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“A Boy’s Best Friend is His Mother…” – Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield

Running water. Shadows. Screams. Dark, dark, red, red, rich, strong, running, dribbling, gushing blood. Screeching violin music. Clasping fingers. Shower-curtains. Broken rings. Curtains falling. Crumpled in a heap…

In 1960, famous British film-director Alfred Hitchcock created one of the most amazing horror films in history about a woman and a man and an isolated, family-run motel in the middle of nowhere. The ‘Shower Scene’ from the film ‘Psycho’ and its infamous high-pitched, screeching violin music is known the world over and has been parodied in countless TV shows, cartoons and movies. Norman Bates, a deluded, psychotic young man slashes a young woman in the bathroom of her motel cabin and leaves her to bleed to death.

While “Psycho” has gone down in history as one of the most famous horror films of all time, few people today would guess that the character of Norman Bates was actually based on a real person. Robert Bloch, the author who wrote the original novel “Psycho” which Hitchcock adapted to film, based the character of Norman Bates on a man which the press called the Butcher of Plainfield.

Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield

Plainfield, Wisconsin is a small, quiet little village. So small that in 2000, just under 900 people lived there. It was the Plainfield of the early 1950s that caught the world’s attention with a series of crimes that shocked the world and which made the murderer, a man named Edward Gein, a household name throughout America and the world, inspiring countless horror films, TV series and books to be written about him, based on him or which alluded to him over the next sixty years.

So who was Ed Gein and why was he called the Butcher of Plainfield? What was it that he’d done? Those with weak stomachs should not continue. Those with hardier constitutions…read on…

The Gein Family

Edward Theodore Gein was born on the 27th of August, 1906. His parents were George Gein and Augusta Gein. Ed had one older brother, Henry Gein. As is typical of stories of this kind, Mr. Gein was a violent father. He frequently abused his two sons Henry and Edward and was constantly drunk and often unemployed. George’s wife and Henry and Ed’s mother, Augusta, was a strong Christian. The only reason their marriage survived as long as it did was because they didn’t believe in divorce.

Augusta supported her family through the grocery store that she ran. Before long, the family decided to move from LaCrosse County to Waushara County in Wisconsin and a small village called…Plainfield.

In Plainfield, the Gein family lived in a primative farmhouse where Augusta sought to control her two sons’ every movement. Apart from school, the Gein brothers were not allowed to leave the farm. They spent their time doing chores and working the land. Augusta kept her boys in line by reading them passages from the Old Testament of the Bible, usually passages dealing with murder, immorality, forgiveness, retribution and the fact that all women (sweet, loving Mother Gein, of course, tactfully excluded from this mire of immorality and filth) were sluts, prostitutes and whores.


The Gein family farmhouse, on the outskirts of Plainfield, Wisconsin

Augusta’s domination over her sons had highly damaging affects. Constantly abused by their parents, the two Gein brothers became silent, introverted and mentally unbalanced. Edward was often picked on in school because of his strange behaviour which included bouts of random and totally unexplained laughter.

In 1940, George Gein died from a heart-attack. Because of the necessity for money, Augusta gave her sons a limited degree of extra freedom, which they used to become handymen, helping out around the village. Ed occasionally did some babysitting for the local villagers while Henry helped in various labourer-type jobs around Plainfield. Edward, probably due to the constant abuse he received at home, wasn’t able to relate to adults and appeared to bond better with children. It was at this time that Henry started getting detatched from his mother, wanting to leave the farm and make his own way in life. He feared the connection that Edward and mother had with each other and considered it unnatural. He began to speak out about this relationship to Edward, who refused to hear a single bad word against their mother, despite the fact that she once poured boiling water over Edward’s genitalia after she caught him masturbating…

In mid-1944, Henry and Edward were busy putting out a grass-fire near their farm. The story goes that Edward and Henry got separated as night fell. Apparently worried for his brother’s safety, Edward contacted the police who sent out a search-party. Edward led the police-officers through the shrubs and trees right to Henry’s body, despite claiming not knowing where he was. Although it was strongly suspected that Edward had murdered his brother, due to the head-injuries found on Henry’s skull, probably inflicted by Edward after another argument about their mother, the police wrote the death off as an accident. Cause of decease: Asphyxiation.

By now, alone and fully under the influence of his dominating mother, Ed’s mind began to become increasingly warped. As the months passed, he became more and more unstable until on the 29th of December, 1945, Ed’s mother Augusta finally died from a stroke.

Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield

The death of his beloved, abusive and highly-controlling mother was the last straw for Ed. Traumatised, brainwashed and abused since birth, isolated from people his own age and living on a mental diet of lies and deciet, Ed Gein’s mind finally snapped. Once Augusta had died, Gein lost the last tiny and weak grip that he had on any sense of the term ‘normality’ and he descended into a twisted and obsessive world of his own making and entrapment.

Such was Gein’s attachment to his mother, as well as the state of his incredibly warped, damaged and degenerated mind, that shortly after 1945, Gein, by now 39 years old began to unravel, taking on the persona which we would now readily identify with Norman Bates.

Augusta’s death shattered Gein in ways that many people can only imagine. The perverted relationship that they shared together meant that, despite everything she had done, Gein missed his mother. He started expressing a desire for a sex-change operation…which never happened…and he also tried to remember his mother in other, more macabre ways. Still living in the house which he had barely left since he was a boy, Gein closed off the upstairs living quarters as well as the downstairs parlour…rooms which his mother frequently used…and retreated into the kitchen and a small room adjacent to it. The Gein farmhouse was so primative that even by now in the late 1940s, it was probably one of the very few dwellings in or near Plainview that did not have electricity in it. The only lighting was provided by candles, oil lamps or sunlight in the daytime.

As the years progressed, Gein developed an interest in darker subjects such as taxidermy and death-cults. He shot and killed two Plainfield women, Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, because they resembled and reminded him of his mother, whom he missed so dearly, and whom he wanted back with him again. Wanting to make himself a “woman suit”, Gein went on nightly graverobbing excursions, exhuming the corpses of recently-dead women who resembled his mother’s physical appearance. These bodies were variously butchered, skinned and dismembered for various purposes over the next few years.

Arrest and Trial

In a small town like Plainfield Wisconsin, news spreads fast. The deaths of Mary Hogan, a local tavern-owner, and Bernice Worden, owner of the Plainfield hardware store prompted swift police-action. Investigators questioned, requestioned, examined and cross-examined every single person in town. They even questioned Gein himself, but they deemed Gein…who was seen by the villagers as being something of a weirdo and oddball…to be too mentally deranged and timid to actually do anything as horrible as kill two big, strapping women such as Hogan and Worden. If they’d known the kinds of things that a mentally dranged oddball like Gein could do, they probably would have arrested him on sight.

As it turned out, policemen raided the Gein farm in 1957, searching for clues. In a shed near the house, officers discovered the body of Mrs. Worden, tied by her ankles to the ceiling and gutted and dressed out like a butchered game-animal.

Forcing entry into the Gein house and using flashlights to light the way, police officers were in for the shock of their lives.


A photograph of the kitchen in the Gein house, showing the squalor and disarray in which Ed Gein lived his life

Apart from the upper floor and a couple of rooms downstairs which Ed had sealed off as a memorial to his mother, the rest of the house was filthy. Body-parts, bits of body-parts and bits of bits of body-parts lay all over the house. The fridge was full of human organs, skulls were cut open and used as bowls, Gein’s bed had a bedframe with skulls on it for decoration. Furniture was upholstered with human skin, face-masks were made from actual faces, the skins of which had been tanned to prevent rotting.

The police were appalled by what they saw, and arrested Gein soon after. Gein confessed that he had killed Worden and Hogan and that he regularly went to cemetaries nearby to exhume recently-deceased women so as to skin their bodies and live out his transvestite dreams.

Gein was tried and found guilty of First Degree Murder. He entered a plea of Insanity and was thereafter and for all the days of his life, until he died in 1984, confined to a series of mental hospitals. In 1958, the Gein farmhouse “mysteriously” burnt to the ground. Police were pretty sure it was arson and that furious Plainfield townsfolk had torched the Gein house out of disgust and anger at what Ed had done, not only to their residents, but also to their deceased…but they conveniently turned a blind eye and pretended that they didn’t know who had started the fire.

Edward Theodore Gein died on the 26th of July, 1984, from respiratory and heart-failure due to complications from cancer. He was 77 years old. He was buried in Plainfield Cemetary.

Impact on Popular Culture and Society

Gein’s impact on popular culture is undeniable. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the various ‘Pyscho’ books and films and movies of perverted killers who skin their victims and wear their flesh all have their roots in the demented mind of Ed Gein.

Unlike Albert Fish or Jack the Ripper, Ed Gein did not kill a vast number of people. He murdered a grand total of two women. What makes him so infamous is what he did with human bodies, how he butchered them, how he used their body-parts and skins to craft all kinds of gruesome objects and decorations and how he tried constantly to find things or do things or wear things or create things…that would remind him of his mother, the one woman he ever knew and ever loved and who had so traumatised his life ever since he was a boy.

After all, as Norman Bates famously says…

“A boy’s best friend is his mother”.

B

 
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An Impossible Dream: The History of Flight

For centuries, man has wanted to do lots of things. He has wanted to ride in a wheeled vehicle unpowered by a walking manure-factory. He has wanted to sail the open seas…without sails. He has wanted to communicate long distances without having to travel long distances, he has wanted to invent a form of illumination that won’t set the house on fire and he’s wanted to explore under water without ending up under ground. But of all the dreams that mankind has had, none has been stronger than man’s desire…to fly.


Mr. Wile E. Coyote provides a historically-accurate practical demonstration of mankind’s early experiments with flight

For centuries, flight was considered impossible – the dream and fancy of fools, a pipe-dream, a hallucination, an idiotic fantasy. And yet today, we can fly halfway around the world within twenty-four hours. How? And…Why? This article will explore the history of manmade aircraft – anything that didn’t come with a beak, claws and a feathery lining, from the first experimental aircraft to airliners as we know them today.

Flight of Fancy

Since time immemoriam, man has looked at the skies, and has seen birds. Or maybe bats. Probably even flies. On the off-chance, even a mosquito. He puzzled and fumed and fussed over the fact that all these things could do the one thing that he couldn’t – Fly.

Mankind has had dreams of flight for centuries. Even the famous inventor and painter, Leonardo from Vinci, invented a bloody helicopter before the word had even been thought up! But even with wonderful sketches, ideas, dreams and brainstorming, man couldn’t make a successful flying machine. To many, it was considered impossible. Man did not understand what made something fly and, once it was flying, how to keep it flying and, once it was kept flying, how to make it stop flying!


Leonardo’s fantasmagorical flying machine…would it ever have really worked?

The very first flying machines never left the pages that they were drawn on. Leonardo, who created the world’s first helicopter prototype as well as a primative parachute, never actually manufactured his inventions, although modern reconstructions and testing has shown that, with enough persistance, the right materials and a whole heap of chutzbah, it could be done! So…when did man first take to the air?

Full of Hot Air

The first real flying machines that mankind created out of his own hands which really worked were primative hot-air balloons. Hot air balloons had been known for centuries; they were toys and novelties. Cute little fun displays to be seen at garden parties, a toy for the children to marvel at and something for older people to ponder: “What if…?”

The first unmanned hot-air balloons were introduced into the world centuries ago. Early experimenters realised two things about the air which we breathe: Cold air descends. Hot air rises. By this logic, if you put hot air (produced by a continuous heat-source, say, a candle) inside a sealed compartment (like a paper bag), then the hot air would cause the bag to rise, once it had been filled up enough. This proved to be the case, and the hot air balloon was invented.

The idea of travelling by hot air balloon took a while to ehm…get off the ground, though. It wasn’t until the early 18th century that the first experiements by European scientists and inventors were begun. The big problem confronting these early experimenters was weight! For this fancy-schmancy ‘hot air balloon’ gizmo to actually lift anything of value off the ground, it would need a massive envelope (the big ‘balloon’ part) and it would need even more hot air! It was all these scary weight-concerns that kept mankind grounded for so long. For a balloon flight to be successful, weight had to be kept to an absolute minimum!

