News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
About 236,000 sperm whales were killed in the 19th century for lamp oil. That’s right our Greenpeace friends, it was that black stuff discovered in Titusville that you hate so much that really saved the whales.
Bitumen is another name for asphalt. In Arabic it is called mumiyah. It is what the Egyptians used to embalm bodies. It is where we get the word mummy.
Conan Doyle JM Barrie — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and JM Barrie were on the same cricket team. Doyle was the author of Sherlock Holmes stores. Barrie wrote Peter Pan.
Who was George E. Akerson? He was the first presidential press secretary. He served from March 4, 1929 to March 16, 1931 under Herbert Hoover.
France’s TGV holds the train speed record hitting 357.2 mph in 2007. Of course, that’s just for conventional trains. A Japanese maglev hit 375 mph on a test track in 2015.
The American record was set on Dec. 20, 1967 when a UAC turbo train hit 170.8 mph on the Penn Central track between Trenton and New Brunswick in New Jersey. It remains the word record for gas turbine-powered rail vehicles.
Pee Wee Herman’s father — Milt Rubenfeld — was one of the founders of the Israeli Air Force.
The apple certainly fell far from that tree. For you Millennials and Gen Whatever Follows here is Pee Wee in action:
El Dorado is not a where but a who. It’s a shortening of the Spanish phrase El Hombre Dorado which means “The Golden Man” or possibly the phrase El Rey Dorado which means “The Golden King”.
Just something to keep in mind next time you watch that John Wayne movie where James Caan poorly recites the Edgar Allen Poe poem.
Here’s George Alexander doing a better job:
The first letter carried by an air vehicle sort of involved Ben Franklin. It was a letter from his son — William the Loyalist — to his grandson William Temple Franklin delivered by hot air ballon over the English Channel on Jan. 7, 1785.
Loyalist William was in England as you would expect. Temple was in Paris assisting Ben in a diplomatic role. T
The first “air mail” in the United States occurred eight years and two days later — Jan. 9, 1793 — when Jean-Pierre Blanchard ballooned from Philadelphia with a personal letter from George Washington to the owner of whatever property he happened to land on which ended up being in Deptford, N. J.
Delta blues legend Robert Johnson actually made his living playing polkas, waltzes and standards like Danny Boy. He even once played for an Italian wedding in New Jersey.
Those balloons used to spy on the enemy during the Civil War worked. A balloonist could see five miles with the unaided eye.