Category Archives: History

Miss Bra Queen Contest 1954 and Albert Einstein Sticking Out His Tongue By Arthur Sasse

Sometimes It Is A Slow News Day

News photographers take pictures that are assigned to them by editors based upon events that might merit coverage.

The caption to this January 5, 1954 Acme news phtograph is “Photographer Arthur Sasse was assigned to cover a contest for the title of Miss Bra Queen of 1954.”

The top portion of the photograph shows Sasse taking the photo that apppears in the bottom panel. Miss Bra Queen was a bust as far as news coverage goes.

Sasse was an accomplished photographer and three years previous to Miss Bra Queen, he took one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century. Today, young people would probably think this was photoshopped, but of course it wasn’t.

It shows super-genius Albert Einstein had a humorous and mischievious side to him. March 14, 1951 was Einstein’s 72nd birthday and he had just gotten into a car to be driven home with Frank Aydelotte and his wife. Sasse was asking Einstein to smile but Einstein had smiled many times that day for the photographers and was sick of it. So he stuck out his tongue instead. Sasse snapped the photo and the iconic image was captured.

Einstein loved the photograph after he saw it and ordered nine copies of it for his personal use. The original photo sold for $74,324 in 2009 at auction.

This is the scene in the moments leading up to the famous photograph being taken and the original uncropped version.

The Best Woman Presidential Candidate Ever

A Sport That Never Gained Popularity

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Jeeves, Get My Dirigible Ready!!!

The headline in the New York Times of March 7, 1909 proclaimed, Aerial Yachting Promises to be the Real Thing in Sport. For some reason, this sport never took off – if you’ll pardon the pun.

Aerial Yachting would be for “the sport loving public who want the latest thing to machines that can be conveniently managed in the air and accommodate from three passengers up to half a dozen or so, making the trip socially pleasant apart from the novelty of the expedition.”

All you would need to participate would be a large sum of money to have a massive 100 foot plus dirigible powered by a motor constructed for you. Then of course you’d have to figure out how to fly the thing on your own because there weren’t too many aviators at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Clement-Bayard ship illustrated in the accompanying article below, was 175 feet long and had made successful flights over Paris. Mr. Adolph Clement the builder of that dirigible, planned to open an agency at his automobile showrooms in New York to promote dirigible flights.

This was the dawn of aviation and World War I would see the dirigible used extensively for military purposes. The luxury aspect of dirigibles as a sport, never really caught on with the wealthy.

Original Times Article March 7, 1909 – click to enlarge

A Photographic Trip To Green-Wood Cemetery Part 3

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Monuments And Odds & Ends

The focus for the final installment on Green-Wood Cemetery are monuments and some interesting things that I took note of.

Dogs

Dogs are not permitted to be buried in human cemeteries. Somehow though fourteen years after inventor Elias Howe’s death, a dog “Fannie,” was buried at the family plot in 1881. That is the exception.

For many people, their dogs were like members of the family. Continue reading →

A Photographic Trip To Green-Wood Cemetery Part 2

A Photographic Trip To Green-Wood Cemetery Part 1

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A Different Way To Spend The Day In New York, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery

When I’m asked by people visiting New York what are some of the things they should do while they are here, my answer usually results in incredulous looks. “Go see Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx or Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.”

Most people will never visit a cemetery unless their relatives are located there. Even then, most people dread going to a cemetery. This is a mistake from a cultural standpoint. Cemeteries, especially historic ones like Green-Wood, possess landscape and architectural treasures that you cannot see in any museum. They also contain a history told in granite, marble, bronze, slate and limestone through an array of monuments, mausoleums, crypts, sarcophagi and tombstones of the permanent residents of Brooklyn. As Green-Wood describes itself on its web site:

Green-Wood is 478 spectacular acres of hills, valleys, glacial ponds and paths, throughout which exists one of the largest outdoor collections of 19th- and 20th-century statuary and mausoleums. Four seasons of beauty from century-and-a-half-old trees offer a peaceful oasis to visitors, as well as its 560,000 permanent residents.

The rural cemetery movement began in 1831 with the opening of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts, Continue reading →

Death By Root Beer

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A Soda Tax Would Not Have Prevented Henry Koerner’s Death

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg doesn’t like soda and would like to tax people to discourage them from drinking it. But it wasn’t obesity or the root beer itself that caused Henry Koerner’s demise, it was a bizarre accident.

In the August 20, 1892 New York Times, a brief story appears about Henry Koerner, who worked for Lighte Brothers (a mineral water manufacturer) at 509 East 17th Street and how he was killed when the root beer he was loading on to a wagon exploded.

When Koerner slipped on a fruit peeling on the sidewalk, the ten pound pressurized tank of root beer he was carrying dropped on the stone pavement and exploded like a charge of dynamite. The tank shattered in all directions with one piece going right through Koerner’s head, killing him instantly. The explosion was so powerful, the top of the tank went 150 feet into the air and fell to the ground with a deafening crash. The poor man left behind a wife and three children.

I’m sure there was little if any compensation for his loss of life, as accidents like this were dismissed as being part of the hazards of working. Below is the original newspaper story.

The Things We Do For Love

Boy 16, And Girl 14, Walk Over Twenty Miles Round-Trip During Blizzard With Temperatures Hovering At Zero Degrees To Get Married

Valentines Day has come and gone. I know love can drive you to do crazy things, but I can’t recall seeing a story like this.

The date was February 16, 1904, one hundred eight years ago, the thermometer read 0° with blizzard-like conditions raging in New Jersey. Continue reading →

How Many Books Were Published 100 Years Ago As Compared To Today?

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A Glut of Publishing

In 1907 there were 9,260 books published in the United States according to the New York State Library Bookboard.

Compare that to 2010 when there were 316,480 books published by traditional publishing companies according to Bowker.

Add to that another 2,776,260 on-demand titles produced by reprint houses specializing in public domain works and by presses catering to self-publishers and ”micro-niche” publications.

That is over 3 million books published in one year.

No wonder it is so hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Continue reading →

Life In 1909 – Random News And Advertising

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What Was Happening On January 21, 1909

I picked a random day 103 years ago to see what was in the news. I read the entire New York Times newspaper for Thursday, January 21, 1909 to come up with the some interesting stories and unusual items. The paper was only 18 pages! The major differences compared to current newspapers: few photographs accompany any story and articles of different types are interspersed on the same page, so the news is not sectioned by category. I have put the article summary in blue and my comments are in black italics.

Crowds flocked to the Auto Show at Madison Square Garden. Lots of famous people showed up including Colonel John Jacob Astor and Mr. & Mrs. George J. Gould. There was a selection in gasoline powered and electric cars on display.

Not many people realize that in the early days of automobile manufacturing gasoline and electric cars were battling for market share. Steam cars were also an option, but were left unmentioned in the article. Before 1909 over 600 companies in the United States had at one time started manufacturing automobiles and half of them had already run out of business. An estimated 200,000 automobiles were in use in the United States according to the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers. What would our current energy situation be like today had the electric car won the battle for vehicular supremacy over the gasoline powered engine?

An advertisement for Renault showed they led all automobile companies in US imports with 214 in 1907 and 244 in 1908.

The runner-up for sales in each year (by half as much) were in order: Mercedes, Fiat and Panhard?!

The Conference Committee of the Independent Telephone Officers to meet the following week on plans to build a long distance telephone line from Boston to Omaha. The cost: $5,000,000 immediate expenditure and $30,000,000 over the next four years! Continue reading →

Stuff Nobody Cares About

A not so random collection of observations about things you should care about