From September 4, 1910

WILL THE LEANING TOWER FALL AS DID THE CAMPANILE? Only the Excellence of Its Masonry, Which Makes the Walls One Mass, Has Kept the Structure From Collapsing Long Ago. (PDF)

St. Mark’s Campanile collapsed in 1902. It was rebuilt and would be reopened in 1912. In the meantime, it was natural to turn an eye towards Italy’s famous leaning tower in Pisa and consider its destiny.

In more recent history, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which leans because it was built on a soft foundation, had work done to make sure it doesn’t fall. The bells were remove to reduce weight, counterweights were added, and it was straightened very slightly. It is estimated that it will remain stable for 300 to 400 years.

It also may have some help from Pisa Pushers.

From September 4, 1910

X RAY MOVING PICTURE MACHINE SHOWS BRAIN AT WORK: Dr. Max Baff of Clark University Tells of the Remarkable Invention of a Scientist at Buenos Ayres Which May Pry Into the Soul’s Secrets. (PDF)

80 years before the invention of fMRI, which tracks blood flow in the brain to measure brain activity, this doctor describes a device for doing precisely that using x-rays. The headline suggests that it was already in use, but the article explains that it was still theoretical at the time.

He is now in correspondence with a scientist in Buenos Ayres who is constructing a device to be attached to the X ray apparatus by which the cells of the brain may be magnified at least 5,000 times. The new apparatus will consist of this magnifying instrument, of the Roentgen ray, more widely known as the X ray, and of the cinematograph. The X ray will disclose the action of the brain, the cinematograph will flash instantaneously each movement on a recording film, and the magnifying lens will give these such proportions as to make them visible to the naked eye…

“When you are thinking there is more blood in the cells of your brain than when your mind is inactive. All doctors know that the part of the body that is working is congested with blood.

“But not until the present has it been possible to study these cells at close range. Not till these new mechanical achievements has there been a way of determining what changes take place in the neurons.”

The doctor imagines that, once 500 or so test subjects have been properly studied, these tests could help determine whether or not a person is mentally fit or an imbecile. Perhaps science can even learn something about the soul. Okay, so maybe that use case is a little pseudoscience-y, but it’s still neat to see a germ of an idea that is actually used today.

From August 21, 1910

WILL VACCINE BE THE GREATEST CURE IN MEDICAL SCIENCE? Experimentation Proves That it Is Effective in Many Diseases Formerly Not Included Within its Scope. (PDF)

It’s exciting to read about scientists realizing that this great discovery is even more widely applicable than they realized. Vaccination for smallpox and a few other diseases were already around for 100 years or so before this article, but the next few decades would bring discovery of vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, and polio.

From August 14, 1910

TO LESSEN CRIME IN CHILDREN THROUGH MEDICAL CARE: The Work of Dr. M. G. Schlapp of Cornell University Medical School Among the Feeble Minded and Unfortunate Young in New York; Scientific Observations of the Environments and the Symptoms of Mentally Defective Children to be Collected and Recorded. (PDF)

The theory posed here by Dr. Schlapp of Cornell Med School is that kids who commit crimes are either normal kids who unfortunately live in abnormal environments, or they are themselves physically or mentally abnormal. In these cases, if we can cure the defect, the child should no longer have criminal tendencies. Easy enough.

In the furtherance of this effort to reclaim unfortunate boys and girls, every child that is arrested in the City of New York is taken to the Children’s Society, and, whether the offense be serious or trivial, an examination that is complete as medical science can make it is conducted, for the purpose of discovering whether or not the little one is mentally disturbed, and, if he is, whether that condition is due to defects in heredity or in environment.

After the examination of the child has indicated the nature of the moral or physical defect that has landed him in the clutches of the law, that child becomes a subject of observation on the part of the doctors and agents of the Children’s Society. if his predicament is the result of an inherited disease, the plan is to treat him medically until the last trace of that disease has been eradicated, and that accomplished, to judiciously train and look after him until he becomes his own master and is able to take his place in life as a useful member of society…

Here is an actual case that recently came to the attention of the Children’s Society.

A boy, 10 years old, was arrested by the police at a seaside resort. He had stolen about $20 from his father. He did not deny it, and when asked if he would do so again, answered, “Yes, if I get a chance.”

