Month: May 2010
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Running Trains On One Rail
Aw, it’s not for you. It’s more of a Shelbyville idea. RUNNING TRAINS ON ONE RAIL (PDF) From May 29, 1910
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How To Kill Germs With Violet Rays
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 […]
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Peripatetic Philosophers Of This Many-Sided Town
We don’t have streetcorner conversations like this in modern New York. Every now and then someone holds court on the street, but it’s usually to talk about Jesus. Blogs and Twitter seem to fill that niche today. But I like the notion that you could discuss different topics in different parts of town with whomever […]
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Is The Modern Woman More Beautiful Than The Girl Of Ages Ago?
The headline doesn’t reveal that the question has been posed to just two people for this article: the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (whose sculpture The Thinker is still famous today) and the American sculptor Gutzon Borglum (whose much larger work at Mount Rushmore wouldn’t begin for another 15 years). They discuss modern, historical, and ethnic […]
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One Family Homes To Solve New York’s Congestion
The article begins with the proclamation that “a prominent engineer and statistician recently estimated that by the year 1950 New York City’s population would exceed 19,000,000!” It goes on to explain that businesses will displace residences in Manhattan, which will see a population decrease, but Queens and Brooklyn will blow up to 6,000,000 and 7,000,000 […]
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Torpedo Airship Controlled By Wireless Is The Latest Invention
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 […]
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Jewelry Stores Are Magnets For Thieves
This article describes the categories of criminals who steal from jewelry stores. Employees who steal are obviously called “inside” thieves. Then you have “kleptos,” which are customers who steal for no apparent reason (kleptos are sometimes even long-time customers who certainly have the means to buy what they take). And then there are the professional […]
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Circus Clown A Serious Person Out Of The Ring
The same week the Magazine published a boring article about what the Supreme Court Justices are really like out of the courtroom, it made up for it with this awesome article about what circus clowns are really like out of the ring. The highlight is this interview with a then-famous clown named Slivers: “It’s funny,” […]
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Being Fat Is Like Having Money In The Bank
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 […]
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The Subway Crush Causes Mental Strain
This could just as easily have been written today. THE SUBWAY CRUSH CAUSES MENTAL STRAIN (PDF) From May 15, 1910
SundayMagazine.org 