Not so much an Old House Idiosyncrasy, than an idiosyncratic old house–The Trinity House is a house style from the colonial period that is unique to Philadelphia. These houses were invented to solve the problem of what to do with the center of a large squarish city block: fill it up with alleyways and tiny houses!
Here’s a great exploration of these homes from the always interesting website Atlas Obscura.
Euphonia was an amazing machine that was ahead of her time, and who seems to have been the first victim of the “Uncanny Valley” into which falls those creations that seem a bit too real, and creep people out. (Think of the movie “The Polar Express” in which the animation was a bit too real and which turned Chris van Allsburg’s magical Christmas book into a vaguely unsettling computer animated movie.)
Written mention of machines built to imitate human speech date as far back as the 13th century. Early devices, however, were deemed by the Church to be heretical and were often destroyed (in one instance, it is written, a talking device was smashed by St. Thomas Aquinas himself) or at least kept out of the public eye. It was not until the 18th century that the social climate was willing to permit the creation of mechanisms that imitated human elocution, safely protected under the umbrella of scientific pursuit.
In 1846, a German astronomer living in The United States named Joseph Faber unveiled his cutting-edge Euphonia at London’s Egyptian Hall, having accompanied P.T. Barnum across the Atlantic. Faber had spent the previous seventeen years perfecting this remarkable oddity, and had even dashed an earlier machine to bits out of frustration after American audiences failed to pay him much attention…
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I’ve always admired countries that put figures other than national political leaders on their currency. The UK £20 note featured the great scientist Michael Faraday for a while in the 1990s and in pre-Euro days, Galileo was on the Italian 2000 lire note. Apparently Jane Austen is scheduled to appear on a UK £10 note next year. The closest that the US has gotten is Benjamin Franklin on our $100 bill. While Dr. Franklin was a noted scientist of his day, he is featured on US currency because he was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
It was not always so, however. Continue reading
The Endurance icebound, photographed at night. Photographer: Frank Hurley, Source: Royal Geographical Society.
I’m the first to admit that I know little about sewing and almost as little about details of Victorian fashions, but I am keen on dispelling myths about the past, especially those that are endlessly repeated on the Interwebs or, even worse, by docents at historic homes and museums.
So, I found this article on myths of corsets both entertaining and informative. Now, as a proper Victorian man, I wouldn’t be expected to know anything about corsets for the most part. But as an improper Steampunk man, well, Steampunk women wear their corsets on the outside, so they’re not as hidden as they would otherwise be.
The article busts (see what I did there?) the myths of corsets and how they were supposedly worn using actual measurements of historic garments, and explaining how the illusion of the hourglass figure was created. So the next time you come across an expert telling you about 18-inch Victorian waists and removing ribs and pushing organs around and the origin of the fainting couch, you’ll know better.
I ran across this graphic which describes the origins (and typical toxicity) of many materials that have been used across the centuries as dyes and pigments. (What’s the difference between a dye and a pigment, you say? Simply put, a dye imparts color to a substrate (cloth, hair, etc.) while a pigment consists of particles which are mixed into a carrier and coated onto a substrate (think paint.))
In any case, it’s an interesting stroll through arsenic-laced wallpaper, heavy metals, and ground-up mummies, leading to purple mauveine, the first synthetic dye, whose discovery by Joseph Perkin in 1856 started organic chemical synthesis–which itself leads to the modern pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
I hadn’t heard of the web comic before–Veritable Hokum–but it describes itself as “a comic about mostly history, maybe science, and possibly some other stuff too.”–so right up my alley. I foresee binge reading of its archives in my near future.
The Front Porch of the Grand Victorian Bed and Breakfast in Ontario, Canada. This is exactly the type of front porch that we don’t have on our house. Photo Source: Tripadvisor.
I got back from a trip to Banff, Alberta, Canada a week or so ago, where it had snowed on us three times (yes! In August!). We arrived at San Francisco International and could feel the heat as soon as I stepped onto the jetway. Our very temperate week was ending in a tropical weekend.
Now, I grew up in Boston, so I’m used to hot and humid summers, and at least the summers in the Bay Area aren’t too sticky. But I live in a Victorian house, and staying even somewhat comfortable when the mercury pushes into the triple digits takes a bit of work.
A recent article describes “10 Ways Victorians Managed to Stay Cool Without A/C”. Reading through it though, I think it should more accurately be entitled “How Victorians Managed not to Die of Heat Exhaustion” as several of the methods don’t sound particularly effective. Continue reading
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