It wasn’t until November 21, 1783 that the world’s first manned balloon-flight happened. The two lucky fellows in the basket on this historic day were Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d’Arlandes, a physics teacher and a soldier, respectively. The balloon being flown was a creation of the famous Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne. One likely reason why it took so long for man to take to the skies in hot air balloons was because of how long these things took to make! Apart from the exhausting testing that the Montgolfier brothers carried out on their balloons, there is also the physical size of the balloons themselve to consider. The historic balloon which took de Rozier and d’Arlandes into the air on that day in November, 1783 was absolutely massive! Here are the technical specifications of that famous balloon, as translated from the original French document:

Height of Globe: 22.7m (75ft).
Weight of Globe: 780kg (1,700lbs).
Diameter: 14.9m (49ft).
Lifting capacity: Max approx 830kg (1,800lbs).
Volume of Globe: 2,000 cubic meters (73,000 cubic feet).
Gallery (a doughnut-shaped basket attached to the envelope): 1m wide (3ft).

Needless to say, getting such a massive balloon into the air was not easy, but when it happened, history was well and truly written and made. The Montgolfier brothers’ success was so amazing that King Louis XVI elevated the entire Montgolfier family to the French nobility as a reward! If the Montgolfiers had known that the French Revolution was just a few years away, they might have decided to take the second prize of a two-door, 4hp carriage with guilded windowframes instead…


The hot air balloon created by the Montgolfier brothers

The Hot Air Balloon was now here to stay, and from the late 18th century until the early 20th century, it dominated flight around the world. Hot air balloons were popular attractions at public events, they were used as observation-posts during warfare and for the first time in history, man could fly over the land he owned and see everything from a bird’s eye view.

Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines

Although the hot air balloon allowed mankind its first proper view down on the world, it did have one major drawback – Hot air balloons were slow, hard to navigate and dangerous to fly. They could only move where the wind blew and could only move as fast as the wind allowed. This was deemed unsatisfactory, by some, and it was decided that what mankind really needed was a flying machine that could be completely controlled by man – A machine that could take flight, stay in the air, go where the pilot wanted it to, and land when and where he wanted it to land.

Like the balloon before it, the aeroplane was slow to take off. As Betty Boop says in one of her cartoons, “It was called insane by ‘most every man!”…and it was! The idea of a heavier-than-air flying machine was proposterous! How could such a thing ever work?

At the turn of the last century, mankind was only just beginning to understand aerodynamics, or how airflow affects moving objects. Chief among this group of people who were studying aerodynamics was a pair of brothers named Wilbur and Orville.

Orville and Wilbur Wright, (born 1871 and 1867, respectively) are the two men credited with inventing the world’s first controllable airplane, and it took some doing, too. And it’s proof that you don’t have to have a college education to be a genius…neither of the Wright Brothers attended university!

The Wright Brothers initially led very different lives. In 1885, Wilbur was hit in the face by accident during a game of hockey. There was no significant damage done (although he did lose a few teeth), but the shock of the blow did make him more introverted than he used to be. He spent most of his time at home, reading and looking after Susan Wright, the Wright Brothers’ mother who was by this time, dying of tuberculosis (she did eventually pass away in 1889).

Orville Wright worked as a printer after dropping out of highschool. Wilbur, getting rather bored with sticking around at home all the time, joined his brother in business, and the two boys worked together as editor and publisher respectively, of various small-town newspapers.

In the 1880s, a new machine was invented. It was light, fast, easy to ride and safer to operate than its predecessors, allowing the rider to balance on its frame more easily and control its speed and movement more comfortably.

The bicycle had been introduced to the world.

Wanting to make as much money as they could, the Wrights packed up their printing press and jumped onto the cycling craze, opening a bicycle repair and manufacture-shop in the 1890s. Throughout the 1890s, flight pioneers were constantly making the headlines, with newer, ‘better’ flying machines. All this talk of flying got the brothers thinking. Wilbur was the one who really got interested in flying, and he set about trying to make a flying machine. Orville joined in later, once Wilbur’s work was showing a sufficient degree of promise.

The Wright brothers started out small, practicing their flying first with kites and then with gliders before attempting anything that we’d recognise today as a conventional airplane. Wilbur studied the movements of birds to try and discover the secret ingredient to Lift, the necessary component of flight to compensate for gravity. The Wrights theorised that it was the gliding motion of birds and the movement of air over their wings that allowed them to fly like they did, rather than the actual flapping motion which some inventors had tried for years to reproduce.

The brothers made a breakthrough when they discovered wing-warping, that is, bending or angling a pair of wings to create the correct kind of airflow to provide lift for the aircraft as well as giving it the ability to turn, rise and fall through the air. It was easy enough to bend a wing – just make it out of something light and flexible. The problem was how to control wing-warping. Left to their own devices, early wings would warp of their own accord, depending on wind-conditions. By attaching ropes and pulleys to the edges of their wings, the Wright brothers were able to pull on the cables and affect wing-warp themselves, giving them for the first time, an aspect of control over their aircraft!

Throughout the early 1900s, the Wright Brothers experimented with gliders to give them an idea of how wings and angling these wings affected flight and lift. To aid them with this, they built one of the world’s first wind-tunnels! With wind on demand, the boys were able to test their flyers more and more often and were able to record data more effectively.

Powered Flight

The dream of mankind was to have powered, controlled flight. By the early 1900s, the Wrights were already working on the “control” part, but they still needed to address the issue of power. They knew from their experiements that any power-source onboard an airplane would have to be as light as possible. Fortunately, their experience working on bicycles meant that the Wright Brothers already had some grounding in light and powerful machines.

The world’s first airplane, Wright Flyer I, took to the air in 1903. Using a custom-made internal-combustion engine created in their own bicycle-shop (after no established engine-manufacturers of the time were able to make one small, light and powerful enough for their needs) and propellers made of wood, tested relentlessly in their wind-tunnel, the Wright brothers were ready to fly.

For obvious reasons, this milestone was fraught with danger. Steering a glider, launching a glider and landing a glider was relatively safe – there were no moving parts. But with their new airplane, the boys had to be careful of the rotating propellers, which were literally revolutionary at the time, since nobody had yet figured out how an airplane’s propeller actually worked!

The historic first flight took place on the 17th of December, 1903.

Actually, more than one flight took place on the 17th of December, 1903, on the beaches near Kittyhawk, South Carolina. Four flights in total were conducted. A number of people came out to witness this historic event: Adam Etheridge, Will Dough, W. C. Brinkley, Johnny Moore, a local lad who was on the scene at the time, and John T. Daniels, a member of a nearby lifesaving station.

Of the four flights taken, the first, third and fourth were photographed. The famous “First Flight” photograph (With Orville at the controls and Wilbur jogging alongside) was taken by John T. Daniels, the lifesaver, and a man who had never operated a camera before (or since!). Daniels had been given instructions by Orville to take the shot when he saw the machine move in front of the camera. Daniels, too excited by what was going on around him, nearly forgot to take the photograph! At the last minute, he tripped the shutter and history was made…

The Airplane Takes Off

If the Wright Brothers thought that their newfangled “flying machine” (Oh what an absurd notion!) was ever going to be a wonderful, amazing, popular, attention-grabbing, imagination-stimulating, sought-after and life-changing machine!…They were wrong.

In fact they were so wrong they probably wondered why the hell they started in the first place. The truth was that very few people were actually interested in their new flying-machine. It didn’t make the headlines that they’d expected it to (probably because so many other flying-machines had done so, and they’d all failed!) and the military was not in the least bit interested. The planes were too light, too flimsy, too dangerous to fly. What possible military application could they have?

The Rise of the Airplane

Just like early anythings, planes were not seen as having much application in the world of the time. Cars were slow, tempermental things, new on the scene, expensive and prone to breakdowns. Similarly, planes were seen as expensive, rich, playboy toys which could never have any practical application in the real world. This changed during the years of the First World War when armies soon discovered the advantages of having an aerial wing which could fly over battlefields, bombing and strafing the enemy, which could take photographs and which could report on enemy troops and movements. By 1918, the airplane had proven itself as a practical and important machine in warfare.

If the 1900s were the experimental stages of airplane-operation, then the 1910s and the 1920s became the era of aircraft endurance-testing. All kinds of famous airplane-related events took place in the 1910s and 1920s, many of which are still fondly remembered today. Here’s a list of them:

1912 – April 16th. Harriet Quimby is the first woman to fly across the English Channel (Dover-Calais, in 59 minutes). Unfortunately, her moment in the sun and her chances of making the front pages were dashed when a little-known watercraft called the R.M.S. Titanic sank in the Atlantic Ocean the night before…

1927 – May 20-21. Charles Lindbergh flies the Spirit of St. Louis from New York City to Paris, France, in the world’s first solo nonstop crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.

1928 – 31st May-9th June. Sir Charles Kingsford Smith & Co make the first crossing of the Pacific Ocean in a three-leg journey from California, USA, to Hawaii, Hawaii to Fiji, Fiji to Brisbane, in Australia.

The 1920s also saw the founding of several famous commercial airline companies. United Airlines is founded in 1926 as Boeing Air Transport. The famous Australian airline company Quantas is founded in 1920. The German airline company Lufthansa is founded in 1926. Pan Am, the American airline is founded as Pan-American Airways in 1927.

Luxury Travel

From the second half of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century, luxury long-distance travel was to be had in only one way. That one way was in an amazingly grand and luxurious ocean-liner, which would transport you across vast stretches of water from England to America, America to Australia, Australia to Asia, Asia to Europe and so-on. The largely experimental status of aircraft in the early 20th century meant that the ocean-liner trade was still going strong well into the 1950s, but things were all about to change.

The 1920s showed everyone that airplanes, just like steamships, could safely travel amazing distances, and what’s more, they could do it in significantly more comfort and at faster speeds! This led to the 1930s boom of the airline industry.

Sometimes we like to kid ourselves that airline travel today is really luxurious…little personal TV screens, computer-games, telephone and internet access, luxurious onboard dining and crayons and those cheap, crappy plastic model-airplanes for the kiddies are all the luxury that we need.

In the 1930s, though, there was a whole new kind of luxury…the airship!

The airship was like a hybrid between the airplane and the hot air balloon. Invented in the 1900s, the airship had its golden age from the 1910s-1930s. Less noisy, larger and capable of carrying more passengers than early conventional, fixed-wing airplanes, the airship became the way to travel in style, comfort and most importantly…speed, in the early 1900s. A number of countries operated airship lines, from the United Kingdom, the United States and most notably of all…Germany.

Although large and amazing, airships were dangerous machines. The hydrogen gas which inflated the huge envelopes of many airships was highly explosive and extensive precautions were taken to prevent fires – in Germany, for example, you couldn’t take your camera or your cigarette-lighter onboard an airship – They were confiscated by the crew and locked in a special cargo-area, to be returned by the crew when the ship had reached its destination. The sparking of a cigarette-lighter or the burning flash from early, magnesium flash-bulb cameras was seen as a fire-hazard.

Due to their large size, airships could be difficult to control in bad weather. When the weather was fine, flying in an airship was an exciting and wonderful experience, but when there was a storm, heavy rains or lightning around, the experience could become quite frightening. Winds could rip at the cloth covering of the airship’s enevelope, dangerous static-electric charges could build up on the airship’s frame (although this could also create a spectacular display of ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ to dazzle and awe passengers!) and heavy winds and rain could affect handling and manuverablity. The airship USS Akron crashed in April of 1933 due to flying in a storm after spending only 18 months in civilian service. Of the 76 passengers and crew onboard, only three people survived and were picked up by US. Coastguard watercraft after the crash.

The most famous airship crash is, of course, that of the Hindenburg, which spectacularly erupted into flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey in early 1937 and crashed and burned to the ground in a matter of seconds! Of the 97 passengers and crew onboard, roughly one third (36 people) of them died, including one member of the ground-staff. Destroyed after just over a year in service, the Hindenburg’s demise saw the end of grand airship travel, which was written off as just being far too dangerous.