For several years the lad had been in the habit of running away from home. The laymen would call him an incorrigible. Apparently he was mentally normal, yet he had no feeling whatever for father, mother, or sister, or anybody else except himself. He was absolutely morally deficient. That boy needed, and he is getting, medical treatment and observation, and the chances are that he will be saved.

It’s unclear to me what kind of medical treatment would cure a boy of morally deficiency, and the article does not elaborate. But they’re going to have their work cut out for them, as one week earlier the Magazine noted that 11,000 kids were arrested last year alone.

From July 31, 1910

ICE WATER FROM SUNSHINE (PDF)

The article describes the Mexican olla, a clay vessel which uses evaporation of water on the surface to cool the vessel’s contents enough to keep perishables from spoiling. I’d never heard of it before, but it makes sense.

The next step, I suppose, it getting ice from fire. For that, see The Mosquito Coast.

From July 31, 1910

EXPERTS FORETELL THE WONDERFUL FEATS OF SURGERY: View of Drs. Charles Mayo, John H. Gibbon, Edward Martin, John B. Murphy, Roswell Park, and Others. (PDF)

The doctors in this article give rather sensible and reasoned responses when asked to predict the near future of surgery. They look forward to better anesthesia, simplification of procedures, etc. But one doctor makes several references to a man named Dr. Carrel, whose work in the area of transplantation he feels has a lot of potential. This got me curious.

So I looked up this Dr. Carrel. What a guy. Dr. Alexis Carrel was the first person to successfully suture blood vessels together. He developed methods of preventing infection during surgery. He worked with Charles Lindbergh to build a machine that circulates blood through organs outside the body. In 1912, he won the Nobel Prize for his work. Sounds good so far.

But there’s a strange and dark side of Dr. Carrel. He kept a chicken heart alive in his office for decades (it even outlived him). His laboratory walls were all black, and he insisted that his staff wear black clothes. He promoted the idea that people can be preserved in suspended animation for hundreds of years. And he was denied tenure at the University of Lyon medical college after he told colleagues that he witnessed a woman miraculously cured by divine intervention.

But the most appalling thing is that Dr. Carrel promoted eugenics. He advocated that gas chambers be used to kill people who are genetically inferior, criminal, or insane. He wrote about this in his book Man, The Unknown, a later edition of which included a note in praise of the Nazis’ “energetic measures.”

In light of this, I was disturbed to come across a 1999 Mother’s Day speech by the late John Cardinal O’Connor of the New York Archdiocese in which he praises Carrel as a good Catholic for standing by his statement that he witnessed divine intervention. O’Connor states, “Dr. Alexis Carrel undoubtedly believed in the extraordinary statement from our Divine Lord in today’s Gospel [Jn. 14:15-21]. ‘If you love me, keep my commandments.’” I think the Cardinal did not do his homework on that one.

From July 24, 1910

WILL FUTURE GENERATIONS LOSE HISTORICAL RECORDS OF TO-DAY? Scientists Point Out the Probably Destruction of Newspaper Files in a Few Centuries — The Wood Pulp Problem (PDF)

In the late 1990s, I was a photographer for Christie’s auction house. I shot for every department, and even though the historic letters and documents were not a challenge to shoot, they were still among my favorite things to photograph. I felt privileged to handle (carefully) important documents from history, including one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, letters from America’s founding fathers, the diary of a Civil War soldier, etc. Since many of today’s documents exist only digitally, our ancestors won’t have these kinds of physical objects hundreds of years from now. While looking at digital files can give me a similar feeling of connectedness with the past, there’s a feeling I get when I’m holding a piece of paper in my hand that was signed personally by George Washington that I just can’t get from a digital copy of the same document.

Preserving those kinds of historic documents has always been a challenge. This article mainly concerns newspapers and the switch from rag-based to wood-based paper in the late 1800s (wood-based paper being more difficult to preserve). Microfilm was already around in 1910, but the article does not discuss the possibility that newspaper copies could be preserved on film. Microfilm didn’t really become popular until the mid-1920s, and it wasn’t until 1935 that Kodak’s Recordak division began preserving the New York Times in that format.

