On April 2, 1877, at London’s Royal Aquarium, a fourteen-year-old girl with the stage name Zazel became the first female to perform the human-cannonball trick in public. She later worked for P. T. Barnum, who, in response to the “Dangerous Performances Bill” under consideration by British Parliament, wrote defensively to the New York Times in 1880 that he paid Zazel $250 a day—“I should never have invested this large sum in any feature, however attractive, had I not known it was placed beyond the chance of accident.”
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A special committee of the U.S. House of Representatives asked Lewis W. Leeds, a ventilation engineer and prominent critic of the popular belief that night air is inherently harmful to humans, to assess air quality inside the Capitol in 1868. The resulting report concluded that the House Chamber “is really the foulest place in the whole building,” with vents “so choked up with tobacco spittal and sweepings of the floor as to render the air rising from them very disagreeable.”
In his catalogue of the world’s people in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder mentioned Scythians who feed on human flesh, Africans who “are frequently seen to all appearance and then vanish in an instant,” the Arimaspi who have only one eye, the Adrogyni who possess male and female parts, and the Monocoli who are born with “only one leg, but are able to leap with surprising agility.”
The medieval Occitan troubadour known as the Monk of Montaudon was a master of the enueg, “song of annoyance.” “I can’t stand a long wait,” he complains in one composition, written around 1200, “Or a priest who lies and perjures himself / Or an old whore who is past it, / And—by Saint Delmas—I don’t like / A base man who enjoys too much comfort.” The song goes on in this fashion for nine more verses.
According to film director Joe Swanberg, a significant number of people believe that an obscure 1985 film about mind control was not in fact real, and that they had dreamed the particulars of the Quebecois film. “The Peanut Butter Solution,” wrote Swanberg, “successfully convinced young viewers that they dreamed it rather than watched it.”
The opening of a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2000 inspired fears that high-speed collisions might launch a chain reaction that could turn the earth into a hyperdense sphere about one hundred meters across. A risk calculation determined this to be unlikely; if the collider were to run for ten years, the chance was no greater than 1 in 50 million. “The word unlikely, however many times it is repeated,” wrote concerned scientists, “just isn’t enough to assuage our fears of this total disaster.”
While minister to France in 1778, Benjamin Franklin met Voltaire at the Academy of the Sciences. On hand was John Adams, who wrote that “neither of our philosophers seemed to divine what was wished or expected” of them by the crowd. Eventually, the two embraced and kissed each other on the cheek, an act that Nicolas de Condorcet said provoked such enthusiastic approval that “it was said to be Solon who embraced Sophocles.”
“By its policy,” wrote Vitruvius between 30 bc and 15 bc, the Roman Empire “curbs the courage of the northern barbarians; by its strength, the imaginative south. Thus the divine mind has allotted to the Roman state an excellent and temperate region in order to rule the world.”
Gone to Greece to fight for the country’s liberation from Ottoman rule, Lord Byron, who financed a fighting force, noted in his journal on September 28, 1823, that he “did not come to join a faction but a nation—and to deal with honest men” and was dismayed to find that “they are such d——d liars; there never was such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise.” Nevertheless, he died there on April 19, 1824, after contracting a fever.
“Kings embodied the whole period of their reign,” wrote Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power. “Their death, whether it came with the decline of their strength or, as later, coincided with their natural span of life, indicated a break in time. They were time. Between one king and the next, time stood still. There was a gap in it—an interregnum—which people sought to keep as short as possible.”
In Confucianism the five cardinal human relationships (wulun) are love between fathers and sons, righteousness between rulers and subjects, difference between husbands and wives, seniority between older and younger brothers, and trust between friends. Though at the bottom of this hierarchy, friendship is the only relationship not determined by ranking or kinship.
Banished from the kingdom of Kindah, the sixth-century prince and poet Imru al-Qays spent much of his life wandering the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula developing the literary genre wuquf ala al-atlal, or “stopping by the ruins.” “The courtyards and enclosures of the old home have become desolate,” he wrote in one verse, “the dung of the wild deer lies there thick as the seeds of pepper.”
Julius Caesar was criticized for his loosely belted toga. “Beware the badly belted boy,” said Sulla; Cicero sneered at Caesar’s habit of “trailing the fringe of the toga on the ground like an effeminate.” His political rival Cato the Younger made a point of wearing a short toga with no tunic underneath, as was considered masculine. But a decade later it was common for young Roman men to grow goatees, wear flowing togas, and use “loosely belted” as a catchphrase.
The earliest reliable account of human flight concerns a Benedictine monk named Eilmer, who in 1066 fastened wings to his hands and feet, jumped from a tower, and glided more than six hundred feet before falling from the sky and breaking both his legs. He blamed the failure on not having fitted himself with a tail.
“I’m ashamed of you, dodging that way. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance,” said Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick not long before a Confederate bullet struck his skull and killed him.