The Hindenburg Crash. The structure on the right is the airship mooring-tower

To understand why the public was so drawn to airships, these flying death-traps, one has to see what they were really like and what they meant to people at the time. Airplanes are faster, but they’re smaller, more cramped, more uncomfortable.

The interiors of German commercial airships that flew through the air during the 1920s and 30s were bright, modern, luxurious, airy and with plenty of space to move around and stretch your legs. Passengers even slept in their own cabins, instead of trying to sleep strapped into their chairs like we have to do these days. Add to this the fact that travelling by airship was so much faster than travelling by…ship-ship. Steaming from England to America took at least five days using the fastest and most modern ocean-liners in the 1930s. Flying from Germany to America by airship in the 1930s took two or at a stretch, three days. For speed and convenience, the airship certainly won out here.


A period airship advertisement from the 1930s boasting a two-day crossing from America to Europe, which was three times faster than a similar crossing by ocean-liner

The risks of airship travel and the spectacular crashes that involved airships soon spelt an end to their aerial dominance, though. They were seen as just being far too risky a thing to use. Why speed up your trip by a few days when you risked crashing, falling from the sky and being killed when you could cross the ocean in a week by ship? And even if the ship was to sink, you could still get into a lifeboat and radio for help! By the late 1930s, the glory days of the airship were over.

Postwar Boom

The 1950s saw many things – the emergence of the Cold War, television, rock and roll and do-wop music. But it also saw the downfall of many things, such as the gradual dying-out of the transatlantic passenger-ship industry and the end of the airship industry. But from the ashes of the airship industry, a new form of transport was to emerge…

…the modern airliner.

Capable of transporting more people to more places with more speed, airliners were the thing of the future. Although the airliner of today probably shares several characteristics with the airliners of the past, early airliners had various perks such as the ability to smoke onboard planes (thank god that’s over with!) and being served meals with real cutlery, chinaware and glassware (something that doesn’t happen today!) and being able to listen to live piano-music! Yes, believe it or not, but early airliners used to have (specially made) pianos onboard them, usually in First Class, where passengers could listen to live music!


An airliner’s piano-bar in the 1960s

Continued safety-concerns and space-restrictions mean that spaces reserved for piano-bars, cocktail lounges, drinks bars and other public-seating areas on airplanes where passengers could mingle and chat, are now a thing of the past, leaving us with nothing but tantilising images of what is, what was, and what might have been…

 
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Lock, Stock and Barrel: A Concise History of Firearms

Guns. Pieces. Firearms. Rods. Heaters. Six-Shooters. Hand-Cannons. Bullet. Shot. Cap. Cartridge. .45. .38. .22. 9mm. Flintlock. Wheel-lock. Matchlock. Caplock…

In one way or another, firearms have been around for centuries…ever since some clever guy in China discovered that if you mixed sulphur, crushed charcoal and saltpetre (that’s an old term for ‘Potassium Nitrate’) in the correct quantities…and didn’t get killed in the process…you could produce a powerful explosive! It’s impossible to imagine today’s world without guns, isn’t it? What would police-officers use on violent criminals? What would soldiers fight with? What would armed criminals use to hold up the local convenience-store with?

This article will look into the history and development of firearms from the very earliest and most primative pieces, to the first modern firearms that we would know today.

The Big Bang and the Invention of Gunpowder

Just like everything else of value, such as the compass, decent food, the wheelbarrow, martial-arts and fireworks, the Chinese invented gunpowder. The first documented proof of this comes from the early 12th Century. The Chinese were quick to grasp the possibilities of this new invention. With an explosive such as this, they could create weapons…primative weapons, that’s true, but weapons nonetheless…and weapons of a kind that nobody else at the time, had ever seen. Cannons, muskets, grenades, bombs and even naval-mines, used to blow holes in ships.

By the 13th and 14th Centuries, the Europeans had also discovered gunpowder. Early gunpowder was tricky to make, though, and highly dangerous. It took considerable experimentation in the 1200s before those people brave enough to tamper with the stuff had come up with a suitable ratio of ingredients. Europeans improved gunpowder by moistening it in a process called ‘corning’. By corning the gunpowder, makers could form the powder into cakes and then break these down into individual little granules or ‘grains’. This prevented excessive gunpowder-dust from hovering around in the air, which was a significant explosive hazard.

The First Firearms

The very first firearms were crude, dangerous inaccurate weapons, little more than a tube that was open at one end, sealed at the other and with a small hole at the sealed end of the tube called a ‘touch-hole’. Called ‘hand-cannons’ or ‘hand-gonnes’, they were merely scaled down versions of larger artillery pieces in-use at the time. Little thought was given to them and they certainly weren’t relied upon in battle. Indeed, many early guns were so impractical that they often came with forked, wooden stands or poles upon which to rest the muzzle of the gun. That way, one hand could be freed from supporting its immense weight, to hold the burning match-cord or ‘slow-match’ (a precursor to the modern fuse) to the touch-hole to ignite the gunpowder and fire the ammunition.

Firing Mechanisms – Matchlock

The very first firearms had to be set off by putting a burning match-cord into a touch-hole to ignite the powder and fire the weapon. This was adequate, but hardly ideal. With both hands, or one hand and a forked, wooden stand needed to support the length and weight of early muskets and hand-cannons, guns were dangerous, agonisingly slow, inhibiting of movement and fatally slow to reload.

In the 1300s, the first reliable firing-mechanism was invented…the matchlock.


A man firing a matchlock musket. The burning white rope is the match-cord

The matchlock worked by filling the barrel of the gun with blackpowder, then driving down your bullet and a wad of cloth or paper to keep everything firmly seated. You then filled the flash-pan with powder and closed it. After this, you fitted your smouldering match-cord into the jaws of a simple, S-shaped lock on the side of the gun. You then opened the flash-pan by hand, aimed and pulled the trigger. If you’d lined up the match-cord with the pan, then the cord came forward, ignited the priming-powder in the pan and fired the gun for you. This kept both your hands free to fire and hold the gun and kept both your eyes on the target. From the 1300s until the early 1500s, this was the most advanced firing-mechanism available, even though it was incredibly slow, allowing only about two shots a minute (if you were lucky!).

It was during the matchlock period of firearms, when guns were coming onto the battlefield which had for so-long been dominated by bows, arrows, crossbows, bolts, swords and spears, that a new word was coined.

“Bullet Proof”.

These days, we’ll add ‘proof’ to the end of anything. Waterpoof. Fireproof. Leakproof. Greaseproof. Idiotproof.

What does “proof” actually mean?

The word ‘proof’ itself means to provide evidence or to show effectiveness. Hence the term ‘proving ground’, an open area where weapons were ‘proofed’ or demonstrated to show their effectiveness. Given this definition, what is the original meaning of ‘bullet-proof’?

Originally, bullet-proofing meant proving (that is, ‘demonstrating’) that bullets could not penetrate your body-armour. Back when soldiers still marched into battle wearing plate-armour, it was the job of the armourer to “proof” his armour. This was done by firing a bullet from a matchlock pistol or musket, at the breastplate of his completed suit of armour at point-blank range. If the armour was good quality, the musket-ball left a dent in the armour’s breastplate. This dent was circled or marked in some way by the armourer so that it stood out to the enemy. This circled dent, caused by the bullet, was the “proof” that his armour was impervious to firearms. Hence the term “bulletproof”.

Firing-Mechanisms – Wheel-lock

If you’ve ever used a modern cigarette-lighter, then the basic operation of the wheel-lock firing-mechanism should be pretty familiar to you. Invented in the early 1500s, the wheel-lock was the first self-igniting firing-mechanism. It didn’t rely on a tempermental and fiddly piece of smoking cord to light the powder…it created its own lighting-mechanism through pure friction.

The wheel-lock operated by pulling the trigger, which rotated a steel wheel inside the firing-mechanism. This wheel, when rotated fast enough by the pull of the trigger, created sparks which set off the gunpowder and fired the weapon.

Although the wheel-lock was pretty advanced…for the first time you could just load a gun and shoot it, for the first time, you could (with luck) shoot a gun in the rain, for the first time, you didn’t need to fumble with burning match-cords…its downfall was that the wheel-lock firing-mechanism really was…advanced. Far too advanced to be practical. The intricacies of the mechanism made it a pain in the ass to clean, lubricate and maintain. It was also hard to mass-produce and it required master gunsmiths to be able to disassemble, repair and clean them effectively. Because of this, they died out, to be replaced by…

Firing-Mechanisms – Flintlock

The flintlock firing-mechanism is one of the most famous firing-mechanisms in the world. Half of our firearms jargon and slang comes from the flintlock. A ‘flash in the pan’, meaning a sudden idea which amounts to nothing, referred to a gun misfiring, producing a quick flash of burning powder and nothing else. ‘Going off half-cocked’, meaning to start before being fully prepared, referred to flintlock guns firing before the hammer had been pulled off its safety-position. ‘Ramrod straight’ referred to the necessity for really straight, rigid ramrods, used to help load early firearms.

The flintlock mechanism was invented in the early 1600s, and for the next, at a rough estimate, 230 years…it remained the forefront of firearms technology. Even though it couldn’t operate reliably in wet weather like the wheel-lock mechanism, the flintlock was popular for a number of reasons: It was easy to use, easy to clean, easy to make and easy to repair. Its simplicity of operation meant that anybody could pick up a musket or a pistol and know how to use it within a couple of minutes, without risk of injury. The flintlock mechanism even came with its own “safety-position’: The hammer had to be cocked twice before a gun could be fired properly. The positions, called “half-cock” and “full-cock” related to how far away from the frizzen the firing-hammer could be pulled back to. Half-cock provided access to the flash-pan and frizzen, but would not cause the gun to fire if the trigger was pulled accidently. Pulling the hammer back to full-cock meant that when the trigger was pulled, the gun would fire.

The flintlock mechanism worked by using a type of stone (called…’flint’) which was clamped into the jaws of the gun’s lock (hence the term ‘flint lock’). The piece of flint ws usually a small, sharp piece of stone which, when the gun was fired, came down and struck against a ‘frizzen’ or steel striking-plate, creating sparks. After hitting the frizzen, the flint would push the frizzen back, allowing the sparks to fall into the ‘flash-pan’ which ignited the priming-charge of gunpowder. Once the priming-charge was lit, it would ignite the main charge of gunpowder inside the barrel through the small ‘touch-hole’ next to it, setting off the gun and firing the projectile. Considerably faster and safer and easier to maintain than other firing-mechanisms, a trained soldier could fire three or four shots a minute using a flintlock firearm, or, under exceptionally good training, up to five shots a minute, or one shot every twelve seconds! A considerable change from the matchlock mechanism which only allowed one or two shots a minute, a couple of hundred years before.

Firing Mechanisms – Caplock

The caplock mechanism was similar to the flintlock mechanism, but with a few advantages: It was easier and faster to load and, unlike the flintlock mechanism, it could enable a gun to be fired in wet weather. It worked like this:

You poured gunpowder down your musket-barrel, along with a bullet and a cloth or paper wad, to stop anything falling out. You rammed it all down with a ramrod, withdrew the rod, returned it to its cradle underneath the gun-barrel, and then you fitted a small brass cap (similar, but larger than a modern child’s precussion-cap, used for toy ‘cap-guns’) over the ‘nipple’, a small metal tube above the breech of the gun, which had replaced the more bulky flintlock mechanism.

With the gun loaded and the brass cap securely placed over the nipple, you pulled back the firing-hammer, aimed and pulled the trigger. The hammer hit the gun-cap, and a chain reaction occurred. On the underside of the gun-cap was a small, impact-detonated explosive charge. When the firing-hammer hits the cap, it sets off the charge, that sends sparks and flames down into the breech of the gun. This lights the gunpowder and the subsequent burning and expansion of gases forces the bullet out of the gun.

Until the advent of the modern, self-contained cartridge…this was as advanced as firing-mechanisms got, until the later stages of the American Civil War in the mid 1860s.

The Evolution of Ammunition

Ammunition has always been changing, and throughout history, there have been several kinds of ammunition used in firearms. The three most common are the round ball, the Minie ball and the modern bullet.