Incidentally, if you do have a wood pulp newspaper you want to archive, the website historybuff.com has a pretty good overview of how historical newspapers can be preserved.

Today, newspapers are usually created digitally, and so are easy to preserve digitally. But even digital records can become impossible to retrieve as formats become obsolete. And the fluid nature of the internet, where most publishing takes place these days, makes it a difficult medium to preserve. But the non-profit Internet Archive is making a great effort.

I’m glad that people were thinking about preserving their archives 100 years ago. If they weren’t, I’d have a much harder time with this website.

Side note: As a photographer, I think a lot about future-proofing my digital archive. I began shooting digitally in 1997 — at Christie’s, where the studio was on the cutting edge of digital photography — and recently came across some old images in file formats that I couldn’t open. (It took some hunting but I finally found legacy software that allowed me to convert the images to a modern format.) If you save the raw files from your digital camera, chances are good that they are in a proprietary format that may one day be obsolete. Some of the best writing I’ve found about future-proofing your digital photo archives is by Peter Krogh. If these issues concern you, I recommend his book on Digital Asset Management for photographers.

From July 24, 1910

IF YOU ARE BALD YOU’LL STAY BALD: That’s What a Tonsorial Artist Says and He Always Has His Reasons Therefor (PDF)

The logic here seems to be: If there were a cure for baldness, barbers would know about it. Barbers don’t know about it. Therefore there is no cure for baldness. Modus tollens.

But the real gem is this quote: “Some are born bald. Some achieve baldness. Some have baldness thrust upon them… The born bald usually get over it and live to get it again.” Sage words.

From July 24, 1910

WHY SOME CHILDREN ARE ALWAYS LAZY: Experts Have Made a Study of This Familiar Weakness in Childhood and Suggest a Cure (PDF)

Maybe your child isn’t deliberately lazy. He might just be defective. Keeping in mind that a healthy child takes 8 years to complete 8 school grades, you can use this handy guide to see how long it might take your child to finish school, depending on what kind of defect your child has:

Defective vision: 8 years
Defective teeth: 8.5 years
Defective breathing: 8.6 years
Hypertrophied tonsils: 8.7 years
Adenoids: 9.1 years
Enlarged glands: 9.2 years

Woe is the child with enlarged glands and defective teeth. Luckily, these defects can all be counteracted with proper nutrition. This scientific study is based on a sample size of 27 children.

From July 17, 1910

SHOULD DARK OR LIGHT CLOTHES BE WORN ON HOT DAYS? Interesting Experiments by Government Experts on the Effect of the Color of Garments (PDF)

Summer heat getting to you? Cool off with this lengthy look at experiments carried out in an effort to determine whether you should wear light clothes, dark clothes, light clothes over dark clothes, or some other combination to beat the heat.

The problem of the undergarments has been taken up by the Federal Government very seriously of late and exhaustive tests have been made. The experiments have been carried out on an elaborate scale recently in the Philippines, where a thousand men have been used in the tests which have been carried on for upward of a year. If the soldier can be made to march further, carry more weight, and fight better in hot weather merely by changing his shirt, naturally the United States Government wants to know all about it.

It’s actually pretty interesting to see the lengths they went to, the blood tests, the dietary monitoring, the consideration of dark skin versus light skin, etc., in their research. The conclusion at the time was that our bodies suffer from the short wavelength light rays more than the actual heat, so opaqueness of clothing matters more than the color.

From July 17, 1910

WOMEN TRIUMPH IN NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION: Mrs. Eliza Flagg Young Placed at the Head of the Organization Heretofore Controlled by Men (PDF)

I don’t want to gloss over the main point of this article, which is that Eliza “Ella” Flagg Young became the first female head of the NEA, so take a moment to let her great accomplishment settle in. Now there’s something else I found while researching this article that I want to discuss.

For some reason, Eliza Flagg Young comes up in several articles on-line about homeopathy. This excerpt at homeopathic.com quotes from a book called The Consumer’s Guide to Homeopathy by Dana Ullman, who also runs the site and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. He wrote:

Eliza Flagg Young, MD, a nineteenth century physician, once said, “Every woman is born a doctor. Men have to study to become one.” Although this may be a controversial statement, what isn’t controversial is that women tend to be the primary health care providers in most families. In the vast majority of homes women are responsible for watching over the health needs of the children, and by their shopping and cooking, they are responsible for fulfilling the nutritional needs of the family.

