Young Ruth Wheeler was ambitious. Fifteen years old, the youngest of three sisters, she was determined to contribute to the support of her widowed mother. The family was stretched as tight as worsted wool on a spinning wheel. Money walked in the front door of their shared apartment, grew wings, and flew out the window. Ruth dreamed of changing her struggling New York city family’s fortune.

Figuring that the business world offered a young woman the best chance of a regular wage, Ruth enrolled in the Merchant and Banker’s Business College. There she studied stenography — the art of shorthand…

Think of life as a bank account. At the moment we are born, each of us receives a certain number of dollars, deposited in an armored steel vault. We do not know the amount of this initial infusion of seed money, but we do know that it is a wasting asset. Every hour, one dollar is withdrawn and spent to fund whatever we are doing at the moment. Nothing stops this outward flow of cash, and we have no way to add more money to our present holdings. When the balance reaches zero, when the balance is depleted, we die.

…

Edmond Halley (1656–1742) entered astronomy’s hall of fame for proving that a comet (the eponymous Halley’s Comet), followed an elliptical orbit around the Sun, returning to perihelion every seventy-six years. For thousands of years, humans believed that comets appeared in the heavens in no predictable pattern. They appeared without warning and vanished in the same manner. Most people believed that God (or the gods) sent comets as warnings to the Earth’s inhabitants. Comets were portents of doom, signs of impending disaster.

Halley changed all of that. By predicting a comet’s orbit (and being proven correct in 1756), Halley placed comets…

Although best known for his proof that comets — and in particular Halley’s Comet — followed regular orbits around the sun, Edmond Halley was a scientific prodigy. In addition to applying Newtonian mathematics to comets, he charted the stars of the southern skies, searched for a method to allow sailors to calculate longitude, and attempted to calculate the age of the earth by studying the rising levels of salt in the seas. He translated Greek and Latin scientific texts into English, and when he became interested in the writings of Apollonius, taught himself Arabic to translate those treatises. …

A winter evening in Brooklyn, February 1902. John Earl, the night man at the Glen Island Hotel, watched as the front door opened and a young couple walked in from the cold night. The man was handsome, six feet tall, and retained the solid musculature of a varsity high school athlete. His companion, slightly younger and shorter, was a beautiful blonde with a slender build.

They wanted a room. Earl was in the business of renting rooms. He pushed the ledger across the counter to the man, who recorded their names as “J. Wilson and wife, Brooklyn, NY.” A key…

Welcome to the Flotsam Files, a weekly digest of odd stories from the past that have washed up on my desk.

In this installment, we travel back to the early twentieth century to learn why women were better armed when they wore hats; we receive timeless dieting advice that demonstrates there truly is nothing new under the sun; and finally, we meet the millionaire who found the perfect gift for a wife who has everything.

Woman Skewers Police Officer With Hatpin

Although Mrs. Otto Tosch’s name would suggest that she was not of Greek descent, the vengeful spirit of Electra ran through her veins.

She was…

The Wright brothers were wrong — Professor J. S. Zerbe of Los Angeles, California was convinced of it.

Yes, they had been the first to launch a human into powered flight, but they had gone about the task in a completely misguided way. The Wrights had modeled the Flyer on a bird, an idea that the good professor found risible:

To pattern a flying machine on the lines of a bird, furnishing it with wings and legs and a tail, and then supplying nothing in place of the brains or of the instinct which the bird possesses, is a most…

Welcome to another installment of the Flotsam Files, an eclectic arrangement of the historical tidbits that washed across my desk this week. For no good reason, today’s edition celebrates the possibilities and potentialities of the wedded state: we encounter an early use of remote technology to facilitate long-distance nuptials; travel to Nevada to read about ambitious plans to fine bachelors; and finally, round off our tour with a marriage gone wrong.

Enjoy!

Remote Weddings now Possible!

Enthusiastic technology evangelist, L. W. Buckley, announced plans to orchestrate the world’s first remote wedding in Seattle. The city had decided to host an exposition in 1909, and…