Musket-Ball or Lead Shot

The earliest type of ammunition was obviously a round ball. Originally made of rounded off pebbles or stones, the musket-shot, the mainstay of ammunition up until the second quarter of the 19th century, was later made out of lead. People used to make their own lead balls by melting down lead in a small spoon or cup over a fire, before pouring the molten lead into a small bullet-mould. When the lead had hardened, the mould was opened and a small, round lead ball came out. Lead-shot was easy and cheap to manufacture, but it was hardly accurate. Due to the windage (gap) between the interior of old gun-barrels and the musket-balls manufactured to go into them, and the fact that the barrels were smoothbore, meant that these bullets were not accurate beyond about a hundred meters. With the addition of rifling to muskets, a musket-ball could be fired accurately to a range of about 200-250 meters, however.

The Minie Ball

Invented by Claude Etienne Minie in the 1850s, the Minie Ball (despite its name), is not actually a ball. It’s a conical-cylindrical projectile, very similar in shape to the modern cartridge-bullet. The Minie ball was designed to be used with another innovation in firearms technology: Rifling.


Minie Balls, the new type of ammo that replaced the musket-ball of the 18th and early 19th centuries

Rifling is the process of cutting a curved, spiralling groove into the inside of a gun-barrel. This groove allows the bullet to spin in the barrel after the charge has gone off, giving it greater accuracy. Although rifling had existed on a smaller scale before the invention of the Minie ball, when the two were combined, it allowed guns to be significantly more accurate than before. This led to devastatingly high levels of carnage during subsequent military engagements such as during the American Civil War. The Minie ball fired from a rifled musket or rifle could hit a target more than twice as far away as a comparable, unrifled musket firing a regular lead ball. However, military tactics didn’t evolve as fast as the weaponry which meant that in the earlier years of the Civil War, armies were still lining up, shoulder to shoulder in close formation, within a few dozen yards of their enemies and firing at each other, just as their ancestors had done nearly a hundred years before, in the American Revolution.

Cartridge-Bullet

The modern bullet as we know it today, or rather, ammunition as we know it today, was the result and combination of three different elements: The impact-detonated precussion-cap (seen on muskets of the American Civil War), smokeless modern gunpowder and the modern, conical-cylindrical bullet, derived from the shape of the Minie Ball. But why is it called a ‘cartridge’?

The term ‘cartridge’ as it refers to firearms, has existed a lot longer than modern all-metal cartridges and bullets. A ‘cartridge’ originally referred to a rolled up tube of paper, which contained a pre-measured amount of gunpowder and a projectile (either a lead shot or a Minie Ball, depending on the period). The ball and the powder were seperated inside the cartridge by a twist in the paper. When a soldier needed to load his musket or rifle, he ripped the paper cartridge open, poured a bit of the powder into his flash-pan, closed the frizzen and then poured the rest of the powder down the gun-barrel. He then pushed in the shot or the Minie Ball and then scrunched up the paper cartridge, stuffed it into the gun-barrel and rammed it down with a ramrod.

The modern cartridge bullet as we know it today, containing the bullet and gunpowder in a sealed metal cartridge-casing, came around in the 1840s, however, its introduction was slow. In fact, in the early years of the American Civil War, many soldiers were still firing muzzle-loaded muskets and rifles, similar to the ones their ancestors used in the Revolution. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century saw mass-production of cartridge-bullets which gradually led to the obcelescene of muzzle-loaded, loose-powder firearms.

Multi-shot Firearms

Thusfar, this article has concentrated on single-shot firearms. Pistols, muskets, rifles, blunderbusses and so-forth. The main weakness of these firearms brings me to the next part of this article…firearms that could fire more than one shot between reloadings.

Even the Minie-Ball-shooting rifle of the 1850s and 60s, though faster to reload and more accurate than its 18th century counterpart, the flintlock musket, had one major drawback: It could only fire one shot at a time. Once you loaded it and aimed and fired, you had to reload it all over again. In the heat of battle, this was a waste of precious time. This hazard of early firearms was the kind of problem that kept gunmakers up late at night, wracking their brains for centuries, trying to find a solution.

Various interesting firearms were developed throughout history, in an attempt to invent a gun that could fire more than one round before needing to be reloaded. The famous ‘Pepperbox’ gun or revolver is one of these inventions:


The ‘Pepperbox’ Revolver

Depending on the size and number of barrels, the pepperbox revolver could fire anywhere from five to ten rounds before it had to be reloaded. Pepperbox revolvers were not terribly accurate, but they did allow people to have more firepower on them without also needing more guns.

The modern revolver or “six-shooter”, a handheld firearm capable of firing six bullets in quick succession (hence the term ‘six-shooter’) was developed from the early pepperbox revolver and became a reality in the 1840s. Samuel Colt, the American inventor and firearms manufacturer did not invent the revolver, as some people believe, he merely improved on its design. Early revolvers were blackpowder firearms, requiring the user to load each bullet, powder and wadding one by one. Early cylinders had to be turned by hand and cocked and fired one by one. Sam Colt changed this by producing revolvers that would shoot cartridge-bullets. Cocking the firing-hammer immediately lined up a new bullet and pulling the trigger fired the gun. You still had to cock the revolver again after that shot, before you could fire the next shot, but the basic modern revolver as we know it today, had been invented. This style of revolver was called the “single-action” revolver, because pulling the trigger only fired the gun, it didn’t also rotate the cylinder and cock the weapon again (the later “double-action” revolver would do this, and allow you to fire the gun even faster).

Samuel Colt was many things, but amongst other things, he was a salesman. It was he who practically single-handedly, introduced the world to the modern revolver. Indeed, the revolving-cylinder handgun was so new in the 1840s that it was still called a “pistol”. It wouldn’t be for another few years that the term “revolver” became the accepted term for Colt’s new toy.

From the 1840s until the early 1900s, handheld firearms were limited to revolvers. However, a new invention, the automatic pistol, soon changed things, affecting how fast and how many bullets a person could fire at once.

The automatic pistol was developed in the late 19th century. In its most basic form, the pistol works by pulling the trigger, which sets off a chain reaction. After pulling the trigger, the firing-pin hits the primer-cap on the cartridge, which ignites the gunpowder and fires the bullet. The recoil from the bullet firing forces the slide at the top of the gun to shift backwards, ejecting the spent shell-casing and allowing a new cartridge from the clip stored in the gun-butt, to ascend into the firing-chamber above.

The automatic pistol was a big improvement on the revolver, for various reasons. It was faster to shoot and easier to reload. But an automatic pistol did require more care than a revolver. Failure to strip down and clean the pistol properly could result in the gun jamming and failing to work properly. The simplicity of the revolver meant that most civilians and police-forces stuck with the older firearm for longer, before updating to automatic handguns.


Colt M1911 pistol. One of the world’s most famous and recognisable automatic handguns

In situations where firepower means winning, revolvers were more quickly phased out and replaced with the newer handguns. The Colt M1911, one of the most famous automatic pistols in the world, developed…as the name suggests…in 1911, was the standard-issue sidearm for soldiers and officers in the U.S. Army for nearly 90 years! The Colt 1911 was finally replaced in the 1980s and 1990s by the Beretta 92, however, it continues to be used in various areas in the U.S. Army as well as in some professional police-forces. The fact that the Colt M1911 is now almost 100 years old and still in popular use says something considerable about its design and practicality.

The big problem about writing an article about firearms is that it’s such a vast topic. So far, I’ve covered the development of gunpowder, early firearms and the development of multiple-shot handguns. That’s as far as this particular article will go, however. Additional articles on various other aspects of firearms history may surface in the future.

 
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Classic Bling – Buying and Owning a Pocket Watch

I’ll be honest…I’m not a fan of wristwatches. Never have been, am not now, and never will be. I find them uncomfortable, irritating, pedestrian and boring. Plus, I can never find a dial that I like. I’m a simple person and I hate trying to read a watch-dial that has tiny numbers, that has no numbers, or that has a million other things on it, like day, date, month, moonphase, stopwatch, heartrate-monitor and an inbuilt, nuclear-holocaust-grade gieger-counter.

Unfortunately these days, most watches seem to come in one of those three categories. To add to this, I do a lot of things with my hands: Writing, typing, playing the piano and handling heavy stuff. And when I’m doing stuff like that, a wristwatch just gets in the way. I used to have a really bad habit (according to some), of removing my wristwatch all the time and putting it into my pocket whenever I used it, and only taking it out when I wanted to tell the time. Well, after a few years of this, I gave up and decided that for my 21st birthday a few years ago, I’d buy myself a pocket-watch.

I love pocket-watches. Call me kooky and weird if you must, but I do. They’re a classic piece of men’s jewellery which, sadly, has been out of fashion for the best part of the last fifty or sixty years. The last commercially-produced pocket watches were made in the 1970s, and by that, I mean you found them in shop-windows or in magazines. These days? Not on your life.

I wear a pocket-watch on a daily basis. It’s easy to read, it’s classy, I don’t have some ugly manacle on my wrist all the time…and believe me, the pocket-watch is an amazing conversation-starter!

On watch forums, on history forums and just generally online, I’ve heard of people who want to buy pocket watches, either to wear, or to practice watchmaking on, or to give as a present to a friend or relation. Maybe they want to establish a sort of classic dress-style and want the watch to complete their look. Maybe they’re steampunkists looking for that finishing touch to their outfit. But then they start wondering: “Where the hell do I find a pocket-watch?”

The biggest problem with pocket watches is that, since they’re so rarely worn these days, finding one can be a challenge. This is my guide to shopping for a good-quality antique, vintage or hell, even a modern pocket watch! So let’s get to it. Hopefully, you’ll find it helpful.

Where to Look?

This is probably the hardest thing. Where do you start looking? The days where you could mail-order a pocket-watch from a magazine or buy one in a regular shop are long gone. But there are still places you can go to find a pocket watch. Here they are:

Antiques Shops.

Duuuuuh! Pocket-watches in antiques shops are usually good quality, but keep in mind that these watches are being sold by professional antiques dealers. Their prices could be scarily expensive. And that’s without spending the money to get the watch serviced, as well! Unless you’ve got money to burn, it’s best to avoid these places.

Watch Shops.

Another rather obvious place. Some watchmakers’ shops do sell pocket-watches. Either modern ones or vintage and antique pocket-watches that they’ve bought, serviced and want to resell, or watches that people have sold or donated to them. Buying a pocket-watch from a watchmaker or a watch-shop is still going to be expensive, but you will at least have the peace-of-mind in knowing that you’re dealing with a professional who not only knows his stuff (hopefully!) but that you’re also buyinig a pocket-watch that has already been serviced, saving you a nice bit of money.

Flea-markets and watch-shows.

Flea-markets, bric-a-brac markets, watch-shows, junk-shops, thrift-shops and other dealers of second-hand junk are another nice place to look for pocket watches, however, these places can be fraught with various dangers, such as the quality of the timepiece, the knowledge of the seller, and of course…the fact that the watch is second-hand, being sold outside of a professional environment.

You might get amazingly lucky and buy a good-quality pocket-watch secondhand. But you still have to pay to get the watch serviced. You wouldn’t buy a car without having it serviced before driving it, would you? No. Neither should do that with a pocket-watch. They’re mechanical devices that require care and attention. If you do find a nice pocket-watch, then you have to deal with the seller. If the seller is ignorant of the quality of the watch, you could probably knock the price down pretty substantially before buying it, or, if the seller knows *exactly* what he’s selling, you might not get anywhere. The last factor is that you’re buying the watch second-hand outside of a professional environment. What do I mean by this?

By this, I mean that the watch most likely has not been serviced. Servicing means that the watch has been taken to a watchmaker, it has been examined, disassembled, examined, cleaned, examined, lubricated, reassembled, examined, timed for accuracy and then put back together into its complete state again. When buying any pocket-watch second-hand, remember that you will need to have it serviced and that you should factor at least $200 into the service-cost. So if you buy a watch for $100, it’ll cost about $300 (or more, depending on what needs to be done) to get the watch to a satisfactory, working condition.

Buying online.