Because homeopathic medicines are considerably more amenable to home care than are conventional drugs, it is predictable that American women have had a history of interest in homeopathy.

Eliza Flagg Young, MD? Was the first female head of the NEA, who dedicated her life to education, also a physician? That seemed unlikely, so I researched further. In fact, Eliza Flagg Young did receive a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 1900, but it was a Ph.D in education, not a medical degree.

I found the quote correctly attributed to “Dr.” Ella Flagg Young, as that was her title, in several places including medical books. But I only see the false attribution of an “MD” degree on homeopathy sites. I’m not sure if the error predates Ullman, or if he made the illogical jump himself.

Coincidentally, while researching another article I posted this week about a movement to get kids to stop kissing, I came across a relevant quote by Flagg Young in an Ohio newspaper. Here is the quote (emphasis mine):

The rumor that a campaign was to be instituted in the public schools of Chicago to enroll pupils and teachers in the new organization was met with a denial by Supt. Ella Flagg Young, says the Chicago Inter-Ocean.

“I think more harm is done by directing children’s attention to disease than can be offset by the new ideas advanced by kissing,” she said last night. “As to the merits of the scheme to stop the practice of kissing, I cannot say. I am not a doctor.

Is it really possible that a homeopathic expert didn’t check his facts? That he made an assumption unsupported by evidence? That he found a connection where there is none? That seems so unlike homeopathy.

From July 17, 1910

AN ELECTRIC FARM TO BE TRIED ON LONG ISLAND (PDF)

I expected this article to just be about a farm that’s run on electricity, which would have been a novelty in 1910. But it’s actually about a farm that electrocutes its crops to see what happens:

Plants have been compared growing under natural conditions and with the stimulant of the electric treatment, so that an exact measurement might be made. It has been found that after 104 hours of the electric current marked results were obtained. The tobacco plants increased 39 per cent. faster under the electric treatment, beets increased 12 per cent. faster, lima beans, 11 per cent., and carrots 8 per cent. faster.

The practice, known as electro-culture seems to have been unsuccessful in the long term. For more information, read this section of the book Questions of Power by Bill Luckin.

From July 3, 1910

GOOD SCHOOL LUNCHES FOR THREE CENTS PROVE A SUCCESS: And for a Penny More Dessert Is Supplied — That Is the Interesting Result of Experiments by the School Lunch Committee (PDF)

It’s nice to read an account of a School Lunch Committee that cares about affordable nutrition in schools where poor children are often malnourished.

For a child who is really very ill-nourished one meal a day is not the solution of all its troubles, but it goes a good way toward helping. Moreover, the luncheons are planned so carefully that for each 3 cents the child gets almost half the number of calories that scientists have declared necessary for a day’s nourishment. So the one meal does a good deal. There was some talk when the subject of this experiment was first broached to the effect that it was unnecessary, that no children went to school complaining of hunger. It was the old trouble of confusing hunger with malnutrition. But now, armed with facts and figures, the committee is ready to prove its case. And then they will doubtless ask, “What are you going to do about it?”

Everybody knows that children who have not a fair start in life are likely at some time in some way to become a charge to the State. Fortunately only a small proportion of them ever come to this, for if it were the rule there would be no money for anything but caring for invalids and paupers; still, whenever a child is neglected the State runs the chance of having some day to pay for it.

On all sides we hear about race suicide, and we have it drilled into our ears that the nation whose birth rate declines is well started on the road that leads to degeneration. To all of this everybody is constantly saying “Amen” with pious fervor. Meanwhile what children there are in the country may die from malnutrition without anybody becoming particularly excited over the fact.

The country wants children; the country must have children; and then when children do come the country does not seem to feel that it is its business to keep them alive…

It would really seem to an impartial observer from Mars or some other logically minded planet that we ought either to take care of the children when they are here or else drown them as soon as they are born.

Jamie Oliver would be proud.

