Shows / History Archives - Futility Closet
Episodes
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Zoology
Description of the Lyon in Edward Topsell’s 1607 bestiary The History of Four-Footed Beasts: Lyons bones have no marrow in them and are so hard that they…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Indisposed
FDR’s sense of humor was a winner with the press. One day, when he was laid up in bed with a cold, the Post pulled a classic typographical error. The…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Lineage
If the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Gunner
After the first Japanese air raid on Darwin in February 1942, Australian aircraftman Percy Westcott heard whimpering under the ruins of a mess hut and…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Also-Rans
Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Summary Advice
Full text of a memo from Winston Churchill to his War Cabinet, Aug. 9, 1940: To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Morton’s Fork
John Morton, Lord Chancellor under Henry VII, used a universal argument to demand gifts for the royal treasury: If a man lived well, he was obviously rich. If…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
A Blow to Tourism
Anglican priest Samuel Peters opposed American independence and was forced to flee the colonies as the revolution approached. From London he exacted a sort of…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Flight From Moscow
Russian chess master Alexander Petrov composed this puzzle to commemorate Napoleon’s defeat in 1812: Currently the emperor stands in Moscow, on h7. The…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Things to Come
H.G. Wells’ predictions for the “house of the future,” made in 1903: Chimneys will be obsolete, replaced by an electric heater in the center…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
The Blast Shadow
On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, a customer was sitting on the steps of Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, waiting for the branch to open, when an atomic bomb exploded…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Living Memory
An item for Independence Day: In 1937 the New York Times reported that the last living son of a Revolutionary War soldier was still in good health and living…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Summing Up
J. Horace Round’s 1895 book Feudal England contains a bitter invective against Oxford historian Edward Augustus Freeman — it’s hidden in the…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
A Salt Hygrometer
An “easy and curious method of foretelling rainy or fine weather,” from an 1860 book on conjuring, of all places: “[T]he best instrument of…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Perspective
This is the oldest surviving successful aerial photograph, shot in October 1860 by James Wallace Black from a hot-air balloon 1,200 feet over Boston. He called…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Groundwork
Like its predecessor, our present civilization may be no more than one of those crops farmers sow to improve their land by the fixation of nitrogen from the…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
One World
Al-longs, ong-fong der lar Part-ree-e-yer, Ler joor der glwore ait arr-ee-vay. — Lyrics to La Marseillaise rendered in phonetic French for British…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Mouthful
In 1641, a syndicate of Puritan clergymen published a pamphlet upholding the Presbyterian theory of the ministry. They published it under the memorable…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
Milestones
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. This beginning of time, according to our chronology, happened at the start of the evening…
- History Archives - Futility Closet
A Union Cipher
This baffling message illustrates a cipher adopted by the Union Army in 1862: TO GEORGE C. MAYNARD, Washington Regulars ordered of my to public out suspending…