Some watch-collectors or watchmakers or watch-sellers love selling stuff on eBay, and this can be a very nice place to look for watches, provided that you know what you’re looking for. As pocket-watches can be expensive, people aren’t likely to try and cheat you out of money, because if you buy a dud from them, they know that they’re probably never going to hear the end of it from you. Stick to online shops or sellers with high reputations.

Apart from eBay, there are also plenty of watch-sites online that sell new or used pocket-watches. These are also excellent places to search for pocket-watches, as each watch-listing will usually include all the important details about the watch’s manufacture, quality, age and service-history. Prices might be a bit high, so keep that in mind.

What to Look For?

Now you know where to look, the next thing to know is what to look for. Don’t forget that pocket watches have been around for about five hundred years. There were literally hundreds, if not thousands of watchmakers, making everything from the sensible, to the sensational, to the senseless! Making…er…sense…of all these watches and the varying qualities is important, so that you know what to look for.

Wanting to buy a pocket-watch is only half the battle. Knowing what makes quality is the other half. As most pocket-watches these days are ones that you’ll be buying second-hand, keep an eye on the following:

Brand/Company/Watchmaker

Pocket-watches have been around for centuries. There are millions of pocket-watches out there made by thousands of watchmakers. How do you know what’s good quailty? A general rule of thumb is: Never buy a pocket-watch if you can’t type the name of the watch-company or watchmaker into a Google Search, and find information on it. If nobody’s bothered to write about this company or watchmaker and post it online, there’s probably a damn good reason. The two main reasons are: Rarity (which means if your watch breaks, you can’t find parts for it!) or poor quality (which means you’re wasting money having it serviced!).

Stick to well-known watchmakers. Companies such as: Waltham, Hamilton, Elgin, South Bend, Rockford, Illinois, Patek-Philippe (if you can afford it!), Breuget (again, if you can afford it!), Tissot, Ball and Omega, to name just a few. All these companies made watches of good quality which are worth looking at.

General Condition

Never…ever…buy a broken pocket-watch. Buying a nonfunctioning watch is fine, but not a broken one. What’s the difference?

A ‘nonfunctioning’ watch is a watch which is in perfect mechanical condition. It just won’t run. This can be remedied by a trip to the watchmaker. Once it’s cleaned and reassembled, it should work wonderfully! So if you find a watch that’s in good condition but which doesn’t run, buy it and send it to the watchmaker.

A broken watch is…a broken watch. One with damaged components, one with missing components (even worse!) or one which is being sold ‘for parts’. If you’re unlucky enough to buy a broken watch, depending on the brand of watch, it may be possible to get the watch fixed and working, but this could mean a higher servicing-bill. Keep that in mind.

The next thing to look for in buying a watch is general condition…

Case and Caseback

In the strictest term, a ‘watch’ is the movement, the mechanics inside the case. The case around the watch is just something to keep it safe. Watch-cases are made up of various components:

– Bow. (Pronounced like ‘throw’). The bow is the round metal ring or loop on the top of the watch-case. This is where you clip your watch-chain to. A good bow should be centered properly and not too loose or likely to part company with the case.

– Bezel. The bezel is the metal securing-ring around the crystal. A nice bezel should be free from brassing, scratches and dents.

– Crystal. The crystal (some people like to call them the ‘glass’) is the circle of glass, plastic or crystal over the watch-dial. Crystals should be free from scratches, chips and cracks.

– Caseback. The caseback is the back of the case (duh!). Some casebacks have small cartouches or blank, empty spots on them. These were there for people to engrave their monograms or initials on. A good caseback should be free from scratches, dents and brassing.

– Crown. The crown is the round, corrugated knob at the top of the watch, above the pendant and below the bow. The crown is used to wind the watch, and in most cases, set it to the right time. A crown shouldn’t be too loose and wobbly. It should turn smoothly and evenly when you wind the watch and it should pop out smoothly and click back down smoothly when you set the time.

Dial

Watch-dials should be clean and easy to read, without any hairline cracks or chips or faded lettering and markings. A small note: A hairline crack does NOT damage the whole integrity of the dial: Dials were placed on metal backing-plates which secured them to the watch-movement, so a crack on the dial doesn’t mean that it’s going to fall to pieces.

Hands

A pocket-watch typically has three hands. Hour, Minute and Second. In most pocket-watches, the second-hand is a tiny thing which spins around the ‘seconds subdial’, which is a smaller, inset dial at the bottom of the watch, at the six o’clock point. Make sure that all the hands match and that they’re proportionate to the size of the watch.

Movement

The ‘movement’ is the mechanics inside the watch. Check for cracks, rust, missing screws, wobbly bits that shouldn’t be, and stationary bits that shouldn’t be. Most importantly of all, check the balance. The balance is the the heart of the watch. It’s the bit that swings back and forth, making the watch go ‘tick-tock’. Balances can be pretty delicate, so don’t touch it, just look at it. Check to see that the balance-spring (more commonly called a ‘hairspring’) is perfectly coiled. If it’s tangled up or if it’s off-center, that will need to be looked at by a watchmaker.

While you’re looking at the movement, search for the following features…

If you’re buying an American-made vintage or antique pocket-watch, look for the serial-number. The serial-number on the movement can tell you how old the watch is, how many of this model were made and how long they were made for. Also look for words like “Jewels” and “Adjusted”. Good quality pocket-watches always had jewels in them. These are typically rubies or sapphires which are used as bearings to cut down on friction. Cutting down on friction means that the watch runs smoother and keeps better time. Aim to buy a watch with at least seven jewels. The traditional jewel-counts for quality pocket watches started at seven, and then went up to nine, eleven, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one and lastly, twenty-three jewels. A seven-jewel watch will give you decent timekeeping. A watch with more jewels should give you better timekeeping, but don’t expect quartz-watch accuracy…that’s not going to happen. Ever.

If you find the word ‘adjusted’ inside your watch, you might find extra words like “Adjusted to *X* positions”.

There are eight possible ‘adjustments’ that can be made to a watch. Adjustments for position (there are six of these) meant that the watch was expected to keep accurate time, no matter how you held the watch: upside down, right side up, flat on a table, flipped upside down on a table, on a stand on its side…anything. Then, there are two other adjustments: Isochronism and Temperature.

Isochronism (say that six times fast! Pronounced ‘eye-sock-row-nism’) is the ability of the watch to keep time regardless of the mainspring’s level of tension. All watches should be adjusted for this. If you find ‘Temperature’ engraved on the watch-movement, it means that the watch has been adjusted to keep time in extremes of temperature: Freezing cold and boiling heat (from about 0 degrees celsius to about 45 degrees, or 32 degrees farenheit and about 115 degrees).

Buying a highly jewelled, adjusted watch in good condition will assure you of good timekeeping once it’s been serviced by a professional. Don’t bother buying a mechanical pocket-watch without at least seven jewels in it…it’s not worth it. Watches like that were designed to be used until they broke, after which, they were meant to be thrown out. Don’t waste your money on that.

Buying your Watch

Now you know where to look, and what to look for. Antiques shops, watch-shops, flea-markets, eBay, online shops. What to check for on a good quality watch. Now you want to buy a watch. What do you do?

How much does a pocket-watch cost? This is probably the first thing you’re asking.

That really depends. I could go out right now and buy a mechanical pocket watch made in China for $15 (and yes, I have actually done that, a long time ago). But that $10 Chinese-made piece of junk isn’t going to last you any, and it’s not gonna look nice when you wear it. So how much should you expect to pay for a quality watch?

Modern Pocket-Watches

Modern pocket-watches are usually quartz pocket watches with plated watch-cases. A simple quartz pocket-watch can be had for about $10. It’ll last forever, it’s easy to maintain, and…that’s it. But when most people think about pocket watches, they imagine those old-timey wind-up things that you see in old movies. How much does one of those cost?

Antique & Vintage Mechanical Pocket-Watches

A word of warning: When buying mechanical pocket watches, newer is not always better. A modern, good-quality mechanical pocket-watch might be a nice thing to buy, and some of them are indeed great quality and worth the money, but remember that these days, most pocket watches are manufactured as showpieces and decoration…not as practical timepieces.

If you want a mechanical pocket-watch, it’s better to buy a vintage or antique watch from a famous watch-company. Why? Because back when these watches were made, quality-control, testing and general manufacturing standards were a LOT higher. This is because they had to be…they were the only watches around, so they had to be good quality. Unlike today when everything is a throwaway affair, back then, you bought a pocket-watch to last you your whole life, so quality was much better.

A watch like that can be had for anywhere from a hundred dollars (not including servicing) to around $500 or more, depending on quality, case-metal, reputation of the maker and of course, the functionality of the watch. Solid gold and silver watches are very hard to buy cheap. Unscrupulous people love buying watches like this…and they rip out the movement…they take off the crystal, they remove the dial…and they melt the watch-case down for scrap. Because of this, solid-gold watches or solid silver watches are getting increasingly expensive. Unless you have a lot of money, forget about owning one of those. Whatever you pay for your pocket-watch, be it $100 or $1,000, always remember to factor in another $250 for the servicing that the watch will have to undergo before you can use it!

Watch-Cases

If you want a gold watch, the best thing to go for is a gold-filled watch. Vintage and antique gold-filled watches are more common, they cost less and they looked just as nice. But just to clarify: Gold-filling is NOT gold-plating.

The Difference?

Gold-filling is done by getting two sheets of gold and sandwiching them either side of a base-metal (brass) and welding them together nice and solid. This creates the appearance of solid gold without the heart-attack-inducing price-tag. Because it was cheaper to produce but just as pretty, most watch-case companies made cases like this. They lasted a long time and they looked pretty. When checking a case for gold-content, gold-filled cases are usually marked “Gold filled” or “Guaranteed to wear for 5/10/20/25 years”. The longer the case is guaranteed to ‘wear’ or last for, the better the gold-filling and the better the quality. Gold-filled cases were usually 14kt, but this can vary.

Gold-plating is done by immersing a base-metal watch-case (made of brass) into a solution and electroplating it with gold. This is also cheaper and gives the appearance of gold. But unlike gold-filling, which will last for decades, you’d be lucky if gold-plating lasts a year. The gold-plating is often so thin (only a few microns) that enough rubbing and handling of the watch-case will soon rub all the gold right off. On the other hand, it takes decades of heavy use to do the same thing to a gold-filled case.

What if you want a silver watch-case instead? If you can’t afford real, sterling or coin-silver, then you’ll have to settle for silver-plate, or you could do the next step down and buy a watch with a nickel case. Nickel might sound cheap, but it can give a nice, silvery look to a watch at a fraction of the price.

Another thing you should consider is the case-style that you want. This won’t be too hard, there are only two. The first case-style is the ‘open-face case’. This means that you have the case and the bezel and the crystal and the dial, with the crown at 12 o’clock. The other case-style is the ‘hunter-case’. A hunter-case pocket-watch is one with a lid that closes over the watch-dial. This can be a useful feature for some people, who want to prevent the watch-crystal from getting scratched, cracked or chipped. A hunter-case watch is opened by pressing down on the crown, which releases a spring-loaded catch inside the watch-case to open the lid. Closing a hunter-case watch should be done by pressing down on the crown, closing the lid and then releasing the crown to keep it shut. Just snapping the case-lid shut can damage the catch and the metal on the edge of the case.

Setting-Mechanism

On most pocket-watches these days, setting the time is pretty easy. You pull out the crown, turn the hands and then pop the crown back down. Vintage pocket-watches, however, had about four ways to set the time. Knowing which one of these applies to your new antique or vintage pocket watch is important…doing it wrong could mean your watch has to go back to the watchmaker!

– Key-set.

Key-set watches are the oldest of the oldest pocket watches. These watches were set by using the watch’s winding-and-setting key. Watches like these were obsolete by the second half of the 19th century, though.

– Pendant/Crown-set.

The most common kind. You pull out the crown and turn it to set the hands and then push it back in. If your watch-crown doesn’t pop up neatly when you tug on it to set the time, don’t force it! It could be one of the following…

– Lever-set.