From June 26, 1910

SCIENCE MEASURES THE ENERGY STORED IN VARIOUS FOODS: Interesting Results Given from Recent Government Experiments with the Calorimeter (PDF)

We think about calories as just a number on a food container, and it’s easy to forget that a calorie is actually a unit of energy. It’s the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree. So how did they determine how many calories were in food in 1910? The article describes a pretty outrageous experiment:

In making these experiments a man is shut in an apartment that is sealed hermetically and supplied with air, food and drink…

While the man within is reading or writing or attending to the numerous small duties connected with the care of himself, for he must weigh himself, stripped and dressed, twice a day, must note his bodily temperature and keep track of many other conditions connected with the experiment, those on the outside are busy with a long programme of work that must be done regularly every hour of the many days that some of the experiments are under headway. For instance, the thermometer in most of the experiments is read every two minutes, and the reading set down carefully.

The air is removed, measured, and recycled. The subject’s heat emission is measured during work, rest, sleep, reading, etc. All of this is used to measure… something.

At this point the article loses me, because I’m not quite sure how you go from that information to the amount of calories in food. I have an easier time understanding how tests like this could be used to measure calories burned by various activities, and indeed tests like these are used today for that very purpose. But how you go backwards to the food he ate is beyond me.

Slate.com has a pretty good writeup about how we measure calories in food today.

From June 19, 1910

CAN YOU TELL AN EAR FOR MUSIC BY LOOKING AT IT? If Dr. J. J. Kinyoun’s Theory Is True the External Ear Dicsloses Whether You Have the Musical Gift or Not (PDF)

For a minute in 2007, the blogosphere was abuzz about a Hungarian plastic surgeon named Dr. Lajos Nagy who claimed that making your ears pointy would allow you to better appreciate music. He said this craze was huge in New York, and would soon be sweeping the globe.

On his website, he explains scientifically why pointed ears are more sensitive to sound:

One of its reasons is rather simple: pointed ears focus sounds in a better way, which, in the case of animals, is supplemented by the fact that they can orientate themselves towards the source of sounds without turning their heads, by moving only their ears.

The other reason is the own frequency of the pinnae, as being solid objects themselves, which changes together with their shape. Pointed ears resonate with sounds at the frequency of around 8 kHz, thus they amplify sharp sounds instead of the intermediate frequencies. This is the reason why, amongst other things, dogs are sensitive to ultrasonic sounds, which are imperceptible for human ears.

Although turning the pinnae still remains impossible for human beings according to its anatomic features, the advantages of pointed ears can be enjoyed once again with the help of a simple, routine operation.

Of course all of this is ridiculous, and it doesn’t take much poking around on his site to realize that it’s a big joke (see this discussion for more information).

If the hoaxter had seen this 1910 article, perhaps his fictional doctor could have marketed his craft differently. This article claims that ear shape determined not your ability to appreciate music, but to be musical yourself. As one doctor quoted in the article says:

“It is commonly thought that persons who have the musical ‘gift’ have a peculiarity of the auditory tract, which distinguishes them from ordinary folk. There seem to be an actual physical quality in the hearing of musicians whereby they differentiate tones with subtlety, and this quality is congenital…

[There is] a peculiar conformation of the external ear in musicians, first observed by Dr. J. J. Kinyoun of Washington, but never published, which is constant and readily perceptible.”

I’d go on to quote the description of the peculiar conformation, but it makes about as much sense as Dr. Nagy’s explanation for his procedure, so I’ll spare you the details. But the conclusions at the end of the article are still worth a look if you want to know how to tell if your own kids are musical by looking at their ears. And if they’re not, I suppose they can always get plastic surgery.

From June 19, 1910

“NO CENTENARIAN LIVING,” SAYS DR. WOODS HUTCHINSON: And Probably Only Three Ever Lived to be Over 100 Years of Age He Concludes After Studying the Question of Centenarianism (PDF)

Life expectancy is longer than it’s ever been, and there were already hundreds of people claiming to be more than 100 years old in 1910. But Dr. Woods Hutchinson investigated and decided they were all wrong:

“I don’t mean that such men and women are wilful liars. I believe they are mistaken. Many of them don’t know when they were born. Many of them become almost feeble-minded and believe they are a great deal older than they are.

“Oftentimes a person who does not know his age is told at 60 that he looks to be 80, and ever afterward computes his age from that basis. If he lives to be 82 he is declared to have lived to be 102. If he lives to be 90 he is said to have lived to be 110.”

But, the article notes, if Dr. Hutchinson is right, “this means almost all of the rest of the world is wrong”:

Germany, a year or two ago, with a population of 33,600,000, claimed 78 centenarians; France, 213; England, 145; Scotland, 46; Denmark, 2; Belgium, 3; Sweden, 10; Norway, 23; Spain, 410, while the Balkan States outdid the world with a claim of one centenarian to each 100 of population.

For me, the most surprising thing in this article was the revelation that in 1910 elephants were believed to live to 300 years old. According to a recent Discovery Channel article, the median lifespan of African elephants in the wild is actually 56 years.

Dr. Hutchinson, incidentally, died in 1930 at just 68 years old.

From June 12, 1910

DR. HYSLOP TELLS OF EXPERIMENTS WITH FAMOUS MEDIUMS: Secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research Reports Furthers on the Piper Phenomena (PDF)

Spiritualism was at its peak in popularity at the turn of the last century. Thousands of people met with mediums in hopes of reaching their dead loved ones. Even Mary Todd Lincoln attended a séance in hopes of speaking with Abraham one more time.

Leonora Piper was one of the more famous mediums in 1910. Dr. James Hyslop, head of the American Society for Psychical Research, attended one of her séances and wrote about it in this article.

I’ll believe that the dead can communicate with the living when there is actual evidence to support this claim. Until then, I’m a skeptic. Hyslop, however, seemed to believe that Piper really did communicate with the dead.

In 1992, Martin Gardner wrote an article called How Mrs. Piper Bamboozled William James which demonstrated how Leonora Piper used cold reading techniques to give the impression that she can communicate with the dead.

Cold reading is the same practice used today by so-called mediums and psychics like Sylvia Brown, John Edward, and James Van Praagh. The thing about cold reading is that it doesn’t always work, and often relies on the subject making connections where there is none; then the subject counts that as a successful hit on behalf of the psychic.

Hyslop does exactly that just a few paragraphs into the article, explaining that “two or three incidents which he had to reject as false… have since then found a probable interpretation.”

One of these is an incident which he had referred to before as the incident of “the broken wheel.” His father communicating from the spirit land by means of a medium, he says, had mentioned that he (his father) and his (Dr. Hyslop’s) aunt, Eliza, had been in an accident in which the wheel of a wagon was broken.

When Dr. Hyslop asked his aunt about the accident she denied that it had taken place. Therefore, he discarded the communication as of no value.

Now he declared the incident turns out to be one which occurred the day after his father’s death, and involved Dr. Hyslop and his uncle. This uncle has since died, and, Dr. Hyslop declares, the latter, in communicating from the spirit world, has used the incident to prove his identity to his wife, Dr. Hyslop’s aunt.

Even though the psychic got almost all the details wrong, Hyslop managed to make it fit something in his life that made sense to him. That’s a hit! More likely it’s an example of confirmation bias on Hyslop’s part. Who doesn’t know someone who’s been in an accident?

While some so-called psychics may actually believe they have supernatural powers, it’s the ones who know better and prey on innocent people who really infuriate me. So it’s with pleasure that I link to this great video of famed psychic James Van Praagh attempting to give a cold reading where absolutely nothing goes right for him.

From May 29, 1910

HOW TO KILL GERMS WITH VIOLET RAYS: Dr. Frederick G. Keyes Tells of the Important Results of Experiments With Milk Made in the Laboratory of Brown University (PDF)

This article is about removing germs from milk using ultraviolet radiation. That doesn’t sound very exciting on the face of it. Since I couldn’t decide whether or not milk germ eradication is a topic worth posting about, I did a little investigating. When I eventually found myself browsing through a 1917 book called City Milk Supply I decided that I didn’t want all my research going to waste. So here you have this fascinating post about milk, germs, and radiation.

In a nutshell, the main scientist in this article says:

“The pasteurization of milk has been followed by great improvement in conditions, but there is objection to the Pasteur treatment method, because it is claimed that the taste of the milk is changed. The effect of the ultra-violet rays on milk is different, and although it kills all the harmful germs the taste of the milk is not changed.