A lever-set watch (which was mandatory for ALL railroad-quality pocket-watches) works by unscrewing the bezel, pulling out the small, metallic setting-lever and turning the crown to set the time. Once the correct time is set, the lever is pushed back in and the bezel is screwed back on.

– Pin-set.

Pin-set watches are similar to lever-set watches, only, instead of pulling something out, you push something in. In this case, the setting-pin. On watches like this, the setting-pin is located near the watch-bow. You press down the pin and that allows you to turn the crown to set the hands. Once the hands are set, you release the pin and let the watch run.

Watch-Chains

Pocket-watches are rarely sold with their necessary watch-chains. Normally, you’re going to have to buy them seperately. A pocket-watch must be worn with its chain. Not only does it look nicer, it’s also a security feature. The chain catches the watch and prevents it from becoming abstract art on the pavement, if it should fall out of your pocket. The annoying thing about watch-chains is that they can be even MORE expensive than the watches themselves!

Solid gold watch-chains cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars. The cheapest I’ve found is $400. On the other hand, you can get a nice gold-filled chain for a fraction of that price, and a nice, polished brass watch-chain for even less! My brass Albert watch-chain cost all of $20 and it looks great!

When buying a chain, you want to make sure that it’s got a decent length (at least 10-14 inches long), that it’s strong and that the swivel-clips work. The clip is, after all, what holds the watch to the chain, so examining its integrity is vital.

There are four main types of watch-chains around today: Albert, Double Albert, ring-clip and belt-clip.

The Albert and Double Albert (named for His Royal Highness, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria) are the most iconic of watch-chains. They feature a swivel T-bar at the end of the chain and were designed to be worn with jackets and waistcoats.

The ring-clip chain was designed to be worn with a pair of trousers. You put the watch into your watch-pocket and clipped the chain to your belt-loop.


A pocket-watch with a ring-clip chain

The belt-clip chain was also meant to be worn with trousers, where you put your watch into your watch-pocket and clipped the chain to your belt.

Wearing your Pocket-Watch

This is probably one of the most confusing things about pocket-watches in the 21st century. You’ve bought a nice, good-quality pocket watch. A 1902 Ball railroad watch with 21 jewels, eight adjustments and a pretty, gold-filled case and a nice, long watch-chain. Only…now…you don’t know what to do with it.

If you have absolutely no desire to actually wear your pocket watch, then another thing you can do with it is buy a pocket-watch stand. They’re cheap and easy to get online and you can put your watch (with the chain) onto your stand and use it as a clock on your desk or your dressing-table! That way, you can use it without using it…if that makes sense.

However, if you actually bought your watch and chain to wear it, but don’t know how…read on.

Now, a rather irrelevant piece of information is that I work as a volunteer in a charity shop. While helping out a customer there last week, she commented on my watch-chain and wondered what was on the end of it. I showed her, and this sparked a conversation between her and her friends about the pocket-watches that their fathers and grandfathers used to wear. She then asked me if you HAD to have a waistcoat (which is what I was wearing at the time) to wear a pocket watch?

The answer is ‘no’. I’ve been wearing a pocket-watch for the past two years, but I only bought a waistcoat a few months ago. Sadly, there is a HUGE misconception that you MUST own a three-piece suit, or at least a waistcoat, to wear a pocket-watch, and this tends to put people off. Maybe they don’t have a suit or a waistcoat, maybe they don’t want to wear it, but they feel that they have to. This simply isn’t true. Granted, the three-piece suit isn’t as prevelant today as it was sixty or seventy years ago, but you can still wear a pocket watch with modern dress. You just have to be creative.

Pocket-watches can be worn in a variety of ways; wearing one with a waistcoat is simply the most common one. There are a few ways you can wear a pocket watch, and here they are:

Suit-jacket breast-pocket.

Most suit-jackets or suit-coats will have a buttonhole in the left lapel. That’s not just there to look weird or to put a flower into…it’s also where you put your watch-chain! Inserting the T-bar of an Albert-chain into the buttonhole from the front will keep the T-bar out of sight and keep the chain securely in-place. Your watch and the rest of your chain sits snugly in the jacket’s breast-pocket. You can, if you like, hang the rest of your chain out of your pocket, if you don’t want it cluttering up your breast-pocket and making it look too bulky.

Trousers watch-pocket.

Not many people are aware of this, but often when you buy trousers or jeans, they come with enigmatic little pockets, usually on the right side, near the hip. Useless for keys, mobile-phones, coins and condoms, these were actually added to jeans to serve as…you guessed it…watch-pockets!

Due to the “designer” fad of jeans at the moment, not all fifth-pockets will accomadate a pocket-watch, but most of the traditionally-styled jeans should present no problem at all. Just slip your pocket-watch into your trousers or jeans watch-pocket and then clip your ring-clip chain to the nearest convenient belt-loop, or slide your belt-clip chain over your belt. This latter chain is best clipped onto the belt from behind the belt, instead of in front, so that the clip doesn’t snap off the belt accidently when you pull on it. You may notice that the watch will sit in the pocket rather snugly – this is because you’re not meant to shove your fingers in there. Instead, pull on the watch-chain to slide the watch out instead.

Waistcoat pocket.

Last but not least, the classic way: Wearing a pocket-watch with a waistcoat. To do this, you’ll need an Albert or Double-Albert chain. A pocket-watch can be worn with a double or single-breasted waistcoat and in any one of the two (or four) pockets. It’s really a matter of personal choice. Which-ever pocket is selected, the chain should be inserted into a buttonhole so that the top of the chain is in line with the top of the watch-pocket.

Caring for your Pocket Watch

Now that you have your pocket-watch, how do you look after it?

Winding

A pocket-watch should be wound once each day, either when you wake up, or when you go to sleep. Winding it more than once a day is not damaging to the watch, but it serves absolutely no purpose. A functional pocket-watch should be wound at least twelve turns. If it doesn’t, then it needs to be checked by a watchmaker. A pocket-watsh should be able to be wound right up and let to to run. If it’s wound up tight and it doesn’t run, it needs to be serviced. ‘Overwinding’ is a misnomer. It doesn’t mean that the watch has been wound too tightly and won’t run, it means that it’s been wound fully, but that the watch is too dirty internally, to run properly. This can be fixed with a routine servicing.

Storing your Watch

When you’re not wearing your watch, you should keep it in a clean, dry, dust-free place. In a jewellery-box, on a watch-stand or on a table where it won’t get bumped. Laying your watch on its back on your bedside table when you’re not using it (such as before going to bed) is perfectly fine.


My two pocket-watches sitting and hanging from their watch-stands on my desk, in company with my other great passion…my fountain pens!

Caring for your Watch

The caseback of the watch should be opened as rarely as possible, to prevent dust from getting inside the movement. Never try any of your own mechanics on your watch unless you’re actually studying watchmaking. The only exception to this is moving the regulator to get the watch to keep better time.

Keep your watch away from water, heights and dust. Antique and vintage pocket-watches are not waterproof or shockproof and both water and a significant-enough jolt are enough to send them back to the watchmaker. Keep the watch dust-free by keeping the caseback closed at all times unless you really need to open it.

Servicing your Watch

In the old days, a pocket-watch had to be serviced every two years. These days, you should have it serviced every five years (if you use it regularly) or every ten years (if you don’t). It’s important to find a watchmaker who will do a good job servicing your watch. If he charges less than $100 for a servicing…find another guy. If he promises to have the watch back to you quicker than two weeks…find another guy. If this person’s idea of a watchmaker is someone who changes batteries, does engraving and puts on watch-straps…find another guy.

Pocket-watches are delicate, fine machines that only an expert watchmaker should service. Servicing will cost at least $100-$200 (sometimes more, if the watch is exceptionally fine or exceptionally terrible!) and should take about 2-4 weeks. There’s over a hundred tiny little components inside a pocket-watch and they all have to be checked for integrity and quality, so servicing a pocket-watch takes time. Don’t expect it to be done in a hurry.

 
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Bridging the Thames: The History of the Tower Bridge

The United Kingdom has a lot of famous things. Queen Lizzie, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Top Gear, Mock the Week…famous authors, terrible weather, national cuisine of a questionable quality, colourful slang and one of the most powerful naval forces in the world.

And then there’s this thing:

Tower Bridge, which crosses the River Thames in London, the British capital, is one of the most famous structures in the world. It’s recognised and admired all over the globe as a national, aesthetic and engineering masterpiece of the Victorian age. Despite what we might think, Tower Bridge is nowhere near as old as some of us would like to think. In fact, Tower Bridge opened on the 30th of June, 1894. Little more than a hundred years ago. Today, we could hardly imagine London without it.

Before the Bridge

London has been around for centuries, ever since a town called “Londinium” was founded by the Romans in 47AD. For a considerable time, there were very few crossings of the River Thames and for centuries, London Bridge (originally built by the Romans) was the only bridge crossing the Thames within the boundaries of London.

Fast forward a few centuries, and you’ll find more and more bridges added to London to cross the river it’s built around. By the time the Tower Bridge was dreamt up in the 1890s, the River Thames had…

Regent Bridge (Vauxhall Bridge) (1816)
Westminster Bridge (1862)
Waterloo Bridge (1817)
London Bridge (1831)

Increasing commercial and industrial development in the East End of London during the second half of the 19th century (brought on by the Industrial Revolution) meant that another bridge needed to be built across the Thames to ease the congestion on London Bridge and the nearby Tower Subway tunnel (which, despite the name, was really a pedestrian tunnel and wasn’t actually used by trains).

By the 1870s, congestion on London Bridge was chronic and a committee was set up in 1876 to decide on a new crossing-point on the River Thames, down-river from London Bridge. A competition was held, inviting engineers and designers to send in their ideas for a new bridge to cross the Thames. One of the big challenges in designing the new bridge, however, was the fact that in building this bridge, it would be blocking river-access to the Port of London. Any bridge built down-river from London Bridge would have to be high enough to allow ships and boats to pass safely beneath it, not an easy thing to accomplish when the Thames is a tidal river with tides that rise and fall several feet at a time.


London Bridge, Ca. 1910. Although this painting was completed sixteen years after Tower Bridge was opened, it shows quite clearly how congested London Bridge had become, and the absolute necessity for a new river-crossing

Over fifty designs were sent to the bridge committee for consideration, but a potential winner was not decided upon until, in October of 1884, two men, Horace Jones and John W. Barry, came up with their idea for a bascule-suspension bridge. The Committee were quick to see the advantages of Jones and Barry’s design and approved it for construction.

The suspension-bridge is able to span great distances, such as the River Thames, easily. The double-bascule segment of the bridge in the middle meant that ships could easily pass through the structure to head upriver. The ‘bascules’ were the two leaves of the central drawbridge, which could be raised (to let ships pass through the bridge) and lowered (to allow vehicular and foot-traffic to cross the river) by mechanical means.

Building the Bridge

Construction of Tower Bridge started in 1886. For the number-crunchers reading this, here’s a few statistics:

Number of Contractors: 5.
Number of Construction-Workers: 432.
Construction-time: 8 Years.
Amount of Concrete to make bridge piers: 70,000 tons.
Amount of Steel for the bridge’s framework: 11,000 tons.
Cost of Construction: 1,184,000 pounds sterling (approximately 100,000,000 pounds sterling today).


Tower Bridge under construction

As the bridge was constructed, tons of granite and Portland Stone was brought in to build the bridge’s distinctive towers. At the top of the bridge, linking the two towers, is a pair of walkways. These were included in the bridge’s design so that pedestrians could continue to cross the bridge even when the drawbridges were opened and crossing the bridge via its main span was impossible. The walkways were closed soon after, though, when they became a favourite haunt of prostitutes and thieves.

The bridge was completed in 1894 and was originally painted chocolate brown. It’s current red, white and blue colour-scheme was added in 1977 in commemoration of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee (which marks the 25th year of the Queen’s reign).

Opening the Bridge

The bridge was formally opened on the 30th of June, 1894, by His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales (King Edward VII later in life).


A painting capturing the atmosphere of the formal opening of Tower Bridge in 1894. Note all the ships dressed with their signal-flags for the occasion

Tower Bridge became popular in a hurry. Not just because it looked really neat, but also because it was toll-free (a surefire hit with any bridge-crosser). The nearby Tower Subway tunnel charged a toll for its use while the bridge did not. Because of this, intelligent Victorians soon abandoned the Tower Subway tunnel and started crossing the bridge regularly instead. The bridge was so popular that by 1898, the Tower Subway tunnel closed due to a lack of revenue!

If you’re wondering why the two structures are called ‘Tower Subway’ and ‘Tower Bridge’, it might do well to examine a map of London. The tunnel and the bridge which put the tunnel out of business were named ‘Tower’ due to their close proximity to the Tower of London, the ancient fortress and prison on the north bank of the River Thames.

Raising and Lowering the Bridge

One of the most famous things about Tower Bridge is not its shape or its size or the fact that it was named after some spooky old castle next door…it’s the fact that it moves! The raising and lowering the drawbridges that make up Tower Bridge’s central span, is the most recognisable feature of this marvel of engineering. So how is it done?

From its opening in 1894 until 1975!…Tower Bridge was opened using steam-powered hydraulic engines. There were two engines, one to raise each side of the bridge. At the press of a button, the two halves of the bridge could be raised up to their full angle of 86 degrees each. This whole process took about one minute. Speed was important on the River Thames, when ships needed quick access to the London Docks further up-river.

During the Second World War, a third steam-engine was made. Its purpose was to act as a standby in case Tower Bridge was hit by a German bomb during the Blitz and one of the operational engines was put out of commission by the damage. Fortunately, this never happened and the third engine (along with the other two original steam engines) is now a museum-piece.

In 1976, the bridge’s original steam-powered engines were removed and replaced with more modern electrical ones. They still raise and lower the bridge using hydraulic power, but don’t require as much maintenance.

 
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Brother Can You Spare A Dime? The Impact of the Great Depression

Despite the fact that I’ve got a whole category dedicated to this one, major event in history, this is the first time I’ve actually written about the Depression specifically for my blog, probably because the Depression was just such a big thing and because it lasted so damn long! A whole decade!

In recent months, talk of depression has been on the rise, and since the original Great Depression is still within living memory (just!) and since this is just such a massive and pivotal moment in history, I think it’s time to write about it.

They Used to Tell Me they were Building a Dream…

The 1920s have not been given the name the “Roaring Twenties” for nothing. The end of the Great War in 1918 meant that people were free once again to live their lives as they chose. And in the 20s…people chose to party! The economic caffeine-shot of the First World War meant that technology was rapidly advancing, evolving and developing, giving folks new ways to have fun. Now, people found time and money to explore new things such as the motor-car, radio, jazz-music, the cinema, the talkies, the theatre and the roadtrip. Jobs created by new industries in music, entertainment, film, the automotive industry and radio, meant that money was plentiful and with money, people wanted to buy things. Prosperity and fun were the watchwords for the 1920s.

…And so I followed the Mob…

For nine years, the world enjoyed dizzying and euphoric prosperity, glad to leave the troubles of the Great War, which had killed millions, far behind. For nine years, people rode the thrilling and amazing rollercoaster that was the 1920s. The new jobs and new industries meant there was plenty of money, work and prosperity to go around. In the USA, Prohibition brought even more spice into the mix, with gangsters, crime-waves, illegal liquor and underground bars and nightclubs called ‘speakeasies’. However, all this glitz and glamour would not last and sooner or later it had to collapse.

Perched on the Precipice

With so much money changing hands and spinning around the world in the 1920s, people wanted to get their hands on as much mazoomah as they could. To do this, thousands of folks, from big city businessmen to Mr. Fenwick who ran the local general store, wanted to get in on the stock-market to buy shares, sell shares and make money on them. Share-values had been rising and falling steadily throughout 1929 and people became more and more excited, trying to make larger, grander and more impressive profits.

In essence, what caused the Crash of 1929 was the simple rule of “Supply and Demand”. The fewer products there are, the higher the prices are, the more products there are, the lower the prices are. Similarly, the fewer products there are, the higher their values will be; correspondingly, these values would drop if there was a sudden abundance.

With so many shares being bought in 1929, share-prices and values skyrocketed! With values up so high, people started selling shares to make as much money as they could. The only problem was…they were selling too many…too fast. With the market flooded, share-values dropped and soon, Wall Street was in freefall as people frantically tried to sell off their now worthless shares, while others tried to buy back more, to raise their value again!


Wall Street, Manhattan. End of October, 1929. The large building on the right is the New York Stock Exchange

Despite the best efforts of big investors and bankers, however, the Wall Street Crash was now spiralling out of control, whizzing downwards in an unstoppable freefall from its lofty perch, just a few months before. October 29, 1929, the date of the Wall Street Crash, led to the onset of the Great Depression.

The Start of Something Great

The Great Depression wasn’t called “Great” for nothing. Wall Street, as the center of the financial world, affected finances all over the globe. If America sneezed, the rest of the world caught a cold, as they say. And right now, the world was in hospital with a bad case of pneumonia. With the Crash and the loss of literally billions of dollars (a unit of measurement probably thought unimaginable in 1929!), the effects started being felt all around the world, within weeks, months and in rare cases, a couple of years.

Because the United States was rapidly losing money, the rest of the world started losing money, too. International deals broke down due to a lack of payment. International investments fell through and soon, the catastrophe was worldwide as international trade starting sliding further and further down towards calamity. But what was it like on a more local level? How could a disaster of this scale in the worlds of big business and finance destroy everything beneath it?

With the loss of shares, companies went bust. Lots of them. With the closure of their places of business, employees were out of work. With the slowing production of consumer-goods, shops started getting fewer and fewer products. Unable to sell their goods to a population which had no money, shopkeepers were forced to lower prices, which caused their shop-assistants to have to take pay-cuts, which meant they couldn’t buy as many goods as they could before, which caused further price-reductions, which…You get the idea. Granted, this is a rather simple example of how things panned out, but it was what happened, nonetheless.

Brother Can You Spare A Dime?

Unemployment began to spread rapidly once the Depression properly took hold. Especially hard-hit countries included the United States (unemployment 25%), Australia (30%), the United Kingdom (20%), Canada (27%) and Germany (30%). Tariffs on imported goods were meant to encourage people to purchase goods made by their own, national companies and businesses, but this failed to work when competing countries started increasing tariffs as well, grinding international trade to a halt.


When the Depression hit, many people had to sell their most prized posessions to stay afloat. Here, bankrupt investor Walter Thornton is trying to sell his luxury roadster automobile in Manhattan after losing all his money in the Wall Street Crash

Industries that were affected included the big money-spinners like shipbuilding (the famous White Star Line and the competing Cunard Line only survived bankruptcy due to a merger), the entertainment industry (several piano-manufacturers went out of business when people could no-longer afford to buy such expensive instruments) and construction. The vast amounts of money required for public works simply wasn’t there, causing thousands of people in the construction-industry to lose their jobs.

…When there was Earth to Plough…

A big contributing factor to the severity of the Depression in the United States was the coming of the “Dust Bowl” in the early 1930s. Years of overgrazing and poor farming techniques in the rural areas of states such as Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, had stripped the land of its vital topsoil and vegetation, which was crucial to keeping the fragile terrain in balance. Severe drought in during the first half of the 30s caused much of what was once fertile farming-land, to dry up and turn to dust, quite literally. This left thousands of farmers and their families homeless and without a source of income. Many of them packed up their worldly goods into their cars or trucks and drove West, towards California to find jobs, which put even more strain on the already fragile job-market, which could barely keep Californians employed, let alone all the Texans and ‘Okies’.


A photograph taken during the Dust Bowl. The wind whipped up huge sandbanks that blocked doorways and could trap people inside their houses

But the ‘Dust Bowl’ could not possibly be so bad as to actually FORCE people to leave their farms and homes…could it?

Yes, it could. The Dust Bowl was not just a mere inconvenience. It was a life-threatening environmental disaster. With no grass or trees to hold down the dried out topsoil, strong breezes whipped up the sand and created highly damaging sandstorms, which could make it impossible to see what you were doing or where you were going. Even hiding inside your house wasn’t any good, because the sand and the wind would be forced in through any cracks or crevices in the woodwork, the window-frames or the doorframes. Sand could get into your eyes, ears, nose, mouth…and worst of all, down your throat and into your lungs!

…When there were guns to Bear Arms…

As if the Great Depression couldn’t get any worse, with farming folk charging into the cities, and with cities having no jobs for their own people, let alone farmers, another group of people were about to take up the fight to try and earn some money, or at least get any money at all! This group of people was known as the Bonus Army.

The Bonus Army received its name because it was made up of former U.S. Army soldiers, who had served in the First World War (then called the Great War). It was called the ‘BONUS’ Army because these war-veterans wanted their bonuses! Or to be precise, they wanted their army-pensions and government entitlements. Unfortunately, with the U.S.A. rapidly losing money, the government was in no position to start giving handouts to retired soldiers. Frustrated by this lack of action, many members of the ‘Bonus Army’ set up shanty-towns and camps in the U.S. capital of Washington D.C. They named their camps “Hoovervilles”, a derisive term aimed at then-president Herbert Hoover, who never accepted that the Depression was as bad as people said it was.

The Bonus Army was a real pain in the neck and by mid-1932, the government was getting sick and tired of it. But the thing was, the Army wasn’t a bunch of grumpy old men banging walking-sticks on the doors of the U.S. Capitol…it was a real army made up of real soldiers! At its peak, it had some 43,000 members, made up of war-veterans and their famlies, who demanded cash-payments for service rendered during the War. Eventually, everything erupted when then Attorney-General William D. Mitchell ordered the Washington D.C. police-department, together with soldiers from the United States Army, to evacuate (a nice little euphamism for ‘force out’) the Bonus Army from the nation’s capital.

Initially, the army-veterans thought that the U.S. Army was there to help them, but when their commanding officers (General Douglas MacArthur and then-Major George S. Patton) ordered the troops to charge the camps, anarchy ensued! Fires were lit, shots were fired and hundreds of people were injured in the confusion to follow.

When President Roosevelt came to office in 1933, he didn’t want to pay the army-bonuses either. But he did try to find work for the unemployed war-veterans, and both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged the former soldiers to enlist in the various civil-works programs which were being created under the “New Deal” scheme, to get Americans back to work.

Once I Built a Railroad, I Made it Run…

During the Depression, people found work any way at all, that they could. If a man was lucky, he found a job. But it was usually just the one, small job, working part-time. Some people managed to scrape things together and make ends meet for their families by working two or three part-time jobs a week, to make up a regular wage. With everything on a knife-edge and with so little money going around, employers could not afford to hire any staff full-time. People busked on the streets, playing music, doing magic-tricks or other forms of street-performance to try and scrape a few pennies together. Others went hunting to try and shoot or trap animals to feed their families. And this was provided that their families had places to live: A lot of landlords evicted entire families into the streets after they were unable to pay their rents.

But for those who could not hold onto their jobs, for those who couldn’t find jobs (even part-time ones on half-wages), for those who had no homes, the only alternative to starving to death or begging, was to become a hobo.

A hobo is a wandering worker, going from town to town, looking for employment. It’s thought to come from the term ‘Hoe-Boy’, a generic farm-worker who tilled the land with a hoe. For many hobos, travelling great distances to find work was the only way to survive. Many of them did not have cars (with no money for petrol, could you blame them?) and probably didn’t have bicycles as well (and if they did, probably couldn’t afford tyres). Thus, to travel around the vast stretches of the United States, many of them took to riding the rails.


Hobos sneaking into a boxcar of a stopped railroad locomotive

Riding the rails was a dangerous thing to do. It involved hobos climbing into box-cars attached to railroad locomotives as they travelled across the countryside, since hobos couldn’t afford tickets to ride legally. This practice of jumping into box-cars was dangerous for several reasons. The most obvious one is the speed of the train. Although steam-powered locomotives don’t go anywhere near as fast as what trains do today, the big ones could still top 90 miles an hour going full steam ahead on full-throttle. Managing to swing yourself into an open box-car when it’s thundering along at 70 or 80 miles an hour was not easy, and several hobos were killed falling from box-cars and being thrown under the wheels of the train, to be crushed to death.

Another less-obvious danger was that of being arrested. Many railroad-yards and stations employed railway police whose job it was to ensure safety and to make sure that there were no illegal activities going on (such as hobos trying to ride a train without a ticket!). Getting arrested was a big inhibitor to finding work, so hobos had to be doubly-careful not to be caught by a railroad policeman or ‘bull’ as they were commonly called.

Once I Built a Tower Up to the Sun…

One of the biggest consequences of the Great Depression was the ending of public works projects. Without money, construction companies ground to a halt and after their current building-project was finished, many hundreds of construction-workers found themselves out of a job. Schemes such as the construction of the Boulder Dam (which was its original name, today known as the Hoover Dam) were designed to get people back to work. It didn’t necessarily matter what kind of work, so long as people were working and earning money. Other famous buildings and structures constructed during the Depression included the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia, the Golden Gate Bridge in California, USA, and the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings in Manhattan, New York City. In Germany, the construction of the famous autobahn highways gave many people much-needed jobs, which had the unfortunate backlash of making the Nazi Party increasingly popular in pre-war Germany. Similar road-building projects in the United States helped to put more people back at work.

Why Should I Be Standing in Line?


One of the best-known photographs of a Depression-Era breadline

In the days before government handouts and social security, people relied heavily on their neighbours for support if they found themselves unemployed. With the Depression and so many thousands of people out of work, feeding the homeless and unemployed became a real challenge. Breadlines and soup-kitchens opened up in major cities, offering cheap or free food for the poor, homeless and unemployed. They were run by charitable individuals, religious groups and in one instance…even members of the criminal classes! To escape the nosy faces of the boys in blue, infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone opened up soup-kitchens and breadlines to feed the unemployed to look good in the public eye, and draw away attention from his criminal activities.

Surviving the Depression was not easy. People faced constant fears and hardships, not knowing what would happen to them the next day. On a domestic level, housewives learnt how to be thrifty and cheap. Children learnt how to do without, and husbands and fathers learnt how to make their limited dollars stretch further. People who were able to hold onto their houses and jobs ate incredibly simple and cheap food, surviving on eggs, bread, flour, potatoes and vegetables. Foodstuffs such as fish and meat were hard to come by and were significantly more expensive (unless you managed to hunt or fish for your meat, that is).

Nothing was wasted in the Depression. Clothing was recycled over and over and over again, until it literally fell to pieces. Dress-shirts or business-shirts which were too old, worn out or dirty, became summer short-sleeeved shirts by chopping off the sleeves and sewing new hems and cuffs. Worn out summer short-sleeved shirts became handkerchieves by cutting up the fabric into squares. Worn out trousers became shorts. Any clothes worn out beyond use would be picked apart for its buttons and thread, and then probably scrunched up and used as fuel for the stove or fireplace. Jars and bottles were saved up to be reused for storing food, drink or anything else that might need a container to hold it. When the family car ran out of petrol or broke down and couldn’t be fixed for a long time, it was sometimes “put up on blocks”. This meant to put bricks or concrete blocks under the car’s axles to lift it off the ground, the purpose of this being to prevent damage to the tires and the suspension.

In the Depression, one of the main ways to forget one’s troubles was to go to the cinema. Cinema tickets were cheap and they allowed ordinary people to enjoy a couple of hours’ entertainment in a comfortable movie-theatre…even if they weren’t able to afford the popcorn, chocolates and coca-cola that would usually have made the experience complete. The motion-picture industry was one of the few big, expensive industries that managed to survive in the Depression because people bought millions of film-tickets to take their minds off their troubles. The famous adventure film “King Kong” was single-handedly responsible for saving film-studio RKO from imminent bankruptcy in 1933.

We’re In the Money!

The Depression was not universal, though, and some people and countries were very minimally affected by it. In industrialised western countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and other places, if you managed to hold onto your wealth and your job, the Depression became an easy time for you. With such cheap prices everywhere, people who weren’t ruined by the Wall Street Crash or its after-effects, were now able to afford things that they weren’t previously able, such as new clothes, automobiles and consumer goods. During the Depression, luxury car-makers such as Duesenberg and Pierce-Arrow, survived long enough (Duesenberg was defunct in 1937, Pierce-Arrow in 1938) to give the wealthy elite of the United States (who were able to hold onto their millions) some truly stunning vintage luxury automobiles and limosuines.

The Soviet Union was one of the few countries not affected in some way by the Great Depression. Due to the Union’s rejection of capitalism, the ripple-effect of the Wall Street Crash, which hit every other capitalist state in the world, was largely unfelt in the USSR, and as a result, emerged from the Depression largely unscathed.

Old Man Depression, you are through…

The coming of the Second World War in 1939 was what ended the Depression, be it a rather unfortunate catalyst for getting the world out of a jam. The necessity for mechanisation, mobilisation and workers to run factories and machines quickly put people back to work all over the world. The recovery was slow, however. Although the War did springboard many countries out of the Depression, it took several years for the global economy to recover from the battering it had received from the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

— — — —

The subheadings used in this article come from the lyrics of two famous Depression-era songs:

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (1931).
“We’re In the Money” (1933).

 
by

Albert Fish: The Original Bogeyman

Albert Fish,
Albert Fish,
Children were,
His favourite dish!

Not many people would remember that rhyme today. And probably even fewer people would remember the fellow named Albert Fish…which is probably just as well, considering who he was.

Growing up, all children are invariably taught never to talk to strangers, never to wander off, never to take candy from people they don’t know and never to follow someone they don’t know to somewhere they don’t know, or to get into a car with a driver they’ve never met.

Well. Albert Fish was living proof (if ever any was needed), that such rules aren’t just around to scare kids out of their wits at night, and if you’ve any naughty kids who aren’t listening to their parents about keeping away from strangers…the story of Mr. Fish might bear repeating.

The Man Behind the Monster

Hamilton Howard Fish was born in 1870, the son of Randall Fish, who was old enough to be his grandfather (at age 75!). Considering that Hamilton Howard Fish’s first and second names were the same as a pair of famous watch-companies (The Hamilton Watch. Co. and the Howard Watch. Co), it’s probably not surprising that soon after his birth, he changed his name to Albert. Okay seriously, he wasn’t named after a pair of watch-manufacturies (The Hamilton Watch. Co. didn’t exist when Fish was born). He was actually named after Hamilton Fish, a distant relation who was the 16th governor of the State of New York.

Albert Fish’s life was miserable at the best of times. His family had a history of mental illness; a branch of medical science generally misunderstood in the 19th century. How severe was his family’s mental instability? Well…one of his uncles was a maniac, one of his brothers was locked in a lunatic asylum, another brother of his died from the condition commonly known as “Water on the Brain”, his mother was prone to hallucinations and a sister of his was also diagnosed with an undisclosed “mental affliction”.

All in all…not a happy family.

Young Albert was a homosexual masochist (a person who derives pleasure from pain); something that he discovered about himself from a very young age. When in school, he discovered that he enjoyed being caned. He had affairs with other boys and even got a job at a local bathhouse, just so that he could see other boys undress!…and he wasn’t even twenty yet!

Fish’s sexual experimentations grew more and more extreme as the years continued. By his early twenties, he became a prostitute, a homosexual rapist and had developed a highly disturbing fascination with castration. Amazingly, despite all this, he did actually get married and produced six children of his own!

Not surprisingly, Fish’s marriage did not last, and his wife soon left him. His mental state went spiralling out of control as he continued raping and molesting boys from as young as five years old and upwards. He developed a fascination with self-harm (the less said about that, the better) and began to suffer from hallucinations, claiming that God told him to do things to children. Doctors diagnosed Fish with religious mania.

The Attacks Begin

By the 1920s, by which time Fish had already served two jail-terms for molestation, he had well and truly started the actions for which he became infamous: Abucting, torturing and killing children. He often selected younger children, African-American children or those with mental retardation. His most famous kidnap-and-murder victim was Grace Budd.

Grace Budd lived with her parents, her sister and older brothers. She was just ten years old.

It all started one day in 1928. Edward Budd, one of Grace’s brothers, put an advertisement in the local newspaper (the now defunct ‘New York World’). He said that he was an 18-year-old lad looking for a job on a farm somewhere in the country. Interested employers should come to the Budd home to see if Edward was suitable for work on their properties.

If young Edward knew who was about to show up on his father’s front doorstep, he probably would’ve burnt down the building where the New York World was printed! On the 28th of May, 1928, Albert Fish came calling. Only, he wasn’t Albert Fish, the infamous rapist and sexual deviant…he was Frank Howard, a farmer living in New York state. Edward Budd wasn’t home, but Fish met young Grace and became very interested in her.

The next time Fish called, he met Edward and agreed to hire him. He also met Mr. Albert Budd I, Edward and Grace’s father. Fish asked if he could take Grace to his sister’s house. There was a birthday party there that the girl might like to attend. Once the party was over, Fish could return Grace back home. Mr. and Mrs. Budd thought this was a wonderful idea, and agreed to let Fish take their baby girl to his sister’s ‘birthday party’.

It was a trap, of course. There was no birthday party. And Mr. and Mrs. Budd would never see Grace again.

Once the Budds realised that Grace had been abducted, they contacted the police, but despite frantic efforts, the child was not found. Nothing more was heard until one day in 1934, a full six years later. On that day, Mrs. Budd received a letter which was unsigned. Not being able to read due to her illiteracy, she left the letter alone, until one of her sons returned home to read it for her. The text of the letter is written below (with original spelling retained). It is not for faint of heart…

    Dear Mrs. Budd.

    In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong, China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1–3 per pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak—chops—or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girl’s behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid [sic] there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys, one 7 and one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them – tortured them – to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 year old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except the head—bones and guts. He was roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried and stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E 100 St. near—right side. He told me so often how good human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3, 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick – bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho [sic] I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.

The Budd Family was horrified and disgusted at the letter and demanded police-action. By examining the envelope which carried the letter, and its postmarks, the police were eventually able to track down Albert Fish to an address at 200, East 52nd Street, Manhattan. Officers and detectives waited for Fish in his bedroom until he arrived home. William F. King, the arresting officer, confronted Fish with the evidence and the accusation of murder. Fish agreed to be taken in for questioning, however at the last minute, he tried to slash King with a straight-razor! King successfully disarmed Fish and arrested him, taking him off to be questioned.

Under questioning, the police soon discovered the true barbarity that bubbled away inside Fish’s head. He had not actually intended to kidnap Grace, but had actually wanted to kidnap Edward (and a friend of his), take them to the woods, strip them naked, tie them up, castrate them and leave them to bleed to death.


Albert Fish, shortly before his death

After the initial questioning was over, Edward Budd and his father Albert, were driven to the police-station by investigators, to positively identify Fish as the man who had kidnapped their sister and daughter. When Edward spotted Mr. Fish, he threw himself on the old man, screaming out: “You old bastard! Dirty son of a bitch!” and had to be physically restrained by police!

Trial and Execution

For the kidnapping, murder and cannibalisation of Grace Budd (amongst others), Albert Fish was sentenced to death. The court-case was one of the most amazing ever seen, and it took some pretty extraordinary pieces of evidence from the prosecution (such as an x-ray photograph of Fish’s pelvis, with nearly thirty nails permanently embedded in it!) to show the court that Fish really was the sick and twisted manical lunatic who would, and did, kidnap, rape, butcher and eat children and teenagers.

The trial of Albert Fish lasted all of ten days. On the last day, the jury, who had seen such morbid pieces of evidence such as x-rays, photographs and even Grace Budd’s skull and who had heard testimonies from both the Fish and Budd families took less than an hour to find Fish guilty of murder. The judge promptly sentenced Fish to death. Obviously, Fish was not pleased about this…but he livened up a bit when he discovered he was going to be electrocuted in the electric-chair, and thanked the judge for the sentence and opportunity.

In 1935, Fish was sent up the river to the state penitentiary, Sing Sing Prison, New York where, on the 16th of January, 1936, Albert Fish was executed by electric-chair. He was sixty-five years old.