“So far as I have been able to determine the only noticeable change is that the milk in its new method loses its animate or ‘cowy’ odor, something that will not, in my opinion, cause people to object.”

But this other scientist says:

“It will destroy the micro-organisms without doubt. That has been positively proved. But what chemical changes would take place in the milk we have not yet entirely determined. This is to be found out only by lengthy experiments. There may be such a change brought about by the using of the violet rays that the milk would not be suitable for use. It might develop a disagreeable smell or taste, which would render it impossible to use. These are matters yet to be determined.”

And seven years later, here’s what the book City Milk Supply had to say on page 308 after further research:

When milk was exposed under conditions suitable for a satisfactory reduction of the bacteria by the ultraviolet rays there was also produced an abnormal disagreeable flavor that would render the milk unsaleable… On a commercial scale it would be difficult to control the factors which influence the bactericidal action of the rays and moreover the disagreeable flavor imparted to the milk renders the process impracticable.

So there you go.

From May 22, 1910

TORPEDO AIRSHIP CONTROLLED BY WIRELESS IS THE LATEST INVENTION: Thomas R. Phillips, Who Made It, Claims to Control a Dirigible Balloon Loaded with Bombs Without Leaving His Office. (PDF)

Today the military uses Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles to remotely bomb foreign targets. This must be the UCAV’s great grandfather.

“I can,” says Mr. Phillips, “sit in an armchair in London and make my airship drop a bunch of flowers into a friend’s garden in Manchester or Paris or Berlin.”

But it is not for the dropping of flowers that he intends his invention. It is for the dropping of dynamite bombs.

[At the London Hippodrome, Phillips demonstrated with] a twenty-foot model of a Zeppelin dirigible. In itself the thing looked harmless enough… It looked like a toy balloon at the mercy of any gust of wind — purposeless, slow, and unwieldy.

And then suddenly — Cr-r-rack! Mr. Raymond Phillips had touched a lever, and the airship sprang into life. Nothing had touched it — nothing, that is, that could be seen by the eye of any human being — and yet at that touch and at the sound of the compelling “Cr-r-rack!” the airship model awoke and became a purposeful thing.

“Crack, crack!” again and again. Running his fingers from one key to another he stopped it dead, turned it about, made it rise and fall, made it turn figures of eight in the air, and finally stopped it again, motionless in the air, forty feet above the orchestra stalls.

“Now,” said he, “just imagine that row of seats is a row of houses, and that instead of a model, with paper toys in its hold, I am controlling a full-sized airship carrying a cargo of dynamite bombs. Watch!”

He pressed another key. There was a faint click from the framework of the airship, and the bottom of the box that hung amidships fell like a trapdoor, releasing not bombs, but a flight of paper birds that fluttered gracefully down on the seats beneath.

The whole article is very interesting. But for the life of me I cannot figure out what any of it has to do with that woman in the middle photo who has antennae attached to her back. It’s hard to see, but I think the caption says “A Dress Lighted by Wireless.” I have no idea.

From May 15, 1910

BEING FAT IS LIKE HAVING MONEY IN THE BANK: At Last a Physician Rises Up and Seriously Defends Surplus Flesh; Which Should Comfort Thousands (PDF)

In 1910, thin was already in for both health and fashion. But Dr. George Niles has some really practical reasons why it might be good to be fat:

Suppose a ship went down in midocean and a few of the passengers and crew got off on a raft. Suppose on one of the rafters was a man of about 40 per cent fatty matter — the kind that has not seen his shoelaces for ever and ever so long — according to Niles’s theory he would outlive the whole crew, granting of course (which the doctor does not) that the raft does not ground on a cannibal island or the crew draw lots with stacked chips…

Dr. Niles explains it thus: “Fat is like a housewife who, though not apparently earning anything, by her care and industry conserves the fruits of her husband’s labor, enabling him not only to support the domestic establishment, but also lay aside a surplus.”

Furthermore, the doctor “also asserts in so many words that to be fat is to be genial in disposition and optimistic in temperament, while to be thin is to be restless, pessimistic, uncontented and temperamentally dissatisfied with life in general.” Therefore, he adds, “grow fat and rejoice in your